Diamela Eltit and the Possibility of Traumatic Testimony

• In Event: Testimony, Post-Testimony, and Identity

Abstract

Published during the years of the military dictatorship in Chile, the work of Diamela Eltit (1949) has long been placed on the periphery of publishing circuits. In this paper I would like to focus on one of Eltit’s most defying texts, El padre mío (1989), a verbatim transcription of the fragmented, apparently nonsensical testimony of a schizophrenic homeless man about Augusto Pinochet’s totalitarian regime. I am particularly interested in exploring the ways in which the schizophrenic’ speech enacts the difficulties of communicating traumatic experience, and how trauma is translated into a poetics of witnessing and a poetics of the subject under dictatorial regimes. In a postdictatorial context dominated by different voices presenting many versions of History, Eltit's book presents alternative ways of approaching both literature and testimony. Her transcription of the broken discourse of a mad man rethinks narrative genres in general and testimony in specific, not as a mere collection of facts but as a figurative collection of meanings that reflect a moment of sociopolitical and subjective crisis.

Author

• Sebastián Antezana Quiroga, Cornell University