From Nunca más tu Ni una menos. Testimony and Fiction in Contemporary Argentine Narrative

VICTORIA GARCÍA

The Routledge Handbook of Violence in Latin American Literature

Routledge

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2022; p. 276 - 289

If, at first glance, testimony and fiction may appear to be two opposingdiscursive modalities, they are in fact complementary and mutually reinforcingin the narrative representation of experiences of violence. This articledevelops this argument in the light of two relevant narrative series incontemporary Argentine literature: the narrative about the repression in thelast dictatorship, produced since the 1980s, and the literature focusing ondifferent forms of violence against women, which gained strength since 2015. Weargue that, in these texts, fictionalisation does not attempt on the will togive testimony ; on the contrary, it constitutes a necessary condition forputting the traumatic experience into words. Fiction, in effect, broadens thenarrative perspective beyond the point of view of the person who has been there¸ and favours the processof subjective reconstruction that takes place as resistance in the face ofviolence. The enunciative distancing implied by fictional recreation takes asits object not only the real events narrated in these texts, but also the firstperson who tells the story, which will be displaced, split and multiplied inthe various enunciative instances that make up the fictional discourse.