UNSETTLING INTERPRETATIONS: READING PRACTICES, MEMORY, AND POLITICS IN LAURA ALCOBA'S MANÈGES/LA CASA DE LOS CONEJOS (2007), HÉCTOR ABAD FACIOLINCE'S TRAICIONES DE LA MEMORIA (2009), AND ALBERTINA CARRI'S LOS RUBIOS (2003)

At the intersection of the autobiographical, the historical, and the fictional, Laura Alcoba’s Manèges (2007) [La casa de los Conejos/The Rabbit House (2008)], Héctor Abad Faciolince’s Traiciones de la memoria (2009), and Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003) deal with contemporary quandaries in the aftermath of the Latin American regimes of the seventies and eighties. They make a sideways approach to protracted, polarized discussions on issues surrounding recent history and politics of memory—including present-day ramifications that have impact on concrete governmental policies. The critical reception of Abad, Alcoba, and Carri shows signs of an analogous turn toward polarization. I argue that such turn is unwarranted, for these works challenge our interpretive practices precisely by appeal to rhetorical strategies and innovative uses of textual performativity that preclude settling on any one reading, thus eroding the basis of any “strong,” polarized reading. Shifts from direct report to free indirect discourse in three-person dialogue scenes, for instance, prevent us from matching utterances and speakers. In the absence of textual markers to justify one matching over others, favoring and settling on any one of them involves forcing the text into an arbitrary interpretive framework. Thus, we violate the formal structure of these texts and foreclose a more nuanced assessment demanded by the very texts: if we can’t make justified matchings, we are limited but urged to increase the projection of tentative matchings. Since each set of speaker-utterance attributions yields different scenarios, the upshot is a palette of varied interpretations of the events, actions, and characters of the same dialogue scene. This centrifugal move – into the text—is complemented by a centripetal analogue that sends readers outside the text, into the “real world,” in search of missing pieces whose necessity is hinted at by the texts themselves. This requirement to restitute what is missing and unsaid also tends to go unnoticed--or ignored. Such blindness, which leads to misreading and exerting violence on texts, also plagues interpretive approaches to sociopolitical phenomena, whether their focus be current events, recent history, or memory-related issues. If sound, this assessment calls for a deep revision of our interpretive practices