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Article Excerpt
The following pages discuss two very specific and different attempts to cope with "unhostly" historical discourses. (1) Whereas in Ariel Dorfman's autobiography, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey, fails to mediate experience and self-understanding, in Albertina Carri's film, The Blonds, it invests the present with inassimilable and hostile remnants of the past. In the case of Dorfman's text, the narrator is left "homeless" when the historical discourse through which he interprets the events in his life breaks down, and his account strives to rework the terms that articulate the story of his life to a history that he might again inhabit. By contrast, Carri's film attempts to disengage both memory from biography and biography from history, as it works against the demands made on a younger generation by a historical discourse intended to redeem a devastating past. Both the autobiography and the film exploit the possibilities of their respective mediums, which, to some extent, also orient their angle of approach to historical discourse: Dorfman's account addresses the relationship between different, sometimes contradictory or mutually exclusive narrative levels; Carri's film raises the question of how historical discourse structurally mediates the perception of the everyday, and with it, the perception of oneself, of the past, and of memory. Although their concerns and strategies respond to particular needs and contexts, both works have to address, to either transform or invalidate, the mechanisms of identification and the operations of prosopopoeia through which historical discourse tends to construe its narrative coherence. The discussion will focus on how the autobiography and the film do this, working with or against their given historical discourses whose inconsistencies, contingencies and remnants they "welcome," albeit in different ways.
1. The Faces of History
In a recent film for children, The Ant Bully, a child who destroys ant nests to vent his anger at being bullied by a bigger, stronger peer, is shrunk to the size of his victims and condemned to live with them until he assimilates their mores. In due time, of course, the protagonist will identify with the community of ants and with their ethical principles, will save them from a greater danger than he was himself, and will eventually recover his normal size, having learned the virtues of collective action, solidarity and community. On the other side of the screen, the infant audience presumably assimilates this lesson on bullying and abuse of power, absorbing principles of good citizenship, responsibility, respect for others and other forms of life, etc. Ultimately, however, children might learn less from the rather simple and straightforward "morality" of the plot than from the various strategies the film displays to deal with the more troubling and complex issues raised by the experience of the insect-human scenario which it rehearses. For, as anyone knows who has willingly, sadistically or indifferently, either crushed an ant or consciously refrained from doing so, the initial feeling of omnipotence at the ease with which life can be disposed of is more often than not clouded over by the awful thought that humans can, just like insects, unexpectedly succumb to, or be spared by, events. In either case, arbitrariness prevails, exposing the frailty of human will with respect to events and the latter's impending threat to narrative sense.
This threat is staged in The Ant Bully in the anthropomorphized ants' initial vision of the child: while still his normal size, he figures in the insects' pantheon of good and bad divinities as "the Destructor," an irrational force that disrupts the daily life of the ant-community, destroying their communal efforts and their organization without an identifiable ethos. Here, the human experience of vulnerability is projected unto the insects, who are made to perceive humans' (imagined?) omnipotence in the same way that humans perceive those events that overrule them. But the arbitrary forces to which humans are subject are humanized by analogy when the "Destructor" is shrunk to the ants' size, allowing the insects to envisage the source of danger and engage it on equal terms, transforming blind Fate into a seeing, reasonable, and comprehensible force. On his side, as he is forced, at insect-level, to face what was before (and can no longer be) the object of exertion of his irrational power, the child must acknowledge the relativity of his omnipotence, and is consequently able to recognize that of others--which he demonstrates when, having recovered his normal size, he fends off the bully that used to terrorize him. Most important, perhaps, having become the face of the events that disrupted the ants' lives, the child understands that the disruptions in his own life may have "faces" in turn, that they may well be reasoned with, as the ants reasoned with him, and that they may even "learn," that is, change, be integrated in an argument or within a bounded narrative. At the end of the film, when the domestication of the inhuman forces conjured by the insect-human scenario is fully achieved, the child resumes his place and stance in the human world, which further closes upon the already anthropomorphized insect world and subsumes into itself both divine and natural agencies.
The absorption of non-human agencies into a humanized sphere of events and actions sets the conditions for the constitution of a properly historical discourse, the comforting folds of which provide refuge from arbitrariness as well as the medium--a home of sorts--in which sense is at once conveyed and upheld: events have agents, agents have faces, faces have language and can be spoken to, they are inscribed in given social and political contexts, they relate to other faces, they can be narrated and acquire meaning and value. Clearly, though, historical discourse can neither contain nor mediate all events, and the chain of identifications that could ward off the danger inherent to the insect-human scenario is bound to break at different times in a person's or a community's life--events will disrupt what is perceived, retrospectively, as a course of life; the narrative of one's life, or that of a community, will be on hold, as if the "natural" link that sustained the sense of belonging between a group and its members were severed. Then, we might say, the stones of history are lifted, uncovering helpless swarming insects:
Could the difference between living and dying really just grind down to this: destiny or fate or sheer dumb wonderful idiotic luck or whatever you want to call it? And life is just one more accident in an accidental universe? And we are no more than insects played with by a demented, impenetrable faceless force that offers no reasons because there are none? Or is there an explanation? (37, emphasis mine)
These anguished words are triggered by Ariel Dorfman's recollection of the series of events that, against all probability, prevented him from being--and dying--by Allende's side at Chile's presidential palace La Moneda, on September 11, 1973. This is the date of the military take-over that put an end to the dream of peaceful revolution in Latin America and deprived Dorfman of the historical medium within and through which he had come to understand his life. Indeed, as we find out throughout his account of his journeys back and forth between South and North America, Spanish and English (whence the title of his autobiography, Heading South, Looking North. A Bilingual Journey), Chile and its revolution had become for Dorfman the "place in history," the "real community" (7) for which he hungered ever since, as a child, he imagined a fictive one to safeguard himself "from death and loneliness" (7). In the Revolution he had heard the promise of a common story for himself and the "crowd" (245), a home in one language and one culture. The narrative of his life had espoused that of the Revolution, the latter had welcomed him in its making; the military take-over breaks up this idyllic relationship between biography and history. While it foregrounds the fictional nature of this idyll, Dorfman's autobiographical account will attempt to make sense of this fallout and to weave individual and historical narratives into each other.
The narrative alternates chapters that relate Dorfman's life "from the beginning"--literally, his birth--to the time of the military take-over, with chapters that recount chronologically the fatal date and the following days, thus foregrounding the design to "join" these two storylines anew on the very same temporal spot in which they are figured as departing. They never do, of course, because there is no such precise moment--his survival is a "nonevent," a death that does not take place. But the story lines "meet" in the Epilogue, where Dorfman figures himself on the plane, on his way to the North, on the tangent between the "circle in his life" that is ending and that which is about to begin. This image signals the harmonization of the different rhythms of the alternating chronological relations, and works on the genre of the chronicle with which Dorfman nuances his autobiographical account. As the chapter titles (except the epilogue) indicate--all beginning with "A chapter dealing with the discovery of..."--readers are referred to the chronicles of the discovery and conquest of the Indies, which have not only marked Latin American literary and political discourse, but have been constituted as the rhetorical beginnings of American history. The chronicles, of course, are famous for what, from a modern perspective, appears as a lack of historical rigor and as a confusion between fact and fiction. In the case of Dorfman's text, referring to these unreliable and also hybrid testimonies foregrounds the fictional and mixed nature of the autobiographical storyline...
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