"Que no se olvide nunca que esto duele": Trauma, posmemoria y la generación intermedia en la obra de Nona Fernández
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2024
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Haverford College. Department of Spanish
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Thesis
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The Manuel J. and Elisa P. Asensio Prize
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spa
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Bi-College users only
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This thesis explores the ways in which Nona Fernández, a Chilean author, playwright, and actress, represents the memory of the Pinochet dictatorship in the books Avenida 10 de julio Huamachuco (2007) and Space Invaders (2013). Employing the theoretical background of trauma studies– specifically the theories of “postmemory”, the “intermediate generation”, and the idea of the inexpressibility of trauma– this thesis asks how Fernández represents the memory of the dictatorship in her books, what literary strategies she uses to give possibility to the expression of trauma, and, on a broader scale, how her work contributes to the debates over memory in Chile. I find that Fernández showcases the horrors of authoritarian Chile in the 1980s through her characters’ experiences of oppression and repression both in dictatorship and democracy and the dysfunction in their personal lives, which serves as a microcosm of the political sphere. On a more general level, she leverages her characters’ imagination and dreams, and her own use of intertextuality, to construct a memory of the Chilean dictatorship that is specific to the intermediate generation. Most importantly, I find that her work insists on a collective vision of trauma and memory and presents a powerful argument for the imperative of memory on a societal scale.