Violence and silence in the feminine narrative on the last civic-military dictactorship in Argentina: neither tricks of the weak nor resilience

Abstract

The narratives which invite me are written by women whose protagonists are also females: preferably mothers and daughters. It is from their relationship that the story is approached, in most cases. Silence is a relevant and significant feature among these protagonists; a silence that intervenes both in the plot as well as in the aestheticideological line chosen by their authors. Thus, it is presented in its multiple possible meanings, though always emphasizing one in particular.It may well be that one of the most elaborated topics on the literature of the dictatorship is forced silencing as a repression method applied by the military. However, I prefer to stop at another variation which has been less trodden by reviewers.The starting point of my hypothesis is that, in the Argentine literature framed in these fictions, there emerges an aesthetic-ideological line which questions hegemonic stories. The latter are so often associated with patriarchy, arising both from the military and from the insurgents? discourse that such line remains anchored in a conflicting and borderline area, which collects topic bases from those discourse types in order to reflect on them from a critical standpoint. I refer to a series of novels by Argentine writers of the last decades, whose books have been appearing as from the 80?s: Conversación al sur (1981), by Marta Traba; El resto no es silencio (1989), by Carmen Ortiz; El Dock (1993), by Matilde Sánchez; A veinte años, Luz (1998) and Doble fondo (2017), by Elsa Osorio; El silencio de Kind (1999), by Marcela Solá; Viene clareando (2005), by Gloria Lisé; Todos éramos hijos (2014), by María Rosa Lojo, and Lengua madre (2015), by María Teresa Andruetto.In all of them, silence, as a strategy of resistance to the totalization of meaning, is the common denominator and implies a form of visibilization of the power matrixes in their multiple spheres, though in that of gender, in particular.In previous essays, I have dealt with Marta Traba?s and María Rosa Lojo?s work, whose fictional machinery centered round the questioning of those types of hegemonic discourse through the deconstruction of the maternity figure. However, on this occasion, I will delve into the work of two other writers: Gloria Lisé and Marcela Solá, who discuss the rationality of power and the tamed word through music and the oneiric.