Dialoguing Across Catastrophes: Chilean Post-Coup and Post-Dictatorship Cultural Production in the Works of Roberto Bolano and Raul Ruiz.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the works of Chilean diasporic artists, novelist Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Ruiz, question old forms of representation and their underlying assumptions in order to open new conceptual spaces from which to think the political in the wake of the 1973 military coup. The texts examined respond to the destructive effects of certain ways of thinking about art, politics, and history. Nonetheless, the process of witnessing opens up the possibility of new spaces for political critique. Firstly, the texts work to dismantle what is perceived as the fixed unity of the political subject. Secondly, these texts connect aesthetic innovation to political innovation. Thirdly, they engage with the systematic exclusion of the feminine element in Latin American political thought.

Chapter 1 analyzes Chilean exilic documentary and argues that, in contrast with Patricio Guzmán and Miguel Littín’s realist style, Ruiz privileges surrealist documentary in order to illustrate the crisis in the dominant political paradigm and the conceptual difficulties of its representation. In Chapter 2, a close reading of Ruiz’s Life is a Dream (1986), I establish that the film’s critical intervention in the original Baroque play opens up a space for the subject’s self-critique. I use Freudian theory to argue that Ruiz problematizes the concept of a transparent memory by exploiting the unconscious dimension of both memory and dreams.

Moving from cinematic form to literature, my third chapter expands the discussion on the interrelationship between art and politics by analyzing Estrella Distante (1996) and Nocturno de Chile (1999) in order to understand the epistemological underpinnings of Latin American fascist discourse. Using Walter Benjamin’s theory of history, I argue that Bolaño sees fascist culture as desirous of autonomy from history or politics and he embarks on the discursive dismantling of that autonomy. My final chapter reads the maternal figure in Amuleto (1999) in order to show how Bolaño offers a feminist critique of the masculine underpinnings of Latin American revolutionary teleology. My reading reclaims an ignored maternal figure in order to reformulate a political practice of resistance informed by an ethics of care.