Abstract
This article explores the fear of political otherness in Mariana Enríquez’s short story “The Inn” in which the author combines the reality of Argentine history with elements of the gothic horror style while maintaining a sharp focus on social criticism. “The Inn” blurs the lines between the reality of a not-so-distant past and elements of the supernatural to delve into an Argentine history scarred by the last dictatorship. This article seeks to examine the use of the figure of the desaparecido as representative of a politics of erasure of the political other that has been systematically censored and unacknowledged. It is also an examination of the re-membering and re-inscribing of the desaparecido as an intergenerational cultural exercise to counteract an institutionalized narrative of erasure and forgetting.
Highlights
This article explores the fear of political otherness in Mariana Enríquez’s short story “The Inn” in which the author combines the reality of Argentine history with elements of the gothic horror style while maintaining a sharp focus on social criticism
ARGENTINE HORROR AND SOCIAL CRITICISM Mariana Enríquez (Buenos Aires, 1973-) is a journalist and writer who combines in her horror fiction the reality of Argentine history with elements of the gothic horror style while maintaining a sharp focus on social criticism
Her writing brings to life the terrible elements of a not-so-distant past marked by its last dictatorship (1976-1983), clandestine torture centres, desaparecidos [disappeared] and children taken from their mothers while they were political prisoners to be adopted out to “good” families
Summary
ARGENTINE HORROR AND SOCIAL CRITICISM Mariana Enríquez (Buenos Aires, 1973-) is a journalist and writer who combines in her horror fiction the reality of Argentine history with elements of the gothic horror style while maintaining a sharp focus on social criticism. The sense of fear and terror in the short story represents this intrinsic political awareness and underlines the effects of an intergenerational socio-political trauma compounded by the absence of knowledge of the physical landscape of the secret detention centres and concentration camps It is an intergenerational experience of a psychological horror of a “not-knowing” where traumatized relatives of the desaparecidos are denied the knowledge of the whereabouts of their disappeared loved ones to the clandestine concentration and internment sites after their kidnapping by the armed forces. Like the postmodern horror film, Enríquez’s short story “The Inn” remembers “ordinary people’s ineffectual attempts to resist a violent monster” (ibidem: 19) – though the monster in this story are the ghosts of past atrocities committed at the Inn. Enríquez does not have to describe the abuses inflicted on the prisoners brought to the police academy since this knowledge is a shared history in which “horror exposes the terror implicit in everyday life: the pain of loss, the enigma of death, the unpredictability of events, the inadequacy of intentions. It is a terror that follows the girls back home – a haunting of the fear that the ghosts will return and of ghostly shadows moving in the hallways of their own homes
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