Unhostly Historical Discourses in Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey and Albertina Carri's film The Blonds

Abstract

Unhostly Historical Discourses in Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North:A Bilingual Journey and Albertina Carri's film The Blonds Valeria Wagner (bio) 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, [End Page 155] 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 [End Page 156] 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...