La postmemoria del silencio: Transmisión truncada y elipsis tangibles en la obra de Manuela Fingueret y Sergio Chejfec

Abstract

This essay analyzes the novels Daughter of Silence ([1999] 2012 translated by Darrell B. Lockhart) and Garlic for the Devil (2011), both by Manuela Fingueret (1945-2013); and Slow Biography (2007) by Sergio Chejfec (1956- ) in the context of the transmission of memory and its silences. In her writing, Fingueret goes beyond connecting the experiences of the Holocaust and the Dirty War through Jewish Argentine characters expelled and exiled by horror. The author is aware of the impossibility of transmitting a complete memory and she lets her characters reconstruct their memories highlighting what is spoken as well as what cannot be transmitted within the family environment. Likewise the narrator in Chejfec’s novel starts the untenable mission of writing her father’s biography (and, at the same time, the narra-tor’s own) within a plot where the investigation is answered with silences and hesitation. The processes unleashed in Fingueret’s and Chejfec’s texts defy the notion of truth and of the historical archive while they allow readers to elaborate their own conclusions about the perspectives of the (un)named and the (in)imaginable. Therefore, it purports to review the notions of memory and postmemory (particularly the notion coined by Marianne Hirsch) to include the postmemory of silence. This postmemory is defined as lacunae that form within the fragments of memory that the main characters embody, which are silent fissures that highlight what it is not said.