Politics of the post-memory in the Chilean narrative

Abstract

This analysis focuses on postmemory novels, by Chilean authors born between 1967 and 1983, ascribed to three modulations: postmemory of confrontation, recomposition and conformity. These subcategories of postmemory imply the need to assume that the violence experienced in the country intervened materially and symbolically in the family structure. However, they also allow us to consider that we are facing a type of narrative that privileges a bourgeois subject, collectively disjointed, that rejects the non-conservative family structure. Regarding the notion of memory, it appears as a burden that would even be desirable to ignore. For this reason, there is a clear desire to cut with all referents since in their present/adult the referent operates as a restatement of pain. These narratives present, lastly, a subject without utopias, hopes, desires for change or for rereading the political history of the country. They are oriented to oblivion, the enthronement of individualism, the annulment of the social context, focused on the autonomy of the subjectivity, thus registering in what I can call neoliberal literature, which also highlights the absence of any desire for reparation.