CHILEAN DICTATORSHIP MEMORIES IN NONA FERNÁNDEZ’S

Abstract

This essay analyzes the novel La Dimensión Desconocida (2018), by Nona Fernández, from the discussion about the memories of the Chilean civic-military dictatorship regarding the means of memory (JELIN, 2002; ASSMAN, 2011) and transgenerational memories (HIRSCH, 2015; SOLOMONE, 2017). It examines how, on the one hand, the novel discloses several narrative perspectives and proposes reflections about memory between generations and, on the other, it applies the testimony of a regretful torturer in his various manifestations through the media of remembrance. In this research, I observe how the narrator-protagonist, who is also a writer, is in a permanent exercise on what to do with her own and other’s memories, conjugating her personal experience with an ocean of documentary information and artistic products of collective memory. It is from this union that the narrator of La Dimensión Desconocida writes her book, which we consider a self-fictional reflection of Nona Fernández's own work. Whether it is within the literary plot, or from a perspective of Fernández's artistic trajectory, one can see the wide network of memory works in which art will play an unique role in the ethical duty of remembrance.