Introduction:
Enriquez, Marina, Things we lost in the fire, trans. by Megan McDowell (London: Portobello Books, 2017).
‘These grotesque visions of bodily trauma from Argentina reflect a country still coming to terms with decades of violent dictatorship.’[1]
Summary:
This collection of short stories, all but one told from a female perspective, reflects upon the precarious nature of lives of women and other vulnerable groups in post-dictatorship Argentina.
The collection’s central theme is bodily trauma, often self-inflicted. In ‘End of Term’ a schoolgirl removes her fingernails with her teeth in response to ‘what the man with slicked-back hair made her do.’[2] In ‘Adela’s House’ a boy jumps in front of a train and is obliterated so thoroughly that only his left arm remains between the tracks: ‘It seemed like someone had carried that arm to the middle of the tracks to display it like a greeting or a message.’[3] In the collection’s title story, ‘Things we lost in the fire’, women begin to set fire to themselves in response to male violence.
Analysis:
Mariana Enriquez has commented that ‘the dictatorship in Argentina was incredibly violent but in a very secret way. Thousands were tortured and killed, yes, but this was very successfully hidden from the population.’[4] It is this combination of violence and secrecy that makes the Gothic the natural literary genre with which to engage with the precarity of the lives of Argentina’s most vulnerable citizens, a precarity that has been caused by an oppressive and abusive political regime.
Most of the stories turn on the familiar made unfamiliar, directly evoking Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’. As Ona Russell notes ‘all is normal, relatively speaking, until X occurs.’[5] Thus the reader is unsettled by a dirty handshake, a girl pulling off her fingernails with her teeth, and an amputee coddles her stump. In addition, moments of personal epiphany are punctuated with supernatural incidents. The terrors conveyed are therefore both real and metaphorical.
Again evoking Freud’s reflections on the uncanny, Enriquez’s stories accentuate the importance of place. In particular houses and homes are made prisons rather than havens, in Freud’s terms the heimlichis made unheimlich.
Thus Enriquez is unequivocally using Gothic devices to reflect on the precarity of life for many still affected by widespread political violence of Argentina’s recent past, a past which Enriquez has said ‘leaves scars, like a national PTSD.’[6] This evokes Judith Butler’s proposition that ‘injurability and aggression [represent] two points of departure for political life’[7]as she engages with Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘conception of the precariousness of life, one that begins with the precarious life of the Other.’[8]For Enriquez the repression of Argentina’s dictatorship past remains, haunting the present day in the enduring damage done to the most vulnerable in Argentinian society. It is in response to this that ‘the stories in Things We Lost in the Fireshine a light on those scars. Haunted houses, deformed bodies, polluted rivers, all point to the “horrifying history of state terror”, to quote [Enriquez’s] English translator, Megan McDowell.’[9]
Notwithstanding the collection’s undoubted power, the stories’ relentless grotesquerie runs the risk of numbing the reader to the plight of those whose precarity of life is exposed. This highlights a central question regarding Gothic fiction’s capacity to offer a means with which to engage with the plight of those othered by systemic injury and aggression. Whilst Gothic fiction’s delight in the transgressive ensures that it is the natural genre for telling these stories, its ambivalent response to oppressive authority arguably compromises its capacity to convey the much-needed counter narratives of those whose lives have been made precarious by such oppression.
[1]John Self, ‘Things we lost in the fireby Mariana Enríquez review – gruesome short stories’, The Guardian [online] (2 November 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/02/things-we-lost-in-the-fire-by-mariana-enriquez-review[accessed 12 March 2019] (para 1 of 4)
[2]Mariana Enriquez, Things we lost in the fire, trans. by Megan McDowell (London: Portobello Books, 2017), p. 124.
[3]Enriquez, p. 69.
[4]Bongani Kona, ‘”Dark history is good for literature”—Bongani Kona chats to Argentine author Mariana Enriquez about her English debut, Things We Lost in the Fire’, The Johannesburg Review of Books[online] (2 July 2018) https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2018/07/02/dark-history-is-good-for-literature-bongani-kona-chats-to-argentine-author-mariana-enriquez-about-her-english-debut-things-we-lost-in-the-fire/[accessed on 12 March 2019] (para 5 of 25).
[5]Ona Russell, ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’,Americas Quarterly[online] (Young Entrepreneurs Issue, 2017) https://www.americasquarterly.org/content/things-we-lost-fire[accessed on 13 March 2019] (para 2 of 6).
[6]Kona, (para 6 of 25).
[7]Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence(London & New York: Verso, 2006), p. xii
[8]Butler, pp. xvii-xviii.
[9]Kona, (para 6 0f 25).
Precarious Gothic 