Seauve, Lena

Fictional texts from the perpetrator’s perspective pose an emotional challenge to the reader: we usually identify with homodiegetic or autodiegetic narrators. However, when narrators act as perpetrators of violence on behalf of illegitimate regimes or if they condone the violence of such regimes, the reader’s position becomes ethically problematic. This problem arises less if the narrators are perpetrator figures who are invariably portrayed as all together inhumane than in the case of characters who take an ambivalent stance toward illegitimate violence, for example as bystanders or collaborators – as complicit subjects. In fictions about military dictatorships in Latin America, a special historical-sociological circumstance comes into play: the grey area (Primo Levi) between perpetrators and victims is often particularly large in the case of violent inner-state conflicts. In my paper, I analyze narrative strategies that purposefully play with the ambivalence of complicit narrators in order to emotionalize readers in a certain way. In Martin Kohan’s novel Dos Veces Junio (2002), the homodiegetic narrator, a recruit and chauffeur of a military doctor during the dictatorship in Argentina, is confronted with an inhuman question: a young opponent of the regime gives birth to a child in captivity and those in charge discuss at what age a child can be tortured in order to force the mother to testify. Carlos Franz’ 2005 novel El desierto addresses the Chilean military dictatorship, from the perspective of a complicit. Narrated by an internally focalized heterodiegetic narrator the novel focuses on a female provincial judge who is forced to collaborate with the local representative of the military dictatorship.