Bodies That Appear, “Escrache-Bodies”: From Post-Memory to Trauma and Horror in Short Stories by Mariana Enriquez

Abstract

This article analyzes the short stories “Cuando hablábamos con los muertos”, “Chicos que faltan” and “El desentierro de la angelita” by Mariana Enriquez (Argentina, 1973), compiled in her book Los peligros de fumar en la cama (2017). It exposes the thesis that the political horrors of the Argentine dictatorship are made visible in an allegorical way, through the presence of bodies of horror –uncomfortable due to their absence, their phantasmagoria, their incompleteness, their abjection, their lack of singularity–. It also rescues the question suggested by these aesthetic creations: the binomial memory / oblivion.