Event date: Wednesday 19 March 2014, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room (first floor, room 117 – see floor plan)

“Laughter and Irony in Relation to Memory: The Latin American Literary Context”; given by Dr. Brigitte Adriaensen (Radboud University Nijmegen)

“Making fun of traumatic experiences is a delicate issue. However, Freud worked on the cathartic function of the joke (1905), and Andréa Lauterwein, in her edited volume Rire, Mémoire, Shoah (2009) insists on the presence and relevance of laughter in the memory of the Shoah. In opposition to Adorno (1944), who stated that humour was not any option in relation to the Holocaust, Lauterwein defends the therapeutic potential of laughter as well as its social and controversial function. Through laughter, she argues, discursive communities are consolidated, and accumulated tensions and emotions are liberated. Moreover, laughter questions established versions of History, tends to put taboo items to the fore, and in that sense creates the dissension that is necessary to perpetuate memory. Significantly, most theories that engage with ludic representations of the Shoah limit themselves to concepts such as jokes, laughter, and humour. However, the implicit and indirect dimensions of irony and its axiological dimension might turn it into another useful concept in the context of trauma studies: could we say that the oblique character of irony is especially akin to the mediated way in which trauma is related through literature?

In the context of Latin American literature, the presence of laughter and irony is still less prominent than in the context of the Holocaust, both in the cultural field and in the academic context. A logical reason is that the experiences of violence in the subcontinent are recent or even ongoing. In my talk I will focus on two very different cases: the Argentinean memory of the last dictatorship (1976-1983) and the Mexican war on drugs declared by Felipe Calderón (2006-today).

I will first concentrate on the way in which irony and parody are privileged means to reflect on the memory paradigm firmly established in the Argentinean cultural and academic context. How does irony question existing discourses on memory in the high-brow postdictatorial novel? What are its objects, strategies, and effects? What is the role of testimonial literature generations and of generational shifts in the use of irony?

Next, the predominance of memory studies in Argentina will be contrasted with the sharp absence of an official memory discourse in the case of Mexico, which is due, in part, to the fact that in this case the drug war is still ongoing. Generally known as a pulp genre, the drug novel has often been criticized because it fails to engage with the traumatic present and because of its aesthetic and ludic approach to violence (influenced by Tarantino cinema, spaghetti westerns, etc.). What are the functions of black humour and cynicism in these literary texts? Could we consider the representation of abject corpses and severed heads as materializations of memory, or are they merely a contribution to the daily spectacle of violence in Mexico?”

Brigitte Adriaensen is Associate Professor of Hispanic Literatures at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is the principal investigator and coordinator of the research programme The Politics of Irony in Contemporary Latin American Literature on Violence, for which she received a VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Her publications are situated in the fields of Spanish and Spanish American literature, and include La poética de la ironía en la obra tardía de Juan Goytisolo (Verbum, 2007) and Pesquisas en la obra tardía de Juan Goytisolo (with Marco Kunz, Rodopi, 2009). She has published articles in such journals as Texte: Revue de Critique et de Théorie Littéraire, América: Cahiers du Criccal, Guaraguo: Revista de Cultura Latinoamericana, Lettres Romanes, and Variaciones Borges, and she is a co-editor of Narrativas del crimen en América Latina (with Valeria Grinberg Pla, LitVerlag, 2012).