Writing and Testimony. The construction of the archive in "Puño y Letra" by Diamela Eltit

Abstract

This paper is centered in the presence of the archival material in the work of the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit Puño y letra (2005). The book recovers the recording of the trial of Enrique Arancibia Clavel for the murder of General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert, committed in Argentina in 1974. Eltit attended the trial in Buenos Aires in 2000 and, five years later, she published a fragment of the case. This fragment is accompanied by documents that have a significant testimonial value and at the same time resignified in Puño y Letra. Within the archives, there is a letter from Augusto Pinochet to General Prats, the pleadings of the lawyers and the testimony of Eltit, among others. This article underlines the conjunction of documents and their multiple readings and interpretation. As Jacques Derrida (1994) said, we don’t read in the same way what it is filed in another way. The evidence presents in the book gives testimony of the network of horror imposed by the dictatorship and highlights the work of women in the construction of an alternative memory.