Parallel Universes in Fiction: writing about Chile’s disappeared

Reviewed: The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez

Penguin Random House, 240 pp.

Some titles say a lot about a book and “Twilight Zone” or “La Dimension Desconocida”, by Chilean author Nona Fernandez, not only does that but in many ways constitutes the story that sets the scene for the actual story in the book. “Twilight Zone” is the English title of Fernandez’s original book title in Spanish. It is taken from a North American television series from the early 1960s that featured unusual or surreal events inspired by the sci-fi or fantasy genre. The term “twilight” refers to the period of time before sunrise or after sunset when the skies are not completely dark but are not clear yet either. Even though the term is mostly employed technically in this manner, “twilight” also has metaphorical uses and with the television series “The Twilight Zone” it became a popular way of referring to experiences with surprise endings or stories with twist endings.

In the original version, Nona Hernandez’s book is called “La Dimension Desconocida”, the name by which the series was known in Chile and which translates from English as “the unknown dimension”. Even though the English translation of the original title and the English title do not totally coincide, they each give us a different glimpse of what the book is about. The “unknown” refers to the many thousands of people who were forcibly disappeared during the regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, whereas “dimension” refers not to a place as such but to the dark and parallel zone where such atrocities took place. The “twilight zone” is a liminal zone, a not-so-real dimension but also a not-so-imaginary one either and as mentioned before, a zone of surprise endings or mid-point reversals.

This article is a review of Nona Fernandez’s book, triggered by a personal and professional trajectory that includes a year spent in Santiago of Chile between 2001-2002 and some experience of the Yemen context and of its own history with missing and forcibly disappeared persons. Chile and Yemen are two countries grappling with a heavy legacy of disappeared persons and this review is an attempt to shed light on aspects of Chile’s journey guided by Nona Fernandez’s narrative. The review contains a selection of features from the book that highlights the complexities that surround the topic of missing persons. It is also a homage to literature and to the role it plays to validate and provide representation to experiences that are rarely acknowledged and that for the most part remain invisible as happens all too often with disappeared persons.

In the book the two realities exist in parallel but they do not overlap. This approach – highlighting parallelisms which remain nonetheless separate – suggests a state of dissociation where a considerable number of Chileans appear completely detached and unaware of the gruesome reality that was happening in parallel to their lives. Sometimes, however, the two came close. One scene in the book provides an exacting illustration of the psychological tension arising from living in a state of deep cognitive dissonance: the arrest of Jose Weibel, a young Communist Party militant, on his way to dropping his kids at school. What is disturbing was the manner in which the arrest was treated: trivialized rather than someone’s battle for survival. Jose Weibel’s arrest in the morning of 29 March 1976 passed undisturbed and caused no impact on the appearance of “normalcy”. According to Memoria Viva, a digital repository of information concerning the circumstances of the disappearances occurred during Chile’s dictatorship, agents of the country’s internal security forces arrested Weibel for allegedly stealing a wallet from a bus passenger. He was never to be seen again and his whereabouts were never located.

There were also situations where the two realities stood practically face to face, forcing a recognition between them. Nona Fernandez describes one scene where “the passersby, the people on the street, my mother, the bus driver, all those who inhabited the apparent world of everyday, normal life, witnessed for a moment that crack through which the unknown dimension peeked out”. The moment happened during the arrest of an opponent of the regime, Contreras Maluje, whose resistance to being taken into custody did not go unnoticed by passersby. In the book, the “see-through” moment is treated not as an epiphany as such but instead as a turning point that contains the potential for a wider discovery of the “unknown dimension”.

Nona Fernandez tackles the “unknown dimension” not as a single event or sudden occurrence, but instead as an outcome that can only be reached through causation and by following a string of developments. The narrative structure of “The Unknown Dimension” – divided into four parts, each representing a different zone of access to the “unknown dimension” – gives us one of central claims made in the book: since enforced disappearances are part of a narrative maintained by those in power to supress truth, evade accountability and manage public perception, the only way to displace a narrative is by constructing a new one. As mentioned, in the book, this narrative takes the form of four key foundations or “zones” that represent the journey from people’s ordinary daily lives into the “unknown dimension”: from the “entrance area” (“zona de ingreso”), passing through the “contact zone” (“zona de contacto”) and the “ghost zone” (“zona de fantasmas”), before reaching the “escape zone” (“zona de escape”).

Assuming there were hundreds of other similar cases, when did the building of manufactured normalcy start to crumble? One critical turning point in “The Unknown Dimension” was when in August 1984, Andres Antonio Valenzuela Morales appeared on the cover of a magazine under the headline: “I tortured people”. Until his act of self-denunciation, Morales had been a member of the regime’s intelligence services. His confession to a journalist working with the Cauce magazine in Santiago included many revelations about his direct and indirect participation in acts of torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. His place of birth – a coastal village named “Papudo” that can be translated as “boogey man” – adds to Valenzuela’s goriness. Even so, according to Nona Fernandez, he maintained a perfectly ordinary appearance: “he did not look like a monster or an evil giant, neither did he look like a runaway psychopath...he could be anyone. Including our high school teacher”.

A substantial part of “The Unknown Dimension” deals with imagination and collective memory, what differentiates them and also what is rendered possible by each given the absence of missing persons and the insurmountable challenges families face such as denialism, social stigma, lack of evidence and psychological impact to name a few. The book is also about memory construction and above all its limits: those of the contexts in which disappearances have taken place, which are often characterized by recurring cycles of conflict and violence with impunity for perpetrators; and in addition to these, the limits of language and the ways in which language fails to capture the realities that we don’t see and that we don’t understand. Language informs the way we perceive and understand the world. What Nona Fernandez shows us is that there was no language to describe and no language to understand what stood through the cracks of the Boogey Man’s door. As she says, “I don’t know the words of what unfolded. Nor do I want to. I lack the words and images to write the rest of the story”.

Finding out the truth of what happened and reconstituting the memory of what happened are incredibly arduous in the context of enforced disappearances. Country records prove us this: many states delay the prospects of coming to terms with their past and with this particular legacy. Many countries have also failed to adopt legislation concerning missing persons and their families, including providing a definition of who is a missing person, as is the case of Yemen. Despite the adoption of the international convention for the protection of all persons from enforced disappearance twenty years ago, the number of countries who have not signed nor ratified the convention – like Yemen - is higher than those who have. These factors are not conducive to the establishment of the truth. When official authorities are unwilling to take these steps, it becomes unbearably hard for families to obtain any answers about the fate of their loved ones.

“The Unknown Dimension” is a book about absences – first and foremost of those whom we love - and the profound conundrums and questions that confronting their absence raises, with no guaranteed answers in sight. It is also a book about journeys, their maze of tunnels and zones and about the mimicry that often exists between the tunnels of our inner world and those that we find in the outer world. One book critic noted that “The Unknown Dimension” was a “social autopsy” of Chilean society under Pinochet’s dictatorship. By focusing on the social disconnection caused by untruths and duplicity, Nona Fernandez’s book is a walkthrough of the anatomy of Pinochet's regime, of the tunnels it excavated, literal and imagined, and of its unknowable places. Drawing on the imagery of parallel realities, the book provides a representation of the regime's cartography, its realities, and how they co-exist whilst being completely insulated from each other. As “The Unknown Dimension” shows us, the paradoxes created through lies and the manipulation of reality are multiple and profound. They can trick us into assuming, at great risk for others, that what is not seen does not exist, that the absence of evidence is the evidence of the absence.

Despite the pessimism that “The Unknown Dimension” may evoke, it is also a book about possibilities, about see-throughs that sometimes occur spontaneously and those that we crack through in our horizons. The twilight zone relies on the qualities of the color of dusk – medium dark medium bright shades of blue with soft purple undertones - as a symbolic shorthand to convey a realm of possibility. For Nona Hernandez, this realm is not what happens by force of circumstances (the book offers a stark warning about the risks of diminished agency and automacity) but instead it is closely tied to agency and ultimately to our personal narratives and lived experiences. A society firmly anchored on the recognition of the subjectivity of its citizens is a society of truth and indisputably better prepared to face boogey man.