Between the speech and the living: La casa de los conejos, by Laura Alcoba

Abstract

Laura Alcoba’s, La casa de los conejos (2008) is a first-person narrative on repression and resistance to the dictatorial Argentine government by the Montoneros, in 1976. In the context of contemporary studies of memory, in which subjectivity and stories of life experiences are increasingly valued, how do we understand the movement of the author to seek documentary sources in her narrative? Given the huge categorization of memories’ types, how can we classify the author’s evocations? We came to the conclusion that the search of documents confirms the author’s need to sustain, by printed records, her individual memories that are also collective; that her testimony transits between truth, subjectivity, sacralization and, finally, that her memories are between post-memory and inherited memory, configuring a “hybrid memory.” Beatriz Sarlo, Marcio Seligmann-Silva, Maurice Halbwachs, Michael Pollak are some of our theoretical references.