Carlos Manuel Varela and the Role of Memory in Covert Resistance

Abstract

This essay analyzes the use of memory as covert resistance to political repression in two dramas by the Uruguayan playwright Carlos Manuel Varela: Alfonso y Clotilde (1980) and Interrogatorio en Elsinore (1983). Written during Uruguay’s period of dictatorship, 1973-84, the dramas suggest several ways in which memory may be employed in the service of resistance: 1) as a covert weapon in a struggle to create an alternative reality 2) as a spur to action 3) as a guide to ethical behavior and 4) as a performance that encodes, repeats, and reinvigorates the alternative reality. The theoretical work of Pierre Nora, Michel de Certeau, and Joseph Roach help us understand theatre such as Varela’s as a site of memory, in which communal history is formed by the interplay between performers and spectators. (AEP)