Outside of this volume already circumscribed by the signi- fication articulated in (the father's) discourse nothing is: awoman [l'afemme]. Zone of silence [Zone de silence].
THE line of argument which I have been developing throughout this book would suggest that the exclusion of women from the Paternal Logos, or the 'Lodgic' of the Father--ultimately bound up with their circumscription within it--can be contested from another place, through a fundamental dis-placement which, re- writing its topography, converts the imposed zone of silence into one of subversion, resistance, and contestation. In this chapter, I shall explore two novels by the Colombo-Argentine writer, art critic, academic, and theorist, Marta Traba, using the trope of la zona del silencio which she herself suggested (independently of Irigaray) in one of her works of art criticism. The novels I shall be discussing in this context are Conversación al sur ( 1981; Mothers and Shadows) and En cualquier lugar ( 1984; Some Untidy Spot), as well as some of her critical texts. 2
Although born in Argentina ( 1930), Traba nevertheless spent most of her life outside Argentina, particularly in Colombia, and came to consider that country as her home (see e.g. "'Me considero un ciudadano libre de toda sospecha' (I consider myself a citizen free of suspicion)" in Araújo de Vallejo (ed.), Marta Traba (selected critical work, pp. 350-1)). After being expelled from the United States in 1982 along with Angel Rama under the notorious 'Clause 28' of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, classifying her as a 'communist subversive' ( ibid. 351 ; see also Rama, "'USA y los escritores latinoamericanos'"), she was granted Colombian nationality by the then President Belisario Betancur, shortly before her death in an air crash in Madrid ( Nov. 1983). She left a prodigious lifetime of work--apart from twenty-seven books of art criticism, many major articles, some 1,200 short texts for cultural magazines and newspapers, three complete series of television programmes (averaging over thirty half-hour programmes each), several major lecture series for universities across the Americas, and founding and directing the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá, she found time to write seven novels, two volumes of short stories and a collection of poems.
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Publication Information: Book Title: The Subversive Psyche: Contemporary Women's Narrative from Argentina and Uruguay. Contributors: Elia Geoffrey Kantaris - author. Publisher: Oxford University. Place of Publication: Oxford. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number: 194.
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