ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis can be a powerful critical tool to approach how Peruvian cultural production reflects upon the brutal armed conflict that the country experienced in the 1980s and 1990s. Two of the most popular novels dealing with the years of fighting, La hora azul (2005) by Alonso Cueto and Renato Cisneros’s La distancia que nos separa (2015), feature protagonists determined to trace the origins of their traumas back to the years of the conflict through the detailed analysis of the actions of their fathers, military men involved in the counterinsurgency measures taken by the Peruvian government during the two decades of war. Although a Freudian or Lacanian reading of these characters’ pursuits would seem warranted, this chapter takes a different type of psychoanalytic approach to these texts. Drawing on Esther Rashkin’s ruminations of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concept of phantom, the chapter proposes that the obsessive behavior that both characters display when searching information about their fathers’ actions can be read as a symptom that verifies the existence of a shameful (or rather purposely invisible) secret that prevents them from acknowledging their responsibility in the racism and discrimination that catalyzed the violence during the conflict.
