Institutionalized Violence and Oppression: Ambiguity, Complicity and Resistance in El Campo and The Conduct of Life

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• Institutionalized Violence and Oppression:Ambiguity, Complicity and Resistance in El Campo and The Conduct of Life
• Araceli González Crespán (bio)

Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro's El Campo, written in 1967 and first performed in 1968, is a play that portrays institutionalized violence through ambiguity, double meanings, duplicity, lies, and lack of reference.¹ Upon his arrival to what he presumes to be a new job as an accountant, the main character Martín will slowly realize that, instead, he is a prisoner in a concentration camp. What happens on stage and what the victims experience is never explicit, so both the protagonist and the audience are confronted with the visible, physical consequences of such violence combined with the psychological terror induced by lack of definition, vagueness, and ignorance. Oppression deprives the victims and the audience of any sense of comprehension and renders them powerless.

The Conduct of Life premiered almost twenty years later, in 1985. Cuban American Maria Irene Fornes set the scene in "A Latin American country. The present."² The general, diffuse reference to place and time does not incorporate more specific details other than the performance space: the house of Orlando, an army lieutenant that will soon be a commander. He participates in tortures and abuse not only as part of his professional duties but also privately, at home, where he keeps Nena, a twelve-year-old destitute girl he has kidnapped. Here, the victimizer sadistically replicates the institutional abuse in the personal domain. Other characters in the household, namely his wife Leticia, are at first unaware of the existence of Nena although her complicity plays a role in the sustained abuse of the victim.

The arrival of the new millennium seemed to bring with it the illusion that military regimes were a thing of the past and that democracy was the [End Page 109] destiny, if not reality, across America. In the continent, threats to political stability seemed to come from afar, with Islamic terrorism identified as the external enemy; however, in the second decade of the century, we have already witnessed the surge of anti-democratic reactions based on demagogy and populism from within the system. For example, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Donald Trump in the United States, both became presidents by virtue of democratic elections but have pushed the limits of what democracy means by questioning the voting process. Prior to the 2022 election, President Bolsonaro—who openly defended Brazil's military dictatorship—uttered constant baseless accusations of fraud in the electoral system, attacked freedom of speech, and repeatedly threatened the Supreme Court.³ At the moment of writing these lines, in 2023, Trump's refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election has had such an effect that, for the first time in United States' modern history, "the dominant faction in one of two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests."⁴

Living in a world that seems far away from the political unrest that facilitated the advent of dictatorships in Latin America but that experiences other kinds of political threats to democracy, it can be illuminating to interrogate the representation of violence, repression, and oppression in these two plays. This article aims to explore different modes of perpetuating institutionalized violence and to identify forms of resistance to it by comparing and contrasting these two plays that present American oppressions. This can be a reminder of the disastrous effects of upturning a system based on the recognition of equality before the law for all citizens, and it can stimulate awareness and resistance by providing a critical perspective on the challenges of those assaults on freedom.

A Question of Style: Theatrical Form in Griselda Gambaro and Maria Irene Fornes

Gambaro's and Fornes' highly original signature styles and theatrical strengths present a challenge to any easy definition; both dramaturgies resist description because of the variety of modes and themes each playwright has covered in their extensive theatrical productions. When compared, there are some striking similarities in their playwriting careers: [End Page 110] both were basically self-taught and started to get involved in theatre relatively late. Gambaro was mostly trained by reading...