What does it mean to reckon with your nation’s past when its history resembles Rod Sterling’s science-fiction horror anthology television series, a show whose name has become a shorthand for describing experiences that border on the surreal and disturbing? In Nona Fernández’s genre-defying novel The Twilight Zone, translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, these are precisely the considerations that preoccupy our narrator, who is transfixed by the events of Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean military dictatorship between 1973 to 1990. How does one begin to responsibly exhume the stories that have been excluded from the record? To restore fullness and vibrance into the lives that were needlessly extinguished? 

Our narrator is first introduced to this sinister parallel reality at age thirteen when she is confronted by a cover of Cauce magazine featuring Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, an intelligence agent, with the confessional headline, “I tortured people.” Prior to this encounter, she lacked even a tenuous grasp of the instigators behind the attacks, crimes and scandals of the political crisis; her understanding of the world had previously been shaped only by the stories passed down from her classmates. Though her understanding of the terrifying regime is incomplete, Valenzuela’s involvement is immediately burned into her mind. When she encounters him a second time, twenty-five years later, the memory of their initial encounter remains just as fresh, and she is once again gripped by the spell of his image. Her reacquaintance with this intelligence agent in adulthood becomes incontrovertible proof that there indeed exists an invisible underground world, “a disturbing universe that we sensed lay hidden somewhere out there, beyond the bounds of school and home, where everything obeyed a logic governed by captivity and rats.”

These incidents thrust the narrator back into an obsessive haze and her subsequent interactions with “the man who tortures people” carry increased significance. When their paths cross while she works as a script writer on a documentary about the Vicariate of Solidarity, a human rights organization founded by the Catholic Church, she is faced with a video recording that injects Valenzuela’s virtual presence with movement and life. Another time, her mother recounts a story where she witnessed a man named Carlos Contreras Maluje throwing himself under a bus to escape Valenzuela’s capture. 

Though these disturbing events are reported rather matter-of-factly, Fernández compellingly implicates readers into these individual experiences through collective memory. Braided with personal, cultural and political histories, her novel offers an array of portals through which to gain broader context of the regime while comprehending the specificity of the narrator’s experience. After all, it is through fastening the everyday to the unforgettable that the distinction between individual memory and the national imaginary converges to construct a tapestry of stories belonging to the domain of the public and private, the past and present. Sometimes, this narrative strategy materializes through comparisons to characters from The Twilight Zone: the narrator is the fading actress from “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” alone and attempting to decipher the same images that repeat forever; Contreras is the lonely space traveler from “Probe 7, Over and Out,” stranded on an unknown planet and abandoned by his home base. Unsettling histories that cannot be reproduced through exposition must rely upon familiar references to convey their otherworldliness and unveil the disquieting reality beneath the surface.

Other times, collective memory is drawn out through references to cultural texts and touchstones rooted in the narrator’s personal memories. A fond classroom lesson about astronaut Yuri Gagarin’s orbit around the Earth reminds her of his far-reaching recognition, a phenomenon that resulted in a generation of children being named after a man “who had seen what no one else had ever seen.” One of Gagarin’s namesakes across the planet he circumnavigated, the narrator reveals, was Yuri Gahona, a boy who fearlessly traverses through the expanse of his neighbourhood searching for his father, a missing municipal employee. When Valenzuela is transported out of a disguised van while fighting invisible presences, the Ghostbusters theme song runs through her mind. When the narrator and her mother watch her documentary in theatres, it’s the summer of Avengers 2: Age of Ultron’s release and the blockbuster’s presence overshadows her film in every way. Juxtaposed against each other, it’s evident that certain narratives, especially messy ones that have been lost to suppression, killing and disappearance, will struggle to reach the same audiences.

If the narrator’s fascination with Valenzuela derives from concern with the lacuna in institutional memory, she attempts to repair this tear through a mode of counterarchiving that bears resemblance to Saidiya Hartman’s method of working with “scraps at the archive” and “unknown persons, nameless figures, ensembles, collectives, multitudes, the chorus.” Fernández skillfully builds a record of her own, complicating the official narrative with emotional context, speculative fiction and textual references that expand the haunting grounds of her nation’s subjectivity. To fill the gaps between facts she possesses, she imagines the everyday lives of the historical subjects, saturating their stories with banal activities and familial responsibilities. When the state’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights fails to acknowledge individuals who cannot be neatly categorized, Fernández employs a practice that embraces ambiguity and empathy while addressing the incomprehensible violence inflicted upon victims. 

The narrator, critiquing the selective memories of violence on display, ponders, “How is a museum of memory curated? Who chooses what to show? Who chooses what to leave out?” The novel suggests possible answers to its inquiry about the responsibility of storytelling by proposing the inclusion of informal fragments, digressive tangents and autofictive elements. In highlighting the personal, subjective possibilities of archives, Fernández not only fleshes out the lives of the minor figures in history but discloses her own involvement in crafting a literary museum of memories. Certainly, the approach isn’t exhaustive, but her ability to supplement the dominant, legible narrative with alternative objects paves a path towards unconventional modes of remembering for the future. For now, though, Fernández’s chilling and urgent novel has sufficiently proved itself to be a radical departure in how to mourn, seek answers and chronicle history.