The Nickname "Pinocha" in the World of Lies of the Last Argentine Dictatorship: A Reading of When We Talked with the Dead by Mariana Enríquez

Abstract

This article analyzes Mariana Enríquez’s short story Cuando hablábamos con los muertos through the lens of a protagonist’s nickname, Pinocha. The epithet, evoking Pinocchio as the archetypal liar, functions as a semantic name intimately connected to the story’s setting: Argentina’s final dictatorship – marked by systematic recourse to falsehood – and the early post-dictatorship years, when silence about the recent past was violently imposed. The study argues that, despite her ignorance, Pinocha is bound to the regime through her familial world. From this perspective, her trauma can be interpreted as the experience of suddenly recognizing oneself as implicated in state criminality. Under this reading, Pinocha embodies what Michael Rothberg has termed a «genealogically implicated subject», a category designating those who inherit histories of violence without having been active agents.This figure opens reflection on the family members «complicit» in the dictatorship’s repression and destabilizes rigid binaries between perpetrators and the persecuted.