Secrets and Lies

It is interesting to think about Rigoberta Menchu in relation to Borges' El etnografo regarding the idea of the secret. Last week the secret was held by the observer, the student held liable by the institution. In Menchu it is held by the observed. Not just held, as Sommer points out in "No Secrets for Rigoberta", but dangled in front of the reader. If according to Levinas secrecy is the inviolable core of human subjectivity how does the secret function in Menchu versus El etnografo? One difference is Menchu's refusal to take a subject-position. Menchu refuses to be a stable subject which can be observed by the authority. She is, instead polyvalent, shifting. She refuses to be the Other from which the truth is extracted. As Sommer writes, "Think of Dinesh's tirade when Stanford University made her testimonial part of a required curriculum. Instead of scientific information about genuine Indians, stable objects of investigation, he gets a protean subject of multiple discourses in Indian disguise" (117). This refusal turns, as Sommer argues, a scene of interrogation into self-authorization. The testimonio also questions the absolute nature of truth, blurring the line between fiction and factual data. Especially with the controversy surrounding Menchu as to the facticity of her story, I found As Sommer's argument that Menchu calls into question the notion of truth, as she quotes Hancke, "legends tend to be as true in substance as they are false in detail."