Retracing Disappearance: Literary Responsibility and the Return of the Far Right

September 12, 2024 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 33, Numbers 2 & 3, January 2023 & May 2023

Federico Pous (bio)

A review of Bishop, Karen Elizabeth. The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror. SUNY P, 2020. SUNY Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture.

The Space of Disappearance offers a profound reflection on the figure of disappearance as a literary mode of depicting, unraveling, and subverting the modus operandi of political life in Argentina. Through detailed analyses of singular literary works by Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, Karen Elizabeth Bishop outlines a very suggestive hypothesis that traces a collective literary construction of different modes of disappearance. Following Maurice Blanchot’s idea that “the goal of literature is to disappear,” Bishop identifies “dissimulation” (Walsh), “doubling and displacement” (Cortázar), as well as “suspension” and an “embodied superabundant” (Martínez) as literary modes of disappearance which are, at the same time, “symptoms and products” of the disappearance of literature itself. Ultimately, Bishops argues that there is a “narrative commons” in which disappearance operates, not only by denouncing the actual systematic killing and disappearance of dead bodies perpetrated by the state during the last dictatorship (1976-83), but also by putting to work an “ethical commons” that aims to dismantle, bear witness, and eventually cope with the profound terror generated during that historical period in Argentina. Bishop’s interventions touch on multiple angles of the role of literature in the construction of political narratives with clever close-readings, relevant socio-political connections, and dense theoretical reflections that make the book worth reading. From my point of view, her most interesting reflections refer to the tensions between the role of the writer and the political interpellations at the time.

Grounding Disappearance

From a historical perspective, the desaparecidos have become a tragic imprint for recent Argentinean cultural and political history. The systematic production of enforced disappearance carried out during the last military and civic dictatorship included the political persecution of militants and political opponents, who were kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated, followed by the disappearance of their bodies. The proliferation of clandestine centers of detention and extermination (CCDE) was at the center of these repressive practices, leaving a profound wound in Argentinean society. A partial reconstruction of the events carried out by the CONADEP and published first in the book Nunca Más (1985), revealed that there were 340 CCDE, and it was calculated that 30,000 people disappeared at the time. Furthermore, the practice of disappearing bodies after killing political opponents by official repressive forces (or paramilitary groups) can be traced back at least to the beginning of the previous dictatorship (1966). However, the systematization of disappearance as the heart of the repressive system took place in the 1976–83 period, filling the whole society with fear and terror.

In this context, grounding disappearance becomes quite paradoxical: on one hand, it requires proper investigation to both unravel and reconstruct the modus operandi of the state and its repressive system; on the other hand, the literary imagination grows in the space of disappearance, as it is an intangible terrain that cannot ultimately be grasped. Walsh’s short story, “Esa mujer” (1965) about the handling of a woman’s dead body is so effective because he doesn’t mention who she is, even as the reader assumes she is Eva Perón. In contrast, the effects of Eva Perón’s body’s journey fulfilling and overflowing the figure of the desaparecidos in Martínez’s novel seems to overwhelm the hole left by the real desaparecidos in Argentinean society. Bishop mentions the impossibility of burying Evita’s body [in the ground] and its symbolic derivations. In these instances, literature puts to ground, or grounds, these modes of disappearance that cannot otherwise be grasped. By abstention or by excess, each writer appeals to the reader to bear witness and process what is missing. Bishop mentions that her intervention goes along with the allegory of the crypt (Avelar) that pinpoints the impossibility to complete the mourning process, and, of course, with the ongoing work on memory carried out in the country during the post-dictatorship period.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet maintains that “the [Jewish] genocide was thought and imagined by [the Nazis, which] demonstrates that it is possible to think it and imagine it” in order to represent it (qtd. in Crenzel 13). In that sense, the task of the literary imagination could reflect the attempts that preceded the production of desaparecidos during the seventies. And indeed, this matrix of disappearance can be traced as one of the foundations of the nation-state in the so-called Campaña del Desierto (1879-1880), when in the name of “Argentina” the newly formed army took over the Patagonia region killing most of the Indigenous population that were living on that land. The massacre of the Indigenous population, then, and the national narrative that erased the now-called Pueblos Originarios (the last of them were supposedly killed during that campaign), along with the erasure of the afro-descendant population (they were supposedly annihilated after a yellow fever epidemic in 1870), can be considered early practices (and narratives) of disappearance at play at the very foundation of the Argentine nation-state. From that perspective, Bishop’s grounding of disappearance displays a narrative commons that stretches throughout Argentinean cultural history with the ethical injunction of dismantling its repressive apparatus and solidified narratives, while also tending to the wounds and scars left in the affected people that have been part of Argentinean society since its inception.

Literary Responsibility

The Space of Disappearance explores the tension between the general impulse of literature to disappear and the writer’s responsibility to reflect on (and intervene in) the events taking place in the social and political life at the time. In that sense, Pilar Calveiro asserts that the “disappearance power” (poder desaparecedor or poder concentracionario) carried out by the military forces made the “concentration camps [CCDE] and the society tightly united. … The whole society was the victim and the perpetrator, the whole society suffered, and everyone has, at least, a responsibility” (my trans.; 159). This social call for responsibility interpellated especially a generation of intellectuals who were compelled to intervene politically, despite their different political conceptions. In the words of Walsh, interviewed by Piglia in 1970 and cited in the book, “I can’t conceive art if it is not directly related to politics” (“no concibo hoy el arte si no está relacionado directamente con la política”; my trans.; Walsh). This collective mantra interpellated the three writers analyzed in this book in a common search to find the language of the political.

Stereotypically, Cortázar aimed to put the literary games that characterized his short stories and novels at the service of the revolution (particularly, financing and supporting publicly the Nicaraguan revolution at the time). In the novel-comic Fantomas (1975), Cortázar intentionally finds a popular way to spread the word about the declaration of the second Russell Tribunal on human rights violation in Latin America (in which Cortázar himself participated). As a mode of disappearance, Cortázar uses a “doubling and displacing” mechanism, referring to himself as a character (the writer) in the comic, exiled in France, who at the end of the novel talks on the phone with a polyphonic voice of Latin American people. He comments on the prediction made by the superhero Fantomas, who fights against the disappearance of books, about the Latin American catastrophe to come and urgently “instructs the reader” to act. Both the prediction and the call to action were shared by several intellectuals at the time. In that sense, Cortázar doesn’t add a new specific mode of thinking disappearance but a clever mode of denouncing its advent.

Meanwhile, Walsh’s major writings aimed to employ his literary-detective mind to unravel and resolve not only concrete political murders but also the systematization of political repression under the dictatorship. Indeed, in the 1970s Walsh became a member of the Peronist guerilla Montoneros and was killed in the streets by the military after sending for publication his famous “Carta Abierta a la junta military” (1977), in which he denounces the existence of a systematic plan of disappearance of political opponents. In tracing a short story like “Variaciones en Rojo” (1956) as part of that literary trend, Bishop identifies Walsh as a precursor of the other authors. The finding is quite remarkable, as the key to this short story is to unravel how disappearance operates by hiding a piece of evidence in a piece of art. As a mode of disappearance, Bishop discovers there the work of “dissimulation” that adds up to Walsh’s reconstruction of real political crimes—like in Operación Masacre (1957) or in ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (1969)—through the use of testimonies, forensic evidence, and detective-like reasoning. In that sense, Calveiro writes that “the politics of disappearance during the seventies encompassed, along with the disappearance of people, the attempt to disappear, at the same time, the crimes and the criminals” (my trans.; 12). The role of the writer for Walsh is to reconstruct the crime scene in all its dimensions, unraveling the technics of disappearance involved in the covering up (disappearance) of the evidence and the killer. For Walsh, behind the foundation of a society there are a series of crimes that need to be resolved to come to terms with political life.

In her analysis of Martínez, Bishop’s depiction of the different strategies of “suspension” in La novela de Perón as a mode of disappearance is quite brilliant. The novel is about the day of Perón’s return flight to Argentina in 1973 after eighteen years of exile. He was going to be received in the airport of Ezeiza by thousands of sympathizers, but the massacre of leftist militants by a far-right faction canceled what was supposed to be a long-delayed encounter of the people with their leader. Bishop pinpoints that Perón in the plane is being suspended “in between worlds.” Similarly, the “interval between two thoughts” with which Martínez starts the last paragraph of the novel coincides with the exact moment before the massacre begins, constituting another gap that subtracts itself from time. These “suspensions of time” can be seen as moments of the disappearance of history that return with a potency that generates an overflowing violence (like in the massacre); or a simulacrum, in which people don’t believe that the man who returned is Perón. For them, he is a farce, far from the leader they have imagined; they therefore decide to continue waiting for him. In that sense, even Perón “disappeared” for the people at the time. These two outcomes surrounding the figure of Perón speak to the political unconscious of Argentine society and operate as the return of the repressed: armed violence and disbelief, a dreadful combination, reside at the bottom of the systematization of disappearance that was about to begin.

Finally, the idea of the body of Evita as “embodied superabundant” is a result of a post-dictatorship novel inscribed in a different literary trend: the political responsibility of creating a collective narrative that reconstructs what happened with the desaparecidos while contributing to the long process of mourning the traumatic experience. For Bishop, “Evita’s corpse is the narrative mode of disappearance” (160). In Santa Evita, Martínez takes up previous modes of disappearance techniques to make appear, ultimately, “the place of the disappeared in history” (160).

Indeed, the place of the desaparecido exceeds representation through an exuberant production of symbols that permeates the whole country’s social fabric. Evita’s embalmed body proves through the novel that it cannot be buried, “resist[ing] straightforward narrative” as a way of installing the frame of historical memory in the country (187). Along with other literary works like En estado de memoria (Tununa Mercado), or even La ciudad Ausente (Ricardo Piglia), Santa Evita operates as a mode of disappearance that is constantly showing Evita’s body as evidence that, even dead, cannot disappear completely.

From that perspective, Martínez’s political intervention is not so much the “denunciation” of the actual production of disappearance (like in Walsh or Cortázar), but the profound questioning of the modus operandi of political life in Argentina, including the Peronist movement. In the last instance, Bishop seems to suggest that the Peronist phenomenon was already embedded in a similar landscape of disappearance from which it couldn’t be detached. And if we want to understand the roots of the horror and the extent of the suffering produced by this modus operandi—a reading that is haunting us today again in the ominous return of the far right to power—we must untangle its Peronist origins too.

Federico Pous is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University, and works on the politics of memory, human rights, and contemporary social movements in Latin America and Spain. He published Eventos carcelarios (UNC Press 2022), about the experience of political prisoners during the 1970s in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil; and co-edited the volume, Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), about Paraguayan cultural history and the status of democracy in this country.

Works Cited