The Space of Disappearance

A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror

Karen Elizabeth Bishop

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438478524, 9781438478517
• eBook ISBN: 9781438478531
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examines the evolution of disappearance as a formal narrative and epistemological phenomenon in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction.

More than thirty thousand people were forcibly disappeared during the military dictatorship that governed Argentina from 1976 to 1983, leaving behind a cultural landscape fractured by absence, denial, impunity, and gaps in knowledge. This book is about how these absences assume narrative form in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction and the formal strategies and structures authors have crafted to respond to the country's use of systematic disappearance as a mechanism of state terror. In incisive close readings of texts by Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, Karen Elizabeth Bishop explores how techniques of dissimulation, doubling, displacement, suspension, and embodiment come to serve both epistemological and ethical functions, grounding new forms of historical knowledge and a new narrative commons whose work continues into the twenty-first century. Their writing, Bishop argues, recalibrates our understanding of the rich and increasingly urgent reciprocities between fiction, history, and the demands of human rights. In the end, The Space of Disappearance asks us to reexamine in fiction what we think we cannot see; there, at the limits of the literary, disappearance appears as a vital agent of resistance, storytelling, and world-building.

1

Mimesis by Other Means

The Aesthetics of Disappearance in Rodolfo Walsh’s “Variaciones en rojo”

Todo crimen que deja indicios materiales es imperfecto.

—Rodolfo Walsh, Mayoría n° 61

The image should stand out from the frame.

—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

The production of space is thus transformed into its opposite: the reproduction of things in space.

—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

In March 1977, one year after Jorge Rafael Videla’s anti-Peronist junta ousted Juan Domingo Perón’s third wife as president of Argentina, Admiral Emilio Massera informed a task force that he wanted the journalist and revolutionary Rodolfo Walsh captured alive. The death squad, which included the notorious torturers Alfredo Astiz and Jorge Acosta, requested a “Free Zone”—an order that alerted local police forces to stay clear so that the State could carry out a clandestine arrest—in downtown Buenos Aires in order to set a trap for Walsh. The usually alert and cautious Walsh walked into the ambush. In preparation for this moment, the author carried with him both a cyanide pill and a small pistol that might provoke his captors to shoot him. He used the latter that day and was gunned down in the street. His body was put in the trunk of a car and taken to the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, or the ESMA, then operating as a clandestine concentration camp on the shore of the Río de la Plata in Buenos Aires. Walsh’s body was recognized by two friends when left overnight in a corridor, but it would be some years before they were released and could confirm the journalist’s death to his family and friends. In the meantime, a habeas corpus writ filed on his behalf was denied, his family did not know if he was alive or dead, and his body was never recovered. Walsh’s disappearance was condemned widely, including in an open letter to the junta published in La Nación on November 25, 1977, and signed by fellow writers Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Italo Calvino.

Among the documents that Walsh’s murderers found on his person was a map they deemed an important key to his clandestine revolutionary operation. Accompanied by a moveable disc, it was interpreted by the army to reveal the locations of upcoming attacks from the revolutionary left.1 But they could not identify these locations or otherwise make sense of the chart. The meaning of the map was later revealed by his daughter Patricia as a chart of the night sky that Walsh drew up to teach his daughters to follow the progression of constellations throughout the year; the disc revealed not the future sites of guerilla attacks but rather the orbits of the planets around the sun.2 The account evidences the shortsightedness of the dictatorship, but it also serves as a cautionary introduction to reading not only the investigative journalism for which Walsh is more widely recognized but also his detective fiction. For it reminds us that clues might not mean what they seem, that the key to a crime may reside in our reading practices, and spatial organization can be in its own right an important source of new knowledge. These analytic propositions prove fundamental to making sense of Walsh’s early fiction and the model it offers up for later twentieth-century Argentine authors who will go on to draft disappearance as a particular narrative mode and device in response to the pressures of state terror.

This chapter examines how disappearance manifests as a significant literary trope and tool in the eponymous short story of Walsh’s 1953 trilogy of detective fiction, Variaciones en rojo (Variations in red). Throughout the work, Walsh cultivates an aesthetics of disappearance in which the absent and then also the forms of dissimulation that cover up and over what is missing become particular modes of knowledge. Walsh constructs gaps, deferrals, and disappearances that are fundamental to the narrative structure of his fiction and to solving the crime at hand, but these become also critical to how we read art and its potential relationship to mortal crime. For disappearance, and the murderous attempt to use art to close the gaps it leaves behind, proves the clue that leads to the crime’s resolution. Walsh’s early detective fiction offers up the possibility that art and disappearance are intimately connected and instructs his reader in the oblique interpretive tools and practices that allow us to parse their relationship and the forms of knowledge and intimations of justice that emerge from it.

The more complex potential of this relationship will manifest decades later in Argentine fiction where doubling and displacement, suspension, and embodiment emerge as fully fledged narrative modes of disappearance. But Walsh’s “Variaciones en rojo” offers up an early version in which techniques of deferral and dissimulation—the attempt to hide, mask, or deflect presence—point simultaneously to disappearance, art, and new knowledge. Here art is realized or read as mimetic intervention only after having served as a means of deflection such that deferral, referral, and displacement appear as constitutive components of imitation. Put simply, art deflects in order to reflect real, if narrative, life—which in this case involves murder—and the reader, viewer, and metadetective resists attending to what obliquity plainly reveals at her own risk. For there, Walsh’s narrative universe reveals—in its complicated, recursive network of the visual, the missing, and the denied—resides the knowledge that we need to restore balance and justice in a world gone wrong.

Solving the crime, which is also solving for disappearance in this relato de enigma, requires we read the ways that art intersects with the lived world as much as reflects it. Walsh uses art to communicate what is not immediately visible so that the story’s detective, and the reader alongside him, have to turn to art in order to make sense of the world before them. Navigating this circuitry of mimetic referral depends on both logic and the careful parsing of spatial organization. The close circumscription of space—not unimportantly also one of Poe’s requirements for literary composition3—and of time are both traditional provisions of analytic detective fiction; a classical crime must occur within a bounded space and bracketed time period such that space has always had an important role to play in works of detective fiction. But in Walsh’s work, the useful interpretation of physical space is only possible by understanding the function of disappearance and how it informs our reading of art.4 Here the spaces that disappearance takes up, conquers, and opens in the overlapping lived and aesthetic worlds prove the key to solving the mortal crime at the heart of the story. In “Variaciones en rojo” Walsh tests the relationship of disappearance to both logic and art, and he crafts an aesthetics in which what is missing reveals what is before us. The possibility, while here still literary preoccupation, serves as precursor to the more urgent formal narrative interventions that disappearance will make decades later as a response to the realities of state terror. But Walsh confirms already art’s capacity to house and make visible disappearance; he asks that we pay careful attention to the aesthetic forms and spaces it occupies and the pressure these exert on how we see and interpret the lived world.

Operation True Crime

Forty years after his death, Rodolfo Walsh is best remembered for his literary journalism or true crime narrative, particularly Operación masacre (1957), Caso Satanowsky (1958, 1973), and ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (1969), and for his final work, “Carta abierta de un escritor a la junta militar” (Open letter from a writer to the military junta, 1977), the document that surely sealed his death. These works, as well as a vast collection of journalistic pieces, short stories, posthumously published outlines for future work, and partially finished pieces, reflect the personal and professional transition that Walsh underwent from author of literature to literary journalist to purely political writer.5 In hindsight, the transition makes sense. Early on in his career, while he was still writing detective fiction and submitting his work to municipal literary prizes, he worked as a proofreader and translator at Hachette in Buenos Aires, and as an editor, most notably of the first collection of Argentine crime fiction, Diez cuentos policiales argentinos (Ten Argentine police stories, 1953), in which he brought together works by Jorge Luis Borges, Jerónimo del Rey, Leopoldo Hurtado, and the pseudonymous H. Bustos Domecq (shared alter ego of Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares). The last work in the anthology is his own, “Cuento para Tahúres” (A story for cheats). Walsh’s world was largely a literary one at least until 1951, when he began to work as a journalist at the magazines Leoplán and Vea y Lea in Buenos Aires. He continued to dedicate himself to both literature and journalism throughout the fifties, but his definitive entry into the world of investigative political writing came in 1957, with the serial publication of his first work of literary journalism, what would later become Operación masacre (Operation Massacre).

Walsh’s account—which precedes by nine years Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), often cited as inaugurating the genre of true crime literature—details the José León Suárez massacre, the attempted execution of eleven alleged participants in a June 1956 Peronist uprising against then-president Aramburu.6 Of the eleven men police attempted to execute in a wasteland next to a city dump, six survived by running beyond the scope of the police vehicle headlights and escaping into the dark or by playing dead. All of the survivors went into hiding and were presumed dead by the police. In December 1956, Walsh received a tip that there had been survivors to the execution, one of whom Walsh tracked down in the Bolivian embassy where he had taken refuge. This survivor related the night’s events to Walsh, who subsequently put his own life on hold in order to investigate the police violence.7 He published a final version of his account, “Massacre del barrio José León Suárez: un libro sin editorial” (Massacre in the José León Suárez district: a book without a publisher), in nine installments that ran from May to July 1957 in the magazine Mayoría; three different publishing houses came out with new editions in 1964, 1969, and 1972.

Shortly after beginning his investigation into the Aramburu government’s illegal executions, Walsh wrote in a letter to his American friend, translator, and detective genre enthusiast Donald Yates, “I’ve had a hell of a time these three months. Most of it away from home. But I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do, working on a real case and succeeding too. This thing grows more sensational every day.”8 After years of reading and writing detective fiction, Walsh was now putting his efforts toward investigating a real crime; the move was a logical one that in retrospect both solidifies the beginning of Walsh’s career as a writer of political literature and makes manifest his belief that politics and art be contiguous projects. While Walsh continued to write literary fiction over the next twenty years, including the important collection of short stories Los oficios terrestres (1965), he increasingly devoted his efforts to political journalism, politicized fiction, and further true crime narrative. He took on two new investigative projects, Caso Satanowsky and ¿Quién mató a Rosendo?, in which he detailed the cover-ups surrounding the political murders of a prominent judge and a union leader, both in Buenos Aires.

About this shift in his writing, he observed:

La desvalorización de la literatura tenía elementos sumamente positivos: no era posible seguir escribiendo obras altamente refinadas que únicamente podía consumir la intelligentzia burguesa, cuando el país empezaba a sacudirse por todas partes. Todo lo que escribiera debía sumergirse en el nuevo proceso, y serle útil, contribuir a su avance. Una vez más, el periodismo era aquí el arma adecuada.

The devaluation of literature had wholly positive elements: it wasn’t possible to keep on writing highly refined works that only the bourgeois intelligentsia could consume when the whole country was starting to shake up. Everything I wrote had to immerse itself in the new process, and be useful, contribute to its advance. Once again, journalism was here the appropriate weapon.9

Walsh describes his turn to journalism as a response to the social and political demands of his time. But he doesn’t ever see art and politics as entirely unconnected. Instead, he sees them as dynamic facilitators of each other’s projects: politics as a valid literary preoccupation and literature as a crucial mechanism for political change.

In March 1970, in an interview with his friend Ricardo Piglia, Walsh confirmed what his writing had long espoused, a concerted commitment between aesthetics and politics:

Hoy pienso que no sólo es posible un arte que esté relacionado directamente con la política, sino que como retrospectivamente me molesta mucho esa muletilla que hemos usado durante años, quisiera invertir la cosa y decir que no concibo hoy el arte si no está relacionado directamente con la política, con la situación del momento que se vive en un país dado, si no está eso, para mí le falta algo para poder ser arte. No es una cosa caprichosa, no es una cosa que yo simplemente la siento, sino que corresponde al desarrollo general de la conciencia en este momento, que incluye, por cierto, la conciencia de algunos escritores e intelectuales, y que realmente va a ser muy clara a medida que avancen los procesos sociales y políticos, porque es imposible hoy en la Argentina hacer literatura desvinculada de la política o hacer arte desvinculado de la política, es decir, si está desvinculado de la política por esa sola definición ya no va a ser arte ni va a ser política.10

Today I think that not only is an art directly related to politics possible, but that also in hindsight, this catchphrase that we have used for years really bothers me; I’d like to invert it and say that today I cannot conceive of art that is not directly related to politics, to the current situation being lived in a given country. If that’s not there, I think something is lacking for it to be art. This is not caprice, it isn’t something that I simply feel, but rather that corresponds to the general evolution of conscience right now. This indeed includes the conscience of some writers and intellectuals, and is really going to become very clear as social and political processes go forward. Because it is impossible today in Argentina to create literature disconnected from politics or to create art disconnected from politics. I mean, if it’s disconnected from politics, for that reason alone it’s already not going to be art nor is it going to be politics.

Walsh here responds to Piglia’s questions about the relationship between the novel and the short story, about the type of fragmentary novel that Walsh constructs in his true crime narrative. Earlier in the interview, Walsh identifies the novel as a “bourgeois conception of literature” and posits that different moments in social history require different forms of representation; he feels that “fiction is likely coming to its splendid end” and that “new forms of production necessitate a new kind of more documentary art.”11 Walsh aims to create art that demonstrates something, an art founded on the idea that testimony (testimonio) and protest or criticism (denuncia) are artistic categories at least as worthwhile as fiction.12 This brings him to his claim that art and literature are directly and inextricably related, a belief that responds to the political upheaval and social changes taking place in Argentina at the time. For Walsh, literary form must reflect a lived present; the novel, at least the traditional nineteenth-century novel that informed the novels produced in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, was either ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Space of Disappearance Knowledge, Form, Rights
• Chapter One Mimesis by Other Means The Aesthetics of Disappearance in Rodolfo Walsh’s “Variaciones en rojo”
• Chapter Two Double Exposure The Hermeneutics of Catastrophe in Julio Cortázar’s Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionale
• Chapter Three In Abeyance Strategies of Suspension in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s La novela de Perón
• Chapter Four Errant Metonymy The Embodiment of Disappearance in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita
• Conclusion The Disappearance of Literature
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover