Mapping Disappearance: Representing the Absent in Modern Argentine Fiction
Mapping Disappearance is a study of the relation between the aesthetics and politics of disappearance in modern Argentine fiction. I show that disappearance appears as an aesthetic preoccupation in the mid-twentieth century that responds to a contemporary cultural history of repressive political tactics and later reflects the condition of having been disappeared under the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. The atrocities of the so-called Argentine Dirty War – among them the systematic and forcible disappearance of over thirty thousand people – are the historical crux upon which the book hinges. But I open up my analysis to a literary and historical context that reaches before and after the gaping ethical breach of state repression that lasted from 1976-1983 in order to demonstrate how disappearance is manifested as a larger aesthetic and philosophical preoccupation that informs how we understand the history of disappearance as a political and ideological device.
Mapping Disappearance begins with an historical and theoretical introduction that examines the cultural legacies of disappearance in Argentine politics and letters. In chapter one, I examine how Rodolfo Walsh uses disappearance as both trope and epistemological tool in order to construct his little-studied 1953 trilogy of detective stories, Variaciones en rojo. In chapter two, I demonstrate that Julio Cortázar both records historical knowledge and provides for an abiding historical consciousness via an aestheticization of human rights abuses in his 1975 Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales: una utopia realizable. In chapter three, I move to the literary aftermath of Argentina’s Dirty War to show how contemporary novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez constructs disappearing spatial worlds in his 1989 La novela de Perón in order to render the historical figure of Juan Domingo Perón inaccessible. And in the final chapter, I trace Martínez’s use of itineraries and spatial discontinuity in his 1995 novel Santa Evita as he constructs a trajectory of the dead, embalmed, copied, and disappeared body of Eva Perón in his effort to offer the corpse up as an unlikely mythic memorial to the Dirty War’s disappeared. I end with an epilogue that lays out the ethical and philosophical necessities and challenges of representing disappearance and the disappeared.
