Argentine Postdictatorial Fictions of the 1980S–2000S

From Mourning to Reconstruction: Argentine Postdictatorial Fictions of the 1980s–2000s Emilse Hidalgo Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2009 Abstract This thesis proposes to read Argentine postdictatorship fictions of the 1980s–2000s not, as has frequently been the case, from the point of view of mourning, memory and defeat but from a more positive perspective oriented towards the reconstruction of a fuller national history and identity. As in Borges’s “Pierre Menard”, the argument is essentially a critical hermeneutic one: it is based on a dynamic rather than static thinking of history and textuality that seeks to open up the reading of texts to the present rather than leave their interpretation statically closed off in the past. The social, political, and economic crisis known as “the Argentinazo” (December 2001), the annulment of the Amnesty Laws in August 2003, and the politics of memory and human rights that ensued thereafter provide in this thesis a distinct historical context from which to rethink both “early” (1980s/1990s) and “new” (post–2001) postdictatorial literature. My suggestion all along is that the linkage of literature, artistic and activist cultural politics, including a politicised reading of literature, will necessarily have as its aim the formation of a popular or collective critical consciousness. Overall the main contributions of this thesis are twofold. Firstly, the interpretation of postdictatorial fictions from a pedagogico-political perspective makes the textual analysis of these fictions new and original in their own right. And secondly, this research demonstrates that postdictatorial fictions constitute a cultural reservoir or a cultural archive of historical resistance, dissent, and human rights struggles from which it is hoped present and future generations can learn to live more democratically. i Acknowledgements I owe my biggest debt of gratitude to my two wonderful thesis supervisors, Peter Brooker and Adam Sharman, whose encouragement, advice and commitment during the time of my research has been invaluable, extremely generous and enriching. Thanks are also due to my beloved parents, Beatriz and Raúl, and my grandparents, Miguel and Ana, whose education and hard work have made me the woman, student and researcher I am today. Special thanks and love is due to my beloved partner, Mauro, whose incredible patience and loving support have helped me along all these years. My brothers (Gabriel and Fernando), nephews and nieces (Nico, Santi, Trini, Lara, Matías) and dear in-law family (Gabriela, Mariela, Javier and Silvana, Carlos and Graciela) have also been extremely encouraging and an inspiration to me, especially Mariela and Graciela who are incredibly committed scientists. I am also very grateful to Julieta, Carolina, Silvia, Lorena, and Hernán, my closest and dearest friends in Argentina, who have always cheered me on. Thanks are also due to all my partners in the School of Modern Languages (Matthew, Shahab, Chris, Guy, Meesha, Jorge, Ana Souto and Ana Lessa, Laiz, Eireann, Alex, Caroline, Adity, SooJeong and countless others), as well as to Maria and Michael for their friendship and support. And last but not least, I wish to express my gratitude to the University of Nottingham’s Department of Spanish, Latin American and Portuguese Studies for their partial funding of my thesis through my work as a GTA and to the University of Nottingham’s International Office for their Arts Scholarship. Without their generous financial assistance, this thesis would have been an impossible dream. ii Contents Acknowledgements . ii I Reconstruction and the politics of memory 1 1 The task of reconstruction 2 1.1 Introduction . 2 1.2 Research objectives . 2 1.3 Research questions: why postdictatorship fiction? . 3 1.4 Methodology . 19 1.5 Thesis structure . 27 2 From mourning and defeat to exemplary memory 29 2.1 Introduction . 29 2.2 Fredric Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” . 29 2.3 Rethinking the task of mourning as the imperative for postdictatorial fiction 33 2.4 Exemplary memory: building democracy . 36 3 The historical and the geographical imagination in contemporary Ar- gentine fictions 47 3.1 Introduction . 47 3.2 The historical and geographical imagination in the Argentine literary tradition 47 3.3 The impact of globalization on the “new” Argentine writers . 60 3.4 Hybridity and deterritorialization as key features of contemporary culture . 69 iii II Case Studies 73 Case Study 1: From traumatic mourning to an apolitical cosmopolitanism 74 4 The aesthetic of mourning, memory and defeat in Rodrigo Fresán’s Historia argentina 75 4.1 Introduction . 75 4.2 Historia argentina as absurd tragicomedy . 75 4.3 Urban space and neoliberalism . 84 5 Trauma, nomadism and global narratives—“delete” Argentina 95 5.1 Introduction . 95 5.2 From national histories to McOndo . 95 5.3 The DNA of a globalised writer . 102 5.4 A “hollow” cosmopolitanism . 114 Case Study 2: Reconstructing history: narratives of utopia and defeat 118 6 (Mis)reading tradition in Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial 119 6.1 Introduction . 119 6.2 Subverting silence through quotation . 119 6.3 The “European” genealogy of Argentine culture . 133 7 Writing and memory in Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente 141 7.1 Introduction . 141 7.2 Counternarratives and conspiracy as resistance . 141 7.3 The untapped emancipatory potential of tradition . 150 8 Reconstructing the history of the defeated: Tomás Eloy Martínez’s La novela de Perón 161 8.1 Introduction . 161 8.2 The eyes of the fly; or dialectical history . 161 8.3 “Otra Argentina es posible”: Benjamin’s “weak” Messianic power . 172 iv Case Study 3: The pedagogic function of the past 184 9 Martín Kohan’s Dos veces junio, Museo de la Revolución, and Ciencias morales 185 9.1 Introduction . 185 9.2 “Algo deben haber hecho”: Examining the complicit silence of Argentine society . 185 9.3 “The Revolution teaches” . 198 III Conclusion and Future Paths 217 10 The way ahead 218 10.1 Conclusions . 218 10.2 Future paths . 221 Bibliography 228 v Los dolores que quedan son las libertades que faltan. Manifiesto Liminar de la Reforma Universitaria de 1918 Federación Universitaria de Córdoba vi Part I Reconstruction and the politics of memory 1 1 The task of reconstruction 1.1 Introduction This chapter introduces the starting point of my thesis, a three-year full-time research project aimed at studying Argentine postdictatorship narrative fictions from a more positive or hopeful interpretative perspective than the dominant one of mourning and defeat. Firstly, the general objectives of the research are identified, together with the reasons for studying narrative fictions within postdictatorial cultural and artistic production. Sec- ondly, the main research questions are stated, and the methodological approach is outlined in order to specify the guiding spirit of this thesis. 1.2 Research objectives This study takes as its starting point the notion that the postdictatorial literature pro- duced in Argentina for the past three decades (roughly from the 1980s to the year 2008) has become a much more complex and nuanced cultural formation than has so far been described by the term “literature of mourning, memory and defeat”. In effect, the literary production under scrutiny far exceeds in its complexity the three broad approaches by which it has been studied so far. Neither “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 1988), nor post-boom literature (Martin 1989; Shaw 1998; Swanson 1990, 1995, 2003), nor what some Latin American cultural critics such as Beatriz Sarlo (1987), Idelber Avelar (1999) and Néstor García Canclini (2004) have termed the allegories of mourning and defeat, de- scribe the same phenomenon and, even within these categories, there are more nuances and differences than seem apparent at first sight. Therefore, the overall aim of this research is to provide an in-depth textual critical analysis of postdictatorial Argentine narratives written since the 1980s, foregrounding a more positive or pedagogic function for these nov- 2 els. That is, this thesis proposes an alternative approach to the reading and interpretation of postdictatorial novels which does not “freeze” them in the past of their original context of publication and reception—back in the 1980s and early 1990s when the sense of defeat and mourning were absolute—but opens them to the social and historical tensions of the present where a more hopeful attitude towards national identity and history has begun to be envisioned in the past few years. 1.3 Research questions: why postdictatorship fiction? The continued influence of the Process of National Reorganization in the social, political and economic present of Argentina has become more rather than less pronounced in re- cent years. If this “Process” is understood to cover (as it is in this thesis) not only the military dictatorship of the 1970s, but also the continued economic and social transfor- mation of Argentina that reached breakpoint in the economic default of 2001, then the continuities between the dictatorship and the postdictatorship democratic periods must be fully acknowledged and a “fuller” notion of history with explicit links and connections between past and present is needed. Furthermore, the annulment of the Full Stop and Due Obedience Laws supported by President Kirchner and passed by the National Congress in August 2003, and the possibility of bringing the military and police repressors to justice has meant not only the beginning

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