| This dissertation is an interdisciplinary examination into the representation and significance of disappearance in modern Argentine narrative. It takes as its point of departure the historical events of the so-called Argentine dirty war (1976-1983) during which more than 30,000 citizens were bodily disappeared under widespread and systematic state repression. But I open up my analysis to an historical context that reaches before and after this gaping ethical breach to demonstrate how disappearance manifests itself as a larger aesthetic and philosophical preoccupation that parallels the deployment of disappearance as a political and ideological device. In this project, I argue that disappearance is a specific form of exile that, like all exilic experience, is primarily concerned with questions of place and historical consciousness. I rely on twentieth-century theories of space and place and philosophies of history in order to analyze how recent Argentine literature reflects an anxiety with either the aesthetic trope or the political condition of disappearance and as a result manages, if paradoxically, to manifest a certain poetics of place that grounds the very real category of the political desaparecidos .;In chapter one, I look at how Rodolfo Walsh drafts disappearance as a central aesthetic and philosophical tool in the construction of his 1953 collection of detective fiction, Variaciones en rojo. I understand this authorial move against the background of Walsh's conflicted literary and political commitment, and finally his disappearance in 1977. In chapter two, I argue that Julio Cortazar's 1975 generically-hybrid novella, Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales, both records historical events and provides for an abiding production of historical consciousness in his readers. In chapter three, I consider how Tomas Eloy Martinez constructs disappearing spatial ontologies or worlds in his 1989 La novela de Peron that render the historical figure of Juan Domingo Peron inaccessible. In the final chapter, I turn to Martinez's 1995 Santa Evita to show how he offers up Eva Peron's dead and errant body as an unlikely memorial to the dirty war's disappeared that functions as a structure of cartographical excess. Ultimately, I demonstrate that disappearance is a defining epistemological concern of modern Argentine narrative. |
