The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror (Suny Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture)

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. "More than 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the military dictatorship that governed Argentina from 1976-83, 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 looks at 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 new millennium. Their writing, Bishop argues, recalibrates our understanding of the reciprocity between fiction and history. In the end, The Space of Disappearance asks us to look again at what we think we cannot see. For there, in fiction, at the limits of the literary, disappearance appears as a vital agent of resistance, storytelling, and worldbuilding"-- Provided by publisher Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Space of Disappearance Knowledge, Form, Rights Historical Distortions Modes of Disappearance Refraction and Resistance Literary Form and Human Rights At the Limits of the Literary The Book to Come Chapter One Mimesis by Other Means The Aesthetics of Disappearance in Rodolfo Walsh’s “Variaciones en rojo” Operation True Crime In the Beginning Variations in Red Privileged Sight The Framing and Unframing of Art Bloody Dawn Chapter Two Double Exposure The Hermeneutics of Catastrophe in Julio Cortázar’s Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionale A Fellowship of Exile On Gaining Political Purchase Smokescreen Catastrophe and Consciousness Double Vision Force of Form Chapter Three In Abeyance Strategies of Suspension in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s La novela de Perón Other Logics A Deliberate Gap Dead Center What World Is This? Where in the World? Anticipatory Fictions Chapter Four Errant Metonymy The Embodiment of Disappearance in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita Liquid Sun Null Intersection Simulacra, Site, and the Superabundant Burial Plots in the Bardo Aesthetic Justice Conclusion The Disappearance of Literature Notes Works Cited Index