Reimagining (Trans)national Futures
Playful Aesthetics and Argentinian Memory
of the Falklands/Malvinas War
Haico Kaashoek 12776858
FGw MA Comparative Literature Supervisor: Dr. David Duindam Second reader: Dr. prof. Murray Pratt 15/06/2020
Contents
Illustrations ...2
Acknowledgements ...3
0 Introduction: Playful Aesthetics and Argentinian Memory of the Falklands/Malvinas War ...4
1 Traumatic Memory: Representation, Play and Futurity ...16
1.1 Memory and Representation ...17
1.2 Memory and Play ...22
1.3 Memory and Futurity ...27
2 Conscientious Abjector: (Re)monumentalizing Memory in Heroína, la guerra gaucha ...31
2.1 Gauchesco, Nation ...33
2.2 Abjected Subject, Abject Laughter ...37
2.3 New Heroes, New Monuments ...43
2.4 Conclusion ...48
3 Corporal Archives: (Re)playing Trauma in Teatro de Guerra ...50
3.1 Reen(acting) Trauma, Embodied Memory ...52
3.2 Counter-Memories, Empathic Collaboration ...58
3.3 Counter-Collectivities, Concrete Utopias ...62
3.4 Conclusion ...67
Conclusion: Playing with the Future...69
Illustrations*
1 Masked heads portraying Margaret Thatcher (left) and Leopoldo Galitieri (right) kissing ...5
2 British veteran David Jackson (left) and Argentinian veteran Gabriel Sagastume (right) removing their masks ...5
3 Book cover Heroína, la guerra gaucha ...32
4 British-Nepalese veteran Sukrim Rai turned toward the backdrop, kukri blade in hand ...57
5 Argentinian veteran Marcelo Vallejo presenting personal items from the conflict ...57
6 British veteran Lou Armour observing a young Argentinian actor’s make-up application ...61
7 The final reenactment, performed by the veterans ...61
8 The final shot: all six veterans, awaiting the continuation of the performance ...67
Acknowledgements
Thank you, David, for your enthusiasm and your guidance throughout these unusual four months.
Thank you to my family and friends for your patience and support.
And thank you, to the extent that this is possible, to the beautiful country of Argentina, which never failed to be a source of inspiration during the time I spent there between the summers of 2018 and 2019. In many ways this thesis is the continuation of an intellectual journey that began in the city of Buenos Aires, one of the few places I have truly felt at home.
Introduction
Playful Aesthetics and Argentinian Memory of the Falklands/Malvinas War
About a third of the way into Argentinian theater director Lola Arias’ documentary film Teatro
de Guerra (Theater of War, 2018) a short moment, not a wholly unfamiliar scene, cleaves the
otherwise steady stream of dialogue: the close-up shot narrowly frames two opposed national leaders slowly leaning toward one another until they finally, deliberately kiss (figure 1). Former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and former Argentinian general and president Leopoldo Galitieri—the respective leaders behind the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War—hold the utopic pose, before slowly pulling back again as the black silence separating their lips reimposes itself, the living flesh beneath their crude masks pulsing noticeably with each trapped breath.1 When the two figures then peel away their rubber faces (figure 2), revealing themselves to be military veterans, former enemies in fact, they avoid each other’s gaze, perhaps somewhat sheepishly for the historic possibility they have provocatively conjured. In that moment of theatric reconciliation, spectators might for a second forget the war’s horrific reality and its tragic aftermath, the trauma both sides have and, as the project makes clear, still suffer and certainly still remember. And yet, we can also wonder how this imaginative act, this playful evocation of the past thirty-five years after the war had ended, might change the way spectators remember the war itself, especially for those younger viewers with no personal memory of its occurring, and the future consequences for the national memory narrative.
1 Rather than adopt either the respective British or Argentinian name for the islands, I will refer to the conflict as the
Figure 1
Figure 2
In raising these questions, this thesis seeks to address and contribute to a larger debate within the field of Memory Studies: namely, the current shift towards futurity. Faced with uncertain and indeed concerning geopolitical and ecological futures around the globe, the field has betrayed a deeper concern that memory, by virtue of its object of study (the past), might be unable to meaningfully support or, even worse, might actually block attempts to actively envision and shape a desirable future (Gutman et al; Craps “Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory”; Rigney “Hope Against Hope”). To my mind, there have thus far been two noteworthy attempts to answer this concern: the first has transplanted a traditional approach to traumatic memory into the future, under the name “anticipatory memory,” and the second has
sought to move beyond traumatic subjects entirely, focusing instead on positive forms of attachment, most notably in the form of hope—both will be addressed in what follows. Taking a different line, perhaps somewhere between the two, this thesis instead argues for a reassessment of playful acts of memory and, with it, a broader conception of memory that attends to the futurity inherent to all acts of memory. While I welcome the move to expand the field’s versality, I do believe that Memory Studies’ concern reflects a limitation of methodology more than it does of subject. Inviting forms of attachment beyond grief and mourning in relation to traumatic histories, playful memory is uniquely situated to alternatively engage historical trauma, and, as I hope to show, it does so to very political ends. By variously probing, shocking and joking, the playful aesthetics examined in this thesis seek to subvert contemporary national politics, while counterposing new memories for new communities, aligned along alternative politics. In doing so, they seek to undermine and rewrite hegemonic cultures and identities. By attending to the complex dynamic between the politics of playful memory aesthetics and the limits of appropriate representation, between national memory discourse and imagined (trans)national futures this thesis will argue that playful memory is a future-oriented practice.
As cultural scholars Ann Rigney and Chiara de Cesari have noted, there is little need today to list the now extensive scholarship that has connected the active and conscious cultivation of cultural memory and the formation of what Benedict Anderson famously called “imagined communities” (Rigney & de Cesari 1; Anderson). Indeed, 19th-century historians such as Ernst Renan recognized the necessary role held by a “common legacy of memories” (Renan 261), doctored or not, in uniting and defining a community as heterogenous as the nation. More than fifty years later, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs would only elaborate this connection further by
insisting that individual memories fundamentally depend on collective forms of memory in that they are validated and informed by the larger memory narratives that underpin the various overlapping communities to which an individual pertains (Halbwachs 38). By repeatedly reproducing the past, or at least some version of it, the individual and the community both perpetuate a sense of identity (47).
If cultural memory, understood from the “social-constructivist perspective” (Rigney, “Portable Monuments” 366), can be conceived as an ongoing, dynamic and collective relationship to the past, mediated and communicated via cultural objects in all their various media and forms, one might then begin to question the relationship between playful approaches to memory and a community’s conception of self, particularly when the past is traumatic. As one cannot physically return to the past, a community can only guard the memory narratives it chooses to reproduce each time anew, and so maintain a living connection to the events of the past as they become ever more remote. Playful approaches to the collective memories underpinning community identity, with renditions that risk trivializing traumatic events or converting them into spectacle, perhaps even displacing “the facts of the matter” as they circulate within a community, are thus never politically innocent. Now, I will be among the first to argue that we should be able to joke about traumatic events of the past, however, I am also fully aware that laughter can turn to genuine irreverence, and irreverence to forgetting, with all of the socio-political costs that that can entail. And yet, playful memory, with its ability to make room for emotions other than horror or grief, does allow artists to momentarily deaden the affective sting of traumatic memories, and thus approach trauma from a stance less concerned with mourning and psychoanalytic conceptions of working-through and acting-out, with irrepresentability, fragmentation or even meaninglessness (Freud; Caruth; Leys; Garibotto). Indeed, in the works I
will examine, trauma is approached and represented directly and without hesitation, albeit perhaps reframed or refigured. While one can certainly dismiss playful approaches to traumatic memory as disrespectful or even dangerous, one can also ask as to their political potential, an area of memory research that remains underexplored. This thesis will examine two recent and deliberately playful works engaging with traumatic memory, as set against the social and political backdrop of the Argentinian experience of the Falklands/Malvinas War.
Playful approaches to traumatic pasts are, however, not new to Argentina, where a number of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic have done important work tracking and analyzing the evolution of cultural memory landscape after the collapse of the Military Dictatorship (1976-1983) following the defeat of the Falklands/Malvinas War. These cultural studies include, most recently, Ceclia Sosa’s Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of
Argentina’s Dictatorship (2014), Geoffrey Maguire’s The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture (2017) and, finally, Jordana Blejmar’s Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (2017), which has identified
and focused its attention on “playful aesthetics” and “playful memory” mostly among artists with disappeared parents, while attending to the various ways play allows them to navigate personal histories of trauma and the impact on any individual or collective sense of identity. Blejmar’s work certainly raises the question as to the extent to which these “playful, irreverent, non-solemn and anti-monumental” (Blejmar, Playful Memories 1) approaches to memory of the dictatorship have influenced the two works in question and continue to inform approaches to memory more generally in Argentina. Most of Lola Arias’s earlier work, for example, belongs to this ludic “structure of feeling” (Williams), while Teatro de Guerra forms part of a more recent project and her first foray into the memory of the Malvinas/Falklands War. The present thesis builds on this
valuable memory work, which has focused until now, to the extent that they have addressed play, on playful memory’s pedagogical value and its ability to bring in new voices and new archives to contest hegemonic or what might be called the “official” narratives of traumatic events. I intend then to extend this research towards playful evocations of the past that strive for deeper political interventions. The two works examined here, both composed by authors with little or no memory of the war, turn to the past, not to renew their audience’s affective connection to it or to elaborate the facts of the event—or at least, as I argue, that is not their primary function—but instead attempt to effect greater cultural shifts and utopic visions of the future. Playful memory here allows a dialogue, via the past, with contemporary Argentinian national identity and the very idea of the nation as a meaningful or desirable frame today and in the future.
And while there is undoubtedly a multidirectional relationship (Rothberg,
Multidirectional Memory) between the respective memories, it nevertheless remains essential to not reduce the memory of the Falklands/Malvinas War to that of the Military Dictatorship. As
memory scholars like Matthew Benwell have recently mapped out, the varied memoryscape in Argentina recognizes the war’s inseparability from the context of state terrorism, while simultaneously refusing to simplify the war to the military junta, in order to better address the entangled web of victim and perpetrator ethical categories (Benwell 287). It is therefore essential to understand the conflict’s historical complexities.
The 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War lasted 74 days, claiming the lives of 649 Argentinian and 255 British military personnel in the process; the number of suicides after the war has since almost doubled the counts on both sides. While historians in both nations now readily recognize the war, in its timing and escalation, as a synchronized act of political opportunism, the defeat suffered by the Military Dictatorship remains a source of unease within the Argentinian national
consciousness (Vitullo 12), just as sovereignty over the islands remains contested to this day. Where successive governments after the war refused or seemed unable to address the complex knot of nationalism, complicity and public deception until only recently, writers and artists have historically been the social actors to step into the gap between the silence of state discourse and the conflict’s strong presence in the public imagination outside of those institutions (Vitullo; Esteban; Benwell). Indeed, with the exception of historical works by Federico Lorenz and Rosana Guber, historical and memorial work examining the war notably pales, though understandably so, in comparison to that which concerns the military junta more generally. Rather than risk supporting the military junta’s conduct in any shape or form as the nation came to terms with the full extent of the atrocities inflicted upon its own people, the first democratic governments sought to desmalvinizar the memory of the dictatorship, that is, minimize the war and its memory to the role it played in the dictatorship’s collapse (Vitullo). Unexamined went the nearly unanimous support the foundering regime was able to garner overnight by announcing the “recovery” (Dagatti) of the islands.
After a long silence, one in which war veterans, stigmatized for their association with the military dictatorship despite being mostly conscripts, struggled for decades for political recognition, the conflict has gained a renewed political prominence within state memory narratives over the last fifteen years. In 2012, the Kirchner administration (2003-2015) declassified the Informe Rattenbach, a military report that had been commissioned by the dictatorship and subsequently ordered to be kept secret for fifty years for its damning critique of the military junta’s conduct throughout the war. International observers saw this as an ongoing attempt by the administration to definitively shift any blame for the war from the populace onto the military dictatorship (New York Times World Briefing). In 2014, the same administration
would also open the first government-funded museum dedicated to the islands in Buenos Aires. While Argentinian historians like Frederico Lorenz have criticized the national narrative adopted by the museum for downplaying if not dismissing the lived history of the islands as one marked by the war and its aftereffects (Lorenz), the current administration has only confirmed that the cause of reclaiming the islands still holds significant political currency within a popular strain of socialist politics premised on “Memory, Truth and Justice” (Pagina12).2
Spanish-language cultural scholars Julieta Vitullo and, more recently, Luz Celestina Souto have published studies on the politically varied and growing body of cinematic and literary post-war work, however, little academic attention has thus far been paid to the authors and artists with little or no direct memory of the war who have only begun producing within the last few years. These younger artists do however undoubtedly stand on the shoulders of a small tradition of satiric and playful cultural production that has, from the beginning, repeatedly sought to interrogate the public deception and the waste of human life that was the Falklands/Malvinas War. The war had barely run its course when artists, faced with little testimonial or journalistic evidence of the war’s actual proceedings other than sudden defeat, began playfully imagining the tragic yet picaresque tale of Argentinian deserters whose only interest had been to survive the whole ordeal. Rather than mythic epics of patriotic battles, parody abounds, undermining nationalistic fixations on the patria. Perhaps one of, if the not the most iconic novel about the Falklands/Malvinas War, allegedly finished just three days after the war had ended, Los
Pichiciegos (Malvinas Requiem, 1982) by Rodolfo Fogwill (1941-2010) narrates the morbidly
humorous tale of a group of Argentinian deserters who burrow underground where they stockpile the items they manage to steal from their own army or barter with British forces. In many ways the next wave of artists writing in the excesses of the neoliberal boom of the 1990s, many of
whom are close in age to the actual veterans, continued this satirical tradition of antiheroes and violence, but shifted their attention to the post-war and the veterans’ precarious social position as largely “forgotten” members of society.3 Full of addiction, madness and shame, a canonical work
like Carlos Gamerro’s Las Islas (The Islands, 1998) narrates the story of a PTSD-suffering computer hacker enmeshed in an absurd underworld of veterans planning the recapture of the islands. Following the financial crisis in 2001, the election of the Kirchner administration with its focus on human rights justice and memory, and the emergence of a new media landscape, the third wave of cultural production heralded a plurality of approaches, and yet they might roughly be defined by their preoccupation with the inheritance and memory narrative of the war, and with it, the lingering, ghostly presence of trauma.
Set within this context, this thesis does not argue for or against the legitimacy of Argentina’s claim to sovereignty over the Falklands/Malvinas Islands, but instead concerns itself with the work of two Argentinian artists, born shortly before and after the Falklands/Malvinas War, in order to examine the tension between playful aesthetics and memory, memory and national identity, for a generation grown in the “belly” of a post-dictatorship (Gamerro 113), but
also a post-war, Argentinian society. When taking the political dimension of their work into
account, I believe this younger generation’s work can tell us about the dynamics of (counter-) memory formation and subversion, about the limits of acceptable and appropriate representations of the past and ultimately the new paths playful aesthetics can open up moving forward as a powerful political tool.
3 In this rough scheme I follow Souto’s division, set out in “Malvinas, las islas prometidas,” of three generations as
This thesis is divided into three chapters, the first of which will set up my larger theoretical framework, while chapters two and three each examine a recent experimental work of different mediums. Where the form of the novella allows Nicolás Correa (b. 1983) to playfully reimagine a fictive experience of the war’s traumatic realities, Lola Arias (b. 1976) directs the collective reenactment of trauma in a documentary film. Given that both works approach and interrogate national identity and memory from varying entries, I am specifically interested in the play and the tension between differing scales of engagement and the larger implications for playful aesthetics and memory when expanding from a single subject, particularly one that may surprise or challenge audiences, to a larger group engagement. By close reading their respective aesthetics—the abject and the utopian—I will argue that each work, in returning to the battlefield of memory and tracing its aftereffects, seeks to stick a playful finger precisely in “that blind spot” (Vitullo 16), to affectively inflame rather than soothe a festering national wound. In doing so, these works uphold a fundamental narrative ambivalence that would otherwise allow the repression or dismissal of the war’s memory in the interest of instrumentalized nationalism, while simultaneously counterposing their own political visions of the future.
Chapter one situates this project within the larger field of Memory Studies, with an eye on the politics of representation and the nation as framework. I then turn to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theory of play as profanation and Dutch cultural scholar Ernst van Alphen’s defense of playful memory in the context of the Holocaust. While Argentinian cultural scholar Jordana Blejmar’s work on playful memory in relation to the memory of the military junta is valuable, I ultimately argue that an expanded conception of memory might allow us to begin to reassess playful memory’s political value. Addressing recent calls for the field of Memory Studies to become more future-oriented, I argue that recent academic responses risk occluding
the futurity already inherent within memory and thereby perpetuating an ultimately limited view of traumatic memory founded on classical trauma theory. Attending to the dynamic between past, present and future within memory allows us to reassess playful memory’s ability to engage traumatic histories, indeed the political potential within traumatic histories themselves.
Chapter two, then, examines the political mobilization of abjection in Nicolás Correa’s provocative 2018 novella Heroína, la guerra gaucha. Correa reimagines the war from the perspective of a transgender woman, as she recounts her fictive memories from a prison cell in Buenos Aires. Rather than adopt one of the various subject categories engendered by the war and its aftermath, Correa enters the memory of the war, narrating through a new body that doubles as an evocative challenge to the national literary tradition of the Gauchesco. This chapter builds on Julia Kristeva’s conception of abjection as constitutive of collective identity, as well as Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond’s conception of abject laughter. How does returning to the battlefield via abjection dissolve the “boundaries between the real and feigned, the subject and its objects, the sublime and profane” and thus forge a “space for an objection” (Hennefel & Sammond 20) to the contemporary political context? How does the “bastardization of the war’s heroism” (Ocampo) through playful rewriting address reimagine the future? In the end, the novella abjects the patriarchal logic behind the hegemonic memory of war and the current gender politics—indeed, they are one and the same.
Building on and incorporating this analysis, chapter three looks at how utopian aesthetics, as theorized by José Esteban Muñoz, allow Lola Arias to play with real, individual traumatic memories in her collaborative documentary project Teatro de Guerra (Theater of War, 2018). This work regathers three veterans from both the Argentinian and British forces to playfully reenact their wartime memories and reflect more broadly on the war’s continued presence in
each of their lives and their greater communities. Here I am interested in how the documentary implicates the viewer, while performing the transmission of a new embodied counter-memory for a new international community, one that unites rather than divides audiences from both countries. Instead of leading viewers towards a feeling of patriotic solidarity with the young and unprepared Argentinian conscripts facing a professional British army, like other recent Argentinian works of film, the project collaboratively reenacts a British memory of suffering, in which the moment of solidarity with a dying Argentinian soldier, of recognizing Judith Butler’s “grievable life,” proves to be the traumatic event. Arias returns to the war with the soldiers who lived it, to refigure the memory of the war and thus realize the utopian potential contained in an extraordinary moment of trauma. In doing so, the project offers a valuable model for a visionary retrospective politics and a productive methodology for an academic field concerned with Memory Studies’ (in)ability to help reimagine (trans)national futures.
Chapter 1
Traumatic Memory: Representation, Play and Futurity
...so the powers of economics, law, and politics, deactivated in play, can become the gateways to a new happiness.
Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”
The ways in which we invoke traumatic histories are dictated by often-implicit limits. Solemnity and reverence certainly have their place, and yet it is much harder to determine whether and to what extent fantasy and laughter are appropriate. Granted, these limits will vary from community to community, culture to culture, however, works of art that intentionally transgress these limits will pose a problem within a community determined to remember and respect the dead in the interest of envisioned futures. The challenge of knowing or establishing those limits, even defending those limits, holds a certain relevance today, both in the Argentinian context, but also, to use an example closer to home, in Europe more broadly where the memory of the Holocaust (this year marking the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation) finds itself under increasing
skepticism (Walter; Mulhall). The changing media landscape, with its almost infinite online communities, and the simultaneous rise of Holocaust denial at least seem to suggest that memory practices that can somehow connect younger generations to the traumatic past are more necessary than ever and that evocations of the horrors and atrocities of that event therefore must somehow convey its severity as anything but a plaything of the imagination, lest they intend to contribute to memory’s fading and the past’s repetition. As such, the memory of the Holocaust provides a valuable example, given the enormous impact Holocaust Studies has had on the field of Memory Studies, of the changing dynamics that emerge as the past becomes ever-distant, as well as the evolving challenges with which memory must contend as new technologies radically alter how we receive and pass on information, where we get it from and, even more generally,
how we form communities. By comparison, the Falklands/Malvinas War still presents a living memory for many people on both sides of the Atlantic, and yet the questions remain the same: how should we, as an imagined community, commemorate the past and attempt to map, to the extent that we can, our futures together? Playful or irreverent evocations of the past pose, at least at first glance, a challenge for those concerned with the consequences of losing touch with the traumatic past, or at the very least of laughing trauma away. It is therefore necessary to establish a framework that would begin to allow a reassessment.
In this first chapter, I will position my work within the field of Memory Studies, paying particular attention to the politics of representation and the nation as framework, before then turning to the concept of play amid the greater cultural shift towards futurity. I will argue that only be recognizing the futurity already inherent to memory can we fully understand the politics that underpin artistic evocations of the past. If the past allows us to imagine the future, we must also consider how the futures we imagine lead us, in turn, to remember the past. I will suggest that a more thorough understanding of playful memory, but also memory more generally, takes this memory dynamic into account and may in itself answer recent calls for the field of Memory Studies to become more future-oriented. In so doing, I establish the theoretical framework through which I will then read the cultural objects of chapters two and three, in addition to the larger research questions those close readings will work to answer.
Memory and Representation
Given that the field of Memory Studies is a broad as it is varied, I will begin by briefly tracing the historic developments relevant to community and identity formation as well as the
simultaneous debate among historians concerning the limits of representation until these two strands finally converge.
As one of the recognized founding scholars of the current field of Memory Studies, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs first elaborated the seminal concept of “collective memory” in the 1920s, arguing that individual memory is dependent on the social structures within which it is performed and, as such, a collective phenomenon. These thought-systems, or
social frameworks, and the various overlapping communities they delineate, whether that be the
family, the church or the nation, are then mediated by an individual’s social interactions with other members. For Halbwachs, memory is essential to community identity formation and, importantly, its stable preservation across generations. Regarding this point, German memory scholar Astrid Erll has written in “The Invention of Cultural Memory”:
Things are remembered which correspond to the self-image and the interests of the group. Particularly emphasized are those similarities and continuities which demonstrate that the group has remained the same. Participation in the collective memory indicates that the rememberer belongs to the group. (Erll 17)
Central to Erll’s reformulation is the cultivating practice inherent to memory and identity maintenance. For Halbwachs, this is where memory differs from history. While history deals with the past objectively, or what then appeared so, memory serves the community’s needs and concerns in the present and, as such, is therefore not bound to the demands of historical truth value: “A remembrance is in very large measure a reconstruction of the past achieved with data borrowed from the present, a reconstruction prepared, furthermore, by reconstructions of earlier periods wherein past images had already been altered” (Halbwachs 68). While this conception of social frameworks has rightly received critique for its static, container-like formulation, Halbwachs remains an essential figure for establishing culture and its transmission as the products of human interaction and activity.
Halbwachs’ important work, however, would not gain popular traction until the 1980s when French historian Pierre Nora, writing in a (post-)colonial world turned “upside down” by “globalization, democratization, and the advent of mass culture and the media” (Nora 1), published his own groundbreaking Lieux de Memoire. Like Halbwachs, Nora maintained a sharp distinction between history and memory, but instead focused on the nation as “sanctified foundation” (5) for memory, while rejecting the existence of a “natural collective memory” at the national level. In its absence, he theorized what he called lieux de memoire, or “places, sites, causes” (14) invested by the imagination with “symbolic aura” (14), which served as artificial placeholders, or vessels to be imbued with any number of overlapping mnemonic meanings. Building on Halbwachs’ social frameworks, Nora theorized memory as “rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture image and object” (3) and situated “remembrance in a sacred context” (3). For Nora, then, these concrete sites of memory mediate or embody the past in the present.
Though undeniably influential for the field of Memory Studies, Nora’s preference for the nation as framework and his Halbwachian distinction between, on the one hand, memory as imaginative and lived and, on the other, history as objective and neutral, becomes puzzling, if not untenable, given the contemporary international discussions among historians like Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Hans Kellner, Stephen Bann and Dominick LaCapra concerning historiography’s constructed and imaginative nature.
Beginning as early as the 1970s, this discussion would only grow throughout the following two decades as wave-making cultural productions like the North American TV series
Holocaust and French director Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah combined with
important commemorations for the events surrounding the Second World War, effectively igniting a resurgence of interest and debate regarding the proper historicization and
representation of the Holocaust as an event whose significance and qualities seemed to challenge postmodernism’s rejection of any kind of stable truth or reality. In his now famous introduction to the edited collection Probing the Limits of Representation, historian Saul Friedländer sketched the Holocaust’s demands thus: presented with a historic operation whose perpetrators actively sought to erase all traces of their deeds, we are morally obligated to bear witness and represent the Holocaust’s horrors with some claim to truth: “this record should not be distorted or banalized by grossly inadequate representations” (Friedländer 2). Confronted with a limit case, historians thus find themselves in a bind: how to fulfill the moral duty of representing the Holocaust with concepts and tools that are inadequate for capturing its fundamental opacity?
Friedländer’s point is also significant for moving beyond the same national framework around which Nora centered his project: “The underlying assumption is that we are dealing with an event of a kind which demands a global approach” (1). Precisely this attitude reflects what quickly became the Holocaust’s position within global memory culture as a moral benchmark used to promote a consensus regarding universal human rights. The decisive resurgence of interest in the Holocaust as historical trauma would in turn establish victimhood as an ethical category of fundamental concern. Arguably, it has been one of playful memory’s projects to introduce some figurative give into the “fixation” on victim categories (Van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust”).
In part responding to the global reach and impact of the Holocaust memory discourse via new forms of media, the “transnational turn” made within the field of Memory Studies at the start of the 21st century sought to move beyond the nation as dominant framework while simultaneously maintaining its undeniable role in memory production. In Transnational
recognized the “long” coexistence of multiples frames alongside the national, despite its being, until then, “politically the most important and academically the most theorized” (Rigney & de Cesari 9). Essential to the transnational turn has been the attendance to new forms of media as well as their effects on the circulation and articulation of memory in an increasingly transnational yet fragmented public sphere. If literary scholar Andreas Huyssen could note as late as 2003 in
Present Pasts that “older sociological approaches to collective memory-approaches (such as
Maurice Halbwachs's) that posit relatively stable formations of social and group memories-are not adequate to grasp the current dynamic of media and temporality, memory, lived time, and forgetting” (Huyssen 17), then Rigney and De Cesari have been among a number of scholars to reconceive of Halbwachs’ social frames as dynamic processes. Indeed, rather than passive containers of memories, social frames are more accurately conceived as “the historical outcome of acts of remembrance that help to (re)define groups – and their boundaries – and establish new modes of mutual implication (Ebron; see also Rothberg 2013).” (Rigney & De Cesari 9). Variously interlocking and constantly shifting, social frames and the identities they compose are the intersections between history and proactive acts of remembrance, as they come into being and disappear, be they at the level dictated by an online forum, a nation or a globalized economic system.
And while the transnational turn has in many ways been an important step in attending, at least theoretically, to the multi-scalar, multi-directional dynamics and processes of memory in our world today, many of the questions raised in the debate concerning play and the limits of representation by the Holocaust, and for other traumatic memories that demand a similar reverence for a particular community, present their own emerging sub-field. We may now be more aware than ever before of memory’s movement, its interaction and scale, yet there remains
work to be done regarding the ways in which transgressive or playful approaches to memory operate and, alternatively, may be politically mobilized within this contemporary landscape.
Memory and Play
Recent work in the field of Memory Studies has begun to address the power of play or “playful aesthetics” to reshape our ability to engage with cultural memory, invent new forms of cultural memory and reanimate the affective potential of traumatic memories, even across generations (Van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust”; Blejmar, Playful Memories). Indeed play, aside from explicitly making the past present via such forms as reenactment (Schneider), can open up new temporalities; as we shall see, it is political. Building on Giorgio Agamben’s conception of play as political action, I will now address how play has been adapted in the field of memory studies by cultural scholars Ernst van Alphen and, specifically in the Argentinian context, by Jordana Blejmar, before suggesting a wider consideration of its political potential as memory practice in the final section.
For Italian philosopher Gorgio Agamben, play serves as one of the primary means by which we might profane the sacred and thus violate or transgress the unavailability that has come to define it. Tracing the genealogy of profanation in his essay “In Praise of Profanation,” he writes that “‘to profane’ meant…to return [things] to the free use of men” (Agamben 73). If the power of the sacred act lies in the “conjunction of the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces and stages it” (75), playing with the sacred dissolves that unity. Elaborating on this point further in his essay “In Playland: Reflections on History and Play,” Agamben argues that “ritual fixes and structures the calendar; play…changes and destroys it” (“In Playland” 69). Those who play are actually “busy celebrating rituals, and manipulating objects and sacred
words, whose sense and purpose they have, however, forgotten” (70) in that play “tends to break down the connection between past and present, and to break down and crumble the whole structure into events” (74). Conceived thus, play’s political potential then lies in its ability to deactivate, via this temporary de-structuring, “the apparatuses of power and [return] to common use the spaces that power has seized” (“In Praise of Profanation” 77). If repurposing the sacred, extracting objects or behaviors from the political or socioeconomic structures within which they are embedded is a political action, then deliberately choosing to play with traumatic memories that are deemed “sacred” or morally unavailable for the “free use of men” can begin to take on a new meaning.
It is Ernst van Alphen who explicitly weaves play, affect and memory together in his provocative essay “Playing the Holocaust and Playing with the Holocaust.” In an attempt to defend what he sees as the affective power required for an effective Holocaust education, Van Alphen opposes educational practices that strive for purely epistemic “mastery over the object of learning” (Van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust” 152). He argues that, in their desire to respect the memory of the Holocaust and its victims, rigid educational practices drain the archives of horrific events of their affective power for second-, third- or fourth-generation students who have otherwise become numbed by an “overdose” (156) of “saturated memory” (156). By way of example, he cites Holocaust scholar Terrence Des Pres’s three aesthetic commandments:
1) The Holocaust shall be represented, in its totality, as a unique event, as a special case and kingdom of its own, above or below or apart from history.
2) Representations of the Holocaust shall be as accurate and faithful as possible to the facts and conditions of the event, without change or manipulation for any reason—artistic reasons included.
3) The Holocaust shall be approached as a solemn or even sacred event, with a seriousness admitting no response that might obscure its enormity or dishonour its dead. (153; Des Pres)
Commandment number three springs out for its emphasis on the sacred quality of the Holocaust and the consequent limits regarding its representation. Van Alphen takes issue with, among other things, the categorical refusal of any reason whatsoever for the event’s manipulation, arguing instead that an aesthetic transformation of the historical that breaks “the conventional opposition between historical and imaginative” (157) can introduce space for the temporally removed subject to engage with cultural memory on his or her own terms. For Van Alphen, play, specifically in its forms of reenactment or reimagination, has the ability to shake students loose from the “traumatic fixation” (156) on victim categories and thus allow for a “performative mastery of emotions triggered” (156) by the traumatic events. An effective Holocaust education is thus more than a knowledge of the facts. Emotional attachment, and art’s ability to foster it, are essential to keeping memory alive: “Only by means of a working-through on the level where knowledge is not ‘out there’ to be fed to passive consumers but ‘felt’ anew every time again by the participants of a culture that must keep in touch with the Holocaust, can art be effective” (156).
It is important to bear in mind that Van Alphen is building here on what he has termed the “Holocaust Effect” in Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature
and Theory. Having deconstructed the misplaced opposition between traditionally historicist and
“imaginative” representations of the Holocaust, he concludes that figurative representations of history can in fact be more representative of realities that escape traditionally privileged forms of mimetic representation and can therefore serve as better conduits for transmitting historical knowledge. By allowing reenactment on the part of the viewer, the aesthetic work lures its audience into the event itself; when we view an artistic representation of the Holocaust, we “are subjectively living it” (Van Alphen, Caught by History 10). The “Holocaust Effect” is then an
aesthetic process and capability: “we, as viewers or readers, experience directly a certain aspect of the Holocaust or of Nazism, of that which led to the Holocaust. In such moments the Holocaust is not re-presented, but rather presented or reenacted” (10). Conceivably, the intention of conveying or achieving this effect limits the range of “adequate” or acceptable representations of the Holocaust. Van Alphen is not suggesting that, in the name of pedagogy, anything goes.
Although this is certainly a productive concept, one might then wonder why Van Alphen later limits the effectivity of art to evoking affective experience. In relation to traumatic memory, art can be effective in other ways, for example by conveying historic trauma’s unrepresentability, just as archives, as part of memory narratives, can still retain their affective power for viewers. In that sense Van Alphen might be departing from too limited a sample—namely his personal experience. Granted, he may be advocating for art’s ability to establish an individual affective link to the past for generations without the benefit of Marianne Hirsch’s “post-memory” position. Play then becomes a means of helping ensure “never again” by mimicking familial bonds to the past (Hirsch), however, we might also say that Van Alphen’s conception is limited by its function. It does not allow us to understand, to the degree that it is possible, the intentions behind acts of remembrance that intentionally transgress the limits of representation for purposes beyond the pedagogical.
Examining playful aesthetics in post-dictatorship Argentina, Jordana Blejmar combines Agamben’s conception of play as a means of resistance and disruption against biopolitical control with Van Alphen’s argument regarding the pedagogical value of playfully transgressive representation for memory. In Playful Memories she argues that playing or toying with traumatic history, using autofiction and humor to engage the tragic, all serve to diversify and destabilize discursive narratives concerning Argentina’s dictatorship years, while also allowing artists to
explore areas of memory untouched by conventional testimonies. Playful memory introduces new forms of witnessing that allow the point of view of and identification with new subjects: “by admitting autofiction and playful aesthetics as alternative forms of witnessing, these memories can access the point of view of the other (the perpetrator) in ways that previous, testimony-based accounts could not” (Blejmar, Playful Memories 6). Play thus allows victim artists a means of appropriating history and agency, while their aesthetic work serves to “transmit the dictatorial past that monuments, testimonies, traditional conceptions of pedagogy and historical genres fail to do” (45). By showing audiences the plurality of historical experience, playful memories undermine dominant memory narratives. For Blejmar, playful memory practices allow us “to better understand, through their self-reflexivity, the relations between documentary evidence, recall and imaginative investment that are common to all forms of memory” (6; emphasis hers). While this is an important expansion, Blejmar’s work is restricted, and with good reason, to exploring the playful integration of new “documentary evidence” in relation to perpetrator and victim categories in the aftermath of the military dictatorship. Moving to a different socio-political context, then, allows one to see playful memory with yet other concerns.
Before addressing two Argentinian works that both seem to demand more of us than “nunca mas”—whose aspirations seem to lie beyond pedagogical ends and/or unearthing unacknowledged pasts—I propose that we might look to the recent theoretical shift towards futurity, to better understand what it can mean to play with traumatic memory and understand its function. In the final section I will suggest that the cursory dismissal of playful aesthetics may also depend on a theoretically limited conception of memory.
Memory and Futurity
I will now conclude by exploring what I see as the fundamental link between memory and futurity that the recent shift in memory studies toward future-oriented concerns threatens to forget. Building on the work of Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, I will ultimately ask to what extent the transgressive aesthetic that defines playful memory, and its concern with traumatic memory, can help us imagine new political futures and communities. Set within the Argentinian context, my close readings in the two subsequent chapters will work to answer this question in its various layers.
Within the last decade, the field of Memory Studies has initiated a shift in response to what literary scholar Stef Craps has described as a growing call “to become more future-oriented instead of merely backward-looking” (Craps 1). In light of the growing urgency of the climate crisis and the threat of global catastrophe more generally, a number of scholars have sought to move from “present pasts” to “futures pasts” (Craps et al), initiating what has been called a new, fourth phase in the field: memory in the Anthropocene, or “anticipatory memory.” While I commend this important work, and indeed will address the latter in chapter three, I nevertheless believe that it risks occluding the futurity already inherent to memory by displacing our focus rather than expanding our understanding of the performance of memory. The problem may lie with the common conception of memory itself: a definition of memory, like Michael Rothberg’s in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, as “making the past present” (Rothberg 3)—though certainly useful for understanding the labor and contemporaneity of memory—fails to ask to what end we have and do remember.
Cultural scholar Ann Rigney has sought to incorporate the current cultural shift towards futurity by “reframing memory outside the framework of grievance” (Rigney, “Remembering
Hope” 370) and past the overwhelming concern with traumatic histories that has characterized the ethical turn, thus encouraging the field of Memory Studies to attend to positive forms of attachment in remembrance. In her essay “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism Beyond the Traumatic” she borrows Terry Eagleton’s definition of hope in order “to extend the horizon of memory studies by offering a point of view outside of the present” (371), thereby hoping to oppose the “growing ‘paranoid nationalism’ that can be seen as a reaction to the ‘shrinking’ of a society’s hopes for a better future (Hage, 2003)” (370). For Eagleton, then,
hope has an anticipatory logic, one that is not based on inevitability, but on mere possibility. It is life-affirming and future-oriented in a minimalist way: it indicates an enduring attachment to something of value in face of its present absence and past denial. (370)
Rigney thus mobilizes hope, specifically in the memory of activism and memory in activism, as an avenue to explore “how the past and present can interact in producing scenarios for the future without falling back into grand narratives, but also without being wedded to the traumatic” (369). The vocabulary of activism productively recasts “historical violence as a struggle for a cause rather than as a matter of victimisation; as a matter of civic engagement rather than of paranoia” (371). While such a study certainly moves memory away from loss in a productive move for the field, we might also ask whether certain memorial practices in the present can still use loss and historical violence to constitute acts of hope in themselves. Not trauma itself, but the traditional approach to trauma and trauma theory, would then be the fundamentally limiting factor in our approach to traumatic pasts and memory’s subsequent ability to address the future. Rather than “re-enacting hope” or otherwise mobilizing hope for memorability, works might conceivably mobilize the affective and political weight of national trauma in the struggle for a better future— one beyond a kind of reverse utopianism (Bair and Snaizder 4) that merely envisions a future
without the repetition of “horrific pasts” (16), of the kind which has dictated the memory imperatives surrounding the Holocaust and Argentina’s military dictatorship.
It is Indian anthropologist and cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai who allows us to connect a politics of hope or a “politics of possibility” with memory and futurity in his book The
Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. Building on the anthropological work
of the 20th century by Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz and Claude Levi-Strauss, which recognized the imagination as part of the “primary machinery of social reproduction” (Appadurai 288), Appadurai highlights and emphasizes the role of memory in “providing a map for negotiating and shaping new futures” (288). In other words, the ways in which we make the past present play a determining role in our ability to imagine, aspire toward and ultimately produce the future. We might then wonder whether traumatic memory has a crippling or constricting effect on our ability to imagine the future—and then how it might be shifted or loosened. If, as Appadurai argues, imagination and aspiration “can be shown to be everywhere features of the work of culture” (293), then the cultural objects and acts of remembrance that mediate the past and shape memory narratives within various social frameworks might have two effects: on the one hand, they determine our ability to imagine new futures, while on the other hand, they shape the future we deem desirable.
Thus, if we bear in mind that the concern for the future of a community turns memory into a cultivating, selective process, we must recognize two simultaneous processes at work during memory’s performance. Rather than focus solely on present pasts or future pasts or even present futures, we must recognize acts of remembrance as uniting both the past and the future in the present: our vision of the future determines how we remember the past, just as much as the
past, and our memories of it, determines how we envision the future. A complete analysis of memory practices must attend to this interplay.
This is essential when considering the politics of memory’s community-forming function. If memory and social change are thus fundamentally linked, we can now add that memory and the community it engenders can be the future object envisioned by a politics of possibility. In the next two chapters I will turn my attention to two cultural objects in order tease out and explore the relationship between traumatic history and futurity, futurity and the limits of representation, in how these playful works function. To address that last concern, we might thus best begin with an openly transgressive aesthetic.
Chapter 2
Conscientious Abjector: (Re)monumentalizing Memory in Heroína, la guerra gaucha
And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.
Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror
Published in 2018, Nicolás Correa’s playful novella Heroína, la guerra gaucha (Heroine, the Gaucho War) reimagines the Falklands/Malvinas War and its aftermath through what Argentinian critics have called a “daring and vulgar” (Gossweiler), though ultimately fictional, biography of a new subject within the war’s memory.4 Where other canonical works of post-war Argentinian fiction, like Carlos Gamerro’s Las Islas (The Islands, 1998) and Rodolfo Fogwill’s
Los Pichiciegos (Malvinas Requiem, 1983), have satirically reveled in the toxic virility and machismo of the entire military endeavor, this recent provocative work carries readers to a
Buenos Aires prison cell to bear witness to the dizzying testimony of a transgender woman who volunteered her body, not for any heroic love for the patria, but for love itself, a boy: I went to
the Malvinas for a dick (Correa 69).5 Between crude jokes and violent anecdotes, a portrait of the hidden and perilous world of transgender experience on the streets of Buenos Aires emerges, interwoven with the narrator’s memories of familial rejection and her wartime experience. On the book’s cover (figure 3) we find the image of a bearded soldier, wearing a muddied helmet and lipstick, her eyeliner only drawing us further into her challenging gaze: its publication would not go unnoticed. Correa was not only physically threatened by combat veterans, but popular online responses accused him of “bastardizing the war’s heroism” (Ocampo)—one, notably, with a picture of his daughter, perhaps as symbol for the war’s memory or the future generations for
4 “En esa biografía osada y grosera, con una mirada desprejuiciada muy actual...” (Gossweiler). In the absence of
published English translations, all translations are my own.
whom the drafted soldiers sacrificed their lives.6 While such responses are not difficult to
understand, I will argue that they largely disregard the novella’s aesthetic form, that is, how
Heroína plays with memory, and through memory, interrogates national identity. I want to
suggest that by reimagining the war and its damaging aftermath, both in its provocative literary form and its gender politics, the novella concerns itself precisely with those generations to come. In what follows, I will first situate Correa’s novella within the national literary tradition that it both upholds and seeks to subvert, before then reading the narrative and transgressive aesthetic through the conceptual lens of abjection, as elaborated by French theorist Julia Kristeva. Building on these two sections, I will ultimately argue that, through the narrator’s recollection of playful memories, Heroína attempts to reimagine, if not re-engineer, the nation of the present and future around a new gender politics by demonstrating the heteronormative violence inherent to both the war, its current memory narrative and, by extension, the larger politics of the present. Furthermore, what can a deliberately transgressive aesthetic tell us more generally about the friction between the limits of representation and imagined futures?
Figure 3
Gauchesco, Nation
In this first section, I briefly position Heroína within the national literary tradition of the
Gauchesco, examining the critical function of playfully attributing the Falklands/Malvinas War
the same mythical status within the national imaginary as the original literary epic La Guerra
Gaucha by Argentinian writer and statesman Leopold Lugones. I argue that precisely by
returning to a nation-building tradition, monumentalizing a new past and designating an alternative originary moment around a new kind of Gaucho, Heroína opens the possibility of rewriting the current nation.
In Present Pasts, literary scholar Andreas Huyssen begins his cogent analysis of memory in the new millennium by conclusively asserting that literature no longer holds the same nation-building function as it did in the late 18th and early 19th centuries—not because literature has lost the ability to monumentalize the past, but rather because “history itself and its promises” (Huyssen 2) are no longer able to serve the nation in the present:
Literature was of course valued highly as part of the national heritage constructed to mediate religious, ethnic, and class conflicts within the nation. But the main concern of the nineteenth-century nation-states was to mobilize and monumentalize national and universal pasts so as to legitimize and give meaning to the present and to envision the future: culturally, politically, socially. This model no longer works. (2)
By arranging and dramatizing particular historic events, literature, as conceived here, once possessed the ability to unify diverse communities within the nation beneath a single banner by suggesting and glorifying a shared past. As Huyssen points out, such a shared past, once established, naturally entailed a shared present and future. In providing a fundament upon which nations could build, monumentalized pasts and the memory practices that reinforced them instrumentalized the past to establish a guiding politics to be carried into the common future. By establishing a continuity between a monumental past and the culture at present, literature could
thus justify and inspire action in the present. Given today’s fractured memory landscape, the rise of new forms of media and the postmodern distrust of a single historical narrative, Huyssen might be right in declaring that history has largely lost that enriching function today, however, I want to suggest that it would be wrong to say that the works and forms of literature that have helped establish the nations of the contemporary world no longer hold that monumental function.
In both style and subject, Heroína presents itself as a modern version of the Gauchesco, an Argentinian literary tradition concerned with the culture and experience of the quintessential cultural figure of the gaucho, the archetypal man of the land and the national representative of the common people.7 This national genre rose to prominence and enjoyed widespread popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries, during which the nation’s intellectual elite had set itself the task of establishing a national culture. As Argentinian scholars Paula Félix-Didier and Andrés Levinson write in “The Building of a Nation: La Guerra Gaucha as Historical Melodrama,” the Argentinian countryside and its representative figure, the gaucho, quickly “formed the basis of a ‘lettered’ construction and were turned into bastions of Argentine essence” (Félix-Didier & Levinson 56). The gaucho then became the “true representation of the nation, an idea that by the end of the 1930s had become part of the social conscience” (57). Politicians and intellectuals like Leopold Lugones wrote epic works like La guerra gaucha (1905), monumentalizing victorious battles between creole gaucho-soldiers and the Spanish crown, with the explicit intention of providing “Argentina with its first national text along the lines provided by The Odyssey and The
Illiad for Greece or the Divine Comedy for Italy” (56)—a task in which they succeeded, perhaps
7 In The Invention of Argentina, historian Nicholas Shumway describes the gaucho thus: “In its purest sense, gaucho
referred to the nomadic, often outlaw inhabitants of the great plains of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. In current usage, gaucho usually designates the rural working class in general…They roamed freely over the pampas, lived easily off a bountiful land, captured and rode wild horses, drank abundantly, gambled, smuggled, robbed, fought, hunted wild cattle, sold cowhide to purchase what little they needed, ate mostly beef, sang improvised ballads celebrating their heroics and loves, and lived in free unions seldom consecrated by the sacrament of holy matrimony.” (Shumway 12)
not in the extent that a book like the original La Guerra Gaucha is read, but certainly as foundational text within the national imaginary. Particular to Argentina’s case is the focus on territory for national identity given the nation’s heterogenous population. “Land becomes the foundation of the nation and guarantees its unity; it becomes the object of patriotic respect, producing heroes who give their lives to liberate invaded territories—as is the case in La Guerra
Gaucha.” (55). It is this territorial nationalism that returns again and again in the Argentinian
discourse surrounding the Malvinas/Falklands Islands, and which Correa seeks to unmoor by overlaying the war for independence with the national deception and “absurdity” that was the Malvinas/Falklands Conflict, despite the heroic roles ascribed to the Argentinian soldiers 150 years later for “recovering” the Malvinas/Falklands from the British “invasor” (Correa 35). This is a point I will also return to in chapter three.
Heroína builds on this national imaginary while refiguring its familiar categories and
elements by reassigning their referents to figures and situations belonging, rather than to the mythic past, to the second half of the 20th century. The basic structure, however, is familiar. We lend an ear to the recounted life of a single Gaucha—in this case from birth—detailing the series of trials and tribulations she has overcome, but now transplanted into a vastly different Argentina. She is no longer the man of the land, speaking its language, but rather a navigator and representative of the dangers of urban life. Much in the same way Lugones sought to capture and elevate the Gaucho language as a uniquely Argentinian language, Correa captures the particular dialect of the streets of Buenos Aires. What remains unclear is the extent to which we are asked to consider modern Argentina, and its culture, as the “pampa,” or wilderness, that the novella’s heroine must traverse. As a “common” person, she finds herself sucked into her government’s war—one she has little personal interest in fighting. Rather than fighting the Spanish, or
Paraguayans (as in the case of Miguel Hernandez’s El gaucho Martin Fierro), the army now fights for independence, or what is ironically portrayed as independence, from British colonialism to finally reunite the territories that represent a complete Argentina. In Correa’s hands the Argentinian army of young conscripts becomes an army of gauchos: “They were all gauchos and this little gaucha, those who fought there” (19).8 While the soldiers cannot actually be called Gauchos in any strict sense of the word, Correa nevertheless invokes the national tradition, inviting readers to draw their parallels and evaluate differences. Readers are asked to imagine these soldiers as modern gauchos, just as Correa expands the category by inserting a female gaucho, the gaucha, into the epic. The critical function of the figure of the gaucho/a as societal outcast, however, remains intact.
By warping and transposing Lugones’ epic of national struggle, Heroína might be said to damage or modernize the literary tradition, rejecting undesired elements if not the ideologies inherent to that monumental past and the nation it sought to establish and guide into the future. However, I want to suggest that rejection here does not entail an outright dismantling of the national imaginary, rather, by emulating or parodying the style of the Gauchesco and incorporating the famous La Guerra Gaucha within its title, we might also see Heroína, la
guerra gaucha as a modern replacement for that monumentalizing work. The novella thereby
leaves the monumentalizing function of literature intact, and Huyssen’s model—while perhaps, impotent today—still stands as a historic component of the national imaginary and national identity. By maintaining the title and the originary position or a connection to the originary role within the national imaginary, Heroína might also then seek another, more fundamental substitution. If the original referent of Lugones’ La guerra gaucha was Argentina’s violent independence from the Spanish crown and thus the birth of a nation, Heroina, la guerra gaucha
suggests that the Falklands/Malvinas War as a new originary moment for the historical present. If Huyssen is correct concerning history and its promises for the nation today, then literature, entered through its historic national role, can still hold political potential today when twisted through play. By reviving a national-building genre, the novella feigns its historic logic and function, thus playfully monumentalizing a new past. Ironically, memory can then rise again as a “topic for the poets and their visions of a golden age” (Huyssen 2)—but the golden age of a different nation. And if this new heroic past cannot legitimize the nation of the present, the question might then become: what kind of imaginary nation does such a playful memory “legitimize and give meaning,” and what future does it envision “culturally, politically, socially” (2)?
Abjected Subject, Abject Laughter
Within the more general model of the Gauchesco, I now want to introduce the concept of abjection as a productive framework through which we can begin to read the novella’s provocative and deliberately transgressive aesthetic. I propose that we can then better understand the way the novella plays with testimonial tropes in order to implicate its audience and establish the authority of its voice, while abject laughter, evoked in its readers, subtly works to destabilize hegemonic discourses on multiple levels. Much in the same way that the novella undermines the literary tradition, I will argue that abjection within this playful rendition of the literary tradition allows Heroína to undermine current memory narratives surrounding the Falklands/Malvinas War.
In her seminal essay The Powers of Horror, French theorist Julia Kristeva draws from the psychoanalytical tradition to elaborate the concept of abjection as, above all, an expulsion, or a
