Books and memory

Every March 24 transcends the chronological. Today, and forever, it will also be an instance of memory and identity recovery that never ceases to challenge us.

Literature has been, and is, part of that activity. It is something that was advanced in time, that recovers it and that forces us to permanently rethink it from different angles (in many cases depending on the generation that narrates).

The journalist and writer Juan Carrá, with his new book Eyes on the ground (Alto Pogo – 2021), helps us to follow and think about some of those different edges. Many works emerged from the talk and, above all, a human search for those experiences.

The literature that reaches that historical period is a lot. Some take the topic as a topic and others use the time as a backdrop for other stories. “Both are definitely building a world, a literary tone that allows us to reflect, perhaps in a more tangential way, and it seems to me that these texts are more effective over time” he begins by saying Juan Carrá. And immediately he puts the first example: “I think of authors like Juan jose Saer. If one approaches his work as a whole, we will see that politics is always an element. Perhaps it is not the central element of the plot, but it is behind. There is always a political background that enables a world, that enables the construction of a character, that enables a character, or a way of seeing those conflicts that develop interpersonal, sometimes too intellectualized. Thinking in particular, one can think of the novel Nobody ever swims and his character, the Garay cat, with his girlfriend-lover in that house of Corner, with a very slow narration inside that house, which later with other texts we learn that it was from that house that they were “sucked” during the dictatorship and made both of them disappear. From there we can see in Gloss, also, the end of the life of Summer, one of the great characters of Saer, and its link with the revolutionary militancy. Or in the Indelible, where we find a Tomatis totally depressed at one point, absolutely hit by the impact of the dictatorship, not just by the disappearance of one of his friends, the Garay cat, but also in his personal life because of how that whole world around the intelligentsia of that universe proposed by Saer”.

-There we have a tangential entry to the subject. Do these ways of narrating respond to the generation that tells the story?

– Definitely. And the proximity and legitimacies created around the issue are also noticeable within the generations themselves. For example, a book that was recently reissued is Diary of a Montonera princess (Planet) of Mariana eva perez. The issue of dictatorship and Human Rights is approached from a place of black humor and from the use of a game between fiction and non-fiction that at times is very intense as it is approached. And I insist with the black humor, because one could say how did we enter the dictatorship with humor, with irony? We are talking about a girl who is the daughter of the disappeared, the sister of a boy who was born in the Esma and stolen by the dictatorship. She herself, as a child, was kidnapped in the operation where her mother was kidnapped. So we are talking about a victim of State terrorism who tells her own story, but she does not do it in the way we would expect her to. It does so from the place of irony and acidity. And he enters the subject with a forcefulness that allows us to reflect much more on certain political questions around the dictatorship and post-dictatorship than any other text that goes more directly to the subject. Now, this text is possible because we are in a democracy. And it has legitimacy in the intellectual field because Mariana perez he writes it from personal experience. If this same text was written by someone who had not gone through that, he may be questioned about how he enters the subject. Even she was questioned at the time as well.

– Could it be that we need to address the issue from a working class perspective? Now I only remember the stories Infierno Grande by Guillermo Martínez and The Death of the Russian León by Pablo Ramos …

– It seems to me that this issue is more worked on in non-fiction and journalistic investigations from the union movements. There is a book that closely touches Mar del Plata what is the Tie night (Felipe Celesia and Pablo Waisberg –Aguilar), where the disappearance of a group of labor lawyers is narrated. What is being marked there is also the political intention of the dictatorship to end certain advances that the working class had made during the 70s. Over there, the issue is not touched so fully from the workers themselves, but from the lawyers defending those workers who were beginning to win lawsuits and firmly claim their rights.

– Something to highlight in all this is, also, that step that is taken when leaving the intimate and going to the public. It is no longer something of a home so that many more know it. The fear of telling what happened is lost.

– Yes and you have different stages in that too. You have a first stage where the focus is more on the testimony, let’s think about Memory of death (Planet) from Miguel Bonasso, where he relies on fiction because everything was quite hot, but which later ends up being testimony in the Trial of the Boards, and the theme turns on the testimonial, in recovering the voices of the survivors and the stories of the disappeared. A first stage that we can also identify with writers who had lived the subject directly. The narrative of the sons and daughters of that time touches on other topics. Before there was a quest to highlight the terror and recover the testimony. Later on, texts began to appear that claimed militancy that at first did not. At first, not many appeared because at that time the theory of the two demons began to appear, so what was the claim of militancy was not within circulation. In that sense, it seems interesting to me to think of two texts comparatively. One is the book of María Seoane and Héctor Ruiz Nuñez, The night of the pencils (Counterpoint – 1986), and contrast it with the testimony of Emilce Moler in their stories of The Long Night of Pencils (Editorial Marea – 2019). Two texts that definitely speak of the same historical event but from different points of view.

– Many times literature is thought and read as anticipation. One, searching in the texts of that time, could find some antecedent of what was to come and what was happening secretly in the Open letter from a writer to the Military Junta (March 1977) by Rodolfo Walsh, although we were already in 1977. What work do you think was ahead of all that?

– I go a little further back and think about Oesterheld Y The Eternauta (Weekly Zero Hour – 1957). The Eternauta It is a text that if one analyzes it with the post-dictatorship reading, one is seeing the dictatorship ten years before. That invasion, that deadly snowfall, that need for resistance, it seems to me that there is one, we could call it, a premonitory allegory, which is typical of a genre like science fiction. It seems to me that there we have something that a system is showing us, imperialism, behind the symbols that it uses to narrate the history of the genre.

– In addition, one can also think from the figure of the collective and individual hero, typical of what came later, according to the part that is taken from the graphic history. The lonely hero of the first part and the collective of the second …

– Absolutely. And there is something that is very interesting, and going back a little to that of literature and political conjunctures end up generating that the texts end up being hostages of those same conjunctures. If one sees The Eternauta 2, the one that is written in the middle of the dictatorship and with a Oesterheld in hiding who dictates the scripts over the phone to Solano For him to do the drawings, the plot of that second part definitely shows a different view of politics from that of the Oesterheld original. He is already committed to the organization Montoneros, with a very important militant commitment. Later, the dictatorship made almost his entire family disappear because of that.

The stories overlap, as well as the looks and styles. Literature as a means and end in itself to access an identity, to recover the memory of those voices of the time. The texts manifest the experiences of some that are replicated in many. We experience as readers those steps and those experiences like ours, singled out.

“I would also like to mention Martin Kohan, one of the contemporary authors who most masterfully touches the subject. There are four texts of Kohan which I think are very important: one is Moral Sciences (Anagram – 2007), in which he works on the idea of ​​repression within the school National Buenos Aires; soon, Twice june (Debolsillo – 2005), where he does something very interesting, which is to put a character, who is a colimba, a subject of civil society who is taken to military structures and lives repression in a hated way but on the side of the repressors and what that generates in the subjectivity of this character. Then there is Pending accounts (Anagram – 2010), which is a text temporarily displaced to the present, but where he works on the figure of the repressors already old and who are going around there but who have a fairly dense past and, finally, the one that he brought out to the year past, Confession (Anagram – 2020). A very interesting text where he plays with the relationship between the church and the dictatorship. Not only from the thematic but also from the form, as he did Puig at the time with The kiss of spider women (Seix Barral – 1976).

– Finally, post-dictatorship literature, is it a literature that opens or closes?

– It is a literature that is allowing itself to play more with aesthetics. In that sense, it seems to me that it opens the possibility of thinking about the dictatorship by places beyond the testimonial. Beyond the hard fact, beyond the specific question of a person disappeared by the State. I think about it with authors like Felix Bruzzone, for example in The moles (Mondadori Literature – 2008) o Field of May (Literatura Random House – 2019). I think about it from my own Esma (Juan Carrá / Iñaki Echeverría – Evaristo Editorial – 2019), with a new language, the comic strip, getting into a dense theme. A very beautiful girl (Eternal Cadence – 2013) of Julian Lopez and the look of a boy on the world of his mother’s militancy and I can add, finally, The house of rabbits (Edhasa – 2007) of Laura Alcoba. It seems to me that there is a need to open up the subject more and that there is still a certain solemnity about it, that is why at the beginning I rescued Diary of a Montonera princess.

Memories of memories. Experiences taken from the experiences of others. Literature as a bridge for a perpetual work that is to recover and not lose the memory of Argentines.