How armed conflicts were molding Argentine fiction

How has Argentine literature narrated its wars? What images, voices and silences have built around the conflicts that marked its history? As trauma, epic, persistent memory the territory of disputewar has been a recurring theme in national fiction, from independence battles to the last dictatorship.

A new anniversary of the Malvinas War It is an excuse to inquire about how war became a motor for literary creation. In particular, the conflict in the South Atlantic has inspired numerous fictions. From the already famous The pichiciegosde Fogwillwhich narrates the conflict in a key of satire and from a lateral perspective, to The islandsby Carlos Gamerrowhere the absurd and its drifts are also central axes.

In recent years, New publications They have resumed the issue from other perspectives, exploring their current resonances. What new questions wake up these stories? How do you resignify a past that is still open?

“In Argentine literature there are An extensive tradition in war storiesalthough of various types: from the memoirs of some men in May, such as Belgrano, whose life was altered by the independence struggles or the Argentine stories that Bartolomé Miter wrote, both plotted by those same struggles, ”he says Alejandra Laera, Doctor of Letters from the University of Buenos Aires, researcher and professor, in dialogue with Clarion.

A crucial example, according to Laera, is An excursion to the Ranqueles Indiansby Lucio V. Mansilla: “It is a great book that turns the logic of the war because it converts a military expedition into a trip to sign a peace treaty with the Indians, completely changing the perspective of them. It also tries to disarm the Sarmientine opposition between civilization and barbarism.”

For Laera, the war is “nuclear in the Constitution of the Nation and the State in Argentina, so it entered as theme or motive in literature throughout the twentieth century.” States that The pichiciegos He reached a high point in this tradition: “Fogwill wrote the novel when the Malvinas War was not over yet and yet, He anticipated defeat. It crosses war not only with politics, but also with the economy and the procedures of fiction with those of the testimony. ”

Martín Kohan He has also analyzed in a detailed way these topics in his book The country of war (Eternal cadence). “From a time to this part, the way in which wars begin to be deficient in their function of seeking feats and heroisms,” writes and traces a cartography that a cartography that unites Sarmiento, Miter and San Martín with Fogwill or THE GYM WAR by César Aira. On the latter, he affirms: “War in Aira is the irruption: it is the irruption of the inconcilable.”

While the link between war and the last military dictatorship is controversial, due to the controversy around the “theory of the two demons”, it does not stop addressing this axis based on the narratives of the violence that emanate from there emanate. For example, take the figure of Rodolfo Walsh And he analyzes, above all, his “letter to Vicki” and “letter to my friends” where he reconstructs the murder and disappearance of his eldest daughter.

“The parents of the country had been men of arms. And now, their direct children, the men of arms, once again, ruled the country.” That is the beginning of Under flagGuillermo Saccomanno’s novel Published in 1991 that portrays the rawness of the mandatory military service in the time of the dictatorship of Onganía and is advanced propiently to the murder of soldier Carrasco in 1994. The writer, recently awarded the Alfaguara Award for his novel The wind will burn, It is another exponent of the war literature that has explored rawly in different stories and novels.

Fiction also brings together other examples that move away from a factual base: from dystopic Pork War Diary From Adolfo Bioy Casares where young people begin to hunt the elderly, even The Soriasmonumental work by Alberto Laiseca who in 1360 pages tells a fictional and delusional war between totalitarian and technocrats mega-states: Soria, Technocracy and the Soviet Union.

While Argentina is not involved in an armed conflict since Malvinas in 1982the war continues to inspire recent stories, either by complete rereadings or inventions.

“I am very interested, in that sense, Orange GirlsGabriela Cabezón Cámara’s latest novel –Comenta Laera – that although it tells the adventurous life of Catalina de Erauso, who was known as the nun Ensign, from the memoirs he wrote around 1620, the context is that of the colonial war, with his practices of extractivism and dispossession. ”

Regarding this historical character, it was also recently published The crusadeby Florencia Canale, reference within the historical novel. There it is narrated, in the interstices between reality and fiction, the life of this woman in the key of adventures and adventures although clinging to a certain plausible from information based on her memoirs.

However, not all the life of Eraususo is possible to be rebuilt by documents and that is where full camera head in a peculiar way that Laera highlights: “I imagine them hidden into the Guaraní jungle, living with girls and animals, affectively linked to nature, transforming their worldview to total transfiguration. It interests me because it is a novel that, from the reinvention of the past of the colonial war Other ways of imagining a present that is also crossed by war and cultural battles ”, complete.

Another recent case is that of Tomás Downey. Prominent storyteller, in his first novel, López López (Fjordo) tells the story of a soldier named López who fights in a fictional country and is about to be shot. Manages to escape and place a uniform of the enemy side. When he sees the label sewn in the fabric he is surprised: he also belonged to a soldier named López. Suddenly, he is occupying the place of his homonym. Thus the novel takes place investigating all the time about the identity and the figure of the double while this war continues its course.

“I had long the idea of ​​a soldier who changed the side in a war and is ascending until he was in charge of the army against which he had begun to fight. It was a dynamic idea, because it already contained in some way the structure of the novel, but I lacked the character, the world and above all the tone. All that aligned a little when the title appeared, which was the first thing I wrote: I gave me the name of the a notion of registration, between the disturbing and the absurd, ”the author tells Clarion. He also adds that the writing process demanded almost four years of correction.

Account that beyond the disquisitions about duplicity between López and his doppelgangerHe was interested in “putting history, adventures, in the foreground: López happens all these things, he falls in love, he hurts, runs, cries, he hugs with his people, he lies, he tells the truth (or the two things at the same time). The possible interpretations branch and appear, in addition, in the background. They are the product of history, more than the engine”.

Admits some inspiration in the catheterism that emanates from The pichiciegos De Fogwill although he points out: “It seemed important to me, in turn, not falling into the cartoon and imbued with detail and humanity to the characters, López and his group. In the midst of chaos and the absurd, there is room for friendship, for group ideaof a collective purpose, of a future perhaps happier. ”

Add some more examples to the list of Argentine literature crossed by war but, where appropriate, is interested in works that address it laterally: Plopby Rafael Pinedo; Graciastwo pablo catchadjian o ExistDe Antonio Di Benedetto.

Here, Downey observes, “war appears on the one hand as something rather alien, almost as a force of nature in which the characters are trapped, something that does not even make sense to try to understand, and in turn as an excuse to question, or in tension, the sense of belonging, the loyalties. Anyway, identity.”

The war has been present in the Argentine letters From its origins. Either from the heroes writing about their independence battles, to writers who have turned these stories into literary matter. Later, many women also began to tell even more violent stories.

At the crossroads, between imagination and actionthere are also many others. In his essay “Ernesto Guevara: Reading traces”, Ricardo Piglia He writes: “You have to become a writer outside the circuit of literature, only books and life. Go to life (with books in the backpack) and return to write (if you can return). Guevara seeks pure experience and pursues literature, but finds politics, and war.”

However, fiction also runs the risk of emptying traumatic experiences. Beatriz Sarlo He warned in 1994, at number 49 of the magazine Point of view: “When I saw Schindler’s list I alarmed the ease with which the holocaust could forget: fiction did not lead to look for him at the edges of the story, he simply evacuated his story. I want to believe that it was not chance that put me to reread The pichiciegos. I found there A fiction that was not emptied of history and pointed out a particular war, the Malvinas War, in its historical form of miserable and messianic adventure of a dictatorship that entered its sunset. “

Whether as inspiration, testimony or backdrop, wars will continue to narrate. Not only because his memory still beats but because they continue to occur: Ukraine, Gaza; New scenarios of old clashes. Fiction can try to understand, register or exorcise them. Between the past that is rewritten and the present that still burns, literature continues to seek how to tell the inconceivable.