The Space of Disappearance

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.

IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Space of Disappearance: Knowledge, Form, RightsHistorical DistortionsModes of DisappearanceRefraction and ResistanceLiterary Form and Human RightsAt the Limits of the LiteraryThe Book to Come1. Mimesis by Other Means: The Aesthetics of Disappearance in Rodolfo Walsh's "Variaciones en rojo"Operation True CrimeIn the BeginningVariations in RedPrivileged SightThe Framing and Unframing of ArtBloody Dawn2. Double Exposure: The Hermeneutics of Catastrophe in Julio Cortázar's Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionalesA Fellowship of ExileOn Gaining Political PurchaseSmokescreenCatastrophe and ConsciousnessDouble VisionForce of Form3. In Abeyance: Strategies of Suspension in Tomás Eloy Martínez's La novela de PerónOther LogicsA Deliberate GapDead CenterWhat World Is This?Where in the World?Anticipatory Fictions4. Errant Metonymy: The Embodiment of Disappearance in Tomás Eloy Martínez's Santa EvitaLiquid SunNull IntersectionSimulacra, Site, and the SuperabundantBurial Plots in the BardoAesthetic JusticeConclusion: The Disappearance of LiteratureNotesWorks CitedIndex