The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror by Karen Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror by Karen Elizabeth Bishop Erika Teichert Bishop, Karen Elizabeth. The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror. State U of New York P, 2020. 244 pp. ISBN: 9781438478524. Karen Elizabeth Bishop's book is a literary study of disappearance in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction. Reflecting on the country's dictatorial past, Bishop observes that disappearance "shows up as literary preoccupation, device, and mode in relation to the legacies of concealment, disavowal, and withholding of knowledge that enabled enforced disappearance to work as a tool of state terror" (3-4). Relying on her dexterous knowledge of literary theory and on close reading as her "principal methodology" (31), Bishop identifies "four modes of disappearance" (13) in works by Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, and Tomás Eloy Martínez: "dissimulation," "doubling and displacement," "suspension," and "the embodiment of disappearance" (13). At the centre, lies an intriguing argument about the politics of disappearance: that "disappearance functions to construct a narrative commons," offering "a rich ethical common ground: at once a graveyard for those denied one, a textual meeting place, and a staging ground for new ways into text, world, and how we know" (27). Chapter 1 focuses on Walsh's short story 'Variaciones en rojo' (1953). Written before the last military dictatorship, Bishop suggests that this story "offers up an early version" of techniques of dissimulation (41). Thus, pursuing a political reading of Walsh's early detective fiction (46), Bishop asks what the crime committed in the story, together with its attempted cover-up and its subsequent resolution through the interpretation of artworks, can tell us about disappearance. While disappearance is posed in "aesthetic" terms (54), the story holds political lessons about how it operates in authoritarianism, and how it can be resisted. In Bishop's interpretation, "the [End Page 155] story gains in its capacity to function as cipher for understanding how dissimulation and disappearance work in concert as symptoms of violence and as catalysts for the production of new logic-based knowledge" (69). Walsh pushes the subject-matter to its rational limits, showing "that disappearance can be dismantled by logic and the careful parsing of spatial composition, and the violence at its core revealed" (69). As readers, we are asked to interpret disappearance "despite its dissimulation" and, more crucially, to "enact some sort of agency despite the epistemological instabilities that disappearance manifests" (54). Chapter 2 examines Cortázar's graphic novella Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales (1975). Bishop argues that Cortázar employs "doubling and displacement as part of a hermeneutics of catastrophe" to "disclose the constitutive parts of disappearance and reveal how it works to both signal and cover up for a larger network of violence" in the year before the 1976 coup (72). Bishop is interested in the "doubled" nature of the work, and how it manages to "displace" the reader into interpreting history-in-the-making. Doubling is present in different ways: in Cortázar's "doubled" identity —as an intellectual writer, and as a politically aware exile (78); in the novella's "double duty" (82)— as part "political intervention" disseminating the 1974 Russel Tribunal findings, and part "aesthetic undertaking" (85); and in the "doubled" storyline —the disappearance of books that acts as a "smokescreen" for the real crimes documented by the Tribunal (88). Cortázar, who recognises his present as a hinge political moment, wants his readers to do the same: to exercise a "split vision" (106) to identify "this moment as historically charged" (106), and act upon a "catastrophe in the making" (110). Disappearance, in the form of doubling and displacement, "is a self-reflective mode of revelation and commitment" (117). Chapter 3 looks at Martínez's La novela de Perón (1985). Bishop analyses Martínez's use of suspension, a kind of narrative bracketing or purposeful omission, to write a history that only fiction can access (122). Mainly, suspension resides in the figure of Perón himself: "Martínez effects a series of suspensions that keeps Perón in abeyance for the duration of this novel" (127). Thus, the author...