Tracks to Modernity: Reconstructing the Present in Roberto Cossa's El Sur y después

Tracks to Modernity: Reconstructing the Present in Roberto Cossa’s El Sur y después sarah m. misemer texas a&m university  Anumber of prominent Argentine works make use of the cardinal point ‘‘South’’ in their titles to describe the nation or some aspect of it: the short story ‘‘El sur’’ (1944) by Jorge Luis Borges, the film Hombre mirando al sudeste (1986) directed by Eliseo Subiela, and the film Sur (1988) directed by Fernando Solanas, all feature Argentina generically as the ‘‘South.’’ Likewise, Historia de una pasión argentina (1940) by Eduardo Mallea constantly alludes to ‘‘el Sur’’ on its pages to denote Argentina. These are but a few examples of how notions of country and geographical space have been linked in Argentine film and literature . This is also true in Roberto Cossa’s theatrical piece El Sur y después (1987). In addition to notions of spatiality (el Sur), Cossa experiments with temporal dimensions (después/‘‘after’’ or ‘‘later’’) as he pieces together disparate individual histories in an attempt to distill and produce a (re)collection of Argentina’s past.1 This essay will argue that Cossa’s term ‘‘el Sur’’ is a purposely imprecise definition and/or concept that allows him the freedom to define the nation through both a creation and recreation of individual histories and official History. This (re)viewing of the past was necessary in the post-dictatorship democracy because of the aftermath of the national tragedies of the ‘‘disappearance’’ of tens of thousands of citizens by a corrupt and conservative military government in power from 1976–1983. As part of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization), Argentine citizens were kidnapped, tortured, and often killed for their so-called ‘‘subversive’’ beliefs or actions. The ‘‘after’’-effects or ‘‘later’’ (después) renderings of Argentina produced by Cossa in this play depend on imagining and inventing the past from the ‘‘present’’ vantage point. In this way, Argentina (el Sur) is conceived simultaneously as a site of intersection between conflicting notions such as: present and past, truth and fiction, progressive and old-fashioned. Argentina has traditionally been identified with binary oppositions, such as civilización o barbarie in Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845), or as both European and Latin American, colonial and post-colonial, Buenos Aires and the pampas, liberal and conservative, along with a whole host of other possible dichotomies. These 1 All translations provided are by the author of this article. 168  Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.2 (2008) types of socio-political dialectics have continued to shape the unique character of Argentina since its inception as an independent nation in 1816.2 Though only a few years later in 1829 the caudillo Juan Manuel Rosas reinstated a great deal of the Hispanic traditions so many had fought against in the war for independence, merely one year after his defeat in 1852 the pendulum swung again the other way with a new constitution that implemented a liberal project and provided the basis for a modern nation in 1853.3 As part and parcel of this emphasis on modernity and progress in the newly formed Argentine government’s quest for national and international prominence, the construction of railroads was undertaken in 1854, just one year after the consolidation of the new nation-state. Railroads, thus, can be linked with Argentine definitions of progress and persist as a marker of national identity and modernity. Aptly, Cossa has chosen a railroad station as the backdrop for the recollection and recreation of Argentine timelines of development in El Sur y después.4 Like the original railways of 1854, Cossa’s train station—and trains—once again fulfills the service of defining the ‘‘new’’ nation in the democratic setting of the mid-1980s, following the dictatorship. The trains, which pass through the station in El Sur y después traveling both to the North and South, bring with them characters representing various facets of Argentine h/History. These trains, as we will see, simultaneously symbolize the dialectical influences of the forward trajectory (progress/future), while at the same time embodying the backward glance (regression /past). The artist and enthusiast Michael Flanagan writes of trains and the art he...