The Space of Disappearance. A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror by Karen Elizabeth Bishop (review)

March 24, 2021, was the 45th anniversary of the coup d’état that ended the presidency of Isabel Martínez de Perón and unleashed a wave of repression in Argentina. Since then, a vast corpus of literature has emerged about the literary representation of the dictatorship, the role of memory and trauma in Argentine fiction, and the ways in which art and human rights coalesce to give voices to those who have disappeared. Karen Bishop’s The State of Disappearance focuses on “disappearance as a body of work” to examine works by canonical twentieth-century Argentine authors, such as Rodolfo Walsh (1927–77), Julio Cortázar (1914–84), and Tomás Eloy Martínez (1934–2010) (3). This study joins a body of monographs that examine the lasting effects of repression such as Andrew Racja’s Dissensual Subjects (2018).

The introduction starts with the description of a work of art that commemorates the historical events that took place in 1976 and a summary of the dictatorship in which the author builds on insights by Diana Taylor and Idelver Avelar. Judith Butler’s concept of the precarious is included to analyze the literary works. Bishop argues that “the narrative work that this book examines responds to, directly and indirectly, the withholding of knowledge and the states of epistemological suspension propagated by disappearance” (10). In this statement, however, readers encounter a confusing historical chronology. If, as Bishop first explains, disappearances took place after 1975, how can they be represented in Walsh’s Variaciones en rojo (1953), which was published twenty-two years before 1975? The same problem arises with the inclusion of Cortázar’s Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales (1975), published a year before the coup. Nonetheless, the author cites Brian McHale’s assertion about the postmodern text to justify disappearance as a literary technique and to Reinhart Koselleck’s ideas about catastrophe, though a section about its relation to Walsh’s and Cortázar’s novels is missing (16). By doing close readings guided by New Critics practices, Bishop focuses on disappearance and absences which influence the literary strategies. Her method links memory, lived history, and historiography. She identifies four modes of disappearance, which comprise dissimulation, doubling and displacement, and suspension (13). What is missing from this introduction is the rationale to analyze detective fiction, a graphic novel, and a historical novel together.

In the first chapter, Bishop narrates the events surrounding Walsh’s disappearance in 1977 and his movements in the 1970s as well as his knowledge of English and French detective fiction. In order to analyze the way Walsh represents disappearance in Variaciones en rojo, the author compares it with Michel Foucault’s analysis of the painting Las meninas and then proceeds to a meticulous textual analysis of the detective story, relying on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of dissimulation. Here it would have been useful to further engage with other essays about Walsh’s oeuvre, but this study is one of the first to introduce this author to an anglophone readership. The following chapter is devoted to Cortázar’s graphic novel. The author first traces his ideology from anti-Peronism, his perception as a writer in exile, his role in the Russell Tribunal (79), and the factors that contributed to his decision to write Fantomas. According to Bishop, Cortázar denounces a cover-up of the tribunals’ work and resorts to the use of the narrative techniques of doubling and displacement. Janet Roitman’s ideas about crisis are judiciously incorporated to provide lucid textual analysis of Fantomas. The final chapter is dedicated to an interview of Juan Perón done by journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez, which served as a precursor of La novela de Perón. The events of the mid-1970s are carefully detailed along with the postmodern features of Martínez’s novel. In her examination of La novela de Perón...