Chapter 9 - 1980: Memory and the Novel

Summary

This chapter maps out two decades of novelistic production starting with Respiración artificial by Ricardo Piglia in the midst of the dictatorship. An archival pursuit of a history of violence constitutive of national foundations, the narrative insinuates the possibility of a national project where silenced voices might have a hearing. Whereas in Piglia, modernist fragmentation signals an enigma that needs to be solved, in Reina Roffe’s La rompiente a shattered and disrupted memory both names the horror and promises a break away from archival sites of authority. Los Pichiciegos by Rodolfo Fogwill offers a vision of the Malvinas/Falklands War that is both hallucinatory and hyperreal, facing simultaneously the darkness of the present and a visionary glance revealing novel forms of destitution in the making. In novels published in the 1990s such as Matilde Sanchez’s El dock, Rodolfo Fogwill’s Vivir afuera, Sergio Chefjec’s El aire and Los planetas, the characters’ aimless wanderings might be said to explore the failure of memory as historical direction, as national reckoning, as a form of political representation, as harnessing community, yet memories of the horror persist beyond any general project of political reconstitution and the capacity of literature to repair or bestow meaning.