Rethinking Past Present

Transcription

1 Rethinking Past Present By Daniel Link* *Daniel Link is a professor and author. He lectures on 20 th Century Literature at the University of Buenos Aires ( He has edited Rodolfo Walsh s El violento oficio de escribir, Ese hombre y otros papeles personales, and published books and essays including La chancha con cadenas, Escalera al cielo, El juego de los cautos, and Cómo se lee. He has also written the novels Los años noventa, La ansiedad, and Motserrat, along with collections of poems titled La clausura de febrero y otros poemas malos and Campo intelectual y otros poemas. He is a member of the Associação Brasileira de Literatura Comparada (ABRALIC) and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). In 2004 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into Portuguese, English, German, and Italian. As historians well remember, the decade of the seventies is for Argentines a long one. In addition to the methodological difficulties encountered in historiography when attempting to isolate the period, analysts and critics of culture and art also face the danger of articulating mechanically factual processes and symbolic productions with mutually excluding patterns that do not admit the same results. Therefore, we will here endeavor to track in literary texts some indices of the different transformations that would permit speaking of something resembling a literature of the seventies. We will do this with the conviction that, in a peculiar and elliptical way, literature comments upon and represents its own conditions of production: mass literature and media, technologies and utopias, literary genres and political scenes. The Sixties: The Third World and Mass Culture The peculiar constitution of the Argentine literary system and its relative modernity make apparent many of the topics and problems of the sixties and seventies in previously published texts. For example, in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1941), Borges declares his horror at the

2 2 possibility of perpetual copying: mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men. (in Labyrinths. Trans. D. Yeats, J. E. Irby, P. Schooner, H. de Onis, J. Palley, D. Fitts, A. Kerrigan. New York: New Directions, 1964) This statement, which initiates the tale, refers, as does the remainder of the text, to the cultural industry. Thus, Tlön would be a utopia of difference, where reproduction (massive, industrial, incessant) appears terrifying. La invención de Morel (1940) proposes another disturbing model: the perfect copy that devours the model. Here, reproduction putrefies, ulcerates, and corrupts. Bioy s text presents not only a whole theory about cinematographic mimesis, but also a criticism of the cultural industry. Paradoxically, in Bioy s case (much more so than in Borges ) it is a position developed from a generic, hegemonic matrix in the discursive field of mass media, and indeed, science fiction. The passage from fantastic literature to science fiction could then be interpreted as the exhaustion of a model of interpreting reality. It is the abandonment of fantasy (or its mutation to other genres science fiction, or the magical realism that the Latin American boom sold to the entire world), which in principle will become a dominant force in literature of the sixties. "Casa Tomada (1951), by Julio Cortázar, also appears to represent a disintegration of genres. In this story, fantastic in its own right (although in a manner very different from that of Borges or Bioy), the narrator defines himself as a necessary closure of the genealogy established in our home by our great-grandparents. ( House Taken Over, in End of the Game and Other Stories, Random House 1967) This sensation of closure, this un-ease in the house, will appear as marked in space when conflict is unleashed: the ancestors sector is taken over by unknown forces. On the other side of the closed door, the narrator says, my French literature books remained. (ibidem) The closure of genealogy is also the closure of the library, and in

3 3 turn, literature. In this story there is an affirmation of a certain decadent and endogamic aristocratism. Cortázar s tale tells of an irruption whose effects are devastating. The reader is confronted with the abandonment of the fetishes of a defunct genealogy, an impossible culture. In other words, the reader observes a change of genre, the desertion of the dead and useless lineage of fantastic literature. In fact, the Cortázar effect is measured, starting in the 1960 s, more by his novels than by his fantastic tales, which will only again come to occupy a central place within his literary production in the 1980 s. What theme is capable of forcing the rethinking of the scope of the genres, even while that theme is caught up in the act of displacing? It is worth noting that the perhaps most celebrated interpretation of "Casa tomada" (which we owe to Juan José Sebreli) understands invasion in the text as the advance of the Peronist mass, seizing spaces in the face of bourgeoisie exhaustion. The verisimilitude we grant such an interpretation can in part be attributed to the fact that Cortázar s fictions have an intense relationship with the Peronist event ("Las puertas del cielo", Los premios). The same can be said about later texts such as Operación masacre, El fiord o La traición de Rita Hayworth, which belong to another imaginary formation in which the conflicts created by politics have already been decided (for better or for worse). When Cortázar wrote "Casa tomada," Peronism was still the other thing, something sinister, and it was only in the sixties when it acquired a different discursive and literary character. The epistemological change was, among other factors, due to the gradual conversion to revolutionary Peronism and the reinterpretations that these historical changes forced some artists and intellectuals to make. We know that that which is sinister is constituent of fantastic literature, just as we know that third-worldism is characteristic of the culture of the sixties. It is only at this point when Orbis

4 4 Tertius, proposed twenty years earlier by Borges, opens the way to Tercer Mundo. In 1957, Rodolfo Walsh published the first edition in book form of Operación masacre, a police novel for the poor, (Rama,Ángel. "Rodolfo Walsh: la narrativa en el conflicto de las culturas", en Literatura y clase social. México, Folios, 1983) as Angel Rama has called it. In any case, Walsh s book definitely destabilizes literary genres, starting from an extremely complex positing of the realms of fiction and non-fiction. Written as a newspaper investigation and published as such in different episodes, when it reached its book form, Operación masacre transformed itself into something else; a product of the times, it is a non-fiction work (even before non-fiction was codified by some American authors), or a testimony along the lines of the great Latin American testimonial books. Operación masacre belongs in fact and in law to the universe of literature, and accordingly, so it is read. The following year, David Viñas Los dueños de la tierra showed explicit strategies of appropriation of some narrative techniques such as montage (characteristic of the aesthetic series that from 1960 s onward have become hegemonic). These books would inaugurate a series of texts (not the least remarkable of which being Rayuela with its twilight perspective) concerned with the state of narrative techniques and, correlatively, with certain questions linked to the culture industry and the position of intellectuals. Certainly, if there is something characteristic of the literature of the sixties and seventies, it is that correlative concern with politics and at the same time with aesthetics. Since it would be impossible to provide here a complete repertoire of the period s literary works, I will only suggest some texts, more or less representative of literature of the period, by some of the most emblematic writers of the seventies: Manuel Puig, Rodolfo Walsh, and Osvaldo Lamborghini.

5 5 Turning-point Stories In the same way that Borges, Bioy, and Cortázar talk about what the literature of the sixties will be (something that can already be read as a collection of textual operations in 1957 in Operación masacre and in 1958 in Los dueños de la tierra), an almost secret story by Viñas marks the end of an approach to literary production. In "Sábado de gloria en la capital (socialista) de América latina" (1968), happenings, EUDEBA, the Di Tella, Primera Plana, the boom, Sartre, the Cuban Revolution, and television are all present within the delirium of a café revolutionary. In Viñas story, all of the characters, institutions, and discursive and ideological formations of the times can be found and immediately shown up, pulverized, and ridiculed. The description seems so perfect (a pop aleph) that there is no doubt that the sixties have been definitively closed. Oscar Masotta, maybe the most emblematic theoretician of those years, stated in a foreword written in 1968 for Conciencia y estructura, Some recent historical changes have wound up by breaking up the parties, by putting the absurd in evidence. (Masotta, Oscar. Conciencia y estructura. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1980 ( )) Masotta surely referred to May of 1968 (or to the vicissitudes of the exhibition Tucumán arde ) without foretelling that the Cordobazo, which occurred one year later, would confirm his prediction (which also can be read in Viñas story): the death of the festive sixties. In addition to David Viñas Sábado de gloria and Masotta s Prólogo to Conciencia y estructura, both written in 1968, Manuel Puig s La traición de Rita Hayworth, and Alejandra Pizarnik s Extracción de la piedra de la locura, Rodolfo Walsh s Quién mató a Rosendo?, and Juan José Saer s Cicatrices appeared in With these texts, in principle, it would suffice to categorize the literature of the 70 s and its difference with regards to that of the previous period, closed towards 1968 (there are and will always be epigones but, due to considerations of brevity,

6 6 we cannot enumerate them here). Of course, if the decade of the seventies is long, it is not only due to its premature beginning, but also because in its exact middle occurred the coup d etat, the persecution of intellectuals and artists, exile, the prohibition of works, and in synthesis, the terror that froze intellectual debates as well as the autonomous development of the arts. The text that surely marks the final limit of the seventies in Argentine literature is Fogwill s Los pichy-ciegos. Visiones de una batalla subterránea (1983), a novel written about a kidnapping that occurs during the Malvinas war. The Malvinas War was itself a political event that definitively cracked the military s illusions of continued power, checkmated since several months before by the denunciations of writers, artists, and intellectuals, both in and outside of Argentina. After Malvinas, it is a well-known fact that Argentine politics culminated in the alfonsinistic republic. Since 1982, Argentine literature has been obsessed with the revision of the recent past, something which up until that point in time very few texts had done (most of the narratives that attempted to so were published overseas). Much before that, the seventies (which as writer Luis Chitarroni [Chitarroni, Luis. Continuidad de las partes, relato de los límites en La irrupción de la crítica, volumen 10 de la Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1999.] has pointed out did not seem the most adequate nor the most hospitable decade of those that the past century inaugurated before us ) gave the best of themselves, at least from a literary standpoint. Something About Punk If anything defines the passage of the sixties to the seventies, it is the irruption of anti-aesthetic forces in art. Rodolfo Walsh s texts mark the dissolution point of the dominant fictional logic up until that moment, undo the novel as genre, and put the literary institution in crisis. Angel Rama

7 7 has commented that If a descendant of Borges should be sought in Argentine letters in that modernizing line that rescued materials of low origin for an official culture, one must think of Rodolfo Walsh (Literatura y clase social. 1983). In Walsh, one reads a fascination with the use of the genres of industrial culture and the exercise of a series of practices that are the possibility condition of that culture: translations, proofreading, and journalism activities not only represented in Walsh s fiction, but also activities which he practiced before becoming one of the most emblematic writers of the period. Serving as textual material are Walsh s known journalistic cycles in Leoplán or Panorama, and particularly his experience in the daily Mayoría where he organized the Police and Neighborhood Information sections. Walsh s role as a founder of the Confederación General de Trabajadores de Argentina (CGT, an institution which, shortly before its closing, sponsored the exhibition Tucumán arde), and the weekly Semanario villero or the Clandestine News Agency (after 1976) is also incorporated into the text. Additionally, Walsh published Quién mató a Rosendo? (1969), a masterful storybook titled Un kilo de oro (1967), and an allegorical tale about political action, the masses, and leadership, Un oscuro día de justicia (1973), while at the same time writing an important, but yet to be definitively determined amount of stories in magazines of the period. Walsh s texts comment upon and essentially constitute a dissolution of art by political violence, turning genres, textual nuances, and writing itself into politics. One of the characteristics of the period is the obsession of linking the truth (literary and political) of texts with a specific use of writing and language: the mad language of Extracción de la piedra de la locura, Osvaldo Lamborghini s punk language, Cobito s monologue in Manuel Puig s La traición de Rita Hayworth, and the Creole intonations of Walsh, Ricardo Zelarayán, or Luis Gusmán, for example. What is placed in the middle of the written scene is, of course, violence.

8 8 But how does the author go about representing that violence? Literature of the seventies endeavors to answer that question more in relation to the proposal of a style and tone than by way of representation (that will be a characteristic, rather, of the eighties). During the seventies, transgression is central to the concerns of literary theory imported into Argentina. For example, the works of Foucault are translated and are used (understood?) as the philosophical foundation of the guerrilla. Cortázar proposes the guerrilla as micro politics or as a small scandal (of a clear surrealistic slant) in El libro de Manuel (1973), itself representative of the progressive middle class in that period. Furthermore, there are numerous testimonies of clandestine political-military groups having read Foucault at an early stage. In that confusion between aesthetics and politics so typical of the seventies, the terms are this time inverted: it isn t so much that the aesthetic is politicized as has been said so many times before, but that politics has been aestheticized. The transgression, conceived as a category of thought, and in final analysis, of fiction, is installed as a social and political value. Puig, Walsh, Lamborghini and somewhat later (and in a different way), Piglia, Saer, Gusmán, and Fogwill. Thus a literature is born: politics (which until Alfonsín has been dominated by violence) affects prose directly and immediately. Argentine prose and fiction (Sarmiento s Facundo, Esteban Echeverría s El matadero, all that is gauchesco) begin a collapse provoked by violence, and it is this collapse which the seventies chose as a foundation of literature and art. There is also, of course, the question of tone. The tone of literature of the seventies tries to reach that of Hernández and even that of the murderous gauchesca of Ascasubi in the works of Lamborghini and Zelarayán. Moreover, Moreira (1975) and Ema, la cautiva (1981), the first two novels of the then ultra secret writer César Aira, avant-gardiste in a classical line, may be the texts that mark the end of experimentation with the gauchesco.

9 9 In 1973, Noé Jitrik pointed out (in the article "Arte, violencia, ruptura", later compiled in Producción literaria y producción social. Buenos Aires, Sudamericana,1975): What is called culture today, whether it be in Extracción de la piedra de la locura, the Soledades, or Martín Fierro, implies a circuit of three violences, one of which may operate as a rupture: that of the system which it represses (an initial violence), that of art which tries to constitute an exit act, and that of the system that it tries to re-inscribe. Years later, Josefina Ludmer, in the foreword to the re-edition of Cien años de soledad. Una interpretación (Buenos Aires, Centro Editor de América Latina, 1984) observed, repressive power violently politicizes culture while at the same time confronting the alternative politicization (denying the fact that it politicizes culture, while attributing this gesture to the enemy). That is read in the seventies, but that is also written in the seventies. All strategy of those years, aesthetic and/or political, aims programmatically at the breakdown of bourgeois culture, which was consistently interpreted as repressive. However, one of the favorite weapons of intellectuals of the seventies in the destruction of bourgeois culture was the transgression of genre, even by the official media: Walsh and popular journalism, Puig and sensationalist newspapers, or Lamborghini and popular eschatology. Literature and Mass Media Beyond the different positions that intellectuals could occupy, in general, the seventies show an unshakeable confidence (inherited from the sixties) that high culture (arts) could exercise influence on the media. There was a blind assurance that the media would not displace the products of culture from the central position they held with regards to their social (circulation) as well as political (discursive production) effectiveness. Masotta, the critic-prophet of those years,

10 10 noted in Conciencia y estructura the potentially revolutionary (ibidem) character of mass media. He argued that it was a question of using the media s discourse to bore through and infringe upon dominant culture s regressive discourse. Against the literary institution, the massmedia institution. But this may have been one of the greatest violences exercised against literature. On one side, Argentine culture revolved around its identity dramas. On the other, repressive violence cancelled literature s autonomy, politicizing its forms. After all, theories are imported to support a broad range of social practices (from the guerrilla to fashion). The appeal to industrial culture was considered, not as inevitable context (only Saer thought this), but as the main road to aesthetic solutions. Mass media came to solve specifically literary conflicts. Masotta and Puig in a critical way, the boom writers in an uncritical way. Is this equivocal way (Márquez as Rita Hayworth, Lezama as Garbo it was precisely Puig who proposed a similar categorization of Latin American writers) not a violent irruption (and in this case, ironic) of industrial culture s logic in the logic of literature? Consider Rodolfo Walsh who when asked about the ideals that led him to write Operación masacre, answered: Ideals? I wanted to be famous win the Pulitzer Prize have money (Ford) (page number). Writers of the seventies reflected critically on the inheritance of the sixties: a hypothetical alliance between learned culture (more or less avant-gardiste) and mass culture against bourgeois culture could only result in mass media hegemony and the loss of traditional cultural values and references, including the progressive content of learned culture. Once again, it is the literary institution that is put in crisis, only in a way very different from that of the historic avant-garde.

11 11 The ironic comments of the writers of the seventies return First publish, then write (Lamborghini) (reference?) or I wanted to win the Pulitzer Prize (reference?) now stated as farce. The Boom and Beyond: We De-materialize Argentine literature of the sixties and seventies had a relationship of strange fascination and distance with the Latin American boom, that phenomenon that made real stars of a handful of writers of industrial culture. The boom, which affected Latin American literary production as a whole, was a sociological fact (before being a specifically literary one), articulated around a triple market: the Latin American market (Buenos Aires, Mexico), the European market (Barcelona), and the market of the American universities (thus Angel Rama analyzes it in Más allá del boom. Literatura y mercado, 1984). The reasons why suddenly (boom!) literature became a more or less prestigious consumer product, and a more or less glamorous one, are related to the collection of ideologies and attitudes called pop. In the same way that photography makes the realist portrait unnecessary in painting, or how the popular song of mass diffusion displaces a huge variety of poetic genres, cinema marks an additional limit to the previously established ones: mere realist stories in which the code does not count (or pretends no to count) becomes an impossible genre for literature. Novels in the times of industrial culture tend to take charge of their specific problem: writing. The areas most densely referential are, in the boom novels, the most rhetorical ones in the text. In that sense, Manuel Puig s novels present the most problematic articulation of literary mimesis. His first novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968), is written in the limit of the possibilities of representation, and that limit, permanent in his writings, is the key to his

12 12 originality. For Puig, cinema is not only a model for evaluating or interpreting reality, nor is it only the fetish of provincial petite bourgeoisie. Cinema determines the scope of representation and sets its limits. If in the times of mass culture the narrator is impossible (there is no writer, only writing) La traición, it could be said, carries out the mandate of the times like no other text and expels the father of discourse (it is a text with no narrator). La traición is the exact limit of intelligibility within that literary ideology we call realism. Puig has kept to that limit in later novels, and that limit defines his entire project. Puig published for a mass market, but different from the makers of best-sellers such as Silvina Bullrich (Los pasajeros del jardín, 1971; Mal don, 1973; Su excelencia envió el informe, 1974; Será justicia, 1976; Reunión de directorio, 1977; Escándalo bancario, 1980, among others) who drew many young people to literature for the first time, his writing still is still complex, a fact due precisely to the idea of limit on which it is constructed. Puig always works on and from the almost, thus the text s exasperating effect: the almost is scientifically incomprehensible. Neither parody, nor language mimesis; neither kitsch nor camp; neither apocalyptic nor integrated; neither masculine nor feminine ; neither openly sophisticated nor completely chonga. The voice in Puig s novels is that of the almost in each of these forms. An Allegory Osvaldo Lamborghini published his first book, El fiord, in It employs a strange allegory in which the characters bear names that immediately refer to Argentine politics (Carla Greta Terón, the woman who is about to bear a child, is the CGT, Sebas is an inverted condensation of the bases, and so on). As in Viñas story mentioned above, El fiord, is an aleph, but in this case, it

13 13 is ahead of its times. As César Aira pointed out in the foreword to Novelas y cuentos: it concerned, and continues to concern, something unusually new. (Aira, César. Prólogo a Lamborghini, Osvaldo. Novelas y cuentos. Barcelona, ediciones del Serbal, 1988) It anticipated all political literature of the seventies, but at the same time went beyond it, rendering it useless. It incorporated the entire Argentine literary tradition, but provided it with an innovative nuance. It seemed to be riding between two childishnesses: the previous one based on the half-tongue of the gauchesca and the government employees stiffly woodenness of our literary great men, and the later with its always naïve revolutionary fits. In 1973 (the heart of the decade, so to speak), Puig published his third novel, The Buenos Aires affair, Rodolfo Walsh Un oscuro día de justicia, and Luis Gusmán his first book, El frasquito. The second laborghinian masterpiece, Sebregondi retrocede, itself a collection of texts midway between novel and poetry, appeared. Laboghini s text includes a very famous parody of naturalism, El niño proletario, which today can only be understood in reference to gore literature. Some one thousand copies of that book were sold, and César Aira has reminded us of Lamborghini s ironic comment: Effects of the boom. Borges sold sixty four copies of his first book. (ibidem) That same year Lamborghini founded, with other fellow travelers (Germán García, Luis Gusmán, Ricardo Zelarayán, Jorge Quiroga, and Josefina Ludmer), a magazine that was decisive in making up the neo avant-garde of the seventies, Literal. In 1975, when Argentina was already a bloodbath, Literal stated, radically separating itself from the testimonial literature of those years, that the epic of the situation is a metaphysic of opportunism, (Revista Literal, 1, Buenos Aires, Ediciones Noé,1973) breaking from Sartre s axioms to declare that freedom can only be lived when it is lost and pronounced as a sentence.

14 14 María Moreno, in the foreword to the book on Gusmán, Escrito por los otros, has analyzed with particular insight the relationship between avant-garde aesthetics, politics, and psychoanalytic theory. Poet Arturo Carrera (Escrito con un nictógrafo, 1972; Momento de simetría, 1973; Oro, 1975; La partera canta, 1982), equidistant from his two friends Osvaldo Lamborghini and Alejandra Pizarnik, assigned his work of the seventies to the old bajtinian politics of text as carnival and remembered the psychoanalytic prayers (which I never disdained). (" Caza del Snark?", introducción al programa del ciclo Inaudita: Buenos Aires, Dirección Nacional del Libro, 24 de septiembre de 1986) The other magazine that was characteristic of the epoch was Los libros (published between 1969 and 1976). It served as a formative space for the nucleus of intellectuals who founded Punto de vista during the military dictatorship: Beatriz Sarlo, Carlos Altamirano, and Ricardo Piglia, among others. Dictatorship and Democracy Rodolfo Walsh died in a violent clash in His home was raided and his papers confiscated (the same happened to Haroldo Conti and Roberto Santoro, writers whose poetry found a more hospitable place in the decade of the sixties). Manuel Puig, as many others, lived in exile from where he sent his news reports, dispatches that some daring travelers transported in their luggage as Puig s literature was banned at the time. Osvaldo Lamborghini lived a sort of inner exile (in Pringles and Mar del Plata). His third and last book, Poemas, was published in 1980 before he moved to Barcelona where he died in 1985 at the age of 45 (the rest of his dazzling work was published after his death by César Aira). If only two more pivotal authors of literature under the dictatorship may be mentioned (very difficult work, because imposed exile completely

15 15 dislocated the conditions of literary production), Luis Gusmán and Ricardo Piglia must be considered (the latter a promoter of Puig s works). Piglia, who in 1967 had published a book of stories, Invasión, delivered in Nombre falso (1975) a series of texts half way between fiction and essay in which practically all the lines and tensions referred to in this article appear. But it is his novel Respiración artificial (1980), whose main character is Emilio Renzi (the same name he used to publish his notes in Punto de vista), which many critics have read as the key text of that period. Significantly, the novel starts with a question: Is there history? If there is history, it starts three years ago. In April 1976, when my first book was published, I received a letter from him. (Piglia, Ricardo. Artificial Respiration. Duke University Press, 1994). The question of history comes to be an obsession from those years onward, particularly at the same time when literature fluctuates between allegories, political satire (especially Osvaldo Soriano: Triste, solitario y final, 1973; No habrá más penas ni olvido, 1983; Cuarteles de invierno, 1983), and texts that renounce the project of reproducing reality to propose incomplete and fragmented senses. In this last line one would have to place Cuerpo a cuerpo (1979), a formidable tour de force by David Viñas or Una lectura de la historia (1982) and En esta dulce tierra (1984) by Andrés Rivera, from the following period. Linked to the avant-gardes of the seventies (in turn linked, as has been said, to psychoanalytical reflection), Luis Gusmán entered the literary scene in 1973 with El frasquito (the book had a foreword by Ricardo Piglia). Together with Brillos (1975) and Cuerpo velado (1978), these texts define his style during that period which, for lack of a better word, will have to continue being called neo-baroque. That same style characterizes poets of the period such as Arturo Carrera and Néstor Perlongher. Gusmán s universe is that of the popular sectors (that intonation, those behavioral systems, that mythology) duly mixed with references, topics, and

16 16 devices more characteristic of high culture. In that strange intersection between learned and popular, Gusmán finds his place in Argentine literature. Starting from En el corazón de junio (1983), Gusmán made a great effort to give his texts greater transparency, one similar to that expressed by Arturo Carrera in his poetry (Arturo y yo, 1984) during the same period. El frasquito, as Oscar Masotta pointed out, though it does not seen to include any protests [cit. by Link, Daniel in El regreso de El Frasquito", Sitio, 4/5 (Buenos Aires: may 1985)], was soon the object of scandal. And once the dictatorship began in 1977, Gusmán s text had the dubious honor of being one of the first whose circulation was banned by Municipal decree. Juan Gelman, Osvaldo Soriano, Juan Carlos Martini, Luisa Valenzuela, (El gato eficaz, 1972; Aquí pasan cosas raras, 1975; Como en la guerra, 1977; Libro que no muerde, 1980; Cambio de armas, 1982) and Antonio Di Benedetto, among others, also participated in the Argentine Diaspora. The then totally unknown writer, Copi (El uruguayo, 1972; El baile de las locas, 1976; La vida es un tango, 1979, the only novel he wrote in Spanish, La ciudad de las ratas, 1979; La Guerre des Pedés, 1982, among other seminal books), brilliantly wrote in La internacional argentina (1987): Overseas, forming part of the main body of the troops that Nicanor Sigampa designated with the name of Internacional Argentina, were we, who had fled, not the military dictatorship, but all that made possible its existence in Argentine society: Catholic hypocrisy, administrative corruption, machismo, homosexual phobia, censure of everything. But I suppose these categories belong to the past. (Copi. L Internationale Argentine. Paris, Belfond, 1988) The seventies were over. It was an era dominated by a somber book, Nunca más., and Nunca más., in that sense, meant a rejection of violence, and also a rejection of bloodshed.

17 17 Bibliography Aira, César. Moreira. Buenos Aires: Achával Solo, Ema, la cautiva. Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, Prologo in Novelas y cuentos. Osvaldo Lamborghini. Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, Bioy Casares, Adolfo. La invención de Morel. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Sur, Bullrich, Silvina. Los pasajeros del jardín. Buenos Aires: Emecé, Mal don. Buenos Aires: Emecé, Su excelencia envió el informe. Buenos Aires: Emecé, Será justicia. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Reunión de directorio. Buenos Aires: Emecé, Escándalo bancario. Buenos Aires: Emecé, Carrera, Arturo. Escrito con un nictógrafo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Momento de simetría. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Oro. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, La partera canta. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Arturo y yo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, Cortázar, Julio. Bestiario. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Los premios. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Rayuela. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, El libro de Manuel. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1973.

18 18 Chitarroni, Luis. Continuidad de las partes, relato de los límites en La irrupción de la crítica, volumen 10 de la Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1999 Copi. El uruguayo. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, El baile de las locas. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, La vida es un tango. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, La cité des rats. Paris: Belfond, La Guerre des Pedés. Paris: Albin Michel, La internacional argentina. Barcelona: Anagrama, Echeverría, Esteban. El matadero. Madrid: Cátedra, Fogwill. Los pichy-ciegos. Visiones de una batalla subterránea. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, Ford, Anibal. That man. Nuevo Texto Crítico. Ed. Jorge Lafforgue (July 1993-June 1994): Pages. Gusmán, Luis. El frasquito. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Noé, Brillos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Cuerpo velado. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, En el corazón de junio. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, Jitrik, Noé. Producción literaria y producción social. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Lamborghini, Osvaldo. El fiord. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Chinatown, Sebregondi retrocede. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Noé, Poemas. Buenos Aires: Tierra Baldía, 1980.

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