Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies
ISSN: 1470-1847 (Print) 1469-9524 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjil20
Photographic memory and ekphrasis in Tununa Mercado’s En estado de memoria David Rojinsky To cite this article: David Rojinsky (2015) Photographic memory and ekphrasis in Tununa Mercado’s En estado de memoria, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 21:1, 55-74, DOI: 10.1080/14701847.2015.1078988 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2015.1078988
Published online: 25 Sep 2015.
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Date: 26 September 2015, At: 04:30
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 2015 VOL. 21, NO. 1, 55–74 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2015.1078988
Photographic memory and ekphrasis in Tununa Mercado’s En estado de memoria David Rojinsky
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Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, King’s College London, UK
ABSTRACT
Previous studies of En estado de memoria (1990), Tununa Mercado’s meditation on exile and the trauma of return, have tended to refrain from any extended analysis of its ekphrastic quality and the blurring of the text/image binary characterizing the narrator’s account of both memorial experience and the exilic condition. Yet, the plasticity of Mercado’s prose actually encourages the reader to engage each section of the book as if it were one of a series of imagetexts, which, as an ensemble, offer a constellation of visual memories. Of particular interest is the use of photography as a conceptual framing device for highlighting the narrator’s struggle to become a “seeing subject” as a pre-requisite for subsequently becoming a “remembering subject.” For, just as actual photographs are evoked and textually “re-framed” at several junctures within the narrative, the overarching tendency is to narrate memory as if it were a quasi-photographic event. Consequently, I argue that when read/ viewed as a constructed montage of photo-image/texts or a “textual” photograph album, En estado de memoria supersedes any notion of the “unrepresentability” of the traumatic authoritarian past and also exceeds its “post-dictatorship” historical classification by pre-empting today’s conception of memory art as an inter-generational work of construction.
KEYWORDS
Argentina; post-dictatorship literature; memory; exile; imagetext; photography; montage; ekphrasis
Readers of Tununa Mercado’s essays, short stories and novels have often observed that her meta-reflexive oeuvre can be regarded as a single textual continuum in which the tropes common to her writings are the inextricable “states” of memory, exile, and writing itself (Saraceni 2006, 5). From Canon de alcoba (1988) to her most recent novel of exile, Yo nunca te prometí la eternidad (2005), Mercado has tended towards the creation of a web of intertextual allusions between each work, and has thus embarked upon a citational practice, or an “escritura de la re-escritura” which results in an “obra inquieta e inacabada que se sabe en proceso y que se deconstruye a sí misma a través de idas y vueltas por la historia de su misma génesis” (Saraceni 2006, 5). Yet, however self-referential Mercado’s writing practice might appear to be, and however aware of its own literariness, it continues to be seen as potentially “transformative” or “redemptive” in the sense that, on the one hand, it offers the dislocated exile a scriptural
CONTACT David Rojinsky © 2015 Taylor & Francis
[email protected]
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space of enunciation and, on the other hand, it remains an ideal medium for triggering the memorial process on which any such “transformation” or “redemption” might be predicated (Bocchino 2011, 105). In that sense, we might recall Mercado’s own pithy assertion that “[l]a escritura no es otra cosa que memoria” (1994, 32). Amongst Mercado’s works, En estado de memoria (1990), a now canonical meditation on exile and return for the desexiliados of Argentina’s dictatorships of 1966–70 and 1976–83, remains the most celebrated instance of the author’s exploration of this triad of self-reflexive writing, exile, and memory. Indeed, given that (post)exile is equated with psychological trauma, in this particular semi-autobiographical text, and, specifically, the dissociation or division of a self continually identified with alterity, Mercado deploys a writing practice which itself appears “exiled” from the signification or sense it aims to produce (Avelar 2000; Jara 2005; Saraceni 2006; Bocchino 2011). The rupture of the mimetic pact by a decentred narrator and her wavering faith in the transparency of language to transmit experience is, for instance, on several occasions signaled by the slippage between pronominal subjects as the narrating yo merges with ella. If existential dislocation is reflected by this linguistic destabilization in the narrative, the overwhelming critical tendency has nevertheless been to read the text as a testimonial novel in which writing also functions, after De Certeau (1984), much like an “operation” producing subjectivities: for, ultimately, writing facilitates the reversal of that same exilic “pathology” through mastery over the “territory” of the blank page, or because it allows the survivor of State terror to negotiate the (Freudian) passage from melancholy to mourning by offering a symbolic (scriptural) burial of Argentina’s disappeared (Avelar 1999, 2000). In other words, the majority of these previous readings have had little difficulty in positing that the writing practice itself be considered the principal protagonist of En estado de memoria.1 What, quite curiously, is often overlooked in such readings is that if writing is the protagonist of En estado de memoria, it is a writing characterized by an ekphrastic quality which results in a sustained and comprehensive rupture of the text/image binary. I am of course adopting the broader definition of ekphrasis as the “verbal representation of visual phenomena” rather than the more limited notion of the “verbal representation of visual representation” (Horstkotte 2006, 119) so as to include the many invented mental images evoked by the narrator in this process of translation from image to text. Indeed, the narrator renders a whole series of paintings, photographs, geometric visual abstractions, dreams, paranoid fantasies, and even hallucinatory visions of the inner-workings of the unconscious verbally. Moreover, the overwhelming tendency in the text is to associate memory with these visual “scenes” or “tableaux” linked by association, rather than with a chronological series of interconnected events. The memorial process itself is thus understood as ekphrastic in the sense that the narrator attempts to bring unconscious visual experience to consciousness through writing. Ultimately, therefore, the narrator’s pathological “state of memory” amounts to a crisis of vision. Mercado chooses a “visual writing” practice to reflect the fact that, for the narrator, the reversal of her exilic trauma might be sought through the verbalization of the repressed memory-images which continue to haunt her. Furthermore, if textuality has generally been identified with “reason” and temporal linearity, while visuality has generally been identified, like memory, with affect, with spatiality and with anachronism, it makes sense that the narrator would choose to displace a sequential narration of chronologically-ordered events in favour of a patchwork of visually-evocative vignettes from different moments before, during and after the return from exile.2 Invariably,
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the “still” iconicity of these randomly-ordered vignettes serves to transmit both the temporal stagnation of exile and the temporal unpredictability of memory. Consequently, readers encounter visual experience rendered verbally in a way that encompasses not only ekphrastic evocation, but also a scriptural practice imbued with the “epistemological logic of the visual and its affective domain,” rather than the linear “rationality” typically associated with writing (Reber 2010, 69). Nevertheless, previous readings of the book have largely refrained from any extended analysis of this elaborate visualization of the narrator’s memory traces. Even in the case of those studies which have interpreted Mercado’s fragmentary aesthetic in terms of Benjaminian allegory, and hence as also necessarily informed by the language of photography to conceive of such fragments as images (“The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” [Benjamin 1985, 255]), the tendency has been to minimize the visuality issue in favour of a primary focus on Mercado’s writing as a “restitutive” practice (Avelar 1999, 2000; Saraceni 2002, 2006; Bocchino 2011). This is somewhat surprising when we recall that Mercado has had a long experience as an art critic both in Mexico and Argentina, and that, perhaps as a consequence of that same experience, she has tended to draw a symbiotic link between memory, writing and visual images over the years (Plante 2006). Indeed, if in her metareflexive essays (1994, 2003) on the writer’s craft, Mercado has privileged the written word as an infallible conduit to memory, she has also been consistent in her view that the writing of memory is tantamount to a process of salvaging evanescent images and translating them into scriptural form. In that respect, it is worth pondering Mercado’s favoured trope of the caja convocante to describe her writing practice at some length: En algún momento pude haber pensado que el relato que estaba escribiendo era una especie de conjuro, como si la evocación de algunas historias muy viejas, situadas en Córdoba, más concretamente entre los años cuarenta y cinco y cincuenta, disiparan, por la familiarización que operaba la escritura, los “fantasmas del pasado.” Bastó empezar a escribir para que lo que llamo mi caja, es decir mi casa o mi recinto separado del mundo que es la propia escritura (la de cualquiera), se poblara, en sucesivas acometidas nocturnas, durante el sueño y en el semisueño, de seres y objetos flotantemente chagallianos que parecían clamar por sus derechos: ellos estaban haciendo valer la pertinacia con que habían sobrevivido en mí y querían anclar en la tierra. Los traje, los até a la línea y ellos y sus circunstancias parecían contentarse con ese piso de realidad que es la página, o la pantalla – en el primer caso eran negro sobre blanco, en el otro tenían la suprema ocasión de ser trazos lumínicos en la oscuridad –. Pero no se quedaron allí. La acción cambiaba de sujeto: yo conjuraba, pero la escritura, por ese acto de “transmutación” de lo material, convocaba. (1994, 14)
While this imagery proposes an architectonic closed structure (caja; recinto) for both the written text and the writer’s mind’s eye, Mercado proceeds to distinguish between the writing subject performing an incantation or conjuration (conjuro) and writing itself “summoning” or “calling to order” (convocar) phantasmagoric beings from the imagination to the blank page. This fetishization of the written word then reaches a crescendo with the understanding that narrative is the product of a magical or alchemical “pact” (“ese acto de ‘transmutación’”) between the writer and their craft. If the writer’s written memories might function as invocations of past images, and, ultimately, as a means for exorcising ghosts from the past (“los fantasmas del pasado”) they can only do so in conjunction with the caja convocante de la escritura (the scriptural container calling those same images to “order”) in a way that would signal nothing less than a quasi-animistic conception of writing.
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On the other hand, what is also apparent in this passage is Mercado’s conviction that the brute material being invoked, transformed and given substance within the caja convocante de la escritura, are oneiric visual images reminiscent of hovering, ethereal, Chagalesque figures and objects. Hence, if the scriptural process appears to be predicated upon a hierarchical relationship between text and image, the fact is that the same caja trope is strikingly derivative of another “transformative” chamber: the primitive camera. Indeed, the analogy between Mercado’s ekphrastic conception of the writing process and photography is difficult to resist: not least because both are processes enabling the visible to be “captured,” “revealed” and then, “fixed.”3 We might also recall the association of daguerreotypes and early photography with alchemy, spiritism, necromancy, and the “magical” inscription of the sitter’s “shadow” (spirit) prior to the disappearance (death) of their “substance” (corporeal form).4 The long association of photography with death, with the spectral and with haunting would also make it a most appropriate figure in texts devoted to exorcising “fantasmas del pasado” and providing a “symbolic burial” for the disappeared (Avelar 1999, 221).5 Bearing this in mind, it is also worth noting that in her more recent testimonial novel, Yo nunca te prometí la eternidad, dealing with the diaspora of European Jews during the 1930s and 1940s and their eventual exile in Latin America, photography and photographs enjoy a significant role as markers of memory: throughout the narrative, a wide range of characters exchange and contemplate photographs as a means for appealing to the association of photography with objective historical evidence and with an unequivocal index of its subject (“En ningún lugar como en las fotos puede estar tan a flor de piel la subjetividad” [2005, 56]). However, these evoked images are largely subordinated to the intricate web of textual interaction between those same characters and hence, when Mercado decides that her fragmentary memorial aesthetic in the book should be understood as comprising an álbum, it is in the sense of an álbum de recortes or “scrapbook” rather than an album of photographs: “El depósito de las imágenes que junto, las que conciernen al tronco de ese árbol que se levanta en mi propósito de contar, no es la madriguera de los propios recuerdos en cuyo laberinto atesoré mi infancia […] sino un álbum” (2005, 256). While her exploration of childhood memories in La madriguera (1996) had been organized around the trope of a “burrow” of stored memory-images, Mercado now appeals to the notion of the libro de recuerdos or scrapbook to account for the chain of signifying fragments through which Yo nunca te prometí la eternidad assumes the form of a “book of quotations” or an extended montage of reported heteroglossic messages (including diary entries, letters, official documents) concerning Sonia, the protagonist. En estado de memoria shares this fragmentary aesthetic and can equally be viewed as a “book of quotations.” Yet, given its more sustained tendency towards ekphrastic evocation, it is in the sense that it assumes the form of a book of visual quotations organized into 16 separate episodes which, in their turn, are subdivided into equally evocative visual memories. In effect, En estado de memoria can be said to comprise an álbum de imágenes and can thus be re-read as if it comprised a series of “imagetexts” (Mitchell 1994) or, more specifically, as if it were a textual photographic album; not only because of the more complex instances of photographic evocation, but also because photography functions more generally as a framing device for the varied forms of ekphrasis throughout the narrative. At the same time, we will see that even as photography emerges as a master trope for memorial experience, it also appears as a supplement threatening to supplant that same experience in a writing practice often struggling to “reveal” and “fix” repressed visual traces.
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The methodology I adopt here in my own reading of the text is therefore informed by a “visual” reading practice in that, following Louvel, the hierarchical text/image relationship will be reversed and pictura employed to read poesis (2008, 44). I read each episode as if it were a photographic imagetext, and hence a “pictorial device” or “interpretative machine” which invites Louvel’s “reader/viewer” to embrace a “poetics of the visual” (ibid.). While the visuality of Mercado’s textual (photo) montage is purely figurative since images are evoked through ekphrasis and vivid description within the narrative, rather than inserted in the form of actual reproductions of photographs or paintings as in the memory narrative of writers such as the emblematic W.G. Sebald, the association of traumatic memory traces with visual images requiring verbal interpretation remains the same. Similarly, it is worth recalling Mitchell’s assertion that “ekphrastic hope” consists precisely of achieving “iconicity, or a still moment of plastic presence” (1994, 156) through verbal evocation which, ultimately, approximates an actual reproduction inserted into the text on the printed page in the reader’s mind’s eye. Moreover, if Louvel (2008, 45) distinguishes between the inverted reading strategies of the “viewer/reader” of a text containing actual reproductions of images and the “reader/viewer” of a text lacking such reproductions to account for the disruption of linear reading patterns in the former, there remains no doubt that the implicit privileging of spatiality (the visual) over linear temporality (narrative) is common to both kinds of text. My interest here lies precisely in exploring the photographic plasticity of Mercado’s prose in each individual vignette to ascertain the extent to which her focus on the visualization of memory serves, on the one hand, as a rhetorical device to underscore the stalling of the mourning process and, therefore, the (melancholic) resistance to an eventual forgetting (Freud 2006). In that sense, I am indebted to Avelar’s (1999, 2000) argument that by dwelling on the continued presence of the past in allegorical fragments and traces, Mercado suggested a deferral of the final consummation of mourning in the form of a rhetorical negation of the logic of “exchange” or “metaphorization” (Avelar 1999, 204). Consequently, by resisting the successful grieving of personal traumatic loss in this way, she allegorized her rejection of a neoliberal commodity culture predicated on obsolescence.6 On the other hand, I am interested in how the visualization of memory fragments through photographic ekphrastic evocation in the text as a whole might represent an alternative technique for approaching the “unspeakability” of a traumatic past with which surviving artists and writers of State terror were faced.7 Given that the novel was published in 1990, there is no question that previous studies have been most convincing when framing it historically as a response to the post-transitional culture of impunity and to the incipient excesses of Menemist neoliberalism (Avelar 1999; Moreiras 1999; Martins 2003; Saraceni 2002, 2006). After all, Mercado’s post-catastrophe text was written during a period of State-sanctioned amnesia with regard to the State terror of the recent past, and of the concomitant dissolution of that same past into the “synchronous space” promoted by global neo-liberal consumerism (Huyssen 2003). However, when approached as a text which ruptures the binary between visual and verbal media and, more importantly, as a constructed photo-montage of visual fragments awaiting decipherment, I would also argue that En estado de memoria can be viewed as a prescient text, which exceeds the limits of such temporal framing. For, in retrospect, and in terms of both form and content, the novel already signals to its future readers an awareness of the politics of memory and the politics of images generally identified with today’s practitioners of visual memory art in the post-neoliberal Southern Cone (García 2011). Ultimately, a “prophetic” or “anachronistic” reading of the text, as I shall go on to explain, can be justified when we bear
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in mind the following: on the one hand, contemporary memory artists employ montage as an aesthetic technique which overrides the notion of a melancholic “unrepresentability” of the traumatic past; and, on the other, those same artists conceive of the work of memory as an inter-generational process of construction which allows private (traumatic) experience to be allegorized as social memory. The spatial plasticity of Mercado’s prose is immediately apparent in the opening episode, “La enfermedad,” with the evocation of an isolated mental image of the suicidal character Cindal:
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No dejo de pensar en Cindal, quién lo habrá llorado, quién lo llora todavía; salvo yo, quién se acuerda de él, doblado en dos, lastimero […] en la antesala de la muerte, y traza una letra fulgurante y roja con las heridas de su úlcera, y se desangra por dentro torrentes y termina yéndose, en ese arrastre, al otro mundo, ahogado en su propia sangre. (1990, 12–3)
If the figure of the dying Cindal offers a cipher for the brutal fate of Argentina’s disappeared – forgotten by the post-transitional culture – then he also serves as an initial trope for the narrator’s work of mourning in the text. While a visual image of an abject figure doubled over in pain materializes in the reader’s mind’s eye, it is also a striking scriptural metaphor that best transmits the silent suffering embodied by that same figure. Writing and image conflate, therefore, in this very first scene as if to underscore at the outset the association of memory recall with the verbalization of visual experience. Furthermore, in the same episode, when describing how, as an exile in Mexico, the daily arrival of news of another murder or disappearance by the forces of the repressive State eventually made her physical health deteriorate dramatically, the narrator chooses to visualize her own fragile state in the form of a Mexican retablo: “En mi retablo pintado yo podría haber aparecido en mi lecho de enferma” (22). Similarly, in the second episode, “El frío que no llega,” the experience of exile as a timeless, stagnant existence is condensed into “still” pictorial form, this time as a mural: “El exilio se me aparece como un enorme mural riveriano” (33), or, as geometric visual abstraction: “El tiempo del exilio tiene el trayecto de un gran trazo” (34), both of which thus provide visual metonyms for the overarching theme of temporal suspension. While these three opening “scenes” are technically mental images or imagined paintings of immobile figures, they function as framing devices for the wider themes narrated in their respective episodes in a way reminiscent of photo-images inviting verbal commentary. In subsequent episodes, the use of photography as the dominant modality for translating memory-images becomes more overt with the textual “re-framing” of memories of actual photographs or, at other times, the narration of memory itself as a quasi-photographic event. In the case of the third episode, “Cuerpo de pobre,” for instance, the narrator initially posits an understanding of memory as habitus (Franco 2001, xx) or an everyday performance of apparently insignificant gestures and domestic behaviours in the present that trigger memories of her deceased friends from the past: En el recuerdo del otro no se rescata su persona completa sino simples y aparentemente efímeras modalidades que, en algún instante, también fútil en apariencia, se manifestaron; diría que estoy fijada a esos muertos por esos detalles, y con anterioridad lo estaba de la misma manera cuando ellos vivían: por el ejercicio de una manía, por la expresión de un empeño en el marco de la vida doméstica. (49)
However, in the case of Mario Usabiaga (to whom Mercado dedicated the book), her anecdotal recollections, including those devoted to his regulated method for preparing an Argentinean asado, still rely on a quasi-photographic framing of the image-memory.
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This is especially apparent as the narrator proceeds to relate her final memories of Mario’s “modalidades” and “manías” in the form of a series of ekphrastic “scenes” or mental images reminiscent of still family photographs, or even tableaux identified with specific times and places, for the reader to then reproduce in their mind’s eye:
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La primera escena es en Bahía Blanca; él estaba haciendo un asado. Están su mujer y sus hijos, estamos nosotros también […]. En otra escena, meses después, Mario Usabiaga baila con Diana Galak después de una cena en mi casa; […] Otros gestos suyos: se apartaba el mechón de pelo lacio que le caía sobre la frente para inclinarse sobre su máquina de escribir durante las inacabables jornadas en las que traducía del inglés un libro de más de mil páginas. Diana, la muchacha que bailaba, se moría en el cuarto de al lado. (50)
This use of photography as a conceptual device for framing the translation of memories is complemented in the fifth episode, “Oráculos,” by a direct allusion to a primitive daguerreotype as a trope for both memory and exile: me vi a mí misma mirándome en el espejo y descubriendo en un instante, en la piel, los ojos, las comisuras, el ciclón de esos diez años; y no eran arrugas, ni otros signos de decrepitud, era otra cosa, un polvo fino y gris, y por lo mismo macabro, que cubría como si fuera una pátina la totalidad de mi figura. Mi imagen había adquirido los tonos sepia de las viejas fotografías, un rubor ceniciento. (71)
Pondering the illusory nature of temporal stagnation experienced by the returning exile, the narrator, quite ironically, chooses a photographic analogy to express her sudden realization of the inexorable passing of time. It is ironic in the sense that the conventional association of photography with timelessness and the “frozen” moment, and hence the detention of time, is superseded by a conception of the photo-image as a visual record of her ageing during her experience of exile as a “living death.” The reflected mirror image does not, therefore, reveal wrinkled skin or other typical signs of physical decay, but instead, more sinisterly, a self seemingly embalmed by a dust-like gloss and barely illuminated by the ashen and sepia tones of a daguerreotype. If the exilic condition is experienced as a division of the self throughout En estado de memoria, it is in this instance that she actually contemplates herself as “other,” in the form of a nineteenth-century photo-image and thus necessarily invoking the spectral associations of the medium to underscore both her temporal and existential dislocation. Consequently, the photographic image emerges as a metaphor for the whole book as the overarching themes of memory, exile and the struggle to assert subjectivity are visualized in this haunting “self-portrait.” There are three principal episodes in En estado de memoria, however, where both imagined and actual photographic events are reconstructed in relative depth in the form of textual replicas of the mise-en-abyme photograph – the photograph within a photograph. To varying degrees, each of these reconstructions reflects, on the one hand, the conflation of the exilic condition with a disturbing world of visual experience and, while attesting to the narrator’s efforts to free herself from that same world, each also reflects an ambivalent attitude or even resistance to remembering the past. In fact, before considering these re-framed photographic evocations, it is important to emphasize that the narrator in En estado de memoria – however semi-autobiographical – diverges dramatically from Mercado herself (in her essayistic writings) as far as any faith in the power of the written word to actually “summon” (convocar) and translate visual memory-images successfully is concerned. In other words, the narrator of En estado de memoria demonstrates instances of what we might interpret as an “epkhrastic fear” which inhibits, stalls or even negates the verbalization of the visual as a
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conduit to repressed memory and hence, ultimately, offers a metaphor for the irresolution of the passage from melancholy to mourning.8 In the case of “Embajada,” the twelfth episode of the book, and the first of the episodes I will consider in some depth, a short verbal overture, “Por las calles de Córdoba se pasea el general Menéndez,” triggers a disturbing confrontation of mental images in the narrator’s mind’s eye. The unwelcome news, brought by a Mexican character who has recently returned from a visit to Argentina (in the early years of post-dictatorship democracy) to the exiled Argentinean community in Mexico City, functions much like an imaginary newspaper caption accompanying an equally imaginary photograph of the dreaded general for Mercado’s narrator. The narrator simultaneously “sees” the brief and yet shocking verbal stimulus in the form of an inner image that flashes up: the notorious General Luciano Menéndez, in mid-stride, walking unopposed, without bodyguards (“sin guaruras”), and hence with impunity towards the Córdoba Jockey Club (Mercado 1990, 151).9 This inner image evokes a contrasting, quasi-cinematic, low-angle, freeze-frame image of the narrator’s father’s gait along those same streets of her hometown being displaced and even “eliminated” by the general’s since “[n]o había lugar para los dos andares” (151). This clash of emotionally-charged inner images in the narrator’s mind’s eye, thus serves as a metaphor for the culture of amnesia and politics of amnesty characterizing the years of democratic “transition”: “una síntesis de la Argentina y no sólo la Argentina del terror que creíamos terminada, sino de una Argentina actual y permanente” (152). This imagined photo-image of the general, captured in mid-stride, then resuscitates (“convocaba”) an emotionally-charged and yet faint visual memory from the narrator’s childhood: the narrator’s now deceased father stopping to greet local acquaintances encountered as he makes his way along Córdoba’s streets, with his children trailing behind him, struggling to keep up with his customary brisk pace. In this battle of mental images, the visual memory is now only an “escena que se borra,” a blurry scene and yet, a scene which, in the process of being recalled, is simultaneously threatened with erasure through the shocking evocation of the “imagen ominosa del general” (152). What is perhaps most striking about this struggle between mental images and memory-images is how they metaphorize the spatial displacement associated with forced political exile: just as the narrator’s mental image of the general first displaces the vision of her father’s metonymic stride from the street and, subsequently, a fading memory of her father, the narrator is reminded of her own physical displacement from a national place of enunciation to the timeless space of exile in Mexico. Ultimately, the imagined photographic framing of these dialectically opposed inner visions underscores an overarching tendency throughout the book to associate memory with the verbal recuperation of such vignettes as a means for mourning the dead and disappeared. After all, in this particular case, it is precisely the image of the general which has also reminded the narrator that she had been unable to be present in Córdoba at her father’s actual death two years before, “estando yo ausente a más de diez mil kilómetros al norte” (152), and thus to mourn his death in person. However, what this particular clash of images also demonstrates is how the painful recovery of memory provokes a somatic response – the “descargas de adrenalina y el dolor de la gastritis emocional” (152) which attests to the struggle, and at times, even the resistance to recollection. We might thereby reiterate that Mercado emphasizes such physical responses to visual stimuli as a means for stressing the apparent aporia of bringing repressed memorial traces to consciousness: that of narrating or imposing scriptural (“rational”) order on what is essentially “prerational” affective experience.
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If the image of General Menéndez represents an overwhelming “visual experience,” Mercado’s narrator proceeds to return to a time at the height of the dictatorship and describe one of the – now iconic – political rituals used by the exiles to release “el odio y la insatisfacción” they felt when “imágenes como las descritas nos asediaban” (152). For, in the latter half of the same chapter, Mercado offers a second vignette of the scene outside the Argentine embassy in Mexico City where political exiles, brandishing their own photographs of their disappeared relatives, are demonstrating against the dictatorship while simultaneously being photographed themselves by embassy staff lurking behind the building’s windows. Even though examples of ekphrastic description in the traditional sense are limited to brief allusions to the photographs on display, the narrator’s mind’s eye view of the whole scene at the embassy itself resembles a photographic re-framing of two women destined to become celebrated Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Clara Gertel and Laura Bonaparte, holding up their own photographs: Entre ese público siempre estaba – y su imagen debe haber quedado registrada en las fotos que tomaban los diplomáticos de la dictadura, encarrerados o de turno –, Clara Gertel, quien se paraba en la primera hilera, en medio de los niños, y sacaba de su bolsa las dos únicas fotos que le habían quedado de sus hijos desaparecidos; eran muy pequeñas, tamaño carné y apenas podía sostenerlas entre el índice y el pulgar de sus manos, pero las blandía sin desfallecer, en la misma posición y en silencio, mostrándolas a las miradas ocultas que se agazapaban detrás de las ventanas de la embajada. (153) Otra madre, Laura Bonaparte, llevaba sendos carteles por sus hijos, yernos, hijas y nueras desaparecidos y por su marido muerto en la tortura, y eran tantos sus muertos que tenía que sostenerlos por turno de a uno o distribuir sus retratos entre seis personas, hasta que optó por poner una sola gran pancarta con el nombre de toda su familia exterminada. (153–4)
While the fact that the mothers are being photographed by the embassy staff allegorizes the wider dictatorship and post-dictatorship battle between the politics of silence and the politics of memory, it most immediately underscores the tensions over the contemporaneous uses of photography for surveillance by the repressive State and its use as a visual testimony to prior existence of the disappeared. On demonstrations similar to the one remembered by Mercado’s narrator, protestors appropriated the bureaucratic and authoritarian use of photographs – specifically ID photographs – to inscribe an evidentiary index of subjectivity within public spaces, and thus defied the State’s attempts to target those same subjects for archival anonymity and, ultimately, existential oblivion.10 What is therefore striking about Mercado’s evocation of the scene at the embassy is that she adopts the photographic point of view of the embassy staff “capturing” the women below in their lenses as a means precisely for inverting the authoritarian “shot.” In other words, Mercado’s ekphrastic rendition of the remembered scene replicates the gesture of the protestors textually: an appropriation of the State’s repressive photographic index and its transformation into a denunciation of that same State. Consequently, this particular photographic event at the embassy again functions as a metaphor for a whole book in which the narrator must first become a “seeing subject” in order to become a “remembering subject” of buried memorial traces. The event also amounts to a textual replica of the mise-en-abyme gesture characterizing much of today’s memory art photography – the caja china effect – whereby personal archival images are re-framed, and subsequently reconfigured as allegories of social trauma.11 Nevertheless, just as the clash of mental images with which the chapter began underscored the sense of helplessness inherent to the spatial displacement of the exile, the equally despondent conclusion to the chapter signals a more ambivalent assessment of
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the demonstrations led by the exiles in Mexico: “Los actos ante la embajada eran obviamente catárticos, pero resultaban a la larga patéticos recursos; de año a año o de semestre a semestre, esa descarga y la ilusión de que arremetíamos contra la dictadura fueron un ritual político que compensó por la falta, por ausencia, de una práctica política efectiva” (154). That the demonstrations merely served, therefore, as performances of the absence of political action or simulacra of a genuine challenge to the authoritarian State, precisely because they were performed in exile, would also suggest an alternative, potentially dystopian, reading of the photographic event in the scene depicted. While black and white portraits – especially ID photographs – of the detained and disappeared would become the “densest symbol of the crusade for memory” in post-dictatorship Latin American cultures (Richard, cited in Avelar 2006, 263), the photographic event at the embassy could, in contrast, be viewed as an appeal to the conception of the photograph, not as evidentiary index but simply as a visual displacement of the referent and yet another record of absence. Certainly, both the fact that Clara Gertel’s photographic gesture is immediately countered by her own image being captured by surveillance cameras at the window and that Laura Bonaparte eventually defers to scriptural protest invite speculation that, for the narrator, visual politics was as futile as any other form of demonstration when performed in exile. While, then, the textual re-framing of the scene at the embassy does trigger a visual memory of an attempt at political activism, the evocation of the photographic gesture could ultimately serve, like the earlier clash of mental images, to reinforce the melancholic exile’s sense of existential paralysis and political helplessness. The question of the use of photography by affected Argentinean families had already been prefigured in the text during the narrator’s account of a journey to Spain. In this previous case, however, Mercado’s appeal to the medium served primarily to invoke the tension between the traditional association of photography with the objective retention of memory (the nineteenth century “mirror with a memory” tag [Batchen 2004, 8]) and, on the other hand, its association – most famously found in the works of Proust, Kracauer and Benjamin – with the obfuscation or usurpation of experiential memory. In the seventh chapter of the book, “Estafeta” (“Messenger”), where Mercado’s narrator recounts her journey from Mexico City to La Entrega (a village near Sama de Langreo in Asturias, the birthplace of a fellow exile, the Spanish Republican Ovidio Gondi), this tension is particularly apparent. In deciding to travel to Asturias on behalf of a character determined never to return to his homeland, Mercado’s narrator performs yet another example of a series of identifications with distinct manifestations of alterity as she struggles to overcome her own sense of exilic dislocation and to assert herself as a subject of her own remembrance and place: “Estar o no estar en el país, perderlo o recuperarlo, era mi preocupación y ésta era tan fuerte y tan invasora que tuve necesidad de provocar en ella un cambio, o hacer de ella otra figura o al menos, cotejarla con los exilios que estaban viviendo en ese momento, en 1979, mis pares en Europa, y decidí ir a verlos” (96). Yet, if the narrator’s implicit goal is to come to terms with her fantasy of recuperating her own lost homeland and, by extension, a sense of unified subjectivity, she understands this surrogate return primarily in terms of an altruistic restoration of memory to a fellow exile: Me propuse además ir a Asturias, al pueblo de Gondi, regresar en su lugar y contarle todo lo que había visto; aun sabiendo que mi viaje no modificaría su decisión, creí poder devolverle algo de su historia […] pensaba que él pensaba en mí, imbuida de un deber y atrapada en una promesa en cuyo cumplimiento la fantasía del retorno habría de plasmarse y abolirse simultáneamente en un juego de delegaciones, yo por él, él por mi, sin término. (97–8)
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The narrator’s intention thus appears to be that of narrating her visual experience of Asturias or mediating an ekphrastic transfer of experience which, ultimately, will serve to revive Gondi’s evanescent memories of place. Nevertheless, Gondi’s only remaining friend in Spain, Don Manuel Ordax, who acts as the narrator’s guide in Sama de Langreo and Gondi’s birthplace, the village of La Entrega, attempts to reduce any possible spontaneity of the experience and to impose instead a much more self-conscious and meta-reflexive restriction on the memories to be revived. For, by selecting a series of places and performing the activities previously associated with those same places to be communicated to Gondi, Don Manuel establishes an experiential limit on what the narrator is to see and remember, and thus frames the image-memories as if posing them for her in the manner of a series of staged photographic snapshots: “Don Manuel Ordax llevó a cabo los rituales celtas. Decía: ‘Aquí bebíamos la sidra’ y dejaba caer un chorro sobre el piso de aserrín de las cantinas; ‘aquí era la Casa del Pueblo, que ahora han reabierto’; ‘aquí, en esta plaza, jugábamos’; ‘aquí me leyó Ovidio un poema sobre barcos’; ‘dígale que estuvimos frente a la casa donde él vivió con sus padres’, decía” (98). The narrator, however, appears to reject this cartography of memory-images and associated memory-places lacking an experiential charge, which has been chosen for her observation. Instead, she asserts herself as a seeing subject with a more critical vision of her surroundings by filtering her understanding of these memories of others through the contemporary lens of what she considers to be a stagnant present: yo almacenaba en mi memoria de testigo privilegiada mis propios balances, reunía para Gondi mis visiones de un calor fuerte suspendido sobre las copas de los árboles en la plaza, por encima de las casas bajas de Sama, un calor también paralizante sobre los viejos sentados en los bancos, una “prospectiva” de él mismo si no hubiese habido guerra, si su gente no hubiese sido fusilada, si él no hubiese sido desterrado, en la cual él aparecía junto a esos memoriosos ancianos, en estado de jubilación y de escasa gracia. Y se justificaba entonces la negativa, el no retorno. (98–9)
In effect, she too conceives of her own retention of visual memories in terms of photographic framing, but by rejecting the implicit association of Don Ordax’s “snapshots” with incontrovertible evidence of Gondi’s past, and hence another appeal to Barthes’s dictum of “ça a été,” her own photographic vision also offers a meditation on the significance of the scene before her in the present: a “what might have been” rather than simply proof of “what was.” Subsequently, when the narrator’s own “photographic” memorization of the scenes around her is interrupted, quite ironically, by her exposure to actual material photo-images, the question of photographic memory is presented in a much more nuanced and ambivalent fashion, which seems to exceed concerns with objective evidence. As the narrator and Don Ordax continue their tour of “memory places” in Gondi’s village, they come across the elderly widow of a Republican executed by Franco’s forces during the Civil War who claims to have known Gondi’s family. The widow explains how Gondi’s father was also executed by a firing squad three years after the end of the war and then, encouraged by the prospect of an attentive audience, she enthusiastically goes on to recount memory after memory from the period in an endless sequence of remembered events: “apremiada por los recuerdos que nosotros le habíamos desbarrancado en su memoria […] agarra uno, suelta el otro, de a tres y de a cuatro los coloca en abanico, los abre y los junta, como una baraja; no siempre se dan estas ocasiones en una vida viuda, solitaria con hijos a criar de por vida” (99). The mixed metaphor of a fan opening and cards being dealt one after the other, would appear to signal a certain disapproval on the part of the narrator for this apparently facile “revelation”
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of superficial “snapshot” memories by a woman taking advantage of a rare opportunity to unburden herself of her inner archive of past experience. The widow proceeds to draw out two old photographs from her purse as if to appeal to the evidentiary weight of photography as witness to her narrative. Having therefore to abandon temporarily her adopted role as a prosthetic, photographic memory of visual scenes for Gondi, the narrator must now become an observer of what promise to be two residual material fragments of visual experience registered by an actual camera. What she sees cannot but strike her as somewhat disconcerting, however, since the scenes before her hardly seem to complement the widow’s previous generosity in offering up her intimate memories: De pronto saca unas fotos de un monedero negro y grande, el mismo que llevaba para sus compras cuando la abordamos. Una está muy ajada, es de cajón Reflex y tiene los bordes dentados; en ella hay un terreno baldío, con una tapia inacabada en el fondo; en la otra, en colores, la tapia ha sido completada y hay una cruz a manera de monumento que no lleva nombre, solo la palabra PAX. “En ese campo los fusilaron. Al mío lo cogieron con otros treinta y cinco, en los barcos, el 24 de junio,” dice la viuda. “El monumento lo hizo el mismo Franco en los cincuenta.” (100)
With these two images, one of an unfinished monument in the field where Franco’s forces had massacred a group of villagers in the years following the Civil War, and the second, of the monument later finished by the executioners as a means for inducing social amnesia, the widow appears to have faith in the image as a marker of memory and loss, despite the double displacement of the actual event being commemorated. If we recall Young’s (1992) contention that the traditional monument inevitably absorbs the social work of memory by actually relieving the citizen of their individual responsibility to remember the national past, then we might wonder how much more the self-referential gesture of the monument becomes compounded when subsequently mediated by photography. In fact, following this line of reasoning, the widow’s photographs would appear, in a rather dystopian fashion, to provide merely a visual record of the petrification of memory and, ultimately, to be signalling the futility of attempting to transmit a visual memory of past experience inter-generationally. It is in this latter sense of allegorical fragments denoting the displacement or truncation of memory, rather than of unequivocal visual testimonies to past atrocities, that the photographs might be said to reflect the meditative fixation on the past of the melancholic. The (widow’s) photographic testimony to the apparent lack of memorial closure in Spain would thus seem to mirror the narrator’s own stagnant melancholic state and her resistance to engaging the memory of her own past. Indeed, as readers we have to assume that it is this photographic encounter that inspires her to ponder precisely that very analogy. For after having assumed the role of “surrogate memory” for Gondi by becoming a “seeing subject,” and subsequently being confronted with the oblique photographic visualization of her own inner turmoil, the narrator ends the chapter, now apparently galvanized into finally remembering her own traumatic history: “cuando el tren baja de las nubes hacia Madrid, yo inicio mi regreso prematuro a Argentina, en la propia España” (100). In other words, the narrator’s experience with these “other” memories of another traumatic national history enables her, through analogy and figurative displacement, to view first the Spanish case as a double of her own national catastrophe and then to perceive finally the memories of both as an inherited task to be assumed in the present. Eschewing any further identification with alterity, at least for the time being, and opting against further geographical displacement, the following episode, “Celdillas,” finds the narrator back from exile in Argentina, as she embarks upon an inner journey to confront her
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own traces of traumatic memory directly. For it is here that the narrator undertakes nothing less than a quasi-hallucinatory exploration of the depths of her unconscious, visualized as a recinto – an enclosed “cellular” cavity or chamber – which, while both distinguishable from and conflated with the “seeing self,” is further metaphorized as a “fábrica oculta” with the capacity for producing unlimited quantities of potentially threatening memory-images (109). Hence, in an effort to reverse the distressing results of her previous experience with a range of psychotherapists and therapies, the narrator will become her own therapist as she strives to seek out the repressed visual fragments which hold the key to the symptoms of her melancholic malaise: “Allí sondeaba yo sin embargo, pese al riesgo, alguna escena perdida que pudiese haber configurado el síntoma, quería encontrar en el ensueño lo que la razón me negaba y la búsqueda no podía tener otro lugar que el recinto de ojos cerrados para adentro, donde la concentración es máxima y la pérdida de imágenes mínima” (109–10). Moreover, if that same malaise suggests that any boundary between her inner psychic world and her sense perception of an exteriority have become ruptured, then the dazzling lyricism, tropological complexity, and meticulous attention to the minutiae of the narrator’s fantastic visions in this chapter serve precisely to further underscore her desperate attempts to assert herself as a subject of knowledge while at the same time suggesting the possibility of submergence within the image-world of her “cellular chamber.” Initially, the narrator offers a definition of the efecto celdilla or what amounts to a bizarre phobia of any surface reminiscent of the organic structure of a honeycomb (“la consistencia mórbida del panal” [103]), and hence any soft surface composed of a seemingly endless array of identical niche-like forms arranged in impeccable order (“La alineación de agujeros idénticos a lo largo y a lo ancho y en profundidad de una superficie” [103]). In the presence of such a structure, she responds with an uncontrollable desire to destroy that same “order” by “biting” into it. This symbolic biting, she reveals, is thus synonymous with an irresistible compulsion to fuse the self with a surface which, sponge-like, threatens to absorb all “entendimiento” (103). At the same time, therefore, the effect of a magnetic attraction from such cellular chambers upon the narrator presupposes an equally intense sense of dread of an erasure of the self. Once again, it is the language of photography that is critical to the articulation of the narrator’s visual experiences in this section, and not simply because her inner recinto is an image-producing “chamber” reminiscent of a camera. As the narrator visualizes the plant surfaces, which might trigger the “cellular effect,” or the walls of her inner cellular chamber, the encounter with these microscopic “image-worlds” evokes Walter Benjamin’s notion of an “optical unconscious” revealed by photography. This is especially the case given that the narrator’s hyperbolic lyricism suggests a magnified and enhanced visual perception which emphasizes the more pervasive and insidious pathology at work: Hongos que al nacer son convexos, pero que se ahuecan como embudos a medida que crecen, hongos que crecen en haces y manojos, apezonados (Cf. Juan José Tablada) en el centro cuando son jóvenes y que emiten luces fosforescentes por la noche, “como bolas de lumbre”; hongos con casquetes cónicos o en forma de campana, frágiles, con tallos esbeltos y huecos; hongos tembladores con la superfice como lenguas de gato, hongos cuyas celdillas son láminas, hojuelas, niditos o cráteres; hongos surcados y rebordeados, políporos y esporádicos, cuando estaban ante mí, a mis pies o a la altura de la mirada, desencadenaban la misma desesperación cuyo origen indefinido obligaba a apartarse del sitio lo antes posible. (104)
The narrator’s meticulous attention to detail here when accounting for the multiplicity of elaborate forms of mushroom is irresistibly reminiscent of Benjamin’s allusion to Art Forms in Nature, a
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1929 photo-essay by his contemporary Karl Blossfeldt. At the time, Blossfeldt’s experimentation with magnified close-ups of plant surfaces and structures to create a series of amplifications of leaves, stems and flowers was considered revolutionary. These images were sometimes magnified up to 30 times their natural size, and thus revealed the symmetrical, architectural patterns found in natural forms and textures. According to Benjamin, the amplifications revealed “image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things – meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable” (1999, 512). It is also worth remembering that, besides these enlarged close-up images, the cinema and photography of Benjamin’s day had, with the advent of the freeze frame shot and the possibility of slow motion film, inaugurated an era of visual perception hitherto only imagined but unknown to the naked eye. The artificial eye of the camera, meanwhile, afforded the possibility of an enhanced prosthetic vision and an awareness of these hidden “image worlds,” which resulted in nothing less than a revolution in modern perception.12 By extension, this shift in perception, in its turn, offered the possibility of an equally revolutionary denaturalization of the accepted worldview or a “profane illumination” analogous to that sought by the surrealists (Benjamin 1999, 519). Similarly, the corresponding shift in everyday consciousness and experience of the self brought about by modern visual technologies could be regarded as comparable to that resulting from the psychoanalytic revelation of the existence of the unconscious.13 Just as cinema and photography now afforded the detection and processing of aspects of existence previously unavailable to the retina, psychoanalysis afforded the possibility of exploring repressed memory traces previously unprocessed as conscious experience. Not surprisingly, Freud himself had on several occasions drawn an analogy between the photographic negative and its revelation as a photo-image to account for the goals of psychoanalytic treatment (Kofman 1998, 27). Although the parallel between unprocessed visual phenomena and unprocessed traumatic memory is implicit to the book as a whole, it is in this particular episode that it is most overtly embraced by Mercado in the form of this “optical unconscious” associated with photography. For, despite her trepidation at the prospect of submerging herself in her inner image-world, it is at this point that the narrator decides to enter the most forbidding depths of the recinto: “Un día después del regreso a La Argentina, decido rastrear, a cualquier costo, las zonas prohibidas de la memoria para ubicar el momento en el que la superficie de la celdilla recibe la marca siniestra” (110). Then, imagining herself feeling her way along the elaborate and yet potentially menacing walls of her unconscious, the narrator is initially overwhelmed by her customary compulsion to touch the surfaces around her. Her sense of touch, however, is overridden by that of vision and a disconcerting image awaiting detection: Y por el corredor estrecho que me deja la conciencia sólo llego a paredes sobrelabradas, a bajorrelieves vastos y densos en los que las salientes y las entrantes parecen llamar al tacto por su morbidez. Pero el tacto se niega a lo que la visión define cada vez más en su verdad: los frisos que se muestran para el reconocimiento son las primeras imágenes por mí vistas y registradas hace más de cuarenta años, en unas fotografías de campos de concentración que archivaban mis padres. Cuerpos amontonados y muertos; cuerpos alineados dentro de fosas, llamadas con pertinencia fosarios; entrañas de una cámara de gas expuestas en un corte transversal (la puerta ha sido abierta); columnas de un desfile militar nazi, los cascos redondos vistos desde arriba, encolumnados, en su caja rectangular y cuadriculada. Ese orden instaurado por el terror repele y al mismo tiempo devora; si se le elude, de cualquier modo triunfa, la cavidad gana la partida. (111)
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The culmination of the narrator’s exploration is not, then, a direct confrontation with a traumatic image-memory, but a doubly-displaced image: the visual memory of her encounter with photographs of the unburied dead in Nazi concentration camps. In later writings, Mercado would allude to this particular photographic memory-event from her childhood as an instance of how her writing, itself understood as an exilic practice, was finally “ambushed”: “Una imagen abre sus puertas y la deja pasar. La escritura rastrea ese territorio, avanza con sus linternas y, de pronto, cae en una emboscada. Eso es lo que me pasó con el texto ‘Celdillas’ de En estado de memoria” (1994, 23). In this case, therefore, writing appears to be deflected or blocked from the ultimate ekphrastic gesture, that is, of rendering the actual traumatic memory trace present. Instead, beset by “ekphrastic fear,” the narrator displaces the visual traumatic origin of her symptoms to an allegorical allusion to the same. If the archetypal photo-images of genocide thus serve as visual tropes for the fate of the Argentinean disappeared which continue to haunt her, the image of impeccably ordered columns of Nazi troops replicates the symptom of her exilic pathology: the cellular effect. To confront this “order” – her melancholic condition – directly, is to risk an obliteration of the self; to attempt to “avoid” it, is simply to remain enclosed in a timeless chamber, “in a state of” visual experience. Ultimately, the memory of these photographs appears to appeal once again to the notion that trauma – as both a personal and national phenomenon – is beyond representation. These three episodes, therefore, illustrate the importance of photography as a conceptual framing device for the narrator’s attempts to resuscitate memory-images in the text. To varying degrees, however, each of the three episodes suggests a melancholic photographic vision since the narrator dwells, not on her “successful” existential “transformation,” but on the process of recuperating visual memory traces – the state of “being in” memory – and, at times, on the somatic symptoms she invariably suffers as a result of “seeing” or attempting to see those same traces again. Yet, on the other hand, each episode also includes a textual re-framing of [an] archival photograph[s] as a means for transmitting the co-existence of multiple temporalities rather than a linear conception of (attempted) image-memory recall, and, more importantly, as a means for metaphorizing the inter-generational transmission of memory. Similarly, when considered together, the evoked photographs in these three episodes serve to draw parallels between the Argentine State terror of the 1970s, the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust. This parallel reflects the narrator’s struggle to assert a unified subjectivity through various examples of heteropathic identification and, by extension, it offers an allegory for a transnational social memory of traumatic conflict. Bearing this in mind, we might once again return to the conception of the ensemble of vignettes as comprising a scrapbook of imagetexts or a textual photograph álbum. Indeed, when viewed as such, I would argue that rather than solely being preoccupied with a melancholic aesthetic and ekphrastic fear or, by extension, with the “impossibility” of representation, the constellation of memory-images as a whole also constitute a constructivist montage which presupposes an active politics of memory and the image. What I am thinking of here in particular is the relevance of Didi-Huberman’s theory of montage in his study of Holocaust photographs (2003), since it is the archetypal photo-image of the camps that signals the ultimate stalling of memorial experience in Mercado’s text and thus appeals to the “unspeakability” of a traumatic past. In his study, Didi-Huberman presents a sustained critique of what he refers to as the “dogma of the unimaginable” in academic allusions to the Holocaust as an event “free of images” (2003, 63).14 Rather than abide by a hierarchical relationship between testimony and archive which would disqualify archival
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images as incomplete, illusory or even voyeuristic forms of approximating the “unspeakability” of the Holocaust, Didi-Huberman proposes a bimedial – word and image – montage as a means, not for presuming to transmit the all of the horrific event, but for transmitting a “haunting memory” from which “something other than pure silence would escape” (2003, 125). If the capacity of a single image alone to retain that “something” (of the “real”) is therefore put into question, it is the interconnected ensemble of images arranged in montage that “intensifies the image and gives the visual experience a power that our visible certainties or habits have the effect of pacifying or veiling” (136). Montage thus encourages thought about a series of visual monads since memorial knowledge of that which remains “impossible to see entirely” and “inaccessible as an all” can still be triggered (137–8). Consequently, if the past remains “unrepresentable” as a whole, Didi-Huberman, like Benjamin before him, argues in favour of a “citable history” or a montage of allegorical visual fragments which allows “the partially remembered time of the visible” to assume “a visual form of haunting” (138) and to afford “the mnemonic conditions for [these ever so] fleeting yet pregnant images” (170). It is this “visual form of haunting” that Mercado achieves in her own montage of imagetext-episodes when grappling with both her semi-autobiographical narrator’s psychic blockage to remembrance and, by extension, with the apparent “unrepresentability” of the authoritarian past in the Southern Cone. Indeed, rather than adding yet another literary signature to the dogma of the apparent unimaginability of the traumatic past, Mercado’s work offers a bimedial channel for overcoming the epistemological obstacles facing writers and artists in the immediate aftermath of dictatorship. If Mercado thus eschews mimetic realism and chronological linearity as a means for disrupting the authoritarian impulse implicit to a “rational” writing practice, and instead opts for a “visual writing” which reflects the “prerational” affect, somatic symptoms and anachronistic images associated with the unpredictability of traumatic memory recall, she nevertheless transmits a visible past that has been shattered into tiny pieces and then reconstructed in the form of a textual photo-montage. Even when individual memory-images appear not to be able to transmit the all of past traumatic experience, they can – as a constellation – offer a “citable” visual approximation. Mercado’s overarching “ekphrastic hope” is, then, that future readers/viewers complete the ekphrastic cycle (from visible object to verbal representation and back to visible object) so that by seeing the verbalized fragments of a constructed haunting memory, and embarking upon their own heteropathic identification with the narrator, they can interpret them as an allegory of post-catastrophe social trauma. When understood as a composite work of construction, En estado de memoria can, by extension, be re-read as prefiguring the politics of the image of contemporary photographic memory art. What I am alluding to in particular are the photo-essays from the late 1990s and 2000s by artists such as Lucila Quieto, Inés Ulanovsky, and Pedro Camilo Pérez del Cerro, in which private archival photographs of disappeared relatives are re-framed in order, once again, to create a visual metaphor for inter-generational memorial transmission within the public realm.15The gesture in these essays might also be viewed as being derived from a constructivist practice of photo-montage which, by juxtaposing past and present, affords an anachronistic conception of the image: that is, the image conceived of as a site where the co-existence of multiple temporalities – and not just a “recuperated” past – might manifest itself (Blejmar 2008). Indeed, by positing a dialectic encounter between images past and present, these works, like Mercado’s álbum of imagetexts, suggest a rupture of any facile temporal continuity and instead, as images of images, anchor the memory-event in
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the present, and thus offer a meta-reflection on the work of memory itself (García 2011, 87). Even, therefore, as these clusters of photo-images evoke memories of a past that has been reduced to a series of splintered visual fragments, their realignment as constructivist photo-montage simultaneously incorporates and transcends a melancholic preoccupation with the ruins that remain in the present:
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Memorias que se autoconciben como ensamblaje frágil de retazos de un pasado hecho trizas, pero que no se quedan con ese fragmentarismo […], mero catálogo melancólico de ruinas. El montaje es fragmentarismo, sí, pero fragmentarismo constructivista. Estas memorias parten de la destrucción, de la diseminación de fragmentos, pero interpelando al presente para trazar un sentido posible a partir de estos restos. (89)
The work of construction with such fragments thus metaphorizes a politics of memory predicated upon active engagement with contemporary culture and one that is conscious of its legacy for the future. In retrospect, En estado de memoria offers a prescient literary analogue to those same photo-essays: as an emissary from the past, it too invites reader/viewers of the future to look at a series of “re-framed” private images, to trace actively the haunting social memory reflected by the ensemble and to assume thereby the work of memory as an inherited task which, ultimately, holds the key to comprehending their own generation’s present.
Notes 1. Buchanan’s contention that “el acto de escribir le ayudó a salir del limbo provisorio del exilio y superar la crisis de identidad que padeció a su retorno a la patria” (2002, 13) typifies the notion that Mercado’s writing practice is “transformative.” In a similar vein, O’Connell (1998) continued the critical tendency to read the final episode of En estado de memoria, “El muro,” as an indication of the narrator’s success in finally overcoming her melancholy and hence, breaching the psychic resistance (the allegorical wall) to mourning/memory. By writing the self, then, the narrator transcends “the wall” between that same self and its exteriority, and also replaces trauma with remembrance. Logan (1997), meanwhile, read the text as an illustration of a “transformative” feminist discourse, which allowed the woman writer to confront the patriarchal values effectively “exiling” women in their own nations. At the other end of the spectrum, Kaplan (2006) maintained the focus on writing as the object of study but rejected the notion of a “redemptive” or “transformative” writing practice. Instead, she chose to read Mercado’s text as an instance of a post-catastrophe écriture, which cannot but catalogue the erasure of the avowed autobiographical subject and the impossibility of referential plenitude. However, according to others, this destabilization of the writing subject does not necessarily mean the erasure of the self beneath a vortex of self-referential signs, as Kaplan proposed. On the contrary, Saraceni (2002, 2006), Jara (2005), and Bocchino (2011) have argued that the goal of the returning exile-writer is not the recovery of a former self in writing anyway, but to register the scriptural process of re-constructing a new subjectivity out of the ashes of the past using an “exilic” discourse that would question any facile equivalence between past experience and narrative. 2. Visual images are traditionally associated with the spatial, while verbal narrative is generally identified with the temporal. However, Mitchell has proposed that since the reading of visual images is necessarily also temporal, the traditional opposition is compromised: “works of art, like all other objects of human experience, are structures in space-time, and […] the interesting problem is to comprehend a particular spatial-temporal construction, not to label it as temporal or spatial" (1986, 103). Nevertheless, while one might argue against the traditionally paired oppositions of description versus narration and of the spatial versus the temporal, when considering instances of “imagetexts,” it is worth noting that the narrator of En estado de memoria often appears to opt for tradition. For those same binary oppositions are re-asserted
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so as to create instances of visual memory which, in its turn, re-asserts the notion of description (“still” plasticity) “arresting” or “rupturing” narration (chronological chain of events). 3. Mercado was the official translator into Spanish of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological study of photography (La fotografía: un arte intermedio, México: Nueva Imagen, 1979), thus further attesting to her engagement with photographic memory and habitus as a mediator of past experience, both of which characterize her meditations in En estado de memoria. 4. For the history of photography in this regard, Sontag’s iconic study (1977) remains invaluable, as does Benjamin’s essay (1999), while Batchen (1999) and Pinney (2011) also offer valuable insights. 5. We might recall Sontag’s germane conception of photography as a memento mori as a result of its ability to freeze the moment and objectify the body in recognition of the subject’s mortality (1977, 15). 6. Similarly, Gundermann (2007) would later develop the notion of productive “actos melancólicos” as a mode of resistance to the early post-dictatorship culture of reconciliation and forgetting. 7. Echoing Richard’s thesis (2000) on the loss of a totalizing historical sense in post-dictatorship cultures and, similarly, Cánovas’s notion of collective cultural “aphasia” to describe the legacy of “dislocated language” in the Chilean context of authoritarian censorship (Cánovas, cited in Kaminsky 1999, xii), Saraceni summarizes the enormity of the task facing post-dictatorship poetics as follows: “una de las consecuencias más dramáticas de la experiencia del terror, es […] su imposibilidad de ser traducida al lenguaje, de ser expresada mediante un lenguaje basado en el ‘sentido común’ por la desarticulación misma del sentido que se halla en la base de toda vivencia del mal que la hace increíble o inverosímil para los que no la sufrieron, y por consiguiente, intestimoniable e irrepresentable […] [Por lo tanto] la crítica y la ficción postdictatorial han insistido en centrar sus textos en la representación de la desarticulación del nexo experiencia-lenguaje que producen los regímenes represivos” (2002, 152–3). 8. According to Mitchell (1994, 156), “ekphrastic fear” is generally associated with the “resistance” or “counterdesire” to ekphrasis by those who would maintain the hierarchy between poetics and the visual arts. For Mercado’s narrator, however, that same “resistance” or “counterdesire” to the translation of memory-images into a linear verbal narrative can be attributed either to the survivor’s fear of betraying the dead and absent by attempting to speak the unspeakable, or, again after Avelar (1999, 2000), to the postponement of the resolution of a mourning process that ultimately presupposes the active forgetting of the dead and absent. 9. Luciano Benjamín Menéndez was the notorious commander of the Third Army Corps in Mercado’s hometown of Córdoba between 1975 and 1979. After the return to democracy, he avoided prosecution for numerous counts of torture and murder at the detention camp, La Perla, through the Ley de punto final and Menem’s presidential pardons of 1990. However, with the revocation of the country’s amnesty laws during Néstor Kirchner’s presidency, Menéndez was finally prosecuted and is currently serving multiple life sentences for crimes against humanity. 10. On the socio-political uses of photography in Argentina during and after the dictatorship, see Da Silva Catela (2009) and Longoni (2010). 11. Iam thinking here particularly of the photo-essays produced after the twentieth anniversary of the coup in 1996, such as Marcelo Brodsky’s Buena memoria (1997) and Nexo (2001); Lucila Quieto’s Arqueología de la ausencia (1999–2001); Gabriela Bettini’s Recuerdos inventados (2003); Julio Pantoja’s Los hijos: Tucumán 20 años después (1997–2001); Pedro Camilo Pérez del Cerro’s El viaje de papá (2005); Inés Ulanovsky’s Fotos tuyas (2006); Gustavo Germano’s Ausencias (2007); and in Uruguay, Juan Ángel Urruzola’s Miradas ausentes (2008). All are generally available, at least in part, on-line. 12. “For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious” (Benjamin 1999, 511). 13. We might also ponder Baer’s (2005) study of the links between photography and trauma as visual phenomena: “this possibility that photographs capture unexperienced events creates a striking parallel between the workings of the camera and the structure of traumatic memory […] because trauma blocks routine mental processes from converting an experience into
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memory or forgetting, it parallels the defining structure of photography, which also traps an event during its occurrence while blocking its transformation into memory” (2005, 8–9). 14. In particular, Didi-Huberman questions Claude Lanzmann’s exclusive use of verbal testimony of survivors and perpetrators in his epic film Shoah (1985) at the expense of any use of archival footage. 15. See note 11 above.
Acknowledgements
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I presented earlier drafts of this essay at the The Politics and Art[s] of Memory in Post-Dictatorship LusoHispanic Cultures workshop in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, King’s College London in May 2014, and during a research seminar in the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge in June 2014. I would like to warmly thank the staff and students who attended both events for offering helpful criticism and feedback.
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