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Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

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Rethinking Past Present

Daniel Link
a a

Universidad de Buenos Aires Published online: 19 Oct 2007.

To cite this article: Daniel Link (2007) Rethinking Past Present, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 40:2, 218-230, DOI: 10.1080/08905760701627711 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905760701627711

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Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 75, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2007, 218230

Rethinking Past Present

Daniel Link
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Universidad de Buenos Aires

Translated by Matthew Bush

Daniel Link teaches twentieth-century comparative literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He edited Rodolfo Walshs El violento oficio de escribir (1997; The Violent Profession of Writing); his books and essays include Clases. Literatura y disidencia (2005; Classes: Literature and Dissidence) and Leyenda: literatura argentina, cuatro cortes (2006; Legend: Argentine Literature, Four Cuts). He has also written novels, including Los os noventa (2001; The Nineties) and Montserrat (2007), and books of an poems. His work has been translated into Portuguese, English, German, and Italian. As historians well remember, the decade of the seventies was a long one for Argentines. In addition to the methodological difficulties encountered in historiography when attempting to isolate the period, analysts and cultural critics 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 try here to track some indices of the different transformations that would allow us to speak 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
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online # 2007 Americas Society, Inc. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/08905760701627711

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and seventies in previously published texts. For example, in Tlo n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1941), Borges declares his horror at the 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 culture industry. Thus, Tlo n would be a utopia of difference, where reproduction (massive, industrial, incessant) appears terrifying. n de Morel (1940; The Invention of Morel, 1964) proposes La invencio another disturbing model: the perfect copy that devours the model. Here, reproduction putrefies, ulcerates, and corrupts. Bioys text presents not only a whole theory about cinematographic mimesis, but also a criticism of the culture industry. Paradoxically, in Bioys case (much more so than in Borgess) 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. zar, also appears to represent a Casa Tomada (1951), by Julio Corta 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. Trans. Paul Blackburn. New York: 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. The closure of genealogy is also the closure of the library and, in turn, literature. In this story there is an affirmation of a certain decadent and zars tale tells of an irruption whose endogamous aristocratism. Corta 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 zar effect is useless lineage of fantastic literature. In fact, the Corta measured, starting in the 1960s, 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 1980s. What theme is capable of forcing us to rethink the scope of genres, even while that theme is caught up in the act of displacing? It is worth noting that perhaps the most celebrated interpretation of Casa tomada (which

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Sebreli) understands invasion in the text as the we owe to Juan Jose advance of the Peronist mass, seizing spaces from the exhausted bourgeoisie. The verisimilitude we grant such an interpretation can in zars fictions have an intense part be attributed to the fact that Corta relationship with the Peronist event (Las puertas del cielo, 1951, Los premios, 1960; The Winners, 1965). The same can be said about later texts n Masacre (1957; Operation Massacre), El fiord (1969; such as Operacio n de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita The Fjord), and La traicio Hayworth, 1971), which belong to another imaginary formation in which the conflicts created by politics have already been decided (for better or zar wrote Casa tomada, Peronism was still the other worse). When Corta thing, something sinister, and only in the sixties did it acquire a different discursive and literary character. The epistemological change was due, among other factors, to the gradual conversion to revolutionary Peronism and the reinterpretations that these historical changes forced some artists and intellectuals to make. We know that sinister elements are intrinsic to fantastic literature, just as we know that third-worldism is characteristic of the culture of the sixties. It is only at this point that Orbis 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 n Masacre, a police novel for the poor, as Angel Rama has called Operacio it. Walshs book definitely destabilizes literary genres, starting from an extremely complex positing of the realms of fiction and nonfiction. Written as a newspaper investigation and published as such in different n Masacre transformed episodes, when it reached book form Operacio itself into something else; a product of the times, it is a nonfiction work (even before nonfiction was codified by some American authors), or a testimony along the lines of the great Latin American testimonial books. n Masacre belongs in fact and in law to the universe of literature, Operacio ass Los duen and accordingly, so it is read. The following year, David Vin os de la tierra (The Owners of the Land) showed explicit strategies of appropriating narrative techniques such as montage (characteristic of an aesthetic that has become hegemonic since the 1960s). These books would inaugurate a series of texts (not the least remarkable of which being Rayuela [1963; Hopscotch, 1966] 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 also aesthetics. Since it would be impossible to provide here a complete repertoire of the periods literary works, I will only suggest various representative texts by some of the most emblematic writers of the seventies: Manuel Puig, Rodolfo Walsh, and Osvaldo Lamborghini.

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Turning-point Stories
zar talk about what the In the same way that Borges, Bioy, and Corta literature of the sixties will be (something that can already be read as a n masacre and in 1958 collection of textual operations in 1957 in Operacio as marks the end in Los duen os de la tierra), an almost secret story by Vin bado de gloria en la capital of an approach to literary production. In Sa rica latina (1968; Saturday Glory in the (Socialist) (socialista) de Ame Capital of Latin America), happenings, EUDEBA (University of Buenos Aires Press, one of the largest and most ambitious projects of the period), the Di Tella Institute (a center of experimentation in visual arts), Primera Plana (the most famous magazine of the new journalism), the boom, Sartre, the Cuban Revolution, and television are all present within the revolutionary. In Vin ass story, all of the characters, delirium of a cafe 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 definitively ended. Oscar Masotta, maybe the most emblematic theoretician of those years, stated in a foreword written in 1968 for Conciencia y estructura (Consciousness and Structure), Recent historical changes have ended up wrecking the parties, by putting the absurd on display. Masotta surely n referred to May 1968 (or to the vicissitudes of the exhibition Tucuma n is Burning]) without knowing that the Cordobazo, arde [Tucuma which occurred one year later, would confirm his prediction (which also ass story): the death of the festive sixties. can be read in Vin bado de gloria and Masottas ass Sa In addition to David Vin logo to Conciencia y estructura, both published in 1968, as was Pro n de Rita Hayworth, Alejandra Pizarniks Manuel Puigs La traicio n de la piedra de la locura (Extraction of the Stone of Madness), Extraccio n mato a Rosendo? (Who Killed Rosendo?), and Rodolfo Walshs Quie Saers Cicatrices (Scars) all appeared in 1969. These texts, in Juan Jose principle, would suffice to categorize the literature of the 70s and its difference with regard to that of the previous period, closed toward 1968 (there are and will always be epigones but, due to considerations of brevity, 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 tat, the persecution because exactly at its mid-point occurred the coup de 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 end-point of the seventies in Argentine literature is Rodolfo Fogwills Los pichy-ciegos. Visiones de una batalla nea (1983; Malvinas Requiem, 2007), a novel written about a subterra kidnapping that occurs during the Falklands War. The Falklands War was

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itself a political event that definitively cracked the militarys illusions of continued power, which had been checkmated for months by the denunciations of writers, artists, and intellectuals, both in and outside of Argentina. After the war, Argentine politics took a new turn with the n. Since 1982, Argentine literature has l Alfons elected government of Rau been obsessed with revisiting the recent past, which very few texts had done until then (most of the narratives that attempted to do so were published overseas).

Something About Punk

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If anything defines the passage of the sixties to the seventies, it is the irruption of anti-aesthetic forces in art. Rodolfo Walshs texts mark the dissolution point of the dominant fictional logic up until that moment to undo the novel as genre and put literary conventions in crisis. Angel Rama has commented, If a descendant of Borges should be sought in Argentine letters in the modernizing line that rescued materials of low origin for an official culture, one must think of Rodolfo Walsh. In Walsh, we find a fascination with using genres from popular culture and the exercise of practices that are the condition of possibility of that culture: translations, proofreading, and journalism*activities not only represented in Walshs fiction, but also that he practiced before becoming one of the most emblematic writers of the period. Serving as textual n or Panorama, material are Walshs known journalistic cycles in Leopla a where he organized and particularly his experience in the daily Mayor the Police and Neighborhood Information sections. Walsh was also the n General de Trabajadores de Argentina founder of the Confederacio (CGT, a labor union that sponsored, shortly before its closing, the avant n arde), and the weekly Semanario villero or garde exhibition Tucuma the Clandestine News Agency (after 1976). Additionally, Walsh published n mato a Rosendo?, a masterful storybook titled Un kilo de oro (1967; Quie A Kilo of Gold), and an allegorical tale about political action, the masses, a de justicia (1973; A Dark Day of Justice), and leadership, Un oscuro d while at the same time writing an important, but still undetermined, number of stories in magazines of the period. Walshs 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 n de la piedra de la writing and language: the mad language of Extraccio locura, Osvaldo Lamborghinis punk language, Cobitos monologue in n de Rita Hayworth, and the Creole intonations of Manuel Puigs La traicio n, or Luis Gusma n, for example. What is placed in Walsh, Ricardo Zelaraya the middle of the written scene is, of course, violence. But how does the author go about representing that violence? Literature of the seventies

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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 used (understood?) as the philosophical foundation of the zar proposes the guerrilla as micro-politics or as a small guerrilla. Corta scandal (of a clear surrealistic slant) in El libro de Manuel (1973; A Manual for Manuel, 1978), 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 isnt 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 the final analysis, of fiction, is installed as a social and political value. That is what we find in Puig, Walsh, Lamborghini, and, n, and Fogwill. somewhat later (in a different way), in Piglia, Saer, Gusma n had been Thus a literature is born: politics (which until Alfons dominated by violence) affects prose directly and immediately. Argentine prose and fiction (Domingo Faustino Sarmientos Facundo [1845], as El matadero [1871], all that is gauchesco) begin a Esteban Echeverr collapse provoked by violence, and it is this collapse that the seventies chose as a foundation for literature and art. There is also, of course, the question of tone. The tone of literature in the seventies tries to reach that Herna ndez, and even that of the murderous gauchesco of Hilario of Jose n. Moreover, Moreira Ascasubi, in the works of Lamborghini and Zelaraya (1975) and Ema, la cautiva (1981; Ema the Captive), the first two novels sar Aira, avant-gardist in a classical line, may be the texts that mark by Ce the end of experimentation with the gauchesco. Jitrik pointed out (in Arte, violencia, ruptura): What is In 1973, Noe n de la piedra de la locura, called culture today, whether it be in Extraccio n Fierro, implies a circuit of three violences, one of the Soledades, or Mart 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 which it tries to re-inscribe. Years later, Josefina Ludmer observed, in the foreword to the reissue of Cien an os de soledad. Una n (1984; One Hundred Years of Solitude. An Interpretation): interpretacio 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 was to read in the seventies, but that was also to write in the seventies. All strategy from 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

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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 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 regard to their social (circulation) as well as political (discursive production) effectiveness. Masotta, the criticprophet of those years, noted in Conciencia y estructura the potentially revolutionary character of mass media. He argued that it was a question of using the medias discourse to bore through and infringe upon dominant cultures regressive discourse. Against the literary institution, the mass-media 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 literatures 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 popular 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 a way, the boom writers in an uncritical way. Is this equivocal way (Garc rquez as Rita Hayworth, Lezama Lima as Garbo*it was Puig who Ma proposed a similar categorization of Latin American writers) not a violent irruption (in this case, ironic) of popular cultures logic in the logic of literature? Consider Rodolfo Walsh who, when asked about the ideals that led him n Masacre, answered: Ideals? I wanted to be to write Operacio famous . . . win the Pulitzer Prize . . . have money . . . (Ford). Writers of the seventies reflected critically on the inheritance of the sixties: a hypothetical alliance between learned culture (more or less avantgardist) 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 very different way from that of the historic avant-garde. The ironic comments of the writers of the seventies return*First publish, then write (Lamborghini) or I wanted to win the Pulitzer Prize*now stated as farce.

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The Boom and Beyond: We De-materialize

Argentine literature of the sixties and seventies had a strange fascination with the Latin American boom, that phenomenon that made real stars of a handful of writers of popular 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 (as Angel Rama s alla del boom. Literatura y mercado, 1984 [Beyond the analyzes it in Ma Boom. Literature and Market]). 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 popular song 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 not to count) become an impossible genre for literature. Novels in the era of popular 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 Puigs novels present the most problematic n de Rita articulation of literary mimesis. His first novel, La traicio Hayworth, is written at the limit of the possibilities of representation, and that limit, permanent in his writings, is the key to his originality. For Puig, cinema is not only a model for evaluating or interpreting reality, nor is it only the fetish of the provincial petite bourgeoisie. Cinema determines the scope of representation and sets its limits. If in the times of mass culture n, it the narrator is impossible (there is no writer, only writing), La traicio could be said, carries out the mandate of the times like no other text and n expels the father of discourse (it is a text with no narrator). La traicio 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 n the makers of best-sellers such as Silvina Bullrich (Los pasajeros del jard el informe [His [Passengers in the Garden], 1971; Su excelencia envio ndalo bancario [Bank Scandal], Excellency Sent the Report], 1974; Esca 1980, among others) who drew many young people to literature for the first time, his writing 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 texts 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

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sophisticated nor completely chonga. The voice in Puigs novels is that of the almost in each of these forms.

An Allegory
Osvaldo Lamborghini published his first book, El fiord, in 1969. It employs a strange allegory in which the characters bear names that n, the woman immediately refer to Argentine politics (Carla Greta Tero who is about to bear a child, is the CGT, Sebas is an inverted condensation ass story mentioned above, El fiord is of the bases, and so on). As in Vin sar Aira pointed out an aleph, but in this case, it is ahead of its time. As Ce in the foreword to Lamborghinis Novelas y cuentos (1988; Novels and Stories): it concerned, and continues to concern, something unusually new. It anticipated all political literature of the seventies, but at the same time went beyond, rendering such literature useless. El fiord incorporated the entire Argentine literary tradition, but provided an innovative nuance. It seemed to be straddling two half-formed styles: the earlier one based on the rough-hewn tongue of the gauchesco and the wooden bureaucratic ve outbursts language of our great writers, and the later style with its na spouting revolution. In 1973 (the heart of the decade, so to speak), Puig published his third a de justicia, novel, The Buenos Aires Affair, Rodolfo Walsh, Un oscuro d n, his first book, El frasquito (The Vial). The second and Luis Gusma Lamborghini masterpiece, Sebregondi retrocede (Sebregondi Retreats), a collection of texts midway between novel and poetry, also appeared. o Lamborghinis book includes a famous parody of naturalism, El nin proletario (The Proletarian Child), which today can only be understood in reference to gore literature. Some one thousand copies of that book sar Aira has reminded us of Lamborghinis ironic were sold, and Ce comment: Effects of the boom. Borges sold sixty-four copies of his first book. That same year Lamborghini founded, with other fellow travelers a, Luis Gusma n Garc n, Ricardo Zelaraya n, Jorge Quiroga, and (Germa 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 metaphysics of , 1973), breaking opportunism (Literal 1. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Noe from Sartres axioms to declare that freedom can only be lived when it is lost and pronounced as a sentence. a Moreno, in her foreword to the book on Gusma n, Escrito por los Mar otros (2004; Written by Others), has analyzed with particular insight the relationship between avant-garde aesthetics, politics, and psychoanalytic theory. Poet Arturo Carrera, equidistant from his two friends Osvaldo Lamborghini and Alejandra Pizarnik, assigned his work of the seventies to

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the old Bakhtinian politics of text as carnival and remembered the psychoanalytic prayers (which I never disdained) (Caza del Snark?, n Nacional del Libro, 1986). Inaudita. Buenos Aires: Direccio The other magazine that was characteristic of the epoch was Los libros (The Books; published between 1969 and 1976). It served as a formative space for the nucleus of intellectuals who founded Punto de vista (Point of View) during the military dictatorship: Beatriz Sarlo, Carlos Altamirano, and Ricardo Piglia, among others.

Dictatorship and Democracy

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Rodolfo Walsh died in a violent clash in 1977. 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, like many others, lived in exile from where he sent his news reports, dispatches that some daring travelers transported in their luggage since Puigs 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 sar Aira). Two more dazzling work was published after his death by Ce pivotal authors of literature under the dictatorship must be mentioned (very difficult work, because imposed exile completely dislocated the n and Ricardo Piglia (the conditions of literary production): Luis Gusma latter a promoter of Puigs works). n, 1967), Piglia, who had already published a book of stories (Invasio delivered in Nombre falso (1975; Assumed Name, 1995) a series of texts midway between fiction and essay in which practically all the lines and n tensions discussed in this article appear. But it is his novel Respiracio 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 (Artificial Respiration. Trans. Daniel Balderston. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). The question of history comes to be an obsession from those years onward, particularly at a time when literature fluctuates between allegories, political satire (especially Osvaldo Soriano: Triste, ma s penas ni solitario y final [Sad, Lonely, and Final], 1973; No habra olvido, 1983 [A Funny Dirty Little War, 1986]; Cuarteles de invierno, 1983 [Winter Quarters, 1989]), 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; Body to as or Una lectura de la Body), a formidable tour de force by David Vin

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historia (1982; A Reading of History) and En esta dulce tierra (1984; In s Rivera, from the following period. This Gentle Land) by Andre Linked to the avant-gardes of the seventies (in turn linked, as has been n entered the literary said, to psychoanalytical reflection), Luis Gusma scene in 1973 with El frasquito (the book had a foreword by Ricardo Piglia). Together with Brillos (1975; Sparkles) and Cuerpo velado (1978; Veiled Body), 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 stor Perlongher. Gusma ns universe is that of the popular sectors (in its Ne intonation, behavioral systems, and mythology) duly mixed with references, topics, and devices more characteristic of high culture. In n finds his that strange intersection between learned and popular, Gusma n place in Argentine literature. Starting from En el corazo de junio (1983; In n made a great effort to give his texts greater the Heart of June), Gusma transparency, similar to that expressed by Arturo Carrera in his poetry (Arturo y yo, 1984; Arturo and I) during the same period. El frasquito, as Oscar Masotta pointed out, though it does not seem to include any protests, was soon the object of scandal. And once the dictatorship began ns text had the dubious honor of being one of the first in 1977, Gusma whose circulation was banned by municipal decree. Juan Gelman, Osvaldo Soriano, Juan Carlos Martini, Luisa Valenzuela, and Antonio Di Benedetto, among others, also participated in the Argentine Diaspora. The then unknown writer Copi brilliantly wrote in LInternationale argentine (1988): Overseas, forming part of the main body of troops that Nicanor Sigampa designated as the Argentine International, 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. The seventies were over. It was an era dominated by a somber book, s (1986; Never Again, 1986), which meant, in that sense, a Nunca ma rejection of violence and also a rejection of bloodshed.

REFERENCES
sar. Moreira. Buenos Aires: Acha val Solo, 1975. Aira, Ce * * *. Ema, la cautiva. Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, 1981. logo in Novelas y cuentos. Osvaldo Lamborghini. Barcelona: Ediciones del * * *. Pro Serbal, 1988. n de Morel. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1940. Bioy Casares, Adolfo. La invencio Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1944. n. Buenos Aires: Emece , 1971. Bullrich, Silvina. Los pasajeros del jard el informe. Buenos Aires: Emece , 1974. * * *. Su excelencia envio ndalo bancario. Buenos Aires: Emece , 1980. * * *. Esca grafo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1972. Carrera, Arturo. Escrito con un nicto

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