Bringing Memory Home: Historical (Post)Memory and Patricio Pron's El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011)
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13569325.2014.893234
ISSN1469-9575
Autores Tópico(s)Translation Studies and Practices
ResumoAbstractPublished in 2011, Patricio Pron's semi-autobiographical novel details the return of a young Argentine academic to visit his dying father in Buenos Aires, and points precisely to the problematic generational inheritance that characterises the work of Argentina's second generation of dictatorship victims. Negotiating both personal and appropriated memories of his father's militancy during Argentina's last dictatorship (1976–1983), the protagonist gestures to memory not as a source of any objective or official history, but to its inherent quality as a subjective, postponed and mediated construct. Playing with the distinction between history and memory, the novel problematises the potential of postmemory's insistence on creative investment and highlights the difficulties inherent in the re-writing of history as an attempt to understand the past. By building on critical debates surrounding the application of post-Holocaust theory in Argentina, this article will place theories of postmemory firmly within an Argentine context and call for the need to reassess the political nature of the legacy inherited by this second generation. While advancing the discussion of these political elements of Argentine postmemory, attention will thus be drawn to the mechanisms of mnemonic transfer both between and within generations, highlighting how the subjective modification of what is being remembered allows Pron to move beyond an objectively unknowable past and look toward a future that is both open to, and shaped by, his contemporaries. AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Dr Joanna Page for her invaluable contributions to early drafts of this manuscript.Notes 1 Translations from primary texts are taken from published English translations: Ways of Going Home (2013), translated by Megan McDowell; My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (2013), translated by Mara Faye Lethhem. All other translations from Spanish are my own, unless otherwise stated. 2 See Dominick LaCapra's Writing History, Writing Trauma (Citation2001). 3 Hirsch says that she ‘developed this notion in relation to children of Holocaust survivors, but [she] believe[s] it may usefully describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences’, and later specifically refers to Argentina's Dirty War. 4 See, for example, references to The Invaders in Marcelo Figueras’ Kamchatka (2003), the recurring metaphor of Batman and Robin in Félix Bruzzone's Los topos (2008), or the Playmobil sequences in Albertina Carri's Los rubios (2003). 5 See Vezzetti's Casullo's Pensar entre épocas (Citation2004). 6 See Feierstein (Citation2009) for a detailed study of the structural organisation of both regimes. 7 As Diana Taylor (Citation1997) asserts (among others), the complete elimination of the body of the desaparecido results in an ‘interrupted mourning process’, similar to that of a Holocaust victim's family, whereby any acceptance of the victim's death is postponed due to the lack of grave or body. 8 While the persecution in Nazi Germany was largely racial, there were also, of course, other political, sexual and ethnic elements to the regime's discrimination. 9 For example, in Los rubios (2003), the actress playing Albertina Carri questions: ‘It's hard for me to understand my mother's choice. “Why didn't she leave the country?”, I ask myself again and again. Why did she abandon me in the land of the living?’ In Papá Iván (2000), by María Inés Roque, the voiceover states: ‘I've always thought I would have preferred a living father to a dead hero’.10 The detective is another recurring trope in the literature and film of Argentina's second generation. See, for example, Félix Bruzzone's novel Los topos (2008), his earlier short story collection 76 (2007), or Mariana Eva Perez's published blog Diario de una princesa montonera (2012).Additional informationNotes on contributorsGeoffrey MaguireGeoffrey Maguire is a doctoral candidate in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research examines the literature, cinema and visual art of Argentina's post-dictatorship generation, with a particular focus on memory and the figure of the child. He has also been a postgraduate student at the University of St Andrews and a visiting student at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV).
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