Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Rodolfo Walsh, Beyond Literature

2007; Routledge; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905760701627737

1743-0666

Gonzalo Aguilar,

Cinema History and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1The quotes are taken from Rodolfo Walsh, Ese hombre y otros escritos personales (That Man and Other Personal Writings). Ed. Daniel Link. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1996 (when I don't mention dates, which are easy to find in the texts, I place the page number in parentheses). In the prologue, Link says that these papers were “miraculously rescued from the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada [the ESMA, or Navy Mechanics School, was a noted torture center during the Dirty War]” and that “[the papers] had been stolen by the task force that broke in to his house on March 25, 1977” (a day after his assassination and the disappearance of his body). 2In recent years, several successful journalistic and semi-testimonial books have sought to continue in the line of Walsh's testimonial work, and in some cases, such as Miguel Bonasso's El Presidente que no fue (1997; The President Who Was Not), have acknowledged him. However, it is not difficult to perceive, in relation to Walsh's texts, a displacement of politics toward societal intrigue (gossip replacing the public scene). In this last spin, these books use the processes of fiction without any mediation, presenting invented dialogues as real ones, for instance. 3The work Walsh did on pedagogical journalism, which was gathered in the Semanario Villero, was never salvaged. In any event, when democracy was restored in 1972, Walsh didn't publish any of the texts produced in those years; instead, he published work dating from before 1969. 4The statement might seem a bit excessive but it covers all of Walsh's notes during those years. In the interview with Piglia in 1970, he says doubtfully: “We'll have to see to what extent the short story and the novel are not the literary art of a determined social class in a determined period of development, and only in that sense is it likely that the art of fiction might be reaching its marvelous end, marvelous like all endings in the probability that a new type of society and new forms of production demand a new more documentary type of art, more responsive to what can be shown.” In his diary, Walsh claims that fiction “has no real edge … it doesn't accuse or unmask” (Walsh, 1996, 187). 5See Walsh's comments on his interpretation of the story, in the interview with Piglia: [the story] “is very applicable to our concrete situations, specifically Peronism […] A totally mystical concept, which is to say, the myth, the hero carrying out the revolution instead of the the people whose best form of expression is the hero figure, in this case Che Guevara, yet no one isolated fellow, regardless how impressive, can do anything […] he's not some guy coming from the outside because there is no pejorative connotation to the guy from outside, who fights, who plays, and is a hero […] but they learn that they need to join forces. 6The phrase, one of innumerable anti-intellectual outbursts that Debray had been launching since Revolución en la Revolución? (Revolution in the Revolution?), is an excerpt from “Carta a sus amigos” (Letter to his Friends) that he wrote during the Camiri trial (Debray 1969, 268).