During the military dictatorships that besieged the countries of the Southern Cone in the 1970s, the Argentine literature of dissent became a way to survive life under tyranny. The so-called Dirty War, with its litany of fierce authoritarianism disguised as “family values,” became almost a national obsession for Argentine writers. The few citizens who defied literary censorship found salvation in reading amid chaos and horror. Many scholars, literary critics, and historians engaged in the painstaking analysis of political repression, creativity under adversity, and the roles of citizens in times of historical turbulence.
This book, by a distinguished scholar, is for this reviewer the most original and thought-provoking text to explore how “the violent” has always been a mysterious and perverse constant in Argentina’s rich literature. Often the concepts of redemocratization and democratic culture have obscured the previous political history of Argentina, which consisted of tyranny and fear in daily life since the Perón era. This is among the many reasons Foster’s work is important. Its eloquent text revisits and explores the works of Enrique Medina, Marta Lynch, Griselda Gambaro, Alejandra Pizarnik, and many others. His analysis of each of these authors focuses on some key aspect of their literary work, as well as the historical and political events that overshadowed their writings.
One of the most fascinating chapters explores Pizarnik’s world through a bizarre and often neglected prose collection, La condesa sangrienta (The Bloody Countess, 1971), a series of vignettes based on the real life of Erzbeth Bathory (d. 1614), who would massacre young virgins and bathe in their blood. Through a brilliant analysis of Pizarnik’s complete work, Foster illuminates the complex and arbitrary ways of absolute power. This particular work he interprets as a meditation on horror. The diabolical countess randomly kills six hundred women for the mere pleasure of it. An obvious parallel can be drawn with the random and perverse killings of innocent Argentine citizens. According to Foster, “the bloody countess embodies masculinist violence, the rape of the other. In her activities as a rapist, she is a symbol both of the absolute power of the aristocrats and her own historical period (she is saved from execution)” (p. 103). The pardoning of the countess despite her crimes resembles the pardoning of the Argentine military for the murder of almost 30,000 people.
Foster’s meditation on Pizarnik's work, as well as Marta Lynch’s Informe bajo llave (Report Under Lock and Key, 1983) and the plays of Griselda Gambaro, bring to this book the important aspect of how women writers have responded to militarism, I am glad that much of this text applies a feminist analysis to totalitarian culture and brings the voice of often neglected authors such as Lynch to readers. Informe bajo llave also exemplifies how repressive societies murder the individual spirit, which is the fate of its protagonist. This important novel, which Foster notes was written before Lynch’s suicide, depicts the existential fate of a woman besieged by her time and place.
The book’s other chapters explore the relationships between culture and power and official versus unofficial histories. The inclusion of texts that foreshadowed the years of the military dictatorship makes an important contribution to the literary and historical understanding of the violence that permeated Argentine culture. Foster’s analysis of how writers and ordinary citizens alike have survived beyond fear under the darkness of absolute power makes this a major work on violence in Argentine literature. It is a beautifully written and thought-provoking meditation on violence and the endangered spirit of creativity.
