Myth Turned Monument: Documenting the Historical Imaginary in Buenos Aires and Beyond

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Myth Turned Monument: Documenting the Historical Imaginary in Buenos Aires and Beyond Author(s): Karen Bishop Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter, 2007), pp. 151-162Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4619333Accessed: 15-03-2015 18:52 UTC

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Myth Turned Monument: Documenting the Historical Imaginary in Buenos Aires and Beyond

Karen Bishop University of California, Santa Barbara

In 1995, Argentine journalist Tomds Eloy Martinez published his novel Santa Evita as an account of the events surrounding Eva Perdn's death, her body's sub- sequent embalming and eventual exile from Argentina. Instead of rectifying the historical discrepancies propagated during the seventeen years in which her body went missing, however, Martinez's novel works to further complicate and memorialize the myth ofEvita. This textual memorialization has been buttressed by the Argentine government'spublicly attributing one ofMartinez's apocryphalphrases to Eva Perdn, the inclusion offictional material as biographical information by Evita's biographers, and the author's own reflections on the blurred and ideologically defunct boundaries between fiction, history and biography. 7his article is an examination of how these biographical appropriations, epistemological boundaries, and Eva Perdn's body have been manhandled and coerced by those who attempt to tame them, an effort which, paradoxically, has only served to confirm their artficial nature.

Keywords: Eva Per6n / Argentina / history / biography / documentation

n writing his 1995 novel Santa Evita, Argentine author Tomis Eloy Mar-

tinez inserts himself into a body of literature dedicated to the political and vivacious aftermath of his compatriot Eva Per6n. He self-reflexively

locates himself within this corpus in the middle of the novel when he features a catalogue of works in which Evita figures dead or alive, including literature by fellow Argentines Julio Cortizar, Jorge Luis Borges, Nestor Perlongher, and the


152 Journal of Modern Literature

Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti. For the myth of Eva Per6n has long haunted the Southern Cone, a cultural collective whose literary legacies prove inseparable from the political histories that have shaped it. Ihe various attempts to render Evita a literary artifice have also been personal and public endeavors to make sense of a confusing and divisive political genealogy that since its inception has sowed the filial seeds of failed tyranny and impotent revolution.

This dual motivation engenders the propagation of myth, and safeguards myth-making from foundering up against either purely literary or merely historical limits. Martinez understands this and uses it to his advantage to write a novel whose most pointed achievement is to breed still more myth. He rights none of the misconceptions that define Eva Per6n, singles out none of her many personalities for posterity, and only further troubles the historical evidence that might serve to explicate her stellar rise as political and cultural icon.'Ihe author grafts literature onto history to provide for the cultivation and easy dissemination of the myth of Eva Per6n, because a walking, talking, shape- shifting historical protagonist will far outlive any of Evita's other incarnations, imaginary or real. The authorial move is as political as it is aesthetic, which is to say that Martinez's efforts are at once revisionary and revolutionary. His specific project is to dismantle the network of official "truths" that comprise a history of Argentina that overtly masks and silences legitimate versions of the myths that record the construction of the nation and its various national identities.

This undertaking is confirmed at the end of the work when Martinez leaves us where he began, in the dead middle of his story: "Desde entonces, he remado con las palabras, llevando a Santa Evita en mi barco, de una playa a la otra del ciego mundo. No se en qu6 punto del relato estoy. Creo que en el medio. Sigo, desde hace mucho, en el medio. Ahora tengo que escribir otra vez" (391). [Since then, I have rowed with words, carrying Santa Evita in my boat, from one shore of the blind world to the other. I don't know where in the story I am. In the middle, I believe. I've been here in the middle for a long time. Now I must write again.]' The author identifies himself as a twentieth-century Charon, rowing up and down the River Styx between the blind shores of literature and politics that delimit our understanding of history. He is the ferryman who carries his cargo across to the realm of forgetting, but he never lands. He loses his way in between, so that the poor shade he transports survives the banks of oblivion and turns to myth, caught somewhere between her own legacy and the underworld. The distance that Santa Evita never crosses is critical because it means she has gone nowhere, and that Martinez is indeed well-travelled. It is worth noting that an earlier version of the novel continues for another fifty pages or so, and that Martinez decided to go back and end the final draft here, in the middle.2 T~he location of the end predicates its beginning, both as artistic enterprise, and as an exercise in righting historical vagrancies. But for Martinez, the undertak- ings are structurally and ethically linked, so that the promulgation of myth by


Documenting the Historical Imaginary in Buenos Aires and Beyond 153

way of generic hybridization is also the assertion of a political history that has been oppressed and manipulated by those in power.

In an interview published in the journal Americas in 1998, Martinez told Caleb Bach:

Nothing is true, at the same time everything is true. You see, in my part of the world, documents were often falsified by governments. There is almost nothing authentic. This was true during the Islas Malvinas dispute with England: A com- pletely false history based on propaganda was generated as a pretext to pursue a war. The same is true during the so-called dirty war, and generally that principle is basic throughout my country's history. History is written by those in power. Thus, if those in power have the right to imagine a history that is false, why then shouldn't novelists attempt with their imaginations to discover the truth? That is the challenge. (15)

Martinez speaks to the long history of falsification of historical and public record within Argentina by the government, which on a political level, was deployed to protect and buttress wide class distinction, the nationalist ideal of the patria grande, and ultimately to cover up human rights abuses during the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

Literary response to false history and inauthenticated newspress has an equally long legacy in Argentine letters, dating back to the 1845 publication of Domingo Sarmiento's fictional biography Facundo, or Civilization and Bar- barism. Sarmiento's response to and invention of history laid the foundations for a literary genre that blurs the boundaries between fiction and history, political and aesthetic innovation, and as Martinez points out, imagination and truth. Historians and politicians have long been thinking up the history of Argentina, which has left the project of recovering other histories to those who write fiction and who might safely nestle alternate versions of truth between the smooth folds of fancy. False footnotes, forgeries, plagiarism and fabricated historical evidence thus became legitimate literary devices in Argentine fiction, and in their own right, powerful weapons with which to combat the creative national histories being espoused by those in power. The challenge that Mar- tinez identifies here is to re-envision history and historical method by way of an imagination that does not lay claim to a nationalist Argentine teleology, but allows for and actively seeks out a multiplicity of versions and possibilities of what it means to be Argentine.

Martinez revisits the polemics of this endeavor one year later when he asks, in a lecture presented at the Cultural Center of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C.:

Have archives been constructed by educated minorities and powerful politicians to serve their own version of history; and is that history "a book of marvels,"



which conceals, hides and fictionalizes reality? Why should the novel, which is an undisguised fiction, be denied the right to propose its own version of historical truth? Why do we find it hard to believe that through fiction - the lie that dares to speak its name--history might be told in a way that is also authentic or, at least as authentic as that found in the documents? (6)

History strives to work the fabrications it weaves back into a body of work that stealthily claims objectivity and authenticity, while fiction shamelessly avows its inventedness. But a "lie that speaks its name" is less a falsehood than a fiction that disguises itself as truth. Martinez is right to question why, then, there is continued institutional and philosophical resistance to housing history among the archives of fiction. Why do we--we the students, the academy, the reading publics--expect that a distinction be made between the official history of a country and the fiction that history impels? What doctrine of objectivity still has us so convinced that reality might be recorded and reproduced via an empty vessel of perspective? More importantly, what is at stake in a widespread cultural and philosophical unwillingness to relinquish at least part of the discipline of history to the uncertainties of fiction? What realities are we overlooking or bypassing by resisting the possibility that acts of memory might be more properly worked out in the field of fiction than in the domain of history? Whose gaze do we avoid by demanding that the production of history be confined to Objectivist procedure?

In his philosophical work on history, Walter Benjamin anticipated possible answers to these questions. But the query and its ramifications continue to warrant consideration. As he writes in his tract "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable" (257). What is at stake, then, in a reluctance to locate history outside of the boundaries afforded it by historical record is the opportunity to understand how history is decided upon--or rather, to ask ourselves according to what ethical principles, traditions and political motivations we construct it--and how events that may be labeled "historical" in import or nature occur also in fields of vision not traditionally constructed by historians.To recognize that we produce and experience history in the same way we did hundreds of years ago, that the same kinds of events and cultural revelations continue to define our historical expectations and perspectives, is not an intimation of knowledge unless these reflections lead us toward an etiology of history that structurally assimilates into its methodology an evaluation of the roles that documentation, dissemination and politics play in the construction and preservation of"historical fact."



What is amazing is not the wreckage of history piling up at our feet, but that we do not recognize how it got there. Our view of history is untenable, for Benjamin, because it makes room only for the archiving of progress (or the progression of archiving), and does not allow for the possibility that history does not re-invent itself, is not cyclical in nature, but is in fact one single catastrophe that we are still generating due, in part, to our inability to recognize that history-as we know it-does not move (us) forward, but entraps us in a conceptual and ethical standstill, the confines of which we perceive to be the limits of humanity instead of what limits humanity. This standstill permitted the horrors of the twentieth century (the half of which Benjamin would not live to see), which remain uninstructive if we map out our epistemological inquiries about them according to the extent of their horror, instead of studying them to re-evaluate our ideas about where history comes from and to re-envision the methods we employ to construct history, teach it, and respond to it.

It makes sense, then, that any project involved in redefining how we construct history should seek out alternate forms and versions of historical documentation, and that fiction is a valid venue for the production of history. As Martinez points out, the novel is an "undisguised fiction" that does not strive to represent eternal truths, thus making it a trustworthy catalyst for the production of truths, historical and otherwise. The novel, however realist, cannot help but reveal the method of its own making by way of chapter or episode divisions, narrative structure and philosophical reflections. The postmodern novel espe- cially endeavors to be transparent in its production, making frequent narrative and structural use of written artifacts - diaries, letters, newspaper articles, historical documents and forgeries - interviews, cinematographic techniques and intertextual play in order to tell its story.3 Authors no longer claim to derive their inspiration nor information from a single, authoritarian source, but pre- fer to expose what they have mined and how from the variegated expanses of popular culture, literary and philosophical history and global and local events. Such artlessness is what makes contemporary fiction a reliable resource for het- eroglossic versions of history, accounts that are at least as authentic, if not more so in their scope and diversity, than traditional historical record. What is most significant here, however, is not that truths are bent or blurred (though they are), but that the concept of "truth" is blasted out of the continuum along which we construct history, and subsequently, reality.4 Contemporary fiction blasts free our ideals of truth from a continuity of historical objectivism which aims to preserve and market them as object and commodity, and to de-politicize them within a free market economy. Fiction has the power-political and

imaginative-to explode truth and redistribute it along diverse historical

continuities, none of which has the singular ability to represent historical truth, but that together create a constellation of historical possibility which both collapses and expands previously-constructed limits of human action.



A telling example: Evita first met Per6n on January 22, 1944 at a charity in Luna Park for the victims of an earthquake that had devastated San Juan some days before. There exist various and contradictory accounts of how they happened to meet, be seated next to one another, and leave together that night. But the most sought after detail concerns what Evita might have said to Colonel Per6n to attract, and keep, his attention. It would have had to be something catching, for Per6n was already an important minister in the government, and Evita only a second-rate radio actress among many other artists lending their talents to the benefit. In Santa Evita, Martinez recounts Eva's first interchange with the Colonel as follows:

- Colonel-dijo, clavaindole los ojos castafios. - ,Qu6, hija?- respondi6 dl, sin mirarla. - Gracias por existir. (192)

"Colonel," she said, riveting her dark brown eyes on him. "What is it, my girl?" he answered, without looking at her. "Thanks for existing."

He then attests to the veracity of this dialogue by testifying to his meticulous research:

He reconstruido cada linea de ese diilogo mais de una vez en los Archivos Nacio- nales de Washington. Las he leido en los labios de los personajes. Con frecuencia, congelk las imaigenes en busca de suspiros, de pausas cortadas por la moviola, de silabas disimuladas por un perfil que se escurre o por un ademain que no veo. Pero no hay nada mis, aparte de esas palabras que ni siquiera se oyen. (192)

I have reconstructed every line of that exchange more than once at the National Archives in Washington. I have read it on the lips of the characters. I have often stopped the images in a freeze-frame in search of sighs, of pauses cut out at the

editing table, of syllables hidden by a profile that glides past or by a gesture that I fail to see. But there is nothing else, apart from those words that can't even be heard.

What the author stresses here is not his careful research, but rather his facility for invention. He tells us outright that he has "reconstructed"- not recorded nor documented- Eva's first words to Per6n, and that he has done so despite the fact that their conversation is not even audible. Martinez offers us an out, a chance to believe him, when he claims to have read the words on the

lips of the characters (his characters, mind you, the ones in his novel), and by couching this textual observation in a painstaking search for other forms of communication, of which he finds none. Yet is this plausible? The explanation reads like a testament to responsible historical investigation, but upon closer examination asserts precisely what is not present by way of what might have



been. What we are left with, what we remember, is that "there is nothing else, apart from those words that can't even be heard." Martinez asserts what is not there, what he cannot attest to, by turning that absence into the only evidence we can access. The reader can either choose to believe him or decide that his prevarication renders questionable the rest of his historical documentation. It is arguable that Martinez, given the choice between one reader-response or the other, would wisely opt for each at different moments. For in order to construct the myth of Eva Per6n, and to ensure that myth continually reinvent itself, his work must depend equally on a certain level of credulity from his readers (any fiction does), and a liberal amount of mistrust and skepticism. That his testimony allows for both, and frustrates any definitive resolution, is itself a testament to the coeval impurities of historical record and the advances made in the technologies of fiction.

The conversation is indeed apocryphal, a fact that the author reveals in his interview with Bach. He recounts what he first made of the historical footage (a version that differs from his novelistic one), what he made out of it, and how his fabrication entered a public's historical imagination:

I was looking at footage of an artistic festival on January 22, 1944, at Luna Park Stadium in Buenos Aires organized to benefit homeless victims of a terrible earth-

quake.That's where Evita first met the colonel. She managed to seat herself next to Per6n. At one point she leans over and says something, but there is no sound and you can't read her lips, so I asked myself repeatedly, "what could she have said?" And then in my imagination I invented an exchange in which Evita says, "Colonel" and somewhat distracted, Per6n responds with "Que' hija?" and she continues by saying "Gracias por existir." [Thank you for existing.] That phrase later appeared in a novel by someone else, also two biographies of Evita Per6n, one by Alicia Dujovne Ortiz (1995) and another by Fermin Chivez (1990). It kept multiplying like the bodies of Evita! Finally, a few years ago, at the Museo de Peronismo in Buenos Aires, they installed carved marble plaques bearing famous quotes by the Per6ns. Included was the phrase I made up,"Colonel, gracias por existir" attributed to Eva Per6n. I wrote an article in the newspaper explaining I had invented the quote, but it wouldn't go away. he fanatic Peronists, in particular, insisted she really said it, thus it entered the language. Myths are born like this! (19)

Martinez admits to inventing the dialogue because he is unable to read Eva's lips on-screen, but does not confess to having attempted to alter either the historical record or history, except post factum. He does not claim, in Santa Evita, that the passage he records is anything but a reconstruction, yet he does try to stop the historical moment he has fabricated from becoming part of history. And why? Martinez has made a career out of collapsing the generic and philosophical borders between history and fiction, so why should he care to remind his reading public that the quotation was his, not Evita's? Why



should it have mattered to the author that the Museo del Peronismo cite Eva Per6n erroneously? The course of Peronism itself has been so vastly confused that the historical records that account for it are already precariously balanced between documentation and desire; why wouldn't Martinez then expect that the museum constructed to house the party accept the attempt to distinguish between the "real" Per6ns and the ones history invented as a futile and irrelevant exercise? But this is a kind interpretation of the museum's motivations; for history, as we know, is recorded by those whom best it serves, and Peronism is certainly fortified by an account of Eva's first words to Per6n that identifies him as savior of an ailing nation. Perhaps this is why Martinez would have wanted to set the record straight and leave historical events properly uninterpreted and effectively irretrievable, so that they might remain open to interpretation and continue to prove worthy objects of study. A novelistic interpretation of the historical aporia opened up by the inaudibility of what may have been a momentous conversation, and what may have amounted to nothing more than "Is this seat taken?" leaves the event unrecovered, consigned to the past and safely out of the manipulative grasp of history. But more importantly, the gap in record must stand in order to make sense of what is to follow, both historically and mythologically.

As Martinez notes, "'Gracias por existir' es la frase que parte en dos el destino de Evita. En La razdn de mi vida, ella ni siquiera se acuerda de que la dijo" (192). ["Thanks for existing" is the phrase that splits Evita's destiny in two. In My Mission in Life, she doesn't even recall that she said it.] But the fact is, she takes pains to record the necessary aporia, for, as she writes in her memoirs, "The meeting left an indelible mark on my heart; and I cannot omit a description of it, because it meant the beginning of my real life" (Razdn 17). The description she offers up, however, reveals that she leaves the moment untouched, for she glosses over what she said with what she would have wanted to say, or what she meant to say, which Martinez records in Santa Evita: "Si, como usted dice, la causa del pueblo es su propia causa, por muy lejos que haya que ir en el sacrificio no dejare de estar a su lado hasta desfallecer" (193). [If, as you say, the cause of the people is your own cause, no matter how far the sacrifice leads, I shall be at your side until I faint from exhaustion.] As Martinez points out, this invented version is far too complicated and wordy, and doesn't correspond to the images caught on the newsreel. Eva's memory of history, as recorded by her ghostwriter-in a book, it is worth mentioning, whose copyrights were owned by her husband-is not only unreliable, but untrue. The board of the Museo del Peronismo must have also known this, for, length notwithstanding, why otherwise did its members not choose to engrave this speech on the plaque that memorializes Eva Per6n at the museum? Martinez's reconstruction is far more probable than Eva's, and besides, is easier for an audience to remember. In pointing out, then, that the phrase by which Eva



will always be remembered is apocryphal, the good author's intention is not to fix history, but to remind a public of the inconsistencies inherent in any attempt at documenting the past, and again, to challenge the "official" history offered up by government sources. Martinez's public reaction to the museum's plagiarism speaks directly to the ambiguities he sought to affirm in Santa Evita and refuels the myth of the woman he so carefully constructed. That said, his response should also serve to remind careful readers of the author's own practiced epistemological sleight-of-hand.

He traces the trajectory of his apocryphal phrase from its inaudible recording through to its appearance as historical record in two biographies, both of which are widely regarded as well-researched and reliable accounts of Eva Per6n's life. But Martinez skips a step. When he cites the phrase in Santa Evita, he is stealing from a scene in his earlier work La novela de Perdn [The Perdn Novel], in which Juan Per6n tells the author, during a series of interviews that Martinez indeed conducted in Madrid in the seventies, of his first meeting with Eva Duarte. Per6n recounts the famous phrase, which Martinez then includes in a work which he purports narrates real events "using techniques of the novel" (Bach 19). This "true fiction" predates by five years the publication of Las memorias del general [ The General's Memoirs], in which the author criti- cally recounts the substance of his interviews with the exiled ex-president, then living at Puerta de Hierro on the outskirts of the Spanish capital. Ortiz and Chivez also take their accounts of this meeting from La novela de Perdn, which proves to be a problematic source for accurate biographical information.

La novela de Perdn presents itself as a narrative account of Martinez's interview with Per6n, couched in the context of the general's return out of exile in 1973 to Buenos Aires in order to reassume the presidency of his country. It is told from the biographer's perspective, yet is a compilation of his questions to the dictator, Per6n's responses, and Martinez's own commentary and philosophical reflection. Interlaced throughout the text are passages that the general reads from the memoirs he is (supposedly) writing, which are indicated by either introduction or indentation. Per6n, as the narrative tells us, is not writing his memoirs alone. He records them and his secretary, Jose L6pez Rega, transcribes and edits them. Per6n reads the copies that L6pez makes and corrects and approves them, yet our narrator makes it clear that the general's memory is faulty, his secretary's imagination and political scheming vast, and that the memoirs end up being as much fiction as memory. Martinez writes,"[Per6n] est~ corrigiendo sus Memorias. O mejor dicho, va colocandose a si mismo en las Memorias que le ha escrito L6pez: el General lleva meses viandolo en el arduo trabajo de transcribir casetes y enredar documentos" (43). [(Per6n) is correcting his Memoirs. Or, rather, he is in the process of locating himself in the Memoirs that L6pez has written for him-for months now, the General has been seeing him hard at work transcribing cassettes and shuffling



documents.]5 That Martinez is writing a memoir of Per6n writing his memoirs is no accident; the passage serves as metacommentary of the author's own project, as much as I am loathe to draw any analogy between Martinez and L6pez.6 But, Martinez points out, ghostwriting someone else's autobiography is a tricky business: material gets altered, corrected, edited. The final draft is always several versions removed from the original, which is to say, how things "really" happened. Any biographer, Martinez warns us, is guilty of rewriting history. He makes this point again-as if in broad, bold lights-when he decides to title his biography a "novel." The careful reader, then, will proceed cautiously and be prepared to treat all material as suspect, regardless of what credible witness provides the work its source.

It seems Ortiz and Ch~vez are guilty of wanting La novela de Perdn to be something that it is not. Despite the great deal of (auto)biographical information the work provides, it is not Per6n's biography, and does not claim to be. The passage from which they cite Eva's fictitious phrase forms part of Per6n's (purported) memoirs. The interlude occurs while Per6n is driving through Madrid, ill and forlorn, besieged by memories of his time in Spain, and of Evita. He asks his gardener, who is driving, "?Para que al cabo de los afios vengan a suceder estas desmemorias, Lucas?" (266) [Why do these lapses of memory happen after so many long years, Lucas?] and then asks himself, ",Por qu6 me turba hoy Eva esta despedida que s61o es mia? Ya todo se me da vuelta. No se si estoy ydndome o si mas bien me llego" (266-7). [Why is Eva disturbing today this farewell that is mine alone? Everything is making my head spin now. I don't know if I'm going or coming.] T-he general is not well here, he is confused, and his memory poor. And then the memoir is interrupted by memory: as he prepares to leave Madrid, Per6n remembers the first time he met Eva. The account he offers up is almost identical to the one Martinez cites in Santa Evita, a reconstruction which we now know to be a fabrication. Granted, Ortiz and Chivez would not have had access to this information, as Martinez did not reveal his imaginary sources until after they had published their biographies. But La novela de Perdn offers up substantial textual proof that it is not to be trusted as a reliable source from which to cite biographical narrative, nor is it a wholly accurate account of the author's interview with the deposed dictator. The biographers' error is understandable-Martinez goes to great pains to conflate fact and fiction and memory into one believable read--but it serves a cautionary tale: do not trust a work that calls itself a novel. It also illuminates the problematics inherent in biography: neither sources nor research can neces- sarily be trusted as infallible components of historical documentation, as the genre would like to lead us to believe they can.

Ortiz's account in particular, while indeed only one of several possible versions of the meeting that she presents, problematizes the recording of biographical information. She writes, "iSerP verdad que le dijo esas palabras



decisivas que el viejo exiliado madrilefio le confiara a su bi6grafo:'Gracias por existir'?" (Ortiz 103). [Did she really utter the decisive words that the old exiled colonel would later confide to his biographer: "Thank you for existing?"] This biographer then follows the question with a brief psychoanalytic interpretation of the line as indicative of Evita's self-deprecation, a reading that itself works to validate the veracity of the reported speech. The real problem here, however, is not Ortiz's question, but that she attributes the phrase to Per6n and not to his

"biographer." Ihe work provided her with many structural, narrative and paratextual clues that Per6n's memory was unreliable, and his memoirs not of his own invention. Per6n never repeated the phrase that Evita never spoke. But that doesn't mean the declamation isn't historical. For, sixty years after Eva never complimented her way into history (at least that anyone can remember) on that long afternoon, the fictitious--and now biographical--remark has come to memorialize the what-should-have-been-said-instead of history. The famous place-holder stands as a spectacular monument to the fabrications, intransigencies and manhandling that go into constructing history. "Thanks for existing" is historical because it records a moment that proved inaccessible to history.

Notes 1. Trans. Helen Lane. All other translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

2. See Caleb Bach's interview with Martinez in Americas, vol. 50, no. 3 (May/June 1998). 3. See Lloyd Hughes Davies'"Portraits of a Lady: Postmodern Readings of Tomdis Eloy Martinez's Santa Evita"(Modern Language Review, UK. Vol. 95, No. 2) for a discussion of the extensive postmodern narrative techniques employed by Martinez.

4. My reference here is to Benjamin's reflections on the construction of truth, the historical object and political "awakening" which Susan Buck-Morss elucidates in her work The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). The historical object, according to Benjamin, when caught in the tension between past and present, renders the truth political and vis- ible, which manifests itself in the "dialectical image."'his image, cites Buck-Morss, "is identical to the historical object; it justifies blasting the latter out of the continuum of history's course" (219). 5. Trans. Helen Lane.

6. Upon his return to Argentina, and under the auspices of the Peronist government, L6pez Rega set up the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. The so-called Triple A evolved into the state-sponsored paramilitary police force that effected the "war against subversion" in Argentina through systematic strategies of terror.



Works Cited Bach, Caleb. "Imagining the Truth."Amiricas 50.3 (May/June 1998): 15-21. Benjamin, Walter."Theses on the Philosophy of History."Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah

Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 253-264.

Martinez, Tomis Eloy. "Myth, History and Fiction in Latin America." Trans. Marguerite Feitlowitz. Encuentros 32 (May 1999). Lecture sponsored by the IDB Cultural Center Lectures Program. Inter-American Development Bank, Washington, D.C. 27 May 1999.

. La Novela de Perdn. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989.

. Santa Evita. Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta, 1995.

. Santa Evita. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Knopf, 1996.

. The Per6n Novel. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Knopf, 1998.

Ortiz, Alicia Dujovne. Eva Perdn. La biografia. Madrid: Santillana Ediciones Generales, S.L., 1996. . Eva Perdn. Trans. Shawn Fields. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

Per6n, Eva. La razdn de mi vida. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Peuser, 1951.


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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Modern Literature, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter, 2007), pp. i-viii+1-215Front Matter [pp. i-viii]Editor's Introduction [pp. v-vii]Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of "Mad Love" [pp. 1-16]The Dialectic of Electricity: Kenneth Fearing, Walter Benjamin, and a Marxist Aesthetic [pp. 17-41]William Carlos Williams and the Politics of Form [pp. 42-63]Reframing Charles Williams: Modernist Doubt and the Crisis of World War in "All Hallows' Eve" [pp. 64-85]The Familiar Attractions of Fascism in Muriel Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" [pp. 86-102]Spinsters, Surveillance, and Speech: The Case of Miss Marple, Miss Mole, and Miss Jekyll [pp. 103-120]Dubliners' IOU: The Aesthetics of Exchange in "After the Race" and "Two Gallants" [pp. 121-138]Creative Destruction in "Finnegans Wake": the Rise and Fall of the Modern City [pp. 139-150]Myth Turned Monument: Documenting the Historical Imaginary in Buenos Aires and Beyond [pp. 151-162]Imperfect Mastery: The Failure of Grammar in Beckett's L'Innommable [pp. 163-179]In One Ear and Out the Others: Beckett.... Mahon. Muldoon [pp. 180-196]Review: Disseminating the Break: The Poetics of Catastrophic Modernity [pp. 197-203]Review: Becoming and Joyce: Emergent Shifts in Literary Criticism [pp. 204-209]Review: Unpacking Ritual [pp. 210-212]Back Matter [pp. 213-215]

Myth Turned Monument: Documenting the Historical Imaginary in Buenos Aires and Beyond

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