Peter Robertson
Lawrence Thornton’s novel Imagining Argentina explores the evolution and aftermath of that country’s "Dirty War" (1976-1983) during which between 9,000 and 30,000 civilians were "disappeared" by the military regime. First published in 1987, it won both the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award and the PEN American Center West Award. But the film adaptation, directed by Christopher Hampton, and premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2003, was savaged by most critics. They were perturbed by the film’s uneasy fusion of magical realism and historic fact which informs the novel itself.
As I write, Argentina’s "Dirty War" is once again dominating the media, this time in Spain. Baltasar Garzón, the crusading judge, has indicted Adolfo Scilingo, a former Argentine naval captain, for crimes against humanity. This was after Scilingo had made taped confessions, now immortalized in Verbitsky’s book, The Flight, admitting that he had participated in so-called "death flights". In Thornton’s novel, Carlos Rueda, the protagonist, envisions Silvio, his colleague and friend, dropped from a plane to plummet to his doom into the River Plate, "a flower of death on the blue sea". But it is not just Silvio’s death that is romanticized in this novel. Indeed, the book’s title, "Imagining Argentina", is no misnomer and it soon becomes clear that Thornton, who has never lived in Argentina, fails to engage with this country’s reality.
If the "Dirty War" is to be understood, fiction must be disentangled strand by strand from fact. But Thornton undermines the seriousness of his novel’s message by superimposing whimsy on a painful, and unresolved, chapter of Argentine history. Thornton does succeed in conveying the juggernaut of State Terrorism in images such as "a green Ford Falcon disappearing into the night streets of Buenos Aires, its exhaust a stain of gray blood on the air". But when he declares that the soldier’s dream was to lie beside "a prostrate Argentina he had fucked to death", the writing becomes hackneyed and overblown. A pity that, in purveying his reductivist view of history, Thornton omits to mention one of the many atrocities committed by the "Montoneros" (a radical Peronist group), such as the kidnapping and execution of Aramburu, a former Argentine President.
In the final analysis, Imagining Argentina founders on the fantastical. Carlos Rueda, a manager at a Buenos Aires theatre, discovers that he has psychic powers and can use his gift not only to detect the whereabouts of missing persons but also to influence the course of their destinies. However, the reality during the "Dirty War" was entirely different and those seeking information about loved ones encountered only a wall of silence. Later Rueda declares, "So long as we do not let them violate our imaginations we will survive". But once again the truth was a completely different proposition – it was not only the "Montoneros" who went missing but any citizen who dared to think differently.
The novel also turns historicity upside down when it implies that the "de facto" government was brought down by a groundswell of popular resistance – it was, in fact, the Falklands debacle that proved the "coup de grace" for General Galtieri. At the end of the novel, once democracy has been restored, the narrator waxes lyrical, "I would not have been surprised to see a white carnation floating like a benediction in the clear Argentinean sky". But this banal invocation glosses over the tragic repercussions of the "Dirty War". Many of the most gifted members of an entire generation were liquidated, leaving behind a society that is, to this day, deeply conformist.
Indeed, the legacy of these years is so indelible that, during a visit to Argentina, the Italian journalist, Oriana Falacci, opined that every Argentine harboured "a fascist dwarf" within. Falacci is often prone to hyperbole but here her assertion, which some would call a model of restraint, is given ballast by the fact that in 1995, Luis Patti, an infamous torturer during the "Dirty War", was elected mayor by 73% of his constituency. In Imagining Argentina Thornton conjures up the image of an ice cave (enough to make Plato’s Cave seem the source of all enlightenment) for the country that the Generals wanted Argentina to become. If the "fascist dwarves" gain the upper hand, Argentines could descend once again, in an atavistic rush, into caves of their own making.
