Literary Reimaginings of Argentina’s Independence

Front matter

Literary Reimaginings of Argentina’s

Independence History, Fiction, Politics

Catriona McAllister

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Writing and Rewriting Independence

Reading Latin American Historical Fiction Writing Independence, Envisaging the Nation Rewriting Independence: Texts and Contexts

Introduction

Writing and Rewriting Independence

Latin America has produced a vast array of fiction that could be described as ‘historical’, and the category of ‘historical fiction’ has attracted a substantial amount of critical attention over the last few decades. It would be hard to argue, therefore, that this branch of the region’s literary output has been neglected: in fact, our ideas about contemporary Latin American historical fiction have consolidated into such a clear, recognizable critical position that our interpretations can be tinged with a sense of inevitability. While the novels themselves wrestle with a wide range of historical periods and narrative approaches, we frequently extract what they have in common under the umbrella of the “Latin American Historical Novel’.

The current critical paradigm began to take shape in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when debates about the intersections between postmodernism, history, literature, and the shaping of knowledge found themselves in tune with the region’s historical fiction. Through categories such as the ‘new historical novel’ and “historiographic metafiction’ (on which more below), we became familiar with the idea that self-reflexive historical fiction was performing a postmodern destabilizing of the past, reminding us that all history is a form of narrative and cautioning against absolutes. This reading can be applied to a significant proportion of Latin America’s contemporary historical fiction, and therefore arguably became something of a victim of its own success, achieving a level of dominance that has created a feeling of circularity that could lead us to assume we have sufficient explanation of these texts.

This book, however, is born of a nagging sense that we might still be missing the point when it comes to these novels — that arguments foregrounding history and literature’s shared reliance on narrative only begin to tap the potential of these texts, particularly in terms of their political arguments. What if the idea that history is narrative is not the final conclusion of these texts, but merely a starting point? If they seek to expose discursive foundations, is this the limit of their political critique? In fact, are abstract ideas of ‘knowledge’, ‘fiction’, and ‘history’ really the right starting place for interpreting these texts at all? My reading argues that, by departing from a different understanding of history, we can create much more satisfying and politically meaningful interpretations of these texts. Rather than speaking in abstract terms about ‘history’, my starting point recognizes the highly politicized function of particular historical discourses in the public sphere. By identifying what is at stake in the narration of a specific period, by mapping the ways in which these discourses have been appropriated by different actors and shaped within a particular national context, we can explore the diversity of critiques and alternative visions that emerge from literary rewritings of the past.

This introduction will therefore outline both the emergence of the still-dominant paradigm for reading Latin American historical fiction and the contribution I aim to make to this debate. My analysis focuses on texts that reimagine the period of Argentina’s independence, a historical moment that offers a rich discursive landscape through which to explore the reading of historical fiction. This focus can be seen in some ways as a case study, illustrating my broader arguments about our reading of Latin American historical fiction, but it also maps out literary engagements with a period deeply connected to ideas of national origin and identity. As the moment of the birth of the patria, independence enjoys a privileged and unique role in the life of the nation. In Argentina, the long history of official and extraofficial uses of this founding moment has transformed its narration into a site for the projection of conflicting political projects, and it is by understanding this trajectory that we can more fully unravel the ideological engagements of the texts that choose to re-imagine the period. My readings will therefore begin by outlining key narratives that underpin the independence tale, allowing new possibilities for interpreting literary rewritings to come to the fore. Through this approach, ideological nuances can be drawn out, parodic inversions can be detected and explored, and commentary on the present can be deciphered. Most significantly, however, we can reconsider how to frame our search for the political in these texts, ultimately re-evaluating what we consider to be the challenges posed by the playful, self-reflexive rewritings of contemporary Latin American historical fiction.

Reading Latin American Historical Fiction

As mentioned above, the still-dominant approach to reading contemporary Latin American historical fiction emerged while postmodernism was enjoying a central position in cultural debate. This can be seen to have influenced our understanding of the genre in multiple ways, with Hayden White, Fredric Jameson, and Brian McHale being among those who have left their mark on our approach, but the theoretical formulation that provided the clearest direction for reading Latin American historical fiction is Linda Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’. This contribution to postmodern theory examines literary engagements with history, mapping an interpretation that brings broader postmodern concerns to bear on this particular branch of fiction. For Hutcheon, ‘historiographic metafiction’ describes a category of texts whose questioning of history centres on ‘the provisional, indeterminate nature of historical knowledge’, ‘the questioning of the ontological and epistemological status of historical “fact” and ‘the distrust of seeming neutrality and objectivity of recounting’.! ‘Historiographic metafiction’ is therefore profoundly concerned with epistemological provisionality and with exposing the processes by which systems of meaning are constructed and maintained.

Hutcheon’s formulation has proved a persuasive and enduring model that has profoundly influenced the critical discourse surrounding contemporary Latin American historical fiction, even if her particular terminology is not always used. Writing in the late 1990s, Karl Kohut observed that ‘la mayor parte de la critica de la novela histórica? was taking its lead from Hutcheon.” The idea of epistemological scepticism so crucial to Hutcheon's historiographic metafiction is a recurring feature of important studies such as those by Maria Cristina Pons, Juan José Barrientos, Fernando Ainsa, and Magdalena Perkowska, and continues to be applied today.’ It is also present in the critical frameworks applied to single-text studies in a substantial range of literary criticism produced in the same period. Hayden White is also widely cited in this work, lending an idea of history as narrative that leads critics of historical fiction to contemplate an apparent collapse of the boundaries between literature and history. As a result of this influence of postmodern theory, the late twentieth-century paradigm for approaching Latin American historical fiction positions these novels as predominantly concerned with the problematization of stable truth and knowledge.

Another complementary strand of criticism that emerged at about the same time relates to the idea that something ‘new’ was happening in the Latin American historical novel in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Here, the most influential model was created by Seymour Menton, who outlined the defining features of the ‘New Historical Novel”.* These textual elements

1 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 88.

2 Karl Kohut, Introducción”, in La invención del pasado: la novela histórica en el marco de la posmodernidad (Frankfurt: Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1997), pp. 19-20.

3 María Cristina Pons, Memorias del olvido: Del Paso, García Márquez, Saer y la novela histórica de fines del siglo XX (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1996); Juan Barrientos, Ficción-historia: la nueva novela histórica hispanoamericana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001); Fernando Aínsa, Reescribir el pasado: historia y ficción en América Latina (Mérida Venezuela: CELARG; El otro el mismo, 2003); Magdalena Perkowska, Historias híbridas: La nueva novela histórica latinoamericana (1985-2000) ante las teorías posmodernas de la historia (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008). For a more recent example of this approach, see Nancy Malaver Cruz, Ficción y realidad: retos de la novela histórica (1992-2010) (Bogota: Universidad Central, 2018).

4 Seymour Menton, Latin America's New Historical Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).

included the distortion of historical fact, metafiction, intertextuality, parody, the dialogic, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque.* Significantly, this list bears a strong resemblance to the features Hutcheon ascribes to her historiographic metafictions, meaning that it is easy to read across both concepts and draw them together in textual analysis. Moreover, the presence of philosophical ideas concerning history that Menton considers as fundamental to the category ties in closely with the framing Hutcheon gives to history under postmodernism, as he asserts that ‘the impossibility of ascertaining the true nature of reality or history’ is a defining feature of New Historical Novels.* This foregrounds the epistemological instability present in Hutcheon’s theorization, once more allowing for easy movement between a recognizable set of textual features and a particular understanding of historical fiction’s purpose. While many critics have built upon Menton’s model or disputed aspects of his characterization of the genre, current approaches to late twentieth-century Latin American historical fiction are still heavily indebted to this particular framing.

As the idea of a ‘new’ Latin American historical novel gained traction, a mode of reading this fiction became well established. The presence of metafictional devices and literary game-playing in a historical novel seemed inevitably to point to a warning that there can never be a single, definitive account of the past (or present), and that knowledge is inseparable from its discursive production. Their parodic play and self-reflexivity became apparently synonymous with a postmodern destabilizing of previous certainties, interrogating the construction of knowledge and revealing all meaning as indeterminate. It is the seeming ubiquity of this interpretation that has led to a feeling of critical exhaustion. Even several decades on from the most important theoretical advances in this field, and despite some significant further contributions (which will be discussed below), the core direction of travel in our interpretative frameworks has changed surprisingly little. The frustration at this strait-jacketed approach is neatly captured by Brian L. Price, who notes:

se redujo el enfoque crítico al tomar en cuenta sólo ciertos aspectos que de un modo u otro todos tenían que ver con la autorreferencialidad literaria y la manera en que ésta problematiza de forma epistemológica aquello que solemos llamar realidad.”

5 Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel, pp. 22-25.

6 Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel, p. 23. Menton’s assertion that ‘the postmodern collapse of the “grandes narrativas” is unquestionably belied’ by many of the ‘New Historical Novels’ refers to the continued prevalence of the tendency to construct ‘totalizing’ narratives that was characteristic of the Latin American Boom, rather than the continuation of the grands récits of modernity in the wider sense defined by Lyotard.

7 Brian L. Price (ed.). Asaltos a la historia: reimaginando la ficción histórica hispanoamericana (México DF, CP: Ediciones Eón, 2014), p. Io.

It seems clear, therefore, that we need to expand our interpretative possibilities for these texts if we hope to continue developing our understanding of what they have to offer.

In my view, part of the reason for this stalemate lies in our tendency to read ‘the Latin American Historical Novel’ as a genre. By reading historical fiction in this way, we are always dealing with interactions between abstract concepts of ‘history’ and ‘literature’ rather than interrogating any more specific discursive planes that may be at stake. The most prominent works on the Latin American historical novel are wide-ranging, spanning several countries and placing little emphasis on the historical period being rewritten (beyond discussion of whether treatments of the recent past should be included in the category). This fuels the perception that the relationship between history and fiction is the primary focus of these texts, as comparing novels that dialogue with vastly different contexts ensures that their major points of contact are to be found at this general level. In seeking a unifying purpose behind such a rich and varied branch of Latin American literature a degree of ‘flattening’ is perhaps inevitable, and in the case of historical fiction it creates an important disconnect between the texts and the specific discourses they seek to reinvent or parody.

The consequences of this can be seen when we try to identify any more specific political purpose in these texts than the general questioning of epistemology noted above. According to Hutcheon’s model, the unmasking of ideology is postmodernism’s version of a political statement, as she argues that ‘the self-reflexive, parodic art of the postmodern [underlines] in its ironic way the realization that all cultural forms of representation — literary, visual, aural — in high art or the mass media are ideologically grounded’? Postmodernism therefore underlines, shows, or reveals the fact that all discourse has an ideological foundation, but this is the extent of its political potential. While this approach enables us to identify the shared characteristics of a wide range of texts, it creates a model that relies upon abstracting cultural products from their specific context. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that a more concrete definition of these texts’ political engagement does not emerge through the use of this framework. Despite the fact that the decontextualizing, ‘universalizing impulses’ of Hutcheon’s framing of Latin American texts were criticized by Santiago Colas at an early stage of our debates on these novels,’® this abstract vision of political engagement has proved influential for critical discourse on Latin American historical fiction,

8 See Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel, pp. 18-19; Ainsa, Reescribir el pasado, p. 11; Pons, Memorias del olvido, pp. 15-23; Barrientos, Ficcién-historia, Pp. 13-14; and Daniel Balderston, “Introduction”, in The Historical Novel in Latin America: A Symposium (Gaithersburg: Hispamérica, 1986), p. 9.

9 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 3.

1o Santiago Colas, Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 4.

creating the impression that unmasking apparent neutrality or objectivity is the primary political contribution of these texts.

The other definition of the political that frequently emerges in relation to this genre is the idea of ‘cultural resistance’: Colas’s Marxist-inspired discussion focuses on outlining the specific character of Latin American postmodernism as an ‘oppositional politics”;'* Pons portrays the genre as a model of subaltern resistance; and Perkowska discusses the utopian spirit implicit in writing alternative versions of history.'? However, ascribing a unified political position to these texts in the form of a generalized ‘resistance’ risks producing a misleading impression of ideological uniformity (on the basis of aesthetic similarity). Similarly, we often see observations that this branch of fiction is political through its focus on the marginal, particularly its embracing of marginal voices.'* While this is often true, this is again only one dimension of the political explorations at stake in this fiction. My reading will respond to each of these familiar interpretations of the political in Latin American historical fiction by engaging with these texts as political articulations in a different sense: as distinct responses to a set of ideologically charged narratives that build layered and nuanced critiques responding to the pressing concerns of their time.

Over more recent years, there have been several acknowledgements of the fact that our interpretative paradigms for this genre have become tired, leading to attempts to generate new approaches. Some, such as Victoria Carpenter’s 2010 edited volume, seek to move forward by refocusing the debate on different questions. In Carpenter’s volume, the key theoretical focus is ‘the non-linear nature of time’ and its creation of multiple histories that affect ‘the creation, destruction and recreation of collective memory and, consequently, national identities”.** This raises the important question of the ways in which literary reinterpretations of history can intervene in and alter the public discursive landscape, and also foregrounds the issue of time over knowledge construction, moving beyond the familiar critical position. This generates many interesting textual readings, but does not resolve the questions around historical discourse that are the focus of this book. My aim is to interrogate the long-standing framing of the genre, returning to familiar questions and providing different answers.

11 It is worth noting that Colas frames his argument around the question of postmodernity rather than the historical novel specifically, but his argument contains an important focus on literary uses of history in Latin America, and Argentina specifically.

12 Pons, Memorias del olvido, pp. 265-66; Perkowska, Historias hibridas, p. 104.

13 See, for example, Santiago Juan-Navarro, Archival Reflections : Postmodern Fiction of the Americas (Self-reflexivity, Historical Revisionism, Utopia) (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999), p. 290.

14 Victoria Carpenter (ed.), (Re)Collecting the Past: History and Collective Memory in Latin American Narrative (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 3.

Helene Carol Weldt-Basson proposes moving away from postmodernism and instead reading Latin American historical fiction through other theoretical paradigms: feminism and postcolonial studies.'* This offers a possible route out of the impasse, moving away from the focus on the indeterminate status of knowledge and instead opening clearer paths to engagement with the political content of these texts. In her introduction to the edited volume, Weldt-Basson uses these frameworks to argue that there has been a shift in the focus of the Latin American historical novel, with feminist and postcolonial themes and representations gaining in prominence over recent decades. This helps to move us beyond the focus on the genre’s formal evolution, which has created a sense of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the Latin American historical novel: a traditional manifestation that aligns with Lukacs’s reading of the genre,’® and a new” version that deploys the features described above and undermines traditional epistemology (and ideas of historical progress). A reading such as Weldt-Basson’s helps to unravel the multiple textures, priorities, and concerns of this diverse branch of fiction, and to lay claim to its ongoing evolution.

Weldt-Basson’s approach is an important interpretative move as it implicitly highlights an important and understudied dimension of this historical fiction: its constantly changing nature in response to immediate contemporary political concerns. These novels cast the lens of the present over well-worn, traditional narratives, and we must imagine that these foundational tales will continue to be rewritten through fiction, through whatever significant political concerns emerge in the future. However, this ‘side-stepping’ of postmodernism does not acknowledge the synergistic relationship between the evolution of Latin American historical fiction and the postmodern ideas that have dominated our interpretations to date. These texts are consciously drawing on the climate of ideas generated by this critical turn, but our interpretations of the ways in which this paradigm is applied remain limited. Feminism and postcolonialism both hold potential for creating new readings, as Weldt-Basson demonstrates, but my approach instead focuses on addressing this gap by rebuilding our understanding of the relationship between literature and history in these novels. My bid for a way forward begins with recognizing the politicized content of the historical discourses that are parodied, upended, and reconstructed by fiction, in order to assert that it is not ‘history’ that is being challenged, but the specific political constructs associated with these recognizable, often national, narratives of the past.

One of the most frequently cited characteristics of Latin American contemporary historical fiction is its challenge to ‘official history”.'” The specific

15 Helene Carol Weldt-Basson (ed.), Redefining the Latin American Historical Novel: The Impact of Feminism and Postcolonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

16 Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1962).

17 See, for example, Pons, Memorias del olvido, pp. 16-17; Ainsa, Reescribir el pasado, pp. 11, 29; Perkowska, Historias híbridas pp. 37-38.

narratives of ‘official history’ are left unexplained, however, preventing us from engaging with the potential political implications of overturning this vision of the past. In this book, I will argue that by focusing on genre and grouping texts that engage with very different historical moments, we often fail to ask why authors are rewriting a specific historical period, or what the significance of that period is in the public imagination. This abstraction from the meanings attributed to the period in popular consciousness occurs much more frequently in relation to novels that tackle the ‘distant past’ than those that explore more recent history. Novels that deal with twentieth-century history are often considered in the context of their dialogue with political circumstances, with key examples in Argentina being the literary treatment of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, fictional explorations of the figure of Evita, and literary approaches to the 1976-83 military dictatorship. However, the postmodern historical novel framework is often discarded in analysis of these texts, considered irrelevant to treatments of recent history, and as a result this framework is ignored instead of overtly challenged, and the lessons we could glean from the way we read texts that engage with recent history are therefore not applied to other literary treatments of the past. Where novels dealing with twentieth-century history are treated as examples of historical fiction, the existing paradigm is usually invoked in order to highlight a generalized epistemological questioning within the text, therefore reinforcing dominant understandings of these Latin American texts.'*

There are some studies that hone in on the representation of earlier periods, particularly treatments of the conquest, such as A Twice-told Tale: Reinventing the Encounter in Iberian American Literature and Film, edited by Santiago Juan-Navarro, Kimberle S. López's Latin American Novels of the Conquest: Reinventing the New World and Mark Hernandez’s Figural Conquistadors: Rewriting the New World’s Discovery and Conquest in Mexican and River Plate Novels of the 1980s and 1990s.'” Despite the more specific historical focus, López's work and Juan-Navarro’s introduction to his volume

18 Compare Pamela Bacarisse, ‘The Projection of Peronism in the Novels of Manuel Puig”, in The Historical Novel in Latin America: A Symposium, ed. by Daniel Balderston (Gaithersburg: Hispamérica, 1986), which makes no reference to a postmodern context or the stability of historical knowledge in its consideration of the recent past, and Lloyd Hughes Davies, “Portraits of a Lady: Postmodern Readings of Tomas Eloy Martinez's “Santa Evita””, The Modern Language Review, 95 (2000), 415-23, which takes the second approach highlighted above.

19 Santiago Juan-Navarro (ed.), A Twice-told Tale: Reinventing the Encounter in Iberian American Literature and Film (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Press, 2001); Kimberle S López, Latin American Novels of the Conquest: Reinventing the New World (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002); Mark Hernández, Figural Conquistadors: Rewriting the New World’s Discovery and Conquest in Mexican and River Plate Novels of the 1980s and 1990s (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006).

are both framed within the concerns of the New Historical Novel, rather than as a theoretical challenge to this approach. Hernandez, however, departs from an overview of the Chronicles of the Indies and the ways in which these have been read as literature as well as history, thereby pinpointing a distinct discursive tradition with which contemporary authors dialogue. This enables Hernandez to unravel more concrete aims within these texts, such as their ‘[reflection] upon the way that institutional powers have invoked episodes from the discovery and conquest to explain and legitimate the present’ and these novels’ desire to ‘critique the recent historical past’.?° In her contribution to A Twice-Told Tale, Victoria E. Campos also departs from the Chronicles to explore rewritings of the past in Mexico, recognizing the need to situate our response to contemporary historical fiction in relation to broader cultural debates and the original historical narratives rewritten by the texts.” By employing the crénica de Indias rather than the historical novel as a locus for comparison, Campos identifies a cultural critique that does not present knowledge as ‘indeterminate’ but rather as a powerful political tool that must be dissected in order to establish an effective counter-position. These contributions reveal how moving beyond the tendency of historical novel criticism to treat history as an order of discourse, rather than engaging with the way that specific historical episodes have been configured, provides a necessary alternative focus for our consideration of the place of history in the texts. However, we still need to consciously turn these types of readings back on the dominance of the historical novel framework, using them to move away from abstract discussions of ‘history’, and home in further on what we mean by the historical challenges presented by these novels.

Literary treatments of independence have also garnered some dedicated critical attention, particularly in the wake of the bicentenary celebrations across Spanish America in the first decades of the twentieth-first century. Examples include Escrituras y reescrituras de la Independencia (eds. Camilla Cattarulla and Ilaria Magnani, 2012), Representaciones literarias de las independencias iberoamericanas (ed. Luisa Ballesteros Rosas, 2018), and an earlier volume dedicated specifically to Argentina: El archivo de la independencia y la ficción contemporánea (2004), edited by Alicia Chiban.?? In terms of the literary theoretical framework, the analyses in these volumes again often draw on the new historical novel and a postmodern framing of literary engagements with history, therefore tending to lead to similar conclusions as

20 Hernández, Figural Conquistadors, p. 20.

21 Victoria E. Campos, ‘Toward a New History: Twentieth-Century Debates in Mexico on Narrating the National Past’, in Juan-Navarro, A Twice-told Tale, p. 48.

22 Camilla Cattarulla and Ilaria Magnani (eds.), Escrituras y reescrituras de la independencia (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2012); Luisa Ballesteros Rosas (ed.), Representaciones literarias de las independencias iberoamericanas (Madrid: SIAL Ediciones, 2018); Alicia Chibán (ed.), El archivo de la independencia y la ficción contemporánea (Salta: Universidad Nacional de Salta, 2004).

IO LITERARY REIMAGININGS OF ARGENTINA’S INDEPENDENCE more general works on historical fiction. Many of these readings also seek to deepen the exploration of historical detail in literary texts, which can provide valuable insight but is a different proposal to the analysis I will undertake in this book. Although historical detail in itself will necessarily form part of my consideration of the texts, my main concern is to trace the ways in which independence has been signified by different political projects throughout Argentina’s history, and to dissect the role allocated to this foundational period within nation-building projects in order to reconsider the idea of the political in the literary texts I will explore.

In the same way that the conquest is discursively produced by the crónicas de Indias, the writing of independence occupies its own discursive space that must be acknowledged and understood in order to progress beyond generalized statements regarding the production of knowledge that dominate the analysis of the region’s historical fiction to date. I refer to a discursive space that exists in the public imaginary, shaped by the uses of independence as a nation-building discourse, rather than one that is the preserve of professional historians. What matters is the use of well-worn understandings of particular figures and events, the historical narratives familiar from readers’ school days, the stories that are reproduced in public life, and the way that literary texts seek to intervene in this landscape. Carolina Pizarro Cortés provides some valuable insights into the ways in which literary texts engage with some aspects of this ‘public life’ of independence, focusing her analysis on the way that fiction seeks to decentre historical subjects.?? My objective is a broader one, examining a wide range of narratives that underpin conventional tellings of the independence tale. I have also very deliberately selected a single-country focus as, despite commonalities between several Latin American countries in the narration and function of independence, there are important national specificities that are essential to any analysis of the political in these texts. This book therefore aims to intervene both in deepening our understanding of literary approaches to independence, a period with a crucial role in identity discourses and political debate, and also to establish a mode of reading that can deepen and extend our analysis of the political focus of self-reflexive Latin American historical fiction.

Writing Independence, Envisaging the Nation

In order to understand the discursive space of independence, it is important to recognize that it is not merely a historical period like any other. As the designated origin of the nation, it holds a unique status in national mythology, filled with symbolic potential. As the first moment that the state can lay claim to its citizens, it houses the ‘birth of the nation’, and as such

23 Carolina Pizarro Cortés, ‘The Decentring of the Historical Subject in the Contemporary Imaginary of the Independence Process’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 20 (2011), 323-42.

INTRODUCTION II represents the creation not only of a political reality, but also the patria as a discursive construct. It therefore also marks the beginning of the quest to define the nation, to fill this new, empty signifier with meaning. For nations that celebrate independence, the period occupies a unique position in shared rituals and self-construction, as outlined here by Anssi Paasi:

Independence brings together material processes (e.g. construction and naturalization of national and military landscapes, symbols and maps) and events (e.g. independence/national days, flag days, commemorations of national heroes”) that fuse various spatial and historical scales. It is thus a pivotal aspect of ‘national meta-narratives’ that define the key elements of the purported national identity (Morrisey, 2014) and conditions of the subjectification and consent of citizens as re-producers of such narratives.?*

Independence therefore occupies a prominent and ongoing role as a site for projecting discourses on the nation, a role that is crucial to understanding its use in literature.

In Argentina, independence has been consciously employed in efforts of nation-building since its own beginning. The potential power of this symbolic origin was recognized even before full independence was achieved, with the state apparatus of commemoration set in motion almost immediately after the events of la semana de mayo, the week that saw the overthrow of the Spanish Viceroy in Buenos Aires in 1810. The primer triunvirato commemorated the first anniversary with the construction of a pyramid in the central square, while 25 May was declared “día de fiesta civica’ in 1813.2 These first governments showed a keen awareness of the importance of performing the nation as a way to establish and guarantee its continued existence. In his Decreto de la supresión de honores of 8 December 1810, Mariano Moreno offers an analysis of the role of the symbolic in granting authority to a power structure, highlighting the need for the new government to offer the pueblo ‘la misma pompa del antiguo simulacro, hasta que repetidas lecciones lo dispusiesen a recibir sin riesgo de equivocarse el precioso presente de su libertad’.?® Future governments proved no less alert to the potential of performance to create acceptance of a form of governance: under the segundo triunvirato, the marcha patriótica (the song that would become Argentina's national anthem) was rushed out to the provinces as soon as it was approved in Buenos Aires, as part of a conscious attempt to compete against rival identities (both provincial