In: HeLix - Dossiers zur romanischen Literaturwissenschaft, 5 (2012), pp. 62-90

Abstract

Literal acts of de-presentation and percepticidio, the forced disappearance of people during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) challenges aesthetic boundaries. The situation as experienced by the children of the desaparecidos is more complicated as a result of historical distance. In the mid-1990s, these children emerged as the so-called “Generación HIJOS”; they were, as poet Martín Gambarotta puts it, a “camada cadaver,” a phrase referring to Néstor Perlongher’s “Cadáveres,” a paradigmatic poem written under the dictatorship but only published in 1987. Part of the post-dictatorial generation that faces the uncanny fact of the “presencia de la ausencia” in Argentina, Gambarotta’s Punctum is both a réécriture and a new, highly mediatized poetic écriture of Perlongher’s neo-baroque opus. Punctum offers an accelerated stream of poetic images, where the discovery of the corpses—“produced” by the political regime and made possible by social and perceptive conditions—occurs despite extensive interference, which in turn creates a large—“zapping”—horizon of metonymic displacements. This interferences also causes the protagonist, Cadáver, to lose his mnemonic and moral orientation. Punctum thus becomes both a trashy allegorical post-dictatorial epos and one of the most significant poems of the Argentine “poesía de los noventa.” This article focuses mainly on the importance of poetic discourse an imagination after enforced disappearance and biblioclasm; on a comparative analysis of Perlongher’s and Gambarotta’s text; and on an interpretation of Punctum as a post-traumatic “chambre Claire,” one that follows Roland Barthes’s concepts as well as the notion of “punctum.”