MARINA KAPLAN

READING AN ABSENT SENSE:  TUNUNA MERCADO'S EN ESTADO DE MEMORIA

“To write, ‘to form,’ in the informal, an absent sense. An absent sense (not an absence of sense, nor a sense that would be lacking, potential or latent). To write is perhaps to bring to the surface something like absent sense, to receive the passive impulse that is not yet thought, being already the disaster of thought. Its patience.”
                                                            —Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster  

BLANCHOT’S QUOTATION IS ONE OF THREE epigraphs to Jean-Luc Nancy’s book called, appropriately, The Sense of the World. Nancy’s starting point in this study is to remind us that “sense” and “world” have a tautological relationship to each other and that both are becoming void of any meaning. Writing in 1997, and in France, he asserts that “there is no longer any assignable signification of ‘world.’” Immanuel Wallerstein agrees with Nancy to the extent that he defines ours as an age of transition from one economic system—capitalism as we have known it—to a new one that is as yet undecipherable. Paul Bové, for his part, calls this same period “the interregnum” between state and superstate (or no state), a “place and time when there is as yet no rule, when there are ordering forces but they have not yet summoned their institutional rule into full view.”  Whether philosophically, economically, or politically, then, the “sense of the world” is “subtracting itself, bit by bit, from the entire regime of signification available to us” (Nancy). Therefore history, politics, philosophy, art, world, are not the names of subsistent realities in themselves but the names of concepts or ideas, entirely determined within a regime of sense that “is coming full circle and completing itself before our (thereby blinded) eyes.”   We are traversing the end of the world of sense as we have known it.

Predictably, this impasse affects, or should affect, academic disciplines.  In our case, it is the institution of literature that finds itself framed by the disappearance of “world” and shadowed, at present, by an alternative force that makes inoperative the literary. In what follows, I want to stay within the bounds of the crisis of literature by exploring a text that withdraws from the economy of meaning and patiently produces absence. In Tununa Mercado’s En estado de memoria (1990), the experience of exile during the years of two military dictatorships in Argentina is the literal absence of ground. This thematic concern, however, is exceeded by a practice of writing that suspends the willful sutures of the now disappearing regime of sense as it brings representation to crisis. In this way, it transforms literature into an unstable performance whose true protagonist is language and whose negative force suggests that the story of an experience of the self can no longer be told. As such, Mercado’s book is an autobiography that has mutated into écriture and here will be an enabling pre-text to meditate on how the institution of literature questions itself in “the age of transition.”

En estado de memoria creates a “world” from which signification is, to a large extent, leached before our eyes. This happens on one slope of its literary space, a slope where writing eludes redemptive sublations and exscribes life.  But this is not, for the most part, how it has been read. On the contrary, several interpretations treat its language as if it served the expressive functions of communication. Jean Franco, for example, describes it as a “deeply philosophical not to say ethical work that examines subtle states of consciousness in a way that is unusual in Latin American literature.”  She avers that it is a difficult text to classify, but she nevertheless stabilizes it, calling it both a memoir and a novel, and highlights in it the suffering of a consciousness unprotected from the horrors of everyday life. Basing her commentary on narrative as representation, and on the unexamined notion of a consciousness as individuality, Franco is able to tell us what this text means, what it is about—not an easy thing to do in the case of En estado de memoria and therefore a welcome starting point. This positive interpretation, however, forecloses the text’s intense questioning of representation—which is probably what the word text actually means. As a supplement to studies such as Franco’s, in what follows I will concentrate exclusively on that other slope of the literary space, which is made up of furtive and dense moments when the referential function of language falters and mimesis is unworked. I will therefore be interested in those textual events that remind us that écriture cannot be summarized, that in it we do not know who speaks, and that we cannot read it. We can only write it.

As we begin to read, we expect litigation against an intolerable state of affairs: the deaths and disappearances carried out by the Argentine Armed Forces during their sinister state of terror from 1976 to 1983.4 And there is, of course, quite a bit of that, both explicit and implicit. Idelber Avelar, for example, considers this book to be part of the literature of postdicatorship mourning. I discern, however, other elements that diverge from this historical frame, interpolations of a diverse regime of phrases that, for lack of a more precise word, we can call poetry or irony, provided that poetry and irony are understood as interruptions of mimesis and the stability of genres as social pacts.