68 pages • 2 hours read
Lawrence ThorntonImagining Argentina
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Shared Tragedy as a Building Block of Community
In the midst of its focus on disappearance, loss, and the splintering of Argentine society, Imagining Argentina presents a nuanced—and hopeful—concept of community. As news of Carlos’s gift spreads, a throng of petitioners flocks to his garden. These petitioners are united in grief and suffering, forming a community of citizens struggling to cope with the junta’s rule. As the novel progresses, the community grows stronger and bolder, paving the way for political and social change.
During the first session, Martín counts “young women, mothers, grandmothers, a few men, and three children” (42) amongst the crowd, a showing which only balloons as Carlos’s reputation spreads. Watching their assemblage from afar, Martín characterizes the crowd according to their many differences. Some, for instance, are “very poor,” while others park “Chevrolets, Renaults, Fiats, even a Mercedes” in front of Carlos’s home (41). Similarly, some live in Buenos Aires, taking the bus a short distance to Carlos’s door, while others commute from barrios on the edge of the city.
In addition to these demographic differences, each person’s story carries its own distinction. As no one “[insists] on being heard before the others” (43), each attendee speaks one-at-a-time, offering an opportunity to spotlight their particular suffering. One story, for instance, features a university student and his paranoid professor. Another, a playwright-turned-filmmaker whose tell-all documentary catches the generals’ attention. Some are taken alone, in Ford Falcons, while others join their families in “black paneled trucks with the insignia of the post office emblazoned on the doors” (62). Indeed, in Carlos’s garden, every iteration of brutality is on display, demonstrating the breadth of the generals’ mission and their willingness to act without pattern.
However, despite this variety of experience, all these individuals discover understanding through tragedy, creating a bond that transcends superficial differences. Though each story may vary in its exact details, they convey the same stark truth: Every day, people are hunted, disappeared, and tortured, while their families grieve the senselessness of such violence. Martín appreciates this phenomenon, too, noticing that despite differences in names and locations, each person tells “the same story,” assuming a similarly “quiet and defeated” tone in the midst of their grief (59). The mothers on the Plaza de Mayo are a prime example of such an unconventional community, representing a “cross-section of the city’s women” in their diversity (37). The common loss of their children encourages a deep empathy as they march en masse and wear white scarves to signal their “sorority” (37). Suddenly, all individual experiences are subsumed into a mutual cause: The rescue of the disappeared.
This sense of common tragedy not only encourages Argentinians to connect with one another, but also prompts them to recognize their place within a larger history: In many ways, the Argentinian junta is merely a facsimile of regimes that have preceded it. Carlos’s chance encounter with Amos and Sara Sternberg epitomizes this phenomenon. Though relatively unaffected by the junta, Amos and Sara are Holocaust survivors, and their past suffering convinces Carlos to “trust them with the truth” (76) and to relax into a “shared knowledge” (77). Martín, too, peppers his narrative with allusions to similar tragedies, from Hiroshima to the Vietnam War to South African Apartheid. Though this relationship to other cultures suggests tragedy’s pervasiveness, it also suggests the potential for common resistance. As the novel closes, Thornton emphasizes this potency of community: sitting together in the courtroom, the junta’s victims chant “Nunca mas!” (212), hurrying the generals—and the junta they’ve masterminded—out of Argentina forever, with the citizens now united in their victory against the dictatorship.
Memory and Imagination as Resistance
Imagining Argentina presents an intimate look at authoritarianism, examining the junta’s aims while similarly exposing its weaknesses. At the beginning, as the generals tighten their grasp on Argentina, they present a clear objective: To guide Argentina toward a new ideal. For the generals this ideal requires a total reworking of Argentine society, so that it might exclude “socialists, democrats, communists” (91) and instead give way to an Argentina where one could travel from the “north all the way south to Tierra del Fuego” without encountering any resistance (90). In response to this threat of oppression and oblivion, Carlos and his peers learn to use memory and imagination as effective tools of resistance against the authoritarian regime.
The junta seeks to wield control through the suppression of political dissidents, using forced disappearances to engender a culture of secrecy and fear. The generals are careful to leave little record of their brutality, thereby undermining the power of recorded memory. For instance, when Carlos confronts Guzman, eager for news of Cecilia’s whereabouts, Guzman answers: “There is no record, señor. You have made a mistake” (106). Similarly, when Carlos returns home after Teresa’s disappearance, he notices that Esme and Emilia have “righted the furniture, straightened the pictures” (130) to ease his return. Though Esme and Emilia have acted kindly, Carlos interprets their gesture as an unintended symptom of the “generals’ desire to annihilate” (130). For the generals, the cover-up is just as crucial as the crime. As Carlos soon realizes, the generals tread a delicate balance, seeking destruction without the interference of consequence. When the junta falters, and international attention shifts toward Argentina, many Argentinians confront this, too, fearful that the generals might destroy evidence and thereby evade justice.
In response, Carlos unleashes his most powerful weapons: Memory and imagination. In the face of denials, forced disappearances, and scrubbed records, the ability to imagine and remember confers a remarkable power. Sitting in his garden amongst his petitioners, Carlos listens for the “word or image” able to “link the speaker’s pain to his imagination” (88). Empowered by such imagination, Carlos often describes the sexual violence, electrocution, and mutilation that attends the victims’ detention, contributing to a collective memory that thwarts the generals’ elaborate cover-up.
The community, too, soon embraces this potential of memory and imagination, especially in the courtroom. As part of its case, the prosecution invites victims to the witness stand, including an “old woman pointing a shaking finger” and a “teenaged boy […] on crutches” (211). Listening to these testimonies and remembering their own hurts, the onlookers understand “what had been done” (211). Consequently, the generals are sentenced to prison, and as they exit the courtroom, the crowd chants “Nunca mas!” or “never again!” (212)—a rousing mantra that signals a commitment to memory, imagination, and anti-authoritarianism.
The Lasting Impact of Art and Writing
In taking a close look at the nature of time and memory, the novel also explores the idea of mortality and what it means to have a lasting impact on posterity. Ultimately, Imagining Argentina suggests that art and writing settle this tension, enabling ideas, names, and experiences to endure forever.
In the midst of the junta’s brutality, life is especially fragile. Confronted by the senselessness of the junta’s violence and the ease with which the generals target their victims, Carlos begins to understand his own vulnerability. During his trip to the seaside, swimming out way past the shore, a vision of the generals troubles Carlos’s resolve. Sensing the “heaviness of his limbs” (169), Carlos nearly sinks to the ocean’s floor. Though he ultimately resists, Carlos realizes how “close he had come” (169) to accepting his own death. As the junta begins to collapse, and as Argentina begins to consider a lasting justice, this glimpse of Carlos’s demise underscores a serious concern: Despite his visionary and intellectual gifts, Carlos is only mortal.
However, though Carlos himself might be mortal, his ideas need not be, as art and writing emerge as the most significant means of posterity. Martín, for instance, dines frequently at the Cafe Raphael, named, presumably, for the famed Italian painter whose works helped characterize the High Renaissance. Similarly, Martín frequently quotes Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, applying Borges’s own “skewed version of reality” (110) to better understand Carlos’s gift. Even though Raphael is long dead and Borges well past his prime, their artistic legacies color the characters’ perceptions and manifest in one of the novel’s major settings: Through their art, they are truly timeless.
Carlos and Cecilia similarly lean on art and writing to ensure their resistance’s perpetuity. Aiming to faithfully portray her imprisonment, Cecilia turns to writing, producing an elaborately detailed account that could easily “yield hundreds of pages” (179). In this way, she reasons, there will be a record of “what it means to live in darkness” (179). Acting with a similar intention, Carlos writes and stages The Names, in which victims’ names function as the play’s script. Carlos hopes to “keep the names alive” (122) by defying the junta by speaking the names publicly, cementing their relevance to “history” (121). Through art and writing, Cecilia’s and the victims’ stories achieve a lasting impact, transcending mortality and thwarting the generals’ mission to destroy.
It is therefore significant that Carlos’s latest effort at the novel’s close should be to adapt his reunion with Cecilia into a new play, offering a sense of “continuity” (214) between himself and succeeding generations. This way, no one will ever forget the horrors, trials, and spirit of resistance that transformed Argentina during the Dirty War.
