Mapping Invisibility: Subverting Continental Desire in Contemporary Malvinas War Fiction

This article examines Patricio Pron's Una puta mierda (2007) and Patricia Ratto's Trasfondo (2012), two fictions dealing with the 1982 Malvinas War, fought between Argentina and Great Britain. Taking a more distanced position with respect to the conflict, these novels depict an invisible war by dislocating the islands geographically and historically, thereby erasing them from the characters' cartographic and temporal grasp. First, I contend that previous Argentine literature has performed a mapping function in relation to the islands. By representing the war and intervening in the sociopolitical debates around it, literature inscribed onto the islands a continental driven history. Second, I argue that, contrary to their predecessors, Una puta mierda and Trasfondo disarticulate such an inscription by depicting the Malvinas as territories that resist the imposition of language, cartographic location, and History. The emphasis on invisibility restores their status as politically isolated territories, no longer bound to a national or continental history. In both novels, political debates concerning the war and sovereignty over the islands give way to new aesthetic and political preoccupations. Rejecting nationalist associations, Pron's and Ratto's Malvinas become figures of radical isolation that refuse to be subjected to continental desire.