The Infinite and the Intimate: Tununa Mercado’s Monumental Ruins and Scales of Memory

• In Event: Representing the Violent Past from a Postmemorial Position in Argentina and Peru

Abstract

In a 1993 essay “Piedra de honda,” Argentine author and journalist Tununa Mercado returns from exile to face an Argentine landscape transformed by memories of violence and dictatorship. In this piece, read at the inauguration of the monument to the “disappeared” of Villa María Córdoba, Reloj de Sol, the author imagines breaking down the very rocks that compose the memorial, fragmenting the “monumental” memory they represent. Building off the work of James Young and Michael Rothberg, this presentation will map the complex relationship between the spatial and the textual, and explore the multidirectional nature of the memories represented in Mercado’s work; I argue that her fictional space provides a kind of “testing ground” by which it is possible to think through scales of trauma and post-memory. Mercado, who describes her writing as one that is particularly attune to the “aesthetics of the small,” allows the reader to imagine a kind of memory that constantly resists codification –one that “cracks open” each time it is encountered: “¿La novela va a ser la forma de representar una historia que entreabre cada vez que se la roza?” (Narrar Después, 2003;144). I argue that it is through this aesthetics of the small that Mercado is able to begin to map a more nuanced picture of memory work in the space of post-dictatorial Argentina, as well as its relationship to a globalized network of memories of trauma and violence.

Author

• Katharine G Trostel