Background
The ERC project “Narratives of Terror and Disappearance”, which explored the interactions between narrative structure (speculative fiction) and terror by means of forced disappearance, has yielded important insights, some of which can be generalised:
The method and social consequences of forced disappearance represent a borderline case of what is commonly described as the socio-psychological effects of the non-information and/or misinformation of relatives who have lost a loved one to an unnatural death. During the Argentine military dictatorship, misinformation and a lack of communication as to the whereabouts of the regime’s political opponents murdered on its behalf were part of the terror strategy. Both methods were used widely (up to 30,000 times between 1974 and 1979). To spread uncertainty among the population and, as a consequence, inhibit its ability to take action, was key to the dictatorship.
What the literature, newspapers, interviews with relatives, the theatre, and the neighbourhoods of the former secret prisons reveal is an enduring trauma handed down from generation to generation that affects Argentine society’s trust in elementary cultural parameters such as spatio-temporal perception and biographical continuity. Rather than classifying these phenomena exclusively as trauma, which is doubtlessly one of the most predominant diagnoses arrived at during the individual psychological treatment of the relatives, our study sought to enable multidimensional research into the narrative shape of non-knowledge as to the whereabouts of the “vanished person” and the type, manner, location and date of his/her death. To describe the peculiarities observed in this context in oral, written and visual narratives, we drew on the sociological-philosophical phenomenon called “haunting”, which allowed us to better grasp the ghostly and oxymoronic (neither present nor absent; neither dead nor living) type of being and perception associated with the experience of a disappearance that happened a long time ago.
Being haunted by unpredictable and often uncanny moments of contact with vanished family members is experienced as a nightmarish reality that is haunted by the dead, in which material objects carry the signs of long-lost bodies (bleeding walls, speaking taps, etc.) and in which all communication seems to be accompanied by a violent subtext. Instead of grieving, the relatives remain transfixed in a state of not knowing and not being acknowledged, a time loop of sorts. Individual biographical episodes no longer add up to a linear and causal series of events. There is no coherence. Narratives of self remain trapped in a fantastic narrative mode that does not allow integration into a realistic one. This, however, is precisely what needs to happen if there is any hope of overcoming the trauma. In contemporary Argentina, the relatives of the vanished enjoy no more certainty today than they did during the dictatorship. The “haunting”, and the terror of not knowing that it evokes, continue to be socially and politically relevant factors.
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