A couple of months back, I finally broke a long-held duck. Emerging
from a metaphorical cork-lined room and real decade-long grapple with the recondite philosophy of
Monsieurs Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I actually went and did what an
academic is supposed to do, and gave a conference paper. Mental, eh? This paper
I gave bore the deliberately grandiose title of ‘The Text as
“Desiring-machine”: Minoritarian History in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s La novela de Perón’, something I mention
only to indicate what a colossal waste of time it all was (I mean, I could have
been doing something useful, maybe even something ‘scientific’, like designing
more efficient ways to murder people ‘legitimately’, or synthesizing medicines whose
prohibitive costs further cement the deprivation of a health underclass – one
to which I belong, incidentally).
Anyway, it was during the course of the Conference of the
Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) that I attended
a plenary session on the topic of the Falklands-Malvinas Conflict in which Professor
Bernard McGuirk, internal examiner of my (still-unmarked) doctoral thesis, held
a ‘conversation’ with Major Mike Seear, commander of the troops that carried
out the southern pincer movement that took Tumbledown in the advance on Port
Stanley, which turned out to be the war’s final battle.
With Professor McGuirk having himself established,
personally, a now well-respected research body within the University of
Nottingham called The Centre for Post-Conflict Studies, he also undertook one
of its major projects, spending five years researching the (surprisingly
scanty) literature on the events. The result, Falklands-Malvinas: An Unfinished Business, combines McGuirk’s
equally astute and delicate commentaries – sprinkled liberally with high theory,
of course – with fragments of prose and poems, in part or in full.
But Falklands-Malvinas (and yes, both McGuirk and Seear
agree that this is the best name for
it, signalling – appropriately for the Centre’s ethos – a desire for reconciliation and understanding, one
that has been tenaciously sought by these two men and tentatively embarked upon
by Seear’s one-time adversaries from Argentina) was not about literature, much
less about theory. Not principally. Not then, anyway.
As with all wars, it was about blood and death; and it was
about resources. (Very few wars are
about principles, of course, even though they are invariably packaged that way;
it is only when a belligerent’s “principles” are indicators of them denying
future access to resources that our “principles”
are invoked as jus ad bellum: a just
cause for war.)
Much as I found it difficult – indeed, I squirmed in my seat,
literally – to reconcile Seear’s starchy,
almost cold-blooded professional militarism (essentially, his complete
subjugation to the demands of the
British State, a true cog in the machine) with his desire to orchestrate a
reconciliation of the soldiers who fought on those wind-pummelled South
Atlantic rocks, it was nevertheless fascinating to hear from this embodiment of
apolitical military discipline about the
political difficulties that both he
and McGuirk had faced in trying to engineer a reunion between ex-combatants.
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| Major Mike Seear meets Thatcher at the launch of Hors de Combat |
Not
only is El caso Malvinas still a very,
very raw affair in Argentina, associated as it is, perhaps rightly, with
colonial occupation, but the Falklanders themselves have stymied any attempts
to organize a rapprochement on the islands. As for those unemployed working-class
Brits whose restiveness the war was partially designed to pacify, the aggression-quelling
effects of the triumph were compensated for – and then some – by Maradona’s goal in the Azteca Stadium.
Why the need for – and resistance to – such a face-to-face
reconciliation? Isn’t it all done and dusted, that war, and thus best left in
the past? Haven’t the mental wounds long since healed over? It would seem not,
whence the penultimate word in the
title of McGuirk’s book: Unfinished…
Forensic psychiatry recognizes the irreducible connection
between trauma and locale: the intended ‘reunion’ on the Falklands/Malvinas was
designed to exorcise demons that, in the post-traumatic stress complexes
afflicting the veterans, are profoundly connected to the terrain, the
territory. If you will forgive my own diversion into theoretical abstraction, they
are what Monsieurs Deleuze and Guattari would call territorializations, a concept implying above all else a repeated
site for the investment of desire, or fantasy (irrespective of how pleasurable
or painful they may be…and in masochism, of course, the two are so deeply
intertwined as to be indistinguishable). Honey traps; pleasure prisons.
By far the most shocking thing to these ears in Major
Seear’s paper was the following fact: that the numbers of ex-combatants on both
sides who had succumbed to their suicidal urges – still evidently strong so
many years after the gunboats had left the Falklands beyond their visible
horizon – had now surpassed the aggregate figure of those who had died in
battle. A total of 906 soldiers perished in the seventy-four day long war: 649
Argentines and 257 from the British forces. One can easily understand this
phenomenon afflicting the losing side; the ‘shame’ of defeat and tales of
veterans being shunned by their country are familiar to us from dozens of Vietnam
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| British soldiers' reunion at Tumbledown, 2007 |
Thus, the subject of the paper was the post-traumatic stress
disorder felt keenly on both sides, a condition that united the soldiers in a
profound way and one that is scarcely comprehensible to politicians. (As a
perhaps indirect consequence of the war, Seear’s marriage and private life
collapsed amidst nervous breakdown, and he moved to Norway
 |
| President Leopoldo Galtieri |
Anyway, Professor McGuirk’s efforts at reconciliation – specifically,
holding a conference at the University in November 2006 – were not straightforward.
The demeanour of the British officers bore a certain unintentional authority
that their Argentine counterparts, often drawn from the lower middle-classes, in
large part lacked, the initially mute encounter thus doing little, albeit unconsciously,
to smooth out any lingering friction. Nevertheless, amidst this awkwardness, a
peculiar solidarity was crystallized as the two sides exchanged stories of that
cold, unforgiving night of 13 June. 1982.
Offering particular succour, and ultimately leading to a
breakthrough, a thawing of the tension, was the British officers’ detailed explanation
of the meticulous preparation that the Ghurkhas and Scots Guardsmen had
undergone for the battle, preparation borne of a deep respect they had for
their opponent. Finally garnering respect for their courage and their efforts –
something they had not adequately received from the political class that sent
them, underprepared and under-resourced, to fight – meant the world to them. Indeed,
it would be no exaggeration to claim that such recognition was a matter of life
and death…
Earlier, I said that the war was not about literature. Not
then, it wasn’t. Then it was about
oil and fish (whence the final word
in McGuirk’s book’s title); it was also about ‘pride’ and perhaps about the
tangible uneasiness that ‘one’ feels on one’s skin if, like Schopenhauer’s
porcupines, an undesired other is getting just a little too close – in sum, it
was about commerce and desire: political economy and libidinal economy.
We know that in the matter of war it is a universal rule
that it is best not to listen to the exhortations of politicians. Perhaps,
then, it is better to recollect, in quiet contemplation, the wisdom of a literature
that reminds us again and again and again that international wars are always a
game of chess between elites (Kings, Queens, Knights, Bishops and their modern
analogues), elites who may or may not be identical with sovereign States, who
may express transnational
organizations and interests, and for whom patriotism is merely a vehicle for rabble-rousing
and/or suppressing, as the situation dictates. And in this game, the pawns
captured en passant will be the Joe
Bloggs (the Juan Lópezes and John Wards) of the smart bomb-fodder masses.
At the end of Seear and McGuirk’s conversation, the latter –
having pointed up the fishing and oil interests that Thatcher’s government had
there (Falklanders are the richest, per capita, in the sovereign British territories)
– captured this oft-repeated but never hackneyed sentiment with a reading of
one of the few works written by a major author that appeared in the immediate
aftermath of the Falklands-Malvinas conflict: Jorge Luis Borges’s magnificent poem,
‘Juan López and John Ward’.
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| Jorge Luis Borges |
Juan López and John Ward
It was their fate to live in a strange time.
The planet had been carved up among various
countries,
each one provided with loyalties, cherished
memories,
with a past undoubtedly heroic, with rights,
with grievances,
with its own mythology, with forebears in
bronze, with anniversaries,
with demagogues and with symbols.
Such an arbitrary division was favourable to
war.
López had been born in the city next to the
motionless river;
Ward, in the outskirts of the city through which
Father Brown had walked.
He had studied Spanish in order to read Quixote.
The other professed a love of Conrad, revealed
to him in a classroom in Viamonte Street
They might have been friends, but they saw each
other just once
face to face, on islands only too well known,
and each of them was Cain, and each one, Abel.
They were buried together. Snow and corruption
know them.
The story I tell happened in a time we cannot
understand.
Jorge Luis Borges
Clarín,
26 August 1982
--------
Juan López y John Ward
Les tocó en suerte
una época extraña,
El planeta había sido
parcelado en distintos países, cada uno provisto
de lealtades, de
queridas memorias, de un pasado sin duda heroico,
de derechos, de
agravios, de una mitología peculiar, de próceres de bronce,
de aniversarios, de
demagogos y de símbolos.
Esa división, cara a
los cartógrafos, auspiciaba las guerras.
López había nacido en
la ciudad junto al río inmóvil.
Ward, en las afueras
de la ciudad por la que caminó Father Brown.
Había estudiado
castellano para leer el Quijote.
El otro profesaba el
amor de Conrad, que le había sido revelado
en un aula de la
calle Viamonte.
Hubieran sido amigos,
pero se vieron una sola vez cara a cara, en unas islas
demasiado famosas, y
cada uno de los dos fue Caín, y cada uno, Abel.
Los enterraron
juntos. La nieve y la corrupción los conocen.
El hecho que refiero
pasó en un tiempo que no podemos entender.
