A Reader on Reading

•Menem’s revisionist attempt is not original. One of the earliest instances of perfecting the present by erasing the tensions of the past took place in the year 213 B.c., when the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi ordered that every book in his realm be thrown into the fire so as to destroy all traces (as one legend has it) of his mother’s adultery. But no deed, however monstrous or trivial, can ever be abolished once committed — not even by a Chinese emperor, even less by an Argentinean president. This is the adamantine law of our life. The immutability of the past does not depend on the volubilities of government, nor on cravings for revenge or for diplomacy. No deed can be undone. It can be pardoned, but the pardon must come from the offended person and from no one else if it is to have any emotional validity. Nothing changes in the deed itself after a pardon: not the circumstances, not the gravity, not the guilt, not the wound. Nothing except the relationship between the torturer and the victims, when the victims reaffirm their sovereignty, “not weighing our merits,” as the Book of Common Prayer has it, “but by pardoning our offences.” Pardon is the victim’s prerogative, not the torturer’s right—and this Menem’s government and his supporters, such as Vargas Llosa, have apparently forgotten.

•The pardon granted by a victim — the dripping quality of mercy— has no bearing on the mechanics of justice. Pardon does not change or even qualify the act, which will cast its shadow forward, throughout eternity, into every new present. Pardon does not grant oblivion. But a trial, according to the laws of society, can at least lend the criminal act a context; the law can contain it, so to speak, in the past so that it no longer contaminates the future, standing at a distance as a reminder and a warning. In a mysterious way, the application of a society’s laws is akin to a literary act: it fixes the criminal deed on a page, defines it in words, gives it a context which is not that of the sheer horror of the moment but of its recollection. The power of memory is no longer in the hands of the criminal; now it is society itself that holds that power, writing the chronicle of its own wicked past, able at last to rebuild itself not over the emptiness of oblivion but over the solid, recorded facts of the atrocities committed. This is a long, dreary, fearful, agonizing process, and the only possible one. This sort of healing always leaves scars.

•Menem’s amnesty, bowing to the demands of acknowledged murderers and torturers, has postponed the healing for what appears to be a very long time. As it stands today, since all the torturers and murders in the military regime have not been brought to justice, Argentina is a country bereft of rights: its right to social justice ignored, its right to moral education invalidated, its right to moral authority forfeit. The need to “carry on,” the need to “reconcile differences,” the need to “allow the economy to flourish once again” have all been invoked by Menem and his successors as good reasons for forgiving and forgetting. Supported by literate voices such as that of Vargas Llosa, Menem apparently believed that history could be paid off; that the memory of thousands of individuals like my friend from school could be left to yellow on forgotten shelves in dim bureaucratic offices; that the past could be recovered without expenditure of effort, without making official amends, without redemption.

While waiting for the act of justice now denied, the victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship can still hope for another, older form of justice — less evident, but in the end longer-lasting. The maze of a politician’s mind has seldom held the promise of redemption, but that of a gifted writer is almost exclusively built on such a promise, and in spite of Auden’s dictum, it allows no forgetting.

Thanks to certain books (a catalogue too long and personal to be of use here), both the torturers and their victims may know that they were not alone, unseen, unassailable. Justice, beyond the requirements of literary conventions that demand a happy ending is in some essential way our common human bond, something against which we can all measure ourselves. As the old English law has it, justice must not only be done but be seen to be done.

Auden’s lack of confidence in the writer’s ability to change the world is apparently a modern perception. Robert Graves noted that the Irish and Welsh distinguished carefully between poets and satirists: the poet’s task was creative or curative, that of the satirist was destructive or noxious, and both changed the course of worldly events. Even nature was supposed to bow to Orpheus’s words, and Shakespeare recalled the power of the Irish bards, “rhyming rats to death;” in the seventh century, the great Senchan Torpeist, having discovered that rats had eaten his dinner, slaughtered ten on the spot by uttering a verse that began:

Rats have sharp snouts

Yet are poor fighters.