Laura Vázquez The impossible Biography Hector Oesterheld

8/3/2019 Laura Vázquez The impossible Biography Hector Oesterheld

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Laura Vázquez

Translation by Inés Alicia Citadino

The Impossible Biography

e title I have chosen for this essay triggers some questions. Making them explicit will be useful to steer this text further and

establish the path I expect to follow at some point.1 How can I write about Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s political, professional

and family life? Which of his itineraries will I reconstruct intentionally and which ones by chance? How can I give an account

of the crossroads of biography with history? What can I tell about his life that his own work has not yet said in itself? 2 What

are the links between individual and collective memory?3

Narration basically consists of setting up a plot and constructing the ‘place’ from which the narrator will observe the ac-

tion.4 Every piece of discourse defines itself – and its speakers as well – through a choice. is choice obviously implies that

other possibilities are omitted or set aside. As far as I am concerned, I believe that writing about Héctor Oesterheld’s life and

work is impossible. Or rather, it is perfectly possible. It is possible to do so in a thousand different ways, but all the versions

taken together will not suffice to explain and compose his life experience, i.e. those versions that address the relationship

between politics and fiction, between imaginary creation – his own world – and his fascination with ideology, in his capacity

as an activist. It is therefore important that I warn the reader beforehand about this essay’s advantages and disadvantages.

e disadvantages are manifold, to tell you the truth. Drawing up this biography will only partially reconstruct Oesterheld’s

career. An exhaustive overview of his enormous influence on the medium of comics is not to be expected. I will not offer a

detailed description of his works and contributions to Argentina’s graphic media, nor am I interested in recounting his inter-

action with drawers and editors. e reader will not be presented with information about Oesterheld’s private life, or more

details about his connections with the Montonero guerrilla group, details which already have been made public.

e advantage then: this work is presented as fictional from the outset. It has no intention other than to state that the crazy attempt to clearly describe Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s life has been, at least for me and from the very beginning, an impos-

sible task. At some point in the story, Oesterheld’s life becomes incredible. Incidentally, I initially set out to interpret the facts

of a life but I found myself shiing the objective over and over again. I feel that the script writer’s image is more powerful than

his comics, at least from a local perspective.5 And I ask myself: why not forget this Oesterheld altogether? And my reply is:

because what most attracts me to him is that he has turned into a commonplace.

As he seems so unavoidable, how could I not feel tempted by the exercise of memory and historic reification?6 How will I

manage to give an account of his history knowing beforehand that “history will never tell us what happens in an author’s inner

self while he is writing”? (Barthes 1992:177). is is the dilemma that haunts me incessantly: how will I talk about a writer of

comics who ‘disappeared’ during the last military dictatorship? Will I speak of his private life, revealing his secret passions?

Will I retrace his activities as a Montonero militant?7 Will I put his work on show? I am afraid that the parts of this essay will

never make a whole. is puzzle will always have some pieces missing. A plausible hypothesis is that history and fiction are

intimately intertwined. One of their purposes is, perhaps, to mould possible worlds, which does not mean real or probable

worlds.8 And Oesterheld’s story is fictional in this sense too. In the following section of this essay, I will recount some of the

difficulties I encountered while writing this biography. Going over some of these issues, a number of conclusions will become

apparent.

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Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biographywww.camouflagecomics.com

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Life and Work

e intellectual and literary tendencies in Argentina during the last military dictatorship9 should not be divided into being

‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the conflict (I must note that comic strips and cartoons are neither an intellectual nor a literary prod-

ucts).10 is division merely illustrates the dictatorship’s success in breaking up and overriding the cultural field. Widespread

critical and political writing – writing as a way to settle old scores – flourished during the early eighties. But in the Argentina

of the seventies, narrative texts – except for those studied during the period by literary critics, and in communication and

cultural analyses – were controlled at the institutional level. e comic book market, due to its massive and popular character,

underwent the same surveillance. However, there were exceptions: some literary works, texts and comics eluded repression.

Some song lyrics, theatre scripts and novels managed to escape as well. But those gaps in Government power which allowed

other voices to be heard were just occasional flukes and do not reflect a systematic defiance of official authority.11 What I mean

to say is that there were no free spaces because censorship was at its most radical in that period, and the fact that some works

had outwitted authorities – through clandestine publications, articles in social science magazines with limited circulation or

material by exiled artists – does not mean, in contrast to what certain academic publications of the transitional period main-

tain, that the dictatorship was not absolutely effective in imposing its culture of fear. Even when it was not able to control

everything, the level of control was enough to establish a system of effective coercion and domination.12 e critique evinced

by intellectuals and artists was formulated metaphorically and remained within certain margins, through texts and carefully

planned marked by an agonizing double meaning. ese were broken and irregular voices; the symptoms of a suffocating

society.13

e dictatorship, through its imposition of state terror, deleted all free oppositional spaces. As a consequence, the produc-

tion of comics brought out only a few critical or disruptive works.14 Interestingly, these few expressions appeared in different

types of publications because they were created by authors who embraced different ideological points of view, artistic styles

and writing strategies. Summing up, there were few possibilities for comic strips during the dictatorship, but the alternative




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works that existed may be found in a wide array of media, ranging from the most popular to less widely read publications. 15

Now we could make four lists of writers –even though the word list has terrible connotations in Argentine society: four lists

comprising those who stayed and fought by means of their writing, those who joined the armed struggle and survived, those

who died and those who had to – or chose to – live in exile. However, I believe that such lists add nothing that might help us

understand the nuances differentiating personal experience from historical events.

e first problem that emerges upon writing Oesterheld’s biography is that the author’s name should appear in each list,

except the list of exiled. ere is also the hypothesis that the military kidnapped and killed intellectuals and writers, not be-

cause of what they wrote but because of what they did when they were not writing. is logic could be used to explain why

Rodolfo Walsh, Paco Urondo, Haroldo Conti, Raymundo Gleyzer, Enrique Raab and Hector Germán Oesterheld, amongst

many others, ‘disappeared’. What I mean to indicate is that the singular and unique stature of script writers – as paradigmatic

figures – seems arbitrary if we omit that they were part of a peculiar relationship between politics and literature – or between

the militant and the intellectual – which marked the Argentina of the sixties and seventies.16 In Claudia Gilman’s words:

e sixties/seventies was a period with its own historical significance with a more or less precise limit, sepa-

rating it from the previous and following years. is period is surrounded by thresholds that entitle it to be

considered as a temporal-conceptual entity (Gilman 2003: 36).

An ‘instrumental’ view on writing tends to put an author’s life and work on the same level, as if these were watertight distinc-

tions. Are you really what you write? Do you coincide with what you say? Possible answers to these queries are debatable,

to say the least. e thought that the scriptwriter Oesterheld ‘was destined’ to become a revolutionary seems wrong to me. I

also disagree with the view that Oesterheld’s comics, which were not exactly ‘naive’, sealed his fate. People who support this

thesis do not take into account the patterns of identity of that period and the intellectuals’ self-criticism. e childish belief

that Héctor ‘lived his life as if it were one of his scripts’ and that his scripts ‘reflected his life’ only helps those who do not




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want, or are not able to recognize an important fact: Oesterheld joined a revolutionary political project because he believed

in it, because he was sure that his sacrifice could change the world. He did not see his decision as an adventure or as one

of his comic heroes’ adventures. I do not think that Oesterheld considered himself to be hero. His position was that of the

omniscient narrator: he saw himself as one who ‘watches and tells,’ not as someone who ‘acts’. is is the same role he gave to

character-narrators such as Ezra Winston in Mort Cinder , Jubilado Luna in Sherlock Time, Caleb in Ticonderoga or himself in

El Eternauta who are all narrator-witnesses to the real heroes.

I believe Oesterheld felt that he was carrying out an inspirational task: he was the chronicler of a heroic gesture (that of the

Montoneros): by means of his comics he wanted to put into words the effectiveness of the party and the success of the revo-

lutionary will. A story he would never be able to tell. From this position he tried to change reality, which does not mean ‘to

step out of’ reality. e politicizing of literature has a long history (since Zola became the paradigm for the intellectual-writer

as critic, towards the end of the nineteenth century). For a committed author, words mean action: “the writer who composes

a novel is a writer, but if he speaks about torture in Algeria, then he is an intellectual” (Morin 1960: 35). Nevertheless, one

should question whether ‘intellectual’ is the right term to define a scriptwriter of comics. In the present essay, of course,

Oesterheld is considered an intellectual figure of his times. In 1968, Oesterheld wrote an original comic script for Enrique

Lipszyc’s book La Historieta Mundial .17 In it, he recounted, sequence by sequence, his own life up to the moment when his

own editorial company reached its greatest success. is autobiographical script illustrates the author’s ironic approach to life

and work:

24 Bottom: us the hero reaches literary glory and, at the same time, significantly improves his financial

situation: he quits the publishing house he had wished for so long to forget about...

25 Down: ...And he starts working at the newspaper La Prensa as a copy editor, earning four times the salary

he used to get. Six hours, from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. Now he can study... and take his girlfriend to the pictures

with the tickets they give him at the newspaper!




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26: e hero goes with his girlfriend for a walk along tree-lined roads with old country houses. e most

romantic autumn scene; leaves twirling and falling.

Bottom: Both fortune and his girlfriend accompany the hero; he passes his exams at the University, gets a job

in tune with his career: leaves La Prensa and starts working at a mining laboratory.

27 Semi close-up of O. dressed in an overall, pounding a bag of minerals to powder with a grinder; a serious

expression on his face, powder, a shed, machine noise.

Bottom: It’s heavy work, but O. finds the necessary time to keep on studying, to keep on taking his girlfriend

to the cinema, to keep on writing...

If Oesterheld’s life and work were a continuum, that is to say, if he really translated his political thought into his work – an

assessment that should be analyzed in detail – he did not do so in order to use his comics as a ‘weapon’: he did it with the

purpose of transferring his world view into his comics.18 He wrote political scripts for both the Montoneros’ weekly, El Des-

camisado (the comic strip Latinoamérica y el Imperialismo. 450 Años de Guerra was published in the Montoneros’ weekly

between 1973 and 1974) and for Gente, a magazine clearly favorable to the Junta.19

It is remarkable that Oesterheld was hired between 1970 and 1975 by the publisher Columba to do a job that was com-

pletely new to that company.20 In 1969 Oesterheld wrote a new version of El Eternauta (this time illustrated by Alberto Brec-

cia), at the request of the publishing house Atlántida.21 Oesterheld agreed to write the script, and in issue 201 of the magazine

Gente the new comic appeared. It was immediately rejected by the magazine’s readership, which is why the story was cancelled

in issue no. 217, which also included a letter of apology from the publisher. A second part was to be published in 1976 – this

time with drawings by Francisco Solano López, the same illustrator as in the original version of 195722 – on the request of

Record Publishing, where Oesterheld was employed at the time he went missing. On the subject of invasion he also wrote La

Guerra de los Antartes in 1970, with drawings by León Napo (Monghiello Ricci), published in Dos Mil Uno magazine, which

was edited by Alejandro Vignatti.23 On 22 February 1974, a second version of La Guerra de los Antartes was published with




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drawings by Gustavo Trigo in the newspaper Noticias, but the series was cancelled when the police closed the newspaper of-

fice by executive order.24

Oesterheld had already been exceptionally active in political narrative. Examples include La Vida del Che of 1968, illus-

trated by Enrique and Alberto Breccia, which was followed a couple of years later by Evita: Vida y Obra de Eva Perón (1970),

illustrated by Alberto Breccia. But his scripts were not enough to make him a militant. He would reach the people by other

means. Although Oesterheld was convinced that the main function of comics was to enhance social consciousness and at the

same time to entertain, at some point along his personal trajectory this role made him uncomfortable. What I mean is that his

comics had succeeded in questioning the dichotomy ‘art versus popular culture’, while they had not been so effective so as to

cast doubt on the problematic relation between politics and the masses.25 He then decided to link more closely to his people

by forging a relationship that went further than the one offered through the interaction between his daily comics and his

readers. In order to achieve this purpose, he chose to join the excluded and became a Peronist, even if he did not particularly

want to.26 is is why, in my opinion, his work as scenarist does not suffice to understand his political decisions, nor do his

fictions help me in the reconstruction of his biography, which is also part of a historical period. e result is not satisfactory

because it ignores what Oesterheld’s political clandestineness was all about. What he felt. What happened at the crossroads.

e contradictions within. If I could ask him something I would like to know why he, who had sacrificed everything for his

job as a comics scriptwriter, subsequently could sacrifice his writing for a political project.27 When and how did he make this

decision?28

On the other hand, his ‘late entrance’ into militancy – he was 58 when he was killed – seems to bespeak motives other than

merely political or ideological. Nobody could understand why an ‘old man like him’ was ‘tempted’ by the Montoneros’ activi-

ties, especially because an ‘old man like him’ had many better things to do than get ‘caught’ by a violent passion: a peaceful life

and solid career.29 Many times I have heard that there is a ‘before and aer’ in Héctor Oesterheld’s life. While young people

make political and ideological decisions based on passion and life, also in terms of a revolutionary future, in Oesterheld’s case

these options were closed.




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So I ask myself once again: did anything happen ‘in the middle’ that made things change their ‘normal’ course?30 is ques-

tion leads me to the problematic link between Oesterheld’s affiliation with a political group and his family ties.31 Were family

ties stronger than political ones? Another question I ask myself: why do I need to resort to his emotional life as a means of

reconstructing his political life? I mean, why do the stories about his past experiences constantly mix up the historical and the

personal? Why jumble not only political but also emotional aspects, not only militancy but also friendship, not only historicaland public events but also his home routines and the framework of his personal relations? Is there any biographical signifi-

cance in pointing out that Héctor used to mow the lawn, that his daughters were beautiful and that they were good students,

that his house in Beccar32 was warm and comfortable?33 Once again, emotional and private matters are intermingled with

history. Talking about Oesterheld’s life is not the same thing as talking about his work. But his life and historical facts do not

match completely either. Life is always more than the sum of facts.

To grasp the whole meaning of a life, either Oesterheld’s or anyone else’s, is impossible even in terms of an autobiography.

Memory is as dubious as this essay. What Oesterheld might have said about himself would have helped us to reach the truth,

of course. But he would not have been able to be objective about himself, and thus the truth would never be known. We might

have felt a bit more content, though. Luckily, Oesterheld is somehow present to remind us that historical facts are cyclical, that

an exception (such as the snow of 1918) is always more than the mere proof that there is a rule.34 In the preface to the first part

of El Eternauta, published by Record Press in the sixties, Héctor Germán Oesterheld talks about his work:

I have always been fascinated by Robinson Crusoe. I got that book when I was a little child; I must have read

it at least twenty times. El Eternauta was, from the start, my own version of Robinson. A man who feels lonely,

who is a prisoner, surrounded, not by the sea but in his case by death. Nevertheless, El Eternauta was not an

isolated man but a sociable person who had a family, friends. at is the reason for the truco 35 game, for the

small family sleeping in the detached house at Vicente López,36 unable to imagine the oncoming invasion. at

was the beginning. e rest... the rest followed naturally, the same as how everyday life constitutes itself – or

so we think.




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On the Use of Interviews

In order to write this biography, I used different contacts, people that Oesterheld had known personally, from work or intel-

lectual debates and exchanges. ese people talked to me about the author and thereby helped me to at least endow the writer

with a ‘biographical body’. e people I interviewed – sitting quietly, far removed from the frenzy and anxiety of the past

– made an ‘imaginary journey’. But this journey did not consist of a shi in time from an old world to a new one: in this casethe travelers felt ‘suspended’: proximity and distance became blurred. e persons interviewed knew that their journey to the

past, the duty they had taken upon themselves by offering their testimony, would not present them with any conclusive an-

swers.37 e questions I asked myself during the interviews were: who is this person I am interviewing, is it someone speaking

about his or her memories or is it someone re-creating a particular moment? What are the episodes or anecdotes he or she

chooses and what are the things he or she discards? What is he or she leaving out?

Some of these people told me about Héctor: his everyday duties, his domestic life. Others told me about Oesterheld: his

professionalism in writing comics, his profound intellectualism, his encyclopedic knowledge, his humanistic beliefs. Not

surprisingly though, the value of these stories lies in their power to confirm old certainties: the people I interviewed – Oester-

held’s friends, relatives, colleagues; they all repeated the same opinions and phrases over and over. e answers were friendly,sympathetic; they offered me memories that surfaced ‘gently’ without provocation or confusion. e only problem was that

Oesterheld’s story could only be understood when grounded in a historical context.

In any case, what really counts is that the persons I interviewed were marked by the present, which also determined what

events they remembered from the past and how they remembered them. Regarding experiences, their transmission and

variations of social memory, Hugo Vezzetti argues that memory

is not immune to time. If we talk about a mind that goes back to the past from the present, we should take into

account that in Argentina, from 1983 onwards, the re-created perspective in the present is constantly moving

(Vezzetti, 2002: 191).




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Consequently, facts are mixed with fiction and create a myth.38 Politics and life on the one side, but also emotional and profes-

sional matters on the other, make all possibilities of coherence, order or wholeness impossible for narratives such as these. I

know that the ‘whole’ I was able to construct is made of biographical traces and accidental choices (“wholeness is just fake,”

Adorno said). is piece of writing has a historical shape, but it is not Oesterheld’s true story. It cannot be his true story be-

cause I cannot prove its accuracy. And that is all. My hypothesis is that the people I interviewed knew that they were compos-

ing a biography: they saw it as a task; as a necessity in some cases, as a command in others. 39 But all of them co-operated; all

of them wanted to add pieces to the puzzle, to put together the pieces of a broken mirror whose image can never be restored.

Stubbornly, perhaps, they also wanted to understand and clarify why what happened had happened. One single question

guided all their accounts: “What should we do with the past?” Oesterheld’s persona seems to be surrounded by ‘mystery’, by the necessity to explain (to oneself) things that, to a certain extent, are inexplicable.

Héctor Germán Oesterheld was born on 23 July 1919. e records mention 27 April 1977 as the day he was kidnapped. Ac-

cording to different sources it happened in La Plata, but there is no definite agreement on this. Eduardo Arias, the Argentine

to see Oesterheld alive, and who reports that the latter was ‘in a terrible condition’, declared that Oesterheld was imprisoned at

least until January of 1978 (García y Ostuni, 2002: 140). Héctor is thought to have died in Mercedes, a town near Buenos Aires

City, within the first four months of 1978. Only his wife, Elsa Sánchez de Oesterheld, and his two grandsons, Fernando and

Martín Mórtola Oesterheld, survived (cf. Bordel 2002). Oesterheld was kidnapped and shot during the last military dictator-

ship, the self-styled ‘Process of National Re-organization’. He was imprisoned in the military barracks of Campo de Mayo and

La Tablada. Together with his four daughters, Estela, Beatriz, Marina and Diana, and his sons-in-law, he belongs to the thirty

thousand gone missing in Argentina between 1976 and 1983.

We could think that all might have ended differently: ‘ if only he had not gone to that appointment,’ ‘if only he had not been

a militant’, ‘if only a few of his daughters had survived’, ‘if only he had been younger... or old enough,’ ‘if only his wife had loved

him differently... or not loved him at all’, ‘if only that shanty town had not been so close to his house in the beautiful quarter

of Beccar’, ‘if only his daughters had kept on going to private schools’, ‘if only he had been a bit more indifferent or a bit less

bold’ and, at last, ‘if only he had not been touched by the sign of the times...’.

But fatal coincidences contain the traces of destiny, a destiny that Oesterheld, in my opinion, never tried to avoid.




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Notes

1 I will surely return to these questions in my doctoral thesis about Argentinean comics (directed by Dr. Mirta Varela), which I am writing at present forthe School for Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), supported by a scholarship from the CONICET (National Council of Scientificand Technical Research).

2 Beyond the well known argument concerning the multiple modes of interaction between both types of narrative and due to the narrative condition they both share, fiction seems to step over historical bounds and establishes itself as an area of debate and confrontation. About the controversy raised by therelationship between fiction and history, see Balderston et al. (1987).

3 Collective memory and individual memory pose different problems and have different features. It is not the intention of this work to give an accountof the extensive research carried out on these processes. However, it is necessary to point out that the distinctions between memory and history havedominated a considerable amount of research on collective memory (Nora, 1984; Yehushalmi, 1984; Halbwachs, 1997). In the same way, the differencesestablished by some authors between memory and truth and/or memories and imagination are fundamental (Ricoeur, 1999; Schmucler, 1999).

4 at is, whether or not ‘blurring – permanently or transitory – contents and representations in order to underline, evoke or make some others recogniz-able’ (Vezzetti, 2002).

5 Paradoxically and in spite of the important place that comics have maintained within the massive field of literature, they have been treated as marginalor peripheral phenomena. Comics have not been included in literary history, probably because they are not real literature or, more suspiciously, becausethey are not “worthy enough” to be considered as literature. erefore, the argument might go, this sort of thing should be analyzed as a mere product of a cultural industry or the expression of a national system of writing at a specific historical moment.

6 In this respect it is useful to repeat the words of Andreas Huyssen (2002: 25): “we cannot discuss personal, generational or public memory withoutconsidering the new media’s enormous influence as a vehicle for memory.” Recomposing a biography by the superimposition of memories on facts is atheoretical and methodological problem. is apparent ‘dialog’ – which mixes two time-registers, i.e. the present of memory and the past of history – ad-duces several contradictions. Most of all, because images – pictures, videos, and various other sources – are seen as reinforcements of verbal testimony (this is the case of interviews, for instance) and conducive to emotional memory.

7 It is not my purpose to discuss the details and evolution of the Montonero group in this essay. I will make us of Beatriz Sarlo’s words, then, to hint atsome of the movement’s features: “Violence and sin, theology of violence and theology of sin, nothing else was needed: Montoneros came out from thishistorical crossroads between political radicalization and religious radicalization. ey were avengers, prophetic informers, martyrs of an irredeemableNation where crimes had remained unpaid: that was the real outrage’ (Sarlo 2003: 172).

8 “Although reality and fiction follow different forms of logic, at an almost miraculous point, a poetic point, they intersect: one interpretation reveals theconflict between both forms of logic and reveals that the logic proposed for reality contradicts the text logic, or that the text logic is more persuasive andconsistent than the logic attributed to reality. At this intersection, fiction is omnipotent and speaks about everything, without limits.” (Sarlo, 1995)

9 e political violence in Argentina during the seventies intensified following the confrontations within the Peronist faction. Faced with the impendingdeath of Juan Domingo Perón, extreme right-wing groups attached to power, youth organizations, workers’ unions and armed groups started a strugglethat spread to other social groups. On 24 March 1976, a military coup d’état headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla overthrew María Estela Martínez dePerón’s constitutional government and imposed a dictatorship that perfected the repressive mechanisms by means of illegal imprisonment, torture and‘disappearance’ – a cruel euphemism that attained international notoriety. In 1983 a democratic government succeeded the dictatorship.

10 e comic, due to its specificity as a graphic story, constitutes a unique type of discourse based on drawn narration. As a product of culture industry, thecomic takes part in shaping subjectivity and conforming social identities. In this aspect, it represents an active form within the cultural debates of a wholeperiod.

11 Some examples of narratives of resistance during the military dictatorship are: Respiración artificial , 1980, by Ricardo Piglia; La vida entera, 1981, by JuanCarlos Martini and Conversación al Sur , 1981, by Marta Traba. It must be stressed that all these stories originated towards the end of the dictatorship andnot during the first years of State terrorism.

12 During the period immediately following the dictatorship, which ended in 1983, attempts to disclose different aspects of recent history proliferated. Inthis context, every form of resistance to the dictatorship received special attention, either concerning alternative literary works or implied social practices.As such, phenomena such as rock music, literature and alternative magazines were foregrounded and, to a certain extent, established a breeding groundfor new movements within youth culture (Quoted from the UBACYT project paper Cultura, medios y dictadura: memorias en conflicto, directed by Dr.Mirta Varela, whose research group I participate in).

13 For a more comprehensive account, see Ficción y política. La narrativa argentina durante el proceso militar . Balderston, Daniel et al. Alianza Estudio,Buenos Aires, 1987.

14 Ideological alternatives to the dominant culture came about in popular and mass media in several, sometimes contradictory, ways. For instance, someof the comics created during the military dictatorship questioned the regime’s repressive action and confronted authoritarian rule. Nevertheless, they scarcely had any influence on subsequent intellectual and academic debates.

15 ough this does not fall within the scope of the present article, it is worth bearing in mind that, from the first critical genre analyses and formalist ten-

dencies in the seventies, a growing tension concerning medium legitimacy can be traced between narrative popularization and intellectualization. istheoretical gap played havoc with culture. While the avant-garde overcame and took the affective structures of a period further (Williams 1980: 150-158)– and, along with it, its praxis widened the gap between itself and its public – comic books, being immersed in mass culture, allowed us to examine thedifferential value of certain cultural products. From a particular historical moment, Argentine comics functioned as a constant compromise betweenmassive production and individual crasmanship. In other words, the interaction between comic book serials and independent comics transformed theinternal organization of the comic strip field.

16 Certainly, comics are not part of literature, but it is appropriate to analyze them as instances of mass media narrative and treat them as texts that managedto exist outside the norms and helped to train readers from popular sections of society.

17 Between 15 October and 15 November 1968, the First Biennial of Cartoon and Graphic Humor took place at the Di Tella Institute. e Pan AmericanSchool of Arts and the intellectuals associated with the Arts Research Center of the Institute co-operated to set up the show. Despite the times of crisis,the event attracted more than 30,000 people. Not all the visitors were readers of comics; the reasons for such public interest were manifold. e Biennialwas a massive cultural phenomenon and, more importantly, a social token of the times.

18 “It is not known for sure whether this decisive step taken by Oesterheld occurred prior to his four daughters’ (Estela, Diana, Beatriz and Marina) and hissons-in-law’s membership of the Montoneros. Never mind; all this is part of the legend created around Oesterheld’s figure, a legend that has grown alongthe years. Fleeing, living clandestinely, the permanent disruption of his life... these were all part and parcel of his everyday life, which were kept a secret.His wife utterly ignored his militancy – and perhaps her daughters’ – and so did the publishing world. Nothing seemed to have changed, in appearance,

but in fact everything had taken a U-turn” (Mora Bordel: 2002).




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19 On the publication in Gente, I quote an excerpt from an interview (Trillo and Saccomano: 1980) with Oesterheld, with Carlos Trillo joining in: “Oester-held: “El Eternauta in Gente was a failure. And it failed because it was not suitable for that magazine. At that time, I was another man. I wouldn’t be ableto do it again now. And Breccia, for his part, was another man too. Eternauta had its good and bad points. On the one hand, its literary message. On theother hand, there is its graphic message. Regarding the former I found out much later that entire paragraphs had been cut.” Trillo: “e story, I believe,was shut down by the editor. e story of that edition, I mean.” Oesterheld: ‘Indeed. e readers were sending insulting letters to the editorial housebecause they were publishing that comic. at was why we had to hasten and finish it earlier and reach the end, the outcome.’’

20 During the seventies, the concept of ‘comic’ changed, acquiring a more ‘adult’ profile. e publishing strategies vary – this was evident in the magazinespublished by Columba; the comic increasingly intermingled with other genres of mass media; the ‘national’ issues and the interaction between local andbig international publishing houses became predominant. In this period, comics adopted a more ‘serious’ style.

21 e story was spread over 17 issues, and was 50 pages long; the first issue was published on 29 May, during the Cordobazo, a popular uprising in the

Argentinian province of Córdoba directed against General Onganía’s dictatorship. Oesterheld did not ignore the political oppression.

22 El Eternauta was published for the first time on 4 September 1957, in the first issue of the magazine Hora Cero Semanal , with Editorial Frontera, and itcontinued till 1959.

23 In the same year he created the characters Artemio, a Buenos Aires Taxi Driver and Russ Congo. At that time he joined the largest and most popular comicpublishing house, Columba. ere he started writing the scripts for several serials that Columba was already publishing in some of its magazines.

24 Oesterheld, who was already working for the Montoneros’ editorial branch, used the pen name Francisco G. Vázquez.

25 His publishing house, Frontera, was the source of the “modern” national comic because its magazines, Hora Cero and Frontera were clearly detachedfrom the ‘black-or-white’ attitude prevalent at that moment. Oesterheld’s scripts were illustrated by professionals such as Hugo Pratt, Solano López,Roume, Breccia, Pavone, Haunt, Molitemi or Del Castillo. On the ‘opposite side’ was the publisher Columba which issued the comic magazines Intervalo,Fantasía and D’Artagnan. ese magazines did not compare to the intricacies of plot line and design quality of the Frontera editions. Aer Frontera’sdemise in the mid sixties, comics were no longer a privileged field for evasion and evolved in new aesthetic and thematic directions. A co-existence of theregisters of ‘high culture’ and ‘lesser culture’ was put to the fore during this period. At the same time these ‘mixed genres’ and aesthetic shis were beingdiscussed in academic and artistic circles. ese new forms of graphic and written narration came to fruition at the beginning of the eighties, exemplifiedwith the publication of the now mythical magazine Fierro (1984), by Ediciones Urraca.

26 It is useful to keep in mind Carlos Altamirano’s question: “what pushed the ‘revolutionary Christians’, or better, what had pushed some Christians towardsthe idea of a revolution? ere is probably no simple answer to this question. Identifying the facts that immediately activated a phenomenon common tomost Latin American countries seems less complicated. As regards these facts, all opinions coincide: the will to get out of the ‘besieged fortress’ originatedin the Second Vatican Council and forced people to start a dialogue with the actualities of contemporary reality.” (Altamirano 1996: 3).27 “Ambition and desire for prestige, everyone has it. When I think about my family insisting that I write a great novel... Yes, it would entail more status,I reckon. It is something completely different. For my wife and daughters, for instance, it would be different to say ‘I’m Borges’ or Sabato’s wife’ than tosay ‘I’m the wife, daughter, of a comic scriptwriter’. Personally, I feel more satisfied writing for a mass readership. But let us be realistic: not many famouswriters wrote in ideal conditions’. (Interview with Héctor Oesterheld by Carlos Trillo and Guillermo Saccomano; published in 1980).

28 It would be useful to consider Oesterheld as part of a wider movement in the literary field of his time. “During the sixties and seventies, written workswere legitimated by the parameter of politics and public space was the stage where writers gained authority and turned into intellectuals” (Gilman 2003:29).

29 Martín Mortola, Oesterheld’s grandson, recounts: “When my granddad le our home, everything got messed up: a happy home, four wonderful daugh-ters, a marriage... Do you understand?’ (HGO: 1998)

30 It might be an interesting exercise for this essay to ask ourselves about the meaning of the term extrañar (“to find strange”). In Spanish, to find somethingstrange means “to put away,” “to set aside,” “to banish”: “To find something strange is the awkward effect that something uncommon, not belonging to

us or inappropriate, has on us, or else, something that was well known to us and has now become unfamiliar and surprises us when it appears’ (iebaut2004: 12). In this case, the moments “before” and “aer” in Oesterheld’s life point to a rupture with our expectations, a breach caused by the failure of ourcognitive and emotional models. As a public figure, Oesterheld interrupts the process of identification because he represents something that was and now is not . Someone who cannot be named (who was this Oesterheld in reality?) cannot be identified.

31 We can state with certainty that Oesterheld joined the Montoneros aer at least two of his daughters had already joined the group.

32 Beccar is a district on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (translator’s note).

33 “He was a comfort-loving, easygoing man. He needed peace and calm. For instance, he would go to the garden very early in the morning to pull theweeds; he could be seen wandering about, gardening, and watering the plants in the summertime... People surely thought ‘this man must be living on hisprivate income, he does nothing’. But these were the moments when he would create his characters and his stories...” (Elsa Sánchez. HGO, 1993).

34 On 22 and 23 June 1918, snow came down for the first time ever on the city of Buenos Aires. I’d like to remind the readers that snow fell a second time onthat day in 1967, within the pages of El Eternauta. It is unlikely to snow in a city like Buenos Aires. But it did snow, believe it or not, in Buenos Aires.

35 Truco is a traditional Argentine card game played with Spanish cards (translator’s note).

36 Vicente López is a district on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (translator’s note).

37 ese words are transcribed from the documentary HGO (Stefanello and Bailo: 1993): “I can’t believe that those sons of a bitch who were crazy aboutOesterheld’s comics were the ones who would kill him in the end” (Miguel Repiso); “My life has got holes impossible to fill, because of the circumstancesmy family had to live in” (Martín Mortola); “What strange things must have gone on in that family... don’t you think?” (Marcos Lole); “ere are many questions. I would like to know what really went on too” (Hebe Naess); “is is what I wanted to ask him... Why did you do it? What did they fill yourhead with? Why did you do that? at was not how you were...” (Elsa Sánchez); “e feeling of being a survivor felt, many times, like being a traitor”(Miguel Fernández Long).

38 One might agree with the statement that a myth “exerts the highest identificatory power, it brings about identification because it is able to organize imagesthat instinctively invoke all feelings” (Sarlo, 2003: 175).

39 Hugo Vezzetti provides an enriching view on the importance of testimony and the role of the witness. See Vezzetti, 2002: 206-207.




12

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bana) (the quote is taken from the book Nunca Más, from the Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de

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G, Claudia, 2003. Entre la pluma y el fusil. Debates y dilemas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina (Buenos

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H, Andreas, 2002. En busca del tiempo perdido. Cultura y memoria en tiempos de globalización (Buenos Aires, Fondo

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Panamericana de Arte).L, Ana and Mariano Mestman, 2000. Del Di Tella a Tucumán arde (Buenos Aires: El cielo por asalto).

M B, Javier, 2002. “HGO,” Revista digital Tebeosfera http://www.tebeosfera.com

M, Edgar, 1960. “Intellectuels: critique du mythe et mythe de la critique” in Arguments n° 20, 4th semester.

O, Renato, 2002. Otro territorio. Ensayos sobre el mundo contemporáneo (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilm-

es).

S, Beatriz, 1995. Borges, un escritor en las orillas (Buenos Aires: Ariel).

_____, 2003. La pasión y la excepción (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores).

T, Carlos, 2004. La identidad extrañada. Mapas, tiempos, figuras. Boletín de estética. Publicación del Programa de

Estudios de Filosofía del Arte y la Literatura, Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Buenos Aires.

T, Carlos and Guillermo Saccomano, 1980. Historia de la historieta argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Record).

V, Hugo, 2002. Pasado y Presente. Guerra, dictadura y sociedad en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores).

W, Raymond, 1980. Marxismo y literatura ( Barcelona: Península).

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Laura Vázquez The impossible Biography Hector Oesterheld

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