McGuirk-The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict in the Political Cartoon

It Breaks Two to Tangle

Re-construction/Re-disruption of Social Realities

The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict in the Political Cartoon

From Humor to The If… Chronicles

Bernard McGuirk

University of Nottingham

So while in many respects this conflict still

stands out as the last war of a past imperial era,

in others it can now be recognized as the first of

the post cold-war era.

The Official History of the Falklands Campaign

Sir Lawrence Freedman 2005

25 Years… 30 Years? An Unfinished Business…

In Argentina and in the United Kingdom, cultural historians and literary critics

have occasionally addressed and sought to account for the impact of the 1982

conflict on the creative imaginative and artistic output of their respective cultures.

Habitually, however, and with a few notable exceptions, they have done so in

isolation or, at best, with cursory cross-referencing to ‘the other side’. My purpose

is to look beyond national frontiers and to consider not just the so-called Falklands-

Malvinas factor in politics but the conflict’s effect, its multiple effects, by

analysing one of the lasting modes of creative representation of this last of the

traditional wars, as the conflict has been dubbed, namely, the political cartoon.

Although more than a quarter-century has passed since the war broke out,

there continues to be a fascinated or perplexed return to its impact, consequences

and resonances. In recent years, witness the impact of Tristán Bauer’s multiply

prize-winning film of 2004, Iluminados por el fuego, arresting works of fiction,

poetry and drama, painting, sculpture and cinema have drawn on the Falklands-

Malvinas memory bank. Yet what is being remembered? Facts, dates, history? Or

myths, mists, mystery? No definitive answer is available, let alone sought. Strong

images remain, however, and continue to be projected, a reminder that it is

habitually representations of war and conflict that matter; that make a difference.

Whether expressed in histories, documentaries, political satires, protest songs, or

narrative fictions, poems and dramas, war has been a foundational literary act of

societies. In exploring how the cartoon, too, has performed not only as the effect of

social causes but also as the cause of social effects, this short sample study will

address both the indelibly nineteen-eighties Thatcher and Galtieri factors

inseparably from the present, continuingly crucial, questions of how Argentina

represents the conflict to itself, or how the United Kingdom looks at itself and its

cultural war or wars.

Amidst the 2007 twenty-fifth-anniversary plethora of political, drum-

beating, commemorative, nostalgic or vituperative re-evocations of the 1982

conflict in the South Atlantic, to revisit the imaginative representations of war

fostered an understanding of other predicaments, other needs, and different

cultures. It must be stressed therefore that the use of the materials chosen for

analysis here is focussed on a dual objective of familiarizing readers from the one

tradition with images and ideas often well known or taken for granted by the other.

Thus, for example, a British social imaginary suffused for more than two decades

with the penguins and politicians of Steve Bell’s Guardian cartoons might seek

and even find its Argentine counterpart in the exterminated bravery of the censored

and eventually shut down satirical review Humor or the subversive bite of the

newspaper Pagina/12.1 It is more difficult to conceive of relevant equivalence in

the dominant metaphors of respective societies concerned to identify the nation-

state with a warship, a hospital, or the white headscarves of the Mothers of the

Plaza de Mayo; with Trafalgared sea-ventures of a yestercentury or the Iron-Lady

handbags of yesteryear. For when it comes to metaphors there can be no

universals, no smooth transitions, only translations, transversals, re-representations

and risks.

In bringing to the fore caricatural depictions of and in conflict, or in

examining contrastive perspectives on what has broadly been characterized as a

notoriously mythologized affair,2 this analysis will explore perspectives and

introduce angles developed by popular culture deriving from within the

protagonists’ national cultural imaginaries. I endeavour to supplement what has

usually been, primarily, either a ‘Falklands’ or a ‘Malvinas’ critical focus by

adopting an international comparative approach to the topic. Not without risk,

however. Inconceivable is the notion that any author writes from a non-skewed

location; for danger lurks not merely in the brute partisan, it stalks the very

language of self-interrogation, whether singular or plural.

Les animots

Animal: I was tempted [...] to forge another

word in the singular, at the same time close but

radically foreign, a chimerical word that

sounded as though it contravened the laws of the

French language, l’animot […] Ecce animot […]

We have to envisage the existence of ‘living

creatures’ whose plurality cannot be assembled

within the single figure of an animality that is

simply opposed to humanity […] Ecce animot

[…] assuming the title of an autobiographical

animal, in the form of a risky, fabulous, or

chimerical response to the question ‘But me,

who am I?’ (Derrida 2002: 409; 416).

‘No hay que buscarle tres pies al gato’ [It’s no use looking for a three-legged cat],

especially when the four-legged animot is out there still to be read, or staring one

in the face. Yet if proverbs travel with some difficulty, for too many political or

cultural commentators imaginative representations translate not at all. The self-

blinding critic is the one who looks only for defining moments or emblematic

works of art within a sphere pre-designated as either ‘the Falklands’ or ‘the

Malvinas’ War, without taking into account that the ten-and-a-half-week episode,

which has for too long borne a restrictive and puzzling label, was but an event – at

once explicable and tragic – in a greater conflict or conflicts. In the United

Kingdom, pundits have unconscionably overlooked, or been ignorant of, the near

decade-long ‘process’ of Dirty War, Malvinas folly, troubled post-conflict re-

emergence of a still-traumatized Argentine sovereign state, nation and collective

psyche and the will of citizens demanding recognition of both themselves and their

urgent readings of a painful recent history.

The pages of Humor, in the immediate post-conflict phase of mid-to-late

1982, abound with released animo(t)sity. The demons of a repressed national

psyche, however, as will become clear, often bear an uncanny resemblance to those

of the adversary. From the many striking cartoon representations of the Argentine

magazine’s take on the recently ended conflict and on a continuing struggle with

the still sullied mind-cast of a far from finished Dirty War, the cartoonist Montag’s

transmogrification of a populace’s plight is chosen because of its adjacency to

what was to become, in the UK, and in The Guardian newspaper, Steve Bell’s

foundational configuration of his quarter-of-a-century critique of Thatcherism, and

its aftermath, ‘The Penguin’ and his matelot matey, ‘Kipling’. As Argentina was

obliged by the cartoonist to begin, at least, to come to terms with a ‘radically

foreign’ self-in-other/other-in-self, we, too, d’après Derrida, are tempted ‘to

envisage the existence of “living creatures” whose plurality cannot be assembled

within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity’:

Figure 1

Montag’s mock epigraph to his cartoon ‘Viva la vida’ [‘Long live life’] reads:

‘“Las penas son de nosotros, los pingüinos son ajenos” (Cantito folklórico

japonés)’ [‘“The pains are our own, the penguins someone else’s” (Little Japanese

folksong)’]. It lays the path for a distancing effect that, to the uninformed observer,

might do little to contextualize, let alone explain, the ostensible disparity between

the depiction of the military figure, a hardly disguised and ever-perplexed Head of

State, à la General Leopoldo Galtieri, ensconced in the Casa Rosada, initially

disturbed, irritated and eventually uncomprehending in the face of the mass protest

of an identifiably caricatured Plaza de Mayo.

The banners and placards glimpsed through the window of the Presidential

office carry the familiar demands of a nation’s urgent need for survival, for

legality, and for a future freed from the fear of the disappearances either of loved

ones or, even, of the selves of an abject body politic. What the dictator sees,

however, when he can be bothered to look, is a population transfigured… for his is

an exclusively Malvinas-coloured perspective on the relationship between

government dictat and civil society. The dye is cast by Montag’s imaginative

vision of what is seen and yet not seen of the body politic, whether by yet another

in a long line of self-blinding military Presidents or by an on-guard common

soldier blithely off-guard (perhaps because of over-familiarity) to the repression on

which he turns his back but, at the same time, serves to enforce, reinforce and

perpetuate. Without a blush himself, he vacuously underpins the governmentality

of the Casa Rosada.

The cartoonist draws on a classic trope of delay: seen from inside the

Presidential Palace, the windows frame and disclose ‘QUE’; then ‘QUEREMO’,

‘DESAPAREC’, and ‘NO HA DERECH’… less than prevaricating, more than

provocative. The reader-viewer, proleptically more knowing than the

superannuated misreader of the signs and sighs of a stutteringly anguished nation,

namely, el Señor Presidente, invests in decoding the metonymic populace’s ever-

attenuated and too-often strangled cry. So persuaded is the dictator that the vox

populi can be controlled and redirected by the slogan of the nation’s collective

obsession that ‘Las Malvinas son argentinas’ [‘The Malvinas are Argentina’s], he

overlooks its inevitable inversion. For, in Montag’s ‘Viva la vida’ [‘Long live

life’], and in the transmogrified animot imaginary, ‘las argentinas son las

Malvinas’ – the ‘madres de la Plaza de Mayo’ [‘The mothers of the Plaza de

Mayo’], en masse, demand and achieve the completion of their plea, the full

articulation of their and the nation’s sovereign right to self-expression and freedom

of speech: ‘Queremos vivir’, ‘Futuros a desaparecer’, ‘No hay derecho’ [‘We want

to live’, ‘Disappearing futures’, ‘You’ve no right’]. Specters of Ma---s? Or The

State of the [Argentine] Debt, the Work of Mourning, though hardly, as yet, The

New International.

For the penguin animot remains the abject oppressed; the nation is as yet

protected, albeit preposterously, by the anachronistic man-at-arms of a haughty,

oblivious, uncaring military, against the overdue fall of the abject oppressor. For

that caricaturing we shall have to wait, though not for long; another Argentine

cartoonist, Horatius, will soon cross that bridge for us, post-conflict. In the state of

recent siege of 1982, Montag’s depiction juxtaposed, brutally, a gender-marked

confrontation of pregnant female protest and sterile male power. Clustered around

the statue of a spear-holding warrior-maiden figure – ‘Liberty leading the

penguins’ – the animots mothers-to-be, mothers nursing, or mothers bereft, beaks

tight shut, conducted with improvised banners and placards their silent vigil cum

demonstration. The solid edifice of bureaucratic institutionalism that sheltered the

military dictator can be the better understood in the light of what Claire Johnston

has defined as that dangerous iconography that ‘places man as inside history and

therefore changing and woman as outside of it and eternal’ (Johnston 2000: 23).

Montag’s cartoon, however, inverts and subverts such a staged relationship by

having the radical change engendered by female animosity towards the unchanging

sovereign power of Argentine Fascism outed as a uniform male preserve. Thus,

both in the Plaza de Mayo and throughout the Nation, ‘the time is out of joint’ in

the rotten den marked ‘State’.3

Of penguins, albatrosses, lions and… a robot

From April to June 2007, The Guardian newspaper, throughout the period of the

conflict’s seventy-four day anniversary, has replenished another nation’s appetite,

that fed by the UK’s most famous cartoonist’s very particular take on the albatross-

threatened islands of doom, in Steve Bell’s If… Falklands flash-back to both the

‘If…’ and the questioning of history of a fallen, yet favourite, working-class hero,

Reg (less far from Raj than from Rudyard) Kipling.

The If… Chronicles, Bell’s by now legendary daily cartoon strip saw the

emergence from the South Atlantic imaginary of ‘The Penguin’ eleven days after

the Argentine invasion of the real Islands on 2 April 1982.4 It is befriended by the

loyal but sceptical epitome of the British Naval Jack Tar sailor, ‘Kipling’ (‘Born

Grantham, Lincs 1926’) [the year and the place of Margaret Thatcher’s birth] who,

as the Task Force returns at the end of the conflict, is employed to take orders

from, but blurtingly to contest, the smug triumphalism of ‘The Commander’. A

typical example of their dialogue is as follows:

The Commander: ‘Well, Kipling, it seems that victory is ours!! Johnny

Gaucho has thrown in his poncho at last! A triumphant vindication of our

principled stand! The message has gone out loud and clear to every tin-pot

dictator across the globe: “Hands off the British lion! – He may be old, he may

be slow to rouse but when it comes to the crunch…”’

Kipling: ‘… he’s still a blood-thirsty moth-eaten psychopath!!’

The Commander: ‘You’re a treacherous cynical bounder! Kipling! This has

been a time of genuine heroism, Kipling. In future, people will look to this

period for inspiration… a time when our options were clear-cut; when we

quite simply did what had to be done [In the background the sun sets on the

little gun-boat’s fluttering Union Jack]. You know, Kipling, war has a lot of

drawbacks but it certainly does bring people together. We bury our differences

and unite against the common foe!!’ (Bell 1984: 9).

In the final quadrant, ‘The Penguin’ is singing: ‘The party’s over… It’s time to call it

a da-a-ay…’ as ‘The Commander’ shouts at the bird that is giving him the bird: ‘Be

quiet you feathered terrorist!!.’ (10).

When in time-honoured fashion, ‘The Commander’ ‘broaches the grog’

[serves out the Navy rum], Kipling, bearing the beribboned matelot’s cap of HMS

Incredible, and failing to understand his officer’s naval parlance of yesteryear, says

incredulously, ‘I beg your pardon?’

The Commander: ‘Grog, man, grog!! You’re a damned odd egg, Kipling, but

you’re a decent sort underneath! Get it down you, man! “To Victory”!! Give

the damn Penguin some! He may be an outright bounder but we’ve come

through a lot together!!’

The Penguin: ‘It’s against my religion, matey!’ (10).

As they set course for home, told to cheer up by the Commander, who informs him,

‘You’re got a face like a haemorrhoidal horse! We won man! Let’s celebrate

properly!!’, Kipling indulges in a bout of post-conflict prolepsis as he shares both the

grog and his thoughts with his pipe-smoking, lantern-jawed, superior: ‘I’m thinking

about the consequences of all this, and they’re profoundly depressing’(11).

The celebratory return to Albion’s shores is marked by Steve Bell with a

particularly acerbic cartoon sequence:

Figure 2

The quayside, packed with well-wishers, Union Jacks and a bed-sheet inscribed with

‘Welcome Home Conquering Heroes’, is juxtaposed with a troop ship packed with

soldiers and sailors and draped with all manner of banners: a Skull and Cross Bones;

Land of Hope and Glory; a Union Jack; Britannia Rules the Waves; Easy! Easy!

Maggie Rules OK; Call Off the Rail Strike or We’ll Call in an Air Strike; Rah! Rah!;

Woof! Woof!; We’ve Been Good Boys; Lock Up Your Daughters. The armoured

nuclear punts, hidden by the massive troop ship, are greeted on the other bank of the

river by a single and forlorn flag holder, no doubt daunted and crestfallen at the sight

of the Commander’s holding a placard ‘We’d do it again ma’am’, whilst shouting

‘Stop it, Kipling!’ to the disabused able seaman sitting atop the mast and flying an

ensign that reads ‘I’m alive and I’m redundant!’. In the background, a second punt

carries the message ‘Smash bourgeois revisionism’:

Commander: ‘Well, it seems that this is goodbye, Kipling. The best of luck to

you in civvy street – you’re going to need it if you continue to entertain those

funny ideas!’

Kipling: ‘Goodbye, Commander’.

In the customs house, Kipling is confronted by a customs officer:

‘Welcome back hero!! What have you got in the bag? Any animal products?

Anything to declare??’

The Penguin, popping out of the bag:

‘I certainly have: “Watch out Margaret Thatcher!!”’ (19).

A star is born. ‘The Penguin’, (‘Hatched Port Grantham, Falkland Islands 1926’) [the

actual year of M T’s birth; the virtual place of her re-birth as PM Britannia], is

provided by Bell with a thumb-nail biography:

Having spent his early years in traditional Penguin pursuits, the Penguin

became disaffected with the prevailing colonist ethic in the rookery and

dropped out. After a brief spell as a guano smuggler, he got a job as a lookout

for a firm of Argentinian scrap dealers. With the arrival of the taskforce he

joined the Royal Navy on an informal freelance basis, befriending Able

Seaman Reg Kipling, crewman on the armoured nuclear punt HMS

‘Incredible’, who ultimately helped to smuggle the Penguin into Great Britain

as an illegal black and white immigrant. Since then he has been on the run.

His interests include show business, tap-dancing and fish (18).

The representation, on either side, of a land projected as fit for heroes turns sour

immediately following the outbreak of a troubled peace. Never more so than in the

cartoon genre where, certainly, British artists would find in the South Atlantic

confrontation ample inspiration for a satirical pungency that, replicated in an Argentina

under murderous censorship, could prove fatal, as catalogued, for instance, by Blaustein,

Zubieta, Nouzeilles and Montaldo. While a comparison of the respective cartoon and

comic strip traditions of the two nations over the last quarter of a century is another story

– and one that demands an extended study5 – it is important to recall here the

prominence attributed by earlier critics, notably Tim Wilcox, James Aulich, Klaus

Dodds and David Monaghan to the artistic and caricatural representation of the conflict.6

Kevin Foster, in his chapter on ‘Heroes and Survivors’, having demolished the

‘mythopoeic representation’ of the Falklands War as ‘a romance quest’, also notes the

ambivalence of the return whereby, for many ex-combatants, ‘it is somehow

questionable to come through a battle unscathed’ (Foster 1999: 107-08). He includes, by

way of illustration of the theme of the veteran as ‘a political embarrassment’ (though

making no further comment on, presumably allowing it to speak for itself), one of Steve

Bell’s most celebrated cartoons, that which depicts the London Victory Parade (Bell

1983: 55-56). The march-past of Navy, Army and Special Air Service (SAS) and the

salute from the Union Jack-bedecked rostrum of Margaret Thatcher and her entourage

of husband Denis, Defence Secretary John Nott and a Blimpish retired officer (with

incongruously ‘Latin-length’ moustache) are the staple ingredients of Bell’s lampoon.

The killer touch comes in the last panel when, after the parading clones of a steel-jawed,

neck-bepearled Thatcher herself, and of her then and since notorious hard-line Cabinet

Ministers of (un-)Employment and (3Rs) Education, respectively, Norman Tebbit

(shouldered bicycle pump with limp connector in place of cocked rifle) and Rhodes

Boyson (nail-pierced educator’s cane erect and at the ready) have trooped by, an

uninvited and unexpected ambulance with bandaged driver and passenger join the

procession.

Figure 3

The reaction of the PM is to cover with her left hand the gaze of the diminutive onlooker

immediately to her right and, with her right hand, her own unblinking stare. Her trio of

acolyte grandees follow suit. ‘¿Qué pasa?’ [‘What’s going on?’], the uninvited Argentine

might ask. Freedman’s account, in the ‘Thanksgiving’ chapter of his Official History

of the Falklands Campaign, of the background to the 12 October 1982 Victory

Parade, might offer the outsider looking in a clue: ‘A small pacifist demonstration

made little impact: more upset was caused by an initial reluctance to allow wounded

servicemen in their wheelchairs to have a prominent position’ (Freedman 2005: 664).

The little attendant – the omnipresent infernal machine of State – is a

configuration of humanoid camera and gun: ‘the Panopticon of Bentham is the

architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based

[….] All that was needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower [….] Visibility

is a trap’ (Foucault 1977: 200). Bell had introduced Margaret and Denis to ‘Robot’ but

recently, on a ‘Far Eastern jaunt’. Impressed, she had had it imported, her ‘Think Tank’

tasked to come up with the year’s ‘catchphrase for the 1982 Conservative Party

Conference. It spewed out two possibilities: ‘either “Crawl, you scum” or “Next Stop,

Oblivion”’. The PM had opted for the latter.7 Potential, now, however, in the crossing

of the Prime Minister’s hands – blinding and self-blinding simultaneously – is an

erasure of both the all-seeing panopticon and (wilfully) of its self-benighted

supervisor; Bell’s prolepsis to post-Foucauldian critiques of the device’s

effectiveness. More alarming however is the less embryonic prefiguration in the

(herself ever-under-surveillance) orchestrator’s double-armed gesture of a mal-formed

swastika, a sign to be read in consonance with the accompanying iconography of

cloned, look-alike, storm-troopers, unapologetically visible as they march past, in

contrast with the facially invisible but powerfully influential SAS.

To look in Argentina for a comparable effect is to find further and telling

difference. In the immediate aftermath of the downfall of the military government,

Humor was able to publish a cartoon by Horatius that depicts, inseparably, a Defeat

and Victory Parade; in a single frame, and at a glance. Or in a gaze:

Figure 4

Seven pale blue and white sash-draped and medal-heavy high-ranking military

officers file past a placard that reads: ‘Gran Desfile Presidentes De Facto’ [‘Grand

Procession [of] De Facto Presidents’]. Facially, they are all too recognizable as

leaders of the various juntas who had carried out the (far from de iure) ‘functions’ of

Head of State. As they march, from the Right, in high goose-step but in low dudgeon,

the attendant populous that throngs the road-sides directs its collective gaze from left

to right, no doubt in expectation of more uniformed authoritarians to follow the likes

of Onganía (1966-70), Lami Dozo (1976-81 junta; Air Force), Massera (1976-81

junta; Navy), Videla (1976-81 junta; Army), Viola (1981), Galtieri (1982), Bignone

(1983). But the last of the top brass, Bignone, already out of kilter in wearing carpet

slippers rather than be-spurred jackboots, uses his arms and hands in another proleptic

unfolding of regimented discipline. He points to his feet with the left hand while

raising the right to cup his mouth in a gesture of obsequious farewell: ‘¡Epa! ¿Qué

están mirando? Yo soy el último’ [‘Hey! What are you looking at? Me, I’m the last’].

A glance at his headwear reveals that the peak of his cap bears only the fading

resemblance to the penguin-figure that, in varying degrees of prominence, sits atop

the frowning expressions of each of his predecessors.

As in the case of Bell’s embryonic undoing of panopticon power, it is the

authority-bearing figure in the Horatius cartoon that prompts a reminder of the need

for a different gaze. Beatriz Sarlo was to take up the challenge implied, for both the

people as a whole and for a new generation of thinkers who would have to see

differently, but never with indifference:

They were disposed to theorize the need for organizations of iron, panopticons

from the control tower of which all could be seen and things be decided upon.

There were intellectual leaders who were suspicious of intellectuals in general

because they were showing themselves to be prepared to abandon specific

perspectives according to the historic task that knowledge, and the power of

knowledge, had placed in their hands. They believed then that social change is

something that very few can direct and to which, through argumentation,

education and force, the ones being directed must yield themselves up (Sarlo

1994: 174).

The caricatural will draw habitually on the stereotype of recognizability but will be

the more effective, as an agent of potential change, when it details what is different.

Similarity draws attention; difference calls to attention. Take, for example, Bell’s Jack

Tar pastiche in both The If Chronicles and If... Only Again, archetype of the naval

tradition of ‘Jolly tars are our men’, ‘always ready, steady, boys, steady’. They’ll

‘fight and [they’ll] conquer again and again’.8 Inasmuch as his cartoons project the

recognizable, however funny, personage of the loyal subject, sterling in times of war,

unchanging, archetypally conservative, they at once partake of the cliché and open a

space for the disruption of the culture represented. How? Not by the standard nature-

culture binary but by another juxtaposition. Instead of a friendly, great, or even hostile

nature, we are presented with a bald penguin. Nature is inverted, contradicted,

exploded, in a cartoon tradition of animot liberation. ‘The Penguin’ is rendered

invulnerable to injury or death through excess. It thereby becomes the subversive, the

unpalatable, the absolute other not of a Romanticized ‘natural’ man but of a home-

front self, ‘othered’ by, and with, the over-acculturated Jack Tar.

Shortly before and immediately after the Victory Parade strip came the two

cartoons that strike a keynote of percipience for subsequent representations of the

conflict on both sides of the Atlantic. In the one, as has been shown, the ‘Welcome

Home Conquering Heroes’ of the flag-wavers’ banner was juxtaposed with Kipling’s

fluttering private ensign: ‘I’m alive and I’m redundant’ (19). In the other, The

Penguin asks: ‘What now, Kipling, me ol’ matey?’; to which comes the response:

‘Well… I was thinking about suicide’ (56). Framed alongside them, heads on the

railway lines before the rictus-visaged and fast-approaching express of Thatcherism,

kneel the Gang of Four politicians, those Social Democrats who but a year before the

Falklands War had launched their breakaway from the Labour Party, pledging ‘to

reconcile the nation’ and ‘heal divisions between classes’ (BBC News, 26 March,

1981). Sick transit… A crafty inversion effect is set in train by Bell whereby not just

the penguin, the sheep and the albatross but all the creatures of conflict are configured

as putative pets or poodles of State. More sombrely, Kipling’s prolepsis captured the

reality that it was not the politicians but the ex-combat veterans, on both sides, who

put their head on the line; more have died, in the post-conflict, from suicide, than in

the land battles of the 1982 conflict itself.9

Plus ça a changé… In Argentina, Sarlo was still wrestling with the

paradox, or dilemma, of the role of intellectuals in the post-proceso and post-conflict

era some twelve years on:

There can be no nostalgic return to images that seemed just and good in the

past; but nor can there be any critical conformity from what emerges from

their break-up. The figure of the intellectual (the artist, the philosopher, the

thinker), as it was construed in classic modernity, has strode off into the

sunset. But some of the functions which that figure considered its own are still

required by a reality that has changed – and therefore accepts neither

legislators nor prophets as guides (Sarlo 1994: 180).

The warning of Derrida, written incidentally at the time of the proceso, echoes on:

‘We can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to

slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to

contest’ (Derrida 1978: 280). Grand narratives are by no means definitively

deconstructed and returning phantoms can be seen to haunt and spectrally to populate

the representations of conflict contemporaneously and forever.

Post-

Fiction’s relationship with fact, as demonstrated nowhere more comprehensively than

in Lucrecia Escudero’s analyses, Malvinas: el gran relato and Media Truth: Fiction

and Rumors in War News in the Malvinas-Falklands Conflict, is particularly strained

in press coverage of the Falklands-Malvinas conflict on both sides, notoriously in the

Manichean tabloidism of The Sun’s headline, ‘Gotcha!’, on the sinking of the General

Belgrano, or in Revista Tal Cual’s demonizing cover series on ‘La Thatcher Peor que

Hitler’ [‘Thatcher Worse than Hitler’], ‘Más Mala que El Diablo’ [‘More Evil than

the Devil’] and ‘La Thatcher Está Loca’ [‘Thatcher Is Mad’];10 but also generally in

what the English novelist Julian Barnes has categorized as ‘the worst reported war

since the Crimean [....] The fact that the rest of the world viewed the war as a

brainless squabble between nostalgic imperialism and nostalgic fascism was

irrelevant; we didn’t care what the rest of the world thought except to imagine that it

was impressed’ (Barnes 2002: 2).

If ‘the two sides to every story’ cliché is predictably ignored in, especially,

the popular press’s adversarial coverage of the conflict, critics subsequently adjusted

the imbalance. In Argentina, the panorama was perceived to be problematic. In ‘De

cómo la literatura cuenta la Guerra de Malvinas’ [‘On How Literature Recounts the

Malvinas War’], subtitle of their seminal meditation ‘Trashumantes de neblina, no las

hemos de encontrar’,11 Martín Kohan, Oscar Blanco and Adriana Imperatore, already

in 1993, felt able to look back as follows:

The Malvinas conflict, like all wars, is a confrontation of bodies and, at the

same time, a confrontation of discourses [....] The war unfolds a construction

of versions ever struggling to impose themselves, even when the fight

between bodies has been concluded. Two ways of recounting the Malvinas

war have predominated in the dispute for the terrain of collective memory:

one, that we might call the triumphalist version; the other, the version of

lament [....] What is certain is that both are inscribed, finally, in one and the

same frame, participating in one and the same logic: the logic of the Grand

National Narrative, that is the Great Argentine Narrative [....] A symbolic

system: name, flag, anthem, coat of arms, pantheon of heroes and deeds [....]

This story is effective when it succeeds in dissolving internal differences,

making them converge and coincide in the values of national unity (Kohan,

Blanco and Imperatore 1993: 82).

The point is that, whether or not the pro-war or the anti-war discourses predominate at

any one moment, neither ‘version’ can escape the entrapment in its own logic of this

‘Gran Relato Argentino’. Thus, while situating the mainstream artistic tropings of the

conflict as either veering nationalist or going transcendental, they establish the

ideological and the discursive limitations of most depictions of the war: ‘everything

can be said, except that the problem of sovereignty over the islands lacks relevance’

(83). Guilefully, the authors are thus setting up both a patently inadequate binary and

a man-of-straw fall-guy – the Nation and its representations – before indulging their

crucial, and irrefutable, claim that, already from within the period of the war itself to

the time of their writing eleven years on, a differential discourse has existed: ‘other

narratives that, yes, deconstruct El Gran Relato and that belong to the discursive field

of the literary’ (83).

Their explanation of why they are unsettled by, and require an alternative

to, a tired national narrative, serves as a crucial Argentine perspective into the style

and tenor of the works that they praise. They go on to identify a keynote of

subversion that might apply not only to the Argentine writers and artists they single

out:

Their operation consists of deconstructing and of not destroying: what

destruction triggers is a logic that attacks from outside of the system in

question; its objective is to overcome and to replace that other system,

therefore it bombards but does not dynamite it. To dynamite it, to deconstruct

it, assumes acting from the inside: recognizing the internal logic and

structure in order to locate the key points, the pillars that support the system

and that will bring it down: a task of the spy, of the saboteur (84).

They finger, of course, the pressure points of the ‘Gran Relato Nacional’ at precisely

its most vulnerable junctures: causes are not inherently just; jokes are more serious

than the purportedly real; investment is outperformed by inversion. Classically, in

deconstructive parlance, between the inside and the outside there is ever less

difference than différance.

It is salutary to look back, in contrast, at a balefully dismissive but

influential retrospect that emerged, as late as the twentieth anniversary of the conflict,

from the durable Anglo-centric perspective on the narrowly focussed Falklands – as

distinct from the Falklands-Malvinas – effect on the artistic imagination of the

previous two decades:

Though attractive to screenwriters and dramatists, the Falklands war has

made little impact [….] The Falklands are lost and regained between

chapters. This omission is revealing of the status the conflict now has in

British history as the mad aunt no one quite mentions: a position that it

shares with the Prime Minister of the time [….] It’s hard to imagine a British

writer or director getting excited now about making a Falklands film [….]

The reason that almost all the Falklands fictions were created within a few

years of the conflict is that the military adventure never did become our

Vietnam. Margaret Thatcher, who so wanted to be Winston Churchill, had

only a very brief period as a war leader before other events – poll tax, Europe

– eclipsed the significance of the Falklands [….] Though the blood spilled in

the Falklands has left little cultural stain, it may have got into the blood more

than we think (Lawson 2002).

To have heard a mere and perplexing echoing, and in the peremptory voice of the

high-profile English pundit Mark Lawson, of the tentative views expressed by critics

during the first post-conflict decade, was as surprising as it was unconvincing. Such

assertions therefore demanded to be tested and, it would turn out, challenged. Do we

simply stop reading when the conflict has been declared a ‘between chapters’ incident

in the history of the British absurd?

Lawson’s final sentence, however, is amplified albeit unconsciously in a

relevant contemporary context by Paul Greengrass, the director of The Murder of

Stephen Lawrence, of 1999, Bloody Sunday, of 2001, and United 93, of 2006, when

interviewed for a BBC 2 TV documentary on the cultural representation of conflict

and violence, Imagining the Truth. In the summer of 2006, he expressed the view that

‘If you look clearly and unflinchingly at a single event, you can find in its shape

something much larger than the event itself – the DNA of our times’ (Greengrass

2006, in interview). Perhaps the cultural difference of the moment makes the English-

based observers – as they see it – of a peculiarly Argentine process of representation

of the truths of ‘their’ Dirty War, of ‘their’ Malvinas conflict, of ‘their’ post-conflict

traumas of reconstruction and engineered bankrupcy, prefer a different genre of vérité

from many of the artistic expressions still to be explored. An unfinished business,

indeed, is the political and cultural fall-out, over a quarter century, of that ‘last war of

the post imperial era’, ‘first of the post cold-war era’ of Freedman’s take on the

Official History.

Simon Jenkins, reviewing Freedman in July 2005, both delivers a summary

verdict on the history and strikes a note of caution:

I kept sensing Freedman pulling his punches in order to protect someone’s

feelings [...] he is gentle to a fault on Britain’s intelligence failure, largely

ignoring the Argentine planning background [….] The Falklands was the

oddest of wars. Fewer than 2,000 British colonists in the South Atlantic

resisted British pressure to do a deal with adjacent Argentina. Unlike the

non-white colonials of Diego García or Hong Kong, they were indulged in

their intransigence [….] We now know that Argentina’s invasion plan was

part of a deal in 1981 between its navy, discredited as torturers in ‘dirty war’,

and the new junta leader, Leopoldo Galtieri [….] The junta was toppled,

Thatcher’s tottering career was rescued and her ascendancy assured for eight

more years. British losses were 253 dead and 777 badly injured (there were

652 Argentine dead). The cost to the UK was some £4 billion. It was a

straightforward war, but it is as well that history does not do value for money

[….] Any war these days is a failure whether of politics, diplomacy or

military deterence. The Falklands was a trivial conflict yet one awash in

lessons [….] Put crudely, the British Establishment does not piss on victory,

and future generations pay the price [….] For British policy, the war was a

disaster. Thatcher’s sensible defence review had to be torn up, and expensive

carriers retained and replaced. The chiefs of staff still demand ‘Falklands-

style’ capability, allowing ministers to play at empire in Afganistan and Iraq.

Thatcher claimed that the war vindicated her ‘strong defence policy’. That

was absurd. She won only because Argentina invaded before her ‘weak’

policy had time to bite. She would have lost had Galtieri invaded on

Lombardo’s plan. That is the central Falklands paradox. Yet without the war

Argentina would not have had democracy, and I am certain, Britain would

not have had the Thatcher revolution. Perhaps history should do value for

money after all (Jenkins 2005: 35-6).

And so must cultural criticism; for Jenkins grasps the need for comparative analysis in

a way that few have shown themselves willing or able to do.12 Sterling or plate, the

currency of culture is coined in history, traded in lives and negotiated in

representations. The Falklands-Malvinas conflict will continue to be both an

unfinished symptom and an uncompletable story, in and through its many imaginative

representations and re-representations, because it is a repository of differing

investments. Recent commentators betray the politico-economic countenance of the

affair and do so often in the stock-in-trade terminology of the bull and bear – or beef

and mutton – analogies drawn from the lore of the respective protagonists. Whence

the mutual animo(t)sity. Trading partners, exchanging stock images of the other, of

the self, and of the other in the self, the self in the other, caricaturists suddenly find

that they have the floor to themselves but that they cannot control any market within

the regulations of a restrictively national cultural economy.

Retro-spectres

Néstor García Canclini, the renowned Argentine critic and social commentator, not

only updates and warns the cultural analyst on the generic possibilities and dangers

potential in any retrospective on the last quarter century of his country’s history but

also exploits the overlap of politico-economic and imaginative projections of the

Malvinas War and its after-effects in a manner consonant with the aims of this

meditation:

In recent times, testimony as a genre has come under attack, perhaps due to

the debates about its articulation of the real and the imagined, or because it

simultaneously plays with both the dramatic and the farcical. The tension

between these two genres has been pointed out in different accounts of the

Falkland Islands War. This episode was, in part, a grotesque extension of a

war against so-called subversives within Argentina, headed by the military

leaders, and partly a supposed gesture to recover sovereignty, with internal

support and a relative Latin American solidarity. Testimonies of ex-

combatants lamented the lack of experience in battle, the inept and petty state

of the officers, and some even imagined fifteen years after the war – at the

end of the 1990s – that it would be possible to return to battle, to make a

different ending for the movie, so to speak, with better training and

leadership. Meanwhile […] many writers tell the story of the war as a farce, a

sinister game of cunning with no passion, with no heroes or victories, where

it was more important to decline than to defeat. The identity and continental

solidarity claims are replaced by concealment and disguises (Canclini 2004:

13-24).

Canclini but echoes after more than two decades the insight of one of Argentina’s

most prominent writers. Julio Cortázar, on 29 April 1982, after the taking of the

Islands, and pre-figuring any retrospective on finding the balance between heroics and

incompetence, could envisage a more appropriate role for the deemed protectors of

the nation’s safety and integrity: ‘To put it in other terms, what the Argentine people

needed at that time was not that the Army and Navy enter the Malvinas but rather the

barracks; but it is evident enough that the first is a dilatory procedure to continue

avoiding the second’ (Cortázar 1982, in Blaustein and Zubieta 1999: 475).

On epitaphs and epigraphs

A sociology of the negative marketing of a nation, the white and black of an inverse

photography of the self, a darkroom with the need for intermittent light in order to

capture, to frame, to develop and to imprint indelibly on culture the conflict of the

‘underground cell’, has emerged; not in the sense of a terrorist threat to established

government but in the depiction of the government threat to established society.

Government is cell…

In 2007, the national presses on both sides of the Atlantic geared

themselves and their variously vested and invested interests for anniversary

scratchings of illusorily healed-over scars. ‘A new history book’ just ‘distributed to

every secondary school pupil in Argentina’, that tells a wholly familiar and hardly

novel version of the status of the Islas Malvinas, was reported in the following terms:

‘Sovereignty of the Islands remains a popular cause in Argentina, something President

Kirschner clearly wants to tap into before national elections next year’ (The

Guardian, 27 September 2006, 18). The next day, a hardly coincidental counterpoint

was trumpeted – recounting the possible first ‘disappearance’ of the peace, albeit the

real and very troubling case of Jorge Julio López, under the headline, ‘“Dirty War”

torture witness goes missing’ and followed by ‘Former members of the military and

their sympathisers claim that the Dirty War was a necessity to prevent the take-over of

the country by communist guerrilla movements’ (The Times, 28 September 2006, 39).

Television, too, was primed for action as Carol Thatcher visited the Islands and

Argentina to trail Mummy’s War.

In it, Carol Thatcher will recount how the Falklands conflict transformed her

mother into a wartime leader, detailing the stresses and strains of the war on

the former Premier – from the heady moments of success to the shattering

reality of military setbacks. She said: ‘I saw those 11 weeks from the inside

looking out and happen to admire enormously how Margaret Thatcher

conducted herself as a war leader’.‘But this film won’t be a mother-

daughter hagiography’, Ralph Lee, Channel 4’s commissioning editor, said

(Lee 2007: 1)

Nothing so animated as a mother-daughter hagiography. Ipsa dixit. Ipsae dixerunt?

Nothing so animoted as the dogs of war… or its immortalized, blood-stained, jackal:

Figure 5

Like the news reporting, the caricatural representation of the 1982 war, conflictually,

politically, differently and differentially, will never avoid controversies. That

depiction goes on; untroubled by anniversaries, it has never stopped. It only awaits

informed decoders. The inexcusable insularity of any non-comparative assessment of

a struggle that perhaps in the cartoon re-representation of it can be viewed in the light

of not just, say, Theodor Adorno’s celebrated general proposal for understanding the

effects of war: ‘It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own

voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it […] it is to works of art

that has fallen the burden of wordlessly asserting what is barred from politics’

(Adorno 1985: 313). For the notion that art and politics must somehow stand

speechlessly, or infantilely, apart from each other is contradicted by the achievement

of such as the artists discussed here. Chosen emblematically to evoke the epic logos

of a little war and its undiminished resonance, their powerful cartooning draws on and

demands, inseparably, discursive and ideological effects.

To imagine no spectral surplus in the art of the cartoon would be to

condemn any national culture where the historical moment is perceived to be a time

out of joint, or where the State is deemed to be in irresolvable debt, and where the

only work to be essayed might be that of mourning, would be to accept and

simultaneously condemn that State to further abjection. The echoes of Derrida bear

me from Marx to mortality in confronting the ethics of writing of and on the

cartooning of war. For, also, ‘I am at war with myself’ but, in the process of

addressing the starkest cultural study of all, that act of ‘The Giving of Death’, that

pervades and suffuses every one of the images-with-texts that I have chosen to

discuss, it would have been untenable to separate the language of cultural criticism

from some supposed alternative carved out for the purpose of respecting what Paul

Fussell appropriately termed the ‘actual and terrible moral challenges’ posed in

every representation of the cultures of war. For thus to condescend would be to

disrespect, too, what Simon Featherstone, commenting on Fussell’s broad caveat,

encapsulated as the ‘closeness of writing to often appalling personal experience’

(Featherstone 1995: 1-2). ‘Finally, I learn to live’, as a writer and cultural critic,

undifferentially… as ‘an autobiographical animal’. To write, no less than to read,

frees us from our spectres.13

Ecce angelus mortis… Requiescat

Figure 6

Why was the conflict, perforce, represented and representable so differently on the

respective sides? Consider the distance between a task carried out by a professional

military cadre and an enterprise undertaken by however courageous victims of

inseparable heroics and incompetence. ‘Task’ and its corollaries will ever be

differentially defined; task as ‘force’; ‘force’ as the exercise of power; ‘power’ as the

imposition of superior strength; ‘superior’ in relation to recruits; ‘recruits’ conscripted

from anywhere within, and yet outside, a (divided) nation (united) in a belief in

patria… Con-scripted. Not just in caricature but, as the ideologically stark cartoon of

Austin underlines, in the confidence trick perpetrated on the Argentine body politic. If

it would appear that the nation is at play in Argentina but that, ever in the illusion of

lasting victory, the nation does not play at war in the United Kingdom, then the

cartoons of an unfinished business, smiled at and, critically, analysed and re-analysed,

invite a revision of such stereotypes. The topoi of piracy and nos habebit humus are

picked up by Austin’s and The Guardian’s British angle on the obituary earned by

Galtieri and his predecessors in their collusion with and overseeing of some thirty

thousand disappearances of Argentine and other citizens. But the spectres of

Perfidious Albion hover over that Saxon readiness to enter a lease-back prior to an

eventually negotiated sovereignty only thwarted by the Buenos Aires junta’s pre-

emptive strike of 2 April 1982. Thereafter, the warrior nation arises, ‘once more onto

the breach’… or onto the breaching of the rules of engagement? ‘Gotcha’ screams the

front page of The Sun that ever sets on the British Empire re-floated. Sink the

Belgrano! mocked the title of an outraged Steven Berkoff’s corrosive agit-prop

drama. And, again, Britannia rules the waves; or, as the three hundred and twenty one

Argentines lost at sea on 2 May 1982 might have in their caricatured obituary,

‘Britannia waives the rules’. For: ‘How many people realise that before that

calculated piece of sabotage not one British soldier had died!’ (Berkoff 1987: 1).

Adventurisms of hubris are never restricted or confinable to any one side. If

the art of war has anything to gain from the cartooned representation of it, the

strategist must look beyond even the classic Chinese 6th Century BC militarist’s most

basic insight that ‘The military is a great matter of the state. It is the ground of death

and life, the Tao of survival or extinction. One cannot but examine it’ (Sun-tzu 2001:

1). The challenge posed by the depiction of war and its effects and, not least, indeed,

through the liberation of its animots, is to recognize that there is nothing which is not

already and always, and inseparably, soul-searchingly conflictual and textual. Ecce

anima? There are but risky, fabulous, or chimerical responses to that question, too.

Il n’y a pas de hors conflit…

Notes

1. See Eduardo Blaustein and Martín Zubieta, Decíamos ayer. La prensa argentina

bajo el Proceso (1998); and Horacio González ‘The Journalist as the People’s

Detective’, in Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo, The Argentina Reader

History, Culture, Politics (2002). The volumes are landmarks in the scholarship of

memoir.

2. Notably by Kevin Foster in his seminal 1999 analysis Fighting Fictions: War,

Narrative and National Identity.

3. ‘Mourning consists always […] in localizing the dead’, according to Jacques

Derrida in Specters of Marx (1994: 9); the epigraph of the ‘work of mourning’

(déjà et toujours) is ‘The time is out of joint’.

4. The references to Bell’s cartoons are to the subsequently anthologized book

version, first published in 1984.

5. So abundant and rich were the materials that I discovered in the genre when

researching for Falklands-Malvinas An Unfinished Business (Seattle: New

Ventures, 2007) that I devote a second book to them, whence the forthcoming It

Breaks Two to Tangle: Political Cartoons of the Falklands-Malvinas Conflict.

6. See Wilcox’s ‘“We are All Falklanders Now”: Art, War and National Identity’ and

Aulich’s ‘Wildlife in the South Atlantic: Graphic Satire, Patriotism and the Fourth

Estate’ (in Aulich 1992: 58-83; 84-116), Klaus Dodds’s ‘The 1982 Falklands War

and a critical geopolitical eye: Steve Bell and the If… cartoons’ (Dodds 1996: 571-

592), and David Monaghan’s ‘If... :The Falklands War as Cartoon’ (Monaghan

1999: 69-82).

7. The think-tanks – ‘Everything you say is absolutely right Ma’am’ – are a safe bet.

When introduced to them during a visit to the worker-free zone of a car-assembly

line, the PM has only one thing that she would like to ask amidst their pre-

programmed regurgitation of ‘Stop the rot’ and ‘There is no alternative’… Before

she can utter it however the foreman adds to his spiel of ‘these robots work a 24-

hour day, 365 days a year, they need no breaks and no wages’. His selling point?

‘They all vote Conservative’ (Bell 1982: 49).

8. The sea-shanty echoed is the 1759 ‘Heart of Oak’, a song still taught to primary

school pupils, in England and throughout the fading British Empire, until well into

the 1960s. Aulich is drily persuasive on Bell’s depiction of a ‘Jack Tar Agent of

Destiny’ adventurism and the exploitation of a Coleridgean ‘killing of such a

portent of good fortune’ as the albatross in an action that ‘could only have fatal

results’ (Aulich 1992: 98-100).

9. A total of 649 Argentine (321 on the cruiser General Belgrano) and 255 British

military died in the seventy-four day conflict. Some 350 and 300 suicides have

been recorded on the respective sides by those organizations concerned with the

devastating legacy of PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

10. The Sun 4 May 1982; and Revista Tal Cual of 14 and 28 May and 4 July 1982,

reproduced in Decíamos ayer (471).

11. ‘Trashumantes de neblina’ is an untranslatable pun; it plays on the patriotic

anthem: ‘Tras su manto de neblina/no las hemos de olvidar/Las Malvinas

argentinas/clama el viento y ruge el mar’ [‘Behind the mantle of mist/we shall not

forget them/The Argentine Malvinas/claims the wind and roars the sea’], Marcha

de Las Malvinas [March of the Malvinas]. For the native-speaker, multiple

elements underlie the word play: hints of smouldering mutants, of changing forms

emerging from the mists, and the myths, of the Islands.

12. Contrast the throw-away and dismissively unsubstantiated comparison of two

political and cultural economies made recently, and without a word on the

incommensurable conditions underlying his chosen actors’ experience, of Niall

Ferguson: ‘We were right about Thatcherism [….] Britain was on the road to

becoming Argentina and she introduced the correct policies. And the accusations

of presidential-style, unconstitutional government that were levelled against her

have paled into insignificance with Blair [….] I realised that the worst violence

occurred when three factors – an unhomogenised, multi-ethnic society; economic

volatility; and an empire in decline – combined. When you get a collection of

different people facing economic uncertainty at a time when the old order is

collapsing, then all bets are off and you have a recipe for warfare’ (Ferguson

2006: 3).

13. The echoes from Jacques Derrida’s meditations on ‘Je suis en guerre contre moi-

même’ and ‘Donner la mort’ are taken from Apprendre à vivre enfin (Derrida

2004) and from the last exchange I had with him, in Rio de Janeiro in August

2004, on my way to Argentina to pursue and to lay some of the ghosts of my

present undertaking. The lesson I ingested is reproduced in Pensar a

desconstução (McGuirk, 233-44; in Derrida, 2005) and in ‘Derrida

Trans(at)l(antic)ated’ (McGuirk 2006: 71): ‘Lire la littérature… c’est une

spectrologie… Lire libère les spectres. Mes chants sont méchants’.

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Constructing and Disrupting Social Realities: Triumphs and Failures of the Imagination

Professor Bernard McGuirk

Director, Centre for the Study of Post-Conflict Cultures, University of Nottingham

Email: [email protected]