The Role Of Evita's Tyrant In Death And The Compass
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“The only thing that can be done with reality is to invent it again,” and Martínez has vividly transposed the journey of Evita’s corpse into an intense fictional montage (). The author represents himself as a fictitious character, narrating the novel with a web of biography, myth, and history into a vibrantly comedic and somberly perverse chronicle. He melodiously accentuates the woman who "ceased to be what she said and what she did to become what people say she said and what people say she did" (Martínez, 13). Santa Evita is based upon Martínez’s unconventional choice to write about Evita Perón’s corpse rather than Evita herself and follows the narrator as he interviews the individuals who came into contact with Evita’s corpse.
The novel…show more content… The widow of Colonel Moori Koenig expressed how “everybody who had anything to do with the corpse came to a bad end” (Martínez, 48). The narrator points out the Colonel in “That Woman” by Rodolfo Walsh resembles the detective in “Death and the Compass” by Borges (Martínez, 46). He goes on to parallel how the Colonel in “That Women” is awaiting an inevitable punishment just as the detective in “Death and the Compass.” The Colonel, for instance, was haunted by telephone curses and voices stating his daughter will catch polio, and that he will be castrated. Furthermore, the president stated, “every time a corpse enters the picture in this country, history goes mad. Take care of that women, Colonel” for her supporters believed she would come back to life at any moment (Martínez, 16). Of course the president knew she would not come back but she was more dangerous as a corpse than a living being. Evita’s wandering corpse ultimately served to symbolize the uncertainty of Argentina and Argentina’s search for…show more content… In search of the seemingly invisible components of Evita, Martínez tries to recover this essence by assembling several generations of Argentines’ views regarding Evita. The author states, “I was not going to recount Evita either as a curse or a myth. I was going to recount her just as I had dreamed her: as a butterfly who beat the wings of her death forward as those of her life flew backward” (Martínez, 66). “Evita had come back by multiplying herself,” and hence continued forward (Martínez, 52).
Language falls short when it is unable to bring a past reality back, rather it must recreate or even redefine that reality. Novels must employ this through metaphors, thus a literal truth cannot always be uncovered. “By trying to recover Evita’s mythical essence, he succeeds in denying its fossilization into a museum object, its neutralization and process of becoming de-politicized.” “True fictions possess the same power to answer the ‘regimens of truth’ as they do to demystify (in the sense that they attack established myth) and to unmask the established