Tomás Eloy Martínez and the (des)memories of Juan Domingo Perón

Abstract

This paper focuses Las memorias del General (1996) and Las vidas del General (2004), written by the Argentine novelist and journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez, reinforcing the subject of enunciation and the historical referent. Here are some of the reformulations we consider significant between the first and the second of these books, before proceeding to the analysis of the role played by memory, narrative and rewriting of the self in the articles which are present in both editions: 1) "Las memorias de Puerta de Hierro"; 2) "Días de exilio en Madrid "; 3) "Perón y sus novelas". The autobiographical voice of the former president of Argentina, printed in interviews he granted to Martínez, faces the critical considerations and reassessments of the author in the first item listed, it remains in the second text, featured as biographical, and joins the autobiographical writer’s own voice, in the third one and in paratexts of the analyzed books, in a process that allows us to note the adjacent borderlines between memorialistic, biographical, historical and autobiographical narratives.