C Stands for Censorship: “Dirty War” Comics, Camouflage and Buscavidas by Aarnoud Rommens

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		Issue 12: Opening Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases

	C Stands for Censorship: "Dirty War" Comics, Camouflage and Buscavidas
		Author: Aarnoud Rommens Published: August 2005 Abstract (E): Departing from Roland Barthes's intuition that drawings might be, “at first sight” at least, images without a code, the author explores how such a notion might be useful in considering specific comics published in Argentina during the so-called “dirty war,” the period of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. Can reading pose a critical counterweight to an all-pervading cultural conditioning? What ‘subversive' signs could a reader construct as an antidote to the regulation of meaning and suppression of public life which marked this period? By a short reading exercise of two images from the comic Buscavidas (Trillo & Breccia), the author hopes to suggest certain counter-censorial tactics. Abstract (F): A partir de l'intuition de Roland Barthes qu'un dessin pourrait être, « à première vue », une image sans code, l'auteur s'interroge sur l'intérêt d'une telle hypothèse pour l'analyse des bandes dessinées publiées en Argentine durant ladite « sale guerre » des années de dictature 1976-1983. La lecture est-elle capable de résister à un conditionnement culturel omniprésent ? Quels pourraient être les signes ‘subversifs' construits par le lecteur comme antidote au contrôle du sens et à l'interdiction du débat public pendant cette période ? L'analyse de deux cases de la bande dessinée Buscavidas (Trillo & Breccia) permet d'aborder la question des tactiques anti-censure . keywords: Barthes, Breccia, (counter-) censorship, encrage , percepticide.


		1. "At first sight," as Roland Barthes writes, drawings seem to be "messages without a code," in their capacity of "analagon " (Barthes 2000 [1961]: 196). However, if one takes a closer look, drawings are coded, but only on a supplementary level, as they harbor a connoted message by virtue of what is commonly referred to as style - the so-called "treatment" - of the image, as "the result of the action of the creator" (Ibiden). This treatment in its turn refers to a "certain [i.e. aesthetic or ideological] 'culture' of the society receiving the message" (ibid.: 196-97). Now let us focus our attention on figurative drawings, the sort of drawings that are generally found in comics. As I am not interested in style at the moment, let us conveniently suspend this issue and explore Roland Barthes's intuition as our leitmotif, namely the very characterization that "at first sight," drawings are indeed "messages without a code " (ibid.: 196) . Might it not be that, while we are reading a comic for instance, and because of the analogical character of these representative, recognizable and figurative drawings, our attention is diverted from the actual "treatment" of the image? [1] Perhaps it would be more correct to speak in the subjunctive; drawings might - only momentarily perhaps - be messages without a code. So, if only for the sake of the argument, let us maintain that drawings might be "messages without a code " . The characterization "codeless message" is useful in that it suggests the difficulty of decoding images in isolation. The photograph for instance has a meaning, or rather multiple meanings, but it is difficult to find a definite ground for our interpretation without a verbal key, such as an external caption, capable of directing our interpretation. [2] Things are similar in comics, where, by the way, images never function in isolation. Furthermore, comics contain words within the images, and it is often underscored that, in comics, the verbal either anchors ("ancrage") the image (cf. the use of captions) or complements the image as relay ("relais"), where the word supports the visual (i.e. in dialogue). [3] The word, in its anchoring function at least, orients the interpretation of the message, in other words, it reduces the polysemy of the image; it explains the visual message, it endows it with a code. What seems to be presupposed in this analysis is the primacy of the word over the image. Although one can equally maintain that "the interaction between word and image is a feed-back process" (Steimberg 2005), the premise underlying the concept of anchoring seems to suggest a general subordination of the image to the word within comics, at least as decoding is concerned. The image is read as a "symptom" of the word. One can even say, perhaps with a touch of exaggeration, that the "truth" of the image is evaluated on the basis of the text. An analysis based on the concept of anchoring seems to preclude the possibility of an image anchoring the verbal. But why would this be impossible? However interesting this issue might be, I am not interested in its implications, at least not at this moment. 2. The concept of anchoring ("encrage") is interesting because it is suggestive . It evokes the logical possibility of a "de-anchoring", or better, a "non-anchored" image. Is there such a thing in comics? Does it not run counter to our reading intuition? I believe that de-anchoring is an effect that can play in contexts of censorship. Perhaps I should make this nuance first. Semiotic analyses of comics inspired by the findings of Barthes maintain that anchoring is a function of the word in the comics. I believe it is not so much a function but rather the stance of the reader, a reader who is positioned as someone intent on extracting a homogenous interpretation out of fragments. De-anchoring has the effect of frustrating the reader's practice of anchoring. Perhaps it's also better to speak of degrees of de-anchoring: some comics show more resistance to anchoring than others, and it also largely depends on the context of reading. In fact, my research focuses on de-anchoring and its relation to censorship and counter-censorship. 3. The "Process of National Reorganization," the euphemism adopted by the military regime for the period of state terrorism between 1976 and 1983, marks one of the most horrific episodes in Argentina 's recent history. [4]This was a time in which so-called "political agitators" - many of them doctors, students, professors, journalists and trade unionists - disappeared and ended up in a network of secret detention centers. It is estimated that approximately 30,000 persons were abducted to be executed. In the words of James Neilson ( qtd. in Feitlowitz 1998:15), this represented a "secret Argentina ", "that other country [within], the country of the missing, of complicit silence, of demented militarism" [and torture], a clandestine world covered up by the rhetorical finesse of the junta. 4. The period was also marked by harsh censorship. The "guidelines", a euphemism for prohibitions issued by military censors, "made fascists of us all for we were on the lookout for anything that could be construed as 'subversive'" - the Argentine playwright Diana Raznovich recalls ( quoted in Taylor 1997: 11-12) . This was a time in which most artists, at least according to the author María Elena Walsh, wrote with " broken pencil[s] and enormous erasers encrusted in our brain" (quoted in Graham-Jones 2000: xx). Comics were no exception. [5] However, there were those rare comics that voiced a discordant note by making use of what I would call counter-censorial practices. As opposed to the concept of censorship , counter-censorship has its point of origin in the text itself, and not a third party, the censor, who cuts out, crosses out, impounds or destroys that which is deemed 'subversive' - one could call this external censorship .[6] Self-censorship , or internal censorship on the other hand, is strongly linked with the moment of production and authorial intention. Intentions are impossible to verify, and therefore it is equally impossible to point out self-censorship within the pages of a book or a comic. Why should we trust an author, such as the Argentine comics artist Alberto Breccia, when he says that he wanted to draw something more critical and daring but could not, because, in his own words, "to do so I would have signed my own death warrant" ( Vincent 1997) ? The only corroboration we have of this is that he survived to make this testimony. 5. Counter-censorship can be defined as the "disarticulat[ion] [of] the repressive discursive system in order to generate a discourse censored by that very system" (Cánovas 1980: 171). In other words, the counter-censorial work reveals or anticipates its own potentiality for external censorship; it addresses the reader in such a way so as to suggest that what is there on the page has been muffled, which in turn requires the reader to decipher and return possible "subversive" signs. The reader therefore becomes well aware of the mere possibility of censorship, and as such he or she will interpret the 'blanks' and 'silences' as meaningful, as he or she is trying to compose an uncensored version in his or her head, as it were. One can see that counter-censorship refers more to the reception than production. Although counter-censorial techniques were employed by authors, they still largely depended for their decoding on a reader able to pick up cryptic pointers, a reader able and willing to follow a 'subversive' path of interpretation in order to unearth 'dirty' secrets. Such a resistant counter-censorial reading is then largely informed by its context; in a context of surveillance, the reading stance seems more attuned, even hypersensitive, to possible traces of opposition, regardless of the author's intention . Perhaps, due to the context, the reader will even construct additional "blanks", so as to fill them with a resistant reading, as a form of compensation (cf. infra). Tactics of counter-censorship usually include techniques for increasing "the opacity of the sign" (Graham-Jones 2000:26). For example, the "metaphorisation of reality" was one of the preferred techniques of playwrights in order to "recreate onstage the very reality that permeated their lives" (Ibiden). Other rhetorical devices such as "allegory, analogy, the re-appropriation of cultural codes, parody, the orphaned quote, and the double entendre" (ibid.:21) can be understood in a similar vein. These procedures, which rely on a sort of camouflaging of meaning, were also used in comics, and were largely relegated to the visual and not the verbal, which could be decoded all too easily. 6. In addition, I think it is important to consider what I have called the de-anchoring - in addition to the dislocation of the relay - as another possible instance giving rise to a possible counter-censorial reading. Here, text ceases to be an anchor and floats about, which frustrates the interdependence between word and image the reader is so accustomed to. Such signs, usually just details in the image, have no narrative importance. They do not even belong to the level of diegesis. One does not find the counter-censorial in the narrative itself, the content if you will, which is precluded by external censorship to begin with. The reader has to make do with those enigmatic and out-of-place signals that seem to arrest, at least momentarily, the narrative sequencing. De-anchoring remakes the drawing as a true image: in the sense of a message without a code, or rather a message having lost its ground. Such de-anchored images are more or less random, incompetent signs; signs that contain at least this minimal paradoxical message: that of constrained communication, indicating that things cannot be said as they should. The message points to the impossibility of being a true message, but it still cries out to be decoded. Counter-censorial signs are there for everyone to see, and their meaning is to suggest what cannot be said. 7. In this respect, the counter-censorial shows affinity to what has been characterized as percepticide , a concept that refers to the complicit self-blinding of a population witnessing the open spectacle of abductions and other atrocities, where "the "disappeared" were dragged away in full view of family, neighbors, and other observers, [where] people were subjected to overt violence in public avenues during broad daylight [and where] people had to deny what they saw and, by turning away, collude with the violence around them" (Taylor 1997: 122-23). In other words, what people were able to witness every day - arrests with suspects kicking and screaming and dragged by their hair, roadblocks, checkpoints, the ransacking of houses - was not allowed to be seen, or at least it could not be spoken of in public, it could not be acknowledged. What is said has been radically de-anchored from what is seen. In comics, one can feel this same percepticide at work - images depicting state violence were simply forbidden. The paradox is that this percepticide is turned back on the reader: the presence of oblique and 'secret' signs are suggestive of the reader's own self-blinding, and might as such be a painful but indeterminate reminder of the violence of every-day-life. Perhaps this need of the readers to 'fill in the blanks', to read and 'see differently' during the dictatorship, suggests that these readers overcompensated their self-blinding with an over-interpretation of comic images in terms of their perceived 'subversive' potential. What could not be acknowledged in public discourse could be performed through the private act of reading. 8. What I have presented are mere reading hypotheses that try and make some sense out of the sometimes strange signs that you can find in some comic books published during the "Dirty War". By way of conclusion, I would like to go over some images taken from Buscavidas , a comic book by Alberto Breccia (drawings) and Carlos Trillo (scenario); published in Argentina in 1981. I will comment on two particular images taken from Buscavidas . 8.1 What immediately caught my eye in this particular image (Illustration 1) were the words "YUKON Canadian Liquors". At first sight, it seems simple. It is just an advert or a bar sign for " Yukon Jack" - which, as the corporate website announces, is "the black sheep of Canadian liquors - a 100 proof Canadian whiskey and honey based liqueur: boldly flavourful, yet surprisingly smooth." By the way, the brewer Yukon Liquors is also known for its "Perma Frost", some sort of, believe it or not, "peppermint schnapps." [7] However, do the words "Yukon Canadian Liquors" merely function as elements to create a setting, in this case recreate the atmosphere of a rundown working-class district of Buenos Aires? Is this just a case of generating an 'effect of the real'? In my opinion, it does nothing of the sort, on the contrary. It is just one of those frustrating signs that abounds in the entire comic book Buscavidas , it's one of those obstinate signs again, lacking an anchor, and getting on your nerves. It professes to be a seemingly innocent piece of décor, but at the same time it suggests that some more sinister meaning might be lurking underneath, precisely because there is no anchor that can reassure us and arrest the possible associations which "Yukon". The Yukon : that mountainous region of North-western Canada , where gold-diggers and fortune seekers got together at the end of the 19 th Century, all digging for riches, most of them ending up without even a nail to scratch. "Canadian Liquors": the font in the image, set in some sort of "saloon type", recalls the mythical days of the so-called frontier days, the Wild West, the Gold Rush, gun fights, cowboys and Indians, bloodshed and buffaloes, what have you. But what point is there in this little exercise of associations? The sign is just there, stubborn, trying to get our attention again and again, but refusing to give up clues as to why it is there. Something similar occurs within the space of the speech balloons. Here, the text, as you can see for yourself, does clearly not function as support of the images. In fact, the words seem to be scraps from publications in different languages, like Arab, Chinese, English, French, German etc. This is suggestive of the conditioning of discourse in a context of state repression, in which dialogue becomes ready-made monologue, in which discourse is produced according to the strict guidelines imposed by censors. It has to be remembered that between 1976 and 1983, which is also the period in which the first episodes of Buscavidas were first published (viz. 1981), the military government attempted to purify vocabulary of 'dangerous' words. Indeed, "the only safe words" were those deemed safe by the junta; words in accordance with "God, mother-country and home", as Admiral Massera, one of the junta leaders, put it (Marchak 1999:114). The words in the speech balloons, if legible, are printed ready-mades, reiterating such glamorous words such as "St.-Tropez" and "Costa Brava" for instance - prefabricated scraps of discourse that have no supportive function with regards to the images in the comic, to the narrative and to the characters uttering them. The figures just blab and spit out unintelligible or respectable printed words; the kind of speech that has been approved by the censors. 8.2 This image (Illustration 2) refers to censorship in its crudest form, and can be considered the most blatant counter-censorial sign of the comic book Buscavidas . In anticipation of the censor, the C already covers up that which must not be shown, in this case the genitals. As such, the C carries with it a whole history of censorship, the one pertaining to the body and the pornographic. But this C reverberates throughout the entire comic: it clearly signals cultural surveillance and might be an index for self-censorship. It can therefore be seen as a cautionary sign, calling upon the reader to actively search out the subversive, to imagine what lies beneath the sign C. REFERENCES Barthes, Roland, 2000 [1961]. "The Photographic Message," in A Roland Barthes Reader , edited by Susan Sontag, 194-210 ( London : Vintage). _____, 1985. The Responsibility of Forms . ( New York : Hill and Wang). Breccia, Alberto and Carlos Trillo 1994 [1981, 1982]. "Buscavidas," in Alberto Breccia: Obras Completas: Volumen Uno , edited by Fernando García, [1-96]. ( Buenos Aires : Doedytores). Cánovas, Raúl, 1980. El Arte de la Palabra [The Art of Speech] ( Barcelona : Pomaire). Dansereau, Stéphanie, 2002. Petite Lexique sur la Communication Médiatisée , http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r33554/lexique.html , accessed on 17 January 2005. Feitlowitz, Marguerite, 1998. A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the legacies of Torture ( Oxford : Oxford University Press). Graham-Jones, Jean, 2000. Exorcising History: Argentine Theater under Dictatorship ( London : Associated University Presses). Marchak, Patricia, 1999. God's Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s ( Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press). Steimberg, Alejo, 2005. Interview with author, 7 January 2005. Taylor, Diana, 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and nationalism in Argentina 's "Dirty War" ( Durham : Duke University Press). Vazquez, Laura, 2005. " La biografía imposible," in Camouflage Comics , edited by Aarnoud Rommens, http://www.camouflagecomics.com (forthcoming). Vincent, Tom, 1997. " Kwangju Biennale: Power/Metal: Alberto Breccia," in Network Museum and Magazine Project , edited by Tsukasa Mori. ( Tokyo : Dai Nippon Printing), http://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_i/articles/asia/power/breccia.html , last accessed on 17 January 2005. [1]Of course, the duality of the message of the non-photographic analogical repdroduction, where denoted message (analagon) is supplemented with the connotation ("style"), must be kept in mind. "[T]he duality of messages is evident in all reproductions other than photographic ones: there is no drawing, no matter how exact, whose very exactitude is not turned into a style (the style of "verism"); no filmed scene whose objectivity is not finally read as the very sign of objectivity" (197). [2] Further along the essay "The Photographic Message", Roland Barthes himself points out that the photograph does indeed have a connotation (cf. his formulation of the "photographic paradox," in which there is a connoted message on the basis of a codeless message): "Connotation, the imposition of second meaning on the photographic message proper, is realized at the different levels of the production of the photograph (choice, technical treatment, framing, lay-out) and represents, finally, a coding of the photographic analogue" ( Barthes 2000 [1961]: 199). [3] Roland Barthes (1985: 30) refers to this relaying fucntion of the word in comics as follows: "Here language (generally a fragment of dialogue) and image are in complementary relation; the words are then fragments of a general syntagm, as are the images, and the message's unity occurs on a higher level: that of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis". Or, in the words of Stéphanie Dansereau (2002), "La fonction relais du verbe a pour rôle de faire des sauts spatio-temporels par souci d' économie d'espace et de temps pour raconter une histoire tels les espaces diégétiques (récitatifs) dans les B.D. ou les fondus au cinéma". [4] I must stress that my research interest is not limited to the period 1976-83. In addition, I'm also interested in how contemporary discourse and art still struggle with the legacy of this "Dirty War". Incidentally, the issue of inheritance is the central concern behind the internet project "Camouflage Comics," which will bring together the work of 25 Argentine writers and visual artists. The website http://www.CamouflageComics.com will be fully operational by the beginning of April 2005. [5]As Laura Vazquez (2005 forthcoming) points out: "The comics market, due to its massive and popular character, underwent the same surveillance. However, as in literature, there were exceptions. Some 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". [6] My use of the term internal and external censorship is based on Graham-Jones's usage of the terms (2000). [7] Cf. http://www.webtender.com/db/ingred/62



		A NOTE ON THE TEXT This article is part of the ongoing project "Camouflage Comics: Dirty War Images," which sets out to explore the interaction between censorship, aspects of verbal-visual narration and subtle means of counter-censorship in the context of the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-83. In addition, the project is also concerned with the legacy of this violent past onto contemporaneous discourse and artistic modes of expression, with a particular focus on Argentine comics today. A number of Argentine artists and theoreticians have contributed to this project, which has resulted in the website Camouflage Comics: Dirty War Images [http://www.camouflagecomics.com]. Present essay is actually an early version of "C Stands for Censorship: Buscavidas and the 'Terror of the Uncertain Sign,'" which can be found on the Camouflage Comics website [http://www.camouflagecomics.com/pdf/01_rommens_en.pdf]. This paper is a revised and expanded version of the lecture "C Stands for Censorship," which was delivered on 11 January 2005 as part of the "Opening Week" events at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht , the Netherlands . The author also wishes to express his gratitude to Alejo Steimberg for his close reading of the draft of this essay.