Approaching the present, the biographical stories investigated are increasingly concerned with family and work projects. Some troublesome biographical paths involve recent years: four of them went through divorce and two women experienced disruptive medical complications. An intense irritation was moreover expressed in relation to the health system and abusive forms of private payment. In addition, the burden of responsibility increases as their children came of age. Margot and Cristina were worried about their offspring’s education. For the majority, education and
health as ‘businesses’ aroused anger and discontent. Crisitna stressed such a feeling as a consequence of the unfair treatment she received at work. Marcela also experienced dissatisfaction when speaking about the political sphere. For Sergio, who works in the most marginal outskirts, people from the poorest social segment are living in ‘ghettos’. Inequality was a recurrent topic concerning the present society.
In spite of these circumstances, neither a final ‘tragic’ emplotment emerged nor was the current state of affairs harshly criticised. Rather, all of them reveal deep levels of ambiguity regarding the present. One metaphoric setting for such ambiguity is the appraisal of technological advances. They demonstrated an enormous fascination with the latter by using and consuming different new devices, while simultaneously expressing increasing fear over their effects on the new generations (the loss of
‘communication’, ‘creativity’, ‘real enjoyment’).
In such a context, two images of the future prevail. On the one hand, there are individualized versions of resignation: ‘Eventually, you are on your own.’ On the other hand, there is a more fatalistic version expressed by some respondents living in poverty: Hopefully (ojalá)59 things will get better – but probably they will not.
When analysing their present appraisals and images of the future, the differences with Argentinean modes of emplotment become evident. Even though there were certain nostalgic feelings, either related to networks of solidarity or linked to the medial and musicalized culture of the eighties, there exists no strong nostalgic plot.
Even if insecurity evokes a nostalgic discourse of childhood, there is no mythical golden age providing for an initial triumph and subsequent failing and decadence in the present. On the other hand, in spite of the right’s upper-middle-class happy-ending story, there is no movement from detachment towards new integration, as in the comedy plot. That is, in contrast to the stories from Buenos Aires, no collective promise has emerged during the last decade.
What mode of emplotment embraces their past experiences and future horizon of expectations instead? I would like to draw on Frank Kermode’s concept of ‘plot of consoling’. This idea appears in Kermode’s reflections when trying to understand the
59 Ojalá is a word derived from Arabic. It literally means ‘if Allah were to wish it’. When low-class respondents employed this expression, it might replicate a ‘religious’ (macro) sense, emphasising that such necessary transformation was beyond their reach.
apocalyptical thought (Kermode 2000 [1961]: 31). This biblical genre was born in the expectations of Christ’s second coming (Parousia). Given that this second coming has not come about, St. John and St. Paul had to react, making immanent as well as eschatologically meaningful the period of waiting. In this sense, I deduce, the consoling plot is revealed as an alternative to a failed promise, or a response to the
“disconfirmation of literal predictions” (Kermode 2000 [1961]: 9).
Among our respondents, the weight and force of democratic illusion (‘the joy is coming’) emerged after living an entire childhood and youth under dictatorship. The plebiscite was remembered as a mythical episode, burdened with promises of progress, justice and social mobility. The ensuing disenchantment did not completely break the lure of this ‘turning point’.
Furthermore, through rituals of mourning, media memory supports and a slow process of coming to terms with dictatorship, antagonists and adherents (at least amongst these age-groups – but not older age-cohorts) ended up by sharing a minimal consensus with regards to dictatorship: grey and dreadful. Subsequently, fear as a ‘structure of feeling’ was the most widespread term available to speak about the past.
Meanwhile, the present and its circumstances resisted a ‘happy ending’. There was no collective illusion which would enable hope, no promise which would support expectations of a ‘second coming’. Henceforth, their families, their children and their private stories became their consolation. The point is that without a new collective promise, their collective desires became narrowed down to their personal triumphs and family achievements (See, in a similar vein, Cornejo et al. 2014).60 Compared to the inter-generational promise of political activation and justice provoked by Kirchner’s symbolic turning points in Argentina, in Chile, the story of ‘on your own’
prevails.
60 One exception is Mauricio’s life-story ending. Mauricio– after years of alcoholism and drug addiction during the nineties – decided to settle down and start a new relationship.
While living in Peñalolén with his new partner, he established relations with his neighbours in order to struggle collectively against the government by demanding housing solutions. In October 2005 they squatted in a group of houses, demanding a right to stay there and not be relocated in some peripheral district. Housing movements turned out to be one of the most noticeable collective struggles during the last fifteen years, developing novel ‘political subjectivities’ (Angelcos 2012).
In Chapter Six, I will show that the canonical narrative which controls identity boundaries and maintains promises of social mobility will decay due to student protests. However, adult respondents have not completely adopted such a breaking narrative. Student protest narratives attempt to break precisely the temporal boundary which makes these generational stories emotionally meaningful: the difference between dictatorship and democracy.
All in all, the future remains private and strongly ambivalent, as their own present circumstances have become fragile and vulnerable, under constant threat from the marketization of health, education and pensions.
Figure 5
Consoling Plot-line
Chapter 5
Buenos Aires, 1986–1994: Canonical narratives and the cyclical plot
In the last two chapters I examined the Argentinean and Chilean generational memories of people born forty years ago. By looking at the intersections between life course and collective events, I focused on different narrative structures (forms of narrativity, evaluative codes and narrative emplotments) entangled in those micro and macro sequences. The intra-generational differentiation between ‘nostalgic’ and
‘comic’ modes of emplotment in Argentina and the prevalent ‘consoling plot’ of Chilean stories closed both sequences.
The following chapter returns to the Argentinean context in order to analyze this time how young people remember their lives and their defining collective events within a post-dictatorial context. I draw on 18 narrative interviews conducted with people born between 1986 and 1994 in Buenos Aires, Capital and Province. The sample embraces equal numbers of men and women, cutting across different social strata. At the time of the interviews, the participants were in the middle of their
‘formative years’ (ca. 17–25 years), the youngest finishing secondary school and the oldest beginning working life.
This chapter draw particular attention to the symbolical impact of remembering and recovering difficult pasts. Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile young generational sites are characterized by a strong political mobilization of youth (‘the return of militancy’ in Argentina and the cycle of ‘student protests’ in Chile); yet the dynamics of social memories differ strongly. The consolidation of a canonical narrative will burden the Argentine generational site. This ‘burden of history’ will be crucial to understanding the mounting process of youth politicization as well as a broader phenomenon of inter-generational continuity. A cyclical mode of emplotment encapsulates a large sequence of past recoveries: the hyperinflation of 1989 through the crisis of 2001, the consolidation of the dictatorship as a national tragedy under Néstor Kirchner’s government, as well as the recovery of Peronism as a polarizing memory over recent years. This cyclical plot is enhanced through a myriad of collective rituals of mourning and several commemorations.