Mirtha Dermisache’s grafismos, or graphisms, are instantly recognizable: like the patter of an animal’s steps, or the wisp of a signature come undone, their marks reveal not semantic meaning but the gesture of expression itself. The Month of the Flies (UDP, 2024) by Sergio Chejfec, translated into English by Rebekah Smith and Silvina López Medin, is a response to Dermisache’s book of graphisms, Libro N° 8: 1970. It is a little book that holds a mirror to a mirror to a void. On the left side, Dermisache’s graphisms, on the other, a “sequel,” an intervention, ode, interpretation, translation, by the writer Sergio Chejfec.
Dermisache, a teacher, visual artist, and poet, published her first book of graphisms, or asemic writings, Libro N° 1 in 1967—an illegible, 500-page book. This was a time of vivacious global experimentation with mass media-based art, synthesizing, critiquing, falling into, and ripping apart the process and circulation of the world of new print media. Many of Dermisache’s contemporaries, as in the work of collective Tucuman Arde, were critiquing dictatorship and censorship by reappropriating forms of mass media into artworks (strategies we see today in protest media like the New York War Crimes).
Dermisache made few explicitly political works, the most well-known being her Diario, which formally referenced the newspapers announcing the military dictatorship’s massacre of leftist and Peronist political prisoners in Trelew, with scribbles filling the wordless pages. Her work took this tradition into a more intimate exploration of language itself: “What I was doing, and still do, is develop graphic ideas on writing which, in the end, have little to do with political events but much to do with the structures and forms of language.” In Dermisache’s work, we encounter the viscous maw of language and representational meaning. In a much-quoted letter from 1971 that would help Dermisache define the ethos of her own work, Barthes describes the “extreme intelligence of the theoretical problems around writing that your work tackles… forms that could be called illegible writing, which leads readers to formulate… the idea, the essence, of writing.” It’s unsurprising this process of defining her work was a collaborative one, rooted in an inherently reciprocal epistolary exchange. This reciprocity, “similar to reading but incomplete,” as Chejfec references in his note to The Month of the Flies, is central to the reader’s experience of her texts and to Dermisache’s life. She was a teacher, another well-known pedagogical project being her open-ended artistic gatherings called Jornadas de Color y Forma, held at various cultural spaces during the time of military dictatorship, encouraging adults to create for the sake of expression itself. In her application for a Guggenheim fellowship (which went unselected), Dermisache critically defined this practice: “In practice, and although the main thing was and is the research within the graphics, I applied them, together with other creators, in an interdisciplinary way [...] I seek to deepen their own possibilities of expression.”
Chejfec, an Argentine novelist, teacher, editor, and former taxi driver, is one of these dialogic collaborators. In The Month of the Flies, a group of people—the multiplicitous “we”—takes a boat to a small island between Uruguay and Argentina, Isla Martín García, now designated a nature preserve, a mixture of sea, town, and forest. This poem is a diary of a simple day—a group boards the boat, sees the coastline of Buenos Aires, travels the Río de la Plata, arrives at the island, and has lunch. Of course, as we experience Chejfec’s poem, we also textually and sensorially experience Dermisache’s original scribbles, haunting the left side (the side of origin) of our gaze, in their ruinous, sonorous conjugations. These scribblings of eerie beauty haunt and birth the “sequel” of Chejfec. I put quotes around “sequel” because this is how Chejfec describes the poem in his note—a word that I find reveals the peculiar nature of the project itself, and the writer’s grappling with the question of the opaque relationships between the two texts.
The number of lines and the differing line lengths of Chejfec’s poem parallel the structural spine of the graphisms. This implies that Chejfec’s poem is in relation with—in step with, at least, if not a translation of—the left side. This intimate yet ambiguous relationship between the two texts—as Chejfec describes it, “a reindication of nothing via nothing”—is both affirmed and disrupted by one of the most notable features of Chejfec’s text: its erratic spacing. Chejfec invokes (or revokes) the (a)semic power of the space again and again, creating a momentum, a waxing and waning, through the movement of spacing between words, they seem to push into each other, as if racing, tripping, skipping: “Sincewe had / wokenupthatmorning everything, littlebylittle, / everythinghad / seemedmoreandmore intangible.” Beyond the perhaps more obvious use of spacing as a rhythmic device that echoes the jolting of the graphisms, this spacing also reflects the philosophic nature of asemic writing.
Derrida describes the spacing between words, “the supplementary mark of the blank,” as “asemic,” given that they suggest meaning, make signification possible, while in themselves not signifying. Sometimes Chejfec’s use of spacing seems to imply that the dips in Dermisache’s graphisms represent spacing, which, following Derrida’s logic, implies that the graphisms are units of words themselves, separated by these spaces. Other times, Chejfec’s words rush while Dermisache’s graphisms do not (and vice versa), hinting toward a disagreement between left and right sides. In this relational dissonance, we find the paradoxical question at the heart of asemic writing: is it impossible to fully flee meaning, if even when language, squiggles, graphisms are nonsense, asemic, the gesture of those scribbles is its own form of signification?
Chejfec’s work centers on literary experience, writing about writing, and its opposite force, illegibility. In the abundance of loving dedications written by his friends and contemporaries following his death in 2022, Chejfec’s work is often characterized as sharply philosophical, playfully literary, political, open and shifting. His literary inspiration arose from walking through cities and looking closely; this movement and attention guides Chejfec’s embodied interpretations of Dermisache’s work. On page 19, Roxana, with her “halfcrackedvoice,” tells the tourists (readers) on the island (text), “thatfurtherthere wasthe / intangible forest. Meanwhilewe couldhear birds / singing.” As the tourists experience the ruins of Isla Martín García as a tangled thicket, a horizon seen from far away, a cacophony of bird song—all of which form the topography of a real place—so do we as readers experience the graphisms, which exist suspended in a total nothingness and everythingness. In this tour, many imaginaries arise that activate the graphisms: the wash of the boat on water, the tangled forest, the blurred horizon of Buenos Aires seen at a distance:
