RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
A1 Riccardi, Giuseppe Gatti
T1 Memory, metaphor, and traumas in the Uruguayan narrativeof the new century.The proposals of Agustín Acevedo Kanopa and Horacio Cavallo
JF Romanica Olomucensia
YR 2018
VO 30
IS 1
SP 95
OP 110
DO 10.5507/ro.2018.006
UL https://romanica.upol.cz/artkey/rom-201801-0006.php
AB The object of the study is to think about the impact that the end of the grands réctis of modernity has meant for a thematic aspect of contemporary Uruguayan literature that has its focus on the recovery of memory. The collapse of these grands réctis has led writers to adopt minimal stories and leads the analysis to focus on the literary production of two Uruguayan narrators of recent times': Agustín Acevedo Kanopa (1985) and Horacio Cavallo (1977). Their latest collections of stories, Historia de nuestros perros (2016) and El silencio de los pájaros (2013), respectively, relate the collective memory with the crisis of personal identity. Moving from the definitive questioning of the "great stories" previous to postmodernity, a methodological approach to the plot of the stories "El béisbol criollo", by Agustín Acevedo Kanopa, and "La idea del agua", by Horacio Cavallo, will be proposed, using the postulates of the Theory of Reception (Wolfgang Iser), the contributions of Roland Barthes on the multiple senses of the text, and the studies of Roland Spiller on the specific features of personal and collective memory. The study of these two fictional texts shows how during the last twenty years, in Uruguayan literature, some forms of writings that focus on tiny narratives, a sort of minimal histories within History, have been consolidated. These narratives need the reader's collaboration and - once interpreted according to a metaphorical point of view - they cross the limits of the everyday story to reflect the memory of traumatic experiences that have marked the lives of the protagonists, in connection with the Big Histories of the broader society. The allusions to violence present in the two stories do not only create, on the literary level, a double level of reading (the linear and the metaphorical), but they seem to propose - from a current perspective - a single final conclusion by Acevedo Kanopa and Cavallo about the fracture in the national democratic system caused by the dictatorship. Although the dictatorship proved unable to endure, a bitter reading of historical events is nevertheless contained in the two texts: both tell us that certain destructive tendencies and certain realities continue to pulsate below the surface in some human structures, smaller than those of entire States, but still governed by authoritarian and/or coercive laws.