RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
A1 Premat, Julio
T1 Steps in the rut: novels from memory in Argentina
JF Romanica Olomucensia
YR 2018
VO 30
IS 1
SP 125
OP 138
DO 10.5507/ro.2018.008
UL https://romanica.upol.cz/artkey/rom-201801-0008.php
AB In addition to representations, debates, transfers, and productions of historical memory in contemporary novels - and, in the case of Argentina, of the memory of the last dictatorship - current narratives are obsessed with anamnestic gestures that take various forms: family histories and collective narratives overlap in fictions with the focus turned toward the past. In this article, the forms, the impact, and the relations to the present of what could be called, in general terms, the novela de memoria (the memory novel, but also the novel from memory) of this start of the millennium are analysed. As a starting point four long contemporary Argentine novels are taken into account: Un hombre llamado Lobo by Oliverio Coelho (2011), Historia de Roque Rey by Ricardo Romero (2014), El espectáculo del tiempo by Juan José Becerra (2015), and El absoluto by Daniel Guebel (2016). All four appear as hermeneutic fictions in the sense that they turn to the past and to the family history (in particular to the father figure) in search of solutions to dilemmas of the present and to the challenges for the contemporary subject of a problematic historicity. All four, in recounting memories and heritages (personal, cultural, social), go beyond the narcissistic schema of autofiction; in this way, they can be read as examples of a "utopia of memory" and of a repetition that is both a melancholic characteristic and an attempt to invent the novel of the future.