PT Journal
AU de Navascues, J
TI Anti-Borgian appropriations and corporeality in the graphic novel Perramus by Sasturain and Breccia
SO Romanica Olomucensia
PY 2022
BP 275
EP 290
VL 34
IS 2
DI 10.5507/ro.2022.023
DE Breccia and Sasturain; Borges; Argentine comic; dictatorship; grotesque
AB The graphic novel Perramus, published between 1982 and 1989, with a script by Juan Sasturain and drawings by Alberto Breccia, is a canonical work in its genre in Latin America and one of the main texts that dealt with the subject of the military dictatorship in Argentina in the 1980s. In it, an anonymous character known by the nickname of Perramus has various adventures in a city, Santa Maria, dominated by the sinister regime of the Mariscals. Perramus integrates graphic experimentation with the political content of its stories, in this case linked to a left-wing Latin Americanist programme. One of the findings of the work is the inclusion of Jorge Luis Borges as one of its protagonists. The treatment of the Argentinean writer as a character and the ways in which Sasturain's script transforms his public image and his ideas about literature and politics are studied. Perramus, while glorifying Borges as the hero of the story, manipulates Borges' immanentism. Instead, the graphic novel is characterised by its political content and expressionist aesthetics, based on the hyperbolic characterisation of human bodies. Thus, the henchmen lack solid contours, without being pure skeletons: they symbolise the destruction of living matter. In contrast, other characters represent the human body in a carnivalesque manner through exaggeration of its proportions or scatological humour. In all cases, the physical processes of the characters are exalted: reproductive, excrementitious, degenerative, etc. These literary and visual resources are intended to legitimise the graphic novel genre within "high" culture.
ER