Nuevos maniqueísmos: los intelectuales en las novelas históricas de Almudena Grandes

Badebec, 2013

Libro reseñado: Aguirre, Osvaldo y Gilda Di Crosta (eds.). Setecientosmonos. Antología. Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos Editor, 2012.

Studia Historica Historia Contemporanea, 2010

2023

Anales de Literatura Española, 1993

Studia Historica Historia Contemporanea, 1998

2009

Note: The complete dissertation is written in Spanish. My dissertation is about two contemporary novels, The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa and The Obscene Bird of the Night by José Donoso, where these use the monstrosity and the grotesque to critique modernity in Latin America. In The War of the End of the World, there is a military and ideological confrontation between the modern and urban classes that inhabit the coast of Brazil and the inhabitants of sertões, rural areas of the Bahia state, in Northeastern Brazil. The urban classes drive a modernization project –supported by scientific positivism– that has begun to move into the sertões, where in contrast, a premodern culture prevails, in which a popular aspect of the Catholic religion plays a fundamental role. Both the urban classes and the inhabitants of sertões see their adversaries as monsters. According to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the monster embodies the anxieties, fears, and inadmissible desires and fantasies of a community. Modern Brazilian people see iv the inhabitants of the hinterland as monsters because they embody their fear, repulsion and attraction of a pre-modern lifestyle, which they consider to be a barrier to progress. Moreover, the modern Brazilian state and its agents, including its officers and army troops, embody the fear of the inhabitants of the sertões, from their religious perspective, of eternal damnation. Therefore they choose to reject the agents of the state, whom they view as dogs and representatives of the Antichrist. In The Obscene Bird of the Night, through various forms of expression of the grotesque –i.e., the grotesque body, the motifs of the mask and madness, and the design of the surrounding reality as a strange and hostile world–, the novel creates a description of the world opposed to the realistic description of the world, which relies on the notion of the modern subject and the socio-political structures created by the elite. The realistic description of the world proves to be as monstrous as its grotesque counterpart, not only because it is a fiction, but also by the oppressive order that it imposes. The chaos in the grotesque description of the world serves to reveal this state of affairs in the social order and to show the falsity of the idea of the subject that acquires its unity and coherence in reason. The monstrosity and the grotesque both bear witness to the inconsistencies and exclusions that triggered the ruling elite class in Latin America to attempt to modernize its society and criticize the intellectual basis for this project: the rational subject and the foundations of social order established by the elite.

El presente estudio, tiene como propósito demostrar el carácter posmoderno de las dos novelas publicadas hasta el momento por el escritor colombiano Antonio García Ángel, además de demostrar el valor de la obra del autor dentro del campo de la narrativa colombiana actual, dado el desconocimiento evidente alrededor de sus productos literarios. En este sentido, se presenta en primer lugar una fundamentación teórica que pretende aclarar el concepto de posmodernidad y su uso en el desarrollo de este trabajo. En segundo lugar, se muestra cómo las teorías y la cultura posmodernas ofrecen categorías que pueden asumirse como fuentes de análisis para el discurso y la producción en el campo literario actual, haciendo énfasis en la situación particular de la literatura colombiana. Por último, se presenta el análisis de las novelas Su casa es mi casa y Recursos Humanos, con el objeto de mostrar en ellas su carácter posmoderno y su valor dentro de la narrativa colombiana actual.

Orbis Tertius, 1997