Violencia metonímica: la historia y la política en la narrativa de Juan José Saer

Abstract

This essay takes account of the various literary representations of the experience of the last Argentinean military dictatorship by focusing on Juan José Saer’s narratives. Beginning with an analysis of the way in which Nadie nunca nunca (1980) has been included in a virtual corpus of Argentinean novels utilizing allegorical or anti-realistic narrative strategies to tackle the subject (the model for this approach is Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración), the essay advances a way to interpret these novels that begins by analyzing the two senses at the root of every allegoric structure to move toward the metonymic dismantling of these structures. This dialectic movement of the promise/deception of the metaphoric sense constitutes the basic function of the Saerian text in its connection with historical and political figures.