Abstract

GUERRA, Juan José. Melancholy and spectrality in Sergio Chejfec’s Boca de lobo. Recial [online]. 2022, vol.13, n.22, pp.253-269.  Epub Dec 08, 2022. ISSN 2718-658X.  http://dx.doi.org/10.53971/2718.658x.v13.n22.39623.

This work analyzes Boca de lobo (2000), by Sergio Chejfec, starting from the hypothesis that the conjectural future that is constructed in the text has the form of a foggy and overwhelming future. Correlatively, that the industrial suburb is designed more on the traces of conceptual and aesthetic traditions than on an empirical or referential basis, and in this sense the urban space is built through mechanisms of disfigurement and fading that tend to blur the real. The novel is built on the basis of an inquiry into the effect that the remains of the past produce in the present. We interpret these remains in a triple dimension: subjective, to the extent that they refer to a love bond and the aftermath after the breakup; historical, because they allude to the world of industrial work at its point of disintegration; and literary, insofar as they allow to hear resonances of diverse cultural traditions that range from social realism and Marxism to gaucho literature. The three dimensions are imbricated by the concepts of “melancholy” (Freud, Butler) and “spectrality” (Derrida), since they express, respectively, the impossibility of giving up the object and the phantasmatic persistence of the past.

Keywords : Sergio Chejfec; melancholy; spectrality; space; temporality.

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