The aim of this paper is to address Alan Paul´s 2007 Historia del llanto. Un testimonio from an essayistic an analytical perspective, considering it as a laboratory-novel that enquires and suggests other means for memory writing. On one hand, we look into the relevance of the body, particularly of tears and skin. On the other, re-writing memory is viewed as a form that confronts the idea of past reconstruction as a social trauma reparation device. In addition, the novel questions the conception of art at the service of representation and conciliation of meaning. Therefore, we propose to read this work as a text that destabilizes representational forms of the past archive. The effect of this is an uncomfortable estrangement of the means by which actual social discourses have partially come to terms with a narrative about the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina´s recent history. The novel looks for those other materials which the archive, in order to constitute itself and be efficient, has deleted, forgotten or left unsaid. Taking into account the contributions to aesthetic enquire by Jaques Rancière and Jean Luc-Nancy, as well as the ideas by Michel Foucault and Hal Foster to archive issues, the novel can be regarded as a work dealing with past materials and reluctant to suppress meanings. The novel arises as a writing style that intends to keep memory account as an ever-processing exercise crossed by a poetics of bodies in contact. The narration of memory will be subjected to the struggles that replace it into the political arena.
Sabo, M. J. (2015). Acariciando a contrapelo los 70. El archivo en Historia del Llanto de Alan Pauls. Revista Chilena De Literatura, (90). Retrieved from https://boletinfilologia.uchile.cl/index.php/RCL/article/view/37625
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