Masked ball or one most extraordinary inversion: El derecho de las bestias by Hugo Salas versus Amalia by José Mármol

Authors

Abstract

In the Argentinian narrative after the last dictatorship, we can observe a strong tendency to reinterpret the XIXth century: to deconstruct the official version of the history of the period and to rewrite the literary canon. One of the examples is the novel by Hugo Salas entitled El derecho de las bestias (2015), a kind of pastiche of Amalia (1851) by José Mármol. The aim of this paper is to analyze how the contemporary novel retakes the discourse and the narrative structures of the classic, taking them, however, out of the original temporal and political context, since the anti-Rosism, omnipresent in Amalia, is replaced here by an anti-Peronism that seems grotesquely exagerated. Using some of the metahistorical concepts introduced by Reinhart Koselleck we will try to show what consequences, both semantic and political, may have these textual operations.

Keywords:

Recent Argentinian literature, rewriting the canon, Salas, Mármol, Koselleck