El entenado e a tradição literária: olhares críticos latino-americanos a partir das perspectivas de Juan José Saer e Silviano Santiago

Abstract

We present a reading of El entenado (The Witness) that is guided by the articulation between the notions of speculative anthropology, by Juan José Saer, and space in-between, by Silviano Santiago. Our hypothesis is that, on the one hand, these two concepts serve as reading keys for Saerian novel, and, on the other, this narrative can serve as a paradigm for the analysis and understanding of these two literary proposals. With the aim of building a zone of contacts and frictions between the theoretical, critical and fictional projects of these two writers, we verify their narrative assumptions based on the relationship they allow to establish with anthropological practice and with performance art. We examine the border positioning that El entenado maintains with literary tradition, exploring both the conflicting relationship that this narrative establishes with historical and ethnographic discourses and with mimetic art as well as the narrator’s transit between the European and Amerindian worlds. We analyze the specular and anthropological aspects implied in Saer’s concept of fiction in comparison with Santiago’s “hinge-characters” and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism. We try to show how Saer and Santiago, through the projection of their bodies on the world and through a writing made of performance and catachresis, make re-readings of Western literature, recreating it from the intersection of this tradition with their respective regional perspectives. We consider that, although their due proposals for marginal discursive positioning and search for aesthetic autonomy have some characteristics in common, Saer and Santiago differ in relation to the way they use the literary models of tradition in their narratives.