Ficção como antropologia especulativa: embates comunicativos na literatura de Juan José Saer

Abstract

This essay seeks to explore the communicative struggles that emerge from reading of the novel "O Enteado" by Juan José Saer, taking literary fiction as a possibility for reflection on culture and for the experience of conflicts between identity and otherness. Proposing an understanding of fiction as a form of speculative anthropology, we explore, through the writer's work, questions concerning the comparison of different perspectives: what would happen if these comparisons were made inside the fictional space-time developed in a particular work? How do particular fictions advance and question the limits of our possible worlds? Saer’s book is particularly exciting in the pursuit of these interrogations, since it departs from a presumed historical event to retell it through a narrator-character who does not seem to find his own place in any of the two worlds that he attended – the European nor the Colastiné’s – a which creates disturbing reflections on both.