Hunger games in “Vacío era el de antes” by Luisa Valenzuela

• Diane E. Marting ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Mississippi

     University of Mississippi

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: CiberLetras: revista de crítica literaria y de cultura, ISSN-e 1523-1720, Nº. 45, 2021, págs. 17-30
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • While the title stories of Luisa Valenzuela’s collections (“Aquí pasan cosas raras”; “Cambio de armas”) and a few other of her short fictions have been subject to analysis multiple times, the majority of her very short stories have not yet been studied in published form. In this article, I analyze “Vacío era el de antes” (Aquí pasan cosas raras, 1975), in which the author uses an ironic and comic mode to narrate the theme of hunger in Buenos Aires before and during the year of 1974. I treat social, political, and economic context as ‘affordances,’ discourses and objects in discourse, that can be fruitfully disentangled to highlight some of the story’s many meanings. In the story, the narrator peers through a hole in a fence of a construction site and sees an empty grill. Found in many Argentine restaurants and outside many homes, the typical grill (parrilla) and the asado cooked on it, are the architectural and food objects around which the story is constructed. Next, I compare thematically and rhetorically Valenzuela’s story with a forerunner in the literary line of satiric commentaries on Argentine culture, Esteban Echeverría’s “El matadero.” Finally, I bring into the light connections between Peronist ideology and ideas within “Vacío.” In this analysis, I explore some of the consequences, both comical and dire, of the lack of meat at lunchtime on construction sites in “Vacío era el de antes,” revealing trenchant sarcasm and mordant satire as discursive weapons, criticizing state corruption and the downward spiral of the economy.