Resumen de Experiencia y sentido: la escritura de la historia y del horror en la obra de martín caparrós
The work presented aims to analyze the mechanisms through which history is written, on the one hand, and horror, on the other, in the work of Argentine writer Martín Caparrós, with special attention to novels like Ansay o los infortunios de la gloria (1984), La Historia (1999), Los living (2011) or to chronicles like Larga distancia (1992) El interior (2006), La Voluntad (2008) o El Hambre (2014). Starting from the conception of history understood as a horizon of reflection, the hypothesis is analyzed that Martín Caparrós, in his work, questions the construction of official historiography reproducing its forms, its languages, parodying them, in order to evidence and question the different mediations through which we think and think about the world. A similar procedure is detected with respect to the writing of horror: starting from the assumption that language conveys and enables horror, it reproduces that language, strengthened by power, in order to recover and resignify it.
The work is divided into three parts: the first section reviews the theoretical framework of the “new historical novel” to reflect on the status of history in relation to fiction. The aim of attending this corpus is to develop the idea that history, in the narrative of the last decades, acts as a cogito, as a founding concept, as a horizon of reflection.
The second part deals with the analysis of the historical narrative of Martín Caparrós, with special emphasis on La Historia and Ansay o los infortunios de la gloria. In La Historia, Caparrós makes a critical rereading of the concept of foundation and, in Ansay, attends to the conformation of identity in the 19th century, as well as in the colonial past. Therefore, the analysis focuses on elucidating the way in which it tries to dismantle the construction of official historiography, which is through the reproduction of the languages of power to question them. It evidences its forms, reproduces them and in this way creates a counter discourse from fiction.
In the third part, the historical horror is defined and the problems inherent to the writing of horror are posed. Questioning the quality of unspeakable that the tradition has attributed to the horror, different ways of writing are approached that try to give answer to the question on how to transmit, literarily, the horror. The objective of raising this problem is to analyze the way in which it is resolved in the work of Martín Caparrós. As it has been pointed out, Caparrós proposal consists in deautomating the language of power, reproducing it, in order to recover it and resignify it.
Keywords: Martín Caparrós, Argentine narrative, historical novel, horror writing
