Una Memoria de la Literatura: Historia y Paisaje en Las Nubes de Juan José Saer

Abstract

A quick look at Las nubes of Juan José Saer identifies different prototypical resources of those genres in which took shape the imperial imagination of a number of adventurers that throughout the nineteenth century codified the Argentine territory according to a pragmatic an economistic logic that would reappear later in the political and cultural programs of the local elite. But the symbolic form and the socially coded discourses that the text adopts, as the purpose of travel or its lineal, chronological and realistic character, are in tension with the roads it opens later against the grain of the expectations generated in the reader. Indeed, in the same text there is a veridiction regime that undermines the ontological assumptions on which rested these chronicles. By juxtaposing the attributes under which the «desert» was characterized in the nineteenth century with little micro-stories that replace a road or a history of the landscape of the pampas and including herrings and seemingly insignificant details, the novel does not only rework national spatiality but also aims to transform the individual experience and the uniqueness of events, by definition ineffable, into something affordable without subsuming it into a public language, a purpose or direction; an appropriate sense or, if you will, into a sense of property.