Inflexiones literarias en la materia del tiempo: Dos novelas argentinas sobre escritura y memoria

Abstract

Memory and literature have at least one feature in common: both are based on the collection of events and their organization in time by means of a plot. Therefore, reflecting about time in its narrative dimension may shed some light on the individual and collective experience of temporality and on its functioning in stories and in processes of historical memory. This contribution discusses two Argentine novels: Los planetas [1999] by Sergio Chejfec and La casa de los conejos [The Rabbit House] [2008] by Laura Alcoba. Both novels reconstruct, in the interior time of fiction, that period of terror and misery during the last dictatorship in Argentina, while at the same time offering -from the utopia of fantasy in one case and the illusory simultaneity of autobiography in the other- possible imaginaries of a past that still reaches into the present