Ways of Narrating: The Biographical Space Between Politics and poetics in Patricio Pron and Josefina Giglio

Abstract

This article examines the novels El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en lluvia (2011), by Patricio Pron, and Yo la quise (2019), by Josefina Giglio, with emphasis on the ways of narrating. The tension between the lived experience and its becoming an artifice is analyzed, moving through the relationship between literature and memory from the perspective of the generation born during the Argentine dictatorship. The study recovers the concept of biographical space postulated by Arfuch articulated with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of plan and Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope.

In Pron's novel, the return of a young writer to Argentina constitutes the turning point that encompasses the story of Alberto's disappearance (2008), that of Alicia, who disappeared in Tucumán (1976), and that of the writer's parents, Iron Guard militants.

In Giglio, the architecture interweaves the story of the character Yo, a writer faced with the impossibility of transforming a love relationship into fiction, that of Ella, a member of the communist party, and that of Nena and her brother after the disappearance of their parents.

Both novels refer to the questions of how to narrate the experience so as to make the historical event visible. The article contributes to the conceptual problematization of the biographical space, the ways of narrating, and guides a reflection to dismantle the relationship between reality and fiction.