Lines of Flight and Aquatic Environments. The Pampa as Experimental Space of the Aesthetic in the Novels of César Aira and Juan José Saer

Abstract

Abstract Historians and literary critics have described the Argentinean Pampa as a space predominantly connected to the foundational acts and discourses of the Argentinean nation. At the same time at which Argentina emerged as a nation, foundational discourses modeled the sparsely populated region lying beyond the capital Buenos Aires as a flat, unstructured landscape, as the allegedly empty space of a “desert”. The article analyzes how these geopolitical discourses are rewritten in two Argentinean novels from the last decade of the 20th century, César Aira’s La liebre (The Hare, 1991) and Juan José Saer’s Las nubes (The Clouds, 1997), which both perform an act of un-founding by creating alternative literary environments. In doing so, both novels also enact a narrative transculturation of spatial concepts drawn from European cultural theory by reterritorializing them on the territory of the Pampa.