Potentialities and limits of fiction

The narratives of the children of political activists and the disappeared in Argentina emerging after the year 2000 employ fiction as a deliberate aesthetic and political narrative strategy to address the recent past and the repression of the dictatorship (1976-1983). This article will focus on Patricio Pron’s novel El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia [‘My Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain’] (first published in 2011) to explore the potentialities and limits of fiction when approaching painful and controversial aspects of the past. Pron proposes a narrative experiment with autofiction which sparked a debate between him and his father, one of the main characters in the novel, after the novel was published. We argue that the polemic between the Prons reveals a double conflict, centered on the interpretation of the past and on the limits of (auto)fiction when dealing with real, particularly sensitive, events in national history.