La literatura como arqueología: ucronía e historia en la novela The Iron Dream, de Norman Spinrad, y en el cómic Peter Kampf lo sabía, de Trillo y Mandrafina

Abstract

One of the consequences about thinking literature as a laboratory of the human condition, whether in its individual or collective form, is that fiction, especially some type of fantasy, would allow us to consider the present work as some kind of “archaeology.” Indeed, Uchrony, a specific subgenre of the fantastic, departing from the question “what would have happened if…?” allows one to construct a “fictional present” from a bifurcation in the plot that may end up in an “Other history”, in an “Other” present, which may be called Unheimlich, to use the Freudian concept of the sinister. Our familiar present, so familiar, becomes unfamiliar in the face of a turn history did not take but could have taken and survives in the present as a deep layer that may only be accessible “archaeologically.” From this perspective we will analyse the novel The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad, which poses a hypothetical Hitler novel and its latter rewriting by two Argentinian authors, Trillo y Mandrafina, in an 80’s comics.