Timelines, reading laps, suspended bodies

Abstract

This work analyzes literary texts by the writers Cristina Peri Rossi (Indicios pánicos (1970) and “Rumores” (1988) and Fernanda Trías (Mugre rosa, 2021) whose plots are set in different historical times (the Uruguayan dictatorship, Europe prior to the fall of the Wall and a possible biological catastrophe) It is not about recovering any linearity of meaning between these events, but rather thinking about how fictions offer different strategies to think about their present and the conflicts that arise from there to imagine other forms of life. These writings reveal that times return in the form of national and global catastrophes and mark bodies, their modes of relationship, the nature of their stories. In this sense, they are closed worlds where the possibilities of escape and change are almost nulls. In different contexts of social catastrophe the self or the different enunciative instances, go through forms of instability and insecurity that are the precarious figures of contemporary subjectivities. Vulnerability and fear function as affective policies deployed in different tones and material conditions as undoubted marks of those presents and they can only be captured in their fissures. Also as traces or ruins that the modes of writing configure and transit to account for those political and human conditions in undoubtedly upset times that question not only the successions and linearities but the relational regime of past, present and future.

The aesthetic proposals of Peri Rossi and Trías, distant but lucidly immersed writings in those spaces, build closed universes fully out of tune with their times in which panic, danger, economic and social insecurity predominate, like wounds of an exhausted humanity