The impossible duel. Political terror and metaphysical horror in El desmadre by Pablo Farrés

Abstract

Forty years after the return of democracy in Argentina, the state terror of the last dictatorship continues to be a subject for thinking in art and literature. Directly or indirectly, the political violence of those years became material for both fiction and non-fictional discourses, like chronicle and testimony. The history of literature, in turn, has mapped the modes of representation of political violence and State terrorism, pointing out the predominance of allegorical fictions in his first works and the gradual opening to new forms of figuration that, without renouncing to fiction, they dialogue with chronicle and testimony. This article proposes a reading of the novel El desmadre (2013) by Pablo Farrés. The hypothesis is that El desmadre is part of a series of fictions written by the generation of children of missing persons. However, Farrés’ novel, which takes advantage of the openness to irreverent forms such as those of Félix Bruzzone or Mariana Eva Méndez, returns to the allegorical modes of the first narratives of the dictatorship to construct a fiction in which horror overtakes the sense historical and politics, and explores an ontological dimension.