Political Fables and Aesthetic Renewal

Abstract

We know that art finds its own questions and answers. In this chapter I want to address a particular moment in which Argentinian literature was decisively interpellated by politics and, in response, fundament ally revised its traditional representational strategies, calling into question widely recognized aesthetic conventions. It seems natural to assume that literature itself was able to produce these changes. But relating literature to the meanings and tensions it encountered in the world of politics may help us to understand the aesthetic uncertainty we experience today when faced with texts that seem to have an enigmatic relationship with their referential material, and to be alienated from the generic criteria that form their conceptual frame. The literary ‘moment’ I have in mind is the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, which was a time of great mobilizations across Latin America, especially among popular groups and on the left. Comparing that earlier epoch with the contemporary one, we initially notice differences of degree: more of this, less of that, and so on. But closer examination reveals that these are not the main differences: the most decisive and radical shifts are not a question of degree but of quality.