Testimony from the margin. El entenado, by Juan José Saer, and the sense of history

Abstract

This article studies the novel El entenado (1983), by Juan José Saer, a singular work that is included within the genre of the new historical novel but which distances itself from its conventions. El entenado does not reflect on a central event in the history of Argentina, nor does it resort to collective testimonies, but rather shifts its gaze to individual testimony and the narration of an almost forgotten, marginal historical event: the failed expedition of Juan Díaz de Solís (1515) and the testimony of the only survivor of the ritual anthropophagy of the Colastiné Indians, the cabin boy Francisco del Puerto. The theoretical tools of this article correspond to the postulates of Georg Lukács’ historical novel and the premises of María Cristina Pons on the new historical novel of the mid-twentieth century in Latin America; all this in dialogue with the author’s poetics expressed in essays and interviews. The focus of this study, however, is not a generic reflection, but the detailed analysis of the various displacements proposed by Saer: the generic, the spatial and the temporal. The movement from the fragmentation of bodiesor the partial discourse of history to the construction of a symbolic meaning is emphasized. The conclusions reflect on how to integrate the excluded elements (historical, social and individual) in the great discourses and how to endow them with meaning. Thus, this novel proposes to abandon the fruitless search for a historical truth and replace it with a symbolic truth, more critical and inclusive.