Potentialities and limits of fiction. Patricio Pron's narrative in Argentina's post-dictatorial period

VICTORIA GARCÍA

Journal of Romance Studies

Liverpool University Press

Lugar: Liverpool ; Año: 2021 vol. 22 p. 29 - 48

1473-3536

The narratives of the children of political activists and disappeared people inArgentina emerging after the year 2000 resort to fiction as a deliberate aesthetic and political narrative strategy to address the recent past, marked by state repression during the last dictatorship (1976-1983). In this paper, we will focus on Patricio Pron´s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011). This is a relevant case to explore the potentialities and limits of fiction when it comes to approaching painful and controversial aspects of the past. Pron proposes a narrative experiment with autofiction which sparked a debate between him and his father, one of the main characters, when the novel was published. We argue that the polemic between the Prons reveals a double conflict, centered at once on the interpretation of the past and on the limits of (auto)fiction when dealing with real, particularly sensitive events in national history.