The historical beginning ofEl pozo² is actually the earliest incident recounted from the protagonist’s life. It takes the form of a strange scene at a New Year’s party, in which he, bored with the festivities, tricks Ana María, a girl towards whom he feels a mixture of hatred and attraction, into going to the gardener’s shed with him. Once he has got her there, he attacks her.

As in the above quotation from Foucault, the concept of an origin is not arrived at by means of peeling back layers in order to reveal an original essence. Rather what is...

Juntacadáveres¹ was published, three years afterEl astillero(1961), the novel I shall be looking at in the following chapter. My reason for choosing to work on what is apparently the later novel first is this: like many of Onetti’s works, these two share virtually the same setting and some of the same protagonists, but in terms of plot,El astilleroactually follows on fromJuntacadáveres. In an interview with Emir Rodríguez Monegal (1973), Onetti talked of this apparent anomaly, saying: ‘Yo estaba escribiendoJuntacadáveresy la llevaba más que mediada cuando de pronto, por una de ésas (uno puede...

In a work entitledThe Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard (1986: 80), notes a certain dichotomy within the realms of the avant-garde of which he says:

What I have in mind will become clear if we dispose very schematically a few names on the chessboard of the history of avant-gardes: on the side of melancholia, the German Expressionists, and on the side ofnovatio, Braque and Picasso, on the former Malevitch and on the latter Lissitsky, on the one Chirico and on the other Duchamp. The nuance which distinguishes these two modes may be infinitesimal; they often...

If many of Onetti’s novels and stories are set in the fictional hinterland of Santa María, imagined, and more important as a symbolic structure than as an actual place, Puig’s first novel,La traición de Rita Hayworth² is set in a much more concrete reality. This is Coronel Vallejos, clearly based on the town in the Province of Buenos Aires where Puig was brought up, General Villegas. And if Onetti was to effect a radical shift in literature from this region, then Puig was to do the same though in a very different way. To quote one of the foremost...

Boquitas pintadas¹ has some elements in common withLa traición de Rita Hayworth; it is set in the same environment, Coronel Vallejos in the late 1930s, and the stifling parochialism of the first novel is still very much apparent. Moreover both novels are written in the form of different voices often recounting the same situations from different points of view. But there is a number of notable differences. The approach is, if anything, more experimental; the images of Hollywood are replaced by national cultural models, for example in the form of the tango, and by thefolletín; and the concept...

AlthoughHay que sonreír² was published in 1966, it was actually written some years previously. As Valenzuela explains in an interview with Albalú Angel (1984: 3): ‘Me casé a los veinte años y me fui a vivir a Francia, y tuve una hija muy pronto. Y entonces las horas de la siesta de mi hija – tenía meses – yo escribía’ [I married at the age of twenty and went to live in France, and I had a daughter very early. And while she had her nap – she was only months old – I would write]. The novel was...

Valenzuela says of this, her second novel:

Para mí la obra más divertida y más extraña de mi zoológico, esEl gato eficaz. Porque fue el momento de la ruptura con lo que podía llamarse cierta ‘literatura tradicional’. Es cuando encuentro mi propia voz que estaba buscando.¹

[For me the funniest and strangest book in my zoology isEl gato eficaz, because it was the moment of the break with what might be called traditional literature. It’s when I find my own voice, what I was looking for].

In a sense it might be seen as Valenzuela’s version of Rimbaud’s...

Cola de lagartija¹ is quite different from the other novels studied here in the sense that, rather than being purely a work of fiction, it is a work whose central protagonists are based on true historical characters. The identity of these characters and the relationship or play between them and their fictional counterparts will be explored in different parts of this chapter.

The novel, echoingHay que sonreír, is divided into three sections, and as is the case with the earlier novel, these sections and their titles are crucial to an understanding of the work. I shall therefore outline what...