Like Los rubios,
the “disappearance” of the narrator’s friend is the the void around which the
book is constructed. “M”, the friend of the narrator is the present absence at
the center of the narration.
In both Los rubios and Los plantetas, the inability to
conjure the person via memory is not only about absence but about the excess of
memory. In the same way Carri’s search failed, becoming an assortment of loose
ends, fragments which did not add up to a whole but overlapped and fell apart,
the narrator of Los planetas gets lost
in the unlimited possibilities of the past. What Nouzeilles writes about Los
rubios could also be applied to Los planetas:
Excess does not mean
fullness. When meaning explodes, it always leaves, scattered all of the surface
of our recollections, the gaps of the failure to remember or the baffling
certainties of remembering otherwise. 266
Los planetas is fiction and its narrator relies on literary language
to represent the unrepresentable which, as Erin points out in her essay, is intimately
connected with issues of identity and difference. Just as Carri signals the limits of
documentary working with issues of identity and memory, Cheijfec utilized, then points to the limits of
literary discourse. I also found thinking of the void in terms of
unrepresentability (per Badiou), or as the Real useful, as it positions the
void as productive. The void which “cannot be approached” but which “can be
signaled again and again and again” (Graff Zivin 81).
M could also be the Minotaur at the elusive center of a narrative labyrinth of signifiers, an image that corresponds with the recurrent walking through Buenos Aires in an aimless search to fill that void.
ReplyDeleteI want a repost of your zombie apocolypse photos here!
DeleteI tried but it doesn't allow me under the comments sections LOL
DeleteI am also thinking about this relationship between Los Rubios and Los planetas. I think excess and memory have been a themes we've been unpacking lately. I was thinking of the relationship between the two along the lines of seeing the other within the self. But I like this other connection you raise up.
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