Inflections of popular voices in novels El sueño del señor juez and La jaula de los onas, by Carlos Gamerro

Abstract

In this work, we show the paradoxical fact according to which Argentine fiction came to give voice to subaltern subjects (Spivak, 2003) and we recognize, first of all, the operations of Bartolomé Hidalgo and Esteban Echeverría about possible interactions between “civilized” and “barbarian” cultural paradigms. After, we elaborate a short theoretical excursus and address An Excursion to the Ranquel Indians by Lucio V. Mansilla to understand how the work dismantles the stereotypes established by the “Argentine public discourse” (González, 2012) around an otherness of a monstrous nature. We recognize its inscription in the “literary heterodoxy” (Bocco et al, 2023), while see the establishment of a new “orthodoxy” that, since the beginning of this century, has been dedicated to reviewing, questioning and/or deconstructing the stereotypes and dynamics between othernesses building by nineteenth-century canonical texts.In this picture, we situate the work of Carlos Gamerro and analyze the inflections of popular voices in his two novels set in the 19th century, identifying those operations that return to the civilization/barbarism formula to listen with more breadth and depth.