Contenu du sommaire : Fictions de la terreur dans le Cône Sud et au Brésil : représentations récentes

The question as to why, towards the end of the XXth Century and the first decades of the XXIst, the literature and cinema of some South American countries, most notably Argentina and Chile, embraced the protocols of horror literature and associated genres such as the literature of the supernatural, weird literature and science fiction, can be better answered if we consider that supernatural and political horror were divorced in Gothic and Romantic literature, and henceforward followed different paths that at some points crossed, at others diverged, and sometimes even merged. From Hilario Ascasubi's poetry to Mariana Enriquez's narrative, Argentine artists have resorted to the supernatural every time political terror seemed to step out of the realms of the rational and even the human.

The article highlights a new trend of political terror in the narratives of Enríquez, Schweblin, Bazterrica and Lamberti. They cross horror with gothic literature, the sensual and the political violence, folkloric myths and urban legends.

Drawing on the transmedial narratological concept of perturbatory narration, I analyse Argentinian terror stories that work with its narrative strategies: deception (« Cirugía menor » (1992), de Ana María Shua), deception and empuzzlement (« Autólisis » (2012), de Enzo Maqueira), deception and paradox (« El remolino » (2008), de Inés Garland) and empuzzlement (« Las cajas de Unamuno » (2020), de Agustina Bazterrica y « La chica de la banda de folk » (2020), de Marcelo Luján). In the end I present a story which perturbs « only » at the level of the histoire (« Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego » (2016), de Mariana Enríquez).

In the present article I analyze two stories by Mariana Enríquez: « El desentierro de la angelita » and « Bajo el agua negra ». I believe that both stories constitute an ironic parody of Magic Realism that redirects the supernatural imbricated in popular traditions towards a denunciation not only of socio-political atrocities or gender discrimination, but also of the problematic nature of a literary movement whose influence on the reception of Latin American literature has not yet been completely extinguished. Perhaps the New Gothic and one of its paradigmatic representatives –Mariana Enríquez­– will be responsible for the coup de grâce that proclaims its definitive decline.

Starting from the observation that an atmosphere of barely tangible fear is presented in Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (Mariana Enríquez, 2016), this essay turns attention to terror as a method on an intradiegetic level thematically inseparable from the social and the political. I propose to interpret the combination of individual fears and threats in Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego as an expression of a collective insecurity, which I classify as symptomatic of a social dynamic of division. The analysis focuses on the concrete fears of the characters and the constant oscillation between the real and the supernatural elements, which I interpret as symbols of a threatening reality and characteristic of terror as a recent mode of writing in the Southern Cone.

The following article presents an analysis of « Bajo el agua negra » by Mariana Enríquez, a short story that exposes a harsh view of contemporary Argentine society, where violence and corruption are recurrent themes. The article uses the concepts of liminality and ritual to show how these themes relate to the construction of identities and the world in the author's narrative. It also relates to Johan Galtung's (2016) and Jaime Ginzburg's (2013) conceptions of violence to conclude that the story presents a raw and realistic view of contemporary Argentine society, responding to the social context of violence, corruption, marginalization, and extreme poverty that is experienced in some parts of Buenos Aires.

An unnamed protagonist finds himself trapped inside a sort of labyrinth where he can only move from one room to another, with no possibility of return. Driven by the urgent need for liberation, he comes across desolate and frightening spaces, but also with conformist inhabitants resigned to the basic sustenance that is provided by a superior and strange force. His nonconformity leads him to explore, despite the fear and terror of the unknown, corridors and more rooms that deteriorate as he progresses, affecting, by the end, his physical integrity. The system repeats itself cyclically, also in a new space, which is apparently more hospitable than the rooms he has just left, a place from which he also escapes to return to his starting point. The perturbatory narration (Schlickers, 2017) used in El lugar (Levrero, 1969), is presented to us as a metaphor for the individual that lives alienated in the modern city and trapped inside a cyclical machine that drives him to conformism through terror and bewilderment, while experiencing both peace and despair.

The article approaches the novel under analysis in three steps: First, it discusses to what extent and with which specific narrative forms the crime novel is suitable for depicting crimes against humanity and their traumatizing effects. In a second step, the diffusion of the genre, which, in combination with its transformative power, has a special impact, is briefly outlined. Thirdly, the approach of Alexandre Gefen's literary anthropology is introduced, which attributes to fictional literature a « reparative » capacity of its own. Subsequently, the novel is read first as a genre narrative, then as a fiction that keeps visible the wounds caused by traumatic experiences.

In his novels published in his last years, Andrés Rivera (Marcos Ribak, Argentina, 1928-2016) represents terror and violence as embedded in Argentine society of today, the origins of what he sees in internal historical and social developments but also in external influences such as nazi ideology. The article will elaborate his strategies to represent terror and violence and their national and personal meaning in his novels El profundo Sur (1999), Punto final (2006) y Traslasierra (2007).

The intention of this paper is to formulate the concept of 'monstrous hunger' as the center of proposals and actions in three contemporary novels from the Southern Cone that fall within the horror genre: Cadáver exquisito (2018), by Agustina Bazterrica, El conserje y la eternidad (2017), by Ricardo Romero and Zombie (2013), by Mike Wilson. In these three novels, emblematic characters of gothic and horror literature appear, such as the vampire, the zombie and the cannibal (or cannibalism as a general expression), but materialized from the periphery, characterized from an unusual perspective. In their classical conception, these three figures have in common an atrocious hunger taken to extreme consequences. I am interested in mapping the representation of monstrous hunger, as vehement desire, craving for consumption and a matter of State, from the different perspectives offered by these works. It is my intention to dwell on its repercussion within the actions, the discursive framework from which it is told and the metaphors to which it alludes.

The apparent oxymoron of « Carlos Liscano amordaza el silencio » underlines that it was through writing that Liscano (Montevideo, 1949-2023) managed to survive his more than 12 years of confinement imposed by the Uruguayan dictatorship. While in prison he discovered that by writing, as he had previously done by studying mathematics, he could face and survive torture and isolation. Although it was inevitable that he would write about prison, it was finding a way out of the labyrinth of language that traced his path. Texts such as El camino a Ítaca (1994), El furgón de los locos (2001), Manuscritos de la cárcel (2010), La libreta negra (2011), Apuntes de la cárcel (2016) and Los orígenes (2019), as well as his plays and other artistic practices are ample proof of how he found his own voice.

The article suggests the relevance of differentiating between tropes of terror and tropes of horror for the comparison between narratives of Argentine State Terrorism and narratives of the Holocaust, respectively. To this end, after recalling some horror tropes in narratives by R. Piglia, M. Lynch, R. Fogwill, L. Valenzuela, J. Gorodischer, the article addresses horror tropes in the novel The interior ghetto by S. Amigorena.

In this article we want to carry out a reading of Vacas, a novel by the Entre Ríos´ author Belén Sigot published in 2018. The novel begins with a powerful image of dead cows that don't decompose. Set in a community of immigrants from Entre Ríos, the novel shows the scene of a town made of whispers, selfishness, and mistrust, revealing its most sordid face. In the passage that goes from « the land of one's own » to « small town / big hell » , a particular form of terror is installed that does not appeal to fantastic elements as its main source, but to the dissemination of an ominous and unbreathable climate. In this sense, we are interested in delving into the modulations of neo-gothic terror linked to the rural, which inscribes Vacas in the panorama of current argentine narrative, participating in this way in a series of productions that make a renewed treatment of the topics of literature and rurality.

This article suggests a hermeneutic and comparative approach that discusses the dual therapeutic function and effect of A veinte años, Luz (1998) of Elsa Osorio. The novel, a re-écriture of the classic identity model of Oedipus as stubborn seeking of the true origin understood as identity, is a literary work that appeals therapeutically to both sides of the national Argentinian tear. More generally as a case of « world literature », its narrative can serve as a therapeutic fantasy for descendants of victims as well as for descendants of perpetrators of every historical political crime. In a broader comparative context of the post-traumatic literary corpus, in which multiply affinities between individual and national traumata are imagined or discussed, the novel interestingly encompasses both extremes of the spectrum of post-traumatic discourse: the one comparable with the «Jewish » type of a post-traumatic discourse of inherited victimhood, and the other comparable with the « German » type of a problematic inheritance and intergenerational alienation.  

This essay analyses the use of terror as a constructive mechanism of a conflictive image of maternity, as well as the process of becoming mother which the protagonist goes through. Using Rosi Braidotti's theoretical framework of « Becoming Woman », I investigate the rift between the categories of woman and mother, and the effect of gender and maternity on subjectivity as a site of transformation. The figure of the mother in Die, My Love serves as a prototype of feminist political subjectivity, demonstrating the struggle to achieve agency within the family. Harwicz achieves a complex and nuanced representation of this struggle as a process of becoming woman which questions the boundaries of maternity itself.

In her novel Distancia de rescate (2014), the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin summons the constituent elements of what has been called ecohorror. Namely, a variation of the horror genre where the ecological theme tangentially crosses the story to become the source or repository of the feeling of horror. In this framework, I argue that the text establishes a poetics of the unknown, where ignorance and doubt mediate the relationship between individuals and the environment. Thus, the aim of this study is to show how elements such as the figure of the double or the psychoanalytic concept of the failed act converge to create a poetics of ignorance, a tool that could allow us to analyze other disturbing fables of ecological terror.

Terror in Munk, Ricardo Piglia´s last novel, has as it´s horizon the apocalyptic vision of civilization collapse due to the destruction of nature as a consequence of industrial and technological progress. It contrasts a model of literary tradition of texts that lead to the Unabomber´s Manifesto and the tradition of naturalism and works that reject violence and instead of revolt propose renunciation. The vision of the Southern Cone belongs to the postmodern times, building subjectivities from dispersion and multiplicity caused by neoliberalism and globalization. Terror works as method of communication in a tale of writing in the 21st century, with focus on affect theories.

The article analyzes on the motif of terror and its possible effect, horror, in three novels by Roberto Bolaño : Distant Star, By Night in Chile and 2666. In the latter, it will deal with the fourth section, « The part of the crimes », and the fifth section, « The part of Archimboldi ».

In Reencarnación de los carniceros. Visiones de la Era Nuclear (2019), Chilean poet Oscar Hahn (1938) gathers and rewrites poems (previously scattered in other publications) with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic dimensions that represent urban spaces shattered either by war conflicts or nuclear bombs. New fantastic species emerge in Hahnian poetic imagery to populate those dystopian cities where « No queda oxígeno que respirar / La clorofila se ha vuelto alquitrán » . Thus, mutants appear in the poems who « tienen los ojos atrofiados / pero pueden ver y pensar / con cada célula de su piel » . I am interested in the analysis of the end-of-the-world and post-apocalyptic chronotope in the representation of terror in Oscar Hahn's poetic work, since in this dehumanized space-time not only the massive horror (the end of humanity) but also figures and topics of the fantastic narrative are described. Assuming this position implies, first, considering space-time in the study of horror and, second, the fantastic dimension in Hahnian poetry. The latter would be problematic, since it would include the lyric within the manifestations of fantastic literature, which has been limited or reduced to the narrative genre.

Chile is not yet able to present a graphic novel tradition in which the topic of terror is central. The country does not have a series of works that over the years has been condensed into what could be called the Chilean graphic novel of terror. However, in the last 20 years some corresponding titles have been published that have been able to attract the attention of the Chilean community of comic readers, among them, for example, El modelo de Pickman (2008), by Gilberto Villarroel (script), Gabriel Aiquel and Christian Luco (illustrations), as well as Catrileo, by Claudio Castañeda (script) and Tomás Fernández (illustrations). The article proposes a definition of the genre by exploring the contents that trigger terror as a method and its narrative representation that aims to cause terror as an emotion in the implied reader.

I will talk about Dracula in order to talk about Breccia. Dracula is the deliberate digression that initially gave the paper its title. As I wrote and thought about the aim of this article, rather than the construction of a transpositive case study, I became interested in unraveling a corpus of materials produced by the author in which the narrative and aesthetic continuum of blood was presented as a significant chain in its figurative, affective and political dimension.

Carne de perro (2012), by Fernando Guzzoni, and Los perros (2017), by Marcela Said, are films that produce a high degree of incommodity in the spectators. Each one in its own way, they retreat two ex torturers of Pinochet's dictatorship (1973-1989) whose histories provoke an eery terror. The two productions visibilize the cryptofascist tendencies of contemporary Chilean society in dialogue with recent phenomena, observable in cybernetic and viral circuits of social networks. Based on the notions of cryptofascism (Adorn, Orwell), terror (Burke, Radcliffe) and the eerie (Fisher), this work will analyze the traces of terror present in the two films, and later articulate them with some reflections on contemporary cryptofascism in Latin America and the world.

In this work we stop at some recreations of horror in different audiovisual productions in which the events that occurred during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1983-1976) are resignified. Taking visuality and affections as the axis, we approach audiovisual stories : Microrrelatos. Historias breves sobre los juicios de Lesa, that cross art, memory and communication through digital mediation, as well as in the sample that exhibits the work done. In a second moment, we stop the audiovisuals Granada (2005), Búsquedas (2009) and Memorial del espacio (2018) and we close with reflections on the documentary by David Blaustein, Fragmentos rebelados (2018). We believe that these works illuminate areas little traveled by the case studies and give them new meaning, as Patricia Violi (2021) affirms, artistic language can give the past time a new treatment in which absence is not only resignified but also evoked. lost beings and «a space of contact between the living and the dead is opened» (Violi 2021, p. 38). In this paper we analyze the opening to those interstitial zones in the videos and in the documentary in which the viewer's gaze also produces new meanings.

In two recent Brazilian horror films – O nó do diabo and O diabo mora aqui – there are phantasmagorias related to slavery. In these narratives, the violent past comes to the present as an unexpected irruption. Another contemporary film, Bacurau, places the actions in the future ; according to this dystopian narrative, a whole community is attacked by foreigners and finds way to resist and survive. A recent book, A nova ordem by Bernardo Kucinski is also constructed as a dystopian plot, presenting Brazil as a country under a totalitarian regime. These narratives have in common ruptures with linear references to time and formal resources coming from traditional horror. In this reflection, we discuss how important these common elements are in a country, which recently went through an authoritarian and regressive regime.

The sertão has been taken as a space for the development of horror literature since the 19th century, according to Silva (2016), with works such as O Cabeleira (1876), by Franklin Távora and Os brilhantes (1895), by Rodolfo Teófilo. In the 21st century, the sertão has been reaffirming itself as one of the characteristic spaces of the horror genre, both in literature and cinema. This article aims to analyze how humor, social criticism and the fantastic are used as literary and filmic resources in the novel O Capeta-Caolho contra a Besta Fera (2018), by Everaldo Rodrigues and in the film Bacurau (2019), directed by Kleber Mendonça and Juliano Dornelles.