The last text we read in class this semester was Fabian Casas’s Los Lemmings y otros (2005). He is an Argentinian fiction writer, and one could say that his narratives are irrefutably Argentinian. Because we were closing the course with this text, one of the final concerns I wished to address was what could prove as singular about this modality of writing that we rush to recognize as literature. The question is absurdly immense, I admit. But because no definitive answers were sought, I deemed it productive to enter the question’s vast realm through the singular gates of Casas’s fiction.
Some describe Casas’s narratives as examples of a variation of realism that has been emerging in Buenos Aires over the past decade. This recent permutation of realism has extended beyond the literary realm, as filmmaker like Lucrecia Martel and Lisando Alsonso have been regarded as eloquent practitioners of this particular modality of representation. I am avoiding laying out a definition for what is understood as this new form of realism. I would like to arrive at a possible synthesis or conceptual understanding of it gradually rather than positing it as my discussion’s point of departure.
In the absence of a circumscribing definition, the first course of action will be to situate how this discussion understands realism. From the 19th century we inherited a realism that operates as a mimetic form of representation, a master narrative that often times serves as the alter ego of historical discourse. Following Balzac, Vargas Llosa regarded the (realist) novel as the backstage of history. Just as the Latin American boom novels (i.e. those by Cortázar, Vargas Llosa himself, Fuentes, and Márquez, to name a few) in the mid-20th century, the French 19th century novel configured itself as master narratives in which the totality of a universe was contained. And this universe reflected in multifarious ways the reality outside the text, also known as world, history, or even the real. If the 19th century bourgeois novel sought to exhaust the possibility of the novel to cohere a totalized understanding of the world, the boom novel also attempted to recreate a totalized sense of the world by formally exposing the impossibility of such totality.
Many boom authors mobilized the fragment (a structure generally characterized as partial, temporary, limited, finite, incomplete, and precarious) as the organizing unit of their narratives. The once authoritative voice of the narrator gave way to an unreliable, fractured, and self-aware narrating figure. For this and other traits, the boom novel has been regarded as formally experimental, and just as the European modernist novel the boom formalist narrative denied bourgeois realism by deconstructing it. Thus I have denominated the boom novel anti-realist, as it constituted itself upon the dismantling of the bourgeois realist novel.
I propose that, to understand Casas’s realism we need to grapple with the fragment and totality as aesthetic figures rather than ontological entities. As different aesthetic figures, they aspire to different political significance, but such significance does not tell us much about what the fragment is or totality is. And because what they are remains elusive to us to some extent, their relation with realism in whichever permutation, remains undetermined, I argue.
Realism 