Hacia un renovado vínculo entre la obra y su exterior: El desperdicio de Matilde Sánchez

Abstract

This article aims at a thorough interpretation of El desperdicio by Argentinian writer Matilde Sanchez based on a series of narrative paradoxes (patently present in the narrative voice and its locus of enunciation) with ideological implications. The novel not only recounts the tragic life of leading character Elena Arteche, but also provides a chronicle of the last three decades of Argentinian economic and cultural life. In combining a person’s adventures with collective social developments, El desperdicio can be seen as one of several “narratives of collapse” that have recently been written in Argentina. The novel, however, focusses on rural rather than on urban demise. An analysis of the polysemic nature of the title, which can mean both “waste” and “remains”, allows us to establish the link with modern views on autonomy, both in the existential sense of the term (“control over one’s own life”) as in the artistic one (thematized here out of the formalist concept of ostranenie). Our study also considers the place this novel holds within the Argentinian literary fi eld. Finally, the confl icting esthetical paradigms which the author seems to hesitate between are connected with Florencia Garramuno’s ideas on recent changes in the status of literature.