Punctum, de Martín Gambarotta: ¿poema narrativo o relato poético? Paradigma de una escritura elíptica para la postmemoria argentina

Abstract

During the last civil military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), encoded, encrypted, elliptical literary texts were written that address the traumatic events of that time, and are now canonical. The authors of these works were followed by a post-dictatorship generation, brought up under the shadow of political repression, who began to develop their aesthetic strategies twenty years after the coup, from 1996 onwards. Members include Martin Gambarotta, whose prose poem entitled Punctum was to become a literary milestone. In our opinion, this cult poem should be considered a precursor of the most recent Argentinian literature, written after 2001/2002, and branded as paradigmatically rebellious within the field of what is “writable” about the memory of the dictatorship. In Punctum numerous omissive and digressive, carnivalesque and masking strategies are used, visual devices are employed, an intertextual reference to a well-known text by Nestor Perlongher is made, and a strong link with pop culture and rock is found. Gambarotta’s experimental drive in poetry clearly had a fundamental influence on the forms of expression that would become the literature of (post-) memory Argentina, although in this case the focus is narrative rather than poetry.