Quests for a Change of Territories: Forms of Dystopia and Transfiction in La autopista: the movie, by Jorge Enrique Lage

Abstract

The Cuban literary tradition is closely linked to the idea of a “national literature,” reducing narrative to a specific axis of space and time. The authors of the so-called Generación Zero (Generation Zero) experiment with the elements of this “national literature,” or, Literature-Nation (Aguilera 2002), and de-territorialize narrative while working with its tropes. Departing from the idea of ‘transfiction’ (Aguilera 2015) and the idea that utopia is not only referring to a time and space, but also to a genre, I will analyse the novel La autopista: the movie (2015), by Jorge Enrique Lage from that perspective. The novel stretches the binary between utopic and dystopic fiction articulating an ambiguous future that the present article explores through the narrative possibilities of the (trans)generic, (trans)spatial, and (trans)temporal. While easy to conceive of this novel as dystopic, futuristic, and apocalyptic text, it rejects the limits of space, time, and the dystopic genre. The article thus invites a re-thinking of the role of literature in the Cuban tradition as merely representative of territory or nation. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]