“The Political Dimension of the Unification-Disintegration Paradox in Mantra (2001) by Rodrigo Fresán”

Abstract

Rodrigo Fresán’s writing had a significant impact on Southern Cone literature when his first book, Historia argentina, was published in 1991. Despite its high sales and favorable reviews, which earned Fresán the status of a celebrity writer, his works have often been criticized for possessing “an esthetics of insensitivity and/or an ethics of indifference” (Freidemberg). This essay refutes these accusations of postmodern shallowness in Fresán’s writing and instead proposes an examination of the “politics of literature” (Rancière) in his 2001 work Mantra. The purpose of this essay is to challenge the aporias of the theory of “littérature engagée” derived from Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy that were debated among Latin American intellectuals during the 1960s and 1970s. The main objective of this essay is to demonstrate that Fresán’s writing is not only literary but also political in nature. In Mantra, we can observe a system of heterogeneities that disrupts the realm of experience, creating a non-dialectical paradox between the forces of unification and disintegration that elicits an emotional response and challenges the illusion of a concrete, complete identity. This, in turn, allows us to reconsider central themes such as memory.