Jorge Asís and the political fiction of the self

Abstract

This paper examines how Jorge Asís articulates in the novels Flores robadas en los jardines de Quilmes, Carne picada and Canguros a relationship between identity, literature and politics in the Argentine context of the National Reorganization Process initiated in 1976 and the democratic transition of 1983. The critical reception of these novels establishes a series of tensions between the “intellectual field” and the “political field” (Pierre Bourdieu) projected on the figure of the author and his autonomy. Using Nidia Burgos’s notion of “límite del canon”, this article analyzes how literary institutions establish their operations from specific ideological scenarios. At the same time, the double role of Jorge Asís as a writer and as a politician converges into a work that places this tension in its aesthetic and ideological center. Ultimately, this article shows the way in which Asís’s work confronts, from the exclusion from the Argentine literary canon, the institutionalized limits of a literary representation of the historical, political and intellectual memory related to the National Reorganization Process.