Levrero, the rare and an out of place genealogy: from the defeat of “the 1969 generation” to the “empty shudder” in the Uruguayan narrative of the post-dictatorship

Abstract

We propose to address the trend of the rare from Ángel Rama’s reading of Mario Levrero’s work, linking it with the centrality of the Levrerian poetics in the Uruguayan post-dictatorship narrative. We will stop at the historicization of the critic’s formulations, highlighting the political thickness of the “rare” category in relation to the dialogue that it establishes with the avant-garde, the pathological and the borders between the author and his work. We are interested in analyzing the evolution between Rama’s frustrated prediction and a new inflection in the literary field after the coup. Rama (1966; 1972) resemantizes a term coined by Rubén Darío to formulate his genealogy of rare. At the beginning of the ‘70s, he understood this secret and marginal current as a precedent of a new socio-cultural upheaval of revolutionary scope as Modernism meant at the time. However, the coup d’état violently frustrates this project. We maintain, as a hypothesis, that a series of authors reformulate the Uruguayan literary map as emerging from an “empty shudder” caused by the last military dictatorship. For the development of the concept we start from the proposal of Carina Blixen (1996) when she postulates the closure of the antagonism “realism versus imagination” that, according to Rama, characterized the framework of the Uruguayan literary system until the advent of the coup. The category accounts both for the defeat of the revolutionary project of the ‘70s and for Mario Levrero’s influence on writers in the last decades.