Language, Memory, Dissidence: Demitrópulos, Andruetto and the Alternative Pluriform

Abstract

Much of the writing by Libertad Demitrópulos (Jujuy, 1922- Buenos Aires, 1998) as the writing by María Teresa Andruetto is defined by a constant search for the potential of language, a common matter among speakers and writers where encounters, conflicts and arguments of subjects and society, individuals and history converge. In that language, both poetics in turn critically recompose personal and social memories. And this as a previous step to revise the historical in a poetic way, and those memories condense contradictorily and even paradoxically the diverse temporalities and spatialities of the past, present and future. The singular thing is that in both writings that memorial reconstruction is given centrally from the feminine voices or from their disturbing presence, with a decisive protagonism of women that reveals their incidence in history and narrates in an alternative way what happened. From there, both artworks have highlighted the different and dissident voices as promoters and builders of optional exits to historical crossroads. Language, memory and dissidence, articulated with a questioning revision of Argentine history, become the basis of the art of Demitrópulos and Andruetto, where the open exploration of the possibilities of the novel is central. When in different times both authorial poetics emerge, they are defined in their literary contexts for proposing, from the margins, novelistic or pluriforms -according to my denomination- alternatives to the dominant, neither mimetic nor experi- mental, that work between the poetic and the narrative versatility. From these questions, I interrogate both writings in a sequential genealogy, focusing on Río de las congojas (1981) and Sabotaje en el álbum familiar (1984) and Lengua madre (2011) and Los manchados (2015).