A Matter of Exhumation: Horacio Romeu’s A bailar esta ranchera (1970) and the Hauntology of the «Magical Center»

Abstract

As part of an ongoing research about certain episodes lost from the literary production of the Buenos Aires bohemia of the sixties (such as were represented by the Opium and Sunda groups), in this article we attempt to establish a theoretical reading that can assimilate the Derridean notions of «archive» and «specter» (1989; 1995; 1997) to a task of critical exhumation of texts that are absent (whether because they were relegated or because they were forgotten) from that circulation of national literature perceived as «canon»: out-of-catalogue texts, never reprinted, excluded from the academic cartography and the cultural press, texts whose almost exclusive survival is often relegated to enumerations and name droppings with which the criticism portrays the vast bibliodiversity of that period. In this case we focus on the novel –or rather anti-novel– A bailar esta ranchera (1970) by Horacio «Pepe» Romeu, a work of radical formal experimentation whose avant-garde program and inventory of procedures we will read from a series of categories that appeared afterwards, already in the context of the post-dictatorship Argentine literary criticism, to interrogate the sense of the canon, such as the notions of «vanished/approximated» and «magical center», as proposed by Alberto Laiseca (1992), and the irreverent idea of «test», expressed by César Aira (1990).

In a second phase, we are interested in exploring the links from the period that are present in Romeu’s novel, between avant-garde experimentation and hermetism.