Sad Party. El entenado, by Juan José Saer

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show how El entenado (1983), written by Argentinian novelist Juan José Saer in the midst of the dictatorial period, whose plot unfolds during the Spanish conquest of the Rio de la Plata, offers a form of resistance based on both creative and interpretative processes, occurring simultaneously on the diegetic level as well as in the elaborative process of the text itself. Through the narrator’s attempts to rid himself of the burden of guilt by writing about the cannibal Indians who captured him and were then massacred by the Spanish conquerors, one may read a projection of the writer’s desire to resist the totalitarian regime of the military junta. This is made possible through the affirmation of meaning-making as a collective action, especially as far as the “Gutenberg family” is concerned. The narrator as a witness and an orphan, inherits agency from the Indians during his life as a captive among them. This enables his writing to be born and his memoirs – as well as his memory – to be perpetuated by his adopted children thanks to writing and printing. It also operates as an echo of the observation function of the literary text. The circulation of meaning within the text, at the heart of the semiotic process, thus functions as a way for fiction to save from oblivion the genocidal origins of the conquest as well as state-imposed terror during the years of dictatorship.