La literatura cambalachesca en la novelistica de Osvaldo Soriano

Abstract

This study proposes a model for the analysis of Argentinean, and by extension Latin American, literary production based on the centrality of the Argentinean “cambalache” [a secondhand shop], as both a physical cultural space and an icon of popular culture evoked in the well-known lyrics of Enrique Santos Discepólo's 1935 tango Cambalache. This work examines and describes a type of Argentine narrative dynamics characterized by the amalgam of diversity and lack of hierarchy in the textual space. The mockery of inherited cultural and social products, which enables a reflection on the present, seems to be the key to the understanding of this kind of literature, which could be defined as a system generated by others that it reads, recodes and includes in the same space, giving rise to what here is called a “revolución cambalachesca” [the hotchpotch revolution]. This study analyzes seven novels of the Argentine author Osvaldo Soriano (1943-1997), in order to enact a critical reading of the ways in which such fragmentary writing works toward subverting hegemonic models of nationalism.