Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Jul 2022)
Travel and loss in “Noticias secretas” by Juan José Saer
Abstract
In 1988, in the second edition of El arte de narrar, Juan José Saer incorporated the extensive section “Secret News”, with poems written between 1976 and 1982, years that coincide with the period in which the writer was unable to return to Argentina during the last civic-military dictatorship. Among the poems that allude to famous travelers and those that refer in a fragmentary way to an itinerary through European landscapes, it will be observed what new resonances the trip acquires as a permanent inquiry in Saer's work and here, in particular, as an impersonal displacement that sharpens the misplacement and loss. On the one hand, some of the poems will make it possible to recompose a fragmented journey through the cities of Finisterre and the north of Spain, although their development disarticulates the referential expectations that the titles augured. A second series of texts will offer portraits of famous travelers from which Saer will investigate the notion of geographical “limit” and will record the decline of the different variants of the voyage of exploration: the artistic journey at the end of the 19th century, the voyage of conquest and the mystical pilgrimage of the Holy Grail.
