『포로여인 에마 Ema, la cautiva』에 나타난 ‘문명과 야만’의 변주와 전복

Abstract

The dichotomy of Civilization and Barbarism has been a central concept to understand Argentine Literature since its beginning period till the recent 21st century. Starting from the foundational work of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento this theme was treated by many authors and had been a very important one in the Latin American Literature and the History of Latin American Thoughts. From this conflictive and deterministic perspective, the captive woman by a barbaric Indian man could work as an important subject and device for the literary works. Even until this century the rewriting of this theme is actively executed. This article analyzes César Aira’s Ema, la cautiva which rewrites this theme after J. L. Borges’s “Historia del guerrero y la cautiva”. In this Airian novel, the captive woman and the native Indians are not represented in the stereotypical novelistic frame. Rather the typical dichotomized frame is subverted through the dissolution of the values of the Whites and those of the native indians. And this is fulfilled through the ‘intentional frivolity’, one of the most important narrative strategy of Aira. In this process he mixes up the real history and the created story and succeeds in letting the voices heard, the voices that the Official discourses tried to eliminate and negate.