Juan Saer´s “El Entenado”: poetic narrative and historical novel?

Abstract

In El Entenado (2002), by Juan José Saer, there is an elderly narrator who, in a poetic fashion, tells his story, a unique experience of life. In his youth he was travelling as a grummet on a ship coasting the Plata River Basin, when he was forced to witness the sudden attack and further massacre of the boat crew by the local native people. As the only survivor of the slaughter, he is practically adopted by the natives, starting to live among them, without knowing the real reason for having been spared. But the way of living of those natives proved very strange, since they were cannibals, had group sex (orgies), died very young, and the peculiar language they used made it very diffi cult to learn the language and, consequently, their very culture. As a result, this novel tacitly promotes a discussion about the Hispanic conquest of the Americas, from the particular viewpoint of a narrator that poetically builds his vision of that past, without any regard for historical precision. Nevertheless, while the historicity of the text can be read between the lines, its intrinsic poetry is the source of poetic prose, or even of poetic narrative, leading us to see in it traces of literary hybridism.