Adolfo Bioy Casares and friendship

Abstract

This paper analyzes the friendship between two characters from Dormir al sol, a literary work by the Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, as an ethical and aesthetic proposal of resistance against strategies normalization of conducts calculated to prevent communitarian bonds. The relationship between a disciplined clockmaker and a clandestine gambling seller picaro is proposed as an apprenticeship journey by which one achieves the capacity of self-determination and the right to a communitarian life where differences and conflicts are considered as indispensable in the construction of mutual respect. We intend to analyze the presence of the picaro character as an aesthetic device of laughing and irreverence that resists instruments controlling the popular imaginary and the act of living together in micro-spheres through conducts normalization and communitarian relationships immunization. In the centenary year of Casares’s birth, we are interested in featuring the importance this great writer recognized in friendship, what leads us to consider his epithet of “Borges’s best friend” not as a shade, but as a deserved homage.