Fiction as speculative anthropology

a reading of “El entenado”, by Juan José Saer

Abstract

Our interest in this investigation is to highlight the potential of fiction as a speculative anthropology. In order to do so, we will start from the concept of fiction, developed in an essay by the Argentine author Juan José Saer, entitled El concepto de ficción, also using a novel by the same writer, entitled El entenado. In this perspective, the reading and bibliographic review on the theme of literary fictionality will give us enough theoretical support to see how fiction is kept at a distance, both from the “profetas de lo verdadero como de los eufóricos de lo falso”, as Saer insists, without pre-empting anything, to propose an ethics of truth. Thus, Saer assures himself, with El entenado, the possibility of moving between historical events, activating the creative fabulation, which regulates and structures events, articulating to the events of life the reversibility of time, the perception that the human being has of himself and of the surroundings, at the intersection with cultures and in the world that civilizations inhabit Therefore, the reciprocal changes between imagination and life, the game between thinker and thought, subject-object, container-content, are problematized. Imagination and enunciation are provoked, in a leap between objective reality and its multiple possibilities.