The Oliverio Coelho's anticipation novel: a look at the perspective on the Argentine nightmare

Abstract

One of the most significant phenomena in Argentine fiction following the 1976–1983 military dictatorship was the veiled allusion to reality through temporal narrative shifts. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many authors turned to the neo-historical novel, initially due to censorship, but later because they felt unable to depict state terrorism and the disappearance of thousands of people using the traditional tools of mimetic—realist—literature, and instead chose to allude to these events through stories set in the nation’s nineteenth-century origins. Later, with the full implementation of the neoliberal market economy under the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–1999), a reverse temporal shift occurred, and the new crisis—the dismantling of the welfare state, the destruction of national industry, and widespread impoverishment—was sometimes depicted in speculative fiction and science fiction novels that transposed these issues into dystopian future scenarios. In both cases—whether the chronological shift was toward the past or toward the future—the aim was to shed light on the present through veiled, oblique, and above all allegorical stories that alluded to other eras, given the impossibility of providing a narrative account of the present reality.