A poetics of indetermination: notes on Sergio Chejfec

Abstract

One can say that if in the beginning the poetics of the Argentinean writer Sergio Chejfec (1956) claimed Juan José Saer as his ancestral and a privileged textual father, from El aire (1992) and, more precisely, with his novels Los planetas (1999), Boca de lobo (2000) and Los incompletos (2004) one perceives a certain effect or echo evanescent from the very narrative of César Aira. One could say that Chejfec’s poetics acquires potency in a radical negativity, which erodes and makes vulnerable any attempt to classification and of a more or less imaginable definition. And if the narrative progress, understood as a continuum, is the narrative system selected by our author, the sentence could well be understood as aesthetic program.