Virtudes de la errancia: escritura migrante y dispersión en Juan Rodolfo Wilcock

Abstract

Living abroad often exerts a powerful influence on the way individuals construct social interactions. This dissertation addresses linguistic displacements generated by geographic exile. It is mainly focused on Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (1919-1978), an Argentine writer who emigrated to Italy in 1955, toward the end of Juan Domingo Perón's regime. Through Wilcock's writing, the author defines the concept of "migrant writing" dividing it into three categories: eccentricity, technology, and the use of mass-media strategies. Wilcock's exile relocates his narrative outside of the traditional canon. Under this light, the author suggests a reading that, instead of emphasizing the fantastic, concentrates on the entropic relation between culture and language.

The dissertation also explores certain features of Wilcock's originality, due in part to his interpretation of the theory of Chaos as a way to produce an alternative order. Following an abrupt displacement from Argentina's literary establishment, and after breaking up with the genealogy of his precursors (Borges and Cortázar), his innovative mind brings him to a new stand build within the frame of his own eccentricity.

Through the perspective of the "migrant writing," the author explores how Wilcock implements technology through a revision of the avant-garde movement, incorporating popular elements in order to fracture realism. Utilizing mass media strategies Wilcock produces a hybrid textuality in which, instead of verbalizing his images, he underscores their artificiality. Finally, the transgressive character of his narrative is examined through Wilcock's use of the power of excess as a way to exorcise the sense of loss, and to imitate strategies with which primitive cultures faced nature's degradation.