I’ll Have my Trees. The Beginnings in Zambra

Abstract

How to study the contemporary, how to talk about that which is produced today, and move past nostalgia for that which is retro or discourse on the end of categories, of worlds, and works? How to interact with that which is written under the same conditions and reality in which we talk about, study and read literature? How to avoid capitulat- ing to the social, cultural, or ideological categories stockpiled by critics? Or avoid the temptation to replace analysis with the search for a new category–a category that would differentiate and take up once more the act of rupture in literary modernity? These are the questions.

The answer we proffer in this article is a critical fiction: it is matter of studying the beginnings of a writer (in this case Alejandro Zambra’s), without an “oeuvre” being clearly defined or him being, despite recognition, a “canonical” writer. Which is to say, to analyze how he situates himself within his present in his first three novels, what relationship he establishes with tradition, and how he views himself in the future, which equates to observing his method of establishing himself within time. And today, time is clearly a cardinal category for grasping our contemporaneity, whose presentism and acceleration seem to prevent any analytical gaze. By means of a process consisting of certain textual maneuvers (formalism, readings, representations of memory), in conclusion we draft an answer (one of many contemporary answers) to another ques- tion: how to continue writing after the “end of literature”?