In-Between Bottles: boozy Approaches to "Black Out"

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to María Moreno’s writing and some decisive marks of her style which can be read in Black Out (2016): her so-called “plebeian poetics”; her practice of “epistemological cartonerismo”; the privilege she gives to the “ear” as fiction of origin for a mode of “reading”; her constant recycling of her own archives; her leaning towards anecdote; her ethics/aesthetics of “no obra”; her reinterpretation of a number of canonical Argentinian texts under the sign of “alcohol”. This approach is made, however, with a detour which allows a gender-oriented reading by establishing a dialogue with Ricardo Piglia’s Los diarios de Emilio Renzi (2015-2017), published around the same time as Black out. Along this “drunken” itinerary, questions are raised about the cultural environment shared by both texts, the strategies adopted by “boys” and “girls” during the 1960s-1980s, their “tretas”, and their ways of inhabiting certain spaces. In other words: the (self-)figurations of the writing subject and their possible counterpoints.