Aspectos elementares da insurreição indígena: notas em torno a Os rios profundos, de José María Arguedas

Abstract

The reading of the novel Deep Rivers (Los ríos profundos), by the Peruvian author José María Arguedas, is the starting point for a consideration on the effects of popular insurgencies on the Bildungsroman, particularly on its notions of future and past. This essay then examines how these questions of archaeology and eschatology acquire aesthetic shape in the oscillations and breaks that characterize narration in Arguedas’s work, which may be seen as a set of textual experiments that respond to the fractures in Peruvian society. The paper also highlights the way in which the question of the addressee becomes crucial for Arguedas, a condition for the (im)possibility of writing.