Apostilles: El mono en el remolino, by Selma Almada, and Diarios del Capitán Hipólito Parrilla, by Rafael Spregelburd

Abstract

On account of Juan José Saer’s prologue to the 1973 edition of Zama (1956), the topic of marginality accompanied the reception of the novel. It was later rekindled by critics after the release of the homonymous film directed by Lucrecia Martel in 2017. For Beatriz Sarlo (2015), in the prologue, Saer is referring to himself and not to Di Benedetto (the author of Zama): his marginalization is a subjective attitude. In two brief books by Selva Almada and Rafael Spregelburd —which they have overtly declared that they wrote simultaneously with the film’s shooting— the authors discern imperceptible subjectivations which are not in the focus of the camera, but rather in marginal zones of Martel’s film. These conflicts pose the problem of existence in a very different way from the mere waiting or failure of the authors or of Don Diego de Zama. They are the painful situations of background actors or extras who are not actors and have to lend their bodies (Almada, 2017) and the consciousness of a tragicomic character who does not know that he is neither a main character —and will practically disappear in the final montage— nor that he needs a body to survive (Spregelburd, 2018).