The Subsoil of the Homeland: a Reading of Los pichiciegos

Abstract

Forty years after the Malvinas War, when the novel Los pichiciegos was written, the present text proposes a rereading of this fundamental contribution to the post-dictatorship literature in Argentina. The corrosion of the premises of nationality stands out in Fogwill's novel,  and thus the war, depicted, without any judgement of value or trace of epic, becomes delegitimized as a heroic national feat. In this way, the question arises how that statement, that of the Pichis, determines the space and how it contradicts to other stories of the (war) space. By means of the invention of a deserter’s voice, an entire world emerges, the vocabulary becomes dislocated and there is a redefinition of language that makes the implicit, the supplementary, the postponed appear, that until then remained unsaid, such as the "flights of death". One of the proposals of this work is to grasp the sound of Los pichiciegos, different from "challenge" or "mourning", the two traditions or matrixes of our culture that appeared always we wanted to write down the passions of the homeland (Ludmer, 2000).