Potentialities and limits of fiction: Patricio Pron's narrative in Argentina's post-dictatorial period

Abstract

The narratives of the children of political activists and the disappeared in Argentina emerging after the year 2000 employ fiction as a deliberate aesthetic and political narrative strategy to address the recent past and the repression of the dictatorship (1976–1983). This article will focus on Patricio Pron’s novel El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia [‘My Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain’] (first published in 2011) to explore the potentialities and limits of fiction when approaching painful and controversial aspects of the past. Pron proposes a narrative experiment with autofiction which sparked a debate between him and his father, one of the main characters in the novel, after the novel was published. We argue that the polemic between the Prons reveals a double conflict, centered on the interpretation of the past and on the limits of (auto)fiction when dealing with real, particularly sensitive, events in national history.