Stories by Juan José Sena and the small-town costumbrism busted

Abstract

The eight stories of the book The Last Night of the Empire by Juan J. Sena (1992) represent an important stage in the panorama of regional literatures in which the province of La Pampa is included. Sena wrote a series of stories that move the spectrum of the so-called traditional realism, and its follower, costumbrism, to the point of leading them to a culmination that is on the verge of parody.

The objective of this work is to describe and comment on the costumbrist idioms carried to their limits, that is to say, to the stereotype, and how they are pulverized by means of a stylistic procedure that consists in exasperating such limits within the conservative morality of a provincial society.

The methodological framework starts from considering the traditional realistic literature of the early twentieth century in Argentine literature and its continuity and blend with a revisited costumbrism towards the middle of the same century. This leads to the conclusions that will allow us to point out the ruptures of a costumbrism that lead Sena’s stories towards the tragic collapse of its characters and the stylistic modulation of stereotypes which mean anti-dialogism and parody, and as a result, a closure of a literary point of view.