The limits of the inmost. Some notes about ‘private writing’ around the posthumous novel by José María Arguedas

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the diaries included in the last, unfinished novel by Jose María Arguedas, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971), the article seeks to reflect on the conflictive relations between experience and writing. Being intimate diaries, in principle, a form of private writing —and as such a form that works outside the public act of publishing—, their presence in a novel raises a contradiction which implies questioning the status of language as code and vehicle capable in theory to articulate a sense of human experience. The article takes up this alleged contradiction and, following the visible process in the posthumous novel by Arguedas, draws a look that calls into question the usual notions of “intimate” and its relationship with writing, representation and art.