Terror acording to Feiling

• Main Author: Pablo Javier Ansolabehere
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata 2018-03-01
• Series: Estudios de Teoría Literaria
• Subjects: Feiling, terror, géneros, política, gusto
• Online Access: https://fh.mdp.edu.ar/revistas/index.php/etl/article/view/2542

C. E. Feiling published three novels, each of them ascribed to a specific narrative genre: the detective fiction in El agua electrizada (1992), the adventure novel in Un poeta nacional (1993) and the "horror fiction" in El mal menor (1996). In this essay I intend to read that work from the end, that is, from the terror, attending to that ostensible presence of the generic, but also to other ways of understanding and considering the terror that Feiling handles in his three novels. Already in the first novel, the police intrigue is organized around the terror, the meaning and the nonsense of state terror deployed during the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) that persists as a dirty and perverse fog during the democratic years that follow. A terror anchored in history and politics that, at the same time, does not cease to be –perhaps for that very reason– profoundly literary, and which seems to continue, in a perfect sequence, in the historical period that follows it, during which it takes place the plot of El mal menor, at the same time that it seeks its origin –the origin of its terror, historical, political and literary– in Un poeta nacional.