“A survey of illegible scenes”: El corazón del daño by Maria Negroni

Abstract

We propose to read El corazón del daño by María Negroni (2021) as a text built from disobedience to the mother tongue –la madrelengua– through the displacement of the canonized forms of narration and traditional literary genres, the subversion of syntactic, morphological and semantic rules, and the insistent escape towards other texts that the writer summons as a challenge to what literature can –and cannot– say. Thus, we believe that these procedures are formats used by the writer to construct this unclassifiable text (out of classification). The text is woven through fragments, shreds filled with silence, which are assembled in the gaps, in chapters only designated by the blank spaces. As a consequence, both the generic hybridity, as well as the alteration of the syntactic order and the quotations that stage the dialogism, are forms of the deviation of a writing that does not submit to the language imposed by the Mother. We consider that displacement is also, in this text, a struggle with the place of the Mother, a disorder to flee from “that tortuous strategy” (Negroni, 2021: 61) of submission.