About the Flood as Space, Event and Opportunity in Contemporary Argentine Science Fiction

Abstract

In recent decades we find works whose plot culminates in a flood, as in the case of Berazachussetts and Los mantras modernos. We observe that the extreme climatic event could be making it possible that social organization can be reconfigured, at least as a promise towards the end of the plot. In parallel to this use of the flood motif, we find works such as Gongue and El rey del agua and El ojo y la flor in which the excessiveness of the water originates two other opposite and complementary movements in the characters. In the first case, the flood is present from the beginning of the text and is not reversed, which does not prevent the character from changing his status from passive to active. In the other two novels, what is a land full of water becomes a drought and this inversion of the predominant elements in the scenario generates what we could think of as a third space, full of mud, which produces the opening to a new bonding practice.