On Anachronism. Two cases in Contemporary Latin-American literature

Abstract

This article examines the concepts of “anachronism” and “anachronic experience” in a contemporary context. Based on the analysis of two contemporary Latin American works —Álvaro Enrigue’s Muerte súbita (2013) and Balam Rodrigo’s El libro centroamericano de los muertos (2018)—, this article proposes that some non-linear and logically inconsistent connections between events (distant in time and/or in space) can impact the reader and produce him a feeling of vastness that provides meaning to those connections and therefore makes them valid as well as irrefutable. Connections that we call here anachronistic insofar as they are appearances of elements of what seems to be part of the past in the present time, but whose meaning actually transcends the traditional definition of the term since what these anachronic connections show is not a hierarchical relationship between events but a simultaneous one.