The Creative incongruity of the foreign. On the narratives of Pablo Montoya

Abstract

In this essay I explore the concept of extranjería como conciencia de desajuste [«the foreign as awareness of incongruity»] (Canclini, 2014) through the narrative work of the Colombian author Pablo Montoya. The relevance of this concept becomes clear when one considers the shifting positions Latin-American intellectuals have taken in recent years in relation to notions such as local or global, or «ours» and «theirs», not to mention the necessity of taking into account poetics that are consciously eccentric, those bent on unsettling readers through oblique readings of our our own contexts, the abrupt reduction in distances between cultures, the recovery of cosmopolitan traditions, or the re-examination of modes of belonging, subject to constant change. I pay special attential to Tríptico de la infamia, which has won numerous prizes since its publication in 2015, although I am also keen not to overlook his most recent volume of poetic prose, Hombre en ruinas. My goal is to explore what kind of readers Montoya’s writing forges given the two main effects of his stories, underwritten and driven on by poetry, are uncertainty and the uncanny, two words that emphasise our condition as «extranjeros definitivos» [«definitively estranged»], a lesson that has come down to us from the great authors and which the anachronism of the stories studied here brings into focus once more in this reflective dialogue on a cherished tradition of writing.