Work and writing in Chejfec’s Boca de lobo and Aira’s La mendiga

Abstract

This work analyzes the representations of industrial work in Boca de lobo by Sergio Chejfec and La mendiga by César Aira. But in addition, the two novels exhibit their respective story-building processes through certain writing scenes. These not only emphasize the dimension of writing as work but also refer to the poetics of each author. If, on the one hand, the circularity, the iteration and the conjectural character of the elaborate phrase are in Chejfec the formal expression of the link between writing and melancholy, on the other, the stylistic carelessness, the rush and the thick lines of Airian fiction are the signs of an aesthetics of bad writing that is presented as a non-work.