A Poetics Shipwreck

The Witness of Juan José Saer

Abstract

Writer from Santa Fe, Juan Jose Saer (1937l-2005), offers us in his novel, The Witness (2000), a journey in search of the origins of and adventure, not only of the “sea hungry” teenage cabin boy, but also that of which reveals the intimate question of the human being and his Latin-American origin. Saer revisits a long narrative tradition in which the castaway’s image reappears, to bond it with the loss of sense, the precariousness of the world we inhabit, the incompleteness of a language which we think we dominate but drifts in the uncertain. The expressions, representations and the purpose of the tale The Witness, advocate for the fundamentals for a “real” adventure, which materiality lies in the word itself. As a foundational gesture, this “poetic castaway” enunciates the trajectory of an auto-reflexive journey, relative to cause, the effect and presence of a man who describes and invents the entelechy of his ideal life, in regards to the castaway incited by Defoe’s work.