AGON: The melodramatic imagination of José María Arguedas

Abstract

This article introduces the notion of a “melodramatic imagination” as the frame to understanding the kind of sensibility and artistic vision that models Arguedas’ novelistic work. The point of departure is the description of a characteristic type of “attention” in his narrative: its obsessive interest in the figure of the “landlord.” This attention configures a “gaze” that, on the one hand, constructs the ‘landlord’ as the figure of evil and, on the other hand, it incarnates or testifies to the emergence of an opposing subjectivity. The contention is that this process constitutes the “matrix scene”, the struggle (agon) that gives impulse and form to the construction of a narrative.