A Portrait of the Present: Sergio Chejfec’s Photographic Realism

This paper reads Sergio Chejfec's narrative as a particular type of realism in the conext of a return to this aesthetic in recent Argentinean and Brazilian literature. It argues that one of Chejfec's narrative peculiarities lies in the appropriation and use of avant-garde techniques to generate a reality effect. In this process, the use of photography and the passage from classic realist "representation" to an "indexical" mode of signification is crucial. By incorporating the logic of the image within the text, his narrative creates an impression of discontinuity similar to that used in avant-gardist writing, but instead of producing discontinuity to emphasize the artificiality of representation or the impossibility of mimesis, it is used in a positive manner to create a representation of the contemporary. Discontinuity becomes in Chejfec a constructive medium to produce a portrait of the present time, of urban scapes marked by growing marginality, degraded and soiled spaces.