Perceiving Literary Influence in the Works of Juan José Saer

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Juan Jose' Saer is widely acknowledged to be Argentina's most important author of the second half of the twentieth century, and the most important writer in that country after Borges. In his essays, Saer time and again praises a specific set of twentieth-century European and American authors, and he goes as far as saying that, for him, 'literary influences are those writers who become embedded in us and through which we begin to see the world'. As this quote shows, that Saer would grant writers such a fundamental role in shaping, not only one's literary outlook, but one's worldview, unquestionably calls for an in-depth analysis of literary influence in Juan Jose' Saer's works. However, whilst scholarship on Saer's oeuvre has burgeoned in the past few years, there are, to date, virtually no in-depth studies which focus on the specific ways in which the Argentine novelist was influenced by these authors whom he so frequently praises in his essays. My research, therefore, seeks to explore the ways in which Argentine novelist Juan José Saer was influenced by a series of Modernist and Nouveau Roman authors. Specifically, I will argue that the reason why Saer's corpus is so closely linked with these novelists stems from the fact that his works are primarily concerned with perception and perceiving. I will contend that Saer expressed his admiration for a series of French and Anglo-American and Modernist authors and the nouveaux romanciers primarily due to the fact that they all share a common feature, namely, that they move away from a conventionally realist focus on plot towards an increased interest in the portrayal of subjective experience. The ways in which the Modernists and nouveaux romanciers go about doing this, however, differ significantly. Whilst the former group are concerned with characterisation through descriptions of internal though processes, the nouveaux romanciers wish to largely do away with detailed characterisation, focusing, instead, on perceptions of a more phenomenological kind. I will argue that Saer's own portrayals of consciousness are largely the result of an amalgamation of both of these literary modi operandi.