Perceiving Literary Influence in the Works of Juan José Saer

胡安·何塞·萨尔被公认为阿根廷二十世纪下半叶最重要的作家，也是继博尔赫斯之后阿根廷最重要的作家。在他的散文中，萨尔一次又一次地赞扬了一群特定的20世纪欧美作家，他甚至说，对他来说，文学影响力是那些深深植根于我们之中并通过他们开始看到世界的作家。正如这句话所表明的那样，萨尔将赋予作家这样一个根本性的角色来塑造一个人的文学观，甚至一个人的世界观，这无疑要求对胡安·何塞·萨尔作品中的文学影响进行深入分析。然而，尽管关于萨尔作品的学术研究在过去几年里如雨后春笋般涌现，但到目前为止，几乎没有深入研究这位阿根廷小说家是如何受到这些作家的影响的，这些作家经常在他的文章中受到赞扬。因此，我的研究试图探索阿根廷小说家胡安·何塞·萨尔受到一系列现代主义和新罗马作家的影响。具体地说，我认为萨尔的语料库之所以与这些小说家有如此密切的联系，是因为他的作品主要涉及知觉和知觉。我会争辩说，萨尔表达了他对一系列法国、英美和现代主义作家以及新浪漫主义作家的钦佩，主要是因为他们都有一个共同的特点，即他们从传统的现实主义对情节的关注转向对主观经验的描绘越来越感兴趣。然而，现代主义者和新浪漫主义者对待这一点的方式有很大的不同。前者关注的是通过对内部思维过程的描述来刻画人物形象，而新浪漫主义派则希望在很大程度上摒弃细节刻画，转而关注一种更具现象学色彩的观念。我会争辩说，萨尔自己对意识的描绘在很大程度上是这两种文学手法融合的结果。

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.