Back to the ocean of intimacy. On Impureza by Marcelo Cohen

Abstract

Impureza, by Marcelo Cohen, imagines a peripheral territory where the lives of the popular sectors unfold, especially focusing on the educational trajectories of young people cast into precarity, deprivation and permanent violence. This article analyzes the construction of the protagonists’ subjectivities, with their moments of rupture and transformation; and their relationships with the desires, aspirations, sensibilities and capitalist-produced models of happiness. It also explores conceptions of language, from the idea of verbal virus, which reproduces hegemonic forms of symbolic order, to the possibilities of subversion and poetic deviation. Furthermore, it examines the alternative modes of memory construction, contrasting a uniform, media-driven, and technological memory, which becomes either spectacle or religious cult, with an intimate memory, composed as a material and sensory event of strong impact. Finally, the workings of meaning are observed —between controlled containment and dissemination— through the analysis of the grammars that organize the characters’ behaviors, the compositional level of the novel and the instance of enunciation, exploring the links between language and experience, between noise and silence, between the suspension of the word and the prodigy of narration.