Editing and ‘zozobra’ in The Autobiography of Cotton and Liliana’s Invincible Summer, by Cristina Rivera Garza.

Abstract

The Autobiography of Cotton and Liliana’s Invincible Summer, by Rivera Garza, benefits from the porosity between literary genres to make fiction and non-fiction work together both with the archive and the political stances in the books. In the first one, a critic to the extractivistic logic of economic development and criminal violence; in the other, femicide. The present article links Rivera Garza with 1) the implications of montage as a crucial technique in non-fiction, which Amar Sánchez explores in Rodolfo Walsh’s work; and 2) Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranga’s idea of zozobra, a form of constant vulnerability. To Amar Sánchez, the disposition of facts, data and subjects participate in the “editing” of the textual artifact that searches for the non-official true. It is the counterpart of Rivera Garza’s desedimentación. On the other hand, zozobra frames the contingency that accompanies Rivera Garza’s subjects and narrators across the Mexican space: at any given moment, crime or political changes can erase them. It is the zozobra what moves them to search transformative intersubjectivities.