Capital Putamadre: Social Abstraction and Literary Representation in César Vallejo and José María Argueda

Abstract

The author believes that the appearance of the pelican and the anchovy as major figures in these texts allowed Vallejo and Arguedas to thematize an encounter of the “local” and the “global” in an extremely concrete manner, creating the conditions to see in such an encounter the interplay between the particular of individual life and the general determinations of social life. The author argues that this was possible because those small bodies played a pivotal role in the economy and the society of Vallejo’s and Arguedas’s lifetimes, and therefore constituted critical points to focalize the fundamental incongruity in society that arises from the uneven development of capitalism, particularly in a peripheral country like Perú.