Modulaciones de un estremecimiento vacío en la narrativa uruguaya de posdictadura. Futuros perdidos, violencia y el crimen de lo trascendente en <i>Carnaval</i> de Felipe Polleri y <i>Derretimiento</i> de Daniel Mella

I propose a reading of Carnaval (1990) by Felipe Polleri and Derretimiento (1998) by Daniel Mella that I inscribe within the framework of an “empty shudder” that refers to the fact that in the post-dictatorship the closure of the “realism versus imagination” debate occurs and to the ghostly figure of Mario Levrero. Given the fading of the revolutionary project of the 60s, post-dictatorship writers report nostalgia for the lost future. This absence of a future is investigated in both novels through disenchanted characters who use violence. In Carnaval, Polleri constructs a political economy of writing based on a city full of cockroaches where the poet as a mangy cat is what is left over from the system. In Derretimiento Mella investigates the collapse of matter and its lack of transcendence where the luminous experience is ruled out even as an (im)possible story.