Revisiting Juan José Saer’s El entenado / The Witness —Forty Years Later

Abstract: This essay revisits Juan José Saer’s 1983 novel El entenado/The Witness as a novel, as a work of the literary imagination, for the purpose of challenging the thrust of scholarship that reads it, not as fiction, but as faulty ethnography and historiography and therefore a palimpsest of racist-colonialist tropes about the “cannibal” in the Americas. Saer’s novel bears “witness” to the emergence of “scientific” discourses of human communities in early modernity through its mimicry of the ethnographic mode, but the novel’s fictional and literary properties subvert—rather than reinforce—those very discourses. This is accomplished by the novel’s unnamed narrator in sixteenth-century Spain who retrospectively narrates the ten years he spent in captivity with a cannibalistic society somewhere in South America and became immersed in their community. His account is a self-reflexive meditation on the failure of language to signify as well as the irretrievability and capriciousness of memory. It also implicates the myopic nature of sixteenth-century European thought about its historical “others.”