“Diálogo del rebusque”: An Oblique Look at Latin America

Abstract

Latin American theatre has often resorted to rewriting as a way of bearing witness to social reality. To this end, the classics of the past, as well as contemporary narrative texts, have become a valuable source for new dramatic and/or stage writings, as shown by numerous works produced by theatre groups such as El Galpón from Uruguay, La Candelaria and El Local from Colombia, Rajatabla from Venezuela, Teatro del Sol from Peru, and the Centro de Pesquisa Teatral from Brazil.

This paper, which is part of Project No. 312 of the Research Council of the National University of Salta, proposes a reading of Diálogo del rebusque, a rewriting of El buscón and other satirical, narrative, and poetic texts by Francisco de Quevedo.

Diálogo del rebusque is an illuminating text for reflecting on one aspect of the complex field of rewriting in contemporary Latin American theatre: the adaptation of “classics”. In order to address this issue, we formulate several hypotheses about the reasons for adapting texts that are temporally and culturally distant and apparently foreign and in which a predominantly playful attitude seems to prevail, with no evident connection to the social reality of their time.

The analysis of various discursive strategies involved in the transposition of the hypotext allows us to draw the following conclusion: just as in Quevedo’s writing the construction of reality does not proceed in a straight line, but rather along a circuitous path—as the mad scientist in El buscón would say—Diálogo del rebusque, by reintroducing the writing of a classic into new circuits of meaning, also constructs our reality obliquely, through circuitous paths.