The invisible world of immigrants and illegals: a social reading of El camino a Ítaca by Carlos Liscano

Abstract

The aim of our study consists of the analysis of the literary representation that the Uruguayan writer Carlos Liscano offers of the experience of traumatic
emigration from the nations of the Souther Cone towards the European Continent. Centrer of our reflection, as a recovery of a certain memory-witness that characterizes the same author (he lived the experience of the exile in Sweden after the end of the Uruguaya’s military dictatorship, after living 13 years in a Uruguayan prison), is the novel El camino a Ítaca: in this book, Liscano describes in a fictional way the migratory phenomenon to Europe relating to the last thirty years of the Uruguayan history, as consequence of a socio-political and economic breakdowns. In the novel, which had its first edition published in 1994, Liscano proposes a sad and degrading vision of this “forced nomadism” to which certain human groups are submitted in the epoch of the globalization: his protagonist, a young undocumented immigrant who staggers between Stockholm and Barcelona, is a human being who lives at the margin of the society. The man is incapable of any kind of integration in the social structure of the country of destination and - in the Swedish stage – is completely isolated on the linguistic dimension. The double marginalization on which the plot is based shows a dissatisfaction that pushes the subject towards an "emotional purgatory", a condition that prevents him from finding a solid handle in both sociocultural areas of reception. Even if the temporary coordinates of the publication of El camino a Ítaca (fifteen years after the return of the country to the democracy, in June, 1985), places the text in the area of postmodernity, the structure of the story is unravelling according to a scheme that connects with the Hispanic picaresca, particularly with Lazarillo de Tormes: this relation is evident, above all, in the identification of the protagonist with poor and weak persons (an identification that is added to the hatred towards men who abuse of his power), as in the continuous and unfortunate changes of employment that the man experiments on both countries of arrival.