La guaracha del Macho Camacho de Luis Rafael Sánchez y la cultura tardomoderna de la pseudocomunicación.

Abstract

Luis Rafael Sánchez‘s La guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976) is probably the most notorious narrative piece of the 20th century Puerto Rican literature. La guaracha is about a stagnated culture, a metaphoric traffic jam, and almost postmodern version of the "charca" (swampy waters), following an intertextual play with La charca, a classic novel written by the naturalist Manuel Zeno Gandía. The characters of Sánchez are immobilized not only by the car, the radio, the telephone (the ciber culture), but mainly by the hypnotic performance that the guaracha music imposes to all (which embeds the demands of the mass media culture). This situation does not permit that the characters safeguard the national symbolism, the infant smashed by a car (the cybernetic Ferrari) at the end of the novel. This paper also follows the ideas of the semiosphere of Russian theorist Yuri Lotman.