The literary imagination of the great outdoors of South America, a traumatic imagination? In search of fireflies, stars and freedom in the darkness

In Vol de nuit (1931), the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery tells the story of the accidents that occurred at the beginning of an Argentinian airmail service. This story contributes towards the funeral literary imagination of the Andes Cordillera. In Inri (2004), the Chilean poet Raul Zurita confirms such a traumatic literary imagination, when he alludes to forced disappearances. The bodies of the missing persons were thrown in the Andes Cordillera. In Patagonia express (1995), the Chilean writer Luis Sepulveda refers to the struggle of Resistance fighters in Patagonia, during the Chilean dictatorship. This way, he shows the Tierra del Fuego as a space of repression. Finally, in Les ombres de l'Araguaia (2017), the Brazilian writer Guiomar de Grammont describes the Amazonian forest as a place where memory erasure occurred. In this place, young people disappeared during the Brazilian dictatorship. By studying these novels, we will put into relief the traumatic imagination of wide-open spaces in South America, then we will show that these spaces can also be interpreted as the land of freedom.