Ways of Producing the Outside: Mario Bellatin’s Public Garden

This article examines the way in which Mario Bellatin’s literary project revolves around the possibility of inhabiting one’s own fiction. It lays out the question through the analysis of three scenes by Bellatin in which the problem is displaced from individual authorship to a communal problem, thus establishing a tension that sits at the core of his fictional universe, one that straddles between the imaginative power of constructing other possible worlds and the proliferation of abject and totalitarian spaces. Finally, it suggests that the articulation of these two poles in a single gesture appears to constitute a fictional strategy for producing the contemporary out-of-this-world.