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Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, known for his theory of "constant flux," may be one of the most misunderstood and misquoted thinkers of Western philosophy. The way that the protagonist of Julio Cortazar’s Rayuela misreads Heraclitus serves as one example of this phenomenon wherein poorly-conceived postmodern inquiries that seek to weaken the idea of a Truth lead to a nihilistic apathy. Horacio Oliveira misunderstands Heraclitus’ doctrine of constant flux and uses this misreading to “logically” justify his sexist and elitist behavior towards others. This phenomenon crops up again in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Fin de Partie through Hamm, a patriarch that no longer sees any point in trying because the world as he knows it is disintegrating. We can use Heraclitus as a central theoretical point for parsing through what exactly goes wrong with the ethical decisions of these characters. Carole Maso’s AVA serves as a counterexample to Rayuela and Fin de Partie, for the novel revolves around similar theoretical questions but provides us with a more properly “Heraclitean” approach for how to confront a world without fixed meaning. Studying these failures and successes supply us with examples of how Postmodern thought can be used for harm or for good. A Heraclitean reading of these texts shows us how, properly understood, Postmodernism moves not only towards deconstructing structuralized systems of violence and marginalization, but also towards building something out of the rubble.

Se precisan algunas características de Adán Buenosayres y se señalan sus coincidencias con la obra Rayuela de Cortázar. Ambas novelas tienen un fondo autobiográfico, pretenden contar una acumulación de experiencias desde la atalaya de la vida. Se resume igualmente la dispar aceptación crítica de la obra de Leopoldo Marechal, un hito dentro de la evolución de las letras argentinas. In this article, some characteristics of Adán Buenosayres are detailed, and its correlations with Cotázar’s Rayuela are underlined. Both novels have an autobiographical content, and pretend to tell an accumulation of experiences from the watchtower of life. The unequal critical reception of Leopoldo Marechal’s work—a milestone in the evolution of Argentinean literature—is resumed as well.