Fantasmas y otros seres liminales en dos novelas cortas uruguayas de comienzos del siglo XXI: Dina Díaz y Horacio Cavallo

Abstract

The purpose of the present essay is to analyze in what way and in what terms a certain line of the contemporary Hispano-American narrative incorporates in its textual space the image of the ghost as a symbolic event, as a reflection of a metaphorical discourse that aims to understand the Spectral presences as invisibilities / impossibilities. Far from the specters canonized by nineteenth-century fantasy literature, the ghostly figures that we are studying are other forms of knowledge that represent a way of escape from the collapse of the certainties of the 21st century's man. The focus of our analysis is the River Plate area, with particular interest for two short novels published in Uruguay at the beginning of the new century: Una ventana para el pájaro and Oso de trapo, respectively by Dina Díaz and Horacio Cavallo. In the first part of the text we will review the socio-cultural dynamics that have determined the emergence, in the current Hispano-American narrative, of stories in which the familiar becomes strange, according to the Freudian principle of unheimlich. In the second and third part of our essay, the reflections of the first section are applied to the two fiction texts: our aim is to underline – in the plurality of the voices responsible for the narrations and the narrative planes – that the thematic core of both works consists of associating the condition of invisibility with the idea of an existential search, which often remains unanswered.