From disappearing narrators to signs of the author: images of the subject in the short stories of Silvina Ocampo

Abstract

This study proposes an in-depth study of subjectivity in Silvina Ocampo's short stories. In the first chapter of this study, I investigate the mechanisms by which self-generation paradoxically elicits the disappearance of the subject while the process of narration encounters repetition, coincidence, and cyclical movement. In these stories typical of the fantastic mode, we also observe the relinquishing of the narrating self's sense of physical and psychological density, a transformation that involves a radically changed as well as a muted, silenced self.

A similar investigation of the problems of subjectivity continues in chapter two. This time, however, the focus is on the confrontation between the bourgeois, stable subject and the unstable, mutable subject. Though the bourgeois subject aligned with civilization presupposes a stable, discrete identify, while the barbaric other connotes a destabilized, irrational self, the semantic fields of the two poles, civilization and barbarism, overlap in Ocampo's stories. While undoing traditional dualisms, the physically and psychologically destabilized self challenges the social order, the public and private spaces of bourgeois life, and the relations of power specific to these spaces.

A fluid and imprecise form of subjectivity also emerges in Ocampo's introspective work that investigates, while achieving in the process, the creation of authorial self. The contours of an authorial consciousness come into view in the interplay of the fictive metaphors of gestation, the elusive or lost masterpiece, mirrors, and the photograph. The recurring themes and images generated by these metaphors reveal signs of an authorial persona preoccupied with the complex properties of selfhood and reality and the pitfalls in their representations, as well as with the relation between the creator and her literary world.