Del fantástico al <i>nonsense</i>. Sobre la narrativa de Silvina Ocampo

Abstract

The cliché that identifies Silvina Ocampo’s literature as fantastic acts as a calming pretext which somehow domesticates her oddity. In current critical interpretations, this reductive idea, which was explanatory enough in specific past circumstances, continues to operate, even though it results clearly inapplicable nowadays. In my view, the most characteristic moments in Ocampo’s narrative are defined by a writing form whose folly disconcerts the reader, rather than by topics and procedures involving the supernatural, abnormal or unreal. In order to read this literature in these new terms, I posit nonsense as a narrative of insensibility, a usage of madness as aesthetics and ethics.