2 - Re-reading Autobiografía de Irene: Writing and its Double in the Narrative of Silvina Ocampo

Summary

In recent decades, Silvina Ocampo's narrative has attracted readings from several critical approaches which have contributed to the illumination of different zones and stress diverse aspects of her textual production; dominant among them are gender studies, the fantastic as a literary genre, her treatment of cliché and of childhood, her relationship and place among the primary members of the Sur literary group (Borges, Bioy, Bianco, Victoria Ocampo), and her work's autobiographical character. In the present essay I would like to inscribe the following considerations within the last of these currents in order to interrogate the place that writing acquires in the author's poetics, not just as a signifying structure but also as an object of reflection, as itself a theme or pretext for fiction. In other words, my intention is to present a meta-literary reading on the basis of key stories which markedly problematize the writing act.

The presence of doubles, metamorphosis, and transformations, so common in these stories, has long been pointed out as a manifestation of the fantastic through which the notion of a unified identity can best be questioned in order to provide a more complete and more unsettling concept of both subjectivity and reality. In many of the narratives by this author it is possible to propose a specific connection between the presence or appearance of duplicity and some form of reflection or textualization of writing. If the focus here is in no way exclusive, the stories that make up Autobiografía de Irene, the second of Silvina Ocampo's story collections published in 1948 (“Epitafio romano” [Roman epitaph], “La red” [The net], “El impostor” [The imposter], “Fragmentos del libro invisible” [Fragments of the invisible book] and “Autobiografía de Irene” [Irene's autobiography]), become paradigmatic in this sense; in Cecilia Graña's words, “a reflection on writing and narrative mechanics is evident” since “the very condition of writing seems to expose itself completely” (71).

“Epitafio romano,” the story that opens the volume, in its very title refers to a particular type of writing: the inscribed epitaph, which is explicitly related to the preservation of identity in the sense that its function is to identify the buried remains and preserve the memory of a proper name.