Diversion and weakening in Silvina Ocampo’s narrative search

Abstract

Silvina Ocampo’s narrative beginnings were read, in general, from an evolutionary perspective which she acknowledges in Autobiografía de Irene, her second book of short–stories, as a moment of development and improvement of the formal and stylistic “fallacies”, “faults” and “vagueness” that would have characterized the initial tales of Viaje Olvidado. Disagreeing with this perspective that reduces Ocampo’s first book singularity and values in a positive way the transformations present in her later short–stories, this work suggests and argues the idea that in Autobiografía de Irene the singular narrative search that Silvina Ocampo’s literature triggers in Viaje Olvidado diverts from the immanent intentions that drive her to guide herself in an oblivious and external sense, in which its strength and initial invention weaken notably. From my point of view, the volume shows the way in which Ocampo’s literature turns sensitive to the different demands and requirements of the immediate context: on the one hand, the technical and thematic transformations that are found on these tales respond to the aesthetic values that Borges and Bioy proclaim in the interior of Sur (South), on the other hand, the changes that they register at the syntactic level in particular, and in language in general, meet the objections that Victoria Ocampo showed in her well–known review of Silvina’s first book.