Boundaries Between Different Styles of Writing in Rioplatense Fantasy Literature

Abstract

Passages, thresholds, boundaries. Transgressions, infractions. These voices, which abound in fantastical tales, are either spoken or depicted fictionally in the stories told. Bridges, doors, dreams, and doubles are liminal figures; they represent thresholds between conceptions of reality; they allow us to cross from one world into another. Figures and words. As parts of utterances, these terms are liminal spaces intrinsic to narrative discourse and language; they are words that undermine stability and discursive convention; that open a passage from the sayable to the unsayable, from the thinkable to the unthinkable. They are concepts that can be expressed—or rather, evoked—thus shaping the secrets of language and hiding in the silences and gaps of the text, in the absences. Finally, these terms provide a theoretical—and even generic—demarcation with regard to the fantastic: they become theoretical interpretive categories that bring to light some of the modalities of a literary territory.