A incidência do tempo e do espaço no ser: um estudo dos contos “Thanatopia” e “El caso de la señorita Amelia” de Rubén Darío

Abstract

Rubén Félix García Sarmiento or Rubén Darío has an extensive literary production in Spanish, which is composed of poetry and prose. Because of his innovative writing, Darío became an important author for Hispanic Modernism. The publication of Azul (1888), a collection of stories and poems, was decisive for the author to achieve prestige and for him to stand out in the Spanish-American Modernist movement. The wariness towards the language and the aesthetic quality of his literary production is an unarguable aspect for a critical reading of Darío's work. His prose also addresses the fantastic, which demonstrates his ability to write different literary genres. Ruben Darío's fantastic tales usually tell stories about protagonists who experienced hazy and disturbing situations in specific spaces and times. The experience of these fantastic episodes has an impact on the characters, who helplessly watch their lives being transformed. Some examples of these situations can be read in the short stories “Thanatopia” (1893) and “El caso de la señorita Amelia” (1894), both selected as corpus of analysis for this thesis. In the first story, the reader sees the intriguing narrative of James Leen, the character narrator, who returns home to discover his father married a vampire. In the second, we read the story of Doctor Z., who suffers because of his old love which has never been reciprocated or fulfilled. In this one, curiously, time ages almost all of the characters in the narrative, except one, Amélia, who remains a twelve-year-old girl. Considering the remarkable space-time relationship which is established in these narratives, we analyze Rubén Darío's literary construction, based on chronotropic actions and their impact on the configuration of the protagonists. We comprehend that the categories of time and space contribute significantly to the construction of a fantastic universe and also for the characters changing. The action of the chronotopes, conjoined and almost simultaneous, along with fantastic experiences, modify these two narrative, leading them to an eternal life of fear and immersed in melancholy. The investigative study was based on the theoretical works of Bakhtin (1998), Holquist (2015), Ramirez (2016), Sanz (2016), Nunes, (1995), Ricoeur (1994), Tomachévski (1976), Gama-Khalil (2018), Brandão (2019), Bachelard (2008), de Jímenez (1892), Hahn (1978), Oviedo (2012), among others.