THE Threat of literalness: sangre en el ojo by Lina Meruane

Abstract

This study explores the subterranean veins of a narrative that displays, in the manner of a trap or a challenge for curious readers, direct connections with the author’s daily life, with the precariousness of her existence between two worlds and with the trauma of a blindness that was actually suffered. The analysis of the novel pursues several complementary goals: it confronts the text with the theoretical discussions about the concept of “autofiction” highlighting the search for a psychic and ethical truth beyond empirical truths; it examines the verbal mechanisms of that search, paying particular attention to the constant tension between the literal and the metaphoric; it studies some destabilizing narrative signals that take the reader from a seemingly closed and normal world to an unknown dimension, which towards the end of the story, raises the chill of the uncanny.