Author/Narrators: the “Narrative Authenticity” in the first novels of Fernanda Trías

Abstract

In the first novels of Fernanda Trías (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1976), La azotea (2001) and Cuaderno para un solo ojo (2001), narrative voices, always feminine, test their “authenticating authority”, according to the category used by Doležel (1997) to refer the different degrees of illocutionary force possessed by the speech acts of narrative fiction. Not only because their knowledge of the narrated world has the limitations of any homodiegetic voice, of authenticity always relative in fictional terms; also because the growing perceptual rarification of these characters leads the reader to quickly distance themselves from their ways of understanding and valuing the world around them. However, the voice of the writer becomes a repository of expertise and authority to often fill with meaning the directions and ambiguities of these subjective worlds. It is the author who proposes the breaking of the clear limits between the figure of the victim and the perpetrator, who understands fear as the most important emotion from which to explore the scope of literary creation.