Las huellas de la oralidad en siete cuentos del 30

Abstract

The author looks at the way in which narrative discourse is written in «the way people talk» in the stories of Aguilera-Malta, Gallegos Lara, Gil Gilbert and De la Cuadra. This «common speech effect» is created in different ways: with descriptions steeped in myth, or refrains that express collective experience; using oral traditional style, equivalent to that of «once upon a time»; using prosopopoeia (personification, animation, sensitizing metaphor) and hyperbole; alternating between a witness narrator and other educated character, or even alternating between storytelling and conversation by the same narrator. On the other hand, certain thematic motives also show signs of an oral tradition: in the attempt to recapture the primordial universe, in which humanity and nature were one; in the role of collective experience once spread orally that then becomes truth. All of these resources point to the rediscovery of the imagination’s rich expression, values of the coastal (montuvio) world, and the cohabitation or conflict between said values and those promoted by Christian culture and the urban world.