De sobremesa, 1887–1896 : José Asunción Silva: El poeta novelista

José Asunción Silva is a Colombian poet most known for having renewed the metrics in Spanish poetry during the 19th century. José Asunción Silva’s only novel, De sobremesa 1887-1896 [After dinner, 1887-1896] written in 1896 is a significant and representative modernist novel in the tradition of Latin-American modernismo. Silva’s novel has been considered as a structureless, narratively disordered and chaotic text by many literary critics since its first publication in 1925. The text presents a great deal of fragmentation on the surface level: the story is presented by means of temporal discontinuity and multiple narrative voices and its thematic richness seems to be endless. The characters reveal multiple perspectives and a plurality of discourses. This dissertation determines and analyzes the formal and thematic aspects of the text that underlie its apparently disordered structure. The analysis focuses on the study of the referentiality of the text and some of its narrative components. It examines how the different fragments of the story, which are apparently neither logically nor thematically ordered on the surface level, are associated and integrated in the novel as a whole. Silva as a novelist makes use of some of the conventions of poetry and the techniques he applied to his poems. Contrast, association, assimilation and parallelisms are ways of creating new organizational forms of expression in his prose work. The protagonist of the De sobremesa, himself a poet, also plays the role of “author”, “narrator”, “narratee” and “reader” of his own prose work, his personal diary. This is a very particular feature in the context of Latin-American modernist novels written between 1882-1902. The study analyzes the different roles of the character in the story to prove that the sense of unity is built by centering the text technically and thematically on the protagonist in its different roles. Silva makes the protagonist the point of convergence of the whole text. This dissertation suggests that there is an organized structure underlying the apparent disorder and incoherence of the text. The basis for Silva’s text is diversity and ‘the different’ where even the smallest part proves to correspond with a bigger one. For a text of the 19th century, this is an innovative and experimental way of writing that seek to create unity out of disorder and fragmentation. Key words: Latin-American modernismo, modernism, fragmentation, structure, genre, referentiality, narratology, “author”, “narrator”, “narratee”, “reader”, unity, assimilation, contrast, parallelism, correspondence, association