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COPYRIGHT 2002 West Virginia University, Department of Foreign Languages
It is well-known that the early decades of the twentieth-century were years of daring literary experimentation. In Colombia, the period between 1925 and 1935 was pivotal in the modernization of its society and the formation of its vanguard novel. The common perception is that Colombia lacked a true avant-garde and its novel was inconsequential in an overall consideration of Latin American vanguard literature. However, writers such as Eduardo Zalamea Borda, Jose Felix Fuenmayor, Cesar Uribe Piedrahita and Jose Restrepo Jaramillo are representative of those less conventional Colombian novelists who were willing to challenge the nation's official cultural and literary traditions by incorporating various vanguard strategies and ideologies into their works, thus incorporating Colombia into the international avant-garde.
If as some critics claim, Restrepo Jaramillo is the founder of the Colombian psychological novel, his La novela de los tres (1) may well be the first of this type to be published. (2) The concern with the multiplicity of the self is the thematic focal point. Restrepo Jaramillo centers his attention on Freudian psychoanalytic theories, (3) as he artistically strives to find an integrity of self through the understanding of the conflictive voices within his own psyche. In the avant-garde spirit, he departs from inherited plot conventions and character formations, utilizing various self-conscious textual strategies--multiple narrators, metacritical commentaries, the confusion of fiction and reality--intended to draw attention not only to the narrative devices employed but also to the problematics of novelistic creation. The focus is on its gestation through the multiple acts of writing and reading which take place among the narrator and his characters as each one vies physically and psychologically to control th e creation of this work.
The story begins in a room in a pension with the nameless narrator waiting for Jorge, a clerk in a bookstore, to pass by. In the first series of chapters, numbered 1 through 8, we learn that the narrator, with the aid of his friend, Octavio, is attempting to write a novel about Jorge's life. The central interest of these chapters is the matrix of difficulties experienced by the narrator in shaping the novel. The sketchy details of Jorge's existence count as almost nothing. Chapter 8 ends with the same words which began Chapter 1: "Y segui esperando" (41). The second part of the novel, lettered A through J, retells the story but adds those changes made during the narrator's absence by an unknown intruder. As the narrator reads the corrected version, he recorrects it while commenting on the intruder's revisions in a technical as well as a psychological sense. The following three chapters, K through M, describe the narrator's successful attempt at finding the intruder (Jorge). The final chapter, entitled "Epilog o semitriste," concludes with the words "Hay que vivir," (85) emphasizing Jorge's final demise.
As stipulated in the title, this is a novel written, not by one, but by three character-authors: the narrator,...
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