Superposition and coalescence, the twinkling mechanism in the narrative of Nona Fernández

Increased by historic traumas and by the accelerated perception of the present, the memory includes an exercise of representation, elaboration, and freezing of an extinct time. In that sense, literature explores new ways to signify the past, to make an exercise of memory; an example of this is the narrative work of the Chilean writer Nona Fernández. First of all, from a general approximation of the treatment of the past in the story, followed by her narratological articulations, this paper analyses her seven books with the purpose of establishing how that literary creation operates on the construction of a singular memory. The study of the general aspects (temporary leaps in time and the legibility of the past), followed by the specific features of the narrative (articulations, strategies, and devices), led us to characterize this work as a twinkling, an intermittent construction, and a destabilization of the setting of the past, open to the utopia of its entire recovery. Fernández’s work gives an account of a potential quality to restore the memory of the forgotten, of a minor past shadowed by the historical narration. Facing the inevitable interstices of the past, her books reinforce the creative capacity that the literature must densify what is real. Thus, based on uncertain images, the memory completes itself in an oblique way, re-enlightening all that was swallowed by the blinding light of an empty memory.