Feminine Freedom/Metafictional Autonomy in "Los largos días"

Contemporary Mexican author Joaqu?n-Armando Chac?n demonstrates an acute awareness of the complexities facing a male writer who attempts to depict the female other in narrative. In his novels to date, Los largos d?as, Las amarras terrestres, and El recuento de los da?os, female characters have positions of great structural and thematic importance. However, these images of females, like all characters, enjoy an existence contingent on the masculine narrators whose words give them breath, as it were, and they depend even further on the voice of their ultimate father, the flesh-and-blood Chac?n. The problem Chac?n explores is how to permit the female other a discourse within the novel. Los largos d?as presents metafiction as a potential answer: by talking his way through the literary production of a female character, and thus making apparent the role of masculine discourse in her creation, the male narrator might trace an honest and realistic image of woman. A text's self-conscious examination of this operation with regard to the inscription of a feminine other sheds light on the ideology of the narrator, the implied author, and the (supposedly) dead** author whose writing and publishing of a metafictional novel is in itself an ideological act. With the creation of the character Julia** in Los largos d?as, Chacon's writing exploits the self-conscious and playful nature of metafiction to underscore the challenges involved in a masculine depiction of feminine discourse. 94

Autonomy · Epistemology · Political science · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Latin American Literature Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology