Around the story have been erected several theories, all necessary to understand and extract the maximum aesthetic benefit of the genre. Horacio Quiroga, Poe, Hemingway, Piglia, Katherine Anne Porter, Cortázar, Carson McCullers, among others, have provided enlightening ideas about it. Today I would like to introduce another of these ideas, usually little mentioned, but of equal importance in the field of literary theory. I’m talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne and his theory of “the Half light.” He expressed it in his book of Tales Twice-Told tales. It is about capturing the precise contours of reality by the awareness that it is never possible to capture it entirely, that the author’s gaze collides with the misty nature of all reality. Just taking advantage of the medium light that gives us the reality, we can delve into that incommunicable area that always has what we see on the surface.
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Recommends ‘ the composition of salt ‘
I would say that the accounts that compose the book of the Bolivian writer Magea Baudoin The composition of the Salt (García Márquez award) are written in the wake of the thought of Hawthorne, regardless of the author being Conscie Nte or not. The book is made up of 14 stories. It opens a prologue by Alberto Manguel, which serves to better understand the compositional philosophy that was written. and also to repair that almost all his pieces are not up to par or what he thought Hawthorne or what he thinks the same prologue. If I had to keep a story, it’s the one that gives the volume, ‘ the composition of the salt ‘. It is the most finished example of the theory of the half light. A protagonist who has never seen the sea (Bolivia lost its way out to the Pacific in the war against Chile) and that fills with salt its bath. Touching story, where nostalgia and the historical wound gather. He writes Manguel that Borges “observed that perhaps the aesthetic fact was ‘ the imminent discovery of a revelation that does not occur”. I struggled to follow the argument of several tales. Others didn’t interest me. “InStep” is unclear, so the revelation that “does not occur” also does not miss it.
The composition of the salt. Magela Baudoin. Navona, 2017. 128 pages. 16 Euros.
