Umbrales de Babel. Amparos e intemperies en la narrativa puertorriqueña

Abstract

This essay deals with Puerto Rican literary texts from various unusual or vanishing cultural contexts as are “La carta” by José Luis González, Memorias de Bernardo Vega, En Babia by José de Diego Padró, “La muñeca menor” by Rosario Ferré, and Vanessa Droz’s book of poems Estrategias de la Catedral. They all intent to capture images of the city and citizenship focusing on languages and scenes which question those central categories of modernity: the street as the residence of inclemency, a ship’s bow between two cities, a leper’s hospital and immigration as spaces others of exile, the burning family house, the rocking chair on a balcony facing a devastated landscape, the house as a crypt, a drug addict’s giddy dance on the steps to the cathedral. In the selected texts writing, inasmuch it is both memory and interpellation, is the possibility of presenting the strangeness of the city as one of the few experiences allowed to contemporary society. It is so precisely because of its incapacity to render account of the precise reference and thus be able to feel the proximity of an image and its fugacious illumination that allow us to share another way of thinking, and inhabit, the city.