The Dissection of Memory in Juan Marsé's Si te dicen que caí.
Much in the way that a theatre performance begins with the raising of a curtain, Juan Marsé's Si te dicen que caí (1973) begins when an omniscient narrator describes the act of a morgue attendant uncovering a newly admitted corpse. When the hospital employee and protagonist, Ñito, lifts the sheet co...
| Published in: | Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (1475-3839) Vol. 85; no. 1; pp. 15 - 33 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Liverpool University Press / Journals
Feb2008
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| Summary: | Much in the way that a theatre performance begins with the raising of a curtain, Juan Marsé's Si te dicen que caí (1973) begins when an omniscient narrator describes the act of a morgue attendant uncovering a newly admitted corpse. When the hospital employee and protagonist, Ñito, lifts the sheet covering the cadaver he recogniseshis childhood companion Java. Structurally, Marsé's fifth novel progresses as a cadaver undergoes the stages of an autopsy. The deliberate parallelism between the dissection of Java's corpse and the probing into Ñito's memory suggests that the morgue attendant's examination of the cadaver functions as a metaphor for the simultaneous autopsy he performs on the remains of his past. Si te dicen que caí (1973) de Juan Marsé comienza cuando un narrador omnisciente describe el acto de un celador que destapa un cadáver recién admitido al hospital. Cuando el empleado de la clínica, que también es el protagonista, Ñito, levanta la sabana, descubre su compañero de juventud, Java. Estructuralmente, ésta quinta novela de Marsé se va desarrollando mientras el cadáver va pasando por las distintas fases de la autopsia. El útil paralelismo entre la disección del cuerpo de Java y el sondar de la memoria de Ñito sugiere que el procedimiento postmortem por parte del celador funciona como una metáfora para la misma autopsia que el protagonista emprende sobre su memoria. |
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