El nonsense de Silvina Ocampo en “Cornelia frente al espejo”

Abstract

This work proposes an interpretation of Silvina Ocampo’s short story “Cornelia frente al espejo”, one of her less-read stories by specialized criticism, based on the decisive link this story shows with the forms of English nonsense. Besides rewriting some of the main carrollian topics and procedures, such as fragmentation, dreaming, mirroring and the problem of the lost identity, the story is organized according to the intrinsic incompleteness of literary nonsense, whose structure tends towards dissolution and undertakes an elusive movement in which, as soon as one believes to have found a sense, it is lost again.

From strict nonsense, as it has been called, in general terms, by the criticism (Kennedy, 1991), from the game with strict rules (Sewell, 1952), Ocampo goes, in a Deleuzian reading of Carroll, towards the game without rules, to the total dispersion. From the world of “pure logic” (Chesterton, 1901) to another one that threatens to demolish all logic notions, or at least, interferes them with a nonsensical voice. Thus, Ocampo’s narration, stretching the rope of logos to the limit, alters the notions of space, time, body, the self.