Modulación de mundos imaginarios a través de dos técnicas de presentación del tiempo den 'Dance of the happy shades'

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur remarked that an analysis of the techniques of acceleration and deceleration in narratives allowed us a better understanding of plot and characterization. Genette's conclusions have served us as a starting point from which to explore how the Canadian writer Alice Munro has explored a specific mode of temporal presentation in order to create worlds where time comes to a halt and characters are constructed from only a few unchanging traits. This temporal perspective, usually termed "iterative", destroys the essence of real time, which contains a relentless capacity for altering things. The overwhelming use of the iterative mode in Munro's stories shapes our reading experience towards a similar exercise of comprehension: we will find no climactic sequence of events, no change in characters' attitudes, no altered situations. The point of the story lies elsewhere, since fate's workings can have no room in these static worlds. The iterative story gives close attention to an absorbing atmosphere in which characters are trapped by their recurrent habits or oddities of behaviour. Rather than registering the flow of experience as it would affect a series of characters, the narrator prefers to invent a hypothetical time in which they can move about unaffected by change. This way the reader remembers them as neat figures whose most significant traits are captured visually and permanently as if a snapshot was taken that forever holds the characters in that particular world.