Temibles simetrías: la lectura del espacio y el espacio de la lectura en Una familia lejana de Carlos Fuentes

Abstract

The essay suggests that the enclosed space is a metaphor of the reading act-entering a delimited place (house, room, garden or square) is viewed as an entrance to the textual bound. The emphasis on this dimension and the explicit metatextual feature of Una familia lejana (1980), written by Carlos Fuentes, make this novel particularl y adequate to analyze the function of each place as a starting point to meditate on the relationship between the principal actors in the communicative circuit: author, narrator, reader. Likewise, this essay carefully examines the novels specific spaces (Xochicalco, La Place de La Concorde, Pare Manceau and the Clos des Renards) in order to explore how they function as potential signs of harassment to conventionally accepted meaning systems, and to the assumed division between civilization and barbarism.