Silvina Ocampo’s child characters and her destabilizing writing

Abstract

In this article, I present the circumstances and narrative elements that have attracted the attention of the reading community in Silvina Ocampo’s short stories, especially when it comes to her child characters. I demonstrate that her narrative strength comes from the unexpected, the unusual, the peripheral and improbable voices, which, by expressing themselves, exposing what they feel, are capable of exploding all chronology, all logic. I emphasize, through the short stories analyzed, that transgressive writing is revealed by the structure that corrupts norms, language, conventions, the body, as revealed by the two collections of short stories recently published in Brazil. My aim with this text is to contribute to the studies and criticism that have put Silvina Ocampo’s work in the spotlight, to expand my enthusiasm and to motivate new reading practices.