A Writing That Forgets the Borders: Supranational Vision and Deterritorialization of the Storyline in the Stories of the Uruguayan Author, Daniel Mella

Abstract

Within the literary production of the most recent Hispano-American promotions, the object of our study is to think about an aspect related to the process of overcoming the phenomena of localization of writing and the narrated contents. Our analysis is focused, in particular, on the artistic (and literary) production of a country like Uruguay, in which -during the last thirty years- delocalised writings and deterritorialized histories have been consolidating. The objective of our study (based on the theory of specialists such as Fernando Aínsa or Néstor García Canclini) lies in applying to the narrative of Daniel Mella (Montevideo, 1975) the ability of every eclectic writer to cross the border and get out of the temptation of a localized literary product. In order to analyse this process -which entails the absence of an immediate patriotic reference and implies the disappearance of all “centers” – we will study Mella's book Lava, a short story collection; in the book, the topographical cosmopolitanism of the writer is based not especially on a narrative written from a position of spatial nomadism of the artist, but in a writing that configures for its characters an absence of borders; we will consider this absence of borders in terms of the location of their fictional exploits, as well as a creation of a new meaning of the concept “distance from the center”, connected with psychic-emotional areas.