Silvina's Salto: A Descent of Dissensus in Manuel Zeno Gandía's La charca (1894).

Read as a diagnosis of the ills afflicting colonial Puerto Rico, Manuel Zeno Gandía's novel La charca is often critiqued as paradigmatically expressing the racist, paternalistic worldview of the author and the creole elite. This, however, only pertains when one equates the novel's narrator with its author and presumes the former's omniscience. Recalling how the novel exposes the failures of characters of authority and repute—from colonial state representatives to the creole elite—I contend that the narrator, as one such figure, also fails, in his attempt to diagnose and cure (through narration) the diseased world of which he is part. Interpreting curious elisions and descriptions in the text as alluding to the limits of the narrator's gaze, I show how the novel gestures toward other sensorial and aesthetic possibilities, and reinterpret its tragic conclusion to offer one way of reading the novel otherwise. Read as a diagnosis of the ills afflicting colonial Puerto Rico, Manuel Zeno Gandía's novel La charca is often critiqued as paradigmatically expressing the racist, paternalistic world view of the author and the creole elite. This, however, only pertains when one equates the novel's narrator with its author and presumes the former's omniscience. Recalling how the novel exposes the failures of characters of authority and repute—from colonial state representatives to the creole elite, this article contends that the narrator, as one such figure, also fails, i.e. in his attempt to diagnose and cure (through narration) the diseased world of which he is part. Interpreting curious elisions and descriptions in the text as alluding to the limits of the narrator's gaze, it shows how the novel gestures toward other sensorial and aesthetic possibilities. Responding to its provocation to read the narrative against the grain, this article reinterprets its tragic conclusion to offer one way of reading the novel otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]