The art of beating around the bush: digression in Mario Levrero's The Luminous Novel

Abstract

This article analyzes the use of digression in La novela luminosa (2005), by the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero, as a strategy which, through the suspension and the continued displacement of narration, also operates as a transgressive practice aimed at questioning the construction of the discourse itself. On the border between fiction and diary, the narration tends to dialogue with an impossible novel that Levrero must finish for a Guggenheim Fellowship. On the one hand, through the exploration and wanderings of writing, in this daily record digression begins to define an aesthetic or loiterature, on the other, this technique becomes a subversive force that, like desire, tends to destabilize the order of the story.