Tiempo percibido y narración literaria

In order for the events that make up a story to be considered as such, they have to be articulated on the axis of time. Our habits of representation of temporality show it to us under the coordinates of chronology and causality. However, we also know that discourse permits itself to transform our ways of representation and connects actions through spatial contiguity that have supposedly taken place in the distant past. What effects produce this transgression of temporal order of actions? This narrative resource, that comes from the traditional in medias res beginning, emphasizes certain facts and places them before the eyes of the addressee in a close position that forces us to establish a meaning link between them. The fragmentation of the story, the alteration of causal and chronological order of the facts and contiguous illation of distant events are all procedures that attract and manipulate the attention of the addressee since they oblige him to stop at such transformations and look for the signification that they carry. Literary theory, both as a rhetorical tradition and poetic arts, frequently call attention to this procedure. However, it has not been pointed out that the resource can be better understood and valued if we analyze it as a result of a delegation, on the part of the enunciator, of the function of observation in other instances. Basing ourselves on the narratology and on the semiotic conception of perception, we will observe the particularities with which this strategy shows itself in a story by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.