La imagen novelesca

This paper focuses on the problem of the image in Juan José Saer's narrative. The corpus constitutes a phase of his work that deliberately experiments with procedures associated with the French Nouveau Roman. Considering this connection, this reading rejects the interpretations of the novelistic image as dependent on the "importation" of procedures typical of film narratives. The "Saerian" novel deals with the statute of a verbal image that cannot be reduced to the visual, neither be merely interpreted in terms of "poetic prose." The unraveling of this image may open a new way to deconstruct the critical opposition that divides the reading of this novel into two irreconcilable sides: one dealing with the narrative in tension with the conventions of literary realism (where the image is visual or sensory perceptual), and another which considers the "poetic" level of the prose (where the image is a mere trope).