Autentificando el discurso de la verdad en El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros

Abstract

In Casamiento-Coloquio, the opposition between the narrator’s discourse and the discourse of the characters plays with a minimal initial presence and a total final absence of the authorised narrator’s discourse, and with the progressive emergence of characters eager to narrate their own lives, and impose their voice over the frame story – whose power is none other than to regulate and qualify their interventions, – thus leaving them with complete freedom. By situating the enigma of the intrigue of both stories, the miracle of two talking dogs, in a fictional possible not authenticated by the authorised narrator but, paradoxically, by a shady character like the witch Cañizares, Cervantes executes the most complex and astonishing technical pirouette possible. For by means of establishing the absence of an authority in the ordering of the story (an authority from which the ever-reassuring promise of a single version emanates), he makes possible the diverse perspectives offered by the characters with their stories and, with that, he sets off the impossibility of deciding on the truth of the related events.