The ending, in the traditional short story, represents the solution of a conflict. In a first reading, we may not grasp the character's true conflict or its cause. But we easily perceive that there is a conflict, and it is expressed in the anguish and solitude of a man alone in prison, who hugs his own arms and legs, closing himself in a fetal position, anguish and solitude that lead him to a kind of delirium. Thus, unlike the traditional short story, there is no proper solution. When the narrative closes, we do not know if he is finally being crucified, if he has reached the threshold of madness, or if he will remain a prisoner, including of his own deliriums. If he is mad, he is an episodic madman, as he writes his visions inside prison, which can, as we have already admitted, be human prison or the prison of the "self," pushed into the abyssal depths of being.
More than once, we have references to the act of writing. In the "Eleventh Station," the character (and here a metalinguistic game comes in) refers to the words he records in his "notebook," "words with the force of poetry." There is a moment, within the narrative, when it becomes particularly clear that the character writes or records his story within the prison (human or not). It is in the "Thirteenth Station" where we read: (...) "and a whirlwind of things and colors projected before me and I had a pen in my hand and some words in my mind (...) and I could engrave them on that wall creased with moss and green streaks and small creatures and one could now see a snail slowly climbing its path and I too in a slow walk that is still mine have the wall and the pen and the words and the agony and I write without hesitation without trembling without thinking of the men who patrol the prison and ask for my body (...) and I still write." At this point, a fragment in the form of poetry appears. But the poetry is less there than here. Or as much here as there.
This asyntactic language, present in Miguel's text, and without punctuation marks, when the narrative focus is in the first person, is due to the interior monologue the character indulges in, and is so called because it takes place in the character's interior or psychic world, where they talk to themselves. The words, in this case, contain "various levels of consciousness before they are formulated by deliberate speech," as Robert Humphrey states. It is as if we were writing an essay without letting the ideas pass through the censor's filter of reason. Well, interior monologue and especially stream of consciousness are techniques used by modern fiction writers, under the influence of psychoanalysis, to depict psychological, interior time, based on associative memory: "memory pulls memory." The interior monologue is constructed in the preverbal area of consciousness, and the text appears as if it were a record of speech according to emotion. Hence the legitimacy of this asyntactic language and absence of punctuation. The same does not happen when the narrator appears in the second person, as if it were a voice of the narrator's own consciousness. There, correct syntax and all punctuation marks appear. Nothing in the work of a true literary creator, like Miguel Jorge, happens by chance. There is a reason for the choice of alternating narrative focuses. If this entire narrative had a distanced third-person focus, the result would evidently have been completely different.
It is appropriate to clarify to beginners that metalanguage is a technical term without any complexity. It means a language about another language. For example, poetry, or rather, poetic discourse, constitutes metalanguage because it is built upon denotative or common language. But there is the metalinguistic poem or metapoem, that is, one in which the poet speaks about the very essence of poetry, about poetic creation. In the case of the author of Avarmas, by creating the short story in question (and also others in this book), he often provides us with the coordinates of how he carries out his literary exercise. By insinuating that the character he created writes his story, Miguel (or the creator) introduces information about the nature of his own fictional text, stating that this character chooses "words with the force of poetry," when it is he himself who does this. This is effectively what happens in his narrative. Language, through which the author speaks about his own creation, revealing his creative consciousness, is also called metalanguage. And, incidentally, it is one of the tendencies of contemporary narrative that has even invaded children's and young adult fiction. This critical attempt of mine to understand Miguel Jorge's text is also considered metalanguage. Or rather, metametalanguage. There are other species and other levels of metalanguage, which we see no point in elaborating on here. The parenthesis is to avoid an "intellectual affectation," which Eduardo Portella speaks of, that generates incommunicability or blocks communication.
A contemporary short story is generally made to say something about the existing being, even if it seemingly says nothing. And this one, as it is anchored in the poetic, points to a possible allegorical path. The prison, for example, can be the human condition. The via-crucis, the one undertaken by man in this world. It is common to say: everyone has their cross. And, by extension, their Pilate, their Judas, their Peter, their executioners; but also, their Simon of Cyrene, their Veronica, their Joseph of Arimathea, and, who knows, even a self-interested good thief, and so on the analogy goes.
In the Eleventh and especially in the Thirteenth Station, we learn that the character writes his story, using "words with the force of poetry." Julio Cortázar, in his essay "Situação do romance" (The Situation of the Novel), states something equally valid for the contemporary short story: "the novel enters our century with evident manifestations of formal restlessness, of an anxiety that will lead it to finally take a step of incalculable importance: the incorporation of poetic language, the language of immediate expression of intuitions." But he warns that this evolution, which implies the advance of poetry over prose, does not liquidate the novel (nor the short story) as such, because most of its objectives remain outside poetic objectives. What it allowed was a deepening, because according to him "what we call poetry implies the deepest penetration into being that man is capable of. Only it 'crosses the superficial layers without fully illuminating them, focusing its attention on the 'deep' dimensions of being."
Indeed, this narrative by Miguel Jorge is built with words that can ignite a sub-jacente semantic load _ revealing of the human _ which is found in the depth of the text and not on its surface. The words hold a symbolic meaning that needs to be sought further. And the presence of the continuous metaphor that leads the short story to the path of allegory is also noted. What is said is certainly not what is meant. For Angus Fletcher, "Simply put, allegory says one thing and means another." Tzvetan Todorov, who considers this concept too broad, recalls a more modern and restrictive meaning of the term, stating that "allegory is a proposition of double meaning, but whose proper (or literal) meaning has completely faded." For example, in the short story in question, the character, sentenced in a public square, is arrested and subjected to a double ordeal: death on the gallows and on the cross. Does this literally happen? Or in other words: is this really the story being told? We will notice that the literal meaning has faded in favor of another, much richer in meaning, which will not exist without our effort to understand.
