SOURCE: “Los de Abajo, La feria, and the Notion of Space-time Categories in the Narrative Text,” in Hispanofila, September, 1983, pp. 77–91.

In the following essay, Merrell compares Azulea’s Los de abajo and La feria, discussing how both works relate to each other in terms of space and time.

The objectives set forth in this paper include: (1) a brief inquiry into the notion of a priori formal and esthetic categories, (2) an analysis of Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo and Juan José Arreola's La feria based on considerations of space and time as conditioning factors governing the generation of prose literature, and (3) further speculations concerning the possibility of employing spatial and temporal categories to explicate and interpret narrative texts in general.

I

According to Kant's theory of knowledge, in spite of man's incessant striving for the absolute, he is, due to his own internal limitations, destined to perpetual frustration. His...