Childhood in the Narrative of Jorge López Páez: Reformulation of the Theme and Its Contribution to Mexican Literature

Abstract

The narrative works of Jorge López Páez (Huatusco, 1922 – Mexico City, 2017) have been studied from different approaches. In such works, critics have highlighted several themes, including childhood, which the writer highly explored in his long career. The relevance of the representation of childhood, and even adolescence, is evident in a considerable number of works on such a topic: six novels and nineteen stories, out of twenty that encompass López Páez’s production. The aim of this paper is to point out certain peculiarities of the narrative voices in these novels and stories. Moreover, developing the study from thematological notions, I will explore the conformation of a corpus through the reformulation of a topic over almost sixty years. I propose to divide such a corpus into two stages: one in which it is more important to restore the children’s experiences mediated by the mind of the main character, and another one in which the narrative act itself is more relevant. In addition, it is pivotal to trace the constant reformulation of this specific topic in a literary work. Lastly, it is also possible to identify López Páez’s contributions to consolidate the representation of childhood in 20th-century Mexican literature.