Figuras del cautiverio: agua e inercia en Mugre rosa de Fernanda Trías

Images of Captivity, Water and Inertia in Fernanda Trías’ Mugre rosa This article considers the novel Mugre rosa (2020) by the Uruguayan writer Fernanda Trías, with the purpose of analyzing the relationship between water and the multiple images of captivity articulated in the text. Translated into Italian in 2022 by Editorial Sur as Melma rosa, the novel was awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize at the Guadalajara Inter national Book Fair (FIL) in 2021 and has established Trías as one of the best writers of her generation. Published during the Covid-19 pandemic, the novel makes us reflect upon the anticipatory power of literature, as it narrates the epidemic triggered by water pollution and the mysterious transformation of an unnamed world’s ecosystem. The narration revolves around the protagonist’s attempts to survive in this state of affairs as her memory comes and goes between the past and the present. The woman then finds herself divided between these flights into memory and the impossibility of leaving the city to seek a better future. The contaminated water of the sea and the rivers constitutes a symbolic framework linked, on one hand, with intimacy (Bachelard 2005) and the inertia of the characters and, on the other, with the death of the natural environment (Libis 2004). Particular attention will we focused on captivity, the novel’s most powerful narrative device. Indeed, the multiple variations of confinement will be the object of our analysis which starts from and is carried out through a reflection on the aquatic isotopy built in the story, as well as on the deadly nuances acquired by water. We then consider the correspondence established between the articulation of the aquatic space and the construction of the characters, since the text implicitly reflects on the distance that separates the subject from others and even from herself and her own desire. Finally, we examine how memory and remembrance arise as an attempted response and re action to the state of inertia in which the protagonist finds herself.