Love and metanarratives: ¿Love as a metanarrative?

Abstract

Chilean writer Gonzalo Contreras states in an interview that he does not know of any novel, excepting Canetti 's Auto de fe, which does not tell a love story. He includes his own narrative within postmodernity, stressing the absence of a hegemonic idea or a metanarrative. In light of these two assertions, I examine his first three published novels and find that they lead us to consider love as another example of deconstructionism and the fall of the metanarratives. That is, the centrifugal movement of the person towards peripheral manifestations or activities (human affection in Contreras ' narratives). Can love be considered as a metanarrative? Has love in postmodern times turned into a vacuum which cannot be narrated from its very center?