Allegory of Prison in the Paratextual Components of César Vallejo’s Escales (1923)

Escales (1923) is a book of short stories by César Vallejo that has scarcely been studied by specialized critics. The present hermeneutic research is focused on explaining how allegory is configured through paratextual elements such as the title, the subheadings and the epigraph. I focus on these components because, through studying previous critical examinations, I have noticed that these elements are the least analysed, in contrast to the attention that has been paid to the characters and the strictly narrative components. The interest aroused by the analysis and interpretation of these elements is based on the fact that they are figures that encode, in their allegorical materiality, Vallejo’s proposal for the search for a language that may channel the shock of the experience of imprisonment – a language that is also put forward as a form of resistance to injustice. The theoretical explanation of the components and functions of the paratext is guided by Gérard Genette, and, for the formal and conceptual precisions of allegory, I follow the reflections of Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Tzvetan Todorov, Paul de Man and Craig Owens.