Two Grammars of Automobility: Speed, Intimacy, and Memory in Carlos Fuentes’s Cambio de piel and Inés Bortagaray’s Prontos, listos, ya

Abstract

This article examines the narrative function of the road in Carlos Fuentes’s Cambio de piel (1967) and Inés Bortagaray’s Prontos, listos, ya (2006/2018). Through a comparative approach and close reading, it explores how automobile travel operates as a compositional principle that reshapes narrative rhythm, regimes of vision, and the inscription of memory. The study argues that these works develop two distinct narrative grammars of automobility. In Cambio de piel, the road structures an aesthetic of speed and montage in which the landscape functions as a historical palimpsest that activates national memory. In Prontos, listos, ya, by contrast, the domestic journey produces a minimalist narrative economy focused on everyday interaction and affective negotiation among the characters. The comparison demonstrates that automobility does not determine a single narrative form but rather operates as a flexible narrative infrastructure capable of generating divergent aesthetic configurations in contemporary Latin American fiction.