La otra casa grande: reflexiones sobre la novela y “Las muñecas que hace Juana no tienen ojos"

“Las muñecas que hace Juana no tienen ojos,” included in Los cuentos de Juana (1972) by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, is a grotesque and highly innovative text that recovers—or at least seems to recover—the background, as well as certain characters and themes, from his only novel, La casa grande (1962). However, the articulation of this intertextual—or, more precisely, transfictional—link is paradoxical: those elements both are and are not the same as those in the novel. By analyzing the continuities and discontinuities between the two works, this article seeks to highlight, from a perspective that has so far remained unexplored, the radical nature of “Las muñecas,” which stands as an emblem of the experimentalism that runs through Los cuentos de Juana as a whole.