"¿Las fiebres?..ya las tengo!" Melancolía y fading del yo en tres textos de Álvaro Mutis

Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates how the Weltanschauung found in Álvaro Mutis´s oeuvre is profoundly influenced by a late romantic conscience found in the Latin American posvanguardia generation (1920 – 1940). Melancholy –as late modern affective condition- and fading of the subject –as narrative and aesthetic imaginary- are two central figures in his fictional universe. As a consequence of this, some of the heroes and topics in Mutis’s oeuvre are in dialogue with the main topics of the first literary movement in Hispanic America, Modernism. Some of them are: a religious ambiance in their prose, hedonism, cosmopolitanism, decadentism, Latin American landscape as entropy and a fractured self. There is a narrative logic in the literary corpus analyzed –which one can extend to Mutis’ s oeuvre. The hero, before starting his adventure, begins a psychological phenomenology called “fading of the subject”, which is a symbolic process that affects not only his stability as a hero but also the enterprise to which he is committed; all this thanks to his “melancholic condition”. This emotional process begins by revealing poetic images of internal destruction, amalgamation and death, which the hero transfers to the external world. In some of the texts analyzed this process concludes by producing death and devastation (El Húsar, La muerte del estratega), in others there is an urgent need to a symbolic resignification (Amirbar) that allows the hero to survive and start a new adventure. This “spiritual condition” is something Maqroll - Mutis’ main character- knows well when someone asks him about his precarious physical condition, “The tropical fevers...I have them already!” (Amirbar 491)