The Stealth of Death in Contemporary Literature

Abstract

From classical tragedy, which brings Antigone’s word as she seeks to bury Polynices, or Odysseus’s descent into Hades, to the medieval dances of death, with terrifying figures that show death’s harassment of human beings; from the journey proposed by Dante in the Divine Comedy to the metaphor of life as a river that resonates in Manrique’s Coplas; from representations of the transience of time in Renaissance and Baroque poetry to “the tomb that awaits with its funereal branches” in Darío’s poem; from absences and fragmentations, ellipses and ruptures of form, the abyss that follows the verse, or the blank space of the page that encloses the poem, death has always been alive in literary discourse.

The purpose of this paper is to delve into Marcelo Ahumada’s poem “Madrenaturaleza” (Catamarca, 1971), exploring its images of the end, associated with sleep, drugs, heartbreak, and meaninglessness, and connected with ancestral representations that are both recovered and lost in the present of a bewildered speaker.

Within the framework of the research project “Critical Analysis of the Notion of ‘End of the Millennium’ Implied in the Discourses of Art”, the aim of this paper is to correlate the notion of the end of history and of art with reflections on poetic discourse as a border, as well as with a revision of the concept of representation, in order to analyze how poetry aligns itself with death while at the same time freeing itself from it.