UTOPIA, PARAISO E HISTORIA: TRES VERSIONES DE LA BUSQUEDA MITICA EN EL REALISMO FANTASTICO HISPANOAMERICANO. (SPANISH TEXT) (JULIO CORTAZAR; ARGENTINA; GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ; COLOMBIA; JUAN RULFO; MEXICO)

Date of Completion

January 1982

Keywords

Literature, Latin American

Degree

Ph.D.

Abstract

The project involves two studies, each supportive of the other: one in literary criticism, the other in Spanish-American fantastic realism. The former works out a practical synthesis of intrinsic and extrinsic views of literature on the basis of the archetypal structures of the texts. The latter applies that approach to the analysis and hermeneutics of "El ahogado mas hermoso del mundo," by Garc(')ia Marquez, Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, and Cortazar's Bestiario.^ The works are related through their way of reconstructing the mythic pattern of the quest. The resulting models are compared in terms of their implied aesthetics and anthropology. Two dominant nuclei polarize the first two versions: Paradise Lost and Utopia; they correspond to the dialectics of Loss/Recovery of the original topos. The third version develops the dialectics of Loss/Recovery of ontological unity, through the opposing nuclei of the Seeker and his Otherness.^ In the field of critical methodology the study reveals the concrete possibilities of reconciling opposing approaches on the grounds of empirically verifiable data (the literary symbolic patterns); and it shows the capacity of archetypes to recontextualize the text not only in literary tradition (Frye) but especially in the world that produces and consumes the work.^ In the field of narrative, the study proves that the same mythic constellation can articulate divergent and even opposing aesthetic and axiological models. The salient difference among the versions described is that the first two subordinate the process of the quest to its transcendent goal, whereas in the third the goal is a telos immanent in the process. The search for Paradise disguises a historicist model which in turns veils a transcendental monism. In contrast, the transcendence of self and language may become a way to affirm their basic historicity.^ Two opposing variants of the quest result from the conception of paradise, utopia and ontological unity as transcendental monisms or as intrinsic functions of history. The variants stand for divergent models of relation between a narrator and his functions--i.e., his word and his worlds.^

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