Divided into four chapters, my Ph.D. Dissertation, entitled Detectives, víctimas y excluidos: Un análisis de la representación del poeta en la novela hispanoeamericana (1980-2004), examines how the images of the poet as priest, historian, and poète maudit are deconstructed in contemporary Latin American narrative. The first chapter is a theoretical discussion that defines the representations of the inspired creator and analyzes their influence in a corpus of novels that share an essential characteristic: the protagonist is a poet. In order to historically reconstruct the evolution of the Romantic representations of the poet, the body of texts opens with De sobremesa by the Colombian Jose Asunción Silva (written in 1892 but published in 1925), and closes with La rueda de Chicago (2004) by the Colombian novelist Armando Romero.
Using Wolfang Iser’s concept of representation and the cultural imagination, this dissertation analyses nine novels in which one can observe the deconstruction or recuperation of the poet as a Romantic figure. Each section selects a single narrative that serves as the main text to be studied. Chapter two analyses Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes (1998), which recuperates the representation of the poet as a supernatural figure who is capable of deciphering the mysteries surrounding humanity, and thus discovering the destiny of men. The third chapter analyzes Sergio Ramirez’s Margarita está linda la mar (1998). In this novel, the characters of Ruben Darío and Rigoberto López Pérez, Anastasio Somoza’s assassin, are portrayed as opponents, with the result that the notion of the poet as priest is deconstructed in political terms. In chapter four, Cristián Barros recreates the image of the true poet as a cursed writer. His novel Tango del viudo (2003) depicts Pablo Neruda, who incarnates the image of the poet consecrated by the mass media, as a poor and inexperienced young writer starving in Burma.
From the era of Romanticism until the present day, poetry, and in particular the poet, served as the concrete manifestation of “literature.” Therefore, investigating the priority that Hispanic American writers give to the figure of the poet is equivalent to establishing the value placed on writing for their worldview. And since every literary text interprets its own socio-historical context in a particular way, this dissertation will contribute to a more nuanced vision of the existing relationship between literature and contemporary Latin American society.