Facing the Architext: Álvaro Mutis and the Magical realism

Abstract

Among his contemporaries belonging to the boom generation, Álvaro Mutis, with his Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero, stands out by the original way he approaches the mystery. That approach, consisting of putting a “poetic mute” to the mystery, has obvious affinities with the historical Magical realism, “invented” in the interwar period by Italian Massimo Bontempelli. (Not to be confused with vague and imprecise theories that circulated under the same label in Latin America, from the 50s of the last century). In this paper, which is part of a broader research, it is intended to explore the architextual dimension of the Colombian author’s novel cycle, by referring to Gérard Genette, for whom the architext covers “all general or transcendent categories [...] each singular text notes”. In the specific case of Mutis, those categories are reality and mystery themselves, and especially the hero, which synthesizes both, at a mythical level.