Writing from Below: The Aesthetic Abyss

Abstract

This chapter studies subterranean spaces that operate as echo chambers for literary experiments. In the hybrid texts by Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Mario Bellatin and Rodrigo Fresán, the underground becomes a laboratory in which traditional narrative formats are disarticulated—and even wiped out—in a play that mediates between formalist and anti-formalist tendencies and explores this tension in the contemporary megacity. To make sense of the aesthetic choices these authors make, the analyses rely on concepts proposed by Martin Jay and Ángel Rama. A full-fledged vindication of formlessness is absent in all of the texts analyzed: the disordering impulse is not only inherently dependent on a previous order, but it can even become oppressive in and of itself.