Optical Melancholy: Mechanics of Vision in the Poetry, Painting, and Photography of José María Eguren

Abstract

This essay studies the poetry, painting, and photographic work of the Peruvian José María Eguren. It offers the first interdisciplinary analysis of Eguren’s varied works and poetics, understanding them as a whole; locates Eguren within a process of cosmopolitan cultural modernity wider than that presented by literary studies; and shows ways in which early twentieth-century artistic productions transition from romantic fin de siècle concerns into mass media and technology. Specifically, this study explores the role of the senses in Eguren’s literary and visual works, analyses his understanding of the phenomena of vision and visuality during a period in which visual technology and the avant-garde seemed to have left behind the nineteenth century, and discusses the subject of literary and visual melancholy from an early twentieth-century point of view. It addresses the concept of fantasy and argues that Eguren, instead of presenting fantasy and melancholy as fin de siècle decadent phenomena, treats and explains them as processes of human understanding and thought closely linked to both the dynamics of optics and contemporary visual technology.