Dear Colleagues,
You are warmly invited to the first event of the New Year 2015 at the INGEBORG BACHMANN CENTRE FOR AUSTRIAN LITERAURE (IMLR/SAS London):
Patricia Novillo-Corvalan (Kent)
speaks on
Visions of the Abyss: Lowry, Bolaño, and the Ghost of Maximilian of Austria
on Thursday, 22 January 2015, 17:30 - 19:00
Room G35 (Ground Floor)
Senate House, South Block
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
ABSTRACT:
The tragic story of the rise and fall of Maximilian of Austria (1832-1867), the Hapsburg archduke-turned-Emperor of Mexico, has generated scores of legends, dramas, novels, paintings, and films. The aesthetic appeal of the story resides in its potent mixture of politics, romance, tragedy, and melodrama that resulted in the disastrous fate of its two royal protagonists. Maximilian was executed by a firing-squad in Querétaro, Mexico, and his proud and beautiful consort, Charlotte of Belgium, descended into madness. This paper conducts a transnational reading of the imperial narrative by examining its representation in French, British, and Latin American art and literature through a comparative analysis that explores its significance in the works of Edouard Manet, Malcolm Lowry, and Roberto Bolaño.
I will begin with a discussion of Manet’s series of artistic compositions centred on the political theme of the French invasion of Mexico and its tragic conclusion. Entitled L’Exécution de Maximilien (1867-1869), the paintings represent a thinly-veiled critique that reflects Manet’s profound antagonism to, and denunciation of, the Imperial regime of Napoleon III. I will then examine Lowry’s association of Maximilian in Under the Volcano (1947) with the biblical topos of the expulsion from paradise, the motif of Faustian damnation, and the dualistic conception of Mexico as an ‘infernal paradise’. Lowry endorses the age-old construction of the gringo who is ruthlessly shot by bandits in a Mexico that is defined according to the fatalistic catch-all term ‘abyss’, or its Hispanic equivalent, ‘barranca’. I will conclude with a discussion of Bolaño’s revisionist historiography of Maximilian’s adventure in his posthumous novel Woes of the True Detective (2011), in which he returns to the theme of the horrors of history as fictionalised in 2666 (2004) by using the narrative of Maximilian as a symbol for the traumatic consciousness of Mexico.
THE EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO ALL.
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