Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2022)
Images, (im)proper life: the fridas and the misticism of Mario Bellatin
Abstract
In Mario Bellatin's work, the author is the result of a post-production process in which montage and repetition are revealed as his constitutive operations. There, not the work but the life of the artist occupies a unique place that, until now, has not been approached with the precision it deserves. The fact that the author has appeared in the place of the dead, of the random patchwork and, above all, of the double not only indicates an indistinction between the Self and the Other but, above all, a type of life whose extension, anthropology and physics are very particular. In the physics of Bellatin, that the words addressed to Bellatin (by the critics) can be redirected (by the writer) to Kawabata and that, above all, they can be “true” –that is, produce that effect of meaning that we call truth– invites us to think that this extraordinary phenomenon is rather than a chance or textual possibility, a quality of the world and the living. Las dos Fridas (2008) and El libro uruguayo de los muertos (2012) brings together a series of special characteristics in which this work proposes to focus to understand the question about the living that makes up Bellatin's work.
