The uterus and (the) beyond

The analogy of birth and death in baroque and 20th-century Latin American literature

Abstract

“Being born and dying – two actions like one”, writes Calderón de la Barca around 1650; “Life and death are but two phases – antithetical, but complementary – of a single reality”, writes Octavio Paz three and a half centuries later.

Thinking of birth and death in analogy to one another enabled these two authors and some of their contemporaries to generate literary “Lebenswissen” (Ette) and thus fill in the voids of those two events that elude our conscious experience: death and birth. The 28 text passages in the corpus of this thesis negotiate the analogy of birth and death on four thematic axes: At the level of the processual (in which direction are we born and in which direction do we die?), the surrounding (what is the setting for both birth and death?), the emotional (if we cry at birth, do we also cry at death?) and the eventfulness (what rituals accompany birth and death and what do we celebrate in the process?). Using texts from these four thematic categories, this Master’s thesis approaches the question of how the analogy of birth and death is represented in baroque and neo-baroque literature and why concrete, sensual, painful, female experience of life at certain times in certain forms of expression so strongly determines, frames and thus guides reflection on the representation and imagination of the great unknown death.

This work is based on the homonymous Master Thesis published in 2023.