Approximations to a Total Work poetics in Juan Emar’s Umbral

Abstract

In Umbral, Primer Pilar, El Globo de Cristal Emar puts in practice a sort of “peripheral cosmopolitism” by experimenting to the maximum with diverse avant-garde proposals and formulations about the category of Total Work from an attitude of critical distance from those artistic projects. In Umbral he recontextualizes the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns that he had displayed in his work as an art critic in the paper La Nación through different meta-literary strategies: for instance, the creation of a drama-novel that allows him to integrate both the poles of artistic production and of critical reception. Emar, faithful to his understanding of (modern) “living art” as “creative doubt”, renders Umbral as an “object of anxiety” in diverse narratological levels, both thematic and formal. On a thematic level, playing with the Nietzschean Apollonian and the Dionysian allows him to display a poetics of fiction that involves, on a theoretical level, a critique of the modern notion of author.