Demonic imaginary and ‘vanguardia’ poetics in Juan Emar´'s narrative

Abstract

In Juan Emar’s narrative the presence of a demonic imagination links the spirit of negation to a life practice of rupturing the institutional order and the author’s creative imagination. We will attempt a literary cartography of the ‘vanguardia’ artist’s conception through Cavilaciones, Papusa y Umbral: Primer Pilar, taking Miltín 1934 as the central reading axis. This demonic imagination –which in Cavilaciones is still  at a preliminary stage– is in debt with Edgar Allan Poe´s poetics, proven at the intertextual level by the existence of a common semantic matrix both in Miltín 1934 and in Poe’s El Diablo en el Campanario. This matrix condenses the sketches of a poetics of the fluidic-unexpected, which will be later developed in Umbral through the triad: Juan Emar-Narrator-Martín Quilpué.