Manuel Mujica Lainez. Un novelista en El Museo del Prado: A Poetics statement

Abstract

Un novelista en el Museo del Prado, the latest novel by Manuel Mujica Lainez (1984), can be pictured as the literary legacy of the argentinian narrator. A legacy that condenses an essential Poetics: the design of a fable that finds in Art its source of inspiration, a field that feeds the fantasy of the artist and custodies the code of melancholy from the beginning, the sublime temperament of the creative genius. From this iconological background, attention must be paid to the iconographic disposition, which would resume the principles of the “art of memory”, basis of the construction of the “emblems in action” we can see parading along these stories. This work, therefore, requires an active reading role, moving from the image to the word, compromising both fields, essential to approach the construction of the so-called “historical novels of European matter”: Bomarzo, El unicornio, El laberinto and El escarabajo. We must, therefore, consider that this reading approach would resume the legacy of Romanticism and Modernism, extending itself to the literary criticism lessons that Eugenio d’Ors once forged in his Tres horas en el Museo del Prado.