The Poetics of Eeriness: Abandoned Objects and Spaces in the Poetry and Fiction of Álvaro Mutis

Abstract

Álvaro Mutis’s poetic and narrative work—especially his novel and short story cycle Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero (1986-1993)—is filled with abandoned objects, crumbling buildings, and ruins of all kinds. This essay explores some of the most striking instances of this recurring motif, combining new interpretive suggestions with the more familiar reading of Mutis’ work through the lens of the desesperanza: a paradoxical stance that hovers between fatalism and stoicism. What emerges from the analysis is also—perhaps above all—a form of depowered eeriness, to use Mark Fisher’s term: a muted yet unsettling response to abandoned things, which can be read either in postmodern terms, as a heightened awareness of the now-functionless remnant, or in an anti-postmodern key, as the anguished sublimation of the object itself. This ambivalent poetics of ruin and waste resonates deeply with the desesperanza that marks Mutis’s characters, and Maqroll most of all.