The Dance of Love and Death: The Inseparability of the Erotic and the Macabre in Carlos Fuentes

Academic Thesis

ABSTRACT

Anglophone literary criticism frequently confines Latin American literature within reductive postcolonial paradigms, privileging historical and sociopolitical readings over philosophical and psychoanalytic inquiry. This prevailing framework often reduces the essence of Latin American literary production to its colonial legacies, thereby eclipsing its engagement with metaphysical, existential, and ontological themes. Yet, the hallmark features of Latin American literature—such as its experimental narrative forms and seamless interweaving of the fantastic and the real—demand a more nuanced critical lens. By foregrounding philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches, this thesis reclaims Carlos Fuentes, a seminal figure of the Latin American Boom, as a thinker whose works probe the fundamental mysteries of existence, despite his infrequent recognition as a philosopher in his own right.

Fuentes’ oeuvre enacts an striking symbiosis of Eros and Thanatos – the Freudian drives of life and death—articulating an interplay between the erotic and the macabre largely overlooked in Anglophone scholarship. His narratives do not merely juxtapose sex and death; rather, they reveal these forces as inextricably entwined, dual expressions of the same ontological impulse. Death haunts Fuentes’ fictional landscapes, casting its spectral shadow over erotic desire, while the erotic itself bears the imprint of mortality, destruction, and sadistic impulse. This study examines how Fuentes synthesizes these oppositional yet complementary forces, transmuting death into an erotically charged phenomenon and love into a spectral, macabre transcendence. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, the dialectics of creation and destruction, and Indigenous Mesoamerican cosmology, this thesis situates Fuentes within a broader intellectual tradition that interrogates the liminal spaces between unity and dissolution, eros and annihilation.

Through close readings of The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez, this thesis elucidates Fuentes’ transformation of love into an existential act of self-abnegation and metaphysical transcendence. In this vision, love mirrors death: the surrender of self in erotic union parallels the final dissolution of the self in the face of mortality. By reconfiguring love and death as cosmic, metaphysical phenomena, Fuentes compels readers to confront their inseparability as primal forces shaping human identity and experience. This study thus repositions Fuentes not merely as a Latin American literary icon but as a philosopher of the human condition, whose explorations of the erotic and the macabre, the sacred and the profane, illuminate the interconnectedness of all phenomena. Within Fuentes’ imaginative universe, love and death emerge as seductive yet sinister forces, locked in an eternal dance–each ceaselessly entwining with the other to form a sublime, unified continuum of transcendence.