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

Academic Thesis

ABSTRACT

Anglophone literary criticism has long approached Latin American literature through a predominantly postcolonial lens, privileging historical and sociopolitical interpretation while only intermittently according it the philosophical seriousness routinely granted to European literary traditions. This critical tendency often risks reducing Latin American literary production to the aftereffects of colonial history, thereby obscuring its sustained engagement with metaphysical, existential, and ontological inquiry. Yet the defining characteristics of Latin American literature—its formal experimentation and its seamless interweaving of the fantastic and the real—call for a more capacious critical framework. By foregrounding philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches, this thesis reclaims Carlos Fuentes as a thinker whose work rigorously interrogates the fundamental conditions of human existence, despite his relative marginalization as a philosophical interlocutor within Anglophone criticism. It argues for the necessity of reading Latin American literature not only as historically situated, but as philosophically and psychoanalytically generative in its own right.

This study contends that Fuentes’s oeuvre is structured by an intimate and persistent interrelation between the erotic and the macabre—an enduring preoccupation with sex and death that culminates in their convergence as inseparable, transcendental forces. In Fuentes’s narratives, sex and death are not merely juxtaposed but revealed as dual expressions of the same ontological impulse. The macabre functions as the shadow of the erotic, suggesting that desire is inextricable from mortality, while eroticism itself bears the imprint of destruction, pain, and excess. This dynamic closely parallels the Freudian relation between Eros and Thanatos, wherein the life drive and the death drive collide, converge, and at times coalesce. For Fuentes, death is erotic, and sex is irreducibly marked by the logic of finitude.

Through close readings of The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez, this thesis demonstrates how Fuentes reconceptualizes love as an act of metaphysical self-abnegation and transcendence. Erotic union mirrors death: to lose oneself in another through love parallels the dissolution of the self in mortality. By reconfiguring sex and death as philosophical and cosmological phenomena rather than merely thematic motifs, this study repositions Fuentes as a thinker of the human condition. It argues that within his literary universe, love and death are not opposites but interdependent, seductive, and often unsettling forces locked in an ongoing relation—each ceaselessly entwined with the other to form a single continuum of transcendence. Through the interpenetration of the erotic and the macabre, Fuentes ultimately suggests that to love is already to die, and that dying itself constitutes an erotic, transcendent act.