Self Determination in Death as a Transgressive and Innovative Phenomenon: The Cases of Five Latin American Poets

Abstract

The objective of the research for this thesis: “Self-determination in death as a transgressive and innovative phenomenon, The cases of five Latin American poets” have been to study the work of five Latin American women poets of the 20th century and the relationship between their poetry and their life history. Their lives span from the end of the 19th century and the entire 20th. Their lives have in common the transgressive and dissatisfied attitude in the context of a submissive Latin America that led them to trace their lives along paths resulting in a tragic end; four of them due to the decision of self-annihilation, and a fifth in circumstances that suggest a suicide pact. Its chronology establishes the socio-temporal framework of these poets, between the embryonic stage and the current stage of feminism struggles in the American continent. These circumstances are the cause of their dissatisfied attitude towards life. This project focuses on answering two fundamental questions: are the circumstances of life worth living? And what is the meaning and value of life? To address these, the project seeks to understand the continuous vicissitudes of the fact of existing and the absurdity that arises before man when becoming aware of the vagueness of his existence, the abyss of the existence, and of his smallness before the universe. The individual becomes aware that the world is unattainable for them but insists on finding it to give value of their life or actions. Are the elements that lead to salvation here, in the space of poetic art? Or is that same cosmos the framework to observe the unsolvable puzzle and the understanding of the inevitability of jumping into the void? The arguments above do not support one-dimensional answers. It is necessary to examine them from all the perspectives that understand the different visions about the decision to end life by one’s own hand. It is thus important to understand the points of view from philosophy, psychoanalysis, poetic analysis, and sociology. That is why we start with existentialists, Unamuno, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre and Heidegger, who sought to satisfy a sublime desire for tranquility that allows directing life with a specific purpose and leads to hope, but still in the midst of the certainty that pessimism and anguish become the motivation for the act of voluntary death, a choice that recognizes as impossible any type of material or spiritual well-being. Self-indicted death or suicide is an urgency inscribed in the vital context of those who manage to consummate it. Suicide is not bravery or cowardice or a moral problem, but the circumstance from being overwhelmed by suffering. Other organicist forms of visualizing the problem of suicide appear with James Kauffman and his findings that he called “The Sylvia Plath Effect '' when he reported the confluence of creative writing and the presence of mental illness are more frequent and significant association in women poets. Also the methodological approach must include the developments in psychoanalysis and philosophy beyond Freud and Lacan to include Julia Kristeva’s and Luce Irigaray’s thinking, in addition to the historical events that surrounded continental life between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st .