An Epicure in the Terrible: Aesthetics of Decay and Argentine Gothic in Abelardo Castillo?s La Casa de Ceniza

LENCINA, EVA; CONDE DE BOECK, JOSÉ AGUSTÍN

Londres

Conferencia; International Conference 'The Aesthetics of Decay: Ghost Stories and Mysteries'; 2019

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research - University of London

Around 1956, a small-town young man is doing the military service in Olavarría, in the depths of the Buenos Aires province. On the barracks typewriter, he writes a gothic novel worthy of Poe.In La casa de ceniza (The House of Ash, published in 1967), Abelardo Castillo condensed his juvenile readings of Poe, Hoffmann and Rilke, together with his sombre fascination for painting and architecture. Through the character of an infamous painter called Wenzel, the novel postulates an aesthetic of the grotesque, the decay and the ugly in art. Its pages build the pampean setting of a decaying scenery in the middle of which the author erects his ?house of ash?, where Roderick Usher?s gloomy residence and the feverish imagination of the Gothic Revival architectural style resound.Abelardo Castillo (1935-2017) belongs by his own right to the wide and complex tradition of gothic imagination in Argentine literature, beginning in the 19th century with the decadent squalor of Esteban Echeverría?s ?El matadero? (?The Slaughterhouse?) and the wild insanity of Sarmiento?s caudillos and peaking in the 20th century with the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Ernesto Sabato and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada.We will study Abelardo Castillo?s first novel through a category that H.P. Lovecraft baptized in his work as ?epicure in the terrible?: the adaptation of key motifs of European Gothic Literature to the prosaic setting of the own region of origin.