'Yo que no sé apearme'

In 'El trovador colombiano', the second story of the collection El hombre que parecía un caballo, Rafael Arévalo Martínez develops his notion of the process of literary creation. According to this view, poetic inspiration does not depend upon the power or control exercised by the writer, but on his powerlessness, his/her passivity, and his inadequacy when trying to understand a complex and enigmatic reality; the artist achieves an intuition of the hidden order of things only when he feels most incapable and unworthy of such revelation. In this essay I attempt to analyse the implications of this view and several of the narrative strategies used by the the author to articulate it

Art · Epistemology · Intuition · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Revelation · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Latin American Literature Analysis · Literature, Culture, and Aesthetics · Philosophy