Mise en abyme to Rebuild the Kingdom. Dialogue between the Verbal and the Visual in Miguel Ángel Bustos

Abstract

: In the present work we analyze the dialogue between the verbal and visual codes in El Himalaya o la moral de los pájaros (1970), last book by the Argentine Miguel Ángel Bustos (1933- 1976). We postulate that the drawings incorporated by the author are not mere illustrations, but rather integrate the fabric of the story, providing information and levels of reading that words alone do not say. To create it, he recreates myths of origin and destiny from different traditions. Here we only weigh the European one from the time of the Conquest and the pre-Columbian one of the main native peoples. We find that, in his vast erudition, emulating codexes, the creator confronts such traditions, questions them and makes them open to new effects of meaning and overlapping temporalities. A central motif of the analysis is the book as an object itself. In view of these procedures we find that there is a structure that explains from the mechanism of the detail to the entire work: the mise en abyme. Taking into account the rest of his previous books, it explains the entire poetic of our author.