Ruinas y orfandad como soportes de la escritura o una alternativa para leer la decadencia en Julián del Casal

Abstract

The aim of this article is to reflect on the configuration of decadence in a series of chronicles and poems by Julián del Casal (1863-1893). To this end, we will work, in the first instance, with the ruin of Havana's nobility and the incarnation of such ruin as strategies to configure a decadent or declining subjectivity. Secondly, the focus will be on the different ways in which the design of the images in the poems of Hojas al viento (1890) allow the subject not only to re-traverse the experience of orphanhood but also, as with the decadence of the nobility, to deepen it even further in order to empty the senses of the world, and thus, to sustain and propel literature. In turn, this approach will seek to problematize the ways in which critics have thought Cuban decadentism in order to move from a comparative and/or corroborative analysis that seeks to find in modernism a series of decadent topics or themes, to begin to think decadentism as a poetics that corrodes the signs of reality to give shape to a ruined subjectivity.