LA DISPARIDAD DE LAS ARTES EN MAELSTROM, DE LUIS SAGASTI

Abstract

Maelstrom, Luis Sagasti novel published in 2015, displays the lack of limits between literature and visual arts from the writing point of view. In this operation, the novel brings out the actual debate between the identities of the various arts and their proximity. The maelstrom, a kind of great whirlpool which appears on the southern shores of the Norwegian archipelago, is described by E. A. Poe and Jules Verne as a large circular vortex that reaches the bottom of the ocean. Not only it is named this sort of spiral with a central vanishing into the void but the entire novel is built from that movement. Such figure evokes the assembly and heterogeneity of the arts, painting, music and literature in an undifferentiated mix leading to the vertigo of the absolute, infinity or emptiness. The purpose is to read the story as a layout of a place in common for all the diversities, a unique identity for every form of art, the original substratum in which all converge. At the same time, a single fund that shoots into the indeterminate and the unknown. This standpoint is installed in the centre of the contemporary debate about the legitimacy of referring to the «art» in singular for its essential unity with its many manifestations or refer it as a heterogeneous set of practices without a common identity from where they arose. Keywords: Maelstrom,