Violence and the urban environment: an ecocritical reading of "Morirás lejos" by José Emilio Pacheco

• Autores: Diana Dodson Lee
• Localización: Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, ISSN 0145-8973, Vol. 48, Nº. 2, 2019, págs. 157-175
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • While critics have clearly identified the importance of urban spaces in José Emilio Pacheco's works, in general, few have analyzed Pacheco's writings through an ecocritical lens. Two notable exceptions to this are Magda Graniela's article on environmentalism in Pacheco's poetry and Michael Dowdy's article which examines images of Mexico City and environmental pollution in the author's lyric. Graniela's analysis explores several examples from Pacheco's long career as a poet. Graniela's argument sets the precedent to interpret Pacheco's writings as environmentally self-conscious and ethically denunciatory towards the destruction of nature.

    Dowdy similarly concentrates on the natural environment in Pacheco's poetry by focusing on smog and pollution in his poems about Mexico City. However, Dowdy incorporates an extra element into his analysis: language. This critic expands his ecological interpretation of Pacheco's writing by assessing discursive practices interrelated with Pacheco's concern regarding pollution and the degradation of Mexico City's environment. The way Pacheco envisions the interconnectedness of language and the environment is indispensable in Dowdy's estimation. As he states, "Pacheco's unique ecopoetics meld selfreflexive intertextuality with an exploration of how language represents and often obscures natural and economic processes, engaging the spatial as well as the temporal, the referential world of nature that 'surrounds us' in addition to the textual, and the language of uneven geographical development" (314). Both Graniela and Dowdy highlight the intersection of Pacheco's poetry and his treatment of natural elements; in doing so they are among the few examples of literary critics with an intent to survey the environment in Pacheco's work. Both authors touch on the urban sphere in his poetry, but no critic has yet brought to the forefront how the natural environment, urban spaces, and violence are connected in "Morirás lejos." I will discuss these elements to demonstrate how José Emilio Pacheco condemns violence as a degradation of the city space and natural enviromnents.