From Melmoth to Maqroll: The Wanderer in Latin America

Abstract

From Roberto Jorge Payró’s Violines y toneles (1908) to Álvaro Mutis’s Maqroll novellas (1986–1993), Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) repeatedly resurfaces across Latin America’s shifting cultural landscapes of the twentieth century. This article argues that the text’s influence testifies to the malleability and dynamism of Gothic’s transnational transmission from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on the concept of ‘globalgothic’, it traces the elaborate nexus of cultural and political channels through which Melmoth circulated in Latin America. The mapping of Melmoth’s journey across Latin America reveals a world of gothic interchange that traverses and, at times, transcends national, temporal, and generic boundaries. In so doing, this article situates the text and its afterlives within an intricate yet uneven economy of colonial and postcolonial exchange where generic and national hierarchies are often mutually reinforcing but equally unstable. Ultimately, Melmoth’s Latin American afterlives evidence a dynamic interplay between nation, genre, and form in the globalgothic.