The child of dogs: melancholy traits in some of Ortiz’s writings

Abstract

This article proposes a close reading of some texts by Juan L. Ortiz, referring to the encounter with a domestic animal. We start from a poem from his last years, which has the formal complexity of that stage, where an episode starring a child and a dog is narrated. The possibility of deciphering its meaning opens with the confrontation of previous texts: a poem from decades ago, very simple in its structure; and then some prose stories, apparently more autobiographical, that pose an intimate effect and a glimpse of anguish that would become recurring from the poet’s retrospective gaze. A theoretical basis with regard to the reading of the author’s poems and prose is a reference to Freud, whose observations on the events of childhood and the role of certain animals in childhood narratives propose the possibility that such encounters, real or not, assume a form of communication. In Ortiz’s poetry, for example, the animal cannot be distinguished from the position of a subject or agent. The story of that differentiation would be the background to the episode of his long poem, his tragic side.