La Katábasis de José cemí en Paradiso

Abstract

In this article, we argue that Paradiso (1966) by José Lezama Lima can be read from an orphic perspective. We analyse the account of experiences where the protagonist comes close to death during his childhood (chapters I, V and VI), the great speech given by his mother and a reading scene of Cemí himself (Chapter IX) in order to explain how Lezama reconfigures the ancient tale of heroic descent, which, we believe, the author carries out through a complex intertextuality display that refers back to the Orphics, Virgil, Lucretius and Suetonius. We support a critical approach that claims that there was a rather direct reading of ancient epic (and other genres) by latinoamerican novelists from the 1960s and 1970s (Florio, 1997).