Surrealism and madness in the manifestos and the poetry of Xavier Abril

The objective of the article is to analyze the relationship between surrealism and madness in the manifestos and poetry of the Peruvian author Xavier Abril (1905-1990). For this reason, the social and cultural context where poetic avant-garde arises in Peru is characterized, which has the following tendencies: the cosmopolitan avant-garde (represented by Martín Adán, Alberto Hidalgo, among others) and the indigenous avant-garde (whose exponents are César Vallejo, Alejandro Peralta and other poets) Likewise, the surrealist manifestos and some of the most representative poems of Difícil Trabajo de Abril are addressed in order to carry out a hermeneutical analysis that highlights the association between the surrealist metaphor, the dream component and madness. Furthermore, there are two types of madness in Abril's poetic work: that associated with the imagination and that linked to dehumanization in modern capitalist society. The theoretical framework used in the hermeneutical analysis is the General Textual Rhetoric of the Italian theorist Giovanni Bottiroli, above all, the concept of figural province. This is how we talk about metaphorical, antithetical, synecdochic and metonymic thinking. The approaches of the French philosopher Michel Foucault on madness are also applied in relation to the procedures of exclusion of discourses.