Centennial standing: visions of posterity in a piece of prose by Amado Nervo

Abstract

The one hundredth anniversary of the death of the famed Mexican modernist poet Amado Nervo, is an excellent opportunity to read, once more, his not very wellknown prose and to discover the existent memento in the XXI century. “The sixth sense,” one of his stories, offers a series of enunciative behaviors related to the presence of the past in the future, having the oscillations and breaks of the writing of time as one of the essential ideas of understanding reality. Through an analytical approach, we discover the way past time is situated in the present, and likewise organizes and articulates the future that the narrative central character—thanks to an extraordinary surgery—is accurately able to anticipate. And not only that: the past as such is enriched with chronicles of a bygone past filled with mythical inferences, placing our text on a more fantastic generic level than "science fiction" where many critics have placed it. The intention of this article is to propose a reading on the portrayal and performance of time in a narration that entwines past and future concluding that posterity is the living instant of the present time.