The Most Perfect Death: Idle Days in Patagonia by William Henry Hudson

Abstract

In Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) Hudson offers an alternative to the previous traditions of the trip to Patagonia, and although he collaborates in the temporal investigation of the desert already configured by Darwin and Moreno, his writing explores the tensions between Nature, death and primitive regression as experiences of intensity. To do this, he reconfigures the notion of ancestors, elaborates other appropriations of indigenous remains and, in later texts, reads the modern desecration of death in the typographic differences of the burial mounds, rewriting his own death. Thus, it inscribes in the fiction of the primitive a powerful, intimate and refractory deviation from national and imperial morals, which could produce new rewrites of the subject in contemporary Argentine literature.