Las tetas de Tiresias

Coming to literature just at the moment when Symbolism was coming to an end, and dying on the eve of the advent of Dadaism in Paris and the birth of Surrealism, Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) developed a work located at the crossroads of the main aesthetic trends. that span the 20th century. In "Tiresias' breasts", subtitled "Surrealist drama in two acts and a prologue", Teresa changes her sex and becomes a man to free herself from the social impositions she suffers as a woman, after which she leaves her husband and starts a successful military career in Zanzibar. Her husband, in turn, adapts to the situation and hyperbolically assumes the roles associated with women, having 40,050 children in a single day. Witty, irreverent and risk-taking, Apollinaire's work questions and challenges the morality of his time, while calling for an embrace of a radically new future, one in which the old molds are cast aside forever.