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The Afterlife of Testimonio Detective Fiction and the Archive in Contemporary Central American Literature

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The Afterlife of Testimonio Detective Fiction and the Archive in Contemporary Central American Literature THE AFTERLIFE OF TESTIMONIO DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE ARCHIVE IN CONTEMPORARY CENTRAL AMERICAN LITERATURE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Rodrigo Fuentes January 2014 © 2014 Rodrigo Fuentes THE AFTERLIFE OF TESTIMONIO DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE ARCHIVE IN CONTEMPORARY CENTRAL AMERICAN LITERATURE Rodrigo Fuentes, Ph. D. Cornell University 2014 This dissertation argues that the works of Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Rafael Menjívar Ochoa reveal the significant influence that testimonio has in Central American literature today. To begin with, their texts adopt and adapt the narrative and rhetorical conventions present in this form, often parodying or reconfiguring them in order to reveal the tensions and points of rupture in theorizations of canonical testimonial texts. Testimonio’s thematic and formal attributes, in turn, have permeated and been absorbed by the two main literary paths chosen by these writers in their fictional production. On the one hand, they have embraced the detective fiction genre—a thoroughly literary form in its use of well- defined conventions and tropes—in order to effectively dismantle the problematic assumptions of testimonio. On the other hand, their fictions have taken it upon themselves to contend with the archive—a site of discursive production and a depository of fragments belonging to the extraliterary realm alluded to in testimonio— and to adopt diverse archival logics in the process of their own construction. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Rodrigo Fuentes received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) and Comparative Literature. He went on to pursue a doctoral degree at Cornell University, where his research focuses on contemporary Central American literature. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my family, Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Gerard Aching, Patty Keller, Alfa Rafa, and especially Katie. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: 11 THE AFTERLIFE OF TESTIMONIO CHAPTER TWO: 61 THE WITNESS IN DETECTIVE FICTION: FROM COMMITMENT TO COMPROMISE CHAPTER THREE: 110 FICTIONS OF THE ARCHIVE CONCLUSION 163 APPENDIX: 166 INTERVIEWS BIBLIOGRAPHY 180 iv INTRODUCTION In 2009, Beatriz Cortez published La estética del cinismo, an ambitious work of literary criticism which focused on contemporary Central American fiction. Cortez argued that a general disenchantment with the utopian and revolutionary projects of yore had led to a cultural production characterized by an esthetics of cynicism. The book drew from ideas developed in “Estética del cinismo: la ficción centroamericana de posguerra,” an article Cortez had presented in the V Congreso Centroamericano de Historia in San Salvador in 2000. As Perkowska notes in “La infamia de las historias y la ética de la escritura en la novela centroamericana contemporánea,” (2011) the article by Cortez “has been and still is heavily cited by critics of literature in the Isthmus” (1, my translation)1. A quick overview of contemporary Central American criticism attests to this fact: Misha Kokotovich (2003), Ana Patricia Rodríguez (2009), and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner (2012) have all relied to greater or lesser extent on Beatriz Cortez’ ideas in order to develop their own claims regarding the current state of narrative in the region. La estética del cinismo provides an interesting frame through which to read contemporary Central American fiction. Particularly fruitful is Cortez’ rigorous mapping of the twists and turns of testimonio criticism as it attempts to resolve problematic issues of representation, as well as her discussions on the new spaces of subjectivity which these fictional narratives propose. Furthermore, she makes use of 1 “trabajo que ha sido y sigue siendo muy citado por los críticos de la literatura del Istmo” 1 an ample and heterogeneous corpus to test her hypotheses. Where this work falls short, however, is in its central claim. According to Cortez, in contemporary Central American fiction, passion moves the individual—as opposed to political or ideological motives—such that “The expression of this passion allows us to formulate an esthetic project for postwar Central America, an esthetics marked by the loss of faith in moral values and social projects of a utopian nature, in short, what I have called an esthetics of cynicism” (31)2. While her definition of this cynicism and concurrent passion is based on brisk readings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and Fredrich Nietzsche (102-104), an actual framework for understanding how such states of mind and body are incorporated into an esthetics is never developed. Esthetics, on the contrary, seems to point vaguely to common thematic concerns, and perhaps to a particular sensibility evident in the fictions discussed (23). The “esthetics of cynicism” therefore appears to be more concerned with a cynicism towards esthetics—that is, a loss of faith in the productive possibilities of readings focusing on the formal aspects of these texts. Despite arguing that the political and thematic inclinations harbored by contemporary fiction are no longer those of testimonial texts, it seems that Estética del cinismo perpetuates some of the ticks present in traditional testimonio criticism. That is, when providing close readings of the works under discussion, it does so largely to develop localized theories of subjectivity, as well as to link the texts, and read them in relation to, current socio-historical circumstances in Central America. 2 “La expresión de esta pasión nos permite formular un proyecto estético para la Centroamérica de posguerra, una estética marcada por la pérdida de la fe en los valores morales y en los proyectos sociales de tipo utópico, en resumen, lo que he llamado una estética del cinismo” 2 This dissertation takes this perceived lack as a point of departure. It does so by focusing on the rhetorical devices and narrative conventions of testimonio. Suffice it to say for now that testimonios are first-person narratives written by a transcriber who inscribes the oral account granted by a subaltern. Works like Si me permiten hablar… (1977), by Bolivian Domitila Barrios de Chungara, or Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983), by Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú, are emblematic examples of this kind of writing. These are underprivileged subaltern speakers who draw from their lives in order to share a significant experience, usually addressing a situation of urgency and often referring to the human rights abuses to which they have been subjected. Testimonio can therefore be understood as a denunciation, a plea, an act of identity formation and, also, as a story. This last characterization is of central importance to this dissertation because a story, like all literary texts, is based on a series of rhetorical and narrative mechanisms which allow it to function in very particular ways. The following investigation is not concerned directly with testimonios such as the ones previously mentioned, but rather with the formal features present in texts of this nature. Such formal features, as it is, have been teased out and theorized by academics mostly writing from American universities. Despite these kinds of readings, however, textual analyses have usually taken a backstage as the referential, extraliterary dimensions alluded to by testimonio demanded a different kind of critical approach. In other words, the ethical implications of these texts seemed to trump and render trivial at best, or downright ill-willed at worst, any concern with their esthetic 3 attributes. Yet these attributes have outlived testimonio’s heyday, and are alive and present in current fictional production in Central America. The Real Thing, a collection of essays edited by Georg M. Gugelberger and published in 1996, brought together a diverse array of theorizations involving testimonio. It included works by the most prominent critics of the form, and strove to situate it at a time when cultural and political conditions were already very different to those which had given rise to canonical testimonios. Referring to The Real Thing, Jon Beasley-Murray tellingly stated that “If this is testimonio’s wake, many of the key players in the debates that it generated have turned up to give it a decent burial” (122). Testimonio’s cultural relevance certainly seemed to have waned at that point. This dissertation argues that the works of Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Rafael Menjívar Ochoa prove otherwise. Although writing from very different loci of enunciation— these are not subalterns, and neither do they focus on the political impact or denunciatory possibilities of their texts —, their fictional accounts reveal the significant influence that testimonio has in Central American literature today. To begin with, their works adopt and adapt the narrative and rhetorical conventions present in testimonio, often parodying or reconfiguring them for the sake of the authors’ particular narrative programs. Testimonio’s thematic and formal attributes, in turn, have permeated and been absorbed by the two main literary paths chosen by these writers in their fictional production. On the one hand, they have embraced the detective fiction genre—a thoroughly literary form in its use of well-defined conventions and tropes—in order to effectively dismantle the problematic
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