Most writers will take up death as their subject at some point, but few ever write about murder. Yes, murder is a common plot device, but the sensation of murdering and being murdered, of a society that revolves around murder, of living under the real, experienced, undying threat of being destroyed by another human being, complex, living, breathing, hating, and perhaps loving also, that is a rare subject. This heady, sensory, personal concept of murder is the subject of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez. It is a novel about what it means to view trauma permeate society, using the full foulness of language to evoke and elaborate the concept. As that is the subject of the novel, so is it the focus of this essay: by examining how Castellanos Moya handles the viewing of trauma via grotesque language, a theory for navigating issues faced by human rights advocates such as powerlessness, vicarious pain, and fear results.
1. KEY ELEMENTS OF THE NOVEL
Insensatez is concerned with two moments of history: the protracted genocide against the indigenous peoples of Guatemala by their government in the latter half of the 20th Century and the writing of Nunca Más, a report detailing in extensive detail that genocide, prepared by the Catholic Church and published on April 24, 1998. In time, the story belongs to the latter period, that is, the final moments before the publication of Nunca Más, plus a few days after. In space, the story takes place almost exclusively within Guatemala City, with a brief foray into the Guatemalan forest and, at the very end, an unnamed European country.
The European is the second unnamed country in the novel; the first is Guatemala itself. Just as it never names Nunca Más (the unnamed protagonist mentions only that he recommended a different name for the report, taken from indigenous testimony: “todos sabemos quienes son los asesinos”), the country at the center of the book is an open secret (153). The historical ties are oblique. The connection stems from events like the casual appearance of the names of a few Guatemalan politicians, mention of the Salvadoran border, and, naturally, the close correspondence of the events of the novel and Guatemala’s historical narrative.
The protagonist is an unnamed journalist, a recent exile and editor. He stands out as being peculiarly unpleasant, an unpleasantness magnified by his position as narrator. For instance, his exile began when he made the statement, which, at his insistence, was entirely nonracist, that “El Salvador era el primer país latinoamericano que contaba con un presidente africano. … yo no me había referido al hecho, por lo demás verificable, de que el presidente pareciera un negrito africano, que el color de la piel nada importa, sino a su actitud dictatorial y a su negativa a escuchar opiniones de quien no opinara como él” (49). Among his many vices and flaws are found growing paranoia, hyperarousal, compulsive behaviors, and, most predominantly, an aggressive and obsessive sexuality.
This protagonist is tasked with performing final edits to Nunca Más, reviewing the 1100-sheet document before publication. He is an odd choice, as a foreigner and an avid atheist with a hatred for the Catholic Church. As the work begins, the protagonist interacts poorly with the endless depictions of human cruelty in the document, facing increasing distress, paranoia, violent visions, and inability to focus or work. Partially due to literary interest, partially as a coping technique, he finds that much of the indigenous testimony in the report has a poetic quality to it, a quality he describes as Vallejano. He copies these poetic lines in a notebook and uses the lines to harangue disinterested conversation partners and interpret the events of his own life. Refer to the Appendix contains every such line given by the narrator and, for simplicity’s sake, they will be referred to as poems within this essay. Along the way, he attempts to seduce a couple of women, develops a bit of a social life in Guatemala, and picks up an STD along the way, before ultimately abandoning the country a few days before completing his work in a paranoid frenzy. Here, it is worth noting that his paranoia is not altogether irrational; the perpetrators named in Nunca Más were still very much in power.
Of the other dramatis personae, the most central is Erick, or rather, Archbishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, whom the character Erick represents. The connection between the character and the man depicted is strongest in their final moments: “le destruyeron la cabeza con un ladrillo” (155). The only significant difference between their deaths is that Erick died the night of the human rights report’s presentation, while the Archbishop died two days later, April 26, 1998 (“Assassination of Bishop Gerardi”). Erick is presented as a friend of the protagonist, who hired him for the editorial job. The last figure of note is Toto, a Guatemalan farmer and self-proclaimed poet who primarily serves as the protagonist’s conversation partner and guide to the local literary and bar environments— significant, because Castellanos Moya identifies himself as the type of writer and journalist for whom the adage “Dime en qué bar vives parte de tus días y te diré quién eres” is true (“Cartografías”).
2. LOOKING AT TRAUMA
At the center of Insensatez, and a recurring theme within Castellano Moya’s thought is the experience of looking at trauma. This extends beyond the witnessing of traumatic events as a victim or bystander. The primary mode of looking in the novel is vicarious trauma, the trauma that comes from learning about others’ traumatic history. This mode of looking is also the primary mode of most historical fiction, which is not read in the way Bernal Díaz read Historia general de las Indias, instead using a voyeuristic mode. Adjacent to the voyeuristic mode, superficial viewing is the sort of seeing and never perceiving that comes when someone sees another in suffering without processing it in any meaningful way.
The protagonist is locked into the vicarious mode. By the nature of his work, he must constantly read, review, revise, reread, and, in inevitable consequence, comprehend and actualize the awful testimonies he reads. In absence of context, there is a perverse aspect to intruding on someone’s suffering, given how most people will only confess their suffering to someone in whom they have an intimate trust. Furthermore, as he adapts the poems taken from indigenous testimony to his own life, he acknowledges that his situation is fundamentally different from theirs and that his use of their words is appropriation. Here, the vicarious mode is at risk of degenerating into a voyeuristic mode. Indeed, the very act of interpreting these testimonies of such profoundly awful histories as poetry is appropriating them from their justice-seeking context for the contextless, antiseptic study of poetic aesthetics. What prevents the degeneration into voyeurism is intent and context: intent to benefit victims or potential victims, context of acting according to that intent. The protagonist lacks altruistic intent, but the context of his work is guided by the good intent of others. At the very least, even if the Church’s intent in creating Nunca Más was merely “tocarle los huevos al tigre militar,” as the protagonist expresses, the report’s victim advocacy helps to keep him from falling into mere, grotesque voyeurism (17).
He encounters one person in the first mode, that is, a victim. She, a woman working within the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala, had been kidnapped as a 16-year-old student protester and subjected to diverse tortures which in much less graphic detail than the novel, include gangrape and an encounter with another prisoner who, still living, had such a decayed body that maggots were bursting from the flesh. What complicates his encounter with her is that he is privy to her history not because they have any relationship (they never speak), but because he read her testimony in the report. As he notes her beauty, his reaction stands out even stronger against his typical behavior. Contrary to his typical sexual proclivity, what he wants is to have nothing to do with her, to never see her again. As a person in the vicarious mode, exposure to a genuine victim causes the vicarious pain to flare and, in the protagonist’s case, to reach intolerable levels.
Toto is the key example of the superficial mode, at least within his conversations with the protagonist. He is dismissive of the protagonist’s attempts to discuss his work, making Toto a nonoption to relieve the emotional burden under which the protagonist operates. When the protagonist quotes poems 2 through 6, in attempt to make Toto the poet acknowledge the poetic character of the testimonies, Toto responds mockingly with Quevedo’s “Sólo ya el no querer es lo que quiero,” without taking any interest in the protagonist’s selected poems (33). Notably, unlike the indigenous poems, this poetic line, the only conventional poem in the entire novel, is placed between Spanish comillas, not italicized. The superficial mode inoculates the viewer against empathetic pain from viewing trauma and, in many cases, that is probably why this mode arises: to prevent pain.
That it hurts to view others in pain is so essentially human that Rousseau identified it (using the name pity) as still extant even in his concept of the original condition of man and the source of all social virtues. This is truest for witnesses and direct witnesses. Their pain can be so intense that they may refuse to recall or testify of their own trauma, a pain described in the 27th poem: “Para mí recordar, siento yo que estoy viviendo otra vez” (149). To review trauma with memory is to resurrect it. The mind cannot understand a traumatic scene without reconstructing it (whether with specificity or abstraction). To understand trauma, trauma must be relived.
Insensatez represents the dangerous ability of this empathic pain to reach far past the event itself. Any viewer, no matter how distant, exposes themself to this pain if they do not operate under the superficial mode. Insensatez’s protagonist is a hapless victim of this pain, while a figure like Erick is not so helpless. They are not, however, the only ones involved in this question: throughout the novel, the spread of vicarious pain reaches the reader. If it did not, Insensatez would be senseless in title and substance. There are certain moments that must hurt the reader, like the graphic description of infants’ brains flying in the air or the story of a mute man whose torturers demanded a confession and, enraged by his silence, went on to brutalize him and his village (a conundrum of silence that could not even be solved by sign language, as, the report noted, his hands were bound).
This pain is essential because, as Rousseau argued, it spurs humans to preserve not just themselves, but each other, to oppose all cruelty, not just their own suffering. The problem, however, is that this pain can become so intense that it drives many viewers to abandon the vicarious, empathetic mode for the superficial mode. Once in the superficial mode, the impulse of opposition disappears. The superficial mode cannot inspire sacrifice on someone else’s behalf.
The difficulty of viewing trauma is an ancient defense mechanism of cruelty and tyranny, even as it has impulsed the overthrow of cruelty and tyranny. In a democratic era, tyranny needs to be able to endure modern challenges like a free press and international pressures. Mild and moderate cruelty are the easiest to stir public condemnation against. The pain is manageable for the masses. However, the depths of cruelty cannot be described within the bounds of taboo and politeness. Thus, the tyrant has a strategy in making their actions so grotesque that the mere act of reporting what has happened violates social norms, brings crippling emotional pain to the tyrant’s opponents. A human rights advocate with traumatic emotional disorders is less effective than a human rights advocate without them. Genocide is one form of cruelty that has survived modernity quite well, and it owes some of that survival to the fact that anyone who comprehends what is occurring will be deeply disturbed and, in a very real sense, wounded themself. Insensatez, in order to tackle Guatemala’s genocide of its peoples,breaks social norms throughout, especially in its graphic descriptions of torture by rape, violence against infants, and in its description of how readers exposed to such evil themselves reconstruct not only the victim’s perspective, but the perspective of the murderer as well.
3. FOUL MICRONARRATIVE
The question thus becomes, for the concerned author, inspiring enough pain for action but not enough to cause people to flee. Castellanos Moya identifies these two objects: exile/flight/escape and fear/anxiety/pain as permanent concerns of his. His description of the second is especially telling: “The second concern is paranoia, that is to say fear. Not on the individual level but as a collective feeling, as a way of surviving. Fear as a way of life” (Castro Luna). The pain involved in studying history and human rights is not a problem to be fixed, but a quality to be managed in historical and political writing.
Insensatez manages this in an iconoclastic fashion: drenching the entire narrative in nastiness. As has been mentioned, the protagonist himself is the brightest example of the foulness. As a fictional character, most traits of the protagonist are chosen rather than arbitrary. The choice of an atheistic, willfully immoral, predatorial, opportunistic, contemptuous, unreliable narrator to describe the work of the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala in the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) project shows no intention to praise the efforts that produced Nunca Más. The protagonist and Erick are antitheses. Choosing to make such a character protagonist over Erick, the fictionalized archbishop, or other, more palatable members of REMHI is more than a move from macro to micronarrative. If the faults of the protagonist went unrecognized, it would signal an invective, polemic perspective on the part of the novel. The novel respects the work of REMHI but mocks it to do so. Thus, the choice of protagonist is a transition, not only from macronarratives, but a transition from conventional micronarrative as well. In particular, Insensatez is built of willfully foul micronarrative. (Foul micronarrative could be largely be substituted in Spanish with realismo sucio, which some authors like Manzoni have already identified with Castellanos Moya and Insensatez, but the English use of the phrase dirty realism already has its own conflicting associations.)
The use of foul micronarrative has several advantages. First, in terms of moral discussion, the protagonist represents a minimally tolerable standard of care. That is, if the protagonist feels morally obligated to do something, as a person with no moral capital, he sets a standard that everyone should follow, no matter how mediocre, detached, or troubled they are. The protagonist is deeply affected by the descriptions of violence and trauma. The argument, if it were presented as such, is that if this person can take these things seriously, then so can the reader.
Second, foul narrative sets up a pattern for the violation of social norms. Insensatez, as a novel, was going to violate social norms anyway by depicting graphic violence. The graphic depiction of sex, STDs, objectification, and masturbation normalize the breaking of norms. This technique, not without drawbacks, at least allows the reader to confront the taboo subjects of genocide and torture on their own terms, whereas the reader typically has to process the breaking of taboo at the same time as they are meant to contemplate the content itself beyond the taboo.
Third, foul narrative discourages binary thinking. Nunca Más included not only indigenous testimony, but also the testimony of soldiers and officers who killed and witnessed killing. The psychological damage they suffer is a nontrivial part of the conflict and represents political exploitation of soldiers. If soldiers suffer trauma, they become more amenable to acts of violence. Furthermore, damage to soldiers also represents damage to Guatemala, because they are citizens, too. Besse colorfully describes the damage in terms of psychoanalytic fragmentation:
Ese deseo y ese goce del sufrimiento impuesto al otro, esa destrucción de la persona tenderían, según los psicoanalistas, a regular una fragmentación interior infligiéndola al otro; por lo demás, las pulsiones de muerte buscan la disociación, el retorno a la nada. …
No sorprende, por lo tanto, que el texto de Horacio Castellanos Moya, que describe una verdadera carnicería, haga hincapié en el desmembramiento. Cuántas veces leemos verbos como «despedazar», «descuartizar», «destazar», «cortar», «tasajear», «desgarrar», «reventar», «machacar», con gran refuerzo de cuchillazos y machetazos, en una espiral de crueldad que raya en la demencia. El texto no sólo pone de relieve la acción sino su resultado: las personas tratadas como cuerpos sin alma resultan nada más que pedazos de carne, sanguinolentos, despojados de su humanidad y reducidos a objetos repugnantes. Esa orgía sangrienta de cuerpos mutilados, castrados o violados, y esa violación de los derechos humanos que deshumaniza tanto a la víctima como a aquel victimario que degenera hasta lo “infra-humano”, revela una locura total, entre violencia y delirio, sin que ya se sepa cuál de los dos es la causa o el efecto del otro.
Soldiers treat their victims as “cuerpos sin alma,” but to their superiors, the authors of genocide, the soldiers themselves tend also to be “pedazos de carne.” There is a strong inclination to vilify these soldiers and, without any exception, the commission of genocide deserves no apologetics. However, it must be understood that the scars they suffer hurt Guatemala as well and both sides of the conflict must be healed in order for the conflict to end in truth. As observed by poem 28, “eran personas como nosotros a las que teníamos miedo” (150). The study of genocide does not lead to the conclusion that every participant is monstrous. Most people who commit monstrosities do so because of their humanity, not in spite of it. This is insensatez at its finest.
Fourth, Insensatez is not only a depiction of trauma, but also a performance. The protagonist displays an array of symptoms associated with traumatic disorders: paranoia, panic attacks, hyperarousal, and compulsive behaviors. Sharing the space of his mind throughout the novel he narrates allows readers unfamiliar with the processes of trauma to experience, in part, the protagonist’s particular brand of traumatic experience. Since the actual experience of trauma and traumatic is diverse, this performance should not be understood as a generalized representation of trauma. Nevertheless, the protagonist serves as an excellent demonstration of a variety of symptoms a traumatized person may suffer.
Fifth, the protagonist’s fragmented mind shadows these fragmenting processes that are occurring throughout Guatemala and his home country of El Salvador. That is, the performance applies as a metaphor for the person and the nation. The narrator is perverse, divisive, and predatorial in semblance of the perversions, divisions, and predations that must exist in the sort of society that can produce genocide.
Sixth, there is no issue of lionization with foul narrative. If one chooses to respect the creators of Nunca Más, it is on one’s own terms. As far as the narrator is concerned, everyone is held in contempt. This significantly reduces the risks of the author being interpreted as sanctimonious or dogmatic.
Seventh, the novel has consistent narrative heaviness and tone. There is no surprising turn towards the dark, no out-of-place frivolity or humor. Like the issue with taboo, a consistent tone allows the reader to focus on important content rather than the presentation.
Now, this has been a discussion of advantages. There are also significant disadvantages to foul narrative that must be acknowledged:
First, the sensation of sharing perspective with the protagonist is often unpleasant. It is difficult to sympathize with him. For the reader more concerned with the description of human rights issues, he is a distraction and an obstacle. His personal exploits may feel increasingly like deviations from the plot.
Second, his unreliability makes it difficult to provide useful commentary or contextualization to the events within the novel or the tragedies depicted in Nunca Más. For the foul narrative to be successful, it needs to undermine its own credibility. In the case of Insensatez, this is achieved through the protagonist’s paranoia and flawed moral qualities. The protagonist argues for this himself: “yo no estoy completo de la mente, me dije, … porque solo de esa manera podía explicarse el hecho de que un ateo vicioso como yo estuviese iniciando un trabajo para la pérfida Iglesia católica,” as well as his willingness to read the madness of others (16). That this issue is peculiar to the choice of protagonist is emphasized midway through the novel during his discussions with the altogether sane psychiatrist who originally wrote much of the report the protagonist was editing. The protagonist characterizes the Church’s actions as selfish, resents Erick, and near the end of the novel, comes to believe in his delusions that Erick is conspiring with an enemy general. The reader understands that the protagonist’s value judgements hold little value and must make those judgments themself. This unreliability, however, applies to everything about the narrator. While the foul narrative decreases the negative impact of reading such narratives in its own ways, the narrator has an exceedingly narrowed capacity to provide wisdom, interpretation, and the like, all of which can help the reader mentally and emotionally process the difficult information. The narrator, as a helper, is useless.
Third, the reader is put at higher risk for vicarious distress. It is natural to ask, if I were to read Nunca Más, would I be damaged by it in a similar fashion to the damage it caused the narrator? The narrative offers only a limited perspective on the actual contents of the report, and those perspectives are already distressing.
Fourth, foul narrative significantly limits the novel’s potential audience. At least three audiences are excluded by this sort of novel. The first is, naturally, the group which Gabriela Mistral once described as (referring, in that case, specifically to female critics) “esas mujeres que para ser castas necesitan cerrar los ojos sobre la realidad cruel pero fatal” (528). It is unclear if this group can be reached by any serious literature about human cruelty, but if any can, it is certainly not the foul narrative. Second, there are those who, while more than willing to study genocide and human suffering, are uninterested or unwilling to follow the protagonist through his sexual escapades or coexist with his cynical perspective. This group is separate from the first because they are willing to engage with serious literature, but a willingness to engage with serious topics is not the same as a willingness to participate in a discussion regardless of presentation or context. The last group is people who, due to certain sensitivities, may react poorly to the foul parts of the narrative. Mental and emotional illness, being a victim of abuse or predation or the like, all could make reading Insensatez more difficult than it already is. People in this category are likely to be sensitive to the graphic descriptions of cruelty. It is one thing to work through one’s sensitivity to understand another’s suffering, a different thing entirely to be wounded in one’s sensitive heart or mind by nonessential, narrative elements. None of these groups should be excluded from the discussion of violations of human rights. The second group would quite plausibly include a character like Erick, while many victims themselves are liable to fall into the third category. Victims of human rights abuses already face traumatic insensitivity from interviewers, political enemies, and the like when they attempt to speak up.
Fifth, this sensitivity issue not only tends to exclude victims from the discussion, but also makes foul narrative unsatisfying to victims. As expressed by Nadia Murad, a Yazidi victim of genocide and human rights activist, regarding questions she had been asked, such as “When you think about the man who raped you, what do you want to happen to him?” or “Did you try to resist? Could you tell him no?”, “[t]hese kinds of questions are not the ones to ask. The things I want to be asked are ‘What must be done so Yazidis can have their rights?’ ‘What must be done so a woman will not be a victim of war?’ These are the kinds of things that I want to be asked more often” (“On Her Shoulders”). Foul narrative, and especially Insensatez by dint of its unreliable narrator, has little to no power to advocate solutions or change. The reader must turn to other sources to learn about action.
Sixth, the foulness of the narrative and the foulness of the history can mix in deeply unpleasant ways. The rampant sexuality of the narrator, for instance, is hard to forget as he describes the gangrape of his coworker in graphic detail. His tendency to imagine sexual encounters in graphic detail with other women, while not the case here, still adds a perverse color to the scene. It is hard to detach his description of damage to the tortured genitalia from his general obsession with genitalia.
Seventh, there is a heightened risk of misinterpretation by immature or inexperienced readers. In an ideal world, this type of text only lands in the hands of people who are sympathetic to genocide victims, opposed to racism, and can recognize the designed immorality of the protagonist. However, this type of literature would not even need to exist in an ideal world. All texts suffer the risk of misinterpretation, but graphic depictions and the lack of clear commentary make the risk more severe in the case of this text.
4. HISTORICAL FICTION AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Above all, this paper emphasizes the impossible question: how do you prepare a reader to think about the fact that there are people smashing babies’ brains against the floor? To, by the act of reading, relive it not just from the victim’s side, but also to revive the perpetrator? When the protagonist acknowledges “una sensación de levedad … como si mi transformación en el teniente que reventaba la cabeza de los bebés recién nacidos contra los horcones fuera la catarsis que me liberaba del dolor acumulado en las mil cien cuartillas,” and his visions appear not only as he reads but as he rests and does anything besides review and revise the report, it is hard to feel confidence in any good solution for discussing trauma (138-139). To remain in the vicarious mode of viewing trauma is dangerous, but to adopt the superficial view is to leave others permanently in that state as well. “Herido sí es duro quedar, pero muerto es tranquilo”–poem 25 (141). Castellanos Moya’s acknowledgements text at the end of the book, though it uses words that could be found in any acknowledgements section, takes on a special color: “Pude terminar este texto gracias al apoyo desinteresado de [the names of the thanked parties follow]” (156). Being able to finish a text such as this, remaining in the vicarious mode, viewing and reviewing, is terribly similar to the maddening task of the protagonist and, perhaps, requires “apoyo desinteresado” to finish the process whole.
Historical fiction often deals with traumatic events; unresolved trauma is one of the principle reasons why a past event still needs to be discussed. When human rights are at the center of a historical event, the line between historical fiction and political fiction blurs. For his part, Castellanos Moya has consistently denied letting his work be classified as political: “en Centroamérica, solo tenemos la política, o matar al prójimo, que es una continuación de la política; entonces no creo que escriba una literatura política en esencia porque una literatura de este tipo retrata los pleitos por el poder” (Castellanos Moya and Rodríguez Freire 65). For him, his fiction, and by extensión the genre he works in, is an alternative: historical fiction defined by micronarrative. His characters are not politicians, “se pueden encontrar afectados por la política y a veces determinados por ella, pero su problemática no pasa por tomar el poder, ni por convertirse en políticos.” The practice of history, as opposed to politics, is defined by this restraint: not taking power.
Historical fiction and political fiction are often differentiated simply by time, but the question of power is a more robust distinction. As Homi Bhabha argues, “Migrants and refugees spend much of their time caught in the anticipatory anxiety of waiting: waiting to leave, waiting to be caught by the police, waiting to have their testimony questioned, waiting for the legal documentation to come through, waiting for acceptance, waiting to make a new life … Waiting … The politics of waiting is not a passive condition” (qtd. in Karugia et al. 9). Crises of the past drift into the present. Efraín Ríos Montt, who presided over much of the Guatemalan genocide, died in 2018, never brought to justice. He had been convicted in 2013, but his sentence was overturned. In the case of the assassination of Archbishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, three military officials were convicted in 2001, but one has walked free since 2012 and the other has enjoyed the freedom to leave prison at his leisure for much of his time in prison (“Assassination of Bishop Gerardi”). The mere fact that a text be about the past does nothing to separate it from present affairs, just as a text about the present can be very much historical.
Now, if what defines historical fiction is its disassociation from power, rather than time, what can it do for the victim of genocide? Historical fiction’s power is not political—its power is found in perspective. It all goes back to viewing. Political power can subject people to trauma, but it cannot force them to move beyond the superficial mode. To make a person view trauma, with a willingness to endure the pain that entails, is the domain of historical fiction.
Castellanos Moya’s own approach to traumatic history is heavily influenced by Thomas Bernhard, best evidenced by his novel El asco, on account of its less known subtitle Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador. Thornton, referencing Matthias Konzett, argues that Bernhard “[strove] for ‘an aesthetics of witnessing,’ through irony, victimization, and violence, that reflects the ills of society amidst the normalization and rehabilitation processes in post-World War II Austria” and that Castellanos Moya did the same in Central America (216). Witnessing is viewing, viewing by any means necessary, no matter how distant or foreign the subject. As the primary vessel of that access is memory, the movement towards an aesthetic of witnessing is elsewhere called “una cultura de memoria” or “una clima de época” (Salto 138).
Insensatez’s protagonist is just that, a witness and purveyor of memories: his own, those of killers, those of the dead, those of survivors. He witnesses the crimes described in Nunca Más, the creation of that report, the character of its creator, his assassination, and the protagonist’s own vicarious victimization by the military and Church (who pushed him into the experience of vicarious viewing). In no meaningful sense is he an actor—the report would be published without his editing if it were necessary. He, like the victims themselves, like the reader who learns of genocide forty-plus years after it occurred, is powerless. Thus, together, this group can exclaim together, with wildly different spirits, intentions, and meanings the words of poem 21: ¡pero yo siempre me siento muy cansado de que no puedo hacer nada! (113).
This powerlessness is the origin of Castellanos Moya’s historical fiction. The pain of vicarious viewing disappears in the body of the powerful, because the powerful can eliminate the cruelty themselves. The space of this fiction exists precisely because the powerful do not act and thereby preserve the pain of the victim, the author, and the reader alike. It is necessarily anti-power, anti-status quo. This opposition is factionless, as the differences between guerrillas and governments fade away when change does not come, with the helpless victimized time and again (Vanegas V. 329). This fiction is a resentment of political power, which his character Vega expresses powerfully in El asco:
“Los políticos apestan en todas partes, Moya, pero en este país los políticos apestan particularmente, te puedo asegurar que nunca había visto políticos tan apestosos como los de acá, quizás sea por los cien mil cadáveres que carga cada uno de ellos, quizás la sangre de esos cien mil cadáveres es la que los hace apestar de esa manera tan particular, quizás el sufrimiento de esos cien mil muertos les impregnó esa manera particular de apestar.” (26)
The purpose of Castellanos Moya’s fiction is to apestar. It seeks to spread awareness of genocide, of cruelty, of violence in Central America and elsewhere in antipolitical tones.
This powerlessness is felt inside the genre itself. It stands in contrast to traditional history, as well as much of traditional historical fiction (especially testimonio, as described by Thornton). Thomas Bernhard said:
“Truth, it seems to me, is known only to the person who is affected by it; and if he chooses to communicate it to others, he automatically becomes a liar. Whatever is communicated can only be falsehood and falsification; hence it is only falsehoods and falsifications that are communicated … What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth” (qtd. in Thornton 210).
Historical study typically intends to tell the truth, while historical fiction does not necessarily. Testimonio, as a genre, was certainly concerned with that truth, yet Castellanos Moya’s work is a move away from testimonio. William Castro identifies Castellano Moya’s El arma en el hombre, a testimonio-style novel from the perspective of the obviously fictional character Robocop emblematic of the problems with testimonio, that the central perspective of testimonio is necessarily a construction, a fiction. “The traditional subject of testimonio is both an absence and the very center of the novel” (133). Testimonio, historical study, and much of conventional historical fiction is hampered because it operates on the premise that it is true, but that premise is vacuous. Historical fiction, in the style of Bernhard and Castellanos Moya, serves the truth, not by intending to tell the truth as truth, but by acknowledging that he is using lies to create, not the truth, but an approximation thereof.
This is not an optimistic powerlessness; “lo que prevalece al final es la impunidad y el desamparo de las víctimas. Aunque se le atribuye cierta importancia a la memoria escrita, queda claro que esta verdad grabada en papel no lleva ni a la justicia ni a la persecución de los culpables” (Haas 180). Testimonio, the study of history, and historical fiction are powerless together and alike. When Efraín Ríos Montt’s conviction for genocide was overturned, Castellanos Moya wrote about how Guatemala had allowed a former president to be extradited at the same time for money laundering to calm international pressure against letting Ríos Montt go free, a murderer for a thief, a soldier for a civilian. Castellanos Moya was neither surprised nor efficacious, with no pretense that he could influence the event in any way (“Guatemala”).
Reflecting on how imminent death affects a writer, he concluded: “La eficacia del lenguaje responde, más que a una estrategia narrativa, a una condición vital en la que aquello que sobra, que estorba, es eliminado de forma tajante en la mente del escritor” (“Death at Their Heels”). Quite opposite to senselessness, he does rescue some (apolitical) power for language. This power does not stem from narrative skill (indeed, few, if any, of the indigenous witnesses whose poetry he describes in Insensatez could have been trained writers or orators), but from truth, a power conferred by the real conditions which the communicator experiences. This power is unlikely to ever change politics, but, at the very least, “golpea al lector con tanta fuerza que lo subyuga, lo hipnotiza, quizá porque en las frases se concentra la desesperación del hombre tocado por la muerte.” As Castellanos writes of fear, pain, torture, exile, and powerlessness as ways of life, indeed, the way of life of so many Central Americans and hopeless people throughout human time and space, this language that subjugates and hypnotizes is the closest thing to power he seeks.
5. CONCLUSION
There is no power to tell the truth, to effect change, to make people see, to prepare people to see, to make people safe when they see. This is the endless challenge of the human rights advocate: the fact there is no power to save. If the power to save were there, the fragility of human rights and the condition of war could almost disappear. To draw someone else into the conflict is fundamentally cruel, full of falsehood and little-understood processes, to expose them to a futile struggle. To advocate for the victim, the innocent must lose their innocence of heart and become a participant. This process, though it cannot bring anyone to truth or justice, can be described as senseless. Yet, what Elie Wiesel said rings as true of Castellanos Moya’s work as his own:
There is much to be done, there is much that can be done. One person … one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
No matter how senseless his actions may be, Castellanos Moya still wrote Insensatez, still spoke up when Efraín Ríos Montt was pardoned, still advocates for Central American migrants, and will keep on writing pain, fear, exile, and death.
For the vicarious viewer, an alteration of Bernhard’s phrase serves: what matters is whether we want to see the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth. This is what saves the protagonist, in all his perversion, from becoming a voyeur into others’ pain. It also saves him from falling into the superficial mode. Still faithful to his training as a journalist, he wants to see the truth. In this senseless search to see something that cannot be seen, the lines blur between the victimized, witnessing, and the vicarious pains. The senselessness of violence must be mirrored in its opponents, in their senseless, futile quest for truth and a society ruled by powerlessness. If a reader can be persuaded to stick around long enough to become senseless, the question encountered earlier, of causing just enough pain to inspire action but not so much that the reader flees, is resolved. The reader will now endure the pain. Thus, the first objective of historical fiction is well and truly realized.
Finally, the second, hidden purpose of historical fiction can come to the fore. As expressed by Gabriela Mistral, “si la misión del arte es embellecerlo todo, es una inmensa misericordia, ¿por qué no hemos purificado, a los ojos de los impuros, esto? (528). She spoke of beautifying the condition of single mothers, abandoned by their lovers and families, all but their child. The spirit with which she fought for motherhood, aesthetic even in its pain, is true of the human: why have we not purified, in the eyes of the impure, the human, no matter what evils or pain they suffer under? Castellanos Moya, for all the foulness of his stories, is deeply concerned with the beauty of literature. Thus, he observes “pareciera ser común lo que debemos pasar algunos escritores de escribir en condiciones poco propicias, algunas veces evitando ser reprimidos por las ideas que profesamos, pero también sin hacer de la literatura un panfleto, sino que rescatando siempre la belleza de las formas literarias” (qtd. in Menjívar). In this fashion and under this light, the act of holding up indigenous poetry found in antigenocide testimony, rather than academic appropriation, is an act of sublime respect and appreciation. Nunca más, in its title, expressed a senseless, absurd, powerless, yet sublimely all-important, beautiful wish: that never again should the hideous, foul face of genocide appear.
Appendix: Index of Testimonial Quotes
The following are lines taken from indigenous testimony used throughout Insensatez. The page number given is the first appearance of the line, as several lines appear repeatedly (for instance, line 1 appears five times in Chapter One and is the focal point of that chapter). Each original was italicized, but they are written here without italics for ease of reading.
1. Yo no estoy completo de la mente (13).
2. Se queda triste su ropa (30).
3. Las casas estaban tristes porque ya no había personas dentro (31).
4. Quemaron nuestras casas, comieron nuestros animales, mataron nuestros niños, las mujeres, los hombres, ¡ay!, ¡ay!… ¿Quién va a reponer todas las casas? (31).
5. Tres días llorando, llorando que le quería yo ver. Ahí me senté abajo de la tierra para decir ahí está la crucita, ahí está él, ahí está nuestro polvito y lo vamos a ir a respetar, a dejar una su vela, pero cuando vamos a poner la vela no hay donde la vela poner (32).
6. Porque para mí el dolor es no enterrarlo yo (32).
7. A puro palo y cuchillo mataron a esos doce hombres de los que se habla allí. Agarraron a Diego Nap López y agarraron un cuchillo que cada patrullero tenía que tomar dándole un filazo o cortándole un poquito (38).
8. Lo que pienso es que pienso yo (43).
9. Tanto en sufrimiento que hemos sufrido tanto con ellos (43).
10. Mis hijos dicen: mamá, mi pobre papá dónde habrá quedado, tal vez pasa el sol sobre sus huesos, tal vez pasa la lluvia y el aire, ¿dónde estará? Como que fuera un animal mi pobre papá. Esto es el dolor (47-48).
11. Los cerdos lo están comiendo, están repasando sus huesos (48).
12. Quiero ver al menos los huesos (48).
13. Cuando los cadáveres se quemaron, todos dieron un aplauso y empezaron a comer (48).
14. Allá en el Izote estaban los sesos tirados, como a puro leño se los sacaron (63).
15. Hasta a veces no sé cómo me nace el rencor y contra quién desquitarme a veces (68-69).
16. Entonces se asustó y enloqueció de una vez (82).
17. Ése es mi hermano, ya está loco de tanto miedo que ha recibido; su mujer murió del susto también (82).
18. No son decires sino que yo lo vi cómo fue el asesinato de él (82).
19. Porque yo no quiero que maten la gente delante de mí (82).
20. Si yo me muero, no sé quién me va a enterrar (104).
21. ¡pero yo siempre me siento muy cansado de que no puedo hacer nada! (113).
22. Que siempre los sueños allí están todavía (122).
23. Hay momentos en que tengo ese miedo y hasta me pongo a gritar (129).
24. Al principio quise haber sido una culebra venenosa, pero ahora lo que pido es el arrepentimiento de ellos (135-136).
25. Herido sí es duro quedar, pero muerto es tranquilo (141).
26. Que se borre el nombre de los muertos para que queden libres y ya no tengamos problemas (144).
27. Para mí recordar, siento yo que estoy viviendo otra vez (149).
28. Eran personas como nosotros a las que teníamos miedo (150).
29. Mientras más matara, se iba más para arriba (152).
30. Todos sabemos quiénes son los asesinos (153).
31. Después vivimos el tiempo de la zozobra (154).
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