‘Yo no estoy completo de la mente’: Ethics and Madness in Horacio Castellanos Moya's Insensatez

Abstract

The present study examines Horacio Castellanos Moya's Insensatez in relation to recent criticism that has read the novel either as meta-testimonio or post-testimonio. This article challenges these positions through two strategies. First, the analysis relies on a theorem of ethics forwarded by Alain Badiou and Michel Foucault's notions of institutionality vis-à-vis biopolitics to establish that the narrative task at hand is a critique of structures of power extant in postwar Guatemala. This, in turn, permits a dialogue with Walter Mignolo's decolonial stance in regard to human rights, fueling a reading that suggests that the text is critical of measures of giving voice and remembering that conform to Western notions of rights and ethics.

Keywords:

• Alain Badiou
• Horacio Castellanos Moya
• ethics
• Michel Foucault
• Guatemala
• human rights
• Insensatez
• testimonio

Notes

¹I divide the author's novelistic trajectory into two distinct cycles. The first develops a cynical and generalized postwar Central America, characterized at times by a disgusting magical realism (Baile con serpientes) and an intimate, first-person narrator that forces a critical examination of the veracity and viability of narrative to describe experience (El asco, La diabla en el espejo, El arma en el hombre, Insensatez). The second cycle is an adaptation of the new (recently) historical novel, as the author uses peripheral voices to explore the political histories of the region (Donde no estén ustedes, Desmoronamiento, Tirana memoria, La sirvienta y el luchador).

²The REMHI project, which began in October 1994, served as a separate but parallel process to the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), an UN-sponsored truth and reconciliation commission that was established in June 1994. This latter commission published Guatemala: memoria del silencio (1999), which documented the “violaciones a los derechos humanos y los hechos de la violencia que han causado sufrimientos a la población guatemalteca, vinculados con el enfrentamiento armado. La Comisión no fue instituida para juzgar, pues para esto deben funcionar los tribunals de justicia, sino para esclarecer la historia de lo acontecido durante más de tres décadas de guerra fratricida” (15). The CEH report, furthermore, mimics some of the stylistic traits of the testimonio genre, such as the use of religious scripture, political speech, and real fragments of testimony in the form of epigraphs. We may, as a result, expand the critique of the REMHI report (as present in Insensatez) to the text and institutionality of Guatemala: memoria del silencio, though such a project falls outside the parameters of this essay.

³By reading Insensatez as a meta-testimonio, we invariably isolate it thematically and poetically from the author's other novels that focus on a narrative play on the veracity and usefulness of testimony. This can be seen in the role between intellectual and reporting subject in El asco, and through the inability of Rita Mena to textualize her experience in the third chapter of Baile con serpientes. A connected route is pursued by Nanci Buiza, as she focuses on the “poetics of affect” (151) in the testimonio fragments of Insensatez. This reading, like that pursued by Kokotovic, is problematic in that it both reads the novel in a vacuum, away from the threads and notions pursued throughout Castellanos Moya's narrative universe, and fails to account for the very un-testimonio-like fragments that unearth the coloniality of processes/literatures/institutions of human rights.

⁴The term meta-testimonio or testimonio once removed, as explained by Kokotovic, reflects texts that represent “not the first hand experience of oppression communicated in testimonio proper, but rather the potentially transformative experience of reading such accounts” (559). Testimonio, in turn, is the literary label assigned to texts produced between oppressed subaltern and privileged cultural interpreter, where the text foregrounds the orality of the account and emphasizes the truth of the events related (Kokotovic 546). Post-testimonio, on the other hand, is a descriptive term for narrative “donder el escritor reflexiona sobre su rol de mediador cultural frente al inconmensurable horror de las guerras civiles y dictaduras centroamericanas” (Sánchez Prado 79). This categorization is exemplified by Rodrigo Rey Rosa's El material humano (2009) and Iván Thays's Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro (2009), although the latter takes place in a post-Sendero Peru.