In War and in Peace: Representations of Men of Violence in Salvadoran Literature

Abstract

Since Martínez’ coup (1931) Salvadoran history has been marked by extreme violence, mostly been perpetrated by men, local and foreign. And if with the end of the Civil War (1980–1992) hope was raised that a peaceful future lay ahead, reality has turned out to be different: not only has violence continued to blight the nation's life but it often appears even more senseless than before. Not surprisingly, then, portrayals of men of violence are central to the work of many Salvadoran writers. Drawing on the work of two leading writers, this paper examines how, in novels written and published during and after the Civil War, respectively, each depicts particular types of the ‘men of violence’ who have terrorized the nation for so long. Who are these men, where do they come from, what motivates them? These are the kind of questions the authors ask, but are there any obvious answers to be found? As a secondary objective, the paper seeks to assess the extent to which Connell's influential concept of hegemonic masculinity can be imported discursively from the social sciences to help us understand the issues involved.

Notes

¹Manlio Argueta, in Edward Hood, et al., ‘ “Del infierno al milagro”: conversación con Manlio Argueta’, Antípodas, 10 (1998), 81–88 (pp. 81–82).

²Horacio Castellanos Moya, in Rafael Menjívar Ochoa, ‘Entrevista. Horacio Castellanos Moya: “La violencia … es parte de la salvadoreñidad” ’, Vértice, 16 de julio de 2002, pp. 1–5 (p. 2), <http://www.elsalvador.com/vertice/2002/06/16/entrevista.html> (accessed 20 March 2008).

³For a detailed account of these events, see Héctor Pérez Brignoli, ‘La rebelión campesina de 1932 en El Salvador’, in El Salvador, 1932: los sucesos políticos, ed. Thomas Anderson, trans. Juan Mario Castellanos (San Salvador: Biblioteca de Historia Salvadoreña, 2001), 17–43.

⁴See Roque Dalton, Las historias prohibidas del pulgarcito (San Salvador: UCA, 1997 [1^st ed. 1974]); Manlio Argueta, El valle de las hamacas (San Salvador: UCA, 1992 [1^st ed. 1970]) and Cuzcatlán, donde bate la mar del sur (San Salvador: Editorial Universitaria, 1988 [1^st ed. 1986]). All further references are to this edition.

⁵Mo Hume, ‘Contesting Imagined Communities: Gender, Nation, and Violence in El Salvador’, in Political Violence and the Construction of Identity in Latin America, ed. Will Fowler and Peter Lambert (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2006), 73–90 (p. 73).

⁶Harriet Bradley, Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 47.

⁷R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005 [1^st ed. 1995]), 76.

⁸Connell, Masculinities, 77.

⁹Connell, Masculinities, 76, 77.

¹⁰R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995 [1^st ed. 1987]), 186.

¹¹Manlio Argueta, Un día en la vida (San Salvador: UCA, 1998 [1^st ed. 1980]), 7. All further references are to to this edition. The novel was inspired by a testimony given by a woman known simply as Guadalupe who had gone into exile in Costa Rica after her husband, José, was killed shortly before the Civil War began. She is the model for the novel's protagonist (Argueta, personal communication).

¹²Unless explicitly stated, all quotations in italics from the novels discussed here are in the originals.

¹³For a typology of violence, see Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6:3 (1969), 167–91.

¹⁴The affectionate manner in which Lupe talks about her husband, José, in Un día, or Emiliano about his wife, Catalina, in Cuzcatlán, shows this very clearly. I will come back to the question of legitimacy or the lack of it below.

¹⁵Hume, ‘Contesting Imagined Communities’, 74.

¹⁶For more detail on this, see Astvaldur Astvaldsson, ‘Towards a New Humanism: Narrative Voice, Narrative Structure and Narrative Strategy in Manlio Argueta's Cuzcatlán, donde bate la Mar del Sur’, BHS (Liverpool), LXXVII:4 (2000), 605–17 and ‘Estudio preliminar’, in Manlio Argueta, Poesía completa, 1956–2005, ed. crítica Astvaldur Astvaldsson (Maryland: Ediciones Hispamérica, 2006), 11–105.

¹⁷R. W. Connell, ‘Masculinity, Violence, and War’, in Men's Lives, ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995 [1^st ed. 1989]), 125–30 (p. 128).

¹⁸Connell, Masculinities, 79.

¹⁹Connell notes that heterosexual men ‘expelled from the circle of legitimacy’ by hegemonic masculinity tend to be bombarded with abuse which symbolically associates them with femininity (Connell, Masculinities, 79). He also points out that ‘Homosexual men seem to arouse particular fear and loathing among tough “macho” men’ and that ‘This fact has led many to think that violence is an attempt to purge the world of what one suspects of oneself. In psychoanalytical terms, there is a current of repressed homosexual feeling buried somewhere in hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell, ‘Masculinity, Violence, and War’, 128). This, which effectively highlights masculinity in crisis, certainly rings true in the context of the men of violence in all the novels discussed here.

²⁰For example, they beat up a priest, leaving him naked with a wooden stick in his anus at the road side (Un día en la vida, 26). The drunken state in which they tend to be when expressing their absurd adherence to the ideology of their masters is another symptom of their troubled conscience.

²¹Connell, Masculinities, 76.

²²Lupe refers to the consciousness produced by this corrupting practice in the following words, which show her bewilderment when faced with the incredible malice involved in the brutal torture and murder of her husband: ‘por qué esa tortura, esa maldad en los corazones de estos hombres que también tenían una madre, un padre, hijos, hermanos. ¿Quién los había pervertido y les había lavado la sangre de raza [their real identity], ni de cristianos ni de pobres lo que les corría por las venas? ¿Que [sic.] chucha rabiosa los había adoptado como hijos y les había hecho una horchata en vez de la sangre común y corriente de los seres humanos?’ (Un día en la vida, 148-49).

²³For a more detailed discussion of Cuzcatlán, see Astvaldsson, ‘Towards a New Humanism’.

²⁴Argueta was criticized for the one-dimensionality of characters of Un día: ‘todos los campesinos son buenos, todos los guardias son malos’. This is to some extent true, and he set out to correct it in Cuzcatlán: ‘… claro, el soldado (o el guardia) no tiene por qué ser solamente malo. … El mismo es un explotado. … ¿qué es lo que lleva hacia la “maldad” a un guardia cuya procedencia social es campesina … esto sería la idea principal de mi próxima novela’ (Zulma Nelly Martínez, ‘Entrevista con Manlio Argueta’, Hispamérica, 14:42 [1985], 41–54 [pp. 43–44]).

²⁵Connell, Masculinities, 67, 76, 77.

²⁶For example, he has said: ‘Cuento historias de ficción basadas en realidades dolorosas’. See Álvaro Matus, ‘Entrevista con Horacio Castellanos Moya’ (1 de julio de 2005), 1–7 (p. 5), <http://hotelsaturno.blogspot.com/2005/08/entrevista-horacio-castellanos-moya.html> (accessed 23 April 2008); regarding one of his best known and most controversial novels, El asco, he noted: ‘pienso que en esa novela se reflejan los años de la primera posguerra, que se produjeron en la frustración de la transición democrática, vividos, en mi caso, a partir de proyectos en los que me embarqué […]’ (Menjívar Ochoa, ‘Entrevista’, 3). Moreover, like Argueta, in his fiction Castellanos Moya has been critical not just of the Right but also of the Salvadoran Left, which he feels were, in the end, equally responsible for the many atrocities committed during the Civil War. Having been a left-wing activist himself, he concludes a commentary on his critique of the left by saying: ‘[…] todos somos criminales. Ese es el problema, nadie tiene la bondad ética a su lado’ (Enzia Verduchi, ‘Horacio Castellanos Moya: “Todos somos criminales” ’ [n.d.], 1–5 [p. 3], <http://www.sololiteratura.com/hor/horentrtodossomos.htm> [accessed 20 March 2008]): hence his refusal to take sides and commit himself politically in the aftermath of the Civil War.

²⁷Hence assertions like: ‘[…] soy un escritor de ficciones, no un político metido a redentor’ (Horacio Castellanos Moya, ‘Breves palabras impúdicas’, Istmo, 9 [julio–diciembre 2004], n.p., <http://collaborations.denison.edu/istmo/n09/foro/breves.html> [accessed 22 April 2008]), or: ‘Yo escribo ficciones que muchas veces tienen un paisaje político de fondo, pero me gusta ser leído como un escritor de ficciones’ (Matus, ‘Entrevista’, 5).

²⁸Referring to El arma en el hombre, discussed below, he says: ‘… como todas mis obras, no tiene más intención que plasmar en una narración aquellos aspectos de la realidad que me atosigan y que puedo procesar a través de mi imaginación’ (Francisca Guerrero, ‘Horacio Castellanos Moya: “El lector salvadoreño ha sido muy generoso conmigo” ’, La Prensa [11 de julio de 2001], 1–3 [p. 2], <http://archive.laprensa.com.sv/20010711/revista_eco/eco1.asp> [accessed 23 April 2008]).

²⁹Arturo Arias, Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (Minneapolis/London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2007), 19.

³⁰Horacio Castellanos Moya, La diabla en el espejo (Ourense: Ediciones Linteo, 2000), 14–15. All further references are to this edition.

³¹Horacio Castellanos Moya, El arma en el hombre (México D.F.: Tusquets Editores, 2001), 11 (my emphasis). Further references are to this edition.

³²In what Robocop claims is a hallucination, he is approached while in prison by his mother and one of his sisters who want to hire him to kill his father for having abandoned the family. His only concern is how much they are prepared to pay him for eliminating ‘el objetivo’! (El arma, 65).

³³Nicole d'Amonville Alegría, ‘La mutuación de la lengua se produce en América Latina’, Revista Lateral, 84 (diciembre de 2001), 1–6 (pp. 4-5; my emphasis)

³⁴Horacio Castellanos Moya, El gran masturbador (San Salvador: Ediciones Arcoires, 1993), 100–01.

³⁵See Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, and Johan Galtung, ‘Cultural Violence’, Journal of Peace Research, 27:3 (1990), 291–305.

³⁶Hume, ‘Contesting Imagined Communities’, 77.

³⁷Connell, Gender and Power, 183.

³⁸Connell, Masculinity, Violence, and War’, 128.

³⁹Connell, Gender and Power, 184 (my emphasis).

⁴⁰Connell, Masculinities, 77, 84.

⁴¹Connell, Masculinities, 77.

⁴²Connell, Masculinities, 81.

⁴³Connell, Masculinities, 76.

⁴⁴Connell, Masculinities, 79.