Rosario's Fugitive Voice: Deciphering Rosario Tijeras's Ironic Challenge to the Notion of Literatura Sicaresca

Abstract

This essay examines the use of irony in Jorge Franco Ramos's Rosario Tijeras in relationship to recent literary criticism. Frequently, the novel appears in this criticism as a realist narrative of a beautiful, working-class killer told from the perspective of her unrequited lover. In contrast, I argue that the novel portrays the narrator's failure to comprehend the choices that his alleged true love makes between sex work and murder. The novel provides insight into class difference in Colombian society and how discourse, fantasy, attraction, and aversion all play into the narrator's construction of his enigmatic heroine. At times, Rosario briefly reveals the narrator's posturing within the narrative and calls attention to the discursive obstacles that separate middle-class readers and slum residents.

Keywords:

• class difference
• Colombian society
• irony
• Jorge Franco Ramos
• Rosario Tijeras
• sex work
• slum

Notes

1. In 2000, Rosario Tijeras won the Dashiell Hammet award from la Associación Internacional de Escritores Policíacos. Rosario Tijeras became the second bestseller in the country after Gabriel García Marquéz's One Hundred Years of Solitude and was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa. Rabassa justified his choice of texts to translate “porque su obra ha sido considerada pionera de una tradición literaria que ha roto con el realismo mágico de García Márquez” (cited in Mora-Mass).

2. The term literatura sicaresca (assassin's literature) has ubiquitously come to describe a number of gritty, contemporary novels grouped around the portrayal of the sicario.

3. The term sex worker refers to the heterogeneity of different forms of prostitution. It also extracts sex work from a moral framework that either stigmatizes it as shameful or that necessarily perceives it as a form of sexual violence.

4. The last thirty years in Colombia have led to an overall increase in violence that has been mostly attributed to the rise in drug trafficking, in the availability of small arms, and in paramilitary violence. During the 1970s and 1980s, numerous cartels emerged and were dominated by charismatic figures like Pablo Escobar and the Orejuela brothers. Colombia's political landscape is further complicated by the presence of several leftist guerilla groups such as the M-19 (at least until the mid-1980s), the FARC, and the ELN. In addition, Colombia has historically occupied a central position in drug production and distribution and, even after the death of Pablo Escobar in 1992, has continued to be the central focus of the US-led “war on drugs.”

5. There is a wide range of estimates of Colombia's internally displaced population ranging from 2.6 million to 4.9 million. See Salazar, “¿Cuántos desplazados”: and “Colombia registra.”

6. Abad's interpretation offers a nice parallel with Antonio Candido's notion of malandro dialectics in relation to traditional pícaros. Candido suggests that Memorias de um sargento de milicias, arguably the first Brazilian novel, instead of being a “picaresque novel” in fact presents a new dynamic that he characterizes as the “dialética do malandro.” While the picaresque hero narrates his own adventure as an apprentice of chance, the malandro is “one character among others,” and “learns nothing from the experience” of his apprenticeship (81). The malandro character, in Candido's conception, negotiates “a dialectic between order and disorder” that reveals the capriciousness of Brazilian society under the empire. In this regime, work was absurdly separated from production through the institution of slavery, and the control of production was absent through an elaborate hierarchy that placed true power in the hands of a distant aristocratic power. Like Candido's malandro, the sicario gains social and economic mobility through his use of violence and his ability to exploit others for his own profit.

7. For more on Machado de Assis and the use of the unreliable narrator to critique social discourse, see Schwarz's Duas meninas and A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism.