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Horacio Castellanos and the

New Political Novel
Essay by Scott Esposito
Tags: close first-person, detective fiction, Latin American literature, Roberto Bolao
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Discussed in this essay:
Senselessness, Horacio Castellanos Moya (trans. Katherine Silver). New Directions. $15.95. 160 pp.
The She-Devil in the Mirror, Horacio Castellanos Moya (trans. Katherine Silver). New Directions.
$14.95. 160 pp.
Viv mi adolescencia en los prolegmenos de una guerra civil, y despus me hice periodista en la
cobertura de esa larga guerra. Cuento esto para explicar que nunca me propuse escribir una
novela poltica, sino que la poltica era parte del aire que me toc respirar en mis aos
formativos.
I spent my adolescence in the prologue to a civil war, and afterwards I became a journalist
covering this long war. Im telling this to explain that I never set out to write a political novel,
but that politics was part of the air I breathed in my formative years.
Horacio Castellanos Moya
Antes que nada debo confesar que si alguien me dice que yo escribo novela poltica, de
inmediato me pongo en guardia.
First of all, I must confess that if someone tells me that I write political novels, it immediately
puts me on guard.
Horacio Castellanos Moya
What Comes After What Came After The Boom
First there was the Boom. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, the lush, cosmopolitan novel of Latin
America that dared to make the realities of the continent universal. The era of great optimism, the Bolivarian
novel that would unite the continent, that would define the values of Latin America, that would place it on the
world stage.
That didnt happen. Though the Boom more than made its mark, its way of writing fell out of style, and as the
writers of the Boom began to cede ground to the so-called post-Boom writers (sometimes evolving into
post-Boom writers themselves), a seismic shift was underway in both the Latin American continent and the
Latin American novel. By the late 1970s, both were very different places. The continent, once full of belief in
progress and progressive government, was discovering the pleasures of dictatorship, and as the likes of
Pinochet came into power the literatures of Latin America turned from one form of engagement with the body
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1 z 10 2014-04-14 13:37
politic to a very different one. Magical realism was out, gritty reality was in. The scope of the novel was pared
back from the entire continent to just one aspect of it. Writers no longer hobnobbed with presidents and wrote
for the elite. They turned their energy toward the people.
In many ways, the post-Boom was a return to writing before the Boom, but some things could not be put back.
That is to say, though the post-Boom writers were more prosaic in subject-matter (no vanishing Louvres or
generals with 5,000 children here), their novels were written in anything but staid 19th-century realism. Nor
did they completely embrace the delightful fables that Borges charged toward. Thus, for instance, the
post-Boom produced the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig, who combined in his novels the low genre of
Hollywood films, well-defined characters, allusions to the Argentine dictatorships, strong plots, and a mode of
storytelling much closer to the nouveau roman than to Henry James.
The post-Boom made its mark. The dictatorships sputtered, failed, and faded. As time marched on the Latin
American governments put behind them the utopian dreams of Communism, the tragic realities of despotism,
one by one they settled into nice, dull democracythough a turn toward continent-wide democratic
government hardly meant an end to coups, inequality, or warfare. The post-Boom writers, who had so
eloquently and powerfully dissected the extremes of the 70s and 80s in Latin American governance and
society, began to be replaced by writers who had grown up amidst war and disaffection, writers for whom both
the belief in progress and the disbelief in atrocity were artifacts of previous generations.
Image courtesy A Journey Round My Skull.
This brings us to Horacio Castellanos Moya, a writer who counts as his first memory the explosion of a
radicals bomb on his grandfathers porch. The Salvadorian novelist came of age during his nations thirty-year
civil war, eventually engaging it as a war reporter and becoming disillusioned by the leftist guerrillas that
fought to bring down El Salvadors conservative, tyrannical government. He lived abroad for years in Mexico,
eventually returning to El Salvador on a permanent basis in 1991; six years later he was forced to flee into
exile when he took a page from the legendarily irascible Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard and wrote a novel
extremely hostile to his nation of birth. Moyas Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in El Salvador pulled no
punches in denigrating Salvadorian society in the many places where Moya thought it could use a little smack.
For his efforts he was denounced and forced into exile on fear for his safety. Moyas 2003 novel,
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Senselessness, similarly spoke truth to power about some of the most excessive government abuses of
Guatemalas 30-year civil war. (One stretch, for instance, recreates the shattering of a babys skull against a
tree trunk by military death squads.)
At this point it would be understandable to declare Horacio Castellanos Moya a political novelist. Indeed, he
seems incapable of writing a novel that is not intimately linked to the governments, wars, and corrupt political
classes of Central America. And yet, Moya is quite clear. He has asserted that he does not write political
novels. He is absolutely right.
A Brief History of the Political Novel
In his essay Apuntes sobre lo poltico en la novela latinoamericana (Some Points on the Political in the
Latin American Novel), Moya himself traces the advent of the term political novel to Edmund Speares
aptly named book, The Political Novel, published in 1924. Therein Speare layed out a view of a political novel
that sounds very much like Robert Penn Warrens All the Kings Men: a book that examines the actual stuff of
politicslegislation, political campaigns, the rise of great careers. Speare cautions that the political novel isnt
merely a sort of quasi-journalism; it is a work of literature unto itself, he claims, although he also claims that a
political novel is a sort of propaganda that leans rather to ideas than emotions.
So much for Speare. The next point of reference Moya designates on the development of the term political
novel is Irving Howes 1957 book, Politics and the Novel. Though Moya notes some similarity to Speare
(Howe defines it as: a novel in which political ideas play a dominant role or in which the political milieu is the
dominant setting), he points out an important difference in Howes definition: The political novel is
peculiarly a work of internal tensions, says Howe. To be a novel at all it must contain the usual
representation of human behavior and feeling; yet it must also absorb into its stream of movement the hard and
perhaps insoluble pellets of modern ideology. Thus Howe reverses Speare: rather than ideas coming before
humanity, humanity comes before ideaswith a few insoluble pellets of ideology stuck in its veins. Moya
quotes Howes examples of the political novel as The Red and the Black and The Possessed, although he
registers some complaint that Howe ignores Conrad (especially the adventure epic set in a fictitious Central
American nation, Nostromo) and James (The Princess Cassamassima) in favor of jumping right to Orwell and
Malraux.
Moya then comes to Tom Kemme, who in his book Political Fiction, the Spirit of the Age and Allen Drury
greatly expands the definition of the political novel: it is a pop cultural work intended for mass consumption
and it primarily focuses upon the exercise of political power and political acts permeate and unify the
novel. This is a break indeed. Whereas the political milieu was essential to Speare and Howe, for Kemme the
political novel need only concern itself with the exercise of power and political acts. This throws open the
field to a novel such as The Godfather, whichthough not explicitly politicalcould function as a primer on
the exercise of power.
What is interesting about the arc of the political novel as Moya traces it is that the political is becoming more
and more mundane. From Speares definition, which relies on books that dramatize weighty ideas within
government itself, we descend to Julien Sorel and Winston Smith, and then we descend further to the mere
exercise of power and political acts. The political is being demystified, it is being brought down from the
hallowed halls of government to the space of the everyday. In that it mirrors how the Booms quasi-mythic
magical realist approach to politics became the much more common, popular approach embraced by the
post-Boom novelists and beyond.
Once Moya has presented this trend toward a less and less mythic concept of the political, he offers his own
thoughts on what a political novel should be, albeit in his own strange way. Moya flatly declares that speaking
Horacio Castellanos and the New Political Novel | Quarterly Conversation http://quarterlyconversation.com/horacio-castellanos-and-the-new-polit...
3 z 10 2014-04-14 13:37
of the political novel as suchthat is, as the Anglo-Americans dodoesnt interest him. He writes:
I prefer to speak of a way of seeing the world, of writing it, of reading it; of the risky intersection
between politics and the novel. So I will not refer to myself as a political novelist but as just a
novelist, one who in some of his works has put more or less emphasis on the political theme.
In the balance of the essay Moya fleshes this out. He discuss the Latin American novel, a type of novel that he
claims in the 20th century has been permeated by the political. It is not the Latin Americans set out to write
political novels, its that the political keeps working its way in. As Moya elaborates this vision of this Latin
American novel, the difference between the Anglo-Americans and the Latin Americans looms larger and
larger. Moya goes out of his way to note the vast differences between the United States and Latin America. He
laments the catastrophe that maintains more than half the population . . . in poverty; he describes a justice
system ruled by an impunity to crime; he talks about weak and vulnerable political institutions that still
exist in most Latin American nations.
In the wake of such vast differences between North America and Latin America, it becomes clear that the
differences in approach to the political are fundamental. So many of the great Latin American novelists of the
20th century have seen the political play an essential role in their work, yet Howes hard and perhaps
insoluble pellets of ideology are for them utterly soluble and difficult to extract. It is because, as Moya
declares, for many [Latin American] writers it has been natural to breathe this politicized air. Politics is not
insolubleit poisons the very air. And he is quite obviously including himself among the poisoned. For a writer
such as Moya, a world where ideology can be grasped in the hand and placed to the side is unimaginable.
Ideology, and politics, are as implicit to his books as are the rules of grammar, as basic to his characters as is
the need to eat food and drink water.
And yet, though I cannot imagine a Moya novel without politics, in none of his novels have I found that
politics feels as though it is the dominant force. He is interested in something quite different, something that is
connected to the political by the tightest of knots.
In the Swirl of Subjectivity
In Moyas first novel to reach U.S. shoresSenselessness, published last year by New Directionsa lowly
proofreader comes to see himself as the center of a conspiracy to hide the details of Guatemalas civil war. The
man is clearly not any more an egotist than most people, and yet the fact that he is the most inconsequential
link in the chain that will deliver a report on the wars dead to a truth commission doesnt keep him from
coming to fantasize enemy agents behind every bush, himself a wanted man on the run from military
commandos.
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Horacio Castellanos Moya. photo: Nina Subin.
At the same time that the proofreader develops his comically off-the-mark self-image of beleaguered
anti-government agent, another very substantial change is going on. It is a transformation that, though
ostensibly independent of the other transformation, is in fact closely linked. It is this: as the proofreader reads
the report, he is struck again and again by the nave, broken Spanish in which the indigenous Guatemalans
describe the government-ordained massacres that wiped out almost all inhabitants of the villages. He finds it
poetic and compelling, and as his self-image becomes infected by the guise of a hunted man, the rhythm and
substance of his thoughts become infected by the cadences, grammar, and substance of the Native Americans
testimony. Thus, Senselessness begins with the words I am not complete in the mind, and at this point the
protagonist views these words as wholly outside himself. (He in fact jots them into his notebook for future
study.) Yet by novels end the protagonist will have used just those words to describe the mindstate he has
reached. Reflecting the radical fragmentation of his own identity that has been brought on by his paranoid
obsession with hidden government agents, Senselessnesss narrator will conclude the book pondering his own
image in a mirror, concentrating on the expression on my face, which suddenly looked different to me, as if
he who was there wasnt me.
Such a figurative mental fragmentation was portrayed concretely in Moyas 2000 novel The She-Devil in the
Mirror (note the titles final word), just published in English by New Directions: whereas Senselessnesss
protagonist merely imagines himself to have multiple identities, She-Devils narrator actually becomes acutely
schizophrenic over the course of the novel.
The two books connect in some very important ways. She-Devil is narrated by yet another paranoid political
outsider. In both books the protagonists are trying to piece together a mystery theyre not quite sure exists.
And in both an ostensibly democratic but terror-inspiring Central American government will soon become
implicated in crimes.
There is one important difference: rather be narrated by Senselessnesss bohemian artist on the fringes of
society, She-Devil is narrated from the consciousness of a woman comfortably ensconced at a high level of
conformity and privilege: a wealthy Salvadorian who is the daughter of a powerful businessman.
As She-Devil progresses this woman imagines herself becoming the central player in the mysterious death of
her friend. Unlike in Senselessness, where the political angle is obvious to the narrator from the very first
sentence, in The She-Devil in the Mirror the murder is first envisioned by the narrator as a wholly apolitical
act. In fact, she sees it as inexplicableI dont know anybody who could have even thought about
committing such a brutal crimemaybe it was a mistakeand it is only in the quest for an answer that the
narrator comes to believe that the death is orchestrated by individuals operating at the highest levels of
political and economic power. Yet though the narrator does not immediately see the murder as political in
nature, a pervasive political atmosphere is established almost from the start: the murdered woman is sexually
involved with a candidate for president of El Salvador, and the narrators own memories of life with her friend
contain allusions to politics and terror. (Of course, her privileged reaction to them reads as both dark and
hysterically funny.)
As with Senselessness, the shape of She-Devils political conspiracy never becomes very distinct. Trapped
within the narrators paranoid consciousness we can only guess at its actual dimensions, and any objective
reality of an actual conspiracy is never confirmed. Part of this is simply the fragmented distribution of political
power in a modern societythe fact that even a president cant have full information on everything being
done by a government. This fragmentation of power is something that Moya elegantly fuses with the
development of his plot and his character as he marches his protagonists down each alley one at a time, closing
certain threads of investigation even as new ones are introduced.
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Yet the more significant part of this is due to the protagonists mind, which changes subtly but powerfully
throughout both of these novels. What Senselessness and The She-Devil in the Mirror are doing is bringing the
unreliable first-person novel to a modern Latin American context. What for Ford Madox Ford was primarily a
story of infidelity in inter-war England, and for Kobo Abe was about existentialist malaise in mid-century
Japan, and for Walker Percy was about the alienation of the individual in a radically mediated society, and for
Kazuo Ishiguro was a story of classism in contemporary England, becomes for Moya a story of the great
political subconsciousness that seethes through life in 21st-century Latin America. Each of these writers shares
an interest in portraying the space between objective reality and human subjectivity. Fundamentally, they are
interested in what happens as the human mind attempts to piece together a reality, though it lacks the
necessary information to do so. As the diversity of these writers output shows, the dramatization of this gap is
a very malleable tool: an individuals quest for objective truth can interrogate realities about the cultures that
range from a bottom-rung operative in a Latin American state on the verge of failure to a wealthy, privileged
gentleman in a European nation at the height of empire. What is most characteristic about these novels is that
vital facts about the culture each is set in are bound up at the deepest levels with the narrators own gradual
realization that there is no such a thing as an objective reality. The process of self-discovery is contingent on
comprehending ones cultural context.
The most noteworthy aspects of the context in Moyas novels are the two forces that drive his narrators from
innocence and ignorance to a full confrontation with human subjectivity: the brute application of political
power and spiraling paranoia. Moyas handling of these elements represent a break both from how politics has
been written about in the lineage of Stendhal, Conrad, Orwell, et al., and from how politics has been
considered by the Latin American Boom and post-Boom writers. In Moyas new Latin American context the
most brutal of government actions no longer shock, and no attempt is made to comprehendor even represent
them. Moya knows that in such an age as his any attempt at explanation or representation would only be
gratuitous in the face of so many thousands of pages of documentation and explanation. He is not out to
further document the events; rather, he will document an everyday citizens relationship to the political. He
will attempt to consider how the history of atrocity in El Salvador and Guatemala condition an everyday
citizens life, how the Latin American concept of power and paranoia function together.
In place of representation, answers, or understanding, Moyas novels emphasize the searcha search that
ultimately undoes his protagonists. These novels take on the conventions of detective fiction, which Moya in
his essay explicitly singles out as his preferred method of writing political fiction: It seems to me that one of
the most successful and effective forms of tackling the political is by the technique of the thriller or the
detective novel, not only thanks to their virtues for creating suspense but also because with detective fiction it
is possible to immerse oneself so deeply in the sewers of political power. To this Moya might also have added
that detective novels thrust the search to the forefront and do not require an answer (though one is often
given), for his novels do just that: they run rationally through the possible solutions one by one, and yet, when
virtually all of the information is available and the resolution should slide tightly into place, the answer to the
fundamental question that drives Senselessness and She-Devil remains elusive.
Not only is that last piece of information never bestowedeach narrators sanity is revealed as so thoroughly
compromised that the validity of all foregoing information is placed into doubt. One starts to look for the exact
page where reality and the narrators mind parted company. Thus the books are finally seen for what they truly
are: not a search for objective reality but a dramatization of how ones subjective reality is continually formed
and re-formed as a tangible piece of objective reality is pursued. At the end of each, when certainty seems
perhaps finally within the protagonists grasp, we are thrown violently back into the search: Senselessness ends
with the narrator in Europe, infected with the specter of the Guatemalan civil war and unsure of who is good
and who is evil; She-Devil ends with the narrator schizophrenic, trapped in a hospital, and still desperately
scrambling after a truth that is more elusive than ever. They are in exile, safe but scarred, possessed by a need
to return and try once again to grasp a truth whose opportunity to hold they have let slip away.
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6 z 10 2014-04-14 13:37
It is the pursuit of these voices that drives Moya as a novelist: he is a writer far more interested in the workings
of the mind than in the machinations of politics. Though politics plays a substantial role, it is always filtered
through each characters consciousness, as are several other prevalent features of Latin American culture: sex,
religion, indigenous culture, wealth disparities between rich and poor, the stereotypes and petty rivalries
between nations. It is this consciousness that Moya is fundamentally most interested in. As he put it in a 2008
interview, I think the one who most influenced my idea of literature was Elias Canetti, with his conception of
the writer as a custodian of metamorphoses, the writer as someone who has to be able to metamorphose
himself into the people of his time, no matter how weak, miserable, or dark they are.
Moyas greatest tool in this pursuit of metamorphoses is a supple, precise styleindeed, though Moya can do
plot, character, and structure, he is foremost a precise and painstaking stylist. Even the briefest glance at
Senselessnesss forking, swinging, letter-perfect sentences will make that clear. The fact that the political seeps
into these narratives like spilt ink penetrating a white tablecloth is evidence not of Moyas status as a political
novelist but of the necessity of the political as he pursues Latin American voices. Thus the books become a
brilliant elucidation of an ordinary citizens sense of confusion, impotence, outrage, and horror when the use of
political power is laid bare, as it so often is in the nations that Moya has inhabited.
The Democratization of Paranoia
Paranoia has always been an inescapable fact of political fiction. Take for instance Orwells Winston Smith, for
whom the mere acts of keeping a diary and falling in love were necessarily shrouded in layers of secrecy.
Smith had good reason to be paranoid: he was knowingly pitting himselfalmost singlehandedlyagainst the
most repressive and omniscient government in the history of humankind. To take another example: even an
all-powerful political actor like Robert Penn Warrens Willie Stark was necessarily paranoidindeed the more
powerful became, the more paranoid he had reason to be.
What distinguishes Moyas work, and what allows it to be at once utterly political without being political
fiction, is that Moya brings this kind of paranoia to the ordinary individual. He does not write about political
actorsmore often than not his characters have no interest in politics beyond the average citizens concern
with the news of the day. And yet, through paranoia his characters come to feel deeplytoo deeplyinvolved
in the great national political matters of their time.
This innovation of making the political apolitical is something that Moya shares with Roberto Bolao. The
Chilean author put it well when he stated that in his work violence functions in an accidental way, which is
how violence functions everywhere. Violence does often feel accidental in Bolao. It feels beside the point,
irrational, mysterious, and what is terrifying about this is that often the state commitsor at least
sanctionsthis violence. (Almost always the violence can be traced back to the powerful, which generally
implies political connections.)
This sense of accidental violence was what allowed Bolao to bring a feeling akin to the fear of political
repression into the everyday lives of his largely apolitical characters. When violence feels arbitrary it is easy to
believe that anyone can be its next victim, and, sadly, in many Latin American nations violence felt exactly
arbitrary at various points in the 20th century. In fact, such terror was a potent tool of population control in
venues such as the Argentine Dirty War or the Pinochet era in Chile. In these climates of fear it was impossible
to guess who would be the next victim of the state, because the violence carried out by the government against
its people seemed so arbitrary, so fundamentally accidental. No one knew what precisely the grounds for
persecution were; thus, everyone was necessarily a political target.
Even if they do not seem consciously aware of it, the narrators of Senselessness and She-Devil innately grasp
this logic. Though the nations these protagonists live in are ostensibly democracies at peace, the governments
Horacio Castellanos and the New Political Novel | Quarterly Conversation http://quarterlyconversation.com/horacio-castellanos-and-the-new-polit...
7 z 10 2014-04-14 13:37
The Future Is Not Ours: New
Latin American Fiction...
Editor Diego Trelles Paz notes
in his solid and lengthy
introduction to The Future Is
Not Ours ...
U.R. Ananthamurthy and
the Rite of Writing
U.R. Ananthamurthy is
arguably the Kannada
languages most important
twentieth-century au...
From Navidad & Matanza
by Carlos Labb
My name is Domingo.
Actually, Domingo is my
password here in the
laboratory. Just by uttering t...
of these states nonetheless hold the power to inspire in the protagonists a feeling that anyone might be a target
at any time. These books can best be seen as dramatizations of how the protagonists come to believe this.
Whereas Bolao portrays this feeling of state-inspired terror through the idea of a voidsome dark, pervasive
energy that no human can escape fromMoya portrays it by showing how in this distinctive atmosphere even
the most conformist individuals can become susceptible to a kind of wraith-like paranoia.
Moyas novels drag political paranoia down to the level of the mundanenot the paranoia of Pynchon or
DeLillo, which though occasionally applied to everyday citizens feels more like a cause than a consequence,
but quiet paranoia that infects and disrupts like a virus. It is a conception of the political in fiction that is
becoming more and more prominent as a generation whose default setting toward government is apathy and
suspicion has grown up to write novels. It is politics as life, the feel of a place where everything is political and
apolitical at once. Moyas novels imply that in such an atmosphere poisonous to the non-politicized individual,
trying to separate politics from life can and will be dangerous to ones sanity.
Scott Esposito edits The Quarterly Conversation.
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Souls of the Labadie Tract by Susan Howe
Boxwood by Camilo Jos Cela
Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
The Horacio Castellanos Moya Interview
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