Revista Title

Shortened de Estudios Hispánicos, Tomo XLVII, Número 1, Marzo 2013, pp. 151
151-172 (Article)
NANCI BUIZA

Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez

La novela Insensatez (2004) de Horacio Castellanos Moya indaga sobre las

ramificaciones psicológicas, emocionales e ideológicas que agobian al narrador-
protagonista luego de su encuentro con los testimonios de víctimas y testigos
del genocidio maya. Este artículo analiza la forma en que el trauma ajeno,
transmitido a través de los testimonios que el narrador lee, lo conduce a una
metamorfosis inesperada que se manifiesta a nivel caracterológico e ideológico.
Si bien al comienzo de la novela el narrador se presenta como un ladino cínico,
elitista y racista contra los indígenas, hacia el final él mismo adquiere una nueva
capacidad de empatizar con ellos a tal grado que interioriza su trauma. Este
artículo concluye que esta transformación se lleva a cabo gracias a la penetrante
poética de afecto de los testimonios, la cual desestabiliza las categorías ideológicas
de un ser tan altivo y despectivo como el narrador.

˙˙˙˙˙

In his novel Insensatez (2004), Salvadoran-Honduran author

Horacio Castellanos Moya revisits the genre of testimonio in a com-
pletely unconventional way and restores to it the potency that, by some
accounts, the genre had lost. During the 1970s and 1980s, testimonio
gained momentum in Central America and American academia for
giving voice to subaltern subjects whose lives were devastated by the
military repression sanctioned by US foreign policies in the isthmus.
However, by 1996 it became clear to scholars such as John Beverley
that “the moment of testimonio is over” (77). Such a pronounce-
ment referred not to the genre’s abandonment, but to the waning of
its “originality and urgency” which had driven “our fascination and
critical engagement with it” (Beverley 77). Defying the common belief
that testimonio has been divested of its power to reach and penetrate
readers, Castellanos Moya renews it by investing it with poetic force.
This renewal takes place through the vehicle of Insensatez’s narrator and

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 47 (2013)

152 Nanci Buiza

protagonist, a cynical and elitist writer who undergoes a radical psycho-

logical transformation as he copyedits the testimonies of witnesses and
survivors of genocide for a human rights report. The report alluded to
is real and was published in 1998 by the Oficina de Derechos Humanos
del Arzobispado de Guatemala as Guatemala: Nunca Más. Informe del
Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (hence-
forth REMHI report). In what follows, my reading of Insensatez will
show that the poetic force of the testimonies drags the narrator through
an identitary metamorphosis away from his initial cynicism toward an
experience of empathy that enables him to comprehend and ultimately
to internalize the trauma of the Maya indigenous community expressed
in the testimonies he reads.
It is important to clarify that with Insensatez, Castellanos Moya
does not seek to write another testimonio or testimonial novel. As he
himself has stated in interviews, it is a genre that “I don’t cultivate and
that I don’t like at all” (“The Horacio”). Indeed, Castellanos Moya even
speculates that Central American writers of his generation rejected
testimonio because it “had become a kind of new church” that politi-
cally engaged authors were expected to follow (“Our Reality”). In its
heyday “you were supposed to believe in the truth of these novels, the
literal truth . . . Why? Because the backbone of testimonio is historical
truth.” For this reason, he concludes, “[w]e rejected this type of nar-
rative” (“Our Reality”). It comes as no surprise, then, that Castellanos
Moya’s treatment of testimonio in Insensatez offers a fictionalization of
his own perspective on this politically-charged genre. In contrast to
subaltern subjects who share their life stories in order to bring attention
to a social issue, Insensatez gives voice to an arrogant character who, at
the outset of the novel, brazenly discriminates against others—the kind
of character, precisely, that from his position of cultural power robs
others of their voices. Over the course of the novel, however, this
character evolves dramatically into a more empathetic individual as he
encounters testimonio in a way that goes beyond institutional politics
and enters the affective dimension of the trauma of the testimonial sub-
jects. Such an encounter reveals that testimonio contains at its very core
a poetics of affect, which I understand to be a text’s expressive quality
or force that at once bears the presence of the testimonial subject’s trau-
matic experience and penetrates deeply into the receptor, triggering an
empathetic identification with the trauma victim by breaking through
Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez 153

the receptor’s ideological frameworks that inhibit his understanding of

an experience that lies outside the bounds of normative cultural catego-
ries, as is the case with genocide.
Let us recall that during the 1970s and 1980s, many Central
American countries experienced a revolutionary wave that filled the
region with the hope of bringing to fruition the social utopias that
would put an end to the legacy of military dictatorships, political co-
ercion, and social oppression. In these turbulent times, many Central
American authors expressed solidarity with the revolutionary causes by
actively engaging in the struggle and turning their literary production—
especially poetry—into a medium of social change. Roque Dalton,
Ernesto Cardenal, Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, and Claribel Alegría
are some of the emblematic producers of what Barbara Harlow calls
“resistance literature,” which functions as a “political and politicized
activity” that is “directly involved in a struggle against ascendant or
dominant forms of ideological and cultural production” (28–29). It
was also during this time that the genre of testimonio served as a tool to
rally support for the revolutionary resistance by giving voice to subal-
tern subjects, such as Rigoberta Menchú, and shedding light on their
devastating life stories of sociopolitical oppression.1
Castellanos Moya’s literary production, which began in the
late 1980s with his first novel, La diáspora (1989), has distinguished
itself for its skeptical attitude toward politics and many sociopolitical
institutions. He is, indeed, a prominent figure in what Beatriz Cortez
has labeled “la estética del cinismo,” which she defines as “una estética
marcada por la pérdida de la fe en los valores morales y en los proyectos
sociales de tipo utópico” (31). For Cortez, Central American narrative
from the 1990s onward—also known as post-war literature—employs
the aesthetic of cynicism as a mechanism for highlighting the withering
of the revolutionary utopias that the Left had envisioned in previous
decades but were vanishing by the 1990s.2 According to Arturo Arias,
these years are marked by “a certain past intoxication with revolutionary
utopias [that] has given way to a heavy hangover” (Taking 22). Castella-
nos Moya’s narrative feeds off this social disenchantment and political
intoxication and produces unsettling characters that display a scornful
attitude toward society as a way of shedding light on the atmosphere of
social disintegration that reigns during the post-war period in countries
such as El Salvador and Guatemala. Emiliano Coello Gutiérrez explains
154 Nanci Buiza

that many of Castellanos Moya’s protagonists are antiheroes whose cut-

ting humor and sarcasm denounce “el cinismo de un sistema metalizado
que en su violencia se despojó de la máscara moral que utilizase otrora”
(19). Such protagonists often display hedonistic and insolent behavior
that agitates many readers. In fact, in his third novel, El asco (1997),
the protagonist’s diatribe against post-war Salvadoran society gained
Castellanos Moya death threats in El Salvador that forced him into ex-
ile. The novel’s protagonist, Edgardo Vega, is a Salvadoran exile whose
return to his country fills him with revulsion and anxiety. He expresses
his discomfort through a bitter tirade that leaves virtually no aspect
of Salvadoran culture unscathed. Ultimately, his irreverence proves to
be neither hollow nor frivolous, for it unearths the delicate pieces of a
fragmented post-war society in need of reconstruction.
Castellanos Moya’s status as a leading writer of the aesthetic
of cynicism would lead one to expect his treatment of testimonio in
Insensatez to continue in a similar vein; but I will argue that this novel
defies such an expectation in its movement beyond cynicism. Here
Castellanos Moya articulates testimonio as a platform from which he
identifies and salvages some of the poetic threads that gave testimonio
its potency. Insensatez uses these poetic threads in an unconventional
way by weaving a narrative that seeks to accomplish an empathetic
connection between the reader and those affected by tragedy. Whereas
canonical definitions of the testimonio genre center on its “sincerity
rather than literariness” (Beverley 32), Insensatez hinges on poetry as the
bearer of affect, which is the mental and emotional experience and dis-
position that allows readers to connect and identify with others. Poetry
thus serves as a vehicle for the expression of the testimonial subject’s
feelings. It is precisely the poetry of the testimonies that the nameless
narrator copyedits that allows him to undergo an ideological and char-
acterological metamorphosis that, as my reading will show, takes this
novel beyond the framework of the aesthetic of cynicism.
Some readers of Insensatez have tried to understand the narra-
tor and his actions through the category of cynicism, which in effect
thrusts the novel back into the mold strongly associated with Caste-
llanos Moya’s work. Valeria Grinberg Pla believes that the narrator’s
initial cynicism and insensitivity toward the delicate nature of the
testimonies—an attitude encapsulated by his egotism and aloofness—
undermine “la posibilidad de una identificación empática del intelectual
Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez 155

con el sobreviviente.” She does not consider the narrator becoming

traumatized by his intimate encounter with the testimonies to be a
manifestation of his empathetic identification with the social other.
Misha Kokotovic, on the other hand, does find that the narrator’s evo-
lution is essential to understanding “the potential that testimonio may
still have” to transform and move readers (559). Kokotovic analyzes
the novel through the lens of cynicism and explores how Castellanos
Moya intertwines it with testimonio. He claims, rightly, that by inserting
fragments of real testimonies from the REMHI report into a fictional
context of post-war cynicism, Castellanos Moya “paradoxically amplifies
their force and impact at a time when testimonio, by some accounts, has
lost its power to move readers.” Kokotovic suggests that this “power to
move readers” resides in cynicism itself, specifically where he claims that
it is the “cynical wrapping” of the “small, but intensely concentrated
doses” of testimonio that make it “palatable to a disenchanted postwar
sensibility” (548).
Ignacio Sánchez Prado, in turn, questions the role of testimonio
in Insensatez and argues that the novel “refuta de manera implícita la
visión optimista del testimonio latinoamericano como estrategia de
solidaridad” by presenting “un intelectual epistemológicamente incapaz
del acto de solidaridad requerido por el género” (80–81). In this way,
Insensatez can be considered a “post-testimonial” novel for its use of
satire to shed light on the limits of truth commissions and intellectuals
who seek to represent a collective or speak for others (79, 82). Sánchez
Prado concludes that “la narrativa medular de Insensatez es el desmo-
ronamiento del intelectual como figura privilegiada de formación de la
identidad y lo político en el contexto de las posguerras centroamerica-
nas” (84). Consequently, the novel presents the figure of the intellectual
not as the guardian of cultural memory, but as an individual with all his
limitations, repulsive traits, and materialistic desires.
Indeed, it is precisely the narrator’s seemingly impervious dispo-
sition that throws into relief the process by which the trauma of others
affects those who listen to its suffering. Cathy Caruth explains trauma
metaphorically as a voice that cries out through the wound and has the
power to lead its listener to an encounter with trauma, even if it is the
trauma of another (4, 8). This is precisely what happens to the narrator.
He listens to the sorrowful voices that cry out of the testimonies; and
as my reading of the novel will show, it is the act of listening that trig-
gers his remarkable transformation. It seems, then, that the conceptual
156 Nanci Buiza

axis of Insensatez is not cynicism or testimonio, but rather an identitary

metamorphosis through affect.
My analysis focuses on the traces of trauma and racial tension
that shape the narrator’s metamorphosis in tandem with this emerging
poetics of affect. His gradual change unfolds characterologically as an
evolution from a self-centered cynic to a deeply responsive listener who
obsesses over the tragedy of the witnesses and survivors of genocide. On
one level, this characterological evolution is paralleled by an ideological
metamorphosis that distances him from his ladino counterparts and
from his own self.3 Indeed, by the end of the novel, the narrator’s self-
estrangement reaches a climax when he cannot even recognize his own
ladino image in the mirror (147). On another level, his metamorphosis
is marked by his emotional identification with the indigenous survivors
and witnesses he reads about in the testimonies. His change, in effect,
involves a more profound recognition of the injustices committed
against them. By virtue of this twofold evolution, the narrator’s meta-
morphosis culminates with a newfound empathy for the victims of state
terror, which is fundamentally an identification with his racial other.
The narrator’s transformation is also mirrored in his changing
treatment of the testimonies. At the beginning of the novel he fails to
see—to truly read or listen to—their tragic content by decontextual-
izing them through a narrow focus on their stylistic qualities, such as
their rhetorical and syntactical constructions. After his metamorphosis
is complete, however, he comes to understand this aestheticism as a
poetics—that is, as a poetic language through which the victims are able
to express, in their own words, their feelings and emotions of trauma.
By reaching this conclusion, the narrator moves from an aesthetic valo-
rization, in which poetry is an object or a commodity for literary recre-
ation, to a poetics of affect that enables him to understand the trauma
of the other to the point where he begins to share in and internalize it.
The narrator’s metamorphosis sheds light on the special rela-
tionship between an individual and his or her experience with recent
historical texts. According to Frans Weiser, the incorporation of excerpts
from the REMHI report into the novel and the narrator’s appropriation
of them serve as a means “to analyze how readers react to textualized
traces of the past and in turn incorporate these historical narratives
into their present experience to make them meaningful.” By focusing
on how readers experience and engage historical texts such as the tes-
timonies of the genocide in Guatemala, Weiser points to the fact that
Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez 157

what is at stake here is “not the status of the document, but rather the
use of the document” (emphasis in original). The narrator’s metamor-
phosis allows him to assimilate the affective content of the testimonies
he initially consumes as literary delight. The novel hence suggests that
making historical narratives meaningful calls for a personal encounter
with the past; even if that experience proves to be life-altering, as in the
narrator’s case.

Phase One of the Metamorphosis:

Through the Cynical Looking Glass

The narrator of Insensatez is a Salvadoran exiled writer who car-

ries out the task of copyediting the Catholic Church’s report on human
rights violations in a Central American country that remains unnamed
in the novel. It is safe to assume, however, that the action takes place in
Guatemala, where the real REMHI report was compiled and published.
In fact, the novel includes fragments of some of the testimonies found
in this report. Even though the narrator is working on a project whose
purpose is to give voice to the voiceless—mainly the Maya indigenous
communities—he starts the novel by establishing his identification with
the ladino class and its hegemonic ideology of power, class, and beauty.
At one point he calls Guatemala a “pueblo triste y llorón” and makes it
patently clear that he does not belong to this “tierra de indios” (25, 36).
The narrator views all aspects of Guatemalan culture through his elitist
standpoint and is disdainful of its idiosyncrasies, especially those of the
Maya population. He even manifests the hegemonic ideology through
his obsessive sexual fantasies about European women for their “rostro
fino y expresión saludable” while at the same time denigrating indig-
enous women for their lack of “cualquier rastro de belleza” (45, 21).
During this initial phase in the novel, the narrator also decon-
textualizes the testimonies he transcribes by callously transposing them
to his own situation, which is clearly not comparable to the circum-
stances to which the testimonies bear witness. Early in the narrative he
takes the quote “[y]o no estoy completo de la mente” from a Kaqchikel
Maya man whose entire family was massacred, and scornfully applies
it to the psychological condition of the country (13).4 He believes that
the whole population has gone insane after suffering the horrors of war,
158 Nanci Buiza

and then concludes that he is equally insane because “sólo alguien fuera
de sus cabales” like him would be willing to travel to a foreign country
to work for an institution he despises—the Catholic Church—and
carry out the risky task of copyediting an official report of massacres
perpetrated by the national military (14). His complaint—“[y]o no estoy
completo de la mente”—is exacerbated when he does not receive his pay
advance and his workload is doubled without further compensation.
The narrator interprets the administration’s irresponsibility as an offense
to his privileged ladino status and claims that he is not “otro de esos
indios acomplejados” with whom the administration is used to working
(39). The narrator’s outrage over his pay reveals that his true motivation
for accepting this job is money. For him, “el cumplimiento de un pago
está por encima de cualquier otro valor,” including the humanitarian
values invested in the project (37). By the end of the novel, however,
the narrator’s self-diagnosed insanity for accepting such a low-paying
job at an institution he despises will prove to be more prophetic than
cynical.
At the peak of his aloofness, the narrator’s only appreciation of
anything produced by the Maya peoples is the stylistic quality of their
testimonies. He believes that their inventive use of language is on a par
with the best literature. For this reason, he keeps a notebook in which
he jots down testimonial fragments, each of which he considers to be
a “joya poética” (32). Incidentally, this violates the rules prohibiting
him from taking or sharing any information outside the office, which
furthermore reflects his insolent behavior. The narrator is mesmerized
by the figurative language and peculiar syntactical constructions of the
testimonies and considers them worthy of admiration. During this first
half of the novel, the narrator seems oblivious to the actual content of
the testimonies: the stories of pain and sorrow of the Mayas. It can be
off-putting to see how he finds only prosodic value in verses such as
“[p]orque para mí el dolor es no enterrarlo yo . . .” when the words “dolor”
and “enterrar” transmit suffering and sadness that go far beyond the sty-
listic qualities of language (32). Instead of reading such verses for their
affective content, the narrator is surprised that indigenous peoples with
little to no formal Western education can produce such complex poetry
that reminds him of the renowned Peruvian poet César Vallejo (32).
Up to this point, the narrator epitomizes the cynicism that
critics generally describe in Castellanos Moya’s work. In his initial
characterological iteration, the narrator seems unethical for his early
Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez 159

treatment of the testimonies, unreliable for his self-serving motives, ir-

ritating for his macho behavior, and detestable for his aversion to indig-
enous women and culture. Moreover, the novel reveals the workings of
a pan-Central American ethnically-coded hierarchy of power by making
the narrator a Salvadoran ladino who displays an attitude of ethnic su-
periority. His initial disdain for Mayas—an attitude akin to that which
led to their genocide—suggests that he is the Salvadoran counterpart of
the Guatemalan ladinos who committed atrocities against the Mayas.

Phase Two of the Metamorphosis:

Toward an Empathetic Identification

The narrator’s metamorphosis begins to take place halfway

through the novel. This process is manifested in the struggle between
his ladino ideology and his nascent identification with the victims,
putting him in a liminal space situated in a middle of a before-and-
after continuum. As he continues to manifest his typical cynical self,
he nevertheless begins to realize the impudence of his behavior toward
Mayas and their testimonies. The pivotal scene begins when his sexual
fantasizing about some of his European female colleagues is suddenly
interrupted by the memory of a testimony that he considers to be the
perfect storyline for a novel he wants to write in order to “trastornar
la tragedia” (71). To make up for the sparing use of detail in the tes-
timony, the narrator resorts to his own imagination to complete his
metafictional storyline. It is important to note that such a lack of detail
is a symptom of the diluted power of human rights reports, which often
drown the victims’ testimonial voice in statistical and historical data.
Seemingly aware of the inadequacy of such reports, the narrator wishes
to turn a testimony into a fiction that will tell a tragic story through
the affective and poetic language that he believes has a special capacity
to give expression to trauma and pain.
The narrator’s metafiction takes as its protagonist the “alma
en pena” of an indigenous civil registrar who was assassinated by lo-
cal police officers for refusing to surrender the book containing the
names of the dead townspeople (72). The narrator explains that the
importance of this book lies in the fact that President Ríos Montt—
who was, historically, the president of Guatemala—needed those
names to legitimize his ascent to power through a coup d’état. But the
160 Nanci Buiza

civil registrar, resolute in his stand against political corruption, refused

to surrender it and was executed without revealing its hiding place.
Consequently, his name cannot be entered into the book, which makes
his death unofficial and condemns his soul to perpetual torment. He
becomes an “alma en pena” who wanders around looking for anyone
willing to listen to him so that he may reveal the location of the book
and finally record his name in it. Before imagining the novel’s conclu-
sion, the narrator realizes that it is destined to fail and dismisses the
whole thing as foolishness: “a nadie en su sano juicio le podría interesar
ni escribir ni publicar ni leer otra novela más sobre indígenas asesina-
dos” (74). Although his sudden reluctance to write is certainly due to
his belief that people are tired of reading such novels, it is nevertheless
indicative of the fact that this literature has lost the affective force it
once had.
If the narrator initially regards the testimony he wishes to turn
into fiction as a kind of commodity that he can use to achieve his liter-
ary aspirations, then the act of thinking through this metafiction rep-
resents a turning point. At a subconscious level, he gradually begins to
identify with the victims of the massacres by wanting to write the novel
to become “el alma en pena del registrador civil de un pueblo llamado
Totonicapán” (72). What is important here is that the civil registrar is
an indigenous man and that the narrator wishes to become him. By
imagining himself as the soul in sorrow of the civil registrar, the narra-
tor blurs the boundary between himself and the victim whose trauma
he begins to internalize. While this identification signals the beginning
of the narrator’s abandonment of his privileged status as a ladino, his
evolution is at the same time a moral struggle between his cynicism
and his emerging commiseration with the indigenous population. He
continues to have difficulty setting aside his sarcastic self. Even when
he imagines the protagonist of his metafiction to be indigenous, the
narrator continues to deride the civil registrar as “un imbécil que con
su necedad propició que le cortaran con machete todos y cada uno de
los dedos de sus manos” (72). Although this harsh response seems to
represent the quintessence of the narrator’s cynicism, it is nevertheless
quite suggestive in another sense, for it not only draws attention to
the willingness of others to die for justice, but also brings to light—
through the somewhat cursory recognition of the civil registrar’s heroic
act—the narrator’s own struggle with reading the affective content of
Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez 161

the testimonies. That is to say, between interpreting them through the

lens of cynicism or understanding them as a listener to their tragedy.
Even though the narrator ultimately abstains from writing his
imagined novel, Castellanos Moya continues to elaborate on the meta-
phor of the “alma en pena” by turning it into a leitmotiv that represents
the pain, sorrow, and impotence of the witnesses and survivors who
were denied the right to bury their loved ones. In the narrator’s meta-
fiction, the grieving soul of the civil registrar cannot find peace until
his name is registered in the book of the dead. Similarly, as the novel
suggests, the deaths of the thousands of nameless victims have yet to
gain official status because their disappearance renders any closure im-
possible. Family members, witnesses, and survivors are therefore souls in
sorrow searching for their dead in order to give them traditional Maya
funerals. The following quote shows the deep pain and powerlessness
of such an experience:

Tres días llorando, llorando que le quería yo ver. Ahí me senté abajo de la
tierra para decir allí 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 . . . Porque para mí el dolor es no enterrarlo
yo. (32)

For Nathalie Besse, the absence of a dead body in the novel functions
as a “doble aniquilamiento” that effaces the identities of the deceased
victims by stripping them of a name, a body, and a place in their soci-
ety. This erasure of the dead denies the surviving families their right to
mourn, thereby entrapping them in perpetual grief.
The metaphor of the “alma en pena” allows the reader to com-
prehend how closely the narrator is identifying with the victims and
thus serves as a way of charting his metamorphosis. His desire to write
a novel about a grieving soul shows that he is beginning to understand
the kernel of the victims’ pain. The catalyst that makes possible the
narrator’s metamorphosis is the poetics of affect that animates the
testimonies he copyedits. He views poetry as a mechanism that
expresses—in densely packed and highly charged language—the
victims’ shattered mental state and serves as a therapeutic channel
through which to confront one’s own traumatic past. He sees poetic
verses as “cápsulas concentradas de dolor” whose sonority and evoca-
tive power have the strength to penetrate deep beneath his skin, into
162 Nanci Buiza

his psychological stability and emotional state (30). In contrast to the

stylistically oriented notes he takes at the beginning of the novel, the
narrator now jots down the following fragment in his notebook for its
emotional force: “Porque yo no quiero que me maten la gente delante de
mí.” Phrases like this reveal to him “el grado de perturbación mental
de los sobrevivientes y el peligro de que tal estado influyera en quienes
trabajaban con ellos” (82). The narrator’s interpretation here is evidence
of his newly found perspective on the tragedy of others. He realizes
that whoever works closely with trauma runs the risk of unwittingly
assimilating it.
Shortly after the episode of the metafiction, the narrator shows
more signs of his transformation toward a deeper and more meaningful
understanding of the testimonies. He focuses on a quote that belongs to
a K’iche’ elderly man whose family was slaughtered by the military. It
reads: “[s]i yo me muero, no sé quién me va a enterrar.” The narrator sud-
denly reflects on this testimonial fragment and finds himself entering
the terrain of emotional engagement when he remarks to himself that
this man is “en un desamparo tan extremo” (104). He transposes this
sentence onto his own situation, but instead of doing so cynically—as
he did early in the novel with “yo no estoy completo de la mente” (16)—
the narrator now does so in a way that confirms that his emotional
change is underway. He wonders who would bury him if he were to die
and comes to the conclusion that no one would. He laments his loneli-
ness and dwells in “un estado de autoconmiseración” (104). Throughout
the novel the narrator is possessed by the fear of being murdered by
military officials or the Secret Service; he knows his job is dangerous
and could make him the target of state terror. After realizing that he
could die alone like the man of the testimony, the narrator confesses
that: “me sentía en el peor de los desamparos, sin el sufrimiento del
anciano indígena cuya frase me había sumido en tal estado de ánimo,
debo reconocerlo, pero casi tan solo y abandonado como él, aunque una
chica durmiera en mi cama” (104–05).
It is important to emphasize that the narrator admits that
although he feels as lonely and abandoned as the victim, his concerns
now seem trivial in comparison. This recognition signals a newfound
cognitive distance, one which expresses the narrator’s intense engage-
ment with the immeasurable horrors experienced by the survivor,
but still with an awareness of the difference of his own reality as a
Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez 163

reader and listener. The narrator’s egotistical character is affected by

this change, and consequently his old source of racialized sexual solace
has become defunct. His sexual objects—European women—no longer
attenuate his loneliness as a result of his shifting identity as encoded in
his patterns of emotional identification. By this stage in the novel, the
narrator has begun to listen to the affective content that the testimonies
transmit. When he goes to bed, he is no longer concerned about the
woman sleeping next to him or about his usual self-absorbed interests
because now “mis preocupaciones ya eran otras” (105).

Final Phase of the Metamorphosis:

Sharing in the Trauma of the Racial Other

More than simply being the copyeditor of the testimonies, the

narrator becomes their listener. According to Dori Laub, the listener of
the narrative of trauma or extreme human pain partially experiences the
trauma of the victim/survivor by becoming “the blank screen on which
the event comes to be inscribed for the first time.” This process responds
to the need of the survivor to project or transmit the traumatic event
onto someone else in order to be understood. For Laub, “the listener to
trauma comes to be a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event”
and feels the bewilderment, dread, and injury of the trauma victim.
The listener, however, does not become the victim but rather “a witness
to the trauma witness” who joins the victim in a dangerous journey
through the uncharted territory of trauma memories (Laub, “Bearing
Witness” 57–58). Laub cautions that the listener must preserve an
awareness of the hazards of his job since the journey he will embark on
with the trauma victim will lead him to a battleground where the lines
between the victim’s trauma and his own struggles can blur or overlap.
It is crucial for the listener to maintain an undistorted perspective on
reality and a safe ground from which to monitor and control his own
psychological strife, defensive feelings, and fears (“Bearing Witness” 72).
Only then can the listener carry out properly the dual-task of serving
as the guardian of the witness’ testimony and of being a “blank screen”
on which the trauma can be safely and provisionally transmitted (Laub,
“Bearing Witness” 57). The listener, then, must not keep the victim’s
trauma, for it is not his own; he must let it go at the end of the journey
to prevent himself from being trapped in it.
164 Nanci Buiza

The narrator of Insensatez ultimately fails to keep a grip on his

own reality and crosses the boundaries that define his role as a listener.
His position as witness to the trauma witness is undermined when he
falls into a downward spiral as he feels the burden of trauma and its
strangeness. The narrator becomes the voice of the testimonies beyond
the written page when he begins to experience the inexplicable urge to
repeat out loud the testimonial fragments he copies into his notebook.
He becomes traumatized by the tragedy of the witnesses and survivors
and comes to embody an “alma en pena” in search for a listener. This
is the phase in which his relation to the testimonies has finally shifted
from aestheticism to a poetics of affect. His proclivity for the stylistic
qualities of the testimonies becomes so infused with empathy that what
matters now to the narrator is the pain and sorrow they transmit. This
is an experience that wounds him deeply.
Toward the end of the novel, the narrator is so overwhelmed by
everything around him that he withdraws to a spiritual retreat center
outside the city in order to finish his job on time. This transfer, how-
ever, only serves to bring him face to face with his own trauma. After
a few days at the retreat center, he begins to experience the last stage
of his metamorphosis in which he becomes a traumatized subject. One
night, the recurrent violent images he reads in the testimonies trigger
an attack of paranoia. He runs out of his room and begins to “aullar
como animal enfermo” in an effort to alleviate the burden of the testi-
monies (139). Once in the forest, he sees shadows and thinks they are
members of the military intelligence services he believes are out to get
him. He flees and begins to repeat ever more loudly the phrase: “herido
sí es duro quedar, pero muerto es tranquilo” (141). As the trauma victim
he has now become, he fears that enemies will attack him and leave him
for dead just as had happened with the survivors whose stories he now
reads. After this incident, the narrator flees to an unnamed German
speaking country. At this narrative juncture, the novel neither corrobo-
rates nor discounts the narrator’s suspicion of being persecuted, leading
to the assumption that his fear is part of his own paranoia.
The ending, nevertheless, suggests that the narrator’s fear is in
fact well-founded on account of the evidence that the military’s modus
operandi continues to be the unceremonious liquidation of any persona
non grata. Such is the case, we learn, of the bishop who oversees the
human rights report in the novel. While the narrator is in Europe, the
Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez 165

bishop—who also has no name—presents the finished report to the

public only to be murdered that same night. The novel ends with the
narrator reading an email informing him about the murder: “[a]yer a
mediodía monseñor presentó el informe en la catedral con bombo y
platillo; en la noche lo asesinaron en la casa parroquial, le destruyeron
la cabeza con un ladrillo” (155). The bishop is another character of
the novel who embodies the “alma en pena” that fights for justice. He
spearheads the human rights report as a means of denouncing the mas-
sacres perpetrated by the military of Guatemala against its own people.
Unfortunately, he dies a victim to the very injustice he fights against.5
The anonymity of the narrator and the bishop implies that the meta-
phor of the “alma en pena” stands for the impossibility of obtaining
closure and healing the trauma and pain caused by years of suffering
unimaginable atrocities.
The bloodshed at the end of the novel points to the continua-
tion of violence, injustice, and unhealed trauma in the fragmented soci-
ety of Guatemala. The bishop’s murder sheds light on the deeply rooted
political corruption that prevents human rights activists from achieving
justice for the victims they represent. His brutal death marks the per-
petuation of the same military violence and state terror denounced by
the testimonies compiled within the report he oversees. What is more,
the narrator’s inability to heal from his trauma, that is, his condition as
an “alma en pena,” functions as a synecdoche for the collective experi-
ence of the many victims who are unable to find a listener to help them
cope with their own trauma.
By the end of the novel, the narrator is so entrapped in his
trauma that even when he escapes from Guatemala in fear of his life his
thoughts continue to draw him back to the testimonies. His metamor-
phosis has now taken full effect; indeed, to such a degree that he cannot
recognize his own face in the mirror:

mi atención estaba fija en mi rostro, que se reflejaba en el espejo, con

la concentración puesta en cada uno de mis rasgos, en mi expresión,
que de pronto se me hizo ajena, como si el que estaba ahí no hubiera
sido yo, como si ese rostro por un instante hubiera sido de otro, de un
desconocido, y no mi rostro de todos los días, un instante en que me
fui irreconocible y que me causó el peor de los pánicos. . . . (147–48)

It is quite telling that it should be precisely in Europe where the nar-

rator fails to recognize his own image, for it is the historical locus out
166 Nanci Buiza

of which his initial ladino cultural identity emerged. The image he sees
in the mirror now produces a disidentification with that old identitary
model; he has become “unknown” and “unrecognizable” to himself. He
cannot return to his cynical self after being overcome by the trauma of
the survivors. Consequently, he loses the possibility of reclaiming the
position of the cultural otherness that he had occupied at the beginning
of the novel.

Breaking Ideological Frameworks through Affect

Let us here recall Laub’s arguments regarding the listener of

trauma. According to Laub, the listener of extreme human pain “has to
feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, know them from within,
so that they can assume the form of testimony” (“Bearing Witness” 58).
For the listener’s profound identification and the victim’s transmission
of trauma to take place, the listener must first break through the cul-
tural and ideological frames of reference that shape not just his percep-
tion of reality but also his ability to identify with others. Much in the
same way that victims break through their silence and fear by giving
their testimony, their listener, Laub insists, must have his “conceptual
breakthrough” in order to respond to a traumatic reality that is amor-
phous, unmapped, and indecipherable to normative categories (“An
Event” 85). A listener who is unwilling to see beyond his sociocultural
categories and conceptions cannot grasp that trauma victims experience
their own traumatic reality, one that ultimately keeps them entrapped
and fated to an uncanny repetition of the traumatic event.
While the novel illustrates the process by which the narrator
detaches himself from his cultural frames of reference and identifies
with the victims, it also shows how others are unwilling to do the
same. The narrator expresses solidarity with the victims by attempting
to share their testimonies with his ladino friends, but none are will-
ing to listen. They remain shielded and restricted by their ideological
framework, and fail to comprehend the pain and sorrow of the other.
For the ladinos in the novel, there is much at stake in partaking in the
victim’s trauma. Such a charged involvement would mean not only
becoming part of a collective of emotionally wounded people, but also
renouncing their privileged position through an identification with the
indigenous other. Ultimately, the ladinos’ refusal to cross such ethnic
Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez 167

boundaries—that is, to break through their ideological frames to truly

engage in empathy with their other—contributes to the perpetuation
of ethnic class division.
Insensatez goes beyond the mere representation of a tragic story.
It stages the ways in which victims, their listeners, and indifferent by-
standers deal with the living force of trauma in its transmission, recep-
tion, and destabilizing of normative categories and frames of reference.
If the ladinos in the novel exemplify the way in which many in Central
American society have dealt with trauma—namely, by keeping it at a
distance with ideological buffering—then the narrator’s metamorphosis
offers an alternative to this. It shows that even a cynic as bitter and elit-
ist as the narrator can become a true witness to the trauma witness. By
breaking through the frameworks that shaped his initial cynicism, he is
able to identify and empathize with the indigenous other.
It is significant that in this novel Castellanos Moya should
invoke the poetic substance of testimonio as a force that enables moral
and empathetic identification with the subject and his tragedy at a
time when others have proscribed this poetics of affect as a distortion
of factual history.6 The insertion of actual fragments of testimonies
produces a hybrid narrative that fuses history with fiction and vindi-
cates the emotional and figurative language of the voices that truth and
reconciliation projects and human rights reports bury beneath data
and statistics. In this way, Insensatez reveals the poetic richness of the
subaltern’s expressive language to be deserving of appreciation for its
affective truth content rather than censure for its lack of conformity to
the norms of factual historicity.
The emotional truth value in the novel reaches an even deeper
level when the reader comes to understand the degree to which the
narrator is affected by the haunting stories of trauma he did not experi-
ence first-hand. The narrator cannot persist in an escapism of voluntary
ignorance regarding the trauma caused by the atrocities suffered during
Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war and the sociopolitical corruption
of its post-war present. The novel suggests that if such a contemptu-
ous individual can be moved by the pain of others, then the power of
testimonio is not fully lost and should instead be seen through a differ-
ent light; one that allows for more creative freedom and appreciation
of different types of testimonies, not just the politically-charged ones.
At the same time, the narrator’s metamorphosis is his own
testimony to his encounter with trauma; and the reader of the novel
168 Nanci Buiza

becomes a witness to the narrator’s traumatic transformation. By pre-

senting testimonio once removed, as Kokotovic describes it, Castellanos
Moya offers an unorthodox view to the “kind of new church” that testi-
monio had become and creates a fictional intervention that is ultimately
as surprisingly reaffirming as it is openly critical of the genre (“Our
Reality”). Insensatez plays with the crisis of representation in testimonio
by fictionalizing a character that belongs to a privileged social class
rather than to a subaltern one. The novel also shows that there is a crisis
of reception when the narrator acknowledges that the metafiction he
wishes to write will have no reception due to the resistance of some to
sympathize with the tragedy of others. The novel suggests, then, that
whether it is a Maya’s tragic story or a ladino’s account of his encounter
with the victim’s trauma, there are some who nevertheless refuse to lis-
ten. Perhaps this may be due to the fact that in a society that has lived
through years of civil war, like that of Guatemala, understanding the
other’s trauma would imply not just inquiring into one’s complicity in
causing that trauma but also confronting one’s own.
In this vein, Insensatez proposes the idea that dealing with the
issue of trauma—whether personal, collective, or of the other—imposes
a moral obligation when society’s healing and progress depend on it.
Such a moral imperative is inscribed in the novel from its epigraph,
which is a quote from Sophocles’s Antigone: “Nunca, señor, perdura la
sensatez en los que son desgraciados, ni siquiera la que nace con ellos,
sino que se retira” (qtd. in Insensatez 11). This quote calls for a read-
ing that is based on the distinction between good sense and senseless-
ness, which allows the narrator’s initial interpretation of Guatemala as
a country of insane people to take on a new—and now tragic,
rather than cynical—meaning. If good sense does not abide with the
unfortunate—and the title of the novel is, after all, Insensatez—then
the epigraph implies that Guatemalan society is disgraced by decades of
armed struggle and, furthermore, that its recent history and unhealed
trauma have given way to acts of senselessness that have no end in sight.
The key reference to Antigone at the novel’s outset bears meaning that
comes full circle only at the end, once the reader has become witness
to the narrator’s trauma.
It bears recollection that Antigone defies authority in her at-
tempt to give burial services to her dead brother, who was denied this
Trauma and the Poetics of Affect in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez 169

privilege by the king. Although Antigone pays with her life for her defi-
ance, she believes that she has carried out her moral obligation by giv-
ing peace to her brother’s soul. The reference to Antigone instills in the
reader the idea that achieving justice for the dead is the most important
aspect of fulfilling one’s duty and moral obligation to the deceased, even
if that implies the ultimate personal sacrifice. This reference acquires a
deeper meaning for the reader when it becomes clear that one of the
main themes of Insensatez involves the disappearance of the bodies of
the victims of genocide and the survivors’ constant search for them.
Therefore, the reference to Antigone encapsulates the novel’s core argu-
ment, namely, that the inability to recover the bodies of the victims is
what deepens the social wound caused by years of war and genocide.
This bespeaks of Guatemalan society’s inability to heal from its psychic
injury until it listens to, accepts, and works through its own trauma. As
a consequence of positing this new form of bearing witness, Insensatez
shatters the politically exhausted reading of testimonio in order to pick
up the compelling pieces of human suffering that political agendas had
co-opted. Freed from their political coordinates, these pieces reveal an
enduring affective force that the novel ultimately suggests is the only
way through which testimonio’s project of representation may truly
achieve its greatest power.

Emory University

NOTES
* I would like to give special thanks to Dierdra Reber and Arturo Arias for their gener-
ous readings and insightful comments to earlier drafts of this essay.

1
For a detailed discussion on the origin of testimonio and its critical reception, see
Elzbieta Sklodowska.

2
In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were defeated in democratic elections in 1990, which
in effect gave a political victory to a decade-long US covert effort to overthrow them
via the Contras war. In El Salvador and Guatemala, the exhaustion of war and its
economic cost reached their limits. El Salvador ended its twelve-year civil war with the
signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992. Four years later, in 1996, Guatemala
also ended its thirty-six-year civil war with the signing of the Firm and Lasting Peace
Agreement. Diplomatic relations and democracy thus became the vehicle to confront
right-wing conservative parties.
170 Nanci Buiza

3
In Guatemala, ladino is the name used to refer to people of mixed European and
indigenous ancestry (in other Latin American countries they are referred to as mestizos).
They constitute the privileged socio-economic ethnic class of Guatemala and stand in
sharp contrast to the Maya indigenous population. This term should not be confused
with the Judeo-Spanish language also called ladino.

4
The fragments of the testimonies reproduced in the novel appear in italics, always
signaling the testimonial voice. For this essay, the italics have been preserved and are
original to the text.

5
Along with the truth and reconciliation report itself and the name of the Guatemalan
military dictator Ríos Montt, the account of the bishop’s murder is the novel’s final key
historical reference. Bishop Juan Gerardi, who oversaw the report Guatemala: Nunca
Más, was murdered on April 26, 1998, two days after the public presentation of the
report. As in the novel, his assassins used a concrete slab to destroy his face; he was
bludgeoned to death in his home in Guatemala City. The significant modification in
the novel is that Castellanos Moya makes the bishop nameless despite the transpar-
ent historical reference. For more details on Bishop Gerardi’s murder, see Francisco
Goldman.

6
In his controversial book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans,
David Stoll questions certain “factual shortcomings” in Menchú’s account of her life
story and the struggle of her Maya community to overcome poverty, discrimination,
and the genocide carried out by the Guatemalan military (xxiv). Not taking Menchú’s
story at face value, Stoll challenges the conviction that she represents all poor Gua-
temalans and accuses her of presenting a “mythic inflation” of her life story in her
testimonio (232). What I would like to highlight in general terms about the Menchú/
Stoll controversy is that what is at stake is the truthfulness of the testimonial subject’s
story versus his or her poetic freedom to narrate a personal life story that feeds off
a collective experience. For more details about the controversy, see Arias’s book The
Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, which presents a thorough compilation of articles from
both sides of the controversy, including responses by Stoll and Menchú.

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172 Nanci Buiza

Palabras claves: literatura centroamericana, trauma, afecto, testimonio, cinismo,

Castellanos Moya.

Fecha de recepción: 26 agosto 2011

Fecha de aceptación: 28 septiembre 2012