Saturday, May 10, 2008

Post Interview Etiquette Thank You

and violence in the eighties



In an article dated in 1986 recalled, Guillermo Niño de Guzmán wrote that because of the serious social problems bedeviling the country at that time, it was difficult to understand the bitterness and despair of his generation: a generation hit by facts and events that multiple frustrated dreams and ideals, ticking relentlessly iron members with skepticism and disappointment.
This article is interesting because it presents a vision in which many authors who began the decade are recognized. According to them, the eighties is the decade of disappointment. And they were right. Eighties, decade of onset of subversion and one of the worst economic and institutional crisis, perhaps one of the hardest years of the national republican history. According to some articles of the time, Peru has never been so close to disintegrate as a nation. It is also the decade where many representations made in the literary space, like Bruno Aragon Peralta and Rendon Willka emblematic characters of all bloods, of José María Arguedas, begin to take form in social life. That is, to be recognizable in the country's political life. Do Abimael Guzmán Bruno does not seem to Aragon Peralta, and any leader or activist commoner hiker some resemblance to Rendón Wilka? In fact, there are certain parallels between paternalism Arguedas messianic character (Bruno Aragon Peralta) and the Shining Path leader behavior and policy choice taken by Rendón Wilka and regional leaders of Peru's PC.


But paradoxically, at the time of their appearance, these representations were diluted, like soap bubbles. In fact, because of the way was developed subversion, both figures, symbols of the past utopias hopeful for a certain sector of society, quickly deteriorated, and with them all that their symbolic involved: the left, the struggles, the Andean world, etc, etc. It was as if a large statue of clay models for many years to be unveiled to the public from falling to the floor, shattering.
And how the narrators of the 80 respondents to these processes? Within the corpus of writers who emerged in this decade can distinguish two lines. The first would be those writers who shunned address the issue of subversion directly. One of these is Guillermo Niño de Guzmán, who both in his first book Midnight Horses (1984) as A woman does not make a summer (1995), manages to develop a script that allows you to insert in Peruvian narrative a number of issues related not to the social level, but to those of the individual confronted with their own obsessions and dramas. Another writer who keeps more than one similarity is Alonso Cueto, which began in the narrative a year ahead of him with his book of short stories of the past Battle (1983). Cueto, the care of the style of Nino de Guzman, adding a cosmopolitan atmosphere and the development of themes specific to the "thriller." Beside him is also ascribed to the cult Black novel Fernando Ampuero. Also, Carlos Calderón Fajardo is another writer who, beginning in the framework of neorealism with its storybook who dies blink (1981, stories), resulted in the thriller with awareness of ultimate limit (1990, novel short), and in that sort of Gothic horror is The journey never ends (1993, novella).


In the second line would be those that explicitly addressed the issue of subversion. This is the case of Luis Nieto Degregori, who from the start with beer and tired Tired bullet (1987, stories) is bent the story of a social, developing stories revolving around subversive phenomenon in Peru. Dante Castro is also perhaps the most insistently that addressed this issue, even until the end of the polemic eighties with Luis Nieto Degregori on "writer-society relationship and the choice of the theme of violence in the narrative contemporary Peru ", in the now defunct weekly Unicorn. One of Castro's arguments was that "the main tasks of the writers intended to be revolutionary is to rescue the popular vein of art and literature, the worldview of the man of the people (...) is not the task of revolutionaries preciousness sterile, "said Castro, much less in the narrative." combat Party (1991), his second book, is marked by this line of action, almost militant. This is a collection of stories that deal with the "dirty war" of the vortex subversive and insurgency that began in the '80s. But one that led to the limit this line of action is Hildebrando Huarancca Perez, author of The illegitimate , collection of stories characterized by social criticism. This could add the names of Julian Perez, Jaime Pantigozo Montes, Walter Zein Zorrilla and Ventosilla, among others.

Thus, we see that the narrators of the 80 respondents to the process of subversive violence in two ways: some worked out explicitly the issue of subversion, especially after 1986, and others began to explore the intimacy of his characters: the desires, the passions, the thoughts of individuals, their world view and of themselves. But in both cases, the construction of their worlds represented was marked by a subjective view of the environment. In this regard, attention of the narrators shifted from a critical, almost sociological, environmental, as in the '60s and '70s, to a more individualistic.
On the other hand, forms of representation in the level of fiction is not only confined to the lines mentioned above. There are also lines like the narrative anchored in the reconstruction of pieces of collective history marked by violence, as in Cordillera Negra, Oscar Colchado Lucio, who narrates from the subjectivity of a narrator-character "Tomas Nolasco-rebellion Atusparia unleashed in 1885 in the Callejon de Huaylas, and in this stark vision of the slums of Lima, as Cromwell Montacerdos Jara, also narrated from the subjectivity of a character-narrator Yococo-immersed in the garbage and homelessness .


These factors lead me to think, as a working hypothesis, that in the eighties he would begin a process of subjection of the social imaginary. Process would be clearer in the 90s. Indeed, the line of Guillermo Niño de Guzmán, Alonso Cueto, authors such as Mario would come out and Iván Thays Bellatín; of Luis Nieto Degregori and Dante Castro, we find a number of authors that try to marginal urban space, developing A new version of neo-realism of the sixties, such as Oscar Malca, Sergio Galarza and Manuel Rilo, to mention a few cases.

The latter leads me also to reflect on how it is that subversive violence has affected the fabric of the narrative in the last twenty years. I, like Michael Bakhtin, any literature can be isolated from its context, which is always something of the fears, anxieties, troubles of the community is filtered in its themes and structures, and to say otherwise is mistaken, enclosed in a bubble as discursive autistic. What happened during the last twenty years is somehow present in our literature, there is no escape.
[Photos: [1] Miguel Gutierrez, Fernando Alonso Cueto and Ampuero, [2] dead dogs hanging from poles public, [3] Luis Nieto Degregori Paravicino Rosas and Carlos García Miranda, among others, [4] Guillermo Niño de Guzmán.

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