Narrativizar Ausencias. El trauma y su (des)escritura en “El material humano” de Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Abstract

In the framework of the authoritarian heritage re-elaboration in Latin America, this essay analyses the representation of the Guatemalan civil war and dictatorship trauma in El material humano by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, where he rescues the monumental data on violence from the National Police Historical Archive. We focus on the aesthetic strategies through which the author discusses the attempt to find a synthesis between the persistent duty of memory and the absence of the traces of the bodies that the archive (does not) return. By not showing the violence and forcing the reader to see how far their imagination can go, the author creates an ethical short circuit that reads the trauma through its (un)writing.