The ·c ontemporary Spanish-American Novel: Bolaiio and After Edited by Will H. Corral Juan E. De Castro Niebolas Birns BLOOMS B U RY NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY ( cJo13) Central America Rodrigo Rey Rosa (Guatemala, 1958) "All writers tend to be Borges:' says the contemporary Spanish poet Pere Gimferrer, who then adds, "all those who think about literature when writing" (12). The prolific narrative production, especially the novels, of Rodrigo Rey Rosa fulfills in two distinct manners this statement by Gimferrer, who until a few years ago was Rey Rosa's editor at Seix Barral. On the one hand, the quotation takes note of the many connections between Rey Rosa's narrative and Borges's aesthetics and texts. On the other, Gimferrer's quote notes one of the characteristics of Rey Rosa's writing: an awareness of the text as construction and materiality as a testimony to of the permanence and survival ofliterature. Unlike most Guatemalan and, more generally, Central American writers since the 1990s, Rey. Rosa's work has been published by major Spanish presses. When he was represented by the Carmen Balcells literary agency, his stories and novels were published by Seix Barral and Anagrama. In 2010, after he began tobe represented by the Andrew Wylie agency, he has been published in Spanish by the transnational book publisher Alfaguara. Theseries of books from 1992's novella Carcel de arboles (The Pelcari Project, 1997) to Los sordos (2012, The Deaf) confirms Rey Rosa's desire to invent his own tradition, in the manner postulated by Borges in his well-known essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition." Underlying Rey Rosa's work is an attempt to reinvent the novelistic genre. The 12 novels he has published make up a mosaic of forms and genre transgressions. A first group of novels-Carcel de arboles, EI salvador de buques ( 1992, The Ship Savior), and most recently Severina (20 11) -can be described as displacements of fantastic and science fiction narri tives, reminding eine ofboth Borges and Bioy Casares. In Severina we enter a bookish world through the description of scenes, dialogs and characters as peculiar as the bookseller madly in love with Ana Severina Bruguera; a book thief, her inseparable companion; Otto Blanco, a grandfather; and Ahmed, a Maghrebi book merchant. The bookseller's obsession with Ana Severina is the narrative frame for a voyage through an imaginary library of every possible book, perhaps because it could be read as a tribute to Borges and Bowles. This game of mirrors, in which identities can only be expressed obliquely, brings to mind the theme of the double already explored in La orilla africana. Severina not only returns to Rey Rosa's earlier novels but once again makes literature the center ofhis writing. A second group, including 1996's EI cojo bueno (The Good Cripple, 2004), Que me maten si .. . (1997, Let Them Kill Me If... ), Piedras encantadas (2001, Enchanted Stones) and Caballeriza (2007, Stahle), play with detective and noir genres. Others develop the travel or intimate genres, including epistolary forms, as is the case in La orilla africana (1999, The African Shore) and EI tren a Travancore. Cartas indias (2000, The Train to Travancore. Hindu Letters) is closer to autobiography and auto-fiction, as is EI material humano (2009, 137 Human Matter). Caballeriza, published ten years after EI cojo bueno, returns to the ｮｾ＾ｖ･ｬ＠ of intrigue and suspense and to the accurate recreation of a rural world. But Caballeriza does so from within a patriarch's estate, whose birthday brings together various characters. The celebration is disrupted by the accident that ends the life of his most expensive horse. Beyond the in crescendo suspense achieved with a minimalist and transparent language, this novel stands out within Rey Rosa's narrative for proposing a double dimension: the metafiction of the narrator-character-writer, and the self-referential nature of the novel to be written on commission, which the readers have in their hands. This is a multipurpose resource that Rey Rosa employs insistently in subsequent novels, perhaps exemplarily in EI material humano. An additional group, for instance Lo que sofi6 Sebastian ( 1994, What Sebastian Dreamt) and, more recently, Los sordos, are realist narratives, though ones characterized by ambiguity in focalization, including play with criollista (local Hispanic) and indigenist perspectives. Rey Rosa's novels form an open-ended mosaic of forms and hybridities that delineate a delicate and precise exploration through diverse linguistic and imaginative spatial territories. His use of varied locales and settings-Guatemala City, Tangier, an unnamed city in Colombia, New York, Paris, London, Madras, the south of India, the Pacific coast of Guatemala, and the Peten jungle-is more than mere description. Instead, the presence of diverse settings serves to relativize borders, be these national, regional, or continental. Thus, Rey Rosa's narrative is eccentric within a post-national globalized scenario, both in the context of the Guatemalan literary canon, as weil as regarding the dominant modes of writing in Central America. One can, thus, consider him the most universal and cosmopolitan of contemporary Guatemalan writers. He practices what critics have called a "writing without fixed address" (Ortiz Wallner). This is an aspect of his writing that Roberto Bolafto* had already noted in 200_0: "That's how I like to imagine him, with no fixed address, fearless, checking in to cheap hotels, sitting at bus stations in the tropics or in chaotic airports with his Iaptop or a blue notebook into which his curiosity-his entomologist's boldness-calmly unspools" (151-2). Considered one of the most unique Hispanophone voices in contemporary literature, he is frequently associated with his contemporaries Bolafto* and 'Horacio Castellanos Moya•. However, there is no doubt that Rey Rosa's literary relation with the North American author, traveler, and composer Paul Bowles (1910-99) is a counterpart to his previously mentioned ongoing dialogue with Borges. In several interviews (Guerrero, Posadas, Durante), he evokes his apprenticeship with his master Bowles as being as much about literary form as about the ethics of writing: "In addition to the lessons of precision and clarity found in his texts, and what I could learn by translating them, through him I realized that it was possible to organize one's existence, one's life, around the practice of writing" (Posadas). Bowles was, in fact, the translator into English of The Pelcari Project and the young Rey Rosa's first short stories, which were published as The Beggar 's Knife (1985) and Dust on her Tongue (1989). He also welcomed Rey Rosa in Tangier during the early 1980s, when the latter participated in one of the creative writing workshops offered by the former. The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel Central America Thanks to this encounter and the relationship it helped establish he was named Bowles's literary executor after his death in 1999. Traces of the North American's influence are found throughout Rey Rosa's works. Some of these are explicit, for instance in EI material humano, in which Bowles is the main character in one of the anguished protagonist's dreams. Others are less obvious, though far from imperceptible: "I maintain a constant dialogue with Bowles. He was an interlocutor whose words enriched me greatly; and I continue talking with him in imagination and, even more so, in my books" (Durante 6). Throughout his narrative, Rey Rosa, like Borges and Bowles, develops a particular relationship with dreams. According to the Guatemalan, both writers "saw in dreams a sort of antecedent to the creative aesthetic act" (Guerrero 104). Gimferrer, in his preface to La orilla africana, points out the centrality of dreams to the novelist's writing: "In effect, we have the sensation of ethereality by means of a writing simplified to the maximum, in which no word is unnecessary ... almost as if one were living a dream" (Gimferrer, "Prefacio;' 9). Already the title La que sofi6 Sebastian pqints out the centrality of dreams in many of Rey Rosa's works. As mentioned above, this is a short novel written in a realist vein. (Some critics, such as Flores, have even described it as social realist.) It is true that La que sofi6 Sebastian deals with corruption, decadence and the imminent destruction of the environment of the Peten jungle, but, rather than social realist, it is closer to what could be called an oneiric realism with echoes of an ambiguous criollista (local Hispanic) gaze. This combination of the oneiric and regionalism reminds one of other Guatemalan writers, such as Virgilio Rodriguez Macal (1916-64) and Carlos Navarrete (b. 1931). This is a novel that presents a world of hunters, fortune hunters, foreign and Guatemalan tourists, as weil as the inhabitants of the Peten, who struggle for survival in a world that appears to have its laws imposed by a dying nature. Sebastiän, the protagonist, attempts to preserve his enormous land holding in the heart of the Peten, as weil as the archeological site Punta Caracol. Nevertheless, his mission-perhaps misguidedly civilizing-fails. Furthermore, in a moment, somewhere in-between reality and dream, Sebasti<in ends up a victim of the violence prevalent in the Peten jungle. The visual force of the passage probably led the novelist to develop it into a screenplay, written with poet Robert Fitterman, and, then, to direct a movie version of the novel which premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2004. Rey Rosa's film work serves as an example of the importance he gives to artistic collaboration. For instance, the Salvadoran photographer Guillermo Escal6n is the cinematographer of La que sofio Sebastian; and Spanish artist Miquel Barcel6, who designed the book covers of La orilla africana and EI cojo bueno, has a cameo in the movie. In 2004, Rey Rosa received the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Guatemala "Miguel Angel Asturias" (The Miguel Angel Asturias National Book Award). The honor was, to a degree, polemical, since the previous year the Maya-K'iche' poet Humberto Ak'aba had refused it in protest over the ideas expressed by Asturias in his university dissertation "Sociologia guatemalteca: el problema social del indio" ( 1923, "Guatemalan Sociology: The Problem of the Indian''); a racist document which discriminated against the indigenous peoples of Guatemala. Rey Rosa opted to use the money to establish the Premio de Literatura Indigena B'atz', an award that has as its objective promoting Iiterature written in the diverse indigenous languages of Guatemala. As part of the award, the winning texts would be disseminated in both their original version and in Spanish translation. The links with the indigenous world of Guatemala are also explored in his novels. Que me maten si ..., which has interrelated stories set in Guatemala, London and Paris, deals with the legacy of the dirty war that shocked the country by including one of the most brutal events narrated by Rigoberta Menchu in her testimonial text I, Rigoberta Menchu (1982). The search for the evidence of a massacre committed against the indigenous population Ieads three characters-Ernesto, Emilia and Luden Leigh-to the mountains of the Quiche region, one of the most affected by the armed conflict which took place between 1960 and 1996. Open ended, as all of Rey Rosa's novels, Que me maten si ... turns its gaze onto a group of orphans, victims of the system of corruption and impunity which has taken root in the country with the implementation of democracy. In the novel, this system is represented by the character of the retired army officer Pedro Morän. Helplessness and orphanhood, as metaphors for the failure of the state and the absence of one able and willing to guarantee a decent life for its citizens, is also present in Piedras encantadas. In this novel, street children and gang members are presented as the refuse of a profoundly violent society lacking any sense of solidarity. Los sordos deals differently with the ' juxtaposition between urban and rural, Hispanic and indigenous, Guatemala. The novel thus constructs a literary geography of the country: from the city, surrounded by imposing volcanoes, through the Hispanic east, to the indigenous communities settled among impenetrable mountains: By means of the motif of disappearance-of a deaf indigenous boy and of Clara, the daughter of a rich old man from Guatemala City-the novel narrates a plural country. Through Cayetano, Clara's young and naive bodyguard, the reader gets to know the country's daily violence and the faifure of the state's legal system. But the novel also presents the answers to these problems adopted by the indigenous population and their authorities, based on their own traditions and their understanding of justice.. Even in his "Preliminary Note" to the novel, Rey Rosa warns us that his investigation of the millenary Maya system of justice is, at best, rudimentary. Los sordos combines diverse stylistic resources and registers used in earlier texts by the novelist: paratexts, epistolary, dialogues, interior monologues. But, also, despite it being his Iongest novel to date, Los sordos makes constructive use of silence. As Gimferrer writes in his previously cited preface: the novel "sharpens silence until it becomes transparent" (9) . Gustavo Guerrero, referring to an earlier Rey Rosa novel, La orilla africana, makes the point clear: "The sobriety of his writing .. . gives us the measure of his ethical and aesthetic rigor. I believe that no one in Spanish America had previously managed to write such a transparent yet disturbing noveJ:' (103). Conciseness and condensation are characteristic of the totality of Rey Rosa's narrative and give his writings exceptional coherence. As Luis C. Cano notes, Rey Rosa's narrative tends to "examine diverse writings, both in their internal nature, as in their function as an instrument of social investigation" (389) . This is why it does not 138 139 140 The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel surprise the reader that another topic explored in his fiction is that of violence and the possibility and Iimitation implicit in narrating it: 'Tve been interested in narrating violence beginning with my first stories. It's not that I am particularly violent. I believe there is mental or interior violence in everyone" (Posadas). El material humano is a first-person narrative about the visits of a Guatemalan writer to the newly discovered National Police Archive, better known as "The Island:' The narrator-writer is interested in the discovery of the Archive, since he has nothing eise to write about, as he states in the "Introduction:' Once installed in the Archive, the issue of reading and writing the void and horror of repression will be proposed by means of the pre-texts to fiction: index cards, notebooks, and reports. These pre-texts become the fuses that attempt to ignite the search for a meaning that appears inexistent or, in Gerald Prince's terminology, disnarrated. The narrator's research-constantly interrupted and narrated in the fragmentary forms previously mentioned-talks indirectly about Guatemalas historical experience throughout the twentieth century. This archival research into the past is transfigured into an investigation into the destiny of the present. The original inquiry into the life of the hundreds of individuals registered in the archive's index files, and the parallel investigation into his own and his family's future, Iead the protagonist to discover the fact that any human being, including an artist, can be persecuted. In El material humano, Iiterature shows the plurality .of options it has to relate to life and violence. This is the grimace of a writing which originates in a context of dislocation and despair. The novels of Rey Rosa constitute a meta-literary reflection on the impossibility of existence and, finally, force the reader to face the paradox of literature's own existence. Alexandra Ortiz Wallner Works Cited Bolafto, Roberto. Between Parentheses. Trans. Natasha Winner. New York: New Directions, 2011. Cano, Luis C., "Ct:ircel de arboles de Rodrigo Rey Rosa y Ia meta-ciencia-ficci6n:' Revista Iberoamericana, LXXVIII. 238-9 {January-June 2012). 389-403. Durante, Erica. "«Empiezo a escribir escribiendo» Un arsenal de escritura: Rodrigo Rey Rosa entre Borges y BioY:' Revue Recto/Verso 2 (2007), 1-8. Flores, Ronald. "The Enigmatic Drifter:' The Latin American Review of Books 64 (2008). Web. Gimferrer, Pere. "Prefacio:' Rodrigo Rey Rosa. La orilla africana. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999, 9-12. Guerrero, Gustavo. "Conversaci6n·con Rodrigo Rey Rosa:' Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 624 (2002). 103-8. Ortiz Wallner, Alexandra. EI arte de ficcionar: Ia novela contemporanea en Centroamerica. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012. Posadas, Claudia. "Una escritura sin precipitaciones. Entrevista a Rodrigo Rey Rosa:' Espt!culo. Revista de estudios literarios 29 (2005). Web. Central America Rey Rosa, Rodrigo. The Beggar 's Knife. Trans. Paul Bowles. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1985. -Dust on her Tongue. Trans. Paul Bowles. London: Peter Owen Ltd., 1989. -Carcel de arboles!El salvador de buques. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1992. -Lo que sofi6 Sebastian. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1994. -EI cojo bueno. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996. -Que me maten si ... Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1997. -La orilla africana. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999. -Piedras encantadas. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2001. -EI tren a Travancore (Cartas indias). Barcelona:_Mondadori, 2002. -Caballeriza. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2006. -EI material humano. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009. -Severina.' Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011. -Los sordos. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2012. 141