Parody and Testimonio in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez and El Asco
doi.org/10.31641/PLMJ3750
Upasana Thakkar
Yorkville UniversityPublication
Abstract
This article explores two post-war Central American fictional works, Insensatez (2004) and El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador (1997) by Horacio Castellanos Moya, to see them as a sort of postmodern parody (as argued by Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Parody) of the classic testimonio. In Latin America, the testimonio emerged as a genre in the seventies and eighties during the civil wars, reflecting on the injustices suffered by Indigenous people, the struggles of campesinos, and the working class to attain their rights. Nevertheless, with the end of civil wars and dictatorships, we have also allegedly witnessed the end of testimonio as a genre; John Beverley stated: “the moment of testimonio is over.” (“The Real Thing” 77). However, testimonio as a mode of reading literature (that existed even before it was classified as a genre in the North), which was thought to be over, shows sparks of its presence in contemporary Central American fiction. Thus, these fictional works parody the testimonio as a genre – which means they subvert the genre's key aspects while drawing on them to describe post-war narratives from the region.
Keywords
Testimonio, parody, post-modernism, Central America, post-civil-war fiction.
