A Postwar Perversion of Testimonio in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El asco

Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya offers a provocative example of postwar cynicism in his 1997 novel El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador. By telling the story of Edgardo Vega, an emigrant who returns to El Salvador in the mid-1990s after living in Canada for eighteen years, El asco represents the mass exodus of Salvadorans during and after the country’s Civil War (1979–92). Because Vega recounts his story in an oral monologue, his narration recalls the testimonial project of the revolutionary years; however, Vega’s narcissistic story distorts the testimonio to capture the disillusion and contradiction of the postwar years. Through a perversion of the testimonio’s form and content and also by parodying the post-World War II Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, El asco, meaning disgust or repulsion, criticizes El Salvador’s postwar reality and imagines the Salvadoran transnational community. Furthermore, the use of fiction allows Castellanos Moya to denounce the testimonio’s claim on authenticity without abandoning its social project.