Trapped in the Labyrinth: Postwar Guatemala and the Challenge of Literary Representation in Rodrigo Rey Rosa's El material humano

How should one write fiction about the torture and massacre of civilian populations? How to convey the horror of genocidal war without diminishing or trivializing it on the one hand, and without overwhelming readers and leaving them desensitized on the other? How does one write about the violence and pervasive fear that persist when a peace settlement does little to address the economic inequality, social injustice, and official impunity that led to war? These are not hypothetical questions for writers attempting to represent in fiction Guatemala's recent history of conflict. Between the 1954 coup that inaugurated more than 30 years of military dictatorship and the signing of the 1996 peace accords that ended the war between the Guatemalan state and the URNG guerrilla movement, some 200,000 people were killed, most of them during the worst years of the war in the early 1980s. According to Guatemala, Memory of Silence, the 1998 human rights report of the UN-sponsored Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH, or Commission for Historical Clarification), government forces were responsible for 93% of those killed in the war, and 83% of the dead were Maya, far out of proportion to their share of the Guatemalan population (CEH, 85-86).

Several recent novels have struggled with the fictional representation of Guatemala's twentieth century history of state terror and its consequences: Mario Roberto Morales's Señores bajo los árboles: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de los indios (1994), Horacio Castellanos Moya's Insensatez (2004), and Rodrigo Rey Rosa's El material humano (2010).¹ Though each novel adopts a different approach to the representation of their common subject, they all have at least one thing besides subject matter in common: the fiction's considerable reliance on non-fiction materials included in the text. This dependence on nonfiction suggests the inadequacy of fiction alone (at least as felt by these authors) for the representation of the extreme violence and cruelty suffered by hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, particularly the Maya, during the war.²

This article analyzes Rey Rosa's El material humano, a novel constructed around the Guatemalan state's police files, dating back to the late nineteenth century, on those it arrested, tortured, or killed for political dissent as well as criminal acts. The existence of such files had been officially denied until the accidental discovery in 2005 of the National Police's archive, which had apparently been hidden a decade earlier when the 1996 peace accords mandated the replacement of the National Police by the National Civil Police. Although the name changed, the "new" police force remained as corrupt as the one it replaced, and it is no surprise that the National Police archive was discovered on one of the bases of the National Civil Police. In El material humano, a writer named Rodrigo Rey Rosa visits the archive with the intent of writing a novel based on information drawn from it. El material humano is in effect a novel about Rey Rosa's failure to write a novel about the material in the National Police files, a failure that is overdetermined by the persistent corruption, official impunity, and pervasive fear in postwar Guatemala, which turn out to be the novel's real theme.

In contrast to the testimonial material that Señores bajo los árboles and Insensatez incorporate into fiction in order to represent the war and its consequences, the non-fiction material in El material humano, drawn from the Guatemalan state's National Police archive, is of a different order.³ If testimonio is the victim's account of marginalization and state terror, the police archive is something like the reverse: the state's own, self-justifying version of the repression it practiced. The police archive stands in contrast to testimonio in another way as well. While testimonial subjects, as victims of state violence, seek to communicate their experience, the Guatemalan state has gone to great efforts to withhold information about its crimes. El material humano is therefore inevitably an account, related...