The Allegorical Machine: Politics, History, and Memory in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El sueño del retorno

This article looks at how Paul de Man’s work on allegory and temporality can help to shed light on literary treatments of political violence, dictatorship, historical trauma and memory. Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2013 novel El sueño del retorno [The Dream of My Return] explores the internal contradictions and limits found in one of the most influential themes in the literature of post-dictatorship in Latin America: the literary deployment of memory as a step toward truth and justice. At the same time the novel also proposes a subtle but profound critique of the legacy of militancy today.