This week’s section of my self selected book was really short, like 30 pages short. I read it in like 40 minutes by a friend’s fireplace. It was very pleasant; made me happy. This contrasts a lot with my frantic, “i might not finish reading this before class” experience of reading last Bolaño’s section. Following a little bit on my question about reading last blog I think that the context and experience of reading also affect how that section is percived. But I digress.
I’ve been told several times by Jon to actually talk about the book in these blogs. So I wanted to explore a little the idea of horror in Mariana Enriquez’s book. This question has been in my mind since the start, as is quite common that Latin American horror takes the position where the really horrific things are not the supernatural happenings or the gorey descriptions of cults and magic, but the real, tremendously violent events that stain our history crimson. This section, a little chronicle by a journalist, is a “entremés”, a break in the “main plot” of the book. She is investigating a newly revealed “fosa común”, a mass grave used during the military dictatorship. Here she meets with a person linked to one of the previous chapter, a mother of a child we saw disappearing in a non-natural horrific incident. The descriptions to the very real bones and violence does not stray for previous writing from the author, with the scenes being raw, direct, without anything covered by euphemisms. The bones, scattered, tangled, as they are uncovered are the real terrors the character suffer, those that exist in the world outside the book, in our very real, fleshy world. The journalist reflects on what horrors do we chose to focus on, implying heavily that the (in her eyes) fantastical horrors can be a cover, somehow, to the real world: “La imaginación del público se enamora de ciertos horrores y es indiferente a otros” [The public’s imagination falls for certain horrors and doesn’t care for others] (501). Even when the conversation turns supernatural, the journalist thinks that these are just metaphors used to process the very real trauma experienced: “Las metáforas que usaba para comprender la tragedia de su vida me conmovían, pero también me estremecían, especialmente esa especie de delirio místico sobre los poderes de la selva” [The metaphors she used to process her life’s tragedy moved me, but they also shook me, specially that mystical delirium on the jungle’s powers] (505). Empathy, however, is still present. The journalist doesn’t see this as a crazy woman. The journalist sees trauma and is able to relate to the horrors experienced by the interviewee being able to imagine the pain and terror that rules the land:
Aunque podía entender por qué podía enloquecer en ese sentido. Si uno viaja en auto por un camino que atraviesa la espesura, en Misiones, la selva es una prisión con muros a ambos lados, la tierra roja es un río de lava. Ahí, cerca de la laguna, la selva parecía más alejada. A lo mejor por eso elegían el pueblo los familiares, por su apertura. Imaginé los cuerpos en camiones, atravesando caminos embarrados, arroajdos a un pozo, los pájaros [506] nocturnos callados por el ruido de los motores. Había visto, más temprano, un altar a San la Muerte. Y el primer día, cuando llegábamos con el auto desde Posadas, el de San Güesito, un niño muerto y venerado, un animita, como los llaman en Chile. Pensé en los huesos secos que deja el calor, el calor que come la carne hasta que no queda nada.
[Though I could understand how she could go insane in that sense. If one is to drive a path that goes through the thicket, in Misiones, the jungle is a prison with walls on both sides, the red dirt is a river made of lava. There, near the lagoon, the jungle seemed to back up. Perhaps that’s why the families chose that town, for its openness. I imagined the corpses in trucks, traversing mud-ridden dirt roads, thrown into a pit, the nocturnal birds silenced by the motors. I had seen, earlier in the day, an altar to San la Muerte. And the first day, as we arrived by car from San Posadas, San Güesito’s, a dead and worshiped child, an animita, as they are called in Chile. I thought of the dry bones that the heat produces, the heat that eats the flesh until nothing is left] (505,6)
Anyways, what do you think of horror in a world that everyday seems more horrific than the stories we used to fear?