Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Rodrigo Rey Rosa’S "El Material Humano" And The Labyrinth Of Postwar Guatemala: On Ethics, Truth, And Justice, Nanci Buiza

Spanish Faculty Works

Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano (2009) grapples with the consequences of Guatemala’s violent past by probing into a once-secret police archive that brings into the present the sufferings of the past. This article demonstrates how the novel unsettles our easy assumptions regarding the relation between documentary truth and the notions of justice and reconciliation. By charting the protagonist’s intellectual and emotional conflicts, I argue that his crisis ultimately serves a homeopathic function that makes possible a special mode of ethical engagement, one which brings into fruitful tension two distinct modes of cognition—thought and affect—and is thus able to register …