Elements of Hauntology in Delirio by Laura Restrepo and Los amantes de Todos los Santos by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Abstract

Elements of Hauntology in Delirio by Laura Restrepo and Los amantes de Todos los Santos by Juan Gabriel Vásquez1 Gregory Utley The phenomena of the ghost and the return of the past have an extensive presence in Spanish American fiction beginning with Pedro de Solís y Valenzuela's El desierto prodigioso y prodigio del desierto (1650), and continuing eminently with Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967), in which the specters of Prudencio Aguilar and Melquíades repeatedly haunt the Buendía family, particularly José Arcadio Buendía.2 More recently, Laura Restrepo in Delirio (2004) and Juan Gabriel Vásquez in Los amantes de Todos Santos (2008) have continued with this tradition and established hauntology (spectrality, the spectral turn) as one of the leading trends in 21st century Colombian letters. Clearly patent in the fiction of Restrepo and Vásquez are the two foremost bifurcations and models of hauntology, a critical approach that gained prominence with the publication of Specters of Marx (1993) by Jacques Derrida. In the Derridean model, the specter (whatever be its nature) is an "invisible visibility," the living-on of the past in the present, which makes established certainties vacillate. Derrida calls on us to try to speak and listen to this nebulous presence, to accept and live with this manifestation (exorcism is not sought); the objective of this undertaking is not to discover or solve any possible secret, but rather to learn from this specter, phantom or ghost about the past and the possibilities of the future. A radically different, earlier and less known model of hauntology for literary analysis was set forth by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, (chiefly in The Shell and The Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis). They see in the phantom (in its haunting) a representation of a past dark secret that is a type of shame and prohibition that haunts subsequent generations. This phantom and its secret must be exorcised if the living are to go forward in a productive fashion.3 These broad processes characterize the architecture of Delirio and Los amantes de Todos Los Santos, and I will explore how this thematic of intruding secrets and ghosts provides fundamentally different conclusions in each work. In Delirio, past secrets are expunged, bringing into question aspects of social determinism and ethical issues (which are tied to the thought of Martha Nussbaum and her conception of literature as a working through of a set of moral and ethical difficulties leading to modification for the good of all, [End Page 29] and the "event" of Alain Badiou, in which a situation is seen from a different perspective thus leading to new visions and approaches). In Los amantes de Todos los Santos specters, phantoms, and secrets cannot be accommodated in the present, a progression that is affected by the violence of Eros. The general background and exploration of Pablo Escobar's reign of terror in the last two decades of the 20th century gives rise to a dialogic structure of Delirio that focuses upon differing aspects of the pronounced psychosis of Agustina Londoño. Although mostly in the present, one narrative strand regresses to the times of Nicolás Portulinus, Agustina's grandfather, who is described as "ya muy entrado en las turbulencias de la demencia" (21). Portulinus' insanity will haunt Agustina; it is only owing to the persistence of her husband Aguilar that "secrets" are unveiled, thus exposing many moral substrates. For Martha Nussbaum, literature is one of the principal means of ethical theorizing, dating from the times of antiquity. Indeed, she argues that the contemplation of value (ethics) was central to Greek letters: "epic and tragic poets were widely assumed to be the central ethical thinkers and teachers of Greece; nobody thought of their work as less serious, less aimed at truth, than the speculative prose treatises of historians and philosophers" (12). Literature becomes a search for the truth as each reader ponders the text's ethical questions against her own ethical experience and institutions—the novel is a moral achievement and the well-lived life is a work of literary art (37). Literature "speaks about us […]; it searches for patterns...