Poéticas de la desolación: comunidad y violencia en las narrativas de Mario Bellatin y Juan Villoro

Abstract

In the works of the Mexican writers Juan Villoro and Mario Bellatin (Villoro´s El testigo, 2004, Bellatin´s Salón de Belleza and Perros héroes, 1999 and 2003) we may find two opposite modes of conceiving of literary practice vis à vis cultural and historical inheritance. Both of these authors take on a long tradition in Mexican literature, which exhibits a permanent reflection on historical violence in Mexican society, before and after the Spanish Conquest. History, then, becomes both the condition of possibility and the subject matter of literature. But between reality and fiction emerges the question about how to represent that violence; that is, how to approach that problematic core, how to relate terror.