Lost-body writing in Latin America's contemporary historical novel (Edgardo Rodriguez Julia, Puerto Rico, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru)

Latin America's new historical novel contrasts with the historical novel of previous periods in its more complex conception of the formation of individual and collective identity. This dissertation explores how the contemporary historical novel's expanded formulation of identity—which encompasses an individual's bodily experiences as well as mental processes—transforms conventional notions of cultural interaction and history, and confronts the issue of who participates in the process of historical change. Most importantly, the body's emergence in the discourse of the new historical novel signals its desire to explore ethical concerns about writing and its relationship to power. Lost-body writing, a term coined but never explicitly defined by Michel de Certeau, describes the new historical novel's ambiguous attitude toward language, writing and the bodies it inscribes, while it points to an ethics of writing, an alternative to more violent forms of discourse.; Chapter 1 establishes a theoretical framework with which to study textual bodies in the new historical novel. I analyze The Practice of Everyday Life in which de Certeau argues that discourses of power, such as historiography, must suppress bodies in order to shape the knowledge inherent in the activities of individuals into meaningful patterns that are productive and reproducible. At the same time, de Certeau's text shows how the reemergence of the body can destabilize and subvert these discourses of power, and in doing so, return agency to the individual. De Certeau's Practice provides this study with a broad overarching theory with which to articulate the relationship between body, writing and violence; however, the analytical chapters that follow also engage the thinking of other body theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Elaine Scarry.; Chapter 2 examines how the emergence of the carnival body in Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá's La renuncia del héroe Baltasar (1974) destabilizes hegemonic historical discourse and clears a way for new interpretations of Puerto Rico's past, free from the gaze of the colonizer. Chapter 3 studies (dis)embodiment in characterization and in the creation of fiction in Mario Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo (1981) as it undermines the dichotomy barbaric/civilized and asserts the necessity of awareness of the body to moral action. Chapter 4 explores the narrator's construction of self through the process of writing the history of the cannibal other in Juan José Saer's El entenado (1983). This metafictional narrative also examines the human impulse to “write” and the violent nature of writing as it inscribes bodies—our own and other's—to produce knowledge and to endow our existence with meaning. The Conclusions summarize the way the emergence of the body in each of the three novels undermines traditional notions of self, history and writing. I argue that this reemergence of the body signifies a change in the conception of language, and a restored belief in its capacity to represent and act on the material world, even as it admits the inevitability of writing's violence and alteration.