Reflective Memories of Multi-Causal Violence in Colombia: Processes of Remembering and Intertextuality in Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s ‘Canciones para el incendio’

Abstract

In the collection of short stories ‘Canciones para el incendio’, Juan Gabriel Vásquez stages different memories and specifically uses in the last story the example of the protagonist’s story, which occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, to address the violence against nonconformist women silenced in Colombian cultural memory. First, this study examines how the complex story is narrated, between two distinct dimensions of collective memory, by combining different literary registers of a rhetoric of memory conceived by Astrid Erll. By exposing which narrative mode predominates, the aim is to show the consequences of this on the effect of the narration, especially in relation to collective memory. Its classification as a tale related in reflexive mode encourages reflection on the construction of cultural memory and the recognition of the need for a rewriting with the incorporation of previously forgotten memories and perspectives. In relation to this, the analysis focuses on the role played by intertextuality and its central functions. Finally, it points out how the violence that manifests itself in the narrated world directly and indirectly, according to Johan Galtung’s classification, is based on patriarchal (colonialist) structures, conservative ideologies, and fundamentalist religious discourses.