The Modern Morality of Melodrama in El buscador de Cabezas de Antonio Ortuño

• In Event: Melodramatic Depictions of Violence After The Boom

Abstract

Antonio Ortuño’s El buscador de Cabezas (2006) presents us with a narrative voice that struggles to find a moral structure on which to build its self-image. The context of this moral crisis is given by a dystopic society where the characteristic traits of modernity (individuality, mobility and cultural discontinuity) are violently dismantled by a new totalitarian ideology introduced by “Los Republicanos”. Alex Faber, the protagonist, presents himself as a mercenary journalist unable to organize properly the effects of the systematic violence that begins to ravage his nameless country. By combining dystopic narrative tropes and a melodramatic mode of representation, this novel problematizes the moral identity of the protagonist. At the same time, such procedure emphasizes the overflowing excess of the represented world as well as the inconsistencies of the moral system that struggles to make sense of it.
Ortuño’s novel is part of a constellation of literary works (such as 2666, En busca de Klingsor, Cola de Lagartija, Las Bestias, among others) rejecting the historical and spatial location of their conflicts in order to emphasize the moral struggle of their lettered protagonists. Together, these novelspropose a clear questioning to the totalitarian modes of morality, but they also raise the issue of the privatization of morality and its problematic relationship with public forms of writing during the last two decades of Latin American cultural history. Therefore, the first part of my presentation deals with the identification of the common traits to a series of novels that give rise to a new form of melodramatic sensibility, focusing on the problem of a manifold morality. Secondly, I will focus on the representation of the dystopic society of El Buscador de Cabezas and its particular questioning of the journalist’s moral duty and consequent failure to fulfill it.

Author

• Juan Garcia Oyervides