Justice on Trial: Conceptions and Executions of Justice in Dalton’s "Taberna y otros lugares" and Pacheco’s "El silencio de la luna"

• In Event: Roque Dalton

Abstract

This presentation will engage the crisis of state-sanctioned justice that both Roque Dalton and Jose Emilio Pacheco reveal in their works. I draw from Ernst Behler’s Irony and the Discourse of Modernity, where the author cites Jean-François Lyotard who characterizes the postmodern epoch by the loss of credibility that foundational discourses that give meaning to life suffered. As these reason-based metanarratives become unreliable, so does reason and all of the concepts that derive from it: order, law, and justice. Both, Dalton’s poem “La segura mano de Dios” and Pacheco’s “El Gran Inquisidor,” participate in the crisis of legitimation that characterizes postmodern thought through the destabilization of the discourse of justice and consequently, in the case of Pacheco, order and the law. Dalton accomplishes this disruption through the narrative of the man who murdered the Salvadoran dictator General Martínez, revealing the irony of the way in which justice is carried out by the State. Pacheco conversely presents a scene similar to that of Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, in which the accused stands before a judge, unsure of how they got there or what they are being accused of. The figure of the judge embodies the foundational ideology of reason, one that is found to be lacking when its inner workings are revealed. Ultimately, each poet demonstrates that the delegitimization of state-sanctioned justice needs no external intervention because it was flawed from the moment of its conception.

Author

• Samari Y Batres