Polemos and History, Narrative and Image in Sergio Ramírez’s "Mil y una muertes"

• In Event: Inclusion, Justice, History

Abstract

In an essay published in 1985, the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, who had recently been elected Vice President of the country, describes Central America as a terrain afflicted by an almost congenital violence. The forces of destruction and conflict have inflicted their wrath on this region since its integration into the geopolitical and economic West, and have short-circuited every effort to dialecticize pain, suffering, and loss—i.e., turn them into conduits to progress, development, or revolution. In this paper I propose that the same image of a non- or infra-dialectical excess informs Ramírez’s 2005 novel Mil y una muertes. Set in 1987, the novel is narrated by a Nicaraguan statesman who, during a visit to Poland, finds himself attending an exhibition of the works of an unknown early 20th century Nicaraguan expat photographer named Castellón, whose father was a Nicaraguan diplomat based on Europe. Living in Poland in the late 1930s, Castellón witnesses the Nazi invasion together with the murder of his daughter and son-in-law; his photography from this period aims to capture through image the metamorphosis of European civilization into the barbarism and terror of war and genocide. Ramírez’s literary juxtaposition of Castellón’s own experiences during WWII with those of his father, who fifty years earlier had sought to convince European powers to invest in building a transoceanic canal through Nicaragua, provides a double optic for looking at narrative and image as artistic forms of reflection on the undialecticizable excesses of history.

Author

• Patrick E Dove, Indiana University