Posthuman Narrative Creation in Mónica Ojeda’s "Nefando" and Carmen Boullosa’s "La novela perfecta"

• In Event: Figuraciones de lo contemporáneo en América Latina

Abstract

When considering 21st-century Latin American literature and its defining qualities, the question of contemporary technology and its permeating influence is impossible to ignore. We are increasingly seeing the ways technology shapes the literary world as authors experiment with the digital production and circulation of texts and explore the implications of our shifting digital landscape. Taking as a point of departure theories of the posthuman body articulated by Katherine Hayles and Iván Mejía, who see the convergence of the human body with the non-human as the present and future of humanity, this paper considers the function of various technologies in contemporary Latin American literature. Using Mónica Ojeda’s Nefando (2016) and Carmen Boullosa’s La novela perfecta (2006) as primary examples, I argue that this posthuman experience of fusing the human and machine is an integral part of self-expression and trauma navigation. In Nefando, the collaborative creation of a videogame is a way for characters to reconcile experiences of sexual abuse. La novela perfecta, which explores future possibilities rather than dealing with the past, also examines ways that technology can be employed in the production of art. Boullosa fashions a machine that is able to recreate from the “author’s” imagination a total sensory experience for the “reader,” thus describing a sort of posthuman translation that bypasses the process of articulating a written narrative. Ultimately, these two posthuman novels bring together the mind and body with the catalyst of the technological to imagine a new approach to meaningful narrative creation.

Author

• Sarah K Booker, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill