La literatura sobre perpetradores: Hijo de la guerra, de Ricardo Raphael

Literature About Perpetrators: Hijo de la guerra by Ricardo Raphael

Abstract

The extreme violence experienced in Mexico in recent decades has transformed literary repertoires. Narrative works increasingly address this violence from the perspective of victims, witnesses, and, to a lesser extent, perpetrators, the latter providing a substantial angle for understanding the ways in which mass murders are reproduced. Ricardo Raphael's Hijo de la guerra (2019) is a novel that tells the story of a Zetas hitman. This article analyzes the interrelation of the text's ethical, aesthetic, and political dimensions, as well as the relationship between fiction, truth, and reality, characteristics of both post-autonomous literature and the poetics of violence . This approach allows us to analyze, at a textual level, the dilemmatic dimension of the literature of extreme violence and, at an extratextual level, the factors that permeate the life of a person who ends up being both, victim and victimizer in the context of an extremely violent society.