Facing the Pain of the Others: Rodrigo Rey Rosas' Literary Proposals

Abstract

In his essay about the war photos untitled Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag argues that a person who look a real act of cruelty without being able to intervene in order to heal the pain of the victims becomes a perverse spectator. Interested in exploring the mechanisms of the countless forms of violence, the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa looks for the most suitable place to regard the pain without going into the cynical sensationalism neither the accusing lament. His literary proposals, made from a post-national position, presents different existential attitudes, which have as a constant an ambivalence regarding the native country, Guatemala. We will comment the stances sketched it the novels Lo que soñó Sebastián (1994), El cojo bueno (1996), El material humano (2009) and finally Fábula asiática (2016), in which it is pointed out the possibility to create a place like home for the humanity on the global level, even that path to that utopia supposes a previous destructive phase.