ELENA GARRO, A DESHORA: FIGURAS LITERARIAS DE LA ABYECCIÓN

Abstract

The massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968 was the most bloody incident of Diaz Ordaz’s government in Mexico and promoted a severe process of persecution and repression of the student movement. One of its consequences was the suspicion of betrayal by Elena Garro of the movement’s intellectual authors. Since then, Garro embodied an abject character of collaboration, in constant harassment, leading to her exile during twenty years.

This paper considers the implications of the accusation and the diagnosis of insanity that accompanies it. For some critics this insanity is redeemed in her literary work, which in this operation achieves prominence; but the insanity can be thought of as irreducible. Garro’s delirious gaze doesn’t sublimate the trauma, but repeats again and again the political violence, with harassed, exposed and out of place characters, in situations of daily totalitarianism. Figures of betrayal emerge in her histories, involving characters and knowledge outside the language of the official left (animal, children, women, the indigenous), marked by their helplessness and questioning the premises of political parties.