Of mirrors and distortions: forms of (self-)representation in Insensatez, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Insensatez (2004) by Horacio Castellanos Moya is a novel narrated in the first person that poses a self-conscious rhetorical exercise. The narrator's daily encounters with violence and murder give rise to a narrative ego that is in permanent refraction and distortion. This paper examines Castellanos's text via literature of the self and the field of literary theory. It focuses on the many autofictional turns in Insensatez, which have yet to be studied with reference to post-testimony narrative. The main goal of this paper is to show how this new fusion of autofiction and post-testimony narrative takes shape in the novel. This formalist approach is suitable because it allows for the intersection of memory and grief discourse. The fluctuations of narrative voice in the text problematize the task of the witness, but they also recuperate it by reprocessing victims' pain, which is filtered through a number of distorting elements. The paper will address three specific areas: 1) mirroring strategies that refract the fictional self and the representation of reality; 2) strategies that distort the fictional projection of the author; and 3) a carnivalesque degradation which, from a rhetorical and morphological point of view, dominates this text by Castellanos Moya.