Memory and fiction in Rodrigo Rey Rosa's El material humano: The impossible representation of violence in Guatemala

This paper analyzes Rodrigo Rosa's novel El material humano (2009), especially its representation of violence as seen through the author's research on Guatemalan 20th century History. In the novel, the main character searches into the causes of violence in his country, trying to understand the origin of the conflict. However, his work ends in a triple failure: a cognitive, an aesthetic and an ethical one. That failure, as this paper proposes, represents a whole series of stories about the tragedy of historical memory in Latin America and Spain.