“Global Positioning Systems”
April 4 – 7, 2013
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Recalculating: Locating the Politics of Literary Form in Latin American Literature Today
Aesthetics of Failure in Santiago Gamboa’s Plegarias Nocturnas
Aesthetic production in the works by Colombian writer Santiago Gamboa is born from violent dislocation and the disorienting experience of loss of place. His prose, obsessed with crime, death and desperate characters translates the contemporary odyssey of exiles, and draws new cartographies emerging from a country plagued by political and economic violence. Indeed, it relies on this very dislocation for the possibility of meaning: characters are uprooted from their place of birth and yet are able to create meaning only in the most foreign of places and circumstances.
This paper explores the ways in which Gamboa’s latest novel Plegarias Nocturas (2012) describes the loss of place and the search for meaning in contemporary Colombia as it follows two exiled siblings crisscrossing Asia and Europe in search of one another, driven by filial love. Through loss and exile, Gamboa challenges the spatial framework of the nation-state and suggests that domestic circumstances –both political and familial – extend far beyond traditional borders. With the oppressive yet silent violence of President Uribe’s presidency as background and the world of international organized crime as part of the plot, Gamboa redeems and aestheticizes the siblings fractured experience through a writer-narrator who (re)constructs the beautiful tragedy of their failed quest.
