Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature

By Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez

The Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature traces the aesthetic and political development of the Gothic genre in Colombia. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez shows how, in the hands of Colombian writers and filmmakers, Gothic tropes are taken to their extremes to reflect particularly Colombian issues, like the ongoing armed conflict in the country since the 1950s as various left wing guerillas, government factions and paramilitary groups escalated violence. In this context, collectives such as the “Cali group” challenge both the centrality of US and European Gothics as well as the centrality of Bogota-centered perspectives of Colombian politics and conflict. The book demonstrates how writers and filmmakers transform the European and American Gothic to show genealogical links between colonization, imperialism and domestic elites’ maintenance of social inequalities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785278334

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Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature

ANTHEM STUDIES IN GOTHIC LITERATURE

Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature incorporates a broad range of titles that undertake rigorous, multi-disciplinary and original scholarship in the domain of Gothic Studies and respond, where possible, to existing classroom/module needs. The series aims to foster innovative international scholarship that interrogates established ideas in this rapidly growing field, to broaden critical and theoretical discussion among scholars and students, and to enhance the nature and availability of existing scholarly resources.

Series Editor

Carol Margaret Davison – University of Windsor, Canada

Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature

Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950041

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-831-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-831-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Cover credit: Plaza lourdes in Chapinero centro

Bogota, By Nizz / Shutterstock.com

Contents

Introduction: The Gothic in Colombia and in Latin America

1. Gothic Pioneers: José Asunción Silva and José Joaquín Vargas Valdés

Gothic Poetry in Silva

The Gothic Chronicle in Vargas Valdés

2. Gothic in the Hot Lands

Caleño Neologisms: Caliwood and the Tropical Gothic

Saudó, laberinto de almas: Afro-Colombian Witches and the Gothic

3. Colombian Negrótico and the Gothic in the Mountains

Literary Negrótico: Mario Mendoza and Hugo Chaparro Valderrama

El páramo: Horrors of the Conflict at High Altitude

4. Beyond the Regions

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

THE GOTHIC IN COLOMBIA AND IN LATIN AMERICA

Colombia is not the first place that comes to mind when thinking of the Gothic genre.¹ For the most romantic, Colombia is a tropical paradise where it is always sunny; for those less familiar with the country, it is synonymous with little more than drugs and violence. Even for Colombians, Gothic is not a genre through which the country is frequently narrated, in contrast to the omnipresent magical realism, in its variant masterfully used by Gabriel García Márquez.² Perhaps the most visible space in which the Gothic is currently articulated in the country is in the Goth subculture, an important urban tribe in the cold and rainy city of Bogotá. However, Gothic as a literary genre has been practiced in Colombia since the nineteenth century with pieces written in parallel to those produced by European and U.S. gothic authors. By the 1980s, a distinct Gothic variant—the Tropical Gothic—emerged in Colombia and in the larger region of Latin America.

The idea that the Gothic has flourished and continues to do so in Colombia, and in Latin America more broadly, is still novel in cultural and literary studies on the continent. It is not until the first decade of the twenty-first century that critics and scholars started tracing the presence of the Gothic in Latin America. Argentine scholar and poet María Negroni directly connects Latin American fantastic literature with the Gothic genre in her 2009 book Galería fantástica (Fantastic Gallery). In the prologue of her book, she regards Latin American fantastic literature as drifting in the wake of gothic literature (9, my translation), linking the two movements and their productions. For Negroni, the Gothic is an important influence on Latin American fantastic literature, whereas the Gothic itself is not a genre or a mode that has been practiced on the continent. It is not until the second decade of the twenty-first century that studies written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English began to claim a Latin American Gothic as such and trace its cultural products.

Texts in Spanish and Portuguese pioneered these studies: to the already mentioned Galería fantástica we can add the book Gótico Tropical: O sublime e o demoníaco en O Guarani (Tropical Gothic: The Sublime and the Demonic in O Guarani, 2010) by Brazilian scholar Daniel Serravalle de Sá. Originally written in Portuguese, this book analyzes how the nineteenth-century novel O Guarani by Brazilian writer José de Alencar uses and reinscribes gothic images within the Brazilian context. Serravalle de Sá studies images of houses and castles in the novel in relation to the phantasmagorias of colonial and national projections (20). This rigorous study of the work of Alencar and the Brazilian Gothic is one of the first places where the term Tropical Gothic is used as an academic category of analysis of the Gothic developed in the American continent. Serravalle de Sá continued his research on the Brazilian Gothic in multiple publications as well as in his work at the Núcleo Interdiciplinar de Estudos Góticos (Interdisciplinary Center of Gothic Studies) of the Federal University of Santa Catarina. In Brazil, other scholars such as Amanda Muniz and Júlio França have also advanced the study of Latin American and Brazilian Gothic in academic publications and symposia, perceiving the Brazilian Gothic as a mode that the Latin American Gothic tradition incorporates (Meireles da Silva et al. 7).

Ecos góticos en la novela del Cono Sur (Gothic Echoes in the Novel of the Southern Cone, 2013) by Argentine scholar Nadina Olmedo is one of the first area studies written in Spanish on the Latin American Gothic—in this case, on the Southern Cone Gothic. In her book, Olmedo conducts a detailed analysis of the gothic literature and cinema of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, marking the difference between the fantastic and the Gothic. Olmedo’s work opens spaces to think about the specificity of the Gothic in Latin America and its points of connection and divergence with the fantastic genre, which Horacio Quiroga, Julio Cortázar, Maria Luisa Bombal, and other Southern Cone writers interested in the Gothic often practiced. Ecos góticos is also one of the first books in Latin American criticism where South American Gothic literature and cinema are analyzed in parallel, as cultural products related to each other and dependent on the sociopolitical contexts in which they are developed.

In 2015, Olmedo, along with Argentine scholar Osvaldo Di Paolo, published Negrótico, a study on the convergence of the Gothic and the noir, a literary mutation (16) that the authors denominated negrótico. In their book, Olmedo and Di Paolo analyze twentieth-century literary and cinematographic pieces (mainly from the Southern Cone) that masterfully combine tropes and characters of the Gothic with recognizable noir storylines. In these narratives, vampires and zombies interact with gritty detectives in dark urban settings in cities such as Buenos Aires or Santiago. In Spanish and published in Spain, this book was an innovation within Latin American gothic studies. Negrótico recognizes the existence of gothic novels and films from the Southern Cone and describes a hybrid genre that enables a more complex analysis of the Gothic produced in Latin America specifically. Later in this book, I will show how the negrótico also works in Colombian urban literature, especially in novels that are set in the rainy city of Bogotá.

In my 2017 book Selva de fantasmas: El gótico en la literatura y el cine latinoamericanos (Jungle of Ghosts: The Gothic in Latin American Literature and Cinema), I also support the existence of a Latin American Gothic independent of Latin American fantastic literature and magical realism. I trace its origins and early developments to texts written during the nineteenth century in multiple countries on the continent, from Mexico to Argentina—many of these texts were created in parallel to iconic works of the European or US Gothics. I draw from Colombian artists Álvaro Mutis and Carlos Mayolo’s term Tropical Gothic to theorize the Tropicalization of the Gothic as the mechanism of transforming the Gothic in Latin American contexts. I suggest Latin American writers and filmmakers put European and US Gothic out of place, situating gothic monsters and horrors in specific Latin American cultural and political contexts. In my study, Tropicalization refers to the mechanism that transports and transforms Northern Gothic tropes in ways specific to Latin America as a region, in particular, highlighting the genre’s capacity for constructing the Other as monstrous as well as the artificiality of that Othering. As I argue in Selva de fantasmas, the Tropicalization of the Gothic allows a constant movement between homage and criticism of the Northern Gothic. This alternating between respect and poking fun prevents the transported Gothic from stagnating either in idealizations of a homogenous globalized culture or in nationalisms. Tropicalization of the Gothic is a process that puts Eurocentric representations out of place while also challenging a nativist adherence to Latin American narratives and representations seen as traditional.

As a result of the collaboration of Latin American academics and English-speaking scholars interested in the Gothic, English language compilations theorizing the Latin American Gothic began to appear in the 2010s. As stated by Argentine scholar Juan Pablo Dabove, the profusion of texts related to the Latin American Gothic echoes "the relevance of Gothic in the global academic scene, which has led to the increase of conferences, panels, symposia, collections dedicated to the subject, and the creation of the International Gothic Association, responsible for the international conference and the publication of Gothic Studies Journal" (202). Affiliated with universities in Great Britain, this scholarly journal and others such as Studies in Gothic Fiction have been bringing together gothic researchers from all over the world, including Latin America. In the 2014 special issue of Studies in Gothic Fiction, Mexican scholar Enrique Ajuria Ibarra asserted that the use of Gothic motifs in Latin American art, literature and film is far from impossible. On the contrary, as a receptacle of various cultural and social discourses, the region can accommodate elements from foreign and local beliefs and expressions (6). This statement has been reinforced with various examples and from multiple academic spaces during the past decade. In their variations, the goal is to define a literary and filmic corpus of the Latin American Gothic, trace its interactions with other forms of the global Gothic, and analyze its ability to engage with sociopolitical situations on the continent.

Apart from the Studies in Gothic Fiction special issue, one of the most significant compilations on the topic is Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited in 2018 by Puerto Rican scholar Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Spanish scholar Inés Ordiz. In the prologue, Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz assert that their interest in the Gothic follows the fact that the Gothic has undeniably infiltrated the Latin American literary tradition. Authors belonging to the Latin American canon, such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Adolfo Bioy Casares, have been (largely, in some cases) analyzed in gothic terms (5). In this sense, the editors do an excellent job compiling texts from academics who research Latin American Gothic cultural products in North, Central, and South America as well as the Caribbean. Based on the premise that the Gothic in Latin America is very much rooted in local realities and histories, and often linked to different processes of modernization (7), many of the essays included in Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture relate to the idea of Latin America itself as a gothic space.

This approach aligns with Latin American critical studies that explore how America was constructed as the space of monstrosity for the European colonial imaginaries—and it continues to be constructed as a space of monstrosity in the US imaginary. This is the case in studies such as Carlos Jáuregui’s Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina (Canibalia: Cannibalism, Calibanism, Cultural Anthropophagy and Consumption in Latin America, 2008); Persephone Braham’s From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America (2015); Mabel Moraña’s El monstruo como máquina de guerra (The Monster as War Machine, 2017); and Daniel Serravalle de Sá and Marcio Markendorf’s Monstruosidades estética e política (Aesthetic and Political Monstrosities, 2019). These critics analyze how the idea and image of the monster, fundamental in the Gothic, is used as a political weapon in the processes of colonial exclusion of the American Other. If American Otherness is presented from the beginning as monstrous, the exclusion and exploitation of its inhabitants and its resources become a horrific humanitarianism.

Other important compilations such as Oscuras latitudes: Una cartografía de los estudios góticos (Dark Latitudes: A Cartography of Gothic Studies, 2017), edited by Costa Rican scholars Isle Bussing López and Anthony López Get; Doubles and Hybrids in Latin American Gothic (2019), edited by Antonio Alcalá González and Ilse Bussing López; O Gótico em Literatura, Artes, Mídia (The Gothic in Literature, Arts, and Media, 2019), edited by Serravalle de Sá; and Territorio de sombras: Montajes y derivas de lo gótico en la literatura argentina (Shadow Territories: Assemblies and Drifts of the Gothic in Argentine Literature, 2021), edited by Argentine scholar Marcos Zangrandi, have continued with the framing and theorization of the Latin American Gothic. In these collections, editors and authors emphasize both the regional specificities of the narratives analyzed and the ways that writers and filmmakers transgress the gothic canon.

Latin American Gothic scholars and critics often emphasize the difference between the Latin American variant of the Gothic and other modes and genres produced in the continent. Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz refer to the marginalized place that the Latin American Gothic occupies in relation to magical realist fiction and fantastic literature (1). Scholar Carmen Serrano echoes this idea, asserting that the supernatural in Latin American literature has been subsumed under magical realism or the fantastic or ascribed to world visions born of autochthonous cultures (1). In her 2019 book Gothic Imagination in Latin American Fiction and Film, Serrano approaches the Latin American Gothic production through images and tropes usually associated with the European Gothic: the vampire, the doppelgänger, the live burials. In doing so, Serrano highlights these tropes’ connections with the gothic tradition, the transformation that occurs when they are transported to the continent, and their associations with autochthonous tropes from different areas of the continent.

In this book, I affirm and demonstrate with some of the most exemplary cases the existence of the Colombian Gothic, from its few precursors in the nineteenth century to the Tropical Gothic and Colombian negrótico forms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Counter to what might be expected from a country whose artistic productions are often flattened into a few now-stereotyped genres, sufficient significant repetitions—and transformations—of recognizable gothic elements exist in Colombia to speak of the Colombian Gothic as a national manifestation of an existing genre. While the nineteenth-century precursors I address in Chapter 1 could be regarded as writing the Gothic in Colombia, it is not until the arrival of Álvaro Mutis and the Cali group (writer Andrés Caicedo, and film directors Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo) that it is possible to talk about a Colombian Gothic. By this, I mean that the Gothic has undergone a nationally specific version of what I have previously called the Tropicalization of the Gothic in Latin America.

Besides Selva de fantasmas and various articles published in the past ten years, little has been written about the Colombian Gothic as a regional form. Most of the approaches to this mode focus on the work of the