Writting Trauma: Testimony and Surrealism in Reinaldo Arena's El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas

Abstract

This article aligns with Latin American studies on testimony, aiming to explore the textualization of historical trauma in Reinaldo Arenas’s novel El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas. Practices adopted (and adapted) from surrealism restore the centrality of the subject who perceives and communicates the past through imaginative exercises, the demystification of documentary work, the rescue of affective matter, and the embodiment of mental events associated with the state of crisis. Thus, it is concluded that all those phenomena typical of the avant-garde, usually excluded from the testimonial dynamics by the critics, are sine qua non resources in the transmission of the traumatic experience.