“La historia no la leemos, la releemos siempre”: fuga dall’archivio in Rodrigo Rey Rosa e Horacio Castellanos Moya

Abstract

The article analyses the relationship between archive and history in two Centro American novels: El material humano by Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Insensatez by Horacio Castellanos Moya. The analysis clarifies how the search for collective identity into the archive appears to both protagonists as an escape from a present considered violent and chaotic but also as an escape from a tyrannical and silenced past that is still oppressing them. The escape is indeed frustrated by fear and paranoia deriving from the impossibility of revisiting and knowing the past in total freedom.