Building on Ruins: Some Thoughts on Héctor Tizón's Novelistics

Abstract

Ruin is a testimony that denounces the existence of the past. Before a ruin cannot deny what happened. Both literature and history elaborate their speeches with the "ruins of the past," for it does not last in its entirety but only partially. Historians and poets from these vestiges reconstruct the image of that which is not but has been. That act of re-elaboration is deliberate, since it requires the decision of which facts, acts and signs are selected and prioritized. Each generation chooses the fragmented and heterogeneous sources and disposes them according to their own ideals and values to build their history. The oral histories retained the "chronicles" representative of the other Latin American history: that of the original peoples, that of the minorities, that of the vanquished and the marginalized. Latin American narrators show that they have learned the lesson transmitted by oral poetry that preserved the divided, tormented, torn history of the continent, and which, unlike the historiographical document, tolerates the contradictions of the past, amalgamating them with the wealth and versatility of the processes of the historical becoming and its actors both collective and individual. The narrative world that Héctor Tizón proposes in his novels arises from the landscape that marveled him in his childhood and the fragments of history that by these places wandered scattered in oral stories. Shreds of a reality that Tizón was recreating in his work. This reconfiguration led him to venture not only for geography but for a complex web of stories, beliefs and myths that are ultimately those who "encourage" and give way to his narrative world.