Subaltern Violence or how to Leave the Monster Without a Voice: a Study of the Link between Violence and Monsters in the Work of Mariana Enríquez

Abstract

The next article proposes to analyze the place where violence, and its possibilities as a means for creating and guaranteeing a particular order, meets the monster figure in two short stories by Mariana Enríquez. Even though our goal is a theoretical dissertation of the notions of violence and monstrosity, as read in the widespread production of a variety of authors, we believe that the different modulations in the literary texts can shed light on a central aspect of the author’s poetics: the construction of monstrosity through the amplification of poverty’s traces on a person’s body. With this in mind, we analyze “Bajo el agua negra” and “El chico sucio”, two short stories from the 2016 book Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego. We consider that what seems to be a try to unveil certain fears that sprout from class prejudices, with the intention to denounce the oppressive situation in which the lower socioeconomic strata of society is forced to live in, winds up being, due to the use of the aforementioned devices, a reaffirmation of those misconceptions.