A hallucinated literary man in search of verses. Notes on the sublime, terror and the sinister in Insensatez, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Abstract

This study analyzes the poetic figures in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel Insensatez, which are part of animaginary of militarized and dehumanized violence that is seen through the testimonies of indigenous survivors of an ambiguous episode in an unknown territory. These images, understood through the character of a writer, are reconstructed and alter the perception of the protagonist in his present. The study of the text starts from the concepts of the sublime and the sinister, proposed by Edmund Burke and Sigmund Freud, and seeks to understand how these passages not only provoke a fascination for the literary artifice in the protagonist, but also the process in which the reader can observe how the reconstruction of a traumatic event affects the consciousness of the same; with the intention of observing the universal characteristic that they give to the text.