Horacio Castellanos Moya: A Furious Man

Original artwork by Roman Stevens

This is the second part of my El Salvador three-part series. In these articles, I’ll be looking at the impact of the El Salvadar’s barbaric civil war on the country, and how the conflict has been represented in contemporary literature. For more information on this series, click here.

*

“'Glad you could come, Moya, I had my doubts that you would come, so many people in this city don’t like this place, so many people don’t like this place at all, Moya, which is why I wasn’t sure you’d come' said Vega… 'It’s the only place where I feel at peace in this country, the only decent place, the other bars are filthy, abominable, filled with guys who drink beer till they burst, I can’t understand it, Moya, I can’t understand how they so eagerly drink such nasty beer intended for animals, said Vega, it’s only good for inducing diarrhoea…'”

And so begins one of the most controversial stories ever to emerge from Latin America...

Throughout history, literature has always been a popular form in which to convey dissent, but no text has quite shocked the political landscape of El Salvador as Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador.

Novelist, journalist and short story writer, Moya spent the majority of his youth in El Salvador. He left the country in 1979 to study at York University in Canada, narrowly escaping the outbreak of the country’s bloody civil war that went on for over a decade until 1992. He returned to El Salvador on a number of occasions during the conflict, but he has primarily lived abroad for much of his life.

During the late 1990s, Moya wrote a series of novels such as Senselessness and The She-Devil in the Mirror, but few quite achieved the infamy of Revulsion, an off-hand short story written over just a few months during the writer’s time in Mexico City. And when I say that, I mean that few of his novels went on to incite vehement hatred, book burnings and political outrage in the same way Revulsion did.

Horacio Castellanos Moya is one of El Salvador's most infamous writers.

Revulsion is a phenomenal short story. Succinct, sharp and incisive, the book spans just a mere 83 pages. Harmless on first glance, it soon becomes abundantly clear however that this is no normal short story. Structured as an entirely one-sided conversation between Moya and narrator, Vega, the whole book is made up of just one paragraph. A perfect storm of resentment, anger and contempt, in Revulsion Moya essentially takes it upon himself to systematically deconstruct and destroy every aspect of Salvadoran society.

In the book, Moya describes San Salvador – the city’s capital – as “horrible” and says that “the people who populate it are worse, they’re a putrid race, the war unhinged everyone... now it’s vomitous, Moya, a truly vomitous city where only truly sinister people live...” but Moya doesn’t just stop on superficial condemnations, he goes on to criticise everything from politicians to sports and even local delicacies.

Many years after the book’s original publication, Moya said: “I wrote it in 1996-97, in Mexico City, as an exercise in style: I would pretend to imitate the Australian writer Thomas Bernhard, as much in his prose based on cadence and reputation as in his themes, which contain a bitter critique of Austria and its culture. With the relish of the resentful getting even, I had fun writing this novel, in which I wanted to demolish the culture and politics of San Salvador, same as Bernhard had done with Salzburg, with the pleasure of diatribe and mimicry.”

In many ways, it’s a little bit maddening to see Moya dubbing his infamous work as just an “exercise in style”, the kind of thing you might just do for a bit of fun, and perhaps this is just him trying to step out of the shadow that Revulsion has cast over his literary career for so many years. I believe that this book is more than it sets out to be, it’s more than a mere “diatribe”.

In this article, I want to take a quick look at how the civil war influenced Moya’s writing and how it directly impacted his stylistic approach to Revulsion. I’ll also argue that both Moya and his protagonist, Vega, are inexorably Salvadoran and that this book is just as much an ode to a lost relationship as it is a vicious condemnation.

A Stylized Rant

It’s important to understand that Revulsion is more than just an imitation of style. Of course, the narrative tone is enormously inspired by the work of Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, but there are more similarities on a contextual level that make Moya’s work more than mere mimicry.

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is generally considered to be one of the most lauded German-speaking authors of the post-war era. However, much like his spiritual disciple, Horacio Castellanos Moya, his work – in the past – has been criticized within Austria. In fact, he has even been branded a Nestbeschmutzer (one who shits in his own nest).

Thomas Bernard, one of Austria's most critical post-war writers

Bernhard spent the early years of his life living in Vienna, but he moved to a town in southeast Bavaria in 1937, just one year prior to Hitler’s annexation of Austria. During his youth he was forced to join the Hitler Youth while he also struggled with a number of respiratory ailments such as tuberculosis. It was the combination of a number of these factors that birthed in Bernhard a hugely adversarial world view and after the end of the war it began to emanate from the literature he wrote. In one text he even wrote that Austria was a "brutal and stupid nation ... a mindless, cultureless sewer which spreads its penetrating stench all over Europe."

The similarities between Bernhard and Moya are abundantly evident and it’s clear why Moya took to the latter’s writing so readily. And, in a perverse sense, this uncanny connection instils a certain originality within Moya’s work, despite it being intended to be a total imitation.

Moya’s Revulsion is original in a sense that Bernhard’s text were also original when they were first published. Stylistically similar, sure, but contextually unique. Bernhard’s work influenced Moya, but it was the Salvadoran Civil War that necessitated the use of Bernhard’s scathing style.

Revulsion is not only the perfect answer to one of Central America’s most bloody conflicts, it’s also one of the only appropriate answers. The book’s detractors would denounce Moya for his lack of national pride and patriotism, but honestly, what do they expect? When a state loses control and falls apart, artists and writers will create masterpieces exclusively with ash and dust. The truth is, as sinister as Moya’s content is, it will never be as horrific as the context.

The Central American country of El Salvador was ravaged by internal warfare for much of the latter years of the 20th century.

Revulsion’s structure essentially reflects the broken intellectual landscape of El Salvador. At one point Vega says “I can assure you that this country is nothing, at least artistically, no one knows anything about it, it interests no one, no one born here matters in the world of art because the world of art is not the world of politics or crime…” It is exactly this reasoning that makes Bernhard’s style so poignant. How are you supposed to write anything stylistically and artistically innovative in a country where the cultural and artistic sphere is entirely non-existent? Revulsion exists, therefore, because nothing else is more apt.

It’s easy to see why Salvadorans hate Revulsion, not only is the book massively insulting, but it’s also exhausting to read – listening to someone rant for 83 pages straight is no easy feat. However, I believe that Revulsion can still become a national treasure, despite its crude, rebellious nature. Moya’s story is one that condemns a particularly dark time in El Salvador’s recent history, and few would deny that, so why not accept that and move toward a place where society doesn’t deserve to be represented so negatively?

Home is where the Heart is…

Looking back at Revulsion’s infamy, Moya wrote: “Years later, despite having published many other novels since then, on various topics in which I didn’t imitate any writer, and not having written the sequel that some asked me to write, for Salvadorans, I remain uniquely and exclusively the author of Revulsion. Like a stigma, the little imitation novel and its aftermath pursue me.”

Following the publication of Revulsion, Moya has consistently struggled to escape the book's long shadow.

It's really the perfect irony that by writing a book that condemns every facet of Salvadoran society, Moya inextricably bound himself to the country forever. Yet, there’s a reason that Moya wrote so much about El Salvador, it’s his home. We are all eternally bonded to the countries of our upbringing and it is always within our right to convey dissent when we believe it to be necessary.

It’s evident that Moya wrote Revulsion out of a certain urge to convey dissent. Whether sparked by guilt, rage or helplessness, Moya wrote about El Salvador for the good of El Salvador.

This is a malevolent, malicious book of intense fury that few can really say whether it’s been a force for good or bad. One thing is for certain though, Moya is perpetually tied to his dark creation. Revulsion is a book that both enunciated and indelibly marked the relationship between him and the country of his heart.

*

16 years after the publication of ‘Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in El Salvador’, Horacio Castellanos Moya wrote a novel called ‘The Dream of My Return’ – a story revolving around sickness, paranoia and the undying will to return to El Salvador. Forming the final part of my El Salvador series, click here to see my review of the novel…