The Dream of My Return: Moya’s Masterpiece

Artwork by Roman Stevens

This is the final article in my Big Books Small Country series. Having previously looked at Joan Didion’s journalist set of essays ‘Salvador’ and Moya’s ‘Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in El Salvador’, I thought I’d end on another of the latter writer’s works.

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As previously discussed in the second part of my Big Books Small Country series, Horacio Castellanos Moya is a highly-acclaimed Central American writer who initially found fame through his deeply controversial 90s novel, Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in El Salvador. However, Moya’s own story did not end with the publication of Revulsion. In fact, he has gone on to write a series of other novels and stories with the most lauded being his slender 2013 work, The Dream of My Return.

Complete with postmodern techniques and permeated with existentialist ideas, The Dream of My Return resembles the zenith of Moya’s storytelling. Unique, original and experimental, the novel is, in terms of literary style, almost entirely different from Revulsion – where the writer relied largely on imitation.

Despite clear stylistic differences however, there remain strong similarities between the two novels in terms of the messages that Moya tries to convey. Both works have been forged by themes of anger, paranoia and violence. Fundamentally they are both inextricably bound to Moya’s own experiences of warfare and suffering during the Salvadoran Civil War – a recurring topic of exploration in Moya’s writing.

Horacio Castellanos Moya is one of Central America's most notorious writers.

Published at a time when Moya has evidently established his own literary identity within the international literary scene, The Dream of My Return is a skillfully crafted novel that, at heart, expresses the writer’s devotion to the homeland that he entirely condemned in Revulsion. The Dream of My Return is certainly Moya’s masterpiece.

Set in Mexico City many years after the end of the Salvadoran Civil War, the story is narrated by Erasmo Aragon, a down-on-his-luck Salvadoran journalist who has been living in exile for several years. Erasmo is a mess; his marriage is falling apart, and he drinks far too much. Ailing from a mysterious pain in his liver, Moya’s protagonist is feverishly paranoid, jealous, anxious and angry. The story is underpinned by the narrator’s unrelenting desire to return to El Salvador – a personal quest that is either born out of love for his homeland or loathing for his existence in exile.

We are introduced to Erasmo during his desperate search for a new doctor, after his old one spontaneously returned to his native Catalonia two months earlier. It is his meeting with retired doctor, Don Chente, that proves to be the catalyst for Erasmo’s steady descent into a frenzied, plot-deviating state of madness.

Moya and Postmodernism

One of the many things that make The Dream of My Return really stand out is Moya’s continuous experimentation with style and structure. He associates those two aspects of good storytelling with the same level of importance as any writer might assign to character-development and plot. It is Moya’s mastery of both style and structure, coupled with his clear understanding of the infallibility of the human condition that make this novel such a powerfully postmodern piece of literature.

The first few chapters of the novel are uniform in the sense that they are largely all framed within the perspective of a doctor-patient relationship. Therefore, we learn more about our narrator through his confessions to Don Chente. A conventional way of conveying information to his reader, Moya makes us feel comfortable within this set-up and establishes the illusion that things are getting better, that Erasmo’s condition is improving and that we are progressing through an orthodox narrative.

However, it doesn’t take long before the reader receives a chapter outside of this framed doctor-patient relationship, and it becomes clear that this is not the story that was prescribed to us in the earlier chapters. Outside of therapy, Erasmo reveals the extent of his instability as a character and his unreliability of his role as our narrator.

Before long, Moya’s narrative completely transforms from a tale about mental instability and physical sickness into a perfect storm of marital infidelity, suspicion and furious inadequacy. Erasmo has a number of encounters with his good friend Mr. Rabbit who is a “Salvadoran guerrilla in Mexico”. Mr. Rabbit exhibits the levels of violence and intensity that are latent within Erasmo himself, yet are always entirely unable of actually materializing. There is even the suggestion that Mr. Rabbit is a figment of Erasmo’s defective imagination; a dark manifestation urging our narrator to commit heinous crimes. At point, Erasmo even says, “He was a clandestine cadre of the Salvadoran guerrillas in Mexico… that person simply didn’t exist…”

It is under the supervision of Mr. Rabbit that Erasmo begins to truly lose his way and derail the conventional plot at the same time. At one point, he plots to murder the second-rate actor that he finds out his wife has been sleeping with. Conspiring with Mr. Rabbit, Erasmo says:

“The only thing I wanted to do was break that obnoxious Romeo’s neck, for even though I’d never killed anybody and lacked the necessary experience to carry out such an act, at that moment I felt elated at the prospect of killing the man who had cuckolded me, my elation increasing with leaps and bounds as Mr. Rabbit displayed so much indignation and willingness to be my accomplice in the execution of Eva’s ex-lover.”

With the steady deterioration of Erasmo’s mental health, Moya also changes the way he writes to better accommodate his narrator’s descent into insanity. Instead of short, measured paragraphs where the narrator tries to rationally convey his thoughts and objectives, the last chapters are constructed of long, testing passages that are written in a stream-of-consciousness style, designed no-doubt to affirm Erasmo’s escalating loss of sanity.

Moya’s narrative verges on the existential in that a conventional plot is largely abandoned in the face of Erasmo’s total inadequacy to substantially deliver a rational denouement to his own desire to return home. We are therefore denied conventional storytelling because our entirely unreliable narrator becomes so wholly unable to overcome his own deficiencies and overall place within his own setting and plot. Instead, we are left to observe our narrator’s own descent into violence, madness and internal torment.

The Trauma of War

The Dream of My Return exhibits the same level of anger and paranoia that is exhibited in Moya's earlier work, Revulsion. The novel is further evidence of Moya’s overriding exploration of the impact that the Salvadoran Civil War had, not just on the country, but its population within the nation and those living in exile. Ultimately, the reader is left with the underpinning message that violence breeds violence.

During Erasmo’s therapy sessions with Don Chente, we begin to see why our narrator is the way he is. The doctor taps into two early memories of Erasmo’s childhood in El Salvador, the first of which – which is also his first memory – is when a bomb exploded at his grandparents’ house. Erasmo says, “I would have been about three year's old at the time, and my memory consists of one precise image: my grandmother Lena carrying me in her arms across the dark courtyard through the whitish dust from the destroyed wall that permeated the air.”

The Salvadoran Civil War has gone down in history as one of Central America's most violent conflicts.

This unprovoked crime and disturbing traumatic episode then leads Erasmo to his second memory. “The second event from my childhood that had taken root in my memory occurred at the Montessori nursery school… one of my classmates had the gall to take my blocks and refused to give them back… I bashed that wooden block into the head of said child until his cries of pain caught the attention of our teacher, who quickly bent down and picked me up while the other teachers rushed in to help the bully, who was lying on the ground, his head a bloody mess.”

Through these two events, it becomes clear that Moya is conveying to us the gargantuan impact that the frequency of mass violence has on human consciousness. It is here that the similarities with Revulsion are at their most evident. Although entirely different to his previous novel, the same themes and ideas permeate The Dream of My Return. The Salvadoran Civil War has left an indelible stain on Moya’s work, but, as the writer’s main area of exploration, it is clear that the conflict is fundamental to not only his literary identity but his personal identity also.

The Eternal Dream of an Eternal War

In my earlier review of Revulsion, I wrote, “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.” Fundamentally, the same applies to The Dream of My Return.

Although not an intense, 83-page, one-paragraph rant, Moya’s novel delivers the same judgement within a different form. Now in peace time, Erasmo can return to El Salvador, but his own trauma of the war ultimately prevents him from ever doing so. And this is the lasting message innate within Moya’s work – war is an eternal crime that lives on in memory and hinders the dreams of all those it ensnares.

Moya’s bond to El Salvador is something that is permeated with a sense of ambivalence and animosity that only adds to the power of his prose. It’s staggering really, that a writer can write in such abundance about one topic without harbouring any real sense of optimism or hope that things will one day improve. Yet, this grit and staunch perseverance are what make Moya such a powerful writer and are the reason why his work is all the more relevant and necessary in the 21st century.

Moya has won a series of high-profile awards for his dedication and commitment to enhancing the international literary sphere.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed my Big Books Small Country series and found my commentary on the impact of the country’s civil war both interesting and insightful and not at all dull and repetitive… Want to read more about this series? Click here.