This dissertation examines the narrative works of Fernando Vallejo from Los días azules (1985) to La rambla paralela (2002). The study of this corpus condenses some of the most acute issues currently discussed in regards to an ideological and axiological crisis which concerns national discourses and the emergence of post-national formations in Latin America.
The main hypothesis claims that Vallejo’s oeuvre sets forth dissident subjectivities and cultural cornerstones that contour a revision of contemporary metanarratives (local/global, national/postnational, modern/postmodern). The narrator’s discourse is portrayed as a display of truth from a critical and nonconformist subjectivity. The radical idiosyncrasy of Vallejo’s narrator and personae expose the systems of control of traditional ontologies, as well as the hermeneutics of cultural and historical constructions. Through a dissenting perspective, the narrator is able to deconstruct this articulation of reality as he exhibits it as a dominant fiction.
This study is divided into two main chapters which examine form and content of Vallejo’s works. The first one proposes a revision of the concept of autofiction as a (re)creative device for life narratives. Autofiction shapes a discourse in which both processes of autobiographical subjectivities and individualist perspectivism express the crisis of national discourses. The second one examines the main narrative topographies of Vallejo’s books: affect, violence, and humor. Affect, in all of its articulations, advocates for adjacency in diachronic encounters. Violence is expressed both as a dystopic reality, and as a tool to demand justice. Humor is a discourse modality that conveys persuasion towards the narrator’s perspective.
The ideological climax of Vallejo’s works resides in the refusal of his narrator to ascribe his dissidence to subalternity, otherness, or abjection but to a discussion that gives shape to the truth of cultural praxis in contemporary Colombia. In doing so, he contributes to the deconstruction of dominant discourses, showing their contradictory character. He pictures the inefficiency of applying traditional frameworks to a context that ignores concepts such as nation, modern, or global, as significant axes for the shaping of individual and collective subjectivities.