Modes, Forms and Mechanisms of Violence in Memoirs of an Unknown Soldier by Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez

Abstract

Among the literary representations of the recent Peruvian past, a generation of writers who had suffered Internal Armed Conflict (1980-2000) during their childhood, stands out. Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, writer and anthropologist, participated as a child soldier in the armed conflict first in Sendero Luminoso and then as a corporal in the Army. This article will analyze the dimensions, ritualization and protocols of violence on both sides in his work Memorias de un soldado desconocido. Autobiografía y antropología de la violencia, published by the Institute of Peruvian Studies in 2012. Thus, we will examin the aesthetic elaboration of violent situations and the mechanisms of erasure, silencing and distortion exhibited by the author that evidence the tension between writing and experience. The notion of memory (Jelin, 2002; Todorov, 2000) that underlies Gavilán Sánchez’s writing supposes the reconstruction of a life trajectory that inflects the individual and the collective, the experience and the writing, the public and the private. His memoirs present a textual self-configuration intertwined in different autobiographical rhetorical modes that account for a violent past from a position oscillating between the figures of victim and victimizer.