Between destitution and restitution: the filiation story in Larga noche hacia mi madre by Carlos Cortés

Abstract

The concept and institution of the modern family in Latin America is one of the myths of heteropatriarchal modernity that is being questioned in Latin American literature, cinema, and visual arts. Among the sub-genres of the novel that challenge the family (his)story, stands out the filiation story, which the French critic Dominique Viart defines as a writing founded on silence about the life or conduct of an ancestor. This is the case of Larga noche hacia mi madre, a novel by the Costa Rican writer Carlos Cortés (2013), in which the protagonist-narrator carries out a painful investigation about the enigmatic and incomprehensible past of his father, who died before the birth of his son, and the mental illness of his mother. I argue that by resorting to the family album and the findings from his research, Cortés´s narrator and Cortés himself uncover an insurmountable gap between the romantic ideal of masculinity and family, and the actual experience of one (his) family. However, the essay also demonstrates that Larga noche hacia mi madre is not an individual(ized) story, the only one fitting after the devaluation of the meta-narratives of legitimization of modernity, as Viart asserts about the French filiation narrative, but rather it is a counter-story that exposes and delegitimizes patriarchal logic as one of the foundations of modernity and, at the same time, one of the lasting reasons for unhappiness.