Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of

Violence in Fernando Vallejo's La virgen de los sicarios

Norman Valencia

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Tomo 53, Número 1, Marzo 2019, pp. 17-36
(Article)

Published by Washington University in St. Louis

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2019.0027

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/726832

[ Access provided at 11 Mar 2022 00:52 GMT from University of California , Santa Barbara ]
Shortened Title 17

NORMAN VALENCIA

Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and

the Representation of Violence in Fernando
Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios

This paper contends that contemporary representations of violence are profoundly

shaped by two interconnected elements: realism and the influence of the media.
For the most part, Fernando Vallejo’s work has been classified and analyzed in
terms of realism. In my view, however, it also contains a radical criticism of
today’s realisms, their links to the media, and their treatment of violent events.
While many current portrayals of violence depend on a consensus regarding
realistic and objective images of our world, Vallejo refuses to participate in any
form of representation based on consensus. In order to discuss Vallejo’s critique of
contemporary depictions of violence, I focus on his novel La virgen de los sicarios
and two of its defining elements: its first-person narrator and its frontal attacks
on the media. I also analyze his unorthodox portrayal of violent realities with
the help of two theoretical concepts: Walter Benjamin’s information and Slavoj
Žižek’s subjective violence.

˙˙˙˙˙

In this text, I would like to suggest that there is a certain ten-

sion, even a cognitive dissonance, that defines contemporary representa-
tions of violence. In my view, this tension emerges from the combina-
tion of a recent hegemony of realism in global cultural products and
from the media’s powerful influence on today’s depictions of violent
events. I will then pose that Fernando Vallejo’s novel, La virgen de los
sicarios, could be read as a critical antidote to these problems.
In order to understand these conceptual tensions, we should
remember that the twentieth century left us with the idea that reality
is susceptible to endless interpretations that prevent any perfect repre-
sentation of our world. This view would peak in the poststructuralist
period, with theories that saw any depictions of the real as expressions
of historical power structures and discourses (Foucault), as forms of

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 53 (2019)

18 Norman Valencia

iteration and écriture that would never achieve the status of “presence”
(Derrida), as simulacra and simulations related to different media
(Baudrillard) and, in general, as a series of human constructs that could
never produce a perfect image of the real. In the twenty-first century,
an unpredictable surge of communication technologies has guaranteed
the pertinence of these theories: contemporary reality is, literally, a per-
manent construction, a never-ending process of interpretation linked
to a plurality of texts, images, and technological artifacts that mediate
our experience of the world.
A general look at recent cultural production, however, shows us
a growing preponderance of realistic forms of representation, something
that is especially true for media-based products. Because of contempo-
rary media technologies, we live among simulations and virtual land-
scapes, but our sensory apparatus demands that these fictions appear
before us with the greatest possible realism. Today, visual culture is
moving swiftly towards more realistic images of our world, from high-
resolution screens and 3D films to virtual reality. On TV, realism plays
an important role in the medium thanks to reality shows, game shows
that combine different types of competition with the contestants’ biog-
raphies, and sitcoms that copy the basic conventions of documentaries.
Even the rise of the TV series has combined new technologies and their
possibilities with strong links to historical reality.1 Finally, social media
is filled with images and texts that claim to be direct and immediate
representations of our world. Far from searching for Brechtian distanc-
ing effects, the screens that surround us strive to create a sense of perfect
proximity to the real, and this is an essential part of their appeal. They
are simulacra and simulations, then, but with the highest levels of real-
ism. How does this paradoxical combination affect our understanding
of reality and of violence today?
In this paper, I claim that Fernando Vallejo’s writing implies
a critical view of contemporary representations of violence and their
strong links to both realism and the media. This is important because
realism has become, following global trends, a predominant form of
representation in Latin America. A key element to explain this he-
gemony is that, by the end of the twentieth century, the continent
experienced an exhaustion of the fantastical, magical realist, and for-
mally experimental approaches that had become a “trademark” of Latin
American culture with authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Julio
Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of Violence 19

Cortázar, or Gabriel García Márquez, among others.2 This situation

led, since the latter part of the twentieth century, to a resurgence of
different forms of realism, with works like Rigoberta Menchú’s famous
testimony, or with authors like Alberto Fuguet and Pedro Juan Gutié-
rrez. With time, Latin America’s cultural production has created strong
links to genres like biographies, autofictions, testimonies, chronicles,
documentaries, and other forms of realistic expression. These genres
became, simultaneously, some of the most influential ways of portray-
ing violence in the continent. As we will see, Vallejo’s writing includes
a critique of contemporary representations of violence precisely because
of their unexamined links to realism as a formal strategy. Before I begin
this analysis, however, it is important to question the current role of
realism in our societies and how it is related to politics and violence.
A comparative approach to different styles of realistic representation
might give us some clues regarding the uses (and pitfalls) of realism
today.

Realisms Past and Present: Politics and Representation

In this section, I would like to introduce a brief comparison

between present-day realisms and their nineteenth-century counterparts
in order to understand their roles, their strategies, and their political
impact. First, it is relevant to remember that nineteenth-century liter-
ary realism relied on various structural elements that distance it from
today’s realistic cultural products. Authors like Balzac, Flaubert, or Zola
relied on modes of temporality and expression that depended on the
printed word and its possibilities. In this medium, they required many
pages with painstaking descriptions of characters, spaces, and objects
to produce a convincing “reality effect” for their readers. As Fredric
Jameson states, using Balzac as an example:

Everyone knows the patience one must bring to his novels as Balzac
slowly sets in place his various components: description of the town,
history of the profession, the loving enumeration of the parts of the
house, inside and out, the family itself, the physiognomy of the pro-
tagonist and his or her favorite clothes, his or her favorite emploi du
temps—in short, all those different types of discourse which as raw
material were to have been fused back together in this new form but
which Balzac unapologetically requires us to plow through on our way
to story itself. . . . (8)
20 Norman Valencia

For Jameson, Balzac is an example of how realistic representation in

nineteenth-century novels required a certain effort from the reader, as
well as a certain respite from the pace of modern life. This unexpected
deceleration, inscribed in the novels themselves and in their desire to
create a “sense of reality,” was a signal of the complex relationship they
had with the high-speed modernity from which they emerged.3 Today’s
realisms, however, do not share this need to disrupt the speed of ev-
eryday life with their nineteenth century counterparts. This is due, in
part, to the fact that contemporary media and its specific technologies
have completely redefined our ideas regarding realism. Current forms of
realistic representation possess a strong relationship with visual formats
and with technologies that have very different perceptual, affective, and
rhetorical structures than those of nineteenth-century literature. In our
everyday life, reality is constantly portrayed through brief texts or im-
ages produced in real time like Tweets, Facebook statuses, the 24-hour
news cycle, the headlines of online newspapers, or photos and videos
that are shared instantly: this is how we learn about our world and,
significantly, how we are informed about violent events. These formats
have created a completely different rhetoric of realism for our times,
one that is based on an immediate and effortless consumption of data.
This has implied, simultaneously, a very different experience of violence
and its representations: one where speed, fragmentation, and lack of
historical context are the rule.
Moreover, the relationship between nineteenth-century realism
and modernity was marked by other important tensions. For example,
realist authors always maintained a complex relationship with the mod-
ern media and with their most important sponsor, the bourgeoisie. On
the one hand, most authors owed their livelihood to a bourgeois class
that transformed the printed word into a business of unprecedented
success. However, realist writers themselves actually became a source of
discomfort both for the bourgeoisie and for print capitalism as a boom-
ing economic enterprise. Gustave Flaubert’s publication of Madame
Bovary in La Revue de Paris in 1856 offers a perfect example of these
frictions. The novel’s frank depiction of female desire, of middle-class
consumption and usury, and of the anodyne reality of the country’s pro-
vincial bourgeoisie shook the French establishment to its core. It ended
up being censored for its alleged immorality, a status that Flaubert
fought tooth and nail. His efforts against censorship provide significant
Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of Violence 21

traces of how nineteenth-century realists were difficult partners for the

European bourgeoisie and its media markets. When faced with these
authors, bourgeois readers discovered that the meticulous description
of their reality portrayed them as hypocritical and reactionary, not as
agents of modernity and progress. At the time, then, realism created
explosive debates as it circulated bourgeois ideologies and, simultane-
ously, depicted their flaws with great political impact.
Past and present realisms share a desire to take strong political
stances in their societies. In fact, this text focuses on the relationship
between violence and realism because representing violent acts in a re-
alistic fashion is seen, today, as a fundamental tool of political interven-
tion. It is remarkable, however, that current realistic cultural products
and their portrayals of violence are unlikely to stir up debates like those
of their nineteenth-century predecessors. As opposed to the anxiety that
the French bourgeoisie felt with authors like Flaubert, we can see how
contemporary media markets embrace realist works based on the most
violent and heartbreaking situations (like the disastrous War on Drugs
in Latin America) and easily transform them into lucrative bestsellers
and blockbusters. Movies and TV series incorporate violent realities
and transform them into fleeting forms of entertainment that rarely
generate strong debates in our societies.4 In fact, many media outlets
welcome naturalistic representations of violence and link them to both
conservative ideologies (like the obsession with middle-class safety that
is often related to racist, anti-immigrant, or social cleansing movements
on a global scale) and to great profit. In summary, most contemporary
realistic formats and their depiction of violence do not seem to generate
the same political discussions as their nineteenth-century predecessors,
even though they now deal with global audiences. In my view, the key
issue at the core of this inability to generate strong political debates is
the idea of consensus as a structural element that, combined with the
growing influence of the media, defines many of today’s realistic repre-
sentations of violence.

Media, Realism, and Consensus as a Political Problem

A brief comparison between past and present realisms sug-

gests that today’s realistic formats, especially those that are linked to
22 Norman Valencia

the media, do not seem to have the same political impact as their
nineteenth-century counterparts. Since realism has become an impor-
tant representational strategy to deal with Latin America’s complex and
violent realities, it is essential to consider what elements have weakened
its political potential. To fully understand Vallejo’s critique of contem-
porary realisms, it is useful to flesh out some political problems that the
realistic representation of violence faces today.
First, we should thoroughly consider one of realism’s defin-
ing characteristics: the idea that, when faced with a realistic work, the
reader/spectator participates (maybe unconsciously) in a certain form
of consensus. According to some contemporary thinkers, however, the
idea of consensus can imply a negation of politics itself. Chantal Mouffe
points out, for example, that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
coordinated expansion of global capitalism and democracy under the
influence of the United States, many political discussions have champi-
oned the idea of a final consensus that would dissolve all social conflicts.
According to Mouffe:

Many liberal theorists refuse to acknowledge the antagonistic dimen-

sion of politics and the role of affects in the construction of political
identities because they believe that it would endanger the realization of
consensus, which they see as the aim of democracy. What they do not
realize is that, far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation
is the very condition of its existence. Modern democracy’s specificity
lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to
suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order. (29–30)

As opposed to the idea that democracy should aspire to forms of abso-

lute consensus, Mouffe states that, without a valid space for antagonism
in a world that is marked by rampant inequalities, democratic politics
would be impossible. For her, the main objective of democracy should
be to allow for open dialogues between differing political positions,
and not to abolish conflict for the sake of an (impossible) agreement
between all social actors.
This reflection on consensus has important consequences re-
garding contemporary realisms, especially when they aspire to portray
violent events. When faced with realistic works, the reader/spectator
often participates in forms of consensus that are based, not on con-
scious ideas, but on culturally predetermined responses. The character-
istic effect of a realistic work depends on the successful use of different
Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of Violence 23

techniques that, within historically defined standards and conventions,

create the sense of a shared reality. This topic frequently comes up in
theoretical discussions about realism. For example, in Realism, her 2003
critical introduction for Routledge’s collection New Critical Idioms, Pam
Morris states:
The epistemology that underwrites all uses of realist representation is
the same: the need to communicate the information about the mate-
rial, non-linguistic world. . . . It invokes the humanist contract with
the reader based upon the consensual belief that shared communication
about material and subjective realities is possible. (Morris 44)

From the start, Morris is aware that recent theory has criticized these
ideas because, after post-structuralism, the realistic representation of
our world became an object of many contentious debates. However,
one of her objectives is to argue that precisely because realism includes
a “humanist contract” regarding the shared communication of reality, it
would be possible to locate it within an effective political project. Such
a project would stem from the prospect that everyone, confronted with
solid realistic texts or images, would be able to reach a consensus on
what is being portrayed. This would be achieved through an agreement
on images or on verbal materials that represent reality through cultur-
ally established codes: direct testimonies, precise data, reliable sources
and, most importantly, a certain rhetoric that can convey a solid sense
of reality.
My point is not to question those who use realistic formats to
defend just causes, or who, like Morris, try to see the political potential
in realism itself. In fact, as we saw with Flaubert, there have been mo-
ments when the representational consensus implicit in realistic works
shook up entire societies. However, there are several new issues that
emerge regarding realistic representation and its implicit consensuses in
present times. First, we should keep in mind that the cultural conven-
tions that define contemporary realisms are strongly influenced by the
media. And today’s media, with its links to technology and immense
flows of capital, has created new and powerful ideological uses of real-
ism, completely transforming our agreements regarding the representa-
tion of reality. In fact, since there is a strong sense of cultural consensus
behind realism, we are less prone to question the ideological use of re-
alistic texts and images as they appear, for example, in our social media,
24 Norman Valencia

in an online video, or in the news outlet of our preference. Realism,
then, has become the defining representational style for different types
of politicized media because it is less susceptible to critical debates. Fur-
thermore, in many cases, these realistic consensuses are confused with
objective and unmediated representations of reality by media consum-
ers. In the process, the cultural conventions that are necessary for realis-
tic representation are transformed into political consensuses that remain
unexamined and that, instead of denouncing systems of inequality and
injustice, are incorporated into their very logic. Expanding on Mouffe’s
ideas, I believe that we should also submit representational strategies
to open political discussions, and challenge any obvious consensus that
upholds them. The real question should be how to contest the ideologi-
cal uses of realism in our media-based culture and how to understand
the political tensions that remain hidden behind their unscrutinized
consensuses. In what follows, we will see how Vallejo’s own strategies
of literary representation imply an important critique of today’s realistic
treatments of violence, especially when they are defined by the media.

Against Consensus: Vallejo’s Critique of Contemporary Realisms

and Their Portrayal of Violence

In principle, Fernando Vallejo’s entire oeuvre could be con-

sidered a typical example of the contemporary hegemony of realism
in Latin America. His texts can be classified as examples of realistic
genres like biographies (of Porfirio Barba-Jacob, José Asunción Silva,
and Rufino José Cuervo), autobiographies, or autofictions, and several
critics have dedicated vast efforts to study these aspects of his work.5
His writing, however, clearly questions some of the main premises of
contemporary realisms, of their depiction of violence and, especially, of
the consensuses that make them vulnerable to the logic that I described
earlier.
A first element that distances Vallejo’s entire oeuvre from other
realistic works is one of its most remarkable characteristics: its narrator.
As opposed to the classic realistic device of an omniscient, third-person
narrator, Vallejo uses a sui generis first-person voice in all his works,
including his biographies and his unorthodox treaties on topics like
physics, evolutionary biology, or the history of the Catholic Church. In
Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of Violence 25

fact, this highly subjective voice repeatedly mocks classic realist narra-
tors (in authors like Balzac, Flaubert, or Tolstoy) which Vallejo always
relates, ironically, to the figure of God:

. . . el novelista omnisciente, ese pobre diablo con ínfulas de Dios Padre

Todopoderoso, de sabelotodo. ¿Cómo va a poder un pobre hijo de
vecino contarnos los pensamientos, repetir diálogos enteros como si
los hubiera grabado con grabadora y describirnos lo que hicieron los
amantes en la cama como si los hubiera visto con rayos X, o como la
Inquisición, por un huequito? (Vallejo, Peroratas 288)

Vallejo’s own idea of the representation of reality begins by establish-

ing a critical distance from the omniscient third-person narrator and
its iteration in different forms of literary realism. Instead of looking at
Europe’s realist tradition for models, Vallejo prefers other precursors
for his own narrative voice. Juanita Aristizábal has shown the influence
on Vallejo’s literary project of the figure of the dandy as it appeared in
many nineteenth-century European authors like Charles Baudelaire or
Oscar Wilde, and especially in Latin American modernistas like Julián
del Casal and José Asunción Silva. In Aristizábal’s words: “El espectá-
culo del escándalo provocado por la rebelde y excéntrica personalidad
tanto pública como literaria creada por Vallejo puede leerse como una
readaptación del dandy finisecular y su propia voluntad de distanciarse
de las masas, de escandalizar” (176). For these authors and their dandy
personas, creating a realistic consensus around their work was not a
priority at all; on the contrary, their objective was to antagonize their
readers as a strategy to make them reconsider their societies’ value sys-
tems. Like these authors, and instead of trying to convince his readers
that they are obtaining an objective representation of reality, Vallejo
forces them to accept the law of a deeply subjective point of view. As he
states in an interview with Francisco Villena Garrido: “El narrador que
hice en los libros míos es un loco para muchos. Decidí hacerlo excesivo,
exagerado, contradictorio. Hice de él una subjetividad rabiosa, contraria
a la objetividad del resto” (Villena Garrido, “La sinceridad”). In this
way, his work refuses both the objective view of an omniscient narrator
and any possible sense of immediate consensus that could emerge from
this literary device. On the contrary, his narrator strives to create strong
and conflictive emotional responses in his readers, as Daniel Balderston
points out: “Uno de los logros de la primera persona que maneja Vallejo
es que entabla un diálogo con su lector. Por eso mismo ha despertado
26 Norman Valencia

reacciones tan fuertes en algunos lectores, porque se sienten interpe-
lados de modo vehemente por su voz” (261). This intense dialogue
with the reader contributes to a dismantling of the consensual logic of
many contemporary depictions of reality. When confronted with his
texts, you must take a strong political position, instead of searching
for the elements of consensus, identification, and passive acceptance
of data that define most of today’s media-based realisms. You have to
consciously agree or disagree with his texts and question your own po-
litical positions in the process. This is especially true, as we will see, of
his unorthodox depictions of violent events.
Vallejo’s struggle against the media’s representation of violent
realities constitutes another defining element of his work. Much of his
fierce criticism of the media is directed at information, a notion that
Walter Benjamin developed in his later work on Western modernity
and its cultural products. In his well-known essay, “On Some Motifs
in Baudelaire,” Benjamin provides one of his most concise definitions
of this concept and its links to the most important media outlet of his
time, the newspaper:

If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the
information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not
achieve its purpose. But its intention is the opposite, and it is achieved:
to isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experi-
ence of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (newness,
brevity, clarity, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual
news items) contribute as much to this as the layout of the pages and
the style of writing. (4: 315–16)

For Benjamin, the notes in newspapers were already brief allegories of

the role that information would play in the modern world. The mate-
rial in most journals is read only once and it is part of a chaotic and
ephemeral matter that could never be transformed into meaningful
personal experience or historical knowledge. In fact, the newspaper’s
fragmented formats seem designed to obfuscate the possible links be-
tween the different stories on the page. According to Benjamin, this
contributes to the dismantling of a truly historical understanding of
reality: information is immediately incorporated into the swift frag-
mentation of the modern world and, in the process, it prevents the
production of slow and complex reflections about social realities. It is
an efficient and deeply “realistic” representation of our world, but its
Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of Violence 27

critical potential is always weak because of its disjointed and ahistorical

nature. It is remarkable, however, that information (in the news and
in our social media, for example) has become one of the main cultural
pillars of our interpretation of the violent realities that surround us: it
is at the core of our contemporary consensuses regarding violence and
its representation.
In Vallejo’s texts, information is presented as completely in-
adequate in its representation of Colombia’s violent realities. This is
especially true for La virgen de los sicarios (1994), one of the texts that
best embodies his critical views on contemporary depictions of violence.
There, Fernando, the text’s first-person narrator and protagonist, visits
his native Medellín, where he meets and has sexual encounters with
young men from the city’s underworld. At some point, he falls in love
with one of these boys, Alexis, who also works as a sicario. In the novel,
information appears in the form of a repeated scene that constantly
interrupts their love affair: the persistent media coverage of different fig-
ures of power (usually the president or the Pope) as they discuss violent
events in dramatic yet banal terms. The critical distance towards this
type of representation leads to the constant destruction of radios and
TV sets, the defining technologies for informative realism in Colombia
during the 1990s, by the novel’s main characters. In a key moment of
their relationship, Fernando arrives at the house that he shares with
Alexis and informs him that he cannot live anymore in a city with
“treinta y cinco mil taxis con el radio prendido” (Vallejo, La virgen 41).
Because of this, he asks the young man for his gun to commit suicide.
Alexis then decides to empty his weapon at the television on which,
as usual, the president is addressing the nation. Fernando comments:
“Hombre mire, vea, fíjese, porque se le llegó también su día al televisor.
La muerte de este aparato maldito es digna de un poema. Lo estoy pen-
sando en versos de arte mayor, en alejandrinos de catorce sílabas que me
salen tan bien. Yo soy de respiración pausada y de tiro largo” (41). It is
crucial to notice the mention of alexandrine verses (a defining element
of Latin American modernista poetry) as well as the respiración pausada
and the tiro largo (something like “taking a long time” in Colombian
parlance) in this quote. These elements clearly represent Fernando’s
call for a radical confrontation with contemporary media and its main
representational strategies. While the media has created a realist rheto-
ric that depends on speed and fragmentation, Vallejo’s text calls for a
28 Norman Valencia

radical interruption of its flows of information with the violence of a
gunshot. His objective is to use other approaches that allow for much
slower speeds, like the old-fashioned modernista poems that, because
of their complex structures, demand time and effort from the reader.
In short, he looks for other ways to represent the world that surrounds
him, ways that challenge the hasty and unexamined consensuses that
emerge from contemporary media and information.
Vallejo’s novel deals with another element that complicates
today’s consensuses regarding the realistic representation of violence:
what Slavoj Žižek calls “subjective violence” as opposed to “objective”
or “systemic” violence.6 According to Žižek, today’s media markets give
primacy to narratives that exaggerate the relationship between violence
and specific subjects. The preferred subject of today’s representation of
violence is, of course, the criminal. For Žižek, this is part of a common
strategy to generate broad political consensuses by galvanizing entire
societies around the fear of a common enemy. Within these narratives,
the process of interpreting violence is dissolved into a few repeated
elements: fleeting and spectacular depictions of violent acts, anger and
fear towards specific criminals, and the swift resolution of all conflict
through their punishment. Žižek notes, however, that this dispropor-
tionate focus on criminal subjects may produce a realistic depiction of
our world, but it depends on a form of political blindness:

The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived

from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such
against the background of a non-violent zero level. . . . However, objec-
tive violence is precisely the violence inherent to this normal state of
things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level
standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.
(2)

The detailed discussion of the acts of specific criminals provides a per-

fect example of the consensuses created by today’s media-based realisms
and their depictions of violence. For Žižek, these narratives prevent us
from seeing that global systems of exploitation are the “degree zero” and
the “passive consensus” that defines our image of the real; they make
no effort to denounce the systemic forms of violence that have become
“normal” to us, as if they were an inevitable part of reality itself. As con-
sumers of these stories, instead of trying to understand the more pro-
found forms of inequality in our societies, we are often seduced by the
Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of Violence 29

idea that violence can be attributed exclusively to criminal subjects and

that it can be solved by punishing them. Contemporary realisms must
understand that what Žižek calls subjective violence is, from the start,
a superficial and ideological version of reality that hides the systemic
injustices implicit in most criminal acts. However, if they want to par-
ticipate in contemporary cultural markets, most realist writers and film-
makers are urged to take advantage of the appeal of today’s stories about
criminal subjects. These kinds of realistic depictions and the emotional
responses that they generate towards specific criminals do not allow us
to reflect properly on the intricate historical and social origins of current
forms of violence. Because of this, today’s politically engaged realisms
need to acknowledge these challenges and create innovative forms of
representation that can shift the focus from information and subjective
violence to a more nuanced understanding of historical narratives and
systemic forms of injustice. This is precisely what Vallejo’s novel does.
One of the most important aspects of Vallejo’s writing is that
it openly discusses the shortcomings of subjective violence as a form of
representing reality. Through a constant use of provocation in La vir-
gen, he forces his readers to think about the systemic violence that lies
behind many contemporary stories about criminal subjects. Instead of
blaming everything on certain individuals, the novel presents a network
of historical issues that made sicarios possible, usually with an ironic
tone that readers need to acknowledge. At a certain moment in the
novel, for example, Fernando tells the story of a priest who, in confes-
sion, hears a young man mention that he had sex with his girlfriend.
Later, he casually states that he kills for a living, but does not feel guilty
because: “Que se confesara de ellos el que los mandó matar. De ése era
el pecado, no de él que simplemente estaba haciendo un trabajo . . .” (37).
Significantly, the priest absolves him: in the novel, the young criminal
is part of a wide web of social actors. He is not the alpha and the omega
of Colombia’s violence.
Fernando himself participates in several discussions about crim-
inality and guilt in the novel. In many cases, he states that he would like
to see different persons die and his young lovers end up fulfilling his
desires. When Alexis murders an impoverished hippie neighbor because
he constantly bothers Fernando with his loud music, he says:

¿Pero que lo mandé matar? Nunca, jamás de los jamases. Jamás le dije
a Alexis: “Quebrame a éste”. Lo que yo dije fue: “Lo quisiera matar” y
30 Norman Valencia

se lo dije al viento; mi pecado, si alguno, se quedó en el quisiera. Y por
un quisiera, en esta matazón, ¿se va a ir uno a los infiernos? Si sí, yo me
arrepiento y no vuelvo a querer más. (38)

Through Fernando, the text indulges in the violent fantasies of the more
conservative sectors of society, of those who dream about the annihila-
tion of anyone who clashes with the beautiful life of Colombia’s well-
to-do. Every subject finds an appropriate excuse, another guilty party, a
group of subjects responsible for the generalized violence in Medellín,
where the novel takes place. Fernando’s apologies, however, are so con-
tradictory that they show his obvious involvement in the chaos that
surrounds him. Even the use of the language of sin and repentance in
the previous quote denotes Vallejo’s use of irony because Fernando sys-
tematically attacks religion throughout the text. Although the narrator
claims his innocence, we do not have to accept his version as a realistic
or objective description of what happened; it would probably be better
to consider this a parody of those who aspire to achieve a better world
by defending Christian values and, simultaneously, by desiring the
miraculous disappearance of other human beings (especially the poor
and disenfranchised, who are the constant targets of Fernando’s tirades)
from their lives. In the novel, they too are part of a network of actors
that have historically made Colombia a deeply unequal and violent
society. It is the reader’s task to see the implicit irony that separates the
novel’s message from its narrator’s passionate but contradictory argu-
ments.
Keeping this in mind, it would be a mistake to read La virgen
de los sicarios as a conventional realistic text. Far from depicting Colom-
bian reality in a verisimilar or objective way, Vallejo’s novel is opposed
to any univocal agreement between author and narrator, between text
and reader, or between representation and reality. In the process, the
novel demands that its readers take strong interpretive positions that
challenge any form of consensus with it. The narrator’s hyperbolic and
incongruous tone makes it impossible to accept anything he says at face
value. In many cases, the only sane response towards the novel is to
be in complete disagreement with Fernando. This discomfort towards
what appears to be pure realism is one of Vallejo’s greatest achievements
because it demands precisely what many of today’s realistic images of
our world lack: a conscious questioning of contemporary strategies of
Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of Violence 31

representation, especially those that claim to give us an objective or

unmediated access to the real.
Vallejo’s novel also deals, in a similarly brutal gesture, with
Žižek’s concept of objective violence: the untenable consensus of a nor-
mality that allows for the exploitation of millions as if it were a natural
and unavoidable part of reality itself. Immediately after the explanation
of his innocence regarding his neighbor’s death, Fernando reminds us
of several historical events that made sicarios possible in Colombia. The
novel takes place right after Pablo Escobar’s death in 1994, a time when
he was the largest economic supporter of the murder-for-hire industry
in the country. Vallejo shows us that, at this moment, being a hitman
was not simply the product of a generation of evil criminal subjects.
Sicarios were instead the creation of a widespread circulation of capital
related to drug trafficking and of a macabre division of labor that, para-
doxically, did not end with Escobar’s death:

Con la muerte del presunto narcotraficante que dijo arriba nuestro

primer mandatario, aquí prácticamente la profesión de sicario se acabó.
Muerto el santo se acabó el milagro. Sin trabajo fijo, se dispersaron por
la ciudad y se pusieron a secuestrar, a atracar, a robar. Y sicario que
trabaja solo por su cuenta y riesgo ya no es sicario: es libre empresa, la
iniciativa privada. (40)

The quote’s ironic use of the language of the free market aims at a deep
truth: within Colombia’s systemic inequality, “private initiative” allows
for the emergence of death as another form of capitalistic endeavor. And
if anyone thought that killing the country’s most important criminal
would be a solution to all of Colombia’s problems, Fernando proves
them wrong: Escobar’s death results in a chaotic proliferation of new
crimes, now without any controlling force. As opposed to the main
tenets of subjective violence, the novel shows us that the punishment of
a powerful criminal does not change anything if systemic injustice per-
sists. Or, to put it another way: if Colombia maintains a social structure
of insurmountable inequality, violence and crime will always function as
a form of “private initiative” for those who have nothing to lose. Vallejo
also proves that the spectacular media coverage of Escobar’s death was,
simply put, the reduction of a multifaceted social history into forms of
subjective violence and information. His text forces us to think about
a generalized failure to represent and understand this historic event,
especially by the media.
32 Norman Valencia

As we have seen, the novel includes remarkable passages that
show us how informative realism represents violence (through speed,
lack of context, and the exaggeration of the figure of the criminal)
and how these elements make it impossible to understand Colombia’s
complex social history. It also displays, with extreme ruthlessness, the
systemic violence that affects the country. One of the novel’s most
powerful pages shows us how, after Alexis is gunned down in the streets
of Medellín, Fernando meets his lover’s assassin, another young sicario
called Wilmar. Without knowing that he is responsible for Alexis’s
death, he feels attracted to him and they begin a relationship that cop-
ies his previous love affair. Once they get to know each other, Fernando
asks Wilmar to write down a list of his greatest dreams and expecta-
tions. This is his answer:

Que quería unos tenis marca Reebock [sic] y unos jeans Paco Ravanne.
Camisas Ocean Pacific y ropa interior Calvin Klein. Una moto Honda,
un jeep Mazda, un equipo de sonido láser y una nevera para la mamá:
uno de esos refrigeradores marca Whirlpool que soltaban chorros de
cubitos de hielo abriéndoles simplemente la llave. (106)

Here, far from focusing on the spectacle of subjective violence, the

novel reflects on the objective violence that creates this young assassin,
the typical subject of many contemporary stories. For him, foreign
brands have become the only possible objectives for human existence.
These brands are impossible to attain by most Colombians. The young
hitman, however, is an obedient figure that follows with insurmount-
able faith the greatest commandment of global capitalism: to consume
at all costs. If he cannot get these products legally, he will find other
ways to obtain them. In this brief scene, the novel shows us what today’s
informative realisms do not allow us to see: a deep systemic violence,
embedded in the affects, needs, and desires of criminal subjects who
are, usually, the most disenfranchised members of our societies. Most
importantly, if we follow the novel’s logic, it becomes clear that this
system of radical inequality has unexpected consequences that will,
eventually, affect us all. Regarding the previous quote, Erna von der
Walde points out:

Proyectos de vida que se traducen en una lista de compras. La globaliza-

ción no sólo reconfigura nuestros hábitos de consumo, permitiéndonos
consumir en cualquier lugar del mundo las mercancías que se producen
Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of Violence 33

en cualquier otro. También las pobrezas y las violencias que ella produz-
ca estarán a disposición de todos. (226)

Conclusions: Vallejo and the Art of Political Provocation

Fernando Vallejo’s role in contemporary Latin American culture

is that of the provocateur. His main objective is to shock us, to take
a contrarian position towards all possible interlocutors. His abrasive
first-person narrator, constructed in the image of the modernistas and
their reinterpretation of the European dandy, constantly interrupts the
flow of his plots, voicing brutal outbursts that cannot be appropriated
by any political cause. As I mentioned, one of the main objectives of
this voice is to make us question our own values and social constructs;
among them, it criticizes the idea that violence can only be represented
through the consensus implied in an apparently objective realism, es-
pecially today, when the global media has mastered an ideological use
of this specific representational strategy.
Vallejo’s conflictive narrator can make reading his work a dif-
ficult, even unpleasant, task. However, his writing has an unusual
virtue: it refuses to create any form of passive consensus regarding
the violent realities that it represents. He demands that his readers
slowly meditate about what he is saying, as well as evince a permanent
skepticism regarding what appears to be real in his texts. The reader’s
stance towards his writing should be, at every moment, conscious and
political. Instead of inviting us to accept a cultural agreement regard-
ing reality and its representation, Vallejo’s text compels us to debate his
controversial opinions and, simultaneously, to consider the political
tensions and complexities that we tend to overlook when dealing with
most contemporary and media-based representations of violence. As
they read the novel, for example, right-wing readers must confront the
fact that some of their own political views (including the contradictory
defense of Christian values and an open disregard for the poor) can
coincide with radical forms of fascism that very few would dare defend
publicly. Left-wing readers can easily criticize Vallejo’s narrative voice
and its radical opinions, but they must keep this in mind: through
this conservative “performance,” he has produced powerful reflections
on the silent brutality that underlies what we consider normal in our
deeply unequal societies. We could even argue that his main challenge
34 Norman Valencia

is directed precisely at progressive political forces that seem unable to
capture the public’s imagination, while a very conservative informa-
tive realism consistently dominates global interpretations of issues
like poverty, inequality, and violence. Maybe in Vallejo’s disputes with
current forms of representation, we could find a starting point for new
and more radical debates about the violent realities that surround us
and how to portray them. If we follow his infuriating narrator closely,
we will discover a voice with a unique ability to blow up the realistic
consensuses that underpin Benjamin’s information and Žižek’s subjec-
tive violence in our media-based societies. In the process, he could also
help us unveil some of the ideological fictions that define what today
we call the real.

Claremont McKenna College

NOTES
1
Some notable examples are series like Mad Men with its depiction of the 1960s;
Breaking Bad with its representation of the 2008 economic crisis and of issues related to
drug trafficking along the US-Mexico border; Homeland, in which the main character
works as a spy in the “War on Terror” in the Middle East; and Narcos, which depicts
the history of the expansion of drug trafficking in the Americas, first in Colombia
and then in Mexico. The success of each of these series depended, at least in part, on
their interaction with real events.

2
A good example of this position can be found in Alberto Fuguet and Diego Gómez’s
text “Presentación del país de McOndo,” published as a prologue to their 1996 short
story anthology, McOndo. In it they denounce magic realism as an inadequate and
dated form of representing the urban, neoliberal, and globalized Latin America of the
twenty-first century.

3
This was, of course, a very complex process, where modern speed and its interrup-
tion were dialectically at play. Seen from today’s perspective, nineteenth-century
realist novels seem to require a great deal of time and effort. For readers at the time,
however, the printed word in the form of books, newspapers, or serialized novels was
a surprisingly speedy medium, with strong ties to modernity and industrial capital-
ism. As Jaeho Kang puts it: “The rapid growth of the publishing industry in the
early nineteenth century was a decisive factor that accelerated the industrialization
of literary practice” (39). The state of literature as a modern industry and the role of
the author as a producer subject to market rules and practices were an essential part
of the historical transformations of the nineteenth century. However, as I explain in
Nineteenth-Century Realism, Media, and the Representation of Violence 35

what follows, literary realism did have a conflictive relationship with the capitalist
processes that defined its production and dissemination, something that is no longer
the case for many of today’s media-based realisms.

4
One recent example would be the obsessive (and very profitable) representation of
Colombian drug trafficking, and especially, of the figure of Pablo Escobar. Telenovelas
like El patrón del mal and series like Narcos were easily embraced by global audiences
and by media corporations like NBC-Telemundo and Netflix. It seems unlikely,
however, that they have produced strong debates around the economic, social, and
political realities that underlie global drug trafficking. Vallejo, as we will see, has very
different perspectives on this same phenomenon.

5
For a panoramic reading of Vallejo as a writer of autofiction, see Diana Diaconu’s
Fernando Vallejo y la autoficción. Coordenadas de un nuevo género narrativo and Fran-
cisco Villena Garrido’s Las máscaras del muerto: autoficción y topografías narrativas en
la obra de Fernando Vallejo.

6
The concept of “subjective violence” has nothing to do with the idea that violence is
defined by the “subjective view” of the beholder. By this term, Žižek means a depic-
tion of violence that is based exclusively on the actions of specific subjects, without
any concern for broad historical and social contexts.

WORKS CITED
Aristizábal, Juanita C. Fernando Vallejo a contracorriente. Beatriz Viterbo, 2015.
Balderston, Daniel. “La primera persona en La puta de Babilonia de Fernando Vallejo.”
Cuadernos de Literatura, vol. 14, no. 27, 2010, pp. 256–63.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Works. 4 vols., Harvard UP, 2003.
Diaconu, Diana. Fernando Vallejo y la autoficción. Coordenadas de un nuevo género
narrativo. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2013.
Fuguet, Alberto, and Diego Gómez, eds. McOndo. Grijalbo Mondadori, 1996.
Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. Verso, 2013.
Kang, Jaeho. Walter Benjamin and the Media. Polity, 2014.
Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. Routledge, 2005.
Morris, Pam. Realism. Routledge, 2003.
Vallejo, Fernando. Peroratas. Alfaguara, 2013.
———. La virgen de los sicarios. Alfaguara, 2008.
Villena Garrido, Francisco. Las máscaras del muerto: autoficción y topografías narrativas
en la obra de Fernando Vallejo. Editorial Universidad Javeriana, 2009.
———. “La sinceridad puede ser demoledora: conversaciones con Fernando Vallejo.”
Ciberletras, vol. 13, 2005.
Von der Walde, Erna. “La sicaresca colombiana. Narrar la violencia en América Latina.”
Nueva Sociedad, vol. 170, 2000, pp. 222–26. http://nuso.org/media/articles/
downloads/2928_1.pdf.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. Picador, 2008.
36 Norman Valencia

Keywords: violence and representation, contemporary Colombian literature, literature
and media, Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Žižek, contemporary realisms.

Palabras clave: violencia y representación, literatura colombiana contemporánea,

medios y literatura, Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Žižek, realismos contemporáneos.

Date of Receipt: June 2, 2017

Date of Acceptance: May 21, 2018