“Revolution” by Juan Pablo Meneses, the story of the Che statue in St. Michael – 2024-08-23 02:33:49

The narrative text of the Chilean writer Juan Pablo Meneses (Santiago, 1969) is, I have no doubt, an interesting exercise from the scriptural perspective that the story adopts, as well as for the subject it deals with, that is, that which lives in the tradition itself, alien to the literary work, but which will influence its content – I paraphrase the classic definition Kayseriregarding the literary subject. The image of Che Guevara on the cover and the word revolution as the title indicate where the order of the story will go. In the historical imagination, the figure of Ernesto Che Guevara is part of a certain iconography since he was killed in the heights of a place in Bolivia where he wanted to spread the revolution that had begun on the Caribbean island of Cuba.

Meneses’ story moves on the basis of two rhetorical forms that are intertwined in discourse. These are the novel and the chronicle. The first is based on fiction, while the second works on the basis of testimony, in other words, documentary. The chronicle as a journalistic format. In the elaboration of the narrative, both tend to merge linguistically. This seems to be the first merit of the text. Sometimes the reader will not notice where one or the other begins. The index, moreover, is symptomatic: of the three parts into which the work is divided, the author focuses on the first. quid of the matter in the second one which is called The novelwhile those that frame this one are titled The complaint y The story. Consequently, the centrality of the story is a novel that is being written. It is a story framed by historical facts of a chronicle nature that are the ones that enclose the novel. But this is like a mirage, since the frames turn out to be also like a narrative confluence with the center. This discursive ambiguity – in the good sense of the word – is also interesting for the reader of the novel/chronicle text of a specific situation regarding Che.

Iconically, the Argentine guerrilla fighter killed in La Higuera, Bolivia, in 1967, became over time a figure that transcended his revolutionary actions. The image of his corpse in Vallegrande exposed in a laundry room is well-known. There he is with his eyes open in a position that would transform him into a quasi-religious image. The photo on the cover of Meneses’ work is based on the classic photograph by Alberto Korda taken in 1960. Che Guevara with his long hair and a beard – like all the bearded men of the Cuban revolution – and the classic beret on his head with a star in the center of it. A little star will accompany the reader at various moments in the pages. Che looks towards infinity in that photo as if in a messianic attitude. Symptomatically, the body lying in the laundry room shows him with his eyes open like a recumbent Christ. Since Korda’s photo, the guerrilla fighter became an icon beyond political connotations. It became a cultural image, especially of the pop or of the so-called mass culture.

Meneses’ work addresses aspects that I have briefly described. In this narrative structure, the Chilean author focuses his interest on what would be the proto Che would later be transfigured into a Commander Guevara multiplied in various images of mass culture, including the cinema with Omar Sharif as the guerrilla in 1969. It all began with the sculpture several meters high that Mayor Tito Palestro in the commune of San Miguel in Santiago de Chile at the beginning of the seventies planned to build the first monument in the world in homage to the commander, an idea that would be configured by the Buenos Aires sculptor Praxiteles Vasquez in which he shows Che with his arms raised holding a machine gun. The statue was inaugurated in 1970 when Salvador Allende was president of Chile, and Fidel visited it during his stay of several weeks in the country and said, as the story goes, that he saw his friend, Che, turned into bronze for the first time. Later, the monument would suffer several attacks, it would end up decapitated in April 1973 and disappeared.

Juan Pablo Meneses works narratively on the subject around the disappearance of the statue or the monument. That is why the first part of the novel/chronicle is called The Complaint. It refers to the actions carried out by the protagonist in order to find the whereabouts of the image that disappeared during the dictatorship. The work revolves around Juan and Celia, who work in the field of television or film productions. streaming. A company has bought the idea of ​​a documentary series about Che and the famous missing monument. In the third part, the reader will be able to know or glimpse where the guerrilla ended up, all this within the fictionalization of the story with the mixture of the chronicle. In the course of this search that is nothing other than the Revolution From the title, the related theme emerges: the commander, Che, transformed into a fetish.

In short, whoever delves into the pages of Juan Pablo Meneses’ book will be able to perceive the story of a revolutionary statue of Mayor Palestro and Praxiteles, programmed by Meneses with this interesting cross between rhetorical formats and narrative voices. Needless to say, the streaming never came to fruition.

Technical sheet:

Juan Pablo Meneses. Revolution. TusQuets, editors. 2024. 262 pages.