Testimonio

If the novel is a closed and private form in the sense that both the story and the subject end with the end of the text, defining that auto-referential self-sufficiency that is the basis of formalist reading practices, the testimonio exhibits by contrast what René Jara calls a “public intimacy” (intimidad pública) in which the boundary between public and private spheres of life essential in all forms of bourgeois culture and law is transgressed. The narrator in testimonio is a real person who constitutes living and acting in a real social history that also continues. Testimonio can never in this sense create the illusion of that textual in-itselfness that has been the basis of literary formalism, nor can it be adequately analyzed in these terms. It is, to use Umberto Eco’s slogan, an “open work” that implies the importance of and power of literature as a form of social action, but also its radical insufficiency.

In principle, testimonio appears therefore as an extraliterary or even antiliterary form of discourse. That paradoxically, is precisely the basis of both its aesthetic and its political appeal...If the picaresque novel was the pseudoautobiography of a lower-class individual (thus inverting a "learned" humanist form into a pseudopopular one), we might observe in recent literature (1) novels that are in fact pseudo-testimonios, inverting a form that grows out of subaltern experience into one that is middlebrow (an example might be the Mexican novel Las aventuras, desaventuras y sueños de Adonis García: El vampiro de la Colonia Roma, by Luis Zapata, which purports to be the testimonio of a homosexual prostitute...(3) a series of ambiguous forms located between the novel and testimonio as such (for example, Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero or the very intriguing novel/memoir of the Cultural Revolution, Yang Jiang’s A Cadre School Life, which is a testimonio rendered in the mold of a narrative of classical Chinese literature).

--John Beverly, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth