Voice and Memory: Myth, History, and Literature in Héctor Tizón’s Short Fiction

Abstract

To tell a story is to populate the memory jealously treasured by History and Myth; it is to inscribe the archive of orality; it is to narrate a vision of the world that reveals and conceals itself simultaneously. The voices of myth and history are fictionalized in Tizón’s narrative. By intertextualizing these stories, his writing preserves them but also betrays them by translating orality into a foreign code: writing, conceived as a substitute fetish for the spoken word.

Tizón’s literature questions the exchanges and violations of both codes and establishes the writing of orality and the language of silence as representations of the eclectic voice of culture. Orality and writing thus construct the basis of a discourse whose mark is transgression, since it is able to record the expropriations and denials, the integrations and uprootings of a cultural periphery.