“Sex is much more repressed than violence”

There will be little Buenos Aires summer for Guillermo Martínez. The first four months of 2025 will be spent in the United States at the invitation of the University of Virginia, where he will teach a Creative Writing course in Spanish for undergraduate students and a seminar for teachers based on the themes of Eleven theses (and antitheses) about writing fictiona book that proposes reflections and tools on the literary craft.

“I’m going to live in the city of Charlottesvillein a very nice house that is on the university campus and that I already know because it was the one I got when they invited me ten years ago,” he says.

But the topic of the talk with Viva It will be another. It’s just that Martínez just published a dead cata horror story that inaugurates the Illustrated Minotaur collection. The text, originally included in A repulsive happinessa book that won the Gabriel García Márquez Hispano-American Short Story Prize in 2014, has illustrations by the visual artist Santiago Caruso that underline the disturbing and gloomy atmosphere of history.

Fictional horror will be the theme, but also what we naturalize all the time through social networks and the violence that pulsates in public discourse.

In his native Bahía Blanca, Martínez grew up among books. The family library was a paradise where he discovered the charms of the enigma police genrehis favorite, based on the works of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, but it also allowed him to discover horror literature, which his father Julio loved.

“A book that marked me a lot during my childhood was one of russian fairy talesquite terrifying by the way, with eagles that gouged out people’s eyes, winged horses that took you up a snowy mountain where you died immediately or the stories of Baba Yaga (N. of R: old witch of Slavic mythology) and her houses in the forest, a very impressive imagery for me,” he says.

To these initiation readings were added the folkloric tales of the Polidoro collection with their stories associated with the devil, and the classics of Edgar Allan Poe, such as The Dead Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart o The mask of the red death. “All very vividly illustrated,” he recalls. And of course, the stories of Horacio Quiroga: “I would almost tell you that they scared me… Memory The slaughtered chicken and no… no… that was too much. And then look at the things I ended up writing, how great.”

a dead cat tells the story of a young professor who goes to live in an apartment that seems perfect, until the nights begin to become torture due to the piercing and continuous meowing of an old woman’s catwho doesn’t want to know anything by keeping it quiet. Another neighbor, who like him suffers from sleepless nights, will encourage his desire to finish off the animal, which will unleash a domino effect of unforeseeable consequences.

“I put all the clockwork of the police story at the service of this crazy atmosphere. a dead cat It has a trait that appears a lot in my stories: something that is minor, but that scales to a dimension that becomes overwhelming. And it also has the tension that exists between a rational explanation and a superstitious, supernatural one,” he explains.

-Why is horror literature still so attractive?

-I think it is because we all fight in one way or another against a number of repressed impulses: suppress the one who bothers you, think “I wish he died”. In other words, there are mixed feelings that give way to a certain social hypocrisy that is necessary to survive. It is the tension, Sarmiento would say, between civilization and barbarism. Barbarism is in us, without a doubt, and its externalization gives rise to horror. As Goya’s phrase says, the dreams of reason produce monsters. When the protagonist of the story starts to think about the possible ways to kill a cat, he begins to get closer to the criminal act, although he never ends up doing it. And I think that’s what gives the proximity of horror. In Of murder as one of the fine artsby Thomas de Quincey, there is a part, for me unforgettable, in which one notices, with a certain irony, the shudder felt by the person who is about to kill.

-The other days we were able to see how an executive from New York and a man in Recoleta were murdered. Two crimes filmed and broadcast on the networks almost like a spectacle.

-And one more step: There are people who film themselves committing acts very similar to murders, if not the murders themselves.. For example, boys who set fire to a linyera in the street, actions like killing for pleasure and to put it on cell phones, raping girls, etc…. I believe that any technological advance brings good things and horrible things, right? it’s true? And this is part of the new horror in which we live.

-For me, it is due to some of the extreme violence that cinema has had, especially. The stylization and in some way the aestheticization of violence has influenced minds, especially young ones. We live in a world loaded with images of violence. Compare the percentage of violence and the percentage of sex. Sex is much more repressed than violence. Violence is everywhere, at all times, at all times… In American movies the joke is to kill and laugh, right? Let’s think about Tarantino’s films.

-Tarantino, I was going to tell you that, of course.

–I hate Tarantino. It is the conjugation of an ideological position. I hate it in that sense. Even though he wants to whitewash with his films about the Nazis and I don’t know what, deep down I see it as the liberation of a kind of fascist violence. The joy of killing. For me, what is fascism? The joy of killing.

-Regarding what you say, exposed violence and hidden sex, I think about what happened in recent weeks around the book Cometierra, by Dolores Reyes.

-The discourse of certain sectors is loaded with violence all the time. Look at the amount of violence there is in the stories, in the movies that kids watch, in the lyrics of the songs. In other words, violence goes completely unnoticed, normalized, familiar. This is difficult to measure or evaluate, But for me we live in a society that has greatly reduced the level of tolerance for violence. We allow ourselves to be insulted even by the president. All insulted in one way or another, right? The Conicet scientists, the state employees, the people who have left-wing thoughts… He has the luxury of insulting every day and in all his interventions. And somehow that is leading to an increasingly rarefied climate.

-Are you reading contemporary horror literature?

-No. The truth is that it is not a genre with which I, let’s say, feel at all related. I read, of course, stories by María Enríquez, very good ones at that. Read Goliath’s eyeby Diego Muzzio, which is not exactly a horror novel, but has scenes that are very disturbing about madness. I am more interested in horror linked to madness than supernatural horror. For example, a very interesting book that I just read is The future lasts too longthe autobiography of philosopher Louis Althusser, which is a sort of descent into mental illness. And in this sense I am also interested in the work of Carlos Chernov, whose novels and stories have elements of horror, but a horror that is somehow normalized in society. He thinks of utopias where the norm is something horrifying for us, but of which we are already seeing signs.

-Do you notice in contemporary literature a moralizing view, as if one had to write according to certain ethical parameters?

-There is a feature that seems a bit comical to me at this point: that women’s bodies cannot be mentioned admirably without it being read as sexist violence. If you read contemporary American literature you cannot get any sense of whether the characters like female characters or not, because there is absolutely no hint of sexuality. It is as if sexuality were corseted, because there is something like self-censorship on the part of the authors. Well, I call it self-censorship: perhaps there is a new generation that no longer associates women with any idea of ​​sexuality… As if sexuality were something that can be separated from people and left for a second instance, which will come one day. Furthermore, describing a female character based on a certain physical attraction is punishable.

-The curious thing is that it arises from progressive sectors.

-And it’s okay to recognize it. If one considers oneself within progressivism, it is okay to find its problems, recognize the limitations, the flaws… I understand why it comes to this, but it is still a moralistic objection. And this should not play into art.