Desencanto y cinismo en el realismo sucio de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez y su Trilogía sucia de La Habana (1998)

Abstract

Dirty Havana Trilogy (1998), by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, is a set of three books of short stories. Published for the first time in 1998 it narrates the harsh reality of Havana in the nineteen nineties. This analysis will start from dirty realism as a concept that includes cynicism, disenchantment, marginality, violence, daily life and locality. (Birkenmaier, 2001). The concept of cynicism that will be used will be the one proposed by Onfray “Philosophical cynicism proposes a joyful insolent knowledge and an effective practical wisdom” (2002, p. 32). It is also intended to study and analyze the crisis of the Cuban Revolution, which is the reason for the disenchantment, according to the concept proposed by Sophía Yánez (1997). Regarding the methodology, using the theory of the Three Mimesis by Ricoeur, the space/time in which the story takes place will be contextualized, then, it is intended to show the way in which the parts that make up dirty realism are configured in the Dirty Havana Trilogy (1998). The Three Mimesis’s theory suggests that there are three parts to analyze in a text. In the particular case of this analysis, Mimesis I includes the context of the author and the reality in which the work was written, Mimesis II is the analysis of the elements of dirty realism in the Dirty Havana Trilogy and how they are configured throughout the text, and Mimesis III is the last section in which observations about the text are written.