Law’s Will to Truth in The Sound of Things Falling

Abstract

This article addresses law’s will to truth in The Sound of Things Falling, a novel written by Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The novel’s main character is a law professor who feels the urge of overcoming a traumatic experience by digging into the past life of a friend who was murdered in Bogotá in 1996. The article argues that law’s will to truth shapes the main character’s expectations in a journey that he believes will help him explain why he was also a victim of a violent deed. In this quest, the main character discovers that although truth is elusive, the journey reveals that there is a possibility of rebuilding community from uncertainties and ambiguity. In the novel, law-and-literature approaches to narrativity offer a path toward the creation of new communities after violence and trauma.

Keywords:

• Right to truth
• law and narrativity
• trauma
• war on drugs

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank Susanne Zepp, Klaus Hoffman-Holland, Héctor Hoyos, and Lena Hein for their insights in the development of this piece. I am also grateful to Helena Alviar, Patricia Zalamea, Teodora Groza, and all the participants of the 2022 Globinar Series on Law, Capitalism and the Global Crisis at Sciences Po for sharing with me their ideas on the relationship between law and memory. Penélope Salge was a generous Research Assistant for this article.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See generally: Fernando J. Rosenberg, After Human Rights: Literature, visual arts, and film in Latin America 1990–2010 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2006), 59–92.

2 Ibid., 59.

3 Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño. The Global Latin American Novel (New York: Columbia University, 2015), 128–42.

4 Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 51–6.

5 Ibid., 61.

6 Ibid., 21.

7 Ibid., 41–7.

8 Ibid., 117.

9 Ibid., 260.

10 Ibid., 8.

11 Ibid., 63. This is a word game in the Spanish version. The verb “introducir” (to introduce) can be a synonym of “penetrar” (to penetrate). Likewise, “al derecho” also means “rightside position.” The drawing depicts Antonio with a giant erection suggesting his active sexual life with female students.

12 Ibid., 100–3.

13 Ibid., 276.

14 Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El Ruido de las Cosas al Caer (Bogotá: Random House, 2011), 241. (“Y entonces dejó de besarme. Maya me tocó inútilmente, inútilmente se metió mi miembro a la boca, su lengua inútil me recorrió sin ruido, y luego su boca resignada volvió a mi boca y sólo en ese momento me di cuenta de que estaba desnuda”).

15 A classical example of introduction to law textbooks illustrates the point. See Eduardo García-Maynez, Introducción al estudio del derecho (México: Porrúa 1940).

16 Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, 7.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 8.

19 Ibid.

20 Duncan Kennedy, “Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy” in The Politics of Law, ed. David Kairys (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 61.

21 Maynez, Introducción al Estudio del Derecho, XXI.

22 Ibid., XXIII.

23 Julie Stone Peters, “Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real: On the Future of an Interdisciplinary Illusion,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 448.

24 Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, 8.

25 Ibid., 103.

26 Stone Peters, “Law and the Vanishing Real,” 449.

27 Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, 116. In the Spanish version, Maya uses the word “prueba,” which can be translated both as “proof,” but in more technical terms it can also be “evidence” in English. It is possible that Antonio relates “proof” with the more legal term “evidence.” In the Spanish versión see Vásquez, El Ruido de las Cosas al Caer, 107.

28 Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, 245.

29 Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, Gelman V. Uruguay (24 de febrero de 2011), §188.

30 Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, Reglamento General, Acuerdo ASP 001 (March 2, 2020), Article 3. See also, República de Colombia, Law 1922, 2018.

31 Law 1922 of 2018, article 1(a) (author’s own emphasis).

32 Antonio Salcedo Flores, “La verdad procesal,” Alegatos 58 (2004): 279–90. See also, Hernando Devis Echandía, Compendio de Derecho Procesal. Teoría General del Proceso (Medellín: Dike, 1987), 40–1.

33 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 5.

34 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 9.

35 Michel Foucault, La verdad y las formas jurídicas (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1978), 39. The English translation of these conferences that took place in Rio de Janeiro does not include the paragraph where Foucault argues the importance of reading Oedipus Rex as an evidence of Greek judicial practices. See: Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms” in Michel Foucault, Power, Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 1–89.

36 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” 23.

37 Ibid., 16–32.

38 Oxford Reference, (Oxford University Press, 2023), available at: https://www.oxford reference.com/display/10 .1093/oi/authority.2011 0803100412483;jsessionid=B4E8E0F91D78671 F05E413F19BF0FAD9#:∼:text=Determines%20the%20effects%20that%20prior,in%20a%20later%20civil%20action.

39 On how the emergence of human rights vocabulary triggered a belief in substantive justice, see: Günter Frankenberg, “Human Rights and the Belief in a Just World,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 12, no. 1 (2014): 35–60.

40 Repúbica de Colombia, Law 975, 2005.

41 See: GMH, ¡Basta Ya! Memorias de Guerra y Dignidad (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 2013).

42 Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, 5.

43 On impulses and impact in social life see. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (Mansfield: Martino Publishing, 2010), 94–103.

44 Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, 243.

45 See the classical formulation in Kant’s 1784 essay: Immanuel Kant, “An anawer to the question: What is Enlightenment” in What is Enlightenment. Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58–64.

46 Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, no. 3 (1941): 366–88.

47 Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, 244.

48 Ibid., 296.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., 8.

51 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la Lengua Española (2001).

52 Richard Posner, Law and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 389.

53 Ibid., p. 9.

54 Peter Brooks, “Retrospective Prophecies” in New Directions of Law and Literature, ed. Elizaeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 92–3.

55 Peter Brooks, “Narrativity of the Law,” Law and Literature 14, no.1 (2002): 3.

56 Robin Wharton and Derek Miller, “New Directions in Law and Narrative,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 15, no. 2 (2019): 295.

57 Ibid., 297.

58 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 2.

59 Ibid., 3.

60 Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, 276.

61 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.

62 Ibid., 8; See also, Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo, “Violencia, memoria y empatía reflexiva en El Ruido de las Cosas al Caer de Juan Gabriel Vásquez,” A Contra Corriente. Una Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos 20, no. 1 (2022), 67–96, stressing the type of empathy that emerges in Antonio’s encounter with Maya and his disencounter with Aura.

63 Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, 297.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jorge González-Jácome

Jorge González-Jácome is an Associate Professor of Law, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). He holds an SJD from Harvard University and is the author of: Revolución, democracia y paz : trayectorias de los derechos humanos en Colombia (1973–1985) and the novel La Incierta Forma del Tiempo (2023).