Rewriting the honour plot: ‘Infierno grande’ by Guillermo Martínez

Abstract

The short stories in the collection Infierno grande (1989) by Argentine author Guillermo Martínez are bound by a common theme: a deep-seated preoccupation with masculine identity. Born in 1962, Martínez is representative of a generation of men who came of age during the military dictatorship in power from 1976 to 1983, a period ofviolent political repression accompanied by heightened gender anxiety, surveillance, and social control. The title story, set in a small provincial town in 1978, depicts traditional masculinity in crisis, threatened by progressive gender ideology associated with the political left. Martínez stages this crisis of masculinity in the gendered space of the barbershop, traditionally a site of homosocial male bonding, and employs the Calderonian pundonor theme to foreground questions of male honour, female virtue, and violence. The honour plot is not resolved by a vengeance killing, however, but further complicated by the discovery of evidence of atrocities committed by the military state. The author uses the honour/vengeance plot to critique the dominant cultural and political discourses of Argentine masculinity, including the hypermasculine discourse of the military junta. In ‘Infierno grande’, the title story of the collection, Martínez subverts the problematic literary model of vengeance killing in order to challenge the patriarchal logic of the honour code, and to question the invocation of masculine, military and national honour to justify various forms of unlawful male violence against the feminine and feminised Other( s) in the context of the Argentine Proceso.