“The Night Will Never End”. Sexual Violence, Dehumanization and Capitalism in El sexto by José María Arguedas

Abstract

It is a fact that José María Arguedas is one of the most important writers of Latin American literature of the twentieth century; However, the specialized critic has paid little or no attention to a determining factor in his work: sexuality. This article studies El sexto (1961), the penultimate novel of the great Peruvian narrator. Our objective is to analyze the role that sexuality plays, in its degraded modality of rape, in the diegesis of this text. The hypothesis that we assume is that this manifestation (the violations that occur among the inmates of the prison) is not only present as an element that reinforces the reality effect of a prison-related novel, but works as a strategy of domination, control and punishment, which exercises power over those individuals who dare to face the capitalist system and its representatives on duty. This strategy seeks to transform these insurgents into abject beings, stripping them of any possible chink of humanity. In this sense, the prison is not considered as a center of resocialization, rather it is a social machinery of degradation and human debasement.