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Working Through the Archive: Trauma and History in Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Dean Franco
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Abstract

Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues is a metafictional novel that comments on literary history. In its three books, Dr. Gregory Revueltas battles a mysterious and ravaging plague, during the 1780s, 1980s, and mid–twenty-first century. In each book he leaves a legacy of writing for the next Gregory to read. By reading and writing this archive, or library of cultural knowledge, the final Gregory develops a historical consciousness that helps him see beyond his episteme's limited science and derive a cure for the recurring plague. His confronting the plague by reading his own writing both intimately and critically is an allegory for the efficacy of literature as a response to historical trauma. Gregory does not gain agency over history, but through the self-conscious reading of his archive he is able to place himself in a cultural trajectory otherwise inaccessible in each book's bracketed historical moment.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 2 , March 2005 , pp. 375 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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