ABSTRACT
Addressing the idea of artist as interlocutor demands an attention to relations between an articulation of subjectivity and the subjectivation produced. In terms of a subjective interlocutor articulating the collective memory of a situation, one might see testimonio as congruent with the articulation of Lukcss objective poetic principles. Fredric Jameson sees testimonio in contrast to an overt subjectivism, and individualising subjectivation, found in the European novel, downplaying the individual subject in favour of their speaking for a wider collective. Containing elements of autobiography, confession, memoir and oral history, testimonio usually entails a first-person protagonist, recalling life-historical events in a way that often appears in conflict with the representational hegemony of a European and North American bourgeois literature that persists as a legacy of colonialism, and continues under the conditions of capitalist globalisation. In Jameson's reading, Lukcss totalising realism is a hermeneutic necessity, standing in dialectical relation to the free-play of signifiers offered in later modernist and post-modernist literature.
