Rapsodia guatemalteca o el crisol de carencias contemporáneas

Abstract

This essay examines the state of contemporary Guatemalan narrative through an intertextual journey spanning the Editorial X and its foundational generation to the millennial writers who followed. Using the musical metaphor of the rhapsody—a structure that often converses with literary tradition—as its guiding thread, the essay argues that twenty-first-century Guatemalan literature faces a crisis of continuity produced by the absence of critical spaces, editorial precarity, and a lack of historiographical documentation. As a case study, it analyzes Guatemalan Rhapsody (2025) by Jared Lemus, a second-generation Guatemalan-American author whose work accidentally adopts the countercultural mission of Editorial X by disregarding the established canon. The essay concludes that contemporary Guatemalan narrative is not nonexistent, but inconsequential: dispersed, without interlocutors, and stripped of the sustained conversation that defines a living literary tradition.