The Paginas en Blanco: History as Process

The idea of the paginas en blanco throughout Diaz's novel are really intriguing to me. Throughout the semester, I have become increasingly interested in the places in a text where the language fails. The paginas en blanco are yet another example. When Yunior tells his audience that he will "give you what [he's] managed to unearth and the rest will have to wait for the day the paginas en blanco finally speak" what he is really saying is that history itself is still in the process of being made (Diaz 119).

We often think of history as factual marks of events on a chronological time line. The linear concept of time allows us to filter information and accept and reject it based on an imagined space-time continuum. In the frame of a time line, we can categorize, label and understand our histories. However, the paginas en blanco are suspended in a liminal space. They are the histories that have already been experienced, but have not been recorded. There are elements to these stories that maybe do not yet have the necessary language to reveal the historical truth in relation to the fact.

I would argue that this liminal space that belongs to the paginas en blanco is the memory of the various characters in the novel. Arguably, each character has something that they remember, but they cannot adequately articulate. Perhaps it is because they do not have the necessary temporal referent, or maybe it is because they are lacking a different sort of referent. In this particular scene, it is because of "Beli's silence...other folk's lingering unease...[the] info on the Gangster is fragmented" (Diaz 119). In other words, the pages remain blank because the transference of information is impeded by the ideas of the already recorded history. The historical trajectory of the Trujillo regime becomes the history of the Dominican Republic. Furthermore, the varying ways in which the subjects experience that history determines what they can and cannot relate about that history. When the subjects are anxious, or silenced, or fragmented, their experience must present an opposition to the accepted historical trajectory. Therefore, their records are buried, or suspended. The accepted facts will be challenged. Therefore, what they remember of their experience must be suspended, and history remains in a process. The paginas en blanco, then, function in the text as a liminal space of history, they signify a waiting process, a location out of time, and space.