CRITICAL FICTIONS IN LATIN AMERICA

By Catalina Ocampo

B.A., University of Virginia, 2001

A.M., Brown University, 2004

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2015

© Copyright 2015 by Catalina Ocampo

iii

This dissertation by Catalina Ocampo is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying

the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Stephanie Merrim, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Esther Whitfield, Reader

Date______Michelle Clayton, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School

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Curriculum Vitae

Catalina Ocampo was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Virginia in 2001 and the A.M. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2005. She has taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Brown University and was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Puget Sound from 2011-2012. She is currently a Member of the Faculty at the Evergreen State College, where she teaches Latin American literature and culture.

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Acknowledgments

In the coda to this dissertation I outline a literary-critical utopia: it is an open bar where an intellectual community engages, collectively, in the production of critical fictions. In the coda, the bar is populated by the writers, critics, and characters that appear in this dissertation. Yet the community in my utopian open bar is much broader: it includes all those who made this dissertation possible through their camaraderie, support, generosity, imagination, and critical insight. As everyone mentioned here is well aware, this was truly a collective effort.

My infinite gratitude goes to my advisor, Stephanie Merrim, whose critical imagination has kept me on my toes from our first conversation about Alfonso Reyes, years before starting this dissertation. Many of the insights contained in the following pages came from my always-imperfect attempts to answer her careful and incisive questions. I continue to ponder them, and have received no bit of wisdom more productive than the phrase, “the secret to the treasure is the treasure.” It truly was. Her human and scholarly wisdom has made me a better thinker, writer, teacher, and person, and I can only hope that we can continue our dialogue for years to come.

I am thankful to my readers, Esther Whitfield and Michelle Clayton for their generosity and intellectual rigor, for their patience and flexibility. Esther provided untiring suggestions, leads, words of encouragement and caution from proposal to defense, though I owe much more to her. Throughout my graduate education I often looked to her for example and support, and was never let down. I am grateful to Michelle for joining the committee as the dissertation took new shape, and for her meticulous reading, which caught nuances and connections that had slipped me by. I especially appreciate the pointers that help me think about the next steps for this project. I hope to keep the conversation going with both of them.

At Brown University, I am thankful to Julio Ortega, who has been an admirable model of intellectual creativity, and provided early opportunities to present and publish my work. I am grateful to him for introducing me to Héctor Libertella, whose thinking on the relationship between literature and criticism is at the heart of this dissertation. Susan Bernstein also guided me through the ups and downs of graduate school at a critical point in my career, and provided encouragement and a safe haven at a time when I much needed one.

I have also to thank Doris Sommer and the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, which encouraged me to think broadly and creatively about the social contributions of artists and intellectuals. I am grateful to Doris for reigniting my faith in scholarly work and in the possibility of reimagining the role of the humanities. My time vi at the Cultural Agents Initiative has been decisive for my work as a scholar, teacher, and creative thinker, and continues to bear fruit.

During the years I worked on this dissertation, I benefitted greatly from the generosity, good humor, faith, and support of my colleagues at the University of Puget Sound and at the Evergreen State College. I am especially indebted to Pepa Lago-Graña, Mark Harpring, and Harry Vélez-Quiñones, who placed great trust in my abilities as a teacher and scholar and made it possible to create more time to work on my dissertation. I also want to thank Brendan Lanctot, Oriel Siu, Alicia Ramirez Dueker, David Hanson, Curtis Wasson, Diane Kelley, and Rachel Sizer-Williams for the sense of camaraderie that they shared during the semesters I taught at Puget Sound. I am deeply grateful to my teaching partners at the Evergreen State College, who went above and beyond the call of duty to welcome me and guide me through the new adventure of teaching at Evergreen. Alice Nelson and Tom Womeldorff provided friendship and an open space for intellectual and pedagogical experimentation. They challenged me to think about systems of power in new ways, fed my love of narrative, and reinforced my belief in the potential of collaborative work. I am deeply grateful for the kindness of Chico Herbison and Amy Cook, who pulled me out of my intellectual and pedagogical comfort zones and challenged me rethink the relationship between the sciences and the humanities. I thank them for the experience of truly interdisciplinary thinking.

This dissertation would not have been possible without an extraordinary community of friends, who have sat with me in bars, libraries, living rooms, parks, cafes, and virtual spaces to think about and reimagine the world. I thank Kelley Kreitz for her unwavering friendship and innumerable hours of conversation on everything from the relationship between journalism and criticism in Latin America, to the commercial potential of modernista action figures, to job applications, to the challenges of writing and nursing. She knows that this dissertation is of common authorship. I thank Rachel Greene for a beautiful postcard of a library with a secret door leading into a dining room: its subtle poetics capture our friendship, which has helped me persevere through this dissertation. We have now earned half of our imagined meal. I could not have done without Teresa Villa-Ignacio’s friendship, wit, heart, loyalty, open spirit, and intelligence. I thank her for being there from the very beginning and for all the glasses of wine that she shared with me, at all the moments that mattered. I thank Marimar Patrón for understanding the importance of literature, community, and creativity and for sharing her friendship and contagious energy. I owe the title of this dissertation to her. I am thankful to Weston Smith, who always helps me believe that anything is possible. William Tortorelli shared my love of literature, ancient and contemporary, and motivated me to get to the finish line, though he beat me by a couple years. I am grateful to Dan and Anna Scheid for sharing space, children, food, drink, and the experience of writing a dissertation. Their kindness and generosity prevented this project from floundering in its early stages. Stacey Levine, Mike Rosenmeier, April Randle, John Paul, Rachel Spigler, and Will Trask provided home and community in Pittsburgh. They were untiring supporters and made me laugh at the times I needed it most. I am grateful to Peter Hodum and Nathalie Hamel for throwing their doors and hearts wide open, and for repeatedly allowing me to use their home as a writing retreat. Darby Veek and Kristi Lynett also

vii provided unconditional support, unexpected meals, and the knowledge that I could always count on them. Gwynne and Jim Brown always believed in me and in this project, even when I myself was dubious. I thank all my friends, collectively, for the many forms of community and intellectual dialogue they have shared with me: they surpass any utopian model I could have devised by myself.

No tengo cómo agradecerles a mi padre, madre y hermana, quienes apoyaron (y se soportaron) este proyecto durante muchos años. A mi madre, Beatriz Londoño, le debo incontables de horas de ayuda, plegarias, mensajes de apoyo, visitas a todas las ciudades donde escribí esta tesis y sobre todo su incansable amor de madre, su confianza incondicional, su paciencia conmigo. A mi padre, Francisco Ocampo, le agradezco por ser el mejor profesor de crítica-ficción que he tenido en mi vida. De él heredo mi amor por la literatura y las letras, y le dedico este proyecto. Que sea acto de eternidad. A mi hermana, Juana Ocampo, quien siempre fue una mejor hermana mayor, le agradezco su vital energía, su sentido estético, su amor, que siempre me renuevan y me dan fuerzas para seguir adelante.

To Carl Toews, steadfast believer, exacting critic, partner in imagination, voice of pragmatism, co-conspirator, demanding timekeeper, gentle supporter: I have no way to thank him for the many roles that he played, from beginning to end. I thank him for love, ambition, home, all at once. My son Benjamin, already a voracious reader and exacting critic, continues to remind me of the critical power of apparently naive readings. I thank him for challenging my imagination, daily and in unexpected ways. My son Simon was with me, in and ex utero, during much of this project. The second half of the dissertation is his.

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Para mi padre, gran lector ingenuo,

con quien sigo aprendiendo a leer.

ix Table of Contents

Chapter One

Introduction: Critical Fictions in Latin America………………………………………….1

Chapter Two

The King’s Jester: Alfonso Reyes, Eduardo Torres, Augusto Monterroso……………..57

Chapter Three

Critical Silences: La orquesta de cristal and Criticism in Authoritarian Chile…………121

Chapter Four

Héctor Libertella, Beatriz Sarlo, and Josefina Ludmer: Critical Utopias for the End of the

Millenium………………………………………………………………………………197

Coda

Critical Fictions, “En Sincro”…………………………………………………………. 264

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………276

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Critical Fictions in Latin America

In 1953, the Mexican writer and critic Alfonso Reyes published a curious text titled “Canto del Halibut,” which closes the collection of short stories Árbol de pólvora.

At first sight, the text seems out of place in the book of fictions where it appeared.

Subtitled “Epopeya atávica: Cuaderno primero de la Bibliotheca [sic] Hipoglossia,” it consists of a rather brief “epic poem” and a critical commentary that contextualizes, glosses, and analyzes the poem’s fifty-four verses (Reyes, “Canto del Halibut” 110; henceforth cited as “CDH”). Like other critical editions that Reyes published throughout his life, “Canto del Halibut” might appear more at home in one of the volumes that house

Reyes’s expansive and erudite critical oeuvre. The text, after all, claims to be an “Edición algo crítica” (111), though in this case the “algo” signals to the reader that something else is at work. As José Luis Martínez observes, the epic poem, which tells the tale of an ambiguous and polymorphous “halibut,” is rather “lamentable” (“Introducción,” vol. 23,

15), and the presumed author of the commentary surprisingly begins his “critical edition” by inviting the reader to skip over the refrain in each couplet, claiming that he only reproduced it through “probidad filológica” (Reyes, “CDH” 111). The rest of the commentary seems equally suspect. Although it closely follows the conventions of critical analysis, the various critical approaches in the commentary—which range from

1 explication de texte to stylistics—seem to provide little in the way of information or analysis. By the time we get to the “hipótesis psicoanalítica,” we are inclined to agree that the purportedly ancient poem was in fact the doing of a “falsificador moderno,” who wrote both poem and commentary after being fed too much halibut in a long nautical voyage from New York to England (124).

Given the inclusion of “Canto del Halibut” in a collection of short stories, it is not difficult to infer that the “falsificador” is in fact Reyes, and that both poem and commentary are fabrications, meant to be read together as a false critical edition. The fictional nature of the text is further reinforced by a clue in the commentary, which situates “Canto del Halibut” within a long literary lineage of fictional critical works. As the close of the “psychoanalytic hypothesis” states, “No sería la primera vez que

MacPherson sorprende al mundo con los cantos de Ossian” (127). The reference here is to James MacPherson, an eighteenth-century Irish poet who claimed to have discovered, translated, and introduced an ancient cycle of epic poems centered on the hero Ossian, but who apparently penned the poems himself using found fragments of poems and stories. In his article “Alfonso Reyes: ficción, parodia y antropofagia” Manuel Ulacia picks up on the clue and positions both “Canto del Halibut” and McPherson’s poems within a respected and venerable tradition, which he calls “la tradición de la ficción crítica” (594). Although he does not define the term “critical fiction,” Ulacia gestures at a wealth of writers like Miguel de Cervantes, Valery Larbaud, and Fernando Pessoa who have similarly fabricated critics responsible for authoring commentaries, introductions, and critical editions within the framework of literary texts. Despite such respected precursors, Reyes’s imitation of critical language has been relegated to the status of a

2 “curiosidad un poco lateral” (J.M. Martínez, “Introducción” vol. 23, 15) within Reyes’s more “serious” critical oeuvre. In the introduction to the volume of fictions in Reyes’s

Complete Works, José Luis Martínez, for one, depicts “Canto del Halibut” as a mere

“broma literaria” meant to show “que es possible disertar, sobre nada, con toda suerte de consideraciones eruditas y técnicas” (15). The scant critical attention granted to Reyes’s story similarly suggests that “Canto del Halibut” has been considered a passing joke or experimental curiosity, a marginal text among Reyes’s more important works of criticism.1

“Canto del Halibut” is, however, no mere “escape o descanso dominical” (J.L.

Martínez 15) but a text that extends Reyes’s work as a critic and scholar, while challenging the distinctions between literature and criticism that underlie Martínez’s depictions. For although the story is clearly a work of fiction, “Canto del Halibut” also relies on Reyes’s vast cultural knowledge and familiarity with critical approaches like stylistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and classical genre theory. The story is full of highly technical observations and erudite references and includes incisive observations on phenomena as diverse as Latin American modernismo, European primitivism, and Greek scansion.2 It takes on many of the themes that Reyes would elaborate on in his more recognizably “critical” works and uses the parodic imitation of critical languages as a

1 Despite Reyes’s importance as a critic and the fact that he is—according to Edith Negrín—one of the most cited authors in Latin America (77), “Canto del Halibut” has been the object of little critical attention beyond Ulacia’s “Alfonso Reyes: Ficción, Parodia y Antropofagia,” and Marcela Del Río Reyes’s “Alfonso Reyes y el Canto del Halibut: un texto anticipador de las vanguardias.” Martínez’s depictions only encourage such lack of critical attention. In the context of Reyes’s Complete Works, characterizing Reyes’s fiction as a weekend pastime functions as a retrospective move that places Reyes more firmly within the realm of criticism and dismisses his fictional works as marginal or unimportant.

2 In her article on “Canto del Halibut,” Marcela Del Río Reyes offers a detailed account of the numerous literary references that Reyes includes in the text, as well as some of the critical frameworks that he implements in his analyses.

3 fictional instrument to critique both cultural phenomena and critical discourse itself. For in “Canto del Halibut” criticism, too, becomes the object of Reyes’s mordant analysis.

Through his mockery of critical language, Reyes reflects back on particular critical approaches as he uses them to analyze the poem. He suggests, for example, that the

French explication du texte is incapable of accounting for the ambiguities of the poem’s

“género confuso” (116), ridicules psychoanalysis for its non-sequiturs and imaginative hypotheses, and skewers the positivism of Ernest Renan, depicting him as another fabulator given to suppressing and interpolating verses in his translations. Ultimately,

Reyes denounces the transformation of the “sociedad poética, Club del Halibut” into a ponderous “Academia del Halibut,” claiming it will lead to the “anquilosis” of the text

(132).

In its capacity to assume the critical function and elaborate a reflection on criticism from within the realm of fiction, “Canto del Halibut” thus serves as a paradigmatic example of the series of texts I will here call “critical fictions.”3 As Ulacia suggests, Reyes is not alone in his use of fiction to both reflect and reflect on the rhetorical strategies, forms, and conventions of critical language. Particularly fruitful in

Latin America, the fictional imitation of critical forms has been used by authors like

Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Monterroso, Enrique Lihn, Ricardo Piglia, Manuel Puig,

Roberto Bolaño, and Héctor Libertella. From the realm of criticism, these authors pilfer not just stories, characters, and concepts, but also the formal characteristics that define critical activity. We thus find among critical fictions a wealth of stories that mimic and

3 Although I use the term “critical fictions” to refer to a group of fictional narratives that imitate the formal characteristics of criticism and theory, the term is not meant to delineate the boundaries of a sub-genre. It is meant, rather, to sketch out the outlines of a rhetorical strategy that, as I will discuss below, can be used by fiction as well as criticism.

4 sometimes try to pass themselves off as criticism, imitating critical forms as diverse as the lecture, the scholarly article, the journalistic review, the critical edition, or the theoretical treatise. The result is a reflection on literature and its relationship to criticism, as well as a metacritical commentary on the specific forms and languages of literary and cultural interpretation and their historical implementation at certain places and times. Of particular concern for critical fictions in Latin America is the tension between literary forms of interpretation and more recognizably critical languages, particularly those associated with Europe and North America. The tension is illustrated by Martínez’s assessments of “Canto del Halibut,” which suggest that the practice of cultural interpretation through fiction or other “literary” forms is a mere pastime or curiosity, but not serious criticism or theory. Such assumptions have been especially problematic in

Latin America, which was repeatedly depicted throughout the twentieth century as a region rich in cultural products and aesthetic practices but lagging behind both Europe and North America in the realm of critical production.

The problem was a central one for Alfonso Reyes, who spent much of his life and critical energies trying to undermine the perception that Latin America was some kind of primitive realm that produced charming aesthetic objects but was completely devoid of criticism. In “Canto del Halibut,” Reyes stages Latin America’s contradictory relationship to critical discourse through the counterpoint between poem and commentary. The commentary reproduces in parodic form the depiction of Latin America as a primitive tribe given to magical and ritualistic practices. As the fictional critic states in his description of the poem’s plot:

Hasta donde puede colegirse, se cuenta la historia de una tribu primitiva o bien decadente, sensual, sangrienta, voluptuosa, refinada y cruel, que suele

5 embriagarse junto al mar en alguna celebración mágica o fiesta mística, y luego da muerte a un dios para incorporárselo por manducación o bebida, y bajo cuyo poder se retuerce en éxtasis y espasmos, para acabar en alaridos de libertad. (120)

The critic then connects the final line of the poem—“la Independencia del Negro

Halibut!” (115)—to a “baladro de independencia, un 16 de Septiembre [sic] irreal y crepuscular” (120). In the lines that follow, the critic alludes to a number of key events in

Mexican history, from the “unreal” 16th of September, to the overthrowing of the

“Antiguo Régimen,” to the scream “Sufragio efectivo: no reelección!” (120). Lacking specific reference to the “Cry of Dolores,” the Porfiriato, or the Mexican Revolution, such allusions reinforce the vague and mythical story of a sensuous and primitive tribe given to magical celebrations and mystical fiestas but entirely removed from the reasoned and erudite reflections of critical commentary. By associating the commentary with

European forms of analysis, Reyes positions Mexico as the imagined other of Europe.

His parodic depictions emphasize the extent to which European thinking construes its other as primitive, sensuous, and magical, thus turning it into an object of reflection and knowledge while stripping it of such capacities.

The notion that Latin America was a magical land of sensuous artistic production but arid ground for reasoned intellectual reflection posed significant problems for Reyes, especially insofar as it was reinforced by local cultural production.4 For Reyes’s attempts to elaborate a critical discourse from Latin America were compromised by the opposition

4 Although “Canto del Halibut” was purportedly written in 1928, its publication in 1953 as part of Árbol de pólvora makes the text’s critique particularly pertinent. Just a few years earlier, in 1949, Alejo Carpentier had published his novel El reino de este mundo, whose prologue sketched out Carpentier’s theory about the intrinsically magical dimensions of Latin American reality. Carpentier’s theory of “lo real maravilloso” would henceforth serve as a theoretical foundation for the style of “magical realism” that emerged in the following years. Reyes’s text is, however, deeply critical of the tendency to define Latin America as an intrinsically magical land and suggests that such portrayals play into stereotypes about the region.

6 between sensuous and magical creation vs. reasoned and critical reflection, which suggested that in order to be recognized as a valid subject of thought Latin America would have to assimilate and reproduce the forms of European intellectual activity. From the 1920s to his death in 1959, Reyes would attempt to resolve this problem by engaging in a difficult negotiation between European forms of critical activity and local needs, realities, and cultural forms. For Reyes, securing a position as a critical subject required aligning himself temporarily with what we might call a conservative “Academia del

Halibut” and crafting a critical discourse conversant with the languages of European criticism. Yet Reyes’s critical project also entailed validating a diffuse tradition of interpretive practices that crossed the boundaries between literature and criticism. Reyes knew that the heterogeneous forms of that tradition risked being pronounced a “género confuso,” as the fictional critic had done in “Canto del Halibut.” From a European perspective, Latin America’s literary-critical tradition could easily be depicted as a

“narración poética de un suceso heróico, alguna emancipación nacional, costumbres rituales y orgiásticas… una perpetuación inconsciente, visiones étnicas, emociones folklóricas fijadas en los nervios de un pueblo acaso por amontonamiento hereditario, y reveladas de repente por un poético estallido de salto atrás” (116).5 Precluding such judgments and authorizing the literary forms of interpretation in the region remained a key element of Reyes’s project, which relied on literary forms to provide a critical perspective on the specializations and closed categories of metropolitan discourse.

5 The fictional critic’s analysis of the “epic poem” and its “género confuso” can also be read as a parodic description of Latin American ensayismo, which I analyze below in further detail. Spanning a broad range of texts, ensayismo includes, for example, Simón Bolivar’s “narración poética de un suceso heróico,” José Vasconcelos’s “visiones étnicas” in La raza cósmica, the “emociones folklóricas” of Pedro Henríquez Ureña and his attempts to grant new value to Mexico’s traditional arts and crafts, and the “reveladas de repente” in Rubén Darío’s poetic essays (Reyes “CDH” 116).

7 Reyes’s critical fiction is an example of one such “confused genre,” which suggests that the discursive formations of Latin America are not so much confused as confusing to a metropolitan gaze prone to judging them by its own established categories.

As the parodic commentary in “Canto del Halibut” suggests, the European methodologies brought in to elucidate the cultural practices of the primitive tribe ultimately prove incapable of describing the poem’s “confusing genre,” its time and place, the historical realities in which it was written, who the hero was, or even the nature of the event.

Reyes’s fictional reproduction of European critical forms provides a searing commentary on the notion that Latin America was incapable of producing a critical discourse and reflects back on the terms and categories that perpetuated such notions. “Canto del

Halibut” thus situates itself within a broader project to craft a critical discourse in Latin

America that could undo the perceived critical deficiency in the region, and to do so in terms that would not be entirely defined by the centers of discursive power. Undertaken by Reyes and by numerous other Latin American intellectuals, such a project would sometimes be carried out from the position of the critic and sometimes from the position of the fiction-writer. Yet in the ambiguous realm of critical fictions, both writers and critics would continue to move between positions in a sustained attempt to resist the separations between discourses, which increasingly came to determine the validity of literary and critical production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Critical fictions’ discursive ambivalence and polymorphous forms would be particularly productive in Latin America, though their strategies would resonate beyond the region, offering critical possibilities elsewhere occluded by the closure of the literary and critical realms.

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Critical Fictions

Much had changed in Latin America since Reyes penned “Canto del Halibut,” yet by 1992 Reyes’s critical fiction had perhaps come full circle. That year, the Argentine writer Héctor Libertella wrote a text titled “Crítica literaria y/o literatura crítica,” which draws the outlines of a Latin American tradition of writing at the crossroads of literature and criticism. Libertella sets out to identify a “literary” criticism that instead of studying literature proceeds from it, and a “critical” literature that flaunts its field of readings.6

According to Libertella, since the 1960s writers had been reading as much—if not more—criticism and theory as literature. They had been caught in a web of readings that included names like Freud and Saussure, Barthes and Jakobson, Tinianov and Jameson.

For Libertella, the critical readings of writers like Enrique Lihn, Manuel Puig, Severo

Sarduy, and Octavio Paz had resulted in a literature capable of reshuffling the roles of professor, researcher, and writer of fictions, confusing “hasta la total vaguedad esos roles fijados a su propia represión” (349). Through his literary-critical lineage, which also includes writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Macedonio Fernández, Salvador Elizondo, and

6 Libertella’s play with the term “crítica,” used here as both adjective and noun, gets at the heart of some of the terminological difficulties posed by the term “criticism” in English. In Spanish, the term “crítica” covers both the critical faculty usually designated by the term “critique” and the practice of literary or cultural interpretation usually covered by the term “criticism.” As I discuss below, “criticism,” understood as the institutionalized practice of literary interpretation or judgment, became the object of critique by the new theoretical approaches that emerged in the 1960s, which aimed at the closure of both the category of literature and the category of criticism. The terms used to designate the practice of literary interpretation in English henceforth shifted from literary criticism to literary theory to literary and/or cultural studies, thus reflecting changes in the way critics see their field of study. What does remain constant, however, is the appeal to the critical faculty as the basis for interpretation. In the pages that follow, I will use “criticism” in the looser sense of “crítica” to designate the general practice of literary or cultural interpretation and appeal to the adjective “critical” to designate the faculty of critique. For the relationship between the terms “criticism” and “critique” in English, see Criticism and Culture: The Role of Critique in Modern Literary Theory by Robert Con Davis and Robert Schleifer. For changes in the term “criticism” within the English- speaking world up to the 1970s, see Raymond Williams’s Keywords.

9 Augusto Roa Bastos, Libertella conjures up the image of a writer capable of traversing

“en diagonal, como un alfil, la fortaleza de las disciplinas constituidas para llevar y traer herramientas y preguntas de un lado al otro” (356). Seventy years after Reyes penned his critical fiction, Latin American writers seemed to have entered a cosmopolitan territory where they moved with ease among metropolitan theory and were no longer limited by the opposition magical creator vs. reasoned critic.

Yet Libertella’s article also attests to the emergence of new contradictions. For if he sets out to find and gather writers who can confuse roles or cross disciplines, it is because of the newly fortified walls between disciplines and the repressively rigid roles of professor, researcher, and writer of fictions. Libertella points to the paradoxical condition of the literary-critical field at the end of the twentieth century, when both literary and critical writers proclaimed and practiced a new fluidity between literature and criticism, but did so in the context of stronger disciplinary and institutional boundaries. In

Latin America, the tension between discursive fluidity and the closure of constituted disciplines is enacted by Libertella’s article, which was published in 1997 as part of

Lectura crítica de la literatura americana.7 Edited by Saúl Sosnowski, Lectura crítica is a four-volume anthology that collects key critical articles on Latin American literature, most of them written by critics and writers from Latin America.8 The anthology was

7 Libertella’s “Crítica literaria y/o literatura crítica” was later included in slightly edited form as the prologue to his 1993 book Las sagradas escrituras, which includes longer and more detailed interpretations of many of the authors that Libertella mentions in the prologue.

8 Sosnowki’s four-volume anthology includes articles that analyze Latin American literature from pre- Columbian times to the present. It also includes various articles that analyze Latin American criticism, beginning with the “nueva crítica” that emerged in Latin America during the 1960s and 70s and that according to Sosnowski himself inaugurated the field of criticism in Latin America. It is worth noting that the articles included in the anthology are all written after 1960, a choice that reinforces the sense that Latin American criticism finally emerged in the 1960s and 70s.

10 published by the Biblioteca Ayacucho, a publishing house of the Venezuelan government that has served the dual functions of disseminating and canonizing Latin American literary works, often designating them as “classics.” The publication of the four-volume anthology in 1997 thus served to ratify the existence of a Latin American criticism, which

Reyes had set out to create in the 1940s and 1950s and which by 1997 could boast a defined field of precursors, practitioners, and watershed texts. Included in the anthology,

Libertella’s call for a more fluid literary-critical discourse that could break down disciplinary boundaries seems paradoxical. Yet it also enacts the diagonal gesture of a literary-critical bishop intruding into the closed field of a constituted discipline in order to introduce new tools and open new questions.

Such paradoxes in the literary-critical field were not restricted to Latin America.

Since the 1960s, the literary nature of critical writing and the theoretical dimensions of literary texts became commonplaces in scholarly debate in both Europe and the United

States. The “transformation de la parole discursive…. celle-là même qui rapproche le critique de l’écrivain” (Barthes 47) announced by Roland Barthes in 1966 seems to have been confirmed by critics’ willingness to analyze critical works as primary texts in their own right and to highlight the critical dimensions of literary writing. The rise of poststructuralist theory—deconstruction in particular—played an important role in bringing the rhetorical dimensions of critical and theoretical writing to the fore, highlighting the extent to which they share the formal and discursive strategies of literary writing. According to Román de la Campa, deconstruction ended up generalizing a practice he calls “episthetics: that uncertain interplay between epistemology and aesthetics, from which criticism turns into a writing, and language metaphors translate

11 into an immanent sense of rhetorical praxis and agency” (vii). According to De la Campa, many of the powerful aspects of creative writing, including “inventiveness, imagination, formal exploration,” are no longer foreign to the production of critical discourses (152).

Conversely, critics have come to endow literary and rhetorical strategies with the critical capacity to reflect upon the world. The tendency is particularly evident in discussions of parody or so-called “metafiction,” which have earned the title of self-commentaries.9

Such crossovers from literature to criticism and from criticism to literature have even elicited statements like Mark Currie’s assertion that “the wall between academic literary studies and fiction has been demolished from both sides” (Postmodern 70).10

Currie’s 1998 claim occurred, however, at a time when criticism had been established as an academic discipline practiced within universities by academics who—at least in Europe and North America—were rarely leading figures in poetry or in fiction

(Baldick 13). As Christopher Baldick notes in Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the

Present, the dominant fact in twentieth-century criticism is the divergence between the public marketplace for literary consumption and production and the enclosed space of the

9 This tendency is particularly evident in Margaret Rose’s book Parody // Metafiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction, though numerous critics have pointed to the theoretical or critical dimensions of metafictional works and have analyzed the relationship between the rise of critical theory and the increasing tendency towards metafictional moves in the realm of literature. See, for example, Patricia Waugh’s article “Postmodern Fiction and the Rise of Critical Theory.” For a specific account of fiction in English and its borrowings from theory, see Michael Greaney’s Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism. For an account of the self-reflexive turn of the “new fiction” that in the United States followed the nouveau roman, see Raymond Federman’s Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. A collection of notable articles on metafiction and its interpenetration with theory can be found in the volume Metafiction, edited by Mark Currie. It is worth noting here that although the texts I am here calling “critical fictions” do exhibit characteristics of what has been called “metafiction”—including the analysis of literature from within literature itself (Rose 13)—the rhetorical strategies of “critical fictions” go beyond the analysis of literature to reflect metacritically on the rhetorical strategies and institutional dimensions of criticism.

10 Similar statements can also be found in texts like Criticism in the Wilderness, where Geoffrey Hartman argues that criticism should be seen as contaminated creative thinking.

12 university, where scholars became both producers and the main consumers of critical texts (6). In Baldick’s assessment, the accelerated incompatibility between the academic varieties of criticism and the languages and conventions of literary writing was aggravated by the rise of literary theory after 1968. For despite critics’ emphasis on the interconnections between literary and critical discourses and their resistance to the autonomy of both literature and criticism, the specialized vocabularies of theory also reinforced the institutional rift between a professionalized academic criticism and literary production while further restricting the shrinking realm of public critical discussion

(204). By the late 1990s, the literary-critical sphere had become highly differentiated in

Europe and North America as well as in Latin America, restricting critics to the world of the university, barring them from the realm of literature, and narrowing critical discussions to academic debates.11

By the late 1990s North American and European critics could very well proclaim the demolition of the walls between literature and criticism, but it was more difficult to write away the increasingly rigid roles of literary writer and academic critic. Faced with the disjunctive force of the “or” that separated scholar from “creative” writer, the “y/o” that Libertella placed between literary criticism and critical literature seems, indeed, like a “pequeña utopía lingüística” (Libertella, “Crítica” 346). Yet Libertella’s linguistic

11 The restriction of critical debates to the university is a key part of the debate about the role—and demise—of the intellectual, transformed in the late twentieth century into a professional academic. Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual, for example, reflects on the professionalization of intellectuals into specialized academics and seeks alternative ways of articulating the role of the intellectual. In chapter 4 of this dissertation I analyze the particular turn that the discussion about professionalization and the role of the intellectual took in 1990s Argentina through a discussion of the work of Beatriz Sarlo. Throughout the dissertation, I often use the term “intellectual” to designate writers in Latin America whose functions had not yet been strictly differentiated into those of the fiction-writer or academic critic, and whose work retained a public, social function. Conversely, I use the term “critic” to designate writers primarily dedicated to the interpretation of literature and culture, while retaining the term’s secondary definition as the subject of critique. Applied to “creative” writers, my use of the term “critic” thus seeks to challenge the notion that literary writing is not a valid form of critical discourse.

13 utopia is emblematic of both critics’ and writers’ late-twentieth-century attempts to resist the closure of criticism by insisting on the interconnections between literary and critical discourses. In the realm of criticism, the resistance to its closure carried on the initial impulse behind critical theory, which emerged in response to a crisis in the function of criticism during the social upheavals of the 1960s (Eagleton 90). Amid the growing sense that, as a professional discipline, literary criticism was complicit with formal systems of social reproduction (90-1), the new theoretical languages challenged the reigning vision of criticism as a disinterested practice, epitomized by the North American school of New

Criticism. In the United States of the 1940s and 50s, the New Critics had played an important role in defining a new “objective” critical practice that could claim its place in the university by distinguishing it from the subjective vagaries of journalistic criticism.

They outlined the boundaries of an autonomous literary criticism that was distinct from the journalistic review and from literature but also removed from the broader social fabric.12 In the 1960s, the rising theoretical languages aimed their fire at the New Critics’ liberal humanism, depicting it as elitist, idealist, depoliticizing, and socially marginal, replacing it instead with a new “politics of knowledge” that exposed criticism’s place in a network of power-knowledge (Eagleton 91).

12 Ironically enough, the New Critics began as a group of poets who came to be known as the “Fugitives” and who also emphasized the interconnections between criticism and literature. Their attempts to establish the critical interpretation of literary works as a systematic discipline, distinct from both the impressionism of journalistic criticism and the dry approaches of the historical and linguistic scholarship prevalent until then in U.S. academic institutions, paradoxically contributed to the institutionalization of literature and criticism as distinct and separate realms. The resulting institutionalization and separation of literary and critical writing is perhaps most evident in the rise of creative writing departments across the United States. As Mark McGurl notes in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, the handful of creative writing programs that existed in the 1940 had expanded to 52 by 1975 (24). As the number of creative writing programs grew, poets and fiction-writers were increasingly farmed out to them, while English departments were restricted to Ph.D.’s expected to teach and practice critical writing as their main activity. For a succinct overview of the New Criticism and its role in the transformation of critical practice in the United States, see René Wellek’s “The New Criticism: Pro and Contra.”

14 Theory, in other words, targeted criticism as a closed and institutionalized practice and sought to replace it with what Terry Eagleton calls “an intricate overlapping of technical discourses united by their critical, structural, demystificatory style” (94). As

Eagleton argues in The Function of Criticism, the academy nevertheless ended up appropriating the theoretical languages that emerged after the 1960s. Structuralism and its progeny (97), in particular, helped provide an increasingly discredited criticism with a new rationale, while diverting attention away from the question about the social function of criticism that the turmoil of the 60s had brought to the fore (95). In the late 1990s criticism was been strictly divided into the reviewing branch of the publishing industry and an academic realm in which disciplinary shifts and theoretical discourse are less a product of “radical paradigms” than of “marketing strategies that call on graduate programs, academic journals, publishing presses, and professional conferences to produce and disseminate innovative academic texts with a higher degree of commercial self- awareness than ever before” (De la Campa 155). For Baldick, the resulting “bazaar of critical approaches and theoretical schools” tended to construct self-confirming discourses deaf to both the critical challenge of its competitors and to “the corrective influences of a reading public outside the academy” (204).

While initially critical of the closure of criticism into a constituted, isolated discipline, the theoretical and discursive shifts of the late-twentieth century also seem to have drained critical practice in North America of the power of critique that fed the shifts of the 1960s. As Judith Butler defines it in a lecture on Foucault delivered in the year

2000, critique “asks after the occlusive constitution of the field of categories

15 themselves.”13 Neither a judgment nor an abstract principle, “critique is always a critique of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution, and it loses its character the moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely generalizable practice” (Butler). According to this definition, critical discourse in the

United States marshaled the power of critique insofar as it sought to disrupt criticism’s constitution into a defined category or stable institution. Yet the transformation of critique into the abstract foundation of academic criticism paradoxically fed the very institutionalization it sought to resist. Despite the insistence on the “critical” dimensions of literature, literary writing remains, more than ever, separate from critical interpretation. Even in texts that affirm—and are sometimes dedicated to—the critical dimensions of literature, critics are careful to distinguish between the methods and demands of critical practice and those of so-called “creative” writing.14

13 Like the term “criticism,” the term “critique” is unstable, and its definition shifts depending on the historical and cultural context. In his introduction to The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School, Paul Connerton, for example, traces the word back to its Greek roots and outlines the changes in the word throughout its trajectory in German philosophy to the particular uses of word by the Frankfurt School. In Criticism and Culture: The Role of Critique in Modern Literary Theory Robert Con Davis and Robert Schleifer trace the changes that the word has undergone and analyze, in particular, its use by literary theory in the United States. Andrew W. Hass also provides an analysis of the shifts in the term “critique” and the relationship between critique and European artistic production in Poetics of Critique: The Interdisciplinarity of Textuality. For my own use of “critique” or “critical,” I rely on Butler’s redefinition of the term, which designates not an abstract principle—as happens with Kant, for example—but specific attempts to disrupt constituted categories or institutions at particular historical moments, as it is closer in sense to the way the word “crítica” has been used in Latin America.

14 The tendency to emphasize the critical dimensions of literature while distinguishing it from critical writing is evident in Stathis Gourgouris’s book Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era. The book’s title points to the lingering question of whether literature can count as a theoretical or critical discourse without the external tutelage or aid of analytical methods. Gourgouris answers this question in the affirmative, pointing to the performative dimensions of literature as the basis of literature’s “cognitive capacity.” He nevertheless continues to emphasize the difference between the performative thinking of literature and analytical processes like literary criticism and theory. De la Campa is even more stringent in warning against confusing or conflating “the demands of criticism with those of creative writing” and “weaving literary and philosophical motifs without further rigors” (153).

16 It is in this context that critical fictions emerge, appropriating the power of critique in order to question the very language of criticism, its rhetorical strategies, its institutional closure, its efforts at authorization, and its tendency to claim critique as the exclusive foundation of its practice. Appropriating, imitating, mocking, scrutinizing, dissecting, and transforming the forms and rhetoric of critical discourse, critical fictions use the very language of criticism and literary theory to question the critical institution at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. As Ulacia suggests, this strategy was, of course, not exclusive to texts published after 1960. Imitating the kind of scholarly, academic, and analytical language that we have come to associate with the word “criticism” has a long and respected lineage.15 It goes back to texts like Jonathan

Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), Thomas De Quincy’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827), and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833).16 The imitation of critical language can also be found in early-twentieth-century texts like Valery Larbaud’s

Poèmes par un riche amateur (1908), Samuel Beckett’s 1930 lecture “Le Concentrisme,” the fictional footnotes to Brian O’Nolan’s The Third Policeman (written 1939-40), and

15 The texts mentioned below, both before and after the 1960s, do not, of course, constitute an exhaustive list. I mention the most salient examples as a way of sketching out the kinds of rhetorical strategies implemented by critical fictions.

16 Swift’s Tale of a Tub is comprised of a narrative allegorizing the development of Christianity, which is interrupted by a series of “digressions” or brief essays on themes like critics, digressions themselves, and the relationship between readers and writers. De Quincy’s text is written in the form of a lecture delivered to a gentleman’s club expounding on the artistic merits of murder. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus is in turn a commentary on the thought and life of the German philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. Among earlier texts that use the techniques of critical fictions one can also include James McPherson’s Fragments of ancient poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language (1760) and the footnotes to Tristram Shandy (1759-67). For an analysis of the use of footnotes in fictional texts, with an emphasis on Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegan’s Wake, see Shari Benstock’s “At the Margins of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text.”

17 Jorge Luis Borges’s fictions.17 Borges, an author widely known for the presence of footnotes, bibliographies, or other markers of critical language in his fictional texts, provides in fact a good example of the differences between earlier imitations of intellectual language and the critical fictions that emerged after the 1960s.

One of Borges’s characteristic strategies is his use of scholarly, philosophical, and critical discourse as the raw material for fiction. His fictional pillaging often resulted in texts that draw characters or plots from intellectual writing, as is the case with his

Historia Universal de la Infamia (1935), which closes with a bibliography that reveals the sources of Borges’s character sketches of various criminals. In other cases, however,

Borges’s texts fall more closely within the rhetorical strategy I am calling here “critical fictions”: these include stories like “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1944), which is written in the form of a fictional article recounting the discovery of the realm of Uqbar written in the form of a fictional article. Yet in this story, as with the texts I have cited above, the imitation of analytical language draws from a more diffuse intellectual realm that lacked clear boundaries between literary and cultural interpretation and other realms such as philosophy, religious exegesis, and political analysis. In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” for example, literary anecdotes intermingle with details on a false encyclopedia article, bibliographic references to invented historical texts, philosophical disquisitions on Tlön’s cosmology, and discussions of a fiction created by “una sociedad secreta de astónomos,

17 Larbaud’s text takes the form of a critical edition of a collection of poems by the fictional poet A.O. Barnabooth, preceded by a biographical introduction by one “X. M. Tournier de Zamble.” The Third Policeman was published by O’Nolan under the pseudonym Flann O’Brien, and is delivered in the voice of an amateur scholar fascinated by the work of the fictional philosopher and scientist “De Selby”: although the main text follows a more recognizably “literary” narrative, the footnotes provide lengthy interpretations of De Selby’s work. Beckett’s lecture was composed in French and read to the Modern language Society of Trinity College: it focused on the fictional poet Jean du Chas and his invention of the movement that Beckett called “Concentrisme.”

18 de biólogos, de ingenieros, de metafísicos, de poetas, de químicos, de algebristas, de moralistas, de pintores, de geómetras” (434). Borges’s “Examen de la obra de Herbert

Quain” (1941) and “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (1936) come closest to what we now understand as literary criticism. As David Bennett describes it, “Pierre Menard” is “a parody of the sectarian literary memoir designed to correct another critic’s misinterpretation of a dead author” (28). In the early twentieth century, the literary memoir was still considered a form of literary writing—if a marginal one—which coexisted with a number of other discourses.

By the late twentieth century, however, the institutionalization of criticism in the now-separate realms of academic criticism and journalistic reviewing had established more clear boundaries between literary interpretation and the forms and functions of literature. The fictional imitation of critical forms thus had a uniquely critical sting after the 1960s, when a number of critical fictions challenged both the isolation of criticism into an autonomous realm and the distinctions it created between literary and critical discourses. In Latin America, these critical fictions include the texts I will analyze in the following chapters—Augusto Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio (1978), Enrique Lihn’s

La orquesta de cristal (1976), and Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure (2000)—along with other parodic depictions of critical language, such as Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (1976), Ricardo Piglia’s “Nombre Falso (Homenaje a Roberto Arlt)” (1975), and Roberto Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América (1996).18 A similar phenomenon can

18 Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña is written in the form of a dialogue, peppered with lengthy footnotes that discuss various psychoanalytic theories and theories on homosexuality. Piglia’s “Nombre Falso (Homenaje a Roberto Arlt)” is written in the form of a story falsely attributed to the Argentine author Roberto Arlt, preceded by a prologue about the discovery of the manuscript. Finally, Bolaño’s text is written in the form of biographical reviews of various fictional writers with Nazi leanings in Latin America.

19 also be seen elsewhere around the world.19 In the United States, for example, critical fictions include Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Jerome Charyn’s The Tar Baby

(1973), Alan Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative

Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (1996), Percival Everett’s Glyph (1999), and Carl

Hancock Rux’s Talk (2004).20 Like Reyes’s “Canto del Halibut,” these fictions borrow from critical discourse not just characters, settings, and ideas for plots—as is also the case with what is often referred to as the “campus novel” or “academic fiction”—but the form, texture, vocabulary, and style of critical language.21 As with Reyes’s text, their engagement with the particular languages of literary and cultural interpretation extends their critical power beyond metafictional reflections on literature and positions them as critical reflections on the rhetorical and historical dimensions of critical discourse.

Critical fictions are not, in other words, simply reflections on literature or generalized attacks on intellectual practice. Their parodic depictions of critical language

19 A number of fictions from around the world also borrow the forms of scholarly or intellectual activity. They include Lem Stanislaw’s Perfect vaccuum (Polish, 1971), written as a series of reviews of inexistent texts; Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel (Serbo-Croatian, 1984), written in the form of a dictionary; Dmitri Galkovsky’s Endless Deadlock (Russian, 1997, not available in English translation), which consists of an essay on the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov, an essay on the essay, and a lengthy commentary on the second essay; and Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maquiao (Chinese, 1996), also written in dictionary form. However, I limit my contextualization of Latin American critical fictions to examples from the United States as a way of emphasizing the fact that the texts I am here calling “critical fictions” are not simply texts that use the markers of scholarly or intellectual thought but rather texts that specifically target the institution of criticism in their different contexts, as happens with the North American novels cited above.

20 Nabokov’s text is glossed below. Charyn’s novel is written in the form of articles from the “sometimes” quarterly review The Tar Baby, glossing the life and works of the amateur philosopher Anatole Waxman- Weissman. Sokal’s article, which proposes that quantum gravity is a social construct, was published in the journal Social Text as a parody of cultural studies. Everett’s Glyph is written in the form of brief vignettes that expound on post-structuralist theory from the point of view of a 4-year-old prodigy. Rux’s Talk is a theater piece written in the form of a conference panel organized around the work of the writer Archer Aymes.

21 The terms “campus novel” or “academic fiction” are often used to refer to novels that take place and are centered on universities. For analyses of the campus novel in England and the United States see Kenneth Womack’s “Academic Satire: The Campus Novel in Context” and Leslie A. Fiedler’s “The War against the Academy.”

20 are meant not to position literature as a superior discourse over the dry and arcane languages of criticism, but to provide a metacritical revision of the specific languages, theoretical frameworks, or schools of critical thought that came to dominate and define the critical institution in the twentieth century. Rather than distinguishing literary from critical discourse, critical fictions resist the divisions between the two and target what

Baldick has described as “the attempts to claim the title of ‘criticism’ for one set of activities… while debarring others” (4). Critical fictions aim, in particular, at critics’ attempts to set their own presumably more critical languages above other discourses and subjects, most notably literature itself. Critical fictions of the late twentieth century thus emphasize the extent to which criticism is “a hybrid or bastard discourse, an arena of intermingling and jostling discourses with no convincing pedigree that could entitle it to sovereignty over a single and integral domain” (Baldick 3). Insistent on the polymorphous nature of the critical institution, they imitate forms as varied as the critical biography in Lo demás es silencio, the academic journal in The Tar Baby, the journalistic review in La literatura nazi en América, and the conference panel in Talk, and they target trends that range from psychoanalysis to deconstruction to cultural studies. In their imitation of specific critical languages and forms, critical fictions emphasize the historical dimensions of critical practice and the particular institutional and social realities that have shaped criticism’s strategies to establish its own discursive stability.

A notable example of the strategies implemented by critical fictions and their focus on the historical dimensions of critical practice is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which is also one of the most widely known of the critical fictions mentioned above. Published in

1962, the novel consists of a parody of a high modernist poem presumably written by the

21 Appalachian poet “John Shade,” published along with a foreword, a lengthy commentary, and an index prepared by the so-called “Charles Kinbote,” a marginal Russian academic who claims to be the exiled king of Zembla. Kinbote’s line-by-line analysis of Shade’s poem reproduces the scholarly forms and strategies of close reading popularized by the

New Critics in the 1940s and 50s. When it was first published, the novel caused widespread bewilderment among critics, who both indicted Kinbote for vandalizing

Shade’s poem with his absurd critical interpretations and questioned the literary value of

Nabokov’s text.22 The mixed, initial reception of Pale Fire had much to do with the tendency to read Nabokov’s critical fiction according to New Critical principles like the

Intentional and Affective Fallacies and the emphasis on reading texts as self-contained, autonomous objects, divorced from both critical practice and from their broader context.23 For both Nabokov’s novel and Kinbote’s commentary violated New Critical orthodoxy, challenging the increasingly rigid divorce between “creative” texts restricted to the self-contained world of literature and a more “objective” critical practice untarnished by the flights of fancy, amateur interpretations, and historical and political excursus displayed by Kinbote in his commentary.

22 Kinbote’s commentary has been described as “critically barren” (Reading 91), “stupid, irrelevant, self- revelatory exegesis” (Stegner 128), “an academic rape of Shade’s poem” (Macdonald 442), and “absolute rubbish” with “no exegetical bearing on Shade’s poem” (Haegert 410). Nabokov, in turn, was accused of letting his ingenuity and the virtuosity of his technique get in the way of “artistic purposes” (Macdonald 437) and Pale Fire was depicted as a “contrived” formalist experiment (Highet 89) marked by an “appalling” “crudity and lack of imaginative resource” (Steiner 141), “boring”, “unreadable” (Macdonald 437), “overwritten and hard to get the hang of” (Dennis 142), and ultimately unsuccessful as a work of literature. Ironically enough, the quality of Shade’s poem was rarely put in question despite being an obvious parody of modernist poetry.

23 Such principles were most famously laid out in W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s 1946 essays “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” and in Cleanth Brooks’s “The Heresy of Paraphrase” in his 1947 book The Well-Wrought Urn.

22 As with Pale Fire, the particular critical forms imitated by other critical fictions also reflect the form and structure of critical practice at the time of their composition.

Everett’s Glyph, for example, reflects in its brief vignettes—titled with terms taken from literary theory—the dizzying proliferation of theoretical vocabularies that in the United

States of the 1990s dominated critical discourse, threatening to supplant the literary text with their alternative version of writerly practice. In Latin America, the disjointed fragments of critical language found in Enrique Lihn’s La orquesta de cristal—which I will analyze in detail in chapter three—similarly reflect the destructive effects of Augusto

Pinochet’s dictatorship and its capacity to reduce critical discourse to highly technical academic analyses or to the aestheticizing judgments of the regime’s sanctioned reviewers. By echoing prevailing forms of critical discourse, critical fictions also challenge existing assumptions about the form, methods, and function of literature and criticism, and about the relationship between the two. The perceived intrusion of critical forms into the world of literature often elicits puzzlement from critics, who tend to question their literary value or try to reframe the texts, resituating them back within the realm of literature.24 Like Nabokov’s first reviewers, critics thus reproduce in their readings the very assumptions challenged by critical fictions and unwittingly become part of the texts’ metacritical reflections.

24 One of the primary ways in which critical fictions have been reinscribed within the realm of literature is by depicting them as parodies of critical language. Parody’s mockery has helped account for the intrusion of critical writing into a fictional work and allowed critics to cast it as the clever strategy of a literary text that, by exaggerating the absurd idiosyncrasies of criticism, seeks to distance itself from criticism’s diction and style, from its approach to literature, from its ideological assumptions, and from the institutions that support it. Parody is, without a doubt, one of the main tools of critical fictions. Yet the enthusiasm with which these texts reproduce the markers of critical discourse often presses mimicry to the extreme, contravening J. G. Riewald’s claims that “the parodist should be capable of insinuating himself into his model, of assimilating and reproducing its most striking features, however, without ever becoming his model” (127). The resulting discursive ambivalence tends to blur the lines between fiction and criticism instead of establishing differences between them.

23 One of the primary ways in which critical fictions catch both past critical trends and their future critics in the web of their metacritical reflections is by blurring the boundaries between fiction and criticism and making it particularly difficult to distinguish between the two. Like “Canto del Halibut,” the critical fictions mentioned above are masterful displays of gratuitous erudition: they take the arts of footnoting and citation to new heights, lavish pages on arcane theoretical arguments, and dwell on technical minutiae, making exquisite arguments out of commas, allusions, and poetic variants. They are virtuoso performances of critical language that confound the distinction between criticism and literature, model and adaptation, genuine and counterfeit. The result is a heightened discursive ambiguity further complicated by references to both invented and actual authors and texts, by the coexistence of preposterous interpretations and insightful observations, and by actual but often misattributed quotes. The amalgam of folly and expertise, false leads and hidden references, turns critical fictions into disconcerting games that defy readers to distinguish fiction from criticism, the imaginary from the real, the literary from the critical.

Particularly vulnerable to critical fictions’ bewildering games are professional critics, whose expert interpretive tools and knowledge of literature and culture heighten instead of decreasing the dangers of misreading. From their very first pages, critical fictions threaten critics with the possibility of missing key references that might signal the source of the texts’ critical imitations or, even worse, with the risk of ignoring the fictional status of the text altogether. In the United States, for example, Alan Sokal unsettled the critical world by publishing, in the journal Social Text, a parody of

24 theoretical language that many interpreted as a “legitimate” work of criticism.25

Something similar had already happened in Latin America: in the 1950s and 60s, under the respective pseudonyms of Eduardo Torres and Gerardo de Pompier, both Augusto

Monterroso and Enrique Lihn published various critical articles, which not everyone identified as parodies. Often presented as “hoaxes,” articles published in critical journals are particularly subject to misreading, though such dangers are no less present in texts that explicitly present themselves as literature. Ricardo Piglia’s “Nombre Falso

(Homenaje a Roberto Arlt),” for example, was published as part of the short story collection of the same name. Although the text was included with other fictional works, it was still not entirely obvious that the text’s fictional prologue was not meant to be read as

“real” criticism and that the short story it introduced had been lifted from the Russian writer Leonid Andeev and falsely attributed to Artl.26 Even works that have unquestionably been read as literary works hold similar dangers. When Monterroso published Lo demás es silencio, critics hailed the work as a hilarious parody of intellectual thought, yet no one seems to have caught the numerous references to Reyes that explicitly place the novel in dialogue with the Mexican critic.

The danger of critical fictions, in other words, lies in their capacity to expose us as naive readers, incapable of tracking the text’s treacherous games through either lack of

25 Sokal’s article, which is often described as a “hoax,” was meant to mock the lack of intellectual rigor in humanist interpretations about the sciences. The article was not immediately identified as a parody, and Sokal himself later published an essay revealing the fact that the text had been meant as a pastiche of what he depicted as left-wing rubbish. For an overview of what is now known as the “Sokal Affair” see The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy, edited by the editors of Lingua Franca.

26 In “Metaplagiarism and the Critic’s Role as Detective: Ricardo Piglia’s Reinvention of Roberto Arlt,” Ellen McCracken observes that the false attribution of the story to Arlt remained largely undetected when the text was first published. According to McCracken, “libraries have catalogued the story as Arlt’s, and scholars have either voiced uncertainty about its authorship or analyzed it as if it were indeed his” (1072).

25 knowledge or excessive credulity that the text is in fact what it appears to be. For professional critics, such dangers strike at the very heart of the authority derived from a critical ability that presumably exceeds the interpretive capacities of readers who lack the same tools, knowledge, or theoretical frameworks. By enlisting devious strategies that willfully put critics’ competence in question, critical fictions threaten to expose their readers’ critical approaches as even more limited than the critical languages imitated in the text. For whoever fails to “properly” identify critical fictions and catch their secret nods to readers’ literary knowledge becomes a collateral victim of the authors’ ironies.

As Wayne Booth notes in The Rhetoric of Irony: “Even in the most amiable irony one can always imagine a victim by conjuring up a reader or listener so naive as not to catch the joke; no doubt in some uses of irony the fun of feeling superior to such imagined victims is highly important” (27). In the case of critical fictions, however, the object is not just to provide authors with a bit of literary “fun” but to expose critics’ and theorists’ use of the word “critical” to uphold the authority of their own discourse. By turning critics into naive readers, critical fictions undermine professional readers’ sovereignty over the critical faculty and their tendency to strip other discursive frameworks— including literary writing—of the authority to interpret and analyze culture.

As they expose the opposition critical/naive often implicit in critical practice, critical fictions question criticism’s tendency to claim interpretive authority by situating not just other discourses but also other subjects outside the circle of critical activity.

Among their characters, critical fictions often include apparently naive readers who initially seem to be the object of critique but whose naiveté ultimately proves illusory, a

26 result of the categories use to judge critical ability.27 Critical fictions thus highlight the extent to which various definitions of the term “critical” have been established in opposition to an imagined subject who lacks the education, methodologies, or intellectual know-how to interpret literature and culture in a “critical” way. In doing so, critical fictions emphasize the fact that naiveté is a subject position, often determined by a subject or discourse that claims superior authority. In the case of criticism and theory, the collateral victims have often been readers whose subject positions within the system of power and knowledge place them at a remove from authorized and authoritative critical discourses: they include women, the lower classes, the “uneducated” or “illiterate,”

“common” readers who are not part of the academic world, and intellectual traditions at the margins of critical discourse as defined in Europe and North America. Such readers are at greater risk of being designated as “naive.” They are often depicted as readers predisposed to misreading or falling in the thrall of powerful discourses and texts and therefore incapable of producing a critical discourse of their own. So defined, naive readers so thus remain dependent on established critical discourses to cure them of their naiveté and bring them into the circle of critical readers. Critical fictions, however, repeatedly underscore the critical capacities of so-called naive readers and invite us to

27 In chapter 3 of Parody // Metafiction, Margaret Rose includes a detailed and insightful discussion about the presence of naive readers as characters in parodic texts. Taking Don Quijote as a paradigmatic example, Rose claims that the figure of the naive reader forces readers to relate to themselves as potential objects of the author’s parody (63). It brings readers to ask whether they are acting as critical readers, capable of identifying the author’s parody, or as naive readers who reproduce the naive readings represented in the text. For Rose, “the naive reader’s tendency to identify with the text before him is utilized to educate him to both a more critical reading, and to greater ‘self-knowledge’” (63). Although a similar phenomenon can be observed in critical fictions, the presence of the naive reader often has the opposite effect: rather than reinforcing the critical capacities of the reader who “gets” the parody, critical fictions vindicate the critical capacities of purportedly naive readers while questioning the categories or hierarchies of value that sustain our position as “critical” readers.

27 question the categories and social structures that undermine the legitimacy of their interpretations.

In another reversal of critical practice, critical fictions thus use naiveté as a critical tool to both question the authority of established critical frameworks and to highlight the critical capacities of subjects and discourses excluded from critical discourse. This strategy has been particularly fruitful in Latin America, which for years remained in a marginal position with respect to the critical discourses developed in Europe and North

America. The apparent absence of expert or specialized languages to interpret literature and the lack of autonomy of literature and criticism made Latin America’s “literary” or unspecialized interpretations seem like naive approaches bereft of the critical perspective provided by more sophisticated, metropolitan methodologies. Such naiveté nevertheless opened the literary-critical realm in Latin America to a naive or unspecialized reader capable of participating in the interpretation of culture. If in 1930 Borges had already noted that “no van quedando lectores, en el sentido ingenuo de la palabra, sino que todos son críticos potenciales” (“La supersticiosa” 202), by the late twentieth century readers’ status as potential critics had led to more rigid distinctions between naive readers or established critics. For the attempts in Latin America to develop a legitimate critical discourse had also begun to establish disjunctive oppositions between criticism and literature, the critical and the naive, which critical fictions once again tried to resist. In

Latin America at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries they did so by recuperating—though perhaps also inventing—a literary-critical tradition that made no such distinctions.

28 Latin America

In 1976, the Mexican writer Octavio Paz published a brief article in the Times

Literary Supplement titled “A Literature without Criticism.” The article, which was published in translation and would not appear in its Spanish original until 1979, laid out a curious paradox of Latin American cultural production. According to Paz, in the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America could finally lay claim to a thoroughly modern literature, which could boast the title of the third major “non-European Western” literature, together with those of Russia and North America (59). In the realm of critical production, however, Latin America continued to be marked by a disgraceful poverty.28

Latin America’s lack of critical writing, “whether literary, philosophical or moral” (60), posed a serious dilemma in the region, for despite the newfound “modernity” of Latin

American literature, its apparent

weakness… in the critical field, has led some of us to wonder whether Spanish American literature is, despite its real or apparent originality, really modern. The question is relevant because critical thinking has been a basic component of modern literature since the eighteenth century. A literature without critical thought is not modern, or if it is, only in a peculiar and contradictory way. (60)

The questions raised by Paz were especially troublesome in the 1970s, as they came shortly after the so-called Boom, which granted Latin American writers a prominent place in the bookstores and critical discussions of Europe and North America. The unprecedented popularity of Latin American literature in the 1960s thus proved that the

28 I cite from the English version of Paz’s article. The Spanish version was published as “Literatura y crítica,” and reproduced in his Obras completas. The article, however, was initially published in In/mediaciones in 1979.

29 region was indeed capable of creating a “modern” literature that could transcend its local context and be recognized as such by a cosmopolitan, international audience.29

The absence of critical writing in Latin America, in other words, threatened the hard-won modernity that its literature achieved after a long “period of obscurity” (60) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his article, Paz tried to forestall the threat to the region’s modernity by asserting the “undeniable existence of critical literature” (60). Paz countered the region’s critical deficiency by asserting that “some sort of critical thinking, direct or indirect, social or metaphysical, realist or allegorical, appears in nearly every Spanish American writer” (60). Locating the critical spirit in the region’s unquestionably modern writers, he thus affirmed the region’s modernity, but depicted it as an “eccentric” modernity that could not be judged according to the philosophical and political ideas of modern, Western civilization (63). While attempting to change the terms in which Latin America was judged, the time and place in which Paz published his article nevertheless made his assertions about the absence of a Latin

American criticism particularly problematic. Published in an important organ and arbiter of cultural production in the United States, Paz’s article obfuscated the tremendous amount of critical activity that had occurred in the region during the past two decades. As the testimony of a respected Latin American writer, it also seemed to support the prevailing notion that Latin America had an extraordinary and vital literature but lacked its own critical tradition.30

29 Latin American critics often make a distinction between what is referred to as the “new narrative” of the 1960s and 70s, and the “Boom,” a term used to refer to the editorial success of such novels in Europe and the United States.

30 Apparently aware of such contradictions, Paz later wrote a “Nota marginal” that was appended to the Spanish-language version of his article and published in 1988. There, he once again affirms the absence of intellectual movements “comparables a los de Europa” but recognizes the existence of Latin American 30 The purported absence of Latin American criticism—at least until the 1970s—in fact became a commonplace, particularly among scholars within the U.S. academy. Jean

Franco, for example, situates what she calls “the rise of criticism” in Latin America somewhere in the 1970s, when Latin America presumably began publishing critical texts and preparing critical editions, something she calls “a true achievement” after the “lack of such texts,” which “prevented in-depth study of certain areas” (“Afterword” 509). For

Franco, the so-called rise of criticism made it possible to embark on a “new criticism” that aided by poststructuralism, sociocriticism, and deconstruction was no longer “a delayed reflection of literary movements” (508). In his 1996 article “Literary Criticism in

Spanish America,” written for The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature,

Aníbal González is even harsher in his assessments. González again posits the perceived inadequacy of Latin American critical efforts, in comparison to both its subject and to the literary criticism of Europe and North America (425). Like Paz, González recognizes important “precursors” of Latin American literary criticism, such as Andrés Bello, José

Enrique Rodó, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, and

Angel Rama, but asserts that Latin America’s critical inadequacy has often been real.

According to González, Latin America’s criticism has been characterized by its “mimetic character,” “journalistic superficiality,” “lack of patience with serious scholarship,”

“ideological tendentiousness,” and by the limitations imposed by censorship, exile, and a lack of financial and institutional support (425). Proving his point through quotes by

Latin American writers, González concludes that “the history of professional (that is,

thinkers “que han reflexionado con brillo y con hondura sobre nuestra historia, cultura y peculiaridades” and points to the emergence of a Latin American literary criticism more vital and alert than that of previous generations (66).

31 academic or journalistic) literary criticism in Spanish America is therefore a chronicle of delusions, misreading, and outright falsification, with a few bright areas in the realms of scholarship and literary history.” He then justifies his efforts to sketch the field of criticism in Latin America by noting that “even erroneous ideas, if sufficiently widespread, can have an impact on real-world processes and should therefore be studied”

(426).

Written for an English-speaking audience, and published in a text of literary history that often serves as an introduction to defined fields within Latin American literary studies, González’s article thus substantiates with “serious scholarship” the notion that Latin American critics have been little more than naive readers, amateurs given to improvisation, fraudulence, and imposture. At first sight, critical fictions written in Latin America seem to echo such arguments. In the three critical fictions that I will analyze in the following chapters, the reader is confronted by a doubly mimetic criticism, as both a fiction and as an imitation of North American and European methodologies. A perfect mirror of González’s assessments, the critical fictions of Augusto Monterroso,

Enrique Lihn, and Héctor Libertella are full of erroneous ideas, delusions, misreadings, outright falsifications, and yes, a few bright areas in the realms of scholarship and literary history. In Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio, for example, we find a portrait of the provincial critic Eduardo Torres, whose writings are embarrassing examples of critical writing. Incapable of distinguishing between important and unimportant information, the private and the public, what is current and what is passé, Torres seems like a scathing portrayal of Latin America’s provincial critics, whose complete lack of critical judgment has produced laughable works but nothing in the way of serious scholarship. Something

32 similar happens in Lihn’s La orquesta de cristal, which gathers and reproduces the commentaries written about a glass orchestra, whose silence and transparency do not prevent a handful of second-rate critics from expounding with journalistic superficiality and ideological tendentiousness on the meaning and significance of the symphony composed for the orchestra. Finally, Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure seems to offer the height of critical illiteracy: in the novel we find a naive take on Saussure’s diagram of the linguistic sign, misread as a simple drawing and turned into a fable about a couple of writers sitting at a bar and gazing across a plaza at its single tree.

While deeply critical of the type of criticism that has been written in Latin

America, such portrayals are also ironic commentaries on both the terms in which the region’s criticism has been judged and the historical conditions that have shaped it.

Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella no doubt underscore the marginal character and derivative nature of critical discourse in the region, though their reproduction of particular critical forms emphasizes the historical, social, and discursive conditions in which they emerged. In the view of all three writers, the marginal condition of Latin

America’s criticism is as much a product of the metropolitan categories by which it has been judged as of the local obstacles that prevented the development of an autonomous criticism divorced from literary writing in the region. One of their primary targets is, in fact, the attempt to bring the region out of its perceived critical deficiency by crafting a criticism recognizable as such in the centers of discursive power. Creating such a criticism would entail endowing the emerging discourse of criticism with the vocabularies, methodological frameworks, and rhetorical markers that would set it apart

33 from literary writing as well as from other discourses and practices that had previously played key roles in the task of cultural interpretation in Latin America.

It may be fair to say that Latin America had no criticism, understood as a defined and autonomous sphere with its own institutional home in the university. Yet to claim that Latin America had no critical tradition would ignore a robust interpretive tradition in which cultural analysis was invariably tied to political and social reflection as well as to literary practice. Such a tradition can be found in many of the “precursors” of Latin

American criticism identified by González, as well as in other writers often associated with ensayismo. In Latin America, the word ensayismo has been used as a catchall term to designate a broad swathe of writings that cover anything from the polemical writings of nation-builders like Simón Bolívar to the crónicas of Martí to the fictional writing of

Jorge Luis Borges. The discursive ambivalence and formal diversity of the writings covered by the term are a good indication of the lack of differentiation in the realm of letters in Latin America.31 As Julio Ramos argues in Desencuentros de la modernidad en

América Latina, the literary realm in Latin America did not begin the process of autonomization until the late nineteenth century, when modernista writers began drawing the boundaries of a literary realm that could establish a critical relationship to both the state and to the technical and rational discourses of modernity associated with Europe and

North America. Yet, as Ramos also observes, the literary realm also underwent an imperfect process of autonomization that kept writers reliant on journalism, maintained

31 For an overview of ensayismo in Latin America, see Nicolás Shumway’s “The essay in Spanish South America: 1800 to modernismo,” Martin S. Stabb’s “The Essay of Nineteenth-Century Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean,” and José Miguel Oviedo’s “The Modern Essay in Spanish America.”

34 the social function of writing, and included forms of writing, like the crónica and the humanist essay, that were not exclusively “literary.”32

The heterogeneous and polymorphous forms found in both the realm of ensayismo and in the literary realm outlined by Ramos attest to the continuing discursive fluidity of what we might more accurately call the literary-critical realm, which made few distinctions between the forms of literature and the forms of criticism. In the early twentieth century, the essay continued to function as a mode of interpretation whose literary dimensions set it against the rationalizing forces of modernization, the economic interests of foreign powers, and a local state that sought to impose modernizing, North

American and European frameworks (193). Particularly tied to cultural humanists like

Alfonso Reyes and Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the essay—to name one example—played an important role in early twentieth-century Mexico as a critical discourse that set itself against the positivism of the Porfiriato and the specializations of the regime’s

“científicos” (270).33 Yet the essay and its ties to literary practice continued to play an important role throughout Latin America, which was often identified with the realm of imaginative literature or humanistic discourses in opposition to the cold rationalizations

32 Ramos’s Desencuentros de la modernidad is, in many ways, a sequel to Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada, where Rama outlines Latin American intellectuals’ lack of autonomy from political powers. According to Rama, the dissidence that irrupted within the lettered city at the end of the nineteenth century made it possible to configure “un pensamiento crítico” (78) with respect to the individuals and discourses in power. Ramos picks up the thread from here and shows how the relative autonomization of the literary field allowed for the emergence of a critical space in Latin America but argues that such space owed its social impact to the imperfect autonomization of the literary field. It is significant that Ramos’s analysis of ensayismo is located in the last chapter of his book, which situates ensayismo as the last instance of the literary realm’s autonomization from the realm of letters. Ensayismo functions, in this sense, as the last instance of the imperfect autonomization of the literary-critical realm shortly before it split into the distinct realms of literature and criticism.

33 Picking up the efforts of both the modernistas and of José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel, ensayismo situated itself within a literary realm that was closely identified with Latin America itself and construed as a space of critique against the rationalizing, hegemonic forces of Europe and North America. Rodó’s Ariel was fundamental in this respect.

35 of Europe and North America. In the first two thirds of the twentieth century, writers like

Reyes, now identified primarily as a critic, as well as writers like Borges, now identified as a fiction-writer, continued to practice literary forms of interpretation, gathered into the heterogeneous discourse of ensayismo.

Up to the 1970s, the mobile, heterogeneous essay was the lingua franca of a literary-critical realm that maintained a high degree of discursive and institutional fluidity, particularly in contrast to what had occurred in the 1940s and 50s United

States.34 While literature and criticism in the United States split into the more clearly defined and autonomous realms of creative writing and scholarly criticism, in Latin

America writers continued to intervene in the worlds of politics and society and moved more easily between the dual roles of critic and fiction-writer. If González, for example, cites Reyes, Rodríguez Monegal, and Rama as “precursors” and not as literary critics in their own right, it is because of the ease with which they moved between discursive forms, disciplines, and functions.35 As Franco notes, Rodríguez Monegal and Rama not only taught in universities (“Afterword” 504) but also managed and edited non-academic journals that published fiction, literary interpretations, and political analyses. Franco also notes that it was writers like Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and not academics, who revolutionized the reading of literary texts in the 60s and 70s, taking on “the task of importing, disseminating, and inventing theory” (504). Such discursive

34 For an account of what has been depicted as the “demise” or “crisis” of the essay and its relation to the so-called rise of criticism in the 1960s and 70s, see Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot’s “El ensayo y la crítica literaria en Latinoamérica” and Peter Earle’s 1978 “On the Contemporary Displacement of the Hispanic American Essay.” However, as Alberto Giordano suggests in Modos del ensayo: De Borges a Piglia, the essay continued to function as an important form of critical reflection in Latin America beyond the 1970s.

35 One could argue that Andrés Bello and José Enrique Rodó are not strictly literary critics, though Reyes, Rodríguez Monegal, and Rama are without a doubt considered literary critics in Latin America.

36 fluidity contributed to the sense that Latin America did not have its own, distinct literary criticism. For writers and critics could very well claim, like Paz, that Latin America’s critical tradition lay in literary writing (60), or, like Franco, that the novel and the short story were the principal instruments in the process of transforming reading and readers in the region (503). Yet the absence of “professional criticism” or “serious scholarship” threatened to keep Latin America and its cultural products in their old colonial status as objects to be consumed, studied, and analyzed from the perspectives of Europe and North

America.

The resulting search for a Latin American criticism thus participated in a broader problematic about the possibility of theorizing from Latin America and being recognized for doing so in terms that were not dictated by the centers of discursive power. The debate is not restricted to the realm of literary criticism, though its participants often turn to ensayismo as a paradigmatic example of problems that run across various disciplines.

For example, Walter Mignolo notes that, like the humanistic or literary forms of ensayismo, other critical discourses developed in Latin America—including the theory of dependence and “post-occidentalismo”—have fallen out of discussion in North America.

The absence of such discourses from the North American academy tends to turn Latin

America into “un área para ser estudiada, más que un espacio donde se produce pensamiento crítico” (“Postoccidentalismo” 32). For Hugo Achugar, the disregard for

Latin American critical production is largely due to the imposition of metropolitan categories, which are incapable of accounting for the particular forms of Latin American critical discourse and thus cast it as mere “theoretical babbling” (134). The conflict generates a series of aporias, which Achugar poses as a string of unanswered questions:

37 Is it possible to think of a ‘minor’ use of theory—making a free paraphrase of Deleuze’s proposition—and ‘theoretical babbling’ as a positive and valid category? Or does ‘theoretical babbling’ run the risk of being appropriated as a barbarism, as just another way of disqualifying any discourse produced outside the rules of theoretical discourse of the ‘centre,’ or of the northern hemisphere universities? Will Latin American cultural criticism, ‘essay-writing’ (ensayismo), or thought thus be seen as worthless theorization because they do not fall within the academic parameters of ‘scholarly’ thought—in the double sense of the word ‘school’—from the Commonwealth and the gardens of academia? (134)

Although Achugar implicitly underscores the validity of ensayismo and Latin American cultural criticism as forms of theoretical thought, his questions point to the recurring problem of securing their legitimacy in the centers of discursive power.

Such debates are not exclusive to the twentieth century, or to the 1970s when

Roberto Fernández Retamar wrote the texts that Achugar analyzes in his article. In the

1940s—and perhaps even as early as the 1928 “Canto del Halibut”—Alfonso Reyes had already acknowledged the paradoxes of Latin American criticism, emphasizing the importance of creating a critical discourse that might resolve the perceived absence of literary criticism in Latin America. Yet Reyes’s response to the tension between metropolitan demands and local social and discursive realities was not simply to adopt metropolitan discourse.36 He knew that doing so would merely elicit the timeworn judgment that Latin America was only capable of imitating the cultural forms of the metropolis—and badly at that—while failing to provide fitting methodologies to analyze its own cultural products and social realities. Reyes then embarked on what he himself

36 In “Algunos problemas teóricos de la literatura hispanoamericana,” published in Para una teoría de la literatura hispanoamericana, Roberto Fernández Retamar famously claims that Reyes caters to a metropolitan definition of literature, divorced from the realities of Latin American cultural production, and attempts to impose metropolitan standards of purity upon local discursive formations. As I discuss in more detail in chapter 2, Reyes engaged in a more complex negotiation between metropolitan standards and local realities. One could claim that Fernández Retamar’s depiction is an attempt to distance his own critical efforts and those of the nueva crítica from previous critical efforts.

38 depicted as a heroic effort to mediate between the global demand for an “objective” literary criticism and the role that literary writing had played as an important form of critical discourse in the region. Thus, despite being one of the most well-known and vocal proponents of ensayismo, Reyes began crafting what he called a “ciencia literaria” that might be welcomed into a worldly, critical dialogue. As I will discuss in further detail in chapter two, Reyes construed that “literary science” as a capacious discourse that could incorporate numerous methodologies, discourses, and perspectives, including methodologies from Europe and the more literary and unspecialized interpretations that had characterized critical thinking in Latin America.

Availing himself of the essayist’s “mirada integradora” (Ramos 270), Reyes set out to create a distinctly critical discourse in Latin America that would maintain links to various discourses and realms and preserve its critical nature. For Reyes associated the adjective “critical” not with the capacity to stand back or separate his discourse from other realms but with the capacity to comment on and intervene in society. Reyes sought, in other words, to retain the social function of writing, made possible by the imperfect autonomization of the literary-critical realm, whose lack of differentiation from other spheres of culture or society had previously allowed writers to go beyond the self- contained worlds of art or literature.37 As Reyes mentions in his essay “Notas sobre la inteligencia Americana,” writers in Latin America are not born in the highest floor of the

Eiffel tower but in the very center of the earth, where the various roles they have to fulfill

37 One can draw a parallel here between the undifferentiated literary-critical realm and the crónica modernista, which according to Ramos allowed modernista writers like Martí and Rodó to posit the social function of art in society. For in contrast to England, where the notion of art for art’s sake had found fertile ground, in Latin America the spheres of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the social had not been subjected to the same kind of differentiation. Similarly, the lack of autonomization of the literary-critical realm allowed critics in Latin America to go beyond the defined and self-contained world of art or literature and connect the literary work to local realities, thus reflecting critically on both text and context.

39 and the numerous discourses they must wield keep Latin American intelligence “más avezada al el aire de la calle” (86). Reyes, however, was not the only writer in Latin

America to emphasize the need for maintaining the social function of both literature and criticism. As José Antonio Portuondo notes in his 1972 article “Literatura y sociedad,” the instrumental character of literature had been a constant in Latin America: “no hay escritor u obra importante que no se vuelque sobre la realidad social americana, y hasta los más evadidos tienen un instante apologético o criticista frente a las cosas y a las gentes” (391). For Antonio Cornejo Polar, the impossibility of assuming literature as an autonomous category made it imperative for criticism to avoid abstraction and to analyze

Latin America’s literary forms in relation to the particularities of Latin America’s heterogeneous and multinational societies (13).

Maintaining the critical capacity to comment on society—on local political events and social structures as well as on global hegemonies—thus remained a key feature of both the literary and critical projects in Latin America.38 This was particularly true of the project to create a “nueva crítica latinoamericana” (Rincón 174), which picked up on

Reyes’s critical efforts while attempting to set itself apart from the humanistic ensayismo he had come to epitomize. Like Paz, the proponents of the nueva crítica in the 1960s and

70s were also concerned about the apparent lack of criticism in Latin America, particularly at a time when its literature was finally being commented, analyzed, and

38 As Pedro Ángel García Palou notes in La ciudad crítica: Imágenes de América Latina en su teoría, crítica e historiografía literarias, one of the guiding threads of Latin American critical production is the fact that it has emerged not from thoretical models but from a corpus generated by “nudos de conflicto.” In most cases, “la pregunta metodológica sigue siendo… cómo devolverle al texto literario su densidad social superando las teorías del reflejo y sin caer en la inmanencia estética” (15).

40 incorporated into the world canon.39 One of the elements that gave particular urgency and impetus to the project of creating a nueva crítica was the notion that without a legitimate criticism the new narrative produced in the 60s and 70s would be interpreted through

European and North American lenses, thus reinforcing the sense of cultural dependency that Latin American intellectuals had been trying to shake off since independence from colonial powers. In the 1960s and 70s, critics and writers thus depicted the elaboration of a recognizably critical discourse from Latin America as an important part of an emancipatory continental project that would deliver Latin America from subservience to

Europe and North America.

At this point, however, critics distanced themselves from what many characterized as the subjectivist impressionism and literary vagaries of previous interpretive efforts and created a more “objective” criticism, separate from both literary interpretations and from literature itself. In an effort to bring the region up to date with international critical standards, they imported various critical methodologies from Europe and North America and engaged in a lively metacritical debate about the merits and local applicability of such methods.40 Emphasizing what Roberto Fernández Retamar called “la

39 For analyses of the emergence of the nueva crítica in 1960s and 70s Latin America, see Carlos Rincón’s “Acerca de la nueva crítica latinoamericana,” Guillermo Sucre’s “La nueva crítica,” Desiderio Saavedra’s “Nueva crítica para una nueva narrativa: problemas y perspectivas,” Nelson Osorio’s “La nueva narrativa y los problemas de la crítca en hispanoamerica actual,” and Agustín Martínez’s Metacrítica: problemas de la crítica literaria en Hispanoamérica y Brasil.

40 The new critical methodologies—which spanned everything from French structuralism to North American New Criticism to Russian formalism to Marxist analysis—became the object of impassioned debate. While some depicted them as a form of cultural imperialism, the new methodologies allowed other critics to claim theoretical currency with respect to Europe and North America as well as the ability to provide a fuller, more “objective” picture of both literature and of its social context. For a highly critical account of the nueva crítica, see “Crítica tradicional y crítica literaria neo-académica,” where Antonio Alatorre depicts the new “scientific” approach to literature as the Europeanized habit of a neo-academic critic newly minted “de la fábrica, ya listo y dispuesto a todo” (423). Fernández Retamar is also highly critical of the importation of structuralist criticism, though in contrast to Alatorre he sets it against Marxist analysis rather than “traditional” criticism in Latin America (“Algunos problemas” 90-92). 41 integración de los métodos… que de ninguna manera debe confundirse con un eclecticismo desmesurado” (131), the “objective” critic was charged with the task of using the most valuable elements of different critical methodologies in order to provide a fuller, more “objective” picture of both literature and local realities. Influenced by the revolutionary rhetoric of the 60s and 70s, the adjective “critical” became associated with the capacity to weave strands of both local and global discourses into an emancipatory narrative of culture that would further Latin America’s “complejo proceso de liberación”

(88). The nueva crítica that emerged in the 60s and 70s thus retained the commitment to objectivity, the integrative impulses, and the capacity to comment upon society that had marked Reyes’s critical efforts in the 1940s and 50s, but crafted a very different relationship to literature.

Although critics continued to view literature as a critical discourse capable of reflecting on local realities, literary discourse was increasingly seen not as a component of the critic’s discourse but as a separate discourse upon which the critic reflected.

Literature’s growing autonomy in the 1960s consolidated its status as an “other space” from which writers could elaborate a critique of local and global powers (Franco, Decline

6).41 Yet literature alone could no longer fulfill the role of literary criticism, which was now called on to illuminate and articulate the critical insights coded in literature. As

41 As Franco notes in The Fall of the Lettered City, the outsider status that writers claimed in the 1960s gave them a critical space, independent of the state. Literature’s autonomy from political powers was further reinforced by the editorial success of literary works in Europe and the United States, which for the first time liberated writers from their dependence on journalism and allowed them to dedicate themselves to the task of fiction-writing. The literary work thus positioned itself as a negative, critical mirror, which reflected the antithesis of the real state and the ideal of the autonomous nation (7). As Franco notes, however, literature’s economic and political independence occurs at the very moment in which the prestige of literature is put in question by the rise of the mass media and its critical power is compromised by literature’s increasing commercialization. Such threats to the autonomy of literature thus perpetuated the imperfect autonomization of the literary realm, which in Latin America never fully coalesced into a distinct and independent sphere.

42 Fernández Retamar claimed in 1972, excluding literature and “obras al parecer menos rigurosamente estructuradas” from literary theory would be absurd in Latin America, “ya que la division del trabajo entre productores, enjuiciadores y teóricos de la literatura no es frecuente en nuestras letras” (78). Fernández Retamar also warned, however, against going to “el extremo opuesto,” since “una concepción materialista de las ideologías impide tomar al pie de la letra como científicamente válido lo que dice un escritor sobre su obra o la de otros” (78). In Fernández Retamar’s case, the purported need for scientific validity was influenced by the requirements of a Marxist ideology. Yet his reticence to take writers’ critical capacities “al pie de la letra” indicates Latin American intellectuals’ increasing emphasis on the need for a separate critical discourse that could articulate and interpret literature’s reflections of society.42 By distinguishing the new “objective” critical discourse from literary writing, critics both guaranteed the critical validity of their discourse for an international audience while granting new authority to the critic as a social mediator, charged with making visible, to a local public, the figures of liberation coded in the critical mirror of literature.

For a moment, it seemed that Latin America was about to fulfill the utopian project of developing “nuestro propio enfoque crítico, nuestros propios modos de investigación, nuestra valoración con signo particular, salidos de nuestras condiciones, de nuestras necesidades, de nuestro interés” (Benedetti, quoted in Fernández Retamar 90).

Yet the social and cultural transformations of the late twentieth century placed new

42 The emphasis on creating an “objective” criticism was also heavily influenced by the rising importance of the university as a locus of critical thought. As Agustín Martínez notes in Metacrítica, in the mid- twentieth century the university gained a new social function as the hegemonic center of knowledge. In the latter half of the twentieth century, universities in Latin America became privileged and almost exclusive centers in the legitimation and administration of knowledge and in the production of criticism (11).

43 obstacles on the continental critical project articulated in the 60s and 70s. The rise of authoritarian governments in the 70s and 80s had a tremendously corrosive effect upon critical activity: they obstructed and sometimes directly targeted the critical methodologies of the nueva crítica while undermining the totalizing, utopian discourses that had sustained it. As I will analyze in further detail in chapter three, the authoritarian regimes not only sent critical discourse underground or abroad, but also had a lasting effect on the literary-critical realm, accelerating and cementing the divisions between literature and criticism. In Chile, for example, the Pinochet regime capitalized on the recent depiction of criticism an “objective” practice and established more stringent boundaries between literature and criticism in an effort to strip both discourses of their capacity for social commentary. Such changes were, however, not restricted to Chile but reflected broader trends in the region. The growing emphasis on specialization reinforced the changes of the 1960s and 70s—which had shifted the locus of critical activity to the university (Subercaseaux 281)—and ultimately helped consolidate literature and criticism into separate and distinct provinces. During the 80s and 90s, writers were increasingly restricted to producing fiction for the publishing industry and criticism was transformed into a primarily academic activity, whose purpose was to produce specialized knowledge with exchange value in the global academic market.43

43 In “Latin American Intellectuals in a Post-Hegemonic Era,” George Yúdice observes that little has been written about intellectuals for the period ranging from the military dictatorships of the 1980s to the transition to democracy in the 80s and 90s. For that period, critical attention tends to focus on the agency of social movements and civil-society organizations. Yet the shift to academic critical production has in fact been the object of numerous analyses. For example, the combined effects of authoritarian repression, the rise of neoliberalism, and the influence of globalization upon critical production has been the object of incisive analyses and critiques by Nelly Richard and Beatriz Sarlo, whom I analyze in greater detail in chapters three and four of this dissertation.

44 While the rise of academic criticism and its definite separation from literature bolstered the notion that Latin America had finally begun to produce legitimate criticism, it also complicated the project to create a local critical discourse whose terms were not dictated by Europe and North America. For the new boundaries between literature and criticism were set at a time when both authoritarian and democratic governments sought to bring Latin America into a global capitalist economy. Within the new, diffuse currents of power in the late twentieth century, Europe and North America continued to exercise a

“función-centro” that was still felt—perhaps with even greater force—in Latin America

(Richard, “Un debate” 841). As Nelly Richard notes, the globalization of the economy and of mass communications redefined the way that Latin America saw itself “al fragmentar y diseminar los trazados identitarios de lo nacional y de lo continental que le servían de fronteras de integridad al discurso sustancialista de un ‘nosotros’ puro y originario” (“Globalización”). The fragmentation and dissemination of power brought about by globalization not only undermined a continental identity but also subjected local critical discourses to a metropolitan logic that assumed rigid separations between the worlds of fiction-writing, journalistic reviewing, and academic criticism. As I will discuss in further detail in chapter four, the local critical discourses of the 80s and 90s thus found themselves caught in a web of universities and institutions of knowledge that imposed strict boundaries on the types of discourses and rhetorical forms that counted as criticism or theory. Literature, in turn, lost much of its critical power and cultural privilege as it was transformed into another product competing for consumer attention with the mass media (Franco, “Afterword” 508). By the end of the millennium, the absorption of literature and criticism into the global publishing and academic markets had divested both

45 discourses of the social function they previously enjoyed and once again suspended the project of creating a critical discourse from Latin America.44

Henceforth, it became increasingly difficult to claim Latin America, literature, or criticism as critical categories or spaces of resistance. Indeed, all three categories became the object of acerbic critiques, paradoxically made possible by the late-twentieth-century fragmentation that suspended their critical power. If the disintegration of a continental identity closed the possibility of claiming Latin America as an emancipatory space distinct from the centers of power, it also revealed the extent to which the category of

“Latin America” had obfuscated transnational identities based on race, gender, or sexual identity and served the interests of global powers.45 Similarly, if the irruption of mass culture opened the category of literature and drained it of its power of critique, it also allowed some critics to emphasize the elitism that had previously marked literary culture.46 Criticism’s transformation into the academic field of literary studies widened the gap between criticism and subjects or discourses outside the academy, but opened local criticism to a variety of theories and methodologies outside the field of “literary criticism,” capable of providing new challenges to global power and institutional closure.

In light of such transformations, claiming Latin America, literature, or criticism as spaces

44 For an overview of the impact of globalization on Latin American cultural and critical production see Santiago Castro-Gómez and Eduardo Mendieta’s “La translocación discursiva de ‘Latinoamérica’ en tiempos de la globalización,” Nelly Richard’s “Globalización académica, estudios culturales y crítica latinoamericana,” and Jean Franco’s The Fall of the Lettered City.

45 This critique is most clearly outlined by Walter Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America, which situates the emergence of “Latin America” at the beginning of the European colonial project and claims that “the idea of Latin America” is part and parcel of a colonial project that has championed modernity at the expense of African and indigenous peoples and of the memory of their genocide. Mignolo also claims that new social movements and knowledge projects developed by indigenous peoples and Afro descendants in “Latin” America and by Latinos in the United States are making the idea of Latin America obsolete (xv).

46 See, for example, John Beverly’s Against Literature.

46 of critique today may seem absurd, a quaint throwback to a modern era in which they could still boast critical power, or the naive strategy of one not yet aware of or touched by the power of a globalized culture.

Yet one could also argue that the occlusion of such categories in a postmodern or neoliberal era may be precisely what grants them critical force, not as categories but as positions, as formal and rhetorical strategies that flout the new institutional boundaries between discourses and challenge the continuing hierarchies between regions. As

Achugar suggests, globalization has not resolved the tensions between metropolitan categories and local discourses or subjects still excluded from the closed circles of critical or theoretical thinking by virtue of their subject position or the particular form of their discourse. To borrow Achugar’s conclusion, “what remains unsettled and without resolution is the need to transform Prospero’s monologue into a truly democratic assembly” (140). Depicted by Achugar—via Fernández Retamar—as a “foreign sorcerer”

(139), Shakespeare’s Prospero serves as a figure for a metropolitan discourse unwilling to account for critical discourses in Latin America that do not conform to its more clearly delineated spheres.47 For, globalization notwithstanding, both writers and critics in Latin

America continue to resist the specializations of academic discourse in order to craft a literary-critical discourse that can retain the social function of writing and critique the exclusions of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Critical fictions are one example of the many forms in this varied, heterogeneous discourse, which pays little

47 To rearticulate critical fictions in the terms outlined by Achugar’s article and by Fernández Retamar’s Caliban, critical fictions are neither a return to the literary discourse associated with Ariel nor a Calibanesque discourse that turns the language of the metropolis into “theoretical babble” but a critique of Prospero who expects the world to fall into one of these two categories. What is more, critical fictions often question the extent to which Latin American writers perpetuate such categorizations in an effort to assume the position of Prospero for themselves.

47 respect to social, academic, or discursive boundaries. Their purpose is to challenge our current habits of thinking, reading, and thus open critical discourse to an erstwhile

“naive” reader whose participation in cultural interpretation can turn the critic’s monologue—both in metropolitan and Latin American circles—into a truly democratic assembly.

Critical fictions in Latin America thus emerge at the very moment when literature seems to have lost its power of critique in order to reclaim that power, no longer from the institution of literature but from a more diffuse literary-critical realm with a long and complex trajectory in Latin America. Drawing on the diverse forms, strategies, and histories of that trajectory, they elaborate both a local and a global critique. On the one hand, they aim their critical fire at the particular rhetorical strategies of local critics who tried to “deliver” Latin America from its provinciality or critical deficiency by creating a critical institution separate from literature. Mocking such strategies, critical fictions reveal the extent to which local critics only exacerbated their own provinciality, fell prey to fabrication, and reproduced the naiveté that they projected onto others in an effort to establish their authority. On the other hand, critical fictions aim their critique at a metropolitan community that judged Latin America as deficient in the realm of critical thinking because it failed to produce a discourse that conformed to the categories elaborated in Europe and North America. By reproducing local critical forms, critical fictions refute the purported absence of critical discourse in Latin America and emphasize the diversity and richness of critical writing in the region as well as its capacity to use literary or fictional strategies for critical ends. Recuperating a Latin American critical project elaborated throughout the twentieth century, they emphasize the importance of

48 local, contextual readings, the importance of entering each critical fiction’s social and discursive world in order to understand the specific form of the work’s critique.

The texts that follow these general parameters are to be found not only in the realm of “fiction” but also in the realm of “criticism.” As we have seen, the particular history of criticism in Latin America has made it possible to elaborate critical forms more closely imbricated with and perhaps indistinguishable from fiction. For even after the alleged rise of criticism in the 1970s, the creation of a stable and authoritative critical institution in Latin America continued to be interrupted by the repressive force of authoritarian governments, the withdrawal of the protectionist state, the rise of the mass media, the increasing power and authority of the market, and the absorption of criticism into a global academic network. In the absence of a stable critical realm, critics continued to work within often-precarious institutional mediums and moved—both out of necessity and out of choice—between the university and the worlds of journalism and cultural production.48 Such institutional mobility required and enabled a diversity of formal and rhetorical strategies, and encouraged a reflection about criticism’s relationship to readers, discourses, and practices situated outside the tight circles of academic criticism. As a result, several critics turned to literary practice, vindicating and incorporating its formal, aesthetic dimensions into critical texts. Writers like Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella, as well as critics like Adriana Valdés, Beatriz Sarlo, and Josefina Ludmer, thus continued to

48 As De la Campa notes, the stability of full-time teaching positions in Euro-American institutions stands in stark contrast to the situation in Latin America “where even countries such as Venezuela, known for its support of humanistic studies, have witnessed severe contractions and neoliberal regimes such as Chile’s, in spite of their lauded economic strides, have yet to invest significantly in the production of critical or cultural spaces. Such research has been severely limited in all of Latin America, where part-time adjunct positions are the norm” (16). De la Campa concludes that there are few, if any, loci of legitimation for strands of Latin Americanism in Latin America itself, which rather oddly implies that all forms of legitimation must necessarily be located in Europe and North America.

49 use fiction as a valid and valuable critical strategy, which the paradoxes of Latin

American critical discourse made possible well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Critical Fictions in Latin America

In the chapters that follow, I analyze a series of critics and writers who have kindled and rekindled the project of crafting a critical discourse from Latin America by reflecting on and reconfiguring the relationship between literary and critical discourses.

Taking three novels as critical lenses, I delve into three particular histories in the story of that project. My purpose, however, is not to provide a neat or exhaustive narrative. I want to emphasize, rather, the extent to which the diverse and heterogeneous Latin American critical project has been characterized by late starts, archaic residues, jumps in time, inopportune moments, and temporal lagoons, and to depict this disjoint history not as a deficiency, but as a trove of rich critical opportunities. Such opportunities do not emerge from some other space or position of alterity, but are the product of difficult negotiations between metropolitan demands and local realities, between scientific and humanistic paradigms, between subjective and objective positions, between literary and critical discourses, and between different definitions of what literature and criticism are supposed to be. Shifting back and forth between positions, the texts I analyze highlight the various definitions given to different discourses, places, and times, and force us to reflect on how such definitions shape what can and cannot be said at any given place and time. By doing so, they remind us that boundaries are redefinable, that apparently occluded discursive possibilities can be redeployed for strategic critical ends, and that we—whatever our

50 position of partial power or marginal authority—are also implicated in the constitution of social and discursive boundaries.

Through a critical reflection on the social and discursive contexts of critical fictions by Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella, I touch on key moments in the attempt to set the boundaries of critical discourse in Latin America: Alfonso Reyes’s critical efforts in

1940s and 50s Mexico, the critical scenes in Chile immediately before and after the military coup of 1973, and the attempts to find critical spaces in the neoliberal Argentina of the 1990s. Monterroso’s, Lihn’s, and Libertella’s critical fictions highlight the rhetorical strategies of local critics who sought to craft a critical discourse from Latin

America, often undoing the critical boundaries set by metropolitan discourse while establishing new boundaries in the region. Seeking to both authorize themselves and disrupt the power differential with the criticism of Europe and North America, local critics established new separations not only between literary and critical discourses but also between subjects, particularly between critics and a subordinate reader often depicted as “naive.” Already contradictory, critics’ efforts were further complicated by the particular social and discursive conditions that they faced at all three historical moments, which again and again seemed to interrupt the constitution of a critical discourse in Latin America. By imitating the critical languages in force at the time and place of their novels’ composition, Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella eschew a continental perspective and invite us to examine the formal strategies of specific critics, local critical communities, and the shortcomings imposed by certain historical situations. Taking up that invitation, the chapters that follow focus on three distinct places and times in the broader history of critical discourse in Latin America.

51 Chapter two analyzes Augusto Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio (1978) and its engagement with the figure and works of Mexican critic Alfonso Reyes. Written as a fictional biography of a provincial critic, the novel plays on the vision of Latin America as a provincial critical milieu whose interpretations are invariably marked by belatedness, improvisation, and mimeticism. Although the novel has often been read as a “hilarious” parody of the worst of Latin American criticism, I argue that the novel is not just a general parody of Latin America’s critical poverty but a critical reflection on one of Latin

America’s most respected critics and on his efforts to found the realm of literary criticism in Latin America. Through an analysis of Reyes’s works, primarily his theoretical treatise

El deslinde (1944), I parse Reyes’s difficult negotiations with the local and metropolitan critical languages of his time and his efforts to draw the boundaries of a purportedly inexistent critical realm in Latin America. I show how Reyes’s historical circumstances fueled his efforts to deliver the region from the sense of critical provincialism by including, in his “ciencia literaria,” “objective” methodologies as well as more “literary” approaches that would guarantee the humanistic, anti-positivist dimensions of his project.

Monterroso’s critical fiction serves, however, as a critical counterpoint. Its engagement with Reyes reveals the Mexican critic’s attempts to distinguish his discourse from literature and to set himself above a naive reader whom he depicted as incapable of critical thinking.

Chapter three jumps to Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1970s Chile, during which Enrique Lihn wrote the novel La orquesta de cristal (1976). Lihn’s novel mimics a literary monograph, which gathers and glosses the numerous commentaries written from

1900 to 1942 about an orchestra whose instruments are all made out of glass. Using the

52 novel as a critical lens, I analyze the silences imposed by the Pinochet regime on both the literary and critical realms in Chile. I read the mute, transparent orchestra and the almost complete critical silence that followed Lihn’s novel as metacritical reflections on the authoritarian regime’s attempts to block critique by setting stringent boundaries around both literature and criticism. I then focus on the devastating effects that the dictatorship had on both the so-called critical renovation that preceded the 1973 coup and on the critical scenes that followed it. Through a detailed examination of the critical scenes that emerged both before and after the coup, I show how the authoritarian bloc capitalized on the distinctions between literature and criticism established by the critical

“modernization” of the 60s and early 70s in order to fragment the literary-critical realm into the separate spheres of academic criticism, journalistic reviewing, and the production of literary fictions. The languages produced in all three self-contained realms are objects of acerbic critique in Lihn’s novel, which mobilizes the more discursively ambiguous strategies of the underground avant-garde scene that emerged during the dictatorship.

Lihn, however, also provides a parody of the cultural avant-garde and an early warning against the self-authorizing strategies employed by the “crítica cultural” after the return to democracy.

Chapter 4 takes another temporal and geographical leap into the postmodern and neoliberal landscapes of turn-of-the-millennium Argentina, where Héctor Libertella’s El

árbol de Saussure: Una utopia (2000) enters into dialogue with Beatriz Sarlo and Josefina

Ludmer. Libertella’s novel serves as a starting point to analyze the changing relationship between literature and criticism at a time when the neoliberal policies of the 1980s and

90s had transformed literature into a commercial product and absorbed criticism into a

53 global academic market. In El árbol de Saussure, Libertella transforms Saussure’s diagram of the linguistic sign into a setting for a series of fictions, which coexist with interpretations about a host of social and cultural phenomena. The novel’s reflections on the place of literature and cultural interpretation in a “ghetto” overrun by the market provide a critical lens on the dual rise of mass culture and the emergence of cultural studies. I focus in particular on the role that Beatriz Sarlo played in introducing cultural studies to Argentina as well as her subsequent defense of literary value. Sarlo’s arguments about literature’s capacity to provide a critical perspective in the new postmodern and neoliberal landscapes find an echo in Libertella’s critical fiction.

Libertella, however, resists Sarlo’s attempts to turn literature into a pedagogical tool to educate the naive masses in the practices of critique. Like Josefina Ludmer, Libertella reconfigures literature not as a tool for the critical but as a utopian no-place, whose fictional strategies provide a critical space for all, even the most naive readers. For

Ludmer and Libertella, the critical strategies of fiction are particularly useful in Latin

America, which they both posit as an imaginary community that stands in a critical relationship to the discourses of power.

What I hope to present through these three chapters are pieces of a rich yet incomplete story. Their partial status seeks to reflect both the shortcomings and strengths of a Latin American critical project depicted from within and from outside the region as not-yet-constituted, emergent, obscure, and incomplete. For despite efforts to define a recognizable critical realm that might refute the purported absence of criticism in Latin

America, the writers and critics that I discuss in the following chapters attest to the fact that critical discourse in the region remains fluid and volatile. From the perspective of the

54 centers of discursive power, critical discourse in Latin America continues to be fragmentary, diffuse, in the process of being developed, authorized, or made visible. Yet its discursive instability, its precariousness, and its lack of definition are precisely what underlie the critical power of a discourse that has resisted closure because of the historical circumstances that stood in the way of criticism’s institutional stability. Read according to the way it has been proposed from Latin America, critical discourse never did coalesce into a stable and autonomous realm, yet it exists and has existed for a long time as an open discursive space where various disciplines, methodologies, practices, and subjects meet. With their refusal to recognize the boundaries between literature and criticism, critical fictions are at once embodiments of Latin America’s inadequate critical tradition and paradigmatic examples of the multiple rhetorical strategies developed to critique literary-critical discourse and the historical conditions in which it is embedded.

Based on the premise that there is no unified critical discourse in Latin America, that Latin America is a heterogeneous collection of diverse communities, and that there is no literary “genre” of critical fictions, the chapters that follow move discontinuously between discourses, subjects, places, and times. I thus hope to show that critical discourse in Latin America is perhaps best described as a collection of disperse and assorted languages, whose claim to the adjective “critical” lies in their capacity to interrupt the

“occlusive constitution of the field of categories themselves” (Butler). I want to emphasize, in turn, that the term “critical fictions” is not simply meant to define a type of novel but to delineate a rhetorical strategy that can be put into practice by literature and criticism alike. Like the term “Latin America,” critical discourse and critical fictions in

Latin America are not generalizable as de-contextualized and abstract categories. They

55 are, instead, strategic rhetorical moves rooted in a specific place and time and mobilized by subjects who aim their critique from particular perspectives and positions at “some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution” (Butler). As rhetorical moves, critical fictions can, however, be redeployed to open up the boundaries of a critical discourse whose institutional stability in the United States threatens to occlude discursive possibilities and empty criticism of the power of critique.

In the pages that follow, I take up Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella’s invitation to reflect on the formal strategies of specific critics and local critical communities, and on the shortcomings brought about by certain historical situations. Shifting perspective, I propose we read critical fictions in Latin America not through regional, national, or discursive categories like “literature” or “criticism” but through what I might call an emergent critical framework. Somewhat distinct from the broad narrative I have sketched out in this introduction, such a framework begins from the texts and tries to follow the local references and web of readings that echo and spin off from them. The result is a reading that lavishes detail on fragments of syntactical formations, on slight rhetorical refractions between fiction and criticism, on single words allowed to unfold into precarious theoretical edifices, on the echoes of a single lecture, the publication history of a marginal article, or conversations between critics and writers captured in bits and pieces through the traces of the printed word. In the web created between fiction and criticism, text and context, sometimes we will find the traces of metropolitan theory and the categories defined by a global north—but not always. For the purpose of my reading is in part to shake off the habit of reading fiction through the lens of criticism, Latin America through the lenses of Europe and North America, and to try the reverse. The objective is

56 not to take off our perhaps inevitable “antiparras yankees o francesas” (Martí 171) but to flip them around, and through the distorting lens of a text that forces us to look closer, read criticism through literature, North American and European categories through the naive formations of the South.

57

CHAPTER 2

The King’s Jester: Eduardo Torres, Alfonso Reyes, Augusto Monterroso

HAMLET: this might be the pate of a politician… Or of a courtier, which could say, “Good morrow, sweet lord!” “How dost thou, good lord?”… Hum! There’s another. Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?… This fellow might be in ’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries… Whose was it? GRAVEDIGGER: A whoreson mad fellow’s it was… This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester. HAMLET: Let me see. [Takes the skull.] Alas, poor Yorick! - William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”

Reprinted by the Revista de la Universidad de México in January of 1959, “Una nueva edición del Quijote” was not exactly timely. The small-town critic Eduardo Torres had published the review a few months earlier in El heraldo de San Blas, where he set out to inform the reader that Don Quijote was not really an attempt to mock a madman but, rather, an attack on chivalric romances. Riddled with errors of fact and critical gaffes, the article “caused hilarious reactions among Mexico City literati ready to cry foul and accuse the ‘fictitious’ and ‘real’ authors of libel and other non-literary offenses” (Corral

“Before and After” xiv). It was not entirely obvious at the time that the article was in fact the doing of the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, who had been living in Mexico since 1956 and was purportedly attempting to “rescatar una serie de artículos de un intelectual de provincia, específicamente el Dr. Eduardo Torres, de San Blas, S.B.”

58 (Monterroso, Viaje 67). For almost twenty years Monterroso fed the fiction of that

“investigación” or “research project” both in his books and in his interviews, which repeatedly quoted Torres and told of grueling voyages “en autobús, yip o mula” (35) to visit that “prócer de provincia” (30).49 Monterroso also continued submitting articles to various Mexico City magazines under Torres’s and other assumed names. These included a letter by a so-called “Librado Valencia” condemning Monterroso for having “tomado a broma a San Blas” (La Gaceta 5).50 That particular letter was the subject of a wry note by the editors of La Gaceta, who by 1979 seemed aware that Valencia’s remarks meant not only “having made light of San Blas” but also “having created a joke out of San Blas.”

What motivated the shift from the first “hilarious reactions” to the irony of La

Gaceta’s editors was the publication in 1978 of Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio: La vida y obra de Eduardo Torres. The book, which assumed the guise of a critical biography, gathered and reproduced Torres’ published articles and supplemented them with other documents offering insight into the critic’s life. These included four testimonials by employees and family, a selection of Eduardo Torres’s “famous” sayings and aphorisms, an anonymous satiric poem and its analysis, and an afterword by Torres.

Even the book’s peritext seemed designed to sustain the “sham” or “lie” of that

“apocryphal biography” (Herrero-Olaizola 2), rounding it out with an absurd index of

49 Monterroso’s books Movimiento Perpetuo (1972) and La palabra mágica (1983) both include quotations attributed to Eduardo Torres without clarifying Torres’s fictional status. In Viaje al centro de la fábula, Monterroso’s book of interviews, the Guatemalan author also refers to Torres as if he were an actual person, particularly in those interviews dated before the publication of Lo demás es silencio in 1978.

50 Like Valencia’s letter, some of Monterroso’s “fictional” articles and letters are scattered throughout Mexican magazines and journals. Others were reproduced in Lo demás es silencio. The latter included a number of articles by Torres initially published in the Revista de la Universidad de México and in La cultura en México as well as an outraged “Carta Censoria” by “F.R.,” which attacked in minute detail the many errors in Torres’ initial review.

59 names, a bibliography, a list of abbreviations, and a fictional back cover text by the “Lic.

Efrén Figueredo.” As in other critical fictions, the assiduous imitation of critical languages and conventions threatens to trap an unwary reader into mistaking Lo demás es silencio for “real” criticism. The publication of what Monterroso himself dubbed a

“novel” (Viaje 66) nevertheless seems to have put an end to Torres’s “insólita experiencia de ser considerado real y ficticio” (Ruffinelli 39). After two decades of uncertainty and speculation, Lo demás es silencio confirmed Torres’s fictional status and allowed critics to laugh away the discursive ambiguity of his initial articles as an elaborate “broma literaria” (Bonifaz Nuño ix).51

With Torres, San Blas, and its literary supplement consigned to the realm of fiction, critics quickly reframed the texts in Lo demás es silencio as a clever parody by a master of humorous writing.52 Wilfrido Corral’s early depiction of the novel as a “tour de force paródico” (Lector 195) echoed throughout subsequent criticism of Lo demás es silencio, which continued to be cited as a paradigmatic example of parodic strategies.

Critics nevertheless failed to clarify whom or what the novel was parodying. Inquiries into the object of Monterroso’s parody tended to get lost in vague references to “cierto

51 After its publication, all critical commentaries of Lo demás es silencio reflect and are careful to underline critics’ awareness that Monterroso’s text is a fiction, and that Torres is a literary character. Subsequent editions of Lo demás es silencio similarly emphasize the fictional dimensions of Monterroso’s text. For example, the 1991 edition of the novel, published by Ediciones Era, notes the fact that the text is a “novel” on its cover, in contrast to the original 1978 edition, which gives few indications of its fictional nature on its cover or title page. In a similar vein to the 1991 edition, the 1986 Cátedra edition includes a prologue by Jorge Rufinelli, who unambiguously classfies the novel as a fiction and in the second footnote to the novel identifies the text as a “biografía imaginaria” (57).

52 See, in particular, Rony Enrique Garrido’s El humor como principio organizador de las obras de Monterroso. Although most commentaries of Lo demás es silencio classify the novel as a paradigmatic example of Monterroso’s “humorous” writing, the author himself often resisted that classification. As he notes in Viaje al centro de la fábula: “yo no me considero humorista y hasta en ocasiones me molesta que lo pueda ser sin darme cuenta. Como máximo, mi ilusión secreta es ser considerado algún día un autor relista, con humor o sin él” (42).

60 tipo de escritor o ‘hombre de letras’… un medio intelectual… un modo de hacer y vivir literatura” (Vargas 45). Without details on the specificity of that “medio intelectual” the term parody became little more than a taxonomic tool that allowed critics to investigate

Lo demás es silencio’s formal strategies and consolidate its status as a literary text.53

Such readings served, nevertheless, a key function in critics’ self-positioning vis-à-vis

Monterroso’s text. Like other critical fictions, the texts in Lo demás es silencio blurred the boundaries between literature and criticism but made it particularly important for critics to distinguish between them. Given the “hilarious” reception of Torres’s first articles, critics were eager to show that they could differentiate between a critical text meant in earnest and one meant in jest and did so by emphasizing the literary qualities that set Torres’s “spurious” articles apart from “serious” criticism. While this confirmed critics’ skill at identifying parodic intent, it also sparked a sometimes-unwitting discussion about the limits of valid criticism.

Lo demás es silencio played, in this sense, the metacritical role of other critical fictions, eliciting with its deceptive form a reflection on the discursive boundaries that validated a text as either literature or criticism. Writing within a Latin American context,

Monterroso raised the stakes of that reflection by making his protagonist a provincial critic apparently oblivious to the standards of proper critical discourse. Published in the midst of the metacritical debates of the 1960s and 70s, Lo demás es silencio played on

53 Almost every single commentary of Lo demás es silencio classifies the novel as satire or parody. A number of critics, like Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola and Robert A. Parsons, use that classification as a starting point to expound on Monterroso’s metafictional strategies. Others, like Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas and Wilfrido H. Corral, use parody to explain the book’s “generic displacement”: its capacity to incorporate numerous generic conventions within a single literary framework (Corral, Lector 192). Yet in every single description of the book’s parodic strategies critics used the term to emphasize the text’s fictional status and to elaborate on the formal strategies with which Monterroso “confuses the fiction” (Parsons 938, footnote 2).

61 the perceived shortcomings of Latin American criticism and on the notion that Latin

American criticism had been relegated to the margins of global critical debates because of it ignorance, impressionism, and lack of rigor.54 By creating a character who embodied that perceived deficiency, Monterroso set up an elaborate “juego de espejos” (Lo demás es silencio 188, henceforth LDES) with his readers. Confronted with an absurd mirror image, critics of Lo demás es silencio used laughter to take distance from Torres and differentiate his naive, provincial blunders from their own, more “critical” interpretations.55 Like Rafael Moreno-Durán, critics sought to conjugate “nos resulta imposible contener la risa” (202) in the first person plural, embracing both themselves and Monterroso in the circle of that “nos.” For outside that circle stood the object of laughter, but also the danger that called it forth: a group of readers who by accidents of geography, class, or gender lacked the critical judgment to distinguish mockeries from real criticism.

Moreno-Durán’s account of a “humorous” incident that occurred at a 1979 writer’s conference in the Canary Islands is a telling instance of critics’ attempts to set themselves apart from both Eduardo Torres’s folly and from the naiveté of those who failed to recognize it. As Moreno-Durán recounts, Monterroso had read a fictional paper in Torres’s name “que creó un revuelo entre el auditorio, sobre todo entre unas señoras

54 For a broad overview of the metacritical debates of the 60s and 70s, see the introduction to this dissertation, which contextualizes such debates within broader attempts to delineate a realm of criticism in Latin America and discusses the extent to which they were fueled by the perceived critical deficiency in the region. Chapter three also provides further details on the metacritical debates of the 60s and 70s and the rise of the nueva crítica, with particular focus on the Chilean context.

55 As Robert Parsons observes, making his protagonist a naive reader is one method by which Monterroso directs the reader’s attention to himself as an object of criticism in the text (941). Parsons derives his observation from Margaret Rose’s Parody// Metafiction, which discusses the effects of including a naive reader in the parodic text, citing Don Quijote as a paradigmatic example. See in particular Roses’s chapter three: “Parody as Meta-Fiction.”

62 argentinas que a toda costa querían conocer la latitud y longitud exactas, las coordenadas que pudieran orientarlas en su viaje hacia San Blas” (202).56 According to Moreno-

Durán, he and Monterroso would and together laugh at those Argentinean ladies and their incapacity to recognize “una divertida impostura literaria.” In his article, Moreno-Durán’s laughter established a direct parallel between their ingenuousness and the naiveté of

Monterroso’s fictional critic who, ensconced in some Latin American province, had failed to realize the belatedness of his opinion on Don Quijote. The detail of their nationality was particularly significant in the context of an international writer’s conference—particularly one hosted by Latin America’s old colonial power—where that kind of naiveté could easily be read as provinciality. For the Colombian Moreno-Durán, laughter functioned as a way of clearing himself of the charge of provinciality, which in the 1970s continued to dog Latin American critics. His laughter, however, also prevented him from considering the possibility that the “Argentinean ladies” might have been on to something in their desire to pinpoint the exact geographic and historical coordinates of

San Blas.

Like other critics of Monterroso’s work, Moreno-Durán assumed that Torres had been modeled on the worst of Latin American criticism and that Lo demás es silencio parodied a general intellectual milieu but contained in its “mundo particularmente libresco… poco de una realidad histórica, referencial” (Corral, Lector 197). As Gloria

Estela González Zenteno notes in El dinosaurio sigue allí: Arte y política en Monterroso, studies of Monterroso’s work have tended to isolate his texts from their broader historical

56 The paper read by Monterroso in the Canary Islands was included in Lo demás es silencio under the title “Ponencia presentada por el doctor Eduardo Torres ante el Congreso de Escritores de Todo el Continente celebrado en San Blas, S.B. durante el mes de mayo de 1967.”

63 context (17). In keeping with that tendency, commentaries of Lo demás es silencio have stayed, for the most part, within the bookish boundaries of Torres’s “espaciosa sala- biblioteca” (LDES 61) described in the novel’s first testimonial and have ignored the context provided in the following testimonial by Torres’s brother. Set within the bustling streets of San Blas, Luis Jerónimo Torres’s account of his brother’s life breaks the timeless immobility of Torres’s library and places it within specific geographical coordinates. San Blas, which out of context might have referred to any of the 800 towns by that name (Rufinelli, footnote to LDES 58), suddenly comes into focus as a “ciudad grande con los encantos de un pueblo chiquito y al revés” (LDES 70) where one can use the metro, listen to a concert in Bellas Artes, visit two museums, and watch a bullfight.

San Blas assumes a curious resemblance to Mexico City, whose name was similarly used to christen “el ballet local… la plaza de toros y el Estado mismo” (71). Province and city, city and state become interchangeable in Luis Jerónimo’s text, which grants Eduardo

Torres’s assertion “la provincia es la patria” a double meaning as “San Blas is the nation” and “the province is Mexico.”57

As one of the most prominent intellectuals in that provincial state, Eduardo Torres also bears a strange resemblance to a Mexican critic of whom one could similarly say,

“todo se ha dicho” (70). Like Eduardo Torres, Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) was drawn to

“las letras clásicas” (68) and could very well be described with Luis Jerónimo’s final portrait of his brother: “una vez formada su cultura clásica, un día… encontró su eureka y se echo a vagar por los campos del espíritu en la búsqueda cada vez más obstinada a las

57 That identification is further reinforced by Luis Jerónimo’s topsy-turvy gloss of the historical events, including the Spanish conquest, the violent infighting, and the obsession with the gold of “el Norte” (71), that cast Mexico as a province of Europe and North America.

64 premiosas interrogantes de nuestro tiempo” (76). A key figure in the field of Latin

American criticism, Alfonso Reyes emerges in Lo demás es silencio as Torres’s uncanny double, grounding and qualifying Monterroso’s portrait of the provincial critic. Like a distorted reflection of Reyes’s life and work, Lo demás es silencio plays on the myth that was built around Reyes and on a series of interrelated texts by and about him. Critics, however, seem to have overlooked the many echoes between Torres’s and Reyes’s figures, between Torres’s review of Don Quijote and Reyes’s “Una interpretación del

Quijote,” between Torres’s “El pájaro y la cítara (Una estrofa olvidada de Góngora)” and

Reyes’s analyses of Luis de Góngora’s Polifemo, between Carmen de Torres’s account of her husband’s life and a similar “interview” offered by Reyes’s wife in 1966. Despite such parallels, references to Reyes are almost entirely absent from criticism of Lo demás es silencio, a situation no doubt influenced by the reputation Reyes built throughout his life as the very opposite of the provincial critic.58

The author of a vast and erudite oeuvre and recipient of numerous emeritus degrees from universities around the world, Reyes came to be known in Latin America as a kind of “Erasmo mexicano” (Cortázar, in Monsiváis, “Las utopias” 105) at the level of any U.S. or European critic. That reputation was heightened after his death in 1959 by various monumentalizing efforts, which placed Reyes “entre la apoteosis y el epitafio”

(105) and eventually made him “uno de los autores más citados y menos leídos en la actualidad” (Negrín 77).59 As Carlos Monsiváis observes, Reyes’s critical oeuvre became

58 González Zenteno is perhaps the only critic who cites Alfonso Reyes as one of the sources for Monterroso’s parody, but cites Reyes as one in a list of references.

59 For an account of these monumentalizing efforts, particularly during the centenary celebration of Reyes’s birth, see Robert T. Conn’s “Alfonso Reyes and ‘El Ateneo’: Mexico’s ‘Continuing’ Enlightenment.”

65 at once deeply revered and rarely read (105), a situation that seems to have aggravated critics’ failure to see the link between Reyes and Torres. By the time Lo demás es silencio was published in 1978, Reyes had become such a monumental figure that critics never thought to associate him with the absurd, provincial critic in Monterroso’s parodic novel or to connect Reyes’s forgotten and unread texts with Torres’s “hilarious” articles.

The petrified monumentality that masked Reyes’s resemblance to Torres was, paradoxically, one of the main targets of Lo demás es silencio. Through the figure of

Eduardo Torres Monterroso undertook a demonumentalizing task that unearthed Reyes’s provincial roots and the role that they played in his work. The eerie resemblances between Reyes and Torres remind us that Reyes not only hailed from Monterrey in the

Mexican “provincia” but also spent his life trying to neutralize the “círculos concéntricos de fatalidades” (Reyes “Notas” 88) that placed Latin America at the margins of cultural and intellectual debates.

As Sebastiaan Faber notes, Reyes’s entire life could be described as an attempt to annul the conflict between his intellectual vocation and the sense of having been born in a peripheral culture (36).60 The epitaph that opens Lo demás es silencio is evocative of that conflict and of Reyes’s attempts to compensate for the deficiencies of a provincial context by raising himself as the monument that overcomes and refutes them. Composed by Torres himself, the epitaph reads: “Aquí yace Eduardo Torres/ Quien a lo largo de su vida/ Llegó, vio y fue siempre vencido/ Tanto por los elementos/ Como por las naves

60 Reyes’s acute consciousness of his own provinciality is most clearly articulated in a letter to Valery Larbaud, where he tells the French writer, “Ser americano es, ya de por sí algo patético. El solo hecho de existir los dos Continentes... es un hecho doloroso para la conciencia de los americanos...Yo no sólo soy americano, sino, peor aún, hispanoamericano; y lo que es más grave, mexicano. Y todavía para colmo... nativo de Monterrey... ¿Ha pensado usted, alguna vez, en el trabajo que nos cuesta, a los hispanoamericanos, salir, siquiera, a la superficie de la tierra?” (quoted in Blasi 320).

66 enemigas” (LDES 57). With its historical and literary references to Don Quijote, Julius

Cesar, and Herman Melville, the epitaph is a biting commentary on the Latin American critic’s efforts to secure, before his death, the status of a classic. It serves as an ironic reflection on Reyes’s attempts to dictate the terms of his own memorial through the complete works that he began publishing before his death, the personal library he conceived as a national monument (Faber 34), and the memoirs that positioned Reyes as a key player in his country’s recent history.61 From the perspective of Lo demás es silencio, such efforts were as self-serving and absurd as Torres’s prehumous epitaph.

Reyes’s efforts to establish his reputation as a critic were also, however, part of a general strategy in a battle against “las naves enemigas”: they were emancipatory tactics in the context of uneven relations of discursive power, which Monterroso never ceased to put into play and allude to.

Irreverent and iconoclastic, Monterroso’s mockery is always laced with an ironic recognition of the paradoxes involved in crafting a Latin American criticism that would deliver the region from its sense of intellectual provincialism. Through its engagement with Alfonso Reyes, Lo demás es silencio puts into play the historical circumstances that shaped Reyes’s efforts to remedy what many saw as an absolute “lack of criticism” in

Mexico. As Jorge Cuesta noted in 1936, Mexican intellectuals of his and Reyes’s generation continued to feel that they were living in a “raquítico medio intelectual” that condemned them to remain

61 Reyes laid out his will for the organization and publication of his complete works as early as 1926 in a letter published as “Carta a dos amigos” in an addendum to Reloj de Sol and started publishing them in 1955, four years before his death. Upon returning to Mexico in 1939 Reyes also ordered the construction of an office-library, later known as the “Capilla Alfonsina,” which would house his books and which became a national monument after his death. After returning to Mexico Reyes also set out to write Pasado Inmediato, which recounts his experience in the later years of Porfirio Díaz’s government and the key role that he played as a member of the intelectual association “El Ateneo de la Juventud.”

67 autodidactas; conocer la cultura y el arte principalmente en revistas y publicaciones europeas; no tener cerca de ellos, sino muy pocos ejemplos brillantes, aislados, confusos y discutibles; carecer de estas compañías mayores que decidan desde la más temprana juventud un destino; y, sobre todo, encontrarse inmediatamente cerca una producción literaria cuya cualidad esencial ha sido una absoluta falta de crítica. (Obras completas 2:130-31; quoted in Sánchez Prado, Naciones 39)62

Overturning that sense of intellectual marginality and isolation would require a radical shift in the political, cultural, and institutional circumstances that, until then, had hindered the development of an autonomous realm of letters in Latin America. As Angel Rama argues in La ciudad letrada, Latin American intellectuals had been notoriously imbricated with the state up to the late nineteenth century, and did not emerge as an independent class until the twentieth century.63 The situation is succinctly illustrated in “Notas sobre la inteligencia americana,” where Reyes notes that lack of specialization and argues that the social structure of Latin America forced writers to take on “varios oficios, raro es que logre ser un escritor puro, es casi siempre un escritor ‘más’ otra cosa u otras cosas” (85).

According to Reyes, the key role that Latin American intellectuals continued to play outside the literary realm prevented them from constructing “torres de marfil” and situated Latin American intellectuals in “la región del fuego central.” In Reyes’s view, writers’ involvement in what he called “el orden de la acción” granted Latin American writers “mayor vinculación social,” but it also disrupted intellectual work and made it extraordinarily difficult to “asomarse al sobrehaz de la tierra” (86).

62 A contemporary of Reyes, Jorge Cuesta was a member of “Los Contemporáneos,” an avant-garde literary group that played a key role in the development of the Mexican literary field in the 1930s. See in this regard, “El alquimista liberal: Jorge Cuesta y la invención del intelectual” in Sánchez Prado’s Naciones Intelectuales.

63 In Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina Julio Ramos contrasts writers’ lack of autonomy from the political sphere to the situation in Europe, where literature had long counted with institutional structures to support writers’ autonomy (26). Ramos’s book provides a fuller account of the imperfect autonomization of the literary realm in nineteenth-century Latin America.

68 By the 1930s and 40s the situation was, however, starting to change. As Julio

Ramos argues in Desencuentros de la modernidad, the institutional supports established by Reyes’s generation helped consolidate the process of literary autonomy inaugurated by nineteenth-century modernismo.64 The changes brought about by the Mexican

Revolution of 1910 and the early efforts of the Ateneo de la Juventud set the stage for a rapid process of institutionalization that permitted the rise of an intellectual class independent of legal and political powers.65 The numerous artistic and educational institutions, periodicals, and publishing houses established in the 30s and 40s liberated intellectuals from the necessities of nation building and provided autonomous spaces for the production of writing.66 By 1936, Alfonso Reyes was able to proclaim on behalf of

“la inteligencia Americana” “el derecho a la ciudadanía universal que ya hemos conquistado. Hemos alcanzado la mayoría de edad. Muy pronto os habituaréis a contar con nosotros” (“Notas” 90). Read at the VII meeting of the International Committee on

Intellectual Cooperation, that extraordinary declaration of independence from the intellectual tutelage of metropolitan nations was made possible by the emergent literary sphere that granted Latin America new critical autonomy. “Saltando etapas, apresurando

64 For an account of the process of institutionalization that consolidated an autonomous cultural sphere in early-twentieth-century Mexico see Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959). Carlos Monsivais also offers a succinct overview of Mexico’s parallel processes of cultural and political institutionalization in his article “No con un sollozo, sino entre disparos (Notas sobre cultra mexicana 1910-1968).”

65 The Ateneo de la Juventud was an association of intellectuals that sought to revitalize cultural life in early-twentieth-century Mexico. Reyes was one of the youngest members of the Ateneo but played a key role in its efforts to carve out a new space for culture, distinct from the one defined by modernismo and by the positivism officially championed by Porfirio Díaz’s government (Conn, “Alfonso Reyes” 15). For a brief overview, see Gabriela De Beer’s “El Ateneo y los ateneístas: Un exámen retrospectivo.”

66 These included—among many others—the Colegio de México and the La nueva revista de filología hispánica, which Reyes founded and directed, and the Universidad Autónoma de México and Ediciones Era, which would later publish Monterroso’s texts.

69 el paso y saltando de una forma a otra” (83) Latin America had finally developed an independent realm of letters that could grant writers enough critical distance from the political sphere to reflect on Latin America’s cultural, social, and political realities and to develop alternative national projects.67 The emergent literary realm provided a space to develop a discourse on identity that would set Latin America apart from both North

America and from European countries, Spain in particular. Carried out from Latin

America, that reflection promised to transform the region from the object to the subject of discourse and to deliver it from intellectual subservience to metropolitan centers of power.

The creation of an autonomous space for critical reflection became one of the central parodic nodes of Lo demás es silencio, where the desire for a closed and defined literary realm independent of political powers assumed the shape of a library. In

Monterroso’s critical fiction, the library functions as a synecdoche for a coveted literary sphere whose distance from “el mundanal aplauso” of public office would grant the critic the luxury to dedicate himself exclusively to the life of the intellect and allow “que el libro cumpla la natural función que le ha sido dada sin desviaciones ni halagos” (LDES

65). Written from the perspective of Torres’s personal secretary, “Un breve instante en la vida de Eduardo Torres” recounts the arrival of a group of dignitaries at Torres’s library to offer him the governorship of San Blas. That offer is immediately met with Torres’s ponderous and triumphant rejection:

67 As Sánchez Prado argues in Naciones Intelectuales, the degree of cultural autonomy achieved by the intellectuals in Reyes’s generation allowed them to develop what he calls “naciones intelectuales”: a series of discourses enunciated from the literary realm that imagine alternative national projects and function as a critique of hegemonic national culture. According to Sánchez Prado, the institutionalization of a literary field was a key element in the development of such “naciones intelectuales.”

70 Permítanme, pues, se los suplico, no cruzar este Rubicón reservado históricamente a los Julios…. Prefiero mil veces ser como hasta ahora el tercero excluido y vivir a la sombra de la caverna de Platón o del árbol de Porfirio, que salir a la plaza del mundo a cortar falsos nudos gordianos ya no digamos con la espada, símbolo del poder que de ninguna manera me pertenece. (66)

Torres’s rejection of public office embodies intellectuals’ dream of securing the privilege, in Latin America, to “volver a mi retiro de siglos” within the protective cloister of a library (66). Defining its walls would grant intellectuals distance from “el orden de la acción” (Reyes, “Notas” 86) and provide a space from which to elaborate a local critical discourse that could at once question social and political powers while resolving the region’s purported lack of criticism.

By the end of his life Reyes had, by all accounts, become the living embodiment of Latin America’s local, critical discourse. During the last two decades of his life, Reyes put aside his various diplomatic charges and dedicated himself exclusively to consolidating the literary-critical realm, which included directing literary institutions, editing his complete works, and building his personal library.68 Affectionately nicknamed

“la Capilla Alfonsina,” Reyes’s library came to symbolize a sacred space of reflection, free from political or practical considerations, where the writer could abandon himself to the world of letters. In terms that echo the first testimonial in Lo demás es silencio,

Octavio Paz’s obituary for Reyes froze him in that library, immortalizing Reyes as a man

“encerrado en su biblioteca, casi sin esperanzas de ser oído [que] se inclina sobre un texto

68 Reyes himself was a living embodiment of the writer’s lack of specialization in early twentieth-century Latin America. From 1919 to 1939, Reyes took on various diplomatic charges in Europe and South America, including ambassador to Mexico in Argentina. Upon his return to Mexico, Reyes dissociated himself from the realm of politics and increasingly dedicated himself to the cultural sphere. That shift was to a large extent facilitated by Reyes’s new position as director of the Casa de España, a cultural institution originally conceived as a safe harbor for Spanish intellectuals during the Civil War, which Reyes later helped transform into the prestigious academic institution El Colegio de México.

71 olvidado y pesa imágenes y pausas” (“Jinete” 2). Paz’s image of the critic, isolated in his library and exclusively dedicated to the task of interpretation remained, however, something of a fiction. Penned in the 1960s, amid regional efforts to resolve the region’s purported lack of criticism, Paz’s description of Reyes functions as a form of wish fulfillment: it suggested that Reyes’s isolation from the world of action and his exclusive dedication to “el lenguaje, sus problemas y sus misterios” was a heroic act, an “admirable prueba de salud moral” that finally produced, in Latin America, a critic worthy of becoming a classic (np). Yet Paz’s obituary also rewrote and obscured Reyes’s involvement in the “order of action” as well as the extent to which literature and criticism remained imbricated in both Reyes’s work and in the broader literary sphere in Latin

America.

Despite the new autonomy achieved by the literary realm in mid-twentieth- century Latin America, that realm remained largely undifferentiated from the realm of criticism until the second half of the twentieth century. Reyes’s complete works, for example, attest to the partial and hybrid nature of a literary-critical realm in which writers continued to function simultaneously as critics, poets, journalists, novelists, editors, teachers, and promoters of culture. As Monsiváis notes, Reyes’s oeuvre was not a systematic effort but a collection of compilations: its fragmentary character was due to the fact that Reyes “escribe para los periódicos, porque allí y no en el territoiro mucho más restringido del libro… los intelectuales pueden, en un país donde se lee poco, cumplir su servicio público y su deber civilizador” (“Las utopias” 114). Like an abbreviated map of both Reyes’s oeuvre and the Latin American literary-critical realm,

Lo demás es silencio lays out different modes of writing practiced by Reyes and his

72 contemporaries, who continued to serve a public function while alternating now recognizably “critical” genres like the lecture, the review, and the expository essay with satire, translation, short stories, letters, interviews, caricatures, the “testimonio,” and the art of conversation. Genres that would later be assigned to their own distinct jurisdictions run into each other in a diverse textual province whose mixture of literary and critical discourses would continue to be a mark of Latin America’s critical provincialism, both at the time of Reyes’s writing and in 1978 when Monterroso published his critical fiction.

That lack of differentiation in the otherwise autonomous realm of letters would constitute one of the main challenges in Reyes’s efforts to ratify his 1936 declaration of independence. As Reyes realized early on, international recognition of Latin America’s maturity would require a further process of autonomization within the realm of letters, a further “deslinde” that would mark the boundaries of a recognizably critical discourse and would set it apart from the region’s literature. As he put it in El deslinde, an autonomous literature might be the ticket to Latin America’s cultural emancipation: “ella liberta, ella levanta,” but “no sin henchir antes de arrullos, a imagen de la canción de

Ariel, las pausas de la noche de Fausto” (422).69 More than fifteen years after “Canto del

Halibut,” Reyes continued to remark on the fact that without dwelling on the “pauses” of critical discourse Latin American literary productions would always remain folkloric objects of knowledge and consumption but would never be recognized as agents of

69 Reyes is making a reference, here, to José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900), which used the characters from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” as metaphors to describe the differences between Latin America, associated with Ariel, and the United States, associated with Caliban. According to Rodó, Ariel symbolized Latin America’s aesthetic sensibility and spirituality, which he set against and above the base practical and economic interests of the Caliban-like North. In his quote, Reyes briefly argues against Rodó’s notion that Latin America’s distinction and the key to its importance vis-a-vis Europe and North America lay exclusively in the realm of literature or art. As Reyes suggests, securing Latin America’s equality in the world order would also require elaborating a reflective, critical discourse, which he associates in his quote with the figure of Goethe’s Faust.

73 critical discourse, especially because they often failed to meet the requirements for literary autonomy.70 In his attempts to assert the independence of Latin America’s

“inteligencia” before a “tribunal de pensadores internacionales” (“Notas” 90), Reyes knew he was up against the assumption, polemically summed up by Paz, that “una literatura sin crítica no es moderna o lo es de un modo peculiar y contradictorio”

(“Literatura y crítica” 60). A truly modern literature would require the successful construction in Latin America of an autonomous criticism that could verify and advocate for the value, universality, and coherence of Latin American literature based on an intimate knowledge of the circumstances that brought it forth.

Reyes’s El deslinde, a monumental work of literary theory, was in many ways the constitution of that criticism. Published in 1944, it set out to define a literary sphere and used the boundaries of that realm to demarcate a distinct realm of criticism in Latin

America. Those efforts were, however, shot through with the numerous contradictions created by Reyes’s status as a provincial critic and the textual and political strategies through which he attempted to erase the stigma, the “pecado original” (“Notas” 88) of having been born in a peripheral culture. Reyes found himself in the contradictory position of trying to establish the autonomy of the literary and critical realms without losing political agency; of drawing boundaries that instead of further isolating the Latin

American critic would grant him passport to realms, cultures, and disciplines outside his sphere; of arguing for the universality and purity of literature within a framework that would allow for contaminations, fertilizations, and “ancillary” uses of literature. Lo

70 A number of different theorists of Latin American literature—including Ramos, Jose Antonio Portuondo, and Roberto Fernández Retamar—have noted the lack of autonomy, or what Fernández Retamar calls the “hybrid” nature, of Latin American literary productions, which often places them between discourses and grants them an instrumental function.

74 demás es silencio draws out the contradictions in such attempts and exacerbates them to the brink of laughter. Its parodic portrait of the provincial critic attests to the imperfect and perhaps impossible autonomy of the literary and critical realms in Latin America, a dilemma that continued shaping the region’s critical discourse for years to come but that found unique expression in Alfonso Reyes’ pivotal figure.

El Deslinde, or Criticism’s Lines of Demarcation

Published in 1944, El deslinde was written upon Reyes’s return to Mexico after two decades spent abroad in Europe and South America. During those two decades Reyes had worked as a diplomat and ambassador to Mexico but also developed his oeuvre and established his reputation as one of Latin America’s leading intellectuals. The work that

Reyes produced abroad allowed him to position himself as the crowning instance of literary autonomy in the new cultural landscape of mid-twentieth-century Mexico, as the figure that wedded a new institutional reality with a body of writing that sanctioned it.71

The plethora of cultural institutions founded shortly before and after Reyes’s return to

Mexico in 1939 prepared the ground for the triumphant return of an intellectual who would both embody and consolidate Mexico’s emergent literary-critical realm. Enthroned as a new “cacique cultural” (J.L. Martínez, “Introducción,” vol. 13, 5), Reyes founded and led eminent cultural institutions, like the Colegio de México and the Mexican

Academy of the Spanish Language, but also embarked upon his “obra sistemática”

71 During his sojourn in Madrid, Reyes wrote some of his first important works and constructed what Robert T. Conn calls an “Aesthetic State” (Politics 24). That Aesthetic State functioned as the conceptual counterpart to local institutional efforts to support an autonomous cultural sphere, substantiating and authorizing in writing both the emergent republic of letters and Reyes’s status as an intellectual within it. Conn’s The Politics of Philology: Alfonso Reyes and the Latin American Literary Tradition provides a thorough account of the various strategies by which Reyes attempted to legitimize both that Aesthetic State and his own status as an intellectual before returning to Mexico in 1939.

75 (Rangel Guerra 209) and composed El deslinde, Reyes’s most ambitious work of literary theory. As he notes in its conclusion, Reyes conceived El deslinde as the finishing stone of his critical efforts, as a compendium that would “dar coherencia, una figura de unidad… a las reflexiones recogidas en el curso de la experiencia literaria.” Theory,

Reyes declared, is a task “que no se puede empezar hasta que ya se ha gastado lo mejor de los años en acumular los caudales indispensables” (417). Writing a book of literary theory was tacit acknowledgment that both Reyes and the nation had enough “caudales” or volume(s) in their literary experience to warrant such a work and that the time had come for the emergent literary realm to be written into law.

El deslinde functioned, in this sense, as the constitution of a literary realm whose coming-into-being required the offices of a supreme lawyer, an “estadista de la educación del espíritu” (Monsiváis, “Las utopías” 117) who would mark its boundaries and articulate its laws. From his new position as a “cultural chieftain” Reyes took on that role, providing with El deslinde the document that ratified in writing the growing institutional autonomy of the literary sphere. The work’s title borrowed a term from Reyes’s early training as a lawyer and signaled the foundational nature of that task, which Reyes compared to discovering a new continent.72 Reyes was clearly not the first to “deslindar” or mark the boundaries of the literary sphere, yet as he notes in his introduction, “para los americanos es menos dañoso descubrir el Mediterráneo por cuenta propia que mantenernos como eternos repetidores de Europa” (18). Defining literature from Latin

America amounted, for Reyes, to a reverse voyage of discovery that turned Europe’s

72 The word “deslindar” in Spanish means both “to clarify so as to dispel confusion” and to “mark and distinguish the boundaries of place, province, or estate.” The word is often used in a legal setting and designates a property owner’s right to legally delimit the boundaries of his or her property.

76 intellectual constructs into a vast, virgin territory ready to be parsed, bounded, and assigned new jurisdictions. In his self-appointed role as explorer and legislator, Reyes embarked on that long and painstaking journey in El deslinde, navigating the “sistemas dispersos” (44) of history, science, theology, and mathematics in an attempt to demarcate them from the realm of literature.

A work unprecedented in Latin America, Reyes’s vast and systematic theoretical treatise aspired to be a kind of re-entry into history that transformed Latin America from the object into the subject of discovery and knowledge.73 Ironically enough, a number of commentaries on El deslinde have described the book not as a new beginning for Latin

America but as a flight into the realm of European thought.74 Critics’ main point of contention is Reyes’s distinction between “literatura en pureza” and “literatura anciliar,” and the hierarchy that he seems to establish between purely literary texts and texts that integrate both literary and non-literary forms, themes, and functions.75 According to critics like Roberto Fernández Retamar, the centrality that Reyes grants to “literatura en pureza” runs counter to the history of Latin American literature, in which “la línea central

73 As Roberto Fernández Retamar notes, that undertaking was unprecedented in Latin America, where literary theory had rarely been attempted. Perhaps the only work of literary theory written in the region before Reyes’s El deslinde was the brief 1923 pamphlet Las categorías literarias by the Costa Rican Roberto Brenes Mesén (Fernández Retamar, Para una teoría 74).

74 Pedro Angel Palou, for one, describes El deslinde as an attempt to “asear América” (51), while Teresa Delgado Molina claims that Reyes’s idealist belief in literature’s ontological essence prevented him from taking into account the historicity of literature (182). That attempt to “cleanse” Latin American literature or to extricate it from its historical context is often seen as a flight from the historical realities that prevented the region’s literature from fully separate itself from the realms of history or politics.

75 The second chapter of El deslinde is entirely dedicated to what Reyes calls “la función anciliar,” which refers to literature’s capacity to borrow from or “serve” other discourses. As Reyes notes in that chapter, the very object of El deslinde is to distill a literary “essence” from the “sistemas dispersos” in which it is found “en suspensión o en disolución” (44), yet most of his theoretical work—and particularly that second chapter—is dedicated to exploring not “pure” but “ancillary” uses of literature.

77 […] parece ser la amulatada, la híbrida, la ‘anciliar’” (109).76 Reyes’s attempt to “asear

América” (Palou 51) by imposing standards of purity derived from metropolitan literatures is not only “discutible para nuestra literatura (Fernández Retamar, Para una teoría 109) but also makes El deslinde a “pastiche intrascendente,” la “manifestation del colonialismo cultural que hemos sufrido … como secuela del colonialismo político y económico” (82). Reyes becomes, in this light, a mirror image of Eduardo Torres, whose pastiche of references to European literature is a sign not of his cosmopolitanism but of his hopeless provinciality.

Reyes, however, might have countered such criticism with the very words that

Torres used to turn down public office, arguing that the retreat into the library was in fact a form of public service, a way—as Torres put it—to “servir mejor a mis conciudadanos”

(66). Written at a time of growing interest in the universal qualities of literature and in the concept of “literariness,” El deslinde is less an attempt to pry Latin American letters from historical realities than an attempt to combat the region’s marginalization by participating in a metropolitan critical discussion about the specificity of literary discourse.77 Reyes,

76 One of the most prominent critics of Reyes’s attempts to define “literatura en pureza” is Roberto Fernández Retamar. Writing in the context of revolutionary Cuba, Fernández Retamar is particularly interested in validating what he calls the “instrumental” character of literature, or its capacity to serve non- literary ends. Echoing an argument that Reyes himself set forth in “Notas,” Fernández Retamar argues that Latin American literature has always been placed in the service of society. This interpretation of Latin American literature borrows heavily from José Antonio Portuondo, who in America Latina en su literatura makes a similar argument (391). According to Fernández Retamar, the “instrumental” nature of the region’s literature relegates all Latin American texts to the marginal province of “literatura anciliar” in Reyes’s scheme and perpetuates Latin America’s cultural marginality. For details on Fernández Retamar’s argument, see Para una teoría de la literatura latinoamericana, in particular the essay titled “Algunos problemas teóricos de la literatura hispanoamericana.”

77 El deslinde appeared around the time that the New Critics in the United States were publishing some of their most important works. It also arrived shortly after the height of the Russian Formalists and on the coattails of the Prague Linguistic Circle, both of which attempted to define the particular characteristics of literary discourse. In “La reencarnaciones del centauro” Sánchez Prado offers an excellent analysis of El deslinde as an attempt to intervene in a worldwide critical discussion and to cancel out the binary relationship of center-periphery under which Reyes continued to work.

78 however, never lost sight of the fact that constructing an autonomous, distinctly literary realm in Latin America was complicated by the inextricability of politics, history, and literature in the region. If Reyes set out to define the literary realm from Latin America, it was precisely because he knew that securing recognition for Latin American letters among metropolitan circles would require a definition of literature that allowed Latin

American texts to transcend their purportedly provincial context without excluding the vast body of “instrumental” texts that failed to pass the test of literary autonomy. Reyes’s definition of literature would thus have to effect a difficult negotiation between the autonomous and the autochthonous, between global demands and local realities. It would have to reconcile the tensions between a “literatura en pureza” that functioned as the metropolitan standard for works of literature and a “literatura anciliar” that characterized the literary realm in Latin America.

Despite critics’ claim to the contrary, Reyes’s solution was not to simply reestablish the hierarchy between pure and ancillary literature, thus relegating Latin

American letters once again to the periphery. Such depictions of Reyes’s work rest on the assumption that Reyes posited some kind of ontological difference between “literatura en pureza” and “literatura anciliar.”78 Yet, as Ignacio Sánchez Prado notes in “Las reencarnaciones del centauro,” Reyes insisted less on the distinction between these two kinds of literature than on the “fluidez” of the “ente” being parsed. Laced with aquatic adjectives to describe the literary phenomenon, El deslinde is not so much a dualistic taxonomy but rather a vast theory of hybrid forms in which any particular textual manifestation is rife with influences from and tensions between different modes of

78 This assumption is most apparent in Teresa Delgado Molina’s “Alfonso Reyes: ¿‘literatura anciliar’ vs. ‘literatura en pureza’?”

79 knowledge. As if “literature” were an empty vessel blown by the various “agencias del espíritu,” it glides (“se desliza”) “a través de regiones siempre imprecisas” in “una mudanza incesante” to the shores of this or that form, over waters where it is impossible to draw “rayas implacables” (El deslinde 31-33). As Sánchez Prado puts it: “la especificidad del discurso literario es contingente, móvil y, por ende, sólo alcanzable por un deslinde, es decir, por una operación que no llega a conclusiones definitivas de lo literario sino a una constante separación de discursos que, en la práctica, están irremediablemente entrecruzados” (80). El deslinde was, in this light, a way of authorizing a characteristically “ancillary” Latin American literature by offering an account of the numerous “contaminaciones,” “funciones anciliares,” and “fertilizaciones” that occur in practice between different genres and disciplines while positing “literatura en pureza” as an unreachable horizon.

One of the key distinctions that allowed Reyes to reconcile the tensions between the purely, universally “literary” and a local ancillary literature was the difference between “lo literario” and “la literatura.” Based on the distinction between “lo noético” and “lo noemático,” “lo literario” designates a movement of the mind propelled by intention, while “la literatura” refers to the historical accumulation of products resulting from a particular exercise of that mental faculty.79 In Reyes’s “phenomenography,” “lo literario” constitutes a universal birthright, an intrinsic faculty of all subjects that, depending on circumstances, may or may not result in “literatura.”80 Reyes thus provides,

79 Reyes borrowed the two terms from Husserl and initially described El deslinde as a “phenomenology” of the literary phenomenon. In response to later reviews, which faulted Reyes for his “incorrect” use of Husserl’s phenomenology, Reyes changed the term to “phenomenography,” claiming that he had taken the term not from Husserl but from the Mexican Porfirio Parra (Pineda np).

80 As he notes in El deslinde, “No sólo los literatos, no sólo los creadores no literarios: toda mente humana opera literariamente sin saberlo” (43). 80 through “lo literario,” a universal basis for a definition of literature, but also transforms literature into a dynamic phenomenon in which literary modes of thinking can be applied to non-literary themes, uses, ends, and products. That definition of literature as a dynamic interaction between “lo literario” and “la literatura” had felicitous consequences for a region still struggling for cultural emancipation, for it established the equality of all subjects in their capacity to produce literature while expanding the boundaries of

“literatura” to include “impure” forms and instrumental uses of “lo literario.” Defining the literary phenomenon as a system of mediation between a faculty of the subject and a fluid and compound object also had significant consequences for a criticism elaborated from Latin America. In El deslinde, judging literature was not a process of recognizing literary essence, conceived as an immanent quality of the literary object, but of correctly discerning intention in its uncertain path from the subject to the object, from “lo noético” to “lo noemático.” As a force of the mind that transforms “lo literario” into “literatura,” intention made literature inseparable from “lo real” and thus required close attention to the contexts of the literary phenomenon at its moments of production and reception.81

As Sánchez Prado observes, literature for Reyes is always a product of cultural interaction, a historical entity inscribed within specific contexts and shaped by the particular circumstances of both readers and writers (“Las reencarnaciones” 80).

According to Reyes, literary writers cannot fully liberate themselves from empirical data and must fabricate their literary “phantoms” with elements derived from “lo real” (198).

81 Reyes’s literary theory is, in this sense, directly opposed to the conception of literature elaborated by the New Critics elaborated around the same time in the United States. In contrast to Reyes, the New Critics raised the search for intention in literature to the level of a “fallacy” and sought to establish an objective basis for literary value by defining literary essence as an immanent quality of the object. Such a definition was, however, supremely problematic in Latin America, where cultural products rarely met the standards of “pure” literature and thus risked being judged as minor and insufficient works.

81 Under the pressure of aesthetic intention, the mind is nevertheless able to break away from “el suceder real” and to produce a “ficción mental” emancipated from the strictures of the real. When instantiated in the literary text, that “ficción mental” becomes a “ficción verbal,” which returns to “lo real” still bearing a “mínimo de realidad” but reworked into a new world. That new world is then capable of acting upon “el suceder real” as a “querer real añadido por el hombre en un arresto de creación mágica o complementación del mundo por la voluntad verbalmente manifestada” (171). This definition of literature, which takes into account both loans from “lo real” in the process of production and the text’s effects upon “lo real” in the process of reception, highlighted the insufficiencies of a critical practice that purported to contemplate a literary object divorced from its contexts. As Reyes notes in “Fragmento sobre la interpretación social de las letras iberoamericanas,” “La llamada crítica pura—estética y estilística—sólo considera el valor específicamente literario de una obra, en forma y en fondo. Pero no podría conducir a un juicio y a una comprensión cabales. Si no tomamos en cuenta algunos factores sociales, históricos, biográficos y psicológicos, no llegaremos a una valoración justa” (155).

Establishing an appropriate basis for “a fair evaluation” was a key preoccupation for

Reyes, who was faced with the task of reconfiguring the standards by which Latin

American literature was judged while needing, at the same time, to validate his own critical credentials. By defining literature as an intentional phenomenon, which at its points of production and reception was always imbricated with “lo real,” Reyes established “pure” criticism as insufficient grounds for proper judgment. This ensured that Latin American literature, which rarely appeared “en pureza,” would be evaluated in light of its multiple aims and sources and the numerous contexts on which it acted. It

82 also, however, sanctioned various “ancillary” forms of criticism that had been practiced in Latin America along with, and prior to, the newly specialized “exegética.”82

El deslinde’s definition of literature thus became the basis for a much broader

“deslinde” that would have as its object not literature but literary criticism. As its subtitle indicates, El deslinde was merely a set of “prolegómenos a una teoría literaria,” which

Reyes would continue to develop in the brief 1941 essay “Aristarco o anatomía de la crítica” and in the incomplete Apuntes sobre la ciencia de la literatura. Both works allowed the Mexican critic to navigate the fraught waters of criticism and to position himself among the numerous critical idioms of his time. Of particular concern to Reyes were two prevalent modes of critical commentary in Latin America, which he termed

“impresionismo” and “exegética.” Understood a subject’s untrained response to a literary text, “impresionismo” had been losing ground in early-twentieth-century Mexico to philological, psychological, and stylistic methods of literary interpretation, which Reyes gathered under the term “exegética.” In mid-twentieth-century Mexico, the methods of exegética had found fertile ground in post-revolutionary institutions of higher learning where the demise of positivism had opened up new spaces for humanistic inquiry. Pitting themselves against “crítica impresionista,” which continued to be associated with literature and literary publications, the various modes of exegética billed themselves as a new “science of literature.” That claim to scientific status sanctioned exegética as a

82 Humanistic disciplines had been severely reduced and restricted during the years of Porfirio Díaz’s government, which granted new value to scientific disciplines and restructured universities as spaces of objective and scientific inquiry. After the fall of the Porfiriato and during the years of the Mexican Revolution—particularly in the years of institutionalization after Lázaro Cárdenas’s goverment— universities began to open spaces for the humanistic disciplines championed by Reyes and other former members of the Ateneo de la Juventud. One salient example is the Colegio de México, an institution of higher education that was founded in 1940 and specialized in the humanities. However, a “scientific” paradigm continued to dominate institutions of higher learning. As Reyes’s seemingly contradictory use of the term, the “scientific” paradigm was understood as a form of specialized study and was not necessarily in conflict with humanistic disciplines. 83 legitimate scholarly methodology and granted it new preeminence within an emergent intellectual paradigm that privileged the specialized knowledge of the universities

(Sánchez Prado, Naciones 159).

Exegética’s claim to scientific status was, in consequence, of vital importance to

Reyes, who used it to distance his mode of critical judgment from an impressionistic criticism that was quickly losing prestige in both national and international circles.83 As he redrew the geographies of criticism, Reyes used the scholarly prestige of exegética to buttress his own critical project, turning exegética into a buffer zone “a medio camino entre el impresionismo y el juicio” (“Aristarco” 113). Placing it above the more easily accessible impresionismo, Reyes defined exegética as a “zona de laborioso acceso que ya es terreno de especialistas” (112) and made it a necessary step on the arduous ascent to judgment. Only by traversing exegética’s specialized fields of knowledge—the text’s contexts of production and reception, its aesthetic value, the history of its language, and the psychological and cultural profile of the author—can the critic attain “esa corona de la crítica” that Reyes called “juicio.” Exegética thus functioned, in Reyes’s scheme, as the necessary basis for an “estimación objectiva de la obra” (El deslinde 28), providing with its various scholarly methodologies an improvement over the opinion-based impresionismo. Yet even exegética proved insufficient grounds for a judgment that could situate “la obra en el saldo de adquisiciones humanas” (“Aristarco” 113). According to

Reyes, the so-called “science of literature” also failed to reach “juicio” “porque se detiene

83 Impresionismo was associated with what Sánchez Prado calls “la herencia decadentista del modernismo” (Naciones 84). As Conn analyzes in detail in The Politics of Philology, Reyes and other members of the Ateneo de la Juventud sought to provide an alternative to modernismo in the early twentieth century, yet Reyes in particular maintained a complex relationship with modernismo, both setting himself against it and recuperating part of its legacy as he does with impresionismo. For a detailed discussion of the complex relationship between the members of the Ateneo and modernismo see Fernando Curiel Defossé’s “El Ateneo Modernista.” 84 y se entretiene en la mera erudición de sus temas, y porque sus temas mismos, algunas veces, más que un definitivo valor humano tienen un valor interior a los propios fines eruditos” (112). Specialized knowledge, which substantiated exegética’s claims to scientific status, became in “Aristarco” the very element that undermined the broader validity of its conclusions and limited its understanding of literature.

By incorporating exegética into his critical project Reyes was able to claim the prestige of the specialist, yet he also continued to depend on impressionism as a necessary component that completed and broadened humanistic critical judgment. The need for an impressionistic or non-specialized element in criticism was based on a definition of literature that set it apart from other specialized discourses through its very lack of specialization. “La literatura,” Reyes claims, “expresa al hombre en cuanto es humano. La no-literatura en cuanto es teólogo, filósofo, cientista, historiador, estadista, politico, técnico, etc.” (El deslinde 41). As he argues in El Deslinde, what distinguishes literature from history, science, theology, and mathematics is its reliance on “lo humano puro,” which he defined as “la experiencia común a todos los hombres, por oposición a la experiencia limitada de ciertos conocimientos específicos.” (41). According to Reyes, literature is the only theoretical discourse capable of bringing the manifold, undifferentiated experience of the human into the realm of objective knowledge by objectifying the subjective into the products of “la literatura.”84 That process of objectification made it possible to study the products of literature scientifically, but only

84 In El deslinde Reyes defined literature as a “theoretical operation” much like philosophy, history, theology, science, and mathematics, in contrast to “practical” operations like ritual, medicine, or carpentry (77). Literature’s status as a theoretical operation rested on its capacity to objectify the subjective, not through the generalizations of science but through the process of “individuation.” Reyes defined that process as the discovery of a non-generalizable designation whose inflexibility rested on both its semantic uniqueness and its singular occurrence (255).

85 if that “science” also has access to the full spectrum of human experience. As Reyes observes in Apuntes, the study of literature cannot dispense with the “electric shock” of subjective response, “y en esto se distingue de los demás métodos científicos, donde el observador debe desaparecer de la observación” (325). Unspecialized and based on common experience, impressionism provided for Reyes criticism’s point of contact with literature: as a “derecho natural” of all human beings, it was “la respuesta humana, auténtica y legítima ante el poema” that provides the critic with the requisite knowledge of human experience (“Aristarco” 110). In combination with exegética, impressionism completes literary judgment, liberating it from the restrictions of specialization and paradoxically raising Reyes’s humanistic “juicio” to the level of a true science.

Pitting exegética against impresionismo, Reyes thus authorized his own critical project by redefining the “science of literature” as a critical activity that incorporated all methods of interpretation in the synthetic operations of judgment. Claiming that philological, stylistic, or psychological methods alone were not enough to constitute a true science of literature (Apuntes 324), Reyes wrested the title of science away from exegética and assigned it to his own critical project. While exegética’s specialized knowledge sanctioned the new, humanistic criticism as a “scientific” activity based “no en convenciones ni en opiniones subjetivas sino en relaciones objetivas” (Deslinde 79), recourse to impressionistic appreciation presumably guaranteed Reyes’s criticism

“definitive human value.” Its “equilibrio delicado de goce y conocimiento” (Apuntes

325) elevated Reyes’s judgment over both impressionism and exegética and founded a type of criticism that could provide an expert analysis of Latin American literature while placing it “en el saldo de las adquisiciones humanas” (“Aristarco” 113). It also, however,

86 granted validity to the multiplicity of critical approaches in Latin America, where non- specialized critical approaches continued to be an important part of the critical tradition.

In a region where criticism was still practiced both inside and outside the increasingly compartmentalized realm of the university, recognizing the merits of non-specialized interpretation granted new value to a critical tradition that had paid little attention to the divisions between politics, history, literature, and criticism and, often, to the distinction between the specialist and the amateur.

In the 1940s, when Reyes penned El deslinde and the companion Apuntes sobre la ciencia de la literatura, non-specialized forms of interpretation were already starting to be seen as the province of poets and novelists and classified as a literary genre (334) whose value “depende del talento artístico del crítico, de su sensibilidad y de sus dotes literarios” (Apuntes 333). By the time Eduardo Torres’s first articles were published in

1959, it was no longer clear whether that non-specialized approach to the literary text constituted “real” criticism or whether it was “spurious” criticism, only valid when read as a “literary” form. As the reception of Lo demás es silencio suggests, Torres’s untutored understanding of literature had come to be seen by the 1970s as a “naive” form of interpretation and his subjective approach to the text as the ramblings of a fool. That view of unspecialized interpretation was paradoxically encouraged by Reyes’s own attempts to craft a criticism that could make use of literary modes of knowing without giving up its title as a “critical” discourse. Crafting a truly “critical” discourse would thus require setting a boundary between literature and criticism, one permeable enough to permit loans, borrowings, and exchanges but not so flimsy that it would allow his newly constituted criticism to be absorbed into the “human” but also “naive” realm of literature.

87

Saber Crítico, Saber Ingenuo: On Naive and Critical Readers

As he wraps up the introduction to El deslinde, Reyes slips in a key term that would encapsulate the paradoxical operations in his work of literary theory: “Las especies que maneja la no-literatura… son tan humanas como las que la literatura maneja; pero, además, son especiales. No brotan del hombre desnudo, o en su esencial naturaleza de hombre, sino del hombre revestido de conocimientos determinados, aunque éstos no lleguen al ‘saber crítico’” (Deslinde 42). The term “saber crítico” would reemerge a couple of pages later and then disappear entirely from the rest of El deslinde. The concept was nevertheless an important element in Reyes’s attempt to distinguish the purely human discourse of literature from the specialized methods of criticism, and to set exegética apart from a humanistic criticism whose access to literature’s “saber ingenuo” raised it to the level of a true “saber crítico.” As with “lo noético” and “lo noemático,”

Reyes lifted the terms “saber ingenuo” and “saber crítico” from another philosophical work and used them to structure his own theory, revising and transforming their meanings and functions. In this case, the terms derived from the work of Francisco

Romero, Argentinean philosopher whom Reyes had met and stared collaborating with in

1936.85

Reyes’s attempt to carve out a realm of literary criticism in Mexico found a direct parallel in Romero’s efforts to consolidate the discipline of philosophy in Argentina and

85 As Reyes notes in “Notas sobre la inteligencia americana,” he had met Romero at the International Institute on Intellectual Collaboration in 1936 and started collaborating with him to bring together Latin American intellectuals from various countries. During that meeting Reyes and Romero also agreed to investigate and publish simultaneous intellectual histories of each country as a first step to recover the unity of Latin American thought. This project was fueled by the idea that Latin American “inteligencia” had to find its way once again by relocating its center from Europe back to Latin American territories (Gómez- Martínez 458-9).

88 to elaborate a philosophy enunciated from and suitable to Latin America.86 In his attempt to establish a philosophical system that was rooted in historical realities but that allowed an individual or society to transcend them, Romero conceived of a dynamic relationship between temporalities and idealities, mediated by the interactions between “saber ingenuo” and “saber crítico.” In Filosofía de la persona, Romero defines them as two distinct modes of knowledge associated, respectively, with the realm of “life” and the realm of the “spirit”: saber ingenuo is a “spontaneous” form of knowing rooted in a subject’s experience of the world, whereas saber crítico is an intentional specialization, a disciplined reflexivity characteristic of “actitudes deliberadamente cognoscitivas” like philosophy and science (85). Like Reyes’s “lo humano puro,” saber ingenuo constitutes for Romero an “atributo necesario de cualquier existencia humana” (86) that provides the necessary basis for all knowledge and mediates between the realm of temporalities and the higher cognitive and ethical plane of saberes críticos. Through their common title to knowledge, Romero casts saber ingenuo and saber crítico as interrelated modes that can be posited as “tipos ideales” but are in reality difficult to isolate from each other (85). As he notes in Filosofía de la persona, “En realidad el saber ingenuo almacena mucho conocimiento válido, y el saber crítico no siempre logra ser tan crítico como imagina, y admite con frecuencia influjos perturbadores” (85).

Romero’s distinction between saber crítico and saber ingenuo is, in this sense, highly evocative of Reyes’s “deslinde” in its tendency to isolate realms and lay down

86 As Rodríguez-Alcalá notes, Romero began his philosophical career at a time of intellectual revitalization in Argentina and played a key role in the promotion and institutionalization of philosophy as a distinct discipline in Argentina. Like Reyes, he was deeply invested in establishing a tradition of philosophical thinking in Latin America and thus sought to establish a philosophical system that was suitable to the region. For an overview of Romero’s life and work see Hugo Rodríguez-Alcalá’s “Francisco Romero: Vida y obra.”

89 boundaries only to blur them beneath the meticulous details of the exchanges, hybridization, and infiltrations between realms. In Romero’s system, saber ingenuo and saber crítico are in constant interaction and tension, limiting and qualifying each other through their respective intimacy with temporalities and idealities.87 Romero’s description of the exchanges between a specialized saber crítico and a non-specialized saber ingenuo nevertheless casts the passages between the two modes of knowing as a one-way road. For while saber crítico can overflow (“rebasar”) its field of operation and expand into the territories of el saber común, the so-called dark and living mass of saber ingenuo can disrupt theoretical schemes and bring the subject back to the refuge of lived convictions but cannot turn saber crítico into a saber ingenuo. Saberes ingenuos thus acquire validity under the salutary influence of saber crítico and its disciplined modes of thought, but specialized discourses simply cease to be truly critical under the influence of saber ingenuo and its “elementos de perturbación” (88).88 Saber crítico remains, in

Romero’s system, a closed and defensive “recinto” capable of “overflowing” its walls but closed off to a naive intelligence that might claim part of it as its own.89

87 As Romero describes it, saber crítico is constantly assailed by saber ingenuo, “que con su masa oscura y viviente ronda sin tregua el recinto del saber reflexivo…y asume en los casos extremos la forma de una inundación que rompe y suprime los esquemas teóricos,” forcing the subject to return to “el refugio de las convicciones vivas.” Alternatively, saber crítico can also “overflow” (“rebasar”) its field of operation, subjecting all behaviors to its “meditación metódica” and infiltrating “el saber ingenuo” as its results become “verdades de sentido común” (87).

88 According to Romero, we acquire and develop saber ingenuo with the help of various “active tendencies” like imagination, emotion, and fictionalization. Romero also called these “active tendencies” “elementos de perturbación” because of their capacity to disrupt and prevent the serene contemplation of facts.

89 This structure of one-way exchange was crucial for Romero, who advocated a one-directional move driven by the reflexive and methodical apparatus of saber crítico, away from subjectivism and towards an objective, disinterested, and thus “ethical” vision of the world (98). For Romero, the ultimate aim of that negotiation is to transform current realities by adjusting temporalities to the higher purpose of idealities through progressive states of transcendence away from saber ingenuo and towards saber crítico. The move towards idealities would presumably allow the individual to attain the disinterestedness that was the mark of a truly ethical attitude.

90 Paradoxically, the same structure of one-way exchange between saber ingenuo and saber crítico served as the model for Reyes’s depiction of the relationship between literature and criticism. It allowed Reyes to restrict literature to non-specialized modes of knowing while granting criticism access to literature’s saber ingenuo without renouncing its status as a specialized saber crítico. Once again, the difference between “lo noemático” and “lo noético” served Reyes well, for it allowed him to substantiate literature’s universal access as knowledge while limiting the quality of its knowing to saber ingenuo. Romero’s claims about the difficulty of establishing precise limits between saber ingenuo and saber crítico are the starting point in El deslinde to discuss the complex “préstamos y empréstitos” that allow literature and specialized discourses to make use of each other’s “noematic contents.”90 That free and open exchange was crucial for Reyes, for it gave specialized discourses the right to take “las realidades más humildes, las que corresponden al ‘saber ingenuo’” (El deslinde 47) as their object and thus sanctioned a specialized study of literature’s non-specialized content. It also supported Reyes’s definition of literature as “un apetito abstracto que se arroja sobre [la no-literatura] como un ave de presa y vive de su substancia” (108). Limitless and omnivorous, literature knows no bounds in the realm of noematic knowledge, to the point of jeopardizing the existence of “pure” literature “porque no existe literatura viva sin alimentarse de la no-literatura en grado mayor o menor” (108). That freedom to range over the full spectrum of human knowledge nevertheless runs up against stringent barriers in the realm of “el curso noético del pensar” where literature is restricted to a

90 Romero’s observation functions in El deslinde as a point of departure for Reyes’s elaborate explanation of the “cuadro anciliar” (47). That diagram illustrates the many ways in which specialized discourses draw on literature’s saberes ingenuos and establishes literature’s access to both the saber ingenuo of subjective experience and to the knowledge produced by saberes críticos.

91 singular and uncontaminated mode of knowing. Whereas specialized discourses can legitimately make use of literary modes of knowing—including fictionalization and the

“rapto intuitivo” (104)—as they adjust their language to “el suceder real,” such

“contaminaciones noéticas” remain off-limits to literature.91 Literature’s attempts to borrow specialized modes of knowing can only lead to “spurious” contaminations (112) that distort and undermine (“desvirtúan”) literature, turning it at best into “mala literatura” (109) and at worst into something altogether unrecognizable as literature.

The definition of literature as a discourse that “no conoce límites noemáticos… no admite contaminaciones noéticas” (107) was crucial for Reyes in his attempt to establish literature’s universality on both quantitative and qualitative grounds and to claim it vicariously for criticism. If literature’s unlimited access to the conceptual objects of other discourses guarantees the universal breadth of its “temática,” the uncontaminated purity of its mode of thinking effects a magical transformation upon the objects it touches, returning them to the universal realm of “lo humano puro.”92 That capacity to

“rehumanize” specialized knowledge establishes literature as a universally accessible mode of knowing and thus glorifies it as “el camino real para la conquista del mundo por el hombre” (190). The “humanización total por medio de la literatura” also carries, however, implicit advantages for specialized discourses. As Reyes notes in El deslinde:

Por su universalidad misma, [la literatura] adquiere, ante la historia y ante la ciencia, el valor vicario de la vida. Nada que sea humano le es ajeno, y cuanto existe es humano para el hombre. De suerte que la historia y

91 Reyes provides meticulous detail of the many “literary” modes of thinking that aid history and science but ultimately bars literature from using scientific modes of thinking, claiming that “la ciencia se gobierna por un rigor que no cuadra con la naturaleza imaginativa de la literatura” (116).

92 According to Reyes, literature can allow itself “interpretaciones, hipótesis e irregularidades fundadas tan sólo en las sospechas de la humana naturaleza,” and thus inevitably “sujeta al orden humano cuantos datos baña con su magia” (190).

92 ciencia pueden económicamente tomar por materia el estudio de la literatura como un testimonio compendioso de la realidad. Pero, en cuanto la historia y la ciencia significan órdenes del pensamiento específico, se detienen respetuosamente a las puertas de la literatura. En cambio, hemos visto que la literatura unas veces se entromete a ayudar a la historia (III, 14 a 17), y otras, a ayudar a la ciencia (III, 24 a 29). La literatura tiene ejércitos sobrantes para invadir campos ajenos. (110)

Despite Reyes’s military metaphor, literature’s so-called “invasion” of “foreign fields” actually constitutes in his chart a noetic “empréstito” or “loan” that grants specialized discourses the right to use literature’s saber ingenuo but keeps literature out of the noetic territories of saber crítico. For although literature retains access to the

“anthropomorphized” (190) material generated by saber crítico, as a mode of thinking, saber crítico remains the exclusive province of “saberes específicos.”

Reyes’s construction of literature as a universal discourse functioned, in this sense, as a way of claiming, for criticism, literature’s privileged knowledge of and access to “the human” without giving up its status as a critical discourse. As he claims in El deslinde,

La literatura es la manifestación más universalmente humana. La ciencia que la enfoca acentúa por eso su universalidad… Es indudable que la ciencia de la literatura, al integrar sus grupos metódicos (único caso en que alcanza verdadera categoría científica), tiende a los grandes saldos perennes del pensar literario y, por aquí, a los rasgos más fundamentales y básicos de la humana estirpe. (178)

As the expert custodian of literature’s universality, criticism could claim specialized jurisdiction over an object whose limitless range required a comparable “elasticidad metódica” (111). Literature’s ability to touch on all fields of knowledge called for a

“science” that could draw on numerous disciplines and integrate all knowledge into universal conclusions about the human experience. Criticism’s expansive authority over both specialized and unspecialized knowledge nevertheless exceeded, in scope,

93 literature’s universality. One of the best examples of that unbounded latitude was Reyes’s own El deslinde, whose capacity to travel “sin vértigo” (401) through the worlds of mathematics, religion, science, and history attempted to perform that universality, promise to liberate Reyes from the narrow field of Latin American experience. Reyes’s astounding erudition and command of specialized knowledge was nevertheless crucial in that voyage through the universe of knowledge, for it set him apart from the unspecialized, impressionistic critic and verified his credentials as a “serious” critic in the centers of discursive power.

By defining criticism as the specialized study of literature’s universal discourse,

Reyes thus sanctioned “la estimación literaria” as “el único tribunal desde donde el eclecticismo no resulta una ramplonería” (418). Yet it also established an implicit hierarchy between critical and naive modes of knowing, between the expert and the amateur, between the critic and the literary writer, between Reyes’s humanistic criticism and the unspecialized, impressionistic criticism epitomized by Eduardo Torres. Reyes’s hierarchies are most apparent in the last section of “Aristarco o anatomía de la crítica,” which illustrates the humanistic criticism that Reyes sought to construct by setting it off against the incomprehension of a naive reader. Presented with a statement from the

French Revolution, an image from Rousseau, and two verses of Góngora’s poetry, “el humanista” in “Aristarco” correctly interprets the three isolated fragments in a flash of insight that allows him to see, in condensed form, cataclysmic changes in human thought and sensibility. Lacking specialized knowledge of their political, philosophical, and literary contexts, the naive reader can only see, in contrast, “cierto inevitable efecto humorístico,” “un hecho trivial” (114), “una burla de la peor especie” (115). With access

94 only to his own saber ingenuo, the impressionistic reader remains an “amateur” whose privileged access to the literary realm of “lo humano” is not enough to grant him critical judgment. Despite his “vital” relationship to literature, the reader who lacks specialized knowledge ultimately proves to be an “ignorante,” lacking of the synthetic insight displayed by “el humanista” (114) and capable only of “ramplonerías.”

In its condescending portrait of “el ignorante,” “Aristarco” provides one of the most overt instances of the hierarchies between critical and naive knowledge—and their relation to criticism and literature—that Reyes established in his work, and that

Monterroso sought to undermine with his critical fiction. Reyes’s last example of the

“delights” (114) of humanistic interpretation is particularly significant with regards to Lo demás es silencio, as it turns on the same two verses by Góngora that Eduardo Torres analyzes in one of his articles.93 Torres’s “El pájaro y la cítara (Una octava olvidada de

Góngora)” is as a perfect illustration of that “ignorante que ha creído ver una burla de la peor especie” in La fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, a 1627 poem by the Spanish writer

Luis de Góngora.94 As if he were the knowledgeable humanist portrayed in “Aristarco,”

Torres begins his article by contesting the Spanish poet’s renowned difficulty and then plunges into a line-by-line analysis punctuated by the refrain “no presenta problemas”

(LDES 133-35). Torres’s repeated boast of privileged insight is, however, cancelled out by his ridiculous reading, which is not only full of errors of fact, misidentifications, and idiosyncratic interpretations of Góngora’s intricate metaphors but also entirely reverses

93 The two verses by Góngora quoted in “Aristarco” are: “Templado pula en la maestra mano/ el generoso pájaro su pluma,” which also begin the “octava” analyzed by Torres in “El pájaro y la cítara.”

94 Torres’s article was originally published in 1962 by the Revista de la Universidad de México and later reprinted in Lo demás es silencio.

95 the meaning of Góngora’s stanza. In an effort to clarify its meaning, Torres changes the syntax and punctuation of Góngora’s “y al cuerno al fin la cítara suceda” to “Suceda al fin: ¡al cuerno la cítara!” (135). Góngora’s exhortation, which asks his listener to leave the hunt (i.e. “el cuerno”) and listen to his verses (i.e. “la cítara”), becomes in Torres’s reading an abrupt “to hell with poetry!”

Torres’s “El pájaro y la cítara” seems to flesh out the naive reading described in

Reyes’s “Aristarco,” which turns “el ignorante” who can only see “una burla de la peor especie” into an object of derision. Torres’s article was, however, in dialogue with another article by Reyes titled “La estrofa reacia del Polifemo,” which suggests that “el ignorante” was not the real butt of Monterroso’s laughter.95 Like Torres, Reyes too begins “La estrofa reacia” by discussing Góngora’s renowned difficulty and, through a series of quotations by various Góngora experts, similarly suggests that “el no entenderlas no será culpa del poeta galán y levantado, sino de el floxo [sic] que no quiere construirlas y entenderlas” (Pedro Díaz de Rivas, quoted in “La estrofa” 219). Once again, Reyes uses the image of “los indoctos o ingenios perezosos” (Carrillo y

Sotomayor, quoted in “La estrofa” 219) to establish his superiority as an expert.

Consolidating that superiority will be critical in this instance, for, like Torres’s interpretation, Reyes’s clarification of Góngora’s verses depends on a change in punctuation justified through the authority of his privileged insight. Reyes’s exhaustive scholarly comparison of various schemes of punctuation allows him to justify the leeway

95 Monterroso refers to Reyes’s article in “Los juegos eruditos,” a brief essay included in La palabra mágica, published in 1983. Reyes’s article is also referenced in “Peligro siempre inminente,” a short story included in the 1972 Movimiento Perpetuo, which alludes to both Torres’s and Monterroso’s articles. As I will analyze later on, Torres’s, Reyes’s, and Monterroso’s essays belong to a family of texts that play with serious and absurd interpretations of Góngora’s El Polifemo and ultimately undermine Reyes’s attempt to set his expert interpretation above the gaffes of a naive reader.

96 he takes in “jardinear la anarquía que entonces era tan manifiesta y tan incómoda, al ajustar las arbitrariedades de aquella puntuación que tanto afean los viejos textos” (224).

In the last instance, Reyes claims preeminence for his reading based on the fact that “La

Musa me dice al oído que el fragmento resulta más elegante y poético leyéndolo como yo lo leo, lo cual no es criterio inoportuno tratándose de un excelso poeta” (231).

In isolation, Reyes’s “La estrofa reacia del Polifemo” constitutes a piece of extraordinary erudition that grants Reyes unique authority within a transatlantic community of scholars. In light of Torres’s “El pájaro y la cítara” Reyes’s article becomes, however, an absurd piece of criticism based on a random change in punctuation and the flimsiest of whims. The carefully established boundaries between critical and naive readers and between specialized knowledge and literary impression break down beneath the corrosive mockery of a piece that equates Alfonso Reyes with a reader not unlike “el ignorante” in “Aristarco.” “El pájaro y la cítara” questions the “critical” status of the humanist’s insight, whose claim to specialized knowledge is not enough to counteract the apparently aleatory nature of its conclusions. Even more biting, however, is Lo demás es silencio’s perspective on the impossibility of raising a “naive” reading to critical status. Torres’s function as Reyes’s naive doppelgänger, capable of putting his critical credentials in question, is echoed in Lo demás es silencio by Torres’s own doubles, whose “ignorant” perspectives turn out to be more critical than the critic’s. Both

Carmen de Torres, Torres’s wife, and Luciano Zamora, his “ayuda de cámara, o valet, según a él le gustaba llamarme” (LDES 78), take on the role of the fool, whose absurdities are meant to highlight the wisdom of kingly authority. Simple-minded and risible at first, Carmen de Torres’s and Zamora’s accounts of Torres’s life nevertheless

97 prove more critical than Torres’s writings and ultimately expose him as a “farsante”

(108) or impostor, as another fool trying to claim for himself undue repute and authority.

As Robert Parsons notes, Carmen de Torres’s testimonial of her husband’s life

“parodies the most naive type of attestation” (940) in which the testifier unwittingly reveals embarrassing details about the private life of public person in question. Written in the form of a “grabación” or recorded interview, “Hablar de un esposo siempre es difícil” suppresses the interviewer’s voice and leaves only Carmen’s rambling monologue.

Marked by the orality of her recorded thoughts, that testimonial casts Carmen as “una mujer virtualmente analfabeta” (Noguerol Rodríguez 183) who must rely on others to write down her untutored impressions. Carmen’s presumed ignorance is, however, precisely what exposes Eduardo’s pretentions and questions a hierarchy that relegates her to a naive realm of children and household duties where “de lo único que sabemos hablar las mujeres” is “el tema de las sirvientas” (LDES 108). Barred from a masculine realm in which Torres and his friends are always talking about books and other “cosas elevadas,”

Carmen plays a key role as an outsider who, not knowing any better, tells visiting experts from abroad that Torres has not read any of the texts in question. Torres’s immediate reaction is to burst into defensive laughter, suggesting that his wife is a “bromista de primera marca.” As Carmen notes, “esa es una de las formas, por supuesto, en que él resuelve el problema de tener que soportar a una mujer tan criticona como yo; pero a mi no me engaña, aunque como le digo, siempre me quedan mis dudas y pienso si en el fondo no seré yo la tonta” (106). The searing irony of that statement subjects every opposition to double readings and reversals, including not only the opposition “sabio”/

“tonta” but also “crítico”/ “criticona.” If by admitting her own potential foolishness

98 Carmen simply confirms her belief that the real “tonto” is her husband, the purported cattiness of that judgment also functions as a critical interrogation of the hierarchies that privilege Torres’s studied, masculine judgment. In the end, Carmen’s testimony suggests that her “saber ingenuo” is no less critical and no less expansive than her husband’s

“saber crítico” and that it too can lay claim to the “impressive names” of specialized knowledge. As she notes at the end of her monologue, “algo se le va pegando a uno por tonto que uno sea y por eso me puede oír de vez en cuando mencionar uno que otro nombre impresionante, aunque si usted se pusiera a escarbar un poco descubriría que sé tanto como Eduardo (risa)” (107).

Even without reference to a specific historical context, Carmen’s domestic perspective offers a demolishing commentary on the critic’s strategies of self- authorization. That testimonial becomes, however, even more mordant in light of an interview with Reyes’s wife, Manuela Mota, which was published by the critic Miguel

Capistrán in the literary supplement El Heraldo Cultural.96 Like Carmen de Torres’s testimonial, “Visión íntima de Alfonso Reyes” was published in the form of a monologue in which the interviewer’s voice is entirely suppressed. Capistrán’s signature at the end of the monologue nevertheless suggests that Mota needed editorial assistance composing and recording her memories, a notion that is only reinforced by Mota’s self-deprecating assertion “Yo quisiera poder escribir bien para dar a conocer públicamente mi reconocimiento a Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, que ha sido el encargado de la edición de las obras de Alfonso” (np). Despite such implications of her near-illiteracy, Mota was no

“tonta.” As she notes at the very beginning of the interview, Mota was one of the first

96 Although that interview occurred in 1964—five years after Reyes’s death—it did not appear until 1966, a year after Mota had passed away and had no control over published content.

99 women to finish “preparatoria” in Mexico and was in her first year of university studies in chemistry when Reyes—whom she had recently married—asked her to dedicate herself entirely to “las labores del hogar” (np).97 As in Carmen de Torres’s testimonial,

Mota’s naiveté is the product of a strategic irony or unwitting candidness, which reveals and undermines the hierarchies of knowledge established by a man who at some point considered the possibility “que los hombres ‘piensan con las palabras’ pero no las mujeres” (Reyes, El deslinde 138).

As the conclusion to El deslinde suggests, critical writing was, for Reyes, a distinctly masculine activity whose purpose was to “rescatar la interpretación de la poesía entre las sentimentalidades confusas que la ensombrecen, con mano firme de varón, y distinguiendo severamente lo que es emoción, estado subjetivo tan mudo como la misma naturaleza, de lo que es ejecución verbal, de este artificio de palabras, propio patrimonio del hombre” (421). Barred from the pursuit of specialized knowledge, Manuela Mota presumably belonged to that speechless, muddled world of sentimentality and emotion devoid of the clarity and public permanence of critical judgment. With its disjointed and sometimes contradictory orality, Mota’s “intimate” vision of her husband nevertheless proves the very opposite. It verifies, for one, her claim to critical knowledge, including her intimacy with “uno que otro nombre impresionante” (LDES 107) and her assistance preparing the Fouché-Delbosc edition of Góngora’s poetry.98 Her account of her

97 As Mota notes, she was the only woman in her class and was studying at time when women in Mexico were just beginning to pursue careers. As an example, Mota mentions Matilde Montoya, the first female doctor in Mexico, who had recently earned her degree.

98 In the interview, Mota speaks of Reyes’s role preparing the Foulché-Delbosc edition of Góngora’s poetry, but halfway through her narration shifts from the third person singular to the second person plural. She then recounts how she had to help Reyes while he copied, presumably by keeping the book open, though the exact nature of her help remains ambiguous.

100 husband’s intellectual pursuits also reverses Reyes’s oppositions of naive/critical, confused sentimentality/discerning virility, mute subjectivity/articulate objectivity by suggesting that Reyes’s critical efforts resulted not in clarity but in confusion. As Mota notes with regards to El deslinde: “Para él mismo fue muy difícil hacerlo; es muy complicado porque el texto siempre tiene que ir refiriéndo a páginas posteriores, así es que resulta prácticamente una madeja muy enredada y hay que tener muy buena voluntad para seguirla” (np). If Mota demotes Reyes’s erudite work of literary theory to an obdurate and tangled spindle, the rest of his work fares no better. Asides from Reyes’s first collection of essays, the only other works Mota mentions are Reyes’s “amateur” incursions into the realm of history and three incomplete works: Prolegómenos de la teoría literaria (sic), Reyes’s work on Greek mythology, and his translation of The Iliad, all of which she depicts as abortive fragments of Reyes’s original vision. To judge from

Manuela Mota’s account of her husband’s life, Reyes’s remained something of a dilettante who kept jumping from one discipline to another, one incomplete project to another, to whom “todo le atraía, no dejó casi un campo sin explorar” (Mota np).

Mota’s naive attestation ends up corroding Reyes’s most strenuous efforts to distinguish himself as an expert, a scientist of literature, a specialized scholar capable of turning Latin America’s naive, undifferentiated knowledge into critical disciplines that could join a worldly dialogue. Coupled with Carmen de Torres’s testimonial, it upsets a hierarchy that places Reyes above a naive or common reader who requires the assistance of an expert to rise out of that muddled realm of subjective experience and emotion. That pedagogical role, which Reyes often takes on in his writings, assumes alarming dimensions in Lo demás es silencio, where Torres ends up locking up and exploiting the

101 common reader he is presumably attempting to instruct. In the relationship between

Eduardo Torres and Luciano Zamora—who arrives penniless from the countryside and becomes Torres’s valet—Monterroso illustrates Reyes’s paternalistic attitude towards a

(male) common reader instructed to better himself through reading.99 Torres’s insistence that Zamora “[se] instruyera para que llegara a ser algo en la vida” (LDES 79) echoes

Reyes’s exhortations to the “lector común” in “Apolo o de la literatura”:

Lo mejor que puede hacer el lector común es partir desde su propia casa; levantar su lista de la literatura mundial de conformidad con su prejuicio… Ayúdese de manuales y tablas… No quiera abarcarlo todo. Anote lo que le parezca de más bulto, más incorporado en la cultura que respira… Y emprenda, como pueda, el aprendizaje de las lenguas, por lo pronto con miras a leer, si no precisamente a hablar. Es más primo aquello que esto para el cultivo espiritual. El maître d’hôtel chapurrea inútilmente todas las lenguas y no lee ninguna: no pasa de ignorante. (94)

Torres, however, is not content to merely give advice. In his obstinate attempt to bring

Zamora out of his ignorance, every morning Torres locks Zamora in his study with a pile of specialized books on law or grammar. As Zamora admits early on in his testimonial, the pedagogical campaign proves anything but successful. For, “en lugar de leer esos libros al parecer inofensivos” Zamora “agarraba las mejores novelas de Julio Verne,

Victor Hugo, Salgari o, ya en otro género más íntimo, La dama de las camelias” (LDES

79) and steals them away to his servant’s room where he would read them by the transgressive light of a candle.

Zamora thus follows Reyes’s advice to read literature but neglects the discipline of language-learning, manuals, tables, notes, indexes, and the expert’s “sistema de departamentos” (Reyes, “Apolo” 94) as he gives in to the pleasure of reading. Playing on

99 Reyes’s “desconfianza” or distrust of the masses, which Faber argues is often disguised as paternalism (39), has become one of the main critiques aimed at Reyes’s work.

102 the trope of literature’s corrupting influence, Zamora’s testimonial presents literature not as a salutary influence that will distinguish him from an ignorant maître d’hôtel but as an insidious practice that only perpetuates the servant’s naiveté. As Zamora notes at the beginning of his testimonial:

joven al que le da por leer, joven perdido, pues ya sea acariciándose cualquier cosa debajo del ombligo, mordiéndose las uñas hasta hacerlas sangrar, o hurgándose los dedos de los pies, pasa las horas acostado boca arriba en su cama hilvanando quién sabe qué clase de imaginaciones, siempre perdiendo el tiempo en su insaciable curiosidad, entusiasmo o compasión por el género humano (77).

Despite the knowledge he gains from his voracious reading, Zamora remains a naive reader who runs into all the “dificultades” enumerated by Reyes in “Apolo.” Lacking contextual knowledge, Zamora is unable to “penetrar la significación del texto” (Reyes,

“Apolo” 95) and instead falls prey to an “emoción parasitaria,” sees himself reflected in the text, and allows his mind to be carried away “por zonas ajenas a la lectura” (97). All knowledge becomes muddled in Zamora’s testimony, which not only intermingles erudite literary references with “vulgar” colloquial speech but also finds romance in grammar and responds to literature with masturbation. As Parsons observes, “Zamora’s contribution reveals a narcissistic obsession with the physical that renders him incapable of comprehending even the most elementary philosophical distinctions” (340). Torres’s life and work ultimately becomes a mere pretext for Zamora to narrate his romance with

Felicia, the servant next door whom he exalts as a new Beatrice.

In his resistance to specialized knowledge and his reliance on the “purely human”

“saber” of his naive experience, Zamora functions as an embodiment of literature and its capacity to turn “saberes críticos” back into literature, romance, and experience. As such,

Zamora’s testimonial also serves as an allegory for the operation that the critic effects

103 upon the literary realm in order to produce his “saber crítico.” Although Torres presumably initiated his pedagogical campaign for the sake of Zamora’s betterment, that official story hides a more self-serving purpose. By locking Zamora in his study, Torres not only hopes to turn Zamora’s “saber ingenuo” into a “saber crítico” but also uses

Zamora to produce the “saber” of criticism. Torres may have instructed Zamora to read some texts for his own benefit, yet Torres also expects his servant to cull information that he can later relay back to the critic. Like Reyes, who sometimes treated both popular culture and literature as a vast deposit of raw material, Torres sees Zamora as a source of undifferentiated material to be shaped, through the critic’s educated intention, into a distinct literary realm.100 Zamora’s naive and rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing is excellent news for Torres: “que bueno que sepa tanto,” Torres tells the aspiring servant, “tengo muchas cosas que ordenar, copiar, verificar, cotejar, clasificar, revisar y archivar” (LDES 84).

Zamora’s direct knowledge of the material to be organized nevertheless undoes the critic’s project. In his attempt to distinguish “lo cultural” in newspapers and journals he either finds “todo… deslumbrante y cultural” or realizes that what little culture there is

“se hallaba metido entre los cumpleaños, los crímenes y las bodas” (85). In Zamora’s naive perspective the cultural realm remains undifferentiated, inseparable from the daily experience on which “saber ingenuo” is founded. Not even the critic’s presumably

100 Reyes’s definition of literature as a dynamic interaction between “lo literario” and “la literatura” may have opened literary thought to individuals of all ages and educational backgrounds, yet it also retained a conception of literature as a collection of textual objects to be organized into the category of high literature by the expert gaze of the critic. That vision of literary texts as raw material for the critic was particularly notorious with regard to the products of popular culture, which Reyes routinely characterized as “raw material” to be organized into literature. See, for example, Reyes’s distinction between the “lenguaje- coloquio” and the “lenguaje-paraloquio in El deslinde (224), or his essay “Discurso por Virgilio” where he defines “lo autóctono” as a vast deposit of “raw material” to be incorporated into the stream of culture (161).

104 isolated realm of knowledge and reflection is exempt from the “humanizing” force of

Zamora’s “saber ingenuo,” which tends to muddle literature and romance, knowledge and experience. Through Zamora’s intimate insight into Torres’s life, we find that the critic’s library has been functioning as the headquarters for a series of romantic intrigues that similarly confuse the realm of criticism and the realm of subjective experience. As

Zamora’s testimonial reveals, many of the compositions that emerge from Torres’s library—which Zamora is supposed to copy and organize—are love letters to the wives and girlfriends of Torres’s colleagues. “Love,” a word that Reyes often used as a metaphor for the supreme operation of the intellect upon its object, once again acquires its messy associations with sex, romance, infidelity, gender, and power relations.101 Like

Zamora, Torres turns out to be nothing more than another producer of romances, of fictions, of love letters bearing false claims and invented pseudonyms.

In the end, “Recuerdos de mi vida con un gran hombre” makes it difficult to differentiate between Torres and Zamora, between the critic and the fabulator. As Zamora comes to that critical realization, he shakes off the shackles that had been placed upon him and, driven by the force of love’s “saber ingenuo,” escapes Torres’s library in order to elope with Felicia. The coupling of literature with happiness, pleasure, the smile, functions in Lo demás es silencio as a sign of protest without which, according to Reyes,

“no habría historia, historia en el sentido común de la palabra” (“La sonrisa” 242). As

Reyes asserts in “La sonrisa,” the smile signals the birth of criticism: it indicates that we

101 At the very end of El deslinde Reyes claims, for example, that the only legitimate approach to literature is “la inteligencia de amor” (417) and closes his book with a verse from the Song of Solomon that paints him as the lover seeking the places where literature grazes. In “Aristarco” he also calls the process of judging an operation of love: “A través de la escala juegan diversamente la operación intelectual, el mero conocer, y la operación axiológica o de valoración, que aquí podemos llamar de amor; juegan diversamente la razón y la ‘razón de amor’” (109).

105 have begun to doubt our masters and are ready to be emancipated from the strictures of the given. To quote Reyes directly: “Mientras no se duda del amo no sucede nada.

Cuando el esclavo ha sonreído comienza el duelo de la historia” (242). Zamora’s pleasurable coupling with a woman whose “talento natural” he fully recognizes is such a beginning. Their union produces four children: a flight attendant “que de vez en cuando nos trae recuerdos de países lejanos y hasta de las Islas de la Malasia” (LDES 103), a lawyer, a demonstration agent for IBM, and an accountant, all of who embody the practical “saberes” of a growing and increasingly powerful middle class in Latin

America. To read Zamora’s escape allegorically, his flight from the cage of Torres’s library brings literature back into the streets of San Blas where it must come to terms with the messy vicissitudes of survival. Entangled, once again, in the “impurity” of historical realities, literature comes face to face with the challenges of the late twentieth century when Latin America was finding its place in a world that had begun to employ new means and new knowledge in the search for economic and cultural autonomy.

In the 1970s, Lo demás es silencio raises biting questions about the hierarchies that Reyes established between critical and naive knowledge and the extent to which they continued to inform later efforts to establish Latin America’s critical equality with the centers of discursive power. The critical power of Carmen de Torres’s and Zamora’s naive testimonials questions, in particular, the social implications of constructing criticism—and its noematic counterpart, critique—as a specialized discourse restricted to an educated class of scholars. The issue was a particularly sensitive one for Monterroso, an autodidact like Zamora who never finished elementary school but whose voracious readings eventually led him to become a professor of literature at the Universidad

106 Autónoma de México. Monterroso ironically claimed at one point that he never wanted to meet Reyes out of fear of missing a reference (Viaje 19), yet that claim must be read in light of Monterroso’s own extraordinary erudition, which Lo demás es silencio puts into play without excluding the naive reader. “Escribo para cualquiera que sepa leer” (62)

Monterroso maintained, and argued that Lo demás es silencio was meant for both “el erudito” susceptible to the book’s erudite games and for “el lego” capable of enjoying the novel without getting bogged down in the book’s innumerable references (77). That dual structure was essential for Monterroso, who considered the naive reader a key participant in the revitalization of Latin American literature. In a region with few readers “que pueden pagárselos [libros] sin sacrificios y reciben de ellos un placer (el libro como lujo, no como necesidad)” (52), writers had to rely on the common reader as a vital part of their readership. As Monterroso notes in an interview, the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s would have been impossible without “un auge previo de secretarias” who barely had the means to purchase books but needed them to fill “las horas muertas en el trabajo… (el libro como necesidad, no como lujo)” (52). Common readers are, however, more than an economic necessity as their naive perspective provides a critical counterpoint that unsettles and transfigures canonical readings. As Gloria Estela

González Zenteno notes, Monterroso often praised the creativity of ingenuous readers and invites us, in his works, to reflect on the subversive power of a “lectura en apariencia ingenua o tonta” (70).102

102 In his interviews, Monterroso also defends “ingenuidad” or naiveté, claiming that “‘Ingenuidad’ suele equipararse con ‘tontería’; lo mismo que ‘candidez.’ Yo creo que no hay tal y procuro siempre ser cándido e ingenuo al contestar una pregunta. Lo que sucede es que la verdad, o lo que uno piensa ser la verdad, tiene, en primer lugar una fuerza tremenda; y, en segundo, es precisamente lo que nadie cree; de manera que si uno dice con sinceridad algo que lo hace parecer inocente la reacción es: ‘Me quiere tomar del pelo’” (Viaje 101).

107 Monterroso sought, in other words, a radical democratization of literature that had much in common with Reyes’s humanistic vision of literature as a universal discourse accessible to all. Yet, unlike Reyes, Monterroso granted critical potential to the naive interpretations of unspecialized readers whose very exclusion from the circles of expert interpretation gave them the leeway and the pleasure of unorthodox interpretations. The dual structure that granted validity to both naive and critical interpretations also endowed literature with a critical potential that Reyes had excluded from the noetic purity of literature’s “saber ingenuo.” The impossibility of raising literature to the status of a specialized, critical discourse made it necessary for Reyes to construct criticism as a specialized discourse with exclusive rights over critical knowledge, to “henchir antes de arrullos, a imagen de la canción de Ariel, las pausas de la noche de Fausto” (El deslinde

59). In Lo demás es silencio, the apparent conflict between Faust’s doubt and the lulling pleasure of Ariel’s song is, however, entirely absent.103 As Zamora’s testimonial suggests, the enchantment of literature—the pleasure that keeps the servant in his bed, weaving all kinds of “imaginaciones”—does not serve Prospero’s magic or subject itself to his bondage but instead allows Zamora’s Caliban-like figure to assume control over the spell of language. In a text where naive readers possess their own critical magic without having to be educated into the specialized methodologies of criticism, literature ceases to be a mere diversion or pedagogical tool and becomes way of intensifying the

103 Like Reyes, Lo demás es silencio also engages with the figures of Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban, which have served key roles in the construction of Latin American critical thought, not only in Rodó’s Ariel but also in Fernández Retamar’s Caliban. In his critical fiction, Monterroso established a parallel between Torres and Prospero from the title page, where he misattributes Hamlet’s phrase “Lo demás es silencio” to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” The misattribution is pertinent in this regard, as it reinforces the notion that Torres falsely positions himself in the role of Prospero, with control and authority over an Ariel-like literary discourse and over the Caliban-like Zamora. The last section of Lo demás es silencio again references the epigraph and signals the misattribution, claiming “sueño o no, Próspero y Hamlet de la mano en el epígrafe de estas páginas” (198).

108 pleasures of reading into the critical doubt of the smile.

In the end neither Torres nor Reyes has the power to liberate himself from the magic of literature’s “Isla Encantada” (Reyes, El deslinde 411). In the last section of Lo demás es silencio, Eduardo Torres wonders whether he has not been dreaming all along and, identifying explicitly with Prospero, begs the reader’s indulgence (LDES 198).

Reyes’s forays into the fields of specialized knowledge eventually lead him, like Faust, to the realm of magic and prestidigitation from which “el alma recibe su sangre demoníaca”

(412). At the very end of El deslinde Reyes too begins to doubt the privilege granted to

“el oribe del razonamiento” and suggests that reason is only one of fantasy’s many possible combinations “que sólo ha usurpado el puesto a las demás por ser la que entiende de mercado, por ser la de la ‘gramática parda’” (412).104 In an extraordinary reversal of his own hierarchies of knowledge, Reyes ultimately turns reason into a form of imaginative thinking intimately linked with the “saber ingenuo” of the dark, unspecialized regions and classes. As a provincial critic, Reyes had a unique command of that “gramática parda,” which led him through the difficult negotiations of crafting a critical discourse from Latin America. Securing the respect of specialization was a clever strategy to claim a place in a global critical community and gain the authority to vindicate those literary modes of thinking and writing that had marked Latin America’s naive/native intelligence. Yet as Reyes himself admitted later on, his theoretical efforts to legitimize literature as a universal mode of knowledge production and, at the same time, to privilege specialized modes of knowing remained somewhat ingenuous. For in a

104 “Gramática parda”—literally “brown grammar”—is an archaic expression that describes the native or unlearned intelligence of the uneducated classes. The phrase refers, by extension, to a certain pragmatic talent to emerge unscathed or with a certain advantage from difficult situations.

109 region where the boundaries between literature and criticism remained indistinct, conceding the superiority of specialized knowledge not only reinforced existing hierarchies of class and gender but also perpetuated global hierarchies that relegated

Reyes and other Latin American critics to the role of provincial visitors in the metropolitan territories of criticism.

“El farsante”: the Jester, the Actor, the Fraud

In 1957, a few years before his death, Reyes wrote and published a brief text in the form of a letter, titled “Carta a mi doble.” That letter was addressed to an “estimado y laborioso doble” and offered a new assessment of El deslinde.105 “Y no se inquiete usted si me burlo un poco de mí mismo, que eso es señal de buena salud” (247) Reyes warns his hard-working and laborious double, and launches into a scathing assessment of his own theoretical efforts. The work that Reyes had once presented as an epic voyage of discovery, as a heroic and virile attempt to rescue literature from the swamp of sentimentality, becomes in “Carta a mi doble” a trivial attempt to “clavetear, más que poner, puntos sobre las íes” (247), a “lastre… viciosa inflación” made with “los residuos de la vida doméstica” (248). No longer at ease with the title of expert and specialist,

Reyes paints himself as a “mundano primerizo” (247). He also claims that if El deslinde was perceived as a difficult text it was only because of his amateurish tendency towards excessive explanation.106 Reyes, however, also defends his critical approach and admits

105 That letter became the prologue to the book Al Yunque, a collection of essays that continues Reyes’s theoretical project but in the form of the essay instead of the theoretical treatise.

106 To a certain extent, Reyes’s palinode of his theoretical efforts was motivated by the mixed reviews of El deslinde, which accused Reyes of being abstruse and faulted his use of philosophical methods and concepts. For a brief overview of El deslinde’s first reviews see Alfonso Rangel Guerra’s “Alfonso Reyes, teórico de la literatura.” 110 that his theoretical efforts were motivated by a hidden desire for vengeance. “Me incomodaba,” he tells us, “que entre nosotros—y aún en ambientes más cultivados— quien quiere escribir sobre la poesía se considere obligado a hacerlo en tono poético… y se figure que el tono científico o discursivo es, en el caso, una vejación” (249). After reminding the reader that he had elsewhere fulfilled his obligations to the literary muse,

Reyes once again makes a distinction between literature and criticism, comparing their relationship to the relationship between praying and crafting a theological argument, eating and writing about nutrition. The problem, for Reyes, is one of provincialism. For if, “entre nosotros” people employed the practices of French lyceums, “los niños mismos sabrían que se pueden examinar los textos poéticos mediante procedimientos intelectuales, sin que ello sea un desacato ni tampoco una impertinencia” (249). Reyes, in other words, accuses local and global readers “por aquí y por allá” of the ultimate naiveté of thinking that writing criticism from Latin America in a “scientific” rather than a literary register amounts to insubordination or impertinence.

Despite such attempts to justify his adventures in theory, “Carta a mi doble” ultimately ends up renouncing Reyes’s theoretical project. After noting that he had begun to gather material for the literary theory that would follow El deslinde, Reyes admits that he abandoned those efforts, feeling that “le jeu ne veut pas la chandelle, no sé si por el juego mismo o por los que lo ven jugar” (249). “Carta a mi doble” closes with a partial admission of failure, only redeemed by El Yunque, which, as Reyes claims, breaks with the systematic order of those unwritten chapters and scatters their substance “en breves ensayos más fáciles de escribir y más cómodos de leer.” Reyes returns, in other words, to the essay and to the realm of the human, accessible to all, closing his letter with a

111 melancholic goodbye to his theoretical efforts: “Así acabó, pues, aquella tan ambiciosa teoría literaria. Alas, poor Yorick!” No longer Faust with his infinite ambition or

Prospero with his magic, Reyes ultimately identifies with the skull in Hamlet’s hand, with that fool who was once a source of entertainment or the butt of laughter. In his valedictory role as the king’s jester, Reyes once again invokes the risk of being called a

“farsante” like Torres, a risk that would continue to unsettle Latin American criticism for decades to come. For implicit in Reyes’s self-mockery was the notion that, in Latin

America, writing criticism in a scientific or theoretical register was, if not insubordination or impertinence, at least an imposture, an attempt to dress up the region’s writing in clothing that was not its own.

In its parody of the provincial critic, Lo demás es silencio turns on a similar representation of the critic as a “farsante”: a jester or fraud whose attempt to appropriate the critical language of the metropolis inevitably results in comic failure. The novel’s critical engagement with Alfonso Reyes suggests, like “Carta a mi doble,” that even Latin

America’s most revered critic is an amateur or “mundano primerizo,” a polygraph whose stabs at specialized thinking are at best a diversion and at worst a ridiculous undertaking better left to “ambientes más cultivados.” Monterroso’s portrait of the provincial critic is nevertheless mitigated in Lo demás es silencio by a lingering uncertaintly, by the inability to determine “si el doctor fue en su tiempo un espíritu chocarrero, un humorista, un sabio o un tonto” (LDES 78). Throughout Lo demás es silencio and in his other writings

Monterroso continued to hint at the possibility that the provincial critic had deliberately chosen the jester’s role as a strategic position in a treacherous critical landscape. As

Monterroso claims in one of his interviews, “como la de Hamlet… en ocasiones su locura

112 es deliberada y cuando expresa ‘tonterías’ no se sabe si son naturales o parodia de las tonterías que lee en libros de crítica aparentemente inteligentes” (Viaje 102). The line between subservient imitation and critical parody breaks down as the reader begins to wonder if the provincial critic might not have been acting out his naiveté, emulating the specialized discourse of the metropolis only to expose through ingenuous and ingenious repetition the absurdities of that “lastre… viciosa inflación.”

Such a strategy was, in fact, well known to Reyes, who in an early review of

Giovanni Papini’s “Don Chischiotte dell’Inganno” also outlined the advantages of deliberate imposture. As if he were anticipating Monterroso’s critical poetics, Reyes claimed in “Una interpretación del Quijote” that Don Quijote “ha engañado a todos, aún al mismo Cervantes. No está loco: se finge loco—nuevo Bruto, nuevo Hamlet—para romper con las limitaciones del ambiente que lo rodea” (349).107 For a young critic seeking “que el mundo le deje andar errando a su antojo,” playing the fool must have been a compelling strategy to escape the limitations of a provincial background. It might not be entirely foolish to suppose, in that light, that Reyes learned Yorick’s lesson early on and that throughout his life he applied the Ingenious Hidalgo’s method of madness:

“la imitación.”108 Read through the lens of Monterroso’s critical fiction, one begins to wonder whether Reyes might not have used a “deformación voluntaria” whenever it suited his purposes, delivering the discourse of the metropolis sometimes in the role of the “sabio” and sometimes in the role of the fool. As Paz observes in his obituary, humor

107 Both Monterroso and his critics have pointed to Don Quijote as an ancestor and model for Eduardo Torres. See, in particular, chapter 3 of González Zenteno’s El dinosaurio sigue allí.

108 Reyes’s “Canto del Halibut,” analyzed in the introduction to this dissertation, supports the notion that Reyes was a master of imitation and impersonation, capable of confounding clear distinctions between criticism meant in earnest and criticism made in jest. 113 was an “arma invensible” for Reyes, who used laughter to escape the paralysis of erudition (“El jinete” np). As in “Carta a mi doble,” Reyes’s laughter was often aimed at himself, though it could very well have been aimed at us. One can see him taking on the role of Don Quijote, who “conoce a los hombres, y entre odiarlos y divertirse con ellos, prefiere ésto último. E inventó hacerse caballero”—or in this case, a critic—“para que los hombres, creyendo burlarse de él, le sirvieran de bufones” (350). Like Don Quijote,

Torres, and Monterroso, Reyes too can be depicted as a naive-critical reader, whose claims to critical ability are as ambiguous as his claims to naiveté.

That ability to make us doubt whether the critic writes in all seriousness or in jest, whether his absurdities are “natural” or parodies of apparently intelligent critical texts is, in the end, the real danger in Monterroso’s texts. That danger is best illustrated in a brief text titled “Peligro siempre inminente,” which Monterroso included in his 1972 book

Movimiento Perpetuo. Published eight years before the appearance of Lo demás es silencio, “Peligro siempre inminente” highlights the ever-imminent dangers of parodic writing, the continued risk of reading Monterroso’s impostor texts as serious criticism but also of reading serious criticism as an impostor text. Its first paragraph makes direct reference to Torres’s “El pájaro y la cítara” and recounts how the author writes “en broma” “tres cuartillas de falsa exégesis de una octava de Góngora… atribuídos a un crítico de provincia” (137). Certain of eliciting uproarious laughter, he shows the article to some friends: the first gets the joke, two others suspect something amiss and smile with caution, the fourth takes the whole thing seriously, “y el se llena de vergüenza.”

Like an allegory for the reception of Torres’s articles, “Peligro siempre inminente” highlights the capacity of Monterroso’s texts to fool readers incapable of grasping their

114 parodic intent. The second paragraph of the story reveals, however, an even greater danger lurking behind Monterroso’s two-faced textual practices. This time the author

“escribe en serio una nota en la que aclara de una vez por todas el sentido de la llamada

‘estrofa reacia de Góngora,’” referencing an article that Monterroso would later publish under the title “Los juegos eruditos.” In “Peligro,” that article receives, again, a mixed reaction: in this case the first friend rejects the validity of the argument, the other three laugh uproariously, “y él se llena de vergüenza.”

What “Peligro inminente” suggests is that, whether written “en broma” or “en serio” (137) Monterroso’s texts are always subject to a double reading as either parodic literature or serious criticism. The true “farsantes” in this story, those texts function like jokers, preventing readers from settling on either discourse under the danger of exposing themselves as naive readers. The text’s allegorical tale about the perils of parodic writing also suggests, however, that such discursive indeterminacy can apply not only to

Monterroso’s “literary” texts but to “critical” texts as well. Read as a reaction to a

“serious” critical text, the second part of “Peligro siempre inminente” illustrates what

Herrero-Olaizola calls the “apprenticeship” of parodic discourse, which teaches us to challenge the original while considering the validity of the apocryphal (77). Educated by the discursive ambiguities of the first “absurd” text, the imagined readers in “Peligro” have learnt to doubt the “seriousness” of the second article, whose erudite clarifications are either refuted or laughed at. While that critic initially seems to be Monterroso himself, his analysis of Góngora’s verses was not really published until 1983.109 In 1972 when

“Peligro siempre inminente” appeared, that second “note” could very well have alluded

109 “Los juegos eruditos” appeared in 1983 in both Monterroso’s book La palabra mágica and in the Spanish journal Quimera: Revista de literatura.

115 not to Monterroso’s analysis but to Reyes’s attempts at clarifying, once and for all, “La estrofa reacia de Góngora.” With its direct reference to Reyes’s article, “Peligro siempre inminente” serves, in other words, as an allegory for the parodic function of Lo demás es silencio and its capacity to make us to question Reyes’s seriousness. Like the readers in the second part of the story, we have learnt through its parodic portrait to doubt the

“original,” to wonder whether that “erasmo mexicano” might not have been an “espíritu chocarrero,” a dangerous humorist writing “hilarious” parodies of critical discourse.

By the end of Monterroso’s life, it had become common knowledge that he was a

“dangerous” author whom one had to read “manos arriba” (Gabriel García Márquez, quoted in Ruffinelli 18), under the threat of emerging “con las rodillas y el amor propio raspados” (González Zenteno 79).110 Monterroso’s reputation was due, in great measure, to Monterroso’s penchant for confounding the boundaries between literature and criticism, which Reyes had so painstakingly tried to establish. Deliberately guilty of the

“fraude” of which Reyes warned in El deslinde, Monterroso knew how to disrupt the boundaries of the literary realm, which Reyes once described as an “Isla del Tesoro en una cartografía a sabiendas irreal, que a nadie embauca y a todos solaza” (El deslinde

221).111 For not only did he place “inexistent islands” in criticism’s “carta práctica de

110 Isaac Asimov also famously claimed that Monterroso’s texts may be “apparently harmless” but “bite” and leave “scars” if one approaches them without the necessary caution (quoted in Ruffinelli 18).

111 This description comes at a key point in El deslinde as Reyes attempts to define literature according to the absolute correspondance between its “poetemas” and “semantemas.” The intimate correspondence between the two was particularly important in Reyes’s scheme, which had placed authorial intention at the heart of the literary phenomenon. For Reyes, correct interpretation would only be possible if a text somehow encoded the intended semantic content in its particularly poetic expression. Reyes went so far as to describe that correspondence in moral terms, claiming that divorcing the “símbolo significante” from the “ente significado” was a “crime or madness” (221). Thus, while the literary writer is granted certain “rights,” Reyes claimed that writing a fictional work in the form of a treatise, scientific work, or other “practical” form amounted to fraud. Reyes’s discussion is particularly interesting in light of the various critical fictions studied here, which directly contravene Reyes’s moral imperative and place their “inexistent islands” in criticism’s “practical nautical chart.” 116 navegación para que zozobre nuestro barco” but also makes us doubt whether Reyes’s

“carta práctica de navegación” might not have been another fiction. Teasing out the partiality and improvisation, the provinciality and implicit hierarchies in Reyes’s work,

Monterroso blurs the lines that Reyes tried to draw upon the waters and reminds us of the extent to which literary and critical discourses remained intertwined in Reyes’s work. El deslinde, with its heroic efforts to delimit a realm of criticism in a provincial and still unbounded land, sinks beneath the levity of those brief and scattered texts in which the dictum is not rigor, specialization, and expertise but imposture, humor, the improvisation of the amateur. From the wreckage, Reyes emerges not as a monumental, prohibitive figure but as a fool, a deliberate madman, a recent initiate smiling not in irony but in doubt. It is in that role as a jester, equally practiced in pretense and mockery, fiction and critical thought, that Reyes becomes not the target of Lo demás es silencio’s laughter, but its unexpected hero. Following Torres’s critical insight into Don Quijote, one might claim then that, like Cervantes, Monterroso did not intend to ridicule a fool. Perhaps he really meant to attack the delusions of literary criticism, “funesta lectura” that like chivalric romances “andaba de mano en mano corrompiendo las costumbres y distrayendo a las amas de casa de sus deberes domésticos en que de otra manera se hubieran enfrascado”

(LDES 122). Perhaps Monterroso did not set out to ridicule the Mexican critic’s absurd efforts to “igualarse” with the centers of discursive power, but to defend what Reyes called Latin America’s “consigna de improvisación” (“Notas” 83) from which an emergent “crítica literaria” was trying to dissociate itself.112

112 In “Notas sobre la inteligencia americana” Reyes famously claimed that Latin America functioned according to “principle of improvisation” that allowed it to “catch up” with Europe by jumping in great leaps from one stage to another, from one form to the next. According to Reyes, however, the tendency 117 In the years that followed the publication of Torres’s first article in 1959, Latin

America saw the rise of a new kind of criticism that sought to overcome the ignorance, impressionism, and lack of rigor that had presumably characterized critical work in the region. Paradoxically inaugurated by Reyes’s El deslinde, the “modernización intelectual” (A. Martínez 7) of the 1960s and 70s broke with the humanistic tradition of the essay epitomized by Reyes as well as with the literary discourse entangled with it. By the late 1970s, when Lo demás es silencio was published, the unspecialized discourses that still had a place in Reyes’s capacious “ciencia literaria” had lost legitimacy as serious criticism and—as I will discuss in the following chapter—were no longer considered valid elements of a truly “scientific” criticism. Reyes’s criticism was thus consigned to the past and his ambiguous figure buried beneath a tombstone that made him, truly, an

“hermano viejo […] muerto de veras, oh señor de las letras, en tu tan muerto tiempo”

(Cortázar, quoted in Monsivais, “Las utopias” 105). The attempt to relegate Reyes and the discursive ambiguity that he championed to the past or to the realm of literary discourse is what made Monterroso’s critical fiction particularly dangerous. With his characteristic “ingenuidad sangrienta” (Vargas 45), Monterroso invited readers to pass judgment on a critic whose “inability to distinguish between the figurative and the literal… fiction and reality” (Parsons 941), literary and critical discourses was starting to be seen as a mark of provinciality, a sign of Latin America’s deficient development in the realm of intellectual thought. Mocking a critic who both confounded and helped establish the limits between literary and critical discourses in Latin America, Lo demás es silencio

towards improvisation, the lack of specialization, and intimacy with the “air of the street” displayed by the Latin American “inteligencia” made the region particularly well suited to confront the challenges of the twentieth century.

118 confronted critics with the question: is this real criticism? Critics’ unrestrained laughter at the “absurdities” of Eduardo Torres immediately answered that question in the negative, forgetting the fact that Reyes’s oeuvre also included and championed such “naive,” undisciplined, apparently “literary” interpretations. Instead, most critics took it for granted that Monterroso was ridiculing the provincial critic, that unspecialized reader who in his infinite naiveté believes he can travel without passport through the vast regions of knowledge as if they were an unparsed virgin territory. In their laughter, they failed to consider the possibility that Monterroso’s real target was that newly minted specialist whose laugher risks dissolving into the shame of his own hasty certainties.

One imagines Monterroso responding to Moreno Durán’s laughter at the naiveté of those “Argentinean ladies” with an ironic, enigmatic smile. Torres might have been more naive—more critical—and countered that laughter with a quote from Lo demás es silencio:

cuando el lector se ha regodeado a sus anchas y soltado la risa complacido (como todo ser humano de baja condición), con el escarnio que se pretende hacer de figura tan respetable… como lo es el profesor Torres, se encuentra con la súbita sorpresa de que la sátira está dirigida contra el lector mismo, quien ha sido llevado de la mano para ser expuesto de súbito ante este espejo, y a quien, después de la primera risa, por convulsa que ésta sea, se le caerá la cara de vergüenza, si alguna tiene, por su mezquina actitud. (192)

As Monterroso suggests, the real fool in his texts is not Torres or the naive reader who has read his writings as “critical” texts, but that presumably “critical” reader who pretends to know for sure whether Lo demás es silencio was written in all seriousness or in jest. Confronted with a text “que se le ofrece pero que en realidad no se le da, sin que en su ignorancia pueda saber si esto ha sido así con intención o sin ella, o viceversa”

(186), the “Argentinean ladies” in Moreno Durán’s narrative are perhaps more critical. In

119 their desire to know the exact latitude and longitude of San Blas, they function like that reader in “Peligro siempre inminente” whose naiveté teaches us to question the validity of all other interpretations. Like few other readers, those “Argentinean ladies” took

Torres’s writing seriously enough to wonder whether that provincial critic might not be somewhere in Latin America, whether Monterroso might not be vindicating rather than ridiculing his naive perspective. Counterparts of every naive reader in Monterroso’s texts, they awaken the suspicion of our own unwitting naiveté and bring us from the certainties of laugher to the critical doubt of the smile. That smile is, however, no longer tinged with the knowing irony of a doubting Hamlet who knows he is taking other men for fools.

Like those cautious friends in “Peligro siempre inminente” who simply cannot tell whether they are reading literature or criticism, we now smile with the “inseguridad y duda” (Monterroso Viaje 89) of a provincial critical tradition that—as Enrique Lihn’s La orquesta de cristal would suggest—still wavered on the boundary between “crítica literaria y/o literatura crítica” (Libertella, “Crítica” 346).113

113 As Monterroso reminds us in his interviews, the uncertainty that critics have identified in his texts can be understood not only as the mark of relativism or ambiguity but also as a source of doubt and insecurity, presumably for Monterroso, but for his readers as well. The semantic shift from ambiguity to insecurity functions, in Monterroso’s interviews, as the basis for self-parody but also cleverly undermines the confidence with which critics have used uncertainty or ambiguity to classify Monterroso’ work.

120

CHAPTER 3

Critical Silences: La orquesta de cristal and Criticism in Authoritarian Chile

In the late 1960s an obscure character began making the rounds of the literary scene in Santiago de Chile. In August of 1969, Don Gerardo de Pompier came to light for the fist time with the publication of a fragment of his novel El arte de nadar in the inaugural issue of the literary magazine Cormorán. A bio-bibliographic note penned by

Enrique Lihn, the director of the magazine, and Germán Marín, its editor, accompanied the fragment. In their note, the editors praised the writings of “el autor desconocido” and compared Pompier to such eminent literary figures as Julio Cortázar and José Lezama

Lima (Lihn, “El autor” 541). Encouraged by responses like that of the prestigious magazine Casa de las Américas, which saluted the appearance of the unknown author

(Sarmiento 11), Lihn and Marín enthusiastically promoted Pompier’s writing in the pages of their magazine. Pompier became, from then on, a staple in Cormorán. In its pages, he continued to publish articles and served as the addressee and object of various notes, letters, and clarifications questioning the value and originality of his writing.114 Such

114 In his interview with Oscar D. Sarmiento, Adriana Valdés and Germán Marín provide details on the texts and performances that Lihn produced under the guise and pseudonym of Pompier, who was not always identified as a fictional character. Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, literature and criticism, Pompier assumed an extraliterary life and exchanged, for example, a hefty correspondence with both Marín and Juan de Dios Vial Larraín, the director of the Universidad de Chile, who responded to his letters under the pseudonym “Don Narciso de la Vega.” For further details, see the interview “Esfuerzos pasionales, no racionales” in Sarmiento’s El Otro Lihn.

121 buzz around the figure of Pompier was, however, short-lived. In October of 1970

Pompier penned an “Adiós a Santiago” in the final issue of Cormorán and once more fell silent. It was not until 1976 that Pompier reappeared again as one of the various commentators featured in the book La orquesta de cristal. This time, however, Pompier’s florid and inflated prose would barely elicit an echo.

The almost complete critical silence that followed La orquesta de cristal had, nevertheless, little to do with the quality of Pompier’s writing or that of the other

“polígrafos hispanomericanos” featured in the book (Lihn, La Orquesta de Cristal 11; henceforth cited as ODC).115 As early as 1970, a certain “Profesor Luis Iñigo Madrigal” exposed Pompier as a fiction, noting that Pompier’s debut text had been lifted from A.P.

Duflot’s El arte de nadar en el mar y en los ríos, aprendido sin maestro (1876) and that

Pompier had been fabricated to “confundir a los redactores de Cormorán, al destino de la cultura y al pueblo de América” (quoted in Lihn, “Nacimiento” 554).116 By 1976, it was no secret that Lihn and Marín had created the character of Pompier as a way of parodying the pomposity and affectation of an outmoded belletristic writing, and that La orquesta de

115 In La orquesta de cristal Pompier appears under the name “Gerardo de Pompiffier,” though he was clearly intended to embody the same character who had previously penned the articles in Cormorán. As Lihn notes in “Nacimiento, desarrollo e implicaciones de Don Gerardo de Pompier, el resumidero,” Lihn changed the name from Pompier to Pompiffier on the suggestion of the Argentine novelist Héctor Biancotti, who was living in Paris where Lihn had initially hoped to publish the novel. According to Biancotti, the pejorative use of the name “Pompier” (which literally means “firefighter” in French but is also used to refer to conservative critics) was too obvious and made the joke fall flat in France. Lihn thus changed the name, though he later depicted the choice as an act of ridiculous provincialism much like the ones committed by Pompier (562). For a further discussion of the name and figure of Pompier, see also Lihn’s “Entretelones técnicos de mis novelas” (574).

116 The letter to Cormorán exposing Pompier as a fiction was actually written by the poet Juan Luis Martínez under the pen name Luis Iñigo Madrigal (Germán Marín, footnote in Lihn, “El autor desconocido” 542). Taking the pen name of an actual critic in Chile, Martínez engaged in the same kind of literary-critical strategies that characterize both Monterroso’s creation of Eduardo Torres in Mexico and Lihn’s creation of Pompier in Chile, making it more difficult to determine whether his letter was “serious” criticism or part of a literary game. As Germán Marín notes, Martínez’s letter was the first to sound the alert “que acá había gato encerrado” (Sarmiento 12).

122 cristal was actually a novel written by Enrique Lihn. As with Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio, the publication of La orquesta de cristal confirmed Pompier’s fictional status, exposing him as a parodic reflection of a provincial intellectual milieu in which

Pompier’s absurd critical fictions could still be taken as serious writing. In contrast to

Monterroso’s novel, however, Lihn’s novel elicited little laughter. The novel garnered, in fact, surprisingly few reactions, particularly in light of the voluminous bibliography that surrounds Lihn’s poetic oeuvre.117 As Lihn notes in an interview with Pedro Lastra, the novel received scant reviews when it was published and generated few critical analyses in the years that followed (104).118 As if it were a counterpart to the mute glass orchestra discussed in its pages, La orquesta de cristal seemed capable of producing mostly silence, or at most some faint critical tinkling.

Such critical silence is particularly ironic, given the fact that the novel turns on and is built out of critical commentary. Taking the form of a literary monograph, the novel is written in two parts: the first part gathers, quotes, and glosses various commentaries about a glass orchestra presumably commissioned by the U.S. millionaire

117 Lihn was already well known in Chile and highly regarded as a poet when La orquesta de cristal was published in 1976. The bibliography that Pedro Lastra published as part of Conversaciones con Enrique Lihn attests to the numerous studies, reviews, and commentaries written about Lihn’s poetic works, yet it also reveals a lack of attention to Lihn’s narrative, a situation that Lihn often commented on in his interviews.

118 In an interview with Lastra, Lihn observes that when the novel first appeared only Antonio Calderón reviewed the novel in Chile and in Argentina it was the object of one article by the young critic Luis Thonis and a brief chapter in Héctor Libertella’s Nueva escritura en Hispanoamérica (Lastra 104). In his 1981 text “Entretelones técnicos de mis novelas,” Lihn again comments on the scant critical studies of La orquesta de cristal, which at that point were limited to Libertella’s chapter and George Yúdice’s article “Enrique Lihn: parodia vs. retórica” (Lihn, “Entretelones” 570). Since then, other studies of La orquesta de cristal have been published, though—with the exception of Rodrigo Cánovas’s “Circulando en torno a La orquesta de cristal de Enrique Lihn Mancilla”—they focus on Lihn’s narrative fiction as a whole. For studies of Lihn’s fiction, see in particular Christopher Travis’s chapter “Beyond Poetry: Inventing Dystopia” in Resisting Alienation and Juan Zapata’s “La narrativa de Enrique Lihn: expresión de un referente cultural complejo.” In his article, Zapata also discusses the marginal status of Lihn’s narrative in relation to his poetry. Since the novel was re-edited in 2014, numerous articles and reviews have appeared, noting the critical silence that has surrounded Lihn’s work until now.

123 Charles Royce, while the last third consists of critical endnotes that further clarify, contextualize, and interpret those commentaries. Like other critical fictions, Lihn’s novel uses fiction as a discursive mirror to reflect, refract, and distort various critical idioms. In this case, the novel reproduces the symbolist allegories, subjective impressions, psychoanalytic fables, and essayistic writing of Pompier and other fictional critics as they trace the orchestra from its inaugural concert in the 1900 Paris World Fair to its untimely destruction at the hands of the Gestapo in 1942. That story is, however, only faintly discernible through the hazy lens of commentaries and interpretations, which repeat and run into each other with little regard to authorship or bibliographic information. The novel is thus evocative of that “estrado de cristal de un escenario amurallado de espejos”

(ODC 56), which stages and surrounds the crystal orchestra on opening night. Like that glass stage surrounded by mirrors, Lihn’s novel works as a kind of kaleidoscope where shards of critical discourse echo and collide, multiply and fade away as they turn around that empty center: a crystal orchestra that is mute, transparent, and fictitious.

Lihn’s play with assorted shards of critical language is, in fact, what seems to be responsible for the scant critical reflections that the novel produced beyond its covers. As with other critical fictions, the mimicry of critical language in La orquesta de cristal seems to have generated a kind of bewilderment, only in Lihn’s case it took the form not of laughter but of silence. The absence of reviews or critical analyses in the years immediately following the novel suggests that La orquesta de cristal was received as a failed literary experiment, as an excessively abstruse text or one that simply did not merit commentary.119 As Lihn himself observes in a 1981 essay, Chilean critics invariably

119 In his review of El arte de la palabra, where Pompier also appears as a character, Filebo (pseudonym for Luis Sánchez Latorre) suggests that read Lihn’s novels through the same lens as one might read writers of 124 praised his poetry, but often lamented “la falta de ‘distancia estética’ de mi narrativa, la pobreza de su oscuridad, el despliegue que hago en ella de inteligencia ‘redactada’” (Lihn

“Entretelones” 569). According to Lihn, criticism in Chile tended to evaluate his fiction according to exclusively literary criteria, subjecting it to the test of “aesthetic distance,” stylistic clarity, originality, or creativity. In the case of La orquesta de cristal, they read the novel as if it were an autonomous literary object divorced from both criticism and from its critical function.120 Judged in those terms, the “obscure” and “cerebral” arrangement of critical languages seemed merely bad literature, capable of producing only boredom, tedium, and incomprehension in its audience (Lihn, “Entretelones” 569).

Lihn’s use of critical language as the raw material for fiction was thus dismissed an

“aberración de la técnica y el arte” (ODC 97) that produced a monstrous objet d’art as absurd as a set of instruments made out of glass.

The tendency to judge texts in terms of beauty, style, aesthetic distance, or other exclusively “literary” values had nevertheless been the object of Lihn’s mockery since the days of Pompier’s parodic writings in Cormorán. In various interviews and essays,

Lihn continued to resist such readings, particularly with regard to his novels. As he notes in an interview with Cecilia Díaz, La orquesta de cristal was meant to be read not as a

the “Boom” such as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, or Vargas Llosa will only lead to boredom or incomprehension. As he claims, “Frente a sus disquisiciones algunos se aburrirán, temiendo morir de tedio; otros se indignarán hasta proferir insultos” (7).

120 With the exception of Héctor Libertella and Rodrigo Cánovas, few critics read the novel as commentary on discursive boundaries and on social conditions. Libertella describes the novel as a text midway between the procedures of literature and those of criticism (Nueva escritura 93) and Canovas suggests that literary criticism is inscribed within the novel, which presents itself as antagonistic to the anti-cultural project of the regime (Lihn 30). For Cánovas, the novel as a text in constant dialogue with critical theory and situates itself in the tradition of the “anti-novela,” constantly questioning the different discourses that constitute us as subjects (15). Cánovas also places greater emphasis on the cultural context in which Lihn’s novel was written, though it is worth noting that Cánovas writes his article in 1983, at a time when restrictions on critical thought were starting to thaw in Chile.

125 rarified literary experiment but as a critical commentary on the cultural and political context in which the novel was written.121 Published three years after the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, La orquesta de cristal appeared at a time of social and political repression that had profoundly corrosive effects upon critical discourse, leading to what many characterized as a widespread “apagón cultural”

(Brunner 86).122 In La orquesta de cristal, Lihn targeted the “esterilidad crítica” (ODC

38) produced by the military regime and its attempts to squelch critique or to displace it away from the public arena. Read as a critical work, La orquesta de cristal serves, in particular, as a reflection on the dictatorship’s impact on the realms of literature and criticism. The crystal orchestra and the overwrought commentary in the novel function as allegories for the dictatorship’s capacity to silence literature and to reduce critical commentary to “cháchara” or a “volumen de estereotipos” (10). The hollow critical languages parodied in the novel suggest that the resurgence of impressionistic criticism during the years of the dictatorship was part of a broader critical aphasia, which also reverberated in the dry, technical analyses that survived in Chilean universities and in the avant-garde scene that tried to keep literature and criticism alive in authoritarian Chile.123

121 As he notes in an interview with Cecilia Díaz, Lihn wanted to create “una realidad en el lenguaje que tuviera una relación de correspondencia con la realidad” (Díaz 54). In “Entretelones técnicos de mis novelas” Lihn also defines his novel as a critical work, as an attempt to “pensar a partir de la literatura, en ella, con ella y sobre ella, dentro, pues, de la literatura misma” (570).

122 The term “apagón cultural” is a highly contested one, as it both obscures the cultural activity that continued to be carried out in non-official spaces and fails to account for the structural reasons behind the apparent lack of cultural production during the dictatorship. As José Joaquín Brunner notes, the declaration that Chile had entered a “cultural blackout” condensed the acute sense of crisis among the dominant class in Chile. The declaration led to a series of reflection on the crisis in education, in the media, and in reading habits, which attributed to the mediocre education of youth, lack of funding, or to the noxious effects of democracy (86).

123 It is worth noting here that the authoritarian regime did not do away with critical discourse altogether, but displaced it to the underground of cultural life or abroad. As Subercaseaux notes, there were three “sectores de oposición” that maintained critical discourse alive during the dictatorship: critics with links to 126 Such critical silences had much to do with the new discursive and institutional boundaries that the dictatorship tried to establish between literature and criticism, which both undermined literature’s capacity to comment on society and eclipsed the vibrant critical tradition that had emerged in the years before the coup.

From the vantage point of mid-1970s Chile, the silencing power of the dictatorship was particularly foreboding, both for the writers who hoped to raise a voice against authoritarian repression and for a continental literary-critical tradition that only recently seemed to be finding its voice. The 1960s and 70s in Latin America had been a period of extraordinary critical and literary vitality, which promised to bring the region out of the dark center of the earth where Alfonso Reyes once envisioned himself. Latin

America’s renewed hope of ratifying its cultural independence was fueled by the success of the Latin American literary “Boom” in Europe and North America and by the renewed project to elaborate a “nueva crítica latinoamericana” (Rincón 174) that might rectify the region’s perceived critical deficiency.124 In Chile, the continental efforts to update and

“modernize” the interpretation of literature (A. Martínez 6) had a local counterpart in what Bernardo Subercaseaux has called an unprecedented “renovación crítica” (278).125

In the years before the military coup, a new generation of Chilean critics embarked on “la the social sciences and to independent research institutions like FLACSO and CENECA, the literary- critical avant-garde, and various writers who continued to practice criticism from exile (285). Lihn’s and my emphasis on the silencing of criticism focuses here on the Pinochet regime’s capacity to eclipse, marginalize, and obscure such critical interventions.

124 In chapter one of this dissertation I elaborate on the rise of the nueva crítica and the role that it played in the broader efforts to elaborate a critical discourse in Latin America.

125 In the pages that follow, I will continue to use Subercaseaux’s term to refer to the new critical discourse that was elaborated in Chile during the 60s and 70s during both its first and second stages. I keep the term renovación crítica in Spanish, as the term “renovación” covers various key elements of the critical scene that it refers to, including the notions that criticism was being updated, renewed, and modernized, and that Chilean criticism had cast aside its old and antiquated forms in order to bring about a long-awaited critical renaissance.

127 ardua tarea… de desterrar la mirada impresionista sobre la literatura,” replacing it with a

“ciencia literaria” (Cánovas, “Hacia una histórica” 162) that could provide a more systematic and objective approach to literary analysis.126 The rise of the university as the new locus of critical activity encouraged such efforts and provided a “canal de modernización” to socialize the theories that had been produced in Europe and the United

States during the last forty years (Subercaseaux 281).127 The critical methodologies imported during the first “momento imanentista” tended to focus on the linguistic nature of the literary text and included French structuralism, Russian formalism, and North

American close reading (280). Their more “objective” theoretical frameworks opened the possibility of finally overcoming the belletristic and subjectivist criticism that had prevailed until then in Chile, thus bringing the country up to date with metropolitan critical standards.

In the late 1960s, the so-called excessive formalism of the momento imanentista came, nevertheless, increasingly under attack (Subercaseaux 280). The intensification of political and class conflict in Chile initiated a second stage of the renovación that cast literary criticism as an important part of an emancipatory cultural project. Influenced by the Cuban Revolution, the student movements of the 1960s, and the rise of Eduardo

126 As Subercaseaux notes, the renovación established a polemical relationship with the critical approaches that had previously dominated criticism in Chile. In their desire to create a more systematic and rigorous literary criticism, critics of the renovación set themselves against the historical and positivistic school of criticism exemplified by Raúl Silva Castro as well as the impressionistic criticism associated with Alone (pseudonym for Hernán Díaz Arrieta) or Ricardo Latchman (Subercaseaux 279). After the coup, the “crítica de orden impresionista” continued to be practiced by critics like Andrés Sabella, Luis Sánchez Latorre, Gonzalo Drago, and Víctor Castro (291).

127 The expansion of the student body and increased government support to Chilean universities throughout the first half of the twentieth century led to an impressive growth in intellectual production (Austin 33) that fueled much of the “renovación crítica.” As Subercaseaux notes, during the 1970s the university became the new “eje de la crítica que alimenta las funciones editorials, las del comentarista, la del reportero cultural” (281).

128 Frei’s and Salvador Allende’s leftist governments, critics adopted a Marxist understanding of “objectivity” as a full consideration of the social and historical forces acting upon culture.128 In the midst of what many intellectuals perceived as an imminent transition to socialism, socio-historical readings assumed a new importance as critical tools compatible with dialectical and historical materialism, now widely considered “el instrumento científico idóneo” (Fernández Retamar, Para una teoría 92). This led to yet another expansion of the new “ciencia literaria” to include not only formal or structural analyses but also methodologies from the newly prestigious social sciences in Chile, as well as critical perspectives developed by European critics like Lukacs, Hauser,

Goldmann, and the Frankfurt School of Criticism (Subercaseaux 279).129 By 1972, the critical scene in Chile was characterized by a plurality of approaches, which seem to have freed Chile from its critical provincialism and created a vibrant “polémica virtual” that kept “las inteligencias culturales alertas” (Lastra 125).130

128 As Cánovas observes, the rise of Marxist rhetoric in Chile was brought about by Eduardo Frei’s “Revolución en Libertad” and Salvador Allende’s “Revolución Popular” (“Hacia una histórica” 162), which stimulated writers to contextualize literature within “la realidad histórica bajo la óptica de la izquierda” (Lihn, “Política y cultura” 453). Allende’s rise to the presidency was particularly galvanizing, as it sparked the hope in Latin America that a socialist government could come to power by democratic means.

129 Lihn played an important role in disseminating critical theory in Chile and advocating for a literary criticism that paid close attention to the historical and social contexts of literary works. As he notes in “Carta abierta a Padilla,” he had been described as “el director de orquesta de una nueva ilustración socialista” (“Carta abierta” n.p.) and argued for the key role of culture in the transition to socialism. As he advocated in his essay “Política y cultura en una etapa de transición al socialismo,” “las obras deben ser debidamente presentadas, analizadas, comentadas como productos históricos portadores de connotaciones específicas, rescatadas en lo que significaron a la luz de lo que significan o pueden significar” (451).

130 As Cánovas notes, the two “stages” outlined by Subercaseaux do not refer to two mutually exclusive moments that follow each other in time: both tendencies coexisted, intertwined with each other, in a single cultural space (“Hacia una histórica” 163). By 1973, the realm of critical discourse in Chile was marked by a plurality of critical languages that included not just the formalist approaches of the momento imanentista and the socio-historical tendencies, but also literary-historical frameworks and impressionistic interpretations depicted by critics of the renovación as outdated or anachronistic.

129 From the dismal standpoint of the “apagón cultural” in the late 1970s, that vibrant critical scene nevertheless looked like “una metrópolis iluminada de la otra orilla” (125).

With the suppression of an important part of the country’s intelligentsia through exiles, firings, censorship, and disappearances, Chile’s critical scene slipped into an eerie silence. The attempts to eradicate the leftist discourse that marked Chile’s political and cultural spheres prior to 1973 resulted in a radical restriction on the kinds of approaches that were allowed to survive during the dictatorship. Particularly vulnerable to the forces of repression were the historical and sociological approaches that had emerged during the second stage of the renovación and their reflection on the relationship between literature, politics, and society. In the midst of the dictatorship, interpreting a novel as a critical commentary on social and political circumstances had suddenly become a liability, putting in peril not just critics’ reputations but also their lives and livelihood.131 By the time La orquesta de cristal was published in 1976, criticism in Chile had been stripped of contextual frameworks and pared down to a few voices: a highly subjective, journalistic criticism that reduced the work of art to matters of “beauty” and taste, a technical academic criticism that escaped censorship through attention to the formal dimensions of literature, and a cultural avant-garde that carved out a fragmentary and precarious existence in the underground of Chilean culture.

In that atmosphere, it is no surprise that the overinflated rhetoric spouted by

Pompier and the other fictional critics in La orquesta de cristal failed to elicit even the slightest disturbance. By blocking all socio-historical interpretive frameworks, the

131 The stakes of reading Lihn’s novel as a critical work were, in this sense, much higher than they had been with Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio. If “misreading” Lo demás es silencio as a critical work risked exposing critics as naive readers, misreading Lihn’s novel as a critical work contravened not just discursive but also political orthodoxy and could have much graver consequences.

130 military regime silenced any criticism that might read Lihn’s novel as a critique of the dictatorship and its devastating repercussions upon literary and critical discourse.132 The lack of criticism surrounding La orquesta de cristal serves, in this light, not as a measure of the novel’s literary value, but as a kind of “crítica virtual, que puede estar actuando negativamente” (Lihn, quoted in Lastra 104), revealing both current definitions of literature and the state of criticism at the time of the novel’s publication. The dictatorship’s capacity to silence critical discourse by compartmentalizing literature and criticism into narrow and self-contained spheres, divorced from both their broader context and from other discourses, is perhaps best illustrated by a description, in La orquesta de cristal, of the orchestra’s last performance during a private concert for Nazi officials. As one so-called Heinrich von Linderhöfer narrates, the orchestra’s stage, which was surrounded by mirrors in previous concerts, is now “enlutado […] sus cinco caras cerradas por una pintura opaca” (ODC 90). The black paint darkening the mirrors around the orchestra allegorizes the authoritarian regime’s attempts to confine literature within a closed and besieged aesthetic realm where it was barred from reflecting critically on anything, including itself. The lack of all background or contextual information reduced criticism, in turn, to an appreciation of the artistic object’s beauty or formal proficiency.

In the 1970s, the new boundaries placed on literature and criticism dealt a catastrophic blow to a local critical tradition that had been defined, both in Chile and in Latin

America, by its emphasis on contextual readings and by its discursive fluidly.

132 The boundaries that the authoritarian regime placed between La orquesta de cristal and its cultural and political context were both literal and metaphorical: not only did it prevent critics from linking the political turmoil and totalitarian forces mentioned in the novel to the political events occurring in Chile but also kept the novel from entering the country after its publication in Argentina. According to Lihn, only about 20 copies of the novel entered Chile after its publication in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana (“Doce años” 182). 131 Like a photographic negative of the “illuminated metropolis” that preceded the coup, La orquesta de cristal offers a testament to its wreckage, a form of mourning and a silent protest. Through the critical languages parodied in the novel, Lihn suggests that in place of an emergent critical tradition the coup left an archaic critical landscape reminiscent of the dark ages of Latin American criticism, which the nueva crítica had heroically attempted to leave behind. Spanning the years between 1900 and 1942 La orquesta de cristal situates itself in that prehistory, before Reyes’s 1944 “discovery” of literary theory in El deslinde and much before the renovación or “renaissance” of the

1960s. From the “limbo de lo increado” (ODC 100) in the early twentieth century, Lihn rescues scraps of subjective impressionism, historical positivism, essayistic writing, and other critical antiquities from the dustiest corners of the Latin American archive.133 La orquesta de cristal serves, in this sense, as the fictional rendering of an antiquated, nineteenth-century realm of “letters” that seemed shamefully obsolete after the critical ferment and literary success of the 1960s and early 70s.134 Apparently rescued from “un pasado de anarquía y decadencia del que nos hemos purificado” (97), the critical languages in the novel nevertheless reflect the very modes of criticism that were

133 According to a footnote in La orquesta de cristal, “en lo que respecta a la música del Nuevo Mundo permanecía hacia 1900 en el limbo de lo increado” (100). The footnote is a long and bitingly ironic disquisition on the marginality of Latin American culture with respect to France, particularly at the turn of the century. Through a reference to Rubén Darío, the footnote makes a parallel between the realm of music (in which the crystal orchestra presumable falls) and the realm of literature, and plays on the dual notions that Latin America had no literature to speak of before 1900 and that its critics were a mere group of “rimadores y polígrafos” whose writings “aportan la mayor dosis de ingenuo entusiasmo” (12). The ironic phrase “el limbo de lo increado” could thus apply as much to nineteenth-century Latin American literature as to the early-twentieth century criticism that the novel mimics.

134 In “Entretelones técnicos de mis novelas” Lihn depicts Pompier as “un sobreviviente paródico del decadentismo y del modernismo, el ultimo cultor escéptico de la Religión del Arte, condenado a servirnos de guía de las ruinas actuales de la Belle Epoque entre las que vivimos” (576). Lihn thus suggests that Pompier embodies the persistence, in 1970s Chile, of presumably outdated languages associated with the late nineteenth century.

132 prevalent when the novel was published in 1976. Parodying both the impressionistic criticism that survived in the press and the dry, technical monographs created in universities, Lihn implies that the dictatorship left only space for abstruse, outdated, and marginal critical discourses no longer audible in the metropolitan centers of the

“developed” critical world.

If Pompier’s 1969 appearance in Cormorán highlighted the critical insufficiency and marginality that the renovación crítica was supposed to overcome, his reappearance in the 1976 La orquesta de cristal suggests that the dictatorship only perpetuated and perhaps even aggravated the provinciality of criticism in Chile. Criticism during the dictatorship thus continued to suffer from what Lihn called the “metequismo” that kept

Latin America as a second-class citizen in the international republic of criticism, both dependent on the centers of discursive power and incapable of overcoming its dependency.135 As Lihn described it, metequismo is

la ilusión del provinciano de integrarse en el mejor de los mundos compensatorios, que parece liberarlo de la opresión del provincianismo cultural… El meteco de toda especie es el bárbaro o extranjero que se queda con un palmo de narices cuando llega a Atenas. Se cuelga del último carro del tren: llega atrasado a la historia de los países modelos y la repite en el propio, falsificando de este modo lo propio y lo ajeno. El meteco es el falsificador al cuadrado. (Lastra 111)

As belated imitators of the symbolist and impressionistic critical fashions in late- nineteenth century France, the fictional critics in La orquesta de cristal are “metecos” par excellence. Like Eduardo Torres in Lo demás es silencio, Pompier and his cohorts loudly

135 The term “metequismo,” a despective term that Lihn raised to the level of theory, comes from the Greek word µέτοικος, which was used in Ancient Greece to refer to a foreigner who established residence in Athens but who did not have the same privileges as Athenian citizens (“Meteco”). In France, the term “métèque” retains a pejorative meaning and is usually applied to immigrants to designate their lower social status. Lihn uses the term to designate Latin America’s purported provinciality and the acute awareness of that provinciality. In “Nacimiento, desarrollo e implicaciones de Don Gerardo de Pompier, el resumidero,” he elaborates on the etymology of the term and its application to Pompier (558).

133 proclaim their knowledge of metropolitan culture only to reveal their naive incapacity to recognize that their interpretations of Plato, Poe, and Baudelaire come decades if not centuries too late. They thus epitomize what Lihn characterized as Latin American intellectuals’ long-standing propensity to borrow metropolitan discourses in order to compensate for the perceived intellectual poverty of their “lugar subdesarrollado” (Lihn,

“Doce años” 192). In the distorting looking glass of Lihn’s “anti-utopian” novel (Díaz

55), the 1973 coup only aggravated such metequismo. Reversing the progress of the renovación crítica, it thrust Chile back into a dark ages where criticism was once again condemned to keep repeating a foreign and anachronistic discourse that was, for that very reason, anything but critical.

La orquesta de cristal, however, critiques not only the interruption of Latin

America’s critical project, but also the metequismo of the renovación crítica in its desire to catch up with the centers of discursive power. Read through the distorting lens of La orquesta de cristal, the renovación’s emphasis on scientific objectivity and theoretical sophistication created a rift in the literary-critical realm that prepared the ground for the rigid boundaries that the dictatorship later established between literary and critical discourses. For although the desire to craft an objective criticism in Latin America was not new, the particular construction of the new “literary science” in the 60s and 70s excluded non-specialized forms of literary analysis, which still had a place within

Reyes’s more capacious version of “ciencia literaria.” Now banished from criticism were both the “impressionistic” criticism that Reyes had made available to the common reader and the essay form that had played such an important part in Reyes’s Latin Americanist project. In Chile, the association between impressionism and the critics writing in the

134 conservative newspaper El Mercurio further reinforced the growing discredit of unspecialized or impressionistic forms of interpretation, uninformed by current theoretical frameworks.136 This led to a rupture between new “modern” forms of professional criticism, which began to gravitate around the university, and unspecialized modes of essayistic and impressionistic writing based in the press.

During the years of the dictatorship, the military regime capitalized on the rift in the literary-critical realm in order to cement the divisions between the worlds of literary fiction-writing, academic criticism, and journalistic reviewing. By isolating different modes of critical production into self-contained spheres, the military regime threatened both literature’s and criticism’s critical function, which had previously relied on writers’ capacity to move fluidly between the realms of fiction and criticism, between the world of the university and the world of the media, between the languages of high theory and the common reader’s unspecialized languages. The new divisions in the literary-critical realm found, however, new resistance on the part of a cultural avant-garde, which sought to retain the critical function of art, literature, and critical interpretation. Dispersed throughout universities, gallery spaces, private homes, and often precarious cultural institutions, the Chilean “escena de avanzada,” as Nelly Richard has termed it (Margins

2), also took advantage of the fragmentation in the literary-critical realm, turning it into an instrument of critique against the totalizing narratives that characterized both the

136 The term “crítica impresionista” is most often associated with Hernán Díaz Arrieta, who under the pseudonym “Alone” served as the primary critic of the newspaper El Mercurio from 1939 to 1978. Díaz Arrieta openly supported the coup, and was known for his anti-communist postures. Alone was later replaced by José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, a priest of the Opus Dei who began writing in El Mercurio in 1966 under the pseudonym Ignacio Valente and is similarly associated with an impressionistic approach to literary interpretation. I analyze both Alone and Valente in further detail below. It is also worth noting that both Alone and José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois inspired the characters in Roberto Bolaño’s Nocturno de Chile.

135 dictatorship and the years that preceded it (La insubordinación 62). Lihn himself was a key participant in that underground avant-garde scene and in La orquesta de cristal implemented many of the techniques that became hallmarks of its literary-critical practice. The novel’s collage of disperse literary-critical languages mimics both the strategies and structure of an avant-garde scene that mobilized and embodied fragmentation, marginality, precariousness, and discursive fluidity.

The novel is, in this sense, as much a critical reflection of the literary-critical avant-garde as of the purportedly backwards languages that survived in the sanctioned spaces of the military regime. Equally critical of his own discourse, Lihn mounts a ruthless critique against a literary-critical scene that claimed to be at the cutting-edge of aesthetic and critical practices. Reflected in La orquesta de cristal, the cultural avant- garde remained as marginal and precarious as the novel’s provincial polygraphs, whose obsession with French symbolism and fin-de-siècle decadence are as métèque as the cultural avant-garde’s adoption of French post-structuralist theory. As Adriana Valdés notes, Lihn maintained a critical posture with respect to discourses of all ideological signs

(Enrique Lihn 9), including his own (34). For Lihn, all efforts to deliver Chile from its sense of backwardness or critical provincialism count as instances of pathetic metequismo, as ludicrous repetitions of first-world structures of thought that only served to falsify social and discursive realities in Chile. Lihn’s accusation of metequismo was not, however, an appeal to authenticity or a call to overcome Latin America’s purported provinciality. It served, instead, as a critique of global hierarchies, which had made of

Latin America a second-class citizen in the critical republic of letters.

136 Reversing the negative connotations usually associated with the adjective

“meteco,” Lihn appropriated the term and harnessed the critical potential implicit in the meteco’s propensity for falsification and inadequate imitation. Both in La orquesta de cristal and after its publication, the character of Don Gerardo de Pompier became a means to question the divisions that had been drawn between fiction and criticism in the efforts to incorporate Latin America into an international order of thought. Like the naive readers in Lo demás es silencio, Pompier functioned as a fool or a joker, a figure of ambiguous sign whose “texto bufonesco” (Díaz 54) both critiqued and vindicated the second-class turns of Latin American critical discourse. Flouting the new compartmentalizations of culture, Lihn’s undisciplined anti-hero undermined the bellicose disciplinary strategies of authoritarian and authoritative discourses both at home and abroad with the pompous white noise of his literary-critical discourse. He thus continued to work in quiet defense of all those metecos who in the new discursive order

“han quedado sin sitio, descolocadas, desitiadas, errátiles; errátiles como lo es la imaginación” (Lihn, “Doce años” 192).

The Metequismo of Authoritarian Criticism

“Si tiene sentido hablar de una crisis de la cultura,” writes the poet Raúl Zurita in

1981, “es porque—en algún momento—se ha marcado el divorcio entre un pensamiento y la realidad, entre un lenguaje y sus signos, en fin: entre una cosmovisión y la historia concreta. De más está decir que para nosotros, ese momento fue el 11 de septiembre de

1973” (7). Together with Zurita, numerous other Chilean writers and critics have characterized the military coup of 1973 as a catastrophe of meaning, as a sudden

137 breakage between words and signification that interrupted all forms of collective interpretation and making-sense of the world (11). According to Nelly Richard, the military coup was experienced as a “loss of the word,” a traumatic suspension of speech that led to a kind of cultural aphasia (“Reconfigurations” 273). In place of cohesive meanings and shared models of signification, the coup left behind a trail of ruined vocabularies, shattered discourses, and wasted social imaginaries that could not be pieced together into a coherent whole (274). Like the destruction of the Tower of Babel, the devastation of the collective systems of meaning led to what Zurita calls a “confusion of tongues” that made it difficult to both communicate and to make sense (11).

With its fragmentary form and discontinuous collection of critical languages, La orquesta de cristal works as a testament to this “coup against representation” (Richard,

“Reconfigurations” 274), which destroyed the instruments of cultural interpretation.

Difficult and even willfully obscure, the book recreates, for the reader, the experience of trying to piece a story together from fragments of critical discourses that no longer serve as tools to make sense of culture and instead function as obstacles to understanding. The shards of critical language in the novel thus invoke the physical and discursive violence through which the Pinochet regime shattered the systems of interpretation established before the coup. Yet they also reflect the broader process of atomization and fragmentation that served as the ideological counterpart to the regime’s repressive strategies (Brunner 131). As José Joaquín Brunner argues, the dictatorship imposed its authority and worldview not only through direct repression but also through a

“parroquialización de los procesos de comunicación social,” which fragmented all forms

138 of communication and discouraged dialogue between realms of culture (86).137 As Zurita describes it, “[n]unca se ha puesto tanto énfasis en que los universitarios, por ejemplo, sean sólo universitarios, los estudiantes únicamente estudiantes, los científicos solamente científicos, los trabajadores de una tienda sólo trabajadores de una tienda. Cualquier intercomunicación se hace de por sí sospechosa y está sujeta a la censura” (12). By breaking the social body down into small and isolated spheres, the regime sought to prevent the emergence of oppositional structures and to disrupt pre-1973 patterns of thought, combatting the impulse towards socialization through privatization at many levels of society (Brunner 161).

The state of physical siege in which Chile found itself right after the coup was, in other words, a form of intellectual siege (Austin 41) whose purpose was to break down the totalizing narratives developed in the preceding years and refashion Chile according to a neoliberal agenda.138 One of the primary casualties of the dictatorship’s process of social and ideological reorganization was the new understanding of critical activity configured by the second stage of the renovación. In the years before the coup, the adjective “critical” had been associated with the ability to assess and weave various

137 In La cultura autoritaria Brunner argues that the military bloc exerted its power not only through direct repression but also through a drastic reorganization in the modes of production in Chile and a transformation of national culture “que debe expresar esa nueva dominación y volverla sentido del orden, principio de integración social y cauce regulador de nuestas inteacciones cotidianas” (16). According to Brunner, social fragmentation and compartmentalization at numerous levels of society was one of the primary modes by which the military bloc sought to restructure both society and culture in Chile.

138 As Brunner notes, the ultimate purpose of the reorganization of Chilean society was to reinstitute market forces under a neoliberal framework directly imported from North American universities (161). In 1975, Milton Friedman, who had been working in the University of Chicago’s School of Economics, met with Pinochet and recommended the adoption of a radical free-market economic policy, which henceforth came to be known as the “Chicago experiment.” For a broad overview of the effects of the neoliberal experiment on Chilean culture, see Brunner’s La cultura autoritaria. In “Armed Forces, Market Forces: Intellectuals and Higher Education in Chile, 1973-1993” Robert Austin also provides a succinct overview of the Chicago experiment and its effects upon both culture and higher education.

139 interpretive approaches into a coherent narrative that might guide society on the path to cultural and political liberation (Richard, La insubordinación 70).139 From their position as social and discursive mediators, “critical” intellectuals developed narratives that emphasized society as a whole and sought to connect different realms of society by moving fluidly between discourses, institutions, and media.140 After 1973, the adjective’s recent association with leftist thought led the military bloc to interpret “critical” “as

‘communist’ and thus of no interest to Chilean philosophy or higher education” (Austin

33). Recasting the term “critical” as a mask for ideological tendentiousness, the Pinochet regime used it to weed out methodologies that attempted to cross social and discursive boundaries. In an effort to discipline the unruly forces that had threatened to throw Chile into the chaos of socialist revolution, the Pinochet regime exiled, jailed, or disappeared an important part of Chile’s literary intelligentsia, fired critics from their positions in humanities departments, dismantled disciplines like sociology, and blocked intellectuals’ access to the mass media.141 The regime’s attack on critical activity thus eclipsed the

139 As Jeffrey Puryear notes in Thinking Politics: Intellectuals and Democracy in Chile, 1973-1988, the “critical” role of the intellectual in the 60s and 70s was defined in contrast to the role of the expert, specialized in a narrow subject area (8). Unlike the “technocrat,” engaged in instrumental or specialized tasks, the “critical” intellectual sought instead to address broad social problems and to guide action for society (8).

140 The critics associated with the renovación coupled their work in the university with participation in various cultural media, including TV, magazines, newspapers, and the publishing industry. Both Subercaseaux and Cánovas mention a number of university intellectuals who participated in the mass media as part of their critical work. These include Pedro Lastra, Hernán Loyola, and Nelson Osorio, who directed literary and critical collections in various publishing houses; Luis Iñigo Madrigal, Federico Schopf, Antonio Skármeta, and Alfonso Calderón, who wrote for newspapers and magazines; and Ariel Dorfman and José Promis who hosted two different TV programs. For more details, see Subercaseaux’s “Transformaciones de la crítica literaria en Chile: 1960-1982” and Cánovas’s “Hacia una histórica relación sentimental de la crítica literaria en estos reinos.”

141 In the initial years after the coup, the military regime used numerous forms of violence aimed at suppressing critical discourse. Seeking to suppress the leftist discourse that had marked the social and intellectual spheres before 1973, the military forces shut down all media spaces associated with the left, instituted forms of censorship that took their most concrete form in the burning of books (Bianchi 52), expelled about 2,000 academics from universities in the years from 1973 to 1981 (Austin 40), disappeared, 140 socio-historical and Marxist perspectives associated with the second stage of the renovación and suspended the discursive and institutional fluidity that had granted criticism a highly public function in the 1960s and early 70s.

Despite the notion that the military coup created a radical break with previous systems of thought (Richard, “Reconfigurations” 273) and dismantled the renovación crítica (Subercaseaux 282), the authoritarian bloc did not discard all previous categories or critical methodologies. Instead, the authoritarian regime capitalized on the growing rift between “literary” interpretations and a scientific criticism rooted in the university in order to reconfigure criticism as an objective academic discipline best suited for a specialized professional. The regime thus perpetrated the renovación’s call for critical objectivity but recast objectivity as the detached and a-political perspective of a technical specialist now located within the newly dividing walls of the university. The regime’s new emphasis on specialized knowledge paradoxically allowed for the survival of the formalist and structural methodologies that had been imported by Chilean critics in the early 1960s (Subercaseaux 284). With the violent limits placed on socio-historical and contextual readings, critics retreated back to the methodologies of the momento imanentista as the only forms of interpretation allowed within a university system newly reorganized as a series of “conocimientos ordenados técnicamente” (Brunner 151).

Seemingly free of any “critical” intentions, the formalist strain of the renovación crítica found a niche within a new educational order in which knowledge was expected to be free of ideological elements. The technical credentials of structuralism also promised to

jailed, and exiled an important part of Chile’s intelligentsia, shut down university departments, and excluded entire currents of thought by declaring them “subversive” (Brunner 79). In La cultura autoritaria Brunner provides a thorough account of the use of violence to transform the cultural sphere.

141 provide the technical training for individuals to compete in an academic sphere, now guided by the market as “el único lenguaje científico y moderno capaz de dar cuenta de la realidad nacional” (87). The specialization and international prestige of the formalist and structuralist languages imported in the early 60s thus facilitated the professionalization of

Chilean criticism, which was restructured as a purportedly modern academic profession modeled after the specialized disciplines of international academic institutions.

Equally useful to the regime was the renovación’s attempt to distance itself from the “impressionistic” critics associated with the right-wing newspaper El Mercurio, as it allowed the regime to establish more rigid boundaries between university criticism and journalistic commentary. By restricting a technical and objective criticism to narrow

“microcircuitos” within the world of the university (Subercaseaux 284), the mass media became the exclusive domain of an impressionistic criticism no longer charged with the task of guiding the public on the ultimate purpose of society but dedicated, instead, to the task of assessing the literary value of books. Unlike the impressionistic criticism advocated by Reyes, the one that survived in the dictatorship was not a form of interpretation open to all readers but an exclusive privilege granted to a handful of critics ideologically endorsed by the authoritarian bloc. By shutting down dissident newspapers and barring critics from the mass media, the military regime turned the conservative newspaper El Mercurio into one of the few “tribunas” for the public practice of criticism

(Díaz 51). From that tribune, only a small minority of critics—and in particular the critic

Ignacio Valente—were allowed to transcend “el mundo privado de relaciones y proponer interpretaciones y juicios” (Brunner 164).142 This led to a critical monologue that

142 Among the critics who were allowed to keep practicing a “crítica de orden impresionista,” Subercaseaux mentions Andrés Sabella, Luis Sánchez Latorre, Gonzalo Drago, and Víctor Castro (291). Ignacio 142 replaced the plural and dialogical structure of criticism in the 1960s and early 70s.

Among those excluded from critical dialogue was not only the public, now made dependent on the taste of a single critic whose judgments became the official version of culture, but also the creative writer, now restricted to the task of producing aesthetic objects to be judged by the reviewer and consumed by a passive public.

Lihn, however, resisted the narrow role assigned to literary writers and embarked in La orquesta de cristal on a ruthless critique of the journalistic and the academic criticism that survived in Chile during the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship. Both strains of literary interpretation find a critical reflection in the two “cycles” that organize the interpretations gathered in La orquesta de cristal. Running from 1900 to the early

1930s, the first cycle gathers more literary or belletristic interpretations, which the novel describes as “los desarrollos opulentos y hasta de la decadencia refinada de un arte que pueden entenderse bajo la categoría de la primitividad” (70). Full of grand personalities, impressionistic renderings, and idiosyncratic interpretations, the first cycle is strongly reminiscent of the impressionistic criticism that achieved new power and authority during the dictatorship. The death of Charles Royce, the eccentric North American millionaire who commissioned and sustained the orchestra, closes the first cycle and leads into a second, more “technocratic” era spanning from the early 1930s to 1942, during which “el mercado libre… sería prestigiado… por oposición al Realismo-Socialista” (71).

Dominated by the impersonal power of “Fundación X,” the second section evokes the

“scientific” criticism entrenched in the university through the cold, formal analyses of the

Foundation’s various scholarship recipients, who dedicate themselves to “la vindicación

Valente—the pen name adopted by the priest José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois—was, however, the most prominent of the critics writing in the mass media during the Pinochet dictatorship, and is often cited as the only critic allowed to express his opinions on culture in a public forum. 143 histórica, científica y erudita del estable programa de la Orquesta de Cristal” (72). The novel’s parodic reflection of both journalistic and academic criticism unmasks their seemingly innocent neutrality, and exposes the illusion, perpetrated during the dictatorship, that both subjective and technical analyses could claim isolation from the political, economic, historical, and social realities in Chile.

Of the two languages, impressionistic criticism receives perhaps the most elaborate critique, which takes up about three-fourths of the main section in the book.

The first seventy pages of La orquesta de cristal are taken up by the absurd interpretations of the various metecos from Latin America and from other former European colonies who have moved to Paris just after the turn of the century. The extended allegories penned by fictional critics like Roberto Albornoz, Gerardo de Pompier, and M. Saltanek are subject to a ruthless mockery that targets both the classical references and overwrought metaphors used by these critics to interpret the symphony “Amor Absoluto” commissioned for the orchestra. Their apparently erudite references to Narcissus, Plato’s

“divine androgyne,” and a gothic hero pining away for his dead lover are soon revealed as mere products of the critics’ fancy, as wild inventions based on highly subjective associations around the only true knowledge they have of the symphony: its title. As one of the critics in the novel remarks,

Diga lo que dijere para ‘emborracharle la perdiz’ a sus lectores, lo cierto es que no sólo no escuchó la sinfonía Amor Absoluto en esa fiesta de la excentricidad… sino que nunca, ni él ni nadie llegaría a escucharla, como acaso creyó poder hacerlo para acogerse retroactivamente al derecho de haber hablado con conocimiento de causa, girando a la cuenta de esa esperanza un cheque sin fondos… Las significaciones que evoca en los terminos por ese entonces permisivos de una imaginería retórica y pintoresca no existen, al menos en el lugar del que fingen o creen proceder, la partitura de De Glatigny; no existen sino en la prosa artística de Albornoz o, c’est la même chose, como la idea (de nada) sugerida al

144 improvisado musicólogo por la impunidad con que en su tiempo se traducía la música a la palabra escrita bajo la especie de la expresión de sentimientos o de la ‘pintura’ de fenómenos meterológicos como el claro de luna o la puesta del sol. (31-32)

The impossibility of actually listening to the music emitted from the mute bodies of the glass instruments makes the interpretations of these “improvised musicologists” tantamount to fictions. Built out of a patchwork of prestigious references from the aging archive of European culture, those fictions are presented as a product of the “impunity” that in a past era allowed critics to wax poetical on inexistent knowledge and to pass their inventions off as criticism. This depiction of impressionistic criticism as an unaccountable fiction allowed by the excesses of a past era assumes, however, new dimensions when read as a veiled attack on the impressionistic criticism that at the time of the novel’s composition dominated Chilean critical dialogue from the pages of El

Mercurio. “Dejamos pues, de lado a ese Moloch intelectual, a ese dómine de las Artes y las Letras contra cuya autoridad en modo alguno—pedimos que se nos bienentienda— hemos pretendido perpetrar un atentado de mala fe” (22) writes with biting sarcasm one of the critics in La orquesta de cristal. The irony in that disavowal becomes even more mordant when read as a reference, not to Le Mercure de France—as it appears in the novel—but to El Mercurio from Chile.

It would not be the first or the last time that Lihn perpetrated an “atentado” against the “dómines” who wrote in El Mercurio’s literary supplement Artes y Letras and who sought to “tender entre [el poder] y lo Nuevo—terrible rival—una persistente cortina de humo” (22). Both in “Alone, no,” published in 1964, and in “Artes y Letras

Mercuriales, un suplemento del anacronismo,” written in 1984, Lihn denounced the

“anachronism” of El Mercurio’s critics, whose attachment to the old products of

145 European culture and penchant for impressionistic interpretations place them in the prehistories of culture. In his first article, Lihn critiques Alone’s “mentalidad ahistórica” and depicts him as a product of the nineteenth century and a direct heir of the French critic Sainte-Beuve, whom Lihn calls “el padre de la crítica impresionista” (436). In the

1960s, Alone’s predilection for the timeless “universality” of the European archive seemed, no doubt, a product of outdated critical tastes amid the renovación’s enthusiasm for historical interpretations. Yet, twenty years later, Lihn was still denouncing the same tendency in the critics who replaced Alone during the alleged modernization that the newspaper underwent after the coup (“Artes y Letras” 490). According to Lihn, the critics writing for El Mercurio during the dictatorship continued to see culture as a

“tienda de antigüedades” under a “perspectiva de una eternidad espiritual que pone un buen precio a los anacronismos y gusta de los valores que son cosas o piezas de coleccionista” (490). In their desire to be “suprahistóricos y cosmopolitas,” these critics only succeeded in remaining “provincianos y anacrónicos,” poor metecos belatedly recycling the outdated fragments of a European culture that had long passed them by.

Like the critics in first part of La orquesta de cristal, the critics of El Mercurio continued to function as “vestigios de nuestra antigüedad cultural” (“Alone” 436), as an unfortunate devolution in critical thought whose lack of progress stood in stark contrast to the dictatorship’s rhetoric of progress and modernization.

Perhaps more serious than the accusation of anachronism was the notion that the interpretations of El Mercurio’s critics were literary masks that concealed ideological values and political objectives. In both of his articles, Lihn took the indictment of fictional mystification that the novel aimed at Albornoz and directed it against the critics

146 of El Mercurio, accusing them of using “una imaginería retórica y pintoresca” (ODC 31) to hide their alignment with both “Mr. Dollar” (28) and with political power. In “Alone, no,” Lihn depicted Alone’s “literary decadence” as a clever rhetorical strategy that allowed Alone to base his interpretations on his emotional state (“Alone” 436), releasing him from having to back up his judgments with supporting arguments or evidence. As with Albornoz, Lihn accused Alone of basing his opinions on pure whimsy and of using his artistic prose to mask his real intention of shooing away the boogeyman of Marxism

(436) without true “conocimiento de causa” (ODC 31). Alone’s “toga de hombre de letras” functioned as a clever costume whose aura of isolated detachment hid Hernán

Díaz Arrieta’s association with “toda la oligarquía aristrocratizante” and his identity as

“uno de los ideólogos más burdos de la extrema derecha” (“Alone” 436). Guilty of both obsequiousness towards European culture and of trying to pass off his political fabrications as serious criticism, Alone became for Lihn the ultimate meteco, a

“falsificador al cuadrado” whose “inautenticidad y enmascaramiento” (Lastra 111) threatened to mire Chile in perpetual marginality due to the backwardness of his critical tastes and political intentions.

Lihn’s critique, which in 1964 was made in the public forum of the newspaper El

Siglo, became even more pressing after the coup, when the critical plurality and discussion of pre-1973 Chile was reduced to a single newspaper. In a context that had turned El Mercurio into an “imperio comunicacional” (Cánovas, “Hacia una histórica”

172), El Mercurio’s critics could advance their ideological agenda and economic interests among a growing number of “lectores dóciles en un país donde el monopolio del papel ha cedido al monopolio de los mass media” (Lihn, Sobre el anti-estructuralismo 21). Of

147 particular concern to Lihn was the writing of “Ignacio Valente,” the literary mask for the

Opus Dei priest José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, who in the late 1960s inherited Alone’s critical reign in El Mercurio. As a lecturer on Marxism for the military junta

(Subercaseaux 288), Ibáñez Langlois enjoyed a privileged relationship with the authoritarian powers. Valente acquired, in fact, a kind of dictatorial power in the world of

Chilean criticism, where he became a kind of “dictador ilustrado” (Díaz 51) who exercised “casi absoluta hegemonía” (Bianchi 59) and an “autoritarismo personal excesivo” (Lihn, Sobre el anti-estructuralismo 12).143 This relationship to both political and economic power was, however, masked by Valente’s adherence to “valores trascendentales” (Cánovas, “Hacia una histórica” 173), which allowed the critical to claim detachment from worldly interests and assume an a-political stance (Díaz 53). The claim that he never looked at the “color político” of a text in order to condemn or celebrate it (53) granted Valente a critical impunity that was particularly troubling in the context of a regime in which veiled ideological statements could have direct material and existential consequences for both critics and writers.

In various texts and critical venues published before and after the dictatorship,

Lihn would try to unmask Valente’s “transcendental values” as fictional constructs that not only hid the political and economic dimensions of his critical practice but also allowed him to consolidate his quasi-dictatorial power.144 Yet in the heart of the

143 Valente become the newspaper’s primary critic during the dictatorship and was the only critic with a regular column, which appeared every Sunday. In the context of a regime that placed ultimate value in the market as the regulator of culture, Valente’s opinions acquired the force of an immediate advertisement that could make or break literary fame (Díaz 51). As Cánovas notes, the power that Valente assumed in the cultural realm established a master-slave relationship with writers, who were compelled to court and flatter the critic in order to gain his attention (“Hacia una histórica” 173).

144 In his article “Artes y letras mercuriales,” Lihn argued, for example, that the “valores del espíritu” promulgated by El Mercurio’s critics were really status symbols or political instruments used to consolidate 148 dictatorship, La orquesta de cristal assumed the critical task of exposing those “spiritual values” as “mistificaciones que carecen de la inocencia que da la buena fe accessible incluso a los pícaros” (ODC 31). Lihn targeted, in particular, the “spiritual” conception of literature that allowed Valente to depict himself as a privileged interpreter with unique access to the “misterio de la poesía” (Ibáñez Langlois 88). As Gacitúa observes,

Valente’s personal and private understanding of language led to a vision of literature as the product of an inspired genius with a unique relationship to “lo inefable” (90). In La orquesta de cristal, Valente’s invisible, ineffable realm assumes literal form through the

“Sinfonía de Amor Absoluto,” which various critics in the novel interpret as the instantiation of some “belleza extraterrena” (ODC 118).

Evoking Valente, the critics in the first part of the novel similarly situate the symphony in “una especie de isla, patria pura del arte, que el escritor nombrado confunde con Citerea, reducto de Venus, y un poco más allá con alguno de los cielos de la tradición gnóstica o bien cualquiera de esos interestelares espacios vacíos formados de los ángeles que nos mientan las desaprensivas imágenes cristianas de la caótica ciudad de Dios” (36).

Trapped and isolated in a rarified and unearthly realm, the symphony assumes an aura of supreme mystery. The mystery is largely generated by the alleged impossibility of interpreting the divine, unearthly symphony with the material instruments of the crystal orchestra. As one of the critics in the novel claims, doing so would have violated “la ley de la imposibilidad de entremezclarse… la vida definitiva de los ángeles inorgánicos y la vida primitiva que sobrellevamos en la tierra” (30). Because a mystical understanding of

their ideological power (490). Written in 1984 and subject to the restrictions placed upon critical discussion during the dictatorship, that article remained, however, unpublished until 1997, much after Lihn’s death and the demise of the authoritarian regime.

149 the artwork can only lead us to “regiones a las que no podemos seguir por medio de la palabra” (43), interpreting the artwork requires some extra-linguistic perception of beauty acquired through esoteric knowledge or spiritual grace. Interpreting the symphony thus becomes an act of spiritual prestidigitation available only to a critic who can claim instantaneous and wordless entry to the ethereal island of Cythera. In the first part of the novel, the mystical understanding of both the artwork and of interpretation compels critics to draw on the most esoteric of fin-de-siècle mystical practices. In the space of authoritarian criticism, it granted special powers to the mercurial taste of critics like

Valente who could claim intuitive perception of literary beauty.

For Lihn, Valente construes literary criticism as a conjunction of taste and talent plus respect for the “mystery of poetry” (Sobre el anti-estructuralismo 23) because it grants him implicit authority. By turning art into a sacred phenomenon comprehensible only to a reduced critical priesthood, Valente encouraged an apotheosis of taste that secured him exclusive hold on his lonely, critical throne. In La orquesta de cristal Lihn would suggest that construing both literary genius and critical insight as God-given gifts was not only a mystification intended to buttress Valente’s sacred judgment but also an outright fiction. In the novel, Lihn exposes the fiction of artistic mystery through ironic quotation of Mallarmé’s dictum: “tout chose sacrée qui veut demeurer sacrée s’enveloppe de mystère” (ODC 117). For the critics in the novel, the mystery surrounding the artwork is not so much a product of divine inspiration as a result of complete lack of knowledge.

As Albornoz grudgingly concludes, if nobody is able to say anything about “Amor

Absoluto,” it is due to the fact that there is no available information about the symphony’s creator Roland de Glatigny, the musical score, or what the music actually

150 sounds like. Played by an invisible and inaudible orchestra, the symphony provides nothing but open space for wild speculation, which Albornoz fills with a torrent of questions that paint a fantastical portrait of de Glatigny as the secret disciple of the esoteric poet Stanislas de Guaita, as a criminal who murders his lover “por interpósito cuerpo astral,” as a madman who attempts to “identificarse con Dios,” and as a possible member of the Rosicrucian Order (29). All attempts to interpret and contextualize the symphony of “Absolute Love” prove to be no more than fictions spun out of nothingness, tales based not on evidence around which one can build consensus but on a single critic’s claims to private knowledge.

Projected onto the authoritarian world of impressionistic criticism, the accusation of fictional elaboration was particularly damning. In the midst of a regime invested in maintaining strict boundaries between literature and criticism, between fiction and a truth granted by either religious privilege or technical competence, painting impressionistic criticism as the fantastical whimsy of a single critic undermined Valente’s critical authority and cast doubts on his claims to a-political detachment. As with Alone, the claim that Valente’s “spiritual” detachment was a form of “enmascaramiento” was meant to expose the political dimensions of Valente’s critical practice, suggesting that behind his fictional claims lay yet another “crítico que usa de su imparcialidad como del puñal los amigos de Julio César” (ODC 30). If in Alone’s case, his critical costume perpetuated an old form of Latin American metequismo, in Valente’s case the tendency towards anachronism, mimetic repetition, and falsification had, in the midst of the dictatorship, the chilling capacity to both silence writers and to shut down the few spaces for critical reflection that had been left open by the regime. Valente’s power, hinted at in La orquesta

151 de cristal, became apparent a few years later during a small textual tussle between Lihn and Ibáñez Langlois that revealed the political dimensions of Valente’s veiled attacks against the critical discourses that resisted the dictatorship’s project. This time, the attacks would come not through Valente’s impressionistic column in the Sunday paper but through what seemed like a more “rigorous” text, signed by Ibáñez Langlois himself.

Published under Ibáñez Langlois’s own name, Sobre el estructuralismo purported to be “la primera versión integral del estructuralismo en lengua española” (Lihn, Sobre el anti-estructuralismo 3). It sought to provide a general overview of structuralist thought in linguistics, anthropology, and literary theory. The book, which first appeared in 1983, was immediately followed by Sobre el anti-estructuralismo de José Miguel Ibáñez

Langlois, an essay-length book in which Lihn attempted to refute what he would later call

“un libro de consulta para el oficialismo” (Díaz 51). As Lihn points out, it would not be the first time that Ibáñez Langlois published a “manual” intended to provide easy digestion of a complex theoretical topic for supporters of the regime. Ibáñez Langlois had once before published such a manual on Marxism, a topic that seemed much more politically explosive than structuralism. Yet Ibáñez Langlois’s attacks against structuralist criticism also had potentially significant political consequences. According to Lihn,

Sobre el estructuralismo was not so much an objective overview as a “diatriba tardía” against structuralism, which set Valente’s “spiritual” conception of literary beauty over a supposedly newfangled “science.” The diatribe was particularly dangerous when made in

Ibáñez Langlois’s own name, for it distanced his book from the “spontaneous” and

“asystematic” impressionism of his alter ego Valente, who at one point declared himself ignorant of “la jeringonza estructuralista” (quoted in Lihn, Sobre el anti-estructuralismo

152 15). Instead, Ibáñez Langlois used a more technical language as well as the methodological prestige of his identity as a priest-scholar in order to undermine the scientific and “objective” status of structuralist criticism. Especially damaging were the terms that Ibáñez Langlois used to discredit structuralism, as they imperiled both the agents and discourses that had taken up structuralism as one of the few critical options in the restricted world of authoritarian criticism.

Using the same strategy that Lihn had employed against impressionistic criticism in La orquesta de cristal, Ibáñez Langlois attempted to undercut structuralism by depicting it as a shameless fiction dressed up in the deceitful costume of an inoffensive and impartial science. One of the footnotes of La orquesta de cristal, which discusses the

“críticas negativas” that Pompier aimed against the structuralist theories of language inaugurated by Saussure, anticipates Ibáñez Langlois’s attack.145 In terms that echo

Pompier’s critiques, Ibáñez Langlois takes up arms against what he called “una legión de

‘críticos estructuralistas’ que no tienen el gusto ni el talento de Todorov, Jakobson o

Barthes y que por eso mismo se encuentran a sus anchas en el ‘estructuralismo’, ya que les entrega herramientas casi mecánicas de disección del texto literario al margen de la apreciación de su belleza” (Ibáñez Langlois 88). Like Pompier, who also rails against “el vicio de la abstracción al servicio de la mecánica” (ODC 132), Ibáñez Langlois chides second-rate critics in Chile for naively assimilating a series of “mechanical tools” whose scientific sheen obscures the fictional nature of structuralism’s linguistic system. In La

145 Footnote 35 of the novel details Pompier’s encounter in 1918 with Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale and outlines some of the critiques that Pompier aimed at Saussure’s work. The footnote claims that Pompier anticipated many of the negative assessments that rained down on Saussure years later. Ironically enough, Pompier’s critique also seems to have anticipated Ibáñez Langlois’s assessments of structuralism, which were published seven years after Lihn’s novel, thus providing what we might call an after-the-fact model for Lihn’s parody. 153 orquesta de cristal Pompier mocks that system as a kind of gothic fantasy, as “un espectro de nadie emplazado en la nada: la lengua independiente de quienes hacemos el uso pedestre o sublime de la misma nos hace hablar a todos a su amaño” (132). Utilizing a similar strategy, Ibáñez Langlois depicts structuralism’s theoretical constructs not just as

“filosofía errada” but as outright “ficciones” (74). In his book, structuralism is an

“ejercicio poético” (94) that borders “la literatura amena” (98) and Levi-Strauss nothing more than a “poeta culto y fantasioso,” author of a “novela de antropología-ficción” where “las pocas verisimilitudes que han descubierto en el dominio de la cultura flotan en un mar de fantasía y ensoñación” (94).

Ibáñez Langlois’s attack on the scientific status of structuralism was particularly troubling in a critical context where only “scientific” languages could avoid the charge of ideological mystification. Without the scientific alibi that allowed critical frameworks to circulate with impunity, structuralism became yet another suspect discourse, carrier of clandestine political intentions. As Ibáñez Langlois argues, it was “artificioso dar por

‘inofensiva’ o ‘puramente científica’ a la lingüística a partir de Saussure, Jakobson o

Bloomfield” (63). Presumably exposing its real intentions, Ibáñez Langlois depicts structuralism as a materialist philosophy intent on undermining the bases of religious and social institutions. Claiming that structuralism’s system of language devours “la realidad extralingüística” (81) and leaves behind a language without man, Ibáñez Langlois accuses structuralism of anti-humanism (53-63), “nihilism” (60), amorality (104), hostility towards the family and society (105), and ultimately paints structuralism as a direct heir of Marxist and Freudian thought.146 Such an attempt to link structuralism to the currents

146 The article 3.12 of the “Acta de los deberes y derechos constitucionales,” declared “que como una manera de proteger los valores fundamentales en que se basa la sociedad chilena, debe declararse ilícito y 154 of thought that had been violently censored during the dictatorship amounted to a deathblow at a discourse that was already regarded with caution by the regime’s supporters (Cánovas, Lihn 17). As Lihn would put it in Sobre el anti-estructuralismo,

Ibáñez Langlois had taken up the role of a lion-slayer; only the lion was, in this case, mendicant and blind (15).

If Gerardo de Pompier’s reaction to Saussure provides a kind of a priori parody of

Ibáñez Langlois’s arguments, the second part of the novel offers a glimpse into the economic and political context that made structuralism particularly vulnerable in the midst of the military regime. Unlike the archaic impressionistic critics, who in the first part of the novel wax poetic with few restrictions on their mystical interpretations, the

“scientific” critics in the second part of the novel have to contend with the growing threat of Nazi forces and increasingly precarious means of survival, made possible by the impersonal “Fundación X” set up by Royce’s heirs. The Foundation’s demand for academic excellence and technical competence generates a proliferation of “trabajos sesudos y aplicados pero sin el menor interés en sí mismos… [que] tienen sin embargo el mérito de ejemplificar el alto nivel de preparación intelectual alcanzado por la

Fundación” (ODC 72). In a newly technocratic and totalitarian era, the technical and applied analyses of the young critics and musicologists (72) constitute their only means of survival amid diminishing resources for criticism. Seeking to avoid taxes and increase the prestige of Foundation X, Royce’s heirs expand the center for Musical Arts and

contrario al ordenamiento institucional de la República todo acto de personas o grupos destinados a difundir doctrinas que atenten contra la familia, propugnen la violencia o una concepción de la sociedad undada en la lucha de clases, o que sean contrarias al régimen constituido” (quoted in Brunner 83). As Brunner notes, the article was later incorporated into the constitution. In this light, Ibáñez Langlois’s description of structuralism cast it as a subversive discourse immediately subject to censorship.

155 Sciences while neglecting the orchestra and cutting off support to the scholarship recipients, who come mostly from poor countries or former European colonies (71). The ensuing competition leads to an improvement in the quality of interpretations: one of the resulting interpretations by the Chilean meteco Eugenio Rodríguez is even called “sobrio y exhaustivo, brillante – casi capaz de hacerse oír en los medios académicos” (73). In the end, however, the Foundation provides little protection for the orchestra’s “intérpretes,” whose suspicious connections to Africa and to Jewish culture subject them to violence at the hands of the SS police.147

The second part of the novel functions, in other words, as the distorted reflection of the political circumstances that in the late 1970s turned structuralist criticism into one of the few if precarious means of sustaining a critical discourse. Amid the threats of censorship by the regime, its scientific sheen and technical jargon made it possible to present structuralism as “inoffensive” or “purely scientific” while still providing some semblance of critical modernity that could grant it a voice in the centers of discursive power. Being able to claim modernity and academic rigor was particularly important in a context where foreign foundations had come to replace the Chilean university as the source of livelihood for many critics. As Jeffrey Puryear notes, after the coup the independent research centers that had emerged in the 1960s became a haven for displaced scholars seeking refuge in institutions not controlled by the military and one of the few remaining sites of critical thought (39).148 Independent research centers, however, were

147 The word “intérprete” in Spanish can mean both “musician” and “critic.” In the second part of the novel, Lihn often uses the term ambivalently to refer to both the musicians who play the glass instruments of the crystal orchestra and to the critics who provide interpretations of the orchestra and its music.

148 Alternative research centers like the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), the Centro de Indagación y Expresión Cultural y Artistica (CENECA), the Instituto Chileno de Estudios 156 largely dependent on foreign donors like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, which imposed the ruthless logic of their economic structure and research standards upon critics. Like the impersonal Fundación X, foreign donors instituted new international standards of critical excellence that in Brunner’s words subjected Chilean scholars to

“three Anglo-Saxon formulas: ‘publish or perish,’ ‘no nonsense,’ and ‘accountability’”

(quoted in Puryear 53). In addition to establishing implacable deadlines and new demands for productivity, foreign donors also tended to value science over ideology, empirical studies over literary writing, dispassionate research over impassioned critiques, the social sciences over the humanities (53). Like the metecos in La orquesta de cristal, who flaunt their acquired knowledge as a sign of gratitude to the impersonal Fundación

X, critics in Chile gravitated towards the technical languages valued by the foreign donors on which scholars depended for their livelihoods.

As Lihn suggests in both La orquesta de cristal and Sobre el anti-estructuralismo, adopting “blind” technical languages and demonstrating subservience to new international research standards was not enough to guarantee the survival and vitality of critical discourse. At the end of Sobre el anti-estructuralismo Lihn gestures towards the continuing effects of censorship, reminding Ibáñez Langlois that he could not “emplazar al representante de la filosofía perenne a un debate público en igualdad de condiciones”

(22). As Lihn argues, the creation of black lists continued to be a reality, one that Valente obviated in his Sunday column and that Ibáñez Langlois enabled with his attacks on structuralist criticism (22). Despite their benevolent façade, foreign foundations and newly disciplined academic institutions were both unable and unwilling to guarantee the

Humanísticos (ICHEH), and the Academia de Humanismo Cristiano became some of the few remaining sites available to critical thought in Chile. 157 survival not just of structuralism but of the plurality of discourses and meanings on which a truly critical discourse depended. In the end, even Fundación X in La orquesta de cristal caves in to Von Abetz, the ambassador of the Third Reich in Paris who demands an interpretation of Wagner’s “Percival” for a select group of German officials. As

“Heinrich von Linderhöfer” notes in his narration of the crystal orchestra’s final concert, turning down the “invitation” from Von Abetz would have subjected Fundación X to an investigation. Further scrutiny threatened to reveal both its attempts to repatriate various

Jewish musicians to non-belligerent countries and the fact that it harbored “en el seno… de su precaria impunidad” musicians from French Africa and from various occupied countries, including a distant cousin of Franz Kafka, escaped from the Prague ghetto

(ODC 81). Although the denouement of the Wagner concert is never explicitly narrated,

Von Linderhöfer’s narration ends with the sound of German shepherds announcing the irruption of the “mensajeros de la muerte” who would turn the final concert into a swan song, suddenly silenced before Percival’s final redemption (95).

As Lihn put the final period on La orquesta de cristal, there seemed to be no end in sight to the critical darkness amid the metequismo of authoritarian criticism, torn between the absurd interpretations of impressionistic critics beholden to the patriarchs of

Europe and a university criticism in thrall to the technical rigor of North American academic standards. Yet there still remained a third option represented by a “tradición independiente” sustained by various “intérpretes” of the crystal orchestra (74). Faced with the neglect of Fundación X and the encroachment of totalitarian powers, the independent tradition in La orquesta de cristal keeps the orchestra alive through

“unofficial” concerts and by replacing broken instruments with funds from their own lean

158 pockets (75). As the last of the orchestra’s critics, Von Linderhöfer both preserves and perpetuates that tradition through a narration that seems to survive the destruction of the orchestra at the end of the novel. Von Linderhöfer’s narration, which also opens the collection of commentaries in La orquesta de cristal, grants the crystal orchestra a second existence and acts as a form of negative opposition to the destructive forces of Nazism.

Like Von Linderhöfer, an “humorista descreído y sombrío que se ocultaba hasta de su propia sombra” (76), Lihn too would serve as the critical narrator of an independent tradition that would take the critical “espíritu de negación” (76) out of the university and the official organs of the mass media and into the semi-private, improvised world of the artistic underground. Eschewing the boundaries imposed by the economic and political powers on the realm of culture Lihn, along with a cohort of fellow writers, artists, and critics, would keep alive a critical utopia whose precarious and undisciplined disregard for discursive boundaries would briefly function as a node of resistance against the disciplinary actions of authoritarian culture.

Under the Radar: Critical Utopias in the Dictatorship

On December 28, 1977, Don Gerardo de Pompier once again emerged from the shadows, this time in flesh and blood, to deliver a surprising reading at the Instituto

Chileno-Norteamericano. The reading, titled “Lihn y Pompier en el Día de los

Inocentes,” brought Pompier out of the dim outlines of text and onto the limelight of the stage, which he shared with Lihn in a multimedia performance commemorating Holy

Innocents’ Day. The performance began rather conventionally, with Lihn reading his poems from a lectern. Yet before he could finish that reading, Lihn was interrupted,

159 ushered out of the stage, and replaced with another poet “injustamente olvidado” (Lastra

121). Pompier, dressed in spectacles and a cravat, emerged in Lihn’s place and read some of his modernista poems while a documentary film about his life in turn-of-the-century

Paris rolled in the background. Immediately after reading his poems, Pompier disappeared and again reemerged from behind the scenes, this time riding something of a hybrid between a lectern, a coffin, and an electric chair, from which he delivered a dramatic speech that justified Herod for the massacre of the innocents (121).

The 1977 performance was not the first of Pompier’s appearances around

Santiago de Chile. Since 1974, Lihn had taken on the guise of Pompier in at least two other readings, including one at the Centro de Estudios Humanísticos, where Lihn, impersonating Pompier and some of the other critics in the text, read from La orquesta de cristal (121). Like the novel, Lihn’s performances parodied and critiqued the archaic nature of prevailing discourses, exposing the violence and repression veiled by their florid and archaic languages. “Lihn y Pompier en el día de los inocentes” thus played a key role in Lihn’s literary-critical work, perpetuating and extending Pompier’s critical function, though it also embodied and brought together a broader community that crafted an independent critical tradition on the margins of Chilean culture. As Lihn would later tell Pedro Lastra, the performance emerged from the imaginative interaction of various discourses, media, artists, and critics, whose collaborations resulted in the performance, a video, and the illustrated book Lihn y Pompier (121).149 “Lihn y Pompier” was

149 The collaborators in this performance included filmmaker Carlos Flores, critic Adriana Valdés, visual artist Eugenio Dittborn, and poets Jorge Ramírez and Alfonso Vásquez. As Lihn notes in an interview with Lastra, the idea for “Lihn y Pompier” emerged from a conversation with Ramírez and Vásquez, who had invited Lihn to participate in a poetry reading. Lihn declined the invitation, and asked instead to read something by “El autor desconocido.” The idea to develop a performance around the character of Pompier soon developed into a multimedia collaboration among various writers and artists in Santiago (Lastra 121).

160 representative of a broader cultural practice that emerged during the dictatorship and that later came to be known as the “escena de avanzada” or—more broadly—“el discurso de la crisis” (Cánovas, “Hacia una histórica” 165).150

As Cánovas describes it, the discurso de la crisis was a loose collection of related practices by artists, writers, philosophers, and critics who joined theoretical speculation with artistic experimentation in order to create an alternative intellectual space free from the restrictions imposed by the dictatorship (166). Like “Lihn y Pompier,” the alternative discourse outlined by Cánovas was carried out in rented halls, through ephemeral performances on the street, upon the artists’ bodies, in the privacy of individual homes, through homemade or photocopied texts. Situating itself on the margins of official culture, it circulated through “microcircuitos alternativos” that opened up new spaces for syntaxes and meanings otherwise blocked by the regime (Richard, Margins 72) and blurred the boundaries between discourses, genres, and artistic media (Bianchi 59).151

Among the boundaries it ignored were the divisions between literature and criticism created by the dictatorship’s fragmentation of the literary-critical realm. The convergence of theory and practice became one of the signature elements of the escena de avanzada, which encouraged collaborations between sociologists and performance artists, writers

150 The term “escena de avanzada,” coined by Richard, refers to a group of artists and artistic practices that emerged during the initial years of the dictatorship. Cánovas’s “discurso de la crisis” is a broader term that covers both the artistic practices and the critical works produced by the “escena de avanzada.” Neither term, however, refers to an organized “movement” or style but covers, instead, a loose collection of related practices that circulated around urban centers—particularly Santiago—in response to the cultural void left by the repressive strategies of the dictatorship. In the pages below, I use the term “literary-critical avant- garde” to refer, specifically, to the literary and critical practices that emerged from the “escena de avanzada.”

151 Key players in the escena de avanzada include the artist collective CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte), the theater group ICTUS, Adriana Valdés, Eugenio Dittborn, and Carlos Flores, Ronald Kay, Nelly Richard, Lotty Rosenfeld, Raul Zurita. The publications CAL and Separata were created with the explicit purpose of launching an assault upon the laws that marked boundaries between disciplines and specializations (Richard La insubordinación 42).

161 and literary critics, art critics and visual artists, and allowed participants to move fluidly between these roles.152 Lihn, for one, penned literary works and directed performances like “Lihn y Pompier,” but also wrote critical works, organized reading workshops with literary critics Adriana Valdés and Carmen Foxley, and led a seminar on poetics and semiotics, which played a key role in the escena de avanzada (Cánovas, “Hacia una histórica” 167). As Pablo Oyarzún puts it, erasing the boundaries between different artistic genres brought with it “una imbricación riesgosa (y utópica) del discurso crítico y la producción de arte, de la teoría y de la práctica” (44).

The utopian dimensions of the intersection between artistic production and critical discourse would be key in Nelly Richard’s descriptions of the escena de avanzada. As she notes in La insubordinación de los signos, the underground artistic scene during the dictatorship redrew “utopías críticas” through aesthetic practices that subjected established categories of thought to intense cultural revision (25). The avant-garde’s

“critical utopias” were, however, not just a product of the critical writing that emerged alongside artistic practices or even of the new partnerships between critics and artists.

Rather, they were brought about by the “radicalismo crítico” of the avant-garde’s experimental languages (39), which recognized that art and literature possessed critical value and that criticism could make use of the techniques and strategies of art. The art and literature of the cultural avant-garde came to be seen, in fact, as an important critical discourse that stepped in to fill the critical void produced by the disciplinary actions of

152 Among the many partnerships between artists and intellectuals in the “escena de avanzada” one could cite, for example, the collaborations between the sociologist Fernando Balcells, the artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, the poet Raúl Zurita, and the novelist Diamela Eltit in CADA; the participation of literary critic Adriana Valdés in the performance “Lihn y Pompier”; and the key role that critics Nelly Richard and Ronald Kay played in the visual arts scene during the late 1970s and early 80s.

162 the dictatorship.153 For both Richard and Cánovas, Lihn was a primary representative of this form of critical thinking, which he enacted in works like La orquesta de cristal and

“Lihn y Pompier” (Cánovas, Lihn 16; Richard, La insubordinación 25). While subjecting the monolingual, disciplined, and disciplinarian discourses of official culture to an intense critique, Lihn’s works also revealed—according to Richard—the lack of a critical apparatus capable of accounting for the critical dimensions of their aesthetic practices

(Margins 133). By declaring previous interpretive schemes obsolete, works like Lihn’s reiterated the need to create a critical discourse that Chile had presumably lacked until then (133). This gave rise to new forms of critical writing that borrowed artistic techniques like collage, montage, and intertextuality from literary and artistic works and adopted new interpretive frameworks suitable to the “critical radicalism” of the avant- garde’s works.

The avant-garde works of the 1970s thus established a dialectical relationship between literature and criticism that brought forth what Richard calls a “nueva escena de escritura.” In its new critical function, the literature of the escena de avanzada encouraged the emergence of new critical writing that could overcome the limitations of the critical languages that had been prevalent until then in Chile. In order to adequately interpret the new literary and artistic works, the emergent critical scene borrowed heavily from the writings of Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, the Frankfurt School, as well as other psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and post-structuralist theories. As Lihn observes, such

153 In their historical accounts of literary criticism in Chile, both Cánovas and Subercaseaux cite the avant- garde scene of the 70s and 80s as an example of the new modes of critical thinking during the dictatorship. In her account of Chilean literature from 1973 to 1990, Soledad Bianchi also emphasizes the critical function that literature served, citing Lihn’s notion that poetry is “una forma del espíritu crítico y de la lucidez o sería preferable que no fuera nada” (56).

163 authors tended to pass under the regime’s radar and allowed the new critical discourse to sidestep the effects of censorship.154 The critical avant-garde’s new theoretical frameworks also allowed it to contest dominant interpretive strategies and reflect on the dislocations and breakages that the disciplinary strategies of the regime had produced in language. The new critical writing did not, however, adopting these theoretical languages systematically. Rather, it incorporated them through the literary and artistic techniques of fragmentation, assemblage, and pastiche (133). Through a hybrid critical language “que lleva jirones de toda clase de discursos” (18), the cultural avant-garde placed itself outside the disciplined circuits of authoritarian criticism, challenging both the emphasis on specialization within the university as well as the archaic values structure and lack of theoretical sophistication associated with impressionistic criticism. Its “impurity” and

“theoretical heterodoxy” (71) broke the disciplinary compartmentalization that had divided authoritarian criticism into a technical and a literary criticism, creating instead an alternative “zona de convergencias e intersecciones de saberes mutilados y de disciplinas rotas por el in-disciplinamiento de los géneros” (72).

At least as Richard describes it, the escena de avanzada was indeed utopian, crafting in the no-spaces of the regime a previously inexistent critical discourse, capable of both deconstructing and disregarding the disciplinary constructions of the regime and of all totalizing discourses. As she depicts it in La insubordinación de los signos, its critical utopias

alzaron sus precisos y preciosos vocabularios rebeldes a los discursos totalizantes del pensamiento ideológico… fueron varias las obras que

154 As Lihn notes, “A nadie se le ocurre buscar en el Índice a un señor que se llama Walter Benjamin, porque era demasiado sofisticado hacerlo… o pensar que Roland Barthes, por ejemplo, había sido simpatizante de la izquierda francesa y del Partido Comunista Francés” (“Doce años” 185).

164 buscaron deslegitimar las tradiciones del Pasado usando el subterfugio de denunciar—parodiándolo—lo que cada disciplina había ritualizado como herencia y patrimonio de lenguaje y convenciones (25).

With its parodic imitation of critical languages and its reflection on the persistence of nineteenth century forms of thought, La orquesta de cristal is a paradigmatic example of the critical utopias outlined by Richard. Used as a critical lens on the cultural avant- garde, Lihn’s critical fiction nevertheless suggests that its critical utopias were not entirely unproblematic. Despite Richard’s romantic portrayal of the escena de avanzada and its heroic resistance to inherited disciplinary conventions, the literary-critical discourse that it crafted continues to glint in the prismatic reflections of Lihn’s La orquesta de cristal. There, it appears not so much as an emancipatory language than as yet another métèque discourse subject to the same shortcomings as other critical languages in

Chile.

The new critical writing described by Richard was often self-published in photocopied multimedia pamphlets, which echo in La orquesta de cristal where the fictional Gabriel de Shaumard publishes a similiarly ephemeral analysis of the orchestra.

Like many of the critical works published and distributed by the writers and critics of the avanzada, Shaumard’s interpretations initially appear in “un inencontrable folleto” illustrated with numerous photographs (ODC 60). The text quickly becomes a

“curiosidad de las librerías de vanguardia” (60) but is rescued by the editors of La orquesta de cristal, who gloss Shaumard’s ruthless critique of the orchestra’s North

American patron, of impressionistic criticism, and of the derivative nature of local artistic production. Echoing Lihn’s own critiques, Shaumard denigrates the Yankee mogul whose wealth supports the crystal orchestra (61), mocks the “apresurada[s] pluma[s] de cacatúa

165 hispanoamericana” who pen the impressionistic commentaries of the orchestra, and disparages the symphony itself (66), claiming that it fails to reach the “heights” attained by Debussy and French harmonic impressionism (67). Shaumard’s attempts to carry out

“una lectura crítica de las partituras de la sinfonía” are, however, immediately attacked by another commentator, who classifies them as a presumptuous show of critical incompetence (67). Non-fictional commentators would direct similar critiques against the new critical scene in Chile, faulting it for its “digresiones técnicas… totalmente improvisadas” (ODC 68), its preference for high culture, and its bias towards French cultural products. As Cánovas remarks with regards to the cultural avant-garde, the theoretical speculation contained in its literary-critical works was not always “bien fundamentada”; its experimentation with expressive forms was done “a medio camino”; its philosophical project was “realizado con errores”; and it placed “un énfasis demasiado rotundo en la cultura de élite y el discurso crítico francés” (“Hacia una histórica” 166-

167).

In its fluidity between discourses, borrowings from European critical theory, willful marginality and lack of discipline the cultural avant-garde was, in other words, eerily reminiscent of the métèque discourse mocked in both La orquesta de cristal and in

Pompier’s various readings around Santiago de Chile. One might argue, in fact, that as

Pompier and his cohorts pontificated from the pages of the novel, their language was parodying not only official authoritarian discourse but also the presumably “critical” discourse developed by the avant-garde scene in which Lihn participated. As Cánovas suggests, La orquesta de cristal can also be read as a parody of the “galicismo mental” of a critical scene that attempted to compose fragmentary works in light of French post-

166 structuralist theory (Lihn 16) but that ultimately fell into relative obscurity and silence during the years of the military regime. As with other critical discourses in Chile and

Latin America, the undisciplined bricolage of literary registers and imported critical languages restricted the critical works of the cultural avant-garde to a small number of

“iniciados” (Subercaseaux 280) and minimized the cultural impact that they had during the dictatorship (Cánovas, Lihn 18). Despite the ambition to wrest spaces away from official discourse (Richard, La insubordinación 56), the purportedly heroic uprising of the avant-garde’s rebellious languages remained—like the symphony composed for the crystal orchestra—“una incierta toma de posición vagamente subversiva pero sin norte ni guía” (ODC 68). As both Lihn and Adriana Valdés observe, its critical and aesthetic strategies were often incomprehensible to the general public and removed the avant-garde scene from “la vía pública” (Lihn, Eugenio Téllez n.p.). The resulting marginality, which

Richard celebrates for its capacity to provide alternatives to authoritarian culture, posed extraordinary difficulties for writers and critics attempting to put literary-critical discourse into circulation.155 La orquesta de cristal continues to emphasize the difficulties of discursive precariousness through the figures of the crystal orchestra and its commentaries. For their “debilidad que a su vez explica lo precario o deshilachado del tejido sonoro” (ODC 68) threatened to sink the orchestra and its commentaries into the same inconsequent silence as the literary-critical works of the “discurso de la crisis.”

155 As Richard herself observes, the effects of censorship and repression and the meager institutional supports available to the escena de avanzada posed significant difficulties for the magazines that published the work of the avanzada and condemned them to relatively short life-spans (Margins 134-5). Bianchi also highlights the fact that the young authors writing in the first years of the dictatorship often had to self- publish their works in poorly distributed and precarious editions often circulated by hand (53). Gacitúa similarly notes that although artisanal productions became an aesthetic choice during the dictatorship, that choice was determined by economic and social factors (68). 167 In interviews, literary works, and critical writings, Lihn never ceased to insist on the dystopian dimensions of precariousness and marginality, which contributed to what he often called the “ninguneo” or silencing of Latin American literary-critical discourse.

As Adriana Valdés notes, Lihn’s texts used a bricoleur’s scrapbook aesthetic to reflect on the precariousness of his cultural and intellectual milieu (Enrique Lihn 9). Using the techniques of fragmentation, simulacrum, and pastiche, Lihn reproduced not just dominant or metropolitan discourses such as post-structuralist theory but minor genres of literary-critical discourse in Latin America. As he notes in an interview with Lastra,

Creo que me propuse sobre todo realizar una homología de otro tipo entre el texto y la situación; dar cuenta—a través de la forma rudimentaria de producción del texto—de la precariedad y la futilidad de esa situación. Es por eso que allí el bricoleur no trabaja con intertextualidades prestigiosas sino más bien, en general, con el detritus de las viejas literaturas, con algunos restos del modernismo, del decadentismo, del simbolismo. O sea, que para aludir a Hispanoamérica hay que hacerlo desde la precariedad cultural de la que venimos y que el discurso histórico perpetúa. (103)

Embodied in “el estilo pompier,” Lihn’s technique became a way of reflecting on the marginality of Latin American literary-critical discourse and its tendency to emerge “del bolígrafo pero también del plumón que invita a subrayar viejos libros, pero además de los periódicos del día en la medida en que unos y otros engranan, pues la vigencia de la caducidad es ilimitada, como lo pueban libros, y artículos, editoriales, entrevistas de prensa, declaraciones” (“Entretelones” 583). For La orquesta de cristal Lihn pillaged, in particular, all those “trabajos destinados a la inedición” (“Doce años” 185) that have characterized Latin American intellectual life: the impressionistic article, the crónica, and the “undisciplined” essay. Reproducing such marginal critical forms became a way of both salvaging them from oblivion and reflecting on the social, political, and cultural reasons behind their decidedly unheroic and unromantic marginality.

168 In other words, Lihn plays not on a major but on a minor key, taking us out for stroll into the margins. Instead of exalting them for their subversive power Lihn insists on their precariousness, poverty, and insufficiency in order to highlight the local and global hierarchies of discursive value that have contributed to the ninguneo of Latin America’s purportedly minor discourses. Lihn’s critique is directed, however, not just at the discourses that presumed to possess legitimacy and authority—such as El Mercurio’s

“spiritual” criticism and a university criticism that boasted technical competence—but also at his own. The charge of metequismo, which frequently seems like a weapon wielded against dominant discourses, was also a form of self-vigilance. In Valdés’s words, Lihn metequismo was also an instrument of critical “hara-kiri” (Valdés, Enrique

Lihn 29) aimed at preventing “toda comodidad retórica por donde pudiera colarse alguna ilusión metafísica, algún fuego fatuo, alguna pompa sublime” (34). Lihn, in fact, forged a whole aesthetics out of his own metequismo, openly flaunting it in interviews and essays and invoking it as a form of self-parody that exposed his own métèque critical pretentions. Lihn had no qualms about acknowledging his own metequismo or that of La orquesta de cristal, which he openly called “afrancesada” (quoted in Lastra 103). In

“Nacimiento, desarrollo e implicaciones de Don Gerardo de Pompier, el resumidero,”

Lihn admits that he embarked on his pilgrimage to France in 1975 with a parodic attitude but also with naive enthusiasm. Having arrived with the original manuscript of La orquesta de cristal, Lihn tried to publish the novel in France and even fell into the metequismo of adapting La orquesta de cristal to the tastes of French readers, but was ultimately unsuccessful in granting it international appeal.156 The novel has never been

156 As Lihn notes, he both changed Pompier’s name (see footnote 115) and also added more footnotes to the novel at the suggestion of the Argentinean writer Héctor Bianciotti, who was then living in Paris. Bianciotti 169 published into any language and was not re-edited until 2014, almost forty years after its initial publication.157 True to its own aesthetic, Lihn’s would remain, for many years minor, ninguneado in the international republic of letters, apparently fated to become one of those “trabajos destinados a la inedición que se estaban deteriorando hasta físicamente” (Lihn, “Doce años” 185).

In the grotesque “muecas” of Pompier, von Linderhöfer, Enrique Marin, Germán

Lihn, and the other métèque alter-egos in La orquesta de cristal, we hear Lihn’s silent laughter at his own participation in a literary-critical scene trying to catch up with metropolitan critical discourse but condemned to the dark corners of minor literatures.158

Lihn’s laughter also echoes critically against anyone who falls into the “ingenuidad culposa… de constituirse (con ‘buena fe y mala conciencia’ a veces, y a veces sólo de mala fe) como hablantes autonomos, como portadores legítimos” (Valdés, Enrique Lihn

37). Lihn’s self-critical metequismo functions, on the one hand, as a way of mocking the absurd pretensions of Latin American discourses that attempt to constitute themselves as legitimate by distancing themselves from purportedly minor forms of literary-critical language. By emphasizing the ridiculous “mimetismo, inadecuación y falsedad” (Lastra

11) of Latin American literary-critical discourse, Lihn also exposes, on the other hand, the falsehood of model discourses that try to consolidate their authority, veiling the

had made the suggestion to Lihn thinking of the novel’s potential reception in France (“Nacimiento” 562).

157 The Chilean publishing house Editorial Hueders published a new edition of La orquesta de cristal in 2014. In contrast to its initial, silent reception, the new edition of the novel seems to have caused a ruckus, eliciting numerous reviews and blog entries that highlight the parallels between the silence of the cristal orchestra in the novel and the silence in which Lihn’s novel had fallen until now.

158 As Cánovas describes it: “Al parodiar ciertos lenguajes críticos, el discurso de Lihn toma la figura de la mascara, el doble, la mueca. Es esta imagen ambivalente lo que permite al lector burlarse del pretensioso proyecto del Autor de este Libro: escribir una antinovela desde el horizonte cultural de la semiótica francesa” (Lihn 38). 170 inauthenticity of their own language. In “Entretelones técnicos de mis novelas,” Lihn describes the meteco’s critical capacity to unmask the model discourse through his sometimes naive or unwitting use of “pseudosematic mimicry.” Using a term from biology, Lihn compares Pompier to inoffensive animals that mimic the marks of a predator. Like the butterfly Caligo Prometheus, whose wings simulate the eyes and nose of an owl, Pompier’s furrowed brow, spectacles, and dress coat are attempts to imitate

el símbolo atterrador de Minerva, la lechuza que, como la palabra establecida es un ave de presa. Lo que importa en el caso de Pompier es la flagrante insuficiencia del camuflaje que le obliga a exagerar su identidad mimetica con el modelo al punto de hacerlo irrisorio y extender a la lechuza misma, por contagio, la vulnerabilidad de su propio enmascaramiento. Una mala imitación, se diría, desarticula el misterio sin el cual se atasca el mecanismo del aterramiento. (583)

The inadequate, naive, or belated adoption of an authoritative language allows the meteco, in other words, to expose the intimidating performance by which a dominant discourse imposes itself as legitimate. As a footnote in La orquesta de cristal observes,

“los profanos también logran desenmascarar a quien ha fingido tal o cual conocimiento sobre cual o tal materia, sin poseerlo” (151).

In their insufficient or precarious mockery of an autonomous and allegedly legitimate critical discourse, Latin America’s profane—that is, vulgar or naive—critical languages thus expose the spuriousness of North American and European critical languages. The various “rimadores y polígrafos” in La orquesta de cristal thus function much like Rubén Darío, whom the French writer and critic Jean Cassou once called an

“ingenuo venido desde la profundidad de sus trópicos para enriquecer con una mirada nueva nuestro viejo patrimonio histórico, artístico y cultural” (quoted in ODC 100).

Instead of buttressing the sober authority of European critical discourse, the metecos’

171 naive and enthusiastic reproduction of European discourse exposes “el énfasis, la ampulosidad, la prosopopeya, en la literatura de la época; la vacuidad también, la vanilocuencia, y una series de características que están en el modelo también y, por cierto, en la repetición son patéticos” (Lihn, “Entretelones” 193). Subject to delayed repetition in a “minor” critical archive, European critical discourse proves to be no less métèque, no less pompous, fraudulent and artificial than Latin American critical discourse. La orquesta de cristal thus echoes the strategies of Eugenio Téllez’s painting, which Lihn describes as “una pintura gozosa, orgásmica y divertida, hecha de la riqueza de combinaciones de materiales ‘pobres’; lanzada como una red muy bien adiestrada al mar de la precariedad latinoamericana y—ya lo dije—desdoblada burlescamente, en la ridícula autosuficiencia de la mirada europea” (Eugenio Téllez n.p.). As in Téllez’s painting, the “poverty” of critical discourse is what provides the “richness” in La orquesta de cristal: the are no real jewels here, but only the tinkle and glint of glass breaking under a demolishing laughter that turns all crystalline, self-sufficient discourses to refuse, ruin, rubbish.

With its outmoded mimicry of critical languages, La orquesta de cristal thus functions as the analogue of a Latin American critical discourse whose critical potential lies in its very fraudulence and illegitimacy. Undertaking something of a salvage operation for old forms of Latin American criticism, the novel reproduces all the white critical noise in letters, essays, pamphlets, monographs, crónicas, and other “literary” miscellany, which had been silenced by the efforts to constitute a “legitimate” and

“autonomous” Latin American critical discourse. In a novel where “todas las antigüedades (legítimas o ilegítimas) nos parecen igualmente dignas de toda

172 conservación” (ODC 107), Latin America’s “rudimentary” critical forms assume new critical power for their capacity to reveal the artificiality and fictionality of all critical discourse, even the most “rigorous” and “scientific.” As if La orquesta de cristal were a textual version of the Roche aux Quatre Vents—the castle that houses the crystal orchestra—it offers us “un vertiginoso escenario en el que se han dado cita para alternar en la armonía o armonizarse en la disonancia todos los estilos de todas las épocas” (18).

On the collector’s stage, the anachronistic shards of legitimate and illegitimate, belletristic and technical languages acquire the aesthetic sheen of nostalgic trinkets or conservation pieces. Dissociated from the contexts and gestures that granted them power, those critical languages—like old tomes, library busts, and suits of armor—become subject to a mocking gaze capable of seeing their “mecanismo de aterramiento,” the manufactured nature of their transitory dominance.159

Lihn’s recuperation of Latin America’s “archaic” critical discourse thus reveals the critical power of an undifferentiated realm of letters whose undisciplined amalgam of the literary and the critical, of various styles, forms, and languages, predates the alleged dawn of a proper critical discourse in the 1960s. For Lihn, the exaggerated mimeticism, the overwrought belletristic style or dry technicality in the “prehistoric” forms of Latin

American criticism makes them exemplary instances of a discourse in which the literary and the critical are indistinguishable from each other. As he contends in various essays and interviews, literature was an intrinsically critical procedure, a “theoretical” language

(“Doce años” 199) capable of revealing the “inautenticidad congénita” of language

159 As Gacitúa notes in his analysis of Lihn’s “temporal investigations,” “Los estilos literarios que han pasado de moda… ponen en evidencia las convenciones, los estereotipos, los prejuicios de una época. Lo que ‘pasa a la historia’ deja en evidencia una característica de todo lo histórico: su mortalidad, su precariedad, su carácter aleatorio y artificioso” (226).

173 (“Entretelones” 574). Through an awareness of its own fabrication, its unnaturalness and artificiality, literature constitutes

una instancia de honradez que obliga a reconocer en el acto de escribir el hecho de que se está escribiendo… o sea, mostrar cómo el discurso aparentemente funciona en una dirección pero va en otra; está realizando ciertas operaciones clandestinas el tipo que habla; convenciendo; está persuadiendo acerca de cosas que son obviamente mentiras y que deben quedar inscritas como tales en el texto. (“Doce años” 199)

La orquesta de cristal is one such “instance of honesty,” revealing through the deficiencies of its critical discourse the “clandestine operations” by which various critical discourses censored others in their attempt to impose themselves as legitimate. Unlike those discourses, La orquesta de cristal continues to proclaim not the constitution of a legitimate Latin American critical discourse, but its very absence, its dissolution in a heterogeneous, undisciplined din of discourses illegitimately struggling for dominance.

Like the “Sinfonía de Amor Absoluto,” the novel provides an “instancia de objetividad desmusicalizadora que se sirve del ruido para trazarla desde el reverso del sonido, por entre el dibujo fantasmal de una música por hacerse” (ODC 73). In the purported white noise of Latin America’s improvised critical forms, La orquesta de cristal draws the outlines of a critical discourse but declares it unfinished, open, and in process.

Only in Latin America’s “utopía negativa, donde el triunfo constante del discurso vacío, de la cháchara torrencial ha clausurado toda otra forma de hacer uso de la palabra”

(Lastra 109) could one craft such a critical utopia: a critical discourse that emerges from its purported inexistence, from the phantasmatic image of an (un)constituted,

(il)legitimate (lack of) discipline. Lihn’s critical utopia, spectrally present in La orquesta de cristal and projected unto the alleged prehistory of Latin American criticism, also made a fleeting, almost ghostly appearance in the literary and artistic works of the

174 cultural avant-garde. To borrow the interpretation of Eugenio Ramírez, another fictional meteco in the novel, the “deficiencies” of the pre-disciplinary Latin American realm of

“letters” provided “los gérmenes de una actualidad prematura” (ODC 73). They served as seeds for a contemporary literary-critical scene paradoxically enabled by an authoritarian regime that interrupted the constitution of a legitimate Latin American criticism and thus allowed for the continuation of that undisciplined and precarious bricolage of discourses.

The military regime would thus perpetuate, in Chile, Latin America’s status as a “paraíso de la precariedad” (Lihn, Eugenio Téllez n.p.), as a “tierra prometida del fraude” (ODC

139). Installed in such a negative utopia, the literary-critical avant-garde in Chile would once again lay claim to an “impressionistic” Latin American tradition that validated the scrapbook technique of a naive reader prone to borrow, falsify, and misuse all the languages in the literary-critical archive, “aún las menos autorizadas” (ODC 139).

Through Pompier and his fellow “impostores y charlatanes” (139), Lihn would continue to resist all attempts to legitimize such a critical tradition in the voice of an authorized discourse, a métèque impulse that the literary-critical avant-garde could perhaps not resist.

No Commonplace for the Reader

Until his death in 1988, Lihn lived within the discursive boundaries of the dictatorship’s “paradise of precariousness.”160 After a battle with cancer, Lihn passed away just a few months before the referendum that unseated Pinochet from power. After

160 Lihn lived abroad for a couple months at a time in Paris, where he was invited by the French government in 1975, and in New York where he stayed after earning the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978. Lihn also worked as a visiting professor in various U.S. universities. However, he continued to return to Chile, and saw his stays abroad as temporary visits rather than as a permanent exile.

175 the triumph of the “No” to Pinochet’s bid to the presidency, the return of democracy to

Chile granted a new institutional stability to criticism and allowed for the reemergence of critical discourses that had been silenced by the dictatorship. In the years before the referendum, the social sciences, a reinvigorated leftist discourse, and the literary-critical discourse elaborated by the cultural avant-garde began to position themselves as new voices of critical thought, capable of both interpreting and challenging the discourses of power. With the gradual loosening of repressive structures, the opposition’s reorganization after the economic crisis of 1983, and the return of exiled intellectuals, the three strands of critical thought began to emerge from their semi-clandestine silence and moved into more public and visible circuits.161 By 1988 their new power of speech promised to bring Chilean critical thought out of its darkness and precariousness, transforming it once again into a “metropolis iluminada” by the democratic din of discursive plurality.

Nevertheless, as Nelly Richard points out, not all was equal in that newly illuminated metropolis. Despite the growing visibility of the escena de avanzada and the role it played in challenging authoritarian discourse, its critical contributions continued to be marginalized within the new discursive landscape, dominated by the emergence of new academic institutions and prestigious research centers (Insubordinación 76).162

161 The return of exiled intellectuals, many of them associated with the left, gave new impetus to the sociological readings developed both before and during the dictatorship and strengthened research centers like FLACSO and CENECA as nuclei of dissident thought. Critics like Nelly Richard and Adriana Valdés also gained recognition as a critical alternative to official culture (Richard Insubordinación 57).

162 Independent institutes of higher learning established by academics dismissed from their posts were complemented in the 1980s by new academic institutions established after the Higher Education Reform of 1980. The Reform, passed by the authoritarian regime, grafted a neoliberal, free-market model onto higher education that encouraged the proliferation of universities. By 1992, there were fifteen state and forty-two private universities in Chile, in comparison to the two main universities that had existed prior to the dictatorship (Austin 26). 176 Influenced in part by foreign donors’ privileging of the social sciences during the dictatorship and by the key role that social scientists played in the transition to democracy, the social sciences had become the discourse of choice in the world of higher learning. By 1987, Pablo Oyarzún would echo the generally accepted notion that in the world of the “inteligencia criolla” no other interpretive framework had the currency, the structure of influences, the thematic reach (44), and the scholarly rigor of the social sciences (Cánovas, Hacia una histórica 167). Their academic prestige ran counter to what

Richard calls the “audacious” interventions of the cultural avant-garde, which “violated” the rules of objective proof and the technical realism of the “efficient” knowledge epitomized by the social sciences (Insubordinación 71).

Under threat of being silenced beneath the voices of other discourses, the escena de avanzada found its most passionate advocate in Richard, who argued for the critical potential of its aesthetic practices and began to craft a new critical discourse that recuperated and carried on its critical legacy. Much of Richard’s critical energy would be directed towards crafting and positioning a new “crítica cultural” aligned with the cultural avant-garde against both the paradigm of the social sciences and the return of a

“traditional” leftist discourse.163 Richard critiques both discourses for their tendency to suture discontinuities and refashion totalizing narratives (Insubordinación 62), and

163 In Residuos y metáforas Richard emphasizes the fact that “crítica cultural” designates a diverse group of practices, which nevertheless have some common characteristics. For Richard, the texts that fall under “crítica cultural” mix discourses, position themselves on the margins of constituted disciplines, seek out excluded or forgotten practices, and position themseles midway between the essay, reconstructive analysis, and critical theory (142). In “The Reconfigurations of Post-Dictatorship Critical Thought” Richard implicitly defines the new “crítica cultural” as a “critical poetics” in opposition to both the “mourning” of the social sciences, which presumably sought to put behind and forget the wounds of the dictatorship, and the “melancholy” of the traditional left, mired in the nostalgia of a frustrated social project (“Reconfigurations” 273).

177 positions crítica cultural as a watchdog against all forms of totalization, against all

“figuras-del-sistema que reiteran la violencia de la intimidación discursiva en cada serie de enunciados, cadena gramatical, subordinación de frases” (66). Crítica cultural assigned itself, in other words, a critical role unavailable to the discourses of the left and of the social sciences, whose desire to establish the absolute truth of one ideological system or to impose consensus among different political agents threatened to repeat the discursive violence inherent in the intimidations of authoritarian discourse. Crítica cultural, in contrast, claimed a privileged critical role by virtue of its identification with the margins, which remained a space of contestation at a distance from the calls for consensus and commonality. As a critical discourse purportedly marginalized by the discourses of the left and of the social sciences (64, 76) and with roots in an artistic scene that developed on the margins of authoritarian culture, crítica cultural deliberately alighted itself with the margins (Residuos 142) and defined them as a privileged space from which to question the demarcations of symbolic power (Insubordinación 64).

The margin thus became, for Richard, a “concepto-metáfora para productivizar el descarte social de la marginación y la marginalidad” (64). Like Lihn, Richard sought to unleash the critical potential of what was marginal, precarious, and silenced, but did so from a space quite unlike Lihn’s “paradise of precariousness.” Despite her claims to and protestations against marginalization, in the late 1980s Richard’s particular strain of criticism was no longer a marginal “aventura crítica” carried out in ephemeral leaflets and photocopied pamphlets (Oyarzún 44). As Oyarzún observed in a 1987 discussion of

Richard’s Márgenes e institución (1986), “toda opción por el margen reconoce el centro, lo proyecta y se proyecta en él negativamente, para extraer de esta relación de resistencia

178 la negatividad como disciplina, como retórica y como hábito en su propia práctica, y lo que es más importante, como mecanismo de auto-certificación” (50). For Oyarzún,

Richard’s passionate defense of the margin had become mechanism that granted power and stability to her own discourse while projecting marginality onto an artistic and literary scene that became dependent on her critical discourse to advocate for its undisciplined, and thus potentially unheeded, critical interventions. Amid a new discursive landscape in which critical credibility was closely linked to the academic prestige of technical and disciplined knowledge, Richard argued that “para hacer valer el beneficio teórico de su furtivo detalle, lo menor y lo desviado necesitan del pequeño tajo practicado por el análisis cultural” (Residuos 13). Recognizing the fact that the critical sphere was now defined by “sectorialización y profesionalización” (Insubordinación

117), Richard emphasized the need for “públicos en posición de valorizadores” (77) who could circulate the products of the avant-garde.164 Assuming the role of a “valorizadora,”

Richard took it upon herself to “salvage” or “rescue” art and literature from a sea of silence or oblivion.165 As she claims in Residuos y metáforas, the aesthetic “fragments” that she analyzes “carecen de una traducción formal en la lengua comunicativa de la

164 It is worth noting that this observation is made in a critical spirit. As Richard notes in Margins and Institutions there was a “necesidad, también, de reexaminar la dependencia del objeto de arte a las instituciones que administran no solo su distribución y consumo, sino sus valores de inscripción official y de aceptabilidad dominante” (4). Despite her assertion, Richard recognizes the difficulties in changing those conditions and rhetorically continues to situate herself in a position that would allow her to influence the “valores de inscripción official y de aceptabilidad dominante.” In the margins/institutions dialectic drawn out by Richard “crítical cultural” functioned as the “institutions” pole, relegating art to the margins. Crítica cultural thus became a mediator between “los trazados oficiales que dibujan el horizonte de la transición y el fragmentario detalle de construcciones de signos que hacen de lo menor su forma de ser” (Residuos 13).

165 Richard often uses the terms to “salvage” and “to rescue” to describe the task of the cultural critic. As she notes in a round-table discussion about La insubordinación de los signos, the book was conceived as a kind of “salvataje y rescate” of practices and discourses that existed only as/in photocopies and other ephemeral materials (Richard, Insubordinación 102).

179 sociología del presente y permanecerían a la deriva sin la crítica cultural” (13). Declaring the language of art foreign to the social sciences, Richard positions “crítica cultural” as the proper “translator” for art, as a discourse capable of rescuing the shipwrecked shards of art and literature from eternal driftage.

Richard’s depiction of the critic as a heroic figure capable of drawing the secrets of a marginal culture from the silence of its wreckage was particularly useful in a Latin

American context. It allowed Richard both to authorize crítica cultural in an international context while establishing a local criticism in Chile that could finally claim theoretical currency. In the late 1980s, amid the international dominance of postmodern interpretations, Richard’s vindication of and identification with the margin granted a privileged position to crítica cultural, setting it apart from an undifferentiated

“Posmodernist International” while bringing it into critical dialogue with metropolitan criticism. As Richard claims in her “Response to Vidal (from Chile)”:

Although [the Revista de Crítica Cultural] takes up a metropolitan knowledge-game in which the crisis of the center compels it to re-center its attention on its borders and periphery, it does so from the margins, borders, limits, periphery, interstices, in-between – actual liminal site- postures from which it can dialogue critically, in a process of both exchange and confrontation with the postmodernisms and their metropolitan theorization as postmodern center-marginality. (230)

The “crisis of the center” in metropolitan circles granted a critical advantage to crítica cultural, whose intimate knowledge of and positioning at the margin made it uniquely capable of appropriating, reconverting, and embodying the terms of metropolitan theorization (229).166

166 As Richard notes, the uses of the postmodern register for critical debate in Latin America permit the appropriation and reconversion of figures like fragmentation, hybridism, and de-centering, which are particularly fit for analyzing local problematics (“Response” 229).

180 At the same time, however, Richard’s familiarity with the postmodern critical canon, introduced into Chile through the new critical writing of the literary-critical avant- garde allowed her to present herself as a necessary antidote to the “retraso del medio cultural chileno” (Margins 134) and its failure to prepare the way for the consumption and manipulation of “información internacional” (135). Using the language of developmentalism, Richard blames the precariousness of critical thought in Chile for the local incapacity to understand both the products of the avant-garde and their use of cosmopolitan theory. As she argues in Márgenes e institución, the silencing of the literary-critical avant-garde and its use of French post-structuralist theory was as much a result of censorship as of the “oscurantismo cultural nacional,” which stood in the way of

“un desarrollo de pensamiento que necesariamente requiere de los avances analíticos de la teoría contemporánea” (134). Speaking about the critical texts produced by the critical scene of the late ‘70s and early ’80s, Richard notes that

la mayoría de los textos producidos durante ese periodo registran en su interior la dimensión de conflicto que les significa operar con claves de lectura tan escasamente divulgadas en Chile, tan difícilmente identificables (y por ende, descodificables) por el destinatario local que se siente violentado por el exhibicionismo cultural de un cuerpo de riquezas que no hace sino evidenciar sus privaciones. (135)

Amid the “poverty” and “privations” of Chilean culture, crítica cultural assumed the urgent pedagogical role of disseminating and providing the “claves de lectura” that would open the rich treasure chest of post-structuralist theory hiding among the shards of the

“escena de avanzada.” In her role as a privileged interpreter, with the keys to both local culture and international criticism, Richard would once again try to institute and constitute a legitimate Latin American criticism that derived its authority from a

181 “marginal” culture but that set itself apart from that precarious and undifferentiated literary-critical landscape.

Published in the late 80s and throughout the 90s, Richard’s most well known critical texts appeared after Enrique Lihn passed away in 1988. One can still imagine, however, the ridicule with which Lihn might greet such lofty ambitions to construct a criticism that could lead Latin America out of the paradise of precariousness and into an illuminated metropolis, finally freed from its poverty, its darkness, its “falencias”

(Richard, Margins 135). In his 1988 article, “Eugenio Téllez: Descubridor de

Invenciones,” Lihn anticipated such ambitions and critiqued the “nuevas ortodoxias” of the “escena de avanzada.” Through his analysis of Téllez’s paintings and their use of

“poor” and “precarious” materials, Lihn vindicated the “poverty” of words and images, setting it against “jergas especializadas y sus efectos de profundidad que apuntan, gravemente, a la utopía de reemplazar la imagen por la palabra y la palabra por la teoría”

(Eugenio Téllez n.p.). More than ten years earlier, Lihn had elaborated a similar critique in La orquesta de cristal, whose “poor” critical languages revealed and attacked the metequismo of “specialized jargons” with their performance of expertise, profundity, richness, and depth. Read through the refractive mirror of Lihn’s critical fiction Richard appears as a kind of paradigmatic meteca who, like Pompier and his absurd cohort of provincial interpreters, sets out to “integrarse en el mejor de los mundos compensatorios” by promoting a more “developed” critical discourse that could liberate both her and the culture in whose name she speaks from the oppression of “cultural provincialism” (Lastra

111). Her metequismo, absurd enough from Latin America, is perhaps even more ridiculous given the fact that Richard was born and raised in France. Richard was twenty-

182 two when she immigrated to Chile in 1970, after studying modern literature at La

Sorbonne during the 1960s. Her voyage from the City of Light to a Chile about to plunge into the darkness of the dictatorship serves as the mirror image of Pompier’s voyage from

Santiago to Paris. Following the paradigmatic path of the meteco, she would go not from the margins to the center of culture, but from the heart of the “avances analíticos de la teoría contemporánea” to a marginal culture that she would try to “rescue” from oblivion.

Richard’s reverse metequismo, spectrally suggested in Lihn’s novel, comes into sharper focus through the work of Adriana Valdés, a perhaps more witting meteca who has often served as Richard’s interlocutor and as Lihn’s critical counterpart. Together with Lihn and with Richard, Valdés played a key role in the literary-critical avant-garde of the 1970s and is often cited as one of the most important critics from that scene. She was also Lihn’s romantic partner at the time of the composition and publication of La orquesta de cristal, which is dedicated to her.167 Although Valdés appears only once, in the book’s dedication, she stands, in many ways, as the novel’s silent heroine, embodying in her critical interventions something of the critical utopia that both Lihn and Richard tried to defend in their work. Particularly incisive are Valdés’s interpretations of

Richard’s work, which often expose Richard’s efforts at self-authorization and her contradictory relationship to the more precarious strategies of the literary-critical avant- garde. Often included in conferences and publications meant to discuss and celebrate

Richard’s work, Valdés’s comments often have the opposite effect: instead of establishing the authority of Richard’s discourse, they contest and contradict Richard’s

167 As Lihn comments in “Doce años de escritura en todos los géneros,” La orquesta de cristal was a direct result of their romance and its first sentences were penned as part of “una nota irónica que dejé debajo de una puerta hablando de las dificultades del amor absoluto” (191). 183 interpretations, recuperating, instead, a certain lack of discipline that Richard tends to write away in her texts.

One of Valdés’s most critical interventions is “La escritura crítica y su efecto:

Una reflexión preliminar,” included in the 1987 Arte en Chile desde 1973 together with other texts discussing Richard’s recently published Márgenes e institución. Valdés’s article focuses on Richard’s analysis of the critical writing that accompanied the literary- critical avant-garde and highlights the “autism” of that writing as its greatest weakness.

As Richard herself notes, the “escena de escritura” “presuponía un lector no sólo cómplice sino también experto en maniobras transcodificadoras” (La insubordinación

64). According to Valdés, by positing its ideal reader as an expert, well versed in post- structuralist theory, the critical avant-garde isolated itself from “interlocutores reales” and restricted its “escrituras que quisieran ser contestatarias” to “un reducto o ‘reservation’ para sus actividades reservadas” (“La escritura” 84). Like Richard, Valdés attributes the isolation of the critical avant-garde to the realities of the Chilean milieu: in a country where even the “educated” reader only had access to literary categories from “la época del impresionismo,” the writing of the critical avant-garde was perceived as “otro lenguaje técnico, como el lenguaje de otra disciplina en la cual se carece de competencia”

(85).168 For Valdés, the lack of a proper reader is, however, not an inadequacy that needs to be remedied but a reality that, in an unfortunate act of metequismo, the critical avant- garde failed to take into account. As she notes, “al transformar el discurso sobre el arte en una forma más de especialización y en un campo disciplinario que tiene sus propias referencias inaccesibles a los legos, se presupone un tipo de público que en los países desarrollados existe en gran número: un gran público académico que tiene sus

168 The quotations around “educated” are present in Valdés’s text. 184 necesidades de autoperpetuarse” (85). According to Valdés, the critics of the avant-garde did not write for “common readers” in Chile but for an international audience made possible by the institutional scope and stability of metropolitan academia.

Valdés shared with Lihn the concern that the writing and criticism of the literary- critical avant-garde was “divorciado de la vía pública” and comprehensible only to a small circle of specialists capable of theorizing it (Lihn, Eugenio Téllez n.p.). As Lihn put it, the international and internationalizing proposals of the Chilean avant-garde and its dreams of transgression got lost in their pathetic “hermetismo, su hipertrofia teórica, su instalación en una tierra sin suelo, su colectivización sin colectividad” (n.p.). Installed in that utopian “land without ground,” the escena de avanzada became, for Valdés, an

“esfuerzo trágico” insofar as it consumed itself in its own desire, in its will to exist despite external conditions (86). Recognizing and participating in external conditions was, however, of key importance for Valdés, who continued to emphasize critics’ need to come out of the theoretical isolation of their “transgressive” or “oppositional” postures and join the “common reader” in the “vía pública.” In various articles and public discussions, Valdés questions Richard’s deliberate self-marginalization and argues in favor of a less contentious common ground where reader and writer, critic and public could meet. Undermining Richard’s attempts to privilege transgression, interference, disruption, and controversy over “la tiranía lingüística de lo simple, lo directo y lo transparente” (Richard, Residuos 14), Valdés argues that the transgressive gestures of interference and disruption hold no special privilege (quoted in Richard, La insubordinación 111) and vindicates instead the critical potential of the “lugar común”

(Valdes, “La escritura” 89).

185 Drawing on its use in ancient rhetoric, Valdés defines the commonplace as an element of discourse that both orator and audience recognize: it provides a temporary space of consensus that the orator can then use as grounds to build a discourse and open new discursive spaces. In 1987, in the final years of the dictatorship, the commonplace defined by Valdés was a means of combating the compartmentalizations created by the authoritarian regime and their capacity to disrupt dialogue across realms of culture.

According to Valdés, contributing to the atomization of discourse into small circuits of specialized writers and readers can only further the ends of political repression.

Disregarding the compartmentalizations placed upon culture, Valdés thus dreams of the commonplace as a spacious and welcoming “lugar desde el cual leer […] en que quepan mayor número de interlocutores” (89). In the fragmented society of the 1980s and a time when the collective narratives of the 60s and 70s had been declared unworkable, Valdés recognizes the utopian dimensions of her “zona común [donde] todos pueden participar en un mismo discurso colectivo.” Yet she continues to insist on the usefulness of her

“ficción humanista” and its capacity to create a much needed collectivity: “Con esto apunto a un tema sobre el cual no me siento competente para opinar, pero lo recojo a modo de deseo ingenuo: el de una confluencia possible entre los lenguajes de personas que quisieran—al menos en las grandes formulaciones—ser capaces de una acción común en el ámbito social” (85).

Mobilizing a form of strategic candidness, Valdés thus construes herself as a

“common reader” capable of sharing interpretive space with a purportedly naive or unspecialized reader. As in the quote above, Valdés often disavows discursive authority

186 and expertise and depicts her critical strategies as partial and tentative efforts.169 In the round table discussion on Richard’s La insubordinación de los signos, for example,

Valdés objects to Richard’s claims that Valdés’s reading strategies were a “foco guerrillero”—the attack strategies of an insubordinate reader—and presents them, instead, as a “táctica de escape” (quoted in Richard, La insubordinación 99). To borrow the terms that Lihn used to describe Pompier, Valdés identifies not with the predatory owl—symbol of Minerva’s power—but with the Caligo Prometheus, the “vulnerable” and “inoffensive” butterfly that frightens off its aggressors through dissimulation (Lihn,

“Entretelones” 583). Like Pompier, Valdés is also adept in the critical strategies of mimeticism, most notably in Enrique Lihn: Vistas parciales, her collection of essays on

Lihn’s work. In its prologue, Valdés recognizes that some of its essays are clothed in a

“disfraz académico” (20) but claims that she took on “distintos tonos y distintas mascaras” to write the various essays in the book (17).170 As the title of the book declares, Enrique Lihn: Vistas parciales is indeed a partial text: taking sides with Lihn, it renounces all pretentions to objectivity and constructs its readings from partial and fragmentary pieces of discourse drawn from conversations, academic presentations, literary readings, anecdotes, high theory, poetry, and impassioned editorial articles.171 In

169 Valdés’s interventions are often full of caveats that undermine her authority even before she begins speaking. Her claims that “no me siento competente para opinar” is echoed in the round table on Richard’s Insubordinación de los signos where she similarly begins her interventions with phrases like “tal vez me equivoque,” “lo digo sin ironía” (quoted in Richard, Insubordinación 111).

170 It is worth noting that despite Valdés’s rhetorical strategies to disavow her authority, Enrique Lihn: Vistas Parciales offers extraordinary interpretations of Lihn’s work, and earned Valdés the Altazor Prize in the essay category in 2010.

171 In her prologue to Enrique Lihn: Vistas parciales outlines the multiple meanings behind the title, and emphasizes the fact that her former romantic relationship with Lihn prevents her from taking an objective perspective on his work. As Valdés recounts, her incapacity to read Lihn’s texts dispassionately had previously made her unsure of her capacity to contribute to the “estudios avanzados” about Lihn’s work (21). In the end, however, the comments from old and new generations of academics convince her of the 187 contrast to Richard, who translates Lihn into her single deconstructive register, Valdés offers the reader multiple points of entry into Lihn’s work, thus making her text

“accesible a todo público, y no solo a los especialistas en literatura” (21).172

“Una cuerda de reloj/ dedales e insectos, bolitas de vidrio/ la copa quebrada,’ algo

‘transfigurado en un efecto de joyas…’ ‘formalizado por el rigor/ de la ley que sonríe en las cajitas de Joseph Cornell” (Lihn, quoted in Valdés, Enrique Lihn 24). Borrowing verses from one of Lihn’s poems, Adriana Valdés ultimately characterizes her collection of essays as a loose thread, a pinned butterfly, a broken branch, a bit of debris.173 Pieced together like “retazos,” the partial bits of discourse that Valdés uses to construct her text do not aspire to the richness of jewels except through a mirage, through the effects of the

“rigor” not of the specialist but of the assembler, the bricoleur. Over and over, Valdés emphasizes the partiality, precariousness, and insufficiency of every attempt to write about Lihn. Seeking to construct a temporary constellation that would not imprison Lihn

(23), Valdés draws on the same fictional mechanisms that Lihn used for critical ends.

Insisting on the fact that each text “tiene su propia pequeña historia” (15) and serves specific rhetorical ends, she constructed each of her readings accordingly, weaving them together like small fictions from the scraps of “mi memoria y mi imaginación” (24).

text’s “derecho a existir” (21). Thus, instead of attempting to construct an implausible objective perspective, Valés assumes the partiality of her perspective and explicitly states, “tomo partido por él” (15). Valdés thus presents her book as a “texto enamorado” (21): a kind of critical love note that responds almost thirty years later to that literary love note that is La orquesta de cristal.

172 In La insubordinación de los signos Richard presents Lihn as a paradigmatic example of the “utopías críticas” created by the satirical thinking of the 1970s avant-garde. Richard characterizes Lihn’s writing as “un discurso que pone en cuestión el acto mismo de conceptualizar cualquier cosa a través del lenguaje” and presents it as a writing that sets the tone for the most strongly deconstructive works of the dictatorship (23).

173 The quoted fragments are from Lihn’s poem “Para A” in the collection Pena de extrañamiento.

188 Adriana Valdés’s criticism thus remains faithful to the “negative utopia” or

“paradise of precariousness” that Lihn tried to construct in his work. Taking the risk of naiveté, she sides with both Lihn and Pompier and depicts herself as a witting meteca, aware of the “carácter reparatorio” and “un poco victoriano” of her text (24). Not afraid to fall into the “archaic” archive of the “literary” essay, Valdés continues to practice the

“escrilectura: bricolage de textos, collage de fragmentos” that characterizes Prompier’s texts (Lihn, “Entretelones” 583). As she describes her critical writing: “la he armado así como una especie de ilustración de una relación con el saber: menos discipulaje que pillaje, una especie de extraña navegación por el mar de los Sargazos, una recopilación fortuita de ideas encontradas” (“La escritura” 82). The capacity to “errar,” to err or roam like a pirate through the sea of Latin America’s precariousness makes Valdés a paradigmatic example of what Héctor Libertella calls a kind of “artesanía

Latinoamericana acostumbrada a revolver indiferente en las escrituras de cualquier época y lugar” (quoted in Lihn, “Entretelones” 579). Errant and undisciplined, Valdés would resist the impulse to constitute a legitimate criticism, an authoritative interpretation, a closed discipline that would save Latin America from its precariousness. She joins, in this sense, the community of Latin American “common readers,” those metecos “que han quedado sin sitio, descolocadas, desitiadas, errátiles; errátiles como lo es la imaginación”

(Lihn, “Doce años” 193).

Perhaps only thus, with the discursive fluidity of their erring and errant readings, can the metecos displaced by the authoritative discourses of late twentieth-century Chile address what Richard calls the need to revitalize “other archives of knowledge with non- canonical readings” (“Reconfigurations” 277). As Richard is well aware, only such non-

189 canonical readings can “revise actual processes of decentering and transversality with which practices like cultural studies and cultural critique pretend to challenge the criteria of autonomy and purity—of non-interference—associated with traditional criticism”

(277). Revising criticism’s critical strategies became ever-more pressing as the millennium drew to a close and criticism found it more difficult to leave the discursive realm of the university and make itself felt in the “extra-academic territories of action”

(277). As we will see in the next chapter, Héctor Libertella, Beatriz Sarlo, and Josefina

Ludmer would all respond to such challenges by mobilizing a Latin American literary- critical practice that might undo the discursive, institutional, and social boundaries of the late twentieth century. Undoing such boundaries would be particularly pressing as crítica cultural and other forms of Latin American criticism consolidated their authority and incorporated Latin America into an international critical market. Within that newly powerful market, globalization would limit the critical diversity that had paradoxically been allowed by the purported backwardness of a southern cultural milieu and threaten the critical space claimed by Latin American literary-critical practices. It would then be up to other naive readers—the primate, the savage, the illiterate—to elaborate non- canonical readings that could escape the walls of the ghettos created by the late twentieth century.

190

CHAPTER 4

Héctor Libertella, Beatriz Sarlo, and Josefina Ludmer: Critical Utopias for the Turn of the Millennium

“Demás que honra me ha causado hacerme obscuro a los ignorantes, que esa es la distinción de los hombres doctos, hablar de manera que a ellos les parezca griego…”

- Góngora, “Carta de don Luis de Góngora en respuesta de la que le escribieron”

A couple customers are sitting at a bar. It is, as Josefina Ludmer would later put it, “un nuevo mundo” (Aquí 9). We are at the end of the millennium, in the year 2000, and Héctor Libertella has just published El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. In his text, the customers gaze across the bar at a plaza where writers gather around its only tree. There’s a certain festive air to the scene: the plaza is no longer under siege, and it’s market day.

All kinds of characters traverse the plaza’s oval perimeter: a fisherman, an architect, an illiterate man, an obsessive reader, a monkey, a poet, critics and intellectuals from all over the globe. There is, at first sight, nothing extraordinary here—the bar’s customers drink and gaze while the plaza’s only bathroom fills up with graffiti. Yet there is also something slightly askew. For this plaza is part of a ghetto, whose limits are those of the plaza while being as large as the world. In that ghetto the fisherman’s objective is not to fish, but to display his “red” or “net” for the architect, who is interested only in measuring the holes in its network or web (Libertella, El árbol de Saussure 20; henceforth

191 ADS). In a similar way, the reader does not read but pricks his veins with a Parker pen; the monkey wants to take a stroll through the jungle but cannot find his way out of the ghetto; the threads of instant communication gag the global village; and literature has become an illegible ghost: “un fantasma siempre un poco ilegible entre las líneas del mercado” (21).

Yet such reversals do not faze our customers, who gaze at the plaza with “mirada boba” (15). This is, after all, not just any bar, but the one that divides the signifier from the signified, the word “arbor” from a scraggy picture with an upright trace, a leafy frond.

Drawn at the beginning of Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía (2000),

Saussure’s diagram of the linguistic sign offers a kind of map for the new world that

Libertella constructs out of its few and simple traces. As if the diagram were a form of graffiti, found fortuitously and decontextualized, Libertella reads it literally, turning its theoretical structure into the basis for a series of fictions. In them, Libertella sketches out minimal characters. Thin and abstract verbal forms, his characters do not so much act as pose in various scenes that Libertella juxtaposes, layers, and links together. The resulting effect is that of a verbal mock-up or diorama where different scenes are successively brought to the foreground. As the beginning of chapter three describes it: “El ghetto no es un espacio sino una especie de mancha que emergió de un mapa. Junto con esa mancha brotaron objetos y figuras. Todo funciona como una instalación en la que, por casualidad, se destaca ahora uno al azar de los parroquianos del bar” (ADS 35). Like the fisherman who does not fish, the architect who does not build, the monkey whose walk takes him nowhere, this is a narrative that does little narrating. Although published in the collection

“relato” or “narrative” of Beatriz Viterbo Editores, El árbol de Saussure shuns both plot

192 and psychological development. Instead, it makes of reading a fictional mechanism that not only turns Saussure’s diagram into a setting, but also opens its own figures to interpretation. The ghetto’s abstract figures thus become the generative seed for a host of reflections, theories, and readings that share the space of the novel with Libertella’s minimal descriptions.

Like other critical fictions, El árbol de Saussure takes critical writing as the raw material for fiction. In this case, Libertella takes Saussure’s diagram—along with other critical texts and cultural products—as the basis for fictional worlds while using the conventions of criticism to structure his text. Like a series of micro-essays, the seven chapters in the book combine fictional scenes with interpretations supported by quotes, references, and meticulous bibliographic footnotes. As Esteban Prado describes it, El

árbol de Saussure is a “postmundo leído por una postribu internacional” (617). In keeping with the reading strategies at the end of the millennium, Libertella’s “post-tribe” describes its “post-world” through a series of books, texts, and cultural references from a wide variety of fields and disciplines. The referential status of their references is, however, not entirely clear. As with Eduardo Torres in Lo demás es silencio and Gerardo de Pompier in La orquesta de cristal, many of the texts and critics in this novel seem to be fictional, or at least, nowhere to be found in the wide, wide world of the web. Yet in contrast to Monterroso’s and Lihn’s novels, the appearance in the year 2000 of

Libertella’s book did not resolve the text’s discursive or referential ambiguities by allowing readers to classify the book, and the critics within it, firmly within the realm of fiction.174 In fact, the publication of El árbol de Saussure as a self-proclaimed “narrative”

174 In chapter 2, I argued that while the texts published by Monterroso under the pseudonym Eduardo Torres were still ambiguously situated between the realms of criticism and fiction, the publication of Lo 193 only exacerbated the difficulties of distinguishing apocryphal authors from marginal or well-known ones. As Prado notes, “el hecho de que el libro comience con una cita de un autor del que el lector no puede recuperar ninguna referencia lleva a que el resto de los autores que aparezcan citados también sean sometidos a la duda” (671). The so-called

“Winfried Hassler” cited in the book’s epigraph is a paradigmatic example of Libertella’s capacity to blur fiction and criticism by luring the reader into a fool’s errand to determine whether the cited authors are real or imagined, critics or fictions, authors or ventriloquists of their words.

“El parque gráfico está lleno de fantasmas, espectros de libros,” writes one Clóvis

Carvalho, cited in El árbol de Saussure (68). Himself a kind of specter—a “real”

Brazilian politician but an unlikely author of this quote—Carvalho points to the source of radical indeterminacy that in this novel challenges the most erudite of readers attempting to pry fiction from criticism.175 For Libertella seems to attribute false quotes even to well- known writers like Paul Claudel while correctly citing lesser-known works, like an essay on Mirta Dermisache by the Argentine poet Arturo Carrera.176 In other critical fictions, this indeterminacy led to a series of bewildered responses: it elicited the self-protective

demás es silencio resolved the ambiguities by allowing critics to depict Torres’s texts as literary parodies of intellectual writing. In chapter 3, I noted how the publication of Lihn’s novel during the Pinochet regime prevented critics from reading it as a critical commentary on society and encouraged the notion that Lihn’s novel was a rarified literary experiment.

175 Carvalho was Secretary of State during the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-99) in Brazil. Libertella’s book presents him as the presumed author of A cultura que nos olha (São Paulo: Arché, 1997). Both the book and the publishing house are, however, nowhere to be found in electronic bibliographic resources.

176 Libertella attributes the following quote to Paul Claudel, citing it in Spanish: “El objetivo de la literatura es enseñarnos a leer” (53). Finding the original source of this quote again proves a challenge: this may be due either to misattribution, outright invention, or mistranslation, of which Libertella is also fond. Carreras’s quote (68), on the other hand, is correctly cited as coming from the section “La escritura ilegible de Mirtha Dermisache” in the essay “Tejidos esponjosos.”

194 laughter of Monterroso’s readers, eager to prove their critical competence at identifying

“fictional” works, and the silence of Lihn’s would-be critics, cautious of reading a novel as a “critical” text. Yet to judge from various analyses of El árbol de Saussure,

Libertella’s critics seem to be completely cured of bewilderment. The book, in fact, has been pronounced as the culminating point in Libertella’s efforts to connect the parallel territories of literature and criticism (Prado 615). It has been called an “obra maestra de la ficción teórica” (Damiani 11) and a “ficción ensayística” (Estrín 51), and classified as an essay in which literature is both object of analysis and procedure (Crespi 110). As Prado notes in a synthesis of various analyses, “En él no hay forma de diferenciar ficción de crítica, no se presenta como un híbrido en el que puedan detectarse fragmentos diferenciados: cada pasaje es ficción y crítica al mismo tiempo” (615). This tendency to read El árbol de Saussure as a book that is simultaneously fiction and criticism provided a framework for understanding the text and allowed critics to grant literary value to

Libertella’s unconventional textual strategies. It allowed them to position the novel as a literary masterpiece and Libertella as an under-recognized master of Argentine literature, inheritor of such literary giants as Macedonio Fernández and Jorge Luis Borges.177

Such depictions of El árbol de Saussure, however, had to wait until after

Libertella’s death in 2006. There has been little criticism of Libertella’s text and what has been written is mostly found in the collection of essays El efecto Libertella (2010), compiled by Marcelo Damiani in a canonizing effort to recognize Libertella’s literary

177 For example, in “Macedonio Fernández & Héctor Libertella: la escritura puesta en abismo” Ariana Castellarnau engages in an extensive comparison between the writings of Libertella and Macedonio Fernández. In his prologue to El efecto Libertella, Damiani establishes an implicit association between Borges and Libertella by noting that Libertella was born on Borges’s forty-sixth birthday. According to Damiani, this fortuitous circumnstance “quizá… marcó desde el comienzo su precoz destino literario” (11).

195 legacy. Yet immediately after its publication, Libertella’s book received little critical commentary. As Damiani notes in his introductory essay, “durante bastante tiempo

(alrededor de veinte o treinta años), Libertella fue una suerte de código o clave secreta del sentido y del afán literario argentino… muy pocos sabían realmente cuáles eran los algoritmos de ese código misterioso, y menos aún los que podían explicarlos, aunque muchos insinuaran conocerlos” (14). Damiani suggests that Libertella’s writing remained a kind of mystery throughout his life, both the object of prestigious literary prizes and a baffling literary experiment that publishing houses were only grudgingly willing to take on (Idez 189).178 In his elegiac chronicle for Damiani’s compilation, Ariel Idez notes how difficult it became for Libertella to publish his books after El árbol de Saussure, a turning point that changed and reoriented Libertella’s writing (189). According to Damián

Tabarovsky, the number of unpublished manuscripts that Libertella left behind stemmed not from the value of his writing but from the difficulties that his texts posed to readers and publishing houses: “A lo largo de los años se ha escuchado (en redacciones, cátedras, revistas culturales, editoriales, canales de television) que Libertella es un autor ‘difícil’, que ‘vende poco’, que ‘es incomprensible’, que es ‘hermético’, que ‘no circula’” (43).

Libertella’s radical mixture of fiction and criticism remained a source of bewilderment, perhaps not so much for his critics as for a market that did not know how to position or what to do with his texts.179

178 Among other prizes, Libertella won the Premio Paidós in 1968 at the age of 23. In 1971 he received the Monte Avila prize for the novel Aventura de los miticistas, and in 1986 he received the Juan Rulfo Prize for Paseo Internacional del Perverso.

179 Libertella himself liked to perpetuate this view of his writing. When I met him in 2004 he mentioned, with apparent pleasure, that booksellers had no idea in what section of the bookstore to place his texts.

196 Perhaps more representative of El árbol de Saussure and its reception is Josefina

Ludmer’s reading of the book in Aquí América latina, which analyzes various Argentine and Latin American novels published in 2000. The first part of the book, structured as a diary penned during the sabbatical year that Ludmer spent in Buenos Aires in 2000, allows Ludmer to present her analysis as the immediate reaction of a reader coming across Libertella’s text for the first time. “Leo las cien páginas de El árbol de Saussure,

Una utopía y quedo fascinada pero no entiendo nada,” she writes in a surprising admission of critical incomprehension, though she quickly recovers from it: “Después me doy cuenta: es una ‘utopía puramente literaria’, un manifiesto de resistencia al mercado, sin narración. Porque no narra sino, como en toda utopía, inventa y describe un mundo desde cero” (95). With its two poles of confusion and insight, Ludmer’s reading serves as a kind of miniature theory that highlights the interrelated roles of legibility and the market in El árbol de Saussure. Ludmer’s initial dumbfounded reaction to Libertella’s

“literary utopia” echoes the “mirada boba” of the bar’s customers who gaze across the plaza at the writers in El árbol de Saussure (15). The fact that it is always market day in that plaza, and that the plaza is coterminous with the world is critical. As Ludmer notes, this fictional construction allows Libertella to theorize what would happen to both literary and critical discourses if the agora were not only to overtake the world but were also to lose its meaning as a site of public discourse to become, exclusively, a market.180 By staging her reading in the Argentina of the year 2000, at a time when the market had

180 The agora—a term originally used for the main plaza in Athens—had, in ancient Greece, a twin function as both a center of civic life and a market place. This dual function is reflected in the two Greek verbs that derived from the noun agora: ἀγοράζω, agorázō, “I shop,” and ἀγορεύω, agoreúō, “I speak in public.” The twenty-first century use of the term “agora,” however, restricts its meaning to the first function, thus reflecting the sense that the centers of political and civic life and the marketplace do—and should—occupy completely separate realms.

197 achieved new prominence as the regulator of culture, Ludmer engages in similar theorizing: her initial confusion suggests that at the turn of the millennium Libertella’s

“purely literary” text had become incomprehensible, a utopia incapable or unwilling to make a niche for itself in a fast-paced and demanding market.

Despite Ludmer’s characterization of El árbol de Saussure as “purely literary,” it is she—and not critics who depict Libertella’s book as “critical”—who links the book to its cultural and historical milieu. Like Adriana Castellarnau, many critics tend to write about El árbol de Saussure as if it were enclosed in the “estricto e íntimo reducto del espacio literario,” as if the ghetto were “un territorio despojado de la unción regional y de cualquier referencia al orden de lo real” (60).181 Ludmer’s diary entries, on the other hand, situate the novel temporally, surrounding it with the sights and sounds of Buenos

Aires in the year 2000: the clicking of keyboards in internet cafés, people talking on cell phones, a TV flickering back and forth from the show Okupas to newscasts of political corruption, then shifting quickly to footage of a protest against the IMF. For Ludmer, the eternal present of Libertella’s “purely literary” utopia is “una temporalidad puramente formal que responde exactamente a la estructura de nuestro presente del 2000” (95).

Indeed, from its very first pages the novel marks its place and time: by changing the word

“arbre” to “árbol” in Saussure’s diagram (ADS 15) and by citing “1992” as the publication date of its first reference (21) Libertella situates his novel in the Spanish- speaking world at the turn of the millennium. From that temporal and spatial position, the

181 The essays in El efecto Libertella tend to fall into two categories. Some, like César Aira’s “Sin título” or Ricardo Strafacce’s “Arena de verdad,” are elegiac remembrances of Libertella as both writer and friend and situate Libertella’s writing in the context of daily life; others focus on Libertella’s works and sometimes make reference to the broad cultural context of his works. Although most note Libertella’s conflictive relationship to the market, few make reference to the historical context in which El árbol de Saussure is embedded.

198 book “postula una historia y una política de la literatura como resistencia minoritaria a los discursos claros y jerárquicos del poder. Cuanto más illegible más literario y más critico”

(Ludmer, Aquí 96). Libertella’s strategy of illegibility as a literary politics would have a particularly critical sting in the Argentina of 2000, where the acute recession associated with the implementation of neoliberal policies was putting into question both the place of literature and the possibility for critique.

Published in 2000, El árbol de Saussure appeared in the midst of a deep economic recession in Argentina that would eventually lead to the economic, social, and political crisis of 2001.182 Rising unemployment, economic uncertainty, deepening social inequalities, and a growing disillusionment with the government intensified debates in

Argentina about the fate of culture in a changing economic and cultural landscape in which the market had achieved new prominence as the regulator of culture. Although such questions had been raised since the transition from military rule to democracy in

1983,183 they gained new urgency with the implementation of neoliberal policies during

Carlos Menem’s administration (1989-99) and the brief presidency of Fernando de la Rúa

182 Throughout the 1980s, Argentina experienced a number of socio-economic crises leading up to the political and economic collapse of 2001. However, Argentina had also experienced a number of socioeconomic crises throughout the 1980s that sparked food riots, rising inflation, and monetary shortages, which led to the early transition from Raúl Alfonsín to Carlos Menem in 1989 (Newman 161). Although some of the country’s economic problems seemed to improve during the first years of Menem’s presidency, the implementation of neoliberal policies only intensified the problems bequeathed to Argentina by the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. By 1998 Argentina had once again fallen into recession and by 2001 it became the stage for an acute social and political crisis with particular repercussions for the lowest strata of society. For economic and political analyses of the policies that led to the crisis of 2001, see Carranza’s “Poster Child or Imperialist Globalization? Explaining Argentina’s December 2001 Political Crisis and Economic Collapse” and Marisela Svampa’s La sociedad excluyente.

183 For a discussion of the changes in the cultural field after democratization but before Menem’s government, see Oscar Landi, “Campo cultural y democratización en Argentina.” Although the dominance of the market became especially prevalent after 1989, Landi had already argued in 1987 that the cultural climate in the mid-80s was not a propitious one for intervention by the State. His article suggests that some sectors—particularly private media companies—were already beginning to establish an opposition between market and state and seeking the privatization of the mass media and of other industries.

199 (1999-2001).184 During their tenures in office, Menem and De la Rúa gave a new centrality to the market in an effort to incorporate Argentina into a globalized economy, bringing the country into the flows of both international media and transnational capital.

The policies implemented throughout the 1990s reduced the role of the state in dictating cultural policy and turned over the circulation and distribution of culture to the market, while giving new impetus to audiovisual media as the dominating cultural force of the new social landscape.185 With the deregulation and privatization of culture and the increasing power and prominence of large audiovisual conglomerates, literature and criticism began to lose ground to a mass culture that was threatening to eclipse not only distinctly “literary” products, but also the increasingly closed circuits of cultural interpretation.

The weakening of the state through globalization, neoliberal policies, and a growing distrust of the government seemed especially worrisome in the realm of culture, for it threatened to undermine the state’s power and authority to make space for cultural phenomena that failed to meet the demands of the market.186 Particularly vulnerable were

184 For a the effects of neoliberal policies on cultural production, see Francine Masiello’s The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis as well as Argentinean Cultural Production during the Neoliberal Years (1989-2001), edited by Hugo Hortiguera and Carolina Rocha. The introduction to the latter volume provides a succinct overview of some of the major changes that neoliberal policies wrought on the cultural field.

185 As Hortiguera and Rocha note, the privatization in the early 1990s of TV channels and radio stations that had, until then, been in the hands of the State led to the formation of powerful conglomerates. With increased advertising for audiovisual products, the mass media replaced word-centered cultural products (Hortiguera 11). This led to the growing sense that Argentine literature was unable to respond to the specific demands of its given historical times and that literature was being displaced to the margins of cultural life (10).

186 In Ni apocalípticos ni integrados, Martín Hopenhayn argues that the crisis of paradigms and utopias that occurred after the defeat of both socialism and the planning state led to the demise of culture as a public discourse and thus contributed to cultural deregulation (103). In Argentina, however, the reduced role of the state in the regulation of culture also had much to do with the growing suspicion of the state provoked by the military dictatorship of the 1970s and early 80s (Landi 145).

200 word-centered products like literature and criticism, which had to contend with the shrinking of a previously robust publishing market in Argentina, the rise of translational publishing houses (Hortiguera 11), and the growing power of a globalized academia

(Richard, “Globalización” 2-3). Literary works that, like El árbol de Saussure, did not generate mass sales or media attention risked extinction, particularly at a time when economic recession had significantly reduced the purchasing power of the middle class.

Similarly, in the realm of criticism, “la ‘función-centro’ del eje de reproducción y transferencia academico-metropolitana hace que, muchas veces, sólo se reconozcan como válidos, para efectos de la discussion internacional, aquellos discursos que se ciñen linealmente a las demarcaciones de categorías y objetos ya recortados por el diseño globalizante de la industria universitaria” (Richard, “Un debate” 841). For many

Argentine intellectuals of the 1990s, this situation fanned an old Latin American problematic: the preoccupation that in the new globalized landscape, the fate of both literature and criticism would be dictated by the centers of economic and discursive power, which privileged literary and critical works that could easily be incorporated into the global market.

One of the most vocal critics of such transformations was Beatriz Sarlo, whose

Escenas de la vida postmoderna lays out the difficulties presented by the joint forces of postmodernism, globalization, and neoliberalism to “peripheral” countries like Argentina.

The opening of Escenas has become an iconic description of the new world ushered into

Latin America in the last decades of the millennium. This is how she describes her cultural context in the Argentina of 1994:

Estamos en el fin de siglo y en la Argentina. Luces y sombras definen un paisaje conocido en Occidente, pero los contrastes se exageran, aquí, por

201 dos razones: nuestra marginalidad con respecto del ‘primer mundo’ (en consecuencia, el character tributario de muchos procesos cuyos centros de iniciativa están en otra parte); y la encallecida indiferencia con que el Estado entrega al mercado la gestión cultural sin plantearse una política de contrapeso. Como otras naciones de América, la Argentina vive el clima de lo que se llama ‘posmodernidad’ en el marco paradójico de una nación fracturada y empobrecida. Veinte horas de televisión diaria, por cincuenta canales, y una escuela desarmada, sin prestigio simbólico ni recursos materiales; paisajes urbanos trazados según el último design del mercado internacional y servicios urbanos en estado crítico. (5)

Anticipating many of the issues that would come to the fore during the crisis of the late

90s, Sarlo’s book offers a critical counterpart to many of the issues raised in Libertella’s novel. Like Libertella, Sarlo foregrounds the marginality of Argentina, its continuing status as a “ghetto” that has nevertheless been absorbed into a global village.187 In that ghetto, things look meager, contrasts are stark. The state’s absence has turned over the plaza to the market, converting citizens into consumers. This transformation of the public sphere not only dislodged politics from the plaza—a space that had played a key role in

Argentina’s political culture188—but also left little room for the intellectual as a potential

187 The notion that Argentina had been incorporated into the global village was particularly prevalent during the Menem administration, which claimed that Argentina had, in fact, finally entered the First World. The continuing marginality of Argentina, however, was brought to light by the crisis of 2001. This tension between the purported dissolution of center-periphery models and Argentina’s continuing marginal status can also be seen in the realm of criticism. As Jean Franco notes, despite the general sense that postmodernism had dissolved the center and disseminated power, “there is still a tendency to continue debating in terms determined by French or Anglo-Saxon criticism” (“Afterword” 513). Sarlo herself analyzes the paradoxical occlusion of the center in postmodernism in the context of continuing inequalities. See in particular her chapter “Abundancia y pobreza” in Escenas de la vida posmoderna. Román de la Campa also discusses the problem in Latin Americanism, where he notes the tension between the undifferentiation and free play advocated by poststructuralist theory and the hierarchies perpetuated by a neoliberal logic. See in particular his chapter “Globalization, Neoliberalism, Cultural Studies.”

188 The political importance of the plaza in Argentina is perhaps epitomized by the importance that the plaza assumed during Perón’s presidency and its subsequent reinvention by the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who during the dictatorship recuperated the plaza as a space for public debate. Yet, in the 1980s, the center of public life began to shift to the mall, both literally and metaphorically. As more shopping malls, such as Patio Bullrich, were built in the 1980s (Newman 162), culture also turned from a public discourse to a market phenomenon. A good example of the shift can be seen in the public debates about the recuperation of memory after the dictatorship, whose public significance was put in question through their absorption into a “market for social memory” (Masiello 6). It is worth noting, however, that the crisis of 2001 again seemed to revitalize the plaza as a political space and a site for public discourse. 202 critic of those transformations and of the inequalities that they perpetuate.189 As Sarlo’s subtitle— “Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina”—suggests, the fate of the intellectual in the new postmodern landscape is one of Sarlo’s key preoccupations. Like

Libertella, she is concerned, in particular, with the fate of art and literary culture, and the possibility of constructing a discourse around art and literature in Argentina that might offer resistance to globalization and the market.

Sarlo, in other words, is troubled by an old and perhaps now antiquated concern: the possibility of constructing a specifically literary criticism in Latin America whose critical response to internal and external inequalities could be heard in bustling plazas both at home and abroad. That concern was especially pertinent after the transition to democracy in 1983, which seemed to open new hope in Argentina for the long-postponed project of constituting a Latin American criticism. As in Chile, the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 had barred all spaces for critique and sent criticism underground. With the lifting of censorship, the critical discourses elaborated in the informal intellectual circles that came to be known as the “Universidad de las

Catacumbas” promised to offer new bases for a criticism that could both claim critical modernity abroad and respond to local problems. Sarlo herself had been a key figure in the “University of the Catacombs” and helped import a number of critical tools,

189 In “Un debate latinoamericano sobre práctica intelectual y discurso crítico,” Nelly Richard attributes the crisis of the intelectual to the “hegemonía mediática de los lenguajes audiovisuales,” which in late- twentieth-century Latin America decentered the “canon erudito de la ‘ciudad letrada’ cuyo desciframiento era tarea reservada del intelectual moderno” (842). In addition to the rise of the mass media, she also attributes the crisis of the intellectual to two other phenomena: the corrosion of the modern concepts of totality, generality, and universality, which had previously sustained the truth of intellectual discourse, and the increasing “tecnificación de lo social,” which turns the intellectual into an academic “expert,” thus suppressing “la conflictualidad de lo político… y la materia ideológica de donde el intelectual de antes extraía sus argumentos de confrontación al poder” (842).

203 particularly from cultural studies, that might strengthen criticism’s capacity for critique.

Yet after the fall of the dictatorship, Sarlo looked on with dismay as those very tools consolidated criticism into an academic discipline, literature became yet another commercial product, and the mass media took over the spaces for public critique.

In Argentina, the constitution of criticism as an autonomous discipline, with a distinct set of practitioners and its own institutional home in the university, paradoxically occurs “en un momento en que esa autonomía es amenazada por la economía y las fusiones. En un momento en que el libro es una mercancía como cualquier otra o una parte de la industria de la lengua” (Ludmer, Aquí 87). While these changes promised to open new avenues for critical exploration and to undermine the elitism that marked previous critical efforts, they also threatened literature as a relevant category, an object of study, and as a discourse that had traditionally functioned as a space for critique.190 The transformation of literature into another form of merchandise competing for consumer attention led to what Jean Franco has called the “fall of the lettered city”: the erosion of both literature and criticism, discourses that in 1960s and 70s Latin America still had wide resonance among the general public.191 The public function of literature and criticism had been made possible, in part, by the prestige of a literary-critical realm that allowed intellectuals to move between discourses and bring new forms of reading to an

190 Some, like Nestor García Canclini in Mexico and John Beverly in the United States, claimed that the erosion of literature’s privilege and “elitism” at the hands of the new mass culture constituted an effective challenge to both local and global hierarchies, and hailed the rise of cultural studies as a substitute for an old and inoperative literary criticism. John Beverly offers a succinct overview of this perspective in the interview “A little azúcar: una conversación sobre estudios culturales.”

191 As Jean Franco argues in “Twilight of the Vanguard and the Rise of Criticism,” in the 1960s and 70s it was intellectuals—and not academics—who undertook the task of revolutionizing the reading of literary texts. Moving between literature and criticism, writers like Borges, Fuentes, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Onetti, Lezama Lima, García Márquez, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Angel Rama, and Carlos Monsiváis developed “an essayistic criticism which did not necessarily conform to academically imposed models and was written in a language intelligible to a nonspecialist reader” (504).

204 unspecialized public. By the 1990s, the fragmentation of that literary critical realm had professionalized the intellectual as either a writer of fictions for the literary market or an academic expert. With the surge of a mass media dominated by celebrities and audiovisual products, both literary and critical products—including “intensely literary” experiments like Libertella’s and Sarlo’s academic language of Sarlo’s criticism— suddenly seemed “illegible,” far removed from the “vía pública” (Lihn, Eugenio Téllez n.p.). The Latin American intellectual of the turn of the millennium, in other words, had been liberated from having to fill multiple roles but with that new liberty also lost the

“mayor vinculación social” that Alfonso Reyes had claimed for himself in the mid- twentieth century (Reyes, “Notas” 86).

Like the rhesus monkey in El árbol de Saussure, it became increasingly difficult for literary criticism in Argentina to exit its own ghetto and find a space from which to launch a critique of society. The isolation of criticism was particularly troubling in turn- of-the-millennium Argentina, where the lingering memory and threat of authoritarian rule and the still-visible inequalities made it particularly urgent to elaborate a critical discourse that could confront them. The need for a critical discourse was made even more pressing by the increasingly powerful forces of neoliberalism and globalization, which claimed to dissolve the old hierarchies in the cultural field while continuing to reinforce systems of power both within the country and with respect to the first world. As Sarlo suggests in Escenas de la vida posmoderna, the demise of artistic value and the flattening of the cultural sphere made culture ripe for co-optation by the interests of international corporations and the centers of discursive power, which continued to hold sway over the distribution and circulation of discourses and cultural products. Countering proponents of

205 cultural studies, who claimed that the new undifferentiated realm of culture provided an effective challenge to both local and global hierarchies, Sarlo repeatedly pointed to the growing power of the market and its capacity to form a-critical subjects, to shape subjectivities disposed not to citizenship but to consumption. Despite the key role that she played in the development of cultural studies in Argentina, Sarlo continued to question whether the erosion of literature and literary criticism did not answer to a shift in the interests of discursive and economic power, thus perpetuating the very hierarchies that cultural studies claimed to contest. Her own criticism was, in consequence, crafted through a complex dance between literary criticism that ultimately sought to bridge the new rifts between literature, criticism, and society without doing away with the category of literature altogether.

Sarlo set out, in other words, to rethink the place of literature in the new postmodern landscape, as well as its relationship to criticism and to the general public.

She thus joined a broader discussion in Argentina about the form and the role of criticism at the turn of the millennium and the possibility and worth of rescuing literature as a category that still had an important role to play in Latin America.192 Together with other

Argentine intellectuals, including Ludmer and Libertella, Sarlo once again invoked literature, not just as an old category that had once served as a space for critique or as a meeting place between the intellectual and the public, but as a way of drawing a critical space amid the currents of power at the turn of the millennium. For Sarlo, Ludmer, and

192 As in the pre-coup Chile of the 1960s and early 70s, the 1990s in Argentina were marked by intense metacritical debate. Some of the central critics in this debate included Jorge Panesi, Nicolás Casullo, Alberto Giordano, Maria Cecilia Vázquez, Miguel Dalmaroni, and Nicolás Rosa. See, in particular, Las operaciones de la crítica, edited by Alberto Giordano and Maria Cecilia Vázquez, which includes essays by or on many of the critics noted above and Políticas de la crítica: Historia de la crítica literaria en Argentina, edited by Nicolás Rosa.

206 Libertella, literature would function as a kind of utopia, as a fictional island or terra firme that might provide a respite from those currents and revive the project of crafting a critical discourse from Latin America. Their project would once again require redrawing the boundaries between literature and criticism, fiction and critique, critic and public, critical and naive. In the case of Ludmer, Sarlo, and Libertella, it meant reactivating the critical potential of fiction and reimagining a literary-critical space that once served as evidence of Latin America’s critical inadequacy but that returned, at the end of the millennium, with untapped critical potential.

As was the case with other twentieth-century Latin American critics, Sarlo’s particular construction of literature as a discourse that could make criticism more legible to the general public established a contradictory relationship to a reader whom she sought to rescue from naive compliance with the market. Read through Libertella’s critical fiction, Sarlo’s concern for legibility betrays an understanding of the general public as a naive mass in need of education through the accessible forms of literature into the difficult practice of critique. Libertella, in contrast, constructs literature not as a legible but as an illegible discourse, whose incomprehensibility within the new logic of the market grants it a critical position amid the savagery of late capitalism. In the face of the market’s tendency to close all spaces for critique, Libertella revived a presumably obsolete literary aesthetic and responded with the semantic guerrilla tactics of an amphibious literary-critical discourse that called out: “Si la literatura en mi sien, entonces el agujero en tu mercado” (Libertella, quoted in Estrín 52). From the rhetorical opening he created, Libertella launched an intense critique of a global discourse that had declared the world flat, forgetting the uneven flows of power that continue to create ghettos within

207 discourse.193 His critique was directed as much to international as to local intellectuals. It challenged, on the one hand, the “función-centro” of metropolitan discourse and its critical hierarchies of value. Yet it also questioned a critical scene that, at the end of the

1990s in Argentina, was still trying to craft a critical discourse in sync with the demands and challenges of a global critical market while perpetuating the fiction of a naive reader untutored in current strategies of critique. To those critical fictions, Libertella responded with his own: a literary project that while confounding the savviest readers, made a clearing for “retrograde,” “savage,” or “underdeveloped” readers who had lost their place in the new world.

From Literature to Culture, or the Place of the Critical

The scene seemed well prepared for a critical comeback. It was 1984, less than a year after Raúl Alfonsín assumed the presidency of Argentina, thus putting an end to the

Proceso de Reorganización Nacional that for seven years subjected the country to a gruesome military dictatorship. Intellectuals who had been meeting clandestinely with students in the living rooms of their homes were returning to the university. There was a celebratory air in the Universidad de Buenos Aires, which, as part of a return to democracy, organized a series of lectures titled “Los escritores, la producción y la crítica”

(Sarlo, “La crítica” 6). After almost a decade of terror that, according to Noé Jitrik

“damaged the critical capacity of society as a whole” (162) the lecture series at the

193 This notion that postmodernism has had a “flattening” is shared by both critics of postmodernism and defenders of neoliberal policies. Jameson, for example, offers a detailed analysis of the “flattening” effects of postmodern culture; its counterpart can be found in books like The World is Flat (2005) by Thomas L. Friedman, which defends free-markt policies and presumably explains the “flattening” of the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

208 University of Buenos Aires sought to reactivate critical discussion by inviting prominent

Argentine intellectuals to discuss the relationship between writing and criticism. A key figure among them was Beatriz Sarlo, who had played a crucial role in the critical underground during the military dictatorship. During those years, Sarlo participated in the

“University of the Catacombs” (Gerbaudo, “Literatura” 4) and also disseminated critical readings and new methodologies through the magazine Punto de vista (Dalmaroni 94-96).

Her 1984 lecture in the newly democratic Argentina was, however, anything but festive.

As Sarlo herself admits in the opening paragraph, “Yo… vengo con una perspectiva pesimista. O más bien con una perspectiva llena de perplejidades y de dudas acerca de la efectividad de nuestro trabajo” (“La crítica” 6). Sarlo’s lecture, titled “La crítica: entre la literatura y el público,” presented a rather dark picture of criticism in Argentina in the mid-1980s. Whereas others hailed the return of criticism, she suggested that criticism was at the threshold not of rebirth but of demise.

Anticipating many of the questions raised by El árbol de Saussure fifteen years later, Sarlo expressed serious concerns about the place of criticism in the changing landscape of post-dictatorship Argentina. As does Libertella’s novel, Sarlo wondered in her lecture about the fate of interpretation in the wake of Saussure’s work and about the critical transformations brought about by the importation of structuralism and other critical methodologies into the Argentina of the 1960s and 70s. Paradoxically, critics’ happy return to the university after the fall of the dictatorship was one of the elements that most preoccupied Sarlo about the new critical landscape. Sarlo was concerned, in particular, by the possibility that reclaiming lecture halls and classrooms constituted not a triumphant return to a lost public space but a one-way voyage to a cloistered

209 environment. In her lecture, Sarlo compares the situation of Argentine intellectuals in

1984 to that of Roland Barthes and Raymond Williams who, in France and Britain respectively, continued to use the university as a launching pad for polemical arguments that had wide national resonance in the mass media and among the general public (9). In contrast, “La Universidad Argentina hace años que perdió su posibilidad de emitir un discurso autorizado y polémico. La Universidad se limitó a articular un discurso que carece de relevancia para la crítica y para el público” (9). Sarlo’s main point of contention was that by the 1980s the criticism being produced in the Argentine university had become an esoteric discourse, uninteresting and unintelligible to the general public.

For Sarlo, criticism’s growing isolation was due not only to the turbulence of political events in Argentina and their devastating effects upon critical discourse but also to changes in the literary-critical field that helped remove criticism from political discussion and stripped it of social relevance (9).

As in Chile, the Argentine university had played a critical role in the “intellectual modernization” (A. Martínez 6) that swept through Latin America in the 1960s. Like the critics of the “renovación crítica” in Chile, Argentine intellectuals of the 1960s turned to the university as an engine of modernization and used it as a portal for introducing new critical methodologies into the local critical repertoire, including structuralism and various methodologies influenced by linguistics (Panesi, “Operaciones” 10).194 In

Argentina, however, the university’s public function was cut short earlier than in Chile by

194 According to Martín Kohan, the theoretical universe that emerged in Argentina during the 1960s and 70s can be found in Libertella’s literature, which displays an implicit theoretical universe that includes the likes of Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, Blanchot, Bataille, Bakhtin, and the Russian Formalists. The theoretical universe is, according to Kohan, “nítidamente fechado”: it is introduced in the 1960s, blossoms in the 70s and 80s, and is henceforth domesticated and reduced to the status of a vulgate in the 1990s (137).

210 Juan Carlos Onganía’s military coup and by the military takeover of the University of

Buenos Aires in 1966.195 After the shutdown of the department of “Filosofía y Letras” at the University of Buenos Aires, the site of critical renewal and public debate began to shift to magazines like Los Libros, Crisis, Literal, and Latinoamericana, which picked up a task that had become impossible within the intervened university (11).196 Both Sarlo and Libertella played key roles as contributors to the emergent “counter-institutional” critical scene, which included both literary writers and critics and assumed the task of literary interpretation as well as of political critique (11).197 With the rise of Juan Perón to power in 1973, many of the magazines that emerged in the 1960s reframed cultural activity—including both literature and criticism—as a direct response to current political events.198 Their tendency to mix cultural and political critique made them particularly

195 The night of the military intervention of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, now known as “La Noche de los Bastones Largos,” put an end to the ideal of autonomy from the government under which the University had functioned. That night, Argentina’s Federal Police shut down five departments and exerted especially brutal force in the department of “Filosofía y letras,” which had played an important role in the critical renewal of the 1960s.

196 While the journal Los Libros, which Sarlo directed and wrote in, increasingly shifted its focus from culture to politics in the years leading up to the coup (Croce 72), the journal Literal, in which Libertella participated, aggressively defended the relative autonomy of literature but paradoxically did so in political terms (Giordano, “Literal” 59). As Giordano notes, Literal was the site of a heated debate about the relationship between politics and literature. It developed a politics of literature conceived as a negative resistance to a populist polítical discourse that it termed “políticas de la felicidad” (63). Despite its emphasis on the relative autonomy of literature, the magazine continued to publish documents, such as “Para comprender la censura,” that direcly addressed political themes (71).

197 In its inclusion of both literary writers and critics, the “counter-institutional” critical scene of the late 60s had much in common with the Chilean escena de avanzada, which took up the task of both literary and political critique during the Pinochet dictatorship, discussed above in chapter 3. As in Chile, theoretical ideas became fodder for literary production and literary writers—including Germán García, Ricardo Piglia, Luis Gusmán, and Osvaldo Lamborghini—wrote criticism and participated in creating alternative institutional spaces for criticism (Panesi, “Operaciones” 11). Like Lihn in Chile, Libertella was an active participant in that literary-critical scene, and no doubt influenced by the permeable boundary between literature and criticism.

198 As Giordano notes, Perón’s return to Argentina and the political polarization that it generated turned politics into the ultimate benchmark against which all discourses were measured. During those years “la política se impone como lugar común de reflexión y debate al que ninguna formación cultural puede sustraerse” (“Literal” 59). 211 vulnerable to the political persecution after the military coup of 1976. As in the Chile of

Pinochet, all references to politics became suspect during the Proceso de Reorganización

Nacional, which led to the depoliticization of critical discourse and to the shutdown of the counterinstitutional critical scene that emerged in the 1960s.199

The repressive strategies of the military government resulted in the suspension of public debate, though as both Sarlo and Jorge Panesi argue, the changes brought about by the “renovación discursiva” of the 1960s and 70s also contributed to the occlusion of public spaces for critique (Panesi, “Operaciones” 11).200 As Sarlo notes in her 1984 lecture, the theoretical revolution of the 1960s “founded” a modern criticism and updated the teaching of literature, yet it also shifted the center of public debate away from literary magazines like Sur and Martín Fierro, where the essay had previously functioned as a

“common space” for a heterogeneous array of social actors (8). In the 1960s, however, amid the continental rise of the nueva crítica, the new critical scenes in Argentina dismissed the essay as too “anti-theoretical” and “impressionistic” to meet the new requirements for rigor, disciplinary specialization, and conceptual specificity. Ensayismo was thus dethroned from its position as the “príncipe del sistema literario” and exiled “del otro lado del muro edificado por los discursos que se reclaman de la ciencia” (8). From them on, critical discourse became increasingly technical and rarified, and the wide

199 For a discussion of the demise of the political discourses that dominated both the political and cultural spheres before 1973, see Nicolás Casullo, Modernidad y cultura crítica, particularly the chapters “Una temporada en las palabras” and “Los años 60s y 70 y la crítica histórica.” There, Casullo presents the intellectual discourse of the 60s and 70s as yet another victim of the “disappearances” carried out by the military dictatorship and argues that the current political climate in the 1990s threatened to perpetuate the occlusion of that discourse.

200 In 1978 and from the North American university, Peter Earle had made a similar argument about ensayismo and its demise, brought about by the enthusiasm in Latin America for structuralist theory. For further details, see Earle’s “On the Contemporary Displacement of the Hispanic American Essay.”

212 circulation that it had previously enjoyed began shrinking to ever more narrow circles of both production and reception.201 By the time of the 1976 military coup, the highly differentiated circuits of production, readership, and distribution created by the “counter- institutional” critical scene of the 1960s made it more difficult to respond to political events and fulfill the revolutionary objectives it professed (Panesi, “Operaciones” 11).202

By 1984, criticism was restricted to a small circle of academic readers and critics had been stripped of their mediating role between literature and the public.203 The

“fisura” or “desgarramiento” between criticism and society became the central concern of

Sarlo’s 1984 lecture, which took aim at the “rasgos fuertemente iniciáticos” of the critical language that survived during the dictatorship and that returned triumphantly to the university in the post-dictatorship years (10). As Sarlo argued for her academic audience,

“para leer nuestros textos es necesario realizar operaciones complicadas, a veces más complicadas […] que las que exige la literatura misma. Y es posible que menos placenteras” (7). As a discourse more inaccessible than literature, criticism could no longer claim to be a tool or form of knowledge necessary to understand literature’s discursive universe. Without that necessary function, the critic became a “despojado de lugar,” quite unlike the reader, whose function as a consumer of texts continued to assure

201 As Panesi notes, the magazines that emerged in the late 1960s began to target specialized audiences and featured a criticism whose “pathos objetivizante, metodológico, auto-inquisitorial, cargado de estentóreas mímicas científicas” (“Operaciones” 11) restricted it to highly differentiated circuits of production, readership, and distribution. According to Panesi, the shift from the journalistic medium used by ensayismo to the university was a key element in the restricted circulation of critical discourse after the 1960s.

202 A similar argument about the marginalizing effect that imported literary theories had upon criticism can also be found in Rafael Gutierrez Girardot’s “El ensayo y la crítica literaria en Latinoamérica.”

203 As Montaldo notes, the loss of the intellectual’s mediating role in Argentina was further complicated in the 80s and 90s by the adoption of a neoliberal model that imposed strandards of professionalism on various institutions, including the university, while cutting subsidies and public positions in the realms of research and teaching (37).

213 his/her place within the literary system (7). Critics, in contrast, found themselves exiled to the no-place of a ghettoized discourse and marginalized within the walls of a university that suddenly made them irrelevant. In 1984, this irrelevance had significant consequences in the broader social landscape of post-dictatorship Argentina where, instead of making critical discourse superfluous, the advent of democracy seemed to require it more urgently than ever. The recent memory of the atrocities committed during the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional called for a strong critical discourse that might prevent such atrocities in the future and keep their memory alive within a new democracy in which political expediency often led to excessive pardon and forgetfulness.204

In this context, Sarlo invited Argentine critics to resist the marginal place assigned to criticism by both political events and by critics’ own discourse, and to make space within the university for a discourse that—like the ensayismo of the 40s and 50— would not alienate its readers (“La crítica” 10). Sarlo was nevertheless aware that the definitive shift to the university as the locus of critical thought after the dictatorship made it more difficult for intellectuals to move between multiple roles, as Sarmiento did in the nineteenth century, or to deploy the kind of unspecialized, literary discourse used by

Borges in the early twentieth century. The so-called modernization of the 1960s and 70s had forever changed Latin American critical production, drawing it into the currents of a global critical discourse dominated by its academic variant. Globalization had caught

Latin American intellectuals within a “red transnacional de universidades y de

204 The growing concern with the leniency exhibited by political leaders came to a head with the “indultos” that Menem passed between 1989 and 1990s. These laws officially pardoned cilivian and military leaders for any crimes committed during the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional as well as the leaders of the guerrilla organizations that had been active in the 1960s. Menem’s “indultos” went even further than the Ley de Punto Final and the Ley de Obediencia Debida, which had set strict limits to possible sanctions for crimes committed during the Proceso.

214 instituciones del conocimiento que administra recursos para la circulación de las ideas a la vez que programa las agendas de debate intelectual” (Richard, “Globalización”).

Within the new transnational webs of knowledge, Saussure’s diagram and the theoretical revolution that it sparked would henceforth provide a critical focal point. As Libertella suggests in El árbol de Saussure, Saussure’s diagram would come to determine points of view and define critics’ positions in the global critical market (15). No longer would intellectuals be able to intervene as mere readers “en el sentido ingenuo de la palabra”— as Borges once put it (“La supersticiosa” 222)—but would need to demonstrate their knowledge of global critical debates and establish their position vis-à-vis the current theoretical landscapes. Making a space in Argentina for a critical discourse capable of intervening in political discussions, in other words, required validating that discourse within academic circles increasingly judged in terms of theoretical sophistication and international currency.

In the years before 1984 Sarlo had already set out to establish the institutional and discursive bases for a criticism that could claim critical sophistication, connect with an unspecialized reader, and occupy a prominent place in public discussions. Founded in

1978, in the midst of the Junta’s military dictatorship, the magazine Punto de Vista became the vehicle through which Sarlo sought to maintain critical discussion in a besieged Argentina and to redefine the terms of that discussion.205 As Miguel Dalmaroni analyzes in detail, Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano used Punto de Vista to import a series of

205 Punto de Vista was founded by Sarlo, Carlos Altamirano, Ricardo Piglia, and Elías Semán in 1978 as a way of continuing the work that Sarlo and Altamirano had carried out together with Héctor Schmucler in Los Libros, which ceased publication in 1975. As Eduardo Pogoriles notes, Punto de Vista was one of the few spaces for critical debate during the dictatorship. It became a key cultural reference throughout the 80s and 90s and redefined the role of the critical intellectual. The magazine closed in 2008.

215 critical theories, particularly those associated with the Birmingham school of cultural studies as well as sociological approaches to culture like those of Pierre Bourdieu and the early Roland Barthes (94). Importing British cultural studies was a way of reorienting cultural criticism and disrupting the local enthusiasm for French structuralist theory, which according to Sarlo played a key role in the increased impenetrability of critical language and its tendency to devolve into a series of critical fashions understandable only by a small minority (Dalmaroni 94).206 In midst of the dictatorship and faced with the obscurity of the new critical languages, authors like Raymond Williams, Bourdieu, and the Barthes of Mythologies provided models for a socially relevant criticism that could connect criticism with the general reader, stimulate reflection on the connections between culture and politics, and avoid getting caught in the vertiginous succession of critical fashions (94).

Although the editors of Punto de Vista rejected the notion that cultural studies was simply another critical fad, translating authors like Williams and Richard Hoggart in the late 1970s and early 80s nevertheless positioned the magazine as the avant-garde in the intellectual field. Presenting itself as the scout and emissary of an unknown, exotic critical repertoire, Punto de Vista quickly established its authority as a magazine on the cutting edge of critical thinking (Dalmaroni 95). Punto de Vista in this sense worked squarely within the late-twentieth-century logic of a global critical discourse marked by what Román de la Campa calls “constant revolution” (155) and “hyperproduction”

206 As Sarlo notes in “La crítica: entre la literatura y el público,” the new discourses and methodologies imported in the 1960s led to the increasing rarification of critical discourse (8) and turned criticism into a series of “dated” languages (10). Sarlo points out that the adjective “fechado” or “dated,” widely used in 1984, is a galicism that was unknown fifteen years earlier. She thus suggests that starting in the late 60s Argentine criticism began to exhibit the signs of its entry into a critical world marked by the rapid succession of critical fashions.

216 (158).207 The importation of cultural studies into Argentina seemed like the latest response to the insatiable demand for new theoretical frameworks that had come to characterize global critical production. Yet the Birmingham School also allowed the editors of Punto de Vista to sidestep that logic by presenting cultural studies not as a fashionable theoretical language to imitate, but as an argument for a new critical flexibility that could borrow from numerous discourses. As Dalmaroni notes, subscribing to Williams’s theories “significaba constituirse como sujeto crítico ecléctico, móvil, revisionista, metodológicamente escéptico”—that is, as a critical subject who could transcend the dogmatic adherence to the “lenguajes de temporada” associated with

French structuralist and poststructuralist theory (96).208 Williams’s empiricism offered a new way of approaching culture, authorizing criticism to rummage through the whole archive of culture and theory at the level of both methodology and content. Cultural studies’ theoretically sophisticated approach to culture thus allowed Sarlo to step outside the precinct of literature, taking culture as a diverse text to be interpreted semiotically, while avoiding the allegedly arcane vocabularies of high literary theory. Cultural studies thus provided a means to “volver a las calles” (97), literally and metaphorically. It opened the field of interpretation to a variety of social and political phenomena and connected

207 Román de la Campa borrows the term “constant revolution” from Joseph Tabbi and uses it to refer to the rapid succession of technical and specialized languages that supplant one another in a vertiginous process of critical revision. According to De la Campa, this state of “constant revolution” is one of the distinguishing features of critical thinking in a globalized world subject to the late capitalism’s tendency towards hyperproduction. See, in particular, the chapter “Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Cultural Studies” in Latin Americanism.

208 The notion that cultural studies is a theory to end all theories can also be found in John Beverly’s account of the introduction of cultural studies into the United States and its subsequent tranformation into subaltern studies. As he says at the end of the interview, subaltern studies does not have an “afterwards”: its efforts to connect criticism to the problem of social inequalities can only lose its interest with the end of inequality (94). See “A little azúcar: una conversación sobre estudios cuturales.”

217 critics to a public whose practices were considered valid and valuable forms of knowledge.209

The importation of British cultural studies thus allowed Sarlo, in a somewhat paradoxical move, to return to some of the guiding tenets of ensayismo while avoiding the notion that hers was a nostalgic return to a lost and provincial Latin American discourse.210 Cultural studies’ “return to the streets” once again made criticism “más avezada al aire de la calle,” as Reyes had once characterized Latin America’s intelligentsia (“Notas” 86). It also opened criticism to the multiplicity of discourses that

Reyes had marked as necessary elements in a “fair assessment” of Latin American literature and culture (“Fragmento” 155). Like ensayismo, cultural studies allowed the critic to range over the entirety of culture, with the added benefit of bringing the critic in contact with popular groups whose modes of knowledge were now authorized. Cultural studies thus functioned much like Reyes’s “juicio,” which incorporated the “naive” knowledge of an unspecialized, non-academic reader into its more capacious, more

“human” version of criticism. By virtue of its roots in Marxist thought, cultural studies nevertheless obtained an association with radical political praxis and a theoretical sophistication that in a post-1960s world Reyes’s humanism no longer commanded.

Cultural studies thus offered a fitting critical structure that allowed Sarlo to resituate

209 As Nelly Richard notes, in its beginnings cultural studies was characterized by the desire to democratize knowledge, to open it up to practices and forms of knowledge situated outside the traditional corpus of academic discourse: to popular culture, social movements, feminist criticism, and subaltern groups, among others (“Globalización”).

210 For a discussion of the tensions and contradictions generated by the clash between late-twentieth- century theoretical frameworks and a tradition of Latin American ensayismo see Hugo Achugar’s “Leones, cazadores, e historiadores: A propósito de las políticas de la memoria y del conocimiento.” Achugar argues that adopting postcolonial studies as a “new” place from which to read Latin America ignores the fact that the very same questions it raises have been pondered “desde hace varios siglos o desde hace más de un siglo” in Latin America (209). The same could be said for cultural studies in its relation to Sarlo’s project.

218 Argentine criticism within a longer Latin American critical tradition while bringing it into step with both local needs and international trends.

After the return to democracy in 1983, Sarlo continued to disseminate and champion the British strain of cultural studies both through Punto de Vista and through the classes that she offered at the University of Buenos Aires.211 Sarlo’s adoption and dissemination of cultural studies after the dictatorship, however, was not entirely unproblematic. The new prestige granted to cultural studies throughout academic centers in Europe and the Americas and the entrenchment of postmodernity as a kind of “cultural logic” intimately connected to the workings of late capitalism, led Sarlo to reflect on the effects of such phenomena on her project for a socially relevant criticism in Latin

America. In a kind of critical revision of those very critics and theories that she herself had championed, Sarlo engaged throughout the 1980s and especially the 1990s in a rereading of Williams, Bourdieu, Barthes, Hans-Robert Jauss, and other European critics, marking the differences between their social and discursive world and the one in which she produced her texts.212 Sarlo emphasized, in particular, the role that thinkers like

Bourdieu had played in the relativization of values, and the problems that such relativization posed in turn-of-the-century Argentina. She explicitly laid out her doubts in

Chile during a 1997 lecture titled “Los estudios culturales y la crítica literaria en la

211 For an interpretation of Sarlo’s courses as one front of her broader critical work, see Analía Gerbaudo’s “Intervenciones olvidadas: Beatriz Sarlo en la Universidad Argentina de la posdictadura (1984-1986).”

212 Sarlo’s efforts to differentiate her discursive world from that of European critics are most explicit in Literatura/ Sociedad. There, Sarlo and Altamirano outline Bordieu’s construction of literature as an autonomous field and note that the relative autonomy of the cultural field is problematic in of Latin America, which has lacked the institutional structures and stable liberal-democratic systems needed for the constitution of an autonomous realm. Sarlo and Altamirano also note that the autonomy of the cultural realm in Latin America is complicated by the fact that its horizon of aesthetic paradigms is often situated in centers of power located outside Latin America. See in particular the chapter “Del campo intellectual y las instituciones literarias.”

219 encrucijada valorativa,” which Sarlo had also presented a year earlier at Duke University.

Sarlo opens the lecture by noting the changing place of literature in the face of cultural studies’ increasing popularity and mounts a passionate defense of literary criticism’s role as the keeper of aesthetic values.

As Sarlo goes on to argue, literary criticism cannot turn over to cultural studies the task of defining the specificity of literature and establishing literary value, particularly in turn-of-the-century Latin America. In her lecture, Sarlo recognizes the democratic impulse of cultural studies and praises its attempt to rectify literary criticism’s withdrawal from the public sphere by elaborating a less hermetic discourse that could serve as a functional “compañero de ruta” for the social movements that emerged during the transition to democracy (3). Sarlo, however, also highlights the role that cultural studies played in the relativization of aesthetic values and observes that this relativization also seemed to reinforce a postmodern, neoliberal logic.213 According to Sarlo, by the late

1990s relativism had become the touchstone of “nuestras convicciones multiculturales,” yet it also turned over the task of establishing a canon to a market interested not in social but in mercantile value (6). In post-dictatorship Argentina, aesthetic relativization coincided with both neoliberal globalization and with the imposition of pluralism as a regulatory political principle that by leveling all styles and opinions also made them all equally unimportant (Escenas 156). Such pluralism was problematic in a context where

“el mercado, experto en equivalencias abstractas, recibe a este pluralismo estético como

213 For example, in Escenas de la vida posmoderna Sarlo notes how the sociological analysis of art, like the one elaborated by Bordieu, reduced aesthetic positions to relationships of force within the intellectual field. This not only desacralized the sphere of art but also dissolved artistic values by reducing them to questions of institutional accord. As she notes, “sin fundamento en autoridades constituidas y sin fundamento autosuficiente en el territorio del arte, la objetividad de los valores estéticos ha sido dada de baja” (153).

220 la ideología más afín a sus necesidades” (156). For Sarlo, the “efecto de superficie” (32) that seemed to level old hierarchies was a deceptive illusion, which masked the market’s tendency to create ghettos within the cultural sphere while privileging those products and practices that reinforced the structural inequalities of a global capitalist market. Sarlo observes that the market’s capacity to co-opt cultural pluralism is particularly threatening in peripheral countries like Argentina, which lack the political institutions that in

Bourdieu’s France guaranteed the cultural field’s relative autonomy from both politics and the market (Altamirano and Sarlo, Literatura/ Sociedad 159). The threat to the independence of the cultural sphere had been particularly acute during the military dictatorships of the 60s and 70s, yet it was no less disturbing in the 80s and 90s when neoliberal policies threatened to absorb culture into a market whose centers of power still lay in Europe and North America.

Amid the “new populism” that, according to Montaldo, redefined Argentine culture and politics in the 1990s (25), insisting on the specificity of literature allowed

Sarlo to rekindle a debate that might wrest the determination of cultural and social value away from the market.214 As the millennium came to a close, Sarlo continued to defend aesthetic values and the capacity to differentiate art and literature from the mercantile products of mass culture, which produced subjects compliant with an expanding market.

In various texts and articles, she argued that it was still possible and useful to define the specificity of literature, that “algo siempre queda cuando explicamos socialmente a los textos literarios y ese algo es crucial” (“Los estudios” 6). Sarlo viewed that “something”

214 According to Montaldo, the 1990s once again saw a resurgence of the ties between culture and politics that in the 1950s and 60s had been defined by Peronist populism. In the 1990s a similar populism returns, but with a “neoliberal” turn that leads both politicians and cultural producers to seek the regard of the masses through mass cultural appeal. See in this regard the section “Una crítica al saber.”

221 not as an ineffable essence like that which characterized literature for José Miguel Ibáñez

Langlois, but as a “resistance” created by literature’s formal and semantic density. In late twentieth-century Argentina, literature’s resistance was indeed crucial, for it promised to create a critical space capable of interrupting the easy consumerism in which other cultural practices had trained the masses, thus disrupting the flows of power in the globalized market. Sarlo most notably laid out this argument in her 1994 Escenas de la vida posmoderna, where she makes a case for the continued relevance of practicing literary criticism and defining aesthetic values from Latin America. In Escenas, Sarlo also recognizes the challenges of a turn-of-the-millennium landscape that seemed to have left no space for literature or for an intellectual interested in defining social and literary value.

One of the main challenges that Sarlo highlights is the risk of obsolescence, exacerbated by the speed a global academic market that judged critical languages according to their currency with respect to global critical trends. As Sarlo notes in the section “Valores y mercado,” a handful of “exceptional” men and women had, for centuries, discussed aesthetic values within the stable and self-sufficient realm of art

(156). Yet in the few decades that preceded the writing of Ecenas de la vida posmoderna, that realm had been exposed as a “fiction,” aesthetic values revealed as “virtudes imaginarias” (157), and the myths of artistic creation turned into “relatos” that hid the true motives of self-interested positioning within the market (158). In that context,

Sarlo’s defense of aesthetic values risked being dismissed as the naive move of a nostalgic or antiquated intellectual, not only by the centers of discursive power but also by the Latin American cultural studies movement that she had helped shape.215 As Neil

215 Sarlo anticipates the critique of nostalgia or obsolescence in Escenas de la vida posmoderna, where she outlines two possible responses to the demise of the role of the intellectual: that of the “viejos legitimistas,” 222 Larsen points out, one of the guiding impulses of that cultural studies movement was the attempt to offer an alternative to the Frankfurt School’s view of art as the only possible resistance to a mass culture complicit with the horrors of capitalism. In a post-Marxist world in which total revolution no longer seemed possible, cultural studies “dissents from this adverse stigmatization [of mass culture] and urges the recognition of an oppositional, emancipatory dimension in mass capitalist culture” (191). Sarlo’s attempt to retain literature as a relevant category seemed, in this light, like a return to an old and inoperative conception of the aesthetic now associated not with the radical praxis of the

Frankfurt School but with a kind of retrograde elitism.

Cognizant of the challenge, Sarlo recognizes that it is impossible to return to a time when both art and the intellectual still held a privileged position in society, but she rejects the “conformidad acrítica” that accepts the complete occlusion of aesthetic value

(Escenas 178). She claims, in fact, that the discussion of values is “el gran debate en el fin de siglo” (“Los estudios” 1) and characterizes her attempts to define literary value as a newly critical strategy amid the naive enthusiasm for late-capitalist culture. Turning the tables, she depicts the new proponents of cultural studies in Latin America as

“neopopulistas de mercado” (Escenas 6) and claims that they have a naive view of market forces’ capacity to shape subjectivities through apparently liberatory cultural practices.

Their naiveté had not only made cultural studies unwittingly complicit with the market, to

who mourn the passing of the old figure of the intellectual, or that of the “neopopulistas de mercado” (118), who celebrate and encourage its final entombment. Sarlo, however, tries to elaborate a third position that does not fall into either camp. A number of critics nevertheless fault Sarlo for her presumed nostalgia and her incapacity to let go of the categories of the past. Jean Franco, for example, recognizes Sarlo’s attempt to find new critical spaces but dismisses her attempts on the grounds that “her remedies are no more convincing because past practices are not necessarily viable models” (Fall 263). On a similar note, see also Andrea Pagni and Erna von der Walde’s article “Qué intelectuales en tiempos posmodernos o de ‘cómo ser radical sin ser fundamentalista.’”

223 which it had left the formation of the cultural canon, but also reinforced certain inequalities in the cultural and critical spheres. As Sarlo argued in her 1997 lecture, cultural studies’ enthusiasm for the products of previously marginalized groups risked perpetuating the notion that “los latinoamericanos debemos producir objetos adecuados al análisis cultural, mientras que Otros (básicamente los europeos) tienen el derecho de producir objetos adecuados a la crítica de arte. Lo mismo podría decirse acerca de las mujeres o los sectores populares: de ellos se esperan objetos culturales, y de los hombres blancos, arte” (“Los estudios” 11). Sarlo’s insistence on the continuing relevance of literary criticism was, in this light, a form of resistance to a global critical market that perpetuated social hierarchies within the cultural sphere under the pretense of pluralism.

Defying that market, Sarlo affirms the right to literature for Latin Americans, women, and popular sectors. She argues that such groups should not be excluded from the spheres of criticism and art, which still provide a necessary space for critique amid the inequalities of the late twentieth century.216

Picking up a decades-long project, Sarlo thus vindicates Latin America’s right to practice literary criticism and revives an old Latin American tradition that celebrates literature as an emancipatory discourse against the forces of a global culture whose centers lay in Europe and North America. A tradition that dates back to José Enrique

Rodó’s Ariel, it includes Reyes’s humanist argument against positivism and nueva crítica’s depiction of literature as the crucible of a revolutionary consciousness, as well as

216 Despite recognizing that the modern figure of the intellectual is on the wane, Sarlo rescues critique as the one element of modernity that she claims still has a function to play in postmodernity: “Sin embargo, la función crítica, que, entre otras funciones, tuvieron los intelectuales y las vanguardias, todavía ejerce un llamado poderoso porque no han desvanecido las injusticias que dieron impulse al fuego donde se impugnaron poderes absolutos y legitimidades basadas en la autoridad despótica y la concentración de riquezas” (Escenas 177).

224 prominent late-twentieth century critics like Nelly Richard in Chile and Francine

Masiello in the United States.217 Like Richard and Masiello, who insist on the critical potential of “the aesthetic” (Masiello 10), Sarlo depicts literature as a discourse that could once again turn criticism into a socially relevant practice. To that end, Escenas de la vida posmoderna serves as a way of demanding “el derecho a ambos mundos” (“Los estudios”

12): the worlds of popular culture and of literature, understood as a set of aesthetically valuable texts and as a discourse that can be studied and wielded by the Latin American critic. Although she recognizes the prominence of mass culture in the postmodern landscapes of the turn of the millennium, Sarlo seeks to make space for literature both amid those landscapes and in her own text as well. In Escenas de la vida posmoderna,

Sarlo continues to put in practice the methodologies she derived from cultural studies— retaining, with them, the authority and sophistication expected of cultural criticism— while making use of literary forms and a language unburdened by the “baggage” of criticism’s “lenguaje… iniciático” (“La crítica” 10). In Sarlo’s case, this entailed rekindling the literary practices of a Latin American essay tradition that had presumably entered a period of “crisis” or “decadence” after the 1980s (Giordano, “La crítica” 92), but that nevertheless saw a new resurgence in Argentina during the last decades of the twentieth century.

Together with a number of Argentine critics and writers, including Ludmer and

Libertella, Sarlo invokes, once again, a literary-critical space that had presumably been

217 As Masiello notes, Richard and Sarlo are the two main proponents of the “aesthetic turn” in Latin America. While offering a gloss of the critiques directed at Sarlo and questioning Richard’s reliance on the fragment, Masiello nevertheless situates herself within this “aesthetic turn.” In The Art of Transition she argues that art and literature force us to think of interpretative strategies of resistance in response to the flattening gloss of the market (11-13).

225 displaced at the turn of the millennium and resurrects it in her own writing as a way of disrupting the professionalization, homogenization, and closure of criticism.218 Faced with the growing rift between an uncritical consuming public and a ghettoized criticism concerned with but unread by the masses, Sarlo turns to literature as a mediating discourse that can make her own discourse more accessible and thus introduce common readers into the difficult practices of critique. Within her own writing, literature nevertheless remains a subordinate discourse: as with Reyes half a century earlier, for

Sarlo literature was not a form of critical thinking itself but a means to critical thinking, a pedagogical tool that might bring the mass public out of its naiveté and into a new critical consciousness.219

This characterization of both literature and the public would, however, elicit a scathing critical response, both from the critical establishment and from the space of literature itself.220 Assuming the critical function that Sarlo assigns to literature, El árbol de Saussure questions whether depicting literature as an accessible discourse could in fact resist market forces and disrupt the hierarchies between the intellectual and the masses,

218 As Giordano notes, despite the purported “decadence” of the essay, a number of Argentine critics— including Jorge Panesi, Horacio González, Nicolás Casullo and Ricardo Piglia—set out to transform the ethical and aesthetic conditions of criticism in the 1990s. Like Sarlo, they turned to the essay as a discourse whose mixture of literary and critical registers was capable of restoring “la circumstancia literaria que las palabras del saber, para constituirse como tales, necesariamente olvidan” (Giordano, “La crítica” 96). Jorge Panesi similarly notes that Sarlo and other Argentine critics returned to “un programa viejo y renovado… el ensayo cultural interpretativo que afianza y excede, como en el libro de Sarlo, los protocolos académicos de la crítica literaria. El exceso es siempre la literatura” (“Marginales” 41). For a discussion of Sarlo’s “revival” of the essay tradition, see Giordano’s “La crítica de la crítica y el recurso al ensayo.”

219 It is worth noting that in Escenas de la vida posmoderna Sarlo is more worried about the mass public than about the popular classes, whose cultural products and forms of resistance have, she argues, paradoxically been eclipsed by the rise of mass culture. Some critics, such as Benzecry, nevertheless fault Sarlo for focusing more on middle-class consumers than on the popular classes and their emergent forms of resistance. Sarlo’s relationship to “lo popular” is notably complex and exceeds the present discussion. For an introduction to the debate, see Benzecry’s article “Beatriz Sarlo and Theories of Popular Culture.”

220 For an overview of the critiques directed at Sarlo from the space of criticism, see the introduction to Francine Masiello’s The Art of Transition.

226 the centers and the margins, north and south. Unlike Sarlo, Libertella suggests that literature’s inaccessibility and its uncertain place in postmodernity is what opened the possibility for contesting the workings of the market and for establishing a different relationship to a reader whose naiveté need not be cause for pedagogical programs. For

Libertella, the resistance posed by literature’s formal and semantic density is not a tool to educate the naive reader presumably stripped of critical capacities by the legibility of mass culture. As a “zona siempre un poco resistente a la interpretación” (56), literature is, instead, a space whose very inscrutability in the new postmodern landscapes allows it to escape easy assimilation by both criticism and the market. Thus, while Sarlo continued to insist on finding a place for literature, Libertella relegated it to the no-place of the ghetto’s bathroom in the hopes that a naive reader might one day—as if coming across an ancient hieroglyph—read it against the grain of the market.

Postmodern Scenes, or the Place of the Literary

A literary critic is sitting at a bar. This is, for her, a new world: at the counter where she sits with her notepad and pen, a young woman has her last drink before heading to the Buenos Aires night clubs. Dressed in a “brutal” miniskirt and a transparent blouse, the young woman seems to leave little to the imagination. Everything is immediately apparent and resists the gaze of an older tradition that oscillated “entre lo visto y lo no visto” (Sarlo, Escenas 32). Her “costume” nevertheless elicits a perplexed reading. Searching for a former conception of the aesthetic, the literary critic finds in the girl’s carnavalesque clothing an opportunity for interpretation: in the various layers that the girl puts on her body “por capas, por franjas, por pinceladas” (33), the critic reads the

227 signs of a profound shift in aesthetics that has traded depth for surface, memory for amnesia, culture for style. Tracing the various elements on the girl’s body to the “movida madrileña,” the French cabaret, or the Brazilian carnival, the critic observes the dissolution of historical depth through the prefix “retro,” which empties the aesthetic of signification and turns the past into a catalogue of styles for easy consumption.

Yet the bar is not the only place where Sarlo’s critic finds such profound transformations. In her quest for an aesthetic sensibility perhaps best described by the noun “art,” the literary critic takes her notepad and pen to a video arcade, to the labyrinthine passages of a mall, to a restaurant where mother and daughter discuss the plastic surgeries they would like for their birthdays, and to the intimate scenario of a living room where a viewer clicks between channels before settling on a talk show’s extreme form of non-fiction. From all of them, the critic comes out empty-handed: the postmodern landscapes of turn-of-the-millennium Argentina seem to have left little place for literature, understood as a practice defined by moral intensity (6), the tension between permanence and variation of meaning, and formal and semantic density (“Los estudios”

7). By the end of the second chapter of Escenas de la vida posmoderna, the literary critic depicted in its pages could very well summarize her findings with a phrase from El árbol de Saussure: “Si los hilos de la Aldea hoy son invisibles—por satelitales e inalámbricos—, el arte sera doblemente invisible y silencioso en esa red, y la literatura un fantasma siempre un poco ilegible entre las líneas del mercado” (ADS 20-21).

Like Escenas de la vida posmoderna, Libertella’s text portrays a world in which literature has become illegible, absent from the new surfaces created by fashion, the mass media, and new interpretive strategies no longer so concerned with the aesthetic. Echoing

228 Escenas de la vida posmoderna, the verbal sketches in El árbol de Saussure function like a dreamscape of Sarlo’s scenes of postmodern life. In Libertella’s book, the bar’s customers similarly inhabit a flat world where the eye, like “una perla de gelatina que late y late” (ADS 49), is no longer an instrument for interpretation but a mere receptor for a world without depth where everything is immediately visible. There, the plaza has been turned into “la tierra del mercado” (41), where the writer has been reduced to a registered trademark (67) and literary history turned into a vertiginous succession of styles or fashions (40). Sarlo’s meditation on the fashion of Buenos Aires’s youth finds its counterpart in the section of Libertella’s book entitled “Sobre la moda,” which describes fashion as the layering of “moldes” on a body that has become little more than a mannequin (40). There too, the aesthetic is depicted as a “vaciado”: a mass-produced pattern emptied of historicity by the fleeting temporality of a market whose catwalks create a fantasy of eternal youthfulness (39-40; Sarlo, Escenas 40). Amid the market’s new temporality, the dream of creating an eternal and timeless literary work produces not an enduring classic but a kind of hi-tech zombie, “un robot que lleva a cuestas el viejo fantasma llamado literatura” (40). In such a world, Libertella declares literature dead, a

“ghost” or spectral survival no longer visible to the ghetto’s interpreters, who thus concern themselves with other phenomena: fashion, new media, human sexuality, architecture, science, the visual arts.

Like a map of the “new world” at the end of the millennium, El árbol de Saussure thus presents both mock-up of various scenes of postmodern life as well as the sketch of a critical landscape much like the one that Sarlo describes in Escenas de la vida posmoderna. According to Sarlo, the new “scenes” of postmodern life have led

229 interpreters to seek out the new spectacular products and practices of late capitalist culture while overlooking old aesthetic forms. This occurs, in part, because those forms are nowhere to be seen. Yet for Sarlo there is value in seeking them out. In Escenas de la vida posmoderna the literary critic persists as yet another survival who pursues literature, no longer as an object or a hidden message to be uncovered but as an impalpable, invisible, absent discourse. Sarlo’s literary critic functions, in this sense, like the architect in El árbol de Saussure who “en la Aldea Global atada, amordazada con los hilos de la comunicación instantánea… está calculando en aquellos huecos o agujeros entre nudos la medida exacta de lo impalpable” (ADS 20). In Libertella’s book, the task of reading in between the lines of the market is purely intransitive, yet for Sarlo it assumes a very definite purpose. Perhaps a more accurate image for the literary critic in Escenas de la vida posmoderna can be found in the guardian of the ghetto-plaza, who “duerme de día y con los ojos abiertos. Duerme la siesta… y en ese sueño todo es evidente. Él no tiene que descifrar ningún mensaje, ninguna leyenda escrita con –otra vez Macedonio—‘los pies de tinta china de la siesta’” (ADS 73). In a world where “todo está para ser visto por completo” (Sarlo, Escenas 32), where literature is no longer a hermeneutic game structured in the interplay between permanence and variation, the hidden and the apparent, the literary critic still has a role to play. She may no longer be the privileged interpreter of a message or a discourse that needs to be “deciphered,” but she can still act as the wide-eyed guardian of a world that continues to dream, and not always lucidly.

As the title of Sarlo’s second chapter puts it, postmodern culture is a kind of

“sueño insomne” in which we, as individuals, are no longer the ones who dream. For

Sarlo, we are being dreamed by a culture where the market has taken over the place

230 previously occupied by the subject. This has turned our dreams over to a market that has no intention of dreaming up a society other than the one in which the market reigns. As

Sarlo states,

El mercado es un lenguaje y todos tratamos de hablar algunas de sus lenguas: nuestros sueños no tienen demasiado juego propio. Soñamos con piezas que se encuentran en el mercado. Hace siglos, las piezas venían de otras partes, y no eran, necesariamente, mejores. La crítica de los sueños fue uno de los grandes impulsos en la construcción de imágenes de sociedades diferentes. Hoy, entonces, son los sueños seriales del mercado los que están aquí para ser objeto de la crítica. (25)

In this context, it falls to the literary critic to read the dreams of the market and to “hacer ver” (8): that is, to make those dreams apparent to a subject who, amid the illusion of total visibility, has forgotten how to read into messages or intentions. For Sarlo, one of the main problems of the demise of literature is not only the occlusion of the moral and experiential intensity that it provided, but also a decline in the capacity to read critically.

One of the recurring themes in Sarlo’s postmodern scenes is the blindness of the various subjects engaged in the new cultural practices of a postmodern era. The girl heading to the nightclub, for example, “testimonia la forma de una amnesia”: she ignores both the origin of the styles that she combines on her body (35) and the exclusionary force that acts as the flipside of the market’s promises of freedom (41). In a similar manner, the mother and daughter who discuss plastic surgeries are not aware that they function as ventriloquists for a culture that “nos sueña como un cosido de retazos, un collage de partes, un ensamble nunca terminado del todo” (24). The player of video games is also indifferent to the emptying of meaning (52) and television viewers continues to believe that surfing channels is a way of exercising individual agency, without considering the

231 possibility that the very syntax of their practice has been determined by others in advance.

Sarlo’s depictions of the various subjects of postmodern cultural practices suggest that the decline in reading practices has made us illiterate. Failure to read into the forms of contemporary culture has turned us into naive readers, incapable of interpreting the forms of late capitalist culture that determine our desires, our social position, and our subjectivity. This is true not only of “uneducated” readers, such as youth or the popular classes, but also of the very critics who are supposed to be directing their criticism at the serial dreams of the market. For Sarlo, both “staunch neoliberals” and “neopopulist” defenders of the market owe their enthusiasm to a blindness (6). In the first case, their faith in the market is a result of a total disregard for inequality; in the second case, the naive defense of the culture industry is made possible by a complete failure to read into the forms of late capitalist culture. As Sarlo tries to show time and again in Escenas de la vida posmoderna, a careful reading of the new forms of mass culture reveals how instead of promoting individual liberty those forms train subjectivities in an ideology that perpetuates the dominance of the market. For example, the practice of “zapping” or surfing channels on television can only be construed as liberatory if one fails to read into television’s particular aesthetic: Sarlo’s analysis of the “velocidad y el llenado total” created by television’s use of montage ultimately seeks to show that television’s packed visual discourse is meant to promote not individual choice but high ratings (63). As a way of capturing and retaining attention, the quick succession of images follows the laws of a market that knows how to elicit a “felicidad apacible” (64) by creating a discourse that is easy to both interpret and understand (70). Such ease of interpretation is precisely what

232 has boosted the “moda de intelectuales” (68) who depict zapping as an instance of individual agency in the fight against cultural hegemony while completely ignoring the aesthetic dimensions that refute the illusion of choice.

Sarlo argues, in other words, that both the public’s and critics’ new illiteracy in the techniques of aesthetic interpretation leads to a kind of political naiveté that bolsters instead of countering the cultural and social hegemonies of the late twentieth century.

Sarlo’s strategy to offset this interpretive naiveté is to invoke art and literature as practices that, unlike contemporary criticism, are accessible to the public but can still train readers in the difficult practices of critique. As Sarlo argues in the chapter “El lugar del arte,” the current marginalization of art and literature is due not to their inaccessibility but to the rift that the cultural industry has created between a pop culture aimed at the masses and a group of writers and artists “cultos” now restricted to specialists or highly

“vocational” audiences (131). Yet, as the early twentieth century shows, it is possible for the public to consume both “el cine más banal” but also “hechos estéticos singulares” like

John Ford’s “Rio Grande” and Yasujirō Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (132). For Sarlo, such instances of “high” art are based on “experiencias que todos compartimos” and are thus perfectly available to a mass public (134). Like Reyes, Sarlo construes art and literature as discourses rooted in “condiciones comunes” to all human beings, which a few

“exceptional” men and women are capable of transforming into aesthetic objects. The transformation grants aesthetic works a distance that allows us to see our common conditions “de manera más tensa, más precisa, más nítida y también más ambigua” (134).

Throughout that chapter, Sarlo thus tries to retain literature as a useful “fiction” (154): she shows that the aesthetic experience of “high” art offers a diversity of viewpoints and

233 a critical perspective not provided by the products of mass culture. What is more, Sarlo makes that argument using the very literary techniques that she sets out to defend.

Like the various scenes of postmodern life, which Sarlo paints in her previous chapters, the descriptions of artists and writers in “El lugar del arte” borrow the tone and strategies of fiction. Under the subtitle “Instantáneas,” the descriptions are structured as a set of portraits that depict the life and work of six Argentine writers and artists without giving away their names. Using free indirect discourse, they combine descriptions of their work with information that seems to be culled from the writers’ own descriptions of their lives. Yet, as with the other “scenes” in Escenas de la vida posmoderna, Sarlo’s

“snapshots” are not meant to be read as the result of fieldwork or research.221 In contrast to works of cultural studies that include ethnographic descriptions, the scenes and portraits in Sarlo’s book do not provide evidence or testimony. They function, instead, more like the scenes sketched out in El árbol de Saussure. Echoing Libertella’s minimal descriptions, Sarlo’s vignettes work like small allegorical fictions that pare cultural practices down to their most basic forms and code a certain form of the aesthetic.222

Through her “Instantáneas,” Sarlo pits the structures of artistic life against the forms of postmodern culture described elsewhere in the book in order to show not only what is missing in contemporary society but also how art might train us in new ways of seeing

221 One of the main criticisms aimed at Sarlo is that she restricts her “fieldwork” to locales in the middle- class neighborhood where she lives. See, most notably, Benzecry’s article “Beatriz Sarlo and Theories of Popular Culture.” In “Marginales en la noche,” Panesi situates himself in opposition to Sarlo who presumably presents a “ficción de ‘trabajo de campo’” (40). Panesi tries to dispel the illusion that he engaged in fieldwork of any kind and suggests that Sarlo, in contrast, tries to dupe the reader. Panesi, however, does not consider the possibility that Sarlo in fact intended her “fieldwork anecdotes” to be read not as evidence but as fictions.

222 Most of Sarlo’s scenes of postmodern life open chapters or sections and serve as introductory allegories that Sarlo then analyzes and critiques. These scenes thus perform literature’s capacity to introduce readers to difficult theoretical concepts.

234 the world and experiencing temporality. Her argument is perhaps most passionately set forth in the last “snapshot,” titled “Insomnio,” which tells the story of a sleepless woman who roams her house at night, attempting to write. Mindlessly shuffling blank pages, her mind is consumed by the thought of her husband, sleeping calmly nearby and described as “el escritor más grande… el poeta tocado por los dioses y por la fama” (Escenas 147).

The woman shares with him “un amor por la belleza” and a passion for writing that nevertheless leaves upon her “una huella distinta” (147). Much younger than he, the woman feels belated, envious of both his admirable work and the time that he has had to accomplish it. Despite her envy, she nevertheless wishes he might continue to live so he might one day recognize “por fin, que ella era su igual” (148).

There is no indication in the main body of the text that the woman in “Insomnio” has any relationship to Beatriz Sarlo. Yet in the endnotes that list the names of the various men who inspired Sarlo’s snapshots, Sarlo mentions Rafael Fillippelli as someone who “también tiene mucho que ver con todas [las instantáneas]” (202).223

Fillippelli, an Argentine writer and filmmaker, is also Sarlo’s husband, a fact that casts

“Insomnio” as an autobiographical text. Yet Fillippelli in actuality is only two years older than Sarlo. Perhaps one might more accurately portray “Insomnio” as a fictionalized allegory of Sarlo’s experience as a female writer whose desire to prove her equality disrupts her calm slumber in the present and propels her into a past in which the male writer was recognized as an inspired poet. Despite living in the same house at the same

223 Instead of the bibliography listed for other sections of Escenas, the endnotes to “Instantáneas” list the names of Juan José Saer, Sergio Chejfec, Eduardo Stupía, Daniel Samoilovich, and Juan Pablo Renzi and claim that “de ellos he tomado, con una libertad que no autorizaron pero que seguramente comprenderán, los rasgos de estas ‘Instantáneas’” (202). Except for “Insomnio,” the first five “snapshots” can be easily mapped onto the lives and work of the five writers and artists mentioned in the endnotes.

235 time, the woman wonders what unites her with the male writer and questions whether it would be possible for her to stake a claim to a shared “religión del arte, la república de las letras, la persecución común de la belleza y de la verdad” (148). Knowing that such concepts are on the wane, the woman is acutely aware that she risks being disregarded as young, naive, belatedly attempting to revive a modern form of the aesthetic and to keep an old figure of the intellectual alive at the very moment of its passing.224 Her experience of split temporality, however, is precisely what keeps her awake, remembering the words of “ese hombre que seguramente duerme” (149). Shuttling between the deep aesthetic experiences of the past and the smooth blank page of the present, the woman dreams with her eyes wide open, imagining a less uneven world where words like beauty, truth, justice still have some purchase.

Through her fictionalized account of the female experience of writing, Sarlo argues for a conception of the literary that in the postmodern era has become quaintly old-fashioned and depicts the “naive” belief in that vision as the very basis for a critical awakening. Like an antidote to the dehistoricizing force of the “retro,” the earnest desire to recapture an “old” form of the aesthetic provides an experience of historical depth that disrupts the serial temporality of the postmodern market. Behinds its “vaciados” or mass- produced patterns, Sarlo reveals social hierarchies still coded in a seemingly flat present and demands that we recognize her right to a form of the aesthetic already consumed or exhausted by the centers of discursive power. “Insomnio”, in this sense, shares one of the key aesthetic principles that structure El árbol de Saussure, which similarly invokes the

“old ghost” of literature in order to “leer los libros de acuerdo con otro calendario en la

224 Sarlo’s critics have often characterized her in these very terms. Benzecry, for one, depicts the book as a swansong to “the modern dreams of Argentine culture” and Sarlo herself as nostalgic for those dreams (87).

236 tierra del mercado” (ADS 41). Responding to what Martín Kohan calls “una vocación de desfasaje” (135), Libertella also toys with temporality. In his chapter “Sobre la moda,” he overlays the straight and speedy runways of the postmodern market on the circular pathways of the Aztec calendar (ADS 40). There, and in other parts of the book,

Libertella imagines a present that allows for the coexistence of different aesthetic systems, not just through the ironizing force of the “retro” but in strong and contradictory contemporaneity.225 His “desbaratamientos cronológicos,” as Kohan calls them, disrupt both the idea of progress (136), and the very notion of progression. Their effect is both temporal and spatial: by undoing the temporal organization of aesthetic forms, Libertella seeks to make space in the present for other forms of reading. Like Sarlo, he demands that we allow him to read and write according to another calendar, one rooted, perhaps, in

“México, en el corazón de la Aldea” (ADS 40): a place where the “old ghost” of literature still haunts critical discourse.

Written in late twentieth-century Argentina, both Sarlo and Libertella’s claims to literature thus validate the project of a criticism that was “literary” in its attention to certain family of texts and in its use of fictional strategies. Reaching into the past, they make present a “literary” approach to reading that in the latter half of the twentieth century was dismissed as lacking in rigor, impressionistic, obsolete, theoretically unsophisticated, or even naive. Invoking the ghost of a fluid and discursively heterogeneous tradition, they practice two of its most disruptive strategies. They activate,

225 It is worth noting that the sense of contemporaneity in Libertella is unlike the temporal pastiche that has been described as a key element of postmodernity (see for example, Jameson’s account in Postmodernism, or Ingeborg Hoesterey’s Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature). Libertella, in contrast, invokes a sense of the archaic or the “old-fashioned” that is dissolved by the capacity of the “retro” to make present and empty older aesthetic forms of historicity. For a discussion of the sense of contemporaneity that in Libertella disrupts chronological orderings see Martín Kohan’s “Héctor Libertella: La pasión hermética del crítico a destiempo.”

237 first, the use of fiction as a valid form of interpretation based not on theoretical or conceptual constructs but on images, descriptions, dialogue. In reactivating that “old” form of interpretation, they also engage in what Libertella calls an “artesanía

Latinoamericana acostumbrada a revolver indiferente en las escrituras de cualquier época y lugar” (Libertella, Nueva escritura 96). As Libertella argues in Nueva escritura en

Latinoamérica, practicing an apparently naive and temporally jumbled form of reading and writing was—in 1977—a political literary strategy that sought to “disolver la illusion de ‘progreso’, acusar todo proyecto que quiera revivir esa ilusión, y descreer de cualquier superioridad de procedimientos modernos o de nueva síntesis teórica” (41). Its target was as much a Western theoretical “Order” (44) as a local Latin American criticism that explicitly defined itself by its critical function, but only according to the codes of a “new system” established by an international theoretical “evolution” and the “progress” of the latest interdisciplinary research (38).226 In the year 2000, Libertella once again invokes an

“artisanal” form of interpretation, this time through a narrative whose literary approach to texts and cultural phenomena risks market suicide in the realms of both literature and criticism.227 The strategy, however, is no less bold in Sarlo’s text, which places itself

226 In Nueva escritura en Latinoamérica Libertella emphasizes the market function of the nueva crítica of the 1960s and 70s, which assumed the pre-programed role of a critical avant-garde in order to position itself within an allegorical “Feria Internacional” (39).

227 Libertella had, in some senses, already performed that form of “market suicide” with Nueva escritura en Latinoamérica. Although that book was written in a more recognizably “critical” register, it still garnered the critical fire of Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who in “Nueva escritura latinoamericana [sic] de Héctor Libetella” dismisses Libertella’s ideas as simple and simplistic. Rodríguez Monegal claims that Libertella actually displays an unstated theoretical reverence to French poststructuralist theory, a fact that undermined his claims to combat the Wester theoretical Order. In the end, Rodríguez Monegal argues that Nueva escritura en Latinoamérica “no ofrece la condensación de un pensamiento crítico sino las notas de clase de un alumno aventajado. En estilo telegráfico y mezclándolo todo, el autor usa y abusa del privilegio de la lectura digestiva para dar sello propio a lo que han dicho antes y mejor estudiosos de Europa y la América latina” (38). Libertella, however, seems to have pushed even further in the direction of Monegal’s criticism. In El árbol de Saussure he creates a text that could more easily be characterized as a collection of notes written in the “telegraphic style” of a naive reader who tends to jumble everything, most notably, critical 238 more recognizably in the realm of criticism while incorporating literature as a local critical discourse that has not yet exhausted its critical potential (40).

Like the woman in “Insomnio,” both Sarlo and Libertella thus aggressively demand that we recognize their critical right to literature, their right to “girar sobre ese derecho, usarlo, hacerlo producir” (Sarlo, Escenas 150). If they do so for themselves, from their positions of a female critic and/or Latin American writer, their claim to literature also seeks to open interpretation to a presumably naive reader on the margins of the critical market. Sarlo’s depiction of literature as a discourse that is both accessible in its reliance on “common” experiences but dense enough to train us in the difficult practices of critical reading promises to break the hermetic ghettos of academic criticism and bring naive readers into a new critical consciousness. Sarlo, however, also construes literature as a narrow portal or necessary initiation, without which readers remain excluded from the realms of critical interpretation. As Sarlo claims in an interview for the literary supplement “Cultura y Nación”:

Como es el discurso semántica y formalmente más denso y más resistente, lo que aprendemos leyendo literatura puede migrar hacia otros objetos pero no a la inversa. Alguien que se ha enfrentado con el Ulysses de Joyce, como es el caso de Umberto Eco, puede migrar y mirar la televisión. Quien se ha enfrentado sólo a la televisión no puede sentarse frente al Finnegans Wake y esperar que diga algo. El camino es de una sola mano. (cited in Prodlubne 100)228

and literary discourses. This occurred, of course, in the late-twentieth-century context of a critical market in which the power of academia continued to perpetuate the illusion of theoretical “progress” or “currency” and privileged “sophisticated” theoretical readings over “naive” and “simplistic” ones.

228 Escenas de la vida posmoderna is not the only text in which Sarlo depicts the reader of mass culture as naive. Dalmaroni, for example, notes that in El imperio de los sentimientos Sarlo portrays the female reader of “folletines” as a mere consumer captured by the text’s reading contract, which condemns her to contentment, blindness, naiveté, and conformity. The naive reader in her text is thus portrayed as a kind of “iletrada” (lacking in both education and reading capabilities) “incapaz de aferrar la conflicturalidad estética o ideológica” (99).

239 Although Sarlo recognizes the masses’ capacity for critical insight, critical ability remains dormant unless developed through engagement with literary discourse.229

Literature retains, in other words, a pedagogical function for Sarlo, who thus insists on the importance of educational institutions to disseminate literature to a mass public who would otherwise remain in thrall to the mass media’s uncritical forms. Sarlo’s insistence on the accessibility and pedagogical function of literature finds, however, a critical mirror in El árbol de Saussure. There, Libertella questions the presumed legibility of literature while making a case for the critical capacities of a reader untutored in both the discourse of literature and the languages of critique. For Libertella, the critical potential of literature lies not so much in its legibility as in its illegibility, not only within a critical market trained in devising, recognizing, and classifying languages, but also for naive readers whose lack of interpretive training allows them to read against the grain of the market.

Perhaps the most emblematic example of Libertella’s critique can be found in the description of the graffiti found in the ghetto’s only bathroom. On its white walls, a fictionalized Augusto de Campos draws concrete poetry, which Libertella describes as an

“arte rupestre” and an “oficio milenario” (49).230 Instantiating the technique of temporal disarray, Libertella codes in an avant-garde practice of the 1960s a kind of future

229 This structure is particularly important in the context of Sarlo’s argument about the popular classes, whom she claims are capable of critical insight but also vulnerable in the face of postmodern forces that undermine traditional social ties and institutions—like schools—that had served a libertatory function. The absorption of the popular classes into mass culture makes it particularly urgent for Sarlo to identify a discourse that might allow subjects to recognize the market’s role in shaping subjectivities. This is also what leads Sarlo to insist on the importance of education in disseminating a literary culture that might train the popular classes in critical practices while establishing communal ties that might provide a resistance to the forces of globalization. For this argument, see in particular “Culturas populares, viejas y nuevas” in Escenas de la vida posmoderna.

230 Agusto de Campos, a Brazilian writer and founder of the concrete poetry movement, appears in El árbol de Saussure as a fictional figure who roams the ghetto. The graffiti on the walls of the ghetto’s bathroom nevertheless looks exactly like the work of the “real” De Campos and is an excellent example of Libertella’s capacity to blurr the realms of fiction and non-fiction, literature and criticism.

240 prehistory that relates concrete poetry to both the cultural practices of postmodern youth and to ancient pictograms. Quoting an image-poem by De Campos in his text, Libertella presents it as an example of the graffiti in the ghetto’s bathroom:

(ADS 51).

In the ghetto, De Campos’ concrete poetry serves as a paradigmatic figure for writing, which is impossible to interpret because “tudo esta dito,” because literature hides/means nothing. Turned into a “cuerpo presente que expulsa cualquier comentario sobre él” (51), literature has little to offer the critical market. Its best interpreter is thus one who does not seek to read into the letter, who does not expect Finnegan’s Wake to mean anything. In such a place, the best way to interpret literature is by taking the place/side of the most naive of readers. As the fictional critic Clovis Carvalho claims in an “extreme and militant argument,” Augusto’s work is best understood from an idiot’s point of view:

Es decir, en la posición etimológica de un distinto, un separado, un idiotés que ya no quiere hacer profesión de la lectura ni de nada. O, en aquel mismo uso y acentos antiguos, un imbécil que detuvo su desarrollo mental entre los 3 y los 7 años de edad. Alguien que, por esa suerte de desgracia de la naturaleza, sólo puede leer en el instante emblemático de un niño no tocado por la obligatoriedad de la letra. (50)

The idiot, the child, and the illiterate, all serve in El árbol de Saussure as figures for a reader situated outside established patterns of reading and writing. The naive or primitive readers in Libertella’s text are extreme forms of a reader excluded from the centers of interpretation, from those spaces where power over and through the letter still exerts a kind of dominance. In his utopia, Libertella makes no attempt to incorporate

241 those readers into the realm of the lettered, no attempt to cure them of their naiveté, no attempt to educate them into a discourse in which the ghetto’s graffiti would begin to say or mean something. Instead, in those readers Libertella recognizes a unique capacity for interpretation that allows them to understand concrete poetry through their literal reading of De Campos’s textual and conceptual practice. As Libertella writes, “porque es bárbaro y adora imágenes, el analfabeto sabe leer esta poesía salvaje y bárbara. Aquí la letra en estado bruto hace jugar de otro modo los procesos del aprendizaje, la lectoescritura y la transmisión por la mirada” (49). In their savage love for the image, untutored readers engage in a ludic form of reading that unsettles and reshuffles the literary and critical traditions that education has bequeathed to the lettered world. As such, naive readers engage in a practice much like the one that Libertella instantiates throughout his book.

Like them, Libertella situates himself in the position of the illiterate or the barbarian and misreads Saussure’s diagram. Instead of interpreting the diagram “correctly,” as the basis of a larger theory, Libertella misreads it as a childish drawing or as the map of a fictional world. Interpreting it literally, pictorially, Libertella reads Saussure as if he could unlearn his own literacies and the whole critical history that the diagram helped define.

Libertella thus situates himself in the position of the naive reader so as to show that the figures, fables, and landscapes, which the illiterate reads into the traces of writing, are not just fabrications or made up interpretations. They are also critical forms capable of revealing the persistent hierarchies of a critical market that continues to privilege certain discursive formations and subjects by construing them as “critical” in opposition to “naive.” When read through these critical forms, Escenas de la vida posmoderna, for one, betrays Sarlo’s attempts to assert her own dominance by construing

242 the intellectual as a still-necessary figure, charged with shepherding the naive masses, through literature, towards critique. Libertella disrupts this vision through the figure of a naive reader uniquely predisposed towards a transhistorical reading-writing practice that disregards temporal order and hierarchies and stands in critical opposition to intellectuals’ strategic self-positioning according to the latest trends of the market.

Libertella’s revision of both the intellectual and the naive reader, in fact, echoes many of the critiques leveled at Sarlo.231 The guiding thread in these critiques is Sarlo’s tendency to belittle the masses, both popular and middle class, through what Panesi calls “un responso reformista, sarmientino” (“Marginales” 41): because Sarlo holds little faith in the common reader’s native capacity for interpretation, she turns to what Horacio

González calls “frameworks of communicability” (cited in Prodlubne 103) that might make intellectual discourse “legible” to the public and thus allow criticism to compete with the mass media for their attention. If this allows Sarlo to recuperate the public role of the intellectual—which she envies in male European critics like Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes—it also revives a civilizational project that reinforces old hierarchies between the intellectual and child-like, a-critical subjects like the girl heading to the nightclub, the working-class viewer of TV, or the young clientele of shopping-mall video arcades.

Whereas Sarlo’s “Sarmiento-like, reformist” attitude constructs a civilizational critical program that might ward against the savagery of the late twentieth century,

231 These critiques range from those of Horacio González, who claims that Sarlo’s attempt to make intellectual discourse legible is in fact a form of market populism, to those of Benzecry, who critiques Sarlo’s patronizing relationship to the popular classes and her failure to recognize agency in the popular classes. Croce, for example, recognizes that Sarlo tries to avoid the positions of both the populist intelectual and the mandarin academic, but ultimately “incurre en la desestimación del público al que uniformiza” (79).

243 Libertella responds to the same conditions with what we might call a “barbarizing” project, or what he termed in Nueva escritura en Latinoamérica “el proyecto

‘cavernícola’” (41). Libertella’s project, constructed through a web of readings that disregard temporal organizations as well as the boundaries between literature and criticism, is conceived as an “actividad de escribir ficción y de hacerlo a la vuelta de la teoría” (34).232 Its purpose is to turn the tables on criticism, using fiction as a reading strategy to “marcar similarmente a la crítica, desguarnecer sus supuestos y hacer que ella misma pueda tomarse como trazo, como interés” (33). Libertella’s aim, in other words, is to make criticism legible, not by sugarcoating criticism’s difficult languages in the more digestible discourse of literature, but by subjecting critical discourse to a naive gaze that lays its eyes on literature as easily as it does on criticism.233 The procedure is perhaps best illustrated through an anecdote that, according to Laura Estrín, Libertella continued to repurpose in a number of his works: “la anécdota aquella […] en la que en un congreso de lingüística o semiótica en Misiones, en el baño rudimentario y selvático del lugar, jesuita, una frase teórica enloquece por igual a guaraníes y críticos literarios” (Estrín 50).

The obscurity of the theoretical phrase puts it at the same level as every other mark vying for space and attention on the walls of the rudimentary bathroom. It opens theory to both

“sophisticated” interpreters and “barbarians,” here equally capable of reading the

232 Estrín also describes Libertella’s project through a quote by Osvaldo Lamborghini: “montado como intriga literal, el juego donde el texto teórico podrá ser portador de la ficción y la reflexión semiótica tejerá la trama del poema” (50).

233 It is worth noting that Libertella’s aim is not only to open criticism to creative misreading but also to reveal the extent to which critical strategies are also market strategies. In Nueva escritura en latinoamérica he notes, for example, that although his “projecto cavernícola” turns its back on “la conquista de rápidos efectos en el mercado” (28), it also understands that this gesture will inevitably be incorporated into the market by a critical gaze that “lo registra y lo discierne en tanto ingenuo o deliberado, pasivo, violento, seductor, burgués, marginal, terrorista, integrado…” His aim is to do the same with criticism, via literature.

244 theoretical fragment and turning it into a small fiction that can contest the hierarchies between the critical and the naive.

By taking criticism as a trace, subject to creative misreading by any reader,

Libertella challenges the self-interested practices of a reading establishment that continues to use the adjective “critical” not just as a mark of resistance against cultural, economic, and political hegemonies, but also as the instrument of a critical order.

Challenging the critical order, Libertella’s poetics of obscurity opens up criticism to a reader traditionally excluded from that space. Libertella’s literary-critical politics finds one of its best articulations in the novel Zettel, where Libertella “translates” Luis de

Góngora’s famous defense of his obscure poetry. As Libertella renders Góngora’s phrase:

“Demás que honra me ha causado hacerme oscuro: hablar de tal manera que a los ignorantes les parezca griego” (Zettel 28). Adding a colon and eliminating the claim to be an “hombre docto,” Libertella redirects Góngora’s message. If in Góngora’s text the phrase is dismissive of an “ignorant” reader incapable of understanding his literary games, under the foliage of El árbol de Saussure it becomes an impassioned defense of the intractable languages of literature and of a reader whose very “ignorance” places him or her outside established currents of reading and writing. In Libertella’s texts, the naive reader assumes a strategic position: no longer in need of mediation on the part of “learned men,” the naive reader activates our capacity for critical reading by turning texts we thought we understood into a new-old tongue, to be reread as if we too had forgotten to read.

Libertella’s faith that any reader can interpret the sign—even, or especially, if they read it incorrectly or inadequately—thus opens the ghetto of interpretation to

245 encompass the whole world. If Libertella agrees with Sarlo that the reader has been

“desalojado” by criticism’s “enorme bola o masa de comentario en expansion” (ADS 29), his solution is not to make criticism more legible or accessible but to eliminate the mediating role of the critic altogether. If, in another world, a self-designated tribe of intellectuals sought to “completar” literature with their critical reading, “en el ghetto, en cambio, las cosas ocurren instantáneas, sin tanta necesidad de mediación, sin tanto horror vacui” (29). In Libertella’s utopian world, that immediate, instantaneous, literal reading makes Saussure’s diagram much more hospitable: it opens theory to all readers, making a space for them at the bar, not just as consumers but as interpreters. In El árbol de

Saussure, the critical and the naive reader sit together at the bar, like “prójimos,” like

“semejantes,” engaged in a raucous conversation in which “nunca nadie sabe cuál es cuál en el seno de la tribu” (32).234 As they converse, they also watch the writers across the bar, and as they watch, writing becomes a concrete body that expels all commentary about it: “Tanto ‘extraña’ o echa de menos la interpretación (siente su falta), como en ese mismo acto la vuelve exótica o extranjera: la extraña” (52).

Like Sarlo, Libertella believes that “el objeto de la literatura es enseñarnos a leer”

(ADS 53). Yet in Libertella’s utopian world, the pedagogical purpose of literature is not to train us in civilized procedures of criticism, but to turn us—through the “bar, bar, bar” of impenetrable texts—into naive readers capable of strange and barbarous interpretations. As Damiani notes, Libertella’s amphibious, unpredictable style sought to

234 In El árbol de Saussure Libertella also redefines the concepts of “el prójimo” and “el semejante”—terms used in Spanish to refer to one’s fellow human beings—by turning Rimbaud’s metaphor “je est un autre” into a metonymy. Playing with “el prójimo” and “el semejante,” he turns the “other” from one who is unlike me to one who is simply next to me: “el otro no es más que el semejante, en el sentido literal de lo que es ‘símil’, parecido o idéntico. Y el prójimo, que es el próximo de uno, sería entonces su doble” (31).

246 make “la (propia) lengua (ajena) interpelando las certezas semánticas del lector (para que llegue a sentir que lo que lee parece griego; o mejor: Bárbaro” (18). For Libertella, that

“savage” project has been taking place for years, enacted from the barbarous latitudes of

Latin America, where theoretical inadequacy, critical naiveté, or methodological underdevelopment allowed readers to interpret the world differently, to explode both

Latin American and metropolitan traditions, making them illegible while recuperating them for the future. This is the project of a “grupo de ¿cavernícolas? [que] aparece decantando la historia literaria de Latinoamérica, violentando desde su oficio aquella mirada doble—Civilización y Barbarie—y reconociéndose estructuralmente in situ, practicantes en Continente” (35). Libertella, however, views the “Continent” not so much as a space than as a position from which to organize the text’s resistance. Like the utopia in El árbol de Saussure, it is a kind of mark that emerged on a map, where Libertella draws the outlines of a naive community of readers whose literary-critical practices might, at the turn of the millennium, help us learn, once again, how to read.

Fictional Utopias

Here we are, yet again, in Buenos Aires. Another literary critic is speculating about the new world in which she finds herself. She insists that we need a new apparatus, other words and notions in order to understand this new “etapa de la nación, que es otra configuración del capitalismo y otra en la historia de los imperios” (Ludmer Aquí 9). The old “moldes, géneros y especies” that used to divide and differentiate the world are no longer useful or efficacious in reading the “realidadficción” that is Argentina in the year

2000. So our literary critic turns to speculation, in all senses of the word. She turns to

247 mirrors: images, doubles, symmetries, transparencies, and reflections (9). She turns to thinking and theorizing “con y sin base real” (10). She turns to an imagination that is not distinct from the real (11). She turns to the futuristic visions of speculative fiction. She turns to gambling: to machination and the calculated risk of one who measures potential gains (10). Speculation becomes the central strategy of a book that seeks new words and forms to see and hear something of the new world, “porque ¿cómo,” our literary critic asks, “se podría pensar sino desde aquí, América latina?” (9).

To say that the literary critic in Aquí América latina: Una especulación (2010) would also be a fiction. For like the critic in Escenas de la vida posmoderna the literary critic in Ludmer’s book is also part of a scene: although Ludmer did in fact travel to

Buenos Aires as part of her sabbatical from Yale University in the year 2000, in Aquí

América latina she appears as one of many characters who traverse Buenos Aires at the end of the millennium. Written in the form of a diary, the first part of Ludmer’s book offers a record of the critic’s speculations and observations of the subjects, spaces, literature, and media that she encounters in turn-of-the-millennium Argentina, including a copy of the recently published El árbol de Saussure.235 The place and time of the diary are not merely accidental—a fortuitous location from which Ludmer happens to write— but the tactical posture of an author whose “aquí” remains ambiguous. For the “here” in

235 It is woth noting that only the first part of Aquí América latina is written in diary form. To complement the first part, titled “Temporalidades,” the second part of Ludmer’s text is titled “Territorios” and is written in the more conventional form of an academic essay, with bibliographic references and extensive endnotes. In the transition to the second part, Ludmer significantly describes the trajectory of “speculation” as moving “de la ciudad a la isla urbana, de la isla a la nación, de la nación a la lengua y de la lengua al imperio para poder cerrar el género especulativo allí en el imperio, como el inimitable Tlön” (121). While Ludmer ends her book with an essay titled “El imperio,” which discusses the politics of language in the context of migration, one could also argue that her book as a whole moves from the periphery to the center of the empire in its formal transition from the literary and essayistic structure of the intimate diary to the formal requirements of the academic essay.

248 Ludmer’s title is presumably a bar, a room, a library in turn-of-the-millennium “Latin

America.” Yet the publication of Aquí América latina in 2010 suggests that the book could have been penned anywhere from the far south of America to the Anglo latitudes of

New Haven, where Ludmer returned at the end of 2000 and where she continued to teach until 2005. One might say rather that, as in Libertella’s writing, Latin America is not so much a geographical location as a textual position, a fiction that Ludmer assumes in order to open new critical possibilities.

Like both Sarlo and Libertella, Ludmer too sets out to make a critical clearing, and does so by positioning herself in an imagined Argentina that provides the literary critic with a new perspective and a different apparatus with which to read the world. Part of the new apparatus is the imitation of the diary form, which allows Ludmer to construct

Argentina not so much as a geographical location than as a community invoked through the readings and encounters that she narrates in her entries. As the next-to-last entry of the diary suggests, Libertella was a key figure in that community: the “diario sabático” ends with the narration of a stroll that Ludmer presumably took with Libertella through

Buenos Aires on May 30, 2000.236 Written in the voice of Libertella, the diary entry takes us through the streets of Buenos Aires, where the character of Libertella invokes a whole host of writers, cultural events, fictional figures, and literary institutions. It is as if all the cultural ghosts of Buenos Aires had suddenly awoken to accompany Ludmer and

Libertella on their walk. Here we find, all at once, Borges, Esteban Echeverría, and Cesar

Aira, Macedonio Fernández launching his presidential candidacy next to the books on art

236 That date is significant, as “Un paseo por Buenos Aires con Héctor Libertella, contado por él mismo” is preceded and followed by entries dated in December of 2000. This diary entry’s particular location in the book serves as a kind of “desbaratamiento cronológico” (Kohan 136) like the one illustrated in the narration of that stroll.

249 and semiotics in the bookstore “Nueva Visión,” not too far from where Victoria Ocampo edits Sur and Ludmer gets together with Libertella, Osvaldo Lamborghini, and Tamara

Kamenszein to plan the magazine Los nietos de Martín Fierro (109-11). A perfect instantiation of Libertella’s textual and temporal strategies, Ludmer’s narrative draws the outlines of a virtual-real space that embodies both an intellectual community and textual strategies adopted in the rest of her text. For Aquí América latina also weaves indistinctly between literature and criticism, fiction and reality, the public and the private, the now and then. Like El árbol de Saussure, it takes fiction as a reading strategy that disrupts these oppositions, disorganizes temporal and spatial orders, and establishes a critical position in the new world where Ludmer finds herself.

Ludmer’s Aquí América latina thus serves, in this sense, as yet another double of

El árbol de Saussure. Yet Ludmer’s relationship to Libertella disrupts the hierarchical structure that positioned Sarlo in the role of the pedagogue, who uses literature to guide us through her interpretations of a new, postmodern Buenos Aires. In contrast, Ludmer and Libertella take a stroll next to each other, crafting in their dialogical interpretations of

Florida, Viamonte, and Corrientes streets an intellectual community that opens up new forms of reading, writing, thinking. As Ludmer suggests, claiming belonging to that intellectual community grants her a necessarily critical perspective.237 For locating

237 In the introduction to the second part of her book, Ludmer defines a territory as a place to which one claims belonging, whether or not that territory is defined by boundaries charted on a map. To do so, she invokes the Mapuche understanding of territory: “La cultura indígena tiene una relación totalmente diferente con su territorio. Los mapuches dicen que el ser humano es el complemento de la tierra y de todo lo que le rodea; que es parte de un territorio y no su dueño. Y no piden el derecho a la tierra sino al territorio. Reclaman sus territorios usurpados primero por los españoles y después por los militares argentinos. Reclaman derechos territoriales como derechos humanos y piden una política de ordenamiento territorial” (125). Regardless of the actual place from which Ludmer writes her book, she enunciates it from Latin America. For her, Latin America is a territory to which she claims a right, one that has historically been usurped by those in power, and one that she can reorganize as a creative political and textual practice. One can compare this strategy, for example, to Hugo Achugar’s argument in “Leones, cazadores, 250 herself in Latin America entails recognizing, from the outset, the global inequalities that continue to shape intellectual discourse. In the introduction to Aquí América latina

Ludmer asserts:

Especular desde aquí América latina es tomar una posición específica y como prefijada, como un destino. Somos los que llegan tarde al banquete de la civilización (Alfonso Reyes, “Notas sobre la inteligencia Americana”) y esta secundariedad implica necesariamente una posición estratégica crítica. No se puede no imaginar desde aquí algún tipo de resistencia y de negatividad; no se puede siempre perder. (11)

Making reference to Reyes’s foundational declaration of cultural independence from

Europe and inserting herself within the first-person plural, Ludmer locates herself within a marginal critical tradition and takes marginality not as destiny but as critical strategy.

For, unlike Reyes, Ludmer does not conceive of Latin America as a set geographical location that condemns her to provinciality. Instead, like Libertella, she constructs Latin

America as an imaginary and re-imaginable intellectual community whose very marginality allows it to work critically upon discourse.238 In step with Libertella, Ludmer reconstructs that community and revives its project of creating a critical discourse from

historiadores,” where he recognizes that positionality and localization are the centers of political and intellectual debate at the end of the millennium. Achugar’s aim is to highlight the differences between Latin America and the British Commonwealth (to which postcolonial studies often refers) and between Latin America and the space inhabited by Latino communities in the United States. In his desire to establish differences, Achugar nevertheless claims that “los latinos en los Estados Unidos… no son argelinos pero tampoco latinoamericanos” (216). Achugar thus denies the possibility of constructing a territory (“Latin America”) that exceeds the boundaries of a region defined by political borders. He thus ends up reifying Latin America as a physical referent, disregarding the fact that Latin America is a reconstructable map.

238 Ludmer’s strategy reflects Libertella’s in Nueva escritura en Latinoamérica, where he constructs Latin America as a “stone” on which a group of “cavernícolas” projects the literary tradition of the Continent in order to salvage it (36). “Latin America” is for Libertella more a textual practice than a physical referent, though there is a relationship between the two.

251 Latin America, reactivating the many forms of negativity and resistance elaborated by a tradition conscious of its own “secundariedad.”239

As does El árbol de Saussure, Aquí América latina begins by drawing the boundaries of a utopia, a new world where reading, writing, and thinking function differently. In that world fiction overflows and connects the realms of literature and criticism while providing the critic entry into “la fábrica de la realidad” (12). For Ludmer,

Latin America’s awareness of its own “secundariedad” has bred the habit of imagining a world different from the one we now know. It has fueled speculation, making fiction the central instrument of an “imaginación pública” (11) that is common to literature, criticism, and myriad other discourses and practices. Weaving indistinctly between them, public imagination does not differentiate between fiction and non-fiction but rather places fiction at the very heart of the production of reality. As Ludmer argues, public imagination “no tiene índice de realidad, ella misma no diferencia entre realidad y ficción. Su régimen es la realidadficción, su lógica el movimiento, la conectividad y la superposición, sobreimpresión y fusión de todo lo visto y oído” (11-12). Ludmer’s

“public imagination” thus serves as a twenty-first-century version of Alfonso Reyes’s

“inteligencia Americana,” whose lack of specialization and capacity to jump from one form to another, from the world of action and transaction to the world of reflection, made it “más avezada al aire de la calle” (“Notas” 86). In Aquí América latina, we see it at work in Ludmer’s imitation of the diary form, which performs the workings of public

239 In Ludmer’s case, the forms of negativity and resistance in Latin America include not only the strategic use of critical forms and theoretical concepts from the metropolis, but also fiction as a “marginal” mode of critical writing. The diversity of formal strategies in her book attests to the numerous rhetorical strategies invoked by a Latin American literary-critical tradition anxious to liberate itself from its status as second- class citizen.

252 imagination. By asking us to imagine the critic engaged in her day-to-day activities throughout the streets of Buenos Aires, Ludmer weaves the presumably separate realms of literature and criticism within a broader social fabric that includes bits of conversation, clippings from newspapers, political commentary, and gossip from popular culture.

Like El árbol de Saussure and other critical fictions, Ludmer’s book embodies the fluid and polymorphous realm of critical discourse in Latin America, and presents its lack of differentiation as particularly opportune and rife with critical possibilities at the end of the millennium. The lack of distinction between fiction and criticism allows Ludmer, for one, to walk out of the academic cloisters from which Sarlo similarly sought exit, and to come in contact with the myriad cultural practices of the turn of the millennium as well as with the general public. Ludmer, however, conceives the public not as a mass of passive consumers, but as fellow producers of “realidadficción” (12). For Ludmer, “public imagination” is not restricted to intellectuals. It is, instead, a form of public property, a resource common to all. Expropriating imagination and the capacity for fiction-making away from their exclusive use by literature, Ludmer adopts them as primary tools of the critic while construing them as universal capabilities that make critic and general public co-participants in the construction of alternative worlds. As Ludmer claims: “Todos somos capaces de imaginar, todos somos creadores (como en el lenguaje igualitario y creativo de Chomsky) y ningún dueño. Así especula la especulación desde América latina” (11). No longer do we find in Ludmer’s writing the critical “deslindes” that Reyes, the “critical renovation” of the 1960s and 70s, José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, or Sarlo established between critical and naive readers as they attempted to craft criticism as a discourse separate from literature. Everyone is invited into this banquet where criticism

253 and literature commingle as both discourses and modes of thinking. No longer the exclusive property of the critic, critical discourse is thus returned to the general public and to the erstwhile “naive” reader, now turned into a key participant of speculation

“from Latin America.”

The lack of differentiation between fiction and criticism or between critical and naive readers in Aquí América latina is made possible, in part, by the particular historical moment in which Ludmer writes. To imagine or act as if literature and criticism still retained some autonomy is, as she, suggest, a fiction. Citing Scott Lash’s Sociology of

Postmodernism, Ludmer notes that one of the central characteristics of postmodernism is undifferentiation (138). We are, she say, in a time of fusions, when the traditional bipolar categories that modernity used to organize the world no longer hold (87). Although some texts continue to employ these divisions in order to position themselves at the “center” of literary tradition, after 1990 we see the emergence of territories, subjects, and discursive configurations that do not respect such distinctions (127). Among the new discursive configurations are what Ludmer calls “literaturas posautónomas,” which disregard the boundaries between inside and outside, literature and criticism, fiction and reality.

Whether they are literature or not is no longer important, nor even possible to define. For although they continue to be included in genres like “the novel” and define themselves as

“literature,” they empty out old literary categories and turn them into a series of

“vaciados” much like the ones in El árbol de Saussure (Aquí 150; ADS 39). At a time when “todo lo cultural (y literario) es económico y todo lo económico es cultural (y literario)” the old molds are now only useful to “las empresas transnacionales del libro o

[…] las oficinas del libro en las grandes cadenas de diarios, radios, TV y otros medios”

254 (150). Hence, “post-autonomous literatures” give up traditional forms and categories and instead take up literary forms once considered outside or on the margins of literature.

They include testimonial literature, autobiography, the journalistic article, the crónica, the personal diary, and ethnography (151). To Ludmer’s list one could also add the letter, the speech, the critical biography, the literary monograph, the formless and malleable essay: in other words, all the discursive forms that inhabited the undifferentiated world of Latin

American “letters” at the beginning of the twentieth century. Almost a century later, they return to grant “post-autonomous literatures”—which include critical fictions—a new-old rhetorical and discursive flexibility that makes it possible to maneuver into critical positions with respect to an ever-expanding market.

The capacity to maneuver is crucial in the new world, for the alleged end of literature’s autonomy undermines not only the power of the institutions that sustained its autonomy, including criticism, teaching, and academia (153), but also the “poder crítico, emancipador y hasta subversivo que le asignó la autonomía a la literatura como política propia, específica” (154). Literature, in other words, can no longer conceive itself in a space “outside” reality, society, politics, or the market, from which it can launch a critique of these previously differentiated realms. This does not mean, however, that new textual forms have been completely emptied of critical possibilities. What changes in postmodernism is that these texts must devise their critical strategies not from some kind of “outside” but from within the system and in relation to what they critique. The critical, in other words, is no longer a closed fortress but a mobile tactic, a position or stance that one assumes at a certain place and time but that may, as the actors move, require a new

255 pose, a new form, a new syntax.240 In a world like Libertella’s ghetto, where “los bordes de la mancha no son una muralla que uno pudiera atravesar para pensarse ‘afuera’” (ADS

35), the only option is to engage in “el arte de disponer”: the art of rearranging the pieces into a new syntax that might provide an unforeseen perspective, new ways of reading and writing the world.

This is what Ludmer and Libertella both propose in their texts, which challenge the categories of “literature” and “criticism” in favor of a more fluid discursive realm that might grant them greater tactical flexibility. Theirs is a syntactical art and a syntactical politics that recognizes the importance of the position from which one speaks and of the syntax that establishes that position. Their position is often a fictional “Latin America” where one can still move fluidly between fiction and criticism, between invention and argumentation without fluidity being dismissed as the naive habit of a backwards territory. Yet both Ludmer and Libertella also take the risk of assuming even more naive position and temporarily situate themselves within a utopian sphere of literature in order to draw from it the critical and emancipatory power of a realm now rendered “invisible y silencioso […] entre las líneas del Mercado” (ADS 20). For although Ludmer and

Libertella acknowledge the demise of literature at the turn of the millennium, they also invoke the fiction of an autonomous literary realm as a potentially critical space among the territorial reorganizations of postmodernity.241 As Ludmer argues in her interpretation

240 For a discussion of Libertella’s “positional” art and politics, see Martín Kohan’s “Héctor Libertella: La pasión hermética del crítico a destiempo.” In that article, Kohan claims that Libetella sees art as the field for a “war of positions”: “Toda guerra es para Libertella una guerra de posiciones y para resolverse o decidirse le basta con la pose… La ficción territorial habilita un modelo de hostigamiento inmóvil. Esta guerra se libra en estado de detención; con la pose de combate es suficiente” (144).

241 In the first part of her “diario sabático” Ludmer describes the cultural and social circumstances in a Buenos Aires on the brink of the crisis of 2001. Although the first part of the book is situated in the year 2000, the book is published at a time when the hindsight of political circumstances opens the possibility of 256 of El árbol de Saussure, Libertella posits a “purely literary utopia” at the moment in which literary autonomy is put in question by fusions and the market (95). Something similar happens in Aquí América latina, where the fictional narration of Ludmer’s sabbatical in 2000 situates the critic in a marginal location that makes it difficult for her to access texts produced in other countries. This allows her to imagine “un Sistema

Literario Argentino… una organización formal de la literatura nacional, en el estilo de las viejas construcciones de Bourdieu: una parodia del ‘campo literario’” (87). By invoking literature as a fictional construct—a utopia or a parody of Bourdieu’s “literary field”—

Ludmer and Libertella reimagine literature as a temporary construction erected from within the system. No longer imagined as an outside, literature is now a fabricated interior that functions not as resistance itself but as a temporary shelter from which to organize a strategy.

In a world where literature has been dissolved by a market that appropriates and colonizes it, Ludmer and Libertella reimagine it as an open interior.242 Here, literature is a ghetto, a bathroom, a bar, an “isla urbana” (Ludmer, Aquí 137), or a marginal territory where one can imagine words, syntactical forms, relationships, and categories of thought that escape the logic of the market. This is why, in Libertella’s text, there is a billboard on

Saussure’s tree that reads: “LA LETRA DEL LOCO NO GENERA DINERO” (85). In the ghettos produced by the uneven flows of power, there are still spaces that allow for

reading Ludmer’s descriptions as portending the crisis. Ludmer thus highlights the urgency of elaborating a critical discourse at a time when the joint forces of neoliberalism, postmodernism, and globalization seem to leave no space for it.

242 According to Kohan, Libertella’s spatialization of literature defines various interiors that grant him the possibility of “sigilo”—stealth or discretion. As Kohan notes, “No hay resistencia si no hay un interior” (143).

257 different kinds of material and discursive economies. As a commentator notes in El árbol de Saussure,

De semejante leyenda no habrá que inferir que los artistas del ghetto son pobres sino, mejor, pobres posicionales. También aquí hay una circulación de mercaderías, pero no como en Lodz o Varsovia (dos calcetines por tres cebollas; las ropas del pariente recién fallecido a cambio de algún alimento o elemento energizante). El régimen económico en este lugar está intacto, pero los trueques o canjes no guardan relación de valor entre unos y otros productos. Nadie sabe qué es la analogía. (85)

Rather than eliminate the market altogether, Libertella’s utopian literary realm functions according to a logic that is incomprehensible to a system of exchange based on relationships of value. Here the market works according to the fruitless and unfounded art of “gratuidad.” As the fictional Thomas Sfez defines it in the fabricated Walking on the

Edge (1996): “yo te entrego algo que no me pediste ni necesitas. Tú lo procesas como desperdicio y no habrá costo en esta cadena: nadie paga un precio” (86). Among the many “desperdicios” or leftover waste exchanged in Libertella’s open interior are new ways of imagining the world, small fictions that no one has asked for or needs. They include speculations about what would happen in a world without the sign “donde, por ejemplo, no hay dinero que valga como símbolo” (86). Libertella’s utopian speculation about a world without money or sign may be processed as a waste of time, money, or ink, yet it allows us to imagine a literary system where texts, discourses, and readers are not measured against one another according to relationships of value.243

243 The alternative that Libertella imagines is much different from the one Sarlo devises. Sarlo seeks to resurrect literary value as a form of resistance to a market that, in her view, determines value by mass readership or sales. In Libertella’s utopia neither literary value nor mass readership is necessary for, where “gratuidad” guides exchanges, “allí donde hay un interlocutor, un solo interlocutor, allí se constituye un mercado” (94). In contrast to Sarlo, Libertella does not seek to work outside or in opposition to the market but simply to create a market that functions according to different rules.

258 If the utopia of literature makes it possible for Libertella to imagine a different system of exchanges, the “adentroafuera” of literature serves as the basis for Ludmer’s speculations, which are also forms of audacious gambling. For Ludmer risks the obsolescence or naiveté of “reviving” an autonomous literary sphere in the hope of greater gains. It is a strategic move that places all bets on the utopia of a critical space that might allows us to see or think the new world in a different way. Utopia itself is one of those critical spaces. As Ludmer argues in her discussion of El árbol de Saussure, the neoliberal tendency to classify all great ideological projects as unrealistic utopias is one of the great utopian projects of the modern world (Aquí 94).244 According to Ludmer, the utopian impulse is alive as a global “genre,” particularly in a neoliberal discourse that promises an optimal future for society through faith in the market. Yet utopia, understood as the “ordenamiento topológico de un espacio sin territorio,” can also be deployed in critical ways “para hacer presente y para criticar el presente” (94). Libertella’s book, for example, invokes the utopia of an autonomous literature—with its own history and politics—as a form of resistance to the market and to its clear and hierarchical discourses

(96). Ludmer’s exploration of Latin American literature, which she reads like an imaginary autonomous system, reveals similar utopias. Central among them is the “isla urbana,” an open interior where “se puede entrar: tiene límites pero está abierta, como si fuera pública” (131). The urban island can be a physical territory, but also a subject or an institution: it functions according to its own laws and rules and shelters subjects who define themselves in the plural, creating a community not based on family, work, or

244 This point is also highlighted by both Martín Hopenhayn in Ni apocalípticos ni integrados and by Jean Franco in Rise and Fall of the Lettered City. Franco, however, seems to take the “demise” of utopia as a given and thus overlooks the kind of critique offered by Ludmer in Aquí América latina.

259 social class but on “algo diferente que puede incluir todas estas categorías al mismo tiempo, en sincro y en fusión” (131). Like Libertella’s utopia, the urban island is a space where exchanges and relationships are not organized according to the social divisions that characterize the rest of the city (133). It too is a critical instrument found through the exploration of literature—and in particular, Latin American literature—that allows us to see, think, and fabricate a different kind of present.

This, in the end, is both Ludmer and Libertella’s calculated risk: the demarcation of an imaginary territory that turns the world upside down, appropriating its terms and categories but inverting them, as if in a mirror, in order to make us read in a different way. Ludmer calls that territory “Latin America,” a space that functions like an urban island.245 It too is located both inside and outside a world that sees Latin America as

“emerging,” “developing,” not yet constituted. Thanks to its “secundariedad,” Latin

America has nevertheless preserved critical spaces that have elsewhere been shut down or thrown completely open. Those critical spaces have often been created as the result of the

“consigna de improvisación” by which, according to Alfonso Reyes, Latin America sought to fall in step with Europe and North America. They have been made possible by the “metequismo” of a discursive tradition whose status as a second-class citizen has led it to make use of every rhetorical tool that might welcome it into the “best of all compensatory worlds” (Lihn, quoted in Lastra 111). In its improvisation and metequismo,

245 In her book, Ludmer suggests that the demise of the nation as an organizational structure at the turn of the century makes it possible to construct Latin America, once again, as a viable community. As the borders of the nation become more porous and new forms of social organization emerge, Ludmer recuperates the possibility of a transnational identity that she calls “Latin America.” At the turn of the millennium, Ludmer recuperates a project articulated at the beginning of the twentieth century by Martí, Reyes, Henríquez Ureña, and other Latin American thinkers, who articulated a “Nuestra América” conceived not as a homogenizing identity but as a heterogenous association of subjects who saw in the first-person plural the possibility of contesting an emerging empire.

260 Latin American writing has always been a speculative practice, a practice of strategic and risky marking, rearranging, and self-positioning. The objective of its speculations has been, as Ludmer explicitly defines it, to “dar la vuelta al mundo” (13): to gain a passport into the spaces that have power to define the world but also to turn that world on its head.

Doing so entails not only inverting the hierarchies that have negatively defined Latin

America’s discursive strategies—as improvisation, mimeticism, or naiveté—but also rescuing discourses and practices that have been processed by the centers of power as

“waste.” In Latin America, critics and writers have, for example, salvaged an undifferentiated world of letters at a time when the bar between literature and criticism admitted no passage, and made a clearing for literature at a time when postmodernism seemed to leave no space for it. Always, critical discourse in Latin America has been crossing from one side of the bar to the other, from literature to criticism, from fiction to critique, from the naive to the critical according to the strategic needs of its own speculations.

Sitting at the ghetto’s bar, the customers in El árbol de Sausurre, “acaso no saben que, entre las mil y un lenguas del mundo, solo el castellano les da la posibilidad del yo como algo que está constituido por una letra que une—y—y otra que a continuación separa—o—” (ADS 45). Yet some inhabitants of this ghetto do seem well aware of the discursive possibilities granted by their “mirada castellana.” Sitting at the bar, “cada uno ata y/o desata desde esa barra que oscila” (45). Among them, I imagine Ludmer and

Libertella. Libertella is constructing a “yo” that is sometimes critical, sometimes naive, sometimes real, sometimes fictional. The text his “yo” is writing looks like the mock-up of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. It is an inverted diorama made of weights dangling by

261 threads from the ceiling, and needs only a mirror in order to give us the illusion of a construction: “ahora la iglesia aparece erguida o refractada hacia el cielo, como una majestuosa hipótesis. Más o menos así

” (78).

Ludmer looks over his shoulder and, animated, compares his image-text to Joaquín

Torres-García’s “América invertida” (1943). She notes that in Torres-García’s image, the equator is the bar and the mirror, which has turned north into south and south into north; or rather, Torres-García has created a north-south space whose map is recognizable as mirage, fiction, or illusion. Enthusiastically, Ludmer turns to her own text. At the very beginning of it, she constructs a “yo pájaro” that recognizes the north-south space as habitat. Ludmer describes it as a migratory bird, with an acute sense of time and capable of flying between presents, between hemispheres, between discourses (Aquí 23). Shifting her position, she ravels and unravels the terms on either side of the bar. In the end, she pauses, turns to Libertella, and then swivels the bar, which allows them both, with naive delight, to “dar la vuelta al mundo.”

262

CODA

Critical Fictions, “En Sincro”

“Quiero mudar de estilo y de razones.”

- Lope de Vega (via Augusto Monterroso)

On May 30th of the year 2000, Josefina Ludmer says goodbye to Héctor Libertella on the corner of Viamonte and Riobamba. They have just taken a stroll through the streets of Buenos Aires, invoking in the span of a few blocks the “manzana loca” of the

1960s, a gathering of the “Salón Literario” in 1837, and a recent dinner with Osvaldo

Lamborghini. In her diary, Ludmer would later remember that stroll and Libertella’s particular way of disorganizing time. She would call it a “modo de hacer presente con la pura memoria como instrumento, con la pluralidad de tiempos yuxtapuestos” (Aquí 116).

Playing on memory herself, Ludmer invokes Libertella, pausing at the threshold of a video arcade and saying excitedly, “¡Si hasta en un local de videojuegos yo puedo ver todavía una librería!” (112). Yet neither Ludmer’s reminiscences nor Libertella’s

“todavía” are forms of nostalgia. As Ludmer emphasizes, Libertella’s phrase “I can still see” doe not reach back to an occluded cultural and historical past that he seeks to return to, or that persists in us as if we were its heirs. Libertella’s “todavía” is, instead, an instrument to create temporal chords: “un aquí-ahora-antes” that allows the present persists as process and makes a space for the past in the present. Ludmer calls this way of

263 thinking and imagining “en sincro” (116). It is a mode of making-present that populates every point in the city, every subject, idea, and image with its whole history, with all its forms and pasts coexisting in simultaneity, providing myriad forms of being that break up the singularity of the now.

When Ludmer writes, “Yo todavía lo veo a Héctor cuando nos despedimos en

Viamonte y Riobamba el 30 de mayo del 2000,” she also does so without nostalgia

(115).246 For Ludmer really sees Libertella in the present, making temporal chords with an anachronistic or “uchronic” (115) mode of thinking characteristic of a whole “bandada de los agitadores del tiempo” (117). Flocking from Latin America, temporal agitators ignore the hierarchies or orders of time and juxtapose past cultural formations as if they still had a place in the now. It is a habit acquired by living in a temporality at odds with the centers of power, which has instilled the custom of arriving late, reshuffling times, reclaiming unfulfilled possibilities, and making the most out of inopportune moments. As

Ludmer suggests, the tendency to define Latin America as “underdeveloped,” “archaic,”

“emergent,” or otherwise temporally behind has led to a series of repressive, modernizing leaps that have impatiently sought to bring the region in step with the First World.247 The

246 Ludmer’s diary entry is a perfect example of thinking and imagining “en sincro”: dated May 30th, 2000, it is placed out of chronological order in the “diario sabático”—between entries dated December 23rd and December 31st—and its subtitle, “In memoriam,” refers to Libertella’s death in 2006. As Libertella did in their stroll, Ludmer’s diary entry disorganizes time: it creates a temporal chord with May 2000, the turn of the millennium, the death of Libertella in 2006, and 2010 when Aquí América latina was published. Ludmer thus installs Libertella’s ghost in the present and invites us to conjure him every time we read her narrative, which is conjugated in the present tense and makes ample use of “todavía.”

247 Ludmer’s depiction of “los saltos represores y modernizadores” relies on Reyes’s essay “Notas sobre la inteligencia americana,” which suggests that the effort to catch up with Europe has created a disjoint temporality in Latin America, marked by jumps or cuts in time. Although Reyes’s essay suggests that Latin America has finally joined “el banquete de la civilización Europea” (82), Ludmer argues that a similar phenomenon still persists at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As Ludmer claims, the definition of Latin America as “underdeveloped,” “archaic,” or “emergent” in relation to an already-constituted First World has led to the imposition “por decreto” of neoliberal frameworks whose speed is out of phase with 264 imperfect results have created an experience of disjoint temporality, marked by temporal lagoons and patches of unlived time. For Ludmer, however, “el tiempo que nos robaron los saltos represores y modernizadores” (117) is not a cause for nostalgia or melancholy invectives, but the very reason why we can imagine “cambios sin etapas, progresos y modernizaciones sin desarrollos” (27). It is why, from Latin America, we can still say

“todavía” without nostalgia.

I can still see Alfonso Reyes in the Buenos Aires of 1936, delivering his lecture on “La inteligencia americana” at a conference of the International Institute for

Intellectual Cooperation. He is there with Ludmer in the year 2000, telling us that Latin

America is not so much a space,

sino más bien un tiempo, un tiempo en el sentido casi musical de la palabra: un compás, un ritmo. Llegada tarde al banquete de la civilización europea, América vive saltando etapas, apresurando el paso y corriendo de una forma en otra, sin haber dado tiempo a que madure del todo la forma precedente. A veces, el salto es osado y la nueva forma tiene el aire de un alimento retirado del fuego antes de alcanzar su plena cocción. (Reyes “Notas” 82-3)

Assuming the form of an “alegato jurídico” (90), Reyes’s lecture was itself an audacious jump that sought, once and for all, to declare intellectual equality with Europe. It is a paradigmatic example of the open and unconstituted realm of critical discourse in Latin

America, which Reyes once sought to parse into clear and differentiated territories. For despite Reyes’s efforts, critical discourse in the region was and continues to be a hodgepodge of forms that juxtapose, in the same space, myriad spheres, discourses, and times. I can still see that open realm in 1978, reflected in the “Aforismos, dichos, etc.” that make up the third part of Augusto Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio. In political temporality in Latin America, thus reinforcing and prolonging the experience of disjoint temporality described by Reyes in the early twentieth century.

265 Monterroso’s novel, the “estudioso” don Juan Manuel Carrasquilla gathers Eduardo

Torres’s critical pronouncements from conversations in the bar “El Fénix,” diaries, loose notebooks, bits of correspondence, and articles published in the Sunday paper

(Monterroso LDES 159). In the year 2000, the critical miscellany that a “proper” literary criticism was supposed to overcome is still there in Aquí América latina. In her book,

Ludmer similarly draws critical discourse from conversations in bars and restaurants, walks with friends and writers, a “sabbatical diary,” e-mails, and articles published in the newspaper Clarín. Ludmer-Reyes-Monterroso: the temporal chord suggests that critical discourse in Latin America has indeed seen changes without stages, modernizations without development, and leaps into the future whose archaic residues still have a place in our present.

Critical fictions are one example of such archaic residues. Mixing discourses of sundry provenance and juxtaposing times, critical fictions in Latin America are paradigmatic forms of thinking en sincro: as they imitate past critical forms, critical fictions also recuperate them for the present, while emphasizing the extent to which the development of criticism in Latin America is a story of late starts, rushed modernizations, interruptions, and untimely critical formations. We can see pieces of that story, en sincro, in Reyes’s 1936 lecture, where the imitation of a legal argument performs the tensions between an emergent literary criticism and the realm of the “letrado,” still imbricated with the spheres of law and politics. Other pieces are refracted in Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio. Through the figure of Eduardo Torres, Monterroso gestures at Reyes’s contradictory attempts to claim independence and sovereignty over a critical realm, whose forms nevertheless continued to be seen by the centers of power as provincial

266 formations or things of the past. The story is followed, discontinuously, by Enrique

Lihn’s La orquesta de cristal, which stages the temporal disarray caused by the Pinochet regime. In Lihn’s novel, the interrupted project of the nueva crítica coexists, in negative form, with a nineteenth-century critical rhetoric, newly minted academic languages, and avant-garde aesthetic strategies. By the turn of the millennium, the archaic persistence of literature and literary-critical formations in Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure emphasizes the contradictory structure of a postmodern moment, which claims temporal and geographical inclusion, while continuing to exclude certain subjects, places, and times from the authorized realms of critical discourse. In all cases, critical fictions suggest that critical discourse in Latin America remained a u-topia: a discourse that had to be imagined, that continued to be displaced into a future when its myriad and inopportune forms would finally be organized into a stable sphere, discourse, or space.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, that stable realm has still not arrived.

Critical discourse in Latin America remains precarious, rife with outdated languages, imbricated with literary forms, institutionally unstable, seeking authorization, and lacking discursive coherence. Its imperfect constitution is, however, precisely what grants critical discourse in Latin America the rhetorical flexibility to “mudar de estilo y de razones”

(Monterroso, Movimiento 9) in order to fit the changing needs of our critical moment.

Here we have, for example, the old form of the literary biography. It is still here, among

Sarlo’s postmodern landscapes, helping her argue that the modern formations of literature may still have a place in our present. One might consider, too, the art of conversation, which Reyes raised to the level of a critical genre.248 At the turn of the millennium,

248 Reyes’s participation in “tertulias,” his skill as a conversationalist, and his role as a mentor for writers who attended gatherings at his home and library are often referenced in analyses of the author’s published 267 Libertella was still perfecting that art in the bar Varela Varelita, where according to

Ricardo Strafacce, Libertella composed and shared many of his critical fictions.249 The avant-garde aesthetic of the Pinochet years is also not restricted to the 1970s. Its strategies of marginality and precariousness are still there in Adriana Valdés’s essays, which continue to make Lihn present through their methods of collage and fragmentation.

Or remember fiction, that old form of critical writing? I can see it running across the boundaries that separate disciplines, discourses, and subjects. Here it is, at a conference, in a theoretical treatise, in the cultural supplement of the Sunday paper, in a novel, in an academic journal, still thwarting our expectations, still forcing us to switch styles and reasons, still helping us learn how to read.

The list of critical forms is, of course, not exhausted. There is still much we could do with Torres’s sayings and aphorisms, Pompier’s belletristic writing, or the literal graffiti of Libertella’s ghetto-poet. Yet if we molt our style and change our reasons it is not merely for aesthetic pleasure but to rethink criticism’s social function and its relationship to subjects, practices, and discourses placed outside the boundaries of critical activity. Taking on an unexpected form is one way of slashing through the boundaries between “crítica literaria y/o literatura crítica” so as to traverse “en diagonal, como un alfil, la fortaleza de las disciplinas constituidas para llevar y traer herramientas y

oeuvre and are de rigueur in accounts of his life. One of Reyes’s most notable mentees was Carlos Fuentes, who in Tiempo mexicano recounts his visits to the “tertulias” at Reyes’s house.

249 Ricardo Strafacce’s essay “Arena de verdad” was written to commemorate Libertella’s death and is organized around Strafacce’s conversations with Libertella at the bar Varela Varelita. Among various anecdotes of Libertella, Strafacce narrates the jokes they would “compose” together and depicts them as small performances set up as a dialogue between two people (33). Strafacce also quotes various conversations with Libertella that function like miniature critical fictions: they are at once imagination and interpretation, and they recuperate and reinvent critical genres like the aphorism, the dialogue, and the anecdote.

268 preguntas de un lado al otro” (Libertella “Crítica” 356). On this side of the border, in the

United States and in the constituted realm of criticism, we might ask, for example: how shall we construct our discourse, today, when the means of production are changing for criticism and social realities are challenging its discursive and institutional walls? Where will we find critical discourse past, present, and future: on the internet, in the streets, in a journal, in Latin America, or only in the university, in Europe and North America? Who will be the readers and writers of critical discourse, and will they be invited into a plural space that recognizes the myriad and heterogeneous forms of cultural interpretation? Will we continue to imagine a naive reader incapable of recognizing, understanding, or producing valid forms of critical discourse? Or can we imagine a critical discourse in which naiveté is not a tool of exclusion but a critical possibility?

In Latin America, from the perspective of critical fictions, it is not difficult to imagine such a discourse. For in a place where time is unhinged, where critical forms are not anchored in a particular moment but free-float through space and time, it is more difficult to determine whether a critical language is current or dated, cutting-edge or obsolete, developed or underdeveloped, literary or critical, sophisticated or naive. Having produced a polymorphous critical language that continually changes shape and reasons, writers and critics in Latin America have more easily assumed the position of the naive reader. There we have, for example, the monumental figure of Alfonso Reyes, who judged his own El Deslinde not as a high form of literary theory but as a mere clanking on a keyboard, an excessive and laughable imitation of a theoretical treatise. Or Beatriz

Sarlo, whose attempts to rethink the place and use of literature have repeatedly faced accusations of naiveté. Or Enrique Lihn, whose collage of critical language was deemed a

269 poor and obscure write-up of intellectual forms. Or even Monterroso, who observed that

“‘[i]ngenuidad’ suele equipararse con ‘tontería’” but challenged the notion, claiming that he always strove to be candid and naive (Viaje 101). As Ricardo Piglia has observed, naiveté and spontaneity are part of a complex and sophisticated theory (Crítica 10), which the authors of critical fictions in Latin America have often deployed as a strategy to keep our critical faculties alert.250 For as a subject position, naiveté forces us to doubt whether naive critical forms are in fact “ ‘tonterías’ […] o parodia de las tonterías que lee en libros de crítica aparentemente inteligentes” (Viaje 102). Never certain whether critical forms are assumed ironically or in earnest, we must stay on guard, knowing that the stability of our position as critical subjects can easily be turned on its head by a seemingly naive reader who may turn out to be more critical than we are.

In the middle of the plaza sketched out by Libertella in El árbol de Saussure, there is a banner that announces: “EL FUTURO YA FUE” (43). I can see a similar banner hung above an imaginary Latin America where, as in Libertella’s ghetto, “el tiempo existe sobremanera. No se trata de una ilusión. Al contrario, es tan visible y palpable como esa inscripción al pie que actualiza todo” (44). I can imagine a place and time where old critical discourses are actualized and made current, where ensayismo once again finds its relevance as an open and hospitable form, the pamphlet returns to put criticism on the streets, autobiography proves the most fitting form to interpret texts, and

250 Piglia makes this observation at the very beginning of the collection of interviews Crítica y ficción, in response to a question on whether Piglia considers his writing “una escritura no-ingenua, en la que la teoría tiene un papel importante” (10). Piglia responds to the question by both refuting the notion that there are writers without theory and by vindicating naiveté and spontaneity as a sophisticated theory. However, Piglia claims that naiveté, spontaneity, and anti-intellectualism have ruined many writers, thus placing himself as a writer outside that “sophisticated” theory.

270 the school manual turns out to house unforeseen critical possibilities.251 One might claim that such place and time already exist in Latin America, where the future has already happened, where “La Historia no llegó / Aún / Hasta hoy / No llegó el Pasado a /

Todavía” (Libertella, quoted in Ludmer, Aquí 112-13).252 At the end of history, literature, or criticism, we return to those places where they never arrived to begin with. We return, for example, to 1930 when Borges was dreaming of the end of literature and the beginning of criticism. In “La supersticiosa ética del lector” he starts by lamenting the demise of readers, “en el sentido ingenuo de la palabra,” and their transformation into potential critics (202). Turning on the word “ahora,” he later claims “quiero acordarme del porvenir y no del pasado” and concludes his essay by sketching out a literature that can prophesy its dissolution and court its end. Making Borges present, I too want to remember a future in which the naive reader is also a potential critic, and criticism courts its dissolution, and literature is still arriving at its end.

251 The essay, the pamphlet, the autobiography, and the school manual are all critical forms championed and utilized by various contemporary Latin American critics. In Modos del ensayo: de Borges a Piglia Alberto Giordano, for example, analyzes in detail various uses of the essay in the latter half of the twentieth century, emphasizing its continued relevance for Argentine writers. In Margenes e instituciones, Nelly Richard underscores key role that pamphlets played in the avant-garde critical scene that emerged during the Pinochet dictatorship, and she emphasizes the critical function that the precariousness of its form served at the time. Ricardo Piglia, in turn, defends the autobiographical dimension of writers’ critical interventions, and redefines criticism as “una de las formas modernas de la autobiografía. Alguien escribe su vida cuando cree escribir sus lecturas” (13). Finally, in El cuerpo del delito: un manual Josefina Ludmer takes the school manual as the guiding structure for her book on crime in literature. In the note to the second edition, Ludmer frames her use of the manual with what I might call a small critical fiction: “Buscaba una escritura transparente y divertida para contar los cuentos, que el manual fuera popular, que me leyeran en las escuelas. Conmigo la crítica llegaría por fin a las masas… ¡Por lo menos 10.000 ejemplares! En Estados Unidos quería hacerme rica, dejar de trabajar y dedicarme sin límites al puro ejercicio del pensamiento y la imaginación” (11).

252 Hugo Achugar begins his essay “Local/Global Latin Americanisms” with the following quote by Emil Cioran: “Quel será l’avenir? La révolte des peuples sans histoire” (126). In the conclusion to his essay Achugar discusses Cioran’s quote and speculates that the “peoples without history” are those who live “outside western (European) historical time” or those who live within the history of the West “but in a marginal or subordinate position and therefore have an ‘invisible history’” (139). Achugar suggests that among the peoples without history are those who produce critical thinking in Latin America but who remain marginalized by a dominant discourse for which such critical thought is mere “babble.”

271 I want to remember a time when I met Libertella at a conference on “Crítica y literatura” held in Mexico City in 2003. I can still see Libertella amid various critics and writers who were discussing “la intimidad de la creación y la crítica” in Latin America

(Ortega 9).253 At the end of the day, participants gathered at a restaurant or bar to discuss, among other things, the day’s presentations, their naive or critical observations, their expected and unexpected pronouncements. Let us suppose we could have followed

Libertella wherever he pleased. We might have walked out of that academic conference in Mexico City and onto the Streets of Buenos Aires to arrive at the corner of Paraguay and Scalabrini Ortiz, at the bar “Varela Varelita” where Libertella wrote an important part of El árbol de Saussure (Damiani 12). Let us suppose we order a “Pepe Bianco” and walk to the “mesa presidencial” at the very center of the bar (Strafacce 33). There, we run into a couple of “Argentinean ladies” who have finally found Eduardo Torres and are interrogating him about the state of literature in San Blas. Their features are oddly familiar. Another woman tells me their names are “Josefina” and “Beatriz.” The other woman extends her hand: “Manuela Mota, pleased to meet you.” Mota is sitting with

Adriana Valdés, and they are exchanging mordant stories of their partners, while discussing children and the Foulché-Delbosc edition of Góngora’s poetry, thirty-minute recipes and “ideas dispersas de Bakhtin, Hause, Iser, y Bourdieu” (Valdés “La escritura”

82). I interrupt them and inquire about Libertella. They tell me he is sitting at “la mesa de los prófugos” with Lihn and Libertella. After much searching, I finally find them, hidden

253 In his introduction to the volume that gathers the presentations from the conference “Crítica y literatura,” Julio Ortega depicts the intermingling of literature and criticism as the primary project of Latin American literature. According to Ortega, “ese proyecto ha disputado con éxito la normatividad genérica y ha debatido con brío las representaciones usuales. Si ése es un ejercicio de la modernidad y una exploración de las vanguardias, fue también una estrategia de desplazamiento paródico, de temprana historia; y, desde entonces, una vasta práctica de apropiaciones felices” (9). As Ortega notes, the project has a long history, which links modernity and the avant-gardes with appropriations before and after them. 272 strategically behind a column (Strafacce 28), and I pull up a chair. I have a couple questions to ask for a dissertation, and hope they can help with the many things that I still need to “ordenar, copiar, verificar, cotejar, clasificar, revisar y archivar” (Monterroso,

LDES 84).

But things are proving difficult, for the bar is raucous, undisciplined. In one corner, I hear conversations about politics; in another, fantastic fictions assembled from pieces of arcane texts rescued from a dusty box, found somewhere in the back room of the bar. Everywhere, the bar’s customers are exchanging stories, gratuitously, with hidden designs but no apparent purpose. Masks and costumes abound. In a corner, I recognize Ibáñez Langlois, wearing Valente’s mask and a jester’s costume. “El juglar de entonación,” Libertella points him out, “se establece a las puertas del castillo y confunde a los muchos invitados del Rey con palabras o cantos incomprensibles. Prepara la escena para que, una vez en el interior, las palabras del monarca distribuyan clara y entendiblemente a su audiencia: para que su discurso jerárquico sea más claro, transparente y entendible” (ADS 60). Here, however, the king’s speech is delivered from something of a cross between a lectern, a coffin, and an electric chair, where someone is reciting the “Decreto Ley Nº 112” and the “Ley de Punto Final.” Nearby, a naive reader nearby calls them extraordinary pieces of “política ficción.” Here, constitutions are hotly debated, not quite permanent, somewhat precarious, subject to the unstable positions of the bar’s constituents. There we see, for example, Alfonso Reyes, sitting at the bar and trying to draft a constitution, whose terms keep changing as he shifts his position uncomfortably from one side of the bar to the other.

273 I am bewildered, and turn to Monterroso, hoping for clarification. He responds with an inscrutable smile and quotes an article that Eduardo Torres once wrote about

Carlos Rincón: “Lograr con la imaginación la apariencia de realidad y con la realidad la apariencia de imaginación” (LDES 168). Libertella notices my confusion and tries to clarify, stating the obvious. He tells me this is not a state, a university department, or other closed territory, but an open bar, an interior that his friend Josefina Ludmer might call “íntimopúblico.” Here, we can construct identities according to maps that are not found in political atlases and whose coordinates have been unhinged, as those coordinates no longer help us orient ourselves. I ask him, perhaps naively, how on earth we are supposed to find our place. He gestures at Lihn, who is switching back and forth between two masks: an owl’s and a butterfly’s. Libertella says, enigmatically, that there are birds that need neither signposts nor light to find their prey at night, and that certain insects embark on long and exhausting migrations following only a homing instinct that respects no borders in order to flock together, multiply. It is late, I am tired, and beginning to feel dizzy. Ludmer notices, drops by our table, and says there’s a “bandada de los agitadores del tiempo” who is about to head out. She invites me to join them: I accept and begin to gather my bag, my notebooks, and my pens. Ludmer is already at the door. “Vamos,” she says with no impatience, for we have all the time in the world, “vamos a dar la vuelta al mundo.”

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