In Search of the Sacred Book : Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel [1 ed.] 9780822983026, 9780822965046

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IN SEARCH OF THE SACRED BOOK

ILLUMINATIONS: CULTURAL FORMATIONS OF THE AMERICAS SERIES John Beverley and Sara Castro-Klarén, Editors

IN SEARCH OF THE

Sacred Book •

Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel

ANÍBAL GONZÁLEZ

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2018, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6504-6 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6504-6 Cover art: Xul Solar, Barreras Melódicas, 1948. Rights reserved Fundación Pan Klub-Museo Xul Solar. Cover design by Jordan Wannemacher

A book, any book, is for us a sacred object. JORGE LUIS BORGES, “DEL CULTO DE LOS LIBROS” (1952)

Even today, despite all the “postmodern” scepticism about the desire to change existence, we see so many installations and spectacles transformed into religious mysteries that it is not necessarily scandalous to hear it said that words are merely words. To dismiss the fantasies of the word made flesh and the spectator rendered active, to know that words are merely words and spectacles merely spectacles, can help us arrive at a better understanding of how words and images, stories and performances can change something of the world we live in. JACQUES RANCIÈRE, THE EMANCIPATED SPECTATOR (2008)

CONTENTS

Prologue Introduction. A Literary Trinity: The Novel, the Sacred, and the Nation

ix

3

1. Prophetic Discourse in the Naturalist Novel: Federico Gamboa and Manuel Zeno Gandía 32 2. The Other Theologian: Jorge Luis Borges and “the Death of the Novel”

53

3. Tales from Eternity: María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo

81

4. In Search of the Sacred Book: Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, José Lezama Lima

119

5. Desacralizations: Elena Poniatowska, Fernando Vallejo, Roberto Bolaño

156

Notes Works Cited Index

189 209 229

P RO LO G U E

F

rom its beginnings over two centuries ago, the Latin American novel has been linked in a productive interchange with European and AngloAmerican novels, sometimes seeming to mimic them, but also sometimes subjecting elements of foreign novelistic traditions to its own inner dynamics and development. This book aims to examine one of the various aspects of those inner dynamics of the Latin American novel that also, of course, partakes from other cultural traditions: the use of religion to endow the novel with greater aesthetic, intellectual, and even spiritual transcendence. I am particularly interested in the story of how a significant group of Latin American novelists from the turn of the nineteenth to the turn of the twentieth century became involved in a process of sacralization of the novel genre, attempting to turn the novel into more than just a historical account or a work of art, seeking to transform it instead into a higher synthesis of those two opposite modes: a sacred text. I am not using the term sacred text in a metaphorical sense. In my view, as I explain further in chapter 1, many novelists during several decades in the twentieth century and in various countries in Europe and the Americas truly aspired to endow their works with the attributes of sacred texts. In

x  • PROLOGUE

this process, the novel genre critically assimilated into its own makeup a whole range of religious concepts and experiences, from the idea of “the sacred” or “the holy” to notions such as creation, eternity, belief or faith, prophecy, and life after death. Such a process of sacralization, which culminated in Latin America in the Boom novels of the 1960s, eventually led, perhaps inevitably, to an opposite tendency among writers of subsequent generations to desacralize the novel. Nevertheless, as usually happens in the arts, following such a winding path was not a waste of time, since it not only made the Latin American novel one of the most influential forms of fiction at the global level but also led to a more refined and mature understanding of the novel genre by the region’s novelists. Sacralizing and desacralizing the novel has allowed today’s Latin American authors to better understand the limits and possibilities of this genre at a time when they are faced with the challenges of new communications technologies and modes of social interaction in a world that, for better or worse, has grown ever more interconnected. To reflect about the presence of the sacred in the novel is also a way to think about the reasons why we read novels in the first place. Beyond aesthetic appreciation, the “pleasure of the text,” or entertainment pure and simple—all of which are valid purposes—the act of reading novels has often become tinged with aspects of divination, with the impulse to seek out in novels revelations large and small about our human condition and the possible meaning of our lives. This book investigates how Latin American novels of recent times have channeled toward artistic ends an all-toohuman impulse to find in writing not only a record of the past but the shape of the future. I wish to emphasize that this book is not a study in theology that uses literary texts to enrich reflections about the deity. Instead, this book wanders along the common border shared by religious thought and literary creation and aims to study from the standpoint of literature their mutual interchanges and borrowings. Also, although at certain points this book may resemble a history of the novel in Latin America, that is not its intention. My historicist approach aims to track through time the presence of religious elements as one of the least-studied connecting threads of the modern Latin American novel. I express my gratitude here to all those who have accompanied me at various stages of this project and to some who are always present in everything I do. Rafael Olea Franco, of the Colegio de México, set me on the road to

PROLOGUE  • xi

this book when he kindly invited me to participate in a 2003 conference at the ColMex commemorating the centenary of the publication of Gamboa’s novel Santa. I also wish to acknowledge the support of Middlebury College’s Summer Language School program in Spanish and its director, Jacobo Sefami, for allowing me to teach a reduced load during the summer of 2014, which in turn allowed me to continue working on chapters 4 and 5 of this book at the Davis Family Library. My doctoral students at Yale, particularly those in my recurrent seminars on narrative and religion in Latin America, shared with me their many insights and questions: Nicholas Goodbody, Raúl Verduzco, Gina Robinson-Sherriff, Juanita Aristizábal, Marie Escalante, Tatiana Alekseeva, Brais Outes-León, Mariana Melo-Vega, Janelle Gondar, and Ian Althouse. I owe a great debt to the supportive and enriching dialogue with my friends and colleagues in Yale’s Departments of History and of Spanish and Portuguese, Stuart Schwartz, María Jordán, and K. David Jackson. Ever present in my writings are my son Andrés Emil González; my Puerto Rican compatriots, teachers, and friends Luce López-Baralt, Arturo Echavarría, Mercedes López-Baralt, and Teresita Narváez; and my father, mother, and sister: Aníbal González Irizarry, Ruth Pérez, and Lizzette González. This book is for my wife, Priscilla Meléndez, a true world builder (in Peter L. Berger’s sense), whose love builds my world.

IN SEARCH OF THE SACRED BOOK

Introduction

A L I T E R A RY T R I N I T Y The Novel, the Sacred, and the Nation

But beyond it seemed as though there were a cloud wherein were twinkling stars; faces appeared in the depths of its folds—Eschmoun with the Kabiri, some of the monsters they had already seen, the sacred beasts of the Babylonians, and others with which they were not acquainted. It passed beneath the idol’s face like a mantle, and spread fully out was drawn up on the wall to which it was fastened by the corners, appearing at once bluish as the night, yellow as the dawn, purple as the sun, multitudinous, diaphanous, sparkling light. It was the mantle of the goddess, the holy zaimph which might not be seen. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, SALAMMBO

The gods are fugitive guests of literature. ROBERTO CALASSO, LITERATURE AND THE GODS

I

t would seem paradoxical at first to examine the contacts between religion and the genre of the novel, given the markedly secular nature of prose fiction in Western culture. Although poetry and the theater have been harmoniously linked to religion from their respective origins, the same is not true of the novel, a circumstance which led to Georg Lukács’s

4  • INTRODUCTION

famous dictum: “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (88). Despite the existence of doctrinal and allegorical narratives such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), or moralizing picaresque novels such as Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1604) in Spain, or hagiographies or saints’ lives (which are a separate genre in themselves), there are properly no novels or short stories written a lo divino (that is, transferred from a secular to a sacred context) as was easily done with the verses of Garcilaso de la Vega and many other lyric poets of the Renaissance. Concerned more with the uncertainties and errors of “the kingdom of this world” than with the certainty of an otherworldly life, the novel, when dealing with religious topics—ever since the episodes of the avaricious cleric in Lazarillo de Tormes (1545) and of the priest who burned novels of chivalry in the Quijote (1605)—has done so from the critical standpoint of modernity, favoring that which can be seen and known, counted and measured, and contrasting the spheres of the ideal and the real, the sacred and the profane. However, in spite of its decidedly secular origins, as the novel genre has matured it has also been endowed with elements that bring it closer to the sacred. Perhaps even from its earliest beginnings there is something sacred present in the novel: suffice it to recall the prodigous “found manuscripts” written by wizards that are the literal as well as figurative pretexts of the romances of chivalry, or in general that “partial magic” Borges found in the Quijote in one of his most famous essays. “Deep inside, Cervantes loved the supernatural,” Borges notes, and after commenting on the redoubling of a text within itself found in Cervantes and other authors, he concludes, citing Carlyle, that “Universal History is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they too are written” (Obras completas II 45, 47). Borges further implies that the Quijote may also be considered a sacred book, since like these, it confuses and mixes up “the objective and the subjective, the world of the reader and the world of the book” (45).1 Borges’s observation brings us closer to what is probably one of the most influential contemporary definitions of religion, that offered by sociologist of religion Peter L. Berger: “Religion has played a strategic part in the human enterprise of world-building. Religion implies the farthest reach of man’s self-externalization, of his infusion of reality with his own meanings. Religion implies that human order is projected into the totality of being. Put differently, religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the

INTRODUCTION  • 5

entire universe as being humanly significant” (27–28). In harmony with the most commonly accepted etymology of the word “religion” (from the Latin religare: to tie up, to bind, to reunite), according to which religion is “that which binds believers to God” (Oxford English Dictionary Online), both Borges and Berger coincide in understanding religion as an activity that seeks to connect the scattered phenomena of reality by endowing them with a unifying meaning. To better understand how one can conceive that novels may aspire to a near-religious sacredness, we should review some of the basic traits historians of religion have identified in sacred books or scriptures. All specialists agree on the difficulty in defining the category of sacred texts. In large measure this is due to the “relational” character of these writings, as William A. Graham explains: From the historian’s perspective, the sacrality or holiness of a book is not an a priori attribute but one that is realized historically in the life of communities who respond to it as something sacred or holy. A text becomes “scripture” in living, subjective relationship to persons and to historical tradition. No text, written, oral, or both, is sacred or authoritative in isolation from a community. A text is only “scripture” insofar as a group of persons perceives it to be sacred or holy, powerful and meaningful, possessed of an exalted authority, and in some fashion transcendent of, and hence distinct from, other speech and writing. That which is scripture for one group may be a meaningless, nonsensical, or even perversely false text for another. (8195)

Thus, there is always something somewhat arbitrary in the sacredness or sanctity of certain texts, since this depends on the judgment of their readers. Sacred texts, in this sense, resemble the idea of the “classic” text. In ancient Greece, in fact, texts regarded as classics due to their artistic perfection, such as the Illiad and the Odyssey, achieved near-sacred status, and the same occurred even more explicitly to India’s Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana.2 There are no clear-cut generic nor formal traits to delimit what constitutes sacred texts: they may be in prose or in verse, narrative or reflective exposition; they may be ritual books, legal codes, myths and legends, historical accounts, divine revelations, apocalyptic visions, mystic poetry, sayings and proverbs of teachers and prophets, hymns and prayers to deities (Graham 8194). Nevertheless, scholars of religion have noted a series of common char-

6  • INTRODUCTION

acteristics which, from the standpoint of the readers’ experience, are attributed to all of the various sacred texts of humanity; these are power, authority, unicity, inspiration, and eternity or antiquity. The notion of the power of sacred texts is linked to ancient beliefs about the magical virtues of language. In religious discourse, words not only mean, they act. For believers, sacred words are vehicles of salvation that have the power to transform whoever hears or reads them (Graham 8200). For other specialists, this concept of language as action is also linked to the spoken origins of practically all of humanity’s sacred scriptures; Miriam Levering posits that sacred scriptures are usually the first written expressions to appear when cultures move from orality to literacy (“Introduction: Rethinking Scripture” 14). In its most extreme expression, belief in the power of holy books becomes bibliolatry or bibliomancy, practices in which sacred texts become objects of devotion or a locus of supernatural power to the point of making superstitious or magical use of sacred writing. As Graham notes, “The answer to a problem or guidance for any occasion is often sought through scripture divination. Thus turning to sometimes random, sometimes specific pages of scripture in times of adversity, uncertainty, bereavement, or the like is a time-honored but little-documented use of scripture in Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and many other traditions. . . . Numerology and alphabet mysticism connected with a scriptural text are as prominent in such traditions as the Qabbalists and the Sufis and well known in virtually every religious tradition” (8200). For its part, the authority of sacred texts is evidenced by the fact that these are also frequently regarded as the foundation of the legal structures of society. Such is the role of the Torah in Judaism, and the close links of shariah law to the Qur’an in the Islamic tradition are well known (Graham 8201). A further indication of the authority granted to these texts is the special way in which they are handled when in use, from the ark in which the Torah is enshrined in synagogues to the custom of standing when reading the Gospel in Christian churches. Unicity in sacred texts refers to the common tendency among the various religions to regard sacred books as coherent and consistent totalities, even when, historically, they may have been groups of texts of diverse origins. Once the community of believers establishes its canon (a term which in Christian tradition refers to texts that have the status of divine revelation), it generally insists on the unitary nature of its origin and message. Lastly, all sacred texts claim a superhuman or primordial origin for

INTRODUCTION  • 7

their message, claiming to be either products of divine inspiration of prophets or seers (as in the Hebrew tradition) or a direct revelation of the deity, or of transcendence, to a chosen individual, as happens in Islam, Manichaeanism, and even in Buddhism, the only great world religion that is doctrinally atheistic (Thrower 39). The words of sacred writings are also, by extension, regarded as eternal or of great antiquity: Hinduism speaks of an eternal Veda; Islamic doctrine holds that the Qur’an is itself one of the eternal attributes of God, and Buddhism affirms the eternity of the dharma, the foundations of the existence of individuals and of the cosmos (Graham 8202). It may be argued however, that certain works in the novelistic genre share some of the same qualities attributed to sacred scriptures. The salvific power of words is an idea that has been present in certain types of novels since the beginnings of the genre. Examples of the eighteenthcentury sentimental novels in England, France, and Germany come to mind: Richardson’s Pamela (1741), Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloïse (1761), and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796), among others, as well as their popular nineteenth-century descendants such as Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which mobilize what Jane Tompkins called “sentimental power”—the intention to change society by educating and modifying the feelings of their readers (Tompkins 81). Claims of authority similar to those of the Old Testament books in the Bible have been made for some nineteenth-century historical novels based on their representation of key episodes of national history, in the mold of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. “It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers,” said Chesterton in an essay vindicating the Scottish novelist, “if so, the matter could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are neglected by Providence” (Twelve Types 180). Scott’s characters, argues Chesterton, “have that air of immortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dickens. . . . Scott, in his heart of hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story without either beginning or close” (182). Decades later, nuancing his previous strict distinction between epic and the novel in Theory of the Novel, Lukács underscores “the purely epic character of Scott’s novels” which “is very closely linked with the nature of Scott’s historical subject-matter” (The Historical Novel 35). These novels’ imaginative re-creation of the historical origins of a nation, often done with a clearly foundational intention, has frequently given them great weight in their societies. As Doris Sommer has argued in Foundational Fictions: The National

8  • INTRODUCTION

Romances of Latin America, “The local romances did more than entertain readers with compensations for spotty national history. They developed a narrative formula for resolving continuing conflicts, a postepic conciliatory genre that consolidated survivors by recognizing former enemies as allies” (12). In some cases, the artistic quality of these novels, along with their evocation of national origins and their foundational intention, has given them the status of “classics” with which they are regarded by educational and cultural institutions. As for the criterion of unicity, it is well to remember that a common trait of novels during the great flowering of the genre in the nineteenth century is their totalizing impulse, as can be seen in multinovel series such as Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales, and the romans-fleuve of Zola. Sometimes even a single novel—be it I promessi spozi (1825–1827) by Manzoni or War and Peace (1825–1869) by Tolstoy—aspires to offer an allencompassing vision of an entire society during a specific epoch. Totalization in the nineteenth-century novel is also presided over, as is well known, by an authorial voice that, like a deity, seems to see and know everything and controls all aspects of the narrative. Furthermore, although divine inspiration has never been claimed seriously by any work in the novelistic tradition, one does find, particularly in totalizing narratives, the use of a prophetic tone and an implicit promise that the novel’s readers will be able to achieve superior knowledge about reality. In turn, the sense of “antiquity” present even in contemporary novels may be found in the common insistence throughout the Western novelistic tradition that novels portray and explore basic aspects of the human condition, invariable character traits, or existential questions that are valid for all individuals in all epochs. A concept allied to the transcendent or divinely inspired nature of sacred texts is that of the faith or belief that emanates from, surrounds, and sustains them. Curiously, most studies about sacred texts do not stop to explain how it is that these texts arouse such veneration. Instead, they presuppose that belief precedes or coexists with the appearance of sacred writings and that this belief is in turn a product of the shared historical experiences of a community. However, as we have seen, it is common to attribute to sacred words a transformative power that can produce “salvation” or “illumination.” Can a book (be it holy or not) produce faith in its readers? Or does one need already to have some degree of faith in order to read a book? The classic example of reading as conversion in Western lit-

INTRODUCTION  • 9

erature, the tolle, lege episode in chapter XII of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, is also one of the few of its kind, and even this one suggests that reading the Bible (in this case, in fact, a kind of bibliomancy) was for Saint Augustine the culmination of a gradual process of acquiring religious faith. Writing about the experience of arriving to faith, Jaroslav Pelikan points out in the sacred literatures of religious faith, faith-as-experience has often been described in highly individualistic terms: How the poet or prophet has come to know the holy in personal experience has dominated how he or she has described that experience for others, so that they in turn, one at a time, might also come to share in such an experience and duplicate it for themselves. . . . Except for passing moments of intense mystical rapture, however, such individualism has been shown to be illusory. . . . When examined in its total context, moreover, it becomes apparent that the individualized experience of faith has repeatedly taken place during or after corporate worship: The setting of the private vision has often been the temple itself; or when the vision has come in the solitude of the desert or in the privacy of the soul, it has come as a consequence of participation in the ritual of the temple or as a response to instruction in the lore of the community’s tradition. (2597)

Clearly, if faith is motivated by reading, it does not arise in a vacuum but in the context of social relations that have helped to produce it. The notion of “faith” has, of course, many nuances that go beyond Saint Paul’s classic definition as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Pelikan distinguishes between faith as “fidelity,” as “obedience,” as “experience,” as “creed,” and as “confidence.” This last instance is perhaps the most easily transferable to the world of books and reading. In a religious context, faith as confidence is based on the presupposition that there is a pattern of divine order that has guided events in the past and will continue to guide them into the future, although its motives may be inscrutable (Pelikan 2956). Analogously, the novel frequently evokes this providential scheme, the notion that nothing in the text happens by chance.3 Returning to Borges’s observations in “Magias parciales del Quijote,” we may note that by erasing in various ways the borders between “the world of the reader and the world of the book,” both novels and sacred texts display

10  • INTRODUCTION

their power to win the trust of their readers and not merely to suspend their disbelief (as in the well-known notion of “suspension of disbelief” posited by New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century).4 In their highest artistic expression, novels seem able to produce in their readers sensations akin to those provoked by texts that the various human societies consider “sacred”: the promise of a revelation, the hope that by the end of the reading the process will have been worthwhile. Remembering the Pauline definition, it would seem that every novel that manages to capture and sustain the attention of its readers has also managed to produce in them a certain degree of faith as confidence, a “conviction of things not seen.” Readers can be drawn to a novel either by boredom or by curiosity, and upon beginning to read they might feel delight or resistance, astonishment or skepticism, attraction or repugnance toward what is being narrated, but at some point they decide whether to stop reading or to continue doing so. When this last happens, it is because a sufficient degree of faith has been established to sustain the reading, and in the masterworks of the novel genre this faith extends not only throughout the text but even beyond it, toward its context, its production, and its implications. As with sacred texts, it is on the basis of this faith, this confidence, that novel and reader tend to “incorporate” each other,5 although from the readers’ perspective it is more common to feel that it is the novel that has “captured” them, has made them its own. Julio Cortázar’s celebrated short story “Continuidad de los parques” (1956) gives a memorable account of this phenomenon. In the story, the reader of a novel about adulterous lovers turns into the husband who is to be murdered by his rival: “From the blood galloping in his ears the woman’s words reached him: first a blue living room, then a corridor, a carpeted stairway. Upstairs, two doors. No one in the first room, no one in the second. The door to the drawing room and then knife in hand, the light of the tall windows, the high back of the green velvet easy chair, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel” (Cortázar 11). Cortázar’s text also underlines another resemblance between the experience of reading a novel and of reading a sacred text: it is a certain diminution—if not a sort of annihilation—of the reader’s consciousness and identity. Trusting in the novel’s text in the act of reading, readers lose their autonomy and even suspend their sense of self. Half-jokingly, Borges asks in “Nueva refutación del tiempo” (1952), “Those who fervently surrender to a line from Shakespeare, aren’t they, literally, Shakespeare?” (141).6

INTRODUCTION  • 11

Similarly, the sacred book confronts readers with nothing less than the product of an infinitely superior intelligence whose transcendent attributes make readers, in comparison, feel reduced almost to nothingness. In fact, as will be discussed shortly, this sensation of lost or diminished identity is regarded as one of the defining traits of the experience of the sacred or the holy. It is important to delve deeper into this term—the sacred—that forms the basis of my argument. It should be recalled that although the term refers to a very ancient experience, it is itself a relatively recent invention. Its invention is due in large part to German historian of religion Rudolf Otto in his fundamental study Das Heilige (1917; The Idea of the Holy). Although Otto was not the first to use the adjectives “sacred” or “holy” as nouns (both are meanings of the German word heilige), he was the first to use it to refer to the emotional element of religious experience (Oxtoby 4096). Briefly, Otto proposes that aside from all rational arguments about the idea of God, religious experience has an irrational, emotional component. According to Otto, the encounter with the divine implies confronting absolute otherness (the “wholly other,” 25). In turn, being in the presence of absolute otherness arouses a feeling of deep fear in those who experience it, which culminates in a radical diminution of the self and in a vision of transcendence as the only reality. For Otto, it is not merely for rhetorical emphasis that when pleading for the people of Sodom in the book of Genesis, the prophet Abraham addresses God saying, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes” (Genesis 18:27; Otto 9). Evoking the Latin term numen (nature spirit), Otto coins the term numinous to refer to his more anthropological and amoral view of the sacred or the holy, which departs from the usual equivalence between the holy and the good. Reverting again to Latin, the German scholar asserts that the numinous becomes a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which “has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering” although it can also “be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious” (12–13). According to Otto, the presence of the sacred produces in those who experience it a chill resembling fear and a feeling of vertigo similar to ecstasy. It should not be surprising, then, that for Otto the religious concept of the sacred is closely related to the aesthetic concept of the sublime (41–42). This notion dates back to Greco-Roman antiquity, particularly to the treatise Peri hypsos (On the Sublime, third century AD) attributed to

12  • INTRODUCTION

Longinus. In it, the ancient teacher of rhetoric explains that the sublime “does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself. The startling and amazing is more powerful than the charming and persuasive, if it is indeed true that to be convinced is usually within our control whereas amazement is the result of an irresistible force beyond the control of any audience” (Longinus 4). Otto also echoes the version of the sublime proposed in 1757 by Edmund Burke: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it” (Burke 58). In fact, Otto argues that the sublime is the privileged way of expressing the sacred in art, and based on the theories of Wilhelm Worringer he states that the verticality of Gothic art is a concrete expression of the sublime.7

TOWARD A NARRATIVE THEOLOGY Thus far I have been discussing how novels share to a greater or lesser degree some of the general traits that characterize sacred scriptures: power, authority, unicity, inspiration, and eternity or antiquity. To these I have added those of faith, reading according to providentialist schemes, and a tendency to diminish or dissolve the reader’s identity. This last phenomenon occurs particularly when the novel, as Borges argues about the Quijote, and as Cortázar’s short story “Continuidad de los parques” shows on a smaller scale, mixes together the world of the book and that of the reader. Nevertheless, it was in poetry—traditionally more permeable to religious discourse—that the first modern experiments to fuse literature and the sacred in deeper and more organic ways took place, seeking to endow poetry with qualities similar to those of religious revelation. The roots of this phenomenon reach back to eighteenth-century France where, as Paul Bénichou argues, the weakening of the church by the powers of the centralizing state created a vacuum that came to be filled by the rationalist and secularist men of letters of the Enlightenment. As Bénichou points out, “In the period lasting from about 1760 until the Revolution, the apologia of the man of letters becomes a veritable glorification whose exalted tone is associated with a general doctrine of emancipation and progress” (The

INTRODUCTION  • 13

Consecration of the Writer 14). Among the causes for these developments were the greater progress in the material conditions and legal rights of authors, the greater honor and prosperity acquired by authors, their entry as near equals into the upper classes of society, and the growth of a community of lay intellectuals due to the increase in knowledge and technological changes (14). Infusing the cult of reason with a strong dose of sentimentalism, the French philosophes rejected the Christian notion of original sin and affirmed the essential goodness of human beings. Their views offered an exaltation of humankind and a belief in a benevolent God whose interests by and large coincided with those of humanity. The transition from the Enlightenment to romanticism, Bénichou proposes, effectively endowed men of letters (it was indeed men, since few women were granted a similar distinction) with moral and spiritual authority nearly equivalent to that of priests, although totally independent of religious institutions (The Consecration of the Writer 10–133). In romantic poetry, this led to the well-known notion of the poet as vates, seer or prophet, whose verses were capable of giving voice to transcendental truths. M. H. Abrams shows in Natural Supernaturalism (1977) to what extent romantic philosophy and poetry, from Schelling and Hegel to Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, depended on the symbolic use of the biblical narrative plot of the fall and redemption of humanity, a great cyclical story that led from humans’ separation from God due to original sin in the shadow of the tree of knowledge to their reunion with the divine at the foot of the cross.8 This was, of course, an often heterodox religiosity that continued to express, as in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a strong exaltation of the human over the divine. “The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art,” said Blake (The Poetry and Prose 271), to which Abrams comments, “Like the German authors of Universalgeschichte, however, Blake interprets the ancient fable in his own way. His mythical premise, or founding image, is not a transcendent God, but ‘The Universal Man’ who, as ‘the Human Form Divine,’ incorporates deity in himself” (257). Through what Bénichou calls a “poetic ministry” (The Consecration of the Writer 262), romantic poetry sought to reconcile the secular and the sacred, art and religion. Nevertheless, this was done primarily by means of the reinterpretation of the Bible and a prophetic posture that often degenerated into mere pose or outright imposture. Unlike the biblical prophets

14  • INTRODUCTION

who, despite their individual identities and idiosyncrasies (from Elijah to Joel), were ultimately vehicles or messengers of divine will who called people to obedience to God, the romantic poets were above all individualists and libertarian, and each of them proposed, so to speak, their own particular “poetic theology.” It is worth noting that although the romantics generally affirmed the sacredness of poetry, its power to express transcendent truths, none ever seriously attempted to establish a new religion or sect, unlike some heterodox thinkers and mystics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as Emmanuel Swedenborg and Joseph Smith. The romantics did produce, however, numerous poems with an epic tone, fragmentary or inconclusive structure, and ambitious intent, from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht (1800), and Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), Hugo’s La Légende des siécles (1855–1876), and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). The “poetic theology” of the romantics would be further refined through the use of irony and the doctrine of poetic analogy (or “correspondences”) by their heirs, the symbolists; chief among them were Baudelaire and Rimbaud in poetry, Flaubert in prose. This process would conclude at the end of the nineteenth century with the rise of the parallel phenomenon of what may be called a “narrative theology.” Before discussing this aspect further, however, it is necessary to turn our attention to developments in the novel. As I remarked earlier, the paths followed by the novel almost until the twentieth century remained insistently within the realistic confines of the worldly. Even in novels that seemed to veer away from everyday reality, from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1735) to the Gothic and fantastic romances of the romantics (best exemplified by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1816]), these works focus through satire or scientific or philosophical conjecture on critical considerations about “the here and now” and not about spiritual or otherworldly questions. Moreover, through the late eighteenth to most of the nineteenth century, novelists showed little interest in emphasizing possible contacts between their novels and sacred writings, despite the growing prestige and authority of writers in their societies. It is commonplace to refer to the bourgeois origins of the novel and to its consistent preoccupation with exploring and representing the life and adventures of the new social class that had come to dominate Western society. In his classic essay on poetry and poetics El arco y la lira (1956), Mexican Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz underscores the novel’s links to “the lay

INTRODUCTION  • 15

spirit” of modernity, which, in Paz’s view, is built upon the “emptiness of conscience,” the dismantling of religiosity by the critical impetus of “the modern revolution” (221). Commenting on the desacralization of nature by modernity, Paz observes that today, “Man’s relations to nature and to his fellow man are not essentially different from those he has with his automobile, his telephone, or his typewriter. In the end, a gross credulity—as witnessed in political mythology—is the other face of the positivist spirit. Nobody has faith, but everyone has illusions. However, illusions evaporate and then there is nothing left but vacuum: nihilism and platitudes. The history of the lay or bourgeois spirit could well be titled, as in Balzac’s novelistic series, Lost Illusions” (222). Paz’s remarks serve as reminders of the fact that throughout the nineteenth century the novel was founded largely on unbelief and disillusionment, almost as the antithesis of the romantics’ ambitious theologicopoetic project. Examining the echoes of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) in Balzac’s Les Illusions perdues (1837–1843), Pericles Lewis observes, “The title, ‘Illusions perdues,’ echoes that of Milton’s Paradise Lost (in French ‘Paradis perdu’). The disillusionment plot is a secularized form of the story of the Fall. In the fallen world, the possibilities are to try to be like God . . . or to accept one’s place in the world abandoned by God” (Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel 20). The seemingly exceptional cases of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, both of whom were devoutly religious, proves the rule: both Russian novelists’ works deeply explore the extremes of skepticism and dogmatism and the search for good in a world dominated by evil. Pierre Bezukhov’s wavering between relativism and all-encompassing philosophical systems in War and Peace and the Quixotic misadventures of Prince Mishkin in The Idiot (1869) tend to confirm the unredeemed condition of the world and the difficulty of living in the world while trying to follow the moral teachings of religion. A glance at the panorama of the Latin American novel—which, after its fragile beginnings in the colonial period,9 develops strongly in the nineteenth century—shows patterns similar to those of the European novel regarding the presence of religious discourse, although in certain aspects the Latin American novel could even be said to anticipate that of Europe. From its origins, the Latin American novel views institutional religion— at the time, exclusively the Catholic Church—with attitudes ranging from respectful distance to open antipathy. The first attitude is evident in the Mexican José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s picaresque novel El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), in which priests are generally pictured in a positive light

16  • INTRODUCTION

as well-educated individuals endowed with common sense. For example, when Periquillo visits the hacienda of his friend Januario and begins to display his dubious knowledge about comets before the dinner guests like a Cantinflas avant la lettre, it is a priest who contradicts and corrects him with an explanation that is scientifically accurate for its time. The priest then recommends Periquillo certain readings about comets, leaving him “charmed by his honest demeanor” (Fernández de Lizardi 49). Similarly, when Periquillo later tries to pass himself off as a doctor in the town of Tula, it is the prudent priest who sees through his disguise (235– 47). It should be noted, however, that one of the “bad influences” during Periquillo’s youth was the dissolute Martín Pelayo, a student of theology (80–83). Nevertheless, although Fernández de Lizardi avoids confronting the church directly, his novel displays a rationalist-style moralization that turns the notion of sin diffuse and problematical by pointing out the difficulty in telling who is an hombre de bien (an honest man) in a society dominated by injustice, lies, and simulation.10 As Periquillo warns his own children toward the novels’ ending, What I want you to get from this story is to realize how vulnerable we are to being tricked by any sly picaroon who makes us believe ourselves giants of nobility, talent and wealth. We fall for his persuasion—what they call labia [winning eloquence]—, he bilks us if he can, tricking us always, and we only realize we have been had when it is too late to stop it. In any case, my sons, you must study man, observe him, penetrate into his soul; watch the way he operates, disregarding the exteriors of dress, titles, and income, and as soon as you find one who always speaks truthfully and doesn’t stick to his own advantage like iron to a magnet, trust him, and say: this is an honest man [hombre de bien], this one will not trick me, nor will I receive harm from him. But in order to find this man, you will have to ask Diogenes for his lantern. (369)

The repeated discourse about simulation and dissimulation in El Periquillo Sarniento seems to be linked to the baroque topic of disillusionment. However, baroque disillusionment was intended to lead to a mistrust of worldly reality and a search for the divine: “Acudamos a lo eterno” (Let us seek eternity) is the lesson drawn by Prince Segismundo in his own disillusionment in the third act of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño (1633). Instead, in Fernández de Lizardi’s novel, already at the dawn of the nineteenth cen-

INTRODUCTION  • 17

tury, disillusionment is associated with a radical skepticism that is less a baroque residue than an anticipation of the theme of bourgeois disillusionment that would arise in the European novel not long after. The Latin American historical novels in the style of Sir Walter Scott, which began to appear around the 1830s, display a more openly critical attitude toward the church, viewing it as part of the colonial heritage the new nations were seeking to leave behind. From the “relatively neutral posture” (103) toward Spaniards and Indians Benito Varela Jácome finds in the Cuban Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Guatimozín (1846), there arises an entire subgenre of the Latin American historical novel devoted to denouncing religious repression under the Spanish regime and inspired by the Inquisition archives that began to be recovered and investigated after the region’s independence.11 Following the pattern set by Scott’s “historical romances” as well as by popular serial novels such as Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–1843), novels such as La novia del hereje o La Inquisición en Lima (1846) by the Argentine Vicente Fidel López, El Inquisidor Mayor. Historia de unos amores (1852) by the Chilean Manuel Bilbao, La hija del hereje (1848– 1850) by the Mexican Justo Sierra O’Reilly, and Monja y casada, virgen y mártir (1868) by another Mexican author, Vicente Riva Palacio, chastised not only the church and the Spanish colonial regime but also the conservative parties or factions in their respective countries. Antonio Benítez Rojo notes that the liberal program of the Argentine “Asociación de Mayo” founded by Esteban Echeverría sought to reconcile the divisions between Federalists and Unitarians in Argentina through the evocation of the heroic events of the independence period and the anti-Spanish ideology of the “Revolución de Mayo” (447–48). Following Echeverría’s ideas, La novia del hereje offers a liberal romantic interpretation of Spanish history in which the Inquisition, the church, and the Spanish monarchy combine to jointly exploit the New World colonies: Royal despotism, and the perseverance with which the disciples of Torquemada persecuted even the least spark of freedom in the sciences and the intellect, ended up placing at the feet of the authorities, debased, the spirit of vigorous aristocracy with which Spanish nobility had arisen at the dawn of modern history. The middle class, so well-prepared for industry and politics by their communal traditions, had been swept away along with their knowledge and their factories. A verdant and advanced agriculture covered the lands that had belonged to the Arabs; but in that blooming vegetation

18  • INTRODUCTION

the friars thought they could smell the stench of treason and heresy, and they made the better part of the Spaniards flee in their millions from their fatherland for the crime of not thinking in the same way as their oppressors. . . . An army of fanatical and cruel friars took the Christian cross in their hands and, like a banner of blood turned it into the symbol of war and conquest. (López 6–7)

Similar expressions are made by Bilbao in El Inquisidor Mayor when he describes the oppressive and dull environment of Lima in the 1740s: A wealthy and fanatical city, [Lima] showed its character in the immense wall-ed buildings that occupied its principal neighborhoods, within which were the convents of nuns and friars, with their haughty towers and churches. . . . Persecutions were then blessed in the name of fanaticism and the fires of the Inquisition sanctioned or justified the actions of the corruptors who became wealthy in the name of their faith. The Holy Inquisition policed the intentions, the amorous relationships, the political aspirations and the beliefs of all. It was then at its peak, persecuting with its absolutist order all useful spontaneity and doing everything it could to foster ignorance. There had never before been so much superstition in America, nor so much corruption. (22, 25; italics in the original)

Even in other better-known nineteenth-century Latin American novels that do not follow closely Sir Walter Scott’s model, an anticlerical attitude similar to López’s or Bilbao’s is found. Such is the case of Amalia (1855) by the Argentine José Mármol, a canonical work that was originally published as a serial novel attacking the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Mármol denounces the close links between the Rosas regime and the Catholic Church through the gruesome figure of the priest Gaete, who always carries a knife under his cassock and whom the novel’s hero, Daniel Bello, insults vehemently: You unworthy priest, filthy Federalist, despicable man! I should be stepping on you right now like a poisonous reptile to free our country from people like you, but spilling your blood fills me with repugnance because it seems to me that your stench would infect me. I see you’re trembling, you wretch, while tomorrow you’ll raise your demon’s head to look among all the others

INTRODUCTION  • 19

for the one you can’t see right now and who is yet strong enough, because he makes you quake: you who climb up to the chair of the Holy Spirit with your dagger in hand, and show it to the people to urge them to exterminate the Unitarians, whose dirt beneath their shoes is purer and cleaner than your conscience. (270–71)

The widespread anticlericalism present in the novels of Latin American romanticism continued unabated in the subsequent novels by realist and naturalist authors, largely because it was part of the reality of political and social life in the continent: In all the new Latin American nations— including Mexico, despite its liberal constitution of 1857—the Catholic Church continued to have enormous importance in daily life, and in not a few countries priests and church authorities were still seen as allies of the powerful. In Peru, for example, the “Indian’s Trinity” embodied by the priest, the governor, and the judge, exposed by José Torres Lara in his 1855 romantic novel of the same title, was still being denounced thirty years later in the naturalist novel Aves sin nido (1889) by Clorinda Matto de Turner. Nonetheless, certain Latin American naturalist novels begin to display changes in their representation of religion. In Sin rumbo (1885) by the Argentine Eugenio Cambaceres, which some consider the first openly naturalist Latin American novel,12 one finds not so much an anticlerical posture as a wholesale substitution of scientific and philosophical discourse for religious discourse: from Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism to the biological determinism of Claude Bernard and social Darwinism’s idea of a “struggle for existence.” Cambaceres does away altogether with the vague deism and the transcendental view of nature held by the romantics and emphasizes instead “the blind and unthinking force of a Nature gone mad” (first part, chapter 30). Another classic of Latin American naturalism, La charca (1894), by the Puerto Rican Manuel Zeno Gandía, tells of the miserable lives of the peasants who toiled in coffee plantations in the mountains of Puerto Rico. At various moments in the narrative, Juan del Salto, a landowner with liberal ideas, discusses the country’s problems over dinner with his friends, Doctor Pintado and Father Esteban. In their debate, neither the physician’s positivist ideas nor the priest’s spiritualism manages to convince a skeptical Juan. Toward the end of the novel, after the death of the naïve Silvina, the narrator evokes, perhaps ironically, the image of a compassionate but impotent Deity: “In the mystery of night, God was weeping” (214).

20  • INTRODUCTION

Published the same year as La charca, the Mexican novel Tomochic by Heriberto Frías offers a highly emotional portrayal of the intense conflict between popular religious belief and the philosophical positivism of the Mexican government’s ideology. Resembling a less intellectual, more compact version of the Brazilian classic Os Sertões (1902) by Euclides Da Cunha, Tomochic testifies to and denounces the brutal repression of a religiously inspired revolt among the peasants of the Sierra Madre by the Mexican army in 1892. As in La charca, the narrator’s sympathies in Tomochic are equally distanced from the regime of Porfirio Díaz (in whose army he is an officer) as from the fanatical devotees of the Saint of Cabora that the army has been sent to subdue.13 It is important to remember that the Latin American naturalist novels were contemporary to Latin American modernismo, regarded as the first autochthonous and highly influential literary movement in the region. Modernismo was also a deeper and more encompassing cultural phenomenon, in which Latin American literature began to display new attitudes toward spirituality and to experiment in both verse and prose with new ways to link literature and religion. The modernista authors, from the Cuban José Martí to the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, were attentive to the echoes of the politico-religious crises taking place in French culture in the last third of the nineteenth century, which contributed to the rise of European literary movements such as symbolism and decadentism. This is an extensive panorama that has been amply studied, most notably in the French context by Paul Bénichou in L’École du désenchantement: Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, Musset, Nerval, Gautier (1992) and in the context of Spanish-language literature by Octavio Paz in Los hijos del limo (1974). Paz considers symbolism to be “the true French Romanticism” (100), adding that “in fact, the true heirs of German and English Romanticism are the French poets who came after the ‘official’ Romantics, from Baudelaire to the Symbolists” (101). As Bénichou explains, the “negative Romanticism” Baudelaire derives from Gerard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier (L’École du désenchantement 526) arises in part from the political disillusionment and aesthetic introspection among French writers after events such as the authoritarian turn of the July Monarchy, the collapse of the 1848 Revolution, and Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état on December 2, 1851, which led to the change from the Second Republic to the Second French Empire. However, as Ross Chambers reminds us, “Symbolism also had roots in the midcentury, and its idea—an ancient one—that artistic signs could be a medium for expressing the mysteries of ideal, superreal, or spiritual reality gained impetus from

INTRODUCTION  • 21

a wave of ‘spiritualist’ thinking and a craze for tablerapping that reached France from New England in the 1850s. The work of Edgar Allan Poe, combining spiritualist beliefs with a formalist aesthetic, was to be a major influence on French art until well into the 20th century. The translation and presentation of Poe became a major preoccupation for Baudelaire in the early 1850s” (711). Symbolism adopts Théophile Gautier’s notion of “Art for art’s sake”— the emphasis on the autonomy and dignity of art—proposed in the prologue to his 1835 book Mademoiselle de Maupin and further intensifies it into the idea of a “religion of art”: art as a focus of cult and ritual. In poetry, their pose as poètes maudits (cursed poets) allows Baudelaire and Rimbaud to ironically appropriate Christian symbols in the service of visions often contrary to that of Christian morality. As Baudelaire declares in “Le voyage” (1861), “Dive to the depths of the abyss, Heaven or Hell, what does it matter? / To the depths of the Unknown to find what is new!” (263). Baudelaire’s image of the “abyss” hollows out the meaning of the polarities of religious symbology, depriving them of their transcendent character and leaving only their empty forms to be contemplated indefinitely. The influence of Gustave Flaubert’s symbolist-inspired “narrative theology” can be seen in numerous Latin American novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have studied elsewhere in detail the echoes of Flaubert in the Latin American modernista novel;14 it was certainly modernismo’s aesthetics that played a key role in adapting Flaubert and the symbolists’ appropriation of religious discourse to the Latin American milieu. Religion (and its occultist variants), eroticism, and an incipient existentialism were among the main semantic fields from which the modernistas drew the metaphors they used when referring to literature and textuality. The modernistas, with Rubén Darío as their head, created their own literary theology, a “religion of literature” partly modeled after Pythagoreanism but which made use of all the varieties of turn-of-thenineteenth-century occultism.15 Many examples abound in the modernista novels of attempts to “sacralize” the novel and to endow it—although rudimentarily—with the capacity to offer a totalizing view of culture. Let us recall José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa (1896), which consists largely of a viva voce reading of the protagonist José Fernández’s diary. This diary, which Fernández treats like a sacred text because it is devoted to the memory of his dead beloved, Helena, even has the beautifully decorated external appearance of a medieval Bible or

22  • INTRODUCTION

a sacred book: “It was a thick tome with corner protectors and locks of matte gold. Over a blue enamel background, inlaid in the black Moroccan leather were three green leaves, over which there fluttered a small butterfly with wings made of tiny diamonds” (Silva 120). Fernández proclaims in it his desire to “possess EVERYTHING” (129) and, in passages with an exaggerated prophetic tone, he tells of his “plan” to become a multimillionaire and a benevolent despot in his country, remaking it in accordance with a utopian and conservative model (141–47). More explicitly still, the feeling of the sacred is joined to the search for a totalizing vision in another prototypical modernista novel, La gloria de Don Ramiro (1905) by Enrique Larreta. As in José Enrique Rodó’s essay “El que vendrá” (1896), which is filled with messianic images, Larreta’s novel is moved by “the longing to believe which is almost a form of belief” (Rodó 154). A historical novel that harks back to late sixteenth-century Spain in search of the origins of Latin American culture, La gloria de Don Ramiro tends to sacralize a conservative vision of the history and culture of Spain, seeking to lay the foundations of a pan-Hispanic “national theology.” This novel’s totalizing thrust is evidenced in Larreta’s comments about how he came to write it. As Larreta explains, his initial project had been to write a book about the great masters of Spanish painting, but in such a way that, after analyzing each one’s technique, I could shift toward the study of a different aspect of Spanish life under the House of Austria. With Velázquez I would describe the court, its intrigues, politics, and dynastic marriages. With El Greco I would try to go deep into the soul of the hidalgo, of his double work, at once religious and heroic. With Zurbarán I would study the convents, theology, mysticism. With Murillo, popular devotion and the picaresque life. With Ribera, Spaniards outside of Spain. It was, as may be seen, an imposing project. A cathedral. I hadn’t yet laid the first stone and I could already feel the scaffolding’s vertigo. (Larreta 15–16)

SACRALIZATION AND DESACRALIZATION OF THE NOVEL The modernista novels tried to assume a “metadiscursive” position, one in which, through literary discourse and its powers of synthesis, these nov-

INTRODUCTION  • 23

els would offer readers a more extensive and nuanced grasp of the great social and political issues of the age, while avoiding both the abstractions of science and the simplifications of political ideology. In the modernista novels, one may see the rise in Latin America of the figure of “the intellectual” in the twentieth-century sense of the term: scholars or artists who, with the authority of their disciplines, made significant statements about issues of public concern.16 It is worth recalling that the concept of “the intellectual” had been examined polemically by French author Julien Benda in La trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals, 1927). For Benda, the category of the clerc (a medieval term Benda used to refer to those he regarded as “pure” intellectuals) is made up of “all those individuals whose activity essentially does not follow practical ends, and who, finding pleasure in art, scientific research, or metaphysical speculation, that is, in the possession of non-temporal things, all say, each in his own way: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’” (54). The modern intellectual is one who, in Benda’s narrowly conservative view, becomes a “treasonous” clerc: a clerc who becomes involved in political passions and who abandons the contemplative or at best moralizing tenor that, according to Benda, characterized intellectuals of earlier times (55–56).17 Benda’s ideas are pertinent in our context because he underlines the near-priestly status (another resonance of the term clerc) held by intellectuals in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century culture. However, by favoring action over contemplation, modern intellectuals do not abandon their eminent or distanced position with regard to the rest of society even as they try to exert their influence over social debates. Not surprisingly, in consonance with their quasi-religious image, early twentieth-century intellectuals frequently assumed a prophetic stance, and thus prophetic discourse made its appearance in a good number of Latin American novels at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, not just in modernista works but also in those of the more combative naturalist novelists. Prophetic discourse in the early twentieth-century Latin American novel is the point of departure of the process of sacralization (and, later, desacralization) of the novel this book attempts to describe. As will be seen, chapter 2 focuses on two Latin American naturalist novels: Santa (1903) by the Mexican Federico Gamboa and Redentores (1925) by the Puerto Rican Manuel Zeno Gandía. In both works, using the rhetoric of prophecy and

24  • INTRODUCTION

taking as their point of departure Flaubert’s view of the novel as an ironic commentary on holiness, Gamboa and Zeno Gandía explore the possibility of transforming the novel itself into an object of veneration and revelation. In Santa, the story of a beautiful peasant girl’s descent into prostitution in Mexico City and her posthumous redemption through the love of a blind musician becomes an allegory of the moral conundrum of novelistic writing, particularly that of naturalism, which, to remain faithful to its salvationist project of revealing the truth and denouncing social ills, must first immerse itself in abjection and sin. Redentores, in turn, written and published during the heyday of the Anglo-American avant-garde—Joyce’s Ulysses is from 1923 and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer from 1925—features an ironic and negative version of the sublime very similar to Flaubert’s. Chastising Puerto Rico’s society and politics in the early decades of the island’s military occupation and its transformation into a colony of the United States, Zeno Gandía offers his readers the overwhelming spectacle—sublime in the mode of Burke and of Flaubert—of the entire Puerto Rican nation sinking into a vast and confusing whirpool of political, economic, and social forces over which it has no control. In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010), Pericles Lewis has observed in the novelists of European and Anglo-American high modernism (Henry James, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf) a process of religious appropriation similar to what I have noted in regard to Latin America. Lewis points out that in the transition to the twentieth century, influenced by scientific research on the religious impulse by thinkers such as William James, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber, and reacting to the growing secularization in their societies, the agnostic or atheistic novelists of the Anglo-European avant-garde devoted themselves to experimenting with the novel’s language and structure so that it could more effectively describe transcendent experiences (19). Lewis explains that these novelists understood “transcendence” as everyday experiences that produced extraordinary insights into reality, although they often used religious terms to refer to such experiences, such as the term epiphany in Joyce (Lewis 19). Lewis concludes that “the modernists sought a secular sacred, a form of transcendent or ultimate meaning to be discovered in this world, without reference to the supernatural” (19–21). Thus, by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the genre of the novel on both sides of the Atlantic begins to

INTRODUCTION  • 25

incorporate into its makeup, deliberately and self-consciously, the idea of the sacred. However, there were also significant differences in the way in which this happened in different regions: the European modernists, as Lewis remarks, focused their search for the sacred not through collective experiences or extraordinary events but through individual experience and everyday life, seeking to describe what Virginia Woolf called “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (Lewis 22).18 This explains in part these novelists’ intense use of literary techniques such as interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and a heightened descriptiveness, observed by Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset in his 1925 book Ideas sobre la novela when he quipped that in Proust “the novel is reduced . . . to a pure, immobile description” (176). This also explains the modernist novels’ emphasis on psychology, as Ortega y Gasset notes when he proposes that this new type of novel is based on “imaginary psychology” and “the invention of interesting souls” (199, 201). The Spanish and Latin American vanguardist novel of the 1920s and ’30s, instead, evolves against the grain of Ortega y Gasset’s statements that the novel is a “morose genre” or a “cluttered genre” (160, 193), and tends toward what Pérez Firmat calls a “pneumatic aesthetics” in order to produce cloud-like novels that are “weightless, agile, incorporeal” (Pérez Firmat 49). The insistence on formal and verbal experimentation and on the notion of art as play in Hispanic vanguard novels such as El profesor inútil (1926) by the Spaniard Benjamín Jarnés, or Margarita de niebla (1927) by the Mexican Jaime Torres Bodet, among others, leads them to deliberately display their lack of transcendence, in which there is no room for the sacred. A few years later, however, strong sociopolitical pressures arising on both sides of the Atlantic, embodied in events such as the Mexican Revolution (1910–1940) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), led avantgarde authors as well as those who kept their distance from vanguardism to reorient their focus and to seek to give their texts a sense of transcendence by linking them to greater and more encompassing phenomena. In this regard, many authors of the period began to feel that the vacuous pros and cons of political discourse and the ideological differences that often dissolved into sloganeering were insufficient to give greater value and resonance to their writings, as evidenced in works of poetry such as César Vallejo’s Poemas humanos (1938) and José Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin (1939) and in novels such as Miguel Angel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (written in 1933, published in 1946) and Alejo Carpentier’s ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! (1934).

26  • INTRODUCTION

In turn, the rise of irrationalist tendencies in European culture after World War I gave rise to “neo-primitivism” in avant-garde arts and stimulated renewed curiosity both in Europe and in the Americas about religious experience and its effects on society and culture. This can be seen quite clearly in negrismo, one of the most wide-ranging and influential Latin American avant-garde movements, with which Carpentier was affiliated. Even in the “telluric novels,” or novelas de la tierra, of the 1920s and ’30s in Latin America, despite their rhetoric derived from nineteenthcentury realism, one finds a spiritual, nearly pantheistic relationship posited between Latin Americans and their lands, specifically their geographic and natural milieu. As Carlos J. Alonso points out, in telluric novels “the autochthonous Latin American landscape became a privileged literary category, since it was through its constant contact with it that the spiritual essence of the continent’s people was shaped” (63). All of this serves to highlight the widely recognized fact that the Latin American narrative contemporary to that of high modernism was propelled by more urgent impulses than those that gave rise to the novels of Joyce, Woolf, Proust, or Kafka. The “crisis of secularization” that perturbed these European authors scarcely compares with the deep existential questions of political and cultural sovereignty that tormented Latin Americans since the crisis of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Put in starker terms, Latin Americans were much less worried about “the death of God” proclaimed by Nietzsche than by the death of their nations—or at least the severe sociopolitical and economic instabilities that threatened to undo feelings of collective identity that, in the early twentieth century, were barely a century old. As Michael Goebel observes, “The sovereignty of most Latin American nation-states remained fragile and uneven for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both internally in terms of the state’s reach into distant and often inaccessible territories and externally through foreign, first European and later U.S., interference” (6). Nicola Miller has further remarked that the almost certainly crucial role of religion in the development of Latin American nationalisms remains underexplored by academics, who tend to be secular in outlook. When religion is discussed, it is usually under the guise of popular culture—for example, the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico. Moreover, the religious subtext of much Latin American nationalist discourse has often been remarked upon, but that would also be true of many

INTRODUCTION  • 27

other parts of the world. But the long history of Catholicism in the region is yet to be fully addressed, as is the broader relationship between religion, religiosity and nationalism in Latin America. . . . As [Claudio] Lomnitz argued, [Benedict] Anderson’s claim that nationalism replaced religious feeling is hard to sustain on the basis of Latin American evidence. (208)

Indeed, as I argue throughout this book, religion and nationalism come together in a series of key works of the Latin American novel in which the nation becomes the transcendent “secular sacred” of which the novel becomes the holy vessel, its sacred scripture. The intensity of these issues was such that it smothered the playful tendencies of the Latin American avant-gardes and led to the creation of novelistic subgenres that were anachronistic in style and content, such as the novelas de la tierra and the indigenista novels, or—as in Carpentier’s ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! (the title in Yoruba means “Praised Be Thou, Oh Lord”)—it produced texts in which vanguardist frivolity coexisted uneasily with Afro-Cuban religiosity (González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home 61–86). It is not my intention to write a detailed account of the history of the Latin American novel, but it is important to note here that in a small but significant number of narratives from the 1930s until after World War II, one finds an overt appropriation of ideas and motifs associated with religion and theology and an attempt to link them organically in theory and practice to the discourse of the novel and, in turn, to the novel’s discourse about the nation. Of fundamental importance, in this regard, are authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo. Chapter 3 of this book examines Borges’s immense contribution as a critic of many of the ideas of high modernism about literature and transcendence and as the designer of a new “literary theology,” more rational and systematic than Flaubert’s postromantic vision. We will consider how Borges’s rationalism takes into account the nonrational aspects of language in order to understand language’s ancient links to belief and spirituality, as when he observes in the prologue to his book of poetry El otro, el mismo (1964) that “the roots of language are irrational and have a magical character” (Obras completas II 236). During the 1930s, as he began to critically distance himself from the Hispanic vanguardist movement called ultraísmo to which he had belonged in his youth, Borges wrote a series of essays, such as “Una vindicación de la cábala,” “Vindicación del falso Basílides,” “La postulación de la realidad,” “El arte narrativo y la magia” (collected

28  • INTRODUCTION

in Discusión, 1932), and “Historia de la eternidad” (collected in Historia de la eternidad, 1936). In these essays, he began to theorize about narrative, making use of concepts linked to the anthropological and historical study of religions such as magic, eternity, Gnosticism, and the Kabbalah. In the 1950s, Borges lays the ideological foundations of the Boom’s “total novels” in short stories such as “El Aleph,” in which, through the ironic appropriation of the theological concept of eternity, he creates the prototype of texts that are simultaneously totalizing and synthetic. Chapter 4 discusses how the three previously mentioned key novelists of the postvanguard—Bombal, Carpentier, and Rulfo—explore the nature of the sacred in consonance with the ideas of Borges as well as those of anthropologists and historians of religion such as Émile Durkheim and Rudolf Otto. In Bombal’s 1938 novel La amortajada, Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949), and Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), we find a similar use of concepts and images associated with the holy, such as eternity, faith, darkness, emptiness, and silence, to bring readers of their novels closer to the experience of what Otto calls “the numinous.” In this context, discussion of Carpentier’s celebrated prologue to El reino de este mundo, “De lo real maravilloso americano,” will help us to reflect on how these and other mid-twentieth century Latin American novels seek to “re-enchant” the novel, endowing it with an aura of magic and holiness. Twenty years after the end of World War II, there arose in Latin America the novelistic flowering known as the Boom, characterized by lengthy and complex novels with structures reminiscent of works by some of the masters of high modernism such as Joyce and Woolf, as well as of authors belatedly associated with high modernism such as Faulkner.19 The so-called “total novels” of Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, José Lezama Lima, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others, sought to forge—paraphrasing Stephen Daedalus’s words toward the end of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)—the “uncreated conscience of [their] race” (Joyce 299). Thus, in these ambitious novels the evocation of the sacred and reflections on national identity often went hand in hand. The nation—its origins and destiny, its outlines and definitions—was also to a great extent the transcendental subject of these novels. However, unlike the earlier novels of the 1930s and ’40s, which focused on individual countries and the internal struggles of their formation, the Boom novels focused on the Latin American region as a whole, in consonance with the growing sense of Latin American continental unity fostered by events

INTRODUCTION  • 29

such as the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s. Realizing that such a unity was very much a “work in progress”—or even a utopian vision harking back to Simón Bolivar—the Boom novels frequently functioned as prophetic invocations of a future patria grande, a single great continental nation-state whose arrival seemed to be just over the horizon. Promising access to transcendental knowledge about the national origins of Latin America, the Boom novels demanded devoted, attentive, and informed readings driven by a faith of some sort: readings that were less an experience of pleasure than an exercise in ascetic purification or an initiation ritual. Encyclopedic and totalizing, the Boom novels aimed to produce not just scandal and amazement but also a veneration akin to religious devotion. Furthermore, these novels assumed a foundational role in creating a new discourse on the nation in Latin America. To carry out this project, following a well-known dialectic of modernity, the Boom’s “total novels” evoked and critically reviewed national history in order to go beyond it and thus prepare the ground for a new beginning.20 This explains the eschatological or apocalyptic tone common to both the Boom novels and to their models in high modernism, from the mortuary word games of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) to the literally devastating ending of Cien años de soledad (1967) when Macondo is destroyed by a “Biblical hurricane” (García Márquez 447). The process of sacralization of the novel in Latin American narrative reaches its zenith with the Boom. Chapter 4 explores three masterworks of this period whose architecture depends, more or less implicitly, on elements derived from theology and sacred texts. Cortázar’s Rayuela (1964) narrates in an existentialist vein the intellectual and spiritual itinerary of a representative individual, a sort of Latin American Everyman named Horacio Oliveira, while García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad presents a collective portrait of an entire family through the abundant and elaborate use of prophetic discourse and the symbolic mechanisms of “magical realism.” In turn, Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (1966) offers an ambitious attempt to fuse novelistic and religious discourse through the use of highly poetic language. To a great extent, these novels are all stories about creation: of art, of literature, and of the nation, and all of them offer foundational tales as revelations about the history and destiny of Latin America. Aspiring to resemble sacred books, these works emphasize the act of reading as an experience of initiation, of decipherment and discovery and, as said earlier, they demand of readers the utmost attention and devotion.

30  • INTRODUCTION

However, in the very midst of the Boom period there arose in Latin America a group of younger novelists who carried out an implicit critique of the “total novels” and explored a wide range of new novelistic modes: Miguel Barnet and Elena Poniatowska inaugurate the mode of the testimonial or documentary novel that would become predominant in Latin America during the decade of the 1980s; Alfredo Bryce Echenique leads the return to a new sentimental novel that privileges the feelings and accounts of amorous experience; Severo Sarduy and Manuel Puig produce intensely experimental and self-reflexive novels that undermine many of the narrative conventions of the Boom novels; and Mempo Giardinelli and Paco Ignacio Taibo II give greater prominence to crime novels in the “hard-boiled” style. Critics have already characterized these novels and identified many of their commonalities, which appear largely as the negation of many of the salient traits of the Boom novels: a rejection of totalization and of metanarratives that seek to explain everything in favor of narratives centered on individuals and their experiences; a critique of the genealogical structure of the Boom novels and of the patriarchalism and elitism this structure promotes in favor of stories about characters from socially marginalized groups (women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities); a greater emphasis on popular and mass culture; and—of greater relevance for this book’s arguments—a rejection of the processes of textual sacralization linked to the artifices of “the marvelous real” and “magical realism” in favor of a desacralizing and disillusioned view of fiction.21 Both the post-Boom novelists as well as those of the following generation, which comes of age at the turn of the millennium, display this desacralizing attitude that seeks to stimulate greater diversity and individuality in novel writing as well as to bring narrative closer to the experience of daily life in a Latin America that has been transformed by phenomena such as the return to democracy, neoliberalism, and globalization. However, unlike the post-Boom authors, who resisted being categorized, millennial authors—to give them at least a provisional name—have been much more willing to view themselves as part of a community. Two consistently mentioned references given as starting points of the new twenty-firstcentury Latin American narrative are the short-story anthology McOndo, published in Spain in 1996, edited by the Chileans Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez and presented that same year in a MacDonald’s chain restaurant in Santiago de Chile, and the “Manifiesto del Crack,” signed by Mexican authors Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Angel

INTRODUCTION  • 31

Palou, Eloy Urroz, and Jorge Volpi. The full outlines of these new novels are still to be defined, but critics have begun to observe in many of them a common trend of breaking with the idea of the nation, partly as an expression of their artistic maturity and search for greater creative freedom.22 The title of Jorge Volpi’s 2009 book-length polemical essay, El insomnio de Bolívar: Cuatro consideraciones intempestivas sobre América Latina en el siglo XXI (Bolívar’s Insomnia: Four Untimely Considerations on Latin America in the Twenty-First Century), deftly captures the desacralizing thrust of Volpi and his millennial companions, which deconstructs Bolívar’s unrealized dream of a single Latin American nation-state on the eve of the bicentennial of much of the region’s independence (1810–2010). The sixth and last chapter in this book studies the process by which Latin American novelists of the post-Boom and millennial generations have proceeded to dismantle the elements of the sacred in novelistic discourse. The chapter begins with a discussion of the ways in which postBoom novelists begin to pay more explicit attention to religion and its role in society as well as in literature, thus making visible, among other things, the sacred status of the nation that was part of the Boom novels’ background and making it possible to carry out a critique of religion’s effects in the novel. The work of Elena Poniatowska is highlighted, in particular her account of the role of the religious beliefs of Jesusa Palancares, the protagonist of the testimonial novel Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (1969). The chapter continues and concludes with two works that can be considered attempts to disconnect religion and the cult of the nation from novelistic discourse in order to produce novels that are more open and receptive to the social, technological, and artistic changes of the new century: in this regard, the systematic use of blasphemy and contradiction in Fernando Vallejo’s El desbarrancadero (2001) and the anti-nostalgic attitude in Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes (1999) open new paths for the Latin American novelists of the twenty-first century.

One

P R O P H E T I C DI S C OU R S E I N T H E NAT U R A L I S T N OV E L Federico Gamboa and Manuel Zeno Gandía

If prophetic speech is mixed, however, with the fracas of history and the violence of its movement, if it makes the prophet a historical character charged with a heavy temporal weight, it seems that it is essentially linked to a momentary interruption of history, to history become an instant of impossibility of history, a voice where catastrophe hesitates to turn into salvation, where in the fall, already the ascension and return begin. MAURICE BLANCHOT, “PROPHETIC SPEECH” (79)

T

raditionally the naturalist novel has been seen as strongly influenced by positivism and by the scientific discourses of the turn of the nineteenth century. Curiously, this same positivism that incited scientific research about religion utimately allowed naturalism, so closely linked to the material world, to begin assimilating certain aspects of religious discourse into its own makeup. As Émile Durkheim stated toward the ending of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), “In fact, religion does not know itself. It knows neither what it is made of nor what needs it responds to. Far from being able to tell science what to do, religion is itself an object for science!”

PROPHETIC DISCOURSE IN THE NATURALIST NOVEL  • 33

(432). Following the lead of the nascent science of anthropology, naturalist fiction also takes religion as an object of research, but this approach gives rise to unexpected effects, since it unveils this narrative’s dependence from the beginning on certain elements derived from the religious tradition, such as the use of genealogy and myth, and a moralizing penchant. Among the novelists of Hispanic naturalism, scientific interest in religion was combined with a more artistic concept of the novel than that of Émile Zola, derived from Flaubert and the brothers Goncourt, as well as with the symbolist idea of art as a substitute for religion, which led them to experiment more deliberately and openly with the use of religious discourse as an artistic technique. This was the case with the two Latin American naturalist novelists studied in this chapter, whose careers span the turn of the nineteenth century: the Mexican Federico Gamboa and the Puerto Rican Manuel Zeno Gandía. Both, as we will see, explore the possibility of sacralizing the novel through the incorporation of prophetic discourse, which in turn leads to an “abyssal” perspective that, like Flaubert’s “negative romanticism,” joins the abject with the sublime, the profane with the sacred. Federico Gamboa was a journalist, diplomat, and politician. A high government official under Presidents Porfirio Díaz and Victoriano Huerta, he was a personal friend of Zola and of Edmond de Goncourt (Curiel 493). His extensive narrative work was influenced by naturalism from the beginning in his first book, Del natural (1889), but it was also marked by his conversion to Catholicism later in life. He was further known as a bon vivant and as the Catholic party’s candidate for Mexico’s presidency in 1913, but he owes his place in the Mexican literary canon to his most popular novel, Santa (1903), a novel as ambiguous as its author. As José Emilio Pacheco observed, “It is its contradictions and not its coherence that make Santa a fascinating book: a lewd novel written to promote chastity or a chaste novel to celebrate lewdness; the anti-Porfirian critique of a Porfirian or the Porfirian critique of an enemy of the regime; the worst of our literary novels or the best of our subliterary novels” (cited in Olea, Santa 35). To add still another ambivalence to Santa, Gamboa implicitly proposes in it a theory about the “holiness” of the naturalist novels, which in principle seems aimed at counteracting the multiple and frequent accusations of obscenity leveled at these novels in an effort to silence them.1 In fact, Santa has been seen by some critics as an additional instance of the “timid” Hispanic naturalism of Clorinda Matto de Turner, Emilia Pardo Bazán,

34  •  PROPHETIC DISCOURSE IN THE NATURALIST NOVEL

and Manuel Zeno Gandía, among others, who tempered Zola’s supposed coldness and crudity with expressions of compassion and edifying commentary, in some cases due to the religiosity of some of these authors.2 However, positing such a generalized timidity among such diverse authors implies ignoring the patently critical vision of naturalism held by writers from the Hispanic world. It is also incorrect to suppose that their doubts about naturalism were exclusively motivated by their religious faith (this was certainly not the case with Zeno Gandía, who was an agnostic). I believe, instead, that in their readings of naturalism, Hispanic authors became aware of traits of this narrative mode that Zola and his disciples tried to suppress or ignore but which contemporary criticism has begun to uncover; specifically, the continued use of mythical and even biblical allusions in novels that aspired to be secular and scientific. Zola himself was fascinated in a critical way by religious belief, as attested by his Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898). But besides the intention to chastise organized religion (Catholicism in particular), religious discourse is also present at a deeper level in the novels of the “father of naturalism”: Michel Serres has underscored the presence of the Greco-Roman myth of the god Vulcan in Zola’s L’assomoir (1877), as well as Zola’s use of a genealogical framework derived from the Old Testament in his novelistic series (Hermes 40–43). A modernizing but dictatorial regime, the “Porfiriato,” as the Mexican government of strongman Porfirio Díaz is still known, lasted from 1876 to 1911. Through a combination of positivist theory, economic planning, and brute force, Díaz brought peace to a previously unstable and banditridden country, created a booming economy based on large amounts of foreign investment, established railroads, electric service, telegraph networks, tramways, opera houses, banks, and hotels, and oversaw a cultural and intellectual life that, as long as it did not run counter to Díaz’s views, was allowed to flourish.3 With a strong French influence in the lifestyles of its urban dwellers, Porfirian Mexico was a belle époque of sorts which, like its European counterpart, also had its seamier side, ranging from the exploitation of peasants in the haciendas under the fierce vigilance of the Mexican rural police to legally sanctioned prostitution in the cities. As Debra A. Castillo observes, In 1904, Mexico City had 368,000 inhabitants and 10,937 registered prostitutes—common sense and the testimonials of the period remind us that

PROPHETIC DISCOURSE IN THE NATURALIST NOVEL  • 35

in addition to the women officially registered with the Ministry of Health, there were many unregistered prostitutes as well as unfortunate women such as servants who were often forced into occasional prostitution. . . . A minimal control over this vast population was instituted through the Ministry of Health registry and through the establishment of “red zones” where prostitution could be legally practiced in a reclusive setting that would not offend decent society. (37)

Beyond its representation and denunciation of the evils of prostitution and the hypocrisies of Mexican society under the Porfirio Díaz regime, there is in Santa a more intellectual, if no less passionate and complicated, dimension in which Gamboa reflects about the moral dilemmas facing literature in general and specifically the novel. In Santa, Gamboa recognizes that a certain sense of the sacred continues to be present in modern literature, however secular it aspires to be, although this presence of the sacred coexists with literature’s notorious fascination with violence and abjection. Let us briefly review the story of Santa: A young and beautiful peasant girl of Chimalistac, a town on the outskirts of Mexico City in the early 1900s, is seduced by a young army ensign. They consummate their love among the rocks of the Pedregal de San Angel; Santa is made pregnant, the ensign abandons her, and shortly afterward Santa has a miscarriage while working alongside her mother, who then realizes what has happened. In the presence of Santa’s two older brothers, her mother repudiates her and drives her out of the house. Accepting the offer by Elvira La Gachupina, a Spaniard who owns a bordello in Mexico City whom Santa had met by chance at the San Angel fair, Santa shows up at the brothel, explaining that “I’m here . . . because there’s no room for me in my house any more; because my mother and my brothers threw me out; because I don’t have an occupation, and above all . . . because I swore I would end up in this and they didn’t believe me” (Gamboa 23). As her story continues, Santa’s youth and beauty make her a sought-after prostitute; she then becomes the mistress of the Spanish bullfighter El Jaramillo, with whom she has a tense relationship due to his jealousy, until she leaves with the bourgeois Rubio, who sets up a house for her for a time until he grows tired and dismisses her. By then Santa, alcoholic and sick, is forced to enter “the dark circles of cheap prostitution” (Gamboa 267). She is brought out of this environment, already deathly ill, by the blind and grotesque Hipólito, the brothel’s pianist, who had fallen in love with her since her arrival to Elvi-

36  •  PROPHETIC DISCOURSE IN THE NATURALIST NOVEL

ra’s bordello. Santa lives with Hipólito during her last months of life in a chaste relationship, due to her cancer of the uterus. All this time Hipólito tenderly demonstrates his love for Santa until she is taken to the hospital and dies on the operating table. Fulfilling his promise to her before she entered the hospital, Hipólito arranges to bury Santa in the cemetery of Chimalistac, beneath a tombstone “with Santa’s name in large letters” (Gamboa 325). Already in the prologue to his novel, Gamboa encourages a fusion and confusion between Santa the character and Santa the novel: “Don’t think I’m a saint (santa) because that was my name. Also, don’t think I’m a loose woman like the Lescauts or the Gautiers, because of the way I live,” Santa’s voice (or of the novel’s personification?) tells the readers (11). The protagonist’s name, whose incongruence with her profession is repeatedly noted in the text by the other characters, embodies this novel’s fundamental enigma. Why is Gamboa’s antiheroine named “Santa”? In the novel, no one can explain it, and the madams of the various brothels where she works try to change it on various occasions, but to no avail. To the contrary, Santa clings to her name, just as her literally blind lover, Hipólito, does when he has Santa’s name engraved in large letters on her tombstone and strokes it repeatedly, as if reading it with his fingers. Does Santa dishonor her name, as she seems to do throughout most of the narrative, or does she instead manage to redeem and fulfill it posthumously with Hipólito’s help? Is there any basis for assuming Santa’s sanctity? To a great extent, Santa’s holiness—that of the character as well as of the novel—is linked to the ancient biblical paradox of abjection as a means of purification. By abjection I am referring, following Julia Kristeva in her book Powers of Horror (1982), to a version of evil that: “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . Abjection . . . is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you” (4). I also agree with Kristeva’s observation that “the abject is edged with the sublime” (11). Santa makes visible a sort of “inverted theology” present in the fictions of realism and naturalism, embodied in the paradox that in order to be true to its ethical and aesthetic missions, the novel has to open itself up to the “low” and the malignant. This “inverted theology”

PROPHETIC DISCOURSE IN THE NATURALIST NOVEL  • 37

that turns the abject into a way of reaching the sacred is also quite ancient and dates back to the dawn of Christianity, as Kristeva argues, when Jesus refuses to stone the adulterous woman (John 8:7). In Christianity, Kristeva points out, abjection will not be designated as such, that is, as other, as something to be ejected, or separated, but as the most propitious place for communication—as the point where the scales are tipped towards pure spirituality. The mystic’s familiarity with abjection is a fount of infinite jouissance. One may stress the masochistic economy of that jouissance only if one points out at once that the Christian mystic, far from using it to the benefit of a symbolic or institutional power, displaces it indefinitely . . . within a discourse where the subject is resorbed . . . into communication with the Other and with others. One recalls Francis of Assisi who visited leprosaries “to give out alms and left only after having kissed each leper on the mouth”; who stayed with lepers and bathed their wounds, sponging pus and sores. One might also think of Angela of Foligno. (127)

Kristeva’s passing allusion to Angela of Foligno is particularly relevant to my reading of Santa, since this Italian mystic and follower of St. Francis converted after having been married and having children and after having committed a sin so great that she did not want to tell it even to her confessor. Years later, in her 1267 Memoriale, Angela tells of how, in a vision, Christ himself explained why she, having been such a great sinner, had nevertheless received the gift of having visions. Christ, she says, “offered me another example: ‘Those of my little children who walk away from my kingdom because of their sin and turn themselves into the Devil’s children, when they return to the Father, since He is happy for their return, He shows them how especially jubilant He feels. Such is His joy that He grants them a special gift that is not granted to others who were virgin and never left His side’” (Foligno 155–56). For the mystic of Foligno, degradation and sin become, paradoxically, means to improve communication with God. The roots of this paradox are linked to the ancestral dichotomy between body and soul, which Christianism derived from the pagan world. According to this dualistic concept, the body is the prison of the soul, and liberation of the soul is achieved only by means of a gradual annihilation of the body through an ascetic process of which abjection is a key component. It is precisely this paradox of abjection as a means of purification that is

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displayed in Santa. As Debra A. Castillo observes, “The juxtaposition—and near overlap—of virtue and vice is one of this titillating novel’s more slyly seductive features” (43). Santa fulfills in its entirety Kristeva’s observation about the role of abjection in modern literature when she points out that modern literature does not seek to substitute religion, morality, or the law; instead, “it acknowledges the impossibility of Religion, Morality, and Law—their power play, their necessary and absurd seeming. . . . One might thus say that with such literature there takes place a crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality and Immorality” (16). Perhaps the clearest way to appreciate how Santa interweaves religious discourse, which sees abjection as one way to achieve sanctity, and the ethical and aesthetic aspirations of nineteenth-century realist and naturalist fiction, is by means of the recurrent allusions in Gamboa’s novel to petrification and statues. Perhaps playing on the image of stoning, the biblical punishment for adultery, stone turns into a symbol of abjection in this novel: let us recall that it is precisely in the Pedregal (stone pile) where Santa loses her virginity. But allusions to rocks and statues are even richer and more complex, since they evoke, on one hand, the fixity of writing and the novel’s literary artifice, and on the other, the exemplarity and the ethical as well as aesthetic ideal of perfection embodied in statues and images of saints. Several passages in Santa are highly suggestive in this regard. A specially striking one is remarkably similar to a key passage in the later novel by Mariano Azuela, Los de abajo (1915), one of the canonical novels of the Mexican Revolution, when General Demetrio Macías answers the question of why he and his men keep on fighting when the revolution seems exhausted by throwing a small stone to the bottom of a canyon and saying, “Look at that stone, how it doesn’t stop any more . . .” (137). Similarly, Santa tries to explain to Hipólito how she perceives her degraded life by comparing herself with a stone: “It’s as if they all push me and force me to do all that I do, as if I were a stone and someone stronger than me had kicked me with his foot from high above a gully. Nobody can stop me! I bounce here, I break there, and only God knows how I’ll get to the bottom of the gully, if I get there. . . . You want me to tell you why I compare myself to a stone? . . . Because when I was little, I threw them many times like that in the Pedregal, and it made me sad not to

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be able to stop them, seeing them so tiny and hitting against the large rocks, pointed like lances, with knife-edges, that turned around, broke pieces off them, and they couldn’t stop themselves, not even the tree-roots or the branches and leaves could defend them, no. They just kept on falling, getting smaller and more broken up as they fell, until they were invisible—even though I peeked over the edge trying to see them, holding on to something solid—and they gave off a a very dull sound, the sound they made when they hit far below. . . . Also, I compare myself with a stone because people would want women like us to be like stones, without feelings or anything, and you really need to be like a stone to be in this business and to suffer such insults and scorn.” (130–31)

The allusion to the Pedregal evokes, as already mentioned, Santa’s lost virginity, and the image of the falling stone is an obvious symbol of inevitability, but this simile also reminds us of the idea of the body’s petrification, its transformation into a statue. Petrification in this text is not just linked to art and artifice (through the image of the statue and the myth of Pygmalion) but also to the fixity of writing, a fixity that is associated with death and also, through death, with purification and perfection. Let us recall the scene in the Church of Santa Clara, when Santa is hearing mass: “In her ecstasy, she prayed in her thoughts for death, forgetting her life and her stains. To die then and there, face to face with the God of infinite goodness and merciful pardon” (126). Santa’s metaphorical petrification, prefigured by her meetings with ensign Marcelino Beltrán in the Pedregal, begins to appear toward the novel’s end when Santa, already ill with cancer, accepts Hipólito’s love. The latter, in fact, is associated early on and repeatedly with statues, when the narrator alludes to his “eyes without pupils, like a dull bronze statue” (132, 317). Chapter 5 of the second part of Santa abounds throughout with images of sculptures and immobility. The most explicit in this regard appears when Santa at last expresses her love to the long-suffering Hipólito, falling to her knees in gratitude at the same time that Hipólito’s pet dove flies to rest on the blind man’s shoulder, forming a tableau the narrator describes as “a tragic sculpture of the eternal and irremediable human suffering, abandoned in one of the many crossroads of life, weatherbeaten, but always standing, never crumbling, visited by love in its earthly and winged form” (317). It is also pertinent to recall the scene when Hipólito lies down chastely

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next to Santa. The novel’s narrator, who never misses an opportunity for moralizing commentary, remarks, “Undoubtedly that night was the most chaste Santa ever had, purified by a pain that gave her no rest, and bathed in Hipólito’s love, who never moved, trying to supply her with the rest demanded by the ill body and the not very healthy spirit of the girl. Neither one slept and both feigned sleep with their immobility and their closed eyes. From time to time, her body was wracked by pain; his, by desire. And they quietly resisted desire and pain, persisting in immobility and silence” (321). The apex of this process of petrification is reached after Santa’s death in the operating room, when Hipólito orders a gravestone placed over her tomb with “only the name of Santa in large letters, so that neither rain nor weeds could erase it or hide it, and so that he would be able to read and reread it the only way he knew how: with the touch of his fingers” (344). Santa’s metamorphosis takes places when she “becomes” her name, her monumentalized name, inscribed in stone, read with the touch of fingers, returned to her textual origins, to the truth of her artifice, visibly transformed into the text she had always been. But the novel does not end there, with the suggestive image of a male, blind reader who incessantly caresses the contours of a woman-turned-text trying to recover her meaning, to decipher her secret. It is an image that would perhaps have satisfied Gamboa’s more ironic precursors such as Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola himself. However, Gamboa adds to it an openly religious supplement, laying bare the complicity of naturalist fiction (and perhaps all narrative) with a certain idea of the holy. “One ascends to God through love or through suffering!” cries out the narrator toward the ending of Santa, following the “inverted theology” of abjection (346). Like a merciful God, implies Santa’s narrator, the novel as a genre “receives with arms full of mercy the humble, the unfortunate, those who stink and who stain” (346). For Gamboa, Santa’s holiness is a metaphor of the ambiguous sanctity of the naturalist novel itself, which perhaps with excessive naïveté, like the most extreme mystics, risks facing passion, evil, and death in order to discover and tell the truth.

REALISM AND PROPHECY The role of prophecy in Gamboa’s novel lies precisely in this truth-telling impulse. Prophetic discourse appears overtly from the first page of Santa in

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the novel’s epigraph, taken from the book of the prophet Hosea, one of the so-called “minor prophets” (because of the book’s brevity) in the Bible: “I will not punish your daughters when they play the whore, nor your brides when they commit adultery; for the men themselves go aside with prostitutes . . . a people without understanding shall come to ruin. Hosea, Ch. 4, v. 14” (Gamboa 9). As may be seen, this epigraph not only anticipates the novel’s ostensible theme—the hypocrisy surrounding legalized prostitution in Mexico during the Díaz regime—but also the tension between this theme and its formal expression; that is, between the theme of prostitution and the genre of the novel. It should be remembered that in 1903, attitudes derived from Victorian puritanism were still common throughout Western culture; as late as 1888 and 1889, the English translator of Zola’s Nana (1880) was sentenced twice for obscenity (Ladenson 24). Fiction about prostitution, particularly in the style of naturalism, was regarded as pornographic by late nineteenth-century standards. In Hosea, Gamboa finds an example from a sacred text that alludes explicitly to prostitution and can serve as a model to approach his subject within a moralizing context that can shield it from charges of obscenity. Furthermore, the reference to Hosea anticipates the paradoxical process of redemption through abjection used by Gamboa to justify the naturalist novel. As biblical commentaries observe, Hosea prophesies not only through words but also through symbolic actions, such as his marriage following God’s command to the prostitute Gomer, who gives him three children (although none is by him). Hosea repudiates her for her infidelity but ultimately forgives and remarries her. These actions, also told in Hosea’s text, have generally been interpreted as an allegory of Jehova’s relation with Israel during the seventh century BC: although Israel moved away from its God, participating in the cult of Baal, and God ceased to favor Israel, in the end God decided to forgive His people and renew the pact forged during the Exodus (Harper’s Bible Commentary 709–15). To fully understand the function of prophetic discourse in Santa we must briefly examine the idea of prophecy itself and the figure of the prophet. Although in certain definitions prophecy is a concept that goes beyond language—it may include objects or events, such as auguries or portents—its most common forms usually occur through language. As historians Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton observe, “Prophecy and its interpretation is a grammar which is peculiarly flexible and can produce discourse

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suitable to virtually any context or purpose. For instance prophecy proved to be of great importance in coping with unexpected cultural and cosmological shocks such as the discovery of the New World. . . . A prophecy, or the use of prophetic language, is not solely about mystical divination or the coming of the millennium but . . . a political language involving a critique of current political conflicts, institutions and state-making concepts like kingship. In many ways, prophecies are a form of language rather than a well-established content” (3). From a philosophical perspective influenced by Hebrew theology, French critic Maurice Blanchot argues that the prophetic words of the Judeo-Christian tradition “possess neither allegory nor symbol, but that, by the concrete force of the word, they lay things bare” (84). Blanchot further adds, “Prophecy is living mimicry. Jeremiah does not content himself with saying: you will be bent under the yoke; he gets hold of some cords, and goes under a wooden yoke, a fire yoke. Isaiah does not just say: do not count on Egypt, its soldiers are conquered, taken, led ‘barefoot, barebottomed,’ rather he himself takes off his sack and sandals and goes naked for three years” (84–85). The observations by Taithe and Thornton and by Blanchot help us to understand the profound affinity between the discourse of the naturalist novel and Judeo-Christian prophetic discourse: both emphasize lived experience and concrete, palpable facts. Prophecy is ultimately a way of confronting and speaking about reality. Another affinity between prophetic discourse and naturalism lies in the link between naturalism and the transforming impulse of prophecy. The socially reformist—or even revolutionary—intentions of the naturalist novel are well known. Despite the positivist rhetoric by which these novels presented themselves as dispassionate works of “scientific” social analysis, naturalist novels were in fact passionate and ideological works whose purpose was to uncover and denounce social oppression. By means of the visible incorporation of prophetic discourse into his text, Gamboa reconnects the naturalist novel with its most ancient and prestigious sources in prophetic discourse as a form of social criticism. However, for Gamboa prophetic discourse also becomes an instrument to produce in his readers the feeling of vertigo and loss of control associated with the sacred and the sublime. Blanchot has noted how prophetic speech is deeply linked to history and its grandeur: “Prophets are indeed constantly mingled with history, whose immense measure they alone pro-

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vide” (80). For Blanchot, Judeo-Christian prophetic discourse is placed not just in the context of specific historical circumstances but also in a historical process seen in its totality from the perspective of divine providence. It is important to recall that Santa’s narrative is set in the context of a detailed and encompassing description of Mexico City and its history. In fact, Santa is recognized today as an exemplary urban novel that offers a vivid image of Mexico City on the eve of the revolution.4 Santa’s career begins in a notorious brothel ruled by Elvira, a Spanish madam, frequented by some of the most powerful and wealthy men in the city, including the Spanish bullfighter El Jaramillo, who becomes Santa’s lover. A significant scene occurs in chapter 3, when the young Santa, already a successful courtesan, attends the celebration of El Grito de la Independencia (Mexico’s Cry for Independence in 1810) in Mexico City’s main square, accompanied by El Jaramillo and some friends. In the midst of the immense multitude shouting “long live Independence” in a show of nationalist fervor, Santa suddenly feels alienated and diminished. She then tells Jaramillo, “You told us that for you your homeland was a window with geraniums and carnations, right? . . . So you’re happier than I am, because being in mine, I musn’t even call it mine . . . My homeland is, right now, Elvira’s house. Tomorrow it may be another, who knows? And me, I’ll always be just a . . . And she spelled the horrible word, the stigma, on the carriage’s glass window, facing out, as if she were spitting out something that hurt her” (100). Before the spectacle of El Grito, in which the collective power and transcendence of the nation are reaffirmed, Santa feels like Abraham before God in the Sodom and Gomorrah episode in the book of Genesis mentioned by Otto: “I who am but dust and ashes” (Genesis 18:27). It has been said that Mexico City is one of the many characters that appear in this novel, but it is the contrast between the vast metropolis and the girl from the hamlet of Chimalistac who sinks in it as if in the ocean that produces an effect similar to the negative sublime, filled with vertigo and stupefaction, regarded by Flaubert as the key to the power of the novelistic genre.

FALSE REDEEMERS, TRUE REVELATIONS Twenty-two years after the publication of Santa, another novel written by a prominent author of Latin American naturalism again evokes urban life and makes a no less intense and systematic use of prophetic discourse. It is

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Redentores (Redeemers), published in serial form in the newspaper El Imparcial in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the autumn of 1925 by Manuel Zeno Gandía. This ambitious work portrays through a sequence of interwoven plots the conflicts and confluences between Puerto Ricans and their colonial masters from the United States in the years following the 1898 invasion of the island. Redentores is a remarkable eyewitness testimony of the confusions and tensions caused in Puerto Rican society by the U.S. takeover, as well as an accomplished literary work that inaugurates many of the fundamental themes in twentieth-century Puerto Rican narrative, such as the issue of Puerto Rico’s political status and its national identity; Puerto Rican migration to New York City; and modernization, urban growth, and the role of women in the new industrialized society that would eventually develop. Physician, poet, journalist, playwright, and historian, Zeno Gandía was also the preeminent Puerto Rican novelist of the turn of the twentieth century and is considered a founding figure of modern Puerto Rican literature. Inspired by the works of Zola, Zeno Gandía published four novels under the general title of Chronicles of a Sick World: La charca (1894), Garduña (1896), El negocio (1922), and Redentores. The most celebrated of these and his undisputed masterpiece is La charca, which tells of the miserable lives of the peasants that labored in Puerto Rico’s coffee plantations at the end of the nineteenth century. At first, Redentores would not seem a very promising text to read in terms of its use of religion, precisely because the notion of “redemption” itself is regarded with great skepticism throughout the novel. As Rosa M. Palmer de Dueño points out, by choosing the plural form of the term redentor (redeemer) for his novel’s title, Zeno Gandía diminishes its biblical and Christian overtones and gives it instead an ironic, bitter, and accusatory tone (23). Unlike Gamboa, who became a fervent Catholic shortly after publishing Santa,5 Zeno Gandía, as I pointed out earlier, was a lifelong agnostic. It is also worth remembering that throughout his work, and despite his politically liberal inclinations, Zeno Gandía was always skeptical about plans to carry out social reforms or changes in his country, seeing them at best as long-term prospects. As Doctor Pintado states categorically in La charca, “This generation will not be saved” (252). Faithful to that view, Redentores offers a disbelieving and secularized analysis of the idea of redemption or salvation. However, prophetic discourse has many forms, as Taithe and Thornton remind us, and even as Zeno Gandía rejects the idea of redemption, he

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makes use of two other traits of prophetic discourse: prognostication, or predicting the future, and Judeo-Christian prophecy’s direct portrayal of reality and its denunciation of injustice. Regarding the predictive aspect of this novel, although Redentores is written in a realist style and many of its characters are based on historical personages, and in spite of the fact that the action in the novel seems to take place in early 1920s Puerto Rico, Redentores is not, in fact, a historical novel about the island during the first two decades of U.S. colonial domination. References to dates and events throughout this novel are vague and contradictory: for example, based on allusions to Puerto Rican danzas being played at the piano in soirées at the home of Valeria Ulanga (92), action in the novel seems to take place a bit less than a decade after the U.S. invasion, while a mention of the centennial anniversary of an Episcopal Society founded in 1821 (100) places the action squarely in 1921, around the same time the novel was being written. But the novel deviates even more overtly and dramatically from real Puerto Rican history toward the end, when one of its main characters, the politician Aureo del Sol, is named by the U.S. president as the first Puerto Rican–born governor of the island, an event that would not actually happen until 1946, when Jesús T. Piñero was appointed as governor by President Harry S. Truman. As Zeno Gandía commented in a letter to a friend, “Books edited in Puerto Rico remain unsold in bookstores. Why don’t they have an audience in Puerto Rico? The most insignificant foreign writers arouse more interest here than the native-born authors. It seems that nobody wants to know about their own surroundings. And faced by this illness for which there seems to be no cure, our only option is to write for the future” (Zeno de Matos 64). It is likely that Redentores was one of those books that, according to Zeno Gandía, was written with the future in mind. Although it is unknown if Zeno Gandía knew of or read Santa, Redentores’s main plotline is generally similar to that of Gamboa’s novel. It tells of the seduction and abandonment of the young and naïve Piadosa Artante by the villainous Elkus Engels, the governor’s private secretary. (Zeno Gandía’s characters frequently have symbolic and highly stylized names, and the same happens in Redentores: Piadosa means “pious,” and Elkus seems to be an allusion to the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, a Masonic-style U.S. social organization; however, the Germanic surname Engels does not seem to be a Marxist reference.) Piadosa is from an old and prosperous family that has fallen on hard times. Her mother has died and her father,

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Lucas Artante, is obsessed with reviving a legal case that would return to him lands taken from his family years before. Lucas belatedly discovers his daughter’s seduction by Engels and dies accidentally when trying to save his daughter’s honor. Despite the efforts of her friend, the American teacher Madelon Harriman, to keep her far from Engels’s clutches, Piadosa ends her amorous relationship with Antonio del Sol, son of the politician Aureo del Sol, and travels with Engels to New York. The American abandons her there after taking advantage of her, and Piadosa finds employment as a chorus girl in a cabaret, gradually descending, like Santa, into prostitution. Urged by Madelon and by an upper-class Puerto Rican acquaintance, Valeria Ulanga, Piadosa returns to Puerto Rico, seeking to reform her life. There she is found at last by Antonio del Sol, who had never stopped looking for her. In the only instance of hope and redemption in the novel, Antonio regains Piadosa’s love and, forgiving her scandalous past, marries her. Antonio del Sol’s gesture is certainly reminiscent of that of the prophet Hosea, although Zeno Gandía’s text insists that Antonio is marrying for love and not to make a political point. Redentores’s author, however, may indeed be making a political point; if we read Redentores as a social allegory, it could be argued that Antonio and Piadosa symbolize a new generation with different and perhaps more modern values, a generation willing to break with traditional social and moral codes. Of particular interest is the character of the bishop of San Juan, who is only known as the Monsignor, and who from the solitude of the Bishop’s Palace in San Juan observes and is informed about many of the events in the novel and even tries to intervene directly in some of them, like the classical deities in the Illiad and the Odyssey. This character seems to blend traits from two bishops who occupied the see between 1899 and 1921: Monsignor James Herbert Blenk (bishop of San Juan from 1899 to 1906) and Monsignor William Ambrose Jones (bishop of San Juan from 1907 to 1921). Like these two churchmen, Zeno Gandía’s Monsignor, far from behaving like a colonial agent, defends the Puerto Ricans’ right to free self-government and oversees the moral integrity of his flock in the colony. Bishop Blenk, according to Puerto Rican author and politician José de Diego in his book Nuevas campañas (1916), sent from New Orleans to the Puerto Ricans his “apostolic voice of encouragement and hope in the noble and redemptive goal” of asking for the island’s independence (De Diego, Obras completas II 85). For his part, Bishop Jones, according to the Archdiocese of San

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Juan’s website, was a “great defender of cooperativism in the island” and “a defender of the rights and dignity of workers.”6 Although it is true that the Monsignor appears to represent many of Zeno Gandía’s own political points of view in the novel, it is also true that when this novel was written, the main Catholic prelates in Puerto Rico made expressions favoring liberal causes. As Monsignor explains in his conversation with Father Nicolás in the first chapters of Redentores, his religious mission is also combined with a political one. In the spiritual realm, as Catholic prelate in a Puerto Rico recently occupied by the United States, the Monsignor knows he is in competition with “the Reform” (100), that is, with the various Protestant denominations that dominate U.S. religion and have begun to establish themselves on the island. In the political sphere, the Catholic Church’s relative minority status in the United States and the Monsignor’s responsibility to ensure the well-being of the Catholics that are still a majority in Puerto Rico are factors that lead him to covertly oppose the colonizing projects of his countrymen. With his reflective, intellectual tendencies and his broad historical perspective, the Monsignor plays in this novel a role similar to that of the benevolent landowner Juan del Salto in La charca. Like this character, the Monsignor is capable of lucidly interpreting the social and political reality of the island, but certain circumstances limit his power and his actions: if Juan del Salto feared for the economic prosperity of his farm and the safety of his son studying overseas, the Monsignor’s own ambiguous situation as a U.S. citizen and as a representative of the Vatican, along with the relative weakness of Catholicism in the U.S. context, prevent him from taking stronger actions to favor Puerto Ricans. One could even see the figures of the Monsignor and Juan del Salto as anticipations of the demiurgic characters so important to the totalizing novels of the Latin American Boom, from Morelli to Oppiano Licario. Nevertheless, this Puerto Rican novel still highlights these characters’ limitations in spite of their privileged point of view and their apparent power. It is striking that in contrast with the often thundering prophetic tone of the novel’s narrator, the Monsignor does not use his pulpit to publicly chastise the evils of colonialism but prefers instead to work quietly backstage. A secularized prophecy about Puerto Rico’s near future (from the standpoint of the 1920s), Redentores fully carries out the prophetic task of

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social criticism. It was precisely the frankness with which Zeno Gandía discusses in Redentores the issue of Puerto Rico’s independence from the United States and the vices and defects of the island’s political class that caused this novel to be suppressed for many years after its serialized newspaper publication. As late as 1955, Redentores did not appear in the so-called Obras completas (Complete Works) of Zeno Gandía, published in honor of the centenary of his birth, and it only came out in book form in 1960. In the days when the infamous “Ley de la Mordaza” (Gag Law) was enacted against supporters of Puerto Rican independence, this novel by Zeno Gandía was a forbidden, silenced work.7 Even so, unlike the strict censorship he encountered when writing La charca under the Spanish colonial regime, in 1920s Puerto Rico, Zeno Gandía wrote practically without censorship and was able to be much more open in his political views and his social critique. Zeno Gandía’s narrative voice in Redentores does not hesitate in exposing the defects of Puerto Rican politics after the U.S. invasion, and thus the novel abounds in passages such as the following, which chastises Puerto Rican politicians as well as the American colonial administrators: From his early youth [Aureo del Sol] threw himself into politics: a routine politics learned in the old Spanish colony; a rancorous politics that inflamed enmity and hate among adversaries, who were sometimes brothers. . . . It was said that the political environment was a suffocating one; that the political machines that moved it were harming the people’s wellbeing. The islanders became passionate in their struggles and insulted each other, humiliating themselves before their people, before the foreigners who governed the colony. The latter most often displayed moderation and serenity in the expression of their policy, although it was firmly directed toward a sole purpose, guided by a single formula: help the few in order to destroy the many. (53)

Another intriguing passage with a similar tone is found early in chapter 17, where the narrator uses a mechanistic metaphor evocative of the avantgarde style to represent the noxious effect of U.S. interference in the social and political life of the island. The narrator compares here U.S. colonial dominion (and the partisanship this breeds in the colony) with war machines reminiscent not so much of the tanks and cannons of World War I but of the monstrous mechanisms used by Martians to invade Earth in

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H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (first published, coincidentally, in 1898): “The colony was in chaos. To the powerful political machines riveted onto the republic, whose tremor was felt in the colony, were joined the tremendous machines of the local parties, which grabbed with finger-like claws the social and political body of the island they held hostage. Discord and selfishness oiled the gears of those machines that were moved by the impulse of one fabulous command: Americanism; of one fantastical formula: Annexationism; of one servile cult: that of all-powerful Government” (322). A few lines before, in a patently self-reflexive gesture, the narrator compares the situation of thoughtful Puerto Ricans of the 1920s (“men with open souls,” the narrator calls them) to that of the character of Juan del Salto in La charca, and he cites a passage of this novel in which Juan del Salto reflects uncertainly about what he should do in the face of the injustices he sees every day and finally decides to keep quiet and do nothing. The last lines of the fragment as cited in Redentores read, “Since sacrifice for the sake of others entails one’s own suffering, abandonment in the midst of adversity, hunger for one’s children, forgetting the good things one has done, like a hurricane’s wind that spreads seeds of ingratitude and perfidy; since such a deep perturbation of inner life is a consequence of redemptionism . . . let us then let the severe god of egotism reign, let us keep silent and allow the miasma to work without cease, increasing with venomous sediments the immense cesspool of social corruption” (333). After quoting this passage, the narrator concludes, “And the men with open souls either became expatriates, or succumbed, or were erased by ostracism and silence. And the colony was in chaos” (333). Clearly, Zeno Gandía proposes here a continuity between his two novels—La charca and Redentores—as well as between Puerto Rico’s situation under Spanish colonialism and under the new American colonialism. Although La charca portrays an archaic and rural Puerto Rico while Redentores presents a more urbanized island undergoing modernization, in both texts the island’s sociopolitical situation is seen as a turbulent chaos in which the apparent movement of people and things is just a whirling around that leads nowhere. Redentores has numerous passages like this one, in which the narrator passes judgment on events in his country even as he seeks to clearly delineate Puerto Rico’s unstable political panorama in the first two decades of U.S. domination, a period in which patterns that would long dominate the island’s political life were established.

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Aside from synthetic passages such as the ones cited above, which are the most frequent, Redentores also contains segments of documentary materials that directly cite letters, speeches, and articles by characters involved in politics. This is the case with the articles “Latinos y sajones” (chapter 3), “A todos, menos nosotros” (chapter 3), and “Los derechos de la corona” (chapter 5), written and published by Aureo del Sol in his newspaper La Patria Libre, and with the speech by Pedro Piedra about corruption in the island’s political parties (chapter 5). All of these materials made critic Francisco Manrique Cabrera exclaim that Zeno Gandía’s analyses were “very useful for our political history, but not always for art” (45). It should be remembered, however, that in nineteenth-century realist narrative, there is a long tradition of inserting digressive passages offering sometimes excessive contextual information, as in the “requisite little historical paragraph” that Ricardo Palma used to include in many of his Tradiciones peruanas.8 Moreover, Zeno Gandía writes Redentores in the 1920s, when avant-garde novels frequently incorporated, in a collage style, all sorts of supplementary materials: newspaper clippings, drawings, diagrams, receipts, and so on. This was the case with the high modernist novels prior or contemporary to Zeno Gandía’s, which he, as a curious and cultured reader who was proficient in English, must have known: chief among them, Joyce’s Ulysses and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. The seeming excess of political commentary in Redentores should not come as a surprise: it is, after all, a novel centered mostly on politics. In the original edition of La charca, Zeno Gandía used a phrase from Zola’s novel Le docteur Pascal (1893): “Say all, to know all, to heal all.”9 The overabundance of analysis and the sometimes hectoring tone of Redentores may be seen as expressions of Zeno Gandía’s enthusiasm at being able—at long last—to be able to “say all” without fear of censorship. At the same time, his text also betrays a sense of anxiety about whether, in the midst of the turbulent and noisy island politics, his voice will be heard at all. A further parallel between Redentores and Santa is the fact that Redentores is likewise an urban novel. Although San Juan in the 1920s was much more provincial than it is today, Zeno Gandía potrays it as a burgeoning colonial capital in full development, filled with people moving about in streetcars and automobiles. On the other hand, while Redentores offers a detailed panorama of San Juan’s urban growth, a substantial portion of the action in this novel also takes place in New York City, which is described vividly and with precision. Leaving aside the journalistic chronicles about New York

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in the 1880s written by the Cuban poet and patriot José Martí (who was a personal friend of Zeno Gandía) and some travel accounts by authors such as the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and the Mexican narrator Martín Luis Guzmán,10 Zeno Gandía may well be one of the earliest Latin American authors to use this city as the setting for a novel, and his is of course the forerunner of the abundant Puerto Rican narratives about migration from the island to New York. As in Gamboa’s novel, the urban environment of Redentores contributes to the creation of a “negative sublime” similar to Flaubert’s. The streets of San Juan turn into an expanding labyrinth almost as intricate as the intrigues that take place in the novel, and they are also the stage where political mobs gather to intimidate their adversaries.11 New York, in turn, is seen by Zeno Gandía (who knew it well) as a place of Babylonian opulence that overpowers and bewilders due to its scale and its mix of architectural styles: New York, the titan that builds with one hand and destroys with the other, carried poor Piadosa within its near-cosmic extension. She floated like a phosphene over that ocean whose contemplation sometimes soothes like a caress and sometimes frightens like an awful and slow-falling landslide. A profusion of buildings lines streets, avenues and squares, but without any particular style, without harmony, without links with tradition, dissonant amid the silence. These are not the Roman, nor the Flemish, nor the Indian, nor the Gothic houses transformed over the centuries. They are a bit of all that; the outcome of a mixture, something rare, at times extravagant, at times beautiful. The merry colors of Spanish and French cities are fused there with the dark color of Gaelic origin; such a marriage ends in grey, the dominant, profuse and extended grey that is almost the national color, in harmony with the sullen climate, gloomy through much of the year. There are colors that though pleasing in their warmth, sometimes cause disgust when they turn into the sharp color of red mud or of unpolished granite, giving houses the appearance of monasteries. The sun reaches out to them, but a wintry cloudiness stops its rays so that in times of gloom their golden splendor does not shine. As go the colors, so go the lines. Everything is spread around in an overabundance in which nothing stands out. The column that starts as Gothic ends up being Corinthian. The cornice that rises curving, elegant, serene,

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ends in a sharp, arid, and grotesque angle, like the beak of a woodcock. One finds every sort of style here; an English style from the days of Queen Elizabeth, the overly decorated Spanish style of Churriguera, Chinese convexities, Gothic sobriety, Egyptian mannerism, Corinthian flutings. In his books of art Ruskin said that irregularity is poetic to a high degree. That is how New York is poetic: a beautifully ugly city. (294–95)

Just as Gamboa’s Santa feels overwhelmed by the urban environment that surrounds her, all of the characters in Redentores, in the island as well as in New York, seem to be trapped in a vast and confusing vortex of political and cultural forces over which they have no control. Appropriately, Zeno Gandía’s novel ends with a quasi-romantic description of the stormy waves that batter against the emblematic fortress of El Morro at the mouth of the bay of San Juan, offering a vision of the frightening abyss into which Puerto Rico itself has been flung: “It was El Morro, the tremor of El Morro, repulsing clashes of currents, bouncing waves, cones of foam. It was the ocean, the fearsome ocean, turning in rage as if boiling in centuries-long hatreds; subjected to the rising of waters and the fall of rip tides, obedient to impetuous currents, succumbing in convulsive waves to the horrible winds from the North. It was the ocean, El Morro, cracking whiplashes of chained fury, howling funereal chants, furiously shaking the bedrock of the colony, as if to awaken it from its deep slumber of servitude” (363–64). Written by old hands at naturalist fiction, both Santa and Redentores display a strategic incorporation of religious elements into the fundamentally secular discourse of the novel during the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. In this period, the claims of transcendence made by literature and the arts were strongly questioned not just by science but also by commerce, which tended to reduce works of art to the level of merchandise. The novel was not immune to such questioning and, as we will see in the next chapters, one of its strategies to survive the insistent talk about the decline or death of the novel—as in Ortega y Gasset’s Ideas sobre la novela—was that of “re-enchanting” itself by assuming many of the attributes and functions of sacred texts. Prophetic discourse was merely one of the various strategies through which the novel became a vehicle of reflections and revelations not about the afterlife but about this life, a spiritual survival guide to the crises of modernity.

Two

T H E O T H E R T H EO LO G I A N Jorge Luis Borges and “the Death of the Novel”

Just the other day, Chesterton wrote: “The novel may well die with us.” Flaubert instinctively foresaw that death, which is already taking place—Isn’t Ulysses, with its plans, timetables, and details, the splendid agony of a genre?. . . . BORGES, “ VINDICACIÓN DE BOUVARD ET PÉCUCHET,” DISCUSIÓN, OBRAS COMPLETAS I (262)

What are the wonders of Wells or of Edgar Allan Poe—a flower from the future, a dead man submitted to hypnosis—faced with the invention of God, with the laborious theory of a being that is somehow three beings and that only exists outside of time? What is the bezoar stone before Preestablished Harmony, who is the unicorn before the Trinity, who is Lucius Apuleius before the multipliers of Buddhas of the Great Vehicle, what are all the nights of Sheherezade next to one of Berkeley’s reasonings? . . . I don’t know what the reader may think of such semi-theosophical musings. Catholics (that is to say, Argentine Catholics) believe in a world beyond ours, but I have noticed that they are not interested in it. With me, the opposite happens; I am interested and I don’t believe. BORGES, “LESLIE D. WEATHERHEAD” (281)

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I

n the latter half of the nineteenth century, Flaubert carried out an appropriation of the vocabulary and symbols of religion similar to that of the symbolists in order to promote a novelistic writing that questions the referentiality of language and seeks to turn the novel into an object of contemplation rather than a means of conveying knowledge. In a letter to his friend Louise Colet, Flaubert made one of his best-known assertions in this regard: “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere” (Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857 173). It is worth remembering that the context of that sentence is Flaubert’s irritation with the constant sermonizing about slavery in Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which he had just finished reading. “Does one have to make observations about slavery?,” asks Flaubert. “Depict it: that’s enough” (173). Partly motivated by that celebrated novel, whose antislavery sentiments were imbued with a fervor and a rhetoric that had deeply religious origins—the rhetoric of the “American Jeremiad,” as Jane Tompkins calls it—Flaubert began to expound not only a poetics of impersonality but also what could be called his “narrative theology,” a body of ideas that would profoundly influence novelistic writing in his own century and in the twentieth century as well.1 The theological aspects of Flaubert’s thesis about the value of literary impersonality are easier to appreciate if one reads the rest of the passage that follows his famous quote: An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. Art being a second Nature, the creator of that Nature must behave similarly. In all its atoms, in all its aspects, let there be sensed a hidden, infinite impassivity. The effect for the spectator must be a kind of amazement. “How is all that done?” one must ask; and one must feel overwhelmed without knowing why. Greek art followed that principle, and to achieve its effects more quickly it chose characters in exceptional social conditions—kings, gods, demigods. You were not encouraged to identify with the dramatis personae. The divine was the dramatist’s goal. (173–74)

Flaubert’s words suggest that the adoption of religious elements in the novel does not have as its purpose to promote religion but to strengthen the genre of the novel by making the reader feel amazed and overwhelmed “without knowing why.” This feeling of astonishment and humiliation is parallel to Baudelaire’s notion of the “abyss” and works in a similar fashion

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by forcing readers to examine the text, whose origins and meaning escape them even though at first they seem accessible through a writing that seems referential and “realistic.” Jonathan Culler was among the first to observe this technique; as he points out, for Flaubert the realist novel can be a vehicle for understanding the world because it displays the modes of understanding and invites us, if we would enrich our perception, to read our own lives as novels. To make one’s own life a novel is to name its elements in the terms those models provide and compose them into a legible text. . . . What if, when readers had composed their lives as novels, they found them unintelligible? What if, instead of learning how to unify their dispersed selves into a personality and the disparate events of their lives into a meaningful destiny, they found that when put together according to novelistic models things still did not fit together? (85)

The image of the author proposed by Flaubert in the letter I have just cited is that of a God paradoxically hidden by the creation that supposedly reveals him. This image may be seen as a negative or inverted version of the romantic theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, for whom God is made manifest through nature and is perceived through the sense of cosmic unity produced by the contemplation of the natural world (Thrower 49–55). It also evokes a frustrated version of Hegel’s philosophy in Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), in which the history of the universe is conceived as a process of gradual self-knowledge (and therefore a progressive revelation) of the Spirit (Geist). Nevertheless, Flaubert’s ideas may also be interpreted as a negative version of the sublime, which—we should recall—is linked by Otto to the experience of the sacred. Anticipating Otto, Flaubert’s idea of the sublime is closer to Burke’s than to Longinus’s. For Burke, horror and stupefaction are symptoms of the sublime; for Flaubert, they are also the inevitable effect of a masterpiece: “Masterpieces are stupid; they present a tranquil face, like the very productions of nature, like large animals or mountains” (Correspondance II, 451). The stupidity displayed and induced by masterpieces, according to Flaubert, leads in turn to reverie and to a sort of unending fascination: What seems to me the highest thing in art (and the most difficult), is not to evoke laughter, or tears, or lust, or anger, but to work as Nature does:

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that is to say, to induce reverie. And the most beautiful works have in fact this quality. They are of serene aspect and incomprehensible. As for their technique, they are immobile like cliffs, stormy like the ocean, full of foliage, greenery, and murmurs like woods, sad like the desert, blue like the sky. Homer, Rabelais, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe seem to be inexorable. Such works are unfathomable, infinite, multifarious. Through little gaps one glimpses precipices; there is darkness below, dizziness. (Correspondance III, 322–23)

The fascination and dizziness, the astonishment and humiliation produced by masterpieces, are for Flaubert the closest approximation of the sublime in the novel. Nevertheless, in Flaubert all this is presented in terms of the “negative romanticism” described by Bénichou: the Flaubertian sublime arises from the contemplation of the abyss, of emptiness, instead of plenitude. His project to write un livre sur rien (a book about nothing), of which his novel Bouvard and Pécuchet (1880) was perhaps a first draft, suggests that Flaubert’s “narrative theology” was also a “negative theology” born out of Flaubert’s “epistemological nihilism” (Donato 231). Positive or negative, whatever its sign, the result of Flaubert’s project was to incorporate religious discourse into the novel in order to strengthen the novel. In his letters, from which I have cited above, as well as in his novels freed from the straitjacket of realism—Salammbô (1862), The Temptation of St. Anthony (1874), and Bouvard and Pécuchet—Flaubert sketched out the first outlines of the avant-garde novels that would flourish in the early twentieth century in works by James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Italo Svevo, Hermann Broch, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Those outlines prefigured not only the complex and enigmatic verbal constructs of the high modernists but also their aim to produce literary works in which the sublime and the holy would be one and the same. No wonder Borges remarked in “Flaubert y su destino ejemplar” (1932) that Flaubert “was the first Adam of a new species: that of the man of letters as a priest, an ascetic, and almost as a martyr” (263). While in Flaubert’s narratives themselves the sacred is usually presented ironically—although beautiful, Salammbô’s zaimph is still just a piece of cloth and Saint Anthony’s visions, like the writings of Bouvard and Pécuchet, are a parody of Flaubert’s own encyclopedic erudition—it is his devotion to writing expressed throughout his Correspondance that makes him, according to Borges, “exemplary” for later writers.

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Just as Flaubert formulated a “literary theology” that served as the basis for incorporating religious elements in the early twentieth-century European novel, Jorge Luis Borges developed broadly influential models for the artistic appropriation of religious discourse in contemporary Latin American narrative.2 Both authors followed analogous procedures despite starting out from different literary modes: realism in Flaubert, the avant-garde in Borges. As I have just discussed, Flaubert undermined the principles of nineteenth-century realism from within, and in parallel with Baudelaire’s idea of the “abyss,” proposed an idea of the novel based on negation in which the author is a hidden deity whose texts, rather than offering access to meaning, lead instead to an absence of meaning (Culler 85). Instead of the classic mimetic idea of the novel proposed by Stendhal (“a mirror going along a main road,” 371), for Flaubert the novel is a mirage that ultimately leads to contemplation of the abyss—the lack of meaning—that underlies referential reality, thus producing in readers a mixture of fascination and vertigo similar to the experience of the sublime and the holy. Nevertheless, even if this concept of the novel encouraged the critique of realism and the formal experiments of the high modernist novels, it was also fundamentally nihilistic and tended toward quietism: What else could be done after contemplating emptiness? The way opened by Flaubert’s novels seemed to lead not only to works that were profoundly disillusioned with the society and customs of his age but even to disillusionment with the novel itself. It is not surprising, then, that at the height of the avantgarde period in the 1920s, when Joyce, Woolf, Proust, and Kafka, among others, were writing labyrinthine and rather pessimistic novels about “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (Woolf 106), a perceptive observer of vanguardism such as Ortega y Gasset would bring up the issue of the “current decadence” of the novel: “In sum, I believe the novel genre, if it is not hopelessly exhausted, surely finds itself on its last legs . . .” (155). Unlike Flaubert, Borges writes in the aftermath of the avant-gardes, of whom, with ultraismo, he was a promoter during his youth. Borges would later distance himself from what he called “the sect . . . the ultraísta mistake” (“Macedonio Fernández, 1874–1952” 146 ), but this break did not in any way imply an acritical return to prior concepts of literature. To the contrary, Borges carries out a critique of the avant-garde that seeks to build on what he considers to be its contributions: its experimental tendency and its openness to new arts such as cinema, and to genres regarded as subliterary or minor, such as crime fiction and science fiction. Simultaneously, he

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refutes and rejects those aspects of the avant-garde he deems harmful: its playful and inconsequential attitude, irrationalist tendencies, intellectual poverty, and preference for fragmentary forms.3 In “Del culto de los libros,” one of his essays in Otras inquisiones (1952), Borges reflects skeptically about the historical privileging of writing over the spoken word. He begins by observing that today, “A book, any book, is for us a sacred object” (“Del culto de los libros” 91), and reviewing the process that led from Pythagoras (“who did not write,” 91) and the denigration of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus to St. Augustine’s account in Confessions of the first time he saw St. Ambrose reading in silence. He points out, That man went directly from the written sign to intuition, omitting the spoken sign. The strange art he initiated, the art of reading silently, would lead to wonderful consequences. It would lead, after many years, to the concept of the book as an end in itself, not as a means to an end. (This mystical concept, transported to profane literature, would give rise to the singular fates of Flaubert and Mallarmé, of Henry James and James Joyce.) To the idea of a God that speaks to men to command or forbid something, was superimposed that of the Absolute Book, of a Sacred Writing. (92)

Although he disbelieves the sacred in all its forms—including “sacred texts”—Borges recognizes the need to understand the origins and workings of the techniques that allow literature to appropriate the qualities of the holy and to produce in readers that “poetic faith” of which Coleridge spoke in his Biographia Literaria (1817). In another essay in this same volume, borrowing from Benedetto Croce the term “aesthetic fact” to refer to the work of art, Borges argues that literature’s power to persuade as an “aesthetic fact” resides in its capacity to produce in readers the sensation of “the imminence of a revelation that is not produced” (“La muralla y los libros” 13). This canny definition of the literary art, which seems to combine the Kantian notion of art as “purposiveness without purpose” (in Critique of Judgment, 1790) with the Pauline notion of faith as “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1), captures what for Borges’s “literary theology” must be an indispensable element in every artistic fiction: a feeling of transcendence, in the common as well as in the philosophical senses of the term, which refer to the quality of going beyond established limits. Borges’s critique of the vanguardists’ lack of transcendence is particu-

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larly severe, as well as fruitful, in regard to the novel. Although he refused to write novels himself (not counting the parodic detective novel written in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Un modelo para la muerte, 1946), Borges theorizes broadly about the genre and proposes in several of his stories models and plots for possible novels.4 As will be seen in the course of this chapter, Borges contradicts those such as Ortega y Gasset who proclaimed the death of the novel and offers instead ideas about how to restore the genre’s vigor and importance. Many of these ideas are deeply inspired by the close interaction of religious discourse and literary language over the millennia.

BORGES AND “THE DEATH OF THE NOVEL” Prior to examining the ideas that constitute Borges’s new “literary theology,” we should review his critiques of some of the major narrative works of high modernism as well as his interventions in the debate about the decline or death of the novelistic genre. Writing about Henry James, a precursor of high modernism in the novel, Borges raises objections similar to those he will later voice with regard to Joyce, Woolf, Proust, and Kafka. “The sad and labyrinthine Henry James,” Borges calls him in his 1951 essay “La flor de Coleridge” (18). The epithet “labyrinthine” here, as is the case in most of Borges’s work, is clearly not a compliment. Borges’s reading of James in his 1945 prologue to a Spanish translation of “The Abasement of the Northmores” (1900) contrasts the “almost professionally unrealistic” universe of Kafka, Herman Melville, and Leon Bloy with the apparently pedestrian realism of James’s narrative: “James, before revealing what he really is, a rather resigned and ironic inhabitant of Hell, runs the risk of appearing like a merely mundane novelist, one less colorful than others” (95). James’s ordinariness is only redeemed for Borges by the discovery that in his work there are some “deliberate acts of negligence” that “enrich his book” and should not be confused with “the pure vagueness of the symbolists whose imprecisions, by dint of eluding meaning, can mean anything” (95). The “acts of negligence” to which Borges refers correspond to James’s famous ”ambiguity,” celebrated by U.S. critics since the publication of Edmund Wilson’s essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James” (1946).5 Borges’s procedure in this prologue is repeated in his readings of other high modernist novelists: he criticizes the relative simplicity of their sub-

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ject matter and their often anodyne or depressing tone, objecting to their use of language or to their “labyrinthine” or excessively baroque narrative, but ends up recognizing some positive or salvageable aspect of their work. (One exception, as will be seen later, is Proust, with whom Borges is consistently severe in his critiques.) This tug-of-war between attraction and repulsion occurs most dramatically with Joyce’s work, for which the young ultraísta Borges felt an enthusiasm so great that it led him to translate into Spanish and publish the last pages of Ulysses along with a laudatory review in the journal Proa in 1925: “I am the first Hispanic adventurer who has reached Joyce’s book: a tangled and savage country. . . . I will speak of it with the license my admiration gives me and with the vague intensity ancient travelers showed when describing the new lands that appeared before their errant astonishment” (Borges, Inquisiciones 20). Nevertheless, two years after publishing his review of Ulysses, in the midst of the commemoration of the tricentennial of baroque Spanish poet Luis de Góngora’s death by the poets of the generation of 1927 in Spain, Borges expresses in his book El idioma de los argentinos his disgust for such a commemoration: “Góngora is the symbol of elaborate technicality, of the simulation of mystery, of the mere adventures of syntax . . . that is, of all that melodious and perfect non-literature I have always rejected” (123). Borges’s valorization of Joyce will be affected by this new attitude, as César Salgado has observed in his account of Borges’s relation with Joyce’s works: “Given that ultraísta poetic manifestos promoted the cultivation of striking, expressionistic metaphors not unlike Góngora’s, Borges’s attack on the ‘new Gongorism’ can be regarded as a climactic moment in his notorious abjuration of the avant-garde aesthetic ideology of his younger days. Joyce can be included among the writers on Borges’s new index, since, from very early in his literary criticism, Borges had postulated a connection between Góngora’s specious language and Joycean novelistic discourse” (37). Twelve years later, in a note about the publication of Finnegans Wake, Borges comments on the techniques used in Ulysses and the neologisms, puns, and portmanteau words that abound in Joyce’s second novel: “There is no question that Joyce is one of the first writers of our time. Verbally, he is perhaps the first. In Ulysses there are sentences and paragraphs that are not inferior to the most illustrious passages of Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Browne. . . . In this ample volume, however, efficacy is an exception. Fin-

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negans Wake is a concatenation of puns committed in an oneiric English that it is hard not to judge as failed and incompetent . . . Jules Laforgue and Lewis Carroll have played at that game with better results” (436). Salgado notes rightly that “From here on Borges will insist . . . that Joyce’s literary achievement is a form of ‘verbal music’—ergo, poetic, not novelistic—and that it occurs only in isolated moments of his texts. Rather than celebrate T. S. Eliot’s ‘order of myth’ in Joyce’s novels, Borges believes that Joyce’s linguistic and symbolic experiments leave the genre in shambles” (39). Borges is more generous—perhaps more chivalrous—with Virginia Woolf in the biographical sketch about her published in the journal El Hogar in 1936, where he describes her as “one of the most delicate intelligences and imaginations that are now carrying out successful experiments with the English novel” (“Virginia Woolf” 215). Referring to Orlando (1928), he states that it is a “highly original novel . . . Magic, bitterness, and happiness all collaborate in this book” (216). Nevertheless, it is in the Spanish translations Borges made of Orlando and A Room of One’s Own (1930) at the request of Victoria Ocampo where Borges’s reservations about Woolf’s novels may be seen more clearly, particularly the disdain for the “psychological novel” that Borges would again show in greater detail in the prologue to Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel (1940). Leah Leone underscores that the changes Borges made in his translation to the stream of consciousness technique of Orlando were meant precisely to mitigate the “psychological” elements of Woolf’s style: “By breaking up run-on sentences, adding paragraph breaks and inserting colons, dashes and parentheses, Borges’s translation of Orlando clearly marks the distinction between the narrator and the narrated action—covertly moving Woolf’s narrative style from intradiegetic in English to extradiegetic in Spanish. . . . Transforming Woolf’s ‘psychological’ writing into a style of writing he found more artistically acceptable is a hallmark of Borges’s translation aesthetic” (51). About Kafka, from whose work Borges translated some stories and brief prose texts (although not Metamorphosis, as Borges himself clarified in a 1974 interview),6 Borges stated categorically that “development in Kafka is less admirable than his invention. . . . The plot and the setting are what is essential; not the evolutions of the story nor its psychological insight. Thus the primacy of his short stories over his novels” (“Franz Kafka: La metamorfosis” 99). If Joyce is primarily a verbal inventor and Woolf a portraitist of mental states, Kafka is for Borges a good writer of plots, but the nature

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of these plots is nevertheless inconsistent with novelistic practice, since they are dominated by “the motif of infinite delay” (98). Commenting on the “unfinished” aspect of Kafka’s novels, Borges argues that “Kafka did not finish them because they were primarily meant to be endless” (98). Betraying his intention of distancing himself from Kafka, Borges alludes mischievously in his story “La lotería en Babilonia” in Ficciones (1944) to “a sacred latrine named Qaphqa” (458). Other significant previews of Borges’s ideas about the novel are found in several of the essays in his book Discusión (1932): “Una vindicación de la cábala,” “Vindicación del falso Basílides,” “La postulación de la realidad,” and “El arte narrativo y la magia.” The first two, about Kabbalah and Gnosticism, appear one after the other in Discusión and both converge on the theme of language and creation (in the artistic as well as cosmogonic sense). In “Una vindicación de la cábala,” Borges briefly reviews the question of the divine inspiration of the Bible and the Qur’an and the concept of the Holy Spirit, and discusses in detail the notion of the Trinity, which he sees as a monstrous artifice: “The three inextricable Persons communicate an intellectual horror, a suffocating, specious infinity, like that of mirrors facing each other” (210). He then focuses on the book of Genesis—“subject matter of the Kabbalah” (211)—and proceeds to discuss the role of language in the creation of a sacred text. To explain the degree of divine perfection and rigorousness the Kabbalah presupposes in the scriptures, Borges contrasts journalistic writing with that of poetry: press reports, which deal with irregular events, “are necessarily fortuitous,” while poetry is subject to “euphonic necessities (or superstitions)” (211). Even so, if form in poetry is not fortuitous, its meaning is, since not a few poets are “dedicated only to the expression of generalized states by means of the rich adventures of their prosody” (211). Instead, Borges posits that it is the “intellectual” writer who most resembles the God-as-author of the Kabbalists: “This writer, be it in prose (Valéry, De Quincey), or in verse, has certainly not eliminated chance, but has rejected as much as possible, and has restricted, its incalculable effects. He remotely approximates the Lord, for Whom the vague concept of chance has no meaning” (211). Fundamentally, in this essay Borges is interested in the question of the role of the author in literary creation and the degree of control authors have over their texts. For the Kabbalists and other believers in direct inspiration by

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God, the Bible, as the product of an infinite intelligence, is the paradigmatically perfect text, in which every element has meaning. Borges’s preference is clear: the most admirable form of literary creation is that which arises from a rational order that stimulates and seduces the intellect. If for Borges the Kabbalists are prototypes of the intellectual reader, the reader who demands and seeks out rationality and transcendence in texts, the Gnostics are prototypes of the intellectual writers, such as Flaubert, Valéry, or De Quincey, who seek to mimic God’s creation by building their own version of Genesis, a version moved by a desire to understand rationally the origin of the cosmos. Rejected as heretics by Christianity, the Gnostics generated highly complex alternative cosmogonies that, according to Borges, have a double purpose: the first is “to quietly solve the problem of evil by means of the hypothetical insertion of a gradual series of deities between the no less hypothetical God and reality” (“Vindicación del falso Basílides” 214–15). In the Gnostic cosmogonies, the author of our fallible cosmos is the last and the least of a long chain of subaltern deities: “The lord of the heavens at the bottom is that of Scripture, and his fraction of divinity tends toward zero” (213–14). The second purpose is the diminution of this world. It is not our evil, but our basic insignificance what this faith preaches. As in the abundant sunsets of the plains, the heavens are passionate and monumental and the earth is poor. That is the intention that justifies Valentinus’s melodramatic cosmogony, which unspools an endless story about two supernatural brothers who recognize each other, a fallen woman, a frustrated intrigue by evil angels, and a final marriage. In this melodrama or serial, the creation of this world is a mere aside. Admirable idea: the world imagined as an essentially futile process, as a lateral and lost reflection of old celestial episodes. Creation as a casual event. (215)

Paradoxically, the Gnostic cosmogonies, which arise from the attempt to reason about creation and its meaning, produce passionate texts that, like serial novels, appeal more to the emotions than to reason and undermine the apparent solidity of the material world. Borges’s allusions toward the end of this essay to Novalis (“Life is an illness of the spirit,” Borges 216) and to Rimbaud (“True life is absent; we are not in the world,” Borges 216) suggest that Borges sees the Gnostics and their diminishment of reality as precursors to the “negative theology” that Flaubert and the

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symbolists turned into their “literary theology.” It is not by chance that Borges includes toward the end of Discusión two essays devoted to Flaubert: “Vindicación de Bouvard et Pécuchet” and “Flaubert y su destino ejemplar,” in which he exalts Flaubert’s ultimate dismantling of novelistic realism after contributing to its creation and regards him as a prototype of the figure “of the man of letters as a priest, as an ascetic, and almost as a martyr” (262). Borges also views Flaubert as the “example” followed by Mallarmé, James, and Joyce—and we have seen his reservations about these authors. However, Borges finds “admirable” and “heroic” (215) not only the Gnostics’ “negative theology” but also the kind of literature that their cosmogonies resemble: a popular literature, like the serialized novels of a later age,7 whose plots narrating the human soul’s intrepid quest for God mix theology with adventure and prefigure the later Byzantine and chivalric romances. An additional merit of the Gnostic narratives is that their quest depends less on physical prowess than on intellectual traits such as sagacity, knowledge, and memory. This is suggested in Borges’s liberal paraphrase of Saint Iraneaus’s summary of Basilides’s heresy in chapter 3 of Against Heresies (AD 180): And those who know the truth of this story, concludes the profession of faith translated by Irenaeus, will find themselves free from the power of the principalities that have built this world. Each heaven has its own name and the same for each angel and lord and each power of that heaven. The one who knows their incomparable names will cross through their realm invisible and in safety, just like the Redeemer. And just as the Son was not recognized by anyone, neither will the Gnostic be. And these mysteries should never be spoken about, but kept in silence. Know all, let no one know you. (“Vindicación del falso Basílides” 214; italics in the original)8

Kabbalistic readers who seek God by deciphering the slightest details of the sacred text, and Gnostic writers who tell of the attempt to reach God through strategies of knowledge and memory: these two forms of interaction between religion and writing symbolize for Borges the central importance of intellectual work in the writing of novels. Another pair of key essays in Discusión are “La postulación de la realidad” and “El arte narrativo y la magia.” The first underlines again Borges’s preference for fictions of ideas. Against Benedetto Croce’s expressive theory of art, which appears to confuse sentimentalism and realism,9 Borges exalts “the classic postulation of reality,” which is generally characterized by the

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fact that it “does not inscribe the first contacts with reality but their final elaboration into concepts” (218). The second essay has become one of Borges’s most commented-upon works (and sometimes misunderstood). It is important to point out that in “El arte narrativo y la magia,” unlike the previous essays I have examined, Borges explicitly focuses on the “analysis of the procedures of the novel” (226). To start off his essay, Borges deliberately uses as examples two nonrealist novels in English that are totally marginal to the mostly realist canon of nineteenth-century narrative: an almost forgotten novel in verse by William Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1864), and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), the only novel written by Edgar Allan Poe.10 Morris’s novel is an aestheticist retelling of the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts; Poe’s is the parodic tale of a presumed expedition to the then-unexplored North Pole. Both are tales of fantasy and adventure, evidently artificial in their makeup, but which nevertheless manage to produce an impression of verisimilitude that Borges identifies with Coleridge’s idea of the “suspension of disbelief.”11 Speaking of Morris’s novel, Borges states, “It needed above all a strong appearance of veracity, which, if not absolute, would at least be capable of producing that spontaneous suspension of doubt that constitutes Coleridge’s poetic faith. Morris manages to arouse such faith; I want to find out how” (226). Indeed, the first half of Borges’s essay, with its commentary of Morris’s and Poe’s novels, contains an implicit reflection on the role of faith in literary creation, although it centers less on what produces such faith than on the techniques used by authors to arouse it in readers. Borges notes that by means of such artifices, the two fantasy novels he studies manage to enclose their readers in a world that, despite its unreality, is consistent and orderly. After discussing several rhetorical effects used by Morris and Poe to give coherence to their narratives, Borges proposes the existence of one fundamental artifice that contains all of these effects: magical causality. Critics have long ago clarified that the anthropological sense in which Borges uses the term magia in “El arte narrativo y la magia” is different from the term’s sense in so-called “magical realism.” Unlike magical realism, which tends to exalt artistic “primitivism” and seeks to mimic in sophisticated narrative fiction supposedly archaic and premodern styles of narrating and representing experience,12 Borges bases his arguments on the idea of magic proposed by Sir James George Frazer in his classic multivolume work The Golden Bough (1890–1915). Frazer made a strict

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distinction between magic and religion: instead of seeing religion as an attempt to communicate with spiritual beings, he viewed it as an attempt to rigorously manipulate the hidden and impersonal forces of nature by means of a system of rules analogous to the natural “laws” discovered by science (Thrower 102–3). Similarly, for Borges, magic is a sort of primitive rationalism that attempts to decipher the rules of causality: “Magic is the culmination or nightmare of causality, not its contradiction. . . . To the superstitious individual, there is a necessary connection not only between a gunshot and a dead man, but between a dead man and a battered wax figurine, or the prophetic breaking of a mirror, or spilled salt, or thirteen terrible guests at a dinner” (“El arte narrativo y la magia” 230–31). It should be pointed out immediately that Borges moves constantly in this essay between analytical and prescriptive perspectives: he not only analyzes how certain novels work but he is also proposing his vision of how novels should be written in his time. Following on the heels of the passage I have just cited, Borges states, “That dangerous harmony, that frantic and precise causality, governs the novel as well” (231), and shortly afterward he observes, “The precaution that a dreadful event may be brought about by being mentioned is irrelevant or useless in the disorder that reigns in the real world, but not in a novel, which should be a precise game of watchfulness, echoes, and affinities. All episodes in a carefully-told tale have an ulterior purpose” (231). By the end of his essay Borges has made clear that not all novels make use of magical causality, and that even those that try to do so are not always the most satisfactory ones. Borges alludes with irony to Ulysses, stating that “the most complete example of an autonomous orb of confirmations, omens, and monuments is Joyce’s predestined Ulysses. It is enough to read Gilbert’s expository book or, lacking it, the vertiginous novel itself” (232). Concluding, he adds, “I will attempt to summarize what I’ve said so far. I have identified two causal processes: the natural one, which is the result of uncontrollable and infinite operations; the magical one, lucid and limited, where details foretell what is to happen. In the novel, I believe that the only honest approach possible is the second. Let us leave the other one for psychological simulations” (232). The derogatory mention of “psychological simulations” anticipates Borges’s later reservations about realist narrative in his prologue to La invención de Morel. It further suggests that although Joyce turns Ulysses into an

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“autonomous orb” by means of magical causality, this is not enough to save that novel from incurring the sort of tedious “psychological simulation” Borges associates with narrative realism. It is precisely in the prologue to La invención de Morel where Borges’s most extensive formulation of his aesthetics of the novel may be found, in a direct challenge to the expressions of Ortega y Gasset in Ideas sobre la novela. Let us recall that, after defining the novel as a “morose genre” (160) and after discounting the importance of plot, Ortega posits that the only way out from its exhaustion left to “the modern novel” does not lie “in the invention of ‘actions’ but in the invention of interesting souls” (Ortega y Gasset 201–2). Borges alludes to those statements and differs with energy from them, arguing that novels of adventure (de peripecias, in his terms) demand greater intellectual rigor in their writing than the “psychological” novels, which tend to be careless in their form. He obliquely alludes in his examples to “the Russians and their disciples” (referring to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky), but his most damning condemnation is reserved for Proust: “For its part, the ‘psychological’ novel also wants to be a ‘realist’ novel: it prefers that we forget its nature as a verbal artifice and turns every vain precision (or languid vagueness) into another verisimilar trait. There are pages, there are chapters of Marcel Proust that are unacceptable as inventions; to which, unknowingly, we resign ourselves as to the insipid and pointless details of everyday life. The adventure novel, instead, does not present itself as a transcription of reality: it is an artificial object that does not tolerate any unwarranted part” (“Adolfo Bioy Casares: La invención de Morel” 25). Borges crowns his argument by inverting Ortega y Gasset’s hypothesis and positing that in the twentieth century, the opposite of what the Spanish philosopher affirms happens. “If this century has any primacy over earlier ones,” declares Borges, “it is the primacy of its plots” (26). Contrasting Stevenson’s “inferior” plots to those of Chesterton and De Quincey’s to those of Kafka, Borges concludes, rather hyperbolically, that “no age possesses novels with such admirable storylines as The Turn of the Screw, as Der Prozess, as Le Voyageur sur la terre, as this one that has been achieved, in Buenos Aires, by Adolfo Bioy Casares” (26). The four novels to which Borges refers, by James, Kafka, Julien Green, and Bioy Casares, display aspects relevant to our study of Borges’s ideas about the novel, particularly because the first three, like other high modernist novels, are concerned with a world that seemingly has no place for

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the sacred, or in which the sacred is mixed with and hidden by the everyday, the secular, while Bioy’s uses speculatively elements of theological discourse in a manner congruent with the poetics of the novel suggested by Borges. The Turn of the Screw (1898), as is known, is a short novel with a seemingly supernatural theme that narrates the intricate and ambivalent search for the nature of evil by a young governess charged with caring for two children in a solitary English country house. Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925) tells the story of what happens to bank employee Joseph K. after he is arrested for an unspecified crime. In the next-to-last episode of the novel, Joseph visits an almost-empty church whose priest (who also works for the mysterious tribunal that judges K.) tells him an oppressive parable (published separately later as a short story with the title “Before the Law”) that acts as a sort of degraded metaphysical revelation that shows K. the inevitability of his fate (Kafka 282–84; see the comments by Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel 14–15). Le Voyageur sur la terre (1927) is, like James’s, a short novel, and of the three high modernist texts to which Borges alludes, it is the one that most openly displays the religious concerns of its author (a convert to Catholicism, Green was born in France to Americans of Protestant faith; see Semolué): the protagonist Daniel O’Donovan, a fervent Catholic, bemoans the fact that the Bible has been submerged under an accumulation of mundane interpretations and sets out to reconnect with God, as Robert Ziegler observes, through “a process of verbal ascesis, the destruction of documents that overlay the word of God, and an acquiescence to the silence that will enable him to hear the speech that he can understand and that will finally set him free. Indeed the value of the record of Daniel’s spiritual itinerary, like the purpose of Green’s writing, is to affirm and testify to the supersession of their own texts by another which transcends them” (819). This tale of a writer who searches for himself and for God through writing could not but intrigue Borges, and echoes of this novel may be found in many of his works, such as “La biblioteca de Babel,”“El milagro secreto,” “La escritura del dios,” and “Borges y yo.” La invención de Morel narrates the perplexity of an unnamed Venezuelan fugitive who is marooned on a deserted island while trying to escape from the authorities. One day he finds that the buildings he believed to be abandoned begin to be repopulated by a group of wealthy people who seem to be vacationing on the island. Gradually, the fugitive discovers the island’s secret: the visitors are projections of a machine invented by one of them,

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Morel, which has the power not only to record actions but even the souls of its subjects. The projections are activated by the rhythm of the tides, from which the machine gets its power, and thus periodically the people recorded in them repeat the same actions, emotions, and words. It is in fact an attempt to achieve a sort of eternal life or paradise through the technological capture and reproduction of human sensations, although the process of capture itself implies the death of the subjects recorded by the machine. Narrated as a diary in which the fugitive sets down his discoveries, La invención de Morel unfolds as a process of rational investigation by the fugitive, who proudly regards himself as a methodical and rigorous intellectual. The novel also clearly displays the adaptation of some of the religious themes Borges explores in his essays on the Kabbalists and the Gnostics into the framework of a science-fiction adventure story: the quest for eternal life, or life after death, through a rational and orderly process, and the presupposition of the illusory nature of the world and reality. The model of the novel that Borges prefigures or proposes in the prologue to La invención de Morel distances itself equally from Woolf’s idea of “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day,” Ortega y Gasset’s notion of the “morose genre,” and the cloud-like novelas gaseiformes of Hispanic vanguardists. It is instead a nonrealist work whose complex and elaborate stories, told with rational rigor, involve their characters as well as their readers in a sort of search or quest. In this sense, Borges’s favored type of novel seems closer to the “prose romances” of the English tradition, variants of the adventure novel ultimately derived from the medieval romances of chivalry. As M. H. Abrams explains, the prose romance “typically deploys simplified characters, larger than life, who are sharply discriminated as heroes and villains, masters and victims; the protagonist is often solitary, and isolated from a social context; the plot emphasizes adventure, and is often cast in the form of the quest for an ideal, or the pursuit of an enemy; and the nonrealistic and occasionally melodramatic events are sometimes claimed to project in symbolic form the primal desires, hopes, and terrors in the depths of the human mind, and to be therefore analogous to the materials of dream, myth, ritual, and folklore” (A Glossary of Literary Terms 120). Borges, of course, discards the chivalric context and the emphasis on physical action of the old romances of chivalry, adding a strong rationalistic and intellectual component in order to turn them into “works of reasoned imagination” (as he calls them in his prologue to La invención de Morel

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26). Borges’s notorious interest in genres considered “subliterary” in his time, such as detective and science-fiction novels, as well as fantastic literature in general, fits perfectly with his preference for the scheme of the prose romance, which is the ancestor of these genres.13 An indispensable complement to Borges’s essayistic pronouncements on the novel are the numerous descriptions, summaries, and even (false) reviews of novels Borges includes throughout his short stories, particularly in stories such as “El acercamiento a Almotásim,” “Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain,” “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” and “Tema del traidor y del héroe.” It may even be argued that certain stories by Borges, specifically those in his two masterworks Ficciones and El Aleph, remain in their readers’ memories with nearly the same density and richness of detail of a novel; suffice it to recall stories such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “La muerte y la brújula” in Ficciones, or “El inmortal,” “La busca de Averroes,” “Abenjacán el bojarí, muerto en su laberinto,” and “El Aleph” in El Aleph. A repeated pattern in all of the stories I have just mentioned is the presence of the quest pattern, frequently connected to other elements derived from the prose romance, such as isolated or solitary protagonists, evocations of the chivalric or heroic ethos, and melodramatic confrontations between characters representing, in a Manichaean fashion, good and evil. The plot of the apocryphal novel El acercamiento a Almotásim in the short story of the same name is summarized in the following fashion in Borges’s fake review: “The insatiable search of one soul through the delicate reflections it has left in those of others: at the beginning, the tenuous trace of a smile or a word; at the end, diverse and growing splendors of reason, imagination, and goodness” (416). “Tema del traidor y del héroe” outlines the plot of a novel the narrator has yet to write; in it, readers witness the gradual process by which Ryan, investigating the facts in the life and death of his great-grandfather “the heroic, the beautiful, the murdered Fergus Kilpatrick” (496), discovers that in truth his ancestor has betrayed his cause and that his murder was an execution disguised by means of a complex and theatrical conspiracy. “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” takes place in the more modernsounding context of the espionage tale. The story narrates the persecution of the Chinese spy Yu Tsun by British agent Richard Madden during World War I and how Yu Tsun managed to transmit his secret message before being captured. Before conveying his message by means of the mur-

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der of the sinologist Stephen Albert, Yu Tsun converses with Albert about the novel The Garden of Forking Paths, written by an ancestor of the spy. Albert explains that the novel, judged by its contemporaries to be “an uncertain collection of contradictory drafts” (476), was in reality an ambitious text with a branching and potentially infinite structure that aims to contain all possible plotlines (478–79). The passages on which both Yu Tsun and Albert focus their attention, however, are those that evoke the epic and chivalric ambiance of Chinese history, which narrate the story of an army that fights with equal fervor in the middle of the desert or in the midst of a palace feast and whose conduct is ruled by an austere code of honor: “Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable heart, violent their sword, resigned to kill and to die” (478; italics in the original). “Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain” is another of Borges’s stories mimicking book reviews, and in it are discussed the works and literary theories of an obscure and misunderstood British author who “perceived with clarity the experimental condition of his books: perhaps admirable for their novelty and for a certain laconic probity, but not for the virtues of passion” (461). Ambiguously associated by critics with popular authors such as Agatha Christie and with figures of high modernism such as Gertrude Stein and Julien Green, Quain produces works that incite readers to read actively, in the manner of Kabbalists and Gnostics, seeking to go beyond the ostensible sense of the text by means of the decipherment of clues and enigmas. In his detective novel The God of the Labyrinth, the narrator notes, “The reader of that singular book is more perspicacious than the detective” (462; italics in the original). Quain also wrote the “regressive, ramified novel” (462) April March which, like The Garden of Forking Paths, tries to exhaust all possible plots. Just as Borges had proposed in the prologue to La invención de Morel, Herbert Quain “asserted . . . that of the various joys literature can provide, the highest was that of invention” (464). As can be observed throughout these examples, the quest represented in these stories (to which the reader is invited) is of a rational nature, as was the search for divinity by the Gnostics of late antiquity and the Kabbalists of the Middle Ages. In the hypothetical novels Borges proposes and discusses, reading is presented as an activity to be assumed as an adventure, an adventure whose emotions or “joys” arise from the experience of “invention”—a term that, as dictionaries remind us, comes from the Latin invenire, “to discover, to find.” Recalling the words of the young Borges in his review of Ulysses (“I am the first Hispanic adventurer who has reached

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Joyce’s book: a tangled and savage country . . . ,” Inquisiciones 20), it is obvious that although Joyce’s novel soon disappointed him, Borges already thought of reading novels as a sort of quest. This exciting and paradoxically rational emotion of discovery can be so encompassing and intense in some of Borges’s stories that its effects are analogous to the sublime; thus, for example, in “La escritura del dios,” the Maya priest who manages to decipher the secret writing of his god in the jaguar’s skin, after receiving with this knowledge a mystical vision of the cosmos, exclaims, “Oh joy of understanding, greater than that of imagining or feeling!” (598). Certainly the numerous examples of novels in Borges’s stories strongly suggest that if the Argentine master never felt much enthusiasm for the novel genre, he at least felt toward it much as he did with regard to the religious notion of the afterlife: “I am interested and I don’t believe” (“Leslie D. Weatherhead” 281).

“THE ALEPH” AS MODEL Borges would probably have been quick to appreciate the irony of the fact that, despite his preference for the short story over the novel, his short stories served as models for a number of great Latin American novels that not only revived the force and prestige of the novel genre worldwide but were even conceived and received as texts of transcendent value. Quite possibly the most influential of Borges’s stories with regard to the literary evocation of transcendence and the sublime, and thus a cornerstone of the novels of the Latin American Boom of the second half of the twentieth century is “El Aleph.” If any were needed, proof of the importance of this story is the fact that the bibliography on it has already reached close to a hundred articles and book chapters, making it one of Borges’s most studied and commented-upon tales.14 As is known, “El Aleph” combines in a rather surprising way tragedy with humor, transcendence with insignificance, the cosmic with the trivial. As José Emilio Pacheco observed, “The strangeness of ‘El Aleph’ lies in being parody and poetry at the same time” (“En los abismos de ‘El Aleph’” 21). The presence of these and other polarities in the story suggests from the beginning its intention to encompass in a totalizing manner a wide range of experiences. In this sense, much has been said about the references to Dante in this story, which suggest that “El Aleph” is a parody of the

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Divine Comedy, from the name of the narrator’s dead beloved—Beatriz—and the Italian background of both Beatriz and her cousin Carlos Argentino Daneri to Daneri’s pretensions to write a poem describing the world in its totality. It would be equally fair to say, however, that “El Aleph” offers a parody of Edgar Allan Poe: after all, the point of departure of this story dealing mostly with poetic creation is “the death of a beautiful woman,” which, for Poe in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), “is unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Essays and Reviews 19). The story also alludes to the plot of Poe’s well-known tale “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), when Carlos Argentino invites the narrator to drink a glass of cognac and go down into the cellar of the house on Garay Street so that he can see the Aleph: “Suddenly I realized the danger I was in: I had allowed myself to be buried by a madman, after taking some poison. Carlos’s boasts betrayed his fear that I might not see the wonder; Carlos, to protect his delirium, to not know that he was mad, had to kill me” (624; italics in the original). Lastly, the vision of the Aleph described by the protagonist is analogous to Poe’s own enterprise in his hallucinatory essay Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), in which Poe begins his text with a deceptively humble recognition of the difficulty of his task: “It is with humility really unassumed—it is with a sentiment even of awe—that I pen the opening sentence of this work: for of all conceivable subjects I approach the reader with the most solemn—the most comprehensive—the most difficult—the most august. What terms shall I find sufficiently simple in their sublimity—sufficiently sublime in their simplicity—for the mere enunciation of my theme?” (7). As in Poe’s text, the passage in the story in which the Aleph is described is a prose poem, and as in Eureka, the narrator of “El Aleph” begins by cautioning his readers about the impossibility of what he is attempting to do: “I have reached, now, the ineffable center of my tale; now begins, here, my desperation as a writer. Every language is an alphabet of symbols whose use presupposes a past shared by its interlocutors: how should I convey to others the infinite Aleph, which my fearful memory can barely contain?” (624). Nevertheless, beyond the parallels with Dante or Poe, “El Aleph” may also be seen as a parody of the elements of high modernist novelistic writing that Borges disliked, and like any parody, this one is also something of an homage and a recovery. The story’s first sentences prefigure the

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incongruent shifts between the everyday and the extraordinary that occur throughout the story: “The burning February morning when Beatriz Viterbo died, after an imperious agony that did not condescend for a single moment to sentimentalism nor fear, I noticed that the iron billboards of the Plaza Constitución had renewed some sort of advertisement of American cigarettes. That fact pained me, because it showed that the incessant and vast universe was already leaving her, and that such a change was the first in an infinite series” (Obras completas I 617). It is not difficult to observe here the clash between Beatriz Viterbo’s memorable “imperious agony” and the ordinariness of everyday events in Buenos Aires (the “iron billboards” of Plaza Constitución with their ads for “American cigarettes”), followed in turn by the cosmic perspective from which the narrator contemplates the death of his beloved: “The incessant and vast universe was already leaving her.” (These lines also evoke the beginning of a famous 1935 tango by Carlos Gardel and Alfredo Le Pera: “Sus ojos se cerraron / y el mundo sigue andando.” [Her eyes closed / and the world keeps on turning], Todo tango.) Another salient aspect of this story parodies the “psychologism” that Borges denounced in both realist and high modernist novels: the use of the “free indirect style” (pioneered by Flaubert and frequently used in modernist fiction) with which Borges mixes the narrator’s voice with that of his characters. Referring to the “vindication of modern man” made by Carlos Argentino, the narrator incorporates into his discourse without visible separation the idioms and expressions used by Beatriz’s cousin: These ideas seemed so inept to me, so pompous and overblown their exposition, that I immediately connected them with literature. I asked him why he didn’t write them. Predictably, he replied that he already had: those concepts, and others no less innovative, appeared in the Augural Canto, Prologal Canto, or simply Canto-Prologue of the poem which he had been working on for many years, without réclame, without deafening disturbances, always leaning on those two staffs called “work” and “solitude.” First he opened the floodgates of imagination; then, he used the scissors. The poem was titled “The Earth”; it was a description of the planet, which did not lack, needless to say, picturesque digressions and gallant apostrophes. (618–19)

Other “psychologistic” and “realistic” elements of the story are, of course, the narrator’s own obsession with the late Beatriz, as well as his detailed description of the many portraits of Beatriz in the “overstuffed

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sitting room” of the house and the appearance and occupation of Carlos Argentino, which denote—in a tone uncomfortably reminiscent of an ethnic slur—both characters’ Italian immigrant ancestry and their preoccupation with integrating and ascending in Argentine society at the time.15 No less ordinary was the “inexorably modern ‘salón-bar’ . . . only slightly less atrocious than I had expected” to which Carlos Argentino invites the narrator to ask him to convince his cousin, a well-known writer, to write a prologue to Carlos’s poem (621). Within this context that has become debased and ordinary to the point of caricature, Borges again uses the quest as his plotline. However, what, exactly, is the object of the quest? At first, it is not clear in the story what the narrator-protagonist (who, to make things more interesting, is named Borges) is seeking with his insistent returns to Beatriz’s home after her death: Is he trying to revive Beatriz in his memory, to continue feeling a “vainly erotic” satisfaction by having dinner at her home with Carlos Argentino on the anniversary of her death (618)? Or is he trying to unify in his mind “all of the images of Beatriz,” as Carlos Argentino implies by inviting him to see the Aleph (624)? What is certain is that the interest shown by the narrator in Carlos Argentino Daneri is not explainable only because he was Beatriz’s cousin and because Carlos had “(like Beatriz) large and elongated beautiful hands” (618). It is also not explainable merely because his pedantry and pomposity make him the ideal target for the narrator’s mockery. “Pinkish, considerable, grey-haired” (618), author “of a poem that seems to expand to infinity the possibilities of cacophony and chaos” (622), Carlos Argentino provokes in the narrator a mixture of disgust and fascination that is intimately linked to the literary—specifically poetic—pretensions shared by both men. In this sense, the quote by Poe about “the death of a beautiful woman” may serve as a guide, since it suggests that the narrator’s desire to keep alive the memory of Beatriz will be transformed, by dint of listening to the readings of Carlos Argentino’s mediocre poem and after the encounter with the Aleph, into an inquiry into the origins of poetry. Carlos Argentino’s boundless poetic ambition intrigues Borges, but his discovery of the extraordinary Aleph from which Carlos draws his images happens by accident: the news that the owners of the house on Garay Street—rented by Daneri’s family—are going to demolish it leads Carlos Argentino to reveal to Borges the secret of the Aleph (622). Although the narrator states that Daneri’s words betrayed his insanity (623), Borges,

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with the adventurous spirit typical of the quest pattern, does not hesitate to quickly visit Daneri to see the strange object. At this point in the story, Borges the author decides, surprisingly, to represent in detail the Aleph—which turns out to be a “real” object within the tale—in a celebrated passage that constitutes a true prose poem and is the antithesis of Carlos Argentino’s tedious verse exercise. As happens in Joyce and other authors of high modernism, the “epiphany” the character named Borges experiences is a revelation received in an ordinary, everyday context (the narrow basement that “seemed more like a well,” 624), but in his case the means through which the revelation reaches him is in itself extraordinary. The revelation is not experienced here, as in most high modernist novels, as a change of heart or discovery of a hidden fact (although there is something of that) but in a literal encounter with a fantastic object that is nevertheless described in rational terms: “In the lower part of the step towards the right I saw a small translucent sphere of almost intolerable brilliance. At first I thought it was spinning; later I understood that such a movement was an illusion produced by the vertiginous sights it enclosed. The diameter of the Aleph must have been two or three centimeters, but all of cosmic space was there, without diminution of its size” (625). The paragraph prior to this one, as we have seen, echoes in its first lines Poe’s Eureka. Nevertheless, unlike Poe, who sets out with a romantic voluntarism reminiscent of Carlos’s naïveté, to summarize his hyperbolic thesis (“I design to speak of the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical—of the Material and Spiritual Universe:—of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny,” 7), Borges first reviews the “emblems” by means of which the mystics (the Persian poet Attar, the medieval sage Alain de Lille, the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel) have represented divinity and rejects them, because they seem to him too “literary” and therefore, false: “Perhaps the gods would not deny me the discovery of an equivalent image, but this report would then be tainted with literature, with falsehood” (624). Instead, without revealing the rhetorical strategy he will use to solve his “insoluble” problem, which is “the enumeration, however partial, of an infinite set” (624–25), he apologizes beforehand to the reader: “What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I will transcribe will be successive because language itself is. However, something of what I saw will remain” (625). Then, after the description I have cited of the appearance and size of the Aleph, he begins his poetic tour de force: a single

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and lengthy sentence similar to the “stream of consciousness” of Joyce and Woolf, but in fact assembled using the resources of anaphora and what has been variously called “accumulation,” “amplification,” “congeries,” or— perhaps most commonly—“chaotic enumeration” (Dupriez 10), in which, arguably, there can be found no instances of “vain precision” nor “languid vagueness” like those to be found in the prose of Proust (“Adolfo Bioy Casares: La invención de Morel” 25). As Julio Ortega and Elena del Río Parra observe in their critical edition of the original manuscript of “El Aleph,” In the manuscript we can ascertain that Borges made at least three attempts when composing the anaphoric series, looking for the associations (phonic or semantic) and the analogies (resemblances and differences) that end up giving this page its memorable vision of a raptus. It can be shown that geographical frames are followed by biographical ones, and that these segments abound in vertiginous references and signs of pure amazement. But it can also be seen that the laborious reordering, which numbers thirty-two fragments in its final ordering, is due to the phonic figure, to the combinatory and parallelistic necessities of syllables, which alternate monosyllables (beginning with “vi”), with bisyllables and polysyllables. The prosody acquires a sense of intensification and expansion, suggesting simultaneity through enumeration and plenitude through changes of register. (21)

The description of the Aleph within the story is, in itself, an instance of a “work of reasoned imagination” similar to what Borges proposes in the prologue to La invención de Morel (26): the coherent and verisimilar representation of a fantastic object, which also summarizes fundamental ideas. Much more than “something” remains in the narrator’s transcription of simultaneity, and this passage thus constitutes a challenge and a reproach to a vanguardist fiction that, while aspiring to be experimental, innovative, and ambitious, ultimately continued to depend upon the conventions of a pedestrian realism. His vision of the Aleph, as is known, also allows the character named Borges to discover among all the vertiginous images certain “obscene, incredible, precise letters Beatriz had sent to Carlos Argentino,” as well as “the atrocious relic of what had been, deliciously, Beatriz Viterbo” in an “adored monument” in the Chacarita cemetery (625). Nevertheless, this revelation that destroys forever the illusions of the character named Borges, and which would have been given more weight in a narrative in the high modernist style, becomes trivial and forgettable in the

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midst of the cosmic avalanche of impressions and sensations with which the Aleph has flooded him. It is relevant to recall in this context the observations of Leo Spitzer in his classic essay on “chaotic enumeration,” La enumeración caótica en la poesía moderna (1945). Spitzer points out that this literary device, associated to “the grand and majestic vision of the One-All” (25), besides having Homeric origins (which Spitzer does not mention) is also linked to the panegyric enumerations of the Middle Ages, “the Christian litanies in which are enumerated the creatures or the names of God” (30–31). He further observes, “Enumeration has been, until [Walt] Whitman, one of the most efficacious means of describing the perfection of the created world, in praise of the Creator. To make us see that same perfection and unity in the chaotic modern world was a worthy task of the Pantheist of America, who in his neo-pagan way, prepared with his multiple Leaves of Grass what in our days has been brought to fruition by his Christian follower [Paul] Claudel” (31). He concludes by remarking on “the persistence of stylistic forms that have their roots in forms of religious cult. . . . Faith may diminish; even the very content of a religion can turn into an opposite belief; and yet beneath modern chaotic enumeration there still appear the patterns consecrated by Christianity” (79–80). A figure of transcendence, of what surpasses language and literature, the Aleph is tinged with traits that evoke the numinous, as defined by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy: it is not only an object that displays a profound otherness, but it also appears surrounded by other attributes that, following Otto, normally accompany manifestations of the divine and the sublime: darkness, emptiness, and silence (Otto 93–99). In turn, the fact that the Aleph is a discreet, compact object reminds us that the concept of the sublime is linked in Borges to synthesis and, by extension, to understanding. As the narrator of Borges’s story “Funes el memorioso” remarks, “To think is to forget differences, it is to generalize, to abstract” (490). Similar to the use of equations in physics to represent in a condensed way the laws of nature, synthesis is, for Borges, a sign that one has mastered a subject. Nevertheless, unsatisfied with the implications of the Garay Street Aleph, which is absolutely a visual phenomenon made up of images, the narrator posits in a postscript to the story the existence of another, truer Aleph, hidden inside the stones of a column in a mosque in Cairo, which is a purely sonic Aleph. The narrator cites an apocryphal manuscript by the

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celebrated British nineteenth-century explorer Richard Francis Burton: “The faithful who flock to the mosque of Amr in Cairo know very well that the universe is inside one of the stone columns that surround the central courtyard. . . . No one, of course, can see it, but those who bring their ear close to its surface say that, after a while, they perceive its busy hum.” (627). Why does Borges do this? If we recall that, as Borges remarks, language “is successive,” that is, it is spread out over time, the addition of another Aleph with a quality closer to that of language and literature reopens what the quasi-mystical and seemingly definitive vision of the Garay Street Aleph seemed to have closed—the flow of time—and endows the concept of the Aleph with another transcendent attribute: eternity. In another key essay devoted to the literary appropriation of theological and philosophical concepts, “Historia de la eternidad” (1936), Borges reminds us that in all versions of eternity recorded in the history of philosophy, eternity is not “a mechanical aggregation of past, present, and future” but “a simpler and more magical thing: it is the simultaneity of those times” (354). If the visual Aleph of Garay Street stands for simultaneity in space, the sonorous Aleph of the mosque of Amr represents simultaneity in time; that is, what is known as “eternity.” For his part, historian of religion Peter Manchester notes that it is too simplistic to say that eternity is equivalent to atemporality. Within the Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions, “eternity and time are regularly considered together” (Encyclopedia of Religion 2854). Manchester explains this with an example associated with reading: In some ways it is an extremely familiar experience. Consider reading a book that one finds completely compelling, that draws one along in apparently inexhaustible attentiveness and interest. Hours can pass unregistered; it can be shocking to discover how much time has passed, and how meaningless that fact seems compared with the inner composure and vividness of the interval. Any activity that is intensely self-collected, full of purposiveness and power, can generate this effect—not just intellectual but also aesthetic, even physical activity such as dancing or athletics. Experiences of this kind are a threshold for the pure experience of eternity, contemplation. It is important to notice that they are not without duration, indeed they are rich in inner activity and movement. One experiences something like time in them, but a time that arises more than passes,

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that gives rather than takes. An inexhaustible power seems to well up within oneself. When, as is inevitable, the spell is broken, one speaks of having fallen away from that power, not of the power itself having lapsed. (2854)

Although Manchester does not allude to Borges, his description of contemplative experience as a foretaste of eternity is similar to the experience Borges describes in a fragment of poetic prose he includes in “Historia de la eternidad,” titled “Sentirse en muerte,” where he tells us that, while walking along some old streets of the outskirts of Buenos Aires, “I thought, assuredly aloud: This is the same as thirty years ago. . . . The simple thought I am in eighteen hundred and something ceased to be a few approximate words and deepened into reality. I felt dead, I felt like an abstract perceiver of the world: an indefinite fear imbued with science, which is the best clarity of metaphysics. No, I did not think that I had gone back in the presumed waters of Time; rather I suspected I had become possessor of the reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable world eternity” (366). Just before this fragment, Borges asks himself about the origin of the idea of eternity and posits that its model comes from the feeling of nostalgia: “The man who feels saddened and exiled and remembers happy possibilities, sees them sub specie aeternitatis, totally forgetting that the accomplishment of one of them excludes or delays the others. In passion, remembrance tends towards the atemporal. We gather the joys of the past into a single image; the variously ruddy sunsets I gaze at every afternoon will become the memory of a single sunset. The same happens with anticipation: the most incompatible hopes can coexist with each other. In other words, the style of desire is eternity” (364). A tale infused with desire, it is fitting that “El Aleph” should conclude with this oblique evocation of a murmuring Aleph composed of a superimposition of sounds that prefigures eternity: “a splendid artifice that frees us, even if fleetingly, from the intolerable burden of succession” (“Historia de la eternidad” 353). To escape from the “burden of succession,” from the tyranny of time, whether it is historical or everyday time, would become one of the shared goals among Borges and the novelists of the postvanguard period in Latin America, from the 1930s to the 1950s. As will be seen in the following chapter, some of the most relevant of these novelists will find in the “style” and in the concept of eternity a way to allow the novel to escape from the limits of the worldly and the ordinary.

Three

TA L E S F RO M E T E R N I T Y María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo

To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. BLAKE, “AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE” (1803)

Ah, my God, my God! Must one die in order to know? BOMBAL, LA AMORTAJADA (112)

T

he end of eternity as a fundamental concept of European culture and society began in the sixteenth century when, by a complex series of causes ranging from Renaissance humanism to the Protestant Reformation, eternity lost ground before the advances of secularism. Until then, from classical antiquity and through the Middle Ages, as Carlos Eire explains, eternity had not been just a topic of discussion of philosophers and theologians or a doctrinal element of Christianity but also a concept deeply linked to daily life through religious practices such as the cult of

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martyrs and saints, the ritual of mass, and the care for and veneration of the dead (51–68). It is important to underscore the fact that eternity in the Middle Ages was considered a real experience accessible to all believers through the mediation of the ecclesiastical institution. The monastic author who took the name of Dionysius the Areopagite had proposed in the works of the so-called corpus dyonisiacum the existence of a deep connection between the temporal and the eternal and had described how contemplation of the visible world can lead the mind to eternal realities. Furthermore, in De ecclesiastica hierarchia, Dionysius argued that the metaphysical and the physical are integrally linked through the church, which is the visible and material manifestation of the eternal order (Eire 75). These ideas, which sustained for centuries the political power of the medieval church, began to break down dramatically when the Protestant Reformation headed by Martin Luther rejected the cult of saints and martyrs, the doctrine of purgatory, and in general the idea of communication with the dead. For Protestantism, the proximity of the dead to the living and, therefore, access to eternity itself, expressed in the creeds as “the communion of the saints,” was an expectation to be fulfilled in the end times, not a concrete and present reality (Eire 104–9). In the words of Luther, “The summons of death comes to us all, and no one can die for another. Every one must fight his own battle with death by himself, alone” (cited from Eire 109). The breach opened in the sixteenth century between the temporal world and eternity marked the beginning of the process of cultural and social secularization that characterizes Western modernity. This process was delayed, however, in the predominantly Catholic countries of southern Europe, where the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation buttressed a social and religious order that may well be characterized as neo-medieval. Thus, a great poet of the Spanish baroque, Francisco de Quevedo, displays his accord with Tridentine principles about the afterlife when he writes in one of his “moral sonnets”:1 Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos, con pocos pero doctos libros juntos, vivo en conversación con los difuntos y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos.

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Secluded in the silence of these deserts, With few, though learned books in hand, I live in conversation with the dead, And listen with my eyes to the departed. (Quevedo 103)

Quevedo’s sonnet, however, does not restrict itself to reaffirming Tridentine doctrine but also evokes the classical topic of immortality through letters and serves as a reminder, even in more secular times, that in the realm of writing and texts it is indeed possible to “communicate with the dead” through reading. Through this opening, eternity would return to the works of a great many modern authors (from the romantics to the high modernist narrators and their Latin American admirers), as writing is seen as perhaps the only activity in the modern world that can fulfill, however modestly, the ancient promise of various religions to put humans in contact with eternity. Borges’s essays and stories, and his ideas about the novel and transcendence, blazed a trail for certain Latin American novelists of the postvanguardist period who were concerned with overcoming the obstacles of avant-garde frivolity as well as the insufficiency of narrative realism to represent Latin American life. Specifically, I am thinking of works and authors such as La amortajada (1938) by María Luisa Bombal, El reino de este mundo (1949) by Alejo Carpentier, and Pedro Páramo (1955) by Juan Rulfo, although other significant titles could be added to this list, such as Miguel Angel Asturias’s Hombres de maíz (1949) and Juan Carlos Onetti’s La vida breve (1950). With all of these authors, there is a will to distance themselves from the conventions of narrative realism and the “imaginary psychology” proposed by Ortega y Gasset and derided by Borges, even as there is also an impulse to link the novel with urgent questions about individual and collective identity. Furthermore, with all of them the incorporation of religious elements in a secular key is a fundamental narrative resource. Such incorporation is characterized by the explicit evocation of the experiences and the discourse of religion, although in the context of a critical discussion of the social and individual value of religious thought. The process culminates in an exaltation of certain aspects of society—particularly those linked to collective identity and, implicitly, the idea of the nation—and in the creation around these of a framework of artistic effects that seek to evoke in readers the feeling of the sacred, although devoid of otherworldly implications.

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In novels such as La amortajada, El reino de este mundo, and Pedro Páramo, we find an exploration and debate about the power of the religious impulse, not to neutralize it (as with positivist-inspired thinkers such as William James, Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber) but to appropriate it and graft it onto the body of the novel.2 Moreover, although it is true that, as will be seen, these three novels use a range of techniques to arouse the feeling of the holy in their reading, arguably the principal means these works use to “sacralize” themselves is the idea of eternity. As befits such a complex idea, eternity has been understood in various ways throughout history. It has been seen as a simultaneous apprehension of time in all its aspects (past, present, future)—what Boethius called interminabilis vitae tota simul ac perfecta possesio (“Eternity therefore is the perfect possession altogether and at the same time of an endless life”; Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae V.VI). It has also been conceived as a divine attribute that is nevertheless accessible to humans by means of the contemplative state, which is reached through meditation on material things, the things of this world, according to Abbot Suger’s formulation in the twelfth century AD: Mens hebes ad verum per materialia surgit / Et demersa prius hac visa luce resurgit (“The dull mind rises to the truth through material things, / And is resurrected from its former submersion when the light is seen.” Inscription in the Church of St. Denis, AD 1144, Eire 88). Lastly, and more generally, eternity has been understood as the state than can be adumbrated through communion and communication with the dead and the rituals associated with them (Eire 51–68). The concept of eternity Borges favors in “Historia de la eternidad” is closest to that of Boethius: the contemplation of an entire life, freed from the bounds of linear time (a contemplation, Borges adds, moved by desire; 364). Instead, in Bombal, as we will see, although there are also echoes of Boethius, the focus is predominantly on the experience of eternity achieved through communication with the dead.3 In this ancient view, the dead—particularly those who have died because of their faith, as martyrs for their belief—are points of contact with eternity. Alluding to the idea of martyrdom among the first Christians, Eire observes, Focusing on the end times and the transformation of the earth gradually gave way to focusing on the death of every individual, that is, on the way time would end for every Christian, one by one. This gradual transformation depended on an inchoate sense of the person and work of the savior,

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Jesus Christ, as beyond time, and of the individual Christian’s relation to Christ as participation in eternity. Through every Christian, history itself was transcended, even though history itself marched on, stained in the blood of the martyrs. Given the fact that persecution was an ever-present reality, martyrdom acquired a prominent place among Christians and every such act of self-sacrifice came to be seen as an immediate point of entry to eternal life, not just for the individual who died but for the entire community. (52)

It is certainly possible to argue that in La amortajada there is a tendency, nuanced by irony, to portray the protagonist, Ana María, as a sort of martyr sacrificed for the sake of the men who surround her. In turn, as happens with all martyrs, the death of Ana María works as a means to communicate truths that go beyond her own experience to encompass the common experience of women in a given historical period. María Luisa Bombal’s knowledge of Borges’s ideas about the novel was direct and personal, rooted in both authors’ lifelong friendship that began during Bombal’s first stay in Buenos Aires between 1930 and 1940 and lasted until Bombal’s death in 1980.4 In his laudatory review of La amortajada in the journal Sur, Borges tells of his conversations with Bombal prior to the novel and admits that he tried to dissuade her from her project with a characteristically rationalist argument: I know that one day among others, or better, one afternoon among others, María Luisa Bombal told me the plot of a novel she was planning to write: the wake of a supernaturally lucid woman who, in that final night full of visitors that precedes a burial, somehow understands—although dead—the meaning of her past life and knows in vain who she has been and likewise the women and men who peopled her life. One by one they bend over her coffin until the confused dawn arises, and she incredibly recognizes, remembers, and justifies them. . . . I told her [Bombal] that such a plot was impossible to write and that it faced two risks, both equally deadly: one was the obscuring of the novel’s human side by the great superhuman fact of the sensitive and thoughtful dead woman; the other was the obscuring of that superhuman fact by the novel’s human events. The magical side of the work would invalidate the psychological side, or vice-versa. In any case, the work would have a useless part. I think I added as a comment to my negative opinion a quote from H. G. Wells about the convenience of not belaboring too much stories

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about marvelous events. . . . María Luisa Bombal endured with firmness my prohibitions, praised my good sense and my erudition and gave me to read a few months later the original manuscript of La amortajada. I read it in a single afternoon and was able to ascertain with admiration that its pages solve infallibly the two infallible risks I had foreseen. They are so well solved that the unprepared reader never even suspects those risks existed. (“La amortajada” 80–81)

For her part, Bombal coincides with Borges’s remembrances in her “Testimonio autobiográfico” collected in her Obras completas (1996), when speaking of her first years in Buenos Aires: In those days I also met Borges, but he moved in a more enclosed, more intellectual world. Our group was more literary. . . . Oliverio Girondo, Norah Lange, Federico García Lorca, Conrado Nalé Roxlo, Alfonso Reyes. . . . Georgie [Borges’s nickname] belonged to a more intellectual group, but I still became his close friend. . . . I took walks with Borges by the river’s edge; he told me what he was writing about and I told him what I was writing about. One afternoon I spoke to him about La amortajada and he said that it was an impossible novel to write because it mixed realism and the supernatural, but I didn’t pay him any heed and just went on writing. (329, 331)

As Borges admits, his doubts about La amortajada never became realized, and what happens instead is the opposite of what he feared: “magic” and “psychology” do not cancel each other out, and instead they reinforce each other. After all, it is due to the extraordinary artifice of this tale of a dead woman’s voyage to eternity that the novel can best convey the experiences of a Latin American woman who, despite the individuality of her thoughts and intimate beliefs, had lived nevertheless a commonplace life, one subordinated to the rules of her society. Unlike Virginia Woolf’s novelistic project to portray “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (106), Bombal decides to represent an ordinary mind on an extraordinary day—or perhaps better, in an extraordinary way. Moreover, through the peculiar perspective provided by the religious concept of eternity, which allows the novel’s readers to “communicate with the dead,” Bombal is able to reveal to these readers that the mind or the subjectivity she is representing is not as “ordinary” or common as might be supposed, thus conveying a message

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of feminist vindication: the shrouded woman, like all women, is a person with her own particular needs, desires, and criteria that must be heard and respected.5 Despite Bombal’s remarks in the passage I have just cited that Borges was “more intellectual” than her—perhaps alluding to his notorious erudition and to the fact that in those years (the late 1930s) Borges was better known as a poet, essayist, and literary critic—it is important to take into account Lucía Guerra-Cunningham’s advice not to get carried away by the image of Bombal, presented by Bombal herself, as “an ethereal and tragic woman, given to poetry and sentimentalism” (Bombal, Obras completas 9). Guerra recalls that Bombal also identified with “traits associated by our culture with masculinity: logic, precision, and symmetry” (9). The Chilean scholar further adds: Bombal frequently cited the apparently paradoxical phrase by Pascal: “Geometry-Passion-Poetry,” and every time she talked about her writing she stressed that it was organized around a logical axis and exact symmetrical forms. . . . Like Prosper Merimée, whom she admired for the logic he infused into his works, the writing of María Luisa Bombal arises from the margins of all binary oppositions between reality and unreality, and its basic tension is produced precisely by the surprising link—for traditional schemes of thought—between mystery and logic. The latter is associated by the paradigms of our culture with objectivity and rationalism: thus, a mystery rooted in logic is an “oxymoronic structure,” as critics would say to name the paradoxical nature of such a linkage. (Bombal, Obras completas 9–10)

La amortajada certainly anticipates in its writing both “El Aleph” itself and those “works of reasoned imagination” Borges asked for in his prologue to La invención de Morel. Her secularized version of the religious ideas of life after death and eternity coincides with the project outlined by Borges, in his essays on the Kabbalists and the Gnostics I discussed in chapter 3, to appropriate theological notions for aesthetic ends. It is not known if Bombal ever read Borges’s “El arte narrativo y la magia” (although it is likely that she did), but in a fashion similar to that of Morris and Poe in Borges’s essay, Bombal provisionally accepts the premise that there is an existence after death and tries to represent in a believable way that impossible fact. Scholars of Bombal’s work have been analyzing her writings since the 1960s, thus ensuring her current high status in the canon of Latin Amer-

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ican literature (Agosín, Las desterradas del paraíso 122–23). These critics have also pondered the varied stylistic resources and narrative techniques with which Bombal managed to create in her readers the “poetic faith” sought by Coleridge for his works. Typical in this regard are observations such as Esther W. Nelson’s about the narrative efficacy of La amortajada, which resides in its erasure of “the distinctions between the world of the novel and how it is perceived” (María Luisa Bombal: Apreciaciones críticas 182), or Laura Riesco’s comment that, in examining issues of knowledge in her novel, Bombal “assumes a mostly phenomenological position” (María Luisa Bombal: Apreciaciones críticas 211). Observations by these two scholars confirm that Bombal’s text displays many of the techniques used by Morris and Poe, as Borges points out in “El arte narrativo y la magia,” in order to produce “poetic faith”: La amortajada’s narrative is mostly focalized through its dead protagonist; it makes strategic use of imprecision combined with certain realistic details; it avoids the use of terms that are too hackneyed or explicit, and employs partial or obstructed points of view that make believable the descriptions of fantastic events or objects. The first major paradox faced by readers of this novel is that of a woman seemingly imprisoned by death, wrapped in a shroud, whose mouth is closed by a gauze bandage that holds up her chin (La amortajada 13), who can somehow find in such a state the means to put into words what she has not wished or been able to say before and the power to concentrate on her narration now that “no inconvenient thought perturbs her” (97).6 But Bombal’s point of departure is apparently a more modest one: the search for a standpoint that will enable her to express herself as a writer and a woman. A reader of Virginia Woolf, Bombal takes her personal search for “a room of one’s own” to its most visionary extreme: writing, associated with the death and dissolution of the self, becomes also a territory in which to freely display, in the midst of the self’s annihilation, woman’s different subjectivity. Bombal’s narrative voice in La amortajada makes literal what Borges states metaphorically in “Sentirse en muerte”: “I felt dead, I felt like an abstract perceiver of the world” (“Historia de la eternidad” 366). In the figure of a dead woman wrapped in her shroud and submitted to the gaze of the relatives who “watch” her through the night, Bombal also mobilizes—as well as transforms—an image that had already become commonplace in Western literature by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century: that of woman turned into an object of patriarchal contemplation, as an art object and, in literary terms, as a

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text. Such an image frequently presupposed the immobility or death of the woman being gazed at, as Poe expressed with brutal clarity: “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Essays and Reviews 19).7 Bombal subverts this hackneyed and demeaning way to represent women by giving voice to the shrouded woman’s body, thus giving her back her personhood, allowing her to “read” through her half-closed eyes the people who attend her wake: “After nightfall, her eyes became half-opened. . . . Under the tall flame of the tapers, all who were at the wake bent, then, to observe the clarity and transparency of that band of pupil that death had not managed to tarnish. They bent over her and respectfully marvelled, not knowing that She saw them” (Bombal, La amortajada 95). This “reading” of the living by the dead woman is represented at certain moments as a doubling of the narrative voice into other voices, those of the relatives. It is as if, in a final instant of transparency, Ana María could read the thoughts of those who come to visit her body: her first lover Ricardo, her father, her sister Alicia, her son Alberto, her sinister admirer Fernando, her son Fred, her husband Antonio, her daughter Anita, and Father Carlos. However, beyond these strategies, the basic element upon which La amortajada deploys its artifices and which helps to create what we could call a “transcendence effect” in the narration is the concept of eternity. This concept underlies and makes possible the fundamental premise of the novel: that of a narrative voice placed outside the flow of time and thus capable of narrating with an unusually high degree of freedom, but also with clarity, the confusing process of a life. It should be made clear immediately that La amortajada’s narrative does not aim to portray the experience of eternity itself but rather the path that leads to it. Bombal takes advantage of the classic topic of death as a journey to “temporalize” death—which is, rigorously speaking, to be outside of time—and to then turn it, using Manchester’s expression, into “a time that arises more than passes, that gives rather than takes” (2854). The experience of transition into eternity in La amortajada is presented like a voyage from life into death, and this voyage is, as Manchester also points out, an experience “rich in inner activity and movement” as well as filled with purpose and power (2854). From her coffin, Ana María reviews the lives of her relatives and judges them; the long night of her wake allows her to become a reader and reinterpreter of her own life in a revelatory process so

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fruitful that it makes Ana María cry out, “Ah, my God, my God! Must one die in order to know?” (112). This is yet another of the paradoxes in this novel: despite the passivity and languor that afflicted the character of Ana María throughout her life,8 La amortajada abounds in movement and action. During the mostly episodic and retrospective narrative of La amortajada we find a series of passages that give the text a sense of temporal progression. In these, a figure of indecipherable appearance constantly urges Ana María to follow her, taking her by the hand and moving her through enigmatic spaces: Somebody, something, takes her by the hand. “Let’s go, let’s go . . .” “Where?” And she goes. Somebody, something, drags her, guides her through an abandoned city covered by a layer of ash, as if a macabre breeze had delicately blown over her. She walks. Night falls. She walks. A field. In the very heart of that accursed city, a newly watered field, glowing with phosphorescent insects. She takes a step. And she crosses the double ring of fog that encircles it. And dives into the fireflies up to her shoulders, as if in a floating powder of gold. Ah, what is this force that envelops her and carries her away? (118)

The mysterious force, described in highly poetic terms, reveals itself toward the end as entropy: the universal tendency toward disorder and dissolution. Described also as resembling flowing water (148), this inexorable force sometimes becomes fused with Ana María’s death drive: “Fatigued, she nevertheless longs to separate herself from that particle of consciousness that keeps her attached to life, and to let herself fall back, towards the deep and soft abyss she feels down below” (119). It is important to point out that the superimposition of times that characterizes the idea of eternity is represented in La amortajada in a rational and “realistic” way. Ana María is not a disembodied spirit who travels freely through past, present, and future—which would have given the novel an appearance more like that of the “cloud-like” or fragmentary texts of the avant-garde. Instead, what readers perceive is a coming and going between the linear time of entropy and the cyclical or spiral time of retrospection,

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marked by the events during the night of the wake and of the following day that “burns hours, minutes, seconds” (La amortajada 113, 119). To that spiraling time belong the emotion-filled memories of the dead woman, evoked with scant chronological precision and with expressions of uncertainty: “Afterwards . . . Years after” (102), “One afternoon” (102), “What day was it?” (105), “Spring had just begun” (106), “During long years” (120), and so on. This coming and going culminates, however, in visionary passages at the end of the novel in which Bombal adopts a cosmic perspective that preludes that in “El Aleph”: Suddenly, plunged into deep darkness, she feels as if thrown headlong down below, flung vertiginously for a limitless time towards the deep, as if they had dug below the bottom of the crypt and intended to bury her in the very innards of the earth. And someone, something, drew the shrouded woman towards the autumnal ground. And so she began to descend, through the mud, between the roughened roots of the trees. Through the burrows where small and timid animals breathe curled up. Falling, sometimes, into soft wells of frozen cobwebs. She went down slowly, slowly, avoiding flowers of bone and strange beings with viscous bodies that looked through two narrow slits touched by dew. Coming across human skeletons, marvelously white and intact, whose knees drew up, as they did when in their mother’s womb. She set foot upon an ancient seabed and rested there for a long time, between gold nuggets and Millennial seashells. Subterranean streams later dragged her in their rush under the immense vaults of petrified forests. Certain emanations drew her towards a specific center, while others violently expelled her towards climactic zones more appropriate to her matter. Ah, if men knew what lies beneath them, they would not find it so simple to drink water from the springs! Because everything sleeps in the earth and everything wakes in the earth. Once again, the shrouded woman flowed back to the surface of life. In the shadows of the crypt, she had the impression that she could at last move. And she would indeed have been able to push up the coffin’s lid, get up and return, cold and erect, through the roads, to the door of her house. But, born of her body, she felt infinite roots sink and spread in the earth

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like a pulsing spiderweb, through which there climbed tremulously towards her the constant palpitation of the universe. And she only wished now to stay crucified to the earth, suffering and enjoying in her flesh the coming and going of tides that were far, far away; feeling the grass grow, new islands emerge, and the opening, in another continent, of the unknown flower that only lives on the day of an eclipse. And still feeling suns boil and burst, and giant mountains of sand collapsing who knows where. I swear it. The shrouded woman did not feel the least desire to rise up. Alone, she could at last rest, die. She had suffered the death of the living. New she longed for the total immersion, the second death: the death of the dead. (161–62)

The similarities between this passage and the description of the Aleph in Borges’s story lie fundamentally in their use of cosmic imagery evocative of the sublime, which becomes more intense toward the end of Bombal’s passage (“the constant palpitation of the universe . . . still feeling suns boil and burst”). After the feeling of enclosure that predominates throughout the novel—being locked inside her coffin is like an extreme version of the domestic enclosures that have marked the shrouded woman’s life—these latter passages, with their expansive tone, seem to open up to a pantheistic concept of the cosmos. Nevertheless, the novel makes quite clear its rejection of any notion of the divine or the spiritual, as can be seen in the passages where Ana María debates with her sister Alicia and her “terrible God . . . so distant and severe” (114, 115), declaring herself to be “closely attached to the earth” (114) and considering the possibility that she, the shrouded woman, “may not have a soul” (116). A bit later, in the remembrances of Father Carlos, Ana María declares her preference that Heaven should be “just like this earth” (156).9 Unlike the two Alephs that appear in Borges’s story—the visual one in Calle Garay and the sonic one in the mosque of Amr (“El Aleph” 627)—the experience of eternity in Bombal’s novel, like that of medieval Europeans, appears to be much more closely linked than Borges’s to materiality and the body. The tactile images and constant references to the body of the shrouded woman in the last passages of the novel are particularly striking: from the descent “through the mud” into a space evocative of the maternal uterus, with its “soft wells of frozen cobwebs” and the “human skeletons, marvelously white and intact, whose knees drew up, as they did when in

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their mother’s womb,” until she finally feels “infinite roots” growing from her body that link her to “the constant palpitation of the universe” and lead her to one last bifurcation: from “the death of the living” to the curiously redundant “death of the dead” (161–62). The idea that death is a temporary prolongation of life that concludes with a second and definitive death is an ancient and widespread concept, found in certain tribes of Cameroon as well as among the ancient Egyptians (Van Baaren 136). Nevertheless, the last, pleonastic expression that closes the novel may also be seen, to the contrary, as an indefinite opening, since by positing a “second” death (as later Borges would do with his “other Aleph” 627) the text dissolves death in the overabundant time of eternity, which “gives rather than takes” (in Manchester’s words 2854). The sub specie aeternitatis perspective is a strategy in La amortajada that allows Bombal to portray with greater depth and nuance a woman’s subjectivity. However, as it often happens, changes in style and technique produce effects that go beyond simple communicative efficacy. By framing the feminist ideological content in La amortajada with a supernatural concept such as eternity, the ideological content becomes tinged with an aura of sacredness and is endowed with a status similar to that of religious revelation. The text’s style would thus carry out with regard to the ideology it contains a function similar to that of the reliquaries that bear corporeal fragments of saints, which are not only protective containers but also devices to increase the sense of sacredness, the numinous character of the relic, and turn it into a point of contact between the temporal and the eternal (Eire 54–55). Paradoxically it is the perspective of eternity, seemingly so distanced from human experience, that gives the story of Ana María’s life and the reflections it may provoke in readers about women’s social conditions the force and immediacy of a prophetic vision.

CARPENTIER, OR FAITH Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. JOHN 20:29

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! KEATS, “ODE ON A GRECIAN URN” (1819)

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What is El reino de este mundo really about? Most of the readings that have explored its aspects as a “historical novel,” even those that praise the documentary precision of its allusions to historical figures and events, nevertheless recognize that El reino de este mundo does not aim to present a full account of the Haitian Revolution.10 In its famous prologue it is even suggested that Haiti and its history are just pretexts for the presentation of predominantly philosophical and aesthetic issues, such as the linkage between the real and the marvelous, the question of Latin American identity in writing and, of particular relevance to my study, the role of faith in writing and reading. In fact, a growing trend in the most recent interpretations of this novel is to see it as a masterly literary artifice, underscoring particularly its condition as an artifice.11 A key piece of El reino de este mundo’s literary artifice is precisely its prologue. As Emir Rodríguez Monegal observed in 1971 “Up to a point, the prologue . . . has become better-known than the text of this work itself” (“Lo real y lo maravilloso en El reino de este mundo” 619). Monegal furthermore points out how the prologue to El reino de este mundo has frequently been considered apart from the work in which it appears: “Multiplied by the commentaries of critics and professors, reproduced in journals and essay collections, the prologue has been cited and re-cited until it has been turned in on itself and has become independent of the work that preceded it” (“Lo real y lo maravilloso en El reino de este mundo” 619). Indeed, in spite of its being so frequently cited, particularly during the debates about the origins of “magical realism” in the 1960s, the prologue was even omitted from some of the largest editions of El reino de este mundo, such as the first edition printed in Spain by Seix Barral in 1967. Nonetheless, the prologue’s status as an indispensable component of Carpentier’s novel has again become recognized and it is included in all recent editions of El reino de este mundo. What makes it indispensable? Certainly its presence since the novel’s first edition betrays Carpentier’s concerns about the reception of his novel and his intention of controlling its reading, but this, of course, happens to a greater or lesser extent with all prologues. Critics also consistently comment on the prologue’s manifesto-like style, its polemical tone, which opposes Europe and America, aesthetic vanguardism and popular traditions, realism and fantasy, reason and faith (Müller-Bergh). In this prologue, Carpentier critiques aspects of his own literary past; praises art based on non-Western, rural, and popular traditions; and claims to have

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achieved in his novel a synthesis that overcomes the antithesis of the real and the imaginary: “Without setting out to do this systematically, the text that follows corresponds to these sorts of concerns. In it I narrate a series of extraordinary events that happened in the island of Santo Domingo, in a specific period that does not go beyond a human lifespan, allowing the marvelous to flow freely from a reality followed strictly in every one of its details” (11). Critics have already written at length on the question of “the marvelous real,” particularly in regard to the inconsistencies in Carpentier’s claim that in his novel the marvelous emerges spontaneously from the real. However, there has been much less commentary about Carpentier’s use in his prologue of the term and concept of faith. This concept makes its first appearance in the prologue immediately after Carpentier offers his well-known explanation about the nature of “the marvelous” and how it arises: “But too many forget, having dressed themselves up as cheap magicians, that the marvelous begins unequivocally when it arises out of an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), of a privileged revelation of reality, of an unusual or singularly favorable illumination of the unnoticed richness of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads to a sort of ‘limit state’” (8). There are evident similarities between Carpentier’s ideas in this passage and the notion of the “secular sacred” observed by Lewis in high modernism (Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel 19–21). Shortly afterward, however, Carpentier brings up openly the notion of faith, whose ever-growing absence in society and culture the high modernists took for granted but which for the Cuban author is an absolute prerequisite before one can experience the “sensation of the marvelous” (8): To begin with, the sensation of the marvelous presupposes having faith. Those who don’t believe in saints cannot be cured by saints’ miracles, nor can those who are not Don Quixotes enter, in body and soul, into the world of the Amadis of Gaul or Tirant lo Blanch. . . . For Van Gogh it was enough to have faith in the Sunflower in order to fix its revelation upon a canvas. This is why the marvelous invoked from unbelief—as the Surrealists did for so many years—was never anything but a literary trick, as boring when prolonged as certain “arranged” oneiric literature, certain praises of folly, which we have seen before many times. This does not mean we should agree with those who favor a return to the real—a term that in this context be-

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comes gregariously political—who are only able to substitute the conjurer’s tricks with the commonplaces of the “enlisted” literati or the scatological delight of certain existentialists. But it is undoubtedly true that there are scant defenses for those poets and artists who laud sadism without practicing it, admire the Supermale because they’re impotent, invoke specters without believing they’ll obey the spells, and organize secret societies, literary sects, vaguely philosophical groups, with watchwords and arcane purposes that are always unachieved, without ever being able to create a valid form of mysticism nor of leaving aside their most petty foibles to risk it all by playing the most fearsome card, that of faith. (8–9)

Faith, “the most fearsome card”: it is worth underscoring this metaphor evocative of card games that, on the one hand, suggests that the artist is a sort of cheater, and on the other, with its echoes of Pascal’s wager, turns faith into a sort of dare or challenge.12 Shortly earlier, at the beginning of this passage, Carpentier also proposes a utilitarian view of faith as a fundamental component of various forms of artistic creation, from those that seek to cause amazement, such as the romances of chivalry, to those that seek to intensify the artistic experience, as in Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings. Without faith, Carpentier implies, these works would be in vain, reduced to mere smoke and mirrors. Like Borges, Carpentier advocates a concept of art and, specifically, of the novel that rises above whatever is pedestrian or humdrum. Moreover, his novel, like Bombal’s, narrates the experiences of “ordinary minds”—Ti Noel, Pauline Bonparte, Soliman—on “extraordinary days.” Still further, Carpentier’s insistence on marvel and astonishment as traits that differentiate America from Europe and as feelings evoked by the best literary art is not merely an echo of surrealism but harks back to Flaubert and his vision of the sublime in the novel. The concept of faith Carpentier deals with in the prologue to El reino de este mundo, while still close to the Pauline “conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1), also presents itself as a more aggressive, more active version of Coleridge’s modest “poetic faith,” which was content with producing a mere “suspension of disbelief” in the reader. Instead, Carpentier’s version of “poetic faith” aspires to work like a catalyst to bring unity and persuasive power to fiction. In fact, the evocation of faith in the prologue to El reino de este mundo is not just a challenge to the already declining European surrealism (Monegal, Müller-Bergh) but also and above all to the readers of his

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novel, whom with near-evangelistic rhetoric Carpentier urges to discover and appreciate the coherence and originality of his work. Furthermore, by condemning as a “literary trick” the literature of “the marvelous invoked from unbelief” (8), Carpentier implies that as author of the prologue and the novel, he too shares the faith he is demanding of his readers. However, if one reads the prologue more closely, it becomes clear that in describing his encounter of “the marvelous real” during his visit to Haiti, Carpentier keeps a careful separation between his narrative “I” and that phenomenon, portraying himself more as an observer than as a participant: This became particularly evident to me during my stay in Haiti, while in daily contact with something we might call the marvelous real. I was standing on a land where thousands of men anxious for liberty believed in the lycanthropic powers of Mackandal, to the point that such collective faith managed to produce a miracle on the day of his execution. I already knew the prodigious history of Bouckman, the Jamaican initiate. I had visited the Citadel at La Ferriére, an unprecedented work of architecture, only foreseen by the Imaginary Prisons of Piranese. I had breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, a monarch of incredible ambitions, far more surprising than all of the cruel kings invented by the Surrealists, who were given to imagining tyrannies, although not to suffering them. Every step of the way I ran into the marvelous real. But I also thought that such a presence and actuality of the marvelous real was not solely Haiti’s privilege, but a heritage of America as a whole, where a full accounting of its cosmogonies, for example, has not yet been completed. (9–10; italics mine)

As may be seen, the passage begins with the tepid phrase “this became particularly evident to me,” which is not exactly what one would expect from someone who had gone through a genuine experience of religious conversion. Although Carpentier attempts to erase somewhat his distance with the assertion that he was in “daily contact” with the marvelous real, Carpentier’s status as an observer is evidenced at every turn by the contrast with the participatory experience of the Haitians, whose “collective faith” produces a miracle during Mackandal’s execution. The passage ends, furthermore, with some historical and ethnographic observations, made in a scientific-sounding tone, about the role played by myths and beliefs in some episodes of Latin American history (10). Contrary to the general impression produced by the prologue, Haiti was not Carpentier’s “Road

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to Damascus,” where he adopted the faith which the surrealists lacked and which he urges his readers to have. The linguistic manipulation in this text is so skillful, however, that its artifice goes sufficiently unnoticed and the predominant message transmitted is this: without faith one cannot read and understand El reino de este mundo, and if anyone does not understand or appreciate this novel it is because of their lack of faith. The text thus presents itself as a hermetic product that will only transmit its revelation to the initiates predisposed to believe in it. The prologue to El reino de este mundo in fact proposed a new readerly contract for innovative kinds of narrative texts that did not adhere to the realistic conventions of naturalism or of the Latin American novelas de la tierra of the 1930s. Seeking to broaden the novel’s range, these new narrative texts of the Latin American postvanguardists, such as El reino de este mundo, move away from the use of prophetic discourse as social criticism observed in the naturalist novels of Gamboa and Zeno Gandía and instead propose—following Borges—the act of reading as a process of questing, decipherment, and discovery. It is a process that requires of readers the discipline and the disposition—reinforced by faith—to face the challenge of a literary language that is highly poetic, filled with learned expressions and archaisms, such as that which Carpentier introduces in El reino de este mundo, as well as dispersed or fragmentary narrative structures that complicate the search for the text’s meaning. In a broader sense, it is a process that implies the mutual incorporation of text and reader, the breaking of barriers between the world inside and outside the novel, much as it happens in sacred scriptures. In sum, Carpentier in his prologue is urging that his novel be read following the conventionalisms with which sacred texts are read. Thus, the prologue to El reino de este mundo may well be considered a founding document—halfway between a manifesto and a gospel—of the aesthetics of the Boom’s totalizing novels that would arise in subsequent decades. This new readerly contract is, of course, a literary artifice, and another of the aims of the new “poetic faith” Carpentier proposes is to hide such artificiality. Years later, in his novel El arpa y la sombra (1979), in the midst of the self-critical fervor of the post-Boom and nearing his death, Carpentier would denounce the marvelous real as an imposture similar to that presented in Cervantes’s entremés (one-act play) El Retablo de las Maravillas (1615). Allegorizing himself in the figure of Christopher Columbus confessing his sins on his deathbed, and committing a deliberate anachronism

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by alluding to Cervantes’s play in Columbus’s time, Carpentier, through his character, declares, I built myself a stand full of marvels, like those the Goliards carry through the fairs in Italy. I set up my theater before dukes and highnesses, financiers, friars and wealthy men, clerics and bankers, grandees from here, grandees from there, I raised a curtain of words and instantly there appeared, in a dazzling procession, the great carnival of Gold, Diamonds, Pearls, and, above all, Spices. . . . Left Hand, Right Hand. I opened them, I showed them, I moved them with a minstrel’s dexterity, with a goldsmith’s daintiness, or instead, with a dramatic tone, I raised them like a prophet, quoted Isaiah, invoked the Psalms, lit Jerusalem lights, with my forearm magnified by the opening of my sleeve, showing the invisible, pointing to the unknown, flaunting riches, weighing treasures as copious as the imaginary pearls that seemed to flow between my fingers, falling to the floor and bouncing with Oriental sparkles over the amaranth-colored rugs. The noble and wise people applauded me, laughed at my cosmogonic jokes, dreamed for a moment with my visionary goldworker’s promises, my alchemy without flasks, but ultimately my ships never left port and I was left at their doors without ships and without hopes. (Carpentier, El arpa y la sombra 77–79).

As is known, in Cervantes’s El Retablo de las Maravillas a male-female duo composed of Chanfalla and La Chirinos manage to trick the authorities of a country village by forcing them to say they are seeing in an empty stage, as if they were real, the mythical and historical characters evoked verbally by Chanfalla. Whoever admits that they cannot see them will be promptly accused of being a converted Jew. By equating his proposal of the marvelous real in the prologue to El reino de este mundo with Chanfalla and La Chirinos’s trickery in El Retablo de las Maravillas, Carpentier seems to recognize his ethical irresponsibility and to admit that his abuse of the notion of faith in his novel was an act of blackmail committed for literature’s sake.13 The trickery worked, however. Mario Vargas Llosa recognizes this and comments on it in a 2000 article, when he states that Carpentier’s fidelity to historical sources in the composition of his novel “does not in any way impoverish the originality of El reino de este mundo nor the author’s creative talent” (“¿Lo real maravilloso o artimañas literarias?”). Without alluding to the question of poetic faith, Vargas Llosa focuses in his article on Car-

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pentier’s narrative techniques in El reino de este mundo, taking as his point of departure the treatment of time in this novel. An extended quote of Vargas Llosa’s comments is pertinent in this regard: Time in El reino de este mundo is, due to its style, extremely slow, a slow-motion time, so much that readers often have the feeling that time has stopped or been abolished, as happens in the great friezes, in the motionless images of paintings. This sensation is due to the fact that each chapter has its own time—a succession or accumulation of happenings—but between chapters there is no temporal flow, a storytelling continuity that creates the impression of time’s passing. The novel’s story does not advance like “real” time, which flows like a river, without ever stopping. Instead, it jumps from one period to another—from one scene to another—as if these were not linked in a sequence, but juxtaposed, so that each maintains its temporal autonomy. This is why in reading this novel readers have the feeling of moving along a gallery of great murals that are lined up spatially but are chronologically disconnected. . . . The plastic qualities of its style make readers feel that in each chapter many things do not just happen but simply are. And each chapter always consists of one or two central events that are striking and full of experiences, around which everything else seems to gather. Separated sometimes by very long intervals, the novel’s chapters comprise a parade of static temporal periods that complement each other, but without linking together in an even and systematic flow of time. Such time is, like the narrator himself, a complete illusion: an invention. (“¿Lo real maravilloso o artimañas literarias?”)

Vargas Llosa describes with precision the experience that, even after having read the prologue, is produced by a first reading of El reino de este mundo: readers are faced with a sort of collage text that juxtaposes at the same level episodes from different moments in time, undoing the conventional expectation of time as a linear flow. Moreover, this sensation of immobility or slowness is added to Carpentier’s close focus on the things, the objects that surround his characters and give their world solidity and precision, even as they also produce an impression of plenitude and chaotic multiplicity. Vargas Llosa calls time in this novel “a complete illusion: an invention,” but perhaps it is just an invention in the rhetorical sense of “finding the ideas or the necessary arguments to develop a matter” (“Diccionario de la Lengua Española”), since time as it appears in this text is

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very close to the idea and the experience of eternity. Let us recall that the best-known version of eternity, derived from Boethius, posits that eternity is the simultaneous apprehension of time in all its aspects, and that in the subsequent elaborations of this notion by Dyonysius the Areopagite and Abbot Suger it is claimed that contemplation of things in the visible world can lead the mind to eternal truths. Such an experience of contemplation, as Manchester reminds us, produces the impression of an overflowing time, generous and fluid, full of vivid experiences (2854). If the new readerly contract based on faith is an artifice that seeks to control the reading of El reino de este mundo, the artifice that presides over the writing of the novel is that of the literary appropriation of eternity. In this case, the artifice consists in turning history into eternity, worldly succession into a sequence of autonomous episodes devoid of narrative links. To achieve this, Carpentier follows to a great extent the Flaubertian scheme according to which the book’s omniscient narrator “must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere” (Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 173). To this hidden, all-knowing and allseeing deity Carpentier adds another of its inherent attributes from the religious tradition: eternity. This attribute allows the novel’s narrator to move freely, without the limitations of verisimilitude, between a multiplicity of temporal planes and points of view without a fixed association with anyone in particular. Like the Holy Spirit in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Carpentier’s narrator “blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going” (John 3:8). For this unfettered sub specie aeternitatis narrator, the distinctions between rationalism, myth, and legend, as well as the individual and the species and the part and the whole, are fluid and arbitrary; if anything predominates in its discourse, however, it is a general impression of emotional distance, of narrative impartiality, which ends up in indifferentiation and indifference and in a feeling of vertigo associated with the holy and the sublime. In terms of narrative distancing, the echoes of Gnosticism present in El reino de este mundo are significant and are ultimately derived from Borges, whose work Carpentier had read and knew well by the 1940s.14 The novel’s epigraph, taken from Lope de Vega’s El Nuevo Mundo, descubierto por Cristóbal Colón (1614), alludes to the idea, common at the time of the conquest of the Americas, that the so-called “New World” was a land ruled by Satan, which is why the character of the “Demonio” in the passage from Lope cited by Carpentier identifies himself as “The King of the West.”15 Although the

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notion that pagan lands were “possessions” of the devil was not incompatible with Christian doctrine and served in fact as a justification of the conquistadors’ messianic fervor, it also connects to the ancient problem of the existence of evil in a world created by a benevolent and omnipotent god, a problem the Gnostic heretics attempted to solve. Moreover, the view of the devil, “the father of lies,” as ruler of the New World evokes the Gnostic idea that the world, as the creation of a demiurge who, compared to God, is scarcely better than a demon, therefore suffers from unreality and is a mere play of appearances. The title of this novel itself alludes to Christ’s retort to Pilate in John 18:36 (“My kingdom is not of this world”), which underscores the fallen and imperfect nature of the material world. By incorporating the notion of eternity to its narrative point of view, and by trying to translate this sub specie aeternitatis viewpoint into human language, El reino de este mundo produces a narration in which human history is examined coldly and from afar as a game of symbols that are shuffled and mixed up in time and space. It is a phenomenon similar to that described by Borges at the end of his story “Los teólogos” (1949): The end of the story can only be told in metaphors, since it happens in the kingdom of heaven, where there is no time. Perhaps one could say that Aurelian conversed with God and He is so uninterested in religious differences that He mistook him for John of Panonia. However, this would imply a confusion in the divine mind. It is more correct to say that in Paradise, Aurelian knew that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Panonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the hater and the hated, the accuser and the victim) formed a single person. (555–56)

The strangeness of Carpentier’s narrative style in El reino de este mundo has been frequently remarked upon by his critics and commentators. Vargas Llosa states, The narrator displays his formidable talent for transitions and places himself, sometimes using the free indirect style, sometimes not, in the perspective (that should not be confused with the point of view) of one or various characters, sometimes of large groups, for whom such secret animation of matter is an article of faith. In this way, without identifying with the point of view of these characters, preserving a minimum—often infinitesimal— distance from them, the narrator manages to subjectively imbue a historical

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reality with a sense of miracle and marvel, wthout however turning it into something fantastical, keeping it lightly attached to objective life, in which nevertheless legends and myths coexist, and often devour historical experience. (“¿Lo real maravilloso o artimañas literarias?”)

Derek Frost, for his part, points out “the tendency for images and events to emerge from the narrative like figures from a mist” (“Notes on Point of View in Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo”), and commenting on the well-known passage of the execution of Mackandal in chapter 8, J. Bradford Anderson underscores Carpentier’s stylistic complexities in this text: “The negotiations in this passage are extraordinarily complex. The omniscient narrator follows the eyes of the masters; suddenly, he could be a witness in the crowd, an embodied figure. He sees the eyes of the slaves and enters into their subjectivity. The phrase ‘What did whites know of Negro matters?’ could be the voice of a black narrator such as Ti Noel, who has a sense of what whites know and do not know. It could also, however, be the voice of a white narrator claiming a special knowledge derived from political sympathy or anthropological knowledge” (15). This sinuous, elusive, and metamorphic style, added to a vocabulary filled with archaisms and recondite allusions and the totalizing distancing imposed from the perspective of eternity, gives Carpentier’s text an appearance of otherness that reinforces the impression of sacredness the text seeks to produce. Recalling Otto’s terms, “Taken in the religious sense, that which is ‘mysterious’ is—to give it perhaps the most striking expression—the ‘wholly other’ (thateron, anyad, alienum), that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny,’ and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment” (26). It is thus not surprising that, with its aim of evoking the holy, the fourth and last part of El reino de este mundo is dedicated to the concept of fear. It is not, of course, the fear of the existentialists, which Carpentier chastises in his prologue as a “scatological delight” (9), but the stupor before the numinous described by Otto, which is already suggested in that part’s epigraph, taken from the mojiganga Las visiones de la muerte (ca. 1675) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca: Fear of these visions I had, but now

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After seeing these others, More do I fear them. (Carpentier, El reino de este mundo 132)16

In this case, the comical situation of the mojiganga is broadly suggestive: a group of actors have just finished representing an auto sacramental (mystery play) and because they must go put on the same show that same afternoon in another town, they go in their cart already costumed to represent the roles of the Soul, the Body, an Angel, the Devil and Death, with the predictably carnivalesque complications that ensue. Las visiones de la muerte parodies the genre of the autos sacramentales, one of Calderon’s favorite theatrical genres, and Carpentier’s quote from this piece may well be seen as a self-reflexive indication to his more alert readers about the profoundly artificial nature of El reino de este mundo. Moreover, by alluding to a patently unreal and farcical “fear” at the beginning of a portion of the novel in which phantasmagoria, unreality, and the feeling of the numinous predominate, Carpentier may well be signaling the markedly aesthetic nature of his appropriation of religious elements. The first segment of the fourth part, “La noche de las estatuas,” sets up the tone of dread and astonishment by means of the story of the last adventure of Solimán, the tormented manservant and ex-slave of Pauline Bonaparte. This narrative centers particularly on fascination, the third element of the numinous identified by Otto in his formula of the sacred as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans (12–40). Exiled in Rome with the retinue of the widow and daughters of the deposed Haitian king Henri Christophe, Solimán enjoys a picturesque and nearly idyllic existence, becoming an exotic subject of curiosity and admiration of the Roman populace and having a love affair with a Piamontese chambermaid of the Borghese Palace staff. An ambiance of mystery begins to be established through the allusion to the covers “in a new style” of the fashionable songs, whose copper engravings “showed cemeteries at midnight, Scottish lakes, sylphs surrounding a young hunter, damsels depositing a love-letter in a crack in an old Holm-Oak” (Carpentier, El reino de este mundo 134). The characters are thus in the romantic period, with its taste for Gothic tales and supernatural legends, the first deliberate attempt to fuse literature with religion in the modern era. In a night of drunkenness with the chambermaid, the woman leads Solimán with a lamp to explore the galleries of the abandoned palace, showing him the collection of “marbles turned bluish by the moonlight”

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(136). From his sub specie aeternitatis perspective, the narrator describes the numinous effect caused by that “white, cold, immobile world” of classical statues of nude goddesses and nymphs, and “two-horned men with goat’s feet, who must have had some family relation with the Devil” that Solimán gazes at, first with stupor then with growing alarm as, “with the gift drunkards have of seeing terrible things out of the corner of their eye,” Solimán thinks he sees the statues move (136). Otto observes that the sacred’s double nature, at once attractive and repulsive, fascinating and terrifying, is at once the strangest and most noteworthy phenomenon in the whole history of religion. The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own. The “mystery’ is for him not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels a something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dyonisiac element in the numen. (31)

The feeling of fascination becomes intensified in Solimán when the chambermaid shows him a room with a lone statue “of a totally nude woman, reclined on a bed, who seemed to offer an apple” (137). More surprised than drunk, Solimán caresses the desired image of Paulina Bonaparte in the Canova Venus his hands are recognizing, repeating as in a ritual the formerly habitual gestures, noticing that “the matter was different, but the forms were the same” (137), until the cold of the marble makes him imagine it is “a recently stiffened cadaver . . . that it might still be possible to return to life” (138). Delirious and terrified, filled with sacred horror, Solimán begins to “cry out, to give loud cries” (138). Those cries do not cease even after Solimán, ill with malaria, is taken back to his residence, where he dies invoking the help of Papa Legba, “a God who lived in faroff Dahomey,” so that he would open to him not only “the way back to Santo Domingo” (139), as the narrator states, but quite simply the way to the afterworld, since, as Emile Marcelin explains in “Les grands dieux du vodou haïtien” (1947),17 an article that Carpentier probably read:

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Papa Legba or Atibon-Legba is the god of doorways, the lord of junctions and crossroads and protector of houses . . . It is Legba who guards all entryways where good or bad spirits pass. No ceremony can begin without a prayer being addressed to him so that he will agree to open the barrier to the gods: Atibon Legba, l’ouvri bayé pou(r) moin, agoé! Papa Legba, l’ouvri bayé pou(r) moin, Pou(r) moin passer! Lo(rs) m’a tounin, m’ salué loa-yo. Vodou Legba, l’ouvri bayé pou(r) moin, Pou(r) moin ça rentrer! Lo(rs) m’a tou(r)nin, m’a remercié loa-yo. Abobo. (57)

It is Carpentier’s adaptation of the first two verses of this song that Solimán sings before he dies. “La noche de las estatuas” serves as the overture and invocation of themes that will reappear throughout the fourth part of El reino de este mundo, above all the themes of metamorphosis, death, and the sacred, which may also be seen as neo-baroque echoes of Calderón’s mojiganga. Thus, the narrative (although not Solimán) finds “the way back to Santo Domingo” and joins up with Ti Noel, the main Everyman or “ordinary mind” of the novel, in order to tell of the extraordinary days he has left to live. In chapter 2 of the fourth part, “La real casa,” we see an aged and senile Ti Noel in the midst of a carnivalesque, topsy-turvy world, dressed in Henri Christophe’s green silk jacket, seated among the ruins of his master’s old estate, now furnished with objects ransacked from the palace of Sans-Souci, among them “three volumes of the Grand Encyclopedia, on which he used to sit to eat sugar cane” (142). Like Solimán in Rome, old Ti Noel lives a pastoral idyll in which he is a benevolent monarch “who gave orders to the wind . . . filled with beautiful things the holes left in the ruined walls” and whose palace “used to fill up with peasants who brought their bamboo horns, their chachas, and kettledrums” (142–44). With the arrival of the republican mulattos in chapter 3, “Los agrimensores,” the idyll ends under the new regimentation imposed by the mulattos. Then Ti Noel rebels, and in his delirium evokes, as if he had been a saint, King Henri Christophe, whose “word had become stone and no longer lived among us” and whose amputated finger lay like a relic in

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Rome “inside a rock-crystal flask filled with brandy” (147). He remembers Mackandal’s power of lycanthropy and proceeds to transform himself, successively, into a bird, a horse, a wasp, an ant and, finally at the beginning of chapter 4, “Agnus Dei,” a goose (147–51). All of these disguises only manage to produce disillusionment in Ti Noel, as he understands that unlike Mackandal’s metamorphoses, done “to serve mankind,” his own had merely been attempts to “run away from the lands of men” (151). This recognition brings about the moment when, honoring his name (which in Creole means “Little Christmas”) and following the model of high modernism, which Borges adapts and strengthens in “El Aleph,” Ti Noel experiences his epiphany, his “supreme instant of lucidity” (151). The language and imagery of the narrator echo here the descriptions of the concept and experience of eternity, even as they remind us of the phraseology of Bombal and Borges: “He lived, in the space of a heartbeat, the most important moments of his life; he again saw the heroes who had revealed the strength and abundance of his far-off ancestors in Africa, making him believe in the possible germinations of the future. He felt countless centuries old. A cosmic tiredness, as of a planet burdened with stones, fell upon his shoulders wasted by so many blows, labors, and rebellions. Ti Noel had spent his inheritance, and in spite of reaching the ultimate misery, he returned what he had received. He was a body of timeworn flesh” (151). Also, as in the high modernists’ “secular sacred” and the returns to everyday life and materiality we have seen in Borges and Bombal, Ti Noel’s revelation is devoid of mysticism or, rather, seeks to transfer the categories of the mystical experience to the earthly realm, “the kingdom of this world.” After the poetical and sublime tone of the passage I have just cited, the lines that follow it, reminiscent of the “moral” of an old-fashioned story, seem like an instance of bathos: And he understood now that Man never knows for whom he suffers and waits. He suffers and waits and works for people he will never know, and who in turn will suffer, wait, and work for others who also will never be happy, since Man always longs for a happiness beyond the portion allotted to him. But the greatness of Man lies precisely in wanting to better his condition, in imposing Tasks upon himself. In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no greatness to conquer, since over there everything is in an established hierarchy, a revealed mystery, existence without end, the impossibility of

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sacrifice, repose, enjoyment. That is why, loaded with pains and Tasks, beautiful in his misery, Man can only find his greatness, his full measure, in the Kingdom of This World. (151–52)

Nevertheless, this passage is important to understanding Carpentier’s aims. The key term here is “greatness.” In this context, the word “greatness” is analogous to the concept of the sublime, which, as Otto points out, “is closely similar to that of the numinous, and is well adapted to excite it and to be excited by it, while each tends to pass over into the other” (42). Like the sublime in aesthetics and the holy in religion, greatness, as Carpentier’s narrator explains, can only be perceived and experienced in the context of differences, of limits and limitations that allow it to be measured, and these can only be found in the material world. In the “Kingdom of Heaven,” that is, in the undifferentiated and indifferent context of eternity, greatness becomes imperceptible and irrelevant. The revelation of these contrasts is sealed by the twin “visions of death” with which the novel concludes, both of which are eminently worldly: the first is the hurricane, the “great green wind, rising from the Ocean” whose appearance coincides (with marvelous realism’s typical ambiguity) with Ti Noel’s “declaration of war” against the “new masters,” and the second is embodied in the more earthly image, although still linked to the aerial medium, of “that wet vulture, who took advantage of every death, who waited for the sun with outspread wings” (152–53). The vulture’s “feathered cross,” which folds up and disappears in the thickets of Bois Caiman (153), exemplifies the reverse movement through which El reino de este mundo returns the symbols of religious transcendence to the material world from which they have emerged.

RULFO, OR THE SACRED Gradually, the specific enigma I was working on began to concern me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What sort of sentence (I asked myself) would be composed by an absolute mind? BORGES, “LA ESCRITURA DEL DIOS” (OBRAS COMPLETAS I 597)

The year 2005 saw numerous academic conferences and meetings held in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Pedro Páramo,

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and in the years that followed many publications appeared concerning that anniversary.18 By then Pedro Páramo had achieved in Latin America and much of the world not only a canonic status but a condition very similar to that of a sacred book, perhaps the first in Latin American literature to achieve such an exalted state since the beginnings of the process of literary appropriation of religious ideas this book has been following. As Jorge Zepeda has shown in his documented study of the first publication of Rulfo’s novel, after an initial moment of confusion among its first Mexican critics and a more favorable reception by other Latin American writers, such as the Uruguayan Mario Benedetti and the Peruvian José María Arguedas (Zepeda 273), subsequent print runs of Pedro Páramo grew ever larger, and its reputation solidified as a work that “signified a change in the ways in which the Mexican novel was conceived until the 1950s, since it proposed a new way of reading” (Eustolia Urióstegui 222). Pedro Páramo’s reception was framed by a polemic between nationalism and cosmopolitanism taking place in Mexico during those years, which resulted, as Zepeda puts it, in a “conflictive synthesis” in which Rulfo’s novel seemed to harmonize an innovative narrative style with a “rural and profoundly Mexican theme, in consonance with the ‘national essence’ sought in the ‘Mexican philosophy’ of the Hiperión group” (Pérez Daniel 326). Indeed, similar to El reino de este mundo, Pedro Páramo proposed a new readerly contract for the Latin American novel and, to the confusion of some of its readers, it did so without attaching a prologue manifesto such as Carpentier’s. However, unlike El reino de este mundo, which was modestly received after its publication in 1949 (Rodríguez Monegal “Historia y ficción en Carpentier y Borges” 8), Pedro Páramo was published amid the excitement produced by the publication of Rulfo’s short-story collection El llano en llamas in 1953, and in a few years it had achieved numerous printings, enthusiastic reviews by critics from Mexico and overseas, and translations into German (1958), English, and French (1959; Pérez Daniel 325–26). Composed of fragmentary, unnumbered segments in dislocated narrative order, with multiple monologuing voices, abundant narrative ellipses, characters with allusive and evocative names, archetypal circumstances reminiscent of myth and religion (patriarchal genealogies, voyages of return to the homeland, descents to the underworld, among others), and an open evocation of the afterlife, Pedro Páramo has encouraged or tolerated a wide range of different readings and interpretations. The additional fact that Rulfo did not publish further narrative fiction, thus surrounding his

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novel with an aura of silence, helped to give this text an enigmatic, mysterious, and suggestive reputation. As with sacred texts, Pedro Páramo is a book whose symbols readers continue to interpret and reinterpret in search of revelations that the text, by its mere existence, seems to promise. It is hardly necessary at this point to demonstrate the presence of religious aspects in Pedro Páramo’s characters, plot, and language. The story it tells of a powerful man who contaminates an entire town with his guilt is framed from the beginning in questions of good and evil. Comala, a “Purgatory at ground level” (in Benedetti’s words, 125), inspired in part by La amortajada (as Miramontes has decisively shown), is a town of the dead whose wandering souls await, perhaps in vain, for their redemption. Not even the town’s priest, Father Rentería, can save himself from the wide net of complicity Pedro Páramo has woven, since organized religion appears in this novel as a worldly institution that is as liable to be corrupted as any other. In fact, critical opinions about the possible ethical judgment presented in Pedro Páramo about Mexican society and culture have wavered between pessimism and optimism: in a reading that privileges the sociological and historical references in the novel, José Carlos González Boixo sees it as a work that expresses deep anguish and spiritual desolation; in contrast, Roland Forgues argues that Rulfo offers in his novel’s poetic language a “redeeming word,” and Ivette Jiménez de Báez, through a reading focused on the novel’s mythical and symbolic references, proposes that Pedro Páramo is an archetypal and hopeful tale that narrates the descent of a hero—Juan Preciado—to the underworld, from which he will return in a liberating transformation. These and other commentaries on the role of religion in Pedro Páramo center fundamentally on what we could call the work’s ideological background, the ideas the novel communicates about religion and its role in society. I am more interested in highlighting, however, another aspect of religion in the text: how religion affects this novel’s formal aspects, endowing it with some of the traits associated with the holy. It is important to remember that, as was pointed out in chapter 1, the turn of the nineteenth and beginnings of the twentieth century saw the publication of a broad range of works of philosophy, anthropology, and history of religion that offered diverse analyses of religion and the experience of the sacred: from the writings of Nietzsche and Freud to Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Émile Durkheim, Form in Gothic (1912) by Wilhelm Worringer, The Decline of the West

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(1917) by Oswald Spengler, and Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, among many others. Interest in the systematic study of religion coincided and in many cases interacted productively with late nineteenth-century culture’s interest in occultism and irrationalism. In chapter 1, I singled out Flaubert as an instance of some of these tendencies, but it must be recognized that the tendency to appropriate religious images and ideas in order to buttress the prestige of literary discourse became even more deliberate and generalized among the French symbolists and their Latin American admirers, the modernistas. As Octavio Paz has memorably observed about the notion of “analogy” in modernismo, belief in the rhythms and concordances of the universe exalts the poet to the status of a religious initiate, a priest, or a shaman: If [the poet] hears the universe as a language, he also speaks the universe. In the poet’s words we hear the world, the universal rhythm. But the poet’s knowledge is a forbidden one and his priesthood is a sacrilege: his words, even when they do not expressly deny Christianism, dissolve it into vaster and more ancient beliefs. . . . The passion of Christ, as various poems by [Rubén] Darío unequivocally express, is just an instantaneous image in the whirl of ages and mythologies. Analogy affirms cyclical time and ends up in syncretism. This non-Christian, sometimes anti-Christian note, infused with a strange religiosity, was absolutely new in Hispanic poetry. (Los hijos del limo 135)

The symbolist and modernista affinity with occultism and the comparative study of religions was continued in the artistic experiments of the avant-gardes, particularly in their insistence on returning to cultural origins by means of the positive valorization of “the primitive.” Among the texts I have just mentioned, many of which were disseminated in Spanish by the Revista de Occidente during the 1920s, Otto’s The Idea of the Holy stands out because, in addition to offering a theory about the emotional effects of religion, it also offered something similar to an instruction manual of rhetorical and artistic strategies to arouse the feeling of the sacred. Let us take a more detailed look at the notions Otto expounds in chapter 9 of The Idea of the Holy, “Means of Expression of the Numinous.” Otto divides the different forms of expressing the feeling of the sacred into two basic categories: the direct and the indirect. By direct, Otto means the attempt to transmit by means of language, through exhortations and ver-

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bal descriptions, the emotion of the holy, about which he cautions that there is no “transmission” as such of the numinous feeling but rather an evocation of it in the mind of someone already predisposed to receive that experience. “There is, of course, no transmission of it in the proper sense of the word; it cannot be ‘taught,’ it must be ‘awakened’ from the spirit. . . . What is incapable of being so handed down is this numinous basis and background to religion, which can only be induced, incited, and aroused,” Otto states (61). Moreover, the most effective evocation of the numinous feeling occurs through “actual ‘holy’ situations or their representation in description” (60); that is, by means of the re-creation of an environment that promotes the spiritual, particularly a re-creation by way of the voice in an interpersonal situation. “But the mere word, even when it comes as a living voice, is powerless without the ‘spirit in the heart’ of the hearer to move him to apprehension,” Otto cautions (61); when “the wind of the spirit blows,” he adds, not only spoken but also written language may become a sufficient stimulus to make the feeling of the holy appear: “He who ‘in the spirit’ reads the written word lives in the numinous, though he may have neither notion of it nor name for it, nay, though he may be unable to analyze any feeling of his own and so make explicit to himself the nature of that numinous strand running through the religious experience” (61). Among the indirect forms of evoking the holy, Otto underscores the importance of the sublime as an analogy to the sacred and as a more culturally refined alternative to the mere strangeness of the horrible or the grotesque to cause the feeling of tremendum that is part of the experience of the holy (62–63). Moreover, following Schiller, he calls miracle “the dearest child of Faith” (63) and rejects the importance of miracles for the more culturally refined forms of religion, pointing out that “we see how, on the more enlightened levels, ‘miracle’ begins to fade away; how Christ is at one with Mohammed and Buddha in declining the role of mere wonderworker” (64). Currently, in the main religious traditions, the feeling of mystery that is another basic element of the holy is often produced by means of the occultation and revelation of religious messages through the use of more than one language in liturgy or by mixing archaic with contemporary words: There are other manifestations of this tendency of the feeling of the “mysterious” to be attracted to objects and aspects of experience analogous to it

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in being “uncomprehended.” It finds its most unqualified expression in the spell exercised by the only half intelligible or wholly unintelligible language of devotion, and in the unquestionably real enhancement of the awe of the worshipper which this produces. Instances of this are the ancient traditional expressions, still retained despite their obscurity, in our Bible and hymnals; the special emotional virtue attaching to words like “Hallelujah,” Kyrie eleison, “Selah,” just because they are “wholly other” and convey no clear meaning; the Latin in the service of the Mass, felt by the Catholic to be, not a necessary evil, but something especially holy; the Sanskrit in the Buddhist Mass of China and Japan; the “language of the gods” in the ritual sacrifice of Homer; and many similar cases. (64–65)

Otto’s observations, as we will see shortly, are pertinent not just to read the holy in El reino de este mundo, with its style filled with a cultured vocabulary and abstruse references, but also to do likewise in Pedro Páramo, whose language, so close to orality, to the living voice, becomes strange when submitted to the dislocations of the narrative structure of Rulfo’s novel. Continuing his discussion of the rhetoric of the sublime and the indirect ways to evoke the sacred, Otto directs his attention to the visual arts, music, and literature. Based on the theories of Worringer, he asserts that the verticality of Gothic art is an attempt to give concrete form to the sublime (67–68) and proposes that the three great tropes of the numinous in the arts are darkness, emptiness, and silence (68–71). Returning to Rulfo, we see that even the most literal reading of Pedro Páramo immediately comes across these same tropes in the novel’s text. Suffice it to recall the deep and sometimes chilling silences that interrupt this text so full of voices and sounds, such as when Juan Preciado hears the screams of the dead Toribio Aldrete and then suddenly there is silence: “No, there was no way to judge the depth of the silence that followed that scream. It was as if the earth existed in a vacuum. No sound: not even of my breathing or the beating of my heart. As if the very sound of consciousness had been stilled” (36). It is well to remember that one of the various titles Rulfo essayed for his novel is Los murmullos (The Murmurings), an expression that evokes voices bordering on silence. Critics have remarked on the presence of musical allusions in Pedro Páramo; the silences in the novel become even more suggestive in this context when we take into account Otto’s comments on music and the holy: “Not even music, which else can give manifold expression to all the feelings of the mind, has any positive

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way to express ‘the holy.’ Even the most consummate Mass-music can only give utterance to the holiest, most numinous moment in the Mass—the moment of transubstantiation—by sinking into stillness: no mere momentary pause, but an absolute cessation of sound long enough for us to ‘hear the silence’ itself” (70). Darkness and shadows also predominate in Pedro Páramo, not only because the dimension of sound plays a more prominent role than that of sight in this text but also because in this novel we frequently find descriptions of dark and enclosed spaces and of nocturnal scenes, from the “dark, seemingly desolate, rooms” in Eduviges Dyada’s house (13) to the blackness of the tomb in which Juan Preciado lies next to Dorotea (61–65) and the shadow-filled room where Susana San Juan dreams. The links between darkness and mysticism are well known, but it is worth noting that in Pedro Páramo darkness is rarely absolute; instead, descriptions abound of semidarkness or half-light, whether those of a starry night or a rainy day, in ways evocative of Otto’s observation about the use of light and shadow in sacred spaces: The darkness must be such as is enhanced and made all the more perceptible by contrast with some last vestige of brightness, which it is, as it were, on the point of extinguishing; hence the “mystical” effect begins with semidarkness. Its impression is rendered complete if the factor of the sublime comes to unite with and supplement it. The semidarkness that glimmers in vaulted halls, or beneath the branches of a lofty forest glade, strangely quickened and stirred by the mysterious play of half-lights, has always spoken eloquently to the soul, and the builders of temples, mosques, and churches have made full use of it. (68)

No less significant is the impression of emptiness that is conveyed, from the very beginning, by the novel’s title: Pedro Páramo (páramo in Spanish means “wasteland”). The desolate character of Comala is emphasized time and again throughout the novel, as when, in a particularly eerie segment, Damiana Cisneros tells Juan Preciado, “This town is filled with echoes. . . . There was a time when night after night I could hear the sounds of a fiesta. I could hear the noise even from the Media Luna. I would walk into town to see what the uproar was about, and this is what I would see: just what we’re seeing now. Nothing. No one. The streets as empty as they are now” (45).

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Empty distance, remote vacancy, [Otto observes,] is, as it were, the sublime in the horizontal. The wide-stretching desert, the boundless uniformity of the steppe, have real sublimity, and even in us Westerners they set vibrating chords of the numinous along with the note of the sublime, according to the principle of association of feelings. . . . Chinese architecture, which is essentially an art in the laying out and grouping of buildings, makes a wise and very striking use of this fact. . . . Still more interesting is the part played by the factor of void or emptiness in Chinese painting. . . . Not only are there pictures upon which “almost nothing” is painted, not only is it an essential feature of their style to make the strongest impression with the fewest strokes and the scantiest means, but there are very many pictures—especially such as are connected with contemplation—which impress the observer with the feeling that the void itself is depicted as a subject, is indeed the main subject of the picture. . . . For “void” is, like darkness and silence, a negation, but a negation that does away with every “this” and “here,” in order that the “wholly other” may become actual. (69–70)

I am not proposing that Juan Rulfo specifically read Otto’s work and used it as a sort of rhetorical guide to evoke the holy, although Otto’s book was still sufficiently well known thirty years after its first publication in Spanish as Lo santo (1925) to be extensively discussed in a key section of Octavio Paz’s El arco y la lira, which was published just one year after Pedro Páramo.19 Otto himself points out that darkness, emptiness, silence, and the sublime in general are widely disseminated and recognized elements of religious discourse about the holy. I am proposing instead that, whatever his sources may have been, Rulfo makes use of religious discourse to endow his text with that power to astonish and overwhelm that Flaubert attributed to the best novels. Moreover, I propose that Rulfo adds to the triad of tropes I have just mentioned still other elements that help give Pedro Páramo an aura of sacredness. Chief among these are the novel’s well-known dislocated and fragmentary structure; the use of multiple coding, which allows the novel to be read at different symbolic levels; and the fact that in the narrative itself there are characters—specifically, Pedro Páramo and Susana San Juan—who evoke in others the feeling of the holy. Pedro Páramo’s fragmentary structure, which is derived from the avantgarde novelistic tradition of the early twentieth century, operates not only to produce an impression of narrative impersonality and otherness, but it also adds an element of mystery and enigma to the text that invites read-

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ers to participate in a process of decipherment and a search for the text’s coherence. It is a process analogous to that through which many of the sacred books of both East and West were created, from the Bhagavad Gita to the Bible, which are constituted by fragments initially collected from oral traditions, fragments whose divinely inspired nature has been subject to a debate that ultimately declares some to be canonical and others apocryphal (Graham 8198–200). The readers of Pedro Páramo are confronted by the challenge of deciding, through an attentive and devoted reading, which of the novel’s fragments contribute most decisively to the meaning of the work and if any of them are relatively unnecessary or optional. In turn, the strangeness and otherness of that fragmentary narrative also evokes a more literal version of the God’s eye view Flaubert demanded of the novel. If the author in his work must be “like God in the universe,” one may well ask—as Borges does in certain fictions which Rulfo probably did read—what the writing of an all-knowing and all-seeing god would be like, if the deity condescended to write? Might not this writing appear to mere mortals as nonlinear, fragmentary, plural, unhierarchical, and enigmatic as well as total? Written from the standpoint of eternity, the story of the crumbling tyrant Pedro Páramo and his devastation of Comala might well look, as happens in Rulfo’s text, like a collection of fragments transcribed through the device of chaotic enumeration. Once again, we must emphasize the close links between the notions of eternity and of totality. Recalling Boethius’s expression interminabilis vitae tota simul ac perfecta possesio, it becomes clear that narrating as if from eternity is, in the three novels I have discussed in this chapter, a strategy employed to produce an impression of totalization, of complete command over a subject or a process. Until the arrival of the Boom novels, Pedro Páramo was the novel that most explicitly made use of the standpoint of eternity to create the effect of a narrative that encompasses a multiplicity of stories, incidents, and perspectives associated with a community. For its part, multiple coding—a persistent trait of Latin American textuality since colonial times that became a self-conscious device in modern literature—is manifested in Pedro Páramo by means of a system of symbolic allusions that can be decoded in various ways, depending on which of these allusions is assigned greater weight in the text. The symbolic allusions in Pedro Páramo range from character names that often evoke classical or Judeo-Christian mythical contexts (Eduviges Dyada, Donis, Susana

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San Juan, Juan Preciado) to the structures of kinship and genealogy, as Ivette Jiménez de Báez has shown in her book Juan Rulfo, del páramo a la esperanza (117–18). Within the narrative itself, the relation of the inhabitants of Comala with Pedro Páramo, and the near-absolute power he wields over their lives and properties, abundantly displays the “feeling of dependence” and the “awe” or “dread” that, in Otto’s terms, are caused by the presence of the sacred. Like an idol, Pedro Páramo acts at a distance by means of his henchman Fulgor Sedano, whose very name suggests a radiance (fulgor) that can be negative (seda-no; “not-silk”) and even deadly, and also like an idol— as befits his given name, Pedro—he dies at the end of the novel “collapsed like a pile of rocks” (Rulfo 124). But this demiurge that is Pedro Páramo himself adores another immobile and numinous figure in the text: Susana San Juan, who, like an archaic mother goddess, arouses Pedro’s fascination and desire even as she hides from him in the shadows of her room and in the mysterium tremendum of her dreams and visions. This chain of idols in the text of Pedro Páramo suggests the possibility of a creative mise en abyme similar to that of well-known stories by Borges, such as “Las ruinas circulares”—stories in which readers feel themselves part of a potentially endless chain of beings that create each other successively at different levels. Such a feeling of infinity, which is a sort of intellectual vastness, is yet another way in which the text evokes the sublime and the sense of the holy to which the sublime is linked. However, Pedro Páramo’s mimicry of a sacred text is not simply an episode, or even a culmination, of the Flaubertian project of writing a book that would provoke amazement and stupefaction in its readers, although this is certainly something that Pedro Páramo does, as a great many critics and readers can attest. In my view, this novel’s evocation of the numinous or the sacred is ultimately a foundational gesture. Pedro Páramo is certainly not a sacralization of certain aspects of Mexican history and culture—in this respect, it does exactly the opposite, as many of its readers have observed: it produces a profoundly critical, hollowed-out version of Mexico, turning this country’s recent history, including the Mexican Revolution, into an empty wasteland. Nevertheless, it is this action of emptying out, of laying waste, as in the mythical deluges common to many religious traditions, that marks the text’s both sacred and foundational character. It is not so much what happens in the story but the act of telling the story itself that is

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sacred. And it is sacred because it is foundational, because the story being told is a story of creation, though not of a biblical creation ex nihilo but a more modern one of a second creation, the only one possible in “the kingdom of this world”: that of a new novel and a new nation that will rise from the ruins and relics of a prior and vanished order.

Four

I N S E A RC H O F T H E S AC R E D B O O K Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, José Lezama Lima

I have reached, now, the ineffable center of my tale; now begins, here, my desperation as a writer. BORGES, “EL ALEPH” (624)

Would he find La Maga? CORTÁZAR, RAYUELA (119)

I

n a brief and amusing text titled “El profeta de América Latina” (2007), written to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gabriel García Márquez’s eightieth birthday, Mexican novelist Jorge Volpi imagines that archaeologists of the far future digging up the ruins of Harvard’s Widener Library have gleefully discovered a famous ancient volume, believed to have been lost after a nuclear war. According to the narrator, its author is, none other than GGM, one of the last prophets of the Middle Ages (476– 2025). Although not in optimal condition—the Second Atomic War completely destroyed this region of the planet—palaeographers are convinced

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that it is the only known copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude (c1967), the great mythological saga of the ancient dwellers of Latin America. The discovery has been hailed as a unique event: although it was known that the inhabitants of this region of the world venerated the teachings collected in this Book, the natural heir to the Bible or the Qur’an, many skeptics had doubted of its existence. (173)

Half-jokingly, Volpi highlights the textual sacralization of García Márquez’s masterwork and, at the end of his text, in the words of the journalist from the far future, he alludes also to the subsequent desacralization of One Hundred Years of Solitude by newer generations of readers and writers: “Just like it happened with the Bible, the Illiad or the Icelandic sagas, we can no longer read One Hundred Years of Solitude as a religious text, but only as a literary work: one of a few works which, regardless of their authors’ prophetic intentions, or their religious or mystical connotations, can still be read with amazement and pleasure in spite of the ten centuries that have passed since its writing” (175). For his part, in the article “Rayuela y la iglesia cortazariana” (2013), written in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Cortázar’s Rayuela, Colombian novelist Santiago Gamboa expresses feelings similar to Volpi’s about García Márquez and in a similarly ironic tone, although this time they are based on his personal experiences: What is most striking [about Rayuela], from today’s perspective, is what we could call the “Cortazarian Church,” an army of readers-mujaheddins in Spain and Latin America (except for France, where he lived, Cortázar had scant impact in other languages) who would give up their life for him, who swore in his name, and knew by heart whole passages from Rayuela. More than readers, Cortázar had followers, supporters, believers. The explanation for such charisma is probably the fact that Rayuela was in its time a tremendous model for living, a way to live and experience human relations. Cortázar’s great revolution in Rayuela was to proclaim that daily life should always be subject to aesthetic consideration, and in this he truly was ahead of his times. Artists like Sophie Calle, whose works are “interventions” about her own life, seem to have emerged from him. I remember my female schoolmates at Bogotá’s Universidad Javeriana on the day of Cortázar’s death, February 12, 1984. They were Cortázar’s widows, all dressed in black. My city’s “Cortazarian Church” was open for an

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all-night vigil and we were there, so far from everything that seemed so important to us in our rainy and provincial corner of the world. I didn’t dress in mourning, but I did keep silent for some 24 hours in a sign of cosmic disgust, and when I could speak again I said I’d go live in Paris. I was all of seventeen years old. There was also a universal proclamation of sorrow by the United Cronopios Internationale. In the “Cortazarian Church” we were all cronopios, of course, and this is something that, with time, marks an epochal difference: today Rayuela is only a novel (no longer a sacred text), and in spite of its enormous charisma, the truth is that our enthusiasm declines at the sight of some of its plot elements, such as the group of pseudointellectual guys disrespecting a woman, La Maga, just because she gets lost in the Baroque convolutions of the Serpent’s Club (“this is Meccano 7 and you’re barely at level 2,” they tell her), but they stay with her because all of them basically want to have sex with her. According to the narrator, Oiveira [the protagonist] loves her, but his love is mostly displayed in his sexual jealousy or in the nostalgia he feels when at last La Maga goes away. Talita doesn’t come off well, either. That sort of primordial machismo that today makes us blush, was invisible in the sixties. The novel’s intellectual exhibitionism is also a bit embarrassing. (11)

Argentine narrator Ana María Shua also writes from experience in “Sagradas escrituras de un tal Cortázar” (2015). Alluding to the “mad Cortazarian passion in which my generation had lived,” Shua attests when one speaks of Cortázar’s literature, the words Bible, sacred texts, catechumens, reappear again and again, no matter how much we (apostate) Argentine writers try to deny the religious influence JC had in our lives. Like Quixotic, like Borgesian, the word Cortazarian became for us an adjective that went beyond literature and entered our lives. There is a Cortazarian way to get to know a city, of squishing the toothpaste tube, of finding each other deliberately by chance. It’s part of the cronopico system of belief to take as given that chance events don’t exist, that they’re really signs of a code that only a Cortazarian is capable of deciphering, that there is a mysterious parallel reality, an Other World that peeks out partially into ours and that only initiates are capable to recognizing and, in the best of cases, have access to by means of ephemeral passageways. For teenagers in the sixties, as for many other teenagers from then on, Rayuela was a sort of Bible. The relationship is undeniable. The nov-

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el includes a history-story that initiates must know, and establishes codes of conduct which, when omitted or violated, lead to the initiate’s immediate expulsion. Rayuela includes its Leviticus and its Deuteronomy, and if its characters’ actions are intended as models, Cortázar also establishes the morellianas, in which he not only establishes his precepts of how to write like a Real Contemporary Writer, but also how one should feel, perceive, and behave.

Only in recent times, and retrospectively, have critics begun to more clearly understand the presence and the depth of religious and sacred elements in the canonical novels of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s. During the Boom period itself, the strangeness and newness of these novels were measured almost exclusively in political and aesthetic terms. This was particularly evident in works of literary criticism, interviews, debates, and reminiscences as varied as La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969) by Carlos Fuentes, El Boom de la novela hispanoamericana (1972) by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Los nuestros (1966) by Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Literatura en la Revolución y revolución en la literatura (1970) by Óscar Collazos and Julio Cortázar y Mario Vargas Llosa, and Historia personal del “boom” (1972) by José Donoso. In these and other texts of the sixties and seventies, discussion about the distinctive traits of the “new Latin American novel” focused on aspects such as their freer use of the various regional dialects and registers of the Spanish language; their daring experimentation with novelistic form and their rejection of literary realism; their fusion of cosmopolitanism with regionalism; their mixture of allusions to elite as well as popular culture; their greater or lesser degree of political engagement with leftist causes; and their totalizing vision of Latin American history and culture. Religious elements in these novels, however, went largely unremarked. This was partly due to the increased secularization in Western intellectual and cultural life since the end of the nineteenth century, which seemed to have reached its apex with the rise of Communist regimes, which were doctrinally atheistic, in Russia and even China in the Far East. After World War II, religion and spirituality were definitively marginalized in international ideological and political debate in the midst of the tense political climate of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In Latin America, Cuba had carried out the first socialist revolution in the region to successfully defy the United States, arousing utopian but also decidedly secular hopes of social change.

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Even after the rise of “liberation theology” in the early 1970s, it was not until after events such as the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua (with the important participation of left-wing religious leaders) and the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979 that religion once again became a significant part of cultural and political discourse on the world stage. Thus, the religious concepts the Boom novels had assimilated into their makeup partly by following the example of the Anglo-American and European high modernists (Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner) and of Latin American precursors such as Borges, Carpentier, and Rulfo faded from view amid the Boom novels’ abundant cultural, historical, and political references of a secular nature and also due to religion’s seeming lack of relevance in the intellectual environment of the 1960s and 1970s. It is reasonable to ask why, in such an unwelcoming environment, Latin American writers were interested enough in religion to try to endow their novels with some of the traits of the world’s various sacred texts. It wasn’t just because they were following the example of the high modernists (such as Joyce’s epiphanies) and of writers like Borges or Rulfo (think of the Aleph or the talking dead of the haunted town of Comala). Suffice it to recall that the 1960s were characterized by worldwide struggles for social change—anticolonialism, the youth rebellion, the rise of feminism and the sexual revolution, the African American civil rights struggle—and that these phenomena often also had a spiritual dimension: from the nonviolent resistance inspired by Gandhi and framed with biblical references of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the pantheistic hippie subculture in the United States and Europe to Latin American liberation theology, with its attempt to explicitly reconcile the revolutionary struggles of the region’s poor with the social teachings of Christianity.1 It made sense, then, for the authors of novels as ambitious as those of the Boom to seek out in the sacred scriptures of Christianity and other religions a model to create a new totalizing novel that would address the concerns of a region as vast and diverse as Latin America. However, unlike the linear narratives of the nineteenth-century “total novels,” from Balzac and Manzoni to Galdós and Tolstoy, both the Boom novels and sacred scriptures were often structured as a conjunction of multiple fragmentary texts whose unity was presumed to be based on an “eternal” perspective that would reconcile these texts within a providential plan. Paradoxically, in order to portray in a condensed way the totality of Latin American historical experience, the Boom novelists realized they

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had to discard the limitations of historical, successive time and adopt, as Borges proposed in many of his essays and stories, the overflowing time of eternity. An exception that proves the rule about the general tendency to overlook religion’s role in the Boom novels is Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1971 book García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, the first major study of the fiction of the Colombian author, who was still a close friend of Vargas Llosa at the time. As soon as it came out, this book provoked a polemic between Vargas Llosa and the Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, which took place in the form of two articles by Rama criticizing Historia de un deicidio: “Demonios, vade retro” and “El fin de los demonios,” and two replies by Vargas Llosa: “El regreso de Satán” and “Resurrección de Belcebú, o la disidencia creadora.” All were published in the Montevideo journal Marcha between May and October of 1972 and soon afterward collected in García Márquez y la problemática de la novela (1973). In “Demonios, vade retro,” Rama notes that in his critical terminology, Vargas Llosa refers to novelistic creation as an act of “deicide” (killing God) and to writing as an action motivated by an author’s need to exorcise his “demons” and complains that such a language “takes us back fully to theology” (Problemática de la novela 7). Rama is scandalized that in the mid-twentieth century, Vargas Llosa “reconstructs the thesis of the irrational (if not divine, at least demonic) origin of the literary work” and accuses him of abandoning the realist aesthetic (Problemática de la novela 8). Vargas Llosa defends himself by invoking his right to use whatever metaphors he deems appropriate to describe literary phenomena without the obligation to use the politicized terminology then in vogue. He declares, In fact, the difference between “deicide” and “productor” [Rama’s preferred term to refer to an author] is a difference between metaphors: the first borrows its term from religion and the second from economics, and what is amusing is that both Rama and I are laymen with regard to the disciplines from which we are taking images to explain literature. I don’t think this is at all bad: literature will continue to be alive as long as it continues to be totalizing, continuing to nourish itself from all of human experience, and as long as it is necessary to recur to “all” of human experience to explain literature as a whole. The advantage of this “totalizing” conception of literature over the sociological view proposed by Rama is that it encompasses the latter, although stripping away its blinders, its monopolistic pretensions. (Problemática de la novela 181–82)

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Ultimately, both Vargas Llosa and Rama were partly right: Rama was right in pointing out the “nineteenth-century origin” of Vargas Llosa’s thesis and its affinity with the romantic and postromantic legacy, while the Peruvian author in turn was right to relate it to his preference for totalizing novels. In fact, Vargas Llosa’s assertion that “to write novels is an act of rebellion against reality, against God, against that creation of God which is reality” (Historia de un deicidio 85) consciously echoed Gustave Flaubert’s thesis that a good novelist should be like an invisible but omnipresent deity in his work. With his keen intuition as an artist and fiction writer himself, Vargas Llosa implicitly recognizes throughout Historia de un deicidio García Márquez’s intention to mimic aspects of sacred writing in One Hundred Years of Solitude; nevertheless, his analysis does not go much beyond a study of the Colombian’s biographical and bibliographical sources and a description of his narrative techniques. In the sections of his book devoted to “Magic,” “Miracles,” “Myths and Legends,” and “Fantasy” in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Vargas Llosa centers on identifying and describing these elements rather than interpreting them, ultimately explaining their presence in this novel by invoking García Márquez’s “overwhelming and totalizing impulse” to portray all aspects of human existence (Historia de un deicidio 528). Significantly, Vargas Llosa does not use in his book the term magical realism, which was already beginning to be applied in relation to García Márquez by the early 1970s.2 Aside from the confusion it creates about literary genres and movements, the nebulous concept of “magical realism” has at least the virtue of recognizing that the fictions of the Boom were in some way connected to the origins of religious thought—although magic is not rigorously speaking a form of religion. Another of this term’s virtues is that it signals a desire to identify the innovations brought by the Boom’s novels to the Latin American narrative tradition. “Magical realism” posited that such novelty did not lie only in the novels’ formal experiments nor in their cosmopolitanism but that it was instead a sort of “added value” that was difficult to pin down, through which these massive and complex novels, filled with cultural references of all kinds, cast a sort of spell upon their readers, proposing to them a new readerly contract that was difficult but also attractive and very different from that which had ruled in the realist novels. Magical realism (with the emphasis always on “magic”) was an ever-uncomfortable and unsatisfactory term that tried to name the strange and mysterious effect caused by these new novels on their readers: How did

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these long, intellectually challenging, and often hard-to-read novels manage to elicit loyalty and even devotion in a great number of readers? That effect, we now know, and as Volpi’s comments attest, may be understood more precisely as the feeling of the sacred or the holy. In the Boom novels, even those distanced from “magical realism” or “the fantastic,” such as those by Carlos Fuentes or Mario Vargas Llosa, the feeling of the sacred is evoked through a wide range of techniques and devices aimed at producing an impression of textual strangeness, a sometimes radical defamiliarization that makes readers wonder what sort of text it is that they are trying to read. Along with that initial strangeness, other effects—which we might call “sacralization effects”—come into play to evoke the twin feelings of the sublime and the holy. Partly inspired by Otto’s chapter 9, and partly from my own observations, I have concocted a list of these “sacralization effects”: • Eternity as a metaphor of totalization. • The narrative pattern of the quest, derived from the tradition of adventure romances as described by Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture—which has been spiritualized in many religious traditions—from fourth-century-AD Christian Gnosticism to twelfth-century-AD Islamic Sufi poems such as Attar’s The Conference of the Birds.3 • The direct portrayal of the holy through situations and characters associated with the numinous and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. • The strategic use of sonic and visual imagery evocative of the sublime and the holy: silence, darkness, emptiness. • The presence and use of prophetic discourse in both of its functions: as an expression of protest and as prognostication. • The use of orality (frequently in opposition to writing) to generate effects of linguistic vitality, which Otto calls viva vox, that appeal more to the emotions than to reason and, offering a sense of familiarity amid the strangeness, serve to encourage the readers’ confidence in the text. • Linguistic plurality: the encounter of two or more foreign languages in the text or of various dialects or registers of the same language, including learned or erudite terms. This plurality in turn produces a defamiliarization of language in general. • Linguistic defamilarization, which leads to a view of language as

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something sacred in itself, as a hermetic code whose decipherment can produce revelations about reality. French thinker Jacques Rancière has written eloquently about the Christian idea of “the Word made flesh” and how it allows us to read fiction and poetry politically, as words are turned into deeds (The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing 1–6). • The use of metanarrative techniques to erase the differences between what is inside and what is outside of the text. For example: the story within the story, the incorporation into the fiction of real-world characters or of the author himself or herself. These techniques allow readers to believe that they too are part of the text they are reading—an important trait of sacred texts, as scholars of religion point out, related to the belief that sacred words have the power to save or transform their readers. In a more general sense, these techniques aim to produce an intensified version of “poetic faith.” This “bare bones” listing of elements that help create a numinous tone and encourage a “sacred” reading of the Boom novels does not do justice, of course, to these novels’ diversity. Not all of the traits I have cited appear in all of the canonic Boom works. For example, the narrative pattern of the quest, which is prominent in novels such as Rayuela, La muerte de Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, La casa verde by Vargas Llosa, and Cien años de soledad, is less salient in Paradiso (1966) by José Lezama Lima, Tres tristes tigres (1965) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, or El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970) by José Donoso. Nevertheless, the list of “sacralizing” elements serves as a reminder of the complexity of the Boom novels and of their totalizing penchant, which leads them to accumulate so many disparate or contradictory ideas and motifs to the point that some critics have categorized these novels as “neo-baroque” works.4 An examination of the devices of novelistic sacralization in three major works of the Boom will allow us to put my list to the test. Two of these novels, Rayuela and Cien años de soledad, are among the most celebrated and long-lasting works of that period, and the third, Paradiso, although it occupies an eccentric position within the Boom’s canon and is honored mostly by specialists in Latin American literature (among whom it is more often mentioned than read), is the one that makes the most abundant and encompassing use of religious elements and the evocation of the holy.

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RAYUELA: MORELLI, OR THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HORACIO OLIVEIRA Prophetic speech is heavy. Its heaviness is the sign of its authenticity. It is not a question of letting one’s heart speak, or of saying what pleased the freedom of the imagination. False prophets are pleasant and agreeable: amusers (artists), rather than prophets. But prophetic speech imposes itself from outside, it is the Outside itself, the weight and suffering of the Outside. BLANCHOT, “PROPHETIC SPEECH” (82)

It was hard to renounce the belief that a flower can be beautiful for nothingness; it was bitter to accept that one can dance in the dark. Morelli’s allusions to the inversion of signs, to a world seen with other and from other dimensions, as an inevitable preparation for a purer vision . . . exasperated them by offering them the handhold of an almost-hope, of a justification, but at the same time denying them total certainty, keeping them in an unbearable ambiguity. If there was any consolation left, it was in thinking that Morelli also moved within that same ambiguity, orchestrating a work whose true first hearing should be perhaps the most absolute of silences. CORTÁZAR, RAYUELA (717)

There are photographs on the Internet of Julio Cortázar during his second trip to Cuba, at the end of 1963,5 recording his first personal meeting with the Cuban poet José Lezama Lima, with whom he had exchanged letters in 1957 after reading some fragments of Paradiso published in Orígenes, the literary journal founded by Lezama Lima (Goloboff 158–60). In one of the photos, Cortázar and Lezama Lima appear walking in front of the Havana Cathedral; in another two, they are seated at the table of a restaurant in a courtyard of Old Havana.6 Lezama Lima must have seemed to Cortázar like a tropical incarnation of a shaman, or a magisterial genius with a touch of the piantado,7 like his Argentine compatriot Macedonio Fernández, who has been proposed as one of the models for the character of Morelli in Rayuela. It had been an inevitable encounter, not only because of Cortázar’s previous readings of the great Cuban poet whose poetics was founded upon an intense although heterodox Catholicism (Pellón, José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision 25; Salgado 21, 49), but also due to Cortázar’s artistic and personal trajectory up to that

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moment. As one of his biographers summarizes it, “From being the conflicted darling of the journal Sur, a solitary urban phantasist, a demanding reader of literature and a refined hearer of elite music, Cortázar (somewhat abruptly, for some; moved by the logic of the times and of his internal drives, for others) becomes a defender and propagandist of revolutions; a skillful, convincing ideologue of a rejuvenated and nuanced engaged literature” (Goloboff 123). In an interview two years before his death, Cortázar himself alluded to his change, deliberately and somewhat coquettishly using a Christian metaphor: “Although it may sound literary and a bit narcissistic, in my way, my poor little way, I had my Road to Damascus. I don’t recall very well what went on in that road, I think Saul fell off his horse and turned into Paul, no? Well, I too fell off my horse and it happened with the Cuban Revolution” (Montero 14). Disagreeing with the presumed suddenness of Cortázar’s “conversion” to political activism and to belief in a greater Latin American identity represented for him by the Cuban Revolution, Jaime Alazraki points out the multiple precedents for this attitude that may be found in Cortázar’s works before his approach to Cuba: If that confrontation occurs with his trip to Cuba in 1963 . . . the process leading to that trip dates from much earlier and encompasses, in fact, all of his written work, from that youthful note about Rimbaud in 1940 until his last stories. . . . Rayuela records and catalyzes that process of maturation towards political awareness. But before Rayuela there is Los premios, and before Los premios there is “El perseguidor”—a rayuelita [a little Rayuela], as he once called that story—, and before “El perseguidor” there are his first short story collections, until Los Reyes: veritable ports of call of his Road to Damascus towards Latin American consciousness. (6, 8)

To this list Alazraki also adds later another essential text, “Reunión,” pubished in Todos los fuegos el fuego in 1966 but surely written between 1961 and 1965, since it is based on a book by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, La sierra y el llano, published in 1961 and later reprinted with the title of Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria in 1963.8 As I have pointed out elsewhere, “Reunión” is an allegorical rewriting of the aforementioned texts by Che Guevara, which describes the events of the landing by Fidel, Che, and their allies on the eastern coast of Cuba at the beginning of the revolution, in a language which, besides being allegorical, abounds in religious words and images

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(González, “Revolución y alegoría en ‘Reunión’ de Julio Cortázar” 96). Moreover, although Spanish is a language filled with Christian phraseology derived from Catholicism, Cortázar’s allusions are not very common: at one point he compares the leader of the guerrillas with a “pantocrátor” (Todos los fuegos el fuego 75), the representation of Christ triumphant seated on his throne in Byzantine art; in another passage one of the guerrillas compares the place in the mountains where their leader awaits them with a church: “‘We’re going to be like in a church,’ said Pablo by my side, ‘we even have a harmonium’” (Todos los fuegos el fuego 84). Further along, the narrator stops to correct himself upon seeing that he is about to use a religious phrase: “and besides, this calm is rare, this feeling of wellbeing face up as if everything was well this way, as if everything was being fulfilled (I almost thought ‘consummated,’ which would have been idiotic) in accordance with the plans” (Todos los fuegos el fuego 84). These brief examples may serve to remind us that Cortázar made frequent use of religious terminology to refer to his existential searches before the Cuban Revolution as well as during his later political militancy. In this regard, meeting with Lezama Lima, the Catholic poet regarded with increasing suspicion by the Cuban regime, in his first official visit to Cuba could be interpreted as an action symbolic of Cortázar’s desire to unite literature, religion, and politics through his hope for revolutionary change. Rayuela was Cortázar’s most ambitious and successful attempt to fulfill such a desire. This novel is not only, as Cortázar asserted in his interview with González Bermejo in 1978, the autobiographical record of “a time in my life in which I personally felt like a spectator of what was going on outside, without real participation, without wanting to communicate with my fellow men” (González Bermejo 70), but it also is an attempt to persuade his readers to change into less isolated, more supportive individuals. This is done through the story of the experiences of the protagonist, Oliveira, and by means of a somewhat surprising return to a combination of prophecy, holiness, and abjection similar to that we have seen in the early twentieth century in Gamboa’s Santa. In this regard, it may be argued that like Santa sixty years before, although in a secularized way, Rayuela presents itself as a prophetic text with a salvationist intention; that is, it responds to the “need or desire to suppress an essential lack in human existence and to be delivered from all its disabling circumstances” (Marcoulesco 7640). It is not by chance that the novel’s two epigraphs after the no less significant

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“Table of Instructions” allude half-jokingly to “the reform of customs” (as the fragment from Spirit of the Bible and Universal Morality says) or, in the words of the title of the piantado writer with the schizophrenic name, Caesar Brutus: What I Would Like to Be If I Weren’t What I Am (Rayuela 113, 114). In order to fulfill its mission to radically transform its readers, Rayuela assumes some of the typical traits of sacred texts. As a narrative text, one of its principal devices is the direct representation of the holy through the description of characters and situations linked to the numinous: in this case, the characters are Horacio and Morelli, and the situation in which they find themselves is that of the spiritualized search. The most visible seeker, Horacio Oliveira, seeks precisely not to become an ordinary individual in the midst of a world he sees as dominated by what he portentously calls “the Great Custom” (Rayuela 545). This search, or more precisely its persistent and extreme nature, is what makes Horacio extraordinary, although he of course is not satisfied with this. No wonder his name, with its Shakespearian allusion, reminds us of Hamlet’s reproach to his friend Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, act 1, vv. 167–68). In the interior monologue that constitutes chapter 73 (the novel’s beginning in the second version of the novel’s reading proposed by Cortázar), Horacio describes his condition in poetic terms reminiscent not just of Baudelaire’s Petit Poèmes en prose (1869) but also of mystic poets and prophets: “Yes, but who will cure us of the soundless fire, the colorless fire that runs at nightfall along the Rue de la Huchette, coming out of the rotting portals, of the narrow entryways, of the fire without image that licks the stones and lurks in the doorways, how will we be able to wash ourselves of its sweet burning that goes on, that retires itself to keep lasting in alliance with time and remembrance, with the sticky substances that keep us on this side, and which will burn sweetly until it burns us to a crisp” (72).9 Referring to the insistent and destructive nature of prophetic speech, Blanchot cites the prophet Jeremiah: “Jeremiah, without saying so, wants to stop the insistence of the disastrous Word. He keeps it in him, seeking to quiet it while, ‘enclosed in his bones,’ it becomes a devouring fire. ‘I told myself: “Let’s not think of it anymore, let’s proclaim nothing. But it was in my heart like a devouring fire that I exhausted myself in vain to contain”’” (Blanchot 257n1).10 The “Yes” with which the just-cited first sentence of chapter 73 begins, which gives the impression that the narrative voice is replying to

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a prior assertion, is also reminiscent of Blanchot’s observation that “prophetic speech is originally dialogue. . . . But it is dialogue in a more essential way, in that it only repeats the speech confided to it, an affirmation in which by a beginning word something that has actually already been said is expressed. That is its originality. It is first, and yet there is always before it already a speech to which it answers by repeating it. As if all speech that begins began by answering, an answer in which is heard, in order to be led back to silence, the speech of the Outside that does not cease” (82–83). It would not be too excessive to posit, then, that Horacio’s role in Rayuela may be seen as a parody of saints’ lives or, more precisely, of the lives of the prophets. In chapter 31, the always-reasoning Ossip Gregorovius argues with Horacio about the latter’s perennial dissatisfaction with everything. Gregorovius states, “Ever since I’ve known you, you are always seeking, but I have the feeling that you already have in your pocket whatever it is you’re seeking;” to which Horacio responds, “Mystics talk about that, but without mentioning the pockets” (330). A bit later, Gregorovius insists, and Horacio again replies, “You came here [to Paris] to find your statue waiting for you at the edge of Place Dauphine. What I don’t understand is your technique. Ambition, why not? You’re quite extraordinary in some respects. But so far all I’ve seen you do is the contrary of what other ambitious men would do. . . .” “Ah,” said Oliveira, “Your eyes are good for something, it seems.” “Exactly the opposite,” Ossip repeated, “but without renouncing your ambition. And that I can’t explain.” “Oh, explanations, you know. . . . It’s all very confusing, man. Just say that what you call ambition can only flourish in the act of renunciation. You like the formula? It’s not that, but what I’d like to say is in fact unsayable. You have to walk circles around it like a dog seeking its tail. With this and what I’ve said to you about the feeling of belonging it should be enough, you damned Montenegrin.” “I understand vaguely. Then you . . . it’s not something like the vedanta way, or something like that, I hope.” “No, no.” “A lay renunciation, shall we say?” “Not at all. I’m not renouncing anything, I simply do everything I can so that things renounce me. Didn’t you know that to dig a little hole you have to shovel the earth away far away from it?”

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“But then, the feeling of belonging . . .” “You’ve just put your finger on it. Remember the dictum: Nous ne sommes pas au monde. And now start chewing on it, slowly.” “An ambition to start again with clean slate, then?” “A tiny little bit, almost nothing, barely a smidgen, an insignificance, O severe Transylvanian, robber of women in trouble, son of three witches.” “You and the others . . .” Gregorovius murmured, looking for his pipe, “God, what a bunch! Thieves of eternity, funnels of ether, bloodhounds of God, cloud-walkers! Luckily I’m a cultured person and I can enumerate you. Astral pigs!” “You honor me with such epithets” said Oliveira. “It’s proof that you’re beginning to understand me pretty well.” (331)

The allusions to the “unsayable,” to the “negative way” of mysticism, the quote from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873): “Real life is absent. We are not in the world” (Rimbaud 183), and Gregorovius’s epithets for Horacio, all point to a sort of inverted sanctity, a search for purity and transcendence that, rejecting piety and charity, is conducted through abjection and solipsism.11 In another parallel with Gamboa’s Santa and Zeno Gandía’s Redentores at the beginning of the twentieth century, in Rayuela’s chapter 36 Horacio, depressed at being left by La Maga after the death of her baby son Rocamadour, joins a clocharde, a beggar woman, under a bridge in Paris and is later arrested for having sex in public with her (353–69). Like the Hebrew prophets as Blanchot sees them, Horacio assumes prophecy as “living mimicry” (82) or, as we would say today, as a performance. It is important to point out in this context that in the Hebrew tradition (the main source for the concept of the “prophet” in Christianity as well as Islam), prophets were in the beginning shamanic figures, seers whose messages frequently placed them at odds with their society. When, for reasons that are still debated, the words of the prophets began to be written down and enshrined in a canon (a body of highly authoritative texts), the act of prophesying began to be considered a thing of the past: rabbinical scholars generally consider that the classical period of prophecy ended with the construction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 586 BC (Kreisel 7438), when canonical revelation was also established. Nevertheless, there continued to be prophetic activity in Judaism, frequently mixed with the mystical trends common to all religions, although this was not written down nor incorporated into the canon. By the time of Jesus’s min-

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istry (approximately AD 25–30), prophets who did not consider themselves subordinate to canonical prophecy usually claimed to have a special status; in Jesus’s case, he presented himself on certain occasions as an eschatological prophet who proclaimed the imminent arrival of the “Kingdom of God.” In this way he associated himself with a traditional concept of prophets in Judaism, in which certain influential groups believed that God would send prophets of equal rank to their canonical predecessors to announce the end of the world (Sheppard and Herbrechtsmeier 7426). If Horacio Oliveira is a prophet of sorts and if, as Blanchot insists, prophetic speech is part of a dialogue (82), with whom is Oliveira in dialogue? It is not with God, of course, since despite his yearning for transcendence, Horacio is decidedly atheistic. He is also not simply speaking with himself. Despite his solipsistic tendencies, Horacio makes nearly constant reference to a repertoire of readings that reflect the breadth of his culture and his interests: “Arrogant Argentinian, disembarking with all the smugness of a three-by-five culture, knowing about everything, up to date about everything, with an acceptable good taste, with good knowledge of the history of the human race, the art history periods, Romanesque, Gothic, philosophical currents, political tensions, Shell Mex, action and reflection, engagement and freedom, Piero della Francesca and Anton Webern, technology well catalogued, Lettera 22, Fiat 1600, John XXIII. Wonderful, wonderful” (Rayuela 595). As is evident, Horacio’s irony does not spare even his own cultural literacy. Nevertheless, there is one author whom Horacio treats with the respect one shows to oracles and to whom, along with the other members of the Serpent’s Club, he pays homage through passionate, though not uncritical, readings: Morelli. A novelist who theorizes about literature and aesthetics, an experimental author who writes novels very much like Rayuela, Morelli is presented indirectly in Rayuela through the brief personal evocations and the extensive readings of his work done by Oliveira and the other members of the Serpent’s Club. In her study about the figure of the author in Rayuela, Lucille Kerr asks, “What did Cortázar mean by the name Morelli? Is Cortázar’s Morelli meant to figure the Morelli from art history [Giovanni Morelli, 1816–1891], or does it refer perhaps to an author or character we have not yet considered (for example, most obviously, Borges’s [Lazarus] Morell, or Bioy Casares’s Morel, or Well’s Moreau, or Poe’s Morella, or, more obliquely, Macedonio Fernández . . . )?” (40). For Kerr, Morelli’s

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surname (his given name is never mentioned or revealed) is “a sign of instability, a sign of secondariness and subordination as well as of originality and authority” (41). Kerr’s interpretation of the interrelationship among Morelli, Horacio, and Cortázar himself as author-figures in Rayuela suggests, if we view Horacio as a parody of a prophet (another type of author), that Horacio’s relation with Morelli is not that of a disciple or apostle but instead is like that of Christ with regard to his prophetic predecessors. If Morelli can be seen as a prophetic figure who anticipates and establishes the law (a certain poetics of the novel, Rayuela’s own “law”), Horacio, like Jesus Christ, comes to fulfill it (or at least to attempt this), both in the literal sense of making it effective in reality as well as in the figural or allegorical sense of completing or perfecting it.12 The following sermon-like passage in the middle of Horacio’s conversation about Morelli with Ronald, Etienne, and Wong in chapter 99 is suggestive of his intention of somehow “fulfilling” Morelli’s writings: I’m not an optimist, I doubt very much that we’ll ever discover the true history of true humanity. It’s going to be difficult to reach Ronald’s famous Yonder, because we all agree that the problem of reality needs to be formulated in collective terms, not in the mere salvation of some chosen ones. Men who have been realized, men who have jumped out of time and integrated themselves in full, so to speak . . . Yes, I suppose there have been some of those, and there still are. But that’s not enough, I feel that my salvation, supposing I could reach it, also has to be everyone’s salvation, even of the least of men. And that, old man . . . We’re no longer in the fields of Assisi, we can’t wait for a saint’s example to sow sanctity, hoping that each guru will be the salvation of all his disciples. (618)

In spite of the doubts Oliveira voices in this passage about the ineffectiveness of sanctity as a model for life in the modern age, the near-messianic hopes he expresses and the relation of intimate affinity he establishes with Morelli’s texts serve to convey to the readers the urgency of forging a new relationship, to establish a new “law,” if one wills, of literature as well as life. In a perceptive reading of Rayuela, Santiago Colás reflects on the nature of Horacio’s utopian quest. Alluding to the Berthe Trépat episode in chapter 23 and the clocharde episode in chapter 36, he proposes that Horacio’s

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quest is ultimately an ethical one, a search for a neighborly love that arises spontaneously from an individual’s own experiences and is not imposed by religious doctrines, cultural codes, or political imperatives: He [Horacio] still feels that genuine human life and reality are elsewhere, in a different mode of existence. But here, Horacio’s failed attempts to discover immediacy through eroticism and cultural subversions are accompanied by the more subtle enfolding of a parallel narrative. This narrative can be tracked by focusing on certain crucial—in the etymological sense of “crossroads”—episodes. Horacio, frustrated by his relationship with La Maga and by the high culture of European modernism, wanders aimlessly. For once he is not searching. And thus, almost in spite of himself, he reaches out a hand to another. The mystical other side is simply another human being in need of companionship and solidarity. But this third narrative takes Horacio from this intensely joyful discovery . . . and its painful loss, to the repression of the whole episode . . . , to its eventual recovery in Buenos Aires, when he leaps, at the end of chapter 56, into the arms of his friends/lovers Traveler and Talita. (50) .

Colás posits that the jumps and discontinuities that make up Rayuela—already announced by its title (in English, “Hopscotch”)—also constitute the novel’s ultimate meaning, the marrow of its “doctrine”: To reach the sort of disalienated existence prefigured by the “Marxist humanism” of the 1960s “New Left,” it was necessary to understand, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, that “the appearance of every new condition involves a leap; the birth of the new is the death of the old” (141). From the standpoint of a reading that takes into account the religious background shared both by Rayuela and by the Marxism that was so important to the political debates during the 1950s and 1960s,13 we can see that those sometimes haphazard “jumps” Cortázar’s novel demands of its characters as well as of its readers are also a metaphor of the highly intensified “poetic faith” demanded by the new readerly covenant the Boom novels proposed to their readers. If we now shift our attention to the formal aspects of Rayuela and to its “sacralization effects,” we will see that the most striking and fundamental of these is that of eternity as a metaphor of totalization. This device, which also determines the overall structure of this novel, is deployed starting with the well-known “Table of Instructions” in its first page, whose first line declares, “In its own way, this book is many books, but above all it is two

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books,” and then proceeds to describe the instructions to read the texts: the “usual way” of reading, straight through from chapter 1 until chapter 56, omitting the chapters collected under the heading “From Diverse Sides” (in the Spanish original, De otros lados [capítulos prescindibles]), and a reading that follows a list of chapters provided by the author, which includes, in the order determined by Cortázar, the chapters “From Diverse Sides” (Rayuela 111). However, despite the author’s intention to restrict the reading of the novel to two versions by means of the warning “above all,” the first phrase of the first sentence points to the fact that this book is indeed much more than two books; it is clear that the number of possible permutations of this novel’s 155 chapters, although not infinite, is enormous. As Haroldo de Campos observed, Rayuela appears as “the embodiment of that fictional book, April March, a ‘regressive and branching’ novel that gives rise to other novels, attributed by Borges to his character and alter ego Herbert Quain” (De Campos 294). We could go even further and state that Rayuela is also inspired by the “infinite book” written by Tsui Pên in Borges’s “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” made up of a “web of times that approximate each other, bifurcate, interrupt each other, or ignore each other” that “encompasses all possibilities” (Borges 479; italics in the original). Of course, a novel that encompasses multiple plots, multiple time lines, all displayed unhierarchically, simultaneously, is already an image of eternity in the mold of Boethius. Moreover, the chapters “From Diverse Sides” and the rest of the miscellaneous materials spread throughout the novel give Rayuela the characteristic fragmentary appearance we have already examined in precursors of the Boom such as Bombal, Carpentier, and Rulfo. This narrative fragmentation, which makes of Rayuela a prototypical “open work,” also makes it resemble the majority of the sacred scriptures of humanity, which, as I pointed out in the introduction, are commonly composed of texts of diverse origins to which divine inspiration or a link to the sacred is attributed.14 Furthermore, Rayuela’s fragmentariness, like Pedro Páramo’s and that of the description of the Aleph in Borges’s short story, produces an effect similar to that of “chaotic enumeration,” which, as Leo Spitzer observes about its use in the poetry of Walt Whitman, produces “catalogues of the modern world, lost in a dust-cloud of things, which nevertheless come together in a grand vision of the All-One” (25).15 In Rayuela, as in “El Aleph,” narration sub specie aeternitatis leads necessarily to a heterogeneous fragmentation in which the juxtaposition of fragments represents totality in a metonym-

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ical fashion. Moreover, totalization in Rayuela also produces a metaliterary effect through which the frontiers of the text and its context become blurred, and text and world become mixed, in the manner of “Continuidad de los parques” but on a much larger scale. Through the collage-style quotes and clippings of heterogeneous texts this novel incorporates into its discourse—many, though not all, associated with the priestly or shamanic figure of Morelli—language becomes concrete, it turns into a thing, becoming an element that links the novel to the material world. In this fashion, Rayuela offers its readers a prelude and a promise of that for which Horacio is fruitlessly searching: “The image of a possible reunion—but no longer with her [La Maga], but on this side of her or on the other side of her; for her, but not her” (Rayuela 451).

CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD: THE BOOK THAT DEVOURS YOU Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, a law student who had taught me to navigate the Bible and had made me learn by heart the full names of Job’s dinner guests, one day put on the table a frighteningly massive tome and pronounced with his bishop’s authority: “This is the other Bible.” It was, of course, James Joyce’s Ulysses . . . GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, VIVIR PARA CONTARLA (295)

and the last one is being eaten by the ants. GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD (446)

As Jorge Volpi humorously reminds us, it may be argued with good reason that of all the Boom’s texts, none enjoys a more “sacred” status than Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). Regarded as a modern-day Quijote by Spanish-language readers, the fortieth anniversary of its publication was celebrated in 2007 along with the eightieth birthday of its author with an extraordinary display of pomp and publishing involving King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía of Spain and numerous heads of state, the various academies of the Spanish language of the Spanish-speaking world, a commemorative edition, innumerable articles in journals and newspapers and, as a final apotheosis, García Márquez’s return to his birthplace in Aracataca.16 Indeed, few works in the history of literature have been

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the objects of such adoration on such a truly global scale. Most interesting, however, is the fact that the very writing of this novel seems to invite such a reception by evoking many of the common elements of those texts regarded as “holy” by the world’s various religions. Even the most distracted of readers may notice immediately the presence in Cien años de soledad of numerous religious allusions and elements, many of which have already been commented on by critics: biblical allusions to Genesis, Exodus, and the Apocalypse; the plagues of insomnia, of proliferating animals, and of the banana plantations, which evoke the biblical plagues of Egypt; the four-year-long deluge after the banana strikers’ massacre; the importance of genealogy; the use of prolepsis or narrative anticipation associated with the theme of prophecy; and the quiet acceptance of miracles small and large, from the sometimes failed attempts at levitation of Father Nicanor Reyna to the ascension to heaven in body and soul of Remedios the Beautiful. To all of these elements that parody or are reminiscent of JudeoChristian beliefs, we must add the presence of organized religion as one of the many factors at play in the social and political life of Macondo and its inhabitants. In fact, in Cien años de soledad, as in all of García Márquez’s subsequent novels, from Crónica de una muerte anunciada to Del amor y otros demonios, institutional religion—particularly the Catholic church—comes out rather badly, being viewed, in the best of cases, as irrelevant and in the worst as complicit in the abuses of power of conservative regimes. Suffice it to recall the pathetic and laughable figures of the aforementioned Father Nicanor and of the senile Father Antonio Isabel; also, the fanatical wife of Aureliano Segundo, Fernanda del Carpio, who forces her daughter Meme to become a nun; and the failed seminarian and pederast José Arcadio, Meme’s brother, who was brought up in the expectation he would become a pope and instead values only religion’s artistic side and circumstances such as the life-sized statue of Saint Joseph filled with gold coins and the fatal and indelible cross of ashes on the brows of the seventeen sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, which only serves to mark them as victims to be slain one by one. As may be seen, there is no lack of religion in Cien años de soledad, although readers and critics alike have tended to interpret these elements mostly in political terms or, at best, as legendary and mythopoetic flourishes. However, none of these elements, even taken together, accounts for the sacred atmosphere with which the novel is imbued, the odd thrill (or chill) read-

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ers may feel when reading the novel’s very first line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” (11). That first sentence, as we learn at the end of the novel, comes from a wonderful metaliterary artifact that, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “purloined letter,” is hidden in plain sight from readers throughout most of the novel until it finally comes into focus and into its fullest significance at the novel’s end: the parchment manuscripts of the wise gypsy Melquíades, who, like Flaubert’s hidden god, has foreseen and written down everything that takes place in the novel. A set of “parchments . . . that seemed to have been made of some dry material that crumpled like puff paste” on which Melquíades “would spend hours on end scribbling his enigmatic literature” (75), Melquíades’s manuscripts are an embodiment of eternity in the novel, and as such they are a metaphor for the novel’s totalization, its search for an all-encompassing vision of Latin America’s history and human experience. In the original Spanish, the term puff paste is hojaldres, a word that connects with hoja (a leaf, as in a tree, but also as in a book), and it clearly conveys the image of the manuscripts as so ancient and fragile they are crumbling, even as they are made up of very many, perhaps uncountable, leaves superimposed over one another like the various times (past, present, and future) that are superimposed in eternity. It is an impossible object, one that shouldn’t exist in our universe—perhaps that’s why it’s always crumbling, although, being eternal, it never disappears altogether. The manuscripts are the holiest, most numinous object in the novel. This is only dimly realized by many of the characters, but others sense something unusual in them, not just because of their appearance of antiquity or because they were written by the venerable Melquíades—who dies of old age but who returns as a ghost to instruct those who can see him—but also because of some peculiar effects the manuscripts produce on their surroundings and in certain people. Soon after being written, the manuscripts were stored in the house of the Buendías, in Melquíades’s former study room and laboratory, which had been shuttered and used also to store the seventy-two chamber pots used by the schoolgirl friends of Meme Buendía when they visited the house, for which reason this room was called “the chamberpot room” (244). For the women of the Buendía household, as well as for some of the men—Aureliano Segundo, José Arcadio Segundo, and Aureliano Babilonia—“in spite of the room’s having

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been shut up for many years, the air seemed fresher than in the rest of the house” (176). In contrast, for Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who is a dictator figure of sorts, “while the rest of the family was still amazed by the fact that Melquíades’ room was immune to dust and destruction, he saw it turned into a dunghill” (244). This seemingly contradictory association of the manuscripts with both purity and excrement brings to mind Nicola Abbagnano’s observation about the double nature of the sacred: “The sacred has a double nature as holy and as sacrilegious, as that which is sacred because it is specified as such by God’s power, or that which is sacred because it is forbidden or condemned by that same power” (Abbagnano 1030). For some, Melquíades’s manuscripts are pure, while for others they are abject. In both cases, the manuscripts display the mysterious qualities of anything that is forbidden as taboo. Profoundly alien, the manuscripts’ radical otherness is part of what gives them their numinous aura, the mysterium tremendum of which Rudolf Otto speaks. Nevertheless, as in Otto’s formulation, the manuscript’s mysterium can also be fascinans—fascinating. If some wish to leave Melquíades’s book buried in “the chamberpot room,” others feel curiosity and an intense desire to know more. In a novel filled with numerous stories and anecdotes chronicling one hundred years of the town of Macondo’s history, the sacred mystery of the manuscripts gives rise to the novels’ main plotline, which is based on the model of the quest. The quest in this case is not a physical search for the parchments—every Buendía knows where they are—but an intellectual one since, in another indication of their sacredness, and as some of the characters gradually learn through their research, the manuscripts are written in a combination of multiple languages and codes that includes Sanskrit (the ancestor of most Western languages) and Latin, plus “the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a Laecedemonian military code” (382), and one final code of which I’ll talk about a bit later. In fact, lingustic plurality (another trait linked by Otto to the sacred, as I have already mentioned) is a highly visible element in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the novel is filled with allusions to characters speaking languages other than Spanish and to the need to translate and understand those languages. The first direct allusion to translation in the novel appears in the second chapter, when José Arcadio goes to bed with the gypsy girl: “José Arcadio felt himself lifted up and suspended in the air towards a state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst forth with

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an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears and came out of her mouth translated into her language” (40); shortly afterward, not surprisingly, José Arcadio leaves with the gypsies. In the third chapter, we see how Arcadio and Amaranta Buendía, as well as their adoptive sister Rebeca, under the care of their Guajiro Indian nanny, all “came to speak the Guajiro language before Spanish” (44). Language loss and reacquisition occur somewhat later on a collective scale, during Macondo’s plague of insomnia and its accompanying loss of memory. An episode closely related to translation is that of Melquíades’s last days when, already in an advanced state of decrepitude, “he would answer questions in a complex hodgepodge of languages” (74). It is during that same episode that Melquíades makes Aureliano “listen to several pages of his impenetrable writing, which of course he did not understand, but which when read aloud were like encyclicals being chanted” (75). García Márquez’s use of erudite language is here, as always, highly intentional: an “encyclical” is “a letter from the Pope to all the bishops or the faithful”; the term comes from the Greek encyklios (circular). These “circular letters” from the pope are a relatively modern phenomenon (the first dates from 1740), but they are always written in Latin and their use is inspired in the epistles of the New Testament because, like these, their main goal is to explain church doctrine. Unlike the papal bulls, encyclicals are not necessarily considered infallible (“Encyclical,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online). The use of this term associates Melquíades’s manuscripts with the supreme religious authority of Christianity, and like the encyclicals, the manuscripts contain a far-reaching message of the highest importance. The quest to “crack the code” of Melquíades’s parchments culminates at the novel’s end with the aptly named Aureliano Babilonia (whose surname echoes the name of the biblical “Babel,” the mythical birthplace of language). Aureliano begins by reading and learning all he can about the world beyond Macondo (Melquíades’s ghost is always present “like the materialization of a memory” to help him; 328). The manuscripts at this stage are like a complex equation establishing precise relationships among unknown quantities. An earlier Buendía, José Arcado Segundo, had helped to define the equation by counting and classifying the letters of the alphabet in which the manuscript was written, but it is Aureliano Babilonia who discovers that the language written in that alphabet is Sanskrit and so begins to fill in the unknowns in the equation. But if Aureliano already

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knows what the linguistic source of the text is, its “original language,” he still has no idea what its content is. That is why he engages in encyclopedic and wide-ranging as well as antiquarian readings, since he assumes that a manuscript written in a dead language can only deal with events from the past. Later, when Aureliano manages to transliterate—but not translate— Melquíades’s text into the Latin alphabet, he discovers yet another barrier to translation. The manuscript was written in code, that is, in an artificial language designed to hide information—a secrecy not unlike that of allegories and parables in religious discourse—and the full translation of the parchments depends on Aureliano being able to decipher the relation between Spanish and Melquíades’s secret code. Here is where the seemingly parallel lines of genealogy and translation in One Hundred Years of Solitude come together—Melquíades’s code, as the last page of the novel reveals and as is suggested by the manuscripts’ epigraph, is the code of genealogy, of family relations, itself: “The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants” (381). This revelation, as we know, comes as Aureliano finds the dead body of his pigtailed newborn son by his cousin Amaranta Ursula turned into “a dry and bloated bag of skin” (381) similar to the manuscripts and being devoured by ants. In that instant, the manuscripts open up and Aureliano can decipher them as he reads them aloud standing, “without the slightest difficulty, as if they had been written in Spanish and were being read under the dazzling splendor of high noon” (381). Aureliano realizes that “Melquíades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant” (382). The echoes of Boetius’s definition of eternity ring as clear as a bell: “Aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio” (Eternity is the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of everlasting life). As the manuscripts allow themselves to be read it is revealed, in a dizzying game of mirrors, that they contain the entire history of Macondo, from its foundation by the Buendías until the present in which the parchments are being read, and into the future. That future however, is unreachable, since to reach it Aureliano is ineluctably forced to cross a previous span of time and text, and try as he might to jump to the end he will always have to read again and thus remain chained to the text’s eternal and tyrannical temporality. Similarly, Aureliano’s incestuous union with Amaranta

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Ursula has chained him irrevocably to his doomed genealogy and, like the founder José Arcadio Buendía, Aureliano remains tied to a (genealogical) tree, rooted to a spot that is like the eye of the “biblical hurricane” that razes Macondo. Translation, like incest, leads us back to self-reflexiveness, to a cyclonic turning upon oneself that erases all illusions of solidity, all phantasies about “pure language,” all mirages of linguistic “propriety,” and underscores instead language’s dependence on the very notion of “otherness,” of difference, to be able to signify “something.” It also underscores the novel’s dependence on other discourses (such as those of science, the law, and religion) to constitute itself. The novel’s proverbial generic indefinition may well be an indication that, of all the literary genres yet invented, the novel is the one that most closely imitates the rootlessness of language (and the corresponding anxiety to find its roots) that was revealed when modern philology, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginnings of the nineteenth century, finally tore down the myth of the divine origin of language. More specifically, Aureliano’s task of translation in Cien años de soledad makes clear the sterility to which any notion of literary creation as a self-sufficient activity is condemned. It also becomes clear, however, that the tragic fate that awaits Aureliano Babilonia, as the last vestige of a family afflicted by loneliness and selfishness, is destruction. To cite from the novel’s memorable last sentence, “Everything written on [the parchments] was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth” (383). Despite its admonition of unrepeatability, this seemingly pessimistic ending quickly sends readers back to the beginning to read the novel in a new way: with the knowledge that they have been reading a book within a book; the feeling that, as happens in sacred texts, the words in the novel have reached out to grasp them and that the borders between the novel and our world have been erased as surely as was Macondo. The adjective in the phrase “biblical hurricane” is more precise than it seems, since it not only indicates that in Melquíades’s numinous manuscript the word and the world have been joined but also that the text of Cien años de soledad the readers have in their hands refuses to coincide with itself and redoubles itself, seeking instead to envelop and to change all who read it, as is commonly done by all of the world’s sacred texts.

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PARADISO: JOURNEY BACK TO THE SACRED I wanted the poetry that appeared [in the journal Orígenes] to be of the sort that returned to incantations, to rituals, to the living ceremonies of primitive man. It is curious that a poet such as Mallarmé, who derived from such a great tradition, began in his later years to long for an art of incantation, of tribal chiefdoms, as if in the essence sought by poetry primitivism coexisted simultaneously with the most refined elaboration. LEZAMA LIMA , “SUMA DE CONVERSACIONES,” IN PARADISO: EDICIÓN CRÍTICA (36)

The strangest of all the writers promoted during the Boom period, José Lezama Lima was also the only one to openly declare his religiosity. It is also important to point out that, rigorously speaking, Lezama Lima did not “belong” to the Boom. Born in 1910 (like María Luisa Bombal), Lezama Lima produced most of his work during the decades of the 1930s to the 1960s, devoting himself to poetry, essay writing, and to founding and directing various literary journals, of which Orígenes (1944–1954) achieved great resonance in the Hispanic world. Nevetheless, despite his profound influence on the Cuban literary scene, Lezama Lima only began to be known by the broader Latin American reading public thanks to Cortázar, who was only four years younger than the Cuban but whose work developed much later in the cosmopolitan context of Paris. It is in his essay “Para llegar a Lezama Lima,” (published in La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, 1967) that Cortázar gives the Boom’s readers news about Lezama Lima’s first novel, Paradiso, published in Havana in 1966: “I am not a literary critic. . . . I only propose to denounce a shameful ignorance and stand up in advance against the misunderstandings that will surely follow when Latin America hears the voice of José Lezama Lima” (La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos 45). In spite of his good intentions and his comparisons of Lezama to Borges and Octavio Paz (45), Cortázar’s own essay made Lezama Lima appear stranger than he actually was by offering a vision of the Cuban poet as a sort of naïve or primitive genius, which the abundant later criticism of Lezama would rectify and dissipate. As we have seen, in Rayuela the “devices of sacralization” configure a text whose strangeness resides in its fragmentary appearance, which invites and challenges readers to become coparticipants in its creation (as in the

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famous reference to the “reader-accomplice” in chapter 79 that appears alongside the rather infamous reference to “female readers” in chapters 79 and 99) and which furthermore urges readers to “jump”—that is, to perform the necessary act of faith for that new creation to arise. Instead, in Paradiso we are entering a novelistic universe ruled by conglomeration and by the overabundance of a language and a style that appear to unify everything as in a sort of volcanic magma, erasing the conventional differences between terms such as narration and description, high and low culture, beauty and ugliness, negating the least trace of metafiction and thus erecting intimidating barriers to any potential readers who would approach it. At first sight, Paradiso would seem to be the apex of the process of sacralization of the novel we have been following so far: A novel in which, by means of poetry, theology is interwoven in an absolutely visible and organic way with the text at all levels, from the plot to the phrase, and in which all of the themes with which it deals, from sex to politics, are considered sub specie aeternitatis in minute detail as well as with quasi-divine detachment. Even more so than is the case with Pedro Páramo or Cien años de soledad, it would be redundant to point out the presence of elements of religious discourse in Paradiso, which from its very title places itself clearly in the sphere of religion and in which Lezama Lima’s poetics—his so-called “poetic system”—consistently displays its intimate links to Catholic doctrine. However, Paradiso’s visible display of religiosity also marks one of its various significant differences with the totalizing novels of the Boom, since it underscores the absence in Lezama Lima’s novel of a trait that is evident in the Boom novels and their precursors: an awareness of secularism. Reading Paradiso reminds us that effective novelistic sacralization entails a recognition that sacralization is a process, not a product, and it is thus important that the text should try to confront secularism, moving toward the sacred through the secular and not avoiding it. Instead, Paradiso presents itself almost as a photographic negative of the Boom novels, since the latter based their sacralization on their claim to be vehicles for totalizing and critical knowledge of the affairs and things of this world, while Paradiso offers its readers all along in its text the vision of a seamless fictional world in which death is defeated by resurrection through the creative power of poetry. In Paradiso, there is neither critique nor crisis, much less metafiction. Paradiso is the antithesis of Umberto Eco’s notion of the “open work,” which was frequently applied to many of the Boom novels, from Rayuela to Tres tristes tigres, since due to its notorious hermeticism, this novel aspires

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to be the coherent exposition of a poetic doctrine formulated in the very language generated by that doctrine. Simply put, Paradiso is like a real-life Cuban version of Melquíades’s manuscript in Cien años de soledad, minus the process of decipherment needed to connect the world of the book with our own world.17 Also similar to Melquíades’s manuscript, Paradiso has aroused since its publication multiple and conflicting reactions, which range from those who see it as an unnecessarily overstuffed, obscure, and artificial text, to those who exalt “its power of luminous radiance,” although also noting that “too much light can be blinding” (Rodríguez Monegal, “Paradiso: Una silogística del sobresalto” 523; see also Pellón, José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision 1–12). In his pathbreaking study of Paradiso, José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision (1989), Gustavo Pellón, following Rodríguez Monegal’s strategy of accepting the baroque antitheses and paradoxes of Lezama Lima’s writing, has seen this novel as a monstrous, excessive body, symbolized by the image of the tumor the surgeons extract from the body of the protagonist José Cemí’s mother, which Pellón reads as a self-referential emblem of Paradiso’s style (Pellón, José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision 13–27). Most recently, Fernando Guerrero has asked irreverently if Paradiso, along with its unfinished sequel Oppiano Licario (1983), has not simply been a practical joke played by the poet of Trocadero Street on his readers, noting that few writers like Lezama Lima have tried to write as if modern secularization had never taken place, as if it were still possible “at this late stage of the twentieth century” to write while looking elsewhere. It is that basic duplicity that gives rise to the sense of Lezama Lima’s work as a premodern simulacrum. In the era of religion’s decline, few authors can equal Lezama Lima’s spiritual elevation and inspired evocation of the holy. However . . . the holy in Lezama Lima is always sufficiently impure, mundane, and terrifying, so that we can justifiably state that his work is inscribed in a secularized context in the twilight of religion, against secularization, but derived from it. Put in another way: against critics who have seen in Lezama Lima the epitome of the bon sauvage, or the poet of the “beatific vision” (Saúl Yurkiévich, Julio Cortázar), I propose that the unbounded Lezamian spirituality, its excessive manifestation, and the transcendent anxiety and discursive neurosis that infuse his work should be seen instead as symptoms of Lezama Lima’s powerlessness, a sign of the distance between modern man and God. (Guerrero 61–62)

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In the context of the skepticism toward the Boom’s project of novelistic sacralization and the attempts to desacralize the novel to be studied in the last chapter of this book, it is clear that Guerrero’s is not a lone voice but that he in fact echoes the attitudes of many of today’s writers and readers about the Boom and its legacy. My own view, as can be seen in the prior paragraphs, differs from both Guerrero’s and Pellón’s in the sense that I do not think Lezama Lima truly incorporates metafiction and secularity into his novel; rather, I believe the presence of “monstrous,” impure, and worldly elements in this novel can still be explained in a way congruent with Lezama Lima’s insistent move away from the secular, as I will elaborate shortly. Yet another absence in Paradiso, compared to the Boom novels, is the Latin Americanist dimension that characterized many Boom novels in the political sphere and which is part of what, following Lewis, we could call the “secular sacred” of these novels. This is all the more surprising when one recalls the notable essays on Latin American culture published by Lezama Lima in 1957 in his book La expresión americana. Such an absence may be attributed to the partially autobiographical nature of Paradiso’s plot, in which José Cemí may be seen as an alter ego of Lezama Lima, and to the period of Cuba’s history and of Lezama Lima’s life with which the novel deals, which spans the first three decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, it should be recalled that, like other Hispanic Caribbean intellectuals who were his contemporaries (the Puerto Ricans Antonio S. Pedreira and René Marqués, for example), Lezama Lima and his circle of disciples and collaborators were intensely concerned with finding and defining the “essence” of Cuban national culture on the basis of a feeling of profound rootedness in the Cuban landscape, as may be seen in works such as Lo cubano en la poesía (1958) by Cintio Vitier. Is Paradiso the case of a novel that has been sacralized to such a degree that the holy overshadows the novelistic and even the political? Paradiso may not, perhaps, reach such extremes, but it is nevertheless important to examine what is it that makes Lezama Lima’s novel different from those of the Boom authors regarding the presence and attitude toward the sacred. I submit that what we see in Paradiso is an attempt to recover the origins of primordial religious feeling, that “daemonic dread” to which Otto refers in The Idea of the Holy when he explains his characterization of the holy as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The feeling of mysterium tremendum, states Otto,

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may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. . . . Though the numinous emotion in its completest development shows a world of difference from the mere “daemonic dread,” yet not even at its highest level does it belie its pedigree or kindred. Even when the worship of “daemons” has long since reached the higher level of worship of “gods,” these gods still retain as numina something of the “ghost” in the impress they make on the feelings of the worshipper, viz. the peculiar quality of the “uncanny” and “aweful,” which survives with the quality of exaltedness and sublimity or is symbolized by means of it. . . . Taken, indeed, in its purely natural sense, mysterium would first mean merely a secret or a mystery in the sense of that which is alien to us, uncomprehended and unexplained; and so far mysterium is itself merely an ideogram, an analogical notion taken from the natural sphere, illustrating, but incapable of exhaustively rendering, our real meaning. Taken in the religious sense, that which is “mysterious” is—to give it perhaps its most striking expression—the “wholly other” (thateron, anyad, alienum), that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the “canny,” and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment. (12–13, 17, 26)

That otherness which encompasses the strange and the shocking, as well as the “impure, mundane, and terrifying” that Guerrero associates too hastily to the secular, even as it is also linked to the numinous, is the form taken by the primordial sense of the holy that Paradiso seeks to evoke in practically all its pages. Let us go step by step, however, and review first the traditional novelistic aspects of Paradiso. In spite of the strangeness of its language, of the presence in the novel of several segments that are oneiric or hallucinatory, and of one chapter, chapter 12, that weaves together four stories whose relation to the rest of the novel is problematical, critics have pointed out how the narrative plot as well as the setting and the development of the characters in Paradiso follow most of the conventions of realist novels cen-

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tered on family history, as well as of subgenres such as the bildungsroman and the “artist novels” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Salgado 48–87). In terms of its plot, Paradiso tells of the life of José Cemí from his infancy until he is twenty years old in Havana, Cuba, during the first third of the twentieth century. Beginning with the asthmatic attacks that marked the protagonist’s life since childhood, we see also a detailed family portrait of Cemí’s ascendancy and family circumstances: he is the son of a Cuban military man of Basque descent, Colonel Cemí, whose wife Rialta Olaya is descended from a family of prosperous Cuban Creole emigrés who, after Cuba’s independence, return to the island from Florida. In the midst of a dense panorama of relatives and friends, significant absences begin to occur, the greatest of which is the death of Colonel Cemí in a Florida hospital, after which Rialta moves to Havana to live with her sons along with her mother Augusta. The teenaged José Cemí’s school years are recounted in the notorious chapter 8 of the novel, in which sexuality in its diverse manifestations is prominent. Cemí’s friendship with Fronesis and Foción during his college years is told through a series of dialogues and debates among them about philosophical and theological topics. As the years go by, Foción, who is homosexual and fruitlessly in love with Cemí, goes mad. Cemí, in turn, who has grown and matured in his knowledge about poetry through his conversations with Fronesis, has complicated dreams described in chapter 12 (if one accepts Lezama Lima’s own interpretation; Paradiso: Edición crítica 712). Finally, Cemí meets in person with Oppiano Licario, the antiquarian, poet, and clairvoyant who was a personal friend of Colonel Cemí and whom the colonel had charged with completing the poetic education of the young José. Over the framework of this mostly linear and relatively simple narrative, Paradiso overlays a text filled with varied characters, anecdotes, situations, and settings, written in a highly hyperbolic style. The novel’s language, which abounds in cultural references and interlinked metaphors, is shared by both the narrator and the characters, whatever their social stratum. More than its plot and narrative structure, it is this oversaturated, often hieratic language that produces Paradiso’s sacred as well as totalizing effect. Paradiso depends much less on the narrative fragmentation and chaotic enumeration displayed in many of the Boom novels and their precursors than on its style, which, following the norms of Lezama Lima’s “poetic system,” gives the text an air of eternity. As one example among a great many, there is the passage in which the narrator describes Cemi’s awak-

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ening after having used his “anti-asthmatic powders” to fall asleep (in the Spanish original, Lezama Lima places commas idiosyncratically, following the rhythm of his own asthmatic breathing): That artificial sleep that relieved him, transformed him in turn into the analogon or double of the most unexpected opposites in his mutations. When he awoke he had the sensation of an indefinite collection of silences, like those hunts that consist of not varying the range of silences that surround a tiger. It was silence that was stalking, that spread itself below the tiger’s power to hear it. On the elephant’s back, the basket with the group of archers, in the most elaborate of silences to make sure the animal did not feel how its environment was taken into otherness. The tiger was penetrating through the thread of silence into the labyrinth that will destroy it. It now fully dominates its sphere, feels alone before the elephant, which makes itself transparent abandoned to the light, the tiger starts to chew that light. The archers break in, they break the silence into smithereens, and in the area something like a carpet begins to very slowly envelop the cold tiger. In the antithesis of that silence that pursues, at other times, upon waking he remembered La Promenade, that strange forest where the douanier Rousseau paints his wife becoming lost in a silence she does not want to break, carrying an umbrella for an impossible rain, an amulet that seems to have been given by her husband to avoid any sort of surprise in that strange promenade. (Paradiso: Edición crítica 232)

As may be seen in this passage, the simile of the tiger hunt used to describe the silences that surrounded Cemí as he woke up, which by itself might seem gratuitous or hyperbolic, is further embellished and complicated in a sort of drift or errancy of images that flows into what may have been the original referent for the image sleep=silence=tiger, the paintings of the French primitivist artist Henri Rousseau (known as the “douanier [customs officer] Rousseau,” due to his day job). Many of these paintings are set in imaginary tropical jungles, as in Tiger in a Tropical Storm, or Surprised! (1891), The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), or Negro Attacked by a Jaguar (1910); however, Lezama Lima does not allude to them directly but instead alludes to another of Rousseau’s works, without tigers or tropical vegetation, instead portraying the painter’s wife carrying an umbrella, Forest Promenade (1886). Similar to Carpentier’s narrative voice in El reino de este mundo, which shifts freely between temporal planes and points of view, producing a descriptive

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“slow-motion” effect, Lezama Lima’s in Paradiso intensifies even further its mobility in order to produce, from phrase to phrase, the impression of overflowing time that characterizes the idea of eternity. Chapters 12–14, as Remedios Mataix points out, “take place already in a world out of time equivalent to [Lezama Lima’s concept of] la sobrenaturaleza (‘supernature’), ‘because that was, in my view, the only way to finish the work,’ as the author himself stated” (46). Chapter 12 in particular may be seen in principle as a Lezamian equivalent of Borges’s Aleph (although in Lezama Lima each phrase, each sentence, seems to contain an Aleph), save for the fact that in these pages of Paradiso there is much less revelation than there is mystery and hermeticism, and the task of decipherment is left entirely up to the reader. As pointed out earlier, Lezama Lima states in his “Apuntes para una conferencia sobre Paradiso” that the chapter dealt with Cemí’s dreams but that Lezama Lima opted not to identify them as such: “In Chapter 12, I hesitated in putting an epigraph saying: José Cemí’s dreams after his father’s death. Later I decided to let the readers themselves find out that they were dreams. They have not found this out in most cases. And what readers do not find for themselves, they attribute to the author’s incoherences” (Paradiso: Edición crítica 713). Evoking the simultaneity of times in eternity, this chapter develops four stories that are entirely distinct in terms of period, place, and atmosphere in which the narrative voice shifts arbitrarily between third and first person. The series begins with the story of Roman military officer Atrio Flaminio, following his military campaigns until his death in Capadocia; the next story tells of a child’s fascination with a Danish ceramic jar embellished with tiny and detailed drawings of a city; the third describes a nameless character’s wanderings around Havana in an atmosphere of supernatural fear and foreboding, and the fourth is the tale of music critic Juan Longo, whose second wife, twenty years younger than him, attempts to prolong his life by means of a “hibernation” technique derived from “Egyptian theophany” (Paradiso: Edición crítica 373). The presence of supernatural elements linked to fear and mystery is a common element in the four stories: in Atrio Flaminio’s, the Roman leader has to face the terrifying witchcraft of Thessaly (Paradiso: Edición crítica 380–84); in that of the child and the jar, the jar, broken by the child, magically and inexplicably recomposes itself (374–75); the story of the wanderer through Havana is filled with the ghostly presence of “the invisible” (370–71), and that of Juan Longo deals, like a parody of Edgar Allan

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Poe’s horror stories, with a mad wife’s attempts to defeat time and death (387–90). The four stories alternate with each other until, in the chapter’s last pages, they fuse with each other when all of their respective characters meet at the glass urn that holds Juan Longo in a park in Havana (395). Along with these and many other passages that are neo-baroque tours de force (which by themselves already produce the feeling of astonishment linked to the holy), there are also in Paradiso, as is well known, numerous segments in which sex and scatology are represented with a no-less-impressive display of poetic images in which the grandiose and the abject are commingled. A well-known passage is that of the sexual feats of José Cemí’s schoolmate, Farraluque, the “leptosomático macrogenitosoma” (Paradiso: Edición crítica 204),18 when he inserts his hyperbolic penis into the “Neapolitan bay” of the “Spanish girl”: “The rapid flow of blood in adolescence made possible the wonder that, once finished with his normal copulation, [Farraluque] could start with another one per angostam viam. This amorous encounter was reminiscent of the incorporation of a dead serpent by its hissing vanquisher. Ring by ring, the other extensive, flaccid procession penetrated the body of the triumphant serpent, like those monstrous organisms reminiscent of the indistinction of the early Tertiary, when digestion and reproduction were still a single function” (204). Like the many-limbed deities of the Hindu pantheon, or the obscene sheela na gigs of certain Romanic churches in England, France, and Spain,19 the bodies in chapter 8 are transformed into “monstrous organisms,” in shocking and profoundly strange metamorphoses that also evoke the chaos of origins. After the plot hiatus of chapter 12, the last two chapters of Paradiso narrate José Cemí’s encounter with Oppiano Licario, the friend who accompanied Colonel Cemí on his deathbed, who becomes for the young Cemí a magisterial figure analogous to Morelli in Rayuela and Melquíades in Cien años de soledad (like them, Cemí is also the author of a secret manuscript, Súmula, nunca infusa, de excepciones morfológicas; Paradiso: Edición crítica 420). As Mataix observes, Licario is . . . the mysterious character who enters the pages of Paradiso without the novel’s usual identification of name, history, and circumstance. He appears in the novel when and where he is least expected or imagined, but always at crucial moments, giving the episode a special meaning of ritual and initiation: in chapter 5 he is the anonymous “counselor of Latin” who leads Alberto Olaya to his sexual initiation. Oppiano’s second appearance

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occurs moments before the Colonel’s death; the third, on the magic bus. Now, after a gradual process of acquaintance, Licario presides over another sacred ritual in the magic space of his rooms: José Cemí’s initiation into the “hesichastic rhythm” of Lezamian poetry. (53–54)

Critics have noted that in Paradiso, Lezama Lima disseminates his own image through various characters—José Cemí’s is the most visible in the novel, and the other is Licario, about whom Cintio Vitier points out that “the portrait of Oppiano Licario sketched in this chapter . . . is quite similar, despite its novelistic transposition, to the Lezama we visited since the nineteen-forties in Trocadero 162” (xxiv–xxv). A personification of Lezama Lima’s logos poético (Mataix 53), Licario is also the teacher and prophet who preaches faith in poetry. He elaborates on Lezama Lima’s particular view of poetry as a vehicle of transcendence, expressed in key concepts of Lezama Lima’s poetics such as hipertelia (going beyond finality, as Ruiz Barrionuevo explains, 39–40), resurrección (a version of poetic immortality, as Heller argues, 14–15, 136), and sobrenaturaleza (poetry as a substitute for nature, in Lezama Lima’s own words; Paradiso: Edición crítica 710). We are equally distant here from Coleridge’s modest “poetic faith,” produced by a combination of literary effects that seeks to produce verisimilitude, as well as from the mostly utilitarian faith Carpentier invokes in order to make his new readerly compact work, and even from faith in faith itself, like the “leap” we have seen in Cortázar. Instead, more than “poetic faith,” what Lezama Lima proposes is faith in poetry itself and its power to transform reality. It is a demanding faith, expressed in a sort of aesthetic dogmatism, that makes no concessions to the reader and can only be reached by going through a rigorous process of initiation. The opening phrase of Lezama Lima’s essay “Mitos y cansancio clásico,” the first text in La expresión americana, is a motto that defines his entire artistic project: “Only what is difficult is stimulating; only the resistance that defies us is capable of raising, arousing, and maintaining our powers of understanding” (9). If in Cortázar the leap or act of faith in reading is being sought out or is expected to happen eventually, in Lezama Lima this leap is presupposed from the beginning: the leap must take place prior to the reading of Paradiso, and once readers enter the text, the text will present them with one test after another, one difficulty after another. Lezama Lima loved to cite the austere church father Tertullian, who said in reference to Christ’s res-

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urrection, “It is credible because it is incredible” (credibile est, quia ineptum est; De carne Christi 5.4). The faith in poetry of Lezama Lima’s readers is sustained by the implicit promise that the readers’ unlimited devotion will be amply rewarded by at least an inkling of the plenitude of meaning. Nevertheless, Lezama Lima’s delight in hermeticism brings the language of Paradiso closer to the overly elaborate Gnostic theologies, with their passion for secrecy and cryptography, rather than to the unadorned simplicity and comparative openness that predominate in the Christian Gospels. By means of the sacralizing technique of linguistic defamiliarization, Paradiso seeks to take readers back to the primordial origins of the numinous feeling, in which the mysterium tremendum of the divine produced at the same time fear and veneration in all who witnessed it.

Five

DE S AC R A L I Z AT I O N S Elena Poniatowska, Fernando Vallejo, Roberto Bolaño

But that’s not sad, because it’s the truth. ESTEBAN MONTEJO IN BIOGRAFÍA DE UN CIMARRÓN (1966) BY MIGUEL BARNET (15)

T

he last line in Cien años de soledad proclaims that its story is “unrepeatable forever and ever” (448). For religious texts, this has been true long before the modern age, since most of the world’s major religions consider the age of revelation and prophecy to have already ended and hold that the canon of their sacred texts is complete.1 Once the unifying process of canon formation has taken place, there is no room for additional sacred texts in the fullest sense of the term, nor for new prophets with new revelations (there continues to be room for mystical, doctrinal, and devotional texts, of course). Sacred texts cannot—and must not—have sequels. García Márquez understood this, and so did many of his Boom colleagues to a greater or lesser degree: most of them realized that writing additional “total novels” with revelatory pretensions would not only exhaust them physically and mentally but would exhaust the genre itself, whose prestige

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was founded on each novel’s uniqueness, and it furthermore went against the idea of novelistic totalization itself.2 Moreover, the same explosion of cultural creativity that made the Boom possible during the 1960s allowed younger novelists, in the shadow of the Boom’s major figures, to develop radically different visions and models of the novel. In the highly politicized atmosphere of those decades full of revolutionary fervor, the evolving pressures of political ideologies affected the content as much as the forms of Latin American literary genres. Narrative continued to be the ascendant and predominant literary modality, but critiques to the total novel opened the way for a wide variety of narrative approaches that literary critics subsequently began to study and classify (see “The Spanish American Novel: Recent Developments, 1975 to 1990” by Pellón and The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction by Shaw). Under the rather colorless but perhaps inevitable name of the “post-Boom,” new works by authors as diverse as Isabel Allende Reynaldo Arenas, Miguel Barnet, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Elena Poniatowska, Manuel Puig, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Severo Sarduy, and Antonio Skármeta came to the attention of Latin American readers of the 1970s and 1980s. Rejecting the colossal narratives of the Boom’s total novels, these authors focused their efforts on a critique of the Boom novels’ underlying ideology and aesthetic presuppositions, whether from a neo-vanguardist perspective (as in the texts by Arenas, Sarduy, and more recently, Mario Bellatin), or through the exploration of more conventional narrative forms such as the testimonial or documentary novel, the new historical novel, crime fiction, and the new sentimental narrative. An interesting fact about the transition from the Boom to the postBoom in Latin American letters, on which critics have already remarked, is that the Boom authors learned new approaches and techniques from the post-Boom generation. García Márquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and even a masterly veteran such as Alejo Carpentier became excellent students of their younger colleagues Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Poniatowska, Sarduy, and others. Echoes of testimonial and documentary narrative can be found in novels such as Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel (1974) and García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981). A dialogue with Sarduy has been seen in the last two short novels by Alejo Carpentier, Concierto barroco (1974) and El arpa y la sombra (1978; see González Echevarría, “The Pilgrim’s Last Journeys”). With regard to Vargas Llosa, already in Captain Pantoja and

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the Special Service (1973), with its eroticism and bawdy humor, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), with its testimonial elements and the parodic and self-reflexive character of the “scriptwriter,” one can find affinities with the testimonial novels of Poniatowska, Sarduy’s experimentalism, and the autobiographical and sentimental fictions of Bryce Echenique. The decades of the 1980s and 1990s, which witnessed the end of Soviet communism, the Central American peace accords, and the double wave of redemocratization and neoliberalism that ran through the length and breadth of Latin America, also saw the rise of groups of authors born after the end of the 1960s. For these writers, the struggles of the sixties already belonged to the historical past, and in various collective expressions, such as the “Crack Manifesto” in Mexico and the McOndo anthology edited by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez (both texts are from 1996), they gave voice even more explicitly than the post-Boom authors to their desire to break with the established patterns of Latin American literature and to assume a more forward-looking posture on the eve of the arrival, laden with symbolism and expectations, of the year 2000 of the Western calendar. However, more than an absolute break there are instead important continuities between the post-Boom and the group of Latin American narrators who came of age at the turn of the twentieth century, whose standardbearer (a term he would likely have rejected) was Roberto Bolaño. Both groups share some highly visible traits, such as an interest in literature’s relation to other art forms (visual arts, music, cinema); an attachment to subgenres such as the crime novel and science fiction; a critique of nationalism, characterized by a rejection of nostalgia, which leads to a postnationalist attitude; greater attention paid to issues of sexual identity; and the growing trend toward autoficción, the inclusion of facts and elements of authors’ biographies in their own fictions. Even so, perhaps the strongest line of continuity between the post-Boom and the writers we could label as millennials is the question of the links between literature—particularly narrative fiction—and truth. The thorny issue of “truth in fiction” was placed front and center during the vogue of testimonial narratives at the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s, motivated more by political and ethical issues than by philosophical or artistic concerns. More than a search for “poetic truth,” these texts sought out truth mainly in a juridical, forensic sense forged in the context of the notion of “human rights.”3 Prominent among the events that

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directly influenced Latin American writers during those decades, particularly Boom authors such as Cortázar and García Márquez, were the Russell Tribunal’s sessions on Latin America, in which both authors participated as members of the tribunal in 1974 and 1976, and in which tortures, disappearances, and other human rights abuses committed by the right-wing dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, were denounced and documented.4 Needless to say, the main thrust for the rise of testimonial narrative came from the personal experiences of political repression suffered by a wide range of writers and ordinary citizens of Latin American countries, who later wrote or collaborated in testimonial texts, including Claribel Alegría (No me agarran viva: La mujer salvadoreña en lucha, 1983), Domitila Barrios de Chúngara (“Si me permiten hablar” . . . Testimonio de Domitila, 1977), Omar Cabezas (La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde, 1982), Rigoberta Menchú (Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, 1982), and Hernán Valdés (Tejas Verdes: Diario de un campo de concentración en Chile, 1974), among many others. Nevertheless, two highly influential texts that were the immediate precursors of Latin American testimonial narrative were works of ethnohistory inspired by the Cuban Revolution, focusing on what Cuban historian Juan Pérez de la Riva called the “history of people without history”: Biografía de un cimarrón (1966) by Miguel Barnet and Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (1969) by Elena Poniatowska. The urge to seek out and express the truth, which leads in turn to the related concepts of “reality” and “authenticity,” has only intensified in the fictions of the millennial writers, even as historical circumstances have changed dramatically. Now it is not a question of countries subjected to dictatorships, exiles, and civil wars (from the Central American revolutions to the “internal war” against Shining Path in Peru from the 1980s to the 1990s), but of countries that are mostly at peace, where neoliberal development models are the norm and which are ever more affected by the “simulacra” of postmodern culture (through the mass media and cyberspace) denounced by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1981). These were referenced, with a mixture of sarcasm and pride, by Fuguet and Gómez in the prologue to the McOndo anthology: The (copyrighted?) name McOndo is, of course, a joke, a satire. Our McOndo is as Latin American and magical (exotic) as the real Macondo (which, come to think of it, isn’t real but virtual). Our country McOndo is

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larger, overpopulated and full of pollution, with expressways, metro, cable TV, and slums. In McOndo there are MacDonald’s, Mac computers, and condominiums, as well as five star hotels built with laundered money, and giant malls. In our McOndo, just as in Macondo, anything can happen, except that in ours when people fly it’s because they’re on a plane or they’re high on drugs. Latin America, and in certain ways Hispanic America (Spain and all of the Latino USA) seems to us as magical realist (surrealist, crazy, contradictory, hallucinatory) as the imaginary country in which people fly or foretell the future and people live eternally. Here, dictators die and the disappeared don’t return. The weather changes, rivers overflow, the earth shakes, and Don Francisco colonizes our subconscious. (15)

The renewed realism of the millennials’ narrative is thus not based on an acritical attempt to return to the empiricism of the modern tradition but on a radical skepticism about postmodern artifices in literature, the arts, and the cybernetic media, and a vehement desire to neutralize the powers of simulacra. It is, above all, a search for authenticity, both personal as well as artistic. The term and concept of authenticity, so closely linked to existentialism in the years following World War II, has begun again to be used during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Canadian thinker Charles Taylor has argued in A Secular Age (2007) that we have all entered a new “era of authenticity” (477). Personal authenticity has been defined succinctly by British philosopher Bernard Williams as “the idea that some things are in some sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t” (Jeffries 4). This time, however, a concept once criticized as being linked to narcissism and egotism has been reformulated to stress the communitarian nature of ideas such as “the good” and “the important” that play a key role in the process by which subjects determine their own identity (Taylor, Sources of the Self 34–35). As Somogy Varga and Charles Gignon observe “For Taylor, the process of articulating an identity involves adopting a relationship to the good or to what is important, which is connected to one’s membership in a language community” (Varga and Guignon, “Authenticity”). Taylor states it trenchantly: “One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it” (Sources of the Self 35). From another angle, artistic and personal authenticity are closely linked

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in early twenty-first-century Latin American narrative; it might even be said that they are inseparable from one another. The best evidence of this is found, in my view, in the extremely frequent use made of authorial self-fictionalization in this narrative. The presence in fictional works of characters with names and traits similar or identical to those of their author, although with mostly fictional purposes,5 is a literary practice that dates back to the European Middle Ages. In Latin America, Borges was the most prominent and immediate precursor of this technique, in stories such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “El Aleph,” and “Borges y yo” (Schlickers 51–71; Covarsí 97–110). It is important to stress that, as in Borges, in most of the post-Boom and millennial narratives the author’s visibility within the narrative is no longer a display of egotism but a much more modest and self-critical gesture, in consonance with the new concept of authenticity I have just discussed. For example, in Bryce Echenique’s La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña (1985), another influential model for selffictionalization in Latin American narrative, a character named Alfredo Bryce Echenique pursues and harasses the novel’s protagonist, Martín, who detests him wholeheartedly (Bryce 187, 500–503). In other authors’ work, instead of this redoubling we find most frequently the image of an author who is not only a character in his fictions but who also shows himself to be perplexed and uncertain about his authority or even about his capacity to clearly narrate the events in his novel, as may be seen in works ranging from Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s La Habana para un infante difunto (1979) to Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita (1995), Jorge Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor (1999), and Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011). It bears repeating that the trend toward self-fictionalization as well as the concern with personal and historical memory in contemporary Latin American narrative are ways of associating fiction writing not just with authenticity but also with truth telling. Faced with the extraordinary capacity of digital and cybernetic media to create convincing simulacra of reality—in fact, audiovisual “lies”—today’s literature seeks to portray itself as the domain of truth, paradoxically due to the fact that it openly displays its fictional nature, its artificiality, as well as the limitations imposed by the materiality of the things to which it refers, including its characters’ bodies and writing’s own materiality. Even as technology seems to give humanity powers previously associated solely with magic or divinity—for instance, the capacity to re-create events of the past believably and in detail by manip-

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ulating vast volumes of information or to create models that can reliably predict future events—literature goes back to what is concrete, intimate, fallible, and human. This happens, it should be noted, at the same time that by abandoning nostalgia, the millennial authors in Latin America move away from the quasi-religious duty to support and protect national identity in their writings and associate themselves instead with attitudes that are variably described as either “trans-,” “multi-,” or “postnational.” In turn, the inevitability of error and the porous barrier between good and evil in “the kingdom of this world” lead millennial narrators toward ethics, not in its normative or moralizing character but understood as a reflexive judgment on the multiple alternatives preceding any action. Scholars of Bolaño, to cite one example, have frequently observed the importance of ethics in this tutelary author of the millennial group. As Chris Andrews points out, “One of the reasons Bolaño’s fiction matters to so many readers is that it is underpinned by a strong, distinctive, and relatively simple sense of what matters in life. His characters live in ethically and politically oriented worlds” (174). It may well be asked—although this question goes beyond the scope of this book—if religion in the most recent Latin American narrative, after being made more visible and turned into a subject of analyses and discussion, has not been substituted, at least in part, by ethics. The following readings of three representative novels of the post-Boom and the millennial group—Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, Fernando Vallejo’s El desbarrancadero (2001), and Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes (1998)— will examine how the desacralization of the Latin American novel carried out during the past decades involves the three aspects I have been discussing here: the unmasking of religion in the text, the search for authenticity and truth, and the abandonment of nostalgia in order to clear the way for change and experimentation in the twenty-first-century Latin American novel.

WAR OF RELICS: RELIGION AND DIS-ALIENATION IN HASTA NO VERTE, JESÚS MÍO The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heart-

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less world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. MARX , CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S “PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT” (131)

It’s true, our life here is a lie: what they tell in the radio is lies, lies are what the neighbors say, and it’s a lie that you’re going to miss me. JESUSA PALANCARES, IN THE EPIGRAPH TO HASTA NO VERTE, JESÚS MÍO (8)

Similar to other testimonial novels for which it served as an early model, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío dismantles the sacralizing devices of the Boom novels by focusing its narrative squarely on the lives of individuals in a verifiable context. Rejecting the techniques of the holy in the Boom novels—the sub specie aeternitatis narration and its totalizing perspective, the reading in a symbolic or allegorical key, the hidden and omniscient narrator, and the use of prophetic characters—Poniatowska’s novel moves away from fiction toward journalism and ethnography. Critical readings of this text have thus tended to focus primarily on its sociohistorical and artistic elements. As Beth Jörgensen observes, “Early studies of the novel discovered in Jesusa Palancares both a model feminist heroine and a failed revolutionary, establishing two ideological poles between which later analyses would locate themselves. Jesusa Palancares has also been studied according to Jungian archetypes and the standards of the picaresque, the neopicaresque, the Hispanic tradition of the esperpento, the Bildungsroman, and medical anthropology.” (31). Few studies, however, have centered on religion’s presence in this novel, which is quite striking and seems to clash with the text’s perspective, as well as with the personality of its protagonist, Jesusa Palancares (whose real name was Josefina Bórquez; Poniatowska, Luz y luna, las lunitas 56).6 In fact, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío displays its religious content from its very title, as well as in the engraving of the Holy Child of Atocha on its cover (in the most common edition, by Mexico’s Editorial Era), and in the text’s first chapter, in which Jesusa talks about her “visions” and her belief in reincarnation (other episodes linked to Jesusa’s religion are found in chapters 15, 18, 21, 24, and 28 of the novel). Unwary readers might be forgiven for thinking that they are faced with a devotional book, or at least one that deals extensively with popular religion. Curiously, however, Poniatowska claims in a 1989 interview that she tried to diminish the religious dimension of Jesusa’s life in her account:

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She [Jesusa] probably wanted me to emphasize more the things she felt were most interesting, such as spiritualism, and I instead gave it little room in the book because it was something I didn’t understand very much. . . . Afterwards I regretted it, because I would have dealt with this topic at length just to please her. . . . She talked a lot about current affairs, about how bad her housing was, about the people in her neighborhood, about how bad things were in the country; hers was a very pessimistic view. . . . If it had been up to her, the novel would have been only about spiritualism, the high cost of living, and the country’s bad situation. (Steele, “Entrevista: Elena Poniatowska” 94–95)

Poniatowska’s intention to avoid religiosity and emphasize the secular is clear in these expressions. Nevertheless, Jesusa’s insistence, as well as Poniatowska’s own literary instincts, led Poniatowska to allow Jesusa’s beliefs to become evident in the text although they no longer determine the text’s narrative form, as happened with theological ideas in the Boom novels. Thus, although Jesusa believed in the transmigration of the souls, this is not a novel about Jesusa’s various reincarnations (in the mode of stories such as Borges’s “Las ruinas circulares” [1940], or Cortázar’s “Una flor amarilla” [1956]). What, then, is the role of religious discourse in this novel, which even as it tries to keep religion on the margins also displays it openly? Aside from the fact that the real person who was the model for the character of “Jesusa Palancares” believed in reincarnation, what does this theological notion—an orthodox one in Eastern culture and a heterodox one in the West—mean in Poniatowska’s narrative? A paradoxical effect of religion’s increased visibility in this text is that religion openly becomes a topic of discussion and debate. It is no longer a hermetic code that one can only either believe or reject. Moreover, instead of the “eternal” perspective one finds in the Boom novels, in Hasta no verte, Jesús mío a historical, worldly perspective predominates; instead of a totalizing view, the focus is strictly on individuals and the details of their lives. In regard to Hasta no verte, Jesús mío’s historical aspects, this is an instance of the “history of people without history” (in Pérez de la Riva’s phrase), a sort of counter-history, since unlike conventional historiography this text privileges orality and the nonliterary, favoring instead the rhetoric of gossip and the spoken word. This explains the novel’s overabundance of incidents and its lack of an overall plot, which brings the experience of reading closer to the chaotic nature of reality. In Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, a

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highly particularized individual (to the point of being atypical) tells us her life in a sequence of anecdotes, with little or no interpretation on her part or from the author’s. Delving deeper into religion’s role in Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, it is important to note that, in spite of Jesusa’s devotion toward the Holy Child of Atocha (Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío 34–40), during her childhood and youth she hardly ever attended a Catholic church and that in adulthood she joined the so-called “Obra Espiritual.”7 This is a spiritualist sect, officially known as “Iglesia Mexicana Patriarcal de Elias (IMPE),” founded in Mexico City in 1866 by Roque Rojas (who called himself “El Padre Elías”; “Espiritualismo”). Both Poniatowska and the Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Medicina Tradicional Mexicana (DEMTM) warn against confusing spiritualism with spiritism. As the latter source points out, spiritualism is a “religious doctrine founded in the second half of the nineteenth century in Mexico City, which privileges spiritual communication between people and divinity, as well as the healing of sickness as the basis of its doctrine” (“Espiritualismo”). The Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Medicina Tradicional Mexicana (DEMTM) further adds, In some currents of this doctrine, healing is carried out by means of the spiritual possession of the healer—or the medium in this case—by the spirits of physicians from prior ages. Spiritualism conceives of illness as a result of the breaking of some moral precept, or also as the possession of the patient by some maleficent spirit. . . . Although both cults [spiritism and spiritualism] have some traits in common—such as the spirit possession of those who preside over meetings—, the spiritualists distance themselves explicitly from spiritists. The first have their origin in the church of Roque Rojas, the second are the disciples of the Frenchman Allan Kardec, who did not intend to create a new religion. The spiritists communicate with the spirits of people who were not necessarily physicians or therapists, such as Francisco Madero and Pancho Villa, a practice which is anathema to the spiritualists. The latter direct their communications to spirits of former physicians; moreover, the invocation of violent spirits is contrary to spiritualist practice. Possibly, the link between both cults is due to Damiana Oviedo, who had contact with spiritists, despite being a priestess of the IMPE. (“Espiritualismo”)

Poniatowska likewise underscores that spiritualism and spiritism differ in their believers’ class origins (Luz y luna, las lunitas 70). Followers of

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spiritism, which derives from the European occultist craze of the late nineteenth century represented by figures such as the medium Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), are, as Poniatowska observes ironically, “sophisticated, of a high socioeconomic level: many are politicians . . . and their interest is focused on apparitions, ectoplasms, light and sound effects, levitation, and spiritual writing. . . . Instead, in spiritualism poverty is dominant, and many of the poorest from the lower-class neighborhoods seek out the seven churches of Roque Rojas and the Marian Trinitarian temples to receive treatment, healing, and a personal touch” (Luz y luna, las lunitas 70–71). It is difficult to give an account of the historical development of Mexican spiritualism due to the many internal divisions among the followers of Roque Rojas the cult has experienced (“Espiritualismo”). In turn, spiritualism, as a belated and syncretic religious manifestation, is composed of a mosaic of heterogeneous fragments of diverse religious traditions—relics of other religions, one might say—which, in the attempt to fuse them, clash with one another and generate dissension and division into opposite sects. It is understandable, then, why Poniatowska concluded that elaborating on Jesusa’s religious beliefs would draw her text too much away from its main focus of attention on Jesusa’s life and personality. Even so, the spiritualist beliefs Jesusa practices produce and reinforce in her a vision of reality that, against all expectations, is congruent with Jesusa’s own hypercritical and mistrustful character. Along with the belief of the “Obra Espiritual” in communication with the dead and spirit possession, Jesusa also believes in reincarnation “to recognize the spiritual way one needs to go through many perils, pains, and stages. But it is also necessary to return several times to Earth, according to the debts one has” (Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío 10). For Jesusa, reincarnation is a process of purification of the soul through suffering in the world, which is regarded as the proverbial “vale of tears” (Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío 12). The duality this view explicitly establishes between a world plagued by imperfections and evil and a heaven that is perfect evokes a Gnostic-like worldview, as is suggested in the quote from Jesusa Poniatowska placed as the novel’s epigraph (and which I have used as this subchapter’s epigraph): “Our life here is a lie” (Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío 8). Let us recall that for the Gnostics the existence of evil in the world was a central issue, and that this had led them to conclude (in diverse ways, since Gnosticism

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was multiple and fragmented, like Jesusa’s spiritualism) that the world was an illusion and that the true—and most perfect—reality lay in the afterlife. As Gilles Quispel explains, “Today Gnosticism is defined as a religion in its own right, whose myths state that the Unknown God is not the creator (demiurge, YHVH); the world is an error, the consequence of a fall and split within the deity; and that man, spiritual man, is alien to the natural world and related to the deity and becomes conscious of his deepest Self when he hears the word of revelation. Not sin or guilt, but unconsciousness, is the cause of evil” (3508). Paradoxically, the unreality of the world Jesusa posits on the basis of her heterodox religious beliefs does not lead her to quietism nor to seek isolation but instead sustains and sharpens the intense perception of injustice and inequality Jesusa has developed due to her suffering on this earth. As in the beliefs of some Gnostics, as interpreted by Borges, Jesusa’s religiosity is an active one (although in an individualistic way) and is predicated on a notion of religious life as a voyage or quest, filled with adventures and occasionally bizarre episodes. A good example is Jesusa’s story of how Luz de Oriente, who would later be one of her protecting spirits, pursues her through the desert in one of his reincarnations “dressed in white and with a turban,” followed by twelve camels, and kills Jesusa with a pistol shot (Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío 10). The “Obra Espiritual” certainly provides Jesusa with some consolation, in consonance with the Marxist idea of religion as “the opium of the people.” However, the cult also has participatory and relatively democratic elements that allow Jesusa to work to achieve her “salvation.” This is evidenced in the highly critical contrast Jesusa makes between the “Obra Espiritual” and the Catholic Church: In the Catholic Church they say that [the Holy Spirit] is a little dove, because they don’t really explain anything. The priests have their own very different way of doing things and they know about the “Obra Espiritual,” it’s just that they don’t want to develop it because they’re selfish. They don’t want the people to wake up, because then they’ll lose their power. They make a lot of money on masses, weddings, baptisms. In the “Obra Espiritual” not only are the people awakened, but also the congregation itself sustains the Oratorio; the Priestesses, the Mediums, the Pedestals, the Columns, they all help, and nobody asks for offerings. (Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío 15)

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Jesusa’s critique even turns to the “Obra Espiritual” itself as an institution when Jesusa, toward the end of the book, tells of how she was discriminated against by other priestesses due to her low social class (Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío 303). The climax of Jesusa’s disillusioned view of life occurs near the last lines of the novel when she states, “I don’t believe people are good, to tell you the truth, no. Only Jesus Christ, and I never met him. And my dad, whom I never knew if he loved me or not. But, here on earth, how can you expect anyone to be good?” (Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesús mío 316). This helps us understand this novel’s title in relation to its content. What at first seems to be an expression of messianic or apocalyptic expectation is instead shown to be an expression of Jesusa’s recurrent pessimism about the existence of good in the world: until the narrator sees Jesus (if she ever sees him), she will not find anyone alive who is good. In this context it is important to reflect on the question of the symbolic value of the narrator-protagonist’s name. Poniatowska never explains this; she simply states in “Vida y muerte de Jesusa Palancares” that “in fact I called Jesusa Jose, Josefina Bórquez, but when I thought about her I thought about Jesusa” (Luz y luna, las lunitas 56). It seems evident that, aside from protecting the protagonist’s identity (for which any other name would have served), renaming Josefina as Jesusa is a highly suggestive, even shocking, act of symbolism. Jesusa’s story could then be read as a sort of parodic inversion of the common religious topic of the imitatio Christi: Jesusa would be a feminized Jesus, although, also inverting the patriarchal stereotype of women, she would be an aggressive, misanthropic Jesus, closer to the one who drove the merchants from the temple than to the one who meekly died on the cross.

FERNANDO VALLEJO: INTERFERING WITH THE SACRED I am the Spirit that denies! GOETHE, FAUST (61)

I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS WITH THE ANTI-CHRIST AND ECCE HOMO (20)

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The novels of Fernando Vallejo hold a key place in the desacralization of the Latin American novel in the early twenty-first century due to their notorious and militant antireligious attitude, from Los días azules (1985) to the recent ¡Llegamos! (2015). It should be pointed out in this regard that some of the desacralizing traits of Vallejo’s novels are similar to those found in other post-Boom novels, such as Hasta no verte, Jesús mío. As in the testimonial and new sentimental novels, those of Vallejo display an intense subjectivism and individualism: their first-person narrator-protagonist is always the same misanthropic, prejudiced, and selfish “old dandy,” based on the discourse of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century decadentism: “Vallejo’s narrator is modeled after the decadent aristocrats who, in the style of Efraín in Jorge Isaacs’ María (1867) or the female narrator of Teresa de la Parra’s Memorias de la Mamá Blanca (1929), nostalgically mourn the loss of a glorious lordly lifestyle in a family hacienda” (Aristizábal 20). In this way, Vallejo does away with the teeming characters and the quasi-divine narrative impersonality of the Boom novels. Another fundamental aspect of Vallejo’s novels is the critique of nationalism, similar to that which arises in the post-Boom’s testimonial narratives and which has more recently become increasingly evident in novels by authors of the “Crack” group in Mexico; in works by the various collaborators of the McOndo anthology in Chile; and in the novels of Roberto Bolaño. The following declaration by Vallejo has already become both famous and infamous: “I am the memory of Colombia and its conscience, and after me there’s nothing else” (La virgen de los sicarios 21). This reduction of the nation and its symbols to the discourse of a solipsistic and egomaniacal narrator effectively deprives the idea of the nation of its transcendence, which is founded on the notion of collectivity, and turns it into a mirage, one individual’s fantasy. Another effect of subjectivism in Vallejo’s novels is that, paradoxically, it makes religion even more visible by speaking against it in such an open and explicit way. Like many other famous atheists, from the Marquis de Sade to Nietzsche and Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel—who, adapting one of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, stated, “I’m an atheist, thank God”8—Vallejo’s atheism leads him to allude frequently to religion and to do so in the very traditional mode of blasphemy. The following passage of El desbarrancadero (2001) serves as one example among many:

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We love each other, whether this Pope likes it or not. May this Polish transvestite and his henchmen from the Opus Dei and the Company of Jesus be received by Our Lord Satan without delays in his burning cauldron. What? Is this idiot Devil going to let such an international gang of mafiosi go unpunished to sing in Heaven? If there’s a God there has to be a Devil to settle the dirty accounts of this world and to investigate, by the way, those of the Vatican banks to see if they are as clean as they say. God exists, but He’s colluding with all of the white-collar delinquents on the planet. That dude is like the Colombian presidents: a pimp for crime, shameless, unworthy. . . . While He exists there will always be down here, in this unfortunate vale of tears, ecumenism or globalization, corruption, impunity, bribery. The only one who can finish off the four horsemen of the Apocalypse is the Devil. (176)

With an invective laced with blasphemy, Vallejo uncovers and puts to the test the religious framework that has more or less invisibly supported the modern novel since the days of high modernism. When Vallejo’s narrator launches into one of his many broadsides against the deity, he is also denouncing in aesthetic terms the contemporary novel’s seeming dependency upon a religiosity that dares not speak its name. Moreover, he denounces the cynical use of religion as a sort of cinematic “special effect” to turn the novel, traditionally the genre of disenchantment and disillusionment since Cervantes and Balzac, into a genre filled with deceitful magic and ephemeral transcendence. Not surprisingly, his countryman Santiago Gamboa has singled out Fernando Vallejo as one of the models for the most recent Latin American narrative, which “has preferred those writers most removed from magical realism: Sergio Pitol, César Aira, Fogwill, Fernando Vallejo, and, in crime fiction, Paco Taibo II” (Gamboa, “De los noventa para acá”). As can be seen in the just-cited passage from El desbarrancadero, Vallejo does not worry too much about the contradictions, antinomies, and sometimes humorous paradoxes inherent in his blasphemies. This is partly explained by the fact that his narrative discourse is largely based on contra-diction, by which I mean speaking against or in systematic opposition to any concept, individual, or posture Vallejo considers predominant in society. Vallejo’s strategy is comparable to that of the so-called “contraries” in certain Native American nations, such as the “contrary” warriors of the Cheyennes and the heyoka clowns among the Lakota, both of whom “manifest a resistance to normative behavior. Their ritual clowning often

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entails doing daily tasks backward and speaking in seemingly nonsensical and inappropriate ways” (764–65). It also has a close affinity to the attitude of the cynical philosophers of antiquity, from Diogenes to Menippus, whose anticonventional behavior and their practice of parrhesia—speaking always with absolute frankness, even at the cost of their lives—made them into the archetypal social rebels of the ancient world (Branham; Foucault, Discourse and Truth).9 If the search for truth and authenticity, as I proposed at the beginning of this chapter, is one of the fundamental impulses of early twenty-first-century narrative, Vallejo is certainly the author who has taken on this project most dramatically and consistently—despite his apparent inconsistency. Of course no reader of Vallejo can ignore the avalanche of diatribes against the Catholic Church, Christianism, the existence of God, and religiosity in general with which his narrations are peppered. Writing about Vallejo’s “art of vituperation,” Jean Franco observes with bewilderment, “Vituperation is the opposite of dialogue. There is no possible response nor reply to it. In its written form in Vallejo’s work it leaves readers in the uncomfortable situation of being either involuntary accomplices or impotent critics. In 2013 the publication of a collection of his essays under the title of Peroratas (Harangues), confirms Vallejo’s project to construct a discourse that defies liberalism’s preference for dialogue, or at least for the appearance of dialogue. Readers are not participants, but recipients of denunciations that give no chance to reply” (179). It is important to point out that although Vallejo’s invective lashes out also against his Colombian fatherland, as well as against human reproduction, democracy, and populism, it could be argued that sacralization itself is the focus of Vallejo’s anger, inasmuch as the nation, human life, and the masses are concepts that have frequently been sacralized by the dominant culture. The thrust of Vallejo’s attacks is broadly desacralizing. However, it is worth asking how Vallejo’s desacralization is expressed artistically, particularly in regard to the novel. Are narrative and invective compatible? What kinds of novels are produced when one narrates with insults? And further, Is it possible to narrate without faith, even without Coleridge’s discreet “poetic faith”? Precisely due to his constant diatribes, Vallejo’s narrative is fundamentally monothematic and repetitive, narrating relatively simple plots while constantly using the same insulting tone and hurling its epithets always against the same subjects I have just mentioned. The presence of diatribe, however, is but part of a more generalized trait of Vallejo’s narrative: its

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penchant for orality, which allows it to assimilate and display a broad repertoire of Colombianisms and popular as well as cultured expressions. These, despite their often nihilistic content, also give Vallejo’s style a strong feeling of vitality and even of humourism. Among the innumerable passages that could be selected from his works to comment on these stylistic traits, let us examine the following one from El desbarrancadero (2001): He was walking [Darío, the narrator’s brother] through the Amazon jungle in the middle of guerrilla territory with only a little knapsack on his shoulder filled with liquor and marihuana and without an ID card—can you believe it? No one who lives in Colombia goes out without their ID. In Colombia, even the dead have ID cards, and they vote. Leaving the ID card at home is like leaving your prick—nobody with an ounce of brains leaves it! “Why the hell don’t you carry your ID with you, Darío? How hard can it be?” “I don’t have it, somebody stole it from me.” “Idiot!” Letting somebody steal your ID in Colombia is worse than killing your own mother. “And what if somebody with your ID kills a guy?” What is what, nobody’ s going to kill anyone, forget all that fatalism. Fatalism! That word, which nobody uses anymore, we learned it from our grandmother. It comes from the Latin fatum, destiny, which is always for the worst. Raquelita, mother and grandmother, I’m so glad you’re no longer here to see your grandson’s collapse! Like I said, he was walking through the Amazon jungle without his ID card. (16–17)

As may be seen in this passage, Vallejo’s diatribe begins as a digression from the principal narrative (in this case, a brief anecdote illustrating Darío’s addiction to pot), announced by the rhetorical question, “Can you believe it?” This question opens a space to bring up a complaint about the strictness of the national ID card system in Colombia and, in turn, the political parties’ abuse of this requirement by using the IDs of deceased individuals to register them in the electoral rolls. This is followed by the hyperbolic and burlesque comparison between forgetting one’s ID card and forgetting an intimate body part. A quick dialogue between the narrator and Darío interrupts further the already interrupted narration, shift-

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ing to the following paragraph by means of free indirect discourse (“What is what”) until it is stopped in its tracks by a single word, “fatalism,” which in turn provokes a philological definition (its derivation from the Latin fatum) mixed with the emotional evocation of grandmother Raquelita until the following paragraph returns to the phrase with which the segment had begun (“He was walking through the Amazon jungle. . . . Like I said, he was walking through the Amazon jungle without his ID card”). Vituperation creates a structure of interference in Vallejo’s narrative in which meaning constantly shifts between the poles of orality and writing, diatribe (which stops narration while also framing it) and narration (which always seeks to proceed). Are diatribes agents of narrative paralysis in Vallejo’s novels? Or do they help the narrative move forward? Are they “noise” or “message,” or both? The tendency to be constantly complaining, which Poniatowska tried to control in her novel by editing Jesusa’s discourse to give it greater narrative flow, is precisely what Vallejo unleashes in his novels, even taking it, as I have just pointed out, to the level of the paragraphs, sentences, and phrases that comprise his narrative. In view of Vallejo’s training as a biologist,10 Michel Serres’s observations in his book The Parasite (1982) are relevant. In French, the term parasite refers to a biological parasite both as the noise of interference or the static one finds on the radio. Serres points out that both parasites and interference operate by exciting, inflaming, or irritating a system: “The parasite intervenes, enters the system as an element of fluctuation. It excites it or incites it; it puts it into motion, or paralyzes it” (The Parasite 191). Nevertheless, the parasite is not in itself an agent of encompassing or “revolutionary” change but rather a reformist element acting within a generally conservative framework: “Far from transforming a system, changing its nature, its form, its elements, its relations and its pathways . . . the parasite makes it change states differentially” (The Parasite 191). Serres also notes that the parasite, which begins by acting like a poison, can ultimately turn into a vaccine to guard the host against it harmful effects: “In vaccination, poison can be a cure, and this logic with two entry points becomes a strategy, a care, a cure. The parasite gives the host the means to be safe from the parasite. The organism reinforces its resistance and increases its adaptability” (The Parasite 193). We may posit that Vallejo’s diatribes act like this sort of “parasitic” interference as a strategy of inoculation. Such a strategy would work precisely by means of the introduction of an “irritating” discourse in the midst of the

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narrative. The presence of this discourse would serve to denounce before the text’s readers the presence of traditionally “sacralized” themes or topics, such as “the nation,” “the people,” “reproduction,” and the church itself. Readers would then be “vaccinated,” so to speak, against the mimetic illusions of “poetic faith” fomented by novelistic sacralization, as well as against the tranquilizing illusion that novels can produce radical changes in social and political structures. It is thus simplistic to state that Vallejo’s discourse is based on the principle of “transgression” that has strongly influenced contemporary letters since the time of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, which Octavio Paz called “the tradition of rupture” (Los hijos del limo 15–37). The goal of transgression, which has its roots in revolution, has always been that of nullifying or eliminating that which is transgressed (be it the law, nature, or religion) in order to proclaim the establishment of new beginning. There is a creative or redemptive impulse that is ultimately religious in avant-gardist transgression, which may be summed up in Vicente Huidobro’s well-known verse: “The poet is a small God” (78). Vallejo carries out instead a “transgression of transgression,” since he does not eliminate the term he transgresses but instead uses it, although depriving it of its transcendent value. As the previously cited passage states, “God exists, but He’s colluding with all of the white-collar delinquents on the planet” (176). Another instance of “transgression of transgression” in Vallejo is found in his consistent interest in grammar, even as he declares in El cuervo blanco (2012) that grammar “is a pseudoscience like ontology, theology, astrology, phrenology, and psychoanalysis” (227; see the comments by Ospina). In a contra-diction of Nietzsche’s expressions cited in the epigraph to this segment (“I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar”), Vallejo not only does not renounce grammar but instead proclaims himself in La virgen de los sicarios as “the last grammarian in Colombia” (58). The writer from Colombia’s Antioquia province probably considers that following Nietzsche’s suggestion and writing without regard to grammar so as to “be rid of God”—as the members of the historical avant-gardes did with such devices as “automatic writing” and portmanteau words—can only lead to an enigmatic and alienated writing that forsakes all communication, which clearly is not one of Vallejo’s aims. At the beginning of this section I proposed that one of Vallejo’s main contributions is his attempt to produce a profoundly desacralized narrative, one that would resist even the modern tendency to turn literary

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texts—particularly novels—into sacred scriptures. Vallejo’s principal strategy to resist sacralization is the aforementioned technique of contradiction, linked to his systematic opposition to anything that is or seems to be favored or disfavored by the majority of his reading public; thus, Vallejo’s narrator claims to despise all kinds of religion, as well as democracy and populism, the nation in general and in particular (that is, Colombia), reproductive sex, and human life in general. He further reaffirms his atheism (although in blasphemy’s ambiguous terms), his more egotistic than elitist attitude toward the masses, his rootlessness, his pederasty, his love for animals, and his nihilism. It is not a question in Vallejo’s case of a mere inversion of values, such as that carried out by the maudit poets and prose writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Baudelaire to Jean Genet, which has led to surrounding these authors with an aura of “negative sacredness.” It is rather a strategy to offend friend and foe alike in order to prevent his texts from being sacralized and himself from being regarded as a vates or prophet. In this way, Vallejo closes the cycle opened by Federico Gamboa and the naturalist novels at the beginning of the twentieth century with their attempts to incorporate in the novel a secularized version of prophetic discourse. Mercurial and elusive, Fernando Vallejo’s writing harks back to an inaugural moment when literature began to realize that it is made up equally of affirmations and negations, and when it began to discover itself, in Michel Foucault’s phrase, in “the savage and imperious nature of words” (Les mots et les choses 313).

LOS DETECTIVES SALVAJES: A FAREWELL TO NOSTALGIA I should be sitting in another room, rainbow-hued, looking not into the past but into the future. L. P. HARTLEY, THE GO-BETWEEN (10–11)

Nostalgia for a lost paradise, Harry B. Partin observes, “is among the most powerful nostalgias that seem to haunt human beings. It may be the most powerful and persistent of all. A certain longing for paradise is evidenced at every level of religious life” (6983). Interwoven with religion, nostalgia is also not only the longing for the past but also for an ideal place, which is why it is also strongly linked to the idea of the nation. This explains the

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shock felt by readers when, in the last lines of his novel Las batallas en el desierto (1981), where he looks back at his own middle-class childhood in Mexico City during the 1950s, the late Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco ends his story with a cutting statement: “That city is over. That country is over. There’s no memory of the Mexico of those years. And nobody cares: who can be nostalgic for such horror?” (68).11 The revulsion for the immediate past felt by the narrator of Las batallas en el desierto, his overt rejection of nostalgia, had already been anticipated by the quotation from L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), which serves as the novel’s epigraph: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (9). As the serene tone of this declaration suggests, for the English novelist the anti-nostalgic attitude was rather commonplace, something to be taken for granted; this was not the case for Pacheco, nor for most of the Latin American authors of his and of earlier generations, for whom nostalgia continued to be a fundamental part of their writings. Its rejection of nostalgia makes Pacheco’s novel a precursor—not the only one, of course—of today’s works of Latin American narrative fiction that seek to go beyond the nation as their principal framework and their reason for being and thus seek to distance themselves from the nostalgia to which national discourse has become so closely linked. Scholars of nostalgia as a phenomenon in Western culture constantly remark on the current pejorative connotations of the term nostalgia and of the concept’s overall bad reputation. Susan Stewart calls nostalgia “a social illness,” and Charles Maier has trenchantly observed that “nostalgia is to memory what kitsch is to art” (cited by Boym xvi). Curiously, although it refers to the longing for things distant in time and space, nostalgia was diagnosed as an emotional illness in early modern times during the seventeenth century. It was given its Greek name by a Swiss physician to refer to the anxiety certain displaced individuals felt to return to their native land: from Swiss mercenaries fighting abroad and young men from Berne studying in Basel to the domestic laborers who worked in France and Germany (Boym 3). Soon, however, nostalgia ceased to be a sickness to which only peasants or people from the provinces were vulnerable and that could be cured by emetics, bleeding, and the use of opium to become an incurable disease, a mal du siècle, no longer a subject for medicine but one for philosophers and poets. With romanticism, the uses of nostalgia shifted from the intimate and personal to the collective realm, and nostalgia was placed in the service of state propaganda to forge a nationalist sentiment in

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communities that previously had only known love for their native village. From such abuses of nostalgia stems the suspicion with which it is viewed in contemporary culture, since it is invariably associated with the centralizing state, pastism, and conservatism. It is hardly necessary to elaborate on the multiple ways in which romantic nostalgia was placed in service of nationalism throughout the nineteenth century in Europe as well as in Latin America, from Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances and the Latin American “foundational fictions” (Doris Sommer) to the “eternal anthem to Junín, an endless ode to the agriculture of the torrid zone” that was the civil and patriotic poetry that Rubén Darío lamented (206). In Latin America, nationalism and its nostalgic expression in literature remained current, largely due to events such as the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the U.S. military occupations in the Caribbean and Central America that were its sequel during the first three decades of the twentieth century, along with later events such as the Mexican Revolution and the dictatorial regimes that flourished in the region. Nationalist nostalgia was expressed in the novelas de la tierra, for example, as the longing for a lost Arcadia when people, nature, and culture enjoyed a harmonious relation that guaranteed the coherence and solidity of their nations. As Carlos J. Alonso shows, “In the novela de la tierra . . . ‘the autochthonous’ is a discursive mode generated by a complex rhetorical figure that organizes a synecdochical interaction” among three semantic fields: language, geography, and human activity (76). The synecdoche established among these three terms aims to represent “the organicity that binds together and relates to one another and to the environment every one of a culture’s manifestations” (76). Nationalist nostalgia suffered its deepest loss of prestige in Europe and North America after World War II, when the world saw in Nazi Germany the consequences of the poisonous “restorative nostalgia” of which Svetlana Boym speaks in The Future of Nostalgia: a nostalgia that attempts “a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home,” which “does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition” and which posits a “national memory that is based on a single plot of national identity” (xviii). In postwar Latin America, the discredit of this variety of nostalgia led to a trend among writers to adopt another type of nostalgia, “reflective nostalgia,” which, as Boym points out, “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of

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modernity”(xviii). Reflective nostalgia “does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones; it loves details, not symbols” (xviii). It is worth recalling how the seemingly rationalistic and cosmopolitan work of Borges is moved by nostalgic reflections on specific moments and places in Argentina: from a city of Buenos Aires turned into sentimental ruins (“And the city, now, is like a map of my humiliations and defeats,” Obras Completas II 499) to the violent but compelling territory of the Argentine South (“Behind the distrustful walls/ The South keeps a dagger and a guitar,” Obras Completas II 441). Reflective nostalgia presides even more visibly over the fictions of Carpentier, in which the author’s identification with Cuba is presented through very specific historical, architectural, and musical evocations often closely linked to Carpentier’s life experiences: Havana seen as a “city of columns,” the remembrances of youth under the dictatorship of Machado in El acoso (1956), and the various episodes of exile and return to the country he had made his own, embodied in the comings and goings of the Havana siblings Esteban and Sofía in El siglo de las luces (1961) and the Latin American musicologist in Los pasos perdidos (1953). Even Rulfo’s austere and laconic work is configured around the critical remembrance of his native Jalisco, and the desolate environment of Pedro Páramo is presented in contrast to the evocations of a Comala that was once verdant: “I imagined seeing that through my mother’s memories, her nostalgia among remnants of sighs. She always lived sighing for Comala, for the return; but she never went back. Now I come in her place. I bring the eyes with which she gazed at these things, because she gave me her eyes to see: ‘There is, after passing Los Colimotes, the very beautiful view of a green plain, somewhat yellow because of the ripe corn. From that place you can see Comala, making the land white, illuminating it by night.’” (8). Reflective nostalgia in Borges, Carpentier, and Rulfo becomes a device to think of the nation as something fluid and dynamic in a simultaneous process of destruction and construction that never ceases to beckon these authors like a constant siren song, or like a perpetually unfulfilled obligation. Cortázar alludes to the heavy burden of the obligation to look back in search of national origins in the third epigraph to Rayuela, taken from a letter of the French absurdist poet Jacques Vaché to André Breton: “Nothing is so burdensome to a man than being forced to represent a country” (13). It is true, as Jorge Volpi has reminded readers, that the Boom authors were

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initially accused of being rootless cosmopolitans (El insomnio de Bolívar 166– 67), but it is no less true that without the force of a reflective nostalgia that leads to thinking about the nation one cannot fully understand Rayuela nor the rest of the Boom’s masterpieces: neither the Mexican regrets of Artemio Cruz in La muerte de Artemio Cruz, nor the burning memories of nocturnal Havana in Tres tristes tigres, nor the longing for the Caribbean regions of Colombia in Cien años de soledad, nor the pleasure and pain of adolescence in Lima in La ciudad y los perros. The individual memory of each of these authors is surrounded by the collective framework of a social memory to which these authors must surrender, as if in spite of their involuntary exiles and voluntary expatriations, or perhaps because of them, they suffered from a childlike “separation anxiety” from their “mother country.” Even in the narrative of the post-Boom, in which, as I have discussed, Latin American authors left aside the “total novel” in order to experiment with a wide range of novelistic styles, the nation-nostalgia pairing continued to hold sway. It is almost unnecessary to underscore the force with which the discourse about the nation appears in so many testimonial narratives of the 1980s, from Barnet’s Biografía de in cimarrón and Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesús mío to Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú. Moreover, in these works, despite their attempts at journalistic immediacy, there is also a sort of return to romantic costumbrismo, to certain remembrances of things past that are decidedly nostalgic although they are displayed from the critical perspective of those marginalized by society, of the “people without history.” On the other hand, the tenaciously experimental narrative of Severo Sarduy incorporates, with a frequency that goes in crescendo from De donde son los cantantes (1967) to Colibrí (1984) and Cocuyo (1990), references to Cuban history and culture and episodes from Sarduy’s own life (González Echevarría, La ruta de Severo Sarduy 173, 232). It is undeniable that, although the predominant Latin American tradition has favored nationalist nostalgia, there has also always been a substantial number of works that have been accused of deracination, beginning with the writings of the modernistas at the turn of the nineteenth century through the varied prose and verse works of the vanguardists and, as I have already remarked, not a few of the Boom novels. In Mexico—arguably Latin America’s most programatically nationalistic country—one finds the Kafkaesque short stories of Juan José Arreola and Tito Monterroso, the Sade-inspired cosmopolitan novelas of Salvador Elizondo and Juan García Ponce, and the literary currents of the onda and escritura identified by Margo

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Glanz in her 1971 book. In the still-democratic Venezuela of the 1970s and 1980s, there were the ingenious narratives of Luis Britto García in Rajatabla (1971) and La orgía imaginaria (1983), inspired by Borges; in Peru, Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s Prosas apátridas (1975); in Colombia, the Conradian maritime novels about Maqroll the Rigger by poet Alvaro Mutis, and many other such works that could be cited if one were interested in reconstructing an alternative Latin American tradition of literary works distanced from nationalism and nostalgia, even in its reflective form. However, such a tradition would collapse faced by the fact that most of these authors I have listed were highly independent and individualistic and not given to representing movements, groups, or nations. Nevertheless, a few years later in 1996, this independent attitude would become the collective position assumed by two groups of younger writers: the collaborators in the McOndo short story anthology and the Mexican authors who signed the so-called “Crack Manifesto” (Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Angel Palou, Eloy Urroz, and Jorge Volpi). These writers’ search for a sort of “internal democracy of the writer” (in Antonio Skármeta’s phrase; Coddou 579) is expressed through an open rejection of national borders in fiction writing and a willingness to experiment with a greater diversity of themes, ideas, and situations that are not determined by an idea of the nation that they increasingly regard as too parochial. As often happens with changes of paradigm, once the direction of change becomes clear, it is easier to notice that many authors who did not sign these manifestoes had also been following similar directions. Independently of groups such as McOndo and the “Crack” group, Roberto Bolaño—who would become a tutelary figure for most of the authors from both of the aforementioned groups—generated a deliberately anti-nostalgic narrative style in the stories and novels he abundantly produced during the decade before his death in 2003. Let us examine in greater depth the dismantling of nostalgia in Los detectives salvajes, its links to the desacralization of the novel, and some of the directions in which it leads. From the moment Los detectives salvajes was published, it was compared to Rayuela and other Boom texts. Elvio E. Gandolfo jokingly pointed out that “Los detectives salvajes is one of those massive doorstops that easily go beyond five hundred pages to show from the width of its spine that it is a Great Novel (i.e., Rayuela, Paradiso, Los Sorias, Adán Buenosayres)” (Gandolfo 116). Juan Antonio Masoliver observes that “Bolaño’s

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novels are conceived fragmentarily, like felicitous accumulation of scenes, in a tradition begun by Cervantes that it also shares with Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela.” (Masoliver 65). In recent years, Jorge Volpi has astutely pointed out that the case of Bolaño marks a turning point for Latin American literature because, despite being idolized by great many of the new writers, very few of them have followed the kind of relationship the Chilean maintained with tradition. Dozens of young writers imitate his “fractal” stories, his delirious monologues, or his metaliterary erudition, but they have not sought the sort of dialogue or confrontation with his predecessors—with the vast lineage that goes from Modernismo to the Boom—that one finds in all of his books. . . . Bolaño embodies, then, one of the high points of our tradition—that spider’s thread that stretches from Rayuela to 2666—as well as a fracture within it. (El insomnio de Bolívar 175–76)

For Volpi, who has called Bolaño “the last Latin American” (176), a particular trait of Bolaño is that even as he dialogues with the novelistic tradition of the Boom and its precursors, he also dismantles it in his own texts. Significantly, Volpi notes, It is not by chance that Bolaño, a Chilean who lived in Spain, wrote stories and novels that were Mexican, Chilean, Uruguayan, Peruvian, or Argentine with the same ease and conviction. If the members of the Boom wrote centering on their respective countries of origin with the purpose of conjuring the elusive essence of Latin America, Bolaño did the opposite: he wrote books that pretended to belong to those national literatures but which ultimately ended up displaying the fleeting nature of identity. . . . his imitation of different national accents and idiosyncrasies, taken to its parodic extreme (for example, Argentinity in the story “El gaucho insufrible”), barely hid a hilarious critique of the idea of national literature itself. (El insomnio de Bolívar 176)

According to Volpi, Bolaño’s deepest difference with the Boom’s tradition lies in his postnational attitude, expressed in a view of Latin America that is devoid of essentialism and skeptical about fixed concepts of national and personal identity. But this postnational attitude, as we have seen, presupposes a farewell to nostalgia, and the abandonment of nostalgia and

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of the nation in turn implies leaving behind the religious impulse that is interwoven with both. Bolaño’s narrative, then, would be an attempt to abandon the use of religion as an artifice, as a “partial magic” or trick to give the novel a transcendent aura. It could even be regarded as a successful example of narrating without religion at all, if by religion one understands the desire to reach a plenitude of meaning, or in Berger’s words, “the farthest reach of man’s self-externalization, of his infusion of reality with his own meanings . . . the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant” (27–28). Without Vallejo’s penchant for blasphemy, for speaking obsessively about religion even when trying to go beyond it, Bolaño’s narrative simply discards religion and seeks to organize its discourse following nontranscendental coordinates and by linking itself to ethics. Bolaño is not seeking to assign meaning to the world but instead to describe how human beings navigate (and sometimes sink) in a world without inherent meaning, forging often highly personal value systems to help them remain stable in their journey through life. A brief comparison between the traits of sacralization in the Boom novels and the text of Los detectives salvajes will allow us to see some concrete examples of the previous statements. As will be recalled, I posited in chapter 5 that the Boom novels mobilize a series of strategies to assimilate themselves to sacred texts: the narrative pattern of the quest; the use of prophetic discourse as protest or prognostication; the use of metanarrative to blur the borders between the inside and the outside of the text; and the evocation of eternity as a metaphor of totalization, be it through structural devices (a fragmented narrative similar to “chaotic enumeration”) or through symbolic objects (such as Melquíades’s manuscript). All of these devices seek to provoke in readers a more active and radical “poetic faith” than that posited by Coleridge and dramatize the risk and the exaltation produced by the religious action of “re-joining,” of seeking a way to reunite individuals among themselves and with the multiplicity of the cosmos. However, as shown by Chris Andrews’s insightful reading of “Bolaño’s fiction-making system” (33–68), Bolaño’s idea of the novel and of narrative in general is not based on theology but rather on cosmology.12 Specifically, it derives from the scientifically accepted cosmological idea that the universe is expanding after an initial big bang. Nevertheless, Bolaño is not interested in the details of the universe’s origins but in the strategies needed to describe such an expanding universe. It is fundamentally

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a question of perspective. The technique of “expansion” discussed by Andrews, in which Bolaño takes previously undeveloped elements from his texts to reelaborate and amplify them in subsequent texts, is not an attempt to cover up or fill in the narrative gaps such as those into which Cortázar invited readers to “jump” in Rayuela. Instead, Bolaño urges readers to look more deeply and in greater detail at a segment of a more general panorama, which by virtue of the universe’s expansion offers new details, opens new perspectives. Andrews notes that expansion is but one of four processes used by Bolaño, of which the other three are “circulating characters,” “metarepresentation,” and “overintepretation” (34); however, in my view these three processes may well be encompassed by the first one, from which they logically flow. Los detectives salvajes could initially be read as a parody of the Boom novels: the novel derives from a “found manuscript” that is not produced by a wizard such as Melquíades, Morelli, or Oppiano Licario but is instead a fragment from the diary of one Juan García Madero, a seventeen-year-old aspiring poet who is an absolute beginner in love as well as in life. Moreover, the diary does not encompass a whole epoch nor anything resembling an eternity but merely the experiences of Juan in Mexico City and in some cities and towns of the Mexican state of Sonora during a period of around three months, between November 2, 1975, and February 15, 1976. The manuscript is divided into two parts: “Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)” and “The Deserts of Sonora (1976),” which frame the remainder of the novel, the long section titled “Los detectives salvajes (1976–1996).” The ending of the first part, in which Juan, carried off by circumstances, flees from Mexico City with his lover, the young prostitute Lupe, and Arturo Belano in a white Ford Impala driven by Ulises Lima, features a passage in which Juan describes his confused reactions in defense of Lupe and his friends by means of the repeated use of the first person of the verb “to see” in a manner suggestive of a parody of the passage in which Borges describes the Aleph: I saw María advancing through the garden towards me. I saw the faces of the killers inside the Camaro. One of them smoked a cigar. I saw the face of Ulises and his hands moving over the controls of Quim’s car. I saw the face of Belano who looked impassively at the pimp, as if this had nothing to do with him. I saw Lupe with her face in her hands in the back seat. . . . Later I saw that Albert was reeling. He smelled of liquor, surely they had also been

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celebrating the New Year’s Eve. I saw my right fist (the only one I could use, since I carried my books in the other hand) falling on the pimp’s body and this time I saw him fall. . . . I saw the two killers get out of the Camaro and walk towards me. I saw Lupe looking at me from inside the car and that she was opening the door. I knew that I’d always wanted to leave. (136)

The long segment “The Savage Detectives (1976–1996)” is divided into twenty-six chapters that constitute an expansion that projects into the past and into the future from the narrative’s central segment, which begins in “Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)” and ends in “The Deserts of Sonora (1976).” At first it would seem that the novel offers us, as in novels of the Boom, the coexistence of past, present, and future in a single instant, but this seeming imitation of eternity is undone not only by the exact dates it offers but also by the fact that what we read are the first-person reminiscences, sometimes partial and prejudiced, filled with hypotheses and interpretations, of a whole cast of characters who interacted with Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, the two characters “on a quest,” the “savage detectives” of the novel’s title, over the course of two decades. Ultimately, the story collectively told by all those narrators is an open and ill-defined one. On the other hand, the technique of narrating Belano and Lima’s wanderings by means of the monologues of various characters evokes the discourse of the testimonial novels of the post-Boom and underscores the related themes of truth and authenticity that are developed throughout this novel. In their monologues, each of the members of this group of narrators offers their truth as they understand it, and their often confessional tone seeks to emphasize each speaker’s authenticity. Telling about the surgery, convalescence, and death of Ernesto San Epifanio, Angélica Font angrily states, “Of his old friends I was the only one who went to his burial in one of those jumbled cemeteries in the north of the city. I didn’t see any poet, any of his ex-lovers, any director of literary journals” (283). To start his story of how he reencountered Ulises Lima in Tel Aviv, Norman Bolzman declares, “I have always been sensitive to the pain of others, always tried to be in solidarity with other people’s pain. I’m a Jew, a Mexican Jew, and I know the history of my two peoples. With that I think I’ve explained everything” (284). In contrast to Rayuela, the two “savage detectives” who seem to repeat the wanderings of Horacio Oliveira are actually opposites of Horacio, about whom Rayuela offers abundant information on his life and opinions

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(particularly the latter), while readers rarely hear directly the voices of Arturo and Ulises, and what little they know about them comes through the impressions and hypotheses of other individuals. Horacio may not be able to understand himself, but Arturo and Ulises remain enigmatic for the readers throughout Los detectives salvajes. Unlike Rayuela, with its multiple endings evocative of the overflowing time of eternity, the quest narrative in which Bolaño’s enigmatic protagonists are involved in Los detectives salvajes leads to death and banality. After searching for her through the lonely villages of Sonora, Cesárea Tinajero offers no illumination nor any link with poetic tradition. Although her obese body has a monumental quality (“she looks like a rock or an elephant,” notes Juan, 602), Juan states, “Seen from behind, bent over her washerwoman’s trough, Cesárea has nothing poetic about her” (602). A short time later Cesárea dies heroically, although in confusing circumstances, while defending Ulises Lima from the corrupt policeman who, with Alberto, was trying to kidnap Lupe (604). Juan writes in his diary that he looked for and found Cesárea’s poetry notebooks when he returned to her house in Villaviciosa (606), and later he claims to have read them but does not speak of their content, nor does he seem to give them any importance. He simply notes, “I’ve read Cesárea’s notebooks. When I found them I thought that sooner or later I would send them by mail to Mexico City, to Lima’s or Belano’s house. Now I know that I won’t do that. The entire Sonoran police must be on the trail of my friends” (607). Although Bolaño’s life was mostly a sequence of expatriations from Chile to Mexico and from Mexico to Spain, the key to his anti-nostalgic narrative style lies in his emphasis on action: narrators in Bolaño insistently describe sequences of acts, with few pauses for reflection and retrospection. From the multiple narrators of Los detectives salvajes to the solitary one of Nocturno de Chile (2000), Bolaño’s narration, although stemming from the past, moves unceasingly forward; his protagonists, who are frequently his narrators, tell little about their origins or do not dwell on them, moved instead by the urge to tell a story whose ending cannot be clearly foreseen and which moreover often divides into other stories told by other narrators. Much has been said about the “fractal stucture” of Bolaño’s texts, about their tendency to branch out almost indefinitely and of repeating certain patterns on different scales (Echevarría, “Bolaño extraterritorial” 432–33). In temporal terms, fractal repetition, although it produces tree-

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like figures, is totally opposite in meaning to the romantic metaphor of “organic form,” with its roots, stems, branches, and fruits that stand for the idea of clearly defined beginnings and endings, because fractal designs are the product of a repetitive operation without definite beginning nor end: it is a refutation of totalization as well as a “refutation of time,” as in Borges’s celebrated essay.13 Even so, the farewell to nationalist nostalgia in Bolaño and in many other twenty-first-century Latin American writers should not be seen as a nihilistic gesture, nor as a complete rejection of the idea of the nation. As anyone who belongs to a nation without a sovereign state in today’s world knows, and as a 2009 report from an international refugee agency reminds us, “Statelessness, or the lack of effective nationality, affects millions of men, women, and children worldwide. Being stateless means having no legal protection or right to participate in political processes, inadequate access to health care and education, poor employment prospects and poverty, little opportunity to own property, travel restrictions, social exclusion, vulnerability to trafficking, harassment, and violence” (Refugees International, “Nationality Rights for All”). There is no doubt, however, that Western literature has long dreamed of occupying a transnational space, at least since the idea of the “Republic of Letters” arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.14

• In this book, we have followed the development of a twentieth-century trend in Latin American letters to endow the genre of the novel with traits typical of sacred scriptures. Unlike in Europe and North America, this tendency was not so much a reaction to increasing secularism but a response to the sociopolitical crises and tensions in the young Latin American republics, caused partly by the United States’ expansionist policies in the hemisphere. By “sacralizing” the novel, Latin American authors strengthened its cultural prestige in societies where religion was still dominant in the popular sectors and even among the elites and made it capable of more effectively intervening in critical debates about the nation and its issues. The aesthetic consequences of the Latin American novels’ sacralization were not trivial, either. Infusing these texts about worldly matters with numinous qualities, with a sense of the holy, gave their portraits of Latin American life and culture an added dimension and deeper reso-

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nance. Their resonance was such that it even found echoes around the world, as the grand—and successful—literary experiments of the Boom’s “total novels” and the artifices of “magical realism” were repeated in novels from the United States to India and China. Ultimately, Latin American writers of newer generations, who were experiencing (for good or ill) a redemocratized and “globalized” Latin America on the eve of its independence bicentennial, undertook a radical critique of the Boom novels and their “literary theology,” seeking alternative modes of fiction writing based less on national identity than on the truthful and authentic representation of the lives of Latin Americans in the twenty-first century. Heralded in the work of Roberto Bolaño and represented by myriad new voices writing from within the continent and overseas, these fictions embody a search for greater freedom and creative maturity in their ongoing project to extend the frontiers of what can be portrayed in the literatures and cultures of Latin America.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION. A LITERARY TRINITY: THE NOVEL, THE SACRED, AND THE NATION 1. Borges’s essay is opposed to the more common reading of the Quijote, derived from the nineteenth-century realist tradition as a work about disillusionment. Instead, following the avant-garde impulse to renew the novel and laying the groundwork for what would later become “magical realism,” Borges accentuates the “magical” aspects of Cervantes’s novel. 2. As historian of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith observes, “Already in what we today call classical Athens the Illiad and Odyssey were a privileged tradition: semi-scripture, if you like, of the oral type. Alexandria in the third century turned them carefully into scripture of the written type, thus enabling them to serve like the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and the dramatists, as ideal literature also for the non-Greek-speaking phases of Western civilization since that time” (“Scripture as Form and Concept: Their Emergence in the Western World” 40). See also Graham 8196. 3. Borges’s statements in this regard in “El arte narrativo y la magia” (1932) are already well known: “To the superstitious individual, there is a necessary con-

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nection not only between a gunshot and a dead man, but between a dead man and a battered wax figurine, or the prophetic breaking of a mirror, or spilled salt, or thirteen terrible guests at dinner. Such a dangerous harmony, such a frantic and precise causality, rules in the novel as well” (“El arte narrativo” 231). 4. See M. H. Abram’s classic essay “Belief and Suspension of Disbelief,” which discusses the foundations of what Coleridge called “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (cited by Abrams 28). Although Abrams insists that only the evocation of a common human experience can suspend readers’ unbelief, he also recognizes in the last lines of his essay that “the great writer does not merely play upon the beliefs and propensities we bring to literature from life, but sensitizes, enlarges, and even transforms them” (30). 5. In A History of Reading (1996), Alberto Manguel observes, “However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world’s text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not . . . merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven’t yet grasped” (173). 6. With similar brevity, although less dramatically, phenomenological critic Georges Poulet makes an analogous observation: “Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself” (56). 7. In the visual arts, music, and literature, Otto observes that the three great tropes of the numinous are darkness, emptiness, and silence (68–71). 8. See chapter 1 of Natural Supernaturalism: “This Is Our High Romantic Argument” (17–70). 9. As evidenced in, for instance, narratives such as Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690) by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (1775) by Alonso Carrió de La Vandera, and El evangelio en triunfo, o Historia de un filósofo desengañado (1798) by Pablo de Olavide. 10. More details about simulation and dissimulation in El Periquillo Sarniento are found in my book Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative, chapter 2, “Journalism and (Dis)simulation in El Periquillo Sarniento” (21–41). 11. In his foreword to the 1956 edition of Historia del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima: 1569-1820 (1887) by José Toribio Medina, Marcel Bataillon comments on the

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difficulties of having access to the local Inquisition archives in Peru and Chile and contrasts this with the case of Mexico, where these archives were preserved in their entirety: “the original documents of the Lima Inquisition that are held today in the Santiago National Archives are a few lawsuits about money or competencies, a slightly less insignificant ruin than what is left in the National Archive of Peru. What Medina used, thus, was not the local archive of the Lima tribunal, but the part about Lima from the archive in the Inquisition’s Supreme Council in Spain, especially the accounts of pending lawsuits and autos de fe sent by the Council to the Lima inquisitors. What was kept in its own archives by the Lima tribunal, particularly the cases of heresy, disappeared almost completely in times and circumstances that are still to be determined by Latin American scholars . . . The situation is extremely different from that of the Mexican Inquisition, whose local archives are preserved intact in the General National Archives of Mexico” (xvi–xvii). 12. Varela Jácome (112) and Epple. 13. See my essay “Novel and Journalism in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: The Law of Dissimulation in José Mármol’s Amalia and Heriberto Frías’s Tomochic.” 14. See my book La novela modernista hispanoamericana (1987). 15. I refer readers to the fundamental work of Cathy L. Jrade, Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity: The Modernist Recourse to Esoteric Tradition (1983), as well as to recent approaches by Nancy La Greca in Erotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose, who lucidly explores “theories of non-theistic mysticism” in modernista prose. La Greca argues cogently and with abundant documentation that modernista authors in both poetry and prose adopted into their literary works a secularized vision of mysticism, fusing it as well with a strong sense of eroticism (13–44). Eroticism, in fact, is what a “non-theistic mysticism” amounts to, and as French thinkers as varied as the decadentist Paul Bourget and the surrealist Georges Bataille argued, it is not a trivial element in the creation of both religion and art. As Juan Carlos Ubilluz has shown with regard to the readings of Bataille by Latin American Boom authors, eroticism in modernity becomes sacralized as a way to achieve transcendence (9–15), and it thus becomes a key element in the quest to turn certain Latin American novels into their civilization’s “sacred texts.” 16. In La novela modernista hispanoamericana, I examine in detail the origins of the term and concept of the “intellectual” at the end of the nineteenth and the beginnings of the twentieth centuries and explore its importation to Latin America

192  • NOTES

during the modernista period. A more recent, popularizing account of the rise of the intellectual is Steve Fuller’s The Intellectual: The Positive Power of Negative Thinking (2006). 17. Benda forgets that even clercs in the old style, which he so much admired, such as Da Vinci, Erasmus, Kant, Goethe, and Renan, occasionally performed the compromising roles of advisors and counselors to princes and heads of state, although it is true that all expressed at various moments their disdain for politics. 18. Woolf’s quote comes from her essay “Modern Fiction” (106). 19. See Mark Greif’s well-documented essay, “‘The Death of the Novel’ and Its Afterlives: Toward a History of the ‘Big, Ambitious Novel.’” 20. I refer here to the dialectics of “innovative self-destruction” of bourgeois modernity identified by Marshall Berman in his classic All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1988), which he describes as follows: “The truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. ‘All that is solid’—from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all—all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms” (99). 21. For these comments on the Boom and the post-Boom, I have profited from the studies of Gutiérrez-Mouat, Pellón (“The Spanish American Novel: Recent Developments, 1975 to 1990”), and Shaw. To the three post-Boom currents identified by Pellón (the testimonial, the historical, and the detective novel, 282), we should add the other two observed by Shaw (The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction 23–24): what might be called the “neo-vanguardist” one (from Sarduy to Eltit) and the “neo-sentimental” one represented by Bryce Echenique and Isabel Allende. The critiques of magical realism by the millennium authors, which at first seem a bit outdated (“magical realism,” as a term and concept, was gradually rejected by García Márquez after novels such as Crónica de una muerte anunciada), can best be understood if we view them as way to allude to the “sacred” aspect with which many of the Boom novels were invested. Jorge Volpi has been one of the most insistent writers about this point; see his comments in “El profeta de América Latina” (21–26) and El insomnio de Bolívar (67–77).

NOTES  • 193

22. See the essays by Carmen Boullosa, Gustavo Guerrero, Aníbal González, Cristóbal Pera, and Miguel Gomes, collected in the “Diálogo crítico” section titled “Más allá de la nación en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XXI” in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (Washington University in St. Louis).

CHAPTER 1. PROPHETIC DISCOURSE IN THE NATURALIST NOVEL: FEDERICO GAMBOA AND MANUEL ZENO GANDÍA 1. As Elizabeth Ladenson points out in Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita: “Although Zola himself was never prosecuted on literary grounds in France, several of his minor disciples faced obscenity charges in the 1880s, perhaps the most memorable example being Paul Bonnetain, acquitted in 1884 for Charlot s’amuse (Charlot’s Diversions), his naturalist novel about masturbation. The consequences were more dire for Zola’s British publisher Henry Vitezelly. The latter was hauled into court by the National Vigilance Association and convicted twice: once for translations of La Terre, Nana, and Pot-Bouille, in 1888, and sent to jail the following year for having published thirteen French ‘realist’ works, including a translation of Madame Bovary by Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor. He died not long afterward. His son, Ernest Vitelzelly, was one of the translators of Zola’s novels” (24). 2. A succinct account of the polemics among realism, naturalism, and idealism in the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Spanish novel is found in Donald L. Shaw, Historia de la literatura española 5. El siglo XIX, 219–24. In his “Estudio preliminar” to two novels by Clarín, Francisco Muñoz Marquina alludes to the “always timid and nuanced Naturalism of the Spanish novel, which never fully adopts the materialist ideas of Positivism” (32). 3. For a thorough overview of Mexican politics and society in the age of Porfirio Díaz, see Meyer, Sherman, and Deed’s The Course of Mexican History, chapters 26–29. 4. Such is Vicente Quirarte’s astute comment in his essay “Retorno a los Santos Lugares,” in which he reviews the various urban spaces where Gamboa, with great precision, places the action of his novel. 5. It was on January 23, 1903, as he noted it down in his diary (Martínez 40). 6. See “Biografías breves de los obispos de San Juan.” 7. On the “Ley de la Mordaza” and its political context, see César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico en el siglo americano: su historia desde 1898, 227, 241. 8. This phrase appears in “La monja de la llave” in Tradiciones peruanas completes, 202.

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See the comments by Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela in “Hearing Voices: Ricardo Palma’s Contextualization of Colonial Peru,” 214–32. 9. The French original, from which Zeno Gandía eliminated three words, reads as follows: “Tout dire, ah! oui, pour tout connaître et tout guérir!” (Zola 98). These words are spoken by the physician and freethinker Pascal in the context of a heated discussion in chapter 4 with his lover Clotilde, who tries to convince him to return to the church. Perhaps one of the reasons this epigraph disappeared from subsequent editions of La charca may have been its inconsistency with what is said in Zeno Gandía’s novel about the impossibility of achieving an absolutely certain knowledge of reality, which would have made the relationship between the epigraph and the novel an ironic one. La charca is clearly not an attempt on Zeno Gandía’s part to analyze the Puerto Rican society of his day in its entirety. In fact, La charca takes as a given the impossibility of achieving the positivist ideal of absolute knowledge, as may be seen, for example, in the mistakes made by the scientists and pathologists who investigate Deblás’s murder (in chapter 8 of La charca), or in the statement of ignorance with which the novel closes: “a pain without balm . . . that nobody knows!” (214). 10. Many of Martí’s chronicles, collected in his Escenas norteamericanas, take place in New York City, where he lived from 1881 to 1895 (Martí, Escenas norteamericanas); regarding Darío, one of his most detailed impressions of New York appears in chapter 1 of El viaje a Nicaragua, e Intermezzo tropical; see also Martín Luis Guzmán, La querella de Mexico; A orillas del Hudson. 11. “A noisy event had just occurred in the streets of San Juan. A town’s mayor came on business, and because he was a very political figure and a well-known member of the opposition, his adversaries gathered groups that ran after the mayor on the streets, whistling at him, insulting him, and throwing him rocks. The police remained motionless: the mayor was their enemy too, because the police was filled with members of the party he opposed. The scandal was enormous. Certain houses and stores closed their doors. Some fellow party members of the mayor go together to rescue him; they looked for sticks, rocks, a revolver or two. A full-fledged riot was in the offing. From the mob came strident cries. ‘Long live freedom . . . long live democracy!,’ they said, thinking, undoubtedly, that freedom should be for all save for the mayor who had the audacity to come to San Juan, seat of the government imposed by the United States Congress to the colony” (Zeno Gandía, Redentores 175).

NOTES  • 195

CHAPTER 2: THE OTHER THEOLOGIAN: JORGE LUIS BORGES AND “THE DEATH OF THE NOVEL” 1. I use the term “narrative theology” in a mostly literary sense to refer to the appropriation of theological concepts by Flaubert and other writers in order to configure their own particular ideas about the novel. I am not alluding to the usage of this term in “postliberal theology,” a traditionalist branch of Christian theological studies that emphasizes the narrative aspects of the Bible in order to link their interpretation to traditional criteria. See George W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology: Recovering the Gospel in the Church. Although my analysis centers more on literature and aesthetics, it has closer affinities to the approach followed by the distinguished Puerto Rican theologian Luis N. Rivera Pagán in books such as Mito, exilio y demonios: Literatura y teología en América Latina (1996) and Teología y cultura en América Latina (2009), which highlights expressions of spirituality and religious thought in secular contemporary Latin American literary works by major narrators, such as Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez. 2. Borges’s complex relationship with religion and spirituality (a notion that by the end of the twentieth century became so different from religion that today one hears references to “secular spiritualities”; see MacDonald 8718, 8720–21) has recently begun to be explored in more detail. In the final chapters of Borges: A Life (2004), Edwin Williamson delves into the spiritual curiosity displayed by Borges during his last years of life, from a conversation with a Buddhist monk in Japan in 1979 (444) to his deathbed dialogues in Geneva with a Catholic priest and a Protestant pastor (489). Williamson considers that Borges was more attracted to pantheism, particularly as this is expressed in the legend of the Simurgh in Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds (1177), a text to which Borges returned many times during his career after first mentioning it in his short story “El acercamiento a Almotásim” (Williamson 444). See also Anette U. Flynn, The Quest for God in the Work of Borges (2009), Gonzalo Salvador, Borges y la Biblia (2011), and the essays collected in La fe en el universo literario de Jorge Luis Borges (2012). To understand Borges’s “secular spirituality” in its Jewish and Islamic versions, I have found particularly useful the essays “Borges y la espiritualidad judía en tiempo de crisis: La cábala y el hasidismo transpuestos” by Arturo Echavarría and “Ultra Aurora et Gangem: Los laberintos islámicos de Jorge Luis Borges” by Luce López-Baralt, both from La fe en el universo literario de Jorge Luis Borges. 3. In El otro Borges, el primer Borges, Rafael Olea Franco highlights Borges’s consistently independent attitude in contrast to the vanguardists’ tendency to gather into groups (164–65). Olea Franco also underscores the importance of the essays in

196  • NOTES

Discusión in the creation of Borges’s new aesthetic, which Olea Franco describes as a “democratic” concept of literature: “From this standpoint, it is unimportant whether some texts are recognized by ‘high’ culture while others are confined to the margins; thus, a poem by Milton is not intrinsically superior to a milonga simply due to the mere accident of belonging to a prestigious cultural register. . . . When searching for the ‘aesthetic fact’ of texts that have no ‘literary’ prestige, Borges goes beyond the borders of a nineteenth century concept of literature and moves toward a more modern concept, in which literature is not confined solely to the texts of lettered culture” (229). 4. Among the few essays on Borges’s ideas about the novel are those by Luis Leal and Dario Puccini. Also useful are Beatriz Sarlo’s comments in chapter 4 of Borges: Un escritor en las orillas (1995). 5. For a more in-depth exploration of the differences and affinities between Borges and Henry James, see Arturo Echavarría’s “Borges, Henry James, and the Europeans.” Echavarría discusses in particular Borges’s ideas about James’s narrative ambiguity and his experiences as an American in Europe (1130). 6. In Fernando Sorrentino, Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges, 69. 7. Early in his essay, Borges notes that in ancient Alexandria “theology was, then, a passion of the masses” (213). 8. The original passages from Saint Irenaeus paraphrased by Borges are the following: For since he [Jesus] was an incorporeal power, and the Nous (mind) of the unborn father, he transfigured himself as he pleased, and thus  ascended  to him who had sent him, deriding them, inasmuch as he could not be laid hold of, and was invisible to all. Those, then, who  know  these things have been freed from the principalities who formed the world; so that it is not incumbent on us to confess him who was crucified, but him who came in the form of a man, and was thought to be crucified, and was called Jesus, and was sent by the father, that by this dispensation he might destroy the works of the makers of the world. If any one, therefore, he declares, confesses the crucified, that man is still a slave, and under the power of those who formed our bodies; but he who denies him has been freed from these beings, and is acquainted with the dispensation of the unborn father. Salvation belongs to the soul alone, for the body is by nature subject to corruption. He declares, too, that the prophecies were derived from those powers who were the makers of the world, but the law was specially given by their chief, who led the people out of the land of Egypt. He attaches no importance to [the question regarding] meats offered in sacrifice to idols, thinks them of no con-

NOTES  • 197

sequence, and makes use of them without any hesitation; he holds also the use of other things, and the practice of every kind of lust, a matter of perfect indifference. These  men, moreover, practise magic; and use images, incantations, invocations, and every other kind of curious art. Coining also certain names as if they were those of the  angels, they proclaim some of these as belonging to the first, and others to the second heaven; and then they strive to set forth the names, principles, angels, and powers of the three hundred and sixty-five imagined heavens. They also affirm that the barbarous name in which the Saviour ascended and descended, is Caulacau. He, then, who has learned [these things], and  known  all the  angels  and their causes, is rendered invisible and incomprehensible to the angels and all the powers, even as Caulacau also was. And as the son was unknown to all, so must they also be known by no one; but while they know all, and pass through all, they themselves remain invisible and unknown to all; for, Do you, they say, know all, but let nobody know you. For this reason, persons of such a persuasion are also ready to recant [their opinions], yea, rather, it is impossible that they should suffer on account of a mere name, since they are like to all. The multitude, however, cannot understand these matters, but only one out of a thousand, or two out of ten thousand. They declare that they are no longer  Jews and that they are not yet Christians; and that it is not at all fitting to speak openly of their mysteries, but right to keep them secret by preserving silence. They make out the local position of the three hundred and sixty-five heavens in the same way as do mathematicians. For, accepting the theorems of these latter, they have transferred them to their own type of doctrine. They hold that their chief is Abraxas; and, on this account, that word contains in itself the numbers amounting to three hundred and sixty-five. (Saint Ireneaus)

9. In his Estetica come sciencia dell’espressione e linguistica generale (1902), Croce states, “Poetry is the language of feeling; prose of the intellect; but since the intellect, in its concrete reality, is also feeling, every piece of prose has its poetic side” (The Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic 28). 10. One of the first critical articles to discuss this essay of Borges, “Borges: Una teoría de la literatura fantástica” by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, is still useful. The Uruguayan critic describes this essay as a “full-fledged attack on realism” (177) and argues that for Borges, “fantastic literature uses fictions not to escape reality but to express a deeper and more complex vision of reality” (188). 11. The phrase is from a passage of his Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (1817), in which Coleridge discusses his use of supernatural characters in his Lyrical Ballads (1798): “In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed

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to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (5–6). 12. The definition offered by Alejo Carpentier of “the marvelous American reality” in his prologue to El reino de este mundo is the most explicit example of this neoprimitivist tendency in “magical realism.” See the citation of the relevant passages and my discussion in chapter 4. 13. In The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976), Northrop Frye underscores the mythical and symbolic elements of the prose romance. Referring to texts such as “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (from Ficciones) and “El Evangelio según Marcos” (from El informe de Brodie, 1970), Frye posits that the prose romance and the popular narrative which derives from it work like “sacred texts” that repeat the ideals of modern culture in the form of secularized myths, such as the ideal of human fraternity (173). About Borges and the adventure novel, particularly his taste for the serial novels of the nineteenth-century Argentine novelist Eduardo Gutiérrez, see also Balderston’s essay “Dichos y hechos: Borges, Gutiérrez y la nostalgia de la aventura.” 14. A quick search in the MLA International Bibliography finds eighty-eight articles about “The Aleph” since 1964 to the present. In comparison, “El Sur,” another of Borges’s most studied stories, has sixty-eight articles. 15. See the comment in Ortega and del Río Parra, “El Aleph” de Jorge Luis Borges, 75n21. A more up-to-date and detailed reading of this celebrated passage is found in Balderston, “‘Sin superposición y sin transparencia’: La frase larga de ‘El Aleph.’”

CHAPTER 3. TALES FROM ETERNITY: MARÍA LUISA BOMBAL, ALEJO CARPENTIER, JUAN RULFO 1. These principles are collected in article five of the Tridentine Profession of Faith (1564), which reaffirms the doctrine of purgatory, the veneration of saints, and the practice of granting indulgences (Collantes 857–61). 2. See the useful synthesis of the ideas of these and other early twentieth-century thinkers about religion in Thrower. The British scholar sees William James as an instance of the agnostic and philosophical approach to religious experience (61–66); Freud as the main exponent of the idea of religion as a psychological phenomenon (143–50); Durkheim as a researcher of the origins and the social

NOTES  • 199

function of religion (183–88) and Weber as an investigator of the role played by religion in cultural change (188–94). 3. I do not intend to trace here in detail Borges’s “influence” on the contemporary Latin American novel but simply to document the fact that Bombal, Carpentier, and Rulfo were familiar with some of the “theologico-literary” notions of Borges, which served as a point of departure for their respective works. 4. See the article by Verdugo Fuentes. 5. On Bombal’s feminism (which was never militant), see the remarks by GuerraCunningham, 18–23, 29–41. 6. The very ancient association between literature and death is well known. As Michel Foucault reminds us, the topic of poetry as a funerary monument that made it possible to “defeat” death through the immortality of fame becomes in the modern age the topic of writing as the product of the writer’s voluntary sacrifice: “Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author. Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka are obvious examples of this reversal. In addition, we find the link between writing and death manifested in the total effacement of the individual characteristics of the writer; the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and his text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality. If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing” (“What Is an Author?” 117). In his desire to dissolve the concept of the author into an “authorial function” that would delimit certain texts, Foucault contends with Jacques Derrida’s idea of writing as a play of absence and presence and observes that such a notion of writing still retains transcendental, even theological elements: “It appears . . . that this concept, as currently employed, has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity. The extremely visible signs of the author’s empirical activity are effaced to allow the play, in parallel or opposition, of religious and critical modes of characterization. . . . Is not the conception of writing as absence a transposition into transcendental terms of the religious belief in a fixed and continuous tradition or the aesthetic principle that proclaims the survival of the work as a kind of enigmatic supplement of the author beyond his own death?” (119–20). Beyond this now-outmoded theoretical dispute, Foucault is right in perceiving the continued presence of religious aspects in Derrida’s views on writing, whose closest intellectual genealogy can be traced back to Flaubert, the symbolists, and Mallarmé. This is also precisely the concept of writing taken up by

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the high modernists, with whom Bombal enters into a dialogue in search of a writing whose transcendent power is firmly grounded in materiality (as will be discussed with regard to the ending of La amortajada). 7. The complicated effects of this patriarchal and reductive view of women in turnof-the-nineteenth-century literature have been explored in detail by Gubar and Bronfen. It goes without saying that both authors’ analyses would have benefited from knowing about La amortajada, to which they do not allude. 8. This is evidenced by Ana María’s memories, as well as by the observations of many critics of La amortajada: see the articles by Lagos-Pope, Lindstrom, and Nelson in María Luisa Bombal: Apreciaciones críticas. 9. It is important to remark that the passage about Father Carlos is not present in the novel’s first edition from 1938. It was added to the English translation of the novel made by Bombal herself, The Shrouded Woman, published in 1948, and was later included with some modifications in the Spanish edition of La amortajada of 1968, on which all of today’s editions of this novel are based. Even so, this passage basically stresses and nuances attitudes expressed by the novel’s protagonist that were already visible in other moments in the text. See the essay by Mondragón Espinoza. I thank my student E. Stewart Atkins for this reference. 10. See, among others, Pontiero, Rodríguez Monegal (“Lo real y lo maravilloso en El reino de este mundo”), González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, and Speratti-Piñero. 11. See Vargas Llosa, Paz Soldán, Frost, and Léger. 12. A thorough account of Pascal’s wager and the debates about this argument are found in Jordan. 13. For more detailed comments on the echoes of El Retablo de las Maravillas in El arpa y la sombra and their ethical implications, see Killer Books: Writing, Violence, and Ethics in Modern Spanish American Narrative, 105–22. 14. See Rodríguez Monegal, “Historia y ficción en Carpentier y Borges,” and González Echevarría, “Borges, Carpentier y Ortega.” 15. A fine book on this subject is The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (1997) by Fernando Cervantes. See also the classic study by Sola. 16. See the critical edition of this text in Calderón de la Barca, Entremeses, jácaras y mojigangas. Carpentier’s deep interest in golden-age (seventeenth-century) Spanish theater, and in Calderón particularly, is well known. Besides his celebrated plays and autos sacramentales, Calderón also wrote the festive and satirical one-act plays known as mojigangas, which were also known as fin de fiesta, since they were usually performed after the end of a play or auto sacramental (Bergman 5). Using an epigraph taken from a mojiganga for the last section of El reino de este

NOTES  • 201

mundo might seem incongruent with the predominantly solemn tone of the novel as a whole; even so, the humourism of the mojiganga is not illogical in this context, given these pieces’ carnivalesque nature and their association with the endings of theatrical performances. Furthermore, the writing of mojigangas by Calderón, whose religious orthodoxy was well known, signals the complex way in which Spanish baroque culture manipulated artistic and emotional extremes in order to reinforce religious devotion, and Carpentier may arguably be trying to create a similar contrasting effect here. It is not surprising that Calderón himself, after making fun of the autos sacramentales in Las visiones de la muerte, toward the ending of his best-known play, La vida es sueño, makes the protagonist Segismundo exclaim

. . . if this is my disillusionment, if I know that pleasure is a lovely flame that turns into ashes whenever the wind blows; let us seek eternity, which is the lasting fame where joys never sleep and greatness never rests. (Act 3; italics mine.)

17.

Emile, an ethnologist, was brother to Philippe Thoby and Pierre Marcelin, Haitian novelists and poets known to Carpentier, who reviewed several of their works. See Rodríguez. 18. See Dill’s detailed account. 19. In the chapter “La revelación poética” from El arco y la lira, Paz interprets Otto through Heidegger’s philosophy, seeking to buttress what Paz conceives as the primacy of poetry as a creative activity. Paz rejects Otto’s claim that the feeling of the holy is an a priori category of the intellect provoked by the encounter with absolute otherness (which Otto identifies with the divine). Instead, Paz argues that absolute otherness is an inherent quality of human beings and that poetry is “the act through which Man establishes and reveals himself” (156). According to Paz, despite the common origin shared by poetry and religion as experiences of the constitutive “otherness” of human beings, poetry overcomes the antithesis between life and death posited by religion by becoming a “revelation of our condition, and therefore the creation of Man through the image” (156). Aside from their optimism, which turns the poet into a prophetic figure in the romantic style, these arguments coincide substantially with the view of language and literature present in Pedro Páramo. It is not so much a question of Paz’s influence on

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Rulfo but of the common Mexican intellectual environment both authors shared (existentialism; a philosophy of “Mexicanness”), which finds its clearest expression in the books and essays of the Hiperión Group, which as Hurtado explains, was “a group of young professors and students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, comprised by Emilio Uranga (1921–1988), Jorge Portilla (1918–1963), Luis Villoro (n. 1922), Ricardo Guerra (1927–2007), Joaquín Sánchez McGregor (1925–2008), Salvador Reyes Nevares (1922–1993), and Fausto Vega (n. 1922). Leopoldo Zea (1912–2004) joins the group when they decide to focus on the theme of Mexicanness, and from then on, he becomes the group’s main organizer and promoter. Hiperión was active from 1948 until 1952.”

CHAPTER 4. IN SEARCH OF THE SACRED BOOK: JULIO CORTÁZAR, GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA 1. For my account of some of the events surrounding the Boom, besides my own memories of them I have also relied on the interpretation and synthesis of cultural changes in Latin America during the 1960s in Diana Sorenson Goodrich’s A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (2007). A detailed journalistic account of the lives of some of the Boom’s major authors (García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Donoso) and their Spanish editors and literary agents is found in Xavi Ayén’s Aquellos años del boom (2014). 2. See L.-I. Mena, “Hacia una formulación teórica del realismo mágico,” 401. 3. For a discussion of the “quest romance” as a fundamental metaphor in Boom narrative (and in earlier stages of Latin American literature), see Kadir, Questing Fictions: Latin America’s Family Romance. 4. See Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. 5. There was a first trip, as a tourist, in 1961. In his second visit to Cuba, Cortázar was invited to participate as member of the jury for the Casa de las Américas literary prize a few months after the publication of Rayuela (Goloboff 153). 6. The photographs were taken by Cuban photographer Gullermo F. López (who signed them as “Chinolope”) and they are spread around various internet websites: http://www.revistadelauniversidad.unam.mx/6009/celorio/60celorio04.html (in which the photo is erroneously dated as being from 1974). http://elpais.com/diario/2006/09/24/cultura/1159048804_740215.html and http://epoca2.lajiribilla .cu/2011/n536_08/536_03.html (in a photo archive about Lezama Lima).

NOTES  • 203

7. As the Diccionario Usual de la RAE (online version) indicates, “Piantado, da. 1. Adj. coloq. Arg. Crackpot (someone whose reason is somewhat perturbed),” http://buscon.rae.es/drae/srv/search?id=gIgb2TsDpDXX2Zu1dcYz. Cortázar’s fascination with piantados as (involuntary) geniuses of comedy and imagination is attested to in his essay “Del gesto que consiste en ponerse el dedo índice en la sien y moverlo como quien atornilla y destornilla” in La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967). Goloboff points out that Lezama impressed Cortázar so much “that he was hardly able to speak to him” (157). 8. See Jean L. Andreu, “Cortázar, cuentista.” See also my detailed discussion of this story in “Revolución y alegoría en ‘Reunión’ de Julio Cortázar.” 9. In “The Bad Glazier,” from Paris Spleen, Baudelaire writes, “There are natures purely contemplative, completely unsuited for action, who nevertheless, under mysterious unknown impulses, act sometimes with a rapidity of which they would suppose themselves incapable. . . . A friend of mine, as harmless a dreamer as ever was, one day set a forest on fire, in order to see, he said, if a fire would catch as easily as generally claimed. Ten times the experiment failed; but the eleventh it was all too successful” (15). Also, in “Anywhere Out of the World,” in a phrase that anticipates and summarizes Horacio’s dilemma, Baudelaire states, “To me it seems always it would be well for me to be somewhere I am not” (92). In relation to mysticism, suffice it to recall Saint John of the Cross’s “Llama de amor viva”; see López-Baralt, “Huellas del Islam en San Juan de la Cruz: En torno a la ‘Llama de amor viva’ y la espiritualidad musulmana išraquí.” 10. The verse alluded to is in Jeremiah 20:9, which reads, in the New International Version, “But if I say, ‘I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,’ his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” 11. The dense erudition displayed in this and many other passages of Rayuela invites this novel to be read with the detailed attention paid to sacred texts. As Susannah Mary Chewning explains, the “negative way” of mysticism, derived from the writings of Dyonysius the Areopagite, “is characterized by an absence of human knowing—God cannot be known, in this definition, through human understanding or language, so all senses of human understanding must be surrendered in order to gain access to the Divine” (164n3). At least two of the epithets Gregorovius uses are specifically derived from circumstances where the polarities of good and evil, heaven and earth, are inverted: “bloodhounds of God” refers to a folk belief from the shores of the Baltic Sea that the “wolf-men” were enemies of the devil and that, despite their association with witchcraft, they were

204  • NOTES

servants of God (Ginzburg 26–29), and “cloud-walkers” (in Spanish, nefelibatas), a term used by Rubén Darío and the modernista poets, was, according to Gordon Brotherston, “a word invented by Rabelais for a race which walked with their head in the clouds” (163n79). 12. On figural allegory, routinely used in Christianism to explain the relation between the prophets and Jesus, see the classic essay by Erich Auerbach, “Figura.” The New Testament reference about Jesus and the fulfillment of the law and the prophets is from Matthew 5:17–18: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” 13. See Thrower’s comments on the parallels between Marxism and the JudeoChristian eschatology of history in Religion: The Classical Theories: “Marxism, in replacing God by the on-going, forward, teleological movement of history, had not broken as completely with the Judaeo-Christian outlook as many Marxists and Marxist-Leninists liked to think—nor had it broken entirely with the Hegelian understanding of history. When Marxism is looked at from outside the Western cultural tradition it is seen to be more firmly within that tradition than it itself had realised, for the eschatological dimension of history, characterised as it is by terms such as ‘hope’ and ‘fulfillment,’ is fundamental to Jew, Christian and Marxist in a way in which it is not fundamental to Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist. Marxism, despite its claim to that universality which characterises science, took its fundamental outlook, in fact, from a particular cultural tradition in which history was conceived as moving towards an eschaton or telos, even if, for Marxism, this was something which would take place within, rather than beyond, time and history” (180). 14. As Graham notes, “If scriptural texts such as the Qurān or the Book of Mormon can boast a single-source origin with considerable historical justification, the greatest number of scriptures in the world represent collections of material put together not by one person or even one generation but by a gradual process of recognition of sacred texts usually referred to as ‘canon formation.’ Nevertheless, once the community has reached general agreement about which texts it accepts as sacred, it is common for it to affirm unity of origin as well as message in its scriptural corpus” (8201). 15. In a comment to his poem “Aquel” in La cifra (1981), Borges notes: “This composition, like almost all others, makes excessive use of chaotic enumeration. About

NOTES  • 205

that figure of speech, which Whitman used so happily and lavishly, I can only say that it must look like a chaos, a disorder, but must secretly be a cosmos, an order” (338). 16. See Gerald Martin’s account in Gabriel García Márquez: Una vida, 618–26. 17. I hasten to add that I do not wish to minimize in any way the contributions of the many scholars who have added to the growing bibliography on Lezama Lima, which abounds in many outstanding works that have helped clarify Lezama Lima’s cultural background and his intellectual profile. Among these, I have found particularly useful the studies by Heller, García Vega, Mataix, Pellón, Ponte, Salgado, and Ruiz Barrionuevo. But the mere existence of such critical works and the urgent need of textual explication they aim to fill gives substance to my statements. 18. As the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English notes with specific regard to Paradiso’s chapter 8, “There are word-games Lezama weaves through the chapter that evaporate in English” (840). The Encyclopedia in fact discusses the “GraecoLatinate medical-sounding words” concocted by Lezama Lima, such as “leptosomático macrogenitosoma,” which literally refers to a small-bodied individual with a large penis (840). 19. As Freitag argues, sheela na gigs (crude carvings of women displaying their genitalia), which are found predominantly in country churches, are portrayals of folk deities associated with life-giving powers (1).

CHAPTER 5. DESACRALIZATIONS: ELENA PONIATOWSKA, FERNANDO VALLEJO, ROBERTO BOLAÑO 1. Thrower cites the example of the Hebrew tradition: “A view which was widely accepted in the Judaism of the first century of the common era held that prophecy had ceased in the post-exilic period, that is after the time of Ezra. According to this view, Haggai, Zacharia and Malachi were the last of the prophets. With their death, the Rabbinic tradition held that ‘the Holy Spirit had departed from Israel’” (22). 2. For instance, after La casa verde, Mario Vargas Llosa did not cease to write long novels filled with characters and situations, but these soon became more circumscribed in their focus: Conversación en La Catedral (1969), Vargas Llosa’s next great novel, is limited to the period of the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría in Peru (1848–1956). Another text by the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner that resembles the “total novel,”

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La guerra del fin del mundo (1981), is instead a dismantling of the idea of totalization by means of a novel that portrays a fight to the death of radically different narratives that cannot coexist nor be reconciled in a totalizing vision (see González, “Religion and the Novel in Mario Vargas Llosa’s La guerra del fin del mundo”). Perhaps the Boom author who most insistently continued exploring the “total novel” was Carlos Fuentes, from La región más transparente in the 1950s up to Terra Nostra (1975). 3. Although the concept of “human rights” existed since the eighteenth century, it came into effective international circulation through point VII of the Helsinki Accords, signed in 1975 by thirty-five countries, including the United States, Canada, and almost all European states, as well as through the inaugural speech by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, who made human rights a cornerstone of his foreign policy (Moyn and Andrew 148–58). 4. See Moyn and Andrew 142–143 and Repression in Latin America: A Report on the First Session of the Second Russell Tribunal, Rome, April 1974; also Cortázar, Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales. The Russell Tribunal is an independent left-wing organism originally established by British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1963 to investigate war crimes and human rights abuses committed by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. It is not an internationally recognized body of jurists but a panel of intellectuals and public figures from various countries that meets when there is need for it and collects evidence about human rights abuses in various conflicts around the world. The Russell Tribunal has been accused of being a biased organism that only investigates the crimes of the right wing; however, during the Vietnam War and the political repression in Latin America, it was almost the sole international forum where crimes against humanity were made public and protested. 5. Bibliography on autoficción (or self-fictionalization) has been growing in the past decade in the fields of Spanish and Latin American literature after the introduction of the concept by French critics such as Lejeune, Darrieuseq, and Gasparini. In the fields of Spanish and Latin American literature, relevant works include those of Alberca, Molero de la Iglesia, and an essay anthology edited by Toro, Schlickers, and Luengo. 6. Among the few studies on religion in Hasta no verte, Jesús mío are those of Caufield, González-Lee, and Steele. 7. In her lengthy essay “Vida y muerte de Jesusa” (1987) collected in Luz y luna, las lunitas (1994), which offers Poniatowska’s reconsideration of her approach to the life of Josefina Bórquez in Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, the author offers additional details and documentation about the “Obra Espiritual.” I have supplemented

NOTES  • 207

Poniatowska’s information with the website Biblioteca Digital de la Medicina Tradicional Mexicana, from the UNAM (Mexico’s National University) and the entry “Espiritualismo” contained in one of the books collected on that website, Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Medicina Tradicional Mexicana. Poniatowska’s choice of “Jesusa” as her character’s name is evidently significant on various levels, and I will say more about it in the following pages. 8. Attribution of this quote to Buñuel is uncertain, although it is frequently cited as his. Whether by coincidence or by direct reading, it is similar, in a condensed way, to one of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s aphorisms: “und ich dank es dem lieben Gott tausendmal, daß er mich zum Atheisten hat werden lassen” (And I thank the Lord a thousand times that He has allowed me to become an atheist; Lichtenberg 249). 9. It is worth mentioning that in the last twenty years there has been a modest resurgence of interest in the cynics of antiquity among scholars and thinkers. A few months before his death in 1983, French thinker Michel Foucault anticipated this trend in a series of talks given at UC Berkeley on cynics and the discourse of truth (Discourse and Truth). Five years later, German thinker Peter Sloterdijk published an influential book on the subject, Critique of Cynical Reason. 10. This fact is consistently mentioned in biographical summaries of Fernando Vallejo (see Williams 338), and Vallejo himself has published a book on this field, La tautología darwinista y otros ensayos de biología (1998). See also the comments of Jacques Joset about Vallejo’s love for dogs, particularly for his dog Bruja (149– 69). 11. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País, the winner of the 2009 Cervantes Prize repeated his view that “for me, what’s important are books and poems, not their national or regional identification.” Addressing the importance of the past in his work, Pacheco stated that in his work he tried to view the past from a critical angle and declared emphatically, “Nostalgia is a Disneylandization of the past” (Sánchez). 12. It should be pointed out that Andrews does not develop in his text this metaphor of narrative as cosmology in Bolaño (doubtless to avoid distracting readers from the already complex discussion of Bolaño’s narrative techniques), but the metaphor becomes quite visible in the book’s subtitle, An Expanding Universe. 13. I am alluding to “Nueva refutación del tiempo” in Otras inquisiciones (1952). 14. As Dena Goodman reminds us in The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994), “The Republic of Letters rose with the modern political state out of the articulation of public and private spheres, citizen and state, agent and critic. During the early modern period, its citizenry came to value recipro-

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cal exchange based on a model of friendship that contrasted markedly with the absolutist state, corporative society, and the family. In the forms in which it still exists, the republic continues to be at odds with the dominant culture and to question its hegemony” (2). The idea of the “Republic of Letters” has once again been resurrected, although in an ironic mode, in the current debates about globalization’s effects on literature. See, for example, Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2007).

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I N DE X

“Abasement of the Northmores, The” (James), 59 “Abenjacán el bojari, muerto en su laberinto” (Borges), 70 abjection, 24, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 130, 133 Abraham, 11, 43 Abrams, M. H., 13, 69, 190n4 Adán Buenosayres (Marechal), 180 adultery, 10, 37, 38, 41 adventure stories, 67, 69 aesthetics, ix, 38, 58, 67, 122, 157, 170, 186, 195n1, 196n3; formalist, 21; pneumatic, 25; realist, 124; translation, 61 Against Heresies (St. Ireneaus), 64 Aleph, 73, 75, 76–77, 78, 79, 80, 92, 93, 137, 152, 912 “Aleph, The” (Borges), 72–80, 198n14 Alicia, 89; Ana María and, 92 All That is Solid Melts into Air (Berman), 192n20 allegories, 4, 24, 41, 42, 46, 98, 129, 135, 143, 163, 204n12 Alonso, Carlos J., 26, 177 Amalia (Mármol), 18

“Ambiguity of Henry James, The” (Wilson), 59 Ana María, 85, 89–90, 93, 200n8; Alicia and, 92; death drive of, 90 Andrews, Chris, 162, 182, 183 anthropology, 33, 103, 110 antiquity, 6, 7, 8, 12, 207n9 anyad, 103, 149 Apocalypse, 139, 170 April March, 71, 137 art, 21, 23; Gothic, 12; Kantian notion of, 58; literary, 96; sacred in, 12 Artante, Piadosa, 45, 46, 51 Asturias, Miguel Angel, 25–26, 83 atheism, 169, 175 Attar, Farid ud-Din, 76, 126, 195n2 “Auguries of Innocence” (Blake), 81 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Vargas Llosa), 158 authenticity, 159, 184; artistic, 160–61; personal, 160–61 authority, 5, 6, 7, 12, 14, 23, 135, 138, 161, 199n6; religious, 142; spiritual, 13 autos sacramentales, 104, 201n16 autoficción, 158, 206n5

230  • INDEX

avant-garde, 14, 24, 50, 57, 58, 83, 90, 174, 189n1 Aves sin nido (Matto de Turner), 19 Babilonia, Aureliano, 140; Amaranta and, 143–44; Melquíades and, 142–43 Balderston, Daniel, 198n13, 198n15 Balzac, Honoré, 8, 15, 123, 170 Barnet, Miguel, 30, 156, 157, 159, 179 Basilides, 27, 62, 63, 64 Baudelaire, Charles, 14, 20, 21, 54, 131, 175, 203n9; abyss and, 57 Belano, Arturo, 183, 184, 185 Benda, Julien, 23, 192n17 Bénichou, Paul, 12, 13, 20, 56 Berger, Peter L., 4, 5, 182 Bible, 7, 9, 22, 41, 62, 63, 68, 113, 116, 120, 121; reinterpretation of, 13 biblical hurricane, 29, 144 bibliomancy, 6, 9 Bilbao, Manuel, 17, 18 Bildungsroman, 150, 163 Biografía de un cimarrón (Barnet), 156, 159, 179 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 58 Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 59, 61, 67–68, 134 Blake, William, 13, 14, 81 Blanchot, Maurice, 32, 128, 131, 132, 134; on prophecy, 42–43 blasphemy, 31, 169, 170, 175, 182 Boethius, 84, 101, 116, 137, 143 Bolaño, Roberto, 31, 158, 169, 183, 186, 187; expatriations and, 185; fiction of, 162, 182; narrative techniques of, 182, 207n12; novels of, 180–81 Bombal, Maria Luisa, 27, 28, 81, 83, 84, 91, 92, 93, 137, 145, 199n3, 200n6, 200n9; analysis of, 87–88; autobiography of, 86; Borges and,

85; feminism of, 199n5; personhood and, 89; phraseology of, 107; poetic faith and, 88; rationalist argument of, 85–86 Bonaparte, Pauline, 96, 104, 105 Boom, 123, 127, 145, 146, 148; magical realism and, 125 Boom novels, 28–29, 31, 116, 126, 127, 136, 148, 157, 164, 179, 182, 183, 184, 187; genealogical structure of, 30; holy in, 163; impersonality of, 169; religious concepts of, 123–24; sacred status for, 138; secularism and, 146; traits of, 30 Boom period, 28, 47, 72, 122, 145, 156, 159, 178–79, 181, 192n21, 206n2; authors of, 202n1; cultural creativity of, 157 Borges, Jorge Luis, 28, 53, 73, 76, 78, 80, 87, 98, 101, 102, 108, 116, 117, 119, 123, 124, 134, 137, 145, 152, 180; aesthetics and, 67, 196n3; Alephs and, 75, 92, 93, 183–84; anaphoric series of, 77; avant-garde and, 57; Carlos Argentino and, 75; Coleridge and, 65; death of the novel and, 59–72; essay of, 70, 83, 186; eternity and, 84; Flaubert and, 56, 64; Gnostics and, 63, 64, 167; high modernism and, 27; influence of, 199n3; James and, 59; Joyce and, 60; Kabbalists and, 63; on Kafka, 62; on language, 79; literary theology and, 59; magia and, 65; magic and, 66; narrative realism and, 67; phraseology of, 107; poem by, 204n15; prose romances and, 69; Proust and, 60; psychologism and, 61, 74; Quijote and, 4, 9–10, 12, 189n1; rational order/intellect

INDEX  • 231

and, 63; reflective nostalgia in, 178; religion and, 5; sacred texts and, 58; secular spirituality and, 195n2; selffictionalization and, 161; subliterary genres and, 70; “theologico-literary” notions of, 199n3; transcendence/ sublime and, 72; translation aesthetic of, 61; Ulysses and, 66; on Woolf, 61 “Borges y yo” (Borges), 68, 161 Bórquez, Josefina, 163, 168, 206n7 Bouvard and Pécuchet (Flaubert), 56 Bryce Echenique, Alfredo, 30, 157, 158, 161, 192n21 Buddhism, 6, 7, 112, 113, 204n13 Buendía, Aureliano, 139, 140, 141 Buendía, José Arcadio, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144 Buendía, José Arcadio Segundo, 142, 139, 140 Buenos Aires, 74, 80, 85, 86, 178 Buñuel, Luis, 169, 207n8 Burke, Edmund, 12, 24, 55 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 127, 161 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 16, 200n16; mojiganga of, 103–4, 106; theatrical genres and, 104 Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Vargas Llosa), 157–58 Carlos, Father, 89, 92, 200n9 Carpentier, Alejo, 26, 27, 28, 83, 123, 137, 157, 195n1, 198n12, 200n16, 201n17; art/novel and, 96; on Cervantes’s play, 99; faith and, 93–108, 154; historical sources and, 99; manifesto of, 109; marvelous and, 97; narrative style of, 102; narrator of, 101, 108; poetic faith and, 96, 98; reflective nostalgia in, 178; Road to

Damascus moment for, 97–98; stylistic complexities of, 103; surrealists and, 96–97 “Cask of Amontillado, The” (Poe), 73 Castillo, Debra A., 34, 38 Catholic Church, 15, 18, 19, 47, 165, 167, 171 Catholicism, 27, 33, 34, 47, 68, 128, 130, 146 Cemí, José, 147, 148, 150, 151; dreams of, 152; Licario and, 153, 154 Cervantes, Fernando, 4, 98, 99, 170, 181, 189n1, 200n15 Chávez Castañeda, Ricardo, 31, 180 Chesterton, G. K., 7, 53, 67 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 14 Chimalistac, 35, 36, 43 Christianity, 6, 37, 63, 78, 81, 85, 102, 123, 133, 142, 204n12 Chronicles of a Sick World: La Charca (Zeno Gandía), 44 Cien años de soledad (García Márquez), 29, 127, 138–44, 146, 147, 153, 179; celebration of, 119–20; desacralization of, 120; human existence and, 125; last line of, 156; literary creation and, 144; religious allusion in, 139; sacred writing and, 125, 138 Cocuyo (Sarduy), 179 Colás, Santiago: Horacio and, 135–36 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13, 58, 65, 182, 197n11; poetic faith and, 88, 96, 154, 171; on suspension of disbelief, 190n4 Colibrí (Sarduy), 179 colonialism, 17, 45, 47, 49 Columbus, Christopher, 98, 99 Comala, 110, 114, 116, 117, 123, 178 Comedie Humaine (Balzac), 8

232  • INDEX

communication, x, 37, 82, 84, 93, 166, 174; spiritual, 165 Company of Jesus, 169–70 Concierto barroco (Carpentier), 157 Conference of the Birds, The (Attar), 126, 195n2 Confessions (Saint Augustine), 9, 58 consciousness, 10, 25, 61, 77, 90, 113, 129 “Continuidad de los parques” (Cortázar), 10, 12 Correspondance (Flaubert), 56 Cortázar, Julio, 12, 29, 119, 122, 127, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 145, 157, 159, 178–79, 181, 183; allusions of, 130; artistic/personal trajectory of, 128–29; Cuban Revolution and, 129; faith and, 154; Lezama Lima and, 128; piantados and, 203n7; revolution of, 120; Road to Damascus moment for, 129; sacred texts and, 10; total novels by, 28 Cortazarian Church, 120–21 Cortazarian (word), impact of, 121 cosmology, 42, 182, 207n12 cosmopolitanism, 109, 122, 125, 179 “Crack Manifesto,” 158, 169, 180 Critique of Cynical Reason (Sloterdijk), 207n9 Croce, Benedetto, 58, 64, 197n9 Crónica de una muerte anunciada (García Márquez), 139, 157, 192n21 Cuban Revolution, 29, 129, 130 culture, 111, 177, 204n13, 208n14; European, 26, 81; French, 20; high, 146, 196n3; Latin American, 122, 148, 186–87; lettered, 196n3; low, 146; mass, 30; Mexican, 117; nostalgia and, 176; popular, 30; Spanish baroque, 201n16; Western, 41

Daneri, Carlos Argentino, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77 Darío, Rubén, 20, 21, 51, 111, 172, 191n15, 194n10, 204n11; civil/ patriotic poetry and, 177 darkness, 28, 56, 78, 91, 113, 114, 115, 126, 190n7 Das Heilige (Otto), 11 De donde son los cantantes (Sarduy), 179 De ecclesiastica hierarchia (Dionysius), 82 “De lo real maravilloso americano” (Carpentier), 28 De otros lados (Cortázar), 137 De Quincey, 63, 67 De sobremesa (Silva), 21 Decline of the West, The (Spengler), 110–11 defamiliarization, linguistic, 126–27, 155 Del amor y otros demonios (García Márquez), 139 “Del culto de los libros” (Borges), 58 Del natural (Goncourt), 33 Del Salto, Juan, 47, 49 Del Sol, Aureo, 45, 46, 48, 50 democracy, 30, 180, 194n11 “Demonios, vade retro” (Rama), 124 Der Prozess (Kafka), 67, 68 desacralization, x, 22–31, 120, 168–69, 171, 174–75 “Deserts of Sonora, The,” 183, 184 Devil, 104, 105, 170; New World and, 101, 102 Díaz, Porfirio, 20, 33, 34, 35, 41 Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Medicina Tradicional Mexicana (DEMTM), 165 Diogenes, 16, 171 Dionysius the Areopagite, 82, 101, 203n11 dis-alienation, 162–68 discourse, 41, 173; literary, 23, 111;

INDEX  • 233

national, 176; political, 25; religious, 6, 15, 32, 33, 59, 83 Discourse and Truth (Foucault), 171 Discusión (Borges), 62, 64 Discusión, Obras Completas (Borges), 53 disillusionment, 16, 17, 170 divine, 6, 8, 203n11 Divine Comedy (Dante), 73 Donoso, José, 122, 127, 202n1 Dos Passos, John, 24, 50 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 15, 67 Durkheim, Emile, 24, 28, 32, 84, 198n2 Dyada, Eduviges, 114, 116 ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! (Carpentier), 26, 27 egotism, 160, 161, 175 Eire, Carlos, 81, 84–85 El acercamiento a Almotásim (Borges), 70 “El acercamiento a Almotásim” (Borges), 70 El acoso (Carpentier), 178 “El Aleph” (Borges), 28, 70, 72–73, 77, 80, 87, 91, 107, 119, 137, 161 El arco y la lira (Paz), 14–15, 115 El arpa y la sombra (Carpentier), 98, 157 “El arte narrativo y la magia” (Borges), 28, 62, 64, 65, 87, 88 El Boom de la novela hispanoamericana (Rodríguez Monegal), 122 El cuervo blanco (Vallejo), 174 El desbarrancadero (Vallejo), 16, 31, 169, 170, 172 El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (Pron), 161 “El fin de los demonios” (Rama), 124 “El gaucho insufrible” (Bolaño), 181 El idioma de los argentinos (Borges), 60 “El inmortal” (Borges), 70

El Inquisidor Mayor. Historia de unos amores (Bilbao), 17, 18 El insomnio de Bolívar: cuatro consideraciones intempestivas sobre América Latina en el siglo XXI (Volpi), 31 El Jaramillo, 35, 43 “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (Borges), 70, 137 El llano en llamas (Rulfo), 109 “El milagro secreto” (Borges), 68 El negocio (Zeno Gandía), 44 El Nuevo Mundo, descubierto por Cristóbal Colón (Lope de Vega), 101 El obsceno pajaro de la noche (Donoso), 127 El otro, el mismo (Borges), 27 El Periquillo Sarniento (Fernández de Lizardi), 15–16, 190n10 El profesor inútil (Jarnés), 25 “El profeta de America Latina” (Volpi), 119 “El que vendrá” (Rodó), 22 “El regreso de Satán” (Vargas Llosa), 124 El reino de este mundo (Carpentier), 28, 83, 84, 101, 106, 198n12, 200n16; artificial nature of, 104; fear and, 103; as historical novel, 94; human history and, 102; literary artifice of, 94; narrative style of, 102; narrative techniques of, 99–100; narrative voice of, 151–52; prologue to, 96, 98, 100, 109; religious transcendence and, 108; stylistic complexities of, 103; surrealism and, 96 El Retablo de las Maravillas (Cervantes), 98, 99, 200n13 El Señor Presidente (Asturias), 25–26 El siglo de las luces (Carpentier), 178 Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The (Durkheim), 32, 110

234  • INDEX

Elvira, 35–36, 43 En busca de Klingsor (Volpi), 161 Engels, Elkus, 45, 46 Enlightenment, 12, 13 epiphany, 24, 76, 107 Episodios Nacionales (Galdos), 8 eroticism, 21, 136, 158, 191n15 Escenas norteamericanas (Martí), 194n10 Espiritualismo, 165, 166, 207n7 Estetica come sciencia dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Croce), 197n9 eternity, 6, 12, 69, 79, 80, 83, 84–85, 93, 116, 124, 143, 152; concept of, 28, 89, 90, 102; imitation of, 184; seeking, 16; totalization and, 126; understanding of, 82 ethics, 38, 110, 158, 162, 182 Eureka: A Prose Poem (Poe), 73 “Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain” (Borges), 70, 71 Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 14 existentialism, 8, 21, 26, 29, 96, 103, 130, 160, 202n19 Exodus, 41, 139 faith, 93–108, 112, 154; collective, 97; as experience, 9; poetic, 58, 88, 96, 98, 127, 154, 171, 174, 182 fatalism/fatum, 172, 173 Faulkner, William, 56, 123 Faust (Goethe), 168 Federalists, 17, 18 feminism, 123, 199n5 Fernández, Macedonio, 128, 134 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 15, 16, 21, 22 Ficciones (Borges), 62, 70 fiction, 127, 158; modernist, 74; narrative, 158, 170, 176; writing, 161, 187

Finnegan’s Wake (Joyce), 29, 60 Flaubert, Gustave, 3, 14, 24, 40, 43, 51, 58, 63, 74, 96, 111, 115, 116; epistemological nihilism and, 56; essays on, 64; hidden god of, 140; narratives of, 56; negative romanticism and, 33; Otto and, 55; postromantic vision of, 27; realism and, 55, 57; religion and, 54; theology of, 21, 56, 57, 125, 195n1 “Flaubert y su destino ejemplar” (Borges), 56, 64 Forest Promenade (Rousseau), 151 Form in Gothic (Worringer), 110 Foucault, Michel, 171, 175, 199n6, 207n9 Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Sommer), 8 fractal structure, 181, 185–86 Frankenstein (Shelley), 14 Frazier, Sir James George, 65–66, 110 Freitag, Barbara: sheela na gigs and, 205n19 Freud, Sigmund, 24, 84, 110, 198n2 “From Diverse Sides” (Cortázar), 137 Fuentes, Carlos, 122, 126, 127, 157, 206n2; total novels by, 28 Fuguet, Alberto, 30, 150, 159 “Funes el memorioso” (Borges), 78 Future of Nostalgia, The (Boym), 177 Galdós, 8, 123 Gamboa, Federico, 24, 33, 38, 51, 52, 98, 175, 193n4; naturalist novel and, 42; prophecy and, 40; prostitution and, 41; sacred and, 35; Santa and, 36 Gamboa, Santiago, 120, 170 García Márquez: historia de un deicidio (Vargas Llosa), 124, 125 García Márquez, Gabriel, 29, 127, 142,

INDEX  • 235

157, 159, 192n21, 195n1, 202n1; celebration of, 119; human existence and, 125; return of, 138; sacred writing and, 125, 156; total novels by, 28; writing of, 139 García Márquez y la problemática de la novela (Rama), 124 Garden of Forking Paths, The (Borges), 71 Garduña (Zeno Gandía), 44 Gautier, Théophile, 20, 21 genealogy, 33, 117, 139, 143, 144 Genesis, 11, 43, 62, 63, 139 genre, x, 40, 57, 72, 186; cluttered, 25; Latin American, 157; morose, 25, 67; sacred and, 4; secular origins of, 4; subliterary, 70; theatrical, 104 globalization, 30, 170, 187 Gnosticism, 28, 62, 63, 69, 71, 87, 101, 102, 126, 155, 166; definition of, 167; negative theology and, 64 Go-Between, The (Hartley), 175, 176 God, 5, 11, 41, 54, 63, 101, 116, 171, 174, 204n11; as author, 62; bloodhounds of, 203n11; death of, 26; novel and, 4; power of, 141 God of the Labyrinth, The (Wilson), 71 goddesses, 105, 117 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 56, 168 Golden Bough, The (Frazier), 65–66, 110 Gómez, Sergio, 30, 158, 159 González Echevarría, Roberto, 157, 200n10 Gospel, 6, 155 Gothic, 51, 52, 104, 134 Graham, William A., 5, 6, 204n14 Green, Julien, 67, 68, 71 Gregorovius, Ossip, 132, 133, 203n11 Guatimozín (Gómez de Avellaneda), 17 Guerra, Ricardo, 87, 89, 202n19

Guerra-Cunningham, Lucia, 87, 199n5 Guerrero, Fernando, 147, 148, 149 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 14 Guzmán de Alfarache (Alemán), 4 Hartley, L. P., 175, 176 Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (Poniatowska), 31, 159, 169, 179, 206n6, 206n7; epigraph to, 163, 166; historical aspects of, 164–65; religion/disalienation in, 162–68; religious content of, 163, 165; sacralizing devices and, 163 Havana, 128, 150, 152 Hegel, G. W. F., 13, 55 Henri Christophe, King, 97, 104, 106 hermeticism, 127, 146, 152, 155 high modernism, 27, 28, 29, 57, 71, 95, 107, 170, 200n6 Hinduism, 7, 153, 204n13 Hiperión Group, 109, 202n19 Hipólito, 35, 36; Santa and, 38, 39–40 “Historia de la eternidad” (Borges), 28, 79, 80 Historia Personal del Boom (Donoso), 122 holy, x, 6, 28, 163; feeling of, 11, 115, 148, 201n19 Holy Child of Atocha, 163, 165 Holy Spirit, 19, 62, 101, 167, 205n1 Hombres de maíz (Asturias), 83 Homer, 56, 113 human relations, 120, 125 human rights, 158, 159, 206n3, 206n4 humanism, 81, 136 humourism, 172, 201n16 Hymnen an die Nacht (Novalis), 14 I promessi spozi (Manzoni), 8 Idea of the Holy, The (Otto), 78, 111, 148

236  • INDEX

Ideas sobre la novela (Ortega y Gasset), 25, 52, 67 identity, 10, 11, 12; collective, 26; national, 28, 44, 177, 181; sexual, 158 ideology, 20, 23, 25, 42, 93, 157 Idiot, The (Dostoyevsky), 15 Iliad, 5, 46, 120, 189n2 immortality, 7, 83, 154, 199n6 individualism, 9, 30, 169 Inquisition, 17, 18, 191n11 intellectual, 191n16; future of, 23; life, 122; transcendence, ix Islam, 6, 7, 133 James, Henry, 24, 58, 64, 67, 68, 196n4; Borges and, 59; narrative of, 59 James, William, 24, 84, 198n2 Jeremiah, 42, 131, 203n10 Jesus, 37, 85, 102, 112, 121, 135, 154–55, 196n8, 204n12; ministry of, 133–34; misanthropic, 168; vision of, 37 Jews, 184, 197n6, 204n13 Jiménez de Báez, Ivette, 110, 117 José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision (Pellón), 147 Joyce, James, 26, 28, 29, 50, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 66, 72, 76, 77, 123, 138; Borges and, 60; epiphany and, 24; verbal music and, 61 Juan Rulfo, del páramo a la esperanza (Jiménez de Báez), 117 Judaism, 6, 133, 134, 205n1 Judeo-Christian tradition, 42, 110, 139, 204n13 Kabbalists, 28, 62–63, 64, 69, 71, 87 Kafka, Franz, 24, 26, 57, 59, 61, 62, 67, 68, 123, 199n6 Kingdom of Heaven, 107, 108

Kingdom of This World, 108, 162 Kristeva, Julia, 36, 37, 38 La amortajada (Bombal), 28, 81, 83–90, 93, 110, 200n7, 200n9; critics of, 200n8; ending of, 200n6 “La biblioteca de Babel” (Borges), 68 “La busca de Averroes” (Borges), 70 La casa verde (Vargas Llosa), 127, 205n2 La charca (Zeno Gandía), 19, 20, 47, 48, 49, 50, 194n9 La ciudad y los perros (Vargas Llosa), 179 La enumeración caótica en la poesía moderna (Spitzer), 78 “La escritura del dios” (Borges), 68, 72, 108 “La flor de Coleridge” (Borges), 59 La gloria de Don Ramiro (Larreta), 22 La Habana para un infante difunto (Cabrera Infante), 161 La hija del hereje (Sierra O’Reilly), 17 La invención de Morel (Bioy Casares), 61, 66, 77, 87; Borges and, 68, 69–70, 71 La Légende des siècles (Hugo), 14 “La loteria en Babilonia” (Borges), 62 La Maga, 121, 133, 136, 138 La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde (Cabezas), 159 La muerte de Artemio Cruz (Fuentes), 127, 179 “La muerte y la brújula” (Borges), 70 “La noche de las estatuas,” 104, 106 La Nouvelle Heloïse (Rousseau), 7 La novia de hereje (Echeverría), 17 La novia del hereje o La Inquisición en Lima (López), 17 La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Fuentes), 122 La orgía imaginaria (Britto García), 180 La Patria Libre, 50

INDEX  • 237

“La postulación de la realidad” (Borges), 28, 62, 64 La Promenade, 151 La sierra y el llano (Guevara), 129 La Terre (Zola), 193n1 La trahison des clercs (Benda), 23 La vida breve (Onetti), 83 La vida es sueño (Calderón de la Barca), 16, 201n16 La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña (Bryce Echenique), 161 La virgen de los sicarios (Vallejos), 174 language, 79, 138, 143, 145; divine origin of, 144; Guajiro, 142; literary, 59; nonrational aspects of, 27; political, 42; prophetic, 42; rootlessness of, 144; Western, 141 Las batallas en el desierto (Pacheco), 176 “Las ruinas circulares” (Borges), 117 Las visiones de la muerte (Calderón de la Barca), 103–4, 201n16 L’assomoir (Zola), 34 Latin American novels, 122, 123, 169; history of, 27; inner dynamics of, ix; panorama of, 15 “Latinos y sajones,” 50 Le docteur Pascal (Zola), 50 “Le voyage” (Baudelaire), 21 Le Voyageur sur la terre (Green), 67, 68 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 14, 78 L’École du désenchantement: Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, Musset, Nerval, Gautier (Bénichou), 20 Legba, Papa, 105, 106 Les Illusions perdues (Balzac), 15 Les Mystères de Paris (Sue), 17 “Leslie D. Weatherhead” (Borges), 53 Lewis, Pericles, 15, 24, 25, 68, 95 Lezama Lima, José, 29, 127, 130, 203n6, 203n7, 205n18; Cortázar and, 128;

cultural background and, 205n17; eternity and, 152; poetics of, 146, 154, 155; powerlessness of, 147; religiosity of, 145; Rousseau and, 151; secularism and, 147; supernature and, 152; Tertullian and, 154–55; total novels by, 28 Libro de Manuel (Cortázar), 157 Licario, Oppiano, 47, 150, 153, 154, 183 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 169, 207n8 Life and Death of Jason, The (Morris), 65 Lima, 179; environment of, 18 Lima, Ulises, 183, 184, 185 Literatura en la Revolución y revolución en la literatura (Collazos, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa), 122 literature, 35, 190n7, 195n1; concepts of, 57, 196n3; Latin American, 127, 158, 187; popular, 64; religion of, 21; sacred, 9; Western, 88, 186 Literature and the Gods (Calasso), 3 ¡Llegamos! (Vallejo), 169 Lo cubano en la poesía (Vitier), 148 Longinus, 12, 55 Longo, Juan, 152, 153 López, Vicente Fidel, 17, 18 Los de abajo (Azuela), 38 Los detectives salvajes (Bolaño), 31, 162; nostalgia and, 175–86 “Los detectives salvajes (1976–1996)” (Bolaño), 183 Los días azules (Vallejo), 169 Los hijos del limo (Paz), 20 Los murmullos (Rulfo), 113 Los nuestros (Harss and Dohmann), 122 Los pasos perdidos (Carpentier), 178 Los premios (Cortázar), 129 Los Sorias (Laiseca), 180

238  • INDEX

“Los teólogos” (Borges), 102 Lourdes (Zola), 34 Lukács, Georg, 3–4, 7 Mackandal, 96, 97, 107 Macondo, 29, 139, 142, 143, 159–60; biblical hurricane and, 144 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier), 21 magic, 28, 65, 86, 125; partial, 182; religion and, 66 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 58, 64, 145, 199n6 Manchester, Peter, 79–80, 89, 101 Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), 24, 50 “Manifiesto del Crack” (Chávez Castañeda, Padilla, Palou, Urroz, and Volpi), 31 Manzoni, Alessandro, 8, 123 Margarita de niebla (Torres Bodet), 25 marginalization, 30, 65, 122, 179 María (Isaacs), 169 María Luisa Bombal: apreciaciones critícas (LagosPope, Lindstrom, and Nelson), 200n8 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The (Blake), 14 Martí, José, 20, 51, 194n10 martyrdom, 56, 64, 82, 84, 85 marvelous real, 30, 95, 97 Marx, Karl, 163, 192n20, 193n1 Marxism, 136, 204n13 Mataix, Remedios, 152, 205n17 materiality, 92, 107, 161, 200n6 Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 19, 33–34 maudit poets, 175 McDonald’s, 30–31, 160 McOndo anthology, 30, 158, 159–60, 169, 180 Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (Menchú), 159, 179 media, 159; cybernetic, 160, 161; digital, 161

Melquíades, 140, 141, 144, 147, 153, 183; Aureliano and, 142, 143; manuscript of, 182 Memoriale (Angela of Foligno), 37 Memorias de la Mamá Blanca (de la Parra), 169 Metamorphosis (Kafka), 61 metanarratives, 30, 127, 182 metaphysics, 23, 80 Mexican Revolution, 25, 38, 117, 177 “Mexicans Lost in Mexico,” 183, 184 Mexico City, 165, 185; registered prostitutes in, 34–35 Middle Ages, 82, 119 Milton, John, 15, 196n3 “Mitos y cansancio clasico” (Lezama Lima), 154 modernism, 20, 23, 56; analogy in, 111; Latin American narratives and, 26. See also high modernism modernists, 21, 83, 123, 179; secular sacred and, 24 modernity, 44, 49, 52, 82; dialectic of, 29; nature and, 15; spirit of, 14–15 Mohammed, 112 mojiganga, 103–4, 106, 201n16 Monja y casada, virgen y mártir (Riva Palacio), 17 morality, 21, 46; immorality and, 38 Morel, 69, 134 Morelli (character), 47, 128, 131, 134–35, 138, 183; Horacio and, 153 Morris, William, 65, 87, 88 Muerte sin fin (Gorostiza), 25 Müller-Bergh, Klaus, 94, 96 mysterium, 148, 149 mysterium tremendum, 11, 104, 155 mysticism, 37, 107, 133; alphabet, 6; darkness and, 114; negative way of, 203n11; non-theistic, 191n15

INDEX  • 239

mystics, 14, 40, 132 myth, 33, 61, 103; Judeo-Christian, 116– 17; political, 15; secularized, 198n13 Nana (Zola), 41, 193n1 narration, 146, 172–73 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The (Poe), 65 narratives, 33, 65, 88, 102, 151–52, 159, 171, 173; anti-nostalgia, 180, 185; baroque, 60; Latin American, 26, 30, 161, 162, 170; Puerto Rican, 44, 51; radically different, 206n2; totalizing, 8 nationalism, 43, 109, 158, 169, 176–77; religion and, 27 Natural Supernaturalism (Abrams), 13 naturalism, 19, 24, 32, 36, 41, 42; critical vision of, 34; Hispanic, 33–34, 43 nature: desacralization of, 15; great/ sublime in, 12; modernity and, 15 Negro Attacked by a Jaguar (Rousseau), 151 Nelson, Esther W., 88, 200n8 neoliberalism, 30, 158, 159 New Testament, 13, 142, 204n12 New World, 42; devil and, 101, 102 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 26, 110, 168, 169; God and, 174 nihilism, 15, 56, 172, 175 No me agarran viva: la mujer salvadoreña en lucha (Alegría), 159 Nocturno de Chile (Bolaño), 185 Noel, Ti, 96, 103, 106, 107; declaration of war by, 108 nostalgia: abandonment of, 162, 181–82; farewell to, 175–86; national discourse and, 176; national identity and, 177; nationalist, 177, 179, 186;

reflective, 178, 179; religion and, 175; restorative, 177; Western culture and, 176 Novalis, 14, 63 novels: artist, 150; crime, 30; death of, 59–72; as genre, 40; God and, 4; Latin American, ix, 15, 27, 122, 123, 169; modern, 22–23, 67; naturalist, 42; psychological, 67; realist, 55; religion and, 3; telluric, 26; total, 28, 29, 30, 125, 157, 179, 187, 205n2 novelas de la tierra, 26, 27, 98, 177 novelas gaseiformes, 69 “Nueva refutacion del tiempo” (Borges), 10 Nuevas campañas (Diego), 46 numen, 11, 105 “Obra Espiritual,” 165, 166, 167–68 Obras completas, 48, 53 Obras Completas II, 178 occultism, 21, 111, 112, 166 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 93 Odyssey, 5, 46, 189n2 Old Testament, 7, 13, 34 Oliveira, Horacio, 29, 121, 130, 131, 132, 133, 184, 185, 203n9; La Maga and, 136, 138; Morelli and, 135; as prophet, 134; utopian quest of, 135–36 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez). See Cien años de soledad Orígenes, 128, 145 Orlando (Woolf), Borges and, 61 Ortega y Gasset, José, 52, 59, 67, 69, 83; current decadence and, 57; imaginary psychology and, 25 Os Sertões (Da Cunha), 20 Other, 12, 37, 103, 113, 115, 149

240  • INDEX

otherness, 11, 14, 115, 144, 149, 151, 201n19 Otras inquisiones (Borges), 58 Otto, Rudolf, 12, 28, 43, 78, 103, 105, 108, 111, 112; awe/dread and, 117; daemonic dread and, 148; Flaubert and, 55; formulation of, 141; holy and, 11, 115, 148, 201n19; linguistic plurality and, 141; observations by, 113, 114, 115; sacred and, 104; viva vox and, 126 Pacheco, José Emilio, 33, 72, 176, 207n11 Padilla, Ignacio, 31, 180 Palancares, Jesusa, 31, 207n7; discourse of, 173; discrimination against, 168; life/personality of, 166; “Obra Espiritual” and, 167–68; pessimism of, 168; religion of, 163–64, 166, 167; spiritualism of, 166; vision of, 163 Palou, Pedro Angel, 31, 180 Pamela (Richardson), 7 “Para llegar a Lezama Lima” (Cortázar), 145 Paradise Lost (Milton), 15 Paradiso (Lezama Lima), 29, 127, 128, 153, 154, 155, 180, 205n18; language/style of, 145; mystery/hermeticism in, 152; narrative plot of, 149–50; sacred and, 145–55 Páramo, Pedro, 110, 115, 116, 117 parasite, defined, 173 Parasite, The (Serres), 173 Paris (Zola), 34 Pasajes de la guerra revolutionaria (Guevara), 129 Pascal, wager of, 96, 194n9, 200n12 Paz, Octavio, 111, 115, 145, 201n19; on modernity, 14–15; symbolism and, 20; tradition of rupture and, 174

Pedregal de San Angel, 35, 38–39 Pedro Páramo (Rulfo), 28, 83, 84, 113, 116, 146, 178, 201n19; celebration of, 108–9; darkness/shadows and, 114; fragmentariness of, 138; holy and, 115; publication of, 109; symbolism of, 110, 116 Pellón, Gustavo, 147, 148, 205n17 Pérez de la Riva, Juan, 159, 165 Peri hypsos (Longinus), 11–12 Peroratas (Vallejo), 171 Petit Poèmes en prose (Baudelaire), 131 Phaedrus (Plato), 58 Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel), 55 philosophy, 13, 110, 134 “Philosophy of Composition, The” (Poe), 73 “Philosophy of Right” (Hegel), 163 piantados, 128, 131, 203n7 “Pilgrim’s Last Journeys, The” (González Echevarría), 157 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 4 Pintado, Doctor, 19, 44 Plato, 58, 189n2 Poe, Edgar Allan, 21, 65, 73, 75, 76, 87, 88, 134, 140; on death, 89; horror stories of, 152–53 Poemas humanos (Vallejo), 25 poetic faith, 58, 88, 96, 98, 127, 154, 171, 174, 182 poetry, 12, 21, 29, 62, 68, 90, 146, 147, 153, 158, 185, 198n11, 201n19; civil/patriotic, 177; faith in, 155; as funerary monument, 199; Hispanic, 111; modernista, 204n11; reading, 127; religion and, 3; romantic, 13, 14; Sufi, 126 politics, 19, 23, 24, 26, 48, 103, 122, 134, 136, 146, 174; Mexican, 193n3; Puerto Rican, 44

INDEX  • 241

Poniatowska, Elena, 30, 31, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163–64, 173, 179, 206n7; spiritualism/spiritism and, 165–66 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 28 positivism, 15, 20, 32, 34, 193n2 Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 363 Preciado, Juan, 11, 113, 114, 117 prophecy, 23, 175, 205n1; JudeoChristian, 45; realism and, 40–43 “Prophetic Speech” (Blanchot), 32, 128 prophets, 204n12; inspiration of, 7; minor, 41 Prosas apátridas (Ramón Ribeyro), 180 prostitution, 24, 34–35, 41, 46 Protestant Reformation, 81, 82 Proust, Marcel, 24, 25, 26, 56, 57, 59, 67, 77, 123, 199n6; Borges and, 60 psychology, 74, 86; imaginary, 25, 83 Puig, Manuel, 30, 157 Quain, Herbert, 71, 137 Quevedo, Francisco de, 82, 83 Quijote, 4, 9–10, 12, 138, 189n1 Qur’an, 6, 62, 120, 204n14 Rabelais, François, 56, 204n11 Rajatabla (Britto García), 180 Rama, Angel: Vargas Llosa and, 124, 125 rationalism, 27, 66, 87, 101 Rayuela (Cortázar), 29, 229, 121, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135–36, 145, 146, 153, 178, 180, 181, 183, 185; fragmentariness of, 137; nostalgia and, 179; revolution in, 120; savage detectives and, 184; totalization in, 138 “Rayuela y la iglesia cortazariana,” 120 realism, 26, 36, 55, 56, 57, 64, 74, 122, 160, 193n2, 197n10; magical, 30, 65,

94, 125, 126, 187, 189n1, 192n21, 198n12; narrative, 67, 83; novelistic, 64; prophecy and, 40–43 redeemers, false, 43–52 redemption, 41, 44–45 Redentores (Zeno Gandía), 23–24, 46, 47–48, 49, 50, 51, 52; publication of, 43–44; style of, 45 relics, war of, 162–68 religion, x, 27, 38, 47, 112, 122, 139, 162–68, 182; defined, 5, 199n2; human order and, 4; magic and, 66; Marxist idea of, 167; nationalism and, 27; nostalgia and, 175; novel and, 3; paradoxical effect of, 164–65; poetry and, 3; scholars of, 127; society/ culture and, 26; spirituality and, 195n2; systematic study of, 111; theater and, 3; theology and, 27; vocabulary/ symbols of, 54; world-building and, 4 religiosity, 29, 34, 123, 136, 170, 171; Afro-Cuban, 27 Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Lewis), 24 religious tradition, 13, 108, 112, 117 Republic of Letters, 186, 207n14 “Resurrección de Belcebú, o la disidencia creadora” (Vargas Llosa), 124 “Reunión” (Cortázar), 129 revelations, 43–52, 93, 167 Rimbaud, Arthur, 14, 21, 63, 129, 133 rituals, 5, 9, 21, 29, 62, 82, 84, 105, 113, 153, 154, 170 Road to Damascus moment, 97–98, 129 Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, 94, 96, 122, 147, 197n10, 200n10 Rojas, Roque, 165, 166 romanticism, 13, 19, 20, 176; negative, 33, 56

242  • INDEX

romantics, 14, 15, 83 Rome (Zola), 34 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 61 Ruiz Barrionuevo, Carmen, 154, 205n17 Rulfo, Juan, 27, 28, 83, 123, 137, 178, 202n19; celebration of, 108–9; holy and, 115; narrative style of, 109; sacred and, 108–18 Russell Tribunal, 159, 206n4 sacralization, ix, x, 22–31, 33, 84, 163, 171, 174, 182, 186; devices of, 145; novelistic, 126, 127, 146; process of, 23–24; resisting, 175 sacred, x, 6, 7, 10, 83, 108–18, 122, 138, 186, 192n21; idea of, 11; interfering with, 168–75; journey back to, 145–55; novel genre and, 4; secular, 24, 27, 95, 107 sacred texts, 11, 14, 29, 58, 109, 116, 121, 131, 144, 156, 191n15, 198n13; attributes of, ix-x; authority of, 6; classic texts and, 5; defining category of, 5; divinely inspired nature of, 8; reading, 10; superstitious/magical use of, 6; unicity in, 6 sacredness, 5, 103, 141, 175 St. Augustine, 9, 58 St. Iraneaus, 64, 196n8 St. Paul, 9, 10, 129 saints, 20, 38; communion of, 82; lives of, 4 Salammbô (Flaubert), 3, 56 Salgado, César, 60, 61, 205n17 salvation, 8, 135, 167, 196n5 San Juan, 50, 52, 194n11 San Juan, Susana, 114, 115, 116–17 Sanskrit, 5, 113, 141, 142 Santa, 35, 43, 52; Hipólito and, 38, 39,

40; holiness of, 36, 40; virginity of, 38, 39 Santa (Gamboa), 23–24, 33, 36, 37, 40–41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 52, 130; prophetic discourse of, 41; sacred and, 35; saints in, 38; statues/immobility and, 38, 39 Santa Evita (Eloy Martínez), 161 Santo Domingo, 95, 105, 106 Sarduy, Severo, 30, 157, 158, 179 Satan. See Devil “Savage Detectives (1976–1996), The,” 184 Scott, Sir Walter, 7, 17, 18, 177 scripture, 5, 12, 27, 62, 63, 98, 123, 137, 175; sacred, 6, 7, 186 Season in Hell, A (Rimbaud), 133 secular, 3, 4, 12, 13, 24, 26, 27, 83, 149 Secular Age, A (Taylor), 160 Secular Scripture, The (Frye), 126 secularism, 26, 81, 146, 147, 148, 186 Segismundo, Prince, 16, 201n16 self-externalization, 4, 182 self-fictionalization, 161, 206n5 self-reflexiveness, 49, 144 sentimentalism, 7, 13, 64, 74, 87 “Sentirse en muerte” (Borges), 80, 88 Serpent’s Club, 121, 134 Serres, Michel, 34, 173 Shakespeare, William, 10, 56, 60 shamans, 111, 128, 133, 138 Shaw, Donald L., 157, 192n21 “Si me permiten hablar” . . . Testimonio de Domitila (Barrios de Chúngara), 159 Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard), 159 sin, 13, 38 Sin rumbo (Cambaceres), 19 Skármeta, Antonio, 157, 180 Sleeping Gypsy, The (Rousseau), 151

INDEX  • 243

social conditions, 54, 93 social criticism, 42, 48 social Darwinism, 19 social issues, 23, 24 social life, 19, 48 Sodom and Gommorah, 11, 43 Solimán, 96, 104, 105, 106 Sommer, Doris, 7–8, 177 Spanish-American War (1898), 26, 177 Spanish Civil War, 25 Spirit of the Bible and Universal Morality, 131 spiritism, spiritualism and, 165–66 spiritual, 14, 55, 66, 110, 112 spiritualism, 19, 21, 37, 122, 131, 164, 167; Lezamian, 147; Mexican, 166; religion and, 195n2; spiritism and, 165–66 Spitzer, Leo, 78, 137 Stein, Gertrude, 56, 71 Stendhal, 40, 57 strangeness, 72, 102, 112, 116, 122, 126, 145, 149 subjectivism, 103, 169 Sufis, 6, 126 Suger, Abbot, 84, 101 “Suma de conversaciones” (Lezama Lima), 145 Súmula, nunca infusa, de excepciones morfológicas (Cemí), 153 supernatural, 4, 6, 24, 63, 68, 86, 93, 104, 152, 197n11 Sur, 85, 129 surrealism, 95, 96, 97–98 Sus ojos se cerraron/y el mundo sigue andando (Gardel and Le Pera), 74 symbolism, 20–21, 37, 41, 42, 102, 110, 111, 115, 116, 158, 168; religious, 21, 54

“Table of Instructions,” 131, 136–37 Taibo, Paco Ignacio II, 30, 170 Taithe, Bertrand, 41–42, 44 Talita, 121, 136 Tejas Verdes: diario de un campo de concentración en Chile (Valdés), 159 “Tema del traidor y del héroe” (Borges), 70 Temptation of St. Anthony, The (Flaubert), 56 Tertullian, 154–55 thateron, 103, 149 theology, x; Hebrew, 42; inverted, 36–37; liberation, 123; literary, 27, 57, 58, 59, 64, 187; narrative, 12–22, 14, 54, 56, 195n1; national, 22; negative, 56, 63, 64; poetic, 14; postliberal, 195n1; religion and, 27 Theory of the Novel (Lukács), 7 Thornton, Tim, 41–42, 44 Thrower, James, 198n2, 204n13, 205n1 Tiger in a Tropical Storm, or Surprised! (Rousseau), 151 “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (Borges), 70, 161 Todo tango, 74 Todos los fuegos el fuego, 129 Tolstoy, Leo, 8, 15, 67, 123 Tomochic (Frías), 20 Tompkins, Jane, 7, 54 Torah, 6 totalization, 8, 28, 30, 116, 136, 138, 140, 186, 206n2; eternity and, 126; novelistic, 157 transcendence, 24, 28, 29 transgression: avant-gardist, 174; transgression of, 174 transubstantiation, 114 Tres tristes tigres (Cabrera Infante), 127, 146, 179

244  • INDEX

trickery, 16, 95, 96, 97, 99, 182 Tridentine Profession of Faith (1564), 83, 198n1 Trinity, 19, 62 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 67, 68 Twilight of the Idols with the Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 168 ultraísmo, 27, 57 ultraísta, 57, 60 Ulysses (Joyce), 24, 50, 60, 66, 138; Borges on, 71–72 Un modelo para la muerte (Bioy Casares), 59 “Una vindicación de la cábala” (Borges), 27, 62 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 7, 54 unicity, 6, 8, 12 Unitarians, 17, 19 Urroz, Eloy, 31, 180 vaccination, 173, 174 Valéry, 62, 63 Vallejo, Fernando, 31, 162, 207n10; blasphemy and, 182; desacralization and, 168–69, 171, 174–75; high modernism and, 170; narratives of, 169, 171–72, 173–74; nationalism and, 169; sacred and, 168–75; transgression and, 174; vituperation and, 171 vanguardism, 94, 179 Varela Jácome, Benito, 17, 191n12 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 99–100, 102, 122, 126, 127, 157–58, 202n1; García Márquez and, 124; novels by, 28, 205n2; Rama and, 124, 125; replies by, 124; sacred writing and, 125; on time, 100; trickery and, 99 “Vindicación de Bouvard et Pécuchet” (Borges), 53, 64

“Vindicación del falso Basílides” (Borges), 27–28, 62 vision, 24, 29, 34, 37, 56, 147, 163 Viterbo, Beatriz, 73, 74–75, 77 vituperation, 171, 173 Vivir Para Contarla (García Márquez), 138 Volpi, Jorge, 31, 126, 161, 178, 192n21; on Bolaño, 181; “Crack Manifesto” and, 180; García Márquez and, 119, 120; on sacred status, 138 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 8 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 49 Weber, Max, 24, 84, 199n2 Wells, H. G., 49, 85, 134 What I Would Like to Be If I Weren’t What I Am (Brutus), 131 Whitman, Walt, 14, 78, 137, 205n15 wholly other, 12, 103, 113, 115, 149 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Goethe), 7 witchcraft, 152, 204n11 wolf-men, 203n11 Woolf, Virginia, 24, 25, 26, 28, 56, 57, 59, 69, 77, 88, 123, 192n18; Borges on, 61; psychological writing of, 61, 86 Wordsworth, William, 13, 14 Worringer, Wilhelm, 12, 110, 113 Yu Tsun, 70, 71 Zeno Gandía, Manuel, 19, 33, 46, 51, 52, 98, 194n9; analyses by, 50; censorship and, 50; naturalism of, 34; politics of, 47–48; on Puerto Rican books, 45; redemption and, 44–45 Zola, Emile, 8, 33, 34, 40, 41, 50, 193n1