New Intersections: Essays on Culture and Literature in the Post-Modern and Post-Colonial Condition 9783964565167

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Fernando de Toro New Intersections: Essays on Culture and Literature in the Post-Modern and Post-Colonial Condition

TCCL - TEORÍA Y CRÍTICA DE LA CULTURA Y LITERATURA INVESTIGACIONES DE LOS SIGNOS CULTURALES (SEMIÓTICA-EPISTEMOLOGÍA-INTERPRETACIÓN) TKKL - THEORIE UND KRITIK DER KULTUR UND LITERATUR UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZU DEN KULTURELLEN ZEICHEN (SEMIOTIK-EPISTEMOLOGIE-INTERPRETATION) TCCL - THEORY AND CRITICISM OF CULTURE AND LITERATURE INVESTIGATIONS ON CULTURAL SIGNS (SEMIOTICS-EPISTEMOLOGY-INTERPRETATION) Vol. 26

EDITORES / HERAUSGEBER / EDITORS: Alfonso de Toro Ibero-Amerikanisches Forschungsseminar Universität Leipzig [email protected] Luiz Costa Lima Rio de Janeiro costalim@visualnet .com ,br Dieter Ingenschay Institut für Romanistik Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin dieter.ingenschay @rz .hu-berlin .de Michael Rössner Institut für Romanische Philologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Michael .Roessner@romanistik .uni-muenchen .de

CONSEJO ASESOR / BEIRAT / PUBLISHING BOARD: J. Alazraki (Barcelona); G. Bellini (Milán); A. J. Bergere (Los Angeles); A. Echavarna (San Juan de Puerto Rico); Ruth Fine (Jerusalén); W. D. Mignolo (Durham); K. Meyer-Minnemann (Hamburgo); E. D. Pittarello (Venecia); R. M. Ravera (Rosario); S. Regazzoni (Venecia); N. Rosa (Rosario); J. Ruffinelli (Stanford).

Fernando de Toro

New Intersections: Essays on Culture and Literature in the Post-Modern and Post-Colonial Condition

IBEROAMERICANA

•

VERVUERT •

2003

Bibliographie information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

© Iberoamericana, 2003 Amor de Dios, 1 - E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 info @ iberoamericanalibros .com www.ibero-americana.net © Vervuert, 2003 Wielandstr. 40 - D-60318 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 info@ iberoamericanalibros .com www.ibero-americana.net ISBN 84-8489-084-8 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 3-89354-226-4 (Vervuert) ISBN 1-55876-320-1 (Markus Wiener Publishers) For information within the United States please write to Markus Wiener Publishers, 231 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ 08542 USA. Diseño de la cubierta: Michael Ackermann

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706 Published in Germany

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Jennifer Nord for the excellent and detailed revision of this book, which contributed, without any doubt, to refine and polish many aspects of New Intersections. I also thank Dr. Mario Valdes for accepting to write the prologue to this book and for his constant support, encouragement and solidarity with respect to my work. I would also like to thank my University, the University of Manitoba for the sustained support that it provides to my research and also for providing the funding for this publication.

To my mother, Rosalba Garcia To my sister, Maria Listur For being there when it counted

TABLE OF CONTENT

Prologue by Mario Valdés

11

INTRODUCTION

Post-Modernity, Post-Coloniality and Globalisation

13

ESSAYS ON CULTURE A N D LITERATURE IN THE POST-MODERN AND POST-COLONIAL CONDITION

From Where to Speak? Post-Modern/Post-Colonial Positionalities Explorations on Post-Theory: New Times The Post-Colonial Question: Alterity, Identity and the Other(s) Identity, Alterity and the Third Space: The Theatre of Alberto Kurapel The Displacement of Literature and the Literature of Displacement: the Question of Identity Borges and Rulfo: The Paradigms of Modernity and Post-Modernity Borges, Derrida and Writing Roa Bastos, Borges, Derrida: Writing and Deconstruction Roa Bastos: / the Supreme: Simulation, Rhizomaticity and the Dehistorisation of History and the Defictionalisation of the Fiction

19 39 53 75

149

Bibliography

161

85 107 115 129

II

PROLOGUE by Mario Valdés To most readers interested in Latin American literary cultures the name of Fernando de Toro is well known, first as one of the foremost scholars of Latin American theatre, especially the development of semiotics as a viable approach to performance phenomena (see Semiótica del Teatro: Del texto a la puesta en escena (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galema, 1987). To many other Latin Americanists, Fernando de Toro is well known through the volumes he has edited with Alfonso de Toro (Borders and Margins. PostColonialism and Post-Modernism, Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1995; El debate de la postcolonialidad en Latinoamérica, Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1999), or closer to home, the edition he published of selected papers of conferences he organized at Carleton University (Exploration on Post-Theory: Toward a Third Space, Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1999). However, the present volume which collects the best of his articles on cultural post-theory moves him into a new position-he will henceforth be recognized as a front-line voice in the cultural debate surrounding globalization. I am well acquainted with Fernando de Toro's writing, having read or heard most of the texts contained in this volume; there were, however some discoveries for me, first and foremost his comparative study of Jorge Luis Borges and Juan Rulfo. This study deals with the complex problem of achronical periodisation from the perspective of theory of paradigms. In general terms, Fernando de Toro's position can be described as a passionate sometimes intemperate argument for dialogue cutting across cultural boundaries especially the Marxist appropriation of 'third-world' victimization by the first-world. He vehemently opposes fundamentalisms of all kinds, but he also puts down Latin American reluctance to enter the postcolonial debate with the major writers such as Homi Bhabha and Edward Said. I cite from his conclusion to third essay: "The challenge... is to attempt to break the straight-jacket of binarism which characterises much of the 'thirdworld' thinking.... It is fundamental to inquire [into] that 'third space' which Bhabha speaks about, which is nothing but the search for new alternatives that can avoid the repetition of the same mistakes... committed time and time again throughout history." But there is another reason for reading this book-the challenge of matching wits with a master player and although this razor-sharp edge is present in all the essays, the most notable invitation to enter the labyrinth is the seventh essay, "Borges, Derrida and Writing." He writes: "What was revealed [by Derrida] is that the signifler does not contain in itself anything that can inscribe it in the signified; therefore what we are left

12

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

with is a mass of signifiers (floating) with no fixed signifiers. As a result the signified is always sliding under the signifier." Fernando de Toro then indicates that Derrida's position is parallel to that of Borges: "The well-known Saussurian formulation of the sign = signifier/signified and its binary opposition is radically challenged by Borges. In "Brodie's Report" we read: "This conjecture is confirmed by inscriptions which I have discovered up on the tableland... The characters employed in these inscriptions, resembling the runes that out own forebears carved, can no longer be deciphered by the tribe; it is as though the tribe had forgotten the written language and retained only the spoken one' [Borges. Collected fictions 1999,406])" (134-35). The fact that the characters "can no longer be deciphered by the tribe" is due to the sliding of the signified under the signifier to the point that the written language is forgotten, leaving behind only the orality, or presence without the trace. What is Fernando de Toro after in this essay? It is certainly much more than pointing out that Borges was a towering talent recognized and read by Derrida, Foucault et al. It runs much deeper. The point of it all as I read it is to get English-speaking intellectuals into the debate that has been going on for some time in Latin America: a debate that they recognize only when it comes to them from Europe, specifically from France. These essays deliver innovative and valuable aspects for a new reading of parts of late 19lh century Latin American cultural critique, but above all of 20,h century Modernist and Post-Modem literary production. I would only mention two outstanding examples: The essays dedicated to Borges enhance the previous reading of Borges as a key figure of Post-Modernity, and offer, from the perspective of new cultural theory, decisive insights; — the essays on Roa Bastos disclose for the first time the narrative implosion and the rhizomaticity of I the Supreme and lead to a completely new understanding of the history and fictionality (dehistorisation and defictionalisation) in this cardinal fiction. This is a hard-hitting argumentative collection of essays which should be considered by all who are interested in the world after the demise of colonial domination and in the midst of the new reality of the paradox of imperial globalization and the worldwide rise of thousands of regionalisms if not nationalisms.

Mario J. Valdés University of Toronto

11

INTRODUCTION POST-MODERNITY, POST-COLONIALITY AND GLOBALISATION New Intersections gathers my studies and reflections on literature and culture from 1995 to the present day. These studies share in common their multidisciplinary practice; a practice that constitutes a fundamental change in the way we approach literature and culture. We start with a reflection, which is inscribed in post-modern and post-colonial thinking and has marked all cultural activity since at least the mid 1980s. This new way of thinking (which I have defined as Post-Theoretical, 1999) emerges from the need to view literature and culture from a non-disciplinary perspective, i.e., to think about it from a perspective which encompasses a variety of theories simultaneously and productively, yet free from the limits imposed by the disciplinary activity (which today finds itself in rapid dissipation). In contrast to this new way of thinking are arguments that have emerged stating that we are not dealing with a new way of thinking, but rather with a form of recycling disciplines had already established decades ago. This sclerotic attitude, to put it politely, is, in the best of cases, defensive and also demagogic, and it is incapable of accepting the fact that we have experienced epistemological changes that cannot be denied. At the very centre of this debate, post-modernity categorically displays the failure of Modernity, and of Humanism, of Truth, Progress and the Western logos. In the end, we faced the fall of more than two and a half thousand years of thinking which has never put into question its own epistemological bases and has always presented itself as totalising and unquestionable. It is precisely this Western edifice that has crumbled in front of our very eyes, and without having anything to hold on to while crumbling. Daniel Castillo, in a seminal study, and unique in the current Latin American cultural context, states: [...] in a context of crisis of modernity and therefore of humanism, what it also becomes a crisis, is the stabilisation of meaning. A déstabilisation of the referent takes place in relation to which the very concept of truth it becomes, as Nietzsche already purported, a matter of interpretation. The attacks of the author of the Antichrist against modernity and the notion of 'progress' constitute the symptoms of a persistent malaise facing the instrumentalisation of reason, which Adorno and Horkheimer will make sure to make it a systematic and devastating critique. (Castillo, 2000: 16-17)

The essays that comprise New Intersections centre on current issues, i.e., on issues not normally considered by critical studies. These studies pay more attention to what has

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NF.W INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CUT TURF. AND LITERATURE

already been established as acceptable, rather than questioning past reflections. In this sense, New Intersections, is a polemical set of studies which debates defensive thinking and, at the same time, attempts to exhibit new readings of Latin American and global culture. The post-modern condition, and within this, the post-colonial condition, give way to the global condition which characterises literature and culture as nomadic, rhizomatic, hyperreal and cartographic. The global condition is permanent and it does not reside in any pre-given vernacularity or identity. As such, culture is constantly re-negotiated. These are the questions, issues and themes we explore in this book. In "From Where to Speak? Post-Modern/Post-Colonial Positionalities" we enter into a debate that attempts to demonise post-modernity and post-coloniality with the objectivity of distorting the fundamental principles of these two new forms of culture. The central statement of this essay underlines that the only effective way for political and cultural agency resides in remaining inside of the homogenising structures of the West, with the ultimate objective of subverting them (as is clearly shown by the writings of Jacques Derrida). At the same time we unmask the demagogy of some types of discourse which wish to continue "seeing" literature and culture through a sclerotic "eye" and, as a result, have produced some very poor results when facing new political and cultural realities which have emerged with the post-modern thinking. "Explorations on Post-Theory: New Times" examines multidisciplinarity and the fall of the old disciplines. This essay underlines the inescapable fact that culture and literature can no longer continue to be approached from strict disciplinary perspectives. These perspectives not only hinder a comprehensive examination of culture, but also distort the object of study due to the narrowness of the epistemological approach. Today, multidisciplinarity marks the most productive studies in post-colonial, post-feminist and post-modernist research. It is this epistemological position that characterises the work of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, and so many other cultural scholars. "The Post-Colonial Question: Alterity, Identity, and the Other(s)" emphasises the epistemological basis of post-coloniality and tackles the ever more pressing question of identity. At a time when the world has become radically globalised we cannot continue to think within the dead-end binary structure of 'periphery/centre', which has characterised Latin American and 'Third World' thinking for the past forty years. PostColoniality attempts to examine the issues posed by the former colonies and their relationship with the former empires in terms of articulation with the present. The work of Edward Said and the work of Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha include this notion of the "third space" and constitute the bases for this new thinking. "The Displacement of Literature and the Literature of Displacement and the Question of Identity" looks at the question of displacement of vernacular literatures and literature that speaks of displacement. In the first case, we deal with authors who write in English, but this is not their mother tongue, thus English becomes only a medium of communication. Authors such as Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje and many oth-

INTRODUCTION

11

ers are beginning to build a new culture in their adopted countries, a culture that it is not based on language, ethnicity or a pre-established identity. "Identity, Alterity and the Third Space: The Theatre of Alberto Kurapel" rescues the work of this versatile artist; a work which trademarks the inhabiting of the fracture, and the exile; a work that speaks of the Post-Modern Otherness in terms of the construction of a new culture, which is diasporic and always in movement. Kurapel's work is one of the most sharply focussed with respect to Post-Modern and Post-Colonial thinking. "Borges and Rulfo: The Paradigms of Modernity and Post-Modernity" reflects about historiographie issues starting from the notion of paradigm and normal science which was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). On the one hand, we attempt to explain how it is possible that Borges introduces the cultural and literary Post-Modernity in the 1940s, since its paradigm will be set around the 1960s and the international discussion does not begin until the publication of The Postmodern Condition by François Lyotard in 1979. On the other hand, we introduce literary Modernity towards the end of the 1940s by Juan Rulfo with El llano en llamas (1955) and Pedro Paramo (1953). What we attempt to elucidate here is that cultural phenomena do not operate in a linear manner, but rather in a discontinuous and fragmented way. "Borges, Derrida and Writing" and "Roa Bastos, Borges, Derrida: Writing and Deconstruction" start from the reflection about writing following Derrida and its relation with Borges, who writes about writing thirty years before Derrida, and Roa Bastos, (whose thinking about writing is contemporaneous to that of Derrida). Borges, as well as Roa Bastos, presents a deconstructivist activity with respect to literary Modernity, which they bring to an end by introducing literary Post-Modernity. "Roa Bastos: I the Supreme: Simulation, Rhizomaticity and the Dehistorisation of History and the Defictionalisation of Fiction" reflects from the works of Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and is mainly about textual hyperreality and about the rhizomatic structure which constitutes one of the most important works of the xxth century: I the Supreme (1987).

ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE IN THE POST-MODERN AND POST-COLONIAL CONDITION

11

FROM WHERE TO SPEAK? POST-MODERN/POST-COLONIAL POSITIONALITIES

I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and emigré and refugees, gathering on the edge of "forcing" cultures; gathering at the frontiers, gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, halflight of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another's language, gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines, gathering the memories of development, of other worlds lived retroactively, gathering of the people in the disapora indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal status, immigration status—the genealogy of that lonely figure [...] named the seventh man. The gathering of clouds from which the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asks "where should the birds fly after the last sky?" Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration. All of us are alone, because all of us are two. The strange one, the other, is our double. Again and again we try to lay hold upon him. Again and again he eludes us. He has no face or name, but he is always there, hiding. Each night for a few hours he fuses with us again. Each morning he breaks away. Are we this hollow, the trace of his absence? Is he an image? Yet it is not the mirror, but time, that multiplies him. And it is useless to flee, to be disconcerted, to get caught in the web of occupations, tasks, pleasures. The other is always absent. Absent and present. There is a bole, a pit at our feet. Man is violent, anguished, searching for that other who is he himself. And nothing can bring him back to himself, except the mortal leap, love, the image, the Apparition. Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre.

1.

FROM WHERE TO SPEAK?

In the face of the epistemological and analytical challenge of literary studies brought about by semiotics and structuralism, Roland Barthes posed the following question in 1970, "From where shall we begin?" (1970: 3-9). Today we are confronted with the question, From where to speak? We must attempt to answer this question, particularly with relation to Post-Colonialism, and specifically in our case, Latin America, since the decline of Eurocentrism and the end of all master narratives in the second half of this century has led to the decentering of European intellectual traditions (Lyotard, 1979: 31). This crisis, in turn, forges a space of negotiation and voice, not inscribed, and in relation to the "margins" of totalising and universalising narratives. However, before

20.

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: F.SSAYS ON CI II.TURF. AND I.ITF.RATURR

we answer this key question, we have to understand how and from where the question evolves, I hope also to address the question of from where, I, myself, am speaking. The formalist paradigm, which had its roots in Russian Formalism in the 1920s, was continued by the Prague School in the 1930s and 1940s, interrupted by the second World War and taken up again in the 1950s through the mid-1970s, imposed a new space from where to speak and from where to carry out critical analysis. Two opposing positions followed. In Latin America, in the wake of this formalist paradigm, there were, on the one hand those intellectuals who rejected any relation whatsoever with formalism in the name of their "own" theorization devoid of any traces of European or 'imperialist' theoretical discourse. On the other hand, there were those who incorporated this theoretical paradigm into their own analytical practices. These two positions, for the most part endemic in Latin America, represent two salient aspects of PostColonialism, firstly, as an essentialising discourse, and secondly, as a universalising discourse. Both positions articulate a problematic epistemological position with regard to a dominant discourse, since the question that never gets posed, but is constantly there, is from where to speak?

a)

Essentialising discourse

The essentialising discourse is a counter-discourse, a discourse of resistance, which seeks to constitute its own Subject of enunciation and its own Object of knowledge, and this search does not occur as a deconstructive reflection but as an ontological quest for an origin, a return to a lost identity (an entelechy), yet one which considers itself to be recoverable. Nevertheless, this return is merely a fiction. Since there is no possibility of a definitive return, Djelal Kadir, in a brilliant study of Latin American narrative, voices this opinion: The inventive past, rather, must serve as on-going activity, it must haunt as ghost of a beginning assumed to have been, but to have been only as necessary fiction, as poetic history not as totalized (completed) history. It must, too, be a "present" that supplements and is supplemented by the future. In that way, the projected quest, the errant project, may always dwell as unconsummated desire, as nostalgia or as future-directed recollection, displaced and ever-displaceable by the seeking after. (1986: 11)

The attempt to fracture Alterity in order to restore an absent origin in the present manifests itself as an uchronia, or rather a heterotopia, since it is unattainably and schizophrenically present1. The fallacy of this essentialist position is that, for the most part,

1

Djelal Kadir defines Uchronia as follows: "Uchronia is the breaking of form, the form which dwells in time, that is, the form of Utopia. That break constitutes a rupture which shatters the dwelling, the mediate and bypostatized structure of Utopia" (1986:11-12).

FROM WHF.RF. TO SPF.AK?

21

it functions according to the same parameters of a logocentric and Eurocentric discourse (as self-representation of meaning, as presence), that is, according to the binary pairs of subject/object, there/here, inside/outside. In general, this uchronic/heterotopic project results in the construction of an exclusive and homogeneous essentialist illusion that copies and reduplicates universalising imperialist systems and forges new master narratives 2 . In the 1970s, a group of Latin American intellectuals of considerable influence actively supported this position. In particular, Mario Benedetti stated that just as Latin American writers created their own form of expression (which, admittedly is and is not an authentic voice), we as critics "must also work towards a new analytical point of view, with our own interpretive methods, our own particular brand of legitimation, borne out of our circumstances, of our own needs, of our own interests" (1974: 52) 3 . This hysterical obsession with indigenous authenticity is nothing more than a noetic and rhetorical individuation which, as we now know, did not result in the formulation of a specifically Latin American theoretical paradigm. Neither did it result in a singular production of knowledge, since a return to a supposed otitic reality, with the subsequent constitution of its "originary" Subject, is simply an impossibility. Such a quest for a pristine origin is based in a fundamental error. It is assumed that through the negation of logocentrism and Eurocentric discourse, an "indigenous" Subject may be constructed, without realizing that the quest for the lost origin leads to a marginalized position. If assumed, this leads only, and necessarily, to a dogmatic and regressive repetition of the dominant universalising discourse. It is not a question of

2

In "Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourses" Tiffin states: "Frequently, too, the construction of the 'essentially' Nigerian or the 'essentially' Australian invokes exclusivist systems which replicate imperial universalist paradigms" (1983: 21). And she adds that: The process of artistic and literary decolonization has involved a radical dismantling of European codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses. This has frequently been accompanied by the demand for an entirely new or wholly recovered 'reality', free of all colonial taint [...] such pre-colonial cultural purity can never be fully recovered. (1983: 17)

3

The whole text reads as follows: Should Latin American literature, in its greatest moment of blossoming, submit itself gently to the canons of a literature [Western Europe] that today is experiencing a period of fatigue and crisis? [...]. Should structuralist criticism be considered as the unavoidable method of our literature? Or, on the contrary, along with our poets and narrators, should we also create our own critical approach, our own research methods, our own way to evaluate with our distinct imprint, evolved from our conditions, from our needs, from our interest? [my translation] (1974: 54)

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NF.W INTF.RSRCTTONS: F.SSAYS ON CIII .TURF. AND I.ITF.RATURK

negating, or (de)territorializing, in order to (re)territorialize a space inscribed and territorialized by another, from a Subject to whom silence was imposed at the margins and borders on the "peripheric" discourses. In actual fact, the issue at hand is the carrying out of an entire reconstructive project, which we will address later in this essay. As many studies of Post-Modernism and Post-Colonialism have already shown (Ashcroft et al., 1989: 31; Said 1993: xiii-xiv; Spivak, 1990: 39 and 69; Bhabha, 1990: 291-322; Vijay and Hodge, 1991: 400; Tiffin, 1983: 17; Kadir, 1986: 5-11; Soyinka, 1975: 3844; Young, 1990: 168, and A. de Toro, 1995: 11-44), it is no longer possible to restore a point of origin, identity or originary essence, in the sense that the socalled "marginal" cultures are contaminated by an inevitable and inescapable discursive dissemination. From the very outset, this so-called return to a pristine site of origin encounters one major obstacle: 'marginal' societies, in many cases, if not in all cases, are constituted by the global syncretisation of the cultural, ethnic, religious, political, etc. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin have rightly stated: "Within the syncretic reality of a post-colonial society it is impossible to return to an idealized pure precolonial cultural condition" (1989: 109-110). Similarly, in his insightful study, Robert Young reasons: [...] those who evoke the "nativist" position through a nostalgia for lost or repressed culture idealize the possibility of that lost origin being recoverable in all its former plenitude without allowing for the fact that the figure of the lost origin, the other that the colonizer has repressed, has itself been constructed in terms of the colonizer's own self image. (1990: 168)

and he adds that: The "nativist" argument thus simply reproduces a Western fantasy about its own society now projected out onto the lost society of the other and named "the Third World" [...]. All such arguments, whether from colonizer or colonized, tend to revolve around the terms which the colonizers have constructed. To reverse an opposition of this kind is to remain caught within the very terms that are being disputed. Nationalist resistance to imperialism, for example, itself derives its notion of nation and of national self-determination from the Western culture that is being resisted. (1990: 168)

Perhaps one of the more dangerous mistakes has been the belief that it is possible to erase (and forget) history and contemporary thought, as if the so-called marginal ethnicities and cultures lived in a spacio-temporal and epistemological vacuum. Spivak rightly proclaims: I cannot understand what indigenous theory there might be that can ignore the reality of nineteenth-century history [...]. To construct indigenous theories one must ignore the last few centuries of historical involvement. I would rather use what history has written for me". (1990: 69)

FROM WHF.RK TO SPF.AK?

b)

21

Universalising discourse

The other side of the coin is what one might call a universal discourse, that is the incorporation and assimilation of literary theories, such as structuralism, semiotics, reception theory, post-structuralism, etc. This theoretical project has had different effects in Latin America. On the one hand, since the 1970s, literary studies have dealt principally in Eurocentric terms, which, no doubt, have contributed substantially to the shape and substance of literary studies. There are many cases in various countries, particularly Argentina and Mexico, where such critical methods have made an excellent contribution to the dissemination, appropriation and furthering of these theoretical disciplines4. However, in Latin America this theoretical discourse does not constitute a mere copy or replica of the dominant theories of the centre, as has been suggested by some (Richard, 1993: 464-465). The act of attacking this type of incorporation/appropriation from an essentialising perspective, simply because it is not "authentic", reveals not only theoretical and intellectual provincialism and parochialism, but it also reveals a grave mistake which merits further clarification. For example, referring to Modernity in Latin America, Nelly Richard maintains: All the models to be imitated and consumed (industrial and economic organization, political structures, social behaviour, artistic values) were based on European prototypes [...]. This turns them into parodies or caricatures which lack their own operational dynamic because they either do not fit the context or are rejected by it [...]. Characteristically, this kind of production exhausts itself in mere formal repetitions or "doctrinal mannerism". It produces pseudo-theories which are disassociated from the intellectual struggle in which the original concepts and interpretations had to fight for supremacy. They are now no more than fetishes in what has become a merely ornamental construction. (1993: 464-465) 5

This is exactly the essentialising perspective displayed by Mario Benedetti and also by Roberto Fernández Retamar, in which any attempt at incorporation or appropriation is dubbed, "intellectually colonized" (1975: 52)6. According to these critics, the only al4

One of the problems that Latin Americans used to face during the 1960s and 1970s is the lack of translations of the cutting edge literary and cultural theories. Even today, when translations take place within a very short period, the large production of articles in journals is very rarely translated and is therefore difficult to access.

5

In fact, there was a sector within the academic community that had taken up the new theories as mere mannerism, that is the superficial and inadequate appropriation lacking rigor or depth. If the proponents of nationalism and authenticity aimed their criticism at this poor scholarship, there would be no problem.

6

Fernández Retamar is of the opinion that to "propose obediently a theory that is other to our literature as has been attempted amounts to the reproduction of the colonial attitude"

2±

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

ternative is simply to ignore the general advancement o f critical and theoretical research and to continue to apply antiquated, nineteenth-century critical methods, or rather resort to an over-simplified Marxist paradigm that has persisted throughout Latin America until very recently (Fernández Retamar, 1 9 7 5 ) . It is surprising that purist criticism does not attack the issue of the constitution o f the new subject, or the strategic appropriation of theory, and it questions even less the complex problem of the impossibility o f making a clean break with a cultural and social context saturated with the intersection o f discourses and practices of various origins. This reflection simply does not take place, and therefore the proposals o f this kind o f criticism end up as pure idealism. Once again, Nelly Richard suggests that the means o f combating and eliminating an imported version of Modernity in Latin A m e r i c a is to return to the past: As a functionalist and secularizing proposal, modernity has not only erased all the ritual dimensions of a culture to which the philosophy of the logos is profoundly alien, but it has also suppressed that culture's "Catholic substratum", a popular religiousness whose stock of symbols form an integral part of the Latin American "ethos". A symbolic upgrading of this ethos would provide the platform from which to combat the distorting effects of the international modernizing influence since "our cultural synthesis is Latin American, of mixed race, and ritual". As far as art and literature are concerned, a whole current of thought about the alienating role of the idea of modernity as the purveyor of European fictions is grounded in a defense of Latin American culture as derived from autochthonous beginnings. The culture is linked to forms of identity — representations of "oneself' usually equated with the "indigenous" — that are taken to represent the authenticity of a "pure" culture. This purity is defined by the myth of its origins which predate modernity and the contaminating expansion of the culture industry of multinational capitalism. This view — both essentialist and metaphysical — of what constitutes a Latin American identity is mythologized and turned into folklore in any number of ways indigenism, nationalism, third worldism. It consists of several kinds of primitivism in which Latin American identity is equated with a predetermined and fixed identity. The rediscov-

[my translation] (1975: 52). It is pathetic to observe the epistemological error of the materialist colleague. Nobody has ever attempted to "impose" on our very special and autochthonous literatures a theory, and I have never seen either an exclusive theory of French or English literatures. What in fact exists, are various theorisations on narration, on poetry, on varied theatricalities, and many of these are indeed useful for many different literatures, in particular Latin American literature which has developed in an intimate relationship with both North American and European literature. The mistake that Fernández Retamar makes, as well as his colleague Benedetti, is to believe that "nativism" of Latin American narrative is their (technical) invention. To believe this means simply either ignoring the history of literature and the source of literary techniques and narrative modes that have emerged in the last seventy years, and that are, in fact, utilised and appropriated by many "native" writers; or being a demagogue.

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ery of this identity therefore involves a mythical, backward-looking return to the sources and produces a static view of origin (the indigenous substratum) and memory (the mixed-race past), turned into ritual and applied over the whole continent. (Richard, 1993: 466)

This theoretical and intellectual debate, which incidentally passes through the power! knowledge, coloniser/colonised, subject/object grid, not only repeats and reproduces the dominant discourse, but still worse, it is reduced to accepting a permanently marginalised position, since, whether we like it or not, Latin America makes up part of the West. Starting with the name of the continent itself, the national and democratic values, as well as those of identity, are all derived from the language and discourse of the centre. The discourse of Latin America, which is bound to dominant structures of knowledge, at least has the advantage of placing it at the level of dialogue where the subject/I must begin to listen to the Other/he/she. Furthermore, this knowledge, for those who went beyond its surface, was never a mere copy, but it entered into the debate and led to significant changes in the thinking and elaboration of theory of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. We need only think of the vast work produced in the last few decades by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Djelal Kadir, etc., not to mention the latest feminist theoreticians such as Irigaray, Cixous, de Lauretis, Haraway, Moi, etc. It seems clear to me that without the post-structural/Post-Modern/decons-tructionist transformation, not only would we not have entered the debate, but we would have remained within the parameters of an essentialising discourse (which during the 1960s and 1970s, and even today, if strategically employed, retain a certain value). The greatest problem presented by such an essentialising discourse, aside from the ones already mentioned, is that there is a definitive lack of clarity with regard to its own propositions, since it is impossible to turn back, and even if it were possible, what would we turn back for? Apart from the obsession with a Latin American identity, supposedly lost when Columbus "discovered" America, the proponents of an essentialising discourse do not seem to realise that Latin America does not exist, that it is a construction, a fabrication, not only the result of an error, as Djelal Kadir lucidly observes, but a fiction created by a European subject who projected the entire medieval fantasy, not as Platonic Atlantida, but as an ex novo, uninhabited territory, empty and primed for the inscription of a fantasy gone wild. Djelal Kadir counters this: This metaphor is a way of saying that quest in Latin American literature figures as family history, that the errantry which resulted in the discovery of the New World has become internalized by that world's imagination, that the first voyagerist error which led to the necessity of inventing a reality for an unexpected world, the happenstance discovery, serves as precedent for the ever-errant inventiveness of Latin American fictions. (1986: xxi)

And later he adds:

26

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE Those beginnings are in themselves embattled scenes of imaginative romance, for they trace the illusory history and chronicles of topic pursuits and serve as primal map of filial fictions that trace the family history. Latin American fiction, then, is a supreme fiction because it is necessarily fictitious and the origins of that necessity are imaginatively engendered [...]. The phenomenon we refer to as "Latin America" is an artificial and debatable construct. (1986: 3-4)

2.

ON THE CONCEPT OF POST-COLONIALISM

Since the mid-1980s, and especially with the expansion of material that appeared in the 1990s, a body of work has begun to emerge under the theoretical (both literary and cultural) label of Post-Colonialism. As one might think, the concept of "Post-Colonialism" itself, and the studies in question, have created a stir, and at times a violent debate, due to the fact that those who have come to work in the domain of Post-Colonialism in the last few decades feel that a new universalist, imperialist and positivist discourse is invading the terrain that belonged exclusively to the margins, to the Other. But in the last few years, this new field of research has emerged from very diverse contexts and in very close relationship with both post-structuralist and deconstructionist paradigms. The problem with the label "Post-Colonial" is that it is a generic concept emanating from a variety of quite different spaces and temporalities, and for this reason, it runs the risk of homogenising difference into sameness. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin employ the concept of "post-colonialism" "to cover all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day" (1989: 2). To this, they add that "The idea of 'post-colonial literary theory' emerges from the inability of European theory to deal adequately with the complexities and varied cultural provenance of post-colonial writing" (1989: 11). They also add that Post-Colonial theory has emerged as a result of the need to cope with an area of studies from a distinct perspective of which it has, to date, not been the object. It is not at all a question of invalidating studies that date, in some cases, from the previous century, and no doubt for the most part from the Twentieth Century. The emergence of this new discipline can be explained only with respect to Post-Modernism, which can be linked to the rise of ethnic studies, feminism, gay studies, environmental studies, etc. There is no disputing, as Benita Parry defensively states, that: The construction of a text disrupting imperialism's authorized version was begun long ago within the political and intellectual cultures of colonial liberation movements, and the counter-discourse developed in this milieu which is known to western academies, read by black activists in the USA and transcribed as armed struggle in the other hemisphere, was written way back in the 1950s by Frantz Fanon. (1987: 27) 7

7

Curiously, the two capital hooks by Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1959) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) consist fundamentally of a Marxist approach, and

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In her article ironically titled "The Angel of Progress Pitfalls of the term 'Post-colonialism'", Anne McClintock points out that: If 'post-colonial' theory has sought to challenge the grand march of western historicism with its entourage of binaries (self-other, metropolis-colony, center-periphery, etc), the term 'post-colonialism' nonetheless re-orients the globe once more around a single, binary opposition colonial/post-colonial way. (1992: 85) 8

The concept of contemporary Post-Colonialism does not in any way attempt to reproduce the binary system that in fact characterises the previous quotations. On the contrary, the task is to disarticulate not only binary thinking, but to deconstruct essentialist paradigms and Eurocentric representations of Alterity. To this end it has been necessary to abandon essentialism and the facade of reductionist counter-discourses, in order to locate oneself in a space from which it is possible to promote the voice of the Other, exposing the means of representing the marginal perspectives. This is to say that there has been an attempt to reject the marginal position to which Post-Colonial discourse has been relegated. This will only transpire, as we see it, in Post-Modernism, where the Centre is fractured and where universal categories are questioned and are, in fact, dismantled by the Centre itself. This is where a new articulation can be produced, a new space linking both Post-Modernity and the Post-Colonialism in a new epistemology, which prohibits the production of essentialist master narratives, whether they be from the Centre or from the margin.

3.

POST-MODERNISM/POST-COLONIALISM

Post-Modernism can be characterised by the recentring and questioning of master narratives, by the dismantling of Eurocentric philosophical and conceptual systems from within. Simultaneously, there is a reconstructive critique of the Subject (Cadava et al., 1991) as it has been defined by the European Humanist tradition (Soper, 1986). The concrete space which opens up Post-Modernism and deconstruction is one which makes it possible for Post-Colonial counter-discourses to locate themselves inside rather than outside the theory machine that placed them in the margins. This is exactly the change that differentiates the Post-Colonial discourse that preceded PostModernity from contemporary debates. It is not the case, then, of a new assimilation

such an approach hardly could be considered non-Eurocentric. However, many seem to ignore this fact because for them, Marxism seems to be a universal approach and consequently non-Eurocentric. 8

In an extremely cynical statement she declares that: "In the case of 'post-colonialism', at least, part of the reason is its academic marketability" (1992: 93).

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: F.SSAYS ON CtlT.TURF. AND T.ITF.RATURF. to the Eurocentric Subject, and much less a strategy to obliterate difference in the uniformity of sameness. It would seem to us to be an error to posit Post-Modernism, with regard to Latin America, as a new Eurocentric and neo-imperialist conspiracy to eliminate, once and for all, the constitution of a Post-Colonial Subject in the face of its own recentring from within the former Empire. This obsession with indigenous ethnicity is paradigmatically expressed by Nelly Richard, when she maintains that: However, just as it appears that for once Latin American periphery might have achieved the distinction of being postmodernist avant la lettre, no sooner does it attain a synchronicity of forms with the international cultural discourses, than that very same postmodernism abolishes any privilege which such a position might offer. Postmodernism dismantles the distinction between centre and periphery, and in so doing nullifies its significance. There are many instances in post-modemist discourse aimed at convincing one of the obsolescence of the opposition centre/periphery, and of the inappropriateness of continuing to see ourselves as the victims of colonialism. [...] The fact is, however, that no sooner are these differences -sexual, political, racial, cultural- posited and valued than they become subsumed into the metagategory of the 'undifferentiated' which means that singularities immediately become indistinguishable and interchangeable in a new, sophisticated economy of the 'sameness'. Postmodernism defends itself against the destabilizing threat of the 'other' by integrating it back into a framework which absorbs all differences and contradictions. The centre, though claiming to be in disintegration, still operates as centre: filling away any divergencies into a system of codes whose meanings, both semantically and territorially, it continues to administer by exclusive right. (1993: 467-468)9 I have quoted here at length because not only does it recall our point of departure (from where to speak) but, at the same time, it reveals the fundamental error of continuing to accept the marginality of Post-Colonial discourse whose effect, in fact, has not brought about the dismantling of the Eurocentric Subject, but has reiterated marginality and the impossibility of constituting a Post-Colonial Subject. This is the same epistemological trap that a certain sector of essentialist feminist theory has fallen into, their universalist and imperialist notion of "Woman" has been

9

Geraldine Finn holds a similar position to that of Nelly Richard, when she observes that there is also a postmodern ploy with regard to woman: [...] the process of production of postmodernism as a master discourse and discourse of mastery, whose mastery is accomplished through the active and systematic disappearance of women in general and feminism in particular from the framing of its terms and relevances and, correspondingly therefore descriptions and debates of and about culture inasmuch as it is constituted as postmodern. (1993: 123)

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completely rejected with respect to Post-Modernity10, which is not to say that it cannot be strategically employed (Young, 1990: 162, McClintock, 1992: 86)". From our perspective, we hold that Post-Modernism and deconstruction offer a unique opportunity, as much epistemological as strategic, with respect to the centre. It is unique in the sense that the dismantling of Eurocentrism and the relativisation of its epistemological apparatus opens up a space not only to expose the construction of its discourses and representations of the Other, past and present, but it also, and at the same time, allows for the constitution of a plural Post-Colonial Subject, where there is not an already-existing, pre-established and dominating hierarchy. To agree to enter into this debate, incorporating the practice of deconstruction does not necessarily imply the abolition of difference and the acceptance of an imposed uniformity for a new dominant discourse. On the contrary, it implies the introduction and inscription of difference, not for the sake of difference but as a Subject in its own right. With regard to the 'leftist' critics, who, for the most part, have forgotten that their discourse also constitutes one of the major Western master narratives, it is appropriate to point out that Post-Modernism goes considerably farther than being just another stage of late capitalism (Jameson, 1984: 59-92), since it also signals the end of the

10

Regarding the similarities between Post-Colonialism and feminism, Mohanty states: [...] some disconcerting similarities between the typically authorizing signature of such Western feminist writings on women in the Third World, and the authorizing signature of the project of humanism in general — humanism as a Western ideological and political project which involves the necessary recuperation of the 'East' and 'Woman' as Others. (1984: 352)

11

Young states that: Mohanty's arguement also privileges unquestioningly the values of Western feminism, while remaining unselfconscious about its own relation to the oppressive politic-economic power structures that operate between the West and non-Western countries. Western feminist discourse, in short, can not only be ethnocentric, but in certain contexts can itself be shown to be a contemporary form of colonial discourse. (1990: 162) McClintock correctly points out the indifferentiation with respect to women in post-colonial countries: Just as the singular category 'Woman' has been discredited as a bogus universal for feminism, incapable of distinguishing between the varied histories and imbalances in power among women, so the singular category 'post-colonial' may license too readily a panoptic tendency to view the globe within generic abstractions voided of political nuance. (1992: 86).

30.

NF.W TNTF.R SECTIONS : ESSAYS ON CI IT .TURF. AND LITERATURE

centralised and unquestionable site of European History and Culture. In fact, PostModernism, as we see it, is nothing but the dissolution of Western Culture as dominant culture. It is interesting to note that feminist theory of recent years has begun to incorporate Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, etc., but not necessarily because these theoreticians have concerned themselves particularly with questions of feminism. Rather, it is because in their texts, there are elements which can be pertinently incorporated and appropriated, not toward the constitution of a subject as "woman" to replace a "phallocentric" subject, but toward a subject which transcends all binarisms that have been the markers of both Eurocentric and phallocentric discourses (Ashcroft et al. 1989 175-178)12. The work of Hélène Cixous (1993), Luce Irigaray (1985, 1985a), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 1990, 1993), Laura E. Donaldson (1992), to mention only a few, have created a path for Post-Colonial studies to follow.

4.

APPROPRIATION AND STRATEGY

One of the salient aspects of a Post-Modem and deconstructive space is that it demonstrates the constructive character of all discourse and representation. The dominant colonial discourse constructs an image of the Other, of the margins which, in accordance with its own image, and in spite of the counter-discourses, ends up imposing itself on and infiltrating former colonies. The colonised, not only in terms of how it has been seen to be represented and read in the literature of the centre, but also in the disseminated and acquired knowledge, has been "contaminated", to use an adjective from the essentialist discourse. In turn, Post-Colonial societies, particularly Latin America, are the result of an active, though ancient, hybrid which simply cannot be neglected and ignored for the sake of an originary nostalgic past and a lost pure identity, one which is believed to be salvageable. The task is to attempt to resolve the impasse of how the Other might be articulated as Other in all its difference and how it represents itself.

12

Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin state that: Thus the history and concerns of feminist theory have strong parallels with post-colonial theory. Feminist and post-colonial discourses both seek to reinstate the marginalized in the face of the dominant, and early feminist theory, like early nationalist post-colonial criticism, sought to invert the structures of domination, substituting, for instance, a female tradition or traditions in place of a male-dominated canon. But like post-colonial criticism, feminist criticism has now turned away from such simple inversions towards a questioning of forms and modes, to unmasking the assumptions upon which such canonical constructions are founded, moving first to make their cryptic bases visible and then to destabilize them. (1989: 175-176)

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II

For this reason, then, it is indispensable to initiate the deconstruction of the Eurocentric Subject as it appears, for example, in narrative discourse (in cultural, social and political discourses) throughout the ages. The disarticulation/exhibition of the mechanisms and a priori assumptions of its discourse and the knowledge that derives from it, and the means of constituting 'the truth' are fundamental. To this end, Robert Young asserts that: [...] deconstruction involves the decentralisation and recolonisation of European thought insofar as it is 'incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other', and to the extent that its philosophical tradition makes common cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. (1990: 18)13

Yet at the same time it is necessary to initiate the same sort of reflection and analysis with respect to 'native', 'indigenous' discourses on the same continent, since there is nothing homogeneous about these discourses, on the contrary, heterogeneity is their distinguishing feature. The mere fact of displaying representations from the inside and from the outside, will lead to the constitution of a precisely defined Subject, the indication itself of its discursive practice within a fragmented, plural, multi-codified space, where it will be able to articulate itself as a re-writing and re-reading of texts which contributed, in the first place, to the colonising of the "Other". At issue is a non-transcendental Subject, that is, according to Foucault: One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that's to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc, without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history. (1980: 117)

And this Subject will only be able to voice itself through the strategic appropriation of dominant knowledge structures. It is absolutely indispensable to be able to respond and to be heard, and in this manner to promote negotiations within the fissures of the dominant discourse itself. But for this reason it is impossible to remain outside the dominant discourse, since even the absolute purists who reject all theorisation coming from the cen-

13

In another place Young argues that: If deconstruction forms part of a more widespread attempt to recolonize the forms of European thought, from this perspective Denrida's work can be understood as characteristically postmodern. Postmodernism can best be defined as European culture's awareness that it is no longer the unquestioned and dominant centre of the world. (1990: 190)

22

NEW INTER SECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

tre, have contributed to the construction of their own margins, assuming and reifying their marginalised position, and they have also contributed towards their own alterity (ghettoization) as well as the artificial creation and maintenance of Third Worldism. And so we cannot forget, as Spivak lucidly points out, the "domestic First Worldism" (1990: 78) 14 . Strategic appropriation is doubly necessary since it is impossible to disregard or negate the close cohabitation between colonies and imperialism, that inevitably manifests itself in political, social, cultural and religious structures, and equally in the acquired language itself, the language of the centre. We cannot deny that in many cases it is a question of violent imposition of one culture over another, as is evident where Aztec, Toltec or Mayan pyramids are found hidden beneath the churches, cathedrals and grand structures of the colonial Spaniards. Yet this is precisely where we find evidence of symbiotic intersection, exchange, the voice and silence intimately interrelated. Those who wish to remain outside the debate, who wish to return to the pyramid, forget that in the first place, in the present concrete reality which inscribes itself upon us, we have to enter the Cathedral, and dismantle it from within before we can gain access to the pyramid. Furthermore, this pyramid is no longer as it was, but can only be re-constructed as an artefact. Forever lost to the present, it is mere ethnography, a museum. Edward W. Said, like no other, has expressed this with such subtle clarity. In Culture and Imperialism, he maintains: I have no patience with the position that "we" should only or mainly be concerned with what is "ours," any more than I can condone reactions to such a view that require Arabs to read Arab books, use Arab methods, and the like. As C. L. R. James used to say, Beethoven belongs as much to West Indians as he does to Germans, since his music is now part of the human heritage. (1993: xxv)

Perhaps one of the most important tasks of reconstructive scholarship at the margins is the dismantling of the European Humanist universal essentialism, with its supposed truths of History, Humanity, Progress, Science and Reason. The important aspect of such a task is to attempt to elucidate the form that this type of knowledge must acquire, and this is what remains unclear. However, one thing remains clear, and that is that the aforementioned knowledge has to be reinscribed with a recognition of difference, not as Other but as difference, constituted by a Subject on a position of equality.

14

Spivak states with respect to the outside/inside problematic that: I really believe that given our historical position that we have to learn to negotiate with structures of violence, rather than taking the impossible elitist position of turning our back on everything. In order to be able to talk to you, in order to be able to teach within the bosom of the superpower, in order to be, in whatever way, as a citizen of India, some kind of corrective voice towards nativity cultural history there, I have to learn myself and teach my students to negotiate with colonialism itself. (1990: 101)

FROM WHFRF. TO SPF.AK?

II

One possible position with regard to this Subject might not necessarily be the liquidation of the Subject (Cadava et al., 1991), or the constitution of a Subject within a historical context, as Foucault has suggested (1980: 117), but one of an "ethical subject" proposed by Levinas (1896: 345-359). Levinas advocates the re-incorporation of the Subject, not as an ontological transcendental subject that reduces everything to sameness but as an (ethical) subject defined with relation to an Other. According to Levinas, "Ethics redefines subjectivity as this heteronomous responsibility in contrast to autonomous freedom" (Kearney, 1984: 40). When all is said and done, the only thing that is certain is that the constitution of "a Subject on equal footing" can only be brought about from both the outside and the inside. This is to say, a deconstructive critical conscience cannot situate itself outside of the cultural, theoretical or political system or outside of contemporary philosophy for that matter. The potential critique here is that research and scholarship are coming from within the parameters made available by the centre. But whether we like it or not, the problem in any of the various Post-Colonial positions, from extreme nationalism to the far left, is that we are always working from the centre, whether it be from Marx or Hegel, Fanon or Alfonso Reyes, Césaire, Lyotard or Foucault. In fact, it is often contradictory to listen to Latin American theoreticians and artists like Fernández Retamar, Benedetti, and others, speaking about identity, nationalism, indigenous races, all from a Marxist perspective, as if Marxism was not a product of the centre and of economic, political and philosophical positions specific to the West, one of a major master narrative. This is why a strategic appropriation of dominant knowledge structures is absolutely necessary, if for no other reason than to demonstrate its own conceptual and representational apparatus. Within a Post-Modern framework that is, perhaps, the most urgent task at hand. 5.

LATIN AMERICA AND THE POSTS

There are those who suggest that Latin America has always been a Post-Modern continent (Richard, 1993:468), since many of the characteristics that define Post-Modernity, such as the relativisation of History, the transgression of genres, parody, etc., were already present in Latin American culture before Post-Modernism. I think if this is well and truly the case that these characteristics existed from the beginning, that it is a result of the hybrid and synthetic character of the continent, in its colonial and PostColonial status, always open to international culture. However, beyond the ahistorical clichés that can be conjured up to form an image of Latin America, at least in the specific case of literature, the cultural production, at least since the middle of the Twentieth Century, for the most part, has been subject to foreign aesthetic paradigms. At the outset of this paper, I indicated that our own culture has contributed to the construction of a representation of this continent that cannot be ignored. For example, in the political arena, Alejo Carpentier lucidly points out that:

M.

NEW INTER SECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CI JT.TTTRF. AND LITERATURE [In the] great Encyclopaedia, the famous encyclopaedia written by Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, D'Alambert in the middle of the Eighteenth Century in France, whose ideas had so much influence on the leaders of our wars of independence, we find that in this encyclopaedia, the concept of independence still has a mixed philosophical value [my translation]. (1981: 184)

On the cultural front, there was participation through the representations provided by the Conquest and Colony produced by the Spanish, Natives, and Criollos about the new continent 15 during the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, whose cultural markers were, successively, Classicism, Romanticism and Realism/Naturalism. It is interesting to observe how a representative and consistent theme emerges from the literature, which will influence a large part of Latin American literature until the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Civilization and Barbarity. This thematic develops as a rejection of the concrete reality of this continent and therefore as "domestic First Worldism" (Spivak, 1990: 78). Fundamentally, it operates in binary categories: aboriginal/criollo, city/country, black/white, etc. These assimilating and propagandistic ideas can be found in authors such as Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) in the Nineteenth Century (Civilización y Barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga, 1845) and Alcides Arguedas (Pueblo enfermo, 1909) at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, to mention only the most salient cases. These works progress directly from Darwin's, Buffon's and De Pauw's nineteenth-century evolutionary and racial theories, where racial mixture, the historical climate and determination coincide in the creation of a debilitated race and an inferior continent. In fact, it was Cornelius De Pauw who proposed, in 1768, that '"in the course of three hundred years, America will no longer look as it does today in as much as today it looks as it did at the moment of the disc o v e r y ' " [my translation] (Anderson Imbert, 1970: 170). But, as Anderson Imbert has pointed out, "this progress will entail the deamericanisation of America. Europeans are divided regarding the value of America. Meanwhile, some humanists have the tendency to mystify the savage (Montaigne, Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt), others to attack it (Voltaire, Raynal, Joseph de Maistre, Hegel)" [my translation] (Anderson Imbert, 1970: 170) And in fact, this is precisely what Sarmiento suggests: Should we, who are a people as numerous as the sands of the sea, hide ourselves under our pavilion, and voluntarily close the door on European immigration which calls

15

For instance, La Historia general y natural de las Indias by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557), La verdadera historia de la conquista de la Nueva España by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (14927-1584), Naufragios by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (14907-1559?), La Historia natural y moral de las Indias by José de Acosta (1539-1599), De rebus Hispanoram gestis ad Novirn Orbem by Juan Gines de Sepúlveda (1511-15627), La Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (14997-1575), La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla (1534-1594), Commentarios Reales by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616).

FROM WHERE TO SPEAK?

¿1

out with repeated knocks to populate our deserts? Are we to leave as illusory and vain our dreams of development, power and glory, and the predictions, which have favoured us since birth, and which were made with envy by those who in Europe study the needs of humanity? With the exception of Europe is there another Christian country which is unpopulated and ready to be civilized? Are there in America, many peoples, which like the Argentinean, are ready to receive the European population which overflows like water in a cup? In the end, would you not wish that we invoke science and industry to aid us, to call out at them with all our strength, in order that they dwell between us, the former free from obstacle to its thinking, and the latter free from all violence and coercion? [my translation] (1966: 4)

This is a recurring theme in more well-known nineteenth and twentieth-century continental narrative and prose. It suffices to recall José Enrique Rodó's Ariel (1900), in which Prospero and Caliban are representative of this divided America, José Hernández's Martín Fierro (1872 and 1879), Rómulo Gallegos' Doña Bárbara (1929), José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine (1924), Ciro Alegría's El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941), etc. From the essay form under the topos "Prospero y Caliban" and the narrative genre like "the novel of the jungle", "the novela of the plains", "the novel of the land", "the indigenous novel", there would emerge a counter-discourse such as José Vasconcelos' La raza cósmica (1925), José Carlos Mariátegui's Siete ensayos de intepretación de la realidad peruana (1928), Roberto Fernández Retamar's Calibán (1971), José María Arguedas' Ríos Profundos (1958), Alejo Carpentieri El reino de este mundo (1949), Los pasos perdidos (1953), Miguel Ángel Asturias' Hombres de maíz, Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967), José Lezama Lima's Paradiso (1968), etc. The calibanesque representations considered the new American world from a Eurocentric point of view and constructed America from the outside, from the perspective of the colonising Subject, the opposing perspectives are supposedly representations from within. However, if we analyse the latter carefully, we see that either the representation is from a point of view which is, for the most part Eurocentric, or it appropriates the voice of subaltern groups as well as representing them through mythologies, legends, rituals and the lost origin. For example, in Asturias as in Carpentier, the marginal perspective is spoken through the construction, the interpretation and the voice of these narrators. But where is the subaltern voice of the Aztec, of the exiled African, or of the dispossessed? And if this subaltern group does get to speak, from where will it speak? How will it construct or deconstruct its subjectivity so often represented by such distinct, not to mention contradictory, voices (Spivak, 1988: 197-240). It is none other than Alejo Carpentier who eloquently alludes to this point, referring to Los pasos perdidos: I was told many times 'You have brought an intellectual to the jungle.' And I told them: 'I am an intellectual by definition and I cannot wear a disguise when I go to the jungle, I must act as intellectual as I did before the jungle.'" [my translation]. (1981: 109)

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

At the same time, there is considerable ambiguity on the part of essentialist discourse with respect to the famous "indigenous creation," at least with regard to narrative (and equally in the political camp). Latin American narrative takes on an international voice and a fundamental role within the continent when it abandons the simple reproduction of foreign models, which consisted as much of a "mimicking" practice, as of a carrying out of certain adaptations and alterations (think of Maria by Jorge Isaac), and not in an authentic voice. It is only when the Centre is no longer the model, and when what it is taken from it are tools for the construction of their own models, that the tables will be turned and Latin American narrative will not only acquire its own unmistakable stamp of specificity and sever its ties from European models, but will constitute a model to build upon. But these specialised tools, narrative techniques and paradigmatic contributions such as those of Joyce and Proust, will also be incorporated into an autonomous form. It is interesting to observe that the same authors, such as Benedetti, who appropriate these techniques in order to break new ground in innovative ways, reject the same possibility of theoretical discourse (Benedetti, 1974). After reading Octavio Paz's Signos en rotación (1976), Alejo Carpentier's La novela latinoamericana en vísperas de un nuevo siglo y otros ensayos (1981), Vargas Llosa's Contra viento y marea (1986), or Carlos Fuentes' La nueva novela latinoamericana (1976), one cannot help but notice the encyclopaedic knowledge and cultural diversity of these Latin American novelists, their intimate knowledge not just of European cultural traditions, but Indian, Asiatic and other cultures as well. It is this capacity to strategically appropriate knowledge in order to produce an other knowledge that we consider to be fundamental to current debates.

6.

INSIDE/OUTSIDE THE THEORY MACHINE

From where to speak? The question persists. No doubt, whether we like it or not, it is impossible to situate ourselves outside of the theory machine. Since one of the tasks is to foster deconstructive practices, we cannot merely delve into this critical approach, but we must also know what it is that we are deconstructing. Precisely, one of the most serious problems of Latin American indigenous and essentialist discourse is that it rejected theory throughout the 1970s and 1980s, without ever having a real understanding of what it was attacking. This is because it perceives itself as speaking from a position of absolute authority, in actual fact, a fossilised pseudoscientific Marxist discourse, where there is only one science, one History, one truth and one theory. Not only is this discourse bankrupt, but it continues to believe in essentialism as an epistemological end. Today, however, with the advent of the blurring of boundaries that once surrounded totalising discourses, with the bankruptcy of the Hegelian transhistorical Subject, we can only position ourselves with regard to a nomadic subjectivity, in a non-hierarchical space, where discourses are being constantly territorialised, deterritorialised and

FROM WHERF. TO SPF.AK?

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reterritorialised, and where the only certainty is that nothing is certain. There is no longer any fiction or reality, only construction and consciousness of such a construction, and the opening of a Post-Colonial paradigm. As Said has lucidly pointed out: Gone are the binary oppositions dear to the nationalist and imperialist enterprise. Instead we begin to sense that old authority cannot simply be replaced by new authority, but that new alignments made across borders, types, nations, and essences are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism. Throughout the exchange between Europeans and their "others" that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an "us" and a "them," each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident. (Said, 1993: xxv) And finally, "We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies" (Said, 1993: 6).

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EXPLORATIONS ON POST-THEORY: NEW TIMES

The subject-position of the citizen of a recently decolonised "nation" is epistemically fractured. The so called private individual and the public citizen in a decolonized nation can inhabit widely different epistemes violently at odds with each other, yet yoked together by way of the many everyday ruses of pouvoir-savoir. Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine. The wider significance of the postmodern condition lies in the awareness that the epistemological 'limits' of those ethnocentric ideas are also enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices — women, the colonized, minority groups, the bearers of policed sexualities. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those same structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain ways falls prey to its own work. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.

1.

ENDS AND BEGINNINGS...

Something has happened. In the last decades of the Twentieth Century, we have witnessed the emergence of the Post. This is a symptom of a society and a culture that is unable to name what is taking place in the very crux of its activity. The Post, then, comes to replace that which we know is there, but which we do not quite manage to signal. Thus, it is clear, I believe, for all of us, that indeed something has happened. The question, however, remains: what has happened? It is exactly in this questioning of the what that our current "epistemologies", our various practices to look at things, become complex, and it is this what that we are currently, hesitantly, naming Post-Theory. A question immediately appears: what is Post-Theory? Something it is not is the end of theoretical production or theoretical thinking. On the contrary, we are at the very threshold, on the very liminal space of a new production, practice and thinking theory 1

Patrick Imbert points out that: Post-theory is part of a world of post-information leading to what Oliviero Toscani (1995) calls a post-human world. It is a world of the screen where

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CIJI.TURF. AND LITERATURE

Western culture has entered a New Age, one that is still searching for its name. It is this new epistemological and cultural age that we are calling Post-Theory (De Toro, F., 1999)2. Perhaps the most important aspect to note here is that we have arrived at this post-theoretical 'condition', which is, in fact, the de-centring of dominant culture, via the Post-Modern condition. As Lyotard has indicated, in the second half of the Twentieth Century, Eurocentrism and the master narratives (1984: 14-17) have come to an end, and are being rapidly deconstructed from within. The dismantling of the European cultural model and its central role as the sole producer of thought and knowledge has brought not only Europe, but also its former colonies, to a crisis. The Post-Theoretical Condition can be characterized by at least four central components: (a) the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries; (b) the simultaneous elaboration of theory from conflicting epistemologies; (c) the theoretical production from the margins; and (d) the search for a 'beyond', a third theoretical space.

2.

THE FALL(S)

Something else has happened. In the past two decades, it seems that the once universalising and totalising cultural paradigms (particularly structuralism) have collapsed. And, with them, a whole epistemological edifice, particularly the one based on the faith of science: the scientific cathexis has imploded, leaving nothing but phantasmatic traces of its former glory. The sacrosanct disciplinary walls are rapidly dissipating; not because the actual academic institutions have seen the light, the Aufklärung of a new beginning, but rather par la force de choses. The wall can no longer protect its territory, since it has been taken over and eaten away simultaneously from its borders and its inside. The ism of logocentrism, Eurocentrism, ethnocentrism has dropped, fallen, and its graphism has evaporated before an unavoidable avalanche of questions. The centre has fractured and

information, while being transmitted in real time, is subjected to elaborated strategies of construction and reflexivity. In this context, the past is losing ground in front of the rereading of different pasts which now interfere with a future to be built together with multiple contexts opening up to different futures. POST is the era of risk taking. (1999: 36) 2

By 'Post-Theory' we understand a new way to conceptualise culture and its objects of knowledge. At the same time 'Post-Theory' entails a simultaneous convergence of theories emanating from diverse epistemological fields and disciplines with the goal being to analyse given cultural objects from a plurality of perspectives. Thus, 'Post-Theory' also entails interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Gayatri Chakravotry Spivak (1988, 1990 and 1993), Judith Butler (1990, 1993), Chris Weedon (1987) Slavoj Zizek (1992 and 1993); and Homi K. Bhabha (1994a) provide some of the best examples of what we call 'PostTheoretical' discursive practices.

F.XPT.ORATIONS ON POST-THEORY: NEW TIMES

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this fracture has been produced from within, de-constructing it. De-sedimentation has taken the form of an implosion, and with it all the certainties, including TRUTH, and the truth of the boundary have collapsed. But in concrete terms, what is the meaning of: The Walls have Fallen! It means that the specificity of the border, and that of the discipline, has been erased. This erasure is more than a simple metaphor since the specificity was marked, inscribed by at least two key components: the delimitation of the object of study; and the construction of that object through a metalanguage (theoretical construction) and the tools of segmentation [the method(s)]. These are the two basic components that have vanished. The object now is nomadic, cartographic, rhizomatic. It is here and there at the same time. This means, that the very same object is everywhere. It is no longer the "property" or "turf" of a discipline, but it belongs to all. However, a nomadic object entails a nomadic epistemology, a cartographic charting of multiple points of entry and exits. The Fall(s) in fact mean(s) something else: the specificity of the object and its methods also comprise its readings. We all worked in isolation, in our own chapels of knowledge, totally absent and, worse, completely unaware of the next chapel. If any awareness emerged, it was in the form of the Other. Some wander through the world totally perplexed by the hereticism of current practices, crying in desperation before what they consider iconoclastic; blasphemy in our midst, the end of the logos, a new graphie, and also a new episteme. This new reality, which some call interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, is, in fact, nothing of the sort, since the inter- and trans- both contain the disciplinarity. This reality is Post-Theoretical, which, in this context, means a virtual epistemological space in constant transformation; an epistemological space which cannot even entertain the very notion of "discipline" since this would entail a synchronic freeze, an articulation of sorts. Finally, it means that knowledge has been pried open, and now the site is unobstructed by the sclerotic thinking within the narrow and ever-limiting margins of disciplinarity. At long last we can finally think, and think with disrespect. But be careful, since this freedom is ever-more demanding and requires greater discipline. The unavoidable reality is that whether individuals and institutions like it or not, they will have to re-think and re-formulate their work in drastically new ways. Failure to do this will amount to either sudden death or self-annihilation. This is also part of Globalisation; the end of a long-lasting academic practice that indeed produced many good things while it was capable, and had room for change. Today, the scleroticism of academic institutions amounts to a crisis that announces either its end or a new beginning: change or die. This, precisely because the disciplinary boundaries bear no relation to what is taking place today in society. What is even more serious is the resistance of the academic institutions to think the new realities.

42. 3.

NEW INTER SECTIONS : ESSAYS ON CULTI IRF. AND T.TTF.RATI IRF. THOSE HERETIC EPISTEMOLOGIES

Out of necessity, this is today's crisis. Furthermore, with the fracturing of logocentrism and Eurocentrism, as has been unequivocally theorised by Foucault (1977, 1980, 1988, 1988a, 1990,1990a, 1994), Derrida (1974,1981,1990), Lyotard (1984), Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987), and Baudrillard (1983), emerges the paramount urgency to think Culture from a radically different perspective, particularly when there are no longer unitary and homogeneous methods of theory production, since theory is articulated from what has been called the margins, the cultural peripheries, including the former colonies. It is in this de-centring where the ex-colonial discourses experience the radical transformation which is now termed Post-Colonialism, that is to say, when essentialism, dogmatism, and parochialism are being abandoned. It is here, again, where PostFeminism finds a new space. The 'Post' does not imply the end of the feminist or ex-colonial struggles, but the introduction of a new strategy and a new awareness: PostTheoretical. What once was considered unthinkable, today, is possible. Long gone are the days of the totalitarianism and dogmatism with the universalist overtones of Semiotics or Structuralism, and also, European Humanism. Authors such as Gayatri Spivak (1988, 1990,1993), Chris Weedon (1987), Judy Butler (1990, 1993), Laura Donaldson (1992), Cixous and Clément (1993), and let us not forget, Edward Said (1978, 1993), Homi Bhabha (1994a), Slavoj Zizek (1992, 1993), and others, have contributed to the creation of this new space called 'post-theory'. The epistemological space has been pried open, dissected, dismembered. Any object of knowledge may be looked at from many sites, from and through various gazes. The unitary conception of discipline, as well as a unitary, transcendental Subject, has given way to a dismembered nomadic subject's subjectivity, where the points of insertion are those of cartography, and not of tracing. The very notion of conflicting epistemologies obeys to the former epistemological boundaries that marked our activity. It was unthinkable for a Marxist to even consider deconstruction as another possibility to read cultural objects, and by the same token, a certain type of feminism did not allow itself to consider Lacan or Foucault as an alternative to deal with the subject. But this notion also marks a beginning, by recognizing that knowledge cannot continue to be fragmented. It is, precisely, the de-centring of the West that has made it possible to integrate within one, simultaneous space, apparently diverging epistemologies. What it has changed, at least at the epistemological level, is that what becomes important and significative is not so much what divergent theories say, but what we can do with them. It is not important, for instance, that Foucault was not concerned with women's issues, what is relevant is how we can make use of his research in order to say radically different things. In his History of Sexuality at least one thing is meaningful: "The transformation of sex into discourse [...], the dissemination and reinforcement of heterogeneous sexualities" (1990: 61), and how this

F.XPT.ORATIONS ON POST-THF.ORY: NEW TIMES

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discourse, depending of the moment, will be utilized to regulate sexuality and medicalise it in order to police the sexuality of certain groups, such as women and homosexuals. This discursive practice, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, legitimised heterosexual monogamy, but on the other hand it served to scrutinize "the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex" (1990: 39). At the end of the day, the discourse of sexuality, then and now, is a discourse about power. In this same line of inquiry we may consider Lacan's constitution of the Subject, in the Imaginary Order and in the Symbolic Order, and interrogate the whole Lacanian edifice mounted on the Oedipus Complex and the Name-of-The-Father, since both seem to exclude women as Subject, even if we consider the conceptualisation of the edifice as metaphoric (Irigaray, 1985, 1985a). In fact, the very same conceptualisation of an apparent exclusion may serve to unsettle the system on which the edifice has been mounted. Another way to look at the same problem is to relativise Truth, which our Western tradition seems to have grounded on the logos and presence, as Derrida has clearly demonstrated (Derrida, 1974: 6-26). Every theory starts somewhere, and every theory hides this somewhere, that is, what constitutes the impossibility to provide the "proof of the proof' (Lyotard 1979: 51)3 and it is no different when we deal with Truth. We are not implying that there is no truth, but that truth is constructed, and if we accept the constructiveness of truth then we can only conclude that Truth, as such, does not exist and only trues are manifested in various discursive articulations. Some have said that Derrida is not concerned with politics, that he is a-political and an-ethical. Perhaps this is so. However, the fact of the matter is, that this relativisation of truth becomes political when minority discourses, such as feminist, ethnic, gay, etc., question the validity and legitimisation of "hegemonic", totalising, patriarchal discourses, which always try to pass as "natural", grounded on the Truth of God, on the Bible, on the logos. Here, the notion of differance also becomes political, since this grammatology is one of the methods to attack the Western metaphysics of truth and the foundation of presence, and of the Dasein on which it is actually mounted. Derrida has stated that: All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical ontotheology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought, with in the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or philosophical sense, in

3

Lyotard states: With modern science, two new components appear in the problem of legitimation. First to answer the question: how to prove the proof?, or more generally: who dictates the conditions of truth? [my translation] (1979: 51)

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NEW INTERSF.CTTONS: ESSAYS ON CUT,TURF. AND LITERATURE the sense of God's infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense, in the preHegelian or the post-Hegelian sense. Within this logos, the original and essential link to the phone has never been broken. (1974: 10-11)

It is authors such as Judith Butler who will radically question gender formations starting from Foucault and Lacan. Based on them, she carries out a scathing attack of how patriarchal societies have dealt with the question of gender and the inscription of the body. Butler uses Foucault's work in order to put her own inscription on gender and the body: By maintaining a body prior to its cultural inscription, Foucault appears to assume a materiality prior to signification and form. Because this distinction operates as essential to the task of genealogy as he defines it, the distinction itself is precluded as an object of genealogical investigation. (1990: 130) Regarding Lacan, she states: By claiming that the Other that lacks the Phallus is the one who is the Phallus, Lacan clearly suggests that power is wielded by this feminine position of not-having, that the masculine subject who "has" the Phallus requires this Other to confirm and, hence, be the Phallus in its "extended" sense. (1990: 44) Hence, "being" the Phallus is always a "being for" a masculine subject who seeks to reconfirm and augment his identity through the recognition of that "being for". To be the Phallus is to be signified by the paternal law, to be both its object and its instrument and, in structuralist terms, the "sign" and promise of its power (1990: 45). Today, some of these so-called 'marginal' and 'peripherical' discourses find themselves in the theoretical avant-garde of the cultural field, and it is these discourses that are carrying out a theoretical thinking that is without precedent in the Western World. One of the central characteristics of this thought lays in the heterogeneity of the theoretical proposals, which is inscribed in a plural epistemological space, Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, etc. Heterogeneity and rhizomaticity become the site from where our gaze explores and probes the new realities, but this time firmly secured and solidly inhabiting the structures of the centre.

4.

IN-HABITING THE

But something else has happened: an appropriation of the centre's logos, so that it can be deconstructed f r o m within. Something was previously missed by the margins: the belief that the centre could be unsettled from outside. However, this has proven not to be the case, and it is the work and negotiation from within that have been made possible by the Post-Modern condition.

EXPLORATIONS ON POST-THFORY: NF.W TTMF.S

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For these reasons, we feel that the concrete space which Post-Modernism opens up (including deconstruction, feminism, post-colonialism, Lacanianism, etc.) is one which makes it possible for Post-Colonial counter-discourses to locate themselves inside, and not outside, the theory machine that placed them in the margins in the first place. This is exactly the change that differentiates the Post-Modern condition from Modernity. It is not the case, then, of a new assimilation of the Eurocentric Subject and much less a strategy to obliterate difference in the uniformity of sameness. It seems to be erroneous to posit Post-Modernism with regard to margins as a new Eurocentric, neo-imperialist conspiracy to finally eliminate the constitution of a Post-Colonial and feminine Subject, in the face of its own de-centring from within the former Empire. This recognition of indigenous ethnicity is stated by Nelly Richard, when she maintains that: However, just as it appears that for once Latin American periphery might have achieved the distinction of being postmodernist avant la lettre, no sooner does it attain a synchronicity of forms with the international cultural discourses, than that very same postmodernism abolishes any privilege which such a position might offer. Postmodernism dismantles the distinction between centre and periphery, and in so doing nullifies its significance. There are many instances in postmodernist discourse aimed at convincing one of the obsolescence of the opposition centre/periphery, and of the inappropriateness of continuing to see ourselves as the victims of colonialism. (1993: 467-468)

Geraldine Finn holds a similar position to that of Nelly Richard when she observes that there is also a Post-Modern ploy with regard to women: [...] the process of production of postmodernism as a master discourse and discourse of mastery, whose mastery is accomplished through the active and systematic disappearance of women in general and feminism in particular from the framing of its terms and relevances and, correspondingly therefore descriptions and debates of and about culture inasmuch as it is constituted as postmodern. (1993: 123)

This is the same epistemological trap that a certain sector of essentialist feminist theory has fallen into; their universalist and imperialist notion of "Woman" has been completely rejected with respect to Post-Modernity, which is not to say that it cannot be strategically employed (Young 1990: 162; McClintock 1992: 86). Regarding the similarities between Post-Colonialism and feminism, Mohanty states: [...] some disconcerting similarities between the typically authorizing signature of such Western feminist writings on women in the Third World, and the authorizing signature of the project of humanism in general, humanism as a Western ideological and political project which involves the necessary recuperation of the 'East' and 'Woman' as Others. (1984: 352)

NEW INTERSECTIONS: RSSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

Young states that: Mohanty's argument also privileges unquestioningly the values of Western feminism, while remaining unselfconscious about its own relation to the oppressive politic-economic power structures that operate between the West and non-Western countries. Western feminist discourse, in short, can not only be ethnocentric, but in certain contexts can itself be shown to be a contemporary form of colonial discourse. (1990: 162)

McClintock correctly points out the in differentiation with respect to women in postcolonial countries: Just as the singular category 'Woman' has been discredited as a bogus universal for feminism, incapable of distinguishing between the varied histories and imbalances in power among women, so the singular category 'post-colonial' may license too readily a panoptic tendency to view the globe within generic abstractions voided of political nuance. (1992: 86)

With regard to the question of centre and periphery, Alfonso de Toro indicates (as have several 'post-theorists'), that these terms cannot continue to be used in their binary structure but rather, they must be problematised if we are ever to move forward and construct that third space of the in-between. According to de Toro: The terms 'periphery' and 'centre' are neither static nor unilateral. Rather, their implications are diverse, and at least twofold: the periphery is understood as the periphery itself, just as the centre defines itself. The periphery is not always produced as a result of the centre, but, as a result of its deliberate imposition as the periphery, the opposite occurs for the centre. The periphery naturally detaches itself from the attitude of the centre, and the centre from the attitude of the periphery. This differentiation, based on reciprocal implications, would characterize the Post-Colonial condition as distinct from the Colonial condition, which produces a unilateral discourse. (1995: 12)

Today, for an ever-increasing number of intellectuals working in the cultural field in the Third World, it is clear that both the old essentialist discourses and the totalising/universalising discourses, which have been with us since at least the beginning of the Twentieth Century, are over. Post-Modernism has opened to the developing world in general, a space that is incumbent on them to construct. Yet, it is also clear that this space cannot be constructed in a vacuum. It is paramount to get within the master discourses, not to emulate them in a servile manner or follow an ontic reality which is in fact noetic, as has been the case in both colonialism and feminism, but to deconstruct them, and in their cracks inscribe a new and changing dynamic discursivity. The battles ahead are those of language, of competing discursivities and of positionalities. Today, there is a convergence between Post-Feminist and Post-Colonial discourses. And this convergence resides in the consciousness that it is not possible to contin-

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ue speaking from the margins, since this position not only entails a self-marginalisation, but also thwarts any attempt to deconstruct the centre. The latter, can only be dismounted in its own terms, within its own concepts. Derrida has clearly theorised this question: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. (1974: 24) It has also been learned that one cannot speak from outside of the patriarchal system, and that it is simply not possible to ignore the knowledge that has been produced in the hegemonic centres. The deconstruction of current hegemonic systems, as well as the new knowledge being generated from the margins, or rather, from different centres, is articulated in post-colonial and post-feminist theories 4 . Thus, any substantial change in power relations will only be able to take place from inside. It is here where deconstruction becomes a political discourse. Again, what is important in Lacan, Derrida, or Foucault, is not so much what they say but what we can do with what they say. Chris Weedon in her brilliant study on feminism and post-structuralism, states: To dismiss all theory as an elitist attempt to tell women what their experience really means is not helpful, but it does serve as a reminder of the importance of making theory accessible and of the political importance of transforming the material conditions of knowledge production and women's access to knowledge. (1987: 7) [...] Much French feminist writing, for example, which attacks traditional theory as a pillar of patriarchy and locates language as the site of political struggle, does so in the context of a psychoanalytic theory of meaning. (1987: 9) [-] Theory itself is constantly in process, and the argument of this book is focused on the theories which at this moment seem to me to have the power to explain the patriar-

4

By post-feminism we understand the feminism which begins working "patriarchal" theory from approximately the mid-1980's. The fundamental characteristic of Post-Feminism, in my view, is the production of a new knowledge based on Post-Structuralism. Taken strategically from Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Buadrillard, Lacan, etc. It is placing itself inside the 'patriarchal' epistemology and inside the Western theoretical discourse that changes the epistemological practice of Post-Feminism and its knowledge production. Perhaps the book that marks this change is Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) by Toril Moi. From that point onwards, we have a number of very important studies that have been elaborated from the various feminist positions: Chris Weedon (1987), Judith Butler (1990 and 1993), Diane Elam (1994), etc.

NF.W TNTF.R SECTIONS: PAS AYS ON CUT .TURF. AND I.TTF.RATURF. chal structures within which we live, and our position as women and men within them. The political aim is to change them. It is on this basis that a case will be made for post-structuralist theories of language, subjectivity and power. (1987: 11)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, with Judith Butler, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, are, perhaps, the most prominent representatives of what I mean by 'Post-Theory'. For instance, for Spivak, the discussion on periphery/centre is a false one since this binary structure functions within the parameters established by the centre (1990: 5). Her position regarding this binarism is clear: I am viewed by the Marxists as too comic, by feminists as too male-identified, by indigenous theorists as too committed to Western theory. I am uneasily pleased about this. One's vigilance is sharpened by the way one is perceived, but it does not involve defending oneself. (1990: 69-70)

And she adds: One of the things I said was that one of my projects is not to allow myself to occupy the place of the marginal that you would like to see me in, because then that allows you to feel that you have an other to speak to. (1990: 122)

Spivak's position does not imply accepting models of thought or the universalising/essentialising feminism from the West, which is in fact "white middle class American". It is here, like Kristeva (1982), where she refuses labelling, claiming intellectual freedom to pick and choose what she considers useful in order to negotiate and instil agency in the battle of discourses. Feminism, like Post-Colonialism, arrived at a point where they were unable to resolve their respective contradictions within the epistemological grounding that they themselves had created. Thus, a whole range of epistemological components of feminism and colonial discourses entered into a crisis: notions such as gender, woman, periphery, ethnic, heterosexuality, etc. This crisis is due partly to the reproduction of the binarism of the patriarchal system from which they strive to escape by constructing their own theory in a marginalized site. Now, new terms have entered the discussion, such as homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, transexuality (Fuss, 1989, 1991; Dolan, 1993), ethnic diaspora, multiculturality (Pratt, 1992; Minh-ha, 1989; Bhabha, 1994a), etc. The past aversion towards Post-Modernism, from both feminism (Nicholson, 1990) and Post-Colonialism vanishes, when one realizes that it is under the umbrella term of Post-Modernism, that this emergent discourse, now called Post-Theory, could emerge in the first place. Judith Butler, in her seminal work, clearly set the course to follow: The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together constitute a mul-

F.XPI ORATIONS ON POST-THF.ORY: NF.W TTMF.S

42

tiple displacement of those authorities. The complexities of gender require an interdisciplinary and post-disciplinary set of discourses in order to resist the domestication of gender studies or women studies within the academy and to radicalize the notion of feminist critique. (1990: xi) And her criticism of 'main stream feminism' is swift: That form of feminist theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly Western notions of oppression, but because they tend as well to construct a "Third World" or even an "Orient" in which gender oppression is subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential, nonWestern barbarism. (1990: 3) [...] Perhaps there is an opportunity at this juncture of cultural politics, a period that some would call "postfeminist," to reflect from within a feminist perspective on the injunction to construct a subject of feminism. (1990: 5) [••J [...] it may be time to entertain a radical critique that seeks to free feminist theory from the necessity of having to construct a single or abiding ground which is invariably contested by those identity positions or anti-identity positions that it invariably excludes. (1990: 5) This position is not very different to that of Homi Bhabha when he states that: The postcolonial perspective — as it is being developed by cultural historians and literary theorists — departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment of 'dependency' theory. As a mode of analysis, it attempts to revise those nationalist or 'nativist' pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation. It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres. (1994a: 173) And he adds: The time for 'assimilating' minorities to holistic and organic notions of cultural value has dramatically passed. The very language of cultural community needs to be rethought from a postcolonial perspective, in a move similar to the profound shift in the language of sexuality, the self and cultural community effected by feminists in the 1970s and the gay community in the 1980s. (1994a: 175) What has become sufficiently clear, then, is that to remain outside can only reproduce the binarism of the very system it is attempting to dismantle. Accordingly, we have one solution: inhabit the Centre, appropriate its discourses only to subvert them. This practice of "mounting" a discourse in order to deconstruct it, is clearly seen in the work of

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

XL

most post-modernist theoreticians and of the so-called fictional writers. Regarding theory, perhaps the best example one can offer, is the work of Jacques Derrida. In 'fiction' we have as many examples as in the theoretical field of this "mounting on" in the form of intertextuality. For instance, in Foe (1986) by John M. Coetzee, the text is inserted, woven in the in-betweens of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoes. Coetzee's story could not have been told without Defoe's intertext, and this bringing back of the eighteenth-century British expansionism, in a minimalist way, is what makes possible not only the re-reading of that past, but also our present: Coetzee inhabits Defoe's Crusoe. Inhabit does not only mean to appropriate all forms of knowledge, but also to decolonise our own discourses. We could safely say, regarding feminism, that one of the challenges ahead is to 'decolonize feminism' (Donaldson, 1992: 2)6 and, regarding the Third World discourses, the task is to abandon their situation as ex-centric (Bhabha, 1994a: 177).

5.

'BEYOND'

It seems that the central task is, then, to go beyond fossilised discursive positions, and accept the challenge generated, from the 'margins', by Post-Feminism and PostColonialism. I believe that this is absolutely imperative if one is to confront the complex problems that we face regarding the migratory and diasporic masses that are being displaced on the planet. Today, this change is irrefutable and unavoidable. We have travelled from one space to another, but the task is to be here/there at the same time. This is why we have emphasized this epistemological convergence between Post-Feminism and Post-Colonialism, since it is here, I believe, where we may find the key for a deinscription of old cultural codes and a new possibility that will not be reduced to Us and Them 7 .

5

The same can be said of Don Quixote by Kathy Acker (1989).

6

Donaldson states that: Decolonizing Feminism attempts to counter feminism's imperialist tendency to dive deep and surface with a single hermeneutic truth by articulating reading practices that privilege horizontal relationships, not only within women's narrative texts but also gender identities themselves. (1992: 3)

7

Bhabha states regarding this matter: [...] the postcolonial prerogative consisted in reinterpreting and rewriting the forms and effects of an 'older' colonial consciousness from the later experience of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, post-war histories of the Western metropolis. (1994a: 174)

F-XPI.ORATIONS ON POST-THF.ORY: NF.W TTMF.S Homi Bhabha proposes the search for this new space, a beyond*, an space. For Bhabha this space is performative, since:

II in-between

Being in the 'beyond', then, is to inhabit an intervening space, as any dictionary will tell you. But to dwell 'in the beyond' is also, as I have shown, to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future, on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening space 'beyond', becomes a space of intervention in the here and now. (1994a: 7) To intervene in the present means, then, to interrupt the performance of the present (Bhabha, 1994a: 7) by exploiting the in-between spaces. I understand this space, as a liminal space, in its anthropological sense (Turner, 1982: 24). That is, a transitory space, a space other, a third space that is not here/there, but both. This third space implies the inscription and possibility of voices which until now have been silenced or remained underground; it means the possibility to conceive of science, culture, sexuality, society in a different manner; it means the possibility of new forms of representation, which do not have to pass by the binarism which still characterizes our culture; it means, also, to listen anew, to other forms of knowledge, such as the shamanic practices in Mexico, or in Peru, or in Canada, it means to move beyond the Western canon. It is precisely this in-between performativity that I also mean by 'Post-Theory'. But something else has also happened: the boundaries between fiction and reality have fallen (Baudrillard, 1983), between theory and practice. There is indeed a movement toward integration of both practices, where the very notion of writing has changed and the Sign has been placed under doubt (Derrida, 1974: 1-73). The logos obliged us to separate theory and practice on behalf of 'scientificity', shown in philosophy when denegating the rhetoricity of language and the slippery texture of the signifier. Today writing is all we have, and any attempt to a pretended scientificity is doomed to a dramatic failure: we had failed, and now we have the possibility to think or at least to attempt to think beyond binarism. Again, it is Homi Bhabha who has clearly envisaged this possibility: [...] the language metaphor opens up a space where a theoretical disclosure is used to move beyond theory. A form of cultural experience and identity is envisaged in a the-

8

Bhabha defines this space as follows: 'Beyond' signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary — the very act of going beyond — are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the 'present' which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced. (1994a: 4)

NF.W INTER SF.CTTONS : F.SSAYS ON CUT .TURF. AND T.ITF.RATI JRR oretical description that does not set up a theory-practice polarity, nor does theory become 'prior' to the contingency of social 'experience' that is particularly important for envisaging emergent cultural identities. (1994a: 179) Post-Modernism, Post-Feminism, Post-Colonialism have all been transitory notions; notions in search of an inscription, an open search in the making, with no closure: it is not an already there, but a there to come, cartographic.

THE POST-COLONIAL QUESTION: ALTERITY, IDENTITY AND THE OTHER(S)

[...] the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pregiven identity, never a ¿«//-fulfilling prophecy — it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image. The demand of identification - that is, to be for an Other — entails the representation of the subject in the differentiating order of otherness. Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture. The history of society and culture is, in large measure, a history of the struggle with the endlessly complex problem of difference and otherness. Never have the questions posed by difference and otherness been more pressing than they are today. Mark C. Taylor. Altarity.

1.

PREAMBLE

The first essay of this book, I confronted the following question: "From Where to Speak?"1 The question and its answer have become even more critical and urgent today since the discussion surrounding the notion of Post-Coloniality (De Toro, A., 1995a: 17)2 has attained levels of uncharacteristic confrontation. Post-Coloniality has become as much a vilified field of inquiry as was, until very recently, Post-Modernity, and not too long ago, structuralism and semiotics. These critics, self-defined 'Third World' in-

1

The Colloquium "Borders and Margins: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism" (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, October 1994), which was followed by the Colloquium "The Debate on Post-Colonialism and its Dialogue with Iberoamérica" (Spain - Portugal - Latin America) organised by the Ibero-Amerikanisches Forschungsseminar at the Universität Leipzig (April, 2-5, Leipzig, Germany). These colloquia produced two publications (F. de Toro and A. de Toro, 1995 and A. de Toro and F. de Toro, 1999).

2

According to Alfonso de Toro, Post-Coloniality is a cultural term (without de-ideologizing and depoliticizing it) which recodifies and reworks the past and the present into a future, but without producing a neo-colonialism that would be a Colonialism at a most refined level, where the possibility of dialogue would only be given from the perspective of the centre. (1995a: 17)

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CIII.TURF. AND I.TTF.RATIJRK tellectuals again 'resist', but this time, Post-Coloniality. They resist, but we do not understand what they resist, or what for, or why, but unavoidably they resist. Thus, today, it is no longer enough to mark the individual site of discourse, but it is also imperative to clarify the position one takes, and why one takes such a position. This has become an enduring necessity, particularly because the debate has become political, cultural, and social and it is no longer purely literary.

2.

FROM WHERE DO THEY SPEAK

a)

Ella Shohat's 'Archaeology of Excavation'

It is imperative, before I state my site of locution, that some fundamental misconceptions pertaining to the debate on the Post-Colonial question be elicited and be placed, at least, in the specific context where it belongs. It would be futile for me to even attempt to imitate the unrelenting and impoverishing labour carried out by Ella Shohat (1992), who in an act of professional distortion, trivializes the notion of Post-Coloniality and splits it up into the absurd, in spite of the effort made by Bill Aschroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin to situate this term in The Empire Writes Back (1989: 1-13). Her "Notes on the "Post-Colonial" (1992) is a misleading and purposely distorted account of what authors such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha or Edward Said have been seeking to construct. The substantive issue underlying Shohat's position, and those held by Benita Parry (1987), Anne McClintock (1992), Arif Dirlik (1994), Nelly Richard (1993), Simon During (1993), or Klor de Alva (1992), to provide some salient examples, is the belief that a global conspiracy, directed to the so called Third World, is taking place. A conspiracy mounted to eliminate differences, practising the politics of sameness, in fact, a neo-colonialism more subtle and dangerous than the original colonialism. Shohat, in one of her characteristic sweeping generalizations invokes that: Despite its dizzying multiplicity of positionalities, post-colonial theory has curiously not addressed the politics of location of the very term "postcolonial". In what follows, I propose to begin an interrogation of the term 'post-colonial', raising questions about its ahistorical and universalizing deployments, and its potentially depoliticizing implications. (1992: 99)

First of all, the "dizzying multiplicity of positionalities" results from very complex forms that Post-Coloniality acquires in the many different lands where colonialism took hold. Consequently, it is impossible to purport one single positionality. Furthermore, I challenge Shohat to provide one single example where studies on Post-Colonialism have not "addressed the politics of location of the term 'postcolonial'". It is also misleading to refer to Post-Coloniality and its fields of study as "ahistorical and universalizing" and "depoliticizing". To suggest that this field of study is an academic gimmick die-

THF. POST-COLONI AL QUESTION

11

tated by American Universities in search of an ever-new professional prestige (1992: 100) or that Post-Coloniality is nothing more than a "terminological shift" (1992: 100) to replace the term Third-World and the now defunct dependency theory of André Gunder Frank et al., reveals Shohat's epistemological unwillingness to see what is at stake and what the new issues are3. Homi Bhabha clearly separates that type of forgone Post-Colonialism, which spoke ad infinitum about 'us' and 'them', the 'centre' and the 'periphery', 'Marxism' versus 'capitalism', without ever seeking to resolve real issues of minority rights, let alone negotiating a voice and space for minorities 4 . Homi Bhabha, now demonized together with Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Western 'agents' sold to international capitalism, clearly rejected this type thinking: The postcolonial perspective — as it is being developed by cultural historians and literary theorists — departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or 'dependency' theory. As a mode of analysis, it attempts to revise those nationalist or 'nativist' pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation. It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres. (Bhabha, 1994: 173) The central blind point in Shohat's commentaries consists of her failure to understand the epistemological difference between Post-Colonialism and Post-Coloniality. As indicated by Alfonso de Toro (1995: 17), Post-Coloniality is a cultural term whereas PostColonialism is an historical term inscribed in various temporalities and sites. If one can accept this very central and fundamental distinction, then we do not need to engage in hundreds of pages splitting and turning, and overturning the term Post-Colonialism. Let me add this: there are as many postcolonialisms as there were colonies, with all their

3

In fact, it is her frantic attachment to the term Third-World, and to a sclerotic Marxism practiced only by a hand-full of nostalgic fundamentalists, that leads her to adopt such a radical position.

4

Alfonso de Toro questions the binarism of 'periphery' and 'centre', since he considers that: The terms 'periphery' and 'centre' are neither static nor unilateral. Rather, their implications are diverse, and at least twofold: the periphery is understood as the periphery itself, just as the centre defines itself. The periphery is not always produced as a result of the centre, but, as a result of its deliberate imposition as the periphery, the opposite occurs for the centre. The periphery naturally detaches itself from the attitude of the centre, and the centre from the attitude of the periphery. This differentiation, based on reciprocal implications, would characterize the Post-Colonial condition as distinct from the Colonial condition, which produces a unilateral discourse. (1995a: 12)

NF.W INTF.R SECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CI IT TURF. AND LITERATURE external and internal articulations. The form that these post-colonialisms have taken through the centuries, including ours (Canadian), it is not, in my view, what PostColoniality (Bhabha, Spivak, Said, etc.) wishes to discuss and address. Homi Bhabha is clear in this respect (and Shohat's misreading is, to say the least, suspect): Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of 'minorities' within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic 'normality' to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the 'rationalizations' of modernity. [...] the postcolonial project, at the most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies — 'loss of meaning, conditions of anomie' — that no longer simply 'cluster' around class antagonism, [but] break up unto widely scattered historical contingencies. (Bhabha, 1994: 171)5 In this context, Postcoloniality does not mean that colonial or neo-colonial struggles are over. On the contrary, it underlines the very fact that there are emergent voices, emergent cultural articulations and practices that can no longer be decided or explained by the reductionist and binaristic simplicity of the type of thinking purported by Shohat. Post-Coloniality, in the sense quoted above (De Toro, A. 1995a: 17), does not present a closure as Shohat suggests (1992: 106), but it is a transitory notion that attempts to be a beginning, a 'beyond', a third space, that it will give voice and expression to all minorities. Thus, to even suggest, as Shohat does, that: The "post-colonial" leaves no space, finally, for the struggles of aboriginals in Australia and indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, in other words, of Fourth World peoples dominated by both First World multi-national corporations and by Third World nation-states. (1992: 105)

5

Shohat's epistemological and rhetorical position is remarkable. For her, [...] "post-colonial discourse" does not refer to colonialist discourse after the end of colonialism. Rather, it evokes the contemporary theoretical writings, placed in both the First and Third Worlds generally on the left, and which attempt to transcend the (presumed) binarism of Third Worldist militancy. (1992: 103) Needless to say that these self-serving comments are a total travesty of what intellectuals working on with Post-Coloniality, since at least the earlier writings of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, have been attempting to achieve this.

THF. POST-COT .ONTAT. OI fRSTION

SL

At the end of Shohat's thought, we discover that Post-Coloniality only repeats and projects the colonial discourse transforming it into a neo-colonial discourse (1992: 107), concluding that: When examined in relation to "neo-colonialism," the term "post-colonial" undermines a critique of contemporary colonialist structures of domination, more available through the repetition and revival of the "neo". (1992: 107) What Shohat is defending is the fossilised binarism of a defunct Third Worldist thinking; she is justifying the retrieval of an Ursprung, the right to archaeologically excavate the past. She totally confuses Post-Coloniality's fight against essentialism/nationalism with neo-colonial power. She states, that: At times, the anti-essentialist emphasis on hybrid identities comes dangerously close to dismissing all searches for communitarian origins as an archaeological excavation of an idealized, irretrievable past. Yet, on another level, while avoiding any nostalgia for a prelapsarian community, or for any unitary and transparent identity predating the fall, we must also ask whether it is possible to forge a collective resistance without inscribing a communal past. (1992: 109) The central problem that I have with Shohat's position, is double fold: on the one hand, it has the potential to lead directly to extreme nationalism under the proper circumstances; on the other hand, this nationalism is a fantasy intended in an imaginary order that resists symbolisation. Nationalism/essentialism distrusts alterity and seeks, frantically, an identity which in fact does not exist except as fantasy, as petit object a according to Lacan. This 'communal past' could be equated with what Slavoj Zizek calls the "theft of enjoyment" (1993: 201). According to Zizek: The element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relationship toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated. This relationship toward the Thing, structured by means of fantasies, is what is at stake when we speak of the menace to our "way of life" presented by the Other. [-] What he wants to defend at any price is not reducible to the so called set of values that offer support to national identity. National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the Nation qua Thing. This Nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties. It appears to us as "our Thing" (perhaps we could say cosa nostra), as something accessible only to us, as something "they," the others, cannot grasp; nonetheless it is something constantly menaced by "them". [...] All we can ultimately say about it is that the Thing is "itself," the real "Thing," what it really is about, etc. (1993: 201)

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATIIRF.

This analysis of the 'Thing', is applicable today to many places, including the socalled French Canada or English Canada, who feel that we, the Other, are threatening their "Thing", their "way of life". The so-called Third World and former Second Worlds have been champions of the 'Thing'. We know full well the effects of the twentieth-century excavation of 'idealized, irretrievable pasts'. I believe I do not have to give examples. Shohat fails, again, to recognize that both the so called First World and Third World the diasporic element, the migratory movement of millions of peoples throughout the world, in particular in North America, Europe, Latin America 6 , New Zealand and Australia, constitute a very new cultural and social reality. It is not in question that PostColoniality celebrates hybridity, but the recognition that in many parts of the world the old cultural paradigms are being shaken in their very foundations, and societies must grapple with the emergence of new cultural entities, and in fact, they must negotiate complete new forms of "identities". Facing this situation, Alterity and Identity would seem contradictory terms, but they are not.

b)

Arif Dirlik and his 'Postcolonial Aura'

Arif Dirlik begins his article, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third world Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism" with a curious statement: When exactly ... does the 'post-colonial' begin? queries Ella Shohat in a recent discussion of the subject. Misreading the question deliberately, I will supply here an answer that is only partially facetious. When Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe. (1994: 329)

I will not occupy my time dealing with every 'misreading' carried out by Dirlik, since Stuart Hall has already dealt effectively with Dirlik, by stating that Dirlik: [...] ends with the thought that 'Post-coloniality resonates with the problems thrown up by global capitalism', is 'attuned' to its issues and hence serves its cultural requirements. The post-colonial critics are, in effect, unwitting spokesperson for the new global capitalist order. This is a conclusion to a long and detailed argument of such stunning (and one is obliged to say, banal) reductionism, a functionalism of a kind which one thought had disappeared from scholarly debate as a serious explanations of anything, that it reads like a echo from a distant, primeval era. (Hall, 1996: 259)

6

Although in Latin America the diasporic component has been there for centuries, in the form of African, aboriginal, mulatto, mestizo, and other racial communities. However, these communities have never really had a voice.

THF. POST-COLONIAL QUESTION

12

For Dirlik, all of us who in the past few years have engaged in the study of PostColoniality, with absolute seriousness and professionalism, are capitalist collaborators and accomplices in a global conspiracy against his beloved Third World. To him, this is why we invented Postcoloniality because this is what we are 'selling', not only to the West, but also to the naive and 'ignorant' Third World scholars and students. First of all, Post-Coloniality did not start "When Third World intellectuals [...] arrived in First World academe" (1994: 329)7. For decades Third World intellectuals have been teaching both in European and American universities. The simplicity of Dirlik's thinking does not deserve an answer, but due to the nature of his 'scholarly' article, I must respond. The new studies of Post-Coloniality are a result of many factors, chief among them, the total failure of the dependency theory to provide any answer to problems of identity, of migration, of alterity, of gender, varying sexualities, etc. It also results from, as Stuart Hall has correctly pointed out, "the collapse of certain kind of economistic, teleological and, in the end, reductionist Marxism" (1996: 258). I would also add, that the Post-Colonial discourse has emerged as an urgent need to provide some answers to completely new problems created by the diasporic and migratory masses during the second half of the Twentieth Century, whose effects began to be felt both at the political and the cultural level only during the early 1980s. Furthermore, in spite of their detractors, there is an inevitable and intricate relationship between Post-Modernity and PostColoniality, which cannot simply be dismissed. In fact, the whole discussion of PostColoniality emerges not from the field of the social sciences, but from the literary field, since it is here where the postcolonial manifestations were first and clearly felt, at least from the early 1980s, and in some cases from the late 1970s. One has simply to think of writers such as Michael Ondaatje (1976, 1982, 1992, 2000), Kathy Acker (1978, 1986), Rohinton Mistry (1995,1987), Salman Rushdie (1989,1996), Nino Ricci (1990),

7

Dirlik goes on to say : [...] that the label postcolonial was attached to those themes with increasing frequency, and that in conjunction with the use of the label to describe academic intellectuals of Third World origin. From this time, these so-called postcolonial intellectuals seemed to acquire an academic respectability that they did not have before. A description of a diffuse group of intellectuals and their concerns and orientations was to turn by the end of the decade into a description of a global condition, in which sense it has acquired the status of a new orthodoxy both in cultural criticism and in academic programs. (1994: 330) I should point out, that Dirlik is also one of those academics who has 'arrived' from the Third World to the First World, since he is a professor at Duke University in the U.S.A. I can only assume, then, that his criticism is an act of mea culpa, of self-criticism and flagellation.

60.

NEW INTERSECTIONS; ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

J. M. Coetzee (1983,1986), Aritha Van Herk (1990), Kristjana Gunnars (1989), Angela Carter (1985), Daphne Marlatt. (1988), Alberto Kurapel (1987,1988,1989,1991,1994, 1995, 1995a, 1995b, 1996), Hélène Cixous (1991), Manuel Puig (1991), Clarice Lispector (1988), Jeanette Winterson (1989), and Nicole Brossard (1990). Finally, feminism, and particularly post-feminism (De Toro, F., 1999) has had an enduring and persistent effect regarding not only issues pertaining to gender, but also to race, ethnicity and a number of other matters, such as subject position, agency, negotiation, varying sexualities, etc. It is very indicative that Dirlik denounces neocolonial critics particularly on the grounds of: [...] being silent on the relationship of the idea of postcolonialism to its context in contemporary capitalism; indeed, they have suppressed the necessity of considering such a possible relationship by repudiating a foundational role to capitalism in history. (1994: 331)

However, his silence and suppression of the role women in theory and criticism, have played in bringing to the fore questions of patriarchy formations, and the very issue of Post-Colonialism, speaks for itself. One only has to remember the brilliant study by Laura Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminism, with a very suggestive subtitle: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building (1992). Furthermore, Post-Feminism was instrumental in introducing Post-Structuralist thinking not only to women's studies but also to matters dealing with race, gender, etc. In fact, Homi Bhabha, was one of the first to remark on feminist thought as leading the way in questions of Post-Coloniality. Referring to questions of assimilation, Bhabha states: The time for 'assimilating' minorities to holistic and organic notions of cultural value has dramatically passed. The very language of cultural community needs to be rethought from a postcolonial perspective, in a move similar to the profound shift in the language of sexuality, the self and cultural community, effected by feminists in the 1970s and the gay community in the 1980s. (1994a: 175)

In many of our societies we are experiencing radical reorganisations related to the diasporic and migratory movements, which are changing and profoundly altering the shape that these societies are currently taking. I am referring to places such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.A., and, in a certain way, Western Europe. This has lead an ever-increasing number of academics to start paying attention to these new emergent cultural practices, reorganisations, and voices. This genuine concern has absolutely nothing to do with Dirlik's or Shohat's conspiracy theory. According to Dirlik: Postcolonial as a description of intellectuals of Third World origin needs to be distinguished. I suggest below, from postcolonial as a description of this world situation. In this latter usage, the term mystifies both politically and methodologically a situation that represents not the abolition but the reconfiguration of earlier forms of domina-

THE POST-COLONIAL QUESTION

ÛI

tion. The complicity of postcolonial hegemony lies in postcolonialism's diversion of attention from contemporary problems of social, political, and cultural domination of its emergence, that is, to a global capitalism that, however fragmented in appearance, serves as the structuring principle of global relations. (1994: 331) The distortion is peculiar since one of the most compelling and imperative tasks of postcolonial criticism is precisely to confront social, political and cultural issues emerging, now, in different manners in many of our societies. The best response to this kind of thinking is provided again, by Bhabha: Postcolonial criticism bear witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of 'minorities' within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic 'normality' to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the 'rationalizations' of modernity. [...] the postcolonial project, at the most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies — 'loss of meaning, conditions of anomie' — that no longer simply 'cluster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely scattered historical contingencies. (1994a: 171) Let us recall for a moment, that Dirlik's attempt is to demonise Post-Coloniality as an invention of the West, but this time in intimate complicity with Third World critics who "made it" in First World academic institutions: they have found a new product to sell both to the former colonies and to the center, since now the subject of Post-Coloniality, divested of the Third World notion with all its political, Marxist, and revolutionary charge, has now acquired a particular respectability within various quarters, including academia (Dirlik, 1994: 343-353). Having either failed to understand anything related to Post-Modernity or Post-Coloniality, my honourable colleague at last decides to be blunt: After all, there is more than one conceptual way out of the crisis, and we must inquire why this particular way has acquired immediate popularity — in First World institutions. To put it bluntly, postcoloniality is designed to avoid making sense of the current crisis and, in the process, to cover up the origins of postcolonial intellectuals in a global capitalism of which they are not so much victims as beneficiaries. (Dirlik 1994: 353) One question lingers: from where do Shohat and Dirlik speak? What do they propose in dealing with the new world order and the migratory and diasporic situation? How

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do they expect to account for the new cultural, social and political articulations which are taking place all over the world as we speak? This, of course, is not even intimated at, and their discourses result in rather aggressive and dogmatic positions that I have rarely had the opportunity to witness.

3.

THE LATIN AMERICAN 'CONNECTION'

The publication in 1991 of "Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourse", a review essay by Patricia Seed triggered, two years later, a substantive response from several distinguished Latin Americanists in the U.S.A., particularly by Hernán Vidal and Walter Mignolo. This response at best was a defensive one, more inclined to 'defend' the Thing than to engage with the actual arguments that Seed was directing to a number of questions pertaining to Post-Coloniality. What she basically says is: a) that something has happened in the cultural field, something has shifted in terms of disciplinary boundaries ("Literary critics are reading history and anthropology. Cultural anthropologists are developing sophisticated opinions of literary theorists", 1991: 182); b) that the old types of colonial (or anti-colonial) discourse proved themselves to be inadequate (1991: 182); and c) that this new thinking (interdisciplinarity) has entered the field particularly from a Post-Structuralist position. (1991: 182) To these known arch-issues, for anyone working in the field of comparative literary studies, cultural studies, or women studies for the past fifteen years, the Latin Americanists responded in the following fashion.

a)

Hernán Vidal's 'Peripheric Dependency'

According to this distinguished Chilean critic writing from Minnesota, the introduction of Post-Colonial studies into Latin American studies, amounts to little more than a fad, since the: [...] cycles of renewal of Latin American literary criticism were initiated based not on the social problems of the cultures being studied but rather on the new critical theories periodically introduced into the publishing market. (1993: 115)

Thus the 'foreign' trends take over, and it consequently has a colonizing effect due to the very nature of this theoretical importation. For Vidal, these imported formalist theories such as New Criticism, Russian Formalism, Reception Theory, Structuralism, Semiotics, etc., were introduced in the 1960s in Latin America. This periodisation is inaccurate since these theories really did not have a sizeable impact until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Furthermore, according to Vidal's chronology,

THE POST-COT ONTAT. OUF.STTON

61

Beginning in the 1970s, however, efforts were taking hold and expanding toward a return to the social understanding of literature. All this was a consequence of the cultural problems introduced by the Cuban Revolution, the militarized populism in Peru in 1968 [...]. The theoretical bases of this literary criticism expressed various modalities of historical materialism such as the Frankfurt School, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, and especially the implications of Latin American dependency theory for analyzing culture. (1993: 115)

What I find surprising in Vidal's statement is his failure to acknowledge that this 'turn' to social criticism is as 'foreign' as the formalism that seems to concentrate only in canonical works. Furthermore, both the introduction of formalist theories and socio-critical ones, were introduced more or less at the same time, and the epistemological theoretical/critical activity has always been divided in Latin America, particularly since the 1970s onwards. I do agree, however, with Vidal that "During the last few decades, these two modalities of development of Latin American literary criticism — the one technocratic and the other culture-oriented — have tended toward a frank enmity" (1993: 116). Today, due largely to the fall of epistemological and disciplinary boundaries and to the emergence of new cultural practices, such as ethnic literatures, feminist literatures, gay and lesbian literatures, African American literatures, a necessary and urgent epistemological convergence has been taking place between Post-Modernity/Post-Feminism/PostColoniality, and at the very base of these various posts, we will always find the PostStructuralist thought: Derrida (1974, 1981), Lacan (1966, 1971), Baudrillard (1983), Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987, Kristeva (1982), Foucault (1977, 1988, 1988a), etc., and this is precisely the point that Seed brings up in her review article (1991: 182). The distinction made by Vidal between 'technocratic and culture-oriented literary criticism' is, in my view, incorrect. Is Vidal suggesting that structuralism, reception theory, and semiotics, do not engage themselves with culture, and that cultural criticism based on a very clear Marxist bent is the only societal criticism? This will lead to a very particular, partial and disputable notion of culture. Vidal goes on to say that: [...] perhaps the category of "colonial and postcolonial discourse" signals the entrance into cultural criticism of a sector of researchers who previously were characterized by excluding the political. The rapprochement of both groups could contribute positively to a certain continuity of efforts with a paradigmatic semblance. [...] [...] the presumption that when a new analytic and interpretative approach is being introduced, the accumulation of similar efforts in the past is left superseded and nullified. The past as inescapable fact seems to rise up again, supposedly out of nothingness and disguised in a new jargon. (1993: 117)

There are two problems with these statements. First of all, those of us who began working in the 1970s in the fields of semiotics and structuralism were by no means negating the political or the social dimensions of culture. The nature of our work was different,

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NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CUI.TURF. AND I.TTF.RATIIRF.

since we needed to move away from the profusely anecdotal and often politically charged analysis of cultural objects in our attempt to interrogate the literary discourse. During at least the past fifteen years, formalism has indeed abandoned many of its practices and central features, but it has also left an enduring epistemological legacy, and it was this very formalism that began to question itself from within. The earliest and best examples are Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze or Jean Baudrillard. Therefore, it is not that now we are interested in the political, and therefore we have finally seen the light. In fact, the situation is quite different: Post-Modernity made art and theory political by questioning the centrality of Western discourse and cultural production, by making possible the emergence of dissenting voices, the voices of the Others. It is here, in this very moment when, for many of us, particularly comparatists facing texts such as The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie), Foe (J. M. Coetzee), Colmenas en la sombra (Alberto Kurapel), The Book of Promethea (Hélène Cixous), Coming through slaughter (Michael Ondaatje), The Passion (Jeanette Winterson), Blood and Guts in High School (Kathy Acker), The passion according to GH. (Clarice Lispector), Kiss of the Spider Woman (Manuel Puig) we realised that our work had become political, that our previous epistemological grounding had shifted. We are witnessing the emergence of non-national literatures as these have, until recently, been conceived. Post-Modernity has unsettled every certitude, and it has pried open knowledge and texts which can no longer be framed within the established canon, because they do not respond to pre-set narratological models. It is in this moment when our own theoretical, analytical and critical practice changed. Thus when the notion of Post-Coloniality enters the debate, it does so to address a number of problems which have been brewing within the Commonwealth, particularly since the Independence of India toward the middle of the Twentieth Century. The migratory movements and the diasporic element made our locations problematic, and complex, and from here new cultural, social, and political situations began to emerge. It is for this reason that Ashcroft et al., refer to this situation as "the empire writes back": it is in this writing back that many of us entered into the postcolonial debate. Secondly, Vidal seems to suggest that the postcolonial critics not only negate the type of work that he and others have been doing for some decades in the field of Latin American marginal discourses, but he also deplores the fact that we have come to obliterate that work. Vidal's work, like that of many scholars of a certain left, such as Roberto Fernández Retamar, Angel Rama, Carlos Rincón, Beatriz Sarlo, Beatriz Pastor, has persistently developed within dependency theory, very successfully underlining 'them' from 'us', without ever problematising that relationship, and always operating with very comfortable binary categories. In fact, if there is a technocratic criticism this is the one. It is not, then, that one simply ignores categories "firmly established for more than twenty years in historiography and Latin American critics, regarding specific social conditions" (Vidal, 1993: 118). The problem rests in the fact that those categories do not allow one to think the new and emergent cultural realities of today. I have no interest in turning and turning between dependency, periphery and centre. I prefer to agree with Said that:

THF. POST-COT ONTAL QUESTION Gone are the binary oppositions dear to the nationalist and imperialist enterprise. Instead we begin to sense that old authority cannot simply be replaced by new authority, but that new alignments made across borders, types, nations, and essences are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism. Throughout the exchange between Europeans and their "others" that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an "us" and a "them", each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident. (1993: xxiv-xxv)

b)

Walter Mignolo's Theoretical Exhumations

Mignolo opts for the very peculiar practice, although similar in its intent to that of Vidal's, to exhume texts from the past: The critique of what today is grouped under the label of "colonial discourse" has a long tradition in Latin America, which can be traced back to the 1950s when the writings of German philosopher Martin Heidegger began to catch the attention of Latin American intellectuals. The most spectacular example to my mind is that of Mexican historian and philosopher Edmundo O'Gorman. His La idea del descubrimiento de América (1952) and La reinvención de América (1958) represent the early dismantling of European colonial discourse. O'Gorman wrote much before the poststructuralist wave, although he had a similar foundation and perspective. [..J O'Gorman dismantled five hundred years of Western historiography-colonial and postcolonial discourse, as it were. (1993: 122) There are two problems with this statement. First of all, the current discussion and cultural re-articulations are not taking place with respect to 'colonial discourse' but to 'postcolonial discourse'. This is not only a matter of semantics but of what one is attempting to grapple with at this moment. The best example I can provide, are the three special issues on questions of coloniality and Post-Coloniality prepared by Revista Iberoamericana (Moraña, 1995, 1995a), Dispositio (Mignolo and Adorno, 1989) and the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (Totósy and Gunew, 1995). These special volumes at best have confused the discussion. They have very little to do with the Post-Colonial discussion of today. The first two continue to belabour old critical practices, for the most part lacking a fresh understanding of "colonial discourses". Regarding the 'colonial discourse' which is not the focus of my interests, it would be fruitful to look at them from a variety of epistemological sites. The Comparative volume, adds very little to clarify the discussion on Post-Coloniality. The second problem, is that Mignolo suggests that O'Gorman had already done the work that is currently taking place! Let me make something clear: Post-Coloniality, from my perspective, may have at least two critical practices: a) it may concentrate on

6L

NEW INTF.RSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATIIRE

analysing colonial discourses from a new analytical and epistemological framework; and b) the activity will focus on emerging cultural articulations as a result of diasporic factors from at least the second part of the Twentieth Century. What may unite both practices, is the plurality of gazes placed on those discourses: feminist, ethnic, PostSructuralist, etc.8 Mignolo expresses 'reservations' toward the notion of 'Post-Colonial discourse', particularly as a field of study. He sees nothing in this notion but a replacement of 'colonial literature' or 'colonial history'. In fact, for Mignolo, the whole affair of PostColoniality is little more than a form of a new colonization: Perhaps in the intellectual arena, efforts to invent an "other" from afar and long ago disguises new forms of colonization. Jean Paul Sartre pointed out that all non-Western cultures have been reduced to the status of objects by being observed and studied by Western scholars according to Western concepts and categories. Thus although the concept of colonial discourse has opened up new areas of inquiry and helped in rethinking the discursive dimension of colonial (and postcolonial experience), it may unwittingly misguide social scientists and humanists into a new form of intellectual colonization. (1993: 130)

It is extremely surprising that scholars such as Mignolo and Vidal, who have concentrated all their work toward Latin American culture, are now very concerned if others begin to inquire into the field of emergent cultures and voices in many parts of the World, including the so-called First World. What are they suggesting? What might the consequences be if one follows what Sartre said, in all his wisdom, to its limit? Are they implying that scholars from inside a particular ex-colonial site can only speak about that site? If this is the case, then on what basis Vidal may speak about marginal discourses when he is far from having ever experienced marginality, or Mignolo about writings on Colonial aboriginal texts when not only he is historically far removed from those sites, but also geographically? So, who can speak, and about what? This argument is pushed to its limit at the end of Mignolo's exhumatory discourse: My concern is to underscore the point that "colonial and postcolonial discourse" is not just a new field of study or a gold mine for extracting new riches but the condition of possibility for constructing new loci of enunciations as well as for reflecting that academic "knowledge and understanding" should be complemented with "learning from" those who are living in and thinking from colonial and postcolonial legacies, from Rigoberta Menchu to Angel Rama. Otherwise, we run the risk of promoting mimicry, exportation of theories, and internal (cultural) colonialism rather than promoting new

8

The work accomplished by O'Gorman has nothing to do with this new thinking. I do not dispute the value of his work, but to state that O'Gorman was proposing anything similar to the contribution of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is simply an historical and academic distortion.

THF. POST-COT .ONI AT. OIIF.STTON

£LL

forms of cultural critique and intellectual and political emancipations — of making colonial and postcolonial studies a field of study instead of a liminal and critical locus of enunciation. (1993: 131)

This last section it is not only offensive but also troubling: offensive since we have now created another fad, called Post-Coloniality in order to 'extract the riches' from Third World peoples, and then sell those extractions in the form of academic writings; troubling, since Mignolo, like all of us who work outside of the so-called Third World, have and continue to extract riches. If this new field of study initiated by Said and followed by many others, is not engaged in liberating new voices, in entering into new dialogues and negotiations, in rethinking our own past positions, and engaging in a radical and critical questioning of our own practices, in exposing various discursive practices of the past and the present, I really do not understand how this current critical endeavour can be labelled as neocolonialism. Vidal and Mignolo, both have the right to their point of view, but again, as in the case of Shohat and Dirlik, one does not learn: from where do they speak9? If there is at least one important change in terms of loci of enunciation today, in our current Post-Modern Condition, it is precisely the o ver-whelming sites of discursive activity. Never before have people had more possibilities to tell their stories, and in this I definitely include the so-called marginals in the First and Third Worlds. Both Vidal and Mignolo, to use them as exemplars, 'resist' this outrageous, pervasive and contaminatory avalanche of new Post-Colonial critics. Mignolo's colleague at Duke, Dirlik states that: [...] postcoloniality is the condition of the intelligencia of global capitalism. The question, then, is not whether this global intelligencia can (or should) return to national loyalties but whether, in recognition of its own class-position in global capitalism, it can generate a thoroughgoing criticism of its own ideology and formulate practices of resistance against the system of which it is a product. (1994: 356)

As we can see, Post-Coloniality has resulted in a plethora of varying 'resistances'. Román de la Campa's article, perhaps one of the most informed and balanced articles from the Latin American intelligencia residing in the U.S.A., "On Latin Americanism and the Postcolonial Turn", unequivocally points out this 'resistance'. He states, that: It is not surprising therefore, that postcolonialism has been met with some early scepticism by the more or less established schools of Latin American criticism in the United States. In addition, one must bear in mind that this initial response comes just about

9

I do not comment on the third response by Rolena Adorno since it does not add anything to the discussion and in fact repeats much of what Mignolo says, although with less allure.

68.

NEW 1NTF.RSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND I.ITF.RATURF. the time when the full implications of postmodernism as a sociopolitical reality are being felt in Latin American through the neo-liberal political regimes that came about in the eighties. (Campa, 1995: 747)

This scepticism has indeed characterised some Latin Americans working in the United States but also some Latin Americans actually living in their respective lands of origin. They also 'resisted' any innovation during the 1960s and 1970s since the only autochthonous acceptable nationalist theories were those of Marx, Gunder Frank, and for the more progressive, Gramsci, and Adomo et al. But let us be clear, not all academics from 'inside' and 'outside' reacted in this vernacular manner, including Mignolo and other 'extractors of riches'. Some of us attempted to use Western theoretical inquiry as tools to look at a variety of texts and cultures, not to colonise them, but to be able to understand them better, to understand texts which are discursive constructions, texts which carry a culture, texts that talk in more ways than one, texts which are in contact with an international circulation of knowledge and cultural production. In this very engaging article, Román de la Campa raises some important questions, such as the relation of Post-Coloniality to Post-Modernity, and Post-Modemity to high Modernity (1995: 748-749). It is clear that all depends on where one stands in this debate, and one must stand somewhere. If we believe that Post-Modernity is the last stage of global capitalism, well the discussion ends up there. Or, if one believes that PostColoniality is a cover up perpetrated by a bunch of opportunist academics who need ever more new riches in order to sustain their discourses, then the discussion also ends up there. However, if we believe that the World is going through an unprecedented cultural, economic and technological revolution, then one must take a position and speak from somewhere, this is a minimum professional and ethical imperative that we may ask from every 'intellectual'.

4.

THE THING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

a)

From Where Do I Speak?

It is time that I state my own position on this debate, which by now should be sufficiently clear (See essays I and II). Post-Coloniality may not be the finest term to describe the current discursive cultural situation in different parts of the world. Notwithstanding, something has happened in the cultural field that resists the binary approaches of the past, the confrontational and denunciatory discourses, the reductionism of Subject and Other. What has happened is that the so-called 'national' cultures of the West seem to be threatened by migratory peoples, by former colonies, that now come to claim a part of the Centre: the Empire not only strikes back, but as Ashcroft et al. said, it also writes back. (1989) But something else has also happened: the so-called national literatures in the West are produc-

THE POST-COLONIAL QUESTION

ing a literature that it could hardly be considered national. But let me be even more precise: I speak as a Canadian citizen, and as Canadian academic in the sense that I inhabit a site, a territory that it is called Canada, a territory where, in a certain manner, I inhabit, and a territory where questions of diasporic people, identity, cultural policy and multiculturalism are placed at the very heart of our current discussions. I speak as one of those diasporic individuals who no longer belongs to his originary territory, who is also part of an unprecedented and fascinating cultural reality called Canada, and who is not bound by constraints of Blut und Boden. I speak, appropriating all the knowledge that interests me, that is accessible to me, and that can help me and my territory to deal with new emergent realities, since I am also a new and emergent reality. And what are these realities? In the Canadian context, a literature that not only does not follow the canon, but that is neither French- nor EnglishCanadian. I am speaking about authors such as Nicole Brossard, Michael Ondaatje, Nino Ricci, or Alberto Kurapel. Can one speak about these texts as English- or FrenchCanadian? I do not think so. Neither, I think, can Clarice Lispector be considered a Brazilian writer, at least no more than J.M. Coetzee can be classified as a South African writer, Angela Carter as an English writer or Borges as an Argentinian writer. For instance, Nicole Brassard's Mauve Desert (1990), could barely be considered a québécoise text as one could, for example, consider Michel Tramblay's plays. Mauve Desert is a story about many things, about a lesbian community in the middle of the Arizona desert; it is about the logos of the West; Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb; it is about a young girl, Mélanie discovering her lesbian sexuality; it is most of all about writing, Post-Modern writing, about intertextuality, translation, the process of reading and writing; it is a highly dialogic text in the Bakhtinian sense; with a characteristic Post-Modern nomadic subject and structure; it is, finally, a palimpsestic writing which bring her text closer to Foe by John M. Coetzee (1986,1983), to Kepler by John Banville (1981), to Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (1984), to Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig (1991) [1976], to Coming through slaughter by Michael Ondaatje (1976), or to any of the texts by Alberto Kurapel. In fact, writing and its metatextuality is central to any of these texts. In the metatext of Mauve Desert, we read: Reality is what we recapture by an incalculable return of imagined things, like a familiar sense very distinctly set out in our lives. But to all of this there must be, we think, another sense, another version since we dream of it as we do of a musical accompaniment, a centered voice capable of securing for us a passage, a little opening. (1990: 143)

And this text is precisely 'versions' of realities which have absolutely nothing to do with Québec, but everything to do with the Post-Modem Condition, with the construction of reality, with the questioning of our own constructions. Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian of East Asian origin who came to Canada as a teenager and now is considered a Canadian writer, weaves the non-recorded life of the

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NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

Jazz player Buddy Bolden who died in New Orleans 1924, at the age of thirty one. All that it is left is a blurred picture with his band, almost no traces remain, only shards of memory. Is this text English Canadian? East Asian? No. It is just a text emerging from a non-inscribed site, as much as Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard. These texts are inscribing a new culture which, rather than Post-Colonial, I would call diasporic, non-essentialist, anti-nationalist, just global literature. b)

The Dangers of the Thing

The reason why I have a very strong anti-nationalist essentialist position, it is mainly due to two factors: on the one hand, we all know too well the results of nationalism, however mild and justifiable they may be in the eyes of some; on the other hand, because it is impossible, at least in the context where I live, and I only speak of this case, to continue speaking of biculturalism (English and French) in a country where the majority of inhabitants by the year 2010, will be of non-English and non-French extraction. Furthermore, the artistic products refuse any such classification. But let me further clarify my position regarding the national 'Thing'. Etienne Balibar in a seminal article entitled "Paradoxes of Universality" connects, in an unequivocal and definite manner, nationalism to racism. In fact, he argues that "racism has supplied nationalism with the only theories it has" (1990: 283). Many of the socalled Third World cultures, but not exclusively, including, in our case, Québec, have belaboured the question of identity and origin ad infinitum. In fact, in Latin America it seems at times to be an epidemic, particularly when we hear enlightened colleagues such as Hernán Vidal, Walter Mignolo, Ángel Rama, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Carlos Rincón, Beatriz Sarlo, Beatriz Pastor, and some derivatives such as Jean Franco et al., arguing in favour of a fervent nationalism. It is also suspect that for 500 years all they have done is to talk about identity and to develop their own 'Thing', and the Angles of Truth keep reminding us that 'importations' are suspicious and contaminate the 'Thing', and warn us that they must protect their riches from being excavated by others. One of the most peculiar aspects of some of these intellectuals (and writers such as Mario Benedetti), is that they operate from a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, they have no problem in 'utilising' literary techniques from Joyce and others, considering this utilisation as an 'appropriation' of narrative techniques; on the other hand, they deny the very same right to academics who attempt to go beyond a sclerotic 'criticism', which more often than not is anecdotical and strongly ideological (Fernández Retamar, 1975), practiced during the political and cultural period of the 1960s and 1970s. Regarding these issues, Benedetti argues: Should Latin American literature, in its greatest moment of blossoming, submit itself gently to the canons of a literature [Western Europe] that today is experiencing a period of fatigue and crisis? [...]. Should, for example, a novel such as One Hundred

THF. POST-COLONIAL QUESTION

71

Years of Solitude be evaluated following the rules of the nouveau roman, whose creative experience appears today as dried up? Should structuralist criticism be considered as the unavoidable method of our literature? Or, on the contrary, along with our poets and narrators, should we also create our own critical approach, our own research methods, our own way to evaluate with our distinct imprint, evolved from our conditions, from our needs, from our interest?" [my translation] (Benedetti, 1974: 52)

Benedetti's logic is indeed peculiar because Latin American literature since its very inception has been intimately related to European models. To ignore this fundamental fact constitutes a historical distortion. From the Araucana, the models have been European and the language Spanish. What models and language is Benedetti proposing? His persistent "our literature" (the Thing) has never materialised. More than twenty years have elapsed since the publication of Fernández Retamar's book (1975) and "our" theory does not exist. In spite of himself, the generations of academics and students that followed have paid little or no attention to his parochial arguments, since for that generation the structuralism and semiotics of the 1970s, and later Post-Structuralism, deconstruction and the studies of Post-Modernity and Post-Coloniality of the 1980s and 1990s, became more challenging. Similar is Roberto Fernández Retamar's opinion pertaining to this issue: The Latin American theories of literature can not be developed by transposing and imposing to them, the whole criteria developed in relation to other literatures, the metropolitan literatures. Such criteria, as we know, have been proposed — and adopted by us — as if they had universal value. But we also know that this, as a whole, is false and it only represents another manifestation of the cultural colonialism which we have suffered and that we still suffer, as a natural consequence of the political and economic colonialism. Facing this pseudo-universality, we must advocate the simple and necessary truth that a theory of a given literature is the theory of a given literature. (1975: 48)

Since 1975 we continue to await 'our own' theory of Latin American Literature, one that will not colonise 'us'. It is pathetic to observe the epistemological error of the materialist colleague. Nobody has ever attempted to "impose" on our very special and autochthonous literatures a theory, and I have never seen an exclusive theory of either French or English literatures. What, in fact exists, are various theorisations on narration, on poetry, on varied theatricalities, and many of these are indeed useful for many different literatures, in particular Latin American literature which has developed in an intimate relationship with both North American and European literature. The mistake that Fernández Retamar makes, as well as his colleague Benedetti, is to believe that the "nativism" of Latin American narrative is their (technical) invention. To believe this means simply either ignoring the history of literature and the source of literary techniques and narrative modes that have emerged in the last seventy years, and that are, in fact, utilised and appropriated by many "native" writers; or being a demagogue.

22.

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Of what type of colonialism does Benedetti speak about? The only ones who can speak of colonialism in Latin America (if we follow the logic of Benedetti and Fernández Retamar) are the aboriginal peoples. The 'criollos' who continued the Spanish oppression of those peoples, and furthermore, who they systematically exterminated, can hardly be called 'colonised'. From the very beginning, the most 'autochthonous' writers mantained a close relationship with Europe. One only has to think of Andrés Bello, later on, Rubén Darío, César Vallejo (who dies in Italy), Pablo Neruda, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, and the list goes on. This Ultranationalist mentality advocated by the proponets of the 'Thing', goes to extremes. Jorge Luis Borges, who lived all his adult life in Buenos Aires, was considered as a 'foreign' within Latin American literature, but Julio Cortázar, who, on the contrary, lived all his adult life in Paris, was considered a great 'nationalist' and revolutionary. Regarding this frantic defence of national culture, or Schwärmerei according to Zizek, Balibar has lucidly stated: What theoretical racism calls "race" or "culture" (or both) is therefore a birthright of the nation, a historical backbone, a concentration of qualities that belong "exclusively" to the nationalist: it is in the race of "its children" that the nation can contemplate its true identity at its purest. Consequently, it is to the race that the nation must cleave. (1990: 284) [...] It must therefore isolate the "exogenous," "interbred," "cosmopolitan" elements within, then eliminate and expel them. (Balibar, 1990: 284)

This is, in my mind, the fatalistic and irrevocable problem with nationalism: the quest for the original roots (in Latin American they are still looking for them, and in Québec they believe they possess them, but they are threatened). It is on these grounds that national literatures, cultures, societies, willingly or not, end up placing race at their very centre. I do not know of any nationalist movement (and nationalism is rampant today all over the world more than ever before) that does not seek [...] to identify and circumscribe the shared essence of the nationals, racism inevitably embarks on the obsessive quest for a "core" of unobtainable authenticity, shrinks the boundaries of nationality, and destabilizes the historical nation. [...] [...] since there is no way to find racial-national purity or to guarantee its source in the origins of the people, it must be fabricated after the idea of a (super)national Superman. (Balibar, 1990: 285)

It is not gratuitous that I bring in Balibar's reflections here, since they are most pertinent to the current debate on Post-Coloniality. Walter Mignolo, in an article entitled "Occidentalización, imperialismo, globalización: herencias coloniales y teorías postcoloniales", embraces the 'Thing' with singular

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clarity when referring to the concepts of West/East, barbarians/civilized, centre/periphery he states: In so far that these concepts and polarities tend today to be denied by some academic discourses, however they continue to be valid within social discourses, the issue is not to repeat the division between :"?first and third world" is false of that the "centre and the periphery are myths, but rather to demonstrate the imaginary conditions which still today support them."? (1995: 39. The translation is mine) Thus, the solution seems to continue to be, ad infinitum, assuming the periphery and the imaginary origins that have always sustained such fantasies. The whole discussion, the "resistance" and the 'uneasiness' clearly expressed by Mignolo in this article 10 , are intimately related to 'our Thing', to a Latin America that has been invented, by the creation of a Third Worldism whose major collaborators have been the Latin American intelligencia spread through out the World, brandishing the Truth of our 'Thing', which must be protected at all cost", iizek is absolutely right when he declares that: [...] the tale of ethnic roots is from the very beginning the "myth of the Origins": what is "national heritage" if not a kind of ideological fossil created retroactively by the ruling ideology in order to blur its present antagonism? (1993: 232)

10

In the same article, he adds: I am in solidarity with those who feel irritated and uncomfortable with the term "postcolonial" [...]. I do not understand by "postcolonial" a moment where colonialism has overcome, but rather a critical position regarding its legacy. In this sense, I understand by "postcolonial" in the same manner that some understand "postmodern", as a moment regarding the critique of the legacy of modernity. Thus the "postcolonial" theories, would constitute peripherical critical answers to modernity. That is to say, a colonial perspective regarding modernity and postmodemity, the two faces of the same square. (1998: 20, note 3. The translation is mine)

11

Speaking about the Third World, Spivak remarks that: [...] in Western Third Worldism there was a collaboration with the Third World intellectuals who were producing a "Third World", what I would get back is "Well, how about domestic First Worldism, which is why you are here". (1990: 78)

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I hope that the arguments presented in this essay serve to clarify 'misunderstandings' and distortions with respect to Post-Colonial studies. The challenge of these studies is to attempt to break the straight jacket of binarism which characterises much of 'Third World' thinking, as I have shown through some of its most prestigious representatives. It is fundamental to inquire after that 'third space' which Bhabha speaks about, which is nothing but the search for new alternatives of communal living, alternatives that can avoid the repetition of the same mistakes which were committed time and time again throughout history. The historic nationalism which marked the last decades of the Twentieth Century, the genocide and the barbaric criminality of 'civilised' nations must be confronted. If we do not confront what today is escalating, we will be condemned to repeat history, the most abject and dark aspects of our 'humanity'. If we do not succeed in rearticulating our communal living in a different manner in the Twenty-first Century, this will be the most barbaric century that we will have ever known. This is why the work of Bhabha, Said, Hall, Chambers, Spivak, and so many others, have the relevance they have, and the attempt to silence them using the pretext that they represent a Western capitalist conspiracy or a new Western cultural fashion, not only constitutes a perversion, but it also hinders any possibility to live in a different way.

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IDENTITY, ALTERITY AND THE THIRD SPACE: THE THEATRE OF ALBERTO KURAPEL

Time is not simply a succession of "nows" in which the present slips into the past as it moves toward the future. To the contrary, the past that is never present returns as a future that never comes. Mark C. Taylor, Altarity. To heed the solicitation of an inconceivable Other is to leave the comfort of the familial and the security of the familiar in order to err with neither hope of arriving nor expectation of returning home. To wander among pyramids is to trace and retrace le pas of Abraham. The space of such erring is the desert. The time of such erring is the terrifying past that never was, the uncanny present that never is, and the frightful future that never will be. The space-time of such erring is the writerly spacing-timing of Fear and Trembling. Mark C. Taylor, Altarity. The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable.

1.

KURAPEL

The writing and the theatrical practice of Alberto Kurapel during the past fifteen years are inscribed within a textual practice comparable to authors such as Clarice Lispector (1988), Hélène Cixous (1991), Nicole Brassard (1990), John M. Coetzee (1983, 1986), Michael Ondatjee (1976,1992), Kathy Acker (1986), to mention a few well known cases. At the same time, Kurapel's practice is part, in an exemplary way, of a new expression, characterised by the attempt to overcome binarism and propose a new alternative. Kurapel's work is also part of the Post-Modern discussion and of the debates of Post-Colonialism: the Third Space. What is the Third Space? It is the attempt to write in the in-between of past narratives and of current culture. The response that Kurapel provides in his performances is the in-between writing, which places his work at the very centre of the issues pertaining to identity and alterity. Kurapel's work is marked by otherness and difference, but more fundamentally by alterity. This is the central theme throughout his work, from 3 performances teatrales (1987) until his last performances, Trauco pompon de los de-

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monios (1996), Detrâs de las pupilas nacen y mueren todas las heridas (1995a) and Silencioso perfil (1995b) and previous works, Prométhée enchaîné (1989), Carta de ajuste ou nous n'avons plus besoin de calendrier (1991), Colmenas en la sombra ou l'spoir de l'arrière-garde (1994) and La bruta interférence (1995). Kurapel's work can be divided into two moments: a) one is characterised by the fracture, the bilingual performances (Spanish/French) from 3 performances teatrales until La bruta interférence. Here binarism and polarity are exposed, fracture and alterity are displayed as a wound; b) another is marked by what I would characterise as 'intercultural,' where difference is the basis for a new alternative, a new space where the language of alterity is negotiated. In this second moment, bilingusim is abandoned and Spanish remains as the only language.

2.

ALTERITY

With the advent of the Post-Modern Condition, and particularly with what I would call the Post-Colonial condition, the interest on issues pertaining to alterity have been placed at the forefront of the discussion on identity. The works of Mark C. Taylor (1987), Thomas Docherty (1996), Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (1996), David Morley and Kuah-Hsing Chen (1996), Robert Young (1990) Homi Bhabha (1994a), Stuart Hall (1996, 1996a), Trinh T. Minha-ha (1989), Patricia Hill Collins (1990), Iain Chambers (1994), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 1990, 1993), and the seminal work of Edward Said (1978, 1993) show the importance attributed to these topics. We could safely state that Post-Colonial studies start with Edward Said, and from this point others concentrate fundamentally on questions of alterity, even if such studies do not label these questions under the name of alterity. At the same time feminism, in particular, has paid a sustained attention to alterity and identity. From the position of cultural and Post-Colonial studies, the notion of alterity that is normally used is indeed related to notions of otherness, difference and marginality. The notion of alterity, generally, is discussed in relation to politics, and within politics, in relation to issues pertaining to ethnicity, minority, marginality and race. However, this notion has received thorough study within the epistemological framework of PostModemity. For instance, in the artistic field, the works of Merleau-Ponty, Bataille (1959, 1985, 1986) and Kristeva (1982); in philosophy, Hegel, Heidegger (1969, 1971), Kierkegaard, Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida (1974, 1981); and in psychology, Lacan (1966, 1971). It is from the notion of alterity, in what I would call "Post-Modern philosophy and psychology", that we centre our approach to alterity. It is here where we find the analytical instruments that make it possible to separate the notion of alterity from the notions of difference and identity. In the Hegelian system, identity and difference are terms in the same equation, where a reciprocal dependency exists: there is no identity without difference and no dif-

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ference without identity, and this always results in sameness. The only dialectical opposition is the negation of the negation, which incontestably ends in an Aufhebung. In fact, Being is thought of as difference. Identity is difference. Once again, Taylor underlines that "difference as difference, pure or absolute difference, is indistinguishable from identity. Difference constitutes itself by opposition to its opposite, identity" (1987: 16)'. The negation of its own Other is what leads to unity and reconciliation, thus difference always ends up in homos (the same), in das Selbe. At the same time, this homo almost always presents itself linked to a certain origin, to a presence which is absent. We could even state that metaphysics is nothing but the philosophy of the presence which is absent, and this implies an originary essentialism. (Wesensherkunft in the terminology of Heidegger 1969: 63-65). Heidegger states, "The identical always moves toward the absence of difference, so that everything may be belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can say 'the same' only if we think difference" (1971: 218). If one carefully examines the philosophers quoted above we will observe that they are all, in one way or another, related to Hegel, in as much as they carry out a radical critique of ontotheology based precisely on what Hegelian philosophy leaves out, that which he refuses to think: the scatological, the abject, the rejected, the scoria, the garbage, the menstruation, etc. Perhaps this attention paid to Hegel is due to the Cartesian project, that consisted in the philosophy of the Subject, and this project comes to a end with Hegel. According to Taylor, "For Heidegger, modern philosophy comes to an end in Hegel's System, thereby bringing to a close the Western 'ontotheological tradition' that began centuries ago in Greece" (Taylor, 1987: xxvi). Post-Modern philosophy, that in fact is nothing but the end of metaphysics, will focus its attention on all that is not reducible to a system, to that which escapes the system and in this escape, it dismantles it, it deconstructs it. Thus, alterity will not be difference, since this can be reduced, in a deconstructivist sense, in das Selbe, while alterity is characterized by its irreducibility. It is in this irreducibility where the notion of alterity is inscribed, and in this sense it is similar to Kristeva's (1982) notion of abjec-

1

Stuart Hall has elaborated an interesting notion of identity, freeing it from any trace of essentialism and using it in a strategic and differed manner: Identity is such a concept — operating 'under erasure' in the interval between reversal and emergence; an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all. (1996a: 2) The concept of identity deployed here is, therefore not an essentialist, but a strategic and positional one. That is to say, directly contrary to what appears to be its settled semantic career, this concept of identity does not signal that stable core of the self, unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change; the bit of the self which remains always-already 'the same', identical to itself across time. (1996a: 3)

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tion, to Derrida's notion of différance (1974,1981), Lacan's notion of Real (1966,1971), or Bataille's notion of heterology, agiology or eroticism (1959, 1985, 1986). Our interest resides, then, in the fracture, the hymen, the vagina, the cut, the limit, the border, the margin, interior-exterior. Alterity, thus conceived, is then intimately linked to the inhabiting of the fracture, revealing the lack (Lacan), differ/defer, to think the unthinkable, to name the unnameable. Alterity is Pharmakon, it is here and there, indecidible but determinable. Our interest in Kurapel's work resides precisely in his exposure of alterity as a radical separation, in the Lacanian sense, that is, it is inscribed as a permanent rupture, irreducible, and also as an inscription of the permanent lack, one that is impossible to quench with respect to the desire/object always differed/deferred. Alterity has no ontological status since it is not reducible, being simultaneously presence and absence. We are also interested in contextualising Kurapel's alterative thinking. And his work within the Post-Theoretical framework mentioned above. This Post-Theoretical thinking, in our view, expresses many of the current uncertainties.

3.

THE FRACTURE

The fracture, the problem of the Other and alterity are not realities which are only present in the political or social arena. I believe that in the last few years these issues have penetrated all the artistic fields and, in particular, the literary field. Kurapel's work is not an exception and he is one of the first artists to concentrate on these issues. His artistic work, in Spanish/French, inscribes and reveals the fracture of the other in all its complexity. Kurapel inhabits fracture and otherness each time that he writes/performs/enunciates simultaneously in two languages: Spanish and French. One is his own, the other is acquired. In Carta de ajuste ou nous n'avons plus de calendrier we read: "When I translate myself I am no longer alone. I am a memory that has a future. From now on a voice becomes the echo of my voice" (My translation, 1991: 56). It is precisely in this act of self-translation where he attempts not to be the other, but at the same time, the echo of his voice in another language reveals his state as Other. The echo marks the fracture, the division and alterity in all its violence. The translation implies, as does the Venetian bridge, unity and separation, proximity and distance, belonging and loneliness, difference and sameness. In this manner Kurapel inscribes his otherness within the acquired language, he inhabits a space that it is neither this nor that, a space in-between, a space which avoids the margin but which reveals its differance in the double linguistic articulation (differ/defer). Thus Kurapel creates a new space, encrusting and negotiating his discourse within the dominant discourses. Kurapel's battle is a battle of language, of discursivities in competition, of diverse positionalities. In the bilingual texts Kurapel clearly states that it is not possible to continue speaking from the margins, since this position not only implies self-marginalisation, but also

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hinders any attempt to deconstruct the centre. The centre can only be dismounted in its own terms, as Derrida has clearly pointed out: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. (1974: 24)

It is a fact that Kurapel's texts present a clear presence of Latin America, of exploitation, the past colonisation, aboriginal myths, but it is also a fact that in these texts he introduces the past and present Western tradition (Prometheus, Oedipus, Lazarillo, technology), the universal knowledge. For instance, in Prometeo encadenado or in Carta de ajuste there is a violent clash between the presence of Western and Latin American myths, on the one hand, and on the other hand the presence of current technology. Kurapel avoids any temporal and spatial inscription, creating his own time and space, a new space, a third space that attempts to avoid binarism so characteristic of our Western tradition. Kurapel's artistic and performative work links up with current theories purported by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988,1990,1993), Judith Butler (1990,1993), Edward Said (1978, 1993), Stuart Hall (1996, 1996a) or Homi Bhabha (1994a), with respect to the search for a new language that is able to effectively negotiate in the discursive competition. Kurapel inhabits a space where he does not accept being reduced to the margin, and in a double movement and gesture reveals his cultural background and the other culture, he inhabits alterity in order to avoid marginalisation. In this sense he reiterates what Spivak has pointed out with respect to the discourses that seek to alienate: One of the things I said was that one of my projects is not to allow myself to occupy the place of the marginal that you would like to see me in, because then that allows you to feel that you have an other to speak to. (1990: 122)

Kurapel's work is complex and ambitious: at the same time that he inscribes narratives of origin, he denies them; he represents them in order to deny them and fuse them with other narratives, and it is here that resides, not only the originality of his performances, but also the political and ideological dimension of his work. With Homi Bhabha we can state: What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between'

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Kurapel builds his identity with alterity, and precisely in the duplicity of his discourse, he introduces a third space where, more than a language, what he searches for is a voice. At first sight we could think that Kurapel seeks his original roots and thus falls into a parochial essentialism. But this is not the case, since what he seeks is a voice that will be listened to. Thus, in Carta de ajuste he states: When I know that I have a name, I lose it in the words, I erase it in order to write and to arrive at what I am. I know that when I die I will not have a name but perhaps my voice will be listened to. (My translation, 1991: 56)

In La bruta interference the identity is established in the difference of the Other: When you look at me you are looking at your self. Looking at ourselves, finding ourselves. When you speak to me you are keeping silence [...]. Do not forget that when you look at me you are looking at yourself. You are looking at yourself. (My translation, 1995: 55)

The structure of the mirror and reflection is returned by negation. The Subject is only able to recognise himself in the difference of the sight.

4.

THE SUBJECT AND ITS ALTERITY

In his last works, Kurapel abandons bilingualism and this is owed to the integration of characteristics in his works which, until now, had been an element in them, but now becomes central: multiculturality. In Trauco pompón de los demonios (1996), the actors that are part of the text come from different origins: Vietnam, Quebec, Manitoba, Greece, San Salvador, Argentina, Italy, Guatemala, Mexico, Africa, Poland. At the same time, the history of this text is based, according to Kurapel, in a myth from the South of Chile, from the remote island of Chiloe. Identity would seem to inscribe itself in alterity, in plurality. Thus, the Subject can only construct itself in relation to a fracture. The ostentation of the fracture opens up a new multiform space in constant fluctuation Kurapel would seem to propose in his last works the elimination of border and frontiers and a radicalisation of identity in terms of the globalisation not based in otherness but in the acceptance and in the celebration of alterity qua alterity. The abstract and petty nationalism that characterises so many societies, including Latin America, is deconstructed and questioned. Kurapel's proposal is not very different to that of Edward Said when he states that:

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Gone are the binary oppositions dear to the nationalist and imperial enterprise. Instead we begin to sense that old authority cannot simply be replaced by new authority, but that new alignments made across borders, types, nations, and essences are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism. Throughout the exchange between Europeans and their "others" that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an "us" and a "them," each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident. (1993: xxiv-xxv)

Kurapel refuses to accept the margin and thus he locates his practice in zones considered marginal with the objective of removing the margin. In order to do this he makes available to him all the resources offered by the Post-Modern culture where he inscribes his own performative practice: intertextuality, rhizomatic writing, discontinuity, plurality, irony, alterity. Judith Butler, in her seminal work, shows the way to follow, and in this route converges with Kurapel's trajectory, a path that Kurapel has walked since the late 1970s. According to Butler: The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities. The complexity of gender requires an interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary set of discourses in order to resist the domestication of gender studies or women studies within the academy and to radicalize the notion of feminist critique. (1990: xi)

Kurapel attempts to escape the binarism which has marked, from time immemorial, the many cultures that inhabit the planet, particularly Western culture, and within this, Latin American culture. The objective is to escape those polarisations that divide cultures in "us/them" and which reproduce the master narratives and the same dogmatism. It is for this reason that Kurapel globalises his discourse from the periphery, from the margin. From this perspective, Kurapel's work may be considered Post-Colonial since it revises and overcomes the preceding Post-Colonialism. Thus, once again, the Kurapelian project converges with that of Homi Bhabha: The postcolonial perspective — as it is being developed by cultural historians and literary theorists — departs from the traditions of sociology of underdevelopment or 'dependency' theory. As a mode of analysis, it attempts to revise those nationalist or 'nativist' pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation. It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres. (1994a: 173)

What remains evident, both in Bhabha's Post-Colonial theory as well as in Kurapel's project, is that remaining encapsulated in essentialism and nativism, in identity and dif-

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ference, is a trap that can only lead to the reproduction of the system that one attempts to dismantle. The only solution is to inhabit and appropriate the centre's discursivities in order to subvert them. This practice of "inhabiting" other discourses in order to deconstruct them, is a central characteristic of the theatrical practice of Alberto Kurapel, as well as of the whole artistic practice of Post-Modemity, independent of its origin. Intertextual and palimpsestic practices present in Foe by J.M. Coetzee (1986), is a perfect example of this practice: a text inserted and woven in the "fractures" of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Coetzee's story could not have been told without that intertext, and without bringing back British expansionism during the Eighteenth Century. Coetzee achieves this by using a minimalist form and this, in turn, allows not only a reading of the past, but also of the present: Coetzee inhabits the Crusoe by Defoe. To inhabit does not only mean to make every form of knowledge ones own, but also to decolonise our own discourses. With respect to the so-called Third World, the task at hand is to abandon its condition as ex-centric (Bhabha, 1994a: 177).

5.

'BEYOND'

In Kurapel's work the task would seem to consist in overcoming fossilised discursive positions. Kurapel confronts the migration problems: he travels from one space to another, from one temporality to another, from one ethnia to another, to make them all simultaneous: to be here and there at the same time. What remains evident is that there is no going back to a primogenial origin: all we have is the present and the future, and the past is what we once were, but we are no longer that2. In La bruta interference Camila/Camilo says: 2

Robert Young points out on this same subject, that: In a similar way, those who evoke the 'nativist' position through a nostalgia for a lost or repressed culture idealize the possibility of that lost origin being recoverable in all its former plenitude without allowing for the fact that the figure of the lost origin, the 'other' that the colonizer has repressed, has itself been constructed in terms of the colonizer's own self-image. (1990: 168)

And he adds that: The 'nativist' argument thus simply reproduces a Western fantasy about its own society now projected out onto the lost society of the other and named 'the Third World'. [...]. [...] all such arguments, whether from colonizer or colonized, tend to revolve around the terms which the colonizer have constructed. To reverse an opposition of this kind is to remain caught within the very terms that

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In this place I threw it away. It was what I loved the most; or rather the only loved thing I still had with me [...]. Much time has gone by, and I cannot find it. [...] I want to find what I threw away when I had to leave! (1995: 75) [...] I do not know if it was here where I threw it. Here I look for it because a place does not exist. (1995: 84) Kurapel's performances interrupt a space, intervene a temporality, work in the fractures of binarism and polarity as he searches for a new space to be able to re-inscribe our sense of communal life. At the same time, he recuperates the past in order to make it a present, that is, to deconstruct it, display it, and to underline the non-return, thus seeking a new affiliation based in our basic communality: the fact that we have to share this point in the space we call the Earth. Alberto Kurapel's theatre breaks down the limits between fiction and reality, they are fractured, abolished. Kurapel is Kurapel inside and outside the stage: his story is not fiction but a form of construction of what we call Reality. His writing is the form that this reality takes, admitting that we have failed, and from here his constant, nomadic, cartographic and inconmesurable search. In his "Notes to the Staging" for La bruta interférence, Kurapel states: When one has lived in two places, in two epochs, in two universes, in two Histories: one returns here, or there? Attempting to elucidate this dilemma I began to write a play always keeping in mind that the Condor, a bird of prey, which I came to know intimately, is the reincarnation of the Sun in all the mythologies of the Andes. And that from my mountains to yours we travel today in that void built by a virtual reality originated in the media which inoculates conformism, that makes you drowsy, that brutalises you in front of events which take place in cruel and unjust realities [....]. (My translation, 1995: xxvii)

are being disputed. Nationalist resistance to imperialism, for example, itself derives its notion of nation and of national self-determination from the Western culture that is being resisted. (1990: 168)

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THE DISPLACEMENT OF LITERATURE AND THE LITERATURE OF DISPLACEMENT: THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY

The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. Edward Said, "Reflections on Exile". This inevitably implies another sense of 'home', of being in the world. It means to conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitutes our sense of identity, place and belonging. Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity.

1.

DISPLACEMENTS...

Both of these quotations speak of displacement but they also speak of the new place that is currently occupied by the displaced, of a new notion of culture which is not subjected to dominant cultural practices but rather challenges them at their very roots. Modernity produced a displacement which attempted to erase the displaced by assimilation and by Othering. The other was encapsulated, it was denied its language and culture, denied the possibility of an exchange, which, as Said has clearly demonstrated, was always there, but suppressed, indentured'. However, a new form of displacement (not that the reasons of displacement have substantially changed) emerges with the advent of the Post-Modern Condition and by the manner to think the Post-Colonial

1

Said states: [...] such populations and voices have been there for some time, thanks to the globalized process set in motion by modern imperialism; to ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories, is to miss what is essential about the world in the past century. (Said, 1993: xx)

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Condition introduced by Edward Said (1978, 1993) and developed by prominent thinkers such as Stuart Hall (1996, 1996a, 1996b), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 1990, 1993), Homi Bhabha (1990, 1990a, 1994, 1994a, 1996), Robert Young (1990), Carlos Fuentes (1992), Iain Chambers (1994), Irene Gedalof (1999), Mike Featherstone (1990,2000), Jonathan Rutherford (1990), David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (1996), Laura Donaldson (1992), Slavoj Zizek (1992,1993), Daniel Castillo (2001), just to mention some well-known cases. There is a peculiar 'contradiction' regarding displacement in Modernity and in Post-Modernity. On the one hand, Modernity purported a universalist discourse which may have been confused with the current globalisation, at the same time it did everything possible to homogenise and assimilate (territorialise) the Other: unversalisation/assimilation, global but from the perspective of the centre, as the only discourse, that of the logos with its ethos. On the other hand, Post-Modernity introduces the possibility of globalisation and at the same time, that of the local. Never before had the local, the individual solitary voice, had so much to say and to inhabit. This is why, I would say, that not only the Post-Modern Condition and the Post-Colonial Condition are over as epistemological, social, and cultural paradigms, since we have now entered something unprecedented: the global condition, which is marked by the very notion of the third culture (Featherstone, 1990: 237). Ulf Hannerz has indicated, pertaining to this apparent 'contradiction', that: There is now a world culture, but we had better make sure that we understand what this means. It is marked by an organisation of diversity rather than by a replication of uniformity. No total homogenisation of systems of meaning and expression has occurred, nor does it appear likely that there will be one any time soon. But the world has become one network of social relationships, and between its different regions there is a flow of meanings as well as of people and goods. (Hannerz, 1990: 237)

This is precisely the point I am making: globalisation does not equate to "homogenisation of systems of meaning and expression", much the contrary. As Iain Chambers has clearly shown, "there are sixteen million of 'non-European people' who currently live and work in Europe" (Chambers, 1994: 109). This very fact makes it impossible to homogenise culture or assimilate the displaced. Let us never lose sight that Post-Modernity produces the decentring of the West from within and from without, the radical questioning of cultural, social and political paradigms, as it is manifested in the work of Derrida (1974,1981), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Butler (1990, 1993), Mihn-ha (1996), Spivak (1988, 1990, 1993), Bhabha (1994a, 1996), etc. We attest to the end of the logos, of the master narratives and to the binarism that has characterised the global community, particularly the West. It is in this dismantling of the very possibility of supremacy of one culture over another where I see the 'new' displacement becoming productive, penetrating, by producing culture regardless of a given cannon, regardless of a given cultural identity, regardless of a given cultural tradition.

THF. ni.SPT.ACF.MF.NT OF LITERATURE

The highly entrenched notions of East/West, North/South, First/Third World have finally been put under erasure. They have become entelechias and dysfunctional concepts which do not signify anything, except the construction of Othering and of an East and a West, a North and a South that do not exist except in the feverish minds of those who still hold on to a system that is finally crumbling in front of our very eyes: the end of the logos, the end of the master narratives, and most importantly, the end of the superiority of one culture over another. Edward Said, in his usual clarity and vision categorically questions these binary notions by stating that: There is in all nationally defined cultures, I believe, an aspiration to sovereignty, to sway, and to dominance. In this, French and British, Indian and Japanese cultures concur. At the same time, paradoxically, we have never been as aware as we now are of how oddly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, across national boundaries, defy the policy action of simple dogma and loud patriotism. Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more "foreign" elements, alterities, than they consciously exclude. Who in India or Algeria today can confidently separate out the British or French component of the past from the present actualities, and who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French Paris that would exclude the impact of India and Algeria upon those two imperial cities? (Said, 1993: 15)

Thus, from this perspective, I view displacement as one of the central components of cultural globalisation, as a disseminating agent, as a diasporising phenomenon. The point I am attempting to make, is that the new 'condition' of humanity, I would suggest a permanent condition, is displacement, the political, economic, military displacements which have made it possible for the emergence of a (diasporic) new culture fraught with new meanings. Thus culture and displacement become one, altering forever the sense of heimlich into unheimlich. It is this unheimlich that becomes the new "home". The human "home" has become nomadic, and "home" is always the present, the instant in which we inhabit that very moment. I can illustrate this condition by a comment that an artist friend of mine made to me in July 2000. She came from Rome for a full month, and for the first time to Canada, to Winnipeg. When she was ready to go back to "her home", Rome, I said to her: "You must be eager to get back home". She paused and looked at me while searching for the right words, and she replied: "I am always at home. I am at home in a plane, in cities; I am always at home because my home is me. I am never going or coming, I am always already here". This is indeed a choice, a manner to be in the world, to inhabit the territory which we inhabit in that very moment. It is in this sense that I say that our new "home" is the instant, the present, and it is in that present where a new culture is being formulated, a new literature which resists classification and inscription. Displacements are obviously of a very different nature, but independent of this fact, it has lead to something common: nomadicity which is the logical result of dis-

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placement and the most important condition and reality of this new culture, or if one wants to follow Homi Bhabha, this "third culture". The mark of this nomadic culture is indeed hybridity, not a third culture evolving from the encounter of one or more cultures, as Bhabha has correctly indicated (Bhabha, 1990: 211) but rather the simultaneous production of culture that permeates themselves in that continuos intercultural contact between cultures. The diasporisation of culture inscribes a multitude of new sonorities and colours in the territory, which are also nomadic since they are always in a state of flux, of continuous change. This inscription confronts many languages, many histories, many stories, and many geographies. My story enters a new space, how to tell it? How to make it audible to others? How to make it meaningful to others since it is my story/history? This is exactly what we read, for instance, in Nicole Brossard's Mauve Dessert (1990), or Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (2000), in Carlos Fuentes, The Crystal Frontier (1997), Salman Rushdie's East, West (1996), or Jeanette Winterson's The Passion (1987), etc. This culture, and literature, also points to the impossibility of subscribing to an origin (I will return to this point in section 3, "Identities"), to a return of an imaginary beginning: there was no origin to start with. This impossibility of a return, although highly controversial in many cultural centres, has been underlined by all those working in the new post-colonial studies2.

2

For instance, Iain Chambers states that: Migrancy, on the contrary, involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. Always in transit, the promise of a homecoming — completing the story, domesticating the detour — becomes an impossibility. History gives way to histories, as the West gives way to the world. (Chambers, 1994: 4) Edward Said says that: No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim or American are not more than starting-points, which are followed into actual experience for only a moment and quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. (Said, 1993: 336)

THF. niSPI.ACF.MF.NT OF UTKRATTIRE

m

It is this transnational and translational character of the new culture, as indicated by Homi Bhabha, which must be clearly understood. It is here where we find the displaced histories' confrontation with one another, with the various 'cultural centres'3. It is this movable "habitat", as Iain Chambers has brilliantly indicated, that is transforming culture and society as we know it4. The more we think about this "dwelling" it beRobert Young, speaking on a similar matter states that: In similar way those who evoke the 'nativist' position through a nostalgia for a lost or repressed culture idealize the possibility for the fact that the figure of the lost origin, the 'other' that the colonizer has repressed, has itself been constructed in terms of the colonizer's own self-image. [...] The 'nativist' argument thus implied reproduces a Western fantasy about its own society now projected out onto the lost society of the other and named 'Third World'. (Young, 1990: 16) Homi Bhabha is clear when reflecting on questions of ethnic origin: Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The 'right' to signify from the periphery of authorize power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are 'in the minority'. (Bhabha, 1994a: 2) 3

According to Homi Bhabha: Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the 'middle passage' of slavery and indenture, the 'voyage out' of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration of the West after the Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial histories of displacement — now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of 'global' media technologies — make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue. (Bhabha, 1994a: 172)

4

Chambers states that there is no question of origin, since the very notion of 'home' has inevitably been altered forever. He adds that:

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comes even clearer for me that "dwelling", as my colleague the artist indicated, is "us", and "dwelling is everywhere"; we are always that instant, that point, that colour, that sound that indicates we are alive, that we are part of a global community, and independently of who we are, of where we come from, of the colour of our skins, that is, beyond our differences, we are a community, a community united by the memory of what we were and what we will be, the memory of the dismembered and abjected body, of that "body without organs" that Deleuze and Guattari speak of 4 . It is difference, created largely by displacement, that unites us, and this is the central reason that may move us beyond cultural and professional racism. Both transnational and translational perform central activities here, where the former inscribes the movement of people, the latter inscribes the voice and agency of those peoples in a new territory, inscribed, but uninscribed for them and it is in this struggle for inscription where most of the political, racial, social and cultural struggles take place. The nomadicity of the "new comer" is what is threatening, the very fact that it is double, that it already has two "homes", and that this "doppio" is like a mask, two faces leaving the door open for suspicion and mistrust in the eyes of some.

This inevitability implies another sense of 'home', of being the world. It means to conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging. (Chambers, 1994: 4) [•••] So, I finally come to experience the violence of alterity, of other worlds, languages and identities, and there finally discover my dwelling to be sustained across encounters, dialogues and classes with other histories, other places, other people. For the return of the 'native' not only signals the dramatic necessity 'to abrogate the boundaries between Western and nonWestem history', but also returns to the centre the violence that initially marked the encounters out in the periphery that laid the foundations of my world. (Chambers, 1994: 4-5) 5

Deleuze and Guattari state: The body is now nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels, each with a proper name: a peopling of the BwO, a Metropolis that has to be managed with a whip. What peoples it, what passes across it, what does the blocking? A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree — to intensities produced. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 153)

THF. DISPLACEMENT OF LITERATURE

2L

When we speak of displacement within the context of Post-Coloniality we normally speak of people's displacement from without. However, we must also refer to the displacement from within. We tend to ignore the within simply because in many instances it reveals the so-called 'Third World' in supposedly 'First World' countries. There is a growing trend to recuperate lost home lands, whether in South Africa, Namibia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, the former Soviet Union or Canada. For instance, in 1998 a new Territory called Nunavut, covering a vast landmass in the Canadian North, was created and in the year 2000, the Nisga'a Nation received large tracts of land in Northwest British Columbia. This "recovery" is also taking place in other parts of the world as Kevin Robins has indicated, Turks have now rediscovered 'lost homelands', 'lost worlds'. This 'recovery' of identities is in line with a resurgent concern with ethnicity across Europe as a whole. [-..] These are identities that are shared across the borders of nation states. We may consider these developments in terms of cultural revitalisation and enrichment, but there are also clear dangers. If these were to become primary identifications, the situation could become rapidly destabilized. (Robins 1996: 75)

The displacement from within must be addressed in terms of historical injustices committed to first nations/aboriginal peoples. In the Province that I inhabit, Manitoba, we have at least a double historical and contemporary displacement: one that placed aboriginal peoples in reserves and their children in residential religious schools (where they were raped and abused by 'saintly priests') over a century ago, when they were divested of their lands and identities; a second displacement occurred when aboriginal peoples began to abandon their reserves and migrated to the cities. The point I am attempting to convey is that displacement from within is as pervasive and destructive as the displacement from without. One only has to think of the Kurdish people and the Kurdistan question, or of the Armenian question, both questions still unresolved, in spite of at least a century of grief and confrontation. These complex realities can often lead to, and have often lead to, positions of 'ethnic and religious fundamentalism' and the attempt to resuscitate a past that no longer exists (i.e. the Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and the Palestinian-Israeli question, etc.). The danger in 'recovery' and 'restoration' is that it leads to a form of national fundamentalism and fractionalisation, which only repeats the very model of oppression and genocide from where these very ethnicities have, over the ages, attempted to escape. The only viable and productive form of 'recovery', in my mind, is one that changes the very nature and objective of that recovery in terms of a new articulation where what is negotiated is not a 'restoration', the search for 'original roots', but rather a sense of inhabiting and belonging with others, where difference is the uniting link, and not the element of division. A further form of displacement is one that is faced by groups of individuals who are displaced due to their sexual orientation. This form of displacement, although mit-

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igated by a series of rights and laws, is still pervasive in most countries in the world with varying degrees of xenophobia. Rarely do we consider these individuals, who in most places must live in hiding, as displaced peoples. This is a monumental issue that many societies have chosen to ignore but, to their chagrin, it is simply no longer possible to ignore it. Religious fundamentalists, political and racist elements and fanatics have no right to tell us how we should conduct our lives.

2.

NOMADICITIES

Nomadicity has long been part of our humanity. In fact, one could argue that it is the other face of sendentarity, identity, and rootedness. However, a new territory, in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, has begun to emerge in the post-imperial era as described by Edward Said. Nomadicity today has taken the form of various types of displacements, creating unprecedented cartographies not only in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, but in the sense of Jorge Luis Borges in "On Exactitude of Science" (1999: 325), where the map covers the territory and replaces it by the shreds left over time6. This new cartography I am referring to has produced, on the one hand, a literature which narrativises displacement, that is, it presents a literature that is inscribed by the fracture and the wound of displacement. It is not that the subject producing the literature is displaced, but rather the stories, narrated, inhabit displacement. I am thinking of texts such as Mauve Dessert by Nicole Brossard (Canada), The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Foe by John M. Coetzee (South Africa). On the other hand, there is a literature that is the product of displacement. For instance, Salman Rushdie's East, West (India/England), Michel Ondaatje's Running in the Family, Coming through slaughter or Anil's Ghost (Canada/Sri Lanka), Ronhinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, (Canada/India), Nino Ricci 's Lives of the Saints, (Canada/Italy), and Alberto Kurapel's Colmenas en la sombra ou l'espoir de l'arrière-garde (Chile/Canada) .These textuali-

6

Jorge Luis Borges writes: [...] On that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. (Borges, 1999: 325)

THF. DISPI-ACF.MF.NT OF LITERATURE

21

ties intersect in at least two major ways: both problematise the questions raised by identity and tradition in literature and culture. What kind of identity are we dealing with? The question is central since these texts are radically altering the so-called literary canon, at least when we think in terms of the supposed "vernacular" literatures in certain territories. It is necessary then, to revisit this notion since it is no longer operational, at least within the context of a global "displaced" society. It is here where a new "territory" with a specific, yet moving, cartography becomes essential. These literatures both confront the cultural fracture, in one manner or another, and inhabit it. It is the inhabiting of the fracture and then the reflection on uprootedness and tradition 7 which becomes the focus of our inquiry. The very crisis of identity emerges from the intersections of people inhabiting displacement, and in the process imploding the so-called canonical and vernacular literatures; a cultural nomadicity inscribes this new territory. However, a question remains and lingers, and continues to be unanswered: what kind of nomadicity is confronted by displacement? It is the displacement/re-displacement of the peripheries, the inscription of the peripheral voice/voices that we confront at the very centre of cultural power and dissemination, thus the voices of Rushdie, Ondaatje, Fuentes, Ricci, Kurapel, Mistry. It is the emergence of a new culture, a culture that is neither here nor there, a culture which resists a binary placing, a culture that for many is threatening since it is a culture/cultures which results from displacement, and therefore assumes multiple geographies and cartographies, and multiple identities 8 .

7

It is high time to accept that tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) and community (Anderson, 1983) are either invented or imagined and not God given realities.

8

Zizek has stated, in relation to this 'threat' of the Other that: The element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relationship toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated. This relationship toward the Thing, structured by means of fantasies, is what is at stake when we speak of the menace to our "way of life" presented by the Other. [...] What he wants to defend at any price is not reducible to the so-called set of values that offer support to national identity. National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the Nation qua Thing. This Nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties. It appears to us as "our Thing" (perhaps we could say cosa nostra), as something accessible only to us, as something "they," the others, cannot grasp; nonetheless it is something constantly menaced by "them". [...] All we can ultimately say about it is that the Thing is "itself," the real "Thing," what it really is about, etc. (1993: 201)

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NEW INTERSECTIONS: F.SSAYS ON CI II TURF. AND LITERATURE

The diasporic culture that is rhizomatic and does not necessarily recognise an origin is exactly what we are confronting in many geographies in the West, including the territory from where I speak, Canada. What I call a nomadic culture has to do with the intersection of various cultural practices operating simultaneously and mediated, in many cases, by the English language. But this language has also been 'displaced' (by this 'other') to give way to the new sound and colour of migrancy, to the many histories/stories, encounters, sexualities. The name and the sound of this language is multiple, diasporic, nomadic as the citizen who has taken it as a means of communication and developing that new 'identity' in the new territory. This new subjectivity confronts the inherited one and produces a flow of new colours which may start at any point in the trajectory of that individual's new life, and that life, that colour will be guided by the new music and sound of the acquired language, that language is then an appropriation. This is one of the best examples one can provide about the new encounters, where the sound of a language, of the genetic inscription with the memory of the culture, is dislocated, and 'dis-placed' as it is transformed in a phone, which also contains the 'mother language'. Not only have the sound and the colour of the language changed, but also its rhythm, which is, perhaps, the very soul of the language. The ear, the body, the texture of the soul are then no longer the same, the cleavage has taken residence, and this residency is here to stay, it is nomadic and permanent at the same time. This evident and inescapable reality of language has also made it possible for the diasporic voices to have an insertion in the new site of that culture. I am speaking of a culture of displacement that is founded on hybridity; a notion that until recently was condemned (and in many places is still much contested) as that which "I am not". Homi Bhabha recognises hybridity as that space, a third space, which constitutes the new cultural landscape: [...] the cultural act of translation (both as representation and reproduction) denies the essentialism of a prior given originary culture, and then we see that all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge. (Bhabha, 1990: 211)

This implies the erasure of a given origin and a form of inhabiting the world that is always in process, in progress, where the cultural translation, of which Bhabha speaks, operates as a form of penetration and transformation, from 'outside' and from 'inside'. In fact, there is no longer an outside and an inside, but only that moment in which we inscribe ourselves by speaking, by writing, by singing, by painting, by being in the world. Thus it is no longer possible to speak of a given literature as a product of a given society and culture, but rather the production of a culture, which now comes from the hidden down posts of the Empire, as Said would say. This nomadic literature, a literature inserted in the instant, challenges the very notions of cultural identity and that

THF. DTSPI ACFMFNT OF I .ITF.RATIJRH

21

of cultural and literary tradition. It is precisely the point of this essay, to attempt to move beyond and away from dominant and sclerotic notions of culture, which have divided us for centuries and whose results I do not need to underline here since they are self-evident. It is Edward Said who, again, challenges these very notions of literary and cultural origins as they exist in a global and cultural context: In the main, trying to say that this or that book is (or is not) part of "our" tradition is one of the most debilitating exercises imaginable. Besides, its excesses are much more frequent than its contributions to historical accuracy. For the record then, I have no patience with the position that "we" should not only or mainly be concerned with that is "ours," any more than can condone reactions to such a view that require Arabs to read Arab books, use Arab methods, and the like. As C. L. R. James used to say, Beethoven belongs as much to the West Indians as he does to Germans, since his music is now part of the human heritage. (Said: 1993, xxv)

3.

WHOSE IDENTITY? WHAT IDENTITY?

There is no question that identity has become one of the central topics and issues in many recent studies. The reason identity is being debated and interrogated is due to the 'invasion' of a diasporic, displaced, nomadic third culture. The notion of identity can no longer be sustained or defended based on origin and nation, and this is the product of millions of displaced people coming from the former colonies who now live in European nations or in 'new worlds' (the Americas, Australia and New Zealand). In territories such as England, Italy, France or Canada and the United States one must ask Whose Identity and What Identity? Obviously the various centres feel their identity threatened and there is a heightened tension growing in many European countries, one of the best examples is France9. It is a sort of fundamentalism similar to that of many countries in the Middle East. Parallel to this fundamentalism, and intimately connected with it we have the re-emergence of nationalism, which tends to reaffirm tradition, mythical origins, race and identities almost forgotten in recent times, but now they become actual and current again. Etienne Balibar in a seminal essay states that: What theoretical racism calls "race" or "culture" (or both) is therefore a birthright of the nation, a historical backbone, a concentration of qualities that belong "exclusively" to the nationalist: it is in the race of "its children" that the nation can contemplate its true identity at its purest. Consequently, it is to the race that the nation must cleave. (1990: 284) [...]

9

In the month of August 2000 one municipal government passed a law limiting where communities can worship in the city. This intolerance will probably end up in a constitutional challenge based on the freedom to worship.

26.

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: F.SSAYS ON CULTURF. AND I .ITF.RATURF. It must therefore isolate the "exogenous," "interbred," "cosmopolitan" elements within then eliminate and expel them. (1990: 284) [••J [...] to identify and circumscribe the shared essence of the nationals, racism inevitably embarks on the obsessive quest for a "core" of unobtainable authenticity, shrinks the boundaries of nationality, and destabilises the historical nation. (1990: 285) [...] since there is no way to find racial-national purity or to guarantee its source in the origins of the people, it must be fabricated after the idea of a (super) national Superman. (1990: 285)

Identity has always been anchored in this "core", in something that belongs exclusively to one given group, and race is to be found at the very base of this obsolete notion of identity. Thus, this form of identity is inscribed in exclusion and not in inclusion. The challenge today is how to conceive a new form of identity that radically moves away from this fossilised construction of identity that for hundreds of years has been at the very root of genocide and human devastation. The best examples we can provide are the events in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the recent events in Kosovo and even more recently in Israel/Palestine. It seems that history keeps repeating itself and we cannot seem to find a way out of these issues of Blut und Bodeti,0. What we need to do is to unsettle the concept of identity in its very foundations by revealing, on the one hand, its constructiveness and fabrication, and on the other hand, the devastating effects that it has produced in history. At the same time it is imperative to deconstruct the very discourse of identity, its very practice.

10

Iain Chambers, referring to this very same issue, states: For deterritorialization produces both diasporic identities and a new fundamentalism, and here nothing is clear-cut or proceeds smoothly. Older formations stubbornly, often brutally, re-emerge and impose themselves on our differentiated but increasingly connected lives, forcing us to acknowledge murderous tendencies that insist on localised ethnicities, virulent nationalism and religious fundamentalism, as they seek to establish rigid identities, parochial communities and traditional imperatives. (Chambers, 1994: 110) Homi Bhabha states something similar when referring to this issue: These questions [on nationalism and tribalism] emphasize an observation that is becoming increasingly commonplace: the rise of religious 'fundamentalisms', the spread of nationalist movements, the redefinitions of claims to race and ethnicity, it is claimed, have returned us to an earlier historical movement, a resurgence or restaging of what historians have called the long nineteenth century. (1996: 59).

THF. DTSPI .ACF.MKNT OF 1.1TF.RATURF.

SI

There is one thing that we know for sure: we need some form of identity, of an anchorage. But we also know that past forms of identity must be overcome. Identity is one of those cultural and social realities that we could do without, but at the same time we cannot escape it. According to Stuart Hall, identity operates "in the interval between reversal and emergence; an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all" (1996a: 2). Whether we retain the notion of identity or not, or we propose to call it identification as Stuart Hall (1996: 2) has suggested, what is central is to introduce a new way to deal with this issue. The key lies in abandoning the essentialist constructiveness by a nomadic, always-in-process anchoring, one that is negotiated every day and it is never foreclosed. Thus, the question, Whose identity? is the wrong question, since it implies the supremacy of one identity over another. Today, in our diasporic habitat, identities enter into a dialogue, are confronted, exchanged, and, therefore, are always in the process of being 'contaminated' in relation to a given source. The question is, rather, What identity? We can respond: the identity of difference. It is here, in difference where we find the common element to all possible identities. And difference, rather than dividing and excluding, becomes the very substance that unite us". I do not believe for one moment that this has been different in the course of history, but what has changed now is the penetration of the displaced in territories where 'their' identities are perceived as threatening. The division "us" and "them" which characterizes all cultures without distinction is what needs to be addressed. There is no alternative to the questions of identity/identification: we inhabit a fractured world, multiple, that simply does not allow an essentialist habitation of identity any longer.

4.

THE AGENCY OF THE DIASPORIC

I do not have the space here to address all the writers mentioned above, but I would like to focus my attention on some of them as samples of the literature of displacement, and the displacement of literature, and how these literary practices produce a diasporic agency that alter the literary canons of many literatures and the manner in which literatures are portrayed and inscribed. I believe that the so-called national literatures, if 11

Homi Bhabha speaks of 'culture-as-difference' in an attempt similar to ours to address this new sense of identity. Bhabha states: In contemplating late-liberal culture's engagements with the migratory, partial culture of minorities, we need to shift our sense of the terrain on which we can best understand the disputes. Here our theoretical understanding — in its most general sense — of 'culture-as-difference' will enable us to grasp the articulation of culture's borderline, unhomely space and time.

(1996: 54-55)

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CUI.TITRF. AND T ITER ATI IRF.

there ever were such things, are over, and we are attending to the inscription of a new type of literary practice which introduces the diasporic literature, the literature of the margins, as the new form that literature and culture are taking. One of these diasporic writers is the Canadian/Chilean performer, Alberto Kurapel, perhaps one of the best examples of the new type of literature/culture I have been attempting to explain here. He writes in French and Spanish within the same texts, he inhabits the fracture, the fragmentation, the indenturness, and his work is always nomadic and reflects his very own personal life. In one of his performances, La bruta interférence we read: This is the place where I threw it away. It was what I loved the most, or rather what I wanted the most, or rather the only thing I loved that I still had with me.

[...] Much time has gone by, I cannot find it.

[...] I want to find what I threw away when I had to flee (Kurapel, 1995: 75). [-] I do not know if it was here where I threw it. I search here because places do not exist. (Kurapel, 1995: 84) 12 .

The fracture, the problem of the Other and that of alterity are realities which have not only penetrated the social and political field, but also the artistic, literary and cultural fields. Kurapel is, perhaps, one of the very first artists to transform the fracture produced by (political) displacement (in his case) in an artistic matter, in an artistic expression that inhabits indenturness. It is from here where the almost schizophrenic rupture of writing takes place: Spanish/French, simultaneously present a form of Pharmakon where neither term can be reduced to the other, both exist in an indivisible form, presence and absence, irreducible, revealing the brutal complexity and tragedy of Kurapel's existence, where art has become life and life has become art. There is no difference between these two realities, except for a constant deferring and sliding of meaning which can never quite capture the signifier attempting to enclose the signified. The inhabiting of these languages, as a fracture, is clearly stated in Carta de ajuste ou nous

12

My translation. The Spanish texts reads as follows: En este lugar la arrojé. Era lo que más quería; o más bien lo único amado que aún tenía conmigo. [...] Ha pasado demasiado tiempo, no la puedo encontrar. [...] ¡Quiero encontrar lo que boté cuando tuve que irme! (Kurapel, 1995: 75) [...] No sé si fue aquí donde la lancé. Aquí la busco porque los lugares no existen. (Kurapel, 1995: 84)

THF. DISPLACEMENT OF LITERATURE

22

n'avons plus de calendrier where we read: "By translating myself I am not alone any longer. I am a memory that has a future. From now on a voice becomes an echo of my voice" (1991: 56)' 3 . It is precisely this act of self-translation which attempts not-to-be-the-other, that at the very same time and in the very same gesture, echoes his voice in another language, and exposes his condition as Other. The echo marks the fracture and alterity in all its violence. The self-translation is like the Venice ponti: "Bridges join but also separate" (Winterson, 1987: 61); separation and closeness, loneliness and belonging, difference and identity. In this manner Kurapel inscribes his otherness within the acquired language, he inscribes himself in a space that it is neither this nor that, it is a space 'inbetween', a space that avoids the margin but which, at the same time, exhibits his différence in a permanent transition, in a continuous sliding, always negotiating difference and identity, belonging and separation. To speak of displacement, of nomadic cartographies, of diasporic writing, is synonymous to the work of Alberto Kurapel. In his work, both the displacement of literature and the literature of displacement take place. Carlos Fuentes' The Crystal Frontier is a text about triple displacement, about the frontier marked by the Rio Grande, the crack in the earth which separates two cultures, the Mexican and the American, but which in turn never separated its aboriginal people. Fuentes penetrates the various displacements, that of the aboriginal displaced in the first place by colonization, the modern displacement of an entire population to towns whose borders are encrusted in the Rio Grande, or separated by a chain fence that also cuts the earth open, Tijuana/San Diego. It exposes the bourgeoisie, power and corruption, all unavoidably severed and bounded by the frontier, by a crystal frontier, a mirror that reflects and rejects at the same time. Michelina, the main character in "A Capital Girl", one of the nine stories of the Crystal Frontier, experiences this frontier when arriving for the first time to the desert: She tried to find a city somewhere in that panorama of desert, bald mountains, and swirling dust. She could see nothing. Her gaze was captured by a mirage: the distant river and, beyond it, golden domes, glass towers, highway cloverleafs like huge stone bows. But that was on the other side of the crystal frontier. Over here, below — the guidebook was right — there was nothing. (Fuentes, 1997: 4)

The displaced Mexican, displaced in their own country from their regions to the border regions, then displaced inside that border, inside the Crystal Frontier, subdued, indentured, humiliated, the Latino, 'dark and greasy' has no means to strike back, to make his presence felt, to be considered as a human being and not as an inferior ethnic in a highly racist and power driven society such as the United States of America. The inhabitant of the crystal frontier does not have many choices, except to penetrate their

13

"Al traducirme ya no estoy solo. Soy una memoria que tiene futuro. De ahora en adelante una voz se hace el eco de mi voz" (Kurapel, 1991: 56).

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NF.W TNTF.RSECTIONS: F.SSAYS O N CTII.TURF, A N D I.ITF.RATURF.

food, 'Tex-Mex', and their language into everyday life. The fact is that almost half of the United States of America is de facto bilingual. Spanish is the 'other language', the othering of Spanish has only entrenched the bilingual, the de facto 'invasion' of the other's language, and their actual, quite despicable, 'non-white' physical presence cannot be avoided. They strike with the most powerful tool at their disposal, the Spanish language: Our minimal revenge is to give Spanish names to the gringo funnies. Jiggs and Maggie become Pancho and Ramona, Mutt and Jeff metamorphose into Benitin and Eneas, G o o f y is Treblin, Minnie Mouse becomes Ratoncita M i m i , Donald Duck is Pato Pascual, and Dagwood and Blondie are Lorenzo and Pepita. (Fuentes, 1997: 61)

The penetration of language is the ultimate penetration since it is the language of the displaced, the indentured, that 'invades' the new culture, and this is exactly what happens with the whole of culture: foods, literature, clothing, cafés, meetings, and gatherings of all sorts. The sense of displacement can only be thought by the warmth of the 'origin', the memory of culture, of childhood, of the soil, of the earth, of the water, of the sun after the rain, of the fresh baked bread steaming with butter and eggs, of the green tea of boldo, of the air of the sea salt. Marked by displacement, Dionsio, a star Chef in the U S A , after having had his own cooking shows on television and having been consumed by the system, treated himself as merchandise and decided to 'return' to Mexico, to the entrails and the bowels of the Aztec: Heading toward Mexico with nothing gringo, exclaimed Dionisio, tossing all the accumulated objects into the air, onto the earth, into the burning, sun, until the Mustang exploded in the distance, leaving a cloud as bloody as a mushroom of flesh. Everything, get rid of everything, Dionisio said to his companion. Get rid of your clothing, just as I ' m doing, scatter everything in the desert — we're going back to Mexico, we're not bringing a single gringo thing with us, not a single one, my brother, my double. We're returning to the fatherland naked. Can you see the border. Open your eyes wide — do you see, do you feel, do you smell, can you taste? (Fuentes, 1997: 87)

Displacement creates a sense of an unending differing of identity. The crystal frontier blurs identity, identity in this context cannot be negotiated as a reflexive possibility, as a construction that must be deconstructed and obliterated in its old form and practice. The type of displacement that the Mexican experiences, whether on the south or the north bank of the Rio Grande, or on this or that side of the crystal frontier, is always lived as a challenged identity, as an inhabited fracture. In "The Line of Oblivion", which deals with the rejection of the originary identity and the collision with the new territory, the fractured character says: Death is already my country. What country? What memory? What blood? The dark earth and the world that dawns commingle in my soul to formulate these questions,

THE DISPLACEMENT OF LITERATURE

1ÜL

mix them, solder them to my most intimate being. To what I am, to what my parents were or what my children will be. (Fuentes, 1997: 111] [...] I want to be. My God, I want to Be. Who will I be? Like a stream their names enter my gaze, my eyes, my tongue, crossing all the borders of the world, breaking the crystal that separates them. (Fuentes, 1997: 111-112)

The blurring of identity constitutes the devastation of the origin, the ambiguity of the border. What to be, or not to be, is somehow the question: names that do not name anything, except the void. This passage eloquently reveals the new human condition, the condition resulting from displacement, from the centuries of colonisation and devastation, the condition created by globalisation and, therefore, diasporisation. The new condition in all its ambivalence vacillates between choices, assuming the crystal frontier or rejecting it. Fuentes' The Crystal Frontier constitutes one of the most eloquent cases of border literature, and of the displaced. Fuentes also takes on a reality which plays itself out, day in and day out at the border between Mexico and the USA. Fuentes exposes the displaced Mexicans who are forced to leave their small villages in order to seek employment and feed their families. However, they are either apprehended as soon as they reach the border, or caught at the place of work. They are displaced from one place to another, as a football. Fuentes reflects on the ravaging effects of the systems that instituted borders and devastated millions of people. En "Rio Grande, Rio Bravo", we read: [...] this was never the land without men: for thirty thousand years the people have been following the course of the río grande, río bravo, they cross the straits from Asia, they descend from the north, migrate south, seek new hunting grounds, in the process really discover America, feel the attraction and hostility of the new world, don't rest until they explore it all and find out if it's friendly or unfriendly, until they reach the other pole, land that has a placenta of copper, land that will have the name of silver, lands of the hugest migration known to man, from Alaska to Patagonia, lands baptized by migration: accompanied, America, by flights and images, metaphors and metamorphosis that make the going bearable, that save the peoples from fatigue, discouragement, distance, time, the centuries necessary to travel America from pole to pole. (Fuentes, 1997: 222)

Michael Ondaatje's fiction is the type of literature which one may refer to as the displacement of literature in the sense that, although considered a 'Canadian writer', he is not viewed as a writer conforming to the so-called 'Canadian canon', a highly narrow and parochial notion in my view, particularly when some of the most interesting, vigorous and penetrating literature is currently being written by diasporic writers such as Ricci (1990), Mistry (1995), Selvadurai 1994), Mootoo (1996), Lau (1993,1994,1999), etc. Ondaatje's literature, as that of many other 'diasporic Canadian writers', inscribes a literature that speaks of far away lands, of a very diverse culture, making that culture

mi

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

part of the new culture, part of the very fibre which is determining and shaping current Canadian literature and culture. In Running in the Family, Ondaatje attempts to trace the past, from Toronto back to Sri Lanka, to his early youth; attempts to establish the link between the present (Toronto, the new culture) and the past (Sri Lanka, the past, the memory). It is a journey back, but going back not to 'recover' what cannot be recovered, but rather to connect that what is gone, but still forms part of the present cultural substratum, with a new articulation of culture, accepting that we are divided, and this is a permanent condition. Running in the Family uses a narrative technique similar to that of Coming Through Slaughter, that is, allowing the 'story' to develop from fragments of memories, scattered shards lost in time and space: In my mid-thirties I realised I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood. [...] Asia. The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be whispered, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled. It had none of the clipped sound of Europe, America, Canada. The vowels took over, slept on the map with the S. I was running to Asia and everything would change. It began with that moment when I was dancing and laughing wildly within the comfort and order of my life. Beside the fridge I tried to communicate some of the fragments I knew about my father, my grandmother. (Ondaatje, 1982: 16)

'By running to Asia' — Asia as a Western invention, but real in terms of the lives of their inhabitants, inhabitants of an immense diversity — Ondaatje will find that missing link between childhood and adulthood, once thought forgotten. But the quest goes deep into the past and the memory of that past will bring back the here/there in an even more powerful manner. The many 'fragments' of Ondaatje's story are scattered, flashbacks that knit the story and gradually provide us with a territory that takes shape in front of our very eyes. At the end all we have from the past, and the former 'identity', is a vague memory reinforced by the story being told, by writing: "You must get this book right," my brother tells me, "You can only write it once." But the book again is incomplete. In the end all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. Whatever brought you solace we would have applauded. Whatever controlled the fear we all share we would have embraced. That could only be dealt with one day at a time — with that song we cannot translate, or the dusty green of the cactus you touch and turn carefully like a wounded child towards the sun, or the cigarettes you light. (Ondaatje, 1982: 172)

In Anil's Ghost, Ondaatje descends to the very sources of displacement: genocide, torture, political and military brutality. Anil, a Sri Lankan-born, Western-educated forensic anthropologist 'returns home' to unveil and document political murderers. Sent by an in-

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ternational human-rights organization, she uncovers the systematic crimes committed by the government, but she also learns of the crimes committed by the insurgents: the lines of good and evil, of right and wrong get blurred, confused. She is also a displaced, first England, then the United Studies and dozen of places where she uncovers dead bodies in order to bring proof of political assassinations. Surprisingly, she also rediscovers her past: "Suddenly Anil was glad to be back, the buried senses from childhood alive in her" (Ondaatje, 2000: 15). Thus, Ondaatje inserts his tragedy, the tragedy of his people into the Canadian texture, making it a shared history and not a 'foreign' one. As I said at the beginning, displacement has many shapes and faces, and one of them is the form of displacement portrayed by Nicole Brossard in Mauve Dessert, a highly complex text which addresses the past (the atom bomb) and the present (a lesbian community). Brossard's Mauve Desert (1990), could barely be considered as being part of the Québécois canon. Mauve Desert is a story about many things: it is about a lesbian community in the middle of the Arizona desert; it is about the logos of the West; Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb; it is about a young girl, Mélanie discovering her lesbian sexuality; it is most of all about writing, postmodern writing, about intertextuality, translation, the process of reading and writing; it is a highly dialogic text in the Bakhtinian sense, with a characteristic postmodern nomadic subject and structure; it is, finally palimpsestic writing which brings her text to dialogue with previous history, to the destruction brought about by rationality, man and their war machines. The internal displacement of this group of women seeks to shelter them by constructing a self-contained world, quite autonomous from the so-called "real" world, and they manufacture their reality. In fact, writing and its metatextuality are central to any of these texts: In the metatext of Mauve Desert, we read: Reality is what we recapture by an incalculable return of imagined things, like a familiar sense very distinctly set out in our lives. But to all of this there must be, we think, another sense, another version since we dream of it as we do of a musical accompaniment, a centered voice capable of securing for us a passage, a little opening. (Brossard, 1990: 143)

And this text is, precisely, 'versions' of realities that have absolutely nothing to do with Québec, but everything to do with the postmodern condition, with displacement, with the construction of reality, with the questioning of our own constructions and their consequences. Many other writers also speak of a variety of displacements, whether it is Shyam Salvaduri in Funny Boy, Evelyn Lau in Choose Me, or Fresh Girls, or Runaway, or Diary of a Street Kid, Rohinton Mistry in A Fine Balance, or any of the performances of Alberto Kurapel. When we look at literature and culture from the perspective of displacement we quickly realise that displacement is present in almost every piece of literature, that our contemporary habitation is nothing but a result of multiple forms of displacements and this is what currently unites us, this is the fundamental bond that binds us together as a species, as a global community.

1M.

5.

NEW INTERS F.CTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

THE REPETITION OF THE PAST

Displacement is the result and the product of a fossilised ideology, of a fanatic form of ethnic and/or religious and social fundamentalism and essentialism. During the course of the Twentieth Century, after every genocide that took place, the global community said "never again". This was stated after the deployment of gas that killed thousands in the First War World, which left Western Europe wondering about what happened to their 'Humanism', to their 'civilisation', to their 'sophisticated culture'. The same was said after the Holocaust, after Rwanda, after Bosnia-Herzegovina, after Kosovo, and the list goes on, and on and on, and we keep repeating the same atrocities time and time again and we seem unable to break the back of these cycles of mass murders, of genocide and human misery. The question that continues to haunt us is how to avoid this devastating repetition of the past, the binarism that has, for centuries, divided us and has obliterated any possibility of civilised community inhabitation. I am more convinced than ever before that as long as we do not radically challenge and question the way we think and the way we relate to each other, as long as we do not do away with the notion of identity, nation and ethnicity, and with totalitarian and dogmatic religious positions, we will be condemned to repeat the worst of the past, the horrendous murderous behaviour we are capable of. The challenge is indeed daunting, but it is imperative that we overcome the past since we will not repeat it as farce, according to the famous Marxist dictum, but as murderers. When the genocide of Kosovo took place (which was much exaggerated and overblown by the media and the American Government Pentagon spokespersons, although it was no less dramatic for this reason), I felt that there was a unique historical opportunity that could mark the beginning of something new, a new beginning that could once and for all change the path of revenge and retribution. When the Kosovars began returning, I hoped that they would not do to the Serbian population what that population had done to them. My hopes were not realised, pillage, murders, and assassination took place. I often wondered what would have happened if, instead, the Kosovars had given a rose to the Serbians? I stated this, perhaps naive thought, in a lecture in Argentina in June, 2000, and I was accused of being an idealist. If the choice is between hoping for change and mass murder, displacement and discrimination, I know what my choice is, beyond any label.

6.

CONCLUSION

There is no question that something has radically changed, and it has forever altered the way we live. We often speak about the global society, but this is no longer just talk: we are a global society. Massive displacements of peoples from all over the world have unsettled the notion of identity, nation and citizenship. We cannot continue to speak about nations as we have in the past. Countries no longer 'belong' to their first inhab-

THF. DISPLACEMENT OF I .ITER ATI IRF.

m

itants, or to their first settlers, but also to all of those who have come after and have made substantial contributions, and to all of those who were there before the settlers arrived. To believe that Europe 'belongs to the Europeans' or that Canada belongs to the 'Canadians' is indeed a very strange thought. In the year 2010, 51% of Canada's population will be non-English, and non-French. This is why it is particularly troublesome when we hear that Europeans want to remain Europeans and that Quebecois want to be a majority in their own right or some entrenched English bastions speak about losing 'their traditions' due to the invasion of the other, of the diasporic. Europeans seem to have a short and very selective memory: they devastated, pillaged and murdered entire populations all over the planet during the last five hundred years, and now they do not wish to be 'invaded' by the very people that they colonised, murdered and devastated until very recently. It is also highly ironic that Canada, a country built by immigrants will speak about 'pure laine' Quebecois or about 'our English traditions' when the very same country has been 'officially' declared multicultural, and, at the very same time, those 'original' populations are becoming a minority. Furthermore, one must bring into the equation the aboriginal peoples of Canada whose world was brutalised, who were divested of their identity, their cultures shattered, their livelihood destroyed, raped and murdered in the name of European civilisation, 'humanism', culture and science. What a travesty all of this is. These are the same people who today preach about democracy and human rights after having wiped out entire populations, millions of human beings murdered for the sake of European expansion and domination. Faced with this sad state of affairs, we have only one course of action: radically change the manner in which we have conducted ourselves over the centuries, or be condemned to keep repeating the past.

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BORGES AND RULFO: THE PARADIGMS OF MODERNITY AND POST-MODERNITY

The denial of time involves two negations: the negation of the succession of the terms of a series, negation of the synchronism of the terms in two different series. In fact, if each term is absolute, its relations are reduced to the consciousness that those relations exist. A state precedes another if it is known to be prior; a state of G is contemporary to a state of H if it is known to be contemporary [...] each fraction of time does not simultaneously fill the whole of space; time is not ubiquitous. Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time", Labyrinths.

1.

PREAMBLE

Post-Modern Historiography radically questions the linearity and the very method of Modern historiography, since its manner of historicizing does not account for actual paradigm formation and articulation in time and space. One of the best examples Western culture may provide in support of the theory of fragmentation (non-linearity), the fracta of culture, is the writing of Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina) and Juan Rulfo (Mexico). Regarding Rulfo, most of the theoretical studies done on his work underline his place as the 'founder' of Latin American narrative Modernity towards the beginning of the 1950s. However, few years before, by 1941 Borges publishes his Ficciones (1941/1944) and with it brings to an end Western Modern narrative by introducing the Post-Modern paradigm, as has been pointed out by Foucault, Eco, Derrida, and Baudrillard and theorized by many other Western Scholars (A. De Toro, 1992, 1994, 1994a, 1995, 1996, 1999, 1999a; Alazraki, 1988a). That is, at the very same time that Modernity is being launched in Latin America, it is also being concluded by the introduction of the Post of Modernity. How can one explain the collusion of these two very different paradigms, of diametrically opposed epistemologies? Perhaps the answer to these questions my be provided when we pay attention to what was taking place in the field of sciences, particularly theoretical physics (Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg). This is the very objective of our inquiry: to trace the connection of Borges' and Rulfo's work to the Modern paradigm with respect to theoretical physics in the case of Borges; and to painting (Picasso, Braque, etc.), music (Stravinsky, Schonberg), and literature (Joyce, Proust) in the case of Rulfo.

1M. 2.

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CUT .TURF. AND I .TTF.R ATI TRF,

RULFO AND THE END OF MODERNITY

Rulfo is one of the most researched authors in Latin America, however his two seminal works, Pedro Páramo (1953) and El llano en llamas (1955), have not been thought out as literary constructions which inscribe a radical contradiction, and indeed a literary revolution, at the very moment of their generation: that is, to think Rulfo's work from an epistemological perspective, as Gestalt, as a form of telos: end and also beginning. Rulfo's work constitutes precisely that: end and beginning in one and the same movement that raises and cancels itself. El llano en llamas constitutes the very metaphor of Rulfo's writing: origin and end, beginning and closure: self-consumption. Rulfo's work emerges when Western Modernity had concluded at least twenty-five years before (if not earlier), and this is, in my opinion, the central reason why his work is beginning and end at once'. Furthermore, to think Rulfo's work entails to think Latin American and Modernity in terms of Jarry, Picasso, Planck, Einstein, Freud, Breton, Joyce or Proust. However, if we think in terms of the poetry production, then we find Darío at the beginning of Modernity followed by the introduction of a long standing paradigm: César Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz 2 . Once Pedro Páramo is published, everything was said: Modern narrative/writing had begun and ended in one gest, leaving two possibilities: the repetition of the paradigm (normal science) or radical change, a new writing, a new paradigm. Regarding this juncture, Gianni Vattimo has stated that: Modernity is defined as the overcoming and of the new which rapidly grows old and is immediately replaced by something still newer, in an unstoppable movement that discourages all creativity even as it demands creativity and defines the latter as the sole possible form of life. If this indeed is the case, as Nietzsche claims, then no way out of modernity can possibly be found in terms of an overcoming of it. His recourse to eternalizing forces signals this need to find another way to resolve the problem. In his 1874 essay Nietzsche already very clearly sees that overcoming is a typically modern

1

From our perspective, Western Modernity starts at the end of the Nineteenth Century, perhaps with Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry in 1886, and ends towards 1925 in what some have called 'High Modernity'. From this date until the 1950s what constituted the experimental 'vanguard' becomes 'formal science' (Kuhn, 1970), that is, the very extension and development of aesthetic, literary and artistic Modernity. Shortly after the Second World War, Modernity ends and it inscribes itself in one of the most salient representatives of Late Modernity: Samuel Beckett.

2

I believe that Vicente Huidobro is perhaps the most salient expression of Latin American Modernity, as it is inscribed in his manifests on poetry in 1914 and in his very lucid awareness that a new aesthetic paradigm was emerging in the West and in Latin America. His long and challenging poem Altazor (1931) becomes the signature of Modernity. Thus, it is Huidobro who placed Latin American poetic production at the very centre of Western Modernity, and Rulfo almost thirty years later introduces narrative Modernity.

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category, and therefore will not enable us to use it as a way out of modernity. Modernity is not only constituted by the category of temporal overcoming (the inevitable succession of historical phenomena of which modern man becomes aware because of an excess of historiography), but also by the category of critical overcoming. (1988: 166)

This passage from Vattimo brings up one of our central theses: the Ruffian 'silence'/closure originates in his awareness of the impossibility to overcome (Heidegger's Überwindung) the current modern narrative paradigm. The best proof of this impossibility is offered by Borges' writing.

3.

BORGES AND THE END OF POST-MODERNITY

Pedro Páramo/El llano en llamas introduce narrative Modernity when this aesthetic practice had concluded at least twenty years before: as we indicated above, these texts open and close the modern narrative paradigm. Borges does something similar, but from an exactly different temporal site: Ficciones introduces Post-Modernity and closes it at the same time. After Ficciones, Borges himself states that writing is circular and that he only writes notes on what has been written. In fact, most of the metafictional comments found disseminated throughout his work address the double question of closure/re-writing. Borges, from the very beginning of his writing, was fully aware of the changes his writing was introducing. For instance, in "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote", he says: Menard (perhaps without wishing to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions. This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid, and to read Le jardín du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. (Borges, 1962: 54-55)

In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" Borges states something similar: Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel. (Borges, 1962: 17) The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary. [...] I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books. (Borges, 1962: 15-16)

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NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND I .ITF.RATI IRF,

Borges did not even contemplate dealing with Modernity: he simply ignored it, avoided it by writing notes on books already written, including those of Modernity. Thus Borges confronted the very same impossibility of overcoming Modernity as Rulfo did. The central difference between the two resides in that Rulfo confronted it only to impose closure, whereas Borges began as "new technique", a new paradigm, and introduced the Post-Modern cultural paradigm. Borges then, found a way to overcome Modernity, and does it by introducing a minimalist writing, always rhizomatic and palimpsestic. Rulfo's writing ends where Borges writing begins, in fact it ends almost twenty years after the famous publication of Ficciones in 1941/1944. This anachronic fact is most revealing: on the one hand, we have Rulfo introducing narrative modernism in the continent towards the beginning of the 1950s and at the same time Borges introduces Post-Modernity by the beginning of the 1940s. These two very different writing practices intersect where one closes up and the other opens up a paradigm. We believe that both Rulfo and Borges were not adequately understood when their writings first emerged (and in the case of Borges, we had to wait until the late 1970s to start to really understand his writing). For instance, when El llano en llamas and Pedro Páramo were published, one of the most prominent Latin American writers and critics of the moment, Mario Benedetti, said: Among the new Mexican writers, Juan Rulfo (born in 1918) has evidently searched for a new treatment of criollismo. His handling of the short story in El llano en llamas (1953) and in his novel Pedro Páramo (1955), place him between the most ambitious and balanced narrators of Latin America. Beyond his regional mannerisms, of direct and penetrating anecdote, emerges the almost obsessive objective to develop a detailed construction where very little is left to chance. (My translation, 1988: 123)

Thus for Benedetti, "the new treatment", that is Vattimo's overcoming (Überwindung), is the "criollismo"! This gross misreading of Rulfo's work contrasts with that of Borges, where he was considered a Western, 'fantastic' writer by his Latin American counterparts, and a 'realist' writer by his European counterparts. Today, when we reflect on the criticism received by these two writers, one cannot help but wonder, not without certain amazement, about these pronouncements by the prominent Latin American intelligencia. The fact is that Rulfo and Borges were read out-of-context: the former outside Modernity, the later outside the Post. Their writing took place out-side of these two aesthetic paradigms of the Twentieth Century. Rulfo writes after the fact, and Borges before the fact. The linearity of history, and of literary history, is clearly tested and placed under erasure. There is no linearity, but literary practices that enter the cultural field at any juncture, disregarding any chronology or logicity in its constructions. To say about Rulfo, that he is the writer who finds the solution to the "peasant topic" in Latin America (Benedetti, 1988: 130) or that Borges is a realist or a fantastic writer, is not simply a mw-reading, but a deformation of cultural facts.

BORGES AND RULFO

4.

LU

RULFO AND BORGES "IN-BETWEEN"

There is no question that Borges was writing, if not against the canon, at least parallel to it. In order to accomplish his deconstructive task he creates a minimal literature, a literature that can also be defined as minor with the meaning that this term has received from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to deal with Kafka's work. We are proposing that Borges' work is indeed minor, and so is that of Rulfo, although only partially. First of all, let us make some notions clear: "minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs with a major language" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 16). This is one of several characteristics elucidated by Deleuze and Guattari, and the most important, for our purposes, because of its relation to the master narratives (Lyotard, 1979: 31). As Réda Bensmaïa states in the "Foreword" to Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The concept of minor literature permits a reversal: instead of Kafka's work being related to some pre-existent category or literary genre, it will henceforth serve as a rallying point or model for certain texts and "bi-lingual" writing practices that, until now, had to pass through a long purgatory before even being read, much less recognized. (1986: xiv).

Thus Borges could not be associated with the major Master Narratives (Joyce, Proust, Musil, etc.): he inscribed a new manner of writing (and for that matter, of reading in the sense of Rodriguez Monegal, [1972]) unprecedented both in Europe and Latin America. This is one of the central causes underpinning the mis-reading of Borges' work. Furthermore, as we pointed out earlier, this minor literature (which some years later was to become major literature), performs its inscription through miniminality, that is, traces of forms realised as Gestalt, fragments of a story to be, a trace of something that it was. These are the minimal (notes of books, notes on notes) manifestation which deterritorializes the narrative and language by arresting it from the master narratives. Borges narrative had no precedents and his writing is devoid of referent. Although Rulfo writes within the Modern narrative paradigm, his writing moves away from this paradigm and approaches Borges' writing at least in one central aspect: Rulfo's writing is also minimal, and it does not engage in "The composition of vast books [which] is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in few minutes" (1962: 15). Borges' minor literature deterritorializes both Western Modernity and Latin American "criollismo", and reterritorialises a territory not yet charted by an already there in Borges' writing. Rulfo, on the other hand, reterritorialises Modernity only to desterritorialise it. The minoriticity of these writers resides not so much in a language which they transform, but in the deterritorialisation of a major literature. I believe that the fascination that both readers and critics have expressed for Borges' and Rulfo's literature is due to the fascination with the minor. As Deleuze and Guattari said, "There

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is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor. To hate all languages of masters" ( 1986: 26). But how can one explain the a-chronicity of these two writers. That is, their position in an in-between space: between paradigms, one at the outset of a new one, the other at the end of another, and both dislocated in time/space. This in-between space radically questions binary notions such as before/after, periphery/centre, and any notion of historical linearity as we said earlier. The temporal, spatial, and literary convergence of these two writers can only be elucidated if History is constructed rhizomatically, that is, as a punctual historisation of events before they become facts. Facts are a result of events only after the event has been filtered, that is, after a reading, after an interpretation. Linearity, then, ceases to order the events as facts, letting the facts find their own way. It is in the situatedness of their own historical situation where the answer lies.

5.

RULFO AND BORGES AND THE QUESTIONS OF PARADIGMS 3

The question of the paradigm closure/formation and the simultaneity of two paradigms can be, at least partially, explained by Thomas Kuhn's notion of paradigm and the recognition of the possibility of simultaneity. Kuhn states, when referring to various Schools and paradigms, that "Each of the schools whose competition characterizes the earlier period is guided by something much like a paradigm; there are circumstances, though I think them rare, under which two paradigms can coexist peacefully in the later period" (1970: ix). This simultaneity within the Modern paradigm produces very different paradigmatic relations: Borges connects to the Physics and physicists of his time whereas Rulfo links up with the artistic field. My argument is as follows: by the beginning of the Twentieth Century, science, particularly physics, was already Post-Modern. Relativity law, quantum theory, subatomic research, fracticity and incertitude became part and parcel of the cultural and scientific field since Einstein. The here/there, the Derridian pharmakon, poison/medicine, the hymen that is not inside/outside, terms which are placed at the very center of Post-Modernity, have their origin in quantum theory, where atomic phenomenon is discontinuous. The undecidable was here to stay. In 1905 Einstein introduces the theory of relativity and with it the theory of the photoelectric effect which came to dismantle the wave theory of light. The question that Einstein was wrestling with was as follows: how could light at the same time be both wave and particle and therefore produce the wave effect? The uncertainty principle originates here. So what was revealed years later (1926) by Max Born's and Werner Heisenberg's work was the following:

3

We follow here the paradigm notion as defined by Thomas Kuhn: "[Paradigms] These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners" (1970: viii).

BORGES AND R1JI.FO

Ili

It was hard to see why, after one once knew precisely the position and velocity of a particle, its future could not be determined exactly due to the disturbance of an object by the act of observing it. (March, 1978: 217) [...] Thinking in this vein, he had the key insight into the origins of the indeterminacy at the atomic level. He saw that this indeterminacy was indeed the result of ignorance, not merely a practical ignorance, but one of an inherent and unavoidable kind. Its source was the disturbance of an object by the act of observing it. In quantitative terms, this is expressed in the statement that one cannot simultaneously measure the position and momentum of an object to any desired accuracy, No matter how good the instruments used or how careful the procedures, there had to be an irreducible error in at least one of the measurements. The quantitative statement of this rule is known as the uncertainty principle. (March, 1978: 217) Borges and his writing are part and parcel of the "disturbance of the object" and the uncertainty principle. Viewed in this light, he is contemporaneous to the physicists, but not to the artistic world of his time. This is why he was not inclined to follow the Modernist paradigm. A s Thomas Kuhn has observed, those who cannot incorporate the new paradigm to their work, "must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group" (1970: 19). Borges opted for isolation and rejected normal science as an operative form 4 . However, the decision to reject an existing paradigm automatically implies the introduction or adoption of a new paradigm. The necessity of a new paradigm is determined, in Borges' case, by the exhaustion of the previous paradigm and his own awareness that a new form of writing was needed to replace the "vast and laborious books" of modernity. In this sense Borges was contemporaneous to the sciences of his time, but not to the cultural paradigm, that of Modernity. C. Ulises Moulines, discussing the text by Borges, "A N e w Refutation of time" (1999: 317-332), states: While writing this I am ignoring to what extent Borges was aware of the theory of spatial relativity; yet it is clear that the temporal structure which he proposes — time which is "ramified", or in "parallel chains", and in which it is generally impossible to determine a relation of simultaneity among occurrences — is practically the same as that which the theory postulates. (Moulines, 1999: 1171-172)

4

According to Kuhn: The success of the paradigm [...] is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm display as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm. (1970: 23-24)

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Rulfo, in turn, was not contemporaneous to Modernity, but he continued to practice normal science, only to dislodge it from his own practice. Thus he and Borges meet at the very cross-roads of a deconstructive activity as it were, an activity that places Rulfo firmly within Modernity, albeit a concluded one, and Borges at least twenty years before the paradigm of Post-Modernity was to enter the cultural field. I would like to end with a quotation from "The Garden of Forking Paths": The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts'ui PLn conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries — embraces every possibility. (Borges, 1962a: 100)

Ill

BORGES, DERRIDA AND WRITING

[...] it is not a question of embroidering upon a text, unless one considers that to know how to embroider still means to have the ability to follow the given thread. That is, if you follow me, the hidden thread. If reading and writing are one, as is easily thought these days, if reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated (con)fusion nor identity at perfect rest; the is that couples reading with writing must rip apart. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. With famous books, the first time is actually the second, for we begin them already knowing them. The prudent common phrase "reading the classics" is the result of an unwitting truth. [...] the Odyssey, thanks to my opportune ignorance of Greek, is an international bookstore of words in prose and in verse, from Chapman's couplets to Andrew Lang's "Authorized Version" or Bedard's classic French drama or Morris' vigorous saga or Butler's ironic bourgeois novel. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Homeric Versions".

1.

BORGES BEFORE THE POST

Today, when we look back and reflect on the criticism that Borges received, at least until the end of the 1970s, it is easy to attest that most of it was practiced out-of-context, that is outside the Post. This Post, which has been so much debated, vilified, defended, and denied, is both the Post that Borges inscribed in the late 1930s and that which inscribed Borges in the late 1970s. Whatever position one chooses to assume, the fact remains that Borges' literary practice could not be read until the reading codes changed, until the epistimological field entered an unprecedented re-thinking and the very logos of the West was confronted1. It is for this very reason that Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and others have been particularly attracted to Borges. In 1966, in the Preface to The Order of Things (1994), Michel Foucault starts

1

I do not wish to suggest that all the valuable criticism carried out before the end of the 1970s it is not valid. In fact, these scholars could only read according to the epistemologica! grounding and critical practices contemporaneous to them. I am arguing, however, that although Borges was read "within" the Modern paradigm, he did not "fit" either the canonical Modernism (Europe) or the vernacular "realism" (Argentina) of the late 1930s onwards.

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with Borges' taxonomy in "The Analytic Language of John Wilkins"; two years later, Derrida begins his "Plato's Pharmacy" (1981) with two quotations on writing 2 from Borges' "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal", and from the famous "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Again in 1981, Baudrillard starts Simulations (1983) with another well-known text by Borges: "On Exactitude in Science". These three authors quote Borges for radically different reasons: Foucault because of "naming", Derrida because of writing, and Baudrillard because of simulation and hyperreality. There is, however, something in Borges' texts that not only weds these authors in particular, but also embodies PostModern, Post-Theoretical, and de-constructionist thinking in general. From the late 1970s onwards there has been a new wave of Borgesian studies from this Post-Modernist/Post-Structuralist/Deconstructionist perspective. (De Toro, A., 1992,1994,1994a, 1995,1999,1999a, 1999c, 1999d). Perhaps one of the scholars who best personifies this change is Jaime Alazraki who has worked on Borges from the Modernist perspective and later from the Post-Modernist paradigm. (Alazraki [1967, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1977, 1988, 1988a]). The intent of this paper is to continue thinking and inquiring about Borges both with respect to Post-Modernism as it has been developed by Jaime Alazraki as well as by Alfonso de Toro, and deconstruction as it has been dealt with in the brilliant articles by Roberto González Echeverría (1983) and Emir Rodriguez Monegal (1972), which pertain specifically to Derrida and the questions of reading/writing 3 . At the same time, it is not my aim to simply re-confirm the well known fact that Borges was a PostModernist and a deconstructionist avant la lettre and that most of the issues discussed since at least the end of the 1960s were already clearly introduced by Borges with the utmost transparency, as Alfonso de Toro has shown. My aim is, rather, to compare and contrast the surprising proximity of thought between Borges and Derrida, particularly in terms of writing, reading and the instability of the signifier with respect to the signified.

2.

RE-READING/RE-WRITING

Perhaps the most important change which has taken place in the theory of literature and literary criticism from the late 1970s to the present is hermeneutic activity: specifically, reading as a form of inquiry, a form drastically rejected by structuralist logocentrism, a form which has become a pivotal and dominant practice.

2

I will be italicising writing every time I use it in the Derridian sense.

3

There is another article about Derrida and Borges by Rodriguez Monegal (1979). A very substantial portion of this excellent article, however, deals with Derrida's notion of writing. Only a brief section is devoted to Borges and this is done, instead, from a structuralist perspective.

BOROF.S. DF.RRTDA AND WRITTNC,

111

To this new hermeneutics, deconstruction, feminism, Post-Colonialism, and now Post-Theory have made major contributions and, at the same time, have radically altered theoretical practices. This activity, based on the epistemological grounding of PostModemity, has brought about a new form of writing, a new conception of literature, and indeed, a new relationship with the past and past literatures. That is why intertextuality became the raw material for the artists of the second half of the Twentieth Century. However, Borges was the very first to realize with absolute clarity that the Modernist paradigm, which for all intents and purposes was dead by the end of the 1920s, had in fact concluded. There was a new ideation of arts, literature, and culture in general in the workings and he, Borges, was placed at its very inception. References to this awareness can be found in almost all of Borges works. The meta-fictional components of his works, in fact, always refer to this change/awareness. In the following metafictional passage of "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote", we read: Menard (perhaps without wishing to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions. This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid, and to read Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. (1962: 54-55).

This new technique is reading as writing, a very Borgesian aesthetic practice and a theme that travels through all his work: reading, re-writing, palimpsest, rhizome, simulation, intertextuality. It is of the utmost importance to emphasize that Borges does not say that this "new technique" has enriched the art of writing, but rather the art of reading. It is this very same theme that Derrida will make central to both Dissemination (1981) and Of Grammatology (1974). When Derrida refers to this change, a change that Borges had already seized thirty years before, he does it in much the same terms as the latter: [...] beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space. If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently. (1974: 86-87).

In connection to reading, Derrida, in Of Grammatology, speaks of the trace as the already there, as differance which allows the generation of meaning. The trace is intimately connected to the notion of arche-writing,4 as that which precedes any form of graphie and also any form of presence or phonocentrism. In fact, what Derrida expos-

4

Derrida claims that: "The arche-writing would be at work not only in the form and substance of graphic expression but also in those of nongraphic expressions" (1974: 60).

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es, not only in Of Grammatology but also in Dissemination, is that writing precedes speech, and that language does not exist: only writing exists 5 . Thus, the Saussurian binarism of langue/parole is deconstructed, and with it, the signifierIsignified binarism. The unsettling o f this binarism has lasting consequences since the very structure of the Sign {signifier!signified) is put into question. Derrida stresses: [...] that the signified is originarily and essentially (and not only for a finite created spirit) trace, that is, is always already in the position of the signifier, is the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon writing as its death and its resource. (1974: 73) 6 Writing is that which cannot be defined. It is not an exterior, it has no origin and always precedes speech 7 . This is why, for Derrida, the colloquial use of "writing" has nothing to do with his notion of writing, since the latter is always related to graphie, whereas the former it is not welded to any form of "plenitude expression" (1974: 6263): reading, writing, arche-writing, differance, trace, b e c o m e synonymous terms. For Borges, as w e indicated above, reading is also writing and in fact is first and foremost writing. In "Kafka and His Precursors", he provides us with an excellent example of writing as trace, arche-writing-. I once premeditated making a study of Kafka's precursors. At first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoneix of rhetorical praise; after frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods. I shall record a few of these here, in chronological order. (1964: 199)

5

In Of Grammatology

he indicates that:

[...] writing is not just the idea of a system to be invented, an hypothetical characteristic or a future possibility. I think on the contrary that oral language already belongs to this writing. But that presupposes a modification of the concept of writing that we for the moment merely anticipate. (1974: 55) I would rather wish to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the "original," "natural," etc. language had never existed, was never intact, had been untouched by writing, and that it had itself always been a writing. (1974: 56) 6

For Derrida "The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is the differance which opens appearance and signification" (1974: 65).

7

This is made clear in Borges' "The Immortal": "At first, I thought it was some kind of primitive writing; then I saw it was absurd to imagine that men who have not attained to the spoken word could attain to writing" (1964: 111).

BOROBS. DF.RRIDA AND WRITING

m.

What Borges recognises is precisely the trace, the arche-writing, since what he identifies from Kafka is his "voice", his "habits" in literatures of the past; it is not the past recognized in the present (Kafka) but the present recognised in the past. The basic Borgesian position is that everything has already been written and said, therefore the only option a writer has is to "write notes, upon imaginary books" (1962: 17) since "[...] the composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes!" (1962: 15). Derrida expresses this very same theme by asserting that: [...] if the trace refers to an absolute past, it is because it obliges us to think a past that can no longer be understood in the form of a modified presence, as a present-past. Since past has always signified present-past, the absolute past that is retained in the trace no longer rigorously merits the name "past." Another name to erase, especially since the strange movement of the trace proclaims as much as it recalls: difference defers-differs. (1974: 66)

The series of examples that Borges provides to the reader in order to expose Kafka's traces in the past are, in themselves, a trace, since the chain that is established is "Borges/Kafka/the trace": [...] the form of this illustrious problem [Zeno's paradox] is, exactly, that of The Castle, and the moving object and the arrow and Achilles are the first Kafkian characters in literature. In the second text which chance laid before me, the affinity is not one of form but one of tone. It is an apologue of Han Yu, a prose writer of the ninth century [...]. (Borges, 1964: 199) The third text derives from a more easily predictable source: the writings of Kierkegaard. The affinity of both writers is something of which no one is ignorant [...]. (Borges, 1964: 200)

Borges accomplishes two operations with these texts. On the one hand, he traces the trace in Kafka's writing; on the other hand, he discloses and displays his own writing system — one inscribed solely on the trace, on the arche-writing and the play of differance. In fact, as Alfonso de Toro has indicated, the trace in Borges is disclosed by an "affinity" or a "tone" found in the works of authors of the past such as Carlyle, De Quincy, Russel, Berkeley, Kafka, etc. (1994: 248). What Borges says about Kafka, therefore, can also be applied to him. In the same text, Borges comments: "In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality" (1964: 201). This comment has particular consequences: we recognize Kafka's writing in the trace, but at the same time, in the same movement, undecidibility and differance are inscribed since the only manner by which we are able to trace the trace is by Kafka's writing. Without Kafka, writing does not exist. This undecidibility (Kafka/rrace/Kafka/irace) introduced by Borges joins Derrida's thought when he declares that:

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The (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.) concept or operation, motor or sensory. (1974: 62) 8

Borges accomplishes and expounds the very epistemological ground set by the deconstruction of the West, the de-centring and fragmentation of the logos, eurocentrism and phonocentrism. "Kafka and His Precursors" completely dislodges the ex-novo attitude of Modernity and its many -isms, ironising his own first readings of Kafka himself ( " A t first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise" [1964: 199]) only to discover the trace, the true Kafka ("after frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods" [1964: 199]). For Borges all that exits is reading, that is, writing, since to write is nothing more than to re-write what you have read. Yet as Borges states, even this reading/re-writing can be performed "on imaginary books" (1962: 16). This implies that writing is an already-there that does not have to belong to any pragmatised system of signs (De Toro, A., 1994: 246). Similar to "Kafka and His Precursors" is "The Homeric Versions" (1999) and " A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw" (1964) where Borges suggests that there is only one Book where everything is contained and insists on the activity of reading/writing. In "The Homeric Versions" he states: With famous books, the first time is actually the second, for we begin them already knowing them. The prudent common phrase "rereading the classics" is the result of an unwitting truth. (1999: 69-70)

In this text Borges attributes a particular characteristic to "famous books", arguing that before we read them, we already know them, since these books are in themselves the Book of Books, an entire library. In the next paragraph Borges stresses this point:

8

This text continues as follows: This differance is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order-a phonic or graphic text for example-or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of speech and writing-in the colloquial sense-as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense, a writing, no derived "notation" would be possible; and the classical problem of relationships between speech and writing could not arise. (1974: 62-63).

RORGF.S. DF.RRIDA AND WRITING

121

[...] the Odyssey, thanks to my opportune ignorance of Greek, is an international bookstore of words in prose and in verse, from Champman's couplets to Andrew Lang's "Authorized Version" or Bedard's classic French drama or Morris' vigorous saga or Butler's ironic bourgeois novel. (Borges, 1999: 70)

Thus, the Odyssey becomes the Books of Books or the arche-writing and the trace. It is particularly revealing that Borges refers to the Odyssey, since this text is considered to be the very beginning of Western literature. In it, all writing has already been inscribed: the Odyssey is Differance (non-self-presence), since, according to Derrida, "Differance is therefore the formation of form" and "[...] on the other hand [is] the being-imprinted of the imprint" (1974: 63). This is so because writing is neither interior nor exterior to language. Writing is a gap which implies a marking and erasure: a hymen, an exterior/interior and, in fact, a pharmakon. (Derrida, 1981: 61-171). The Odyssey is, according to Borges, an "international library" due to its power of dissemination, of the graft "without a body proper, of the skew without a straight line, of the bias without a front" (Derrida, 1981: 11). The other implicit notion present in Borges' text is writing as repetition, as simulacrum, but a repetition/simulacrum which is never the same or identical to itself. In "The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader" (2000), Borges emphasizes the superior faculty of writing, at least at the level of the transmission of experience. It is, for Borges, as if the graft/graph were inscribed on the surface of the text, since the trace, enacted as dissemination, overpowers presence and phonocentricism. According to Borges, "From that discrete capacity to a purely ideographic writing — direct communication of experiences, not of sounds — there is an inexhaustible distance, though not as great as of the future" (1999: 55).

3.

THE BOOK THAT IS NOT

Borges and Derrida proclaim a book that is not, not only because it has already been written, but also because the book is infinite. It does not exist yet, it does exist; it inscribes and it is inscribed. As the book is destroyed, it is replaced by the text, a new form of inscribing, a new form of writing. Regarding the destruction of the book, Derrida states: If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary. (1974: 18)

This denudation of "the surface of the text" is precisely the deliverance of the text as a rhizomatic surface that can never be completely inscribed or exhausted. It is, in fact, open-ended. Borges, in "The Book of Sand" uses "book" in the same sense as text when he quotes the unknown man who: "told me his book was called the Book of Sand, be-

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cause neither sand nor this book has beginning or end" (1999: 481). In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Borges proclaims that: In literary matters too, the dominant notion is that everything is the work of one single author. Books are rarely signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist; it has been established that all books are the work of one single writer, who is timeless and anonymous. (1962: 28)9. This new textuality and writing becomes evident by dismantling mimesis and the linear narrative model. In terms of Western narrative Borges is one of the very first to inscribe a new literary paradigm by "not considering literature as a 'mimesis of reality' but rather as a partial and illusory 'literary mimesis' based on the multiplication of organised codes according to the principle of the rhizome", as Alfonso de Toro has indicated (1994: 237) 10 . In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Borges introduces this new paradigm: Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel. (1962: 17) The emphasis on the "handful of readers" reveals Borges' awareness of the introduction of a new code whose decodification will be possible only by those capable of reading in a new manner. For his part, Derrida also indicates this change when he points out that:

9

In "A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw" Borges states something similar: Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. One literature differs from another, prior or posterior, less because of the text than because of the way in which it is read: if I were granted the possibility of reading any present-day page — this one, for example — as it will be read in the year two thousand, I would know what the literature of the year two thousand will be like. (1964: 214) In "The Library of Babel" he adds: "In some shelf of some hexagon, men reasoned, there must exist a book which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest [...]" (1962: 85).

10

Alfonso de Toro adds: "Furthermore, the quoted texts do not contribute with an a priori new signification, but to the formation of a new signifier, where intertextuality is imitated" (1994: 237). My translation.

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If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently. (Derrida, 1974: 87) [...] For over a century, this uneasiness has been evident in philosophy, in science, in literature. All the revolutions in these fields can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the linear model. Which is to say the epic model. (Derrida, 1974: 87)

It is this 'epic model' that Borges deconstructs, creating a minimalist writing founded on intertextuality, simulation, palimpsest, and rhizome, as I indicated above. But he also erases the distinctions and binarisms of fiction/reality, theory/practice, author/reader, writing/reading, etc. The erasure is typically revealed in his role as reader and particularly as editor of writings belonging to others. Borges' work is full of this Cervantinian literary device, but with one major exception: for Borges, editorship is not simply a rhetorical device but a writing practice connected to the act of reading/writing. If everything has been written, the only role that an author can assume is that of editor or, at best, as commentator on the writings of others". One of the best examples is provided by the sources quoted at the end of A Universal History of Iniquity (1999: 64). Emir Rodriguez Monegal points out that Borges "admits that to reread, to translate, to retell are part of the literary invention. And perhaps that to reread and translate are what literary creation is about. An aesthetics of reading is implicit here" (1972: 116).

4.

THE INSTABILITY OF THE SIGN

After Dissemination and Of Grammatology our thinking about the sign changed due to the fact that the classical Saussurian relationship between signifier and signified was broken. What was revealed is that the signifier does not contain in itself anything that can inscribe it in the signified, therefore what we are left with is a mass of signifiers (floating) with no fixed signifieds. As a result, the signified is always sliding under the signifier. Jorge Luis Borges was fully aware of this slippery nature of the signified, particularly with respect to writing. If the "formal essence of the signified is presence, and the privilege of its proximity to the logos as phone is the privilege of presence" (Derrida,

11

In many texts Borges assumes this role as reader/writer/editor. Some examples: in El informe de Brodie: "La intrusa", "El indigno", "Historia de Rosendo Juárez", "Juan Muraña", "El toro duelo", "El informe de Brodie". El libro de arena: "La secta de los treinta". El Aleph: "El inmortal", "Los teólogos", "Historia del guerrero y la cautiva", "La busca de Averroes". Historias de la Eternidad: "Historia de la eternidad", "Las kenningar", "La metáfora", "La doctrina de los ciclos", "El tiempo circular", "Las traducciones de Las mil y una noches", "El doctor Mardrus", "Enno Littmann", "Dos notas". Otras inquicisiones: "Las alarmas del doctor Américo Castro", "Quevedo", "Magias parciales del Quijote", etc.

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CUT .TURF. AND I.ITRRATURF.

12±

1974: 18), then the signified can only be slippery and always slides under the signifier. Thus, the signifier always presents itself as an autonomous chain, in the Lacanian sense; that is, the autonomy of the signifying chain from the signified, or "the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier" (Lacan, 1966: 260)12. The well-known Saussurian formulation of the sign = signifier/signified and its binary opposition is radically challenged by Borges throughout his work. In Brodie's Report we read: The word nrz for example, suggests dispersion or spots of one kind or another; it may mean the starry sky, a leopard, a flock of birds, smallpox, something splattered, with water and mud, the act of scattering, or the flight that follows a defeat. Hrl, on the other hand, indicates that which is compact, dense or tightly squeezed together; it may mean the tribe, the trunk of a tree, a stone, a pile of rocks, the act of piling them up, a meeting of the four witch doctors, sexual congress, or a forest. Pronounced in another way, or with other facial expressions, it may mean the opposite. We should not be overly surprised at this: in our own tongue, the verb to cleave means to rend and to adhere. Of course, there are no sentences, even incomplete ones. (1999: 406)

According to Borges, the Yahoos had a writing system, but this system was not governed by sign conventions. On the contrary, the arbitrariness of the sign is not in relation to the referent of the thing but to the signified itself: nrz and hrl correspond to the Derridian floating signifier and to the Lacanian signified constantly sliding under the signifier. Each one of them [nrz or hrl] is potentially invested with infinite signifieds, since each follows the Pearcean logic of continually becoming new signifiers. This is why nrz, may signify spots or a starry sky and hrl, a tribe or a heap of stones. Furthermore, Borges even unsettles the very logos, presence and phonation (living speech) by breaking the relationship between signifier/signified (which since Plato onwards, has been the guarantor of truth, that is, the spoken word is posited in close proximity to thought and meaning): "Pronounced in another way, or with other facial expressions, it may mean the opposite" (1999: 406). This is why Derrida indicates that in the Western tradition, [...] the signified is originarilly and essentially (and not only for a finite created spirit) trace, that is, is always already in the position of the signifier, is the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon writing as its death and its resource. (1974: 73)

This in fact is never trace, and the sign must be the unity of a heterogeneity, since the signified (sense or thing, noeme or reality) is not in itself a signifier, a trace: in any case its meaning is constituted by its relationship with a possible trace (Derrida 1974: 18). In Brodie's Report we read: 12

My translation.

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This conjecture is confirmed by inscriptions which I have discovered up on the tableland. The characters employed in these inscriptions, resembling the runes that our own forebears carved, can no longer be deciphered by the tribe; it is as though the tribe had forgotten the written language and retained only the spoken one. (Borges, 1999: 406)

The fact that the characters "can no longer be deciphered by the tribe" is due to the sliding of the signified under the signifier to the point that the written language is forgotten, leaving behind only the orality, or presence without the trace. In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Borges performs the instability of the signifier with respect to the signified, leaving only a chain of signifiers with no precise signified: the production of meaning becomes erratic; the floating signifier may produce a plurality of meaning similar to the nrz and to the hrl in "Doctor Brodie's Report", or the hron in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". In this story, Borges clearly shows his position with respect to the nature of the sign when he says that: [...] the hronir of the second and third degree — that is, the hronir derived from another hron — exaggerate the flaws of the original; those of the fifth degree are almost uniform; those of the ninth can be confused with those of the second; and those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form which the originals do not posses. The process is a recurrent one; a hron of the twelfth degree begins to deteriorate in quality. Stranger and more perfect than any hron is sometimes the ur, which is a thing produced by suggestion, an object brought into being by hope. (1962: 30)

Borges succeeded not only in utterly obliterating the signified, but also in imploding the referent, since at the end of the process the original hron is left behind and only its simulation remains. The more the hron distances itself from its source, the more perfect it becomes, replacing the "real" with a perfect fake. The chain of signifiers does not lead, as is the case with Lacan, to the un-packing and discovery of the master signifier where the first alienation and lack are inscribed. Instead, in Borges, it leads away from the source towards an enactment of the sign without referent, evoked by hope, by floating signifiers: there is no symbol or sign, but only the becoming-sign of the symbol (Derrida, 1974: 47). At the end, Borges seems to be saying that we are only left with truncated signs, since, as Derrida has indicated, [...] there is thus no phenomenology reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called "thing itself' is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the representamen is not to be proper [propre], that is to say absolutely proximate to itself (prope, proprius). The represented is always a representamen. (1974: 49-50)

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

The non-self-identity of the signified is encapsulated by the incessant sliding: there is no difference, then, between signifier/signified13. At the same time it marks the gap, différance, preceding speech, or rather the writing in speech where speech is another form of writing. In "The Immortal" Borges clearly suggests that writing is not writing and he gives the following evidence when he discovers the man, who has followed him to the City of the Immortals, writing on the sand: He was stretched out on the sand, where he was tracing clumsily and erasing a string of signs that, like the letters in our dreams, seem on the verge of being understood and then dissolve. At first, I thought it was some kind of primitive writing; then I saw it was absurd to imagine that men who have not attained to the spoken word could attain to writing. Besides, none of the forms was equal to another, which excluded or lessened the possibility that they were symbolic. (1961: 111)

This text illustrates in all its complexity the basic contradictions of the logos and presence. As we know far too well, from Plato onwards, and particularly in Saussurian linguistics, writing and/or the phonic symbolisation is only an exteriority whose function is to translate phonation which is truth, presence, phonè. Thus, writing is always exteriority and speech is always interiority. "The Immortal", however, not only exposes that writing is not exteriority but also not necessary symbolic since it is founded not on différence but on dijférance. If we follow this logic of exteriority, then phonation, speech and presence are also exteriority since they represent thought, and in turn they are also represented by signs. Of little importance is the nature of the sign's substance of expression. Whether phonic or graphic, it is always writing. What Borges also indicates in the texts that I have quoted is that what is always discovered is the trace — in one word the arche-writing — as practiced by the man in the sands of the City of the Immortals14. My reading of Borges/Derrida, I hope, has simply shown the obvious: the extraordinary affinity between two writers separated in time and space but not in thought. Derrida shows that presence and phonocentrism is a product of over two and half thousand years of Western meta-physics governed by the logos by deconstructing painstak-

13

According to Derrida, "nothing escapes the movement of the signifier and that, in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is nothing" (1974: 22-23).

14

Derrida states regarding this aspect that: [...] the peoples said to be "without writing" lack only a certain type of writing. To refuse the name of writing to this or that technique of consignment is the "ethnocentrism that best defines the prescientific vision of man" and at the same time results in the fact that "in many human groups, the only word by which the members designate their ethnic group in the word 'man'". (1974: 83-84)

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ingly and unremittingly the authors of presence such as Plato and his pharmakon, Rousseau and his supplement, and Saussure and his sign. Borges, in turn, inhabits the trace, differance, attempting to dwell outside the Western logos and produces an archewriting by inhabiting the whole of literature and of all epochs. If Plato is the father of presence and the logos, Borges is the grandfather of arche-writing and cartography. To conclude, let us end where we started: I believe that generalized writing is not just the idea of a system to be invented, an hypothetical characteristic or a future possibility. I think on the contrary that oral language already belongs to this writing. But that presupposes a modification of the concept of writing that we for the moment merely anticipate. (Derrida: 1974: 55) The Sefer Yetsirah (Book of the Formation), written in Syria or Palestine around the sixth century, reveals that Jehovah of the Armies, God of Israel, and God Omnipotent created the universe by means of the cardinal numbers that go from one to ten and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. That numbers may be instruments or elements of the Creation is the dogma of Pythagoras and Iamblichus; that letters also may be used in the Creation is a clear indication of the new cult of writing. The second paragraph of the second chapter reads: "Twenty-two fundamental letters: God drew them, engraved them, combined them, weighed them, permuted them, and with them produced everything that is and everything that will be". The book reveals which letter has power over air, which over water, which over fire, and which over wisdom, and which over anger, and how (for example) the letter kaf, which has the power over life, served to from the sun in the world, the day Wednesday in the week, and the left ear on the body. (Borges, 1999: 360-361)

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I believe that generalized writing is not just the idea of a system to be invented, an hypothetical characteristic or a future possibility. I think on the contrary that oral language already belongs to this writing. But that presupposes a modification of the concept of writing that we for the moment merely anticipate. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. I would wish to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition, that the "original," "natural," etc. language had never existed, never intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. An arche-writing whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicated and outline here; and which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the arche-writing, by the desire of a speech displacing its other and its double and working to reduce its difference. If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because, within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation, destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened the desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very beginning. And as we shall begin to see, difference cannot be thought without the trace. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Plato maintains both the exteriority of writing and its power of maleficient penetration, its ability to affect or infect what lies deepest inside. The pharmakon is that dangerous supplement that breaks into the very thing that would have liked to do without it yet lets itself at once be breached, roughed up, fulfilled, and replaced, completed by the very trace through which the present increases itself in the act of disappearing. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination.

1.

PREAMBLE

I the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos was published in 1974, at the very moment that the theoretical and practical discussion of Post-Modernity was launched. That is, when it was transformed in normal science after the rise of the paradigm of Post-Modemity, according to the notions introduced by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of the Scientific Revolutions (1979). Perhaps, together with the narrative of Manuel Puig, I am thinking

1M

NEW INTER SECTIONS : ESSAYS ON CUI.TURF. AND LITERATURE

of La Traición de Rita Hayworth (1968), Boquitas pintadas (1969), The Buenos Aires Affair (1973), El beso de la mujer araña (1976), / the Supreme is one of the first narratives that breaks with the paradigm of the so-called 'Boom' narrative of the 1960s in Latin America. What I wish to underline is that Roa Bastos breaks away from this paradigm and introduces literary Post-Modernity at an international level with the publication of I the Supreme. First, I would like to make the following statement: I believe that to consider Roa Bastos as a writer of the 'Boom' is simply an error, particularly since in Latin America in the 1970s the discussion of the culture, theory and literature of Post-Modernity simply did not exist. Alfonso de Toro has stated that "/ the Supreme may be considered, from its linguistic renovation and intertextual form of dealing with history as fiction, as a monumental and decisive work of post-new novel, both within postmodenity and the fictions written in Spanish language" (De Toro, A., 1991c: 60). In fact, the first academic that begins this discussion, in a detailed, documented and rigorous manner in Latin America was Alfonso de Toro in a series of studies published during the 1990s (De Toro, A., 1999,1999a, 1999b, 1997, 1997a, 1996, 1995, 1994, 1994a, 1992, 1991, 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1990, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c). Thus, it was impossible for the academic hispanist, that more often than not has followed new literary theories (at least with a ten year period delay), to think of I the Supreme from a different perspective. In fact, during those years in Latin America academics were still engaged in the discussion on semiotics and structuralism, at the very time that such paradigms were being deconstructed by poststructuralists such as Derrida (1974,1981), Deleuze and Guattari (1986,1987), Baudrillard (1983), Foucault (1990, 1990a, 1988, 1988a, 1977), and so many others that followed. Roa Bastos' work is even contemporaneous or previous to the moment when the discussion on Post-Modernity was launched internationally by the publication of the Postmodern Condition by Françoise Lyotard in 1979. When this discussion began in earnest, I the Supreme was already written 1 , and Roa Bastos had laid the foundations of Post-Modern literature, which epistemologi-cally and from a literary perspective, started with Jorge Luis Borges. I must pause here for a moment in order to reflect about this relationship between Borges, as the initiator of the paradigm, and Roa Bastos, the one who introduced the paradigm two decades later, and the one who transformed it in normal science. This reflection is necessary since it was Borges who initiated cultural and literary PostModernity towards the end of the 1930s. I would also like to make a second statement: Roa Bastos is the direct heir of Jorge Luis Borges from the point of view of his textual practice with respect to writing, narration and the status of both the literature and the reader.

1

Although the publication of I the Supreme was in 1974, the novel was finished by 1970 and it was in the workings since around 1962. On the other hand, Derrida published Of grammatology in 1967 and Dissemination in 1972, that it is to say, at the very same time that Roa Bastos was writing I the Supreme (1962).

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11L

The epistemological issues presented by Borges with respect to the paradigms of Modernity and Post-Modernity, dealt with in essay on "Borges and Rulfo: The Paradigms of Modernity and Post-Modernity", at is, the radical a-chronicity which is evident in both writers and in the questioning of the linearity of historical events. I propose that Post-Modern historiography is not subject to linearity but, rather, it deals with problems of form as they emerge (See pages, 98-99; 102-103). Borges initiated Post-Modernity towards the beginning of the 1940s, Rulfo introduced and closed Modernity towards the beginning of the 1950s, and Roa Boastos reinscribed Post-Modernity and transformed it in normal science toward the beginning of the 1970s. For traditional historians this is an aporia, an epistemological impossibility, but I would argue that a-chrony — or dis-chrony, or whatever one may call the nonchronicity of the cultural and aesthetic phenomena — constitutes the rule, and not the exception. It is precisely this rare coexistence that explains the achronicity I am referring to. In what follows I will deal with three aspects that I believe to be central in I the Supreme beyond any other consideration regarding Roa Bastos' literary technique: a) the discussion about writing; b) the discussion about the status of History and the questioning of the division between history and fiction; and c) the obliteration of the plurality of texts and orality.

2.

PHONOCENTRICSM AND WRITING

Derrida, in Of Grammatology (1967) and in Dissemination (1972), introduced the Platonic discussion presented in Phaedrus about phonocentrism. This discussion perceived phonocentrism as the guarantee of communication and truth, and writing as dangerous since it does not assure communication and truth. Because of this, Derrida introduced the notion of Pharmakon in Dessimination. This notion is based on differance, that is, in the sliding of the signified under the signifier: the pharmakon as indistinguishable from its two meanings: medicine and poison. Thus writing, from the Platonic point of view, is established, from the beginning, as suspect. However, the tradition of the pharmakon has linked this notion only to its negative meaning of death, and this is the truth of the pharmakon as stated by Derrida (1981: 73)2. Thus, writing is pharmakon, death or, at best a supplement of orality. This has been the Western tra-

2

This is a topic is present throughout I the Supreme as it becomes evident in the quotations provided below: [...] the dictionary is an osuary of empty words. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 11) All I can do is write; that is to say, deny what is alive. Kill what is dead even deader. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 92)

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dition which is also restated by Saussure in his definition of the sign and the distinction between langue and parole. In this manner, the discussion has always revolved between presence (phonation) and exteriority (writing), writing as a sign of a sign or phonetic writing. It is with Post-Structuralism that not only the opposition (language/parole) but also the very notion of the sign are deconstructed3.

Whoever you are, insolent corrector of my pen, you are beginning to annoy me. You don't understand what I write. You don't understand that the law is symbolic. Twisted minds are unable to grasp this. They interpret the symbols literally. And so you make mistakes and fill my margins with your scoffing self-importance. At least read me correctly. The are clear symbols/obscure symbols. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 100) You place all your faith in scraps of paper. In writing. In bad faith. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 108) Very shortly there won't be anything left but this tyrannosaurian hand, which will go on writing, writing, already a fossil writing. Its scales flying off. Its sking falling off. Going on writing. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 122) Such is the curse of words; and accursed game that obscures what it is seeking to express. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 207) I'm going to have a go at it another way: by way of supreme weakness; by way of the dead end of the written word. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 320) The delusion in whose toils you lie is making you swallow the dregs of that bitter elixir you call life, as you finish digging your own grave in the cemetery of the written word. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 376) Go on writing. It has no importance, in any event. When all is said and done, what is prodigious, fearful, unknown in the human being has never yet been put into words or books, and never will be. At least so long as the malediction of language does not disappear, in the way that irregular condemnations eventually evaporate. So go ahead and write. Bury your self in letters. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 392) This is the same position that Derrida will underline when establishing the connection between writing and pharmakon: "The truth — the original truth — about writing as a pharmakon will at first be left up to a myth. The myth of Truth, to which we now turn" (1983: 73). 3

I should point out that the notion of sign was criticized by Voloshinov in his book Marxism and Philosophy of Language (1973) at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, that is at the very same time that Saussure was developing his notion of the sign.

ROA BASTOS. BORGES. DERRIDA

m

Roa Bastos deals with the topic of writing from the anti-structuralist position of the Supreme Dictator: this is the trap that Roa Bastos sets for the Supreme. In I the Supreme this topic travels all through the text and constitutes one of the fundamental axes of the text. Writing always presents itself linked to memory and always as repetition, that is, as something already there, as a trace deposited in history and in the collective memory of humanity. At the beginning of the text the Supreme states: "Do you know what memory is? The stomach of the soul, someone wrongly called it. Though nobody is ever the first to give things a name. There is nothing but an infinity of repeaters" (Roa Bastos, 1987: 5). And further down he adds: "memory is the cemetery of words" (1987: 6) and "The man of a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing" (1987: 7). The contradiction of the Supreme resides in the fact that phonation always takes place in situ and therefore it cannot precede writing. This is why there is no one to be "the first to give things a name", since writing precedes phonation. This is an evident Post-Structuralist argument, and according to Derrida, the: Science of "the arbitrariness of the sign", science of the immotivation of the trace, science of writing before speech and in speech, grammatology would thus cover a vast field within which linguistics would, by abstraction, delineate its own area, with the limits that Saussure prescribes to its internal system and which must be carefully reexamined in each speech/writing system in the world and history. (1974: 51). The Supreme emphasises orality and the independence of the signified with respect to the signifier, arguing for the instability of the signifier when he says: There would have to be words in our language that had a voice. Free space. A memory of their own. Words that subsisted alone, that brought place with them. A place. Their place. Their own material. A space where the word would happen the way an event does. As in the language of certain animals, of certain birds, or certain very old insects. But does what is not exist? (Roa Bastos, 1987: ll) 4

The Supreme proposes a partial aspect of memory since he links it to writing, to death. However, there is another possibility to articulate memory, that is, a dead (the one the Supreme refers to) and a living memory. This is the position that Derrida criticises when mapping the tradition of the notion of memory with respect to the pharmakon, a position clearly shared by the Supreme. Derrida states: Now, it is precisely by pointing out, as we shall see, that the pharmakon of writing is good for hypomnesis (re-memoration, recollection, consignation) and not for the mneme (living, knowing memory) that Hamus, in the Phaedrus, condemns it as being of little worth. (1983: 91) Such will be, in its logical outlines, the objection the king raises to writing: under pretext of supplementing memory, writing makes one even more

13£

NF.W INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

Thus, the Supreme states that the phonation ("voice") and the signifier must be set free from the Saussurian relationship between the signified and the signifier in order to all o w a floating signifier open to multiple meanings. This is precisely one o f the fundamental features with respect to the deconstruction o f the Saussurian notion o f sign, a type of deconstruction which w e also find in Borges' texts, such as "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" ( 1 9 6 2 ) or "Dr. Brodie's Report" ( 1 9 9 9 ) or "The Immortal" ( 1 9 6 2 ) . For instance, in "Doctor Brodie's Report", w e read: The word nrz for example, suggests dispersion or spots of on kind or another: it may mean the starry sky, a leopard, a flock of birds, smallpox, something splattered with water or mud, the act of scattering, or the flight that follows a defeat. Hrl, on the other hand, indicates what which is compact, dense, or tightly squeezed together; it may mean the tribe, the trunk of a tree, a stone, a pile of rocks, the act of piling them up, a meeting of the four witch doctors, sexual congress, or a forest. Pronounced in another way, or with other facial expressions, it may mean the opposite. We should not be overly surprised at this: in our own tongue, the verb to cleave means to rend and to adhere. Of course, there are no sentences, even incomplete ones. (Borges, 1999: 406) The independence of the signified with respect to the signifier is radical in this text, and it is to this radicalisation that the Supreme refers when he states: "A space where the word would happen the way an event does. A s in the language o f certain animals, of certain birds, or certain very old insects. But does what is not exist?" (Roa Bastos, 1987: 11). At the same time, he underlines that it is the orality of the word ("its voice") that is first, and this must impact writing, contradicting, then, the instability of the signifier which the text quoted above points to. This b e c o m e s clear when the Supreme states: It cost Patino an effort not to allow himself merely to coast downhill, to follow instead the uphill path of the telling and write at the same time; to hear the disparision of what he writes; to trace the sign of what his ear is taking in. To attune words to the sound of thought, which is never a solitary murmur, however intimate it may be; less still if it is the speech, the thought involved in dictating. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 18)

forgetful; far from increasing knowledge, it diminishes it. Writing does not answer the needs of memory, it aims to the side, does not reinforce the mneme, but only hypomnesis. (1983: 100) Thus, for the Supreme, memory is only hypomnesis this position is strengthened:

lacking mneme. Throughout the text

It's possible that you'll lose the use of words. Lose the faculty of speech? Bha, it's not a bad thing to lose what's bad. No; you won't lose the faculty of speech properly speaking, but rather the memory of words. Memory pure and simple, you probably mean; that's what I have Patino for. (Roa Bastos, 1974: 417)

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It is clear then that the Supreme's ambivalent position is, on the one hand a Platonic one, and on the other hand, a Derridian one. The point I am attempting to underline is that écriture, in the meaning that Derrida gives to this notion, precedes language as graph and phonation. Thus, both oral and written language are forms of écriture, since in both there is a transformation that functions from thought to phonation and writing. The Supreme links these two forms of meaning and, from there, their ambiguity. Derrida states, regarding this point, that: [...] language had never existed, never intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. An arche-writing whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicate and outline here; and which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the arche-writing, by the desire of a speech displacing its other and its double and working to reduce its difference. If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because, within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation, destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened the desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very beginning. And as we shall begin to see, difference cannot be thought without the trace. (1974: 57) The Supreme's statement is echoed in "The Immortal" by Borges, when he clearly suggests that writing is not écriture and provides the following example upon discovering the man, w h o had followed him to the City of the Immortals, writing on the sand: He was stretched out on the sand, where he was tracing clumsily and erasing a string of signs that, like the letters in our dreams, seem on the verge of being understood and then dissolve. At first, I thought it was some kind of primitive writing; then I saw it was absurd to imagine that men who have not attained to the spoken word could attain to writing. Besides, none of the forms was equal to another, which excluded or lessened the possibility that they were symbolic. (1964: 111) It is precisely this capacity to arrive "first" ("attained") to writing that indicates its anteriority with respect to phonation, to the spoken word, to speech, to the presence of the spoken word, and this, simply because there is no distinction between the two pertaining to écriture; between phonation and graph. However, the Supreme maintains this ambivalence throughout the narration, that is, qualifying writing as death, as supplement, as pharmakon. The Supreme categorically inscribes ambiguity when he states: As I dictate to you, you write. Whereas I read what I dictate to you so as later to reread what you write. In the end the two of us disappear in what is read/written. Use the appropriate term of address only in the presence of third parties. For, I grant you, we must observe the formalities, save the appearances, so long as we are visible figures. Everyday words of ordinary language. (1987: 14)

m .

NF.W INTF.RSF.CTTONS: F.SSAYS ON qII.TURF. AND T.TTF.RATIJRR Sir, with your permission, let me say, in a manner of speaking, I feel that your words, however, poorly copied they may be by these hands that the earth is going to swallow up, I feel that they copy what Your Grace dictates to me, letter by letter, word by word. You haven't understood me. Open your good eye and close the bad one. Keep your ears open for the meaning of what I say to you: However, much you may surpass animals in brute memory, in brute power of speech, you'll never know anything if you don't penetrate to the innermost depths of things. (1987: 29-30) Words are dirty by nature. Filth, excrementicity, base and ignoble thoughts exist in the mind of literati; not in words that are speakable. I apply the strategy of repetition to these notes, I have told myself: The only thing that cancels itself out is what is endlessly repeated down to the last detail. Besides, what a bunch of shit! I do and write whatever I please and however I please, since I'm writing only for myself. Why all this mirror business, all these stiff, starch hieroglyphic texts then? Literatology of antiphonies and counterantiphonies. Of front sides and backsides. Copulation of male and female metaphors. (1987: 51) You feed on the carrion of books. You have not yet destroyed oral tradition only because it is the only language that cannot be sacked, robbed, repeated, plagiarized, copied. What is spoken remains alive, sustained by the tone, the gestures, the facial expression, the gaze, the accents, the breath of the speaker. (1987: 56) When I dictate to you, the words have a meaning; when you write them, another. So that we speak two different languages. One feels more at home in the company of a familiar dog than in that of a man speaking a language unknown to us. False language is much less sociable than silence. Even my dog Sultan took the secret to what he said to the grave with him. What I beg you, my dear Sancho, is that you not try, when I dictate to you, to artificialize the nature of the matter being dealt with, but rather to naturalize the artificiality of words. You are my ex-creative secretary. You write what I dictate to you as though you yourself were speaking in my place in secret on the paper. I am not dictating a quanticle of claptrap to you. Mere bibble-babble. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 57) Don't copy these last paragraphs into the draft of the circular. No, Sir, I haven't copied them. When Your Grace dictates in circular form, Order of the Perpetual Dictator, I write his words down in the Perpetual Circular. When Your Grace thinks out loud, in the voice of the Supreme Man, I note his words down in the Spiral Notebook. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 295)

I have quoted these texts simply to demonstrate that there is nothing accidental in the treatment o f these issues regarding writing which are present throughout I the Supreme. In these quotations Roa Bastos states, without any doubt, the issues o f presence/absence, phonation/writing: The Supreme reacts w h e n facing the possibility that the enunciative situation, from where he speaks and believes to assure meaning to his dictation, could be distorted by the written word in that delicate transition o f the proximity o f the sign to the thinking. However, the Supreme is wrong when he believes that his enun-

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ciation is equivalent to his thinking, since his dictation is also a form of writing that precedes a language which in fact does not belong to him, but that is inherited. The transition between thought/word, and word/writing, is equivalent and neither assures meaning5. Derrida has said with respect to Saussure's notion of the sing, that: The sound-image is the structure of the appearing of the sound which is anything but the sound appearing. It is the sound-image that he calls signifier, reserving the name signified not for the thing, to be sure (it is reduced by the act and the very ideality of language), but for the "concept," undoubtedly an unhappy notion here; let us say for the ideality of the sense. I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified and signifier. The sound-image is what is heard; not the sound heard by the being-heard of the sound. Being-heard is structurally phenomenal and belongs to an order radically dissimilar: that of the real sound in the world. (1974: 65)

Nevertheless, and in spite of the negativity that the Supreme feels with respect to writing, his own ambivalence is clearly established in the very usage of language where meaning is constantly differed. The means he employs to create this ambivalence is the introduction of floating signifiers that constantly deploy and reveal their indecidibility. Roa Bastos makes language implode by inscribing its radical ambiguity and variability, working on the variability of the signifier. These are not mere plays on words, but the attempt by Roa Bastos to show the sliding of the signified under the signifier, to establish the intrinsic metaphoricity of language, that is, its 'natural' state which does not distinguish between a first 'denotative' level, and a second 'connotative' one. Roa Bastos' text is saturated with this implosion of the signified where the signifieds are indecidibles in their attempt to be signified. It is ambiguity that characterises these series' of binarisms whose task is, paradoxically, to dislodge them. Once again, in spite of the frenetic Plantonism of the Supreme's logos, this implosion and rupture within the sign between the signifier and the signified, places him within the questioning of the Post-Structuralist that challenges the sign's structure and its stability. I will just provide some examples to make my point6:

5

The Supreme, in spite of his Platonic position with respect to writing, seems to be aware that the signifier does not assure the stability of the signified and that this is always differed: It may also be that nothing has really happened except in this image-writing that goes on weaving its hallucination on paper. What is entirely visible is never seen entirely. It always offers something else that must be looked at further. One never sees the end of it. In any event the club is mine... I mean this pen with the memory-lens imbeded in the pommel. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 197)

6

We must provide the Spanish text since the translation is unable to capture the actual sliding of the signified under the signifier. The translation fails totally in rendering the language subtleties of this great work of art.

m.

NF.W TNTF.RSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE "esas ratas añudas greñudas puede hallarse el culpable" (8); ("the guilty party might very well be among those rats with tangled dangling locks and foot-long fingernails", 4) "los reflasos a esos falsarios" (8); ("Tighten the knots in those notorious forgers' iron neckties", 4) "el sentido de lo cierto y de lo incierto" (17); ("the very meaning of the certain and the uncertain", 13) "la línea entre lo verde y lo seco" (25); ("the line between the greenness and the dryness", 20) "Un decir, yendo-viniendo" (26); ("a manner of speaking, a very quick round trip", 20) "El sentido del sin sentido" (28); ("The sense of the non-sense", 23) "el Faile Bel-Asco" (29); ("Friar el-Asshole", 23) "floricultura escrituraria" (31); ("scriptuary floriculture", 25) "honor deshonorante" (43); ("honor that dishonors it", 26) "procedí procediendo" (46); ("I proceeded by simply going ahead", 39) "compliador-acopiador" (54); ("compiler-collector", 47) "Yo callo dice el callo" (136); ("A shoe has a sole and its tongue says nothing", 124) "¡Homero! "¡Oh mero repetidor de otros ciegos y sordomudos!" (143); ("Homer! O mere repeater", 131) "Me sumergen en el aire-sin-aire" (165); ("Submerge me in air-without-air", 152) "y no solamente los milicastros sino también sus paniaguados serviles" (173); ("not only the milicasters but also their servile civil minions", 158 "Decorado dorado, escrodo en lo no-visible" (212); ("Tinseled trappings, propped up by the non-visible", 195) "Humorada, mi estimado don Manuel; nada más que humo-nada" (223); ("Just a bit of salt, my dear Don Manuel; a trifling joke", 206) "Pasemos al salón de los a-cuerdos" (225); ("Let us proceed to the salon d'a-grément", 207) "Cuando Buenos Aires se convirtió en flamantes ruinas, Asunción la refundo. Buenos Aires se avanza ahora a querer refundirnos" (225); ("When Buenos Aires lay in flaming ruins, Asunción reconstructed it. And now Buenos Aires aims to deconstruct us", 208)

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"El que da y da queda-sin-quedar" (227); ("He who gives and gives is left with nothing left", 209) "Repartámosla equitativamente, pero no en pruebas de equitaci\n. No aceptamos la inquinidad de la inequidad" (227); ("Let us share it equitably, and not waste our time in equitation competitions. Let us not accept the inequity of inequity", 210) "nuestros acuerdos-desacuerdos" (228); ("our accords-disaccords", 210) "Ahora queremos ver, y para siempre, la cara de la dicha por cara que nos cueste la dicha" (245); ("Now we want to see, forevermore, the face of fortune, even though it may cost us a fortune to see it", 225) "Si entienden mi habla-silencio" (416); ("If they understood my silence-speech", 387) "que vivir no es vivir sino des vivir". (430) ("that living is not living but disliving") These quotations reveal several central points: they introduce ambiguity into the discourse by confronting oxymoronic meanings and thus destabilise meaning; at the same time, they show how spoken language, that according Plato and the Supreme, which supposedly assures truth and the accuracy of the discourse, does not do so: on the contrary, it is writing that can assure the possible meaning, at least by the graph, as is clearly shown of the signifier "Bel-Asco" (beautiful/disgust). All these sentences inscribe a fundamental isotopy: incertitude and or indecidibility. They also invert the primary meaning such as the "los a-cuerdos", that is, agreements (acuerdos) of agreements which are not agreement, and agreements which are not wise (cuerdo). The hyphen between the "a" and "cuerdos" or "nuestros acuerdos-desacuerdos" which are not agreements introduces the incertitude and the indecidibility. Thus, the reader is constantly required to decodify these seemingly 'innocent plays on words', which in fact are not, as well as the meaning signified by the signifiers. The Supreme, as Socrates in the Phaedrus, expresses a deep mistrust and suspicion regarding the written text, since the text allows the Subject of enunciation to control the textual enunciation: It is quite sad enough to see ourselves reduced to bottling up our accords-disaccords in words, notes, documents, counter-documents. Locking up facts of nature within signs against nature. Papers can be torn up. Can be read between the lines, and even between the lines between the lines7. Millions of meanings. They can be forgotten. Falsified. Stolen. Trampled on. Not facts. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 210)

7

In Spanish, the texts reads as follows: "Leídos con segundas, hasta con terceras y cuartas intenciones" .

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NF.W TNTF.RSF.CTTONS: F.SSAYS ON CULTURE AND LITERATURE

However, this quotation contradicts what he later will state throughout the text, underlining that it is discourse that makes History (therefore writing), and not facts themselves. I have not attempted to exhaust the writing issues presented by Roa Bastos, on the contrary, I have just begun to deal with them. But I should underline that Roa Bastos launches his discussion, at the same time that Derrida publishes Of Grammatology and Dissemination, when he publishes I the Supreme in 1974.

3.

THE DISCUSSION OF THE STATUS OF HISTORY AND THE QUESTIONING OF THE DIVISION HISTORY /FICTION

I the Supreme is also a text about the writing of History and its objective is to destabilise this type of writing. Thus, the reader is not able to determine what belongs to fiction and what belongs to History. The only way to untangle the status of fiction would be to engage it. In an investigation similar to what the Compiler supposedly carries out. And one may ask, what for? In "The final Compiler's Note" we read: This compilation has been culled — it would be more honest to say coaxed — from some twenty thousand dossiers, published and unpublished; from an equal number of other volumes, pamphlets, periodicals, correspondences, and all manner of testimony — gleaned, garnered, resurrected, inspected — in public and private libraries and archives. To this must be added the versions collected from the sources of oral tradition, and some fifteen thousand hours of interviews, recorded on tape, filled with inexactitudes and confusions, with supposed descendants of supposed functionaries, with supposed kith and kin, close or distant, of The Supreme, who always boasted of not having any; with epigoni, panegyrists, and detractors no less self-proclaimed and nebulous. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 435)

This text would seem to have the intention to speak about truth, that is, give itself the status of History, by stating that its documentation has been collected from the most diverse sources, thus providing objectivity and veracity to the narration. The Compiler acquires the old Cervantine function to "publish a found text". At the same time this final note deauthorises itself, a fundamental characteristic of Roa Bastos' text that, throughout, introduces ambiguity and indecidibility by stating that the compilation is seeded with "inexactitudes and confusions". This quote raises two fundamental issues with respect to the status of the real and the fictional. On the one hand, it establishes, from the very beginning, that the real does not amount but to a mere discursive construction; and, on the other hand, that the text is constituted by the criss-cross and the tissue of multiple texts that in turn are also discursive constructions, and as such, we may infer, that they are not founded outside the discourse, but are rather the product of discourses. From here we can make two statements: a) there is no difference between the discourse of History and the

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so called fictional discourse; b) it is not possible to adjudicate to I the Supreme either the status of history or of fiction: it is an undecidible text. It is a well known fact that I the Supreme comprised, by a plurality of intertexts and texts of diverse nature: the dictation, the private notebook, the logbook, various manuscripts, quotations from Plato, Pascal, Cicero, Robertson, Rousseau, Bonland, Echeverría, Mitre, Tácito de Plata, Tácito Brigadir, Musil, etc. The main text, with respect to the historical content seems to be El Supremo Dictador by Julio César Cháves published in 1942 and various chronicles such as those by Rengger and Longchamp, The Reign of Dr. Joseph Roderick Francia in Paraguay, Th. Carlyle. Dr. Francia in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. IV, 1943; F. Wisner de Morgestern, El Dictador del Paraguay Dr. José Gaspar de Francia, 1923; and B. Mitre, Historia de Belgrano y de la Independencia de Argentina, 1858; and many other texts impossible to locate. However, all this information is useless regarding its status as truth about the world, since these texts are a-chronically inscribed and weaved, and, moreover, they constitute a parody of the historical discourse. This is the very same textual condition that Borges introduces throughout this narrative work. To realize this, one only has to think of "Tlòn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" or of "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote". What Roa Bastos does is to tell the story of Dr. Francia and that of Paraguay in that period, but he alters the linearity of the known history by creating a history which will capture what the official history does not tell: what we do not know and what we would like to know about Dr. Francia. A central component in the text, and I will speak about this matter in more detail at the end of this essay, is that the text produced by the reading of the Compiler's Note is mirrored by that of the reader, and these readings seem to mimic the linear reading accomplished by a historian when evaluating a great variety of documents. The research of these documents does not take place in an ordered, linear manner. This is a reading, in my opinion, which Roa Bastos retains in the actual text and converges with the Supreme's discourse and the various texts and quotations disseminated throughout the text. The Supreme is totally conscious that history is not linear, that it is a constructed discourse about the real: I've ordered you to think nothing at all, nothing, forget memory. To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real. The unreal lies only in the bad use of the power of words in the bad use of writing.

(1987: 59) This quotation reveals the fact that, from the point of view of historiographic writing, that is, from the transition of events into historical facts, there exists a filtration process, an hermeneutic activity which is later inscribed in the writing, and this writing is what shapes the so called historical facts. This is why the Supreme states that "To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real". It is the discourse, the construction of the real through the discourse that constitutes the real, and, as a consequence, historical reality. What is central for the Supreme, as an 'historian', or rather,

1A2.

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND I .ITER ATURE

as a chronist of the events of his time, is not the veracity of the facts, but the facts of veracity, that is, it is the discourse that gives veracity to the facts, and not these to the discourse. In another place the Supreme Dictator comes back to this topic: Two hundred years later, the witnesses of those stories are no longer alive. Two hundred years younger, readers do not know if they are fables, true stories, pretended truths. The same thing will come to pass with us. We too will pass for real-unreal beings, And having reached that pass, we shall go no farther. And a good thing it is too, Excellency! (1987: 66)

The fictionality of History is underlined in this quotation when it is stated that history loses its objective character and acquires a fabular one, since the readers, far away in time and space from the historical events, do not have the elements to differentiate the status of the text called 'historical'. I would go as far as to say that even those who are contemporaneous to the events are unable to differentiate its status since these are always mediated and modelised by discourse, that is, narrativised. For instance, the Verdadera Historia de la Nueva España by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a chronicle of the invasion of Mexico by Cortés, was considered in its time a "History", and in fact, has served as the cornerstone for future Mexican historiography. How much myth there is in that text, of the Medieval thinking still active in naming the real, in inscribing an uninscribed world; how much fiction, not because Diaz del Castillo set out to write fiction, but rather because his reading of that new world was modelised by the European thinking, theology, myths and fables of that period. This is why the Supreme is right when he speaks of fables in the previous quotation. The Supreme, facing History, has only one objective, not to write it but to make it: There comes forth the souvenir-pen another reception that I shall offer the envoy from Brazil, fifteen years later. I can allow myself the luxury of mixing up the facts without confusing them. I thus save myself time, paper, ink, and the trouble of searching through almanacs, calendars, dusting shelf lists, I don't write history. I make it. I can remake it as I please, adjusting, stressing, enriching its meaning and truth. In the history written by publicans and pharisees, they invest their lies at compound interest. Dates to them are sacred. Particularly if they are erroneous. To those rodents, error consists precisely of gnawing holes in documented truth. They turn into rivals of moths and rats. (1987: 194)

Two important questions are raised by this quotation: first, the Supreme clearly states that History is a discursive construction that he manufactures with his discourse, and this discourse contextualises the facts in time and space. This is why he does not attribute any importance whatsoever to chronology and exactitude regarding facts. Secondly, he underlines the political status of any historical discourse. Where its writing is neither impartial nor objective, but, rather, it obeys precise interests and therefore History does not exist, but histories, and from there, its particularity and relativity.

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This is a typical Post-Modern characteristic, since History is one of the master narratives which Post-Modernity has deauthorised. Thus, History is made by the discourse and not outside this, it is a purely discursive product dependent on a discursive Subject and not of the events filtered by that Subject. The second paragraph of the "The final Compiler's Note" continues as follows: The reader will already have noted that, unlike ordinary texts, this one was read first and written later. Instead of saying and writing something new, it merely faithfully copies what has already been said and composed by others. Thus in this compilation there is not a single page, a single sentence, a single word, from the title to this final note, that has not been written in this way. "All history that is not contemporary is suspect," El Supremo was fond of saying. "It is not necessary to know they were born to see that such fabulous stories are not of the time in which they are written. There is a vast difference between a book made by an individual and put before the people, and a book made by a people. There can be no doubt, then, that this book is as old as the people that dictated it." (Roa Bastos, 1987: 435)

Perhaps, the most important change that has taken place in the theory of literature and literary criticism since the end of the 1970s until the present, is the hermeneutic activity: specifically with respect to reading as a form of research, a practice which was drastically rejected by the structuralist logocentrism, but has now become central, and a dominant theoretical and critical activity. Deconstruction, feminism, Post-Feminism, Post-Colonialism, and more recently, Post-Theory have made a substantial contribution to hermeneutics and, at the same time, have radically altered theoretical practices. This activity, anchored in Post-Modernity, has introduced a new form of writing, a new conception of literature, and, without any doubt, a new relation with the literatures of the past. It is for this reason that intertextuality became the raw material for most artists during the second half of the Twentieth Century. There is a remarkable affinity between Borges and Roa Bastos with respect to the notion of 'reading' and of what is read as something previous to a reading, and from here its connection to 'voice' as sound but not as phonation. In the following metafictional passage in "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote", we read: Menard (perhaps without wishing to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions. This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid, and to read Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. (1962: 54-55).

This new technique is reading as writing, an aesthetic practice typically Borgesian, and, at the same time, a topic that travels throughout his work: reading, re-writing, palimpsest, rhizome, simulation, intertextuality. It is of great importance to underline

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that Borges does not say that this "new technique" has enriched the art of writing, but the art of reading. This topic is also taken by Roa Bastos in I the Supreme in the final note. In this, it is emphasised that the text is not the result of multiple readings, that it is the collective product of reading, and that the Compiler has only faithfully copied. It is this that reminds us of Cervantes, faithful translator the Cide Hemete Benengeli's manuscript, author of Don Quixote. Furthermore, the Compiler attributes the text to the people, that is, to a collective notion of reading, of collective memory, where diverse voices of that people are inscribed in the writing carried out by the Compiler, transcribing them in the very same sequence that the Compiler collects his information (and from here the dialogical and structural complexity of this text). Towards the end of the text we read: This second reading, by an inverse movement, reveals what is veiled in the text itself, read first and written afterwards. Two texts, of which the absence of the first is necessarily the presence of the second. Because what you write now is already contained, anticipated in the readable text, that part that is its own invisible side. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 392)

It is precisely this topic that Derrida made central in Dessimination and in Of Grammatology. When Derrida speaks about this issue, an issue that Borges stated thirty years before the publication of Derrida's texts and that Roa Bastos explores contemporaneously, he does it in the very same terms of those of Borges and Roa Bastos: That is why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space. If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently. (Derrida, 1974: 86-87)

Intimately connected to the notion of reading is the anteriority of language, that is, in reading we 'discover' the voices of other and previous readings, readings that contain the collective memory of the inscription of a people, of a culture. Roa Bastos inscribes/founds the Paraguayan history, of a whole people, in I the Supreme. I do not believe that there exists another text in the history of Paraguay that tells the story of that people as Roa Bastos does in this monumental work. It is for this reason that the Compiler says that this text is a people, and the people its transcriber: I take from others, here and there, those maxims that express my thought better and I myself could, not to store them up in my memory, since I lack that faculty. In this way the thoughts and words are my very own as well, as much as mine before writing them. It is not possible to say anything, however absurd it may be, without discovering that it has already been said and written by someone somewhere, Cicero says (De Divinat, II, 58). The I-would-have-said-it-first-if-he-hadn't-said-it does not exist. Someone says something because someone else has already said it or will say it much

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later, even without knowing that someone has already said it. The one thing that it is ours is what remains inexpressible behind the words. It is even farther inside us than what we ourselves are within ourselves. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 415)

Here, Roa Bastos' thinking shows an unprecedented transparency and transcendence and he again reinscribes Borges' thinking: that everything has already been said. Let us remember the famous Borges's text, "Kafka and His Precursors", where he establishes the same relation between past-present-past with respect to writing and reading (Borges, 1964: 199-200). The comments by Borges and Roa Bastos have particular consequence: we recognise the writing of the people and Kafka in the trace, but at the same time, and in the very same moment, there is inscribed indecidibility and differance, as the Supreme points out: "The one thing that it is ours is what remains inexpressible behind the words" (Roa Bastos, 1987: 415), since the manner by which we can track the trace, the voice, is in Kafka's writing. Without Kafka, writing does not exist.

4.

THE TEXTUAL IMPLOSION AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE NOVEL

One of the major difficulties of I the Supreme resides in its reading, in the attempt to follow the narration and to project, what I would call thefabular element (what is narrated), over the sintagmatic axis (what is narrativised). What I wish to underline is that Roa Bastos deconstructs the novel as we have known it until at least the first half of the Twentieth Century. I the Supreme is not a novel, it is an implosion of texts, discourses, voices, a variety of documents that constitute the tissue of the text. There is an evident performativity between the Compiler's act of reading and that of the reader, that is, the Compiler reads and provides the transcription of what he has read and the reader's reading is simultaneous to that of the Compiler. Thus, there is a shared reading experience, simultaneous and performative between the Compiler and the reader, and the text literally is constructed by both readings. In the third and last paragraph of the "Final Compiler's Note", we read: Hence, imitating the Dictator once again (dictators fulfil precisely this function: replacing writers, historians, artists, thinkers, etc.), the re-scriptor declares, in the words of a contemporary author, that the history contained in these Notes is reduced to the fact that the story that should have been told in them has not been told. As a consequence, the characters and facts that figure in them have earned, through the fatality of the written language, the right to a fictitious and autonomous reader. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 435)

The Compiler's act of reading has serious consequences in the structure of the novel, and here resides its difficulty. This is derived from two strategies that the Compiler

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adopts: on the one hand, the narrator transcribes his reading of many documents without ordering them, that is, he presents them to the reader in the very same form that they come up in his research and data collection. Thus, the text implodes, it is fragmented, splintered, and all that we can follow are fragments of narration marked by the very typography of the text, by the layout of the page and the letters in that white space. The typographic layout is the only and weak trace offered by the Compiler: the text is presented as a highly rhizomatic structure, and the Borgesian rhizomaticity is taken to its limit in Roa Bastos' text. The trace, I insist, is inscribed as lines of flight that incessantly deterritorialise the text, only to reterritorialise it and constitute new territory which introduces new lines of flight that in turn will again deconstruct the territory. Thus, the extreme rhizomaticity is what compels us to change our act of reading, to modify our reading habits if we wish to read and capture the textuality of I the Supreme: it is impossible to read this text as we read texts of modernity. This is an open text, one that can be started or ended in any point of its cartography; one may enter by any road of the map and exit by any other road. There is no end in this text and, therefore, the reading is never concluded, and the only aspect that is crystallised is the Supreme's perception of the world. Furthermore, the text does not tell anything and this is clearly stated in the "Final Compiler's Note": "the story that should have been told in them has not been told". This is yet another element that leads the reader astray, since one is used to narrations where a story is told, and thus the reader is unable to follow the 'narration'. At each turn the text seems to lead to a story only to reveal that it is a fragment of a story as were all the previous ones and all the ones that will follow. We face here a writing in the actual making with/in the reading of the Compiler and the reader. It is this narrative strategy which is difficult to follow in I the Supreme, and can only be overcome if we become aware that this text must be read in a different manner, and that only in that moment, when entering into Roa Bastos' rhizome, we manage to capture the meaning: what has been told? Nothing. Nothing that would resemble a story, but much with respect to Paraguay by inscribing the voice of what has not been told by history; it provides us with an internal vision of the Supreme and not of the history contemporaneous to the Supreme, but of the whole history of Paraguay. It is in this respect that Wladimir Krysinski has said: / the Supreme is a great synthesis of forms, of structures and narrtive models which are reflected in its totality: form Cervantes to Musil and Cortázar, including Broch and Joyce. It is for this reason that the reading of this novel reveals the dynamism of the genre, which always results in a form always opened, available and subversive, where the discursivities and narratives of power and the narrative operations of History are found. (Krysinski, 1988: 51. The translation is mine).

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CONCLUSION

What have we said up to now: we have attempted to establish that Roa Bastos introduced Post-Modern narrative as normal science to Latin America, and at the same time, he deconstructed modern narrative. We have also attempted to demonstrate the central topic of discussion of the cultural and literary Post-Modernity, such as language, writing, history, fiction, orality and voice, introduced by Roa Bastos, contemporaneous, or even before this discussion was launched by theoreticians such as Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, etc. This is what makes I the Supreme not only one of the most important literary works of the Twentieth Century in the Spanish language since Cervantes' Don Quixote, but also one of the most significant works of world narratives in the Twentieth Century. With the passage of time the contemporaneity and actuality of Roa Bastos' work becomes even more evident. This work has become a legacy as one of the greatest literary achievements in the West, and in the World.

1M

ROA BASTOS: I THE SUPREME: SIMULATION, RHIZOMATICITY, AND THE DEHISTORISATION OF HISTORY AND THE DEFICTIONALISATION OF THE FICTION

To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange uses. We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and... and and..." Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. The hyperreal represents a much more advanced phase, in the sense that even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary is effaced. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. The very definition of the real becomes that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. This is contemporaneous with a science that postulates that a process can be perfectly reproduced in a set of given conditions, and also with the industrial rationality that postulates a universal system of equivalency (classical representation is not equivalence, it is transcription, interpretation, commentary). At the limit of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations.

1.

PREAMBLE

I the Supreme by Roa Bastos has been the object of numerous studies during the past thirty years, and the majority of them have located his work within the so-called "Boom"

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CIIT.TIIRF. AND I ITER ATTIRF.

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narrative' (Rodriguez Monegal, 1972a and Sosnowski, 1986), and therefore within the narrative of Modernity. Others simply chose to ignore him (Rama, 1981) or they placed him within the so-called novel of the Dictator, another unproductive label to qualify, not only Roa Bastos' narrative but a whole group of Latin American narrative (See page 119). For this reason, and in order to contextualise the reflection I wish to propose, it is necessary to clarify my own definition of Modernity, a definition that I shared with Frederick R. Karl (1988). For me, Modernity begins about 1896 with the representation of Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, and ends by 1925. What follows, until the end of the Second World War, is what Thomas Kuhn (1970) calls 'normal science', that is, the extension of the artistic paradigm of Modernity as a universally accepted practice. During the 1950s a transition took place marked by composers such as John Cage, artists such Andy Warhol, authors such as Samuel Beckett, or architects such as Belgiojoso, Peresutti and Rogers with the construction of the Torre Velasca in Milan in 1957 or by the Pop Art of the 1960s, etc. The Post-Modern Condition, already announced by these artists, was introduced by the 1970s and was transformed in normal science until the end of the Twentieth Century. It is from this position that I reflect on the work of Roa Bastos, and it is from here that I am able to place him within the issues of PostModernity, such as simulation (Baudrillard, 1983), the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), the dehistorisation of history, and deflctionalisation of the narrative.

2. SIMULATION Jean Baudrillard, in his book Simulations (1983), begins with a reference to Borges' text, "The rigor of science". There Borges writes: ... In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of on Single province covered the space of and entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire, that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence they abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. (1973: 141)

1

This term was introduced by Rodríguez Monegal in his book El BOOM de la Novela Latinoamericana (1972a) to characterise the new narrative that emerged during the 1960s which coincided with economic Boom in the continent.

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The reason why Baudrillard quotes Borges is because in the act of duplication, the geographers still maintained an equivalence between the real and the duplicated, between the sign and its equivalence with the real; in one word, the relation between the sign and its referent. Borges keeps the referentiality, that is, the geographer's map coincides point by point with the real territory, and it is this referentiality which, according to Baudillard, is obliterated in the Post-Modern condition. Here, the real is replaced by hyperreality, by cybernetic models independent from reality. According to Baudrillard: Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality, a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — PROCESSION OF SIMULACRA — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. (1983: 2)

What Baudillard states, and is also stated by Borges in "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote" (1962) and in "Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1962), is the impossibility of representation and the differentiation between the real and the hyperreal, the fictitious: the fictitious not as the fake or irreal, but as hyperreal. Roa Boastos in I the Supreme performs an operation of simulation that tells a story that is never told and thus, creates the illusion of referentiality by relying on a 'historical' narrative: the history of Paraguay from the perspective of the Supreme. But this historical narrative is a temporal and spatial manipulation since the historicity of the facts seems to rely on their veracity, but in fact there is no referent at all. The apparent referentiality inscribed in the explosive intertextuality and dialogicity of the text is a deception, is a pure generation of the hyperreal, which is impossible to verify. The normativity of the reading is constantly subverted and the reader's hope to eventually find a guiding thread that will allow him/her to constitute the horizon of expectation in order to establish a diegesis which will make signification possible, is never satisfied 2 . At each turn one seems to be starting the narration, and it is this that will lead to an intense rhizomaticity. The initial pasquinade, which opens the narrative, is introduced as a motivation, as a detective device similar to those of Borges in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" or to those of Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose. There Eco writes:

2

I use diegesis according to the definition provided by Marc Angeno: "We call diegesis the story displayed in a linear sequence of functional events attached to "actants-subject". [...]. We may consider that the level of the diegesis not only contains de "distributional relations, but also the integrative paradigms." (1979: 60).

151

NEW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CI II .TURF. AND LITERATURE In a state of intellectual excitement, I read with fascination the terrible story of Adso de Melk, and I allowed my self to be absorbed by it that, almost in a single burst of energy, I completed the translation using some of those large notebooks [...]. As the reader must have guessed, in the monastery library I found no trace of Adso's manuscript. (1980: 1-2) [...] A few months later, in Paris, I decided to get to the bottom of my research. Among the few pieces of information I had derived from the French book, I still have the reference to its source, exceptionally detailed and precise. (1980: 2)

The difference between Eco's text and that of Roa Bastos resides in the fact that Eco will tell Adso de Melk's story while in the Supreme, as Borges does in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Roa Bastos will never tell the story of the pasquinade. The simulation to tell any story, the many that seem to emerge without ever becoming one, is clearly stated when the Supreme affirms: I can allow myself the luxury of mixing up the facts without confusing them. I thus save myself time, paper, ink, and the trouble of searching through almanacs, calendars, dusting shelf lists, I don't write history. I make it. I can remake it as I please, adjusting, stressing, enriching its meaning and truth. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 194)

"To make" history is to create a model that it is not based on any referent, but is selfgenerated, and this is why simulation replaces the historicity of facts. At the end of the long reading of I the Supreme only shreds of history remain (the map) and the words of the Supreme have replaced reality.

3.

RHIZOMATICITY

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987: 3-25) introduced the notion of rhizome in order to designate a new type of structure, one that is not symmetrical or hierarchical and that is not binary. In order to define the rhizomatic structure, they introduced six principles: connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignificative rupture, cartography and decalcamonia. Each one of these principles interconnects with the next, and in this sense each one is synonymous with the other: thus they are inseparable and must be considered as an ensemble. In order to account for the movement of the rhizome, they introduce the notions of territory, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. I the Supreme does not obey a structure that can be established within the framework of a discontinuous narrative, but one that is symmetric, that is, of Modernity. It is in this way that James Joyce's textuality in Ulysess, or Juan Rulfo's in Pedro Páramo, or Carlos Fuentes' in The Death of Artemio Cruz, or José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night can always be reconstructed in spite of their diegetic discontinuity and fragmentation.

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The reader can order the "a Sujet" component in a "Fabular" sintagme3. However, in I the Supreme there is no possibility of establishing a narrative sintagme that will obey an operation of fabular inscription. Roa Bastos' text functions in a total nomadicity, that is, the textual movement of the territory is inscribed in one instant only to be deterritorialised and then reterritorialised. The complexity of the reading is located precisely in this triple matrix of territory-deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation. The apparent 'lack of understanding', or rather the explosive fragmentation, resides precisely in the deictic vacuum of the text: the deictics do not function as connectors, rather they find themselves floating without connectors. The text is organised in a series of nomadic territories or planes, which on some occasion find a connecting channel such as the topic pertaining to Argentina's and Brazil's attempts to conquer Paraguay. However, these are also nomadic since the Supreme does not respect any type of chronology and spacialisation. The Supreme constantly reveals to the reader the rhizomaticity of his narration, that is, he is continuously displaying the rhizomatic character of his narration: I am the final judge. I decide how things will go. Contrive the facts. Invent the events. I could prevent wars, invasions, pillages, devastations. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 196) We glide along in a time that is also bumping along on a broken wheel rim. The two carriages roll along together in opposite directions. Half going forward, half back. They separate. They graze each other. The axels creak. They draw further and further apart. The time is full of cracks. It leaks everywhere. Scene without a break. At time I have the sensation that I have been seeing all this forever. Or that I've come back after a long absence. To resume the viewing of what already happened. It may also be that nothing has really happened except in this image-writing that goes on weaving its hallucinations on paper. What is entirely visible is never seen entirely. It always offers something else that must be looked at further. One never sees the end of it. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 197)

The Supreme points out two central points of the narrative operation. On the one hand, he underlines the atemporality of the narration, where a section goes "forward" and another "back", and then states that the narrative "never sees the end of it", that is, he refers to the circularity of the narration. On the other hand, from the perspective of textual rhizomaticity, I would like to suggest that it is of no relevance where the reader starts the reading: the rhizomatic text is characterised by making the reading possible at any point of entry or exit. Thus, the text is like a digital matrix (or plane) where multiple codes may be inscribed, a sort of infinite hypertext, with no end. Roa Bastos' text

3

I use the term "Sujet" and "Fable" according to the definition provided by the Russian Formalists: "Sujet" is the artistic organisation of the narrative and "Fable" is the temporal organisation (Todorov, 1965).

m.

NF.W TNTF.RSF.CTIONS: RSSAYS ON CTII .TURF. AND I.ITF.RATURF.

functions within a radical verticality, and its complexity rises from the impossibility o f having a horizontal plane, which constitutes the diegetic axis 4 . D e l e u z e and Guattari state on this point: Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any another point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play every different regime of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor to the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. (1987: 21) This definition provided by D e l e u z e and Guattari perfectly describes the narrative operation of I the Supreme and the nomadic movement of the text. The rhizomaticity is assured for what I would call a narrative implosion, that is, the text implodes within and the reader is devoured by this implosion. The implosion w e a v e s the text in a double operation: the text lacks a narrator and it is constituted by an inexhaustible and indeterminate multiplicity o f v o i c e s , by a rhizomatic dialogism. Wladimir Krysinki has pointed out that: [...] all these elements contain a plurivoice organized by discontinuity and fragmentation of the text, and of a dialogism dialectically oriented towards the realization of a synthesis pertaining to the complexity of historial referents and of the interdiscursividities that propel it, surround it and comment it. [...]. I the Supreme is a "complication of complilations", the point of flight of a representation of representations, developed by the compilator through a transgressive and autonomous writing, at the same time it is pure fiction and a totality problematized by the real. (1988: 51-52)

4

Wladimir Krysinski speaks of a verticality and a horizontality in I the Supreme, but we believe that only verticality operates in this text. Krysinski points out that: Roa Bastos performs a couble fragmentation horizontal and vertical. Both are found in a sort of dialectical relation-tension which provides the novel its cognitive density insofar the two fragmentations function as semiotic systems which refer to knowledge by means of a gradual and dynamic multiplication. (1988: 47)

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ROA BASTOS: / THF. SUPREME The rhizomaticity of I the Supreme 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9) 10) 11) 12) 13) 14) 15) 16) 17) 18)

19)

20)

is established by the following textualities:

The Pasquinade Notes with the dialogues between the Supreme and Patiño The private notebook with affairs of government and the Supreme's reflections on governing The perpetual circular containing all types of decrees addressed to government officials The metatexts as multiple footnotes of various sources The logbook which provides information about the Supreme's past life The voice from the nether land The tutorial voice Pueyrredón's draft document A report from the Commandant of Villa Franca The voice of the Supreme's dog, Sultan The 'false proof-reader' The final voice The voices of Plato, Patiño, Cháves, Robertson, Pascal, Cicero, Rousseau, Echeverría, Bonland, Bartolomé Mitre, Tácito del Plata, Tácito Brigadier) The Compilers's notes clarifying details An appendix added by Roa Bastos regarding the controversy raise by the return to Paraguay of the Supreme's remains The final note by the Compiler Multiple quotations from: Raymond Roussel, Lautrémont, Céline, Montaigne, Baudelaire, Pascal, Ponge, Rebalais, Queneau, Cervantes, Sade, William Blake, Borges, Gumaraes Rosa, The Bible, the Greek and Roman classics Intertexts: Julio César Cháves: El Supremo Dictador, 1942 John P. and William P. Robertson: Letters on Paraguay, 3 vol. 1839 J. Rengger and M. Longchamps: The Reign of Dr. Joseph Roderick Francia in Paraguay, 1927. Th. Carlyle: Dr. Francia in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Vol. IV, 1943. F. Wisner de Morgestern: El Dictador del Paraguay Dr. José Gaspar de Francia, 1923. B. Mitre. Historia de Belgrano y de la Independencia. Argentina, 1858 Fragments and unclassifiable texts

These texts weave the rhizomaticity by establishing a de-structuring that hinders any type of systematic operation. At the same time, and to make the reading even more complex, intertexts are introduced without any diacritic marks. For instance, the quotation by Musil was recognised by Krysinski (1988: 45-46) by accident, since to have read Musil does not imply that the reader will remember this type of detail. Hundreds of readings would be necessary in order to trace the unmarked intertexts.

m .

NF.W INTER S F.CTTONS: ESSAYS ON CUT TURF AND LITERATURE In the "Final Compiler's Note" Roa Bastos states: This compilation has been culled — it would be more honest to say coaxed — from some twenty thousand dossiers, published and unpublished; from an equal number of other volumes, pamphlets, periodicals, correspondences, and all manner of testimony — gleaned, garnered, resurrected, inspected — in public and private libraries and archives. To this must be added the versions collected from the sources of oral tradition, and some fifteen thousand hours of interviews, recorded on tape, filled with inexactitudes and confusions, with supposed descendants of supposed functionaries, with supposed kith and kin, close or distant, of The Supreme, who always boasted of not having any; with epigoni, panegyrists, and detractors no less self-proclaimed and nebulous. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 435) The reader will already have noted that, unlike ordinary texts, this one was read first and written later. Instead of saying and writing something new, it merely faithfully copies what has already been said and composed by others. Thus in this compilation there is not a single page, a single sentence, a single word, from the title to this finale note, that has not been written in this way. "All history that is not contemporary is suspect," El Supremo was fond of saying. "It is not necessary to know they were born to see that such fabulous stories are not of the time in which they are written. There is a vast difference between a book made by an individual and put before the people, and a book made by a people. There can be no doubt, then, that this book is as old as the people that dictated it." (Roa Bastos, 1987: 435) Hence, imitating the Dictator once again (dictators fulfil precisely this function: replacing writers, historians, artists, thinkers, etc.), the re-scriptor declares, in the words of a contemporary author, that the history contained in these Notes is reduced to the fact that the story that should have been told in them has not been told. As a consequence, the characters and facts that figure in them have earned, through the fatality of the written language, the right to a fictitious and autonomous reader. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 435)

The final note provides, in fact, the master key for the reading of the text, in as much as it deploys a textual polyphony, which integrates and inscribes the textual rhizomaticity. That is, Roa Bastos' text does not have a central narrative voice, which is characteristic of the Baktinian polyphony and dialogism, but instead has a multiplicity of voices, which constitute the text, as the Compiler's note attests. The process of reading is similar to the process of writing: both converge in the textual productivity, that is, the reading and the writing are operations in a performative process, self generating in the very instance of reading/writing. The reading, as the writing, constitutes lines of flight, nomadic convergent points in constant circulation. Thus, the text has no closure and it remains open, faithful to its rhizomatic structure.

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4.

SUPREME

151

DEHISTORISATION AND DEFICTIONALISATION

Baudrillard points out in Simulations that the question today is not the imitation or duplication of reality but, rather, its obliteration. Neither is the question about historiographic metafiction as Linda Hutcheon has stated (1989: 47-49, 57, 64), but rather we deal with the obliteration, as introduced by Borges, of any possibility to distinguish between the real and the fictitious. That is, a narrative indecidibility that inscribes the pharmakon, in the Derridian sense, namely, the text is history and fiction, but is both at the same time and therefore there is no possibility of separating them. According to Baudrillard: It is no longer the question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, that is, an operation of deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference. (1983: 4)

I the Supreme performs this very operation stated by Baudrillard, that is, it dehistorises history and defictionalises fiction. For the Supreme, the discourse of History is a construction and as such it is not different from so-called fictional discourse, and at the same time the discourse of fiction is not different to the discourse of History, and from this perspective fiction is defictionalised. What I am referring to, is the indetermination and indecidibility of the demarcation between History and fiction and the real and the hyperreal, between what is considered as given and what is constructed. This operation, similar to the one performed by Derrrida in Of Grammatology and in Dissemination with respect to phonocentrism and writing, is also performed by Roa Bastos when he breaks, on the one hand, with the linearity of History, when the Supreme quotes texts which were written even a century after his own death, and on the other hand, when he triplicates the narrative voice into I-You-He, the voice of a dead man. Roa Bastos' text is full of allusions pertaining the question of History/Fiction, and they are not simple accidents but constitute a clear signal regarding the attention that Roa Bastos has paid to this question: To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real. The unreal lies only in the bad use of the power of words in the bad use of writing. (1987: 59)

This statement by the Supreme characterises the post-modern narrative and cultural discourse, by signalling that real is nothing but the product of a discursive construction,

m.

NHW INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CUITIIRF. AND T.ITF.RATITRF.

and this, in turn, coincides with the hyperreality notion of Baudrillard. Thus, it is the discourse that makes the real, and not the real that is transmitted by a discourse. This statement also corresponds to the Lacanian notion of discourse, where the Subject is constituted by the act of language, it is socialised by the discourse of the Symbolic Order. The irreal lies, according to the Supreme, in the incorrect usage of the word/writing. We know that the Supreme is Platonic/Saussurian with respect to writing as death, the negative side of the pharmakon. Derrida writes in Of Grammatology that: Writing is that forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of interiorization, the contrary of interiorizing memory, of the Erinnerung that opens the history of the spirit. It is this that the Phaedrus said: writing is at once mnemotechnique and the power of forgetting. Naturally the Hegelian critique of writing stops at the alphabet. As phonetic writing, the alphabet is at the same time more servile, more compatible, more secondary ("alphabetic writing expresses sounds which are themselves signs. It consists therefore of the signs of signs ['aus Zeichen der Zeichen'," Enzyklopädie § 459]) but it is also the best writing, the mind's writing; its effacement before the voice, that in it which respects the ideal interiority of phonic signifiers, all that by which it sublimates space and sight, all that makes of it the writing of history, the writing, that is, of the infinite spirit relating to itself in its discourse and its culture. (1974: 24-25)

The incorrect usage of the word/writing, which here function as synonyms, is due to the relation of the hypomnesis (re-membering, recollection, consignation) with the mneme (live memory). The question lies in the position that the Supreme takes, that is, if the writing (of History) responds to memory but not in relation to the mneme but to the hypomnesis: to the past, to the archives, writing would seem to be exterior to memory and in this sense the Supreme opts for the mneme since he then does not need any archives, the hypomnesis: I can allow myself the luxury of mixing up the facts without confusing them. I thus save myself time, paper, ink, and the trouble of searching through almanacs, calendars, dusting shelf lists, I don't write history. I make it. I can remake it as I please, adjusting, stressing, enriching its meaning and truth. In the history written by publicans and pharisees, they invest their lies at compound interest. Dates to them are sacred. Particularly if they are erroneous. To those rodents, error consists precisely of gnawing holes in documental truth. They turn into rivals of moths and rats. As for this perpetual-circular, the order of the facts does not alter the product of the factors. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 196)

The constructivity of History remains clearly established. I say constructivity and not fictionality since constructivity is related to the 'real' by operating as a system of signs whose signification is internal to the discourse, and is consumed as such. The status of the narrated, which normally we call fiction, with all its variations, since Aristotle's Poetic, comes to an end with Roa Bastos, and earlier with Borges. The status of the pharmakon is underlined by the Supreme when he states that:

ROA BASTOS: / THE SUPREME

LS2

Two hundred years later, the witnesses of those stories are no longer alive. Two hundred years younger, readers do not know if they are fables, true stories, pretended truths. The same thing will come to pass with us. We too will pass for real-unreal beings. And having reached that pass, we shall go no farther. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 66) Time and distance seem to dehistorise History in as much as it is cumbersome to delineate what really had occurred, that is, transform events into facts, separate what actually took place from what is imagined. This statement questions the so-called historical discourses. The Supreme constantly underlines the constructivity of History and the indétermination of its discourse. Thus, he dedoxifies the discourse on, and of, History by placing it at the same level as fictional discourse, or rather by obliterating both of them and deploying an undifferentiated discourse, that is, one that does not acknowledge an exteriority (what took place) and an inferiority (the discourse). The discursive evenness advocated by the Supreme, had already been stated by Borges in "Tlôn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius": "The metapysicians of Tlôn are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature" (1962: 25). The Supreme insists, throughout the text on how he 'processes' History and its constructivity: An author of our day has woven a legend about a man so condemned, who goes on rowing endlessly and finally finds the third shore of the river. I myself, in order to institute this sentence here, I took my inspiration from a story recounted by a libertine in the Bastille, which a French prisoner used to recite to me over and over during the siestas of the torrid Paraguayan summer. I take what seems good to me wherever I find it. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 120) I am the final judge. I can decide how things will go. Contrive the facts. Invent the events. I could prevent wars, invasions, pillages, devastations. Decipher those bloody hieroglyphs that no one can decipher. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 196) It may also be that nothing has really happened except in this image-writing that goes on weaving its hallucinations on paper. What is entirely visible is never seen entirely. It always offers something else that must be looked at further. One never sees the end of it. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 197) The plenipotentiary envoys of Buenos Aires, Herrera and Coso, and of the Empire of Brazil, Correia, superposed. Transposed to the dimension upon which I oblige them to gaze. Sitting on each other's knees. In the same place though not at the same time. (1987: 248) These quotations support the fact that the Supreme inscribes himself in a space where an attenuated intertextuality operates, or he fabricates the situation, but in any case the Historical discourse is undermined as 'logos', and is inscribed as fiction. In "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote", Borges writes:

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NF.W INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON CUI .TURF. AND LITERATURE History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. (1962: 53)

This is precisely the operation performed by the Supreme. Deformation and rhizomaticity lead to the obliteration of the referent, that is, any referential process is transformed in the production of floating signs, signs of signs which do not find an insertion in the real, since this is a construction where the events are only an appearance, a phantom of signification, a simulation which cancels any act of representation. Regarding this issue, Baudrillard states the following: So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. The latter starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Conversely, simulation starts from the utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself, a simulacrum. (1983: 11)

5.

CONCLUSION

Jorge Luis Borges introduced Post-Modernity in the 1940s, and Roa Bastos began the discussion of the Post-Modern Condition with I the Supreme, perhaps one of the most complex narratives ever produced in Spanish language or in any other one. The depth displayed by Roa Bastos regarding the thorny issues of the arche-writing, nomadicity, hyperreality or rhizomaticity, places his writing at the level of the great authors of the Twentieth Century: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Musil and Dos Passos. There is no other writer who brought such radical closure to the Modern novel, and in the same act, introduced the Post-Modem 'novel', as Roa Bastos did. In 1974, Roa Bastos opened and closed Post-Modern narrative, in the very same manner that Rulfo opened and closed Modern narrative in an act of metaphorised self-consumption in El llano en llamas. I would like to end with the very words of this great writer: For me, then, as for all the writers of my country who work in the internal or external exile — this literature without a past presents, in the first place, the commitment to rescue this absent literature, the memory of those erased texts, destroyed even before they were written, In them are inscribed the foreshadowing of a future society, and at the same time of a literature in the context of a particular history. In this sense, literature always became for me a form of life, not a form of "living literarily" the reality of history, the reality of social and individual desire and obsessions, but rather as venue that allows the reality of myths and the symbolic forms to penetrate deeply underneath of the surface of human destiny. (Roa Bastos, 986: 129).

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