CRITICAL FICTIONS IN LATIN AMERICA

By Catalina Ocampo

B.A., University of Virginia, 2001

A.M., Brown University, 2004

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2015
 © Copyright 2015 by Catalina Ocampo

  iii  
 This dissertation by Catalina Ocampo is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying

the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date_____________ ___________________________________________
Stephanie Merrim, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date_____________ ___________________________________________
Esther Whitfield, Reader

Date_____________ ___________________________________________
Michelle Clayton, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date_____________ ___________________________________________
Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School

  iv  
 Curriculum Vitae

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

  v  
 Acknowledgments

In the coda to this dissertation I outline a literary-critical utopia: it is an open bar

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

My infinite gratitude goes to my advisor, Stephanie Merrim, whose critical

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

I am thankful to my readers, Esther Whitfield and Michelle Clayton for their

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

At Brown University, I am thankful to Julio Ortega, who has been an admirable

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

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

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

This dissertation would not have been possible without an extraordinary

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

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

No tengo cómo agradecerles a mi padre, madre y hermana, quienes apoyaron (y

se soportaron) este proyecto durante muchos años. A mi madre, Beatriz Londoño, le debo
incontables de horas de ayuda, plegarias, mensajes de apoyo, visitas a todas las ciudades
donde escribí esta tesis y sobre todo su incansable amor de madre, su confianza
incondicional, su paciencia conmigo. A mi padre, Francisco Ocampo, le agradezco por
ser el mejor profesor de crítica-ficción que he tenido en mi vida. De él heredo mi amor
por la literatura y las letras, y le dedico este proyecto. Que sea acto de eternidad. A mi
hermana, Juana Ocampo, quien siempre fue una mejor hermana mayor, le agradezco su
vital energía, su sentido estético, su amor, que siempre me renuevan y me dan fuerzas
para seguir adelante.

To Carl Toews, steadfast believer, exacting critic, partner in imagination, voice of

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

  viii  
 Para mi padre, gran lector ingenuo,

con quien sigo aprendiendo a leer.

  ix  
 Table of Contents

Chapter One

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

Chapter Two

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

Chapter Three

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

Chapter Four

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

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

Coda

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

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

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 CHAPTER 1

Introduction:
Critical Fictions in Latin America

In 1953, the Mexican writer and critic Alfonso Reyes published a curious text

titled “Canto del Halibut,” which closes the collection of short stories Árbol de pólvora.

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

Subtitled “Epopeya atávica: Cuaderno primero de la Bibliotheca [sic] Hipoglossia,” it

consists of a rather brief “epic poem” and a critical commentary that contextualizes,

glosses, and analyzes the poem’s fifty-four verses (Reyes, “Canto del Halibut” 110;

henceforth cited as “CDH”). Like other critical editions that Reyes published throughout

his life, “Canto del Halibut” might appear more at home in one of the volumes that house

Reyes’s expansive and erudite critical oeuvre. The text, after all, claims to be an “Edición

algo crítica” (111), though in this case the “algo” signals to the reader that something else

is at work. As José Luis Martínez observes, the epic poem, which tells the tale of an

ambiguous and polymorphous “halibut,” is rather “lamentable” (“Introducción,” vol. 23,

15), and the presumed author of the commentary surprisingly begins his “critical edition”

by inviting the reader to skip over the refrain in each couplet, claiming that he only

reproduced it through “probidad filológica” (Reyes, “CDH” 111). The rest of the

commentary seems equally suspect. Although it closely follows the conventions of

critical analysis, the various critical approaches in the commentary—which range from

  1  
explication de texte to stylistics—seem to provide little in the way of information or

analysis. By the time we get to the “hipótesis psicoanalítica,” we are inclined to agree

that the purportedly ancient poem was in fact the doing of a “falsificador moderno,” who

wrote both poem and commentary after being fed too much halibut in a long nautical

voyage from New York to England (124).

Given the inclusion of “Canto del Halibut” in a collection of short stories, it is

not difficult to infer that the “falsificador” is in fact Reyes, and that both poem and

commentary are fabrications, meant to be read together as a false critical edition. The

fictional nature of the text is further reinforced by a clue in the commentary, which

situates “Canto del Halibut” within a long literary lineage of fictional critical works. As

the close of the “psychoanalytic hypothesis” states, “No sería la primera vez que

MacPherson sorprende al mundo con los cantos de Ossian” (127). The reference here is

to James MacPherson, an eighteenth-century Irish poet who claimed to have discovered,

translated, and introduced an ancient cycle of epic poems centered on the hero Ossian,

but who apparently penned the poems himself using found fragments of poems and

stories. In his article “Alfonso Reyes: ficción, parodia y antropofagia” Manuel Ulacia

picks up on the clue and positions both “Canto del Halibut” and McPherson’s poems

within a respected and venerable tradition, which he calls “la tradición de la ficción

crítica” (594). Although he does not define the term “critical fiction,” Ulacia gestures at a

wealth of writers like Miguel de Cervantes, Valery Larbaud, and Fernando Pessoa who

have similarly fabricated critics responsible for authoring commentaries, introductions,

and critical editions within the framework of literary texts. Despite such respected

precursors, Reyes’s imitation of critical language has been relegated to the status of a

  2  
“curiosidad un poco lateral” (J.M. Martínez, “Introducción” vol. 23, 15) within Reyes’s

more “serious” critical oeuvre. In the introduction to the volume of fictions in Reyes’s

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

“broma literaria” meant to show “que es possible disertar, sobre nada, con toda suerte de

consideraciones eruditas y técnicas” (15). The scant critical attention granted to Reyes’s

story similarly suggests that “Canto del Halibut” has been considered a passing joke or

experimental curiosity, a marginal text among Reyes’s more important works of

criticism.1

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

Martínez 15) but a text that extends Reyes’s work as a critic and scholar, while

challenging the distinctions between literature and criticism that underlie Martínez’s

depictions. For although the story is clearly a work of fiction, “Canto del Halibut” also

relies on Reyes’s vast cultural knowledge and familiarity with critical approaches like

stylistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and classical genre theory. The story is full of

highly technical observations and erudite references and includes incisive observations on

phenomena as diverse as Latin American modernismo, European primitivism, and Greek

scansion.2 It takes on many of the themes that Reyes would elaborate on in his more

recognizably “critical” works and uses the parodic imitation of critical languages as a

                                                                                                               
1
Despite Reyes’s importance as a critic and the fact that he is—according to Edith Negrín—one of the
most cited authors in Latin America (77), “Canto del Halibut” has been the object of little critical attention
beyond Ulacia’s “Alfonso Reyes: Ficción, Parodia y Antropofagia,” and Marcela Del Río Reyes’s “Alfonso
Reyes y el Canto del Halibut: un texto anticipador de las vanguardias.” Martínez’s depictions only
encourage such lack of critical attention. In the context of Reyes’s Complete Works, characterizing Reyes’s
fiction as a weekend pastime functions as a retrospective move that places Reyes more firmly within the
realm of criticism and dismisses his fictional works as marginal or unimportant.
2
In her article on “Canto del Halibut,” Marcela Del Río Reyes offers a detailed account of the numerous
literary references that Reyes includes in the text, as well as some of the critical frameworks that he
implements in his analyses.

  3  
fictional instrument to critique both cultural phenomena and critical discourse itself. For

in “Canto del Halibut” criticism, too, becomes the object of Reyes’s mordant analysis.

Through his mockery of critical language, Reyes reflects back on particular critical

approaches as he uses them to analyze the poem. He suggests, for example, that the

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

“género confuso” (116), ridicules psychoanalysis for its non-sequiturs and imaginative

hypotheses, and skewers the positivism of Ernest Renan, depicting him as another

fabulator given to suppressing and interpolating verses in his translations. Ultimately,

Reyes denounces the transformation of the “sociedad poética, Club del Halibut” into a

ponderous “Academia del Halibut,” claiming it will lead to the “anquilosis” of the text

(132).

In its capacity to assume the critical function and elaborate a reflection on

criticism from within the realm of fiction, “Canto del Halibut” thus serves as a

paradigmatic example of the series of texts I will here call “critical fictions.”3 As Ulacia

suggests, Reyes is not alone in his use of fiction to both reflect and reflect on the

rhetorical strategies, forms, and conventions of critical language. Particularly fruitful in

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

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

Roberto Bolaño, and Héctor Libertella. From the realm of criticism, these authors pilfer

not just stories, characters, and concepts, but also the formal characteristics that define

critical activity. We thus find among critical fictions a wealth of stories that mimic and

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

  4  
sometimes try to pass themselves off as criticism, imitating critical forms as diverse as

the lecture, the scholarly article, the journalistic review, the critical edition, or the

theoretical treatise. The result is a reflection on literature and its relationship to criticism,

as well as a metacritical commentary on the specific forms and languages of literary and

cultural interpretation and their historical implementation at certain places and times. Of

particular concern for critical fictions in Latin America is the tension between literary

forms of interpretation and more recognizably critical languages, particularly those

associated with Europe and North America. The tension is illustrated by Martínez’s

assessments of “Canto del Halibut,” which suggest that the practice of cultural

interpretation through fiction or other “literary” forms is a mere pastime or curiosity, but

not serious criticism or theory. Such assumptions have been especially problematic in

Latin America, which was repeatedly depicted throughout the twentieth century as a

region rich in cultural products and aesthetic practices but lagging behind both Europe

and North America in the realm of critical production.

The problem was a central one for Alfonso Reyes, who spent much of his life and

critical energies trying to undermine the perception that Latin America was some kind of

primitive realm that produced charming aesthetic objects but was completely devoid of

criticism. In “Canto del Halibut,” Reyes stages Latin America’s contradictory

relationship to critical discourse through the counterpoint between poem and

commentary. The commentary reproduces in parodic form the depiction of Latin America

as a primitive tribe given to magical and ritualistic practices. As the fictional critic states

in his description of the poem’s plot:

Hasta donde puede colegirse, se cuenta la historia de una tribu primitiva o

bien decadente, sensual, sangrienta, voluptuosa, refinada y cruel, que suele

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

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

Halibut!” (115)—to a “baladro de independencia, un 16 de Septiembre [sic] irreal y

crepuscular” (120). In the lines that follow, the critic alludes to a number of key events in

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

“Antiguo Régimen,” to the scream “Sufragio efectivo: no reelección!” (120). Lacking

specific reference to the “Cry of Dolores,” the Porfiriato, or the Mexican Revolution,

such allusions reinforce the vague and mythical story of a sensuous and primitive tribe

given to magical celebrations and mystical fiestas but entirely removed from the reasoned

and erudite reflections of critical commentary. By associating the commentary with

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

His parodic depictions emphasize the extent to which European thinking construes its

other as primitive, sensuous, and magical, thus turning it into an object of reflection and

knowledge while stripping it of such capacities.

The notion that Latin America was a magical land of sensuous artistic production

but arid ground for reasoned intellectual reflection posed significant problems for Reyes,

especially insofar as it was reinforced by local cultural production.4 For Reyes’s attempts

to elaborate a critical discourse from Latin America were compromised by the opposition

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

  6  
between sensuous and magical creation vs. reasoned and critical reflection, which

suggested that in order to be recognized as a valid subject of thought Latin America

would have to assimilate and reproduce the forms of European intellectual activity. From

the 1920s to his death in 1959, Reyes would attempt to resolve this problem by engaging

in a difficult negotiation between European forms of critical activity and local needs,

realities, and cultural forms. For Reyes, securing a position as a critical subject required

aligning himself temporarily with what we might call a conservative “Academia del

Halibut” and crafting a critical discourse conversant with the languages of European

criticism. Yet Reyes’s critical project also entailed validating a diffuse tradition of

interpretive practices that crossed the boundaries between literature and criticism. Reyes

knew that the heterogeneous forms of that tradition risked being pronounced a “género

confuso,” as the fictional critic had done in “Canto del Halibut.” From a European

perspective, Latin America’s literary-critical tradition could easily be depicted as a

“narración poética de un suceso heróico, alguna emancipación nacional, costumbres

rituales y orgiásticas… una perpetuación inconsciente, visiones étnicas, emociones

folklóricas fijadas en los nervios de un pueblo acaso por amontonamiento hereditario, y

reveladas de repente por un poético estallido de salto atrás” (116).5 Precluding such

judgments and authorizing the literary forms of interpretation in the region remained a

key element of Reyes’s project, which relied on literary forms to provide a critical

perspective on the specializations and closed categories of metropolitan discourse.

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

  7  
 Reyes’s critical fiction is an example of one such “confused genre,” which

suggests that the discursive formations of Latin America are not so much confused as

confusing to a metropolitan gaze prone to judging them by its own established categories.

As the parodic commentary in “Canto del Halibut” suggests, the European methodologies

brought in to elucidate the cultural practices of the primitive tribe ultimately prove

incapable of describing the poem’s “confusing genre,” its time and place, the historical

realities in which it was written, who the hero was, or even the nature of the event.

Reyes’s fictional reproduction of European critical forms provides a searing commentary

on the notion that Latin America was incapable of producing a critical discourse and

reflects back on the terms and categories that perpetuated such notions. “Canto del

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

America that could undo the perceived critical deficiency in the region, and to do so in

terms that would not be entirely defined by the centers of discursive power. Undertaken

by Reyes and by numerous other Latin American intellectuals, such a project would

sometimes be carried out from the position of the critic and sometimes from the position

of the fiction-writer. Yet in the ambiguous realm of critical fictions, both writers and

critics would continue to move between positions in a sustained attempt to resist the

separations between discourses, which increasingly came to determine the validity of

literary and critical production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Critical

fictions’ discursive ambivalence and polymorphous forms would be particularly

productive in Latin America, though their strategies would resonate beyond the region,

offering critical possibilities elsewhere occluded by the closure of the literary and critical

realms.

  8  
Critical Fictions

Much had changed in Latin America since Reyes penned “Canto del Halibut,” yet

by 1992 Reyes’s critical fiction had perhaps come full circle. That year, the Argentine

writer Héctor Libertella wrote a text titled “Crítica literaria y/o literatura crítica,” which

draws the outlines of a Latin American tradition of writing at the crossroads of literature

and criticism. Libertella sets out to identify a “literary” criticism that instead of studying

literature proceeds from it, and a “critical” literature that flaunts its field of readings.6

According to Libertella, since the 1960s writers had been reading as much—if not

more—criticism and theory as literature. They had been caught in a web of readings that

included names like Freud and Saussure, Barthes and Jakobson, Tinianov and Jameson.

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

Sarduy, and Octavio Paz had resulted in a literature capable of reshuffling the roles of

professor, researcher, and writer of fictions, confusing “hasta la total vaguedad esos roles

fijados a su propia represión” (349). Through his literary-critical lineage, which also

includes writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Macedonio Fernández, Salvador Elizondo, and

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

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

“en diagonal, como un alfil, la fortaleza de las disciplinas constituidas para llevar y traer

herramientas y preguntas de un lado al otro” (356). Seventy years after Reyes penned his

critical fiction, Latin American writers seemed to have entered a cosmopolitan territory

where they moved with ease among metropolitan theory and were no longer limited by

the opposition magical creator vs. reasoned critic.

Yet Libertella’s article also attests to the emergence of new contradictions. For if

he sets out to find and gather writers who can confuse roles or cross disciplines, it is

because of the newly fortified walls between disciplines and the repressively rigid roles

of professor, researcher, and writer of fictions. Libertella points to the paradoxical

condition of the literary-critical field at the end of the twentieth century, when both

literary and critical writers proclaimed and practiced a new fluidity between literature and

criticism, but did so in the context of stronger disciplinary and institutional boundaries. In

Latin America, the tension between discursive fluidity and the closure of constituted

disciplines is enacted by Libertella’s article, which was published in 1997 as part of

Lectura crítica de la literatura americana.7 Edited by Saúl Sosnowski, Lectura crítica is a

four-volume anthology that collects key critical articles on Latin American literature,

most of them written by critics and writers from Latin America.8 The anthology was

                                                                                                               
7
Libertella’s “Crítica literaria y/o literatura crítica” was later included in slightly edited form as the
prologue to his 1993 book Las sagradas escrituras, which includes longer and more detailed interpretations
of many of the authors that Libertella mentions in the prologue.
8
Sosnowki’s four-volume anthology includes articles that analyze Latin American literature from pre-
Columbian times to the present. It also includes various articles that analyze Latin American criticism,
beginning with the “nueva crítica” that emerged in Latin America during the 1960s and 70s and that
according to Sosnowski himself inaugurated the field of criticism in Latin America. It is worth noting that
the articles included in the anthology are all written after 1960, a choice that reinforces the sense that Latin
American criticism finally emerged in the 1960s and 70s.

  10  
published by the Biblioteca Ayacucho, a publishing house of the Venezuelan government

that has served the dual functions of disseminating and canonizing Latin American

literary works, often designating them as “classics.” The publication of the four-volume

anthology in 1997 thus served to ratify the existence of a Latin American criticism, which

Reyes had set out to create in the 1940s and 1950s and which by 1997 could boast a

defined field of precursors, practitioners, and watershed texts. Included in the anthology,

Libertella’s call for a more fluid literary-critical discourse that could break down

disciplinary boundaries seems paradoxical. Yet it also enacts the diagonal gesture of a

literary-critical bishop intruding into the closed field of a constituted discipline in order to

introduce new tools and open new questions.

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

Since the 1960s, the literary nature of critical writing and the theoretical dimensions of

literary texts became commonplaces in scholarly debate in both Europe and the United

States. The “transformation de la parole discursive…. celle-là même qui rapproche le

critique de l’écrivain” (Barthes 47) announced by Roland Barthes in 1966 seems to have

been confirmed by critics’ willingness to analyze critical works as primary texts in their

own right and to highlight the critical dimensions of literary writing. The rise of

poststructuralist theory—deconstruction in particular—played an important role in

bringing the rhetorical dimensions of critical and theoretical writing to the fore,

highlighting the extent to which they share the formal and discursive strategies of literary

writing. According to Román de la Campa, deconstruction ended up generalizing a

practice he calls “episthetics: that uncertain interplay between epistemology and

aesthetics, from which criticism turns into a writing, and language metaphors translate

  11  
into an immanent sense of rhetorical praxis and agency” (vii). According to De la Campa,

many of the powerful aspects of creative writing, including “inventiveness, imagination,

formal exploration,” are no longer foreign to the production of critical discourses (152).

Conversely, critics have come to endow literary and rhetorical strategies with the critical

capacity to reflect upon the world. The tendency is particularly evident in discussions of

parody or so-called “metafiction,” which have earned the title of self-commentaries.9

Such crossovers from literature to criticism and from criticism to literature have even

elicited statements like Mark Currie’s assertion that “the wall between academic literary

studies and fiction has been demolished from both sides” (Postmodern 70).10

Currie’s 1998 claim occurred, however, at a time when criticism had been

established as an academic discipline practiced within universities by academics who—at

least in Europe and North America—were rarely leading figures in poetry or in fiction

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

Present, the dominant fact in twentieth-century criticism is the divergence between the

public marketplace for literary consumption and production and the enclosed space of the

                                                                                                               
9
This tendency is particularly evident in Margaret Rose’s book Parody // Metafiction: An Analysis of
Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction, though numerous critics have pointed
to the theoretical or critical dimensions of metafictional works and have analyzed the relationship between
the rise of critical theory and the increasing tendency towards metafictional moves in the realm of
literature. See, for example, Patricia Waugh’s article “Postmodern Fiction and the Rise of Critical Theory.”
For a specific account of fiction in English and its borrowings from theory, see Michael Greaney’s
Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism. For an
account of the self-reflexive turn of the “new fiction” that in the United States followed the nouveau roman,
see Raymond Federman’s Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. A collection of notable articles on metafiction
and its interpenetration with theory can be found in the volume Metafiction, edited by Mark Currie. It is
worth noting here that although the texts I am here calling “critical fictions” do exhibit characteristics of
what has been called “metafiction”—including the analysis of literature from within literature itself (Rose
13)—the rhetorical strategies of “critical fictions” go beyond the analysis of literature to reflect
metacritically on the rhetorical strategies and institutional dimensions of criticism.
10
Similar statements can also be found in texts like Criticism in the Wilderness, where Geoffrey Hartman
argues that criticism should be seen as contaminated creative thinking.

  12  
university, where scholars became both producers and the main consumers of critical

texts (6). In Baldick’s assessment, the accelerated incompatibility between the academic

varieties of criticism and the languages and conventions of literary writing was

aggravated by the rise of literary theory after 1968. For despite critics’ emphasis on the

interconnections between literary and critical discourses and their resistance to the

autonomy of both literature and criticism, the specialized vocabularies of theory also

reinforced the institutional rift between a professionalized academic criticism and literary

production while further restricting the shrinking realm of public critical discussion

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

Europe and North America as well as in Latin America, restricting critics to the world of

the university, barring them from the realm of literature, and narrowing critical

discussions to academic debates.11

By the late 1990s North American and European critics could very well proclaim

the demolition of the walls between literature and criticism, but it was more difficult to

write away the increasingly rigid roles of literary writer and academic critic. Faced with

the disjunctive force of the “or” that separated scholar from “creative” writer, the “y/o”

that Libertella placed between literary criticism and critical literature seems, indeed, like

a “pequeña utopía lingüística” (Libertella, “Crítica” 346). Yet Libertella’s linguistic

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

  13  
utopia is emblematic of both critics’ and writers’ late-twentieth-century attempts to resist

the closure of criticism by insisting on the interconnections between literary and critical

discourses. In the realm of criticism, the resistance to its closure carried on the initial

impulse behind critical theory, which emerged in response to a crisis in the function of

criticism during the social upheavals of the 1960s (Eagleton 90). Amid the growing sense

that, as a professional discipline, literary criticism was complicit with formal systems of

social reproduction (90-1), the new theoretical languages challenged the reigning vision

of criticism as a disinterested practice, epitomized by the North American school of New

Criticism. In the United States of the 1940s and 50s, the New Critics had played an

important role in defining a new “objective” critical practice that could claim its place in

the university by distinguishing it from the subjective vagaries of journalistic criticism.

They outlined the boundaries of an autonomous literary criticism that was distinct from

the journalistic review and from literature but also removed from the broader social

fabric.12 In the 1960s, the rising theoretical languages aimed their fire at the New Critics’

liberal humanism, depicting it as elitist, idealist, depoliticizing, and socially marginal,

replacing it instead with a new “politics of knowledge” that exposed criticism’s place in a

network of power-knowledge (Eagleton 91).

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

  14  
 Theory, in other words, targeted criticism as a closed and institutionalized

practice and sought to replace it with what Terry Eagleton calls “an intricate overlapping

of technical discourses united by their critical, structural, demystificatory style” (94). As

Eagleton argues in The Function of Criticism, the academy nevertheless ended up

appropriating the theoretical languages that emerged after the 1960s. Structuralism and its

progeny (97), in particular, helped provide an increasingly discredited criticism with a

new rationale, while diverting attention away from the question about the social function

of criticism that the turmoil of the 60s had brought to the fore (95). In the late 1990s

criticism was been strictly divided into the reviewing branch of the publishing industry

and an academic realm in which disciplinary shifts and theoretical discourse are less a

product of “radical paradigms” than of “marketing strategies that call on graduate

programs, academic journals, publishing presses, and professional conferences to produce

and disseminate innovative academic texts with a higher degree of commercial self-

awareness than ever before” (De la Campa 155). For Baldick, the resulting “bazaar of

critical approaches and theoretical schools” tended to construct self-confirming

discourses deaf to both the critical challenge of its competitors and to “the corrective

influences of a reading public outside the academy” (204).

While initially critical of the closure of criticism into a constituted, isolated

discipline, the theoretical and discursive shifts of the late-twentieth century also seem to

have drained critical practice in North America of the power of critique that fed the shifts

of the 1960s. As Judith Butler defines it in a lecture on Foucault delivered in the year

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

  15  
themselves.”13 Neither a judgment nor an abstract principle, “critique is always a critique

of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution, and it loses its character the

moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely

generalizable practice” (Butler). According to this definition, critical discourse in the

United States marshaled the power of critique insofar as it sought to disrupt criticism’s

constitution into a defined category or stable institution. Yet the transformation of

critique into the abstract foundation of academic criticism paradoxically fed the very

institutionalization it sought to resist. Despite the insistence on the “critical” dimensions

of literature, literary writing remains, more than ever, separate from critical

interpretation. Even in texts that affirm—and are sometimes dedicated to—the critical

dimensions of literature, critics are careful to distinguish between the methods and

demands of critical practice and those of so-called “creative” writing.14

                                                                                                               
13
Like the term “criticism,” the term “critique” is unstable, and its definition shifts depending on the
historical and cultural context. In his introduction to The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the
Frankfurt School, Paul Connerton, for example, traces the word back to its Greek roots and outlines the
changes in the word throughout its trajectory in German philosophy to the particular uses of word by the
Frankfurt School. In Criticism and Culture: The Role of Critique in Modern Literary Theory Robert Con
Davis and Robert Schleifer trace the changes that the word has undergone and analyze, in particular, its use
by literary theory in the United States. Andrew W. Hass also provides an analysis of the shifts in the term
“critique” and the relationship between critique and European artistic production in Poetics of Critique: The
Interdisciplinarity of Textuality. For my own use of “critique” or “critical,” I rely on Butler’s redefinition
of the term, which designates not an abstract principle—as happens with Kant, for example—but specific
attempts to disrupt constituted categories or institutions at particular historical moments, as it is closer in
sense to the way the word “crítica” has been used in Latin America.
14
The tendency to emphasize the critical dimensions of literature while distinguishing it from critical
writing is evident in Stathis Gourgouris’s book Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an
Antimythical Era. The book’s title points to the lingering question of whether literature can count as a
theoretical or critical discourse without the external tutelage or aid of analytical methods. Gourgouris
answers this question in the affirmative, pointing to the performative dimensions of literature as the basis of
literature’s “cognitive capacity.” He nevertheless continues to emphasize the difference between the
performative thinking of literature and analytical processes like literary criticism and theory. De la Campa
is even more stringent in warning against confusing or conflating “the demands of criticism with those of
creative writing” and “weaving literary and philosophical motifs without further rigors” (153).

  16  
 It is in this context that critical fictions emerge, appropriating the power of

critique in order to question the very language of criticism, its rhetorical strategies, its

institutional closure, its efforts at authorization, and its tendency to claim critique as the

exclusive foundation of its practice. Appropriating, imitating, mocking, scrutinizing,

dissecting, and transforming the forms and rhetoric of critical discourse, critical fictions

use the very language of criticism and literary theory to question the critical institution at

the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. As Ulacia suggests,

this strategy was, of course, not exclusive to texts published after 1960. Imitating the kind

of scholarly, academic, and analytical language that we have come to associate with the

word “criticism” has a long and respected lineage.15 It goes back to texts like Jonathan

Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), Thomas De Quincy’s “On Murder Considered as One of

the Fine Arts” (1827), and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833).16 The imitation of

critical language can also be found in early-twentieth-century texts like Valery Larbaud’s

Poèmes par un riche amateur (1908), Samuel Beckett’s 1930 lecture “Le Concentrisme,”

the fictional footnotes to Brian O’Nolan’s The Third Policeman (written 1939-40), and

                                                                                                               
15
The texts mentioned below, both before and after the 1960s, do not, of course, constitute an exhaustive
list. I mention the most salient examples as a way of sketching out the kinds of rhetorical strategies
implemented by critical fictions.
16
Swift’s Tale of a Tub is comprised of a narrative allegorizing the development of Christianity, which is
interrupted by a series of “digressions” or brief essays on themes like critics, digressions themselves, and
the relationship between readers and writers. De Quincy’s text is written in the form of a lecture delivered
to a gentleman’s club expounding on the artistic merits of murder. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus is in turn a
commentary on the thought and life of the German philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. Among earlier
texts that use the techniques of critical fictions one can also include James McPherson’s Fragments of
ancient poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language
(1760) and the footnotes to Tristram Shandy (1759-67). For an analysis of the use of footnotes in fictional
texts, with an emphasis on Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegan’s Wake, see Shari Benstock’s “At
the Margins of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text.”

  17  
Jorge Luis Borges’s fictions.17 Borges, an author widely known for the presence of

footnotes, bibliographies, or other markers of critical language in his fictional texts,

provides in fact a good example of the differences between earlier imitations of

intellectual language and the critical fictions that emerged after the 1960s.

One of Borges’s characteristic strategies is his use of scholarly, philosophical, and

critical discourse as the raw material for fiction. His fictional pillaging often resulted in

texts that draw characters or plots from intellectual writing, as is the case with his

Historia Universal de la Infamia (1935), which closes with a bibliography that reveals the

sources of Borges’s character sketches of various criminals. In other cases, however,

Borges’s texts fall more closely within the rhetorical strategy I am calling here “critical

fictions”: these include stories like “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1944), which is written

in the form of a fictional article recounting the discovery of the realm of Uqbar written in

the form of a fictional article. Yet in this story, as with the texts I have cited above, the

imitation of analytical language draws from a more diffuse intellectual realm that lacked

clear boundaries between literary and cultural interpretation and other realms such as

philosophy, religious exegesis, and political analysis. In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” for

example, literary anecdotes intermingle with details on a false encyclopedia article,

bibliographic references to invented historical texts, philosophical disquisitions on Tlön’s

cosmology, and discussions of a fiction created by “una sociedad secreta de astónomos,

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

  18  
de biólogos, de ingenieros, de metafísicos, de poetas, de químicos, de algebristas, de

moralistas, de pintores, de geómetras” (434). Borges’s “Examen de la obra de Herbert

Quain” (1941) and “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (1936) come closest to what we

now understand as literary criticism. As David Bennett describes it, “Pierre Menard” is “a

parody of the sectarian literary memoir designed to correct another critic’s

misinterpretation of a dead author” (28). In the early twentieth century, the literary

memoir was still considered a form of literary writing—if a marginal one—which

coexisted with a number of other discourses.

By the late twentieth century, however, the institutionalization of criticism in the

now-separate realms of academic criticism and journalistic reviewing had established

more clear boundaries between literary interpretation and the forms and functions of

literature. The fictional imitation of critical forms thus had a uniquely critical sting after

the 1960s, when a number of critical fictions challenged both the isolation of criticism

into an autonomous realm and the distinctions it created between literary and critical

discourses. In Latin America, these critical fictions include the texts I will analyze in the

following chapters—Augusto Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio (1978), Enrique Lihn’s

La orquesta de cristal (1976), and Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure (2000)—along

with other parodic depictions of critical language, such as Manuel Puig’s El beso de la

mujer araña (1976), Ricardo Piglia’s “Nombre Falso (Homenaje a Roberto Arlt)” (1975),

and Roberto Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América (1996).18 A similar phenomenon can

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

  19  
also be seen elsewhere around the world.19 In the United States, for example, critical

fictions include Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Jerome Charyn’s The Tar Baby

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

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

Hancock Rux’s Talk (2004).20 Like Reyes’s “Canto del Halibut,” these fictions borrow

from critical discourse not just characters, settings, and ideas for plots—as is also the case

with what is often referred to as the “campus novel” or “academic fiction”—but the form,

texture, vocabulary, and style of critical language.21 As with Reyes’s text, their

engagement with the particular languages of literary and cultural interpretation extends

their critical power beyond metafictional reflections on literature and positions them as

critical reflections on the rhetorical and historical dimensions of critical discourse.

Critical fictions are not, in other words, simply reflections on literature or

generalized attacks on intellectual practice. Their parodic depictions of critical language

                                                                                                               
19
A number of fictions from around the world also borrow the forms of scholarly or intellectual activity.
They include Lem Stanislaw’s Perfect vaccuum (Polish, 1971), written as a series of reviews of inexistent
texts; Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel (Serbo-Croatian, 1984), written in the
form of a dictionary; Dmitri Galkovsky’s Endless Deadlock (Russian, 1997, not available in English
translation), which consists of an essay on the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov, an essay on the essay,
and a lengthy commentary on the second essay; and Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maquiao (Chinese,
1996), also written in dictionary form. However, I limit my contextualization of Latin American critical
fictions to examples from the United States as a way of emphasizing the fact that the texts I am here calling
“critical fictions” are not simply texts that use the markers of scholarly or intellectual thought but rather
texts that specifically target the institution of criticism in their different contexts, as happens with the North
American novels cited above.
20
Nabokov’s text is glossed below. Charyn’s novel is written in the form of articles from the “sometimes”
quarterly review The Tar Baby, glossing the life and works of the amateur philosopher Anatole Waxman-
Weissman. Sokal’s article, which proposes that quantum gravity is a social construct, was published in the
journal Social Text as a parody of cultural studies. Everett’s Glyph is written in the form of brief vignettes
that expound on post-structuralist theory from the point of view of a 4-year-old prodigy. Rux’s Talk is a
theater piece written in the form of a conference panel organized around the work of the writer Archer
Aymes.
21
The terms “campus novel” or “academic fiction” are often used to refer to novels that take place and are
centered on universities. For analyses of the campus novel in England and the United States see Kenneth
Womack’s “Academic Satire: The Campus Novel in Context” and Leslie A. Fiedler’s “The War against the
Academy.”

  20  
are meant not to position literature as a superior discourse over the dry and arcane

languages of criticism, but to provide a metacritical revision of the specific languages,

theoretical frameworks, or schools of critical thought that came to dominate and define

the critical institution in the twentieth century. Rather than distinguishing literary from

critical discourse, critical fictions resist the divisions between the two and target what

Baldick has described as “the attempts to claim the title of ‘criticism’ for one set of

activities… while debarring others” (4). Critical fictions aim, in particular, at critics’

attempts to set their own presumably more critical languages above other discourses and

subjects, most notably literature itself. Critical fictions of the late twentieth century thus

emphasize the extent to which criticism is “a hybrid or bastard discourse, an arena of

intermingling and jostling discourses with no convincing pedigree that could entitle it to

sovereignty over a single and integral domain” (Baldick 3). Insistent on the

polymorphous nature of the critical institution, they imitate forms as varied as the critical

biography in Lo demás es silencio, the academic journal in The Tar Baby, the journalistic

review in La literatura nazi en América, and the conference panel in Talk, and they target

trends that range from psychoanalysis to deconstruction to cultural studies. In their

imitation of specific critical languages and forms, critical fictions emphasize the

historical dimensions of critical practice and the particular institutional and social

realities that have shaped criticism’s strategies to establish its own discursive stability.

A notable example of the strategies implemented by critical fictions and their

focus on the historical dimensions of critical practice is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which is

also one of the most widely known of the critical fictions mentioned above. Published in

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

  21  
Appalachian poet “John Shade,” published along with a foreword, a lengthy commentary,

and an index prepared by the so-called “Charles Kinbote,” a marginal Russian academic

who claims to be the exiled king of Zembla. Kinbote’s line-by-line analysis of Shade’s

poem reproduces the scholarly forms and strategies of close reading popularized by the

New Critics in the 1940s and 50s. When it was first published, the novel caused

widespread bewilderment among critics, who both indicted Kinbote for vandalizing

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

Nabokov’s text.22 The mixed, initial reception of Pale Fire had much to do with the

tendency to read Nabokov’s critical fiction according to New Critical principles like the

Intentional and Affective Fallacies and the emphasis on reading texts as self-contained,

autonomous objects, divorced from both critical practice and from their broader

context.23 For both Nabokov’s novel and Kinbote’s commentary violated New Critical

orthodoxy, challenging the increasingly rigid divorce between “creative” texts restricted

to the self-contained world of literature and a more “objective” critical practice

untarnished by the flights of fancy, amateur interpretations, and historical and political

excursus displayed by Kinbote in his commentary.

                                                                                                               
22
Kinbote’s commentary has been described as “critically barren” (Reading 91), “stupid, irrelevant, self-
revelatory exegesis” (Stegner 128), “an academic rape of Shade’s poem” (Macdonald 442), and “absolute
rubbish” with “no exegetical bearing on Shade’s poem” (Haegert 410). Nabokov, in turn, was accused of
letting his ingenuity and the virtuosity of his technique get in the way of “artistic purposes” (Macdonald
437) and Pale Fire was depicted as a “contrived” formalist experiment (Highet 89) marked by an
“appalling” “crudity and lack of imaginative resource” (Steiner 141), “boring”, “unreadable” (Macdonald
437), “overwritten and hard to get the hang of” (Dennis 142), and ultimately unsuccessful as a work of
literature. Ironically enough, the quality of Shade’s poem was rarely put in question despite being an
obvious parody of modernist poetry.
23
Such principles were most famously laid out in W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s 1946 essays
“The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” and in Cleanth Brooks’s “The Heresy of
Paraphrase” in his 1947 book The Well-Wrought Urn.

  22  
 As with Pale Fire, the particular critical forms imitated by other critical fictions

also reflect the form and structure of critical practice at the time of their composition.

Everett’s Glyph, for example, reflects in its brief vignettes—titled with terms taken from

literary theory—the dizzying proliferation of theoretical vocabularies that in the United

States of the 1990s dominated critical discourse, threatening to supplant the literary text

with their alternative version of writerly practice. In Latin America, the disjointed

fragments of critical language found in Enrique Lihn’s La orquesta de cristal—which I

will analyze in detail in chapter three—similarly reflect the destructive effects of Augusto

Pinochet’s dictatorship and its capacity to reduce critical discourse to highly technical

academic analyses or to the aestheticizing judgments of the regime’s sanctioned

reviewers. By echoing prevailing forms of critical discourse, critical fictions also

challenge existing assumptions about the form, methods, and function of literature and

criticism, and about the relationship between the two. The perceived intrusion of critical

forms into the world of literature often elicits puzzlement from critics, who tend to

question their literary value or try to reframe the texts, resituating them back within the

realm of literature.24 Like Nabokov’s first reviewers, critics thus reproduce in their

readings the very assumptions challenged by critical fictions and unwittingly become part

of the texts’ metacritical reflections.

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

  23  
 One of the primary ways in which critical fictions catch both past critical trends

and their future critics in the web of their metacritical reflections is by blurring the

boundaries between fiction and criticism and making it particularly difficult to

distinguish between the two. Like “Canto del Halibut,” the critical fictions mentioned

above are masterful displays of gratuitous erudition: they take the arts of footnoting and

citation to new heights, lavish pages on arcane theoretical arguments, and dwell on

technical minutiae, making exquisite arguments out of commas, allusions, and poetic

variants. They are virtuoso performances of critical language that confound the

distinction between criticism and literature, model and adaptation, genuine and

counterfeit. The result is a heightened discursive ambiguity further complicated by

references to both invented and actual authors and texts, by the coexistence of

preposterous interpretations and insightful observations, and by actual but often

misattributed quotes. The amalgam of folly and expertise, false leads and hidden

references, turns critical fictions into disconcerting games that defy readers to distinguish

fiction from criticism, the imaginary from the real, the literary from the critical.

Particularly vulnerable to critical fictions’ bewildering games are professional

critics, whose expert interpretive tools and knowledge of literature and culture heighten

instead of decreasing the dangers of misreading. From their very first pages, critical

fictions threaten critics with the possibility of missing key references that might signal

the source of the texts’ critical imitations or, even worse, with the risk of ignoring the

fictional status of the text altogether. In the United States, for example, Alan Sokal

unsettled the critical world by publishing, in the journal Social Text, a parody of

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

Something similar had already happened in Latin America: in the 1950s and 60s, under

the respective pseudonyms of Eduardo Torres and Gerardo de Pompier, both Augusto

Monterroso and Enrique Lihn published various critical articles, which not everyone

identified as parodies. Often presented as “hoaxes,” articles published in critical journals

are particularly subject to misreading, though such dangers are no less present in texts

that explicitly present themselves as literature. Ricardo Piglia’s “Nombre Falso

(Homenaje a Roberto Arlt),” for example, was published as part of the short story

collection of the same name. Although the text was included with other fictional works, it

was still not entirely obvious that the text’s fictional prologue was not meant to be read as

“real” criticism and that the short story it introduced had been lifted from the Russian

writer Leonid Andeev and falsely attributed to Artl.26 Even works that have

unquestionably been read as literary works hold similar dangers. When Monterroso

published Lo demás es silencio, critics hailed the work as a hilarious parody of

intellectual thought, yet no one seems to have caught the numerous references to Reyes

that explicitly place the novel in dialogue with the Mexican critic.

The danger of critical fictions, in other words, lies in their capacity to expose us

as naive readers, incapable of tracking the text’s treacherous games through either lack of

                                                                                                               
25
Sokal’s article, which is often described as a “hoax,” was meant to mock the lack of intellectual rigor in
humanist interpretations about the sciences. The article was not immediately identified as a parody, and
Sokal himself later published an essay revealing the fact that the text had been meant as a pastiche of what
he depicted as left-wing rubbish. For an overview of what is now known as the “Sokal Affair” see The
Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy, edited by the editors of Lingua Franca.
26
In “Metaplagiarism and the Critic’s Role as Detective: Ricardo Piglia’s Reinvention of Roberto Arlt,”
Ellen McCracken observes that the false attribution of the story to Arlt remained largely undetected when
the text was first published. According to McCracken, “libraries have catalogued the story as Arlt’s, and
scholars have either voiced uncertainty about its authorship or analyzed it as if it were indeed his” (1072).

  25  
knowledge or excessive credulity that the text is in fact what it appears to be. For

professional critics, such dangers strike at the very heart of the authority derived from a

critical ability that presumably exceeds the interpretive capacities of readers who lack the

same tools, knowledge, or theoretical frameworks. By enlisting devious strategies that

willfully put critics’ competence in question, critical fictions threaten to expose their

readers’ critical approaches as even more limited than the critical languages imitated in

the text. For whoever fails to “properly” identify critical fictions and catch their secret

nods to readers’ literary knowledge becomes a collateral victim of the authors’ ironies.

As Wayne Booth notes in The Rhetoric of Irony: “Even in the most amiable irony one

can always imagine a victim by conjuring up a reader or listener so naive as not to catch

the joke; no doubt in some uses of irony the fun of feeling superior to such imagined

victims is highly important” (27). In the case of critical fictions, however, the object is

not just to provide authors with a bit of literary “fun” but to expose critics’ and theorists’

use of the word “critical” to uphold the authority of their own discourse. By turning

critics into naive readers, critical fictions undermine professional readers’ sovereignty

over the critical faculty and their tendency to strip other discursive frameworks—

including literary writing—of the authority to interpret and analyze culture.

As they expose the opposition critical/naive often implicit in critical practice,

critical fictions question criticism’s tendency to claim interpretive authority by situating

not just other discourses but also other subjects outside the circle of critical activity.

Among their characters, critical fictions often include apparently naive readers who

initially seem to be the object of critique but whose naiveté ultimately proves illusory, a

  26  
result of the categories use to judge critical ability.27 Critical fictions thus highlight the

extent to which various definitions of the term “critical” have been established in

opposition to an imagined subject who lacks the education, methodologies, or intellectual

know-how to interpret literature and culture in a “critical” way. In doing so, critical

fictions emphasize the fact that naiveté is a subject position, often determined by a

subject or discourse that claims superior authority. In the case of criticism and theory, the

collateral victims have often been readers whose subject positions within the system of

power and knowledge place them at a remove from authorized and authoritative critical

discourses: they include women, the lower classes, the “uneducated” or “illiterate,”

“common” readers who are not part of the academic world, and intellectual traditions at

the margins of critical discourse as defined in Europe and North America. Such readers

are at greater risk of being designated as “naive.” They are often depicted as readers

predisposed to misreading or falling in the thrall of powerful discourses and texts and

therefore incapable of producing a critical discourse of their own. So defined, naive

readers so thus remain dependent on established critical discourses to cure them of their

naiveté and bring them into the circle of critical readers. Critical fictions, however,

repeatedly underscore the critical capacities of so-called naive readers and invite us to

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

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

interpretations.

In another reversal of critical practice, critical fictions thus use naiveté as a critical

tool to both question the authority of established critical frameworks and to highlight the

critical capacities of subjects and discourses excluded from critical discourse. This

strategy has been particularly fruitful in Latin America, which for years remained in a

marginal position with respect to the critical discourses developed in Europe and North

America. The apparent absence of expert or specialized languages to interpret literature

and the lack of autonomy of literature and criticism made Latin America’s “literary” or

unspecialized interpretations seem like naive approaches bereft of the critical perspective

provided by more sophisticated, metropolitan methodologies. Such naiveté nevertheless

opened the literary-critical realm in Latin America to a naive or unspecialized reader

capable of participating in the interpretation of culture. If in 1930 Borges had already

noted that “no van quedando lectores, en el sentido ingenuo de la palabra, sino que todos

son críticos potenciales” (“La supersticiosa” 202), by the late twentieth century readers’

status as potential critics had led to more rigid distinctions between naive readers or

established critics. For the attempts in Latin America to develop a legitimate critical

discourse had also begun to establish disjunctive oppositions between criticism and

literature, the critical and the naive, which critical fictions once again tried to resist. In

Latin America at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries they

did so by recuperating—though perhaps also inventing—a literary-critical tradition that

made no such distinctions.

  28  
Latin America

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

Literary Supplement titled “A Literature without Criticism.” The article, which was

published in translation and would not appear in its Spanish original until 1979, laid out a

curious paradox of Latin American cultural production. According to Paz, in the second

half of the twentieth century, Latin America could finally lay claim to a thoroughly

modern literature, which could boast the title of the third major “non-European Western”

literature, together with those of Russia and North America (59). In the realm of critical

production, however, Latin America continued to be marked by a disgraceful poverty.28

Latin America’s lack of critical writing, “whether literary, philosophical or moral” (60),

posed a serious dilemma in the region, for despite the newfound “modernity” of Latin

American literature, its apparent

weakness… in the critical field, has led some of us to wonder whether

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

The questions raised by Paz were especially troublesome in the 1970s, as they came

shortly after the so-called Boom, which granted Latin American writers a prominent

place in the bookstores and critical discussions of Europe and North America. The

unprecedented popularity of Latin American literature in the 1960s thus proved that the

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

  29  
region was indeed capable of creating a “modern” literature that could transcend its local

context and be recognized as such by a cosmopolitan, international audience.29

The absence of critical writing in Latin America, in other words, threatened the

hard-won modernity that its literature achieved after a long “period of obscurity” (60)

during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his article, Paz tried to forestall the

threat to the region’s modernity by asserting the “undeniable existence of critical

literature” (60). Paz countered the region’s critical deficiency by asserting that “some sort

of critical thinking, direct or indirect, social or metaphysical, realist or allegorical,

appears in nearly every Spanish American writer” (60). Locating the critical spirit in the

region’s unquestionably modern writers, he thus affirmed the region’s modernity, but

depicted it as an “eccentric” modernity that could not be judged according to the

philosophical and political ideas of modern, Western civilization (63). While attempting

to change the terms in which Latin America was judged, the time and place in which Paz

published his article nevertheless made his assertions about the absence of a Latin

American criticism particularly problematic. Published in an important organ and arbiter

of cultural production in the United States, Paz’s article obfuscated the tremendous

amount of critical activity that had occurred in the region during the past two decades. As

the testimony of a respected Latin American writer, it also seemed to support the

prevailing notion that Latin America had an extraordinary and vital literature but lacked

its own critical tradition.30

                                                                                                               
29
Latin American critics often make a distinction between what is referred to as the “new narrative” of the
1960s and 70s, and the “Boom,” a term used to refer to the editorial success of such novels in Europe and
the United States.
30
Apparently aware of such contradictions, Paz later wrote a “Nota marginal” that was appended to the
Spanish-language version of his article and published in 1988. There, he once again affirms the absence of
intellectual movements “comparables a los de Europa” but recognizes the existence of Latin American
  30  
 The purported absence of Latin American criticism—at least until the 1970s—in

fact became a commonplace, particularly among scholars within the U.S. academy. Jean

Franco, for example, situates what she calls “the rise of criticism” in Latin America

somewhere in the 1970s, when Latin America presumably began publishing critical texts

and preparing critical editions, something she calls “a true achievement” after the “lack of

such texts,” which “prevented in-depth study of certain areas” (“Afterword” 509). For

Franco, the so-called rise of criticism made it possible to embark on a “new criticism”

that aided by poststructuralism, sociocriticism, and deconstruction was no longer “a

delayed reflection of literary movements” (508). In his 1996 article “Literary Criticism in

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

Aníbal González is even harsher in his assessments. González again posits the perceived

inadequacy of Latin American critical efforts, in comparison to both its subject and to the

literary criticism of Europe and North America (425). Like Paz, González recognizes

important “precursors” of Latin American literary criticism, such as Andrés Bello, José

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

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

According to González, Latin America’s criticism has been characterized by its “mimetic

character,” “journalistic superficiality,” “lack of patience with serious scholarship,”

“ideological tendentiousness,” and by the limitations imposed by censorship, exile, and a

lack of financial and institutional support (425). Proving his point through quotes by

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

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

  31  
academic or journalistic) literary criticism in Spanish America is therefore a chronicle of

delusions, misreading, and outright falsification, with a few bright areas in the realms of

scholarship and literary history.” He then justifies his efforts to sketch the field of

criticism in Latin America by noting that “even erroneous ideas, if sufficiently

widespread, can have an impact on real-world processes and should therefore be studied”

(426).

Written for an English-speaking audience, and published in a text of literary

history that often serves as an introduction to defined fields within Latin American

literary studies, González’s article thus substantiates with “serious scholarship” the

notion that Latin American critics have been little more than naive readers, amateurs

given to improvisation, fraudulence, and imposture. At first sight, critical fictions written

in Latin America seem to echo such arguments. In the three critical fictions that I will

analyze in the following chapters, the reader is confronted by a doubly mimetic criticism,

as both a fiction and as an imitation of North American and European methodologies. A

perfect mirror of González’s assessments, the critical fictions of Augusto Monterroso,

Enrique Lihn, and Héctor Libertella are full of erroneous ideas, delusions, misreadings,

outright falsifications, and yes, a few bright areas in the realms of scholarship and literary

history. In Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio, for example, we find a portrait of the

provincial critic Eduardo Torres, whose writings are embarrassing examples of critical

writing. Incapable of distinguishing between important and unimportant information, the

private and the public, what is current and what is passé, Torres seems like a scathing

portrayal of Latin America’s provincial critics, whose complete lack of critical judgment

has produced laughable works but nothing in the way of serious scholarship. Something

  32  
similar happens in Lihn’s La orquesta de cristal, which gathers and reproduces the

commentaries written about a glass orchestra, whose silence and transparency do not

prevent a handful of second-rate critics from expounding with journalistic superficiality

and ideological tendentiousness on the meaning and significance of the symphony

composed for the orchestra. Finally, Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure seems to offer the

height of critical illiteracy: in the novel we find a naive take on Saussure’s diagram of the

linguistic sign, misread as a simple drawing and turned into a fable about a couple of

writers sitting at a bar and gazing across a plaza at its single tree.

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

America, such portrayals are also ironic commentaries on both the terms in which the

region’s criticism has been judged and the historical conditions that have shaped it.

Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella no doubt underscore the marginal character and

derivative nature of critical discourse in the region, though their reproduction of

particular critical forms emphasizes the historical, social, and discursive conditions in

which they emerged. In the view of all three writers, the marginal condition of Latin

America’s criticism is as much a product of the metropolitan categories by which it has

been judged as of the local obstacles that prevented the development of an autonomous

criticism divorced from literary writing in the region. One of their primary targets is, in

fact, the attempt to bring the region out of its perceived critical deficiency by crafting a

criticism recognizable as such in the centers of discursive power. Creating such a

criticism would entail endowing the emerging discourse of criticism with the

vocabularies, methodological frameworks, and rhetorical markers that would set it apart

  33  
from literary writing as well as from other discourses and practices that had previously

played key roles in the task of cultural interpretation in Latin America.

It may be fair to say that Latin America had no criticism, understood as a defined

and autonomous sphere with its own institutional home in the university. Yet to claim

that Latin America had no critical tradition would ignore a robust interpretive tradition in

which cultural analysis was invariably tied to political and social reflection as well as to

literary practice. Such a tradition can be found in many of the “precursors” of Latin

American criticism identified by González, as well as in other writers often associated

with ensayismo. In Latin America, the word ensayismo has been used as a catchall term

to designate a broad swathe of writings that cover anything from the polemical writings

of nation-builders like Simón Bolívar to the crónicas of Martí to the fictional writing of

Jorge Luis Borges. The discursive ambivalence and formal diversity of the writings

covered by the term are a good indication of the lack of differentiation in the realm of

letters in Latin America.31 As Julio Ramos argues in Desencuentros de la modernidad en

América Latina, the literary realm in Latin America did not begin the process of

autonomization until the late nineteenth century, when modernista writers began drawing

the boundaries of a literary realm that could establish a critical relationship to both the

state and to the technical and rational discourses of modernity associated with Europe and

North America. Yet, as Ramos also observes, the literary realm also underwent an

imperfect process of autonomization that kept writers reliant on journalism, maintained

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

  34  
the social function of writing, and included forms of writing, like the crónica and the

humanist essay, that were not exclusively “literary.”32

The heterogeneous and polymorphous forms found in both the realm of

ensayismo and in the literary realm outlined by Ramos attest to the continuing discursive

fluidity of what we might more accurately call the literary-critical realm, which made few

distinctions between the forms of literature and the forms of criticism. In the early

twentieth century, the essay continued to function as a mode of interpretation whose

literary dimensions set it against the rationalizing forces of modernization, the economic

interests of foreign powers, and a local state that sought to impose modernizing, North

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

Alfonso Reyes and Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the essay—to name one example—played an

important role in early twentieth-century Mexico as a critical discourse that set itself

against the positivism of the Porfiriato and the specializations of the regime’s

“científicos” (270).33 Yet the essay and its ties to literary practice continued to play an

important role throughout Latin America, which was often identified with the realm of

imaginative literature or humanistic discourses in opposition to the cold rationalizations

                                                                                                               
32
Ramos’s Desencuentros de la modernidad is, in many ways, a sequel to Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada,
where Rama outlines Latin American intellectuals’ lack of autonomy from political powers. According to
Rama, the dissidence that irrupted within the lettered city at the end of the nineteenth century made it
possible to configure “un pensamiento crítico” (78) with respect to the individuals and discourses in power.
Ramos picks up the thread from here and shows how the relative autonomization of the literary field
allowed for the emergence of a critical space in Latin America but argues that such space owed its social
impact to the imperfect autonomization of the literary field. It is significant that Ramos’s analysis of
ensayismo is located in the last chapter of his book, which situates ensayismo as the last instance of the
literary realm’s autonomization from the realm of letters. Ensayismo functions, in this sense, as the last
instance of the imperfect autonomization of the literary-critical realm shortly before it split into the distinct
realms of literature and criticism.
33
Picking up the efforts of both the modernistas and of José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel, ensayismo situated itself
within a literary realm that was closely identified with Latin America itself and construed as a space of
critique against the rationalizing, hegemonic forces of Europe and North America. Rodó’s Ariel was
fundamental in this respect.

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

Reyes, now identified primarily as a critic, as well as writers like Borges, now identified

as a fiction-writer, continued to practice literary forms of interpretation, gathered into the

heterogeneous discourse of ensayismo.

Up to the 1970s, the mobile, heterogeneous essay was the lingua franca of a

literary-critical realm that maintained a high degree of discursive and institutional

fluidity, particularly in contrast to what had occurred in the 1940s and 50s United

States.34 While literature and criticism in the United States split into the more clearly

defined and autonomous realms of creative writing and scholarly criticism, in Latin

America writers continued to intervene in the worlds of politics and society and moved

more easily between the dual roles of critic and fiction-writer. If González, for example,

cites Reyes, Rodríguez Monegal, and Rama as “precursors” and not as literary critics in

their own right, it is because of the ease with which they moved between discursive

forms, disciplines, and functions.35 As Franco notes, Rodríguez Monegal and Rama not

only taught in universities (“Afterword” 504) but also managed and edited non-academic

journals that published fiction, literary interpretations, and political analyses. Franco also

notes that it was writers like Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and

not academics, who revolutionized the reading of literary texts in the 60s and 70s, taking

on “the task of importing, disseminating, and inventing theory” (504). Such discursive

                                                                                                               
34
For an account of what has been depicted as the “demise” or “crisis” of the essay and its relation to the
so-called rise of criticism in the 1960s and 70s, see Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot’s “El ensayo y la crítica
literaria en Latinoamérica” and Peter Earle’s 1978 “On the Contemporary Displacement of the Hispanic
American Essay.” However, as Alberto Giordano suggests in Modos del ensayo: De Borges a Piglia, the
essay continued to function as an important form of critical reflection in Latin America beyond the 1970s.
35
One could argue that Andrés Bello and José Enrique Rodó are not strictly literary critics, though Reyes,
Rodríguez Monegal, and Rama are without a doubt considered literary critics in Latin America.

  36  
fluidity contributed to the sense that Latin America did not have its own, distinct literary

criticism. For writers and critics could very well claim, like Paz, that Latin America’s

critical tradition lay in literary writing (60), or, like Franco, that the novel and the short

story were the principal instruments in the process of transforming reading and readers in

the region (503). Yet the absence of “professional criticism” or “serious scholarship”

threatened to keep Latin America and its cultural products in their old colonial status as

objects to be consumed, studied, and analyzed from the perspectives of Europe and North

America.

The resulting search for a Latin American criticism thus participated in a broader

problematic about the possibility of theorizing from Latin America and being recognized

for doing so in terms that were not dictated by the centers of discursive power. The

debate is not restricted to the realm of literary criticism, though its participants often turn

to ensayismo as a paradigmatic example of problems that run across various disciplines.

For example, Walter Mignolo notes that, like the humanistic or literary forms of

ensayismo, other critical discourses developed in Latin America—including the theory of

dependence and “post-occidentalismo”—have fallen out of discussion in North America.

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

America into “un área para ser estudiada, más que un espacio donde se produce

pensamiento crítico” (“Postoccidentalismo” 32). For Hugo Achugar, the disregard for

Latin American critical production is largely due to the imposition of metropolitan

categories, which are incapable of accounting for the particular forms of Latin American

critical discourse and thus cast it as mere “theoretical babbling” (134). The conflict

generates a series of aporias, which Achugar poses as a string of unanswered questions:

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

Although Achugar implicitly underscores the validity of ensayismo and Latin American

cultural criticism as forms of theoretical thought, his questions point to the recurring

problem of securing their legitimacy in the centers of discursive power.

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

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

1940s—and perhaps even as early as the 1928 “Canto del Halibut”—Alfonso Reyes had

already acknowledged the paradoxes of Latin American criticism, emphasizing the

importance of creating a critical discourse that might resolve the perceived absence of

literary criticism in Latin America. Yet Reyes’s response to the tension between

metropolitan demands and local social and discursive realities was not simply to adopt

metropolitan discourse.36 He knew that doing so would merely elicit the timeworn

judgment that Latin America was only capable of imitating the cultural forms of the

metropolis—and badly at that—while failing to provide fitting methodologies to analyze

its own cultural products and social realities. Reyes then embarked on what he himself

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

  38  
depicted as a heroic effort to mediate between the global demand for an “objective”

literary criticism and the role that literary writing had played as an important form of

critical discourse in the region. Thus, despite being one of the most well-known and vocal

proponents of ensayismo, Reyes began crafting what he called a “ciencia literaria” that

might be welcomed into a worldly, critical dialogue. As I will discuss in further detail in

chapter two, Reyes construed that “literary science” as a capacious discourse that could

incorporate numerous methodologies, discourses, and perspectives, including

methodologies from Europe and the more literary and unspecialized interpretations that

had characterized critical thinking in Latin America.

Availing himself of the essayist’s “mirada integradora” (Ramos 270), Reyes set

out to create a distinctly critical discourse in Latin America that would maintain links to

various discourses and realms and preserve its critical nature. For Reyes associated the

adjective “critical” not with the capacity to stand back or separate his discourse from

other realms but with the capacity to comment on and intervene in society. Reyes sought,

in other words, to retain the social function of writing, made possible by the imperfect

autonomization of the literary-critical realm, whose lack of differentiation from other

spheres of culture or society had previously allowed writers to go beyond the self-

contained worlds of art or literature.37 As Reyes mentions in his essay “Notas sobre la

inteligencia Americana,” writers in Latin America are not born in the highest floor of the

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

  39  
and the numerous discourses they must wield keep Latin American intelligence “más

avezada al el aire de la calle” (86). Reyes, however, was not the only writer in Latin

America to emphasize the need for maintaining the social function of both literature and

criticism. As José Antonio Portuondo notes in his 1972 article “Literatura y sociedad,”

the instrumental character of literature had been a constant in Latin America: “no hay

escritor u obra importante que no se vuelque sobre la realidad social americana, y hasta

los más evadidos tienen un instante apologético o criticista frente a las cosas y a las

gentes” (391). For Antonio Cornejo Polar, the impossibility of assuming literature as an

autonomous category made it imperative for criticism to avoid abstraction and to analyze

Latin America’s literary forms in relation to the particularities of Latin America’s

heterogeneous and multinational societies (13).

Maintaining the critical capacity to comment on society—on local political events

and social structures as well as on global hegemonies—thus remained a key feature of

both the literary and critical projects in Latin America.38 This was particularly true of the

project to create a “nueva crítica latinoamericana” (Rincón 174), which picked up on

Reyes’s critical efforts while attempting to set itself apart from the humanistic ensayismo

he had come to epitomize. Like Paz, the proponents of the nueva crítica in the 1960s and

70s were also concerned about the apparent lack of criticism in Latin America,

particularly at a time when its literature was finally being commented, analyzed, and

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

  40  
incorporated into the world canon.39 One of the elements that gave particular urgency and

impetus to the project of creating a nueva crítica was the notion that without a legitimate

criticism the new narrative produced in the 60s and 70s would be interpreted through

European and North American lenses, thus reinforcing the sense of cultural dependency

that Latin American intellectuals had been trying to shake off since independence from

colonial powers. In the 1960s and 70s, critics and writers thus depicted the elaboration of

a recognizably critical discourse from Latin America as an important part of an

emancipatory continental project that would deliver Latin America from subservience to

Europe and North America.

At this point, however, critics distanced themselves from what many

characterized as the subjectivist impressionism and literary vagaries of previous

interpretive efforts and created a more “objective” criticism, separate from both literary

interpretations and from literature itself. In an effort to bring the region up to date with

international critical standards, they imported various critical methodologies from Europe

and North America and engaged in a lively metacritical debate about the merits and local

applicability of such methods.40 Emphasizing what Roberto Fernández Retamar called “la

                                                                                                               
39
For analyses of the emergence of the nueva crítica in 1960s and 70s Latin America, see Carlos Rincón’s
“Acerca de la nueva crítica latinoamericana,” Guillermo Sucre’s “La nueva crítica,” Desiderio Saavedra’s
“Nueva crítica para una nueva narrativa: problemas y perspectivas,” Nelson Osorio’s “La nueva narrativa y
los problemas de la crítca en hispanoamerica actual,” and Agustín Martínez’s Metacrítica: problemas de la
crítica literaria en Hispanoamérica y Brasil.
40
The new critical methodologies—which spanned everything from French structuralism to North
American New Criticism to Russian formalism to Marxist analysis—became the object of impassioned
debate. While some depicted them as a form of cultural imperialism, the new methodologies allowed other
critics to claim theoretical currency with respect to Europe and North America as well as the ability to
provide a fuller, more “objective” picture of both literature and of its social context. For a highly critical
account of the nueva crítica, see “Crítica tradicional y crítica literaria neo-académica,” where Antonio
Alatorre depicts the new “scientific” approach to literature as the Europeanized habit of a neo-academic
critic newly minted “de la fábrica, ya listo y dispuesto a todo” (423). Fernández Retamar is also highly
critical of the importation of structuralist criticism, though in contrast to Alatorre he sets it against Marxist
analysis rather than “traditional” criticism in Latin America (“Algunos problemas” 90-92).
  41  
integración de los métodos… que de ninguna manera debe confundirse con un

eclecticismo desmesurado” (131), the “objective” critic was charged with the task of

using the most valuable elements of different critical methodologies in order to provide a

fuller, more “objective” picture of both literature and local realities. Influenced by the

revolutionary rhetoric of the 60s and 70s, the adjective “critical” became associated with

the capacity to weave strands of both local and global discourses into an emancipatory

narrative of culture that would further Latin America’s “complejo proceso de liberación”

(88). The nueva crítica that emerged in the 60s and 70s thus retained the commitment to

objectivity, the integrative impulses, and the capacity to comment upon society that had

marked Reyes’s critical efforts in the 1940s and 50s, but crafted a very different

relationship to literature.

Although critics continued to view literature as a critical discourse capable of

reflecting on local realities, literary discourse was increasingly seen not as a component

of the critic’s discourse but as a separate discourse upon which the critic reflected.

Literature’s growing autonomy in the 1960s consolidated its status as an “other space”

from which writers could elaborate a critique of local and global powers (Franco, Decline

6).41 Yet literature alone could no longer fulfill the role of literary criticism, which was

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

  42  
Fernández Retamar claimed in 1972, excluding literature and “obras al parecer menos

rigurosamente estructuradas” from literary theory would be absurd in Latin America, “ya

que la division del trabajo entre productores, enjuiciadores y teóricos de la literatura no es

frecuente en nuestras letras” (78). Fernández Retamar also warned, however, against

going to “el extremo opuesto,” since “una concepción materialista de las ideologías

impide tomar al pie de la letra como científicamente válido lo que dice un escritor sobre

su obra o la de otros” (78). In Fernández Retamar’s case, the purported need for scientific

validity was influenced by the requirements of a Marxist ideology. Yet his reticence to

take writers’ critical capacities “al pie de la letra” indicates Latin American intellectuals’

increasing emphasis on the need for a separate critical discourse that could articulate and

interpret literature’s reflections of society.42 By distinguishing the new “objective”

critical discourse from literary writing, critics both guaranteed the critical validity of their

discourse for an international audience while granting new authority to the critic as a

social mediator, charged with making visible, to a local public, the figures of liberation

coded in the critical mirror of literature.

For a moment, it seemed that Latin America was about to fulfill the utopian

project of developing “nuestro propio enfoque crítico, nuestros propios modos de

investigación, nuestra valoración con signo particular, salidos de nuestras condiciones, de

nuestras necesidades, de nuestro interés” (Benedetti, quoted in Fernández Retamar 90).

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

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

  43  
obstacles on the continental critical project articulated in the 60s and 70s. The rise of

authoritarian governments in the 70s and 80s had a tremendously corrosive effect upon

critical activity: they obstructed and sometimes directly targeted the critical

methodologies of the nueva crítica while undermining the totalizing, utopian discourses

that had sustained it. As I will analyze in further detail in chapter three, the authoritarian

regimes not only sent critical discourse underground or abroad, but also had a lasting

effect on the literary-critical realm, accelerating and cementing the divisions between

literature and criticism. In Chile, for example, the Pinochet regime capitalized on the

recent depiction of criticism an “objective” practice and established more stringent

boundaries between literature and criticism in an effort to strip both discourses of their

capacity for social commentary. Such changes were, however, not restricted to Chile but

reflected broader trends in the region. The growing emphasis on specialization reinforced

the changes of the 1960s and 70s—which had shifted the locus of critical activity to the

university (Subercaseaux 281)—and ultimately helped consolidate literature and criticism

into separate and distinct provinces. During the 80s and 90s, writers were increasingly

restricted to producing fiction for the publishing industry and criticism was transformed

into a primarily academic activity, whose purpose was to produce specialized knowledge

with exchange value in the global academic market.43

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

  44  
 While the rise of academic criticism and its definite separation from literature

bolstered the notion that Latin America had finally begun to produce legitimate criticism,

it also complicated the project to create a local critical discourse whose terms were not

dictated by Europe and North America. For the new boundaries between literature and

criticism were set at a time when both authoritarian and democratic governments sought

to bring Latin America into a global capitalist economy. Within the new, diffuse currents

of power in the late twentieth century, Europe and North America continued to exercise a

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

(Richard, “Un debate” 841). As Nelly Richard notes, the globalization of the economy

and of mass communications redefined the way that Latin America saw itself “al

fragmentar y diseminar los trazados identitarios de lo nacional y de lo continental que le

servían de fronteras de integridad al discurso sustancialista de un ‘nosotros’ puro y

originario” (“Globalización”). The fragmentation and dissemination of power brought

about by globalization not only undermined a continental identity but also subjected local

critical discourses to a metropolitan logic that assumed rigid separations between the

worlds of fiction-writing, journalistic reviewing, and academic criticism. As I will discuss

in further detail in chapter four, the local critical discourses of the 80s and 90s thus found

themselves caught in a web of universities and institutions of knowledge that imposed

strict boundaries on the types of discourses and rhetorical forms that counted as criticism

or theory. Literature, in turn, lost much of its critical power and cultural privilege as it

was transformed into another product competing for consumer attention with the mass

media (Franco, “Afterword” 508). By the end of the millennium, the absorption of

literature and criticism into the global publishing and academic markets had divested both

  45  
discourses of the social function they previously enjoyed and once again suspended the

project of creating a critical discourse from Latin America.44

Henceforth, it became increasingly difficult to claim Latin America, literature, or

criticism as critical categories or spaces of resistance. Indeed, all three categories became

the object of acerbic critiques, paradoxically made possible by the late-twentieth-century

fragmentation that suspended their critical power. If the disintegration of a continental

identity closed the possibility of claiming Latin America as an emancipatory space

distinct from the centers of power, it also revealed the extent to which the category of

“Latin America” had obfuscated transnational identities based on race, gender, or sexual

identity and served the interests of global powers.45 Similarly, if the irruption of mass

culture opened the category of literature and drained it of its power of critique, it also

allowed some critics to emphasize the elitism that had previously marked literary

culture.46 Criticism’s transformation into the academic field of literary studies widened

the gap between criticism and subjects or discourses outside the academy, but opened

local criticism to a variety of theories and methodologies outside the field of “literary

criticism,” capable of providing new challenges to global power and institutional closure.

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

                                                                                                               
44
For an overview of the impact of globalization on Latin American cultural and critical production see
Santiago Castro-Gómez and Eduardo Mendieta’s “La translocación discursiva de ‘Latinoamérica’ en
tiempos de la globalización,” Nelly Richard’s “Globalización académica, estudios culturales y crítica
latinoamericana,” and Jean Franco’s The Fall of the Lettered City.
45
This critique is most clearly outlined by Walter Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America, which situates the
emergence of “Latin America” at the beginning of the European colonial project and claims that “the idea
of Latin America” is part and parcel of a colonial project that has championed modernity at the expense of
African and indigenous peoples and of the memory of their genocide. Mignolo also claims that new social
movements and knowledge projects developed by indigenous peoples and Afro descendants in “Latin”
America and by Latinos in the United States are making the idea of Latin America obsolete (xv).
46
See, for example, John Beverly’s Against Literature.

  46  
of critique today may seem absurd, a quaint throwback to a modern era in which they

could still boast critical power, or the naive strategy of one not yet aware of or touched by

the power of a globalized culture.

Yet one could also argue that the occlusion of such categories in a postmodern or

neoliberal era may be precisely what grants them critical force, not as categories but as

positions, as formal and rhetorical strategies that flout the new institutional boundaries

between discourses and challenge the continuing hierarchies between regions. As

Achugar suggests, globalization has not resolved the tensions between metropolitan

categories and local discourses or subjects still excluded from the closed circles of critical

or theoretical thinking by virtue of their subject position or the particular form of their

discourse. To borrow Achugar’s conclusion, “what remains unsettled and without

resolution is the need to transform Prospero’s monologue into a truly democratic

assembly” (140). Depicted by Achugar—via Fernández Retamar—as a “foreign sorcerer”

(139), Shakespeare’s Prospero serves as a figure for a metropolitan discourse unwilling to

account for critical discourses in Latin America that do not conform to its more clearly

delineated spheres.47 For, globalization notwithstanding, both writers and critics in Latin

America continue to resist the specializations of academic discourse in order to craft a

literary-critical discourse that can retain the social function of writing and critique the

exclusions of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Critical fictions are one

example of the many forms in this varied, heterogeneous discourse, which pays little

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

  47  
respect to social, academic, or discursive boundaries. Their purpose is to challenge our

current habits of thinking, reading, and thus open critical discourse to an erstwhile

“naive” reader whose participation in cultural interpretation can turn the critic’s

monologue—both in metropolitan and Latin American circles—into a truly democratic

assembly.

Critical fictions in Latin America thus emerge at the very moment when literature

seems to have lost its power of critique in order to reclaim that power, no longer from the

institution of literature but from a more diffuse literary-critical realm with a long and

complex trajectory in Latin America. Drawing on the diverse forms, strategies, and

histories of that trajectory, they elaborate both a local and a global critique. On the one

hand, they aim their critical fire at the particular rhetorical strategies of local critics who

tried to “deliver” Latin America from its provinciality or critical deficiency by creating a

critical institution separate from literature. Mocking such strategies, critical fictions

reveal the extent to which local critics only exacerbated their own provinciality, fell prey

to fabrication, and reproduced the naiveté that they projected onto others in an effort to

establish their authority. On the other hand, critical fictions aim their critique at a

metropolitan community that judged Latin America as deficient in the realm of critical

thinking because it failed to produce a discourse that conformed to the categories

elaborated in Europe and North America. By reproducing local critical forms, critical

fictions refute the purported absence of critical discourse in Latin America and emphasize

the diversity and richness of critical writing in the region as well as its capacity to use

literary or fictional strategies for critical ends. Recuperating a Latin American critical

project elaborated throughout the twentieth century, they emphasize the importance of

  48  
local, contextual readings, the importance of entering each critical fiction’s social and

discursive world in order to understand the specific form of the work’s critique.

The texts that follow these general parameters are to be found not only in the

realm of “fiction” but also in the realm of “criticism.” As we have seen, the particular

history of criticism in Latin America has made it possible to elaborate critical forms more

closely imbricated with and perhaps indistinguishable from fiction. For even after the

alleged rise of criticism in the 1970s, the creation of a stable and authoritative critical

institution in Latin America continued to be interrupted by the repressive force of

authoritarian governments, the withdrawal of the protectionist state, the rise of the mass

media, the increasing power and authority of the market, and the absorption of criticism

into a global academic network. In the absence of a stable critical realm, critics continued

to work within often-precarious institutional mediums and moved—both out of necessity

and out of choice—between the university and the worlds of journalism and cultural

production.48 Such institutional mobility required and enabled a diversity of formal and

rhetorical strategies, and encouraged a reflection about criticism’s relationship to readers,

discourses, and practices situated outside the tight circles of academic criticism. As a

result, several critics turned to literary practice, vindicating and incorporating its formal,

aesthetic dimensions into critical texts. Writers like Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella, as

well as critics like Adriana Valdés, Beatriz Sarlo, and Josefina Ludmer, thus continued to

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

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

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

centuries.

Critical Fictions in Latin America

In the chapters that follow, I analyze a series of critics and writers who have

kindled and rekindled the project of crafting a critical discourse from Latin America by

reflecting on and reconfiguring the relationship between literary and critical discourses.

Taking three novels as critical lenses, I delve into three particular histories in the story of

that project. My purpose, however, is not to provide a neat or exhaustive narrative. I want

to emphasize, rather, the extent to which the diverse and heterogeneous Latin American

critical project has been characterized by late starts, archaic residues, jumps in time,

inopportune moments, and temporal lagoons, and to depict this disjoint history not as a

deficiency, but as a trove of rich critical opportunities. Such opportunities do not emerge

from some other space or position of alterity, but are the product of difficult negotiations

between metropolitan demands and local realities, between scientific and humanistic

paradigms, between subjective and objective positions, between literary and critical

discourses, and between different definitions of what literature and criticism are supposed

to be. Shifting back and forth between positions, the texts I analyze highlight the various

definitions given to different discourses, places, and times, and force us to reflect on how

such definitions shape what can and cannot be said at any given place and time. By doing

so, they remind us that boundaries are redefinable, that apparently occluded discursive

possibilities can be redeployed for strategic critical ends, and that we—whatever our

  50  
position of partial power or marginal authority—are also implicated in the constitution of

social and discursive boundaries.

Through a critical reflection on the social and discursive contexts of critical

fictions by Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella, I touch on key moments in the attempt to set

the boundaries of critical discourse in Latin America: Alfonso Reyes’s critical efforts in

1940s and 50s Mexico, the critical scenes in Chile immediately before and after the

military coup of 1973, and the attempts to find critical spaces in the neoliberal Argentina

of the 1990s. Monterroso’s, Lihn’s, and Libertella’s critical fictions highlight the

rhetorical strategies of local critics who sought to craft a critical discourse from Latin

America, often undoing the critical boundaries set by metropolitan discourse while

establishing new boundaries in the region. Seeking to both authorize themselves and

disrupt the power differential with the criticism of Europe and North America, local

critics established new separations not only between literary and critical discourses but

also between subjects, particularly between critics and a subordinate reader often

depicted as “naive.” Already contradictory, critics’ efforts were further complicated by

the particular social and discursive conditions that they faced at all three historical

moments, which again and again seemed to interrupt the constitution of a critical

discourse in Latin America. By imitating the critical languages in force at the time and

place of their novels’ composition, Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella eschew a continental

perspective and invite us to examine the formal strategies of specific critics, local critical

communities, and the shortcomings imposed by certain historical situations. Taking up

that invitation, the chapters that follow focus on three distinct places and times in the

broader history of critical discourse in Latin America.

  51  
 Chapter two analyzes Augusto Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio (1978) and its

engagement with the figure and works of Mexican critic Alfonso Reyes. Written as a

fictional biography of a provincial critic, the novel plays on the vision of Latin America

as a provincial critical milieu whose interpretations are invariably marked by belatedness,

improvisation, and mimeticism. Although the novel has often been read as a “hilarious”

parody of the worst of Latin American criticism, I argue that the novel is not just a

general parody of Latin America’s critical poverty but a critical reflection on one of Latin

America’s most respected critics and on his efforts to found the realm of literary criticism

in Latin America. Through an analysis of Reyes’s works, primarily his theoretical treatise

El deslinde (1944), I parse Reyes’s difficult negotiations with the local and metropolitan

critical languages of his time and his efforts to draw the boundaries of a purportedly

inexistent critical realm in Latin America. I show how Reyes’s historical circumstances

fueled his efforts to deliver the region from the sense of critical provincialism by

including, in his “ciencia literaria,” “objective” methodologies as well as more “literary”

approaches that would guarantee the humanistic, anti-positivist dimensions of his project.

Monterroso’s critical fiction serves, however, as a critical counterpoint. Its engagement

with Reyes reveals the Mexican critic’s attempts to distinguish his discourse from

literature and to set himself above a naive reader whom he depicted as incapable of

critical thinking.

Chapter three jumps to Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1970s Chile, during

which Enrique Lihn wrote the novel La orquesta de cristal (1976). Lihn’s novel mimics a

literary monograph, which gathers and glosses the numerous commentaries written from

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

  52  
novel as a critical lens, I analyze the silences imposed by the Pinochet regime on both the

literary and critical realms in Chile. I read the mute, transparent orchestra and the almost

complete critical silence that followed Lihn’s novel as metacritical reflections on the

authoritarian regime’s attempts to block critique by setting stringent boundaries around

both literature and criticism. I then focus on the devastating effects that the dictatorship

had on both the so-called critical renovation that preceded the 1973 coup and on the

critical scenes that followed it. Through a detailed examination of the critical scenes that

emerged both before and after the coup, I show how the authoritarian bloc capitalized on

the distinctions between literature and criticism established by the critical

“modernization” of the 60s and early 70s in order to fragment the literary-critical realm

into the separate spheres of academic criticism, journalistic reviewing, and the production

of literary fictions. The languages produced in all three self-contained realms are objects

of acerbic critique in Lihn’s novel, which mobilizes the more discursively ambiguous

strategies of the underground avant-garde scene that emerged during the dictatorship.

Lihn, however, also provides a parody of the cultural avant-garde and an early warning

against the self-authorizing strategies employed by the “crítica cultural” after the return to

democracy.

Chapter 4 takes another temporal and geographical leap into the postmodern and

neoliberal landscapes of turn-of-the-millennium Argentina, where Héctor Libertella’s El

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

Ludmer. Libertella’s novel serves as a starting point to analyze the changing relationship

between literature and criticism at a time when the neoliberal policies of the 1980s and

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

  53  
global academic market. In El árbol de Saussure, Libertella transforms Saussure’s

diagram of the linguistic sign into a setting for a series of fictions, which coexist with

interpretations about a host of social and cultural phenomena. The novel’s reflections on

the place of literature and cultural interpretation in a “ghetto” overrun by the market

provide a critical lens on the dual rise of mass culture and the emergence of cultural

studies. I focus in particular on the role that Beatriz Sarlo played in introducing cultural

studies to Argentina as well as her subsequent defense of literary value. Sarlo’s

arguments about literature’s capacity to provide a critical perspective in the new

postmodern and neoliberal landscapes find an echo in Libertella’s critical fiction.

Libertella, however, resists Sarlo’s attempts to turn literature into a pedagogical tool to

educate the naive masses in the practices of critique. Like Josefina Ludmer, Libertella

reconfigures literature not as a tool for the critical but as a utopian no-place, whose

fictional strategies provide a critical space for all, even the most naive readers. For

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

America, which they both posit as an imaginary community that stands in a critical

relationship to the discourses of power.

What I hope to present through these three chapters are pieces of a rich yet

incomplete story. Their partial status seeks to reflect both the shortcomings and strengths

of a Latin American critical project depicted from within and from outside the region as

not-yet-constituted, emergent, obscure, and incomplete. For despite efforts to define a

recognizable critical realm that might refute the purported absence of criticism in Latin

America, the writers and critics that I discuss in the following chapters attest to the fact

that critical discourse in the region remains fluid and volatile. From the perspective of the

  54  
centers of discursive power, critical discourse in Latin America continues to be

fragmentary, diffuse, in the process of being developed, authorized, or made visible. Yet

its discursive instability, its precariousness, and its lack of definition are precisely what

underlie the critical power of a discourse that has resisted closure because of the

historical circumstances that stood in the way of criticism’s institutional stability. Read

according to the way it has been proposed from Latin America, critical discourse never

did coalesce into a stable and autonomous realm, yet it exists and has existed for a long

time as an open discursive space where various disciplines, methodologies, practices, and

subjects meet. With their refusal to recognize the boundaries between literature and

criticism, critical fictions are at once embodiments of Latin America’s inadequate critical

tradition and paradigmatic examples of the multiple rhetorical strategies developed to

critique literary-critical discourse and the historical conditions in which it is embedded.

Based on the premise that there is no unified critical discourse in Latin America,

that Latin America is a heterogeneous collection of diverse communities, and that there is

no literary “genre” of critical fictions, the chapters that follow move discontinuously

between discourses, subjects, places, and times. I thus hope to show that critical discourse

in Latin America is perhaps best described as a collection of disperse and assorted

languages, whose claim to the adjective “critical” lies in their capacity to interrupt the

“occlusive constitution of the field of categories themselves” (Butler). I want to

emphasize, in turn, that the term “critical fictions” is not simply meant to define a type of

novel but to delineate a rhetorical strategy that can be put into practice by literature and

criticism alike. Like the term “Latin America,” critical discourse and critical fictions in

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

  55  
are, instead, strategic rhetorical moves rooted in a specific place and time and mobilized

by subjects who aim their critique from particular perspectives and positions at “some

instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution” (Butler). As rhetorical moves, critical

fictions can, however, be redeployed to open up the boundaries of a critical discourse

whose institutional stability in the United States threatens to occlude discursive

possibilities and empty criticism of the power of critique.

In the pages that follow, I take up Monterroso, Lihn, and Libertella’s invitation to

reflect on the formal strategies of specific critics and local critical communities, and on

the shortcomings brought about by certain historical situations. Shifting perspective, I

propose we read critical fictions in Latin America not through regional, national, or

discursive categories like “literature” or “criticism” but through what I might call an

emergent critical framework. Somewhat distinct from the broad narrative I have sketched

out in this introduction, such a framework begins from the texts and tries to follow the

local references and web of readings that echo and spin off from them. The result is a

reading that lavishes detail on fragments of syntactical formations, on slight rhetorical

refractions between fiction and criticism, on single words allowed to unfold into

precarious theoretical edifices, on the echoes of a single lecture, the publication history of

a marginal article, or conversations between critics and writers captured in bits and pieces

through the traces of the printed word. In the web created between fiction and criticism,

text and context, sometimes we will find the traces of metropolitan theory and the

categories defined by a global north—but not always. For the purpose of my reading is in

part to shake off the habit of reading fiction through the lens of criticism, Latin America

through the lenses of Europe and North America, and to try the reverse. The objective is

  56  
not to take off our perhaps inevitable “antiparras yankees o francesas” (Martí 171) but to

flip them around, and through the distorting lens of a text that forces us to look closer,

read criticism through literature, North American and European categories through the

naive formations of the South.

  57  
 CHAPTER 2

The King’s Jester:

Eduardo Torres, Alfonso Reyes, Augusto Monterroso

HAMLET: this might be the pate of a politician… Or of a courtier,

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

Reprinted by the Revista de la Universidad de México in January of 1959, “Una

nueva edición del Quijote” was not exactly timely. The small-town critic Eduardo Torres

had published the review a few months earlier in El heraldo de San Blas, where he set out

to inform the reader that Don Quijote was not really an attempt to mock a madman but,

rather, an attack on chivalric romances. Riddled with errors of fact and critical gaffes, the

article “caused hilarious reactions among Mexico City literati ready to cry foul and

accuse the ‘fictitious’ and ‘real’ authors of libel and other non-literary offenses” (Corral

“Before and After” xiv). It was not entirely obvious at the time that the article was in fact

the doing of the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, who had been living in Mexico

since 1956 and was purportedly attempting to “rescatar una serie de artículos de un

intelectual de provincia, específicamente el Dr. Eduardo Torres, de San Blas, S.B.”

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

“investigación” or “research project” both in his books and in his interviews, which

repeatedly quoted Torres and told of grueling voyages “en autobús, yip o mula” (35) to

visit that “prócer de provincia” (30).49 Monterroso also continued submitting articles to

various Mexico City magazines under Torres’s and other assumed names. These included

a letter by a so-called “Librado Valencia” condemning Monterroso for having “tomado a

broma a San Blas” (La Gaceta 5).50 That particular letter was the subject of a wry note by

the editors of La Gaceta, who by 1979 seemed aware that Valencia’s remarks meant not

only “having made light of San Blas” but also “having created a joke out of San Blas.”

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

Gaceta’s editors was the publication in 1978 of Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio: La

vida y obra de Eduardo Torres. The book, which assumed the guise of a critical

biography, gathered and reproduced Torres’ published articles and supplemented them

with other documents offering insight into the critic’s life. These included four

testimonials by employees and family, a selection of Eduardo Torres’s “famous” sayings

and aphorisms, an anonymous satiric poem and its analysis, and an afterword by Torres.

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

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

                                                                                                               
49
Monterroso’s books Movimiento Perpetuo (1972) and La palabra mágica (1983) both include quotations
attributed to Eduardo Torres without clarifying Torres’s fictional status. In Viaje al centro de la fábula,
Monterroso’s book of interviews, the Guatemalan author also refers to Torres as if he were an actual
person, particularly in those interviews dated before the publication of Lo demás es silencio in 1978.
50
Like Valencia’s letter, some of Monterroso’s “fictional” articles and letters are scattered throughout
Mexican magazines and journals. Others were reproduced in Lo demás es silencio. The latter included a
number of articles by Torres initially published in the Revista de la Universidad de México and in La
cultura en México as well as an outraged “Carta Censoria” by “F.R.,” which attacked in minute detail the
many errors in Torres’ initial review.

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

Efrén Figueredo.” As in other critical fictions, the assiduous imitation of critical

languages and conventions threatens to trap an unwary reader into mistaking Lo demás es

silencio for “real” criticism. The publication of what Monterroso himself dubbed a

“novel” (Viaje 66) nevertheless seems to have put an end to Torres’s “insólita

experiencia de ser considerado real y ficticio” (Ruffinelli 39). After two decades of

uncertainty and speculation, Lo demás es silencio confirmed Torres’s fictional status and

allowed critics to laugh away the discursive ambiguity of his initial articles as an

elaborate “broma literaria” (Bonifaz Nuño ix).51

With Torres, San Blas, and its literary supplement consigned to the realm of

fiction, critics quickly reframed the texts in Lo demás es silencio as a clever parody by a

master of humorous writing.52 Wilfrido Corral’s early depiction of the novel as a “tour de

force paródico” (Lector 195) echoed throughout subsequent criticism of Lo demás es

silencio, which continued to be cited as a paradigmatic example of parodic strategies.

Critics nevertheless failed to clarify whom or what the novel was parodying. Inquiries

into the object of Monterroso’s parody tended to get lost in vague references to “cierto

                                                                                                               
51
After its publication, all critical commentaries of Lo demás es silencio reflect and are careful to underline
critics’ awareness that Monterroso’s text is a fiction, and that Torres is a literary character. Subsequent
editions of Lo demás es silencio similarly emphasize the fictional dimensions of Monterroso’s text. For
example, the 1991 edition of the novel, published by Ediciones Era, notes the fact that the text is a “novel”
on its cover, in contrast to the original 1978 edition, which gives few indications of its fictional nature on
its cover or title page. In a similar vein to the 1991 edition, the 1986 Cátedra edition includes a prologue by
Jorge Rufinelli, who unambiguously classfies the novel as a fiction and in the second footnote to the novel
identifies the text as a “biografía imaginaria” (57).
52
See, in particular, Rony Enrique Garrido’s El humor como principio organizador de las obras de
Monterroso. Although most commentaries of Lo demás es silencio classify the novel as a paradigmatic
example of Monterroso’s “humorous” writing, the author himself often resisted that classification. As he
notes in Viaje al centro de la fábula: “yo no me considero humorista y hasta en ocasiones me molesta que
lo pueda ser sin darme cuenta. Como máximo, mi ilusión secreta es ser considerado algún día un autor
relista, con humor o sin él” (42).

  60  
tipo de escritor o ‘hombre de letras’… un medio intelectual… un modo de hacer y vivir

literatura” (Vargas 45). Without details on the specificity of that “medio intelectual” the

term parody became little more than a taxonomic tool that allowed critics to investigate

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

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

Monterroso’s text. Like other critical fictions, the texts in Lo demás es silencio blurred

the boundaries between literature and criticism but made it particularly important for

critics to distinguish between them. Given the “hilarious” reception of Torres’s first

articles, critics were eager to show that they could differentiate between a critical text

meant in earnest and one meant in jest and did so by emphasizing the literary qualities

that set Torres’s “spurious” articles apart from “serious” criticism. While this confirmed

critics’ skill at identifying parodic intent, it also sparked a sometimes-unwitting

discussion about the limits of valid criticism.

Lo demás es silencio played, in this sense, the metacritical role of other critical

fictions, eliciting with its deceptive form a reflection on the discursive boundaries that

validated a text as either literature or criticism. Writing within a Latin American context,

Monterroso raised the stakes of that reflection by making his protagonist a provincial

critic apparently oblivious to the standards of proper critical discourse. Published in the

midst of the metacritical debates of the 1960s and 70s, Lo demás es silencio played on

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

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

American criticism had been relegated to the margins of global critical debates because

of it ignorance, impressionism, and lack of rigor.54 By creating a character who embodied

that perceived deficiency, Monterroso set up an elaborate “juego de espejos” (Lo demás

es silencio 188, henceforth LDES) with his readers. Confronted with an absurd mirror

image, critics of Lo demás es silencio used laughter to take distance from Torres and

differentiate his naive, provincial blunders from their own, more “critical”

interpretations.55 Like Rafael Moreno-Durán, critics sought to conjugate “nos resulta

imposible contener la risa” (202) in the first person plural, embracing both themselves

and Monterroso in the circle of that “nos.” For outside that circle stood the object of

laughter, but also the danger that called it forth: a group of readers who by accidents of

geography, class, or gender lacked the critical judgment to distinguish mockeries from

real criticism.

Moreno-Durán’s account of a “humorous” incident that occurred at a 1979

writer’s conference in the Canary Islands is a telling instance of critics’ attempts to set

themselves apart from both Eduardo Torres’s folly and from the naiveté of those who

failed to recognize it. As Moreno-Durán recounts, Monterroso had read a fictional paper

in Torres’s name “que creó un revuelo entre el auditorio, sobre todo entre unas señoras

                                                                                                               
54
For a broad overview of the metacritical debates of the 60s and 70s, see the introduction to this
dissertation, which contextualizes such debates within broader attempts to delineate a realm of criticism in
Latin America and discusses the extent to which they were fueled by the perceived critical deficiency in the
region. Chapter three also provides further details on the metacritical debates of the 60s and 70s and the rise
of the nueva crítica, with particular focus on the Chilean context.
55
As Robert Parsons observes, making his protagonist a naive reader is one method by which Monterroso
directs the reader’s attention to himself as an object of criticism in the text (941). Parsons derives his
observation from Margaret Rose’s Parody// Metafiction, which discusses the effects of including a naive
reader in the parodic text, citing Don Quijote as a paradigmatic example. See in particular Roses’s chapter
three: “Parody as Meta-Fiction.”

  62  
argentinas que a toda costa querían conocer la latitud y longitud exactas, las coordenadas

que pudieran orientarlas en su viaje hacia San Blas” (202).56 According to Moreno-

Durán, he and Monterroso would and together laugh at those Argentinean ladies and their

incapacity to recognize “una divertida impostura literaria.” In his article, Moreno-Durán’s

laughter established a direct parallel between their ingenuousness and the naiveté of

Monterroso’s fictional critic who, ensconced in some Latin American province, had

failed to realize the belatedness of his opinion on Don Quijote. The detail of their

nationality was particularly significant in the context of an international writer’s

conference—particularly one hosted by Latin America’s old colonial power—where that

kind of naiveté could easily be read as provinciality. For the Colombian Moreno-Durán,

laughter functioned as a way of clearing himself of the charge of provinciality, which in

the 1970s continued to dog Latin American critics. His laughter, however, also prevented

him from considering the possibility that the “Argentinean ladies” might have been on to

something in their desire to pinpoint the exact geographic and historical coordinates of

San Blas.

Like other critics of Monterroso’s work, Moreno-Durán assumed that Torres had

been modeled on the worst of Latin American criticism and that Lo demás es silencio

parodied a general intellectual milieu but contained in its “mundo particularmente

libresco… poco de una realidad histórica, referencial” (Corral, Lector 197). As Gloria

Estela González Zenteno notes in El dinosaurio sigue allí: Arte y política en Monterroso,

studies of Monterroso’s work have tended to isolate his texts from their broader historical

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

  63  
context (17). In keeping with that tendency, commentaries of Lo demás es silencio have

stayed, for the most part, within the bookish boundaries of Torres’s “espaciosa sala-

biblioteca” (LDES 61) described in the novel’s first testimonial and have ignored the

context provided in the following testimonial by Torres’s brother. Set within the bustling

streets of San Blas, Luis Jerónimo Torres’s account of his brother’s life breaks the

timeless immobility of Torres’s library and places it within specific geographical

coordinates. San Blas, which out of context might have referred to any of the 800 towns

by that name (Rufinelli, footnote to LDES 58), suddenly comes into focus as a “ciudad

grande con los encantos de un pueblo chiquito y al revés” (LDES 70) where one can use

the metro, listen to a concert in Bellas Artes, visit two museums, and watch a bullfight.

San Blas assumes a curious resemblance to Mexico City, whose name was similarly used

to christen “el ballet local… la plaza de toros y el Estado mismo” (71). Province and city,

city and state become interchangeable in Luis Jerónimo’s text, which grants Eduardo

Torres’s assertion “la provincia es la patria” a double meaning as “San Blas is the nation”

and “the province is Mexico.”57

As one of the most prominent intellectuals in that provincial state, Eduardo Torres

also bears a strange resemblance to a Mexican critic of whom one could similarly say,

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

“las letras clásicas” (68) and could very well be described with Luis Jerónimo’s final

portrait of his brother: “una vez formada su cultura clásica, un día… encontró su eureka y

se echo a vagar por los campos del espíritu en la búsqueda cada vez más obstinada a las

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

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

American criticism, Alfonso Reyes emerges in Lo demás es silencio as Torres’s uncanny

double, grounding and qualifying Monterroso’s portrait of the provincial critic. Like a

distorted reflection of Reyes’s life and work, Lo demás es silencio plays on the myth that

was built around Reyes and on a series of interrelated texts by and about him. Critics,

however, seem to have overlooked the many echoes between Torres’s and Reyes’s

figures, between Torres’s review of Don Quijote and Reyes’s “Una interpretación del

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

Reyes’s analyses of Luis de Góngora’s Polifemo, between Carmen de Torres’s account of

her husband’s life and a similar “interview” offered by Reyes’s wife in 1966. Despite

such parallels, references to Reyes are almost entirely absent from criticism of Lo demás

es silencio, a situation no doubt influenced by the reputation Reyes built throughout his

life as the very opposite of the provincial critic.58

The author of a vast and erudite oeuvre and recipient of numerous emeritus

degrees from universities around the world, Reyes came to be known in Latin America as

a kind of “Erasmo mexicano” (Cortázar, in Monsiváis, “Las utopias” 105) at the level of

any U.S. or European critic. That reputation was heightened after his death in 1959 by

various monumentalizing efforts, which placed Reyes “entre la apoteosis y el epitafio”

(105) and eventually made him “uno de los autores más citados y menos leídos en la

actualidad” (Negrín 77).59 As Carlos Monsiváis observes, Reyes’s critical oeuvre became

                                                                                                               
58
González Zenteno is perhaps the only critic who cites Alfonso Reyes as one of the sources for
Monterroso’s parody, but cites Reyes as one in a list of references.
59
For an account of these monumentalizing efforts, particularly during the centenary celebration of Reyes’s
birth, see Robert T. Conn’s “Alfonso Reyes and ‘El Ateneo’: Mexico’s ‘Continuing’ Enlightenment.”

  65  
at once deeply revered and rarely read (105), a situation that seems to have aggravated

critics’ failure to see the link between Reyes and Torres. By the time Lo demás es

silencio was published in 1978, Reyes had become such a monumental figure that critics

never thought to associate him with the absurd, provincial critic in Monterroso’s parodic

novel or to connect Reyes’s forgotten and unread texts with Torres’s “hilarious” articles.

The petrified monumentality that masked Reyes’s resemblance to Torres was,

paradoxically, one of the main targets of Lo demás es silencio. Through the figure of

Eduardo Torres Monterroso undertook a demonumentalizing task that unearthed Reyes’s

provincial roots and the role that they played in his work. The eerie resemblances

between Reyes and Torres remind us that Reyes not only hailed from Monterrey in the

Mexican “provincia” but also spent his life trying to neutralize the “círculos concéntricos

de fatalidades” (Reyes “Notas” 88) that placed Latin America at the margins of cultural

and intellectual debates.

As Sebastiaan Faber notes, Reyes’s entire life could be described as an attempt to

annul the conflict between his intellectual vocation and the sense of having been born in a

peripheral culture (36).60 The epitaph that opens Lo demás es silencio is evocative of that

conflict and of Reyes’s attempts to compensate for the deficiencies of a provincial

context by raising himself as the monument that overcomes and refutes them. Composed

by Torres himself, the epitaph reads: “Aquí yace Eduardo Torres/ Quien a lo largo de su

vida/ Llegó, vio y fue siempre vencido/ Tanto por los elementos/ Como por las naves

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

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

Cesar, and Herman Melville, the epitaph is a biting commentary on the Latin American

critic’s efforts to secure, before his death, the status of a classic. It serves as an ironic

reflection on Reyes’s attempts to dictate the terms of his own memorial through the

complete works that he began publishing before his death, the personal library he

conceived as a national monument (Faber 34), and the memoirs that positioned Reyes as

a key player in his country’s recent history.61 From the perspective of Lo demás es

silencio, such efforts were as self-serving and absurd as Torres’s prehumous epitaph.

Reyes’s efforts to establish his reputation as a critic were also, however, part of a general

strategy in a battle against “las naves enemigas”: they were emancipatory tactics in the

context of uneven relations of discursive power, which Monterroso never ceased to put

into play and allude to.

Irreverent and iconoclastic, Monterroso’s mockery is always laced with an ironic

recognition of the paradoxes involved in crafting a Latin American criticism that would

deliver the region from its sense of intellectual provincialism. Through its engagement

with Alfonso Reyes, Lo demás es silencio puts into play the historical circumstances that

shaped Reyes’s efforts to remedy what many saw as an absolute “lack of criticism” in

Mexico. As Jorge Cuesta noted in 1936, Mexican intellectuals of his and Reyes’s

generation continued to feel that they were living in a “raquítico medio intelectual” that

condemned them to remain

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

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

Overturning that sense of intellectual marginality and isolation would require a radical

shift in the political, cultural, and institutional circumstances that, until then, had hindered

the development of an autonomous realm of letters in Latin America. As Angel Rama

argues in La ciudad letrada, Latin American intellectuals had been notoriously imbricated

with the state up to the late nineteenth century, and did not emerge as an independent

class until the twentieth century.63 The situation is succinctly illustrated in “Notas sobre

la inteligencia americana,” where Reyes notes that lack of specialization and argues that

the social structure of Latin America forced writers to take on “varios oficios, raro es que

logre ser un escritor puro, es casi siempre un escritor ‘más’ otra cosa u otras cosas” (85).

According to Reyes, the key role that Latin American intellectuals continued to play

outside the literary realm prevented them from constructing “torres de marfil” and

situated Latin American intellectuals in “la región del fuego central.” In Reyes’s view,

writers’ involvement in what he called “el orden de la acción” granted Latin American

writers “mayor vinculación social,” but it also disrupted intellectual work and made it

extraordinarily difficult to “asomarse al sobrehaz de la tierra” (86).

                                                                                                               
62
A contemporary of Reyes, Jorge Cuesta was a member of “Los Contemporáneos,” an avant-garde literary
group that played a key role in the development of the Mexican literary field in the 1930s. See in this
regard, “El alquimista liberal: Jorge Cuesta y la invención del intelectual” in Sánchez Prado’s Naciones
Intelectuales.
63
In Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina Julio Ramos contrasts writers’ lack of autonomy
from the political sphere to the situation in Europe, where literature had long counted with institutional
structures to support writers’ autonomy (26). Ramos’s book provides a fuller account of the imperfect
autonomization of the literary realm in nineteenth-century Latin America.

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

Ramos argues in Desencuentros de la modernidad, the institutional supports established

by Reyes’s generation helped consolidate the process of literary autonomy inaugurated

by nineteenth-century modernismo.64 The changes brought about by the Mexican

Revolution of 1910 and the early efforts of the Ateneo de la Juventud set the stage for a

rapid process of institutionalization that permitted the rise of an intellectual class

independent of legal and political powers.65 The numerous artistic and educational

institutions, periodicals, and publishing houses established in the 30s and 40s liberated

intellectuals from the necessities of nation building and provided autonomous spaces for

the production of writing.66 By 1936, Alfonso Reyes was able to proclaim on behalf of

“la inteligencia Americana” “el derecho a la ciudadanía universal que ya hemos

conquistado. Hemos alcanzado la mayoría de edad. Muy pronto os habituaréis a contar

con nosotros” (“Notas” 90). Read at the VII meeting of the International Committee on

Intellectual Cooperation, that extraordinary declaration of independence from the

intellectual tutelage of metropolitan nations was made possible by the emergent literary

sphere that granted Latin America new critical autonomy. “Saltando etapas, apresurando

                                                                                                               
64
For an account of the process of institutionalization that consolidated an autonomous cultural sphere in
early-twentieth-century Mexico see Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de
la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959). Carlos Monsivais also offers a succinct overview of
Mexico’s parallel processes of cultural and political institutionalization in his article “No con un sollozo,
sino entre disparos (Notas sobre cultra mexicana 1910-1968).”
65
The Ateneo de la Juventud was an association of intellectuals that sought to revitalize cultural life in
early-twentieth-century Mexico. Reyes was one of the youngest members of the Ateneo but played a key
role in its efforts to carve out a new space for culture, distinct from the one defined by modernismo and by
the positivism officially championed by Porfirio Díaz’s government (Conn, “Alfonso Reyes” 15). For a
brief overview, see Gabriela De Beer’s “El Ateneo y los ateneístas: Un exámen retrospectivo.”
66
These included—among many others—the Colegio de México and the La nueva revista de filología
hispánica, which Reyes founded and directed, and the Universidad Autónoma de México and Ediciones
Era, which would later publish Monterroso’s texts.

  69  
el paso y saltando de una forma a otra” (83) Latin America had finally developed an

independent realm of letters that could grant writers enough critical distance from the

political sphere to reflect on Latin America’s cultural, social, and political realities and to

develop alternative national projects.67 The emergent literary realm provided a space to

develop a discourse on identity that would set Latin America apart from both North

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

America, that reflection promised to transform the region from the object to the subject of

discourse and to deliver it from intellectual subservience to metropolitan centers of

power.

The creation of an autonomous space for critical reflection became one of the

central parodic nodes of Lo demás es silencio, where the desire for a closed and defined

literary realm independent of political powers assumed the shape of a library. In

Monterroso’s critical fiction, the library functions as a synecdoche for a coveted literary

sphere whose distance from “el mundanal aplauso” of public office would grant the critic

the luxury to dedicate himself exclusively to the life of the intellect and allow “que el

libro cumpla la natural función que le ha sido dada sin desviaciones ni halagos” (LDES

65). Written from the perspective of Torres’s personal secretary, “Un breve instante en la

vida de Eduardo Torres” recounts the arrival of a group of dignitaries at Torres’s library

to offer him the governorship of San Blas. That offer is immediately met with Torres’s

ponderous and triumphant rejection:

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

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

Torres’s rejection of public office embodies intellectuals’ dream of securing the privilege,

in Latin America, to “volver a mi retiro de siglos” within the protective cloister of a

library (66). Defining its walls would grant intellectuals distance from “el orden de la

acción” (Reyes, “Notas” 86) and provide a space from which to elaborate a local critical

discourse that could at once question social and political powers while resolving the

region’s purported lack of criticism.

By the end of his life Reyes had, by all accounts, become the living embodiment

of Latin America’s local, critical discourse. During the last two decades of his life, Reyes

put aside his various diplomatic charges and dedicated himself exclusively to

consolidating the literary-critical realm, which included directing literary institutions,

editing his complete works, and building his personal library.68 Affectionately nicknamed

“la Capilla Alfonsina,” Reyes’s library came to symbolize a sacred space of reflection,

free from political or practical considerations, where the writer could abandon himself to

the world of letters. In terms that echo the first testimonial in Lo demás es silencio,

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

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

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

  71  
olvidado y pesa imágenes y pausas” (“Jinete” 2). Paz’s image of the critic, isolated in his

library and exclusively dedicated to the task of interpretation remained, however,

something of a fiction. Penned in the 1960s, amid regional efforts to resolve the region’s

purported lack of criticism, Paz’s description of Reyes functions as a form of wish

fulfillment: it suggested that Reyes’s isolation from the world of action and his exclusive

dedication to “el lenguaje, sus problemas y sus misterios” was a heroic act, an “admirable

prueba de salud moral” that finally produced, in Latin America, a critic worthy of

becoming a classic (np). Yet Paz’s obituary also rewrote and obscured Reyes’s

involvement in the “order of action” as well as the extent to which literature and criticism

remained imbricated in both Reyes’s work and in the broader literary sphere in Latin

America.

Despite the new autonomy achieved by the literary realm in mid-twentieth-

century Latin America, that realm remained largely undifferentiated from the realm of

criticism until the second half of the twentieth century. Reyes’s complete works, for

example, attest to the partial and hybrid nature of a literary-critical realm in which writers

continued to function simultaneously as critics, poets, journalists, novelists, editors,

teachers, and promoters of culture. As Monsiváis notes, Reyes’s oeuvre was not a

systematic effort but a collection of compilations: its fragmentary character was due to

the fact that Reyes “escribe para los periódicos, porque allí y no en el territoiro mucho

más restringido del libro… los intelectuales pueden, en un país donde se lee poco,

cumplir su servicio público y su deber civilizador” (“Las utopias” 114). Like an

abbreviated map of both Reyes’s oeuvre and the Latin American literary-critical realm,

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

  72  
contemporaries, who continued to serve a public function while alternating now

recognizably “critical” genres like the lecture, the review, and the expository essay with

satire, translation, short stories, letters, interviews, caricatures, the “testimonio,” and the

art of conversation. Genres that would later be assigned to their own distinct jurisdictions

run into each other in a diverse textual province whose mixture of literary and critical

discourses would continue to be a mark of Latin America’s critical provincialism, both at

the time of Reyes’s writing and in 1978 when Monterroso published his critical fiction.

That lack of differentiation in the otherwise autonomous realm of letters would

constitute one of the main challenges in Reyes’s efforts to ratify his 1936 declaration of

independence. As Reyes realized early on, international recognition of Latin America’s

maturity would require a further process of autonomization within the realm of letters, a

further “deslinde” that would mark the boundaries of a recognizably critical discourse

and would set it apart from the region’s literature. As he put it in El deslinde, an

autonomous literature might be the ticket to Latin America’s cultural emancipation: “ella

liberta, ella levanta,” but “no sin henchir antes de arrullos, a imagen de la canción de

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

Halibut,” Reyes continued to remark on the fact that without dwelling on the “pauses” of

critical discourse Latin American literary productions would always remain folkloric

objects of knowledge and consumption but would never be recognized as agents of

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

  73  
critical discourse, especially because they often failed to meet the requirements for

literary autonomy.70 In his attempts to assert the independence of Latin America’s

“inteligencia” before a “tribunal de pensadores internacionales” (“Notas” 90), Reyes

knew he was up against the assumption, polemically summed up by Paz, that “una

literatura sin crítica no es moderna o lo es de un modo peculiar y contradictorio”

(“Literatura y crítica” 60). A truly modern literature would require the successful

construction in Latin America of an autonomous criticism that could verify and advocate

for the value, universality, and coherence of Latin American literature based on an

intimate knowledge of the circumstances that brought it forth.

Reyes’s El deslinde, a monumental work of literary theory, was in many ways the

constitution of that criticism. Published in 1944, it set out to define a literary sphere and

used the boundaries of that realm to demarcate a distinct realm of criticism in Latin

America. Those efforts were, however, shot through with the numerous contradictions

created by Reyes’s status as a provincial critic and the textual and political strategies

through which he attempted to erase the stigma, the “pecado original” (“Notas” 88) of

having been born in a peripheral culture. Reyes found himself in the contradictory

position of trying to establish the autonomy of the literary and critical realms without

losing political agency; of drawing boundaries that instead of further isolating the Latin

American critic would grant him passport to realms, cultures, and disciplines outside his

sphere; of arguing for the universality and purity of literature within a framework that

would allow for contaminations, fertilizations, and “ancillary” uses of literature. Lo

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

  74  
demás es silencio draws out the contradictions in such attempts and exacerbates them to

the brink of laughter. Its parodic portrait of the provincial critic attests to the imperfect

and perhaps impossible autonomy of the literary and critical realms in Latin America, a

dilemma that continued shaping the region’s critical discourse for years to come but that

found unique expression in Alfonso Reyes’ pivotal figure.

El Deslinde, or Criticism’s Lines of Demarcation

Published in 1944, El deslinde was written upon Reyes’s return to Mexico after

two decades spent abroad in Europe and South America. During those two decades Reyes

had worked as a diplomat and ambassador to Mexico but also developed his oeuvre and

established his reputation as one of Latin America’s leading intellectuals. The work that

Reyes produced abroad allowed him to position himself as the crowning instance of

literary autonomy in the new cultural landscape of mid-twentieth-century Mexico, as the

figure that wedded a new institutional reality with a body of writing that sanctioned it.71

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

Mexico in 1939 prepared the ground for the triumphant return of an intellectual who

would both embody and consolidate Mexico’s emergent literary-critical realm. Enthroned

as a new “cacique cultural” (J.L. Martínez, “Introducción,” vol. 13, 5), Reyes founded

and led eminent cultural institutions, like the Colegio de México and the Mexican

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

  75  
(Rangel Guerra 209) and composed El deslinde, Reyes’s most ambitious work of literary

theory. As he notes in its conclusion, Reyes conceived El deslinde as the finishing stone

of his critical efforts, as a compendium that would “dar coherencia, una figura de

unidad… a las reflexiones recogidas en el curso de la experiencia literaria.” Theory,

Reyes declared, is a task “que no se puede empezar hasta que ya se ha gastado lo mejor

de los años en acumular los caudales indispensables” (417). Writing a book of literary

theory was tacit acknowledgment that both Reyes and the nation had enough “caudales”

or volume(s) in their literary experience to warrant such a work and that the time had

come for the emergent literary realm to be written into law.

El deslinde functioned, in this sense, as the constitution of a literary realm whose

coming-into-being required the offices of a supreme lawyer, an “estadista de la educación

del espíritu” (Monsiváis, “Las utopías” 117) who would mark its boundaries and

articulate its laws. From his new position as a “cultural chieftain” Reyes took on that role,

providing with El deslinde the document that ratified in writing the growing institutional

autonomy of the literary sphere. The work’s title borrowed a term from Reyes’s early

training as a lawyer and signaled the foundational nature of that task, which Reyes

compared to discovering a new continent.72 Reyes was clearly not the first to “deslindar”

or mark the boundaries of the literary sphere, yet as he notes in his introduction, “para los

americanos es menos dañoso descubrir el Mediterráneo por cuenta propia que

mantenernos como eternos repetidores de Europa” (18). Defining literature from Latin

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

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

  76  
intellectual constructs into a vast, virgin territory ready to be parsed, bounded, and

assigned new jurisdictions. In his self-appointed role as explorer and legislator, Reyes

embarked on that long and painstaking journey in El deslinde, navigating the “sistemas

dispersos” (44) of history, science, theology, and mathematics in an attempt to demarcate

them from the realm of literature.

A work unprecedented in Latin America, Reyes’s vast and systematic theoretical

treatise aspired to be a kind of re-entry into history that transformed Latin America from

the object into the subject of discovery and knowledge.73 Ironically enough, a number of

commentaries on El deslinde have described the book not as a new beginning for Latin

America but as a flight into the realm of European thought.74 Critics’ main point of

contention is Reyes’s distinction between “literatura en pureza” and “literatura anciliar,”

and the hierarchy that he seems to establish between purely literary texts and texts that

integrate both literary and non-literary forms, themes, and functions.75 According to

critics like Roberto Fernández Retamar, the centrality that Reyes grants to “literatura en

pureza” runs counter to the history of Latin American literature, in which “la línea central

                                                                                                               
73
As Roberto Fernández Retamar notes, that undertaking was unprecedented in Latin America, where
literary theory had rarely been attempted. Perhaps the only work of literary theory written in the region
before Reyes’s El deslinde was the brief 1923 pamphlet Las categorías literarias by the Costa Rican
Roberto Brenes Mesén (Fernández Retamar, Para una teoría 74).
74
Pedro Angel Palou, for one, describes El deslinde as an attempt to “asear América” (51), while Teresa
Delgado Molina claims that Reyes’s idealist belief in literature’s ontological essence prevented him from
taking into account the historicity of literature (182). That attempt to “cleanse” Latin American literature or
to extricate it from its historical context is often seen as a flight from the historical realities that prevented
the region’s literature from fully separate itself from the realms of history or politics.
75
The second chapter of El deslinde is entirely dedicated to what Reyes calls “la función anciliar,” which
refers to literature’s capacity to borrow from or “serve” other discourses. As Reyes notes in that chapter,
the very object of El deslinde is to distill a literary “essence” from the “sistemas dispersos” in which it is
found “en suspensión o en disolución” (44), yet most of his theoretical work—and particularly that second
chapter—is dedicated to exploring not “pure” but “ancillary” uses of literature.

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

América” (Palou 51) by imposing standards of purity derived from metropolitan

literatures is not only “discutible para nuestra literatura (Fernández Retamar, Para una

teoría 109) but also makes El deslinde a “pastiche intrascendente,” la “manifestation del

colonialismo cultural que hemos sufrido … como secuela del colonialismo político y

económico” (82). Reyes becomes, in this light, a mirror image of Eduardo Torres, whose

pastiche of references to European literature is a sign not of his cosmopolitanism but of

his hopeless provinciality.

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

Torres used to turn down public office, arguing that the retreat into the library was in fact

a form of public service, a way—as Torres put it—to “servir mejor a mis conciudadanos”

(66). Written at a time of growing interest in the universal qualities of literature and in the

concept of “literariness,” El deslinde is less an attempt to pry Latin American letters from

historical realities than an attempt to combat the region’s marginalization by participating

in a metropolitan critical discussion about the specificity of literary discourse.77 Reyes,

                                                                                                               
76
One of the most prominent critics of Reyes’s attempts to define “literatura en pureza” is Roberto
Fernández Retamar. Writing in the context of revolutionary Cuba, Fernández Retamar is particularly
interested in validating what he calls the “instrumental” character of literature, or its capacity to serve non-
literary ends. Echoing an argument that Reyes himself set forth in “Notas,” Fernández Retamar argues that
Latin American literature has always been placed in the service of society. This interpretation of Latin
American literature borrows heavily from José Antonio Portuondo, who in America Latina en su literatura
makes a similar argument (391). According to Fernández Retamar, the “instrumental” nature of the
region’s literature relegates all Latin American texts to the marginal province of “literatura anciliar” in
Reyes’s scheme and perpetuates Latin America’s cultural marginality. For details on Fernández Retamar’s
argument, see Para una teoría de la literatura latinoamericana, in particular the essay titled “Algunos
problemas teóricos de la literatura hispanoamericana.”
77
El deslinde appeared around the time that the New Critics in the United States were publishing some of
their most important works. It also arrived shortly after the height of the Russian Formalists and on the
coattails of the Prague Linguistic Circle, both of which attempted to define the particular characteristics of
literary discourse. In “La reencarnaciones del centauro” Sánchez Prado offers an excellent analysis of El
deslinde as an attempt to intervene in a worldwide critical discussion and to cancel out the binary
relationship of center-periphery under which Reyes continued to work.

  78  
however, never lost sight of the fact that constructing an autonomous, distinctly literary

realm in Latin America was complicated by the inextricability of politics, history, and

literature in the region. If Reyes set out to define the literary realm from Latin America, it

was precisely because he knew that securing recognition for Latin American letters

among metropolitan circles would require a definition of literature that allowed Latin

American texts to transcend their purportedly provincial context without excluding the

vast body of “instrumental” texts that failed to pass the test of literary autonomy. Reyes’s

definition of literature would thus have to effect a difficult negotiation between the

autonomous and the autochthonous, between global demands and local realities. It would

have to reconcile the tensions between a “literatura en pureza” that functioned as the

metropolitan standard for works of literature and a “literatura anciliar” that characterized

the literary realm in Latin America.

Despite critics’ claim to the contrary, Reyes’s solution was not to simply

reestablish the hierarchy between pure and ancillary literature, thus relegating Latin

American letters once again to the periphery. Such depictions of Reyes’s work rest on the

assumption that Reyes posited some kind of ontological difference between “literatura en

pureza” and “literatura anciliar.”78 Yet, as Ignacio Sánchez Prado notes in “Las

reencarnaciones del centauro,” Reyes insisted less on the distinction between these two

kinds of literature than on the “fluidez” of the “ente” being parsed. Laced with aquatic

adjectives to describe the literary phenomenon, El deslinde is not so much a dualistic

taxonomy but rather a vast theory of hybrid forms in which any particular textual

manifestation is rife with influences from and tensions between different modes of
                                                                                                               
78
This assumption is most apparent in Teresa Delgado Molina’s “Alfonso Reyes: ¿‘literatura anciliar’ vs.
‘literatura en pureza’?”

  79  
knowledge. As if “literature” were an empty vessel blown by the various “agencias del

espíritu,” it glides (“se desliza”) “a través de regiones siempre imprecisas” in “una

mudanza incesante” to the shores of this or that form, over waters where it is impossible

to draw “rayas implacables” (El deslinde 31-33). As Sánchez Prado puts it: “la

especificidad del discurso literario es contingente, móvil y, por ende, sólo alcanzable por

un deslinde, es decir, por una operación que no llega a conclusiones definitivas de lo

literario sino a una constante separación de discursos que, en la práctica, están

irremediablemente entrecruzados” (80). El deslinde was, in this light, a way of

authorizing a characteristically “ancillary” Latin American literature by offering an

account of the numerous “contaminaciones,” “funciones anciliares,” and “fertilizaciones”

that occur in practice between different genres and disciplines while positing “literatura

en pureza” as an unreachable horizon.

One of the key distinctions that allowed Reyes to reconcile the tensions between

the purely, universally “literary” and a local ancillary literature was the difference

between “lo literario” and “la literatura.” Based on the distinction between “lo noético”

and “lo noemático,” “lo literario” designates a movement of the mind propelled by

intention, while “la literatura” refers to the historical accumulation of products resulting

from a particular exercise of that mental faculty.79 In Reyes’s “phenomenography,” “lo

literario” constitutes a universal birthright, an intrinsic faculty of all subjects that,

depending on circumstances, may or may not result in “literatura.”80 Reyes thus provides,

                                                                                                               
79
Reyes borrowed the two terms from Husserl and initially described El deslinde as a “phenomenology” of
the literary phenomenon. In response to later reviews, which faulted Reyes for his “incorrect” use of
Husserl’s phenomenology, Reyes changed the term to “phenomenography,” claiming that he had taken the
term not from Husserl but from the Mexican Porfirio Parra (Pineda np).
80
As he notes in El deslinde, “No sólo los literatos, no sólo los creadores no literarios: toda mente humana
opera literariamente sin saberlo” (43).
  80  
through “lo literario,” a universal basis for a definition of literature, but also transforms

literature into a dynamic phenomenon in which literary modes of thinking can be applied

to non-literary themes, uses, ends, and products. That definition of literature as a dynamic

interaction between “lo literario” and “la literatura” had felicitous consequences for a

region still struggling for cultural emancipation, for it established the equality of all

subjects in their capacity to produce literature while expanding the boundaries of

“literatura” to include “impure” forms and instrumental uses of “lo literario.” Defining

the literary phenomenon as a system of mediation between a faculty of the subject and a

fluid and compound object also had significant consequences for a criticism elaborated

from Latin America. In El deslinde, judging literature was not a process of recognizing

literary essence, conceived as an immanent quality of the literary object, but of correctly

discerning intention in its uncertain path from the subject to the object, from “lo noético”

to “lo noemático.” As a force of the mind that transforms “lo literario” into “literatura,”

intention made literature inseparable from “lo real” and thus required close attention to

the contexts of the literary phenomenon at its moments of production and reception.81

As Sánchez Prado observes, literature for Reyes is always a product of cultural

interaction, a historical entity inscribed within specific contexts and shaped by the

particular circumstances of both readers and writers (“Las reencarnaciones” 80).

According to Reyes, literary writers cannot fully liberate themselves from empirical data

and must fabricate their literary “phantoms” with elements derived from “lo real” (198).
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
81
Reyes’s literary theory is, in this sense, directly opposed to the conception of literature elaborated by the
New Critics elaborated around the same time in the United States. In contrast to Reyes, the New Critics
raised the search for intention in literature to the level of a “fallacy” and sought to establish an objective
basis for literary value by defining literary essence as an immanent quality of the object. Such a definition
was, however, supremely problematic in Latin America, where cultural products rarely met the standards of
“pure” literature and thus risked being judged as minor and insufficient works.

  81  
Under the pressure of aesthetic intention, the mind is nevertheless able to break away

from “el suceder real” and to produce a “ficción mental” emancipated from the strictures

of the real. When instantiated in the literary text, that “ficción mental” becomes a “ficción

verbal,” which returns to “lo real” still bearing a “mínimo de realidad” but reworked into

a new world. That new world is then capable of acting upon “el suceder real” as a “querer

real añadido por el hombre en un arresto de creación mágica o complementación del

mundo por la voluntad verbalmente manifestada” (171). This definition of literature,

which takes into account both loans from “lo real” in the process of production and the

text’s effects upon “lo real” in the process of reception, highlighted the insufficiencies of

a critical practice that purported to contemplate a literary object divorced from its

contexts. As Reyes notes in “Fragmento sobre la interpretación social de las letras

iberoamericanas,” “La llamada crítica pura—estética y estilística—sólo considera el valor

específicamente literario de una obra, en forma y en fondo. Pero no podría conducir a un

juicio y a una comprensión cabales. Si no tomamos en cuenta algunos factores sociales,

históricos, biográficos y psicológicos, no llegaremos a una valoración justa” (155).

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

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

American literature was judged while needing, at the same time, to validate his own

critical credentials. By defining literature as an intentional phenomenon, which at its

points of production and reception was always imbricated with “lo real,” Reyes

established “pure” criticism as insufficient grounds for proper judgment. This ensured

that Latin American literature, which rarely appeared “en pureza,” would be evaluated in

light of its multiple aims and sources and the numerous contexts on which it acted. It

  82  
also, however, sanctioned various “ancillary” forms of criticism that had been practiced

in Latin America along with, and prior to, the newly specialized “exegética.”82

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

“deslinde” that would have as its object not literature but literary criticism. As its subtitle

indicates, El deslinde was merely a set of “prolegómenos a una teoría literaria,” which

Reyes would continue to develop in the brief 1941 essay “Aristarco o anatomía de la

crítica” and in the incomplete Apuntes sobre la ciencia de la literatura. Both works

allowed the Mexican critic to navigate the fraught waters of criticism and to position

himself among the numerous critical idioms of his time. Of particular concern to Reyes

were two prevalent modes of critical commentary in Latin America, which he termed

“impresionismo” and “exegética.” Understood a subject’s untrained response to a literary

text, “impresionismo” had been losing ground in early-twentieth-century Mexico to

philological, psychological, and stylistic methods of literary interpretation, which Reyes

gathered under the term “exegética.” In mid-twentieth-century Mexico, the methods of

exegética had found fertile ground in post-revolutionary institutions of higher learning

where the demise of positivism had opened up new spaces for humanistic inquiry. Pitting

themselves against “crítica impresionista,” which continued to be associated with

literature and literary publications, the various modes of exegética billed themselves as a

new “science of literature.” That claim to scientific status sanctioned exegética as a

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

intellectual paradigm that privileged the specialized knowledge of the universities

(Sánchez Prado, Naciones 159).

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

Reyes, who used it to distance his mode of critical judgment from an impressionistic

criticism that was quickly losing prestige in both national and international circles.83 As

he redrew the geographies of criticism, Reyes used the scholarly prestige of exegética to

buttress his own critical project, turning exegética into a buffer zone “a medio camino

entre el impresionismo y el juicio” (“Aristarco” 113). Placing it above the more easily

accessible impresionismo, Reyes defined exegética as a “zona de laborioso acceso que ya

es terreno de especialistas” (112) and made it a necessary step on the arduous ascent to

judgment. Only by traversing exegética’s specialized fields of knowledge—the text’s

contexts of production and reception, its aesthetic value, the history of its language, and

the psychological and cultural profile of the author—can the critic attain “esa corona de

la crítica” that Reyes called “juicio.” Exegética thus functioned, in Reyes’s scheme, as

the necessary basis for an “estimación objectiva de la obra” (El deslinde 28), providing

with its various scholarly methodologies an improvement over the opinion-based

impresionismo. Yet even exegética proved insufficient grounds for a judgment that could

situate “la obra en el saldo de adquisiciones humanas” (“Aristarco” 113). According to

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

                                                                                                               
83
Impresionismo was associated with what Sánchez Prado calls “la herencia decadentista del modernismo”
(Naciones 84). As Conn analyzes in detail in The Politics of Philology, Reyes and other members of the
Ateneo de la Juventud sought to provide an alternative to modernismo in the early twentieth century, yet
Reyes in particular maintained a complex relationship with modernismo, both setting himself against it and
recuperating part of its legacy as he does with impresionismo. For a detailed discussion of the complex
relationship between the members of the Ateneo and modernismo see Fernando Curiel Defossé’s “El
Ateneo Modernista.”
  84  
y se entretiene en la mera erudición de sus temas, y porque sus temas mismos, algunas

veces, más que un definitivo valor humano tienen un valor interior a los propios fines

eruditos” (112). Specialized knowledge, which substantiated exegética’s claims to

scientific status, became in “Aristarco” the very element that undermined the broader

validity of its conclusions and limited its understanding of literature.

By incorporating exegética into his critical project Reyes was able to claim the

prestige of the specialist, yet he also continued to depend on impressionism as a

necessary component that completed and broadened humanistic critical judgment. The

need for an impressionistic or non-specialized element in criticism was based on a

definition of literature that set it apart from other specialized discourses through its very

lack of specialization. “La literatura,” Reyes claims, “expresa al hombre en cuanto es

humano. La no-literatura en cuanto es teólogo, filósofo, cientista, historiador, estadista,

politico, técnico, etc.” (El deslinde 41). As he argues in El Deslinde, what distinguishes

literature from history, science, theology, and mathematics is its reliance on “lo humano

puro,” which he defined as “la experiencia común a todos los hombres, por oposición a la

experiencia limitada de ciertos conocimientos específicos.” (41). According to Reyes,

literature is the only theoretical discourse capable of bringing the manifold,

undifferentiated experience of the human into the realm of objective knowledge by

objectifying the subjective into the products of “la literatura.”84 That process of

objectification made it possible to study the products of literature scientifically, but only

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

  85  
if that “science” also has access to the full spectrum of human experience. As Reyes

observes in Apuntes, the study of literature cannot dispense with the “electric shock” of

subjective response, “y en esto se distingue de los demás métodos científicos, donde el

observador debe desaparecer de la observación” (325). Unspecialized and based on

common experience, impressionism provided for Reyes criticism’s point of contact with

literature: as a “derecho natural” of all human beings, it was “la respuesta humana,

auténtica y legítima ante el poema” that provides the critic with the requisite knowledge

of human experience (“Aristarco” 110). In combination with exegética, impressionism

completes literary judgment, liberating it from the restrictions of specialization and

paradoxically raising Reyes’s humanistic “juicio” to the level of a true science.

Pitting exegética against impresionismo, Reyes thus authorized his own critical

project by redefining the “science of literature” as a critical activity that incorporated all

methods of interpretation in the synthetic operations of judgment. Claiming that

philological, stylistic, or psychological methods alone were not enough to constitute a

true science of literature (Apuntes 324), Reyes wrested the title of science away from

exegética and assigned it to his own critical project. While exegética’s specialized

knowledge sanctioned the new, humanistic criticism as a “scientific” activity based “no

en convenciones ni en opiniones subjetivas sino en relaciones objetivas” (Deslinde 79),

recourse to impressionistic appreciation presumably guaranteed Reyes’s criticism

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

325) elevated Reyes’s judgment over both impressionism and exegética and founded a

type of criticism that could provide an expert analysis of Latin American literature while

placing it “en el saldo de las adquisiciones humanas” (“Aristarco” 113). It also, however,

  86  
granted validity to the multiplicity of critical approaches in Latin America, where non-

specialized critical approaches continued to be an important part of the critical tradition.

In a region where criticism was still practiced both inside and outside the increasingly

compartmentalized realm of the university, recognizing the merits of non-specialized

interpretation granted new value to a critical tradition that had paid little attention to the

divisions between politics, history, literature, and criticism and, often, to the distinction

between the specialist and the amateur.

In the 1940s, when Reyes penned El deslinde and the companion Apuntes sobre la

ciencia de la literatura, non-specialized forms of interpretation were already starting to be

seen as the province of poets and novelists and classified as a literary genre (334) whose

value “depende del talento artístico del crítico, de su sensibilidad y de sus dotes

literarios” (Apuntes 333). By the time Eduardo Torres’s first articles were published in

1959, it was no longer clear whether that non-specialized approach to the literary text

constituted “real” criticism or whether it was “spurious” criticism, only valid when read

as a “literary” form. As the reception of Lo demás es silencio suggests, Torres’s

untutored understanding of literature had come to be seen by the 1970s as a “naive” form

of interpretation and his subjective approach to the text as the ramblings of a fool. That

view of unspecialized interpretation was paradoxically encouraged by Reyes’s own

attempts to craft a criticism that could make use of literary modes of knowing without

giving up its title as a “critical” discourse. Crafting a truly “critical” discourse would thus

require setting a boundary between literature and criticism, one permeable enough to

permit loans, borrowings, and exchanges but not so flimsy that it would allow his newly

constituted criticism to be absorbed into the “human” but also “naive” realm of literature.

  87  
Saber Crítico, Saber Ingenuo: On Naive and Critical Readers

As he wraps up the introduction to El deslinde, Reyes slips in a key term that

would encapsulate the paradoxical operations in his work of literary theory: “Las especies

que maneja la no-literatura… son tan humanas como las que la literatura maneja; pero,

además, son especiales. No brotan del hombre desnudo, o en su esencial naturaleza de

hombre, sino del hombre revestido de conocimientos determinados, aunque éstos no

lleguen al ‘saber crítico’” (Deslinde 42). The term “saber crítico” would reemerge a

couple of pages later and then disappear entirely from the rest of El deslinde. The concept

was nevertheless an important element in Reyes’s attempt to distinguish the purely

human discourse of literature from the specialized methods of criticism, and to set

exegética apart from a humanistic criticism whose access to literature’s “saber ingenuo”

raised it to the level of a true “saber crítico.” As with “lo noético” and “lo noemático,”

Reyes lifted the terms “saber ingenuo” and “saber crítico” from another philosophical

work and used them to structure his own theory, revising and transforming their

meanings and functions. In this case, the terms derived from the work of Francisco

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

1936.85

Reyes’s attempt to carve out a realm of literary criticism in Mexico found a direct

parallel in Romero’s efforts to consolidate the discipline of philosophy in Argentina and

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

  88  
to elaborate a philosophy enunciated from and suitable to Latin America.86 In his attempt

to establish a philosophical system that was rooted in historical realities but that allowed

an individual or society to transcend them, Romero conceived of a dynamic relationship

between temporalities and idealities, mediated by the interactions between “saber

ingenuo” and “saber crítico.” In Filosofía de la persona, Romero defines them as two

distinct modes of knowledge associated, respectively, with the realm of “life” and the

realm of the “spirit”: saber ingenuo is a “spontaneous” form of knowing rooted in a

subject’s experience of the world, whereas saber crítico is an intentional specialization, a

disciplined reflexivity characteristic of “actitudes deliberadamente cognoscitivas” like

philosophy and science (85). Like Reyes’s “lo humano puro,” saber ingenuo constitutes

for Romero an “atributo necesario de cualquier existencia humana” (86) that provides the

necessary basis for all knowledge and mediates between the realm of temporalities and

the higher cognitive and ethical plane of saberes críticos. Through their common title to

knowledge, Romero casts saber ingenuo and saber crítico as interrelated modes that can

be posited as “tipos ideales” but are in reality difficult to isolate from each other (85). As

he notes in Filosofía de la persona, “En realidad el saber ingenuo almacena mucho

conocimiento válido, y el saber crítico no siempre logra ser tan crítico como imagina, y

admite con frecuencia influjos perturbadores” (85).

Romero’s distinction between saber crítico and saber ingenuo is, in this sense,

highly evocative of Reyes’s “deslinde” in its tendency to isolate realms and lay down

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

  89  
boundaries only to blur them beneath the meticulous details of the exchanges,

hybridization, and infiltrations between realms. In Romero’s system, saber ingenuo and

saber crítico are in constant interaction and tension, limiting and qualifying each other

through their respective intimacy with temporalities and idealities.87 Romero’s

description of the exchanges between a specialized saber crítico and a non-specialized

saber ingenuo nevertheless casts the passages between the two modes of knowing as a

one-way road. For while saber crítico can overflow (“rebasar”) its field of operation and

expand into the territories of el saber común, the so-called dark and living mass of saber

ingenuo can disrupt theoretical schemes and bring the subject back to the refuge of lived

convictions but cannot turn saber crítico into a saber ingenuo. Saberes ingenuos thus

acquire validity under the salutary influence of saber crítico and its disciplined modes of

thought, but specialized discourses simply cease to be truly critical under the influence of

saber ingenuo and its “elementos de perturbación” (88).88 Saber crítico remains, in

Romero’s system, a closed and defensive “recinto” capable of “overflowing” its walls but

closed off to a naive intelligence that might claim part of it as its own.89

                                                                                                               
87
As Romero describes it, saber crítico is constantly assailed by saber ingenuo, “que con su masa oscura y
viviente ronda sin tregua el recinto del saber reflexivo…y asume en los casos extremos la forma de una
inundación que rompe y suprime los esquemas teóricos,” forcing the subject to return to “el refugio de las
convicciones vivas.” Alternatively, saber crítico can also “overflow” (“rebasar”) its field of operation,
subjecting all behaviors to its “meditación metódica” and infiltrating “el saber ingenuo” as its results
become “verdades de sentido común” (87).
88
According to Romero, we acquire and develop saber ingenuo with the help of various “active tendencies”
like imagination, emotion, and fictionalization. Romero also called these “active tendencies” “elementos de
perturbación” because of their capacity to disrupt and prevent the serene contemplation of facts.
89
This structure of one-way exchange was crucial for Romero, who advocated a one-directional move
driven by the reflexive and methodical apparatus of saber crítico, away from subjectivism and towards an
objective, disinterested, and thus “ethical” vision of the world (98). For Romero, the ultimate aim of that
negotiation is to transform current realities by adjusting temporalities to the higher purpose of idealities
through progressive states of transcendence away from saber ingenuo and towards saber crítico. The move
towards idealities would presumably allow the individual to attain the disinterestedness that was the mark
of a truly ethical attitude.

  90  
 Paradoxically, the same structure of one-way exchange between saber ingenuo

and saber crítico served as the model for Reyes’s depiction of the relationship between

literature and criticism. It allowed Reyes to restrict literature to non-specialized modes of

knowing while granting criticism access to literature’s saber ingenuo without renouncing

its status as a specialized saber crítico. Once again, the difference between “lo

noemático” and “lo noético” served Reyes well, for it allowed him to substantiate

literature’s universal access as knowledge while limiting the quality of its knowing to

saber ingenuo. Romero’s claims about the difficulty of establishing precise limits

between saber ingenuo and saber crítico are the starting point in El deslinde to discuss the

complex “préstamos y empréstitos” that allow literature and specialized discourses to

make use of each other’s “noematic contents.”90 That free and open exchange was crucial

for Reyes, for it gave specialized discourses the right to take “las realidades más

humildes, las que corresponden al ‘saber ingenuo’” (El deslinde 47) as their object and

thus sanctioned a specialized study of literature’s non-specialized content. It also

supported Reyes’s definition of literature as “un apetito abstracto que se arroja sobre [la

no-literatura] como un ave de presa y vive de su substancia” (108). Limitless and

omnivorous, literature knows no bounds in the realm of noematic knowledge, to the point

of jeopardizing the existence of “pure” literature “porque no existe literatura viva sin

alimentarse de la no-literatura en grado mayor o menor” (108). That freedom to range

over the full spectrum of human knowledge nevertheless runs up against stringent

barriers in the realm of “el curso noético del pensar” where literature is restricted to a

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

  91  
singular and uncontaminated mode of knowing. Whereas specialized discourses can

legitimately make use of literary modes of knowing—including fictionalization and the

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

“contaminaciones noéticas” remain off-limits to literature.91 Literature’s attempts to

borrow specialized modes of knowing can only lead to “spurious” contaminations (112)

that distort and undermine (“desvirtúan”) literature, turning it at best into “mala

literatura” (109) and at worst into something altogether unrecognizable as literature.

The definition of literature as a discourse that “no conoce límites noemáticos… no

admite contaminaciones noéticas” (107) was crucial for Reyes in his attempt to establish

literature’s universality on both quantitative and qualitative grounds and to claim it

vicariously for criticism. If literature’s unlimited access to the conceptual objects of other

discourses guarantees the universal breadth of its “temática,” the uncontaminated purity

of its mode of thinking effects a magical transformation upon the objects it touches,

returning them to the universal realm of “lo humano puro.”92 That capacity to

“rehumanize” specialized knowledge establishes literature as a universally accessible

mode of knowing and thus glorifies it as “el camino real para la conquista del mundo por

el hombre” (190). The “humanización total por medio de la literatura” also carries,

however, implicit advantages for specialized discourses. As Reyes notes in El deslinde:

Por su universalidad misma, [la literatura] adquiere, ante la historia y ante

la ciencia, el valor vicario de la vida. Nada que sea humano le es ajeno, y
cuanto existe es humano para el hombre. De suerte que la historia y
                                                                                                               
91
Reyes provides meticulous detail of the many “literary” modes of thinking that aid history and science
but ultimately bars literature from using scientific modes of thinking, claiming that “la ciencia se gobierna
por un rigor que no cuadra con la naturaleza imaginativa de la literatura” (116).
92
According to Reyes, literature can allow itself “interpretaciones, hipótesis e irregularidades fundadas tan
sólo en las sospechas de la humana naturaleza,” and thus inevitably “sujeta al orden humano cuantos datos
baña con su magia” (190).

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

Despite Reyes’s military metaphor, literature’s so-called “invasion” of “foreign fields”

actually constitutes in his chart a noetic “empréstito” or “loan” that grants specialized

discourses the right to use literature’s saber ingenuo but keeps literature out of the noetic

territories of saber crítico. For although literature retains access to the

“anthropomorphized” (190) material generated by saber crítico, as a mode of thinking,

saber crítico remains the exclusive province of “saberes específicos.”

Reyes’s construction of literature as a universal discourse functioned, in this

sense, as a way of claiming, for criticism, literature’s privileged knowledge of and access

to “the human” without giving up its status as a critical discourse. As he claims in El

deslinde,

La literatura es la manifestación más universalmente humana. La ciencia

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

As the expert custodian of literature’s universality, criticism could claim specialized

jurisdiction over an object whose limitless range required a comparable “elasticidad

metódica” (111). Literature’s ability to touch on all fields of knowledge called for a

“science” that could draw on numerous disciplines and integrate all knowledge into

universal conclusions about the human experience. Criticism’s expansive authority over

both specialized and unspecialized knowledge nevertheless exceeded, in scope,

  93  
literature’s universality. One of the best examples of that unbounded latitude was Reyes’s

own El deslinde, whose capacity to travel “sin vértigo” (401) through the worlds of

mathematics, religion, science, and history attempted to perform that universality,

promise to liberate Reyes from the narrow field of Latin American experience. Reyes’s

astounding erudition and command of specialized knowledge was nevertheless crucial in

that voyage through the universe of knowledge, for it set him apart from the

unspecialized, impressionistic critic and verified his credentials as a “serious” critic in the

centers of discursive power.

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

Reyes thus sanctioned “la estimación literaria” as “el único tribunal desde donde el

eclecticismo no resulta una ramplonería” (418). Yet it also established an implicit

hierarchy between critical and naive modes of knowing, between the expert and the

amateur, between the critic and the literary writer, between Reyes’s humanistic criticism

and the unspecialized, impressionistic criticism epitomized by Eduardo Torres. Reyes’s

hierarchies are most apparent in the last section of “Aristarco o anatomía de la crítica,”

which illustrates the humanistic criticism that Reyes sought to construct by setting it off

against the incomprehension of a naive reader. Presented with a statement from the

French Revolution, an image from Rousseau, and two verses of Góngora’s poetry, “el

humanista” in “Aristarco” correctly interprets the three isolated fragments in a flash of

insight that allows him to see, in condensed form, cataclysmic changes in human thought

and sensibility. Lacking specialized knowledge of their political, philosophical, and

literary contexts, the naive reader can only see, in contrast, “cierto inevitable efecto

humorístico,” “un hecho trivial” (114), “una burla de la peor especie” (115). With access

  94  
only to his own saber ingenuo, the impressionistic reader remains an “amateur” whose

privileged access to the literary realm of “lo humano” is not enough to grant him critical

judgment. Despite his “vital” relationship to literature, the reader who lacks specialized

knowledge ultimately proves to be an “ignorante,” lacking of the synthetic insight

displayed by “el humanista” (114) and capable only of “ramplonerías.”

In its condescending portrait of “el ignorante,” “Aristarco” provides one of the

most overt instances of the hierarchies between critical and naive knowledge—and their

relation to criticism and literature—that Reyes established in his work, and that

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

“delights” (114) of humanistic interpretation is particularly significant with regards to Lo

demás es silencio, as it turns on the same two verses by Góngora that Eduardo Torres

analyzes in one of his articles.93 Torres’s “El pájaro y la cítara (Una octava olvidada de

Góngora)” is as a perfect illustration of that “ignorante que ha creído ver una burla de la

peor especie” in La fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, a 1627 poem by the Spanish writer

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

Torres begins his article by contesting the Spanish poet’s renowned difficulty and then

plunges into a line-by-line analysis punctuated by the refrain “no presenta problemas”

(LDES 133-35). Torres’s repeated boast of privileged insight is, however, cancelled out

by his ridiculous reading, which is not only full of errors of fact, misidentifications, and

idiosyncratic interpretations of Góngora’s intricate metaphors but also entirely reverses

                                                                                                               
93
The two verses by Góngora quoted in “Aristarco” are: “Templado pula en la maestra mano/ el generoso
pájaro su pluma,” which also begin the “octava” analyzed by Torres in “El pájaro y la cítara.”
94
Torres’s article was originally published in 1962 by the Revista de la Universidad de México and later
reprinted in Lo demás es silencio.

  95  
the meaning of Góngora’s stanza. In an effort to clarify its meaning, Torres changes the

syntax and punctuation of Góngora’s “y al cuerno al fin la cítara suceda” to “Suceda al

fin: ¡al cuerno la cítara!” (135). Góngora’s exhortation, which asks his listener to leave

the hunt (i.e. “el cuerno”) and listen to his verses (i.e. “la cítara”), becomes in Torres’s

reading an abrupt “to hell with poetry!”

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

Reyes’s “Aristarco,” which turns “el ignorante” who can only see “una burla de la peor

especie” into an object of derision. Torres’s article was, however, in dialogue with

another article by Reyes titled “La estrofa reacia del Polifemo,” which suggests that “el

ignorante” was not the real butt of Monterroso’s laughter.95 Like Torres, Reyes too

begins “La estrofa reacia” by discussing Góngora’s renowned difficulty and, through a

series of quotations by various Góngora experts, similarly suggests that “el no

entenderlas no será culpa del poeta galán y levantado, sino de el floxo [sic] que no quiere

construirlas y entenderlas” (Pedro Díaz de Rivas, quoted in “La estrofa” 219). Once

again, Reyes uses the image of “los indoctos o ingenios perezosos” (Carrillo y

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

Consolidating that superiority will be critical in this instance, for, like Torres’s

interpretation, Reyes’s clarification of Góngora’s verses depends on a change in

punctuation justified through the authority of his privileged insight. Reyes’s exhaustive

scholarly comparison of various schemes of punctuation allows him to justify the leeway

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

  96  
he takes in “jardinear la anarquía que entonces era tan manifiesta y tan incómoda, al

ajustar las arbitrariedades de aquella puntuación que tanto afean los viejos textos” (224).

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

Musa me dice al oído que el fragmento resulta más elegante y poético leyéndolo como yo

lo leo, lo cual no es criterio inoportuno tratándose de un excelso poeta” (231).

In isolation, Reyes’s “La estrofa reacia del Polifemo” constitutes a piece of

extraordinary erudition that grants Reyes unique authority within a transatlantic

community of scholars. In light of Torres’s “El pájaro y la cítara” Reyes’s article

becomes, however, an absurd piece of criticism based on a random change in punctuation

and the flimsiest of whims. The carefully established boundaries between critical and

naive readers and between specialized knowledge and literary impression break down

beneath the corrosive mockery of a piece that equates Alfonso Reyes with a reader not

unlike “el ignorante” in “Aristarco.” “El pájaro y la cítara” questions the “critical” status

of the humanist’s insight, whose claim to specialized knowledge is not enough to

counteract the apparently aleatory nature of its conclusions. Even more biting, however,

is Lo demás es silencio’s perspective on the impossibility of raising a “naive” reading to

critical status. Torres’s function as Reyes’s naive doppelgänger, capable of putting his

critical credentials in question, is echoed in Lo demás es silencio by Torres’s own

doubles, whose “ignorant” perspectives turn out to be more critical than the critic’s. Both

Carmen de Torres, Torres’s wife, and Luciano Zamora, his “ayuda de cámara, o valet,

según a él le gustaba llamarme” (LDES 78), take on the role of the fool, whose

absurdities are meant to highlight the wisdom of kingly authority. Simple-minded and

risible at first, Carmen de Torres’s and Zamora’s accounts of Torres’s life nevertheless

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

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

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

“parodies the most naive type of attestation” (940) in which the testifier unwittingly

reveals embarrassing details about the private life of public person in question. Written in

the form of a “grabación” or recorded interview, “Hablar de un esposo siempre es difícil”

suppresses the interviewer’s voice and leaves only Carmen’s rambling monologue.

Marked by the orality of her recorded thoughts, that testimonial casts Carmen as “una

mujer virtualmente analfabeta” (Noguerol Rodríguez 183) who must rely on others to

write down her untutored impressions. Carmen’s presumed ignorance is, however,

precisely what exposes Eduardo’s pretentions and questions a hierarchy that relegates her

to a naive realm of children and household duties where “de lo único que sabemos hablar

las mujeres” is “el tema de las sirvientas” (LDES 108). Barred from a masculine realm in

which Torres and his friends are always talking about books and other “cosas elevadas,”

Carmen plays a key role as an outsider who, not knowing any better, tells visiting experts

from abroad that Torres has not read any of the texts in question. Torres’s immediate

reaction is to burst into defensive laughter, suggesting that his wife is a “bromista de

primera marca.” As Carmen notes, “esa es una de las formas, por supuesto, en que él

resuelve el problema de tener que soportar a una mujer tan criticona como yo; pero a mi

no me engaña, aunque como le digo, siempre me quedan mis dudas y pienso si en el

fondo no seré yo la tonta” (106). The searing irony of that statement subjects every

opposition to double readings and reversals, including not only the opposition “sabio”/

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

  98  
Carmen simply confirms her belief that the real “tonto” is her husband, the purported

cattiness of that judgment also functions as a critical interrogation of the hierarchies that

privilege Torres’s studied, masculine judgment. In the end, Carmen’s testimony suggests

that her “saber ingenuo” is no less critical and no less expansive than her husband’s

“saber crítico” and that it too can lay claim to the “impressive names” of specialized

knowledge. As she notes at the end of her monologue, “algo se le va pegando a uno por

tonto que uno sea y por eso me puede oír de vez en cuando mencionar uno que otro

nombre impresionante, aunque si usted se pusiera a escarbar un poco descubriría que sé

tanto como Eduardo (risa)” (107).

Even without reference to a specific historical context, Carmen’s domestic

perspective offers a demolishing commentary on the critic’s strategies of self-

authorization. That testimonial becomes, however, even more mordant in light of an

interview with Reyes’s wife, Manuela Mota, which was published by the critic Miguel

Capistrán in the literary supplement El Heraldo Cultural.96 Like Carmen de Torres’s

testimonial, “Visión íntima de Alfonso Reyes” was published in the form of a monologue

in which the interviewer’s voice is entirely suppressed. Capistrán’s signature at the end of

the monologue nevertheless suggests that Mota needed editorial assistance composing

and recording her memories, a notion that is only reinforced by Mota’s self-deprecating

assertion “Yo quisiera poder escribir bien para dar a conocer públicamente mi

reconocimiento a Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, que ha sido el encargado de la edición de las

obras de Alfonso” (np). Despite such implications of her near-illiteracy, Mota was no

“tonta.” As she notes at the very beginning of the interview, Mota was one of the first
                                                                                                               
96
Although that interview occurred in 1964—five years after Reyes’s death—it did not appear until 1966, a
year after Mota had passed away and had no control over published content.

  99  
women to finish “preparatoria” in Mexico and was in her first year of university studies

in chemistry when Reyes—whom she had recently married—asked her to dedicate

herself entirely to “las labores del hogar” (np).97 As in Carmen de Torres’s testimonial,

Mota’s naiveté is the product of a strategic irony or unwitting candidness, which reveals

and undermines the hierarchies of knowledge established by a man who at some point

considered the possibility “que los hombres ‘piensan con las palabras’ pero no las

mujeres” (Reyes, El deslinde 138).

As the conclusion to El deslinde suggests, critical writing was, for Reyes, a

distinctly masculine activity whose purpose was to “rescatar la interpretación de la poesía

entre las sentimentalidades confusas que la ensombrecen, con mano firme de varón, y

distinguiendo severamente lo que es emoción, estado subjetivo tan mudo como la misma

naturaleza, de lo que es ejecución verbal, de este artificio de palabras, propio patrimonio

del hombre” (421). Barred from the pursuit of specialized knowledge, Manuela Mota

presumably belonged to that speechless, muddled world of sentimentality and emotion

devoid of the clarity and public permanence of critical judgment. With its disjointed and

sometimes contradictory orality, Mota’s “intimate” vision of her husband nevertheless

proves the very opposite. It verifies, for one, her claim to critical knowledge, including

her intimacy with “uno que otro nombre impresionante” (LDES 107) and her assistance

preparing the Fouché-Delbosc edition of Góngora’s poetry.98 Her account of her

                                                                                                               
97
As Mota notes, she was the only woman in her class and was studying at time when women in Mexico
were just beginning to pursue careers. As an example, Mota mentions Matilde Montoya, the first female
doctor in Mexico, who had recently earned her degree.
98
In the interview, Mota speaks of Reyes’s role preparing the Foulché-Delbosc edition of Góngora’s
poetry, but halfway through her narration shifts from the third person singular to the second person plural.
She then recounts how she had to help Reyes while he copied, presumably by keeping the book open,
though the exact nature of her help remains ambiguous.

  100  
husband’s intellectual pursuits also reverses Reyes’s oppositions of naive/critical,

confused sentimentality/discerning virility, mute subjectivity/articulate objectivity by

suggesting that Reyes’s critical efforts resulted not in clarity but in confusion. As Mota

notes with regards to El deslinde: “Para él mismo fue muy difícil hacerlo; es muy

complicado porque el texto siempre tiene que ir refiriéndo a páginas posteriores, así es

que resulta prácticamente una madeja muy enredada y hay que tener muy buena voluntad

para seguirla” (np). If Mota demotes Reyes’s erudite work of literary theory to an

obdurate and tangled spindle, the rest of his work fares no better. Asides from Reyes’s

first collection of essays, the only other works Mota mentions are Reyes’s “amateur”

incursions into the realm of history and three incomplete works: Prolegómenos de la

teoría literaria (sic), Reyes’s work on Greek mythology, and his translation of The Iliad,

all of which she depicts as abortive fragments of Reyes’s original vision. To judge from

Manuela Mota’s account of her husband’s life, Reyes’s remained something of a

dilettante who kept jumping from one discipline to another, one incomplete project to

another, to whom “todo le atraía, no dejó casi un campo sin explorar” (Mota np).

Mota’s naive attestation ends up corroding Reyes’s most strenuous efforts to

distinguish himself as an expert, a scientist of literature, a specialized scholar capable of

turning Latin America’s naive, undifferentiated knowledge into critical disciplines that

could join a worldly dialogue. Coupled with Carmen de Torres’s testimonial, it upsets a

hierarchy that places Reyes above a naive or common reader who requires the assistance

of an expert to rise out of that muddled realm of subjective experience and emotion. That

pedagogical role, which Reyes often takes on in his writings, assumes alarming

dimensions in Lo demás es silencio, where Torres ends up locking up and exploiting the

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

Eduardo Torres and Luciano Zamora—who arrives penniless from the countryside and

becomes Torres’s valet—Monterroso illustrates Reyes’s paternalistic attitude towards a

(male) common reader instructed to better himself through reading.99 Torres’s insistence

that Zamora “[se] instruyera para que llegara a ser algo en la vida” (LDES 79) echoes

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

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

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

Zamora out of his ignorance, every morning Torres locks Zamora in his study with a pile

of specialized books on law or grammar. As Zamora admits early on in his testimonial,

the pedagogical campaign proves anything but successful. For, “en lugar de leer esos

libros al parecer inofensivos” Zamora “agarraba las mejores novelas de Julio Verne,

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

79) and steals them away to his servant’s room where he would read them by the

transgressive light of a candle.

Zamora thus follows Reyes’s advice to read literature but neglects the discipline

of language-learning, manuals, tables, notes, indexes, and the expert’s “sistema de

departamentos” (Reyes, “Apolo” 94) as he gives in to the pleasure of reading. Playing on

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

  102  
the trope of literature’s corrupting influence, Zamora’s testimonial presents literature not

as a salutary influence that will distinguish him from an ignorant maître d’hôtel but as an

insidious practice that only perpetuates the servant’s naiveté. As Zamora notes at the

beginning of his testimonial:

joven al que le da por leer, joven perdido, pues ya sea acariciándose

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

Despite the knowledge he gains from his voracious reading, Zamora remains a naive

reader who runs into all the “dificultades” enumerated by Reyes in “Apolo.” Lacking

contextual knowledge, Zamora is unable to “penetrar la significación del texto” (Reyes,

“Apolo” 95) and instead falls prey to an “emoción parasitaria,” sees himself reflected in

the text, and allows his mind to be carried away “por zonas ajenas a la lectura” (97). All

knowledge becomes muddled in Zamora’s testimony, which not only intermingles erudite

literary references with “vulgar” colloquial speech but also finds romance in grammar

and responds to literature with masturbation. As Parsons observes, “Zamora’s

contribution reveals a narcissistic obsession with the physical that renders him incapable

of comprehending even the most elementary philosophical distinctions” (340). Torres’s

life and work ultimately becomes a mere pretext for Zamora to narrate his romance with

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

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

“saber” of his naive experience, Zamora functions as an embodiment of literature and its

capacity to turn “saberes críticos” back into literature, romance, and experience. As such,

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

  103  
upon the literary realm in order to produce his “saber crítico.” Although Torres

presumably initiated his pedagogical campaign for the sake of Zamora’s betterment, that

official story hides a more self-serving purpose. By locking Zamora in his study, Torres

not only hopes to turn Zamora’s “saber ingenuo” into a “saber crítico” but also uses

Zamora to produce the “saber” of criticism. Torres may have instructed Zamora to read

some texts for his own benefit, yet Torres also expects his servant to cull information that

he can later relay back to the critic. Like Reyes, who sometimes treated both popular

culture and literature as a vast deposit of raw material, Torres sees Zamora as a source of

undifferentiated material to be shaped, through the critic’s educated intention, into a

distinct literary realm.100 Zamora’s naive and rudimentary knowledge of reading and

writing is excellent news for Torres: “que bueno que sepa tanto,” Torres tells the aspiring

servant, “tengo muchas cosas que ordenar, copiar, verificar, cotejar, clasificar, revisar y

archivar” (LDES 84).

Zamora’s direct knowledge of the material to be organized nevertheless undoes

the critic’s project. In his attempt to distinguish “lo cultural” in newspapers and journals

he either finds “todo… deslumbrante y cultural” or realizes that what little culture there is

“se hallaba metido entre los cumpleaños, los crímenes y las bodas” (85). In Zamora’s

naive perspective the cultural realm remains undifferentiated, inseparable from the daily

experience on which “saber ingenuo” is founded. Not even the critic’s presumably
                                                                                                               
100
Reyes’s definition of literature as a dynamic interaction between “lo literario” and “la literatura” may
have opened literary thought to individuals of all ages and educational backgrounds, yet it also retained a
conception of literature as a collection of textual objects to be organized into the category of high literature
by the expert gaze of the critic. That vision of literary texts as raw material for the critic was particularly
notorious with regard to the products of popular culture, which Reyes routinely characterized as “raw
material” to be organized into literature. See, for example, Reyes’s distinction between the “lenguaje-
coloquio” and the “lenguaje-paraloquio in El deslinde (224), or his essay “Discurso por Virgilio” where he
defines “lo autóctono” as a vast deposit of “raw material” to be incorporated into the stream of culture
(161).

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

Zamora’s “saber ingenuo,” which tends to muddle literature and romance, knowledge and

experience. Through Zamora’s intimate insight into Torres’s life, we find that the critic’s

library has been functioning as the headquarters for a series of romantic intrigues that

similarly confuse the realm of criticism and the realm of subjective experience. As

Zamora’s testimonial reveals, many of the compositions that emerge from Torres’s

library—which Zamora is supposed to copy and organize—are love letters to the wives

and girlfriends of Torres’s colleagues. “Love,” a word that Reyes often used as a

metaphor for the supreme operation of the intellect upon its object, once again acquires

its messy associations with sex, romance, infidelity, gender, and power relations.101 Like

Zamora, Torres turns out to be nothing more than another producer of romances, of

fictions, of love letters bearing false claims and invented pseudonyms.

In the end, “Recuerdos de mi vida con un gran hombre” makes it difficult to

differentiate between Torres and Zamora, between the critic and the fabulator. As Zamora

comes to that critical realization, he shakes off the shackles that had been placed upon

him and, driven by the force of love’s “saber ingenuo,” escapes Torres’s library in order

to elope with Felicia. The coupling of literature with happiness, pleasure, the smile,

functions in Lo demás es silencio as a sign of protest without which, according to Reyes,

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

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

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

  105  
have begun to doubt our masters and are ready to be emancipated from the strictures of

the given. To quote Reyes directly: “Mientras no se duda del amo no sucede nada.

Cuando el esclavo ha sonreído comienza el duelo de la historia” (242). Zamora’s

pleasurable coupling with a woman whose “talento natural” he fully recognizes is such a

beginning. Their union produces four children: a flight attendant “que de vez en cuando

nos trae recuerdos de países lejanos y hasta de las Islas de la Malasia” (LDES 103), a

lawyer, a demonstration agent for IBM, and an accountant, all of who embody the

practical “saberes” of a growing and increasingly powerful middle class in Latin

America. To read Zamora’s escape allegorically, his flight from the cage of Torres’s

library brings literature back into the streets of San Blas where it must come to terms with

the messy vicissitudes of survival. Entangled, once again, in the “impurity” of historical

realities, literature comes face to face with the challenges of the late twentieth century

when Latin America was finding its place in a world that had begun to employ new

means and new knowledge in the search for economic and cultural autonomy.

In the 1970s, Lo demás es silencio raises biting questions about the hierarchies

that Reyes established between critical and naive knowledge and the extent to which they

continued to inform later efforts to establish Latin America’s critical equality with the

centers of discursive power. The critical power of Carmen de Torres’s and Zamora’s

naive testimonials questions, in particular, the social implications of constructing

criticism—and its noematic counterpart, critique—as a specialized discourse restricted to

an educated class of scholars. The issue was a particularly sensitive one for Monterroso,

an autodidact like Zamora who never finished elementary school but whose voracious

readings eventually led him to become a professor of literature at the Universidad

  106  
Autónoma de México. Monterroso ironically claimed at one point that he never wanted to

meet Reyes out of fear of missing a reference (Viaje 19), yet that claim must be read in

light of Monterroso’s own extraordinary erudition, which Lo demás es silencio puts into

play without excluding the naive reader. “Escribo para cualquiera que sepa leer” (62)

Monterroso maintained, and argued that Lo demás es silencio was meant for both “el

erudito” susceptible to the book’s erudite games and for “el lego” capable of enjoying the

novel without getting bogged down in the book’s innumerable references (77). That dual

structure was essential for Monterroso, who considered the naive reader a key participant

in the revitalization of Latin American literature. In a region with few readers “que

pueden pagárselos [libros] sin sacrificios y reciben de ellos un placer (el libro como lujo,

no como necesidad)” (52), writers had to rely on the common reader as a vital part of

their readership. As Monterroso notes in an interview, the Latin American literary boom

of the 1960s would have been impossible without “un auge previo de secretarias” who

barely had the means to purchase books but needed them to fill “las horas muertas en el

trabajo… (el libro como necesidad, no como lujo)” (52). Common readers are, however,

more than an economic necessity as their naive perspective provides a critical

counterpoint that unsettles and transfigures canonical readings. As Gloria Estela

González Zenteno notes, Monterroso often praised the creativity of ingenuous readers

and invites us, in his works, to reflect on the subversive power of a “lectura en apariencia

ingenua o tonta” (70).102

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

  107  
 Monterroso sought, in other words, a radical democratization of literature that had

much in common with Reyes’s humanistic vision of literature as a universal discourse

accessible to all. Yet, unlike Reyes, Monterroso granted critical potential to the naive

interpretations of unspecialized readers whose very exclusion from the circles of expert

interpretation gave them the leeway and the pleasure of unorthodox interpretations. The

dual structure that granted validity to both naive and critical interpretations also endowed

literature with a critical potential that Reyes had excluded from the noetic purity of

literature’s “saber ingenuo.” The impossibility of raising literature to the status of a

specialized, critical discourse made it necessary for Reyes to construct criticism as a

specialized discourse with exclusive rights over critical knowledge, to “henchir antes de

arrullos, a imagen de la canción de Ariel, las pausas de la noche de Fausto” (El deslinde

59). In Lo demás es silencio, the apparent conflict between Faust’s doubt and the lulling

pleasure of Ariel’s song is, however, entirely absent.103 As Zamora’s testimonial

suggests, the enchantment of literature—the pleasure that keeps the servant in his bed,

weaving all kinds of “imaginaciones”—does not serve Prospero’s magic or subject itself

to his bondage but instead allows Zamora’s Caliban-like figure to assume control over

the spell of language. In a text where naive readers possess their own critical magic

without having to be educated into the specialized methodologies of criticism, literature

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

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

In the end neither Torres nor Reyes has the power to liberate himself from the

magic of literature’s “Isla Encantada” (Reyes, El deslinde 411). In the last section of Lo

demás es silencio, Eduardo Torres wonders whether he has not been dreaming all along

and, identifying explicitly with Prospero, begs the reader’s indulgence (LDES 198).

Reyes’s forays into the fields of specialized knowledge eventually lead him, like Faust, to

the realm of magic and prestidigitation from which “el alma recibe su sangre demoníaca”

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

“el oribe del razonamiento” and suggests that reason is only one of fantasy’s many

possible combinations “que sólo ha usurpado el puesto a las demás por ser la que

entiende de mercado, por ser la de la ‘gramática parda’” (412).104 In an extraordinary

reversal of his own hierarchies of knowledge, Reyes ultimately turns reason into a form

of imaginative thinking intimately linked with the “saber ingenuo” of the dark,

unspecialized regions and classes. As a provincial critic, Reyes had a unique command of

that “gramática parda,” which led him through the difficult negotiations of crafting a

critical discourse from Latin America. Securing the respect of specialization was a clever

strategy to claim a place in a global critical community and gain the authority to vindicate

those literary modes of thinking and writing that had marked Latin America’s

naive/native intelligence. Yet as Reyes himself admitted later on, his theoretical efforts to

legitimize literature as a universal mode of knowledge production and, at the same time,

to privilege specialized modes of knowing remained somewhat ingenuous. For in a

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

  109  
region where the boundaries between literature and criticism remained indistinct,

conceding the superiority of specialized knowledge not only reinforced existing

hierarchies of class and gender but also perpetuated global hierarchies that relegated

Reyes and other Latin American critics to the role of provincial visitors in the

metropolitan territories of criticism.

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

In 1957, a few years before his death, Reyes wrote and published a brief text in

the form of a letter, titled “Carta a mi doble.” That letter was addressed to an “estimado y

laborioso doble” and offered a new assessment of El deslinde.105 “Y no se inquiete usted

si me burlo un poco de mí mismo, que eso es señal de buena salud” (247) Reyes warns

his hard-working and laborious double, and launches into a scathing assessment of his

own theoretical efforts. The work that Reyes had once presented as an epic voyage of

discovery, as a heroic and virile attempt to rescue literature from the swamp of

sentimentality, becomes in “Carta a mi doble” a trivial attempt to “clavetear, más que

poner, puntos sobre las íes” (247), a “lastre… viciosa inflación” made with “los residuos

de la vida doméstica” (248). No longer at ease with the title of expert and specialist,

Reyes paints himself as a “mundano primerizo” (247). He also claims that if El deslinde

was perceived as a difficult text it was only because of his amateurish tendency towards

excessive explanation.106 Reyes, however, also defends his critical approach and admits

                                                                                                               
105
That letter became the prologue to the book Al Yunque, a collection of essays that continues Reyes’s
theoretical project but in the form of the essay instead of the theoretical treatise.
106
To a certain extent, Reyes’s palinode of his theoretical efforts was motivated by the mixed reviews of El
deslinde, which accused Reyes of being abstruse and faulted his use of philosophical methods and
concepts. For a brief overview of El deslinde’s first reviews see Alfonso Rangel Guerra’s “Alfonso Reyes,
teórico de la literatura.”
  110  
that his theoretical efforts were motivated by a hidden desire for vengeance. “Me

incomodaba,” he tells us, “que entre nosotros—y aún en ambientes más cultivados—

quien quiere escribir sobre la poesía se considere obligado a hacerlo en tono poético… y

se figure que el tono científico o discursivo es, en el caso, una vejación” (249). After

reminding the reader that he had elsewhere fulfilled his obligations to the literary muse,

Reyes once again makes a distinction between literature and criticism, comparing their

relationship to the relationship between praying and crafting a theological argument,

eating and writing about nutrition. The problem, for Reyes, is one of provincialism. For

if, “entre nosotros” people employed the practices of French lyceums, “los niños mismos

sabrían que se pueden examinar los textos poéticos mediante procedimientos

intelectuales, sin que ello sea un desacato ni tampoco una impertinencia” (249). Reyes, in

other words, accuses local and global readers “por aquí y por allá” of the ultimate naiveté

of thinking that writing criticism from Latin America in a “scientific” rather than a

literary register amounts to insubordination or impertinence.

Despite such attempts to justify his adventures in theory, “Carta a mi doble”

ultimately ends up renouncing Reyes’s theoretical project. After noting that he had begun

to gather material for the literary theory that would follow El deslinde, Reyes admits that

he abandoned those efforts, feeling that “le jeu ne veut pas la chandelle, no sé si por el

juego mismo o por los que lo ven jugar” (249). “Carta a mi doble” closes with a partial

admission of failure, only redeemed by El Yunque, which, as Reyes claims, breaks with

the systematic order of those unwritten chapters and scatters their substance “en breves

ensayos más fáciles de escribir y más cómodos de leer.” Reyes returns, in other words, to

the essay and to the realm of the human, accessible to all, closing his letter with a
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

  111  
melancholic goodbye to his theoretical efforts: “Así acabó, pues, aquella tan ambiciosa

teoría literaria. Alas, poor Yorick!” No longer Faust with his infinite ambition or

Prospero with his magic, Reyes ultimately identifies with the skull in Hamlet’s hand,

with that fool who was once a source of entertainment or the butt of laughter. In his

valedictory role as the king’s jester, Reyes once again invokes the risk of being called a

“farsante” like Torres, a risk that would continue to unsettle Latin American criticism for

decades to come. For implicit in Reyes’s self-mockery was the notion that, in Latin

America, writing criticism in a scientific or theoretical register was, if not insubordination

or impertinence, at least an imposture, an attempt to dress up the region’s writing in

clothing that was not its own.

In its parody of the provincial critic, Lo demás es silencio turns on a similar

representation of the critic as a “farsante”: a jester or fraud whose attempt to appropriate

the critical language of the metropolis inevitably results in comic failure. The novel’s

critical engagement with Alfonso Reyes suggests, like “Carta a mi doble,” that even Latin

America’s most revered critic is an amateur or “mundano primerizo,” a polygraph whose

stabs at specialized thinking are at best a diversion and at worst a ridiculous undertaking

better left to “ambientes más cultivados.” Monterroso’s portrait of the provincial critic is

nevertheless mitigated in Lo demás es silencio by a lingering uncertaintly, by the inability

to determine “si el doctor fue en su tiempo un espíritu chocarrero, un humorista, un sabio

o un tonto” (LDES 78). Throughout Lo demás es silencio and in his other writings

Monterroso continued to hint at the possibility that the provincial critic had deliberately

chosen the jester’s role as a strategic position in a treacherous critical landscape. As

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

  112  
es deliberada y cuando expresa ‘tonterías’ no se sabe si son naturales o parodia de las

tonterías que lee en libros de crítica aparentemente inteligentes” (Viaje 102). The line

between subservient imitation and critical parody breaks down as the reader begins to

wonder if the provincial critic might not have been acting out his naiveté, emulating the

specialized discourse of the metropolis only to expose through ingenuous and ingenious

repetition the absurdities of that “lastre… viciosa inflación.”

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

Giovanni Papini’s “Don Chischiotte dell’Inganno” also outlined the advantages of

deliberate imposture. As if he were anticipating Monterroso’s critical poetics, Reyes

claimed in “Una interpretación del Quijote” that Don Quijote “ha engañado a todos, aún

al mismo Cervantes. No está loco: se finge loco—nuevo Bruto, nuevo Hamlet—para

romper con las limitaciones del ambiente que lo rodea” (349).107 For a young critic

seeking “que el mundo le deje andar errando a su antojo,” playing the fool must have

been a compelling strategy to escape the limitations of a provincial background. It might

not be entirely foolish to suppose, in that light, that Reyes learned Yorick’s lesson early

on and that throughout his life he applied the Ingenious Hidalgo’s method of madness:

“la imitación.”108 Read through the lens of Monterroso’s critical fiction, one begins to

wonder whether Reyes might not have used a “deformación voluntaria” whenever it

suited his purposes, delivering the discourse of the metropolis sometimes in the role of

the “sabio” and sometimes in the role of the fool. As Paz observes in his obituary, humor

                                                                                                               
107
Both Monterroso and his critics have pointed to Don Quijote as an ancestor and model for Eduardo
Torres. See, in particular, chapter 3 of González Zenteno’s El dinosaurio sigue allí.
108
Reyes’s “Canto del Halibut,” analyzed in the introduction to this dissertation, supports the notion that
Reyes was a master of imitation and impersonation, capable of confounding clear distinctions between
criticism meant in earnest and criticism made in jest.
  113  
was an “arma invensible” for Reyes, who used laughter to escape the paralysis of

erudition (“El jinete” np). As in “Carta a mi doble,” Reyes’s laughter was often aimed at

himself, though it could very well have been aimed at us. One can see him taking on the

role of Don Quijote, who “conoce a los hombres, y entre odiarlos y divertirse con ellos,

prefiere ésto último. E inventó hacerse caballero”—or in this case, a critic—“para que los

hombres, creyendo burlarse de él, le sirvieran de bufones” (350). Like Don Quijote,

Torres, and Monterroso, Reyes too can be depicted as a naive-critical reader, whose

claims to critical ability are as ambiguous as his claims to naiveté.

That ability to make us doubt whether the critic writes in all seriousness or in jest,

whether his absurdities are “natural” or parodies of apparently intelligent critical texts is,

in the end, the real danger in Monterroso’s texts. That danger is best illustrated in a brief

text titled “Peligro siempre inminente,” which Monterroso included in his 1972 book

Movimiento Perpetuo. Published eight years before the appearance of Lo demás es

silencio, “Peligro siempre inminente” highlights the ever-imminent dangers of parodic

writing, the continued risk of reading Monterroso’s impostor texts as serious criticism but

also of reading serious criticism as an impostor text. Its first paragraph makes direct

reference to Torres’s “El pájaro y la cítara” and recounts how the author writes “en

broma” “tres cuartillas de falsa exégesis de una octava de Góngora… atribuídos a un

crítico de provincia” (137). Certain of eliciting uproarious laughter, he shows the article

to some friends: the first gets the joke, two others suspect something amiss and smile

with caution, the fourth takes the whole thing seriously, “y el se llena de vergüenza.”

Like an allegory for the reception of Torres’s articles, “Peligro siempre inminente”

highlights the capacity of Monterroso’s texts to fool readers incapable of grasping their

  114  
parodic intent. The second paragraph of the story reveals, however, an even greater

danger lurking behind Monterroso’s two-faced textual practices. This time the author

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

‘estrofa reacia de Góngora,’” referencing an article that Monterroso would later publish

under the title “Los juegos eruditos.” In “Peligro,” that article receives, again, a mixed

reaction: in this case the first friend rejects the validity of the argument, the other three

laugh uproariously, “y él se llena de vergüenza.”

What “Peligro inminente” suggests is that, whether written “en broma” or “en

serio” (137) Monterroso’s texts are always subject to a double reading as either parodic

literature or serious criticism. The true “farsantes” in this story, those texts function like

jokers, preventing readers from settling on either discourse under the danger of exposing

themselves as naive readers. The text’s allegorical tale about the perils of parodic writing

also suggests, however, that such discursive indeterminacy can apply not only to

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

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

Herrero-Olaizola calls the “apprenticeship” of parodic discourse, which teaches us to

challenge the original while considering the validity of the apocryphal (77). Educated by

the discursive ambiguities of the first “absurd” text, the imagined readers in “Peligro”

have learnt to doubt the “seriousness” of the second article, whose erudite clarifications

are either refuted or laughed at. While that critic initially seems to be Monterroso himself,

his analysis of Góngora’s verses was not really published until 1983.109 In 1972 when

“Peligro siempre inminente” appeared, that second “note” could very well have alluded
                                                                                                               
109
“Los juegos eruditos” appeared in 1983 in both Monterroso’s book La palabra mágica and in the
Spanish journal Quimera: Revista de literatura.

  115  
not to Monterroso’s analysis but to Reyes’s attempts at clarifying, once and for all, “La

estrofa reacia de Góngora.” With its direct reference to Reyes’s article, “Peligro siempre

inminente” serves, in other words, as an allegory for the parodic function of Lo demás es

silencio and its capacity to make us to question Reyes’s seriousness. Like the readers in

the second part of the story, we have learnt through its parodic portrait to doubt the

“original,” to wonder whether that “erasmo mexicano” might not have been an “espíritu

chocarrero,” a dangerous humorist writing “hilarious” parodies of critical discourse.

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

“dangerous” author whom one had to read “manos arriba” (Gabriel García Márquez,

quoted in Ruffinelli 18), under the threat of emerging “con las rodillas y el amor propio

raspados” (González Zenteno 79).110 Monterroso’s reputation was due, in great measure,

to Monterroso’s penchant for confounding the boundaries between literature and

criticism, which Reyes had so painstakingly tried to establish. Deliberately guilty of the

“fraude” of which Reyes warned in El deslinde, Monterroso knew how to disrupt the

boundaries of the literary realm, which Reyes once described as an “Isla del Tesoro en

una cartografía a sabiendas irreal, que a nadie embauca y a todos solaza” (El deslinde

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

                                                                                                               
110
Isaac Asimov also famously claimed that Monterroso’s texts may be “apparently harmless” but “bite”
and leave “scars” if one approaches them without the necessary caution (quoted in Ruffinelli 18).
111
This description comes at a key point in El deslinde as Reyes attempts to define literature according to
the absolute correspondance between its “poetemas” and “semantemas.” The intimate correspondence
between the two was particularly important in Reyes’s scheme, which had placed authorial intention at the
heart of the literary phenomenon. For Reyes, correct interpretation would only be possible if a text
somehow encoded the intended semantic content in its particularly poetic expression. Reyes went so far as
to describe that correspondence in moral terms, claiming that divorcing the “símbolo significante” from the
“ente significado” was a “crime or madness” (221). Thus, while the literary writer is granted certain
“rights,” Reyes claimed that writing a fictional work in the form of a treatise, scientific work, or other
“practical” form amounted to fraud. Reyes’s discussion is particularly interesting in light of the various
critical fictions studied here, which directly contravene Reyes’s moral imperative and place their
“inexistent islands” in criticism’s “practical nautical chart.”
  116  
navegación para que zozobre nuestro barco” but also makes us doubt whether Reyes’s

“carta práctica de navegación” might not have been another fiction. Teasing out the

partiality and improvisation, the provinciality and implicit hierarchies in Reyes’s work,

Monterroso blurs the lines that Reyes tried to draw upon the waters and reminds us of the

extent to which literary and critical discourses remained intertwined in Reyes’s work. El

deslinde, with its heroic efforts to delimit a realm of criticism in a provincial and still

unbounded land, sinks beneath the levity of those brief and scattered texts in which the

dictum is not rigor, specialization, and expertise but imposture, humor, the improvisation

of the amateur. From the wreckage, Reyes emerges not as a monumental, prohibitive

figure but as a fool, a deliberate madman, a recent initiate smiling not in irony but in

doubt. It is in that role as a jester, equally practiced in pretense and mockery, fiction and

critical thought, that Reyes becomes not the target of Lo demás es silencio’s laughter, but

its unexpected hero. Following Torres’s critical insight into Don Quijote, one might claim

then that, like Cervantes, Monterroso did not intend to ridicule a fool. Perhaps he really

meant to attack the delusions of literary criticism, “funesta lectura” that like chivalric

romances “andaba de mano en mano corrompiendo las costumbres y distrayendo a las

amas de casa de sus deberes domésticos en que de otra manera se hubieran enfrascado”

(LDES 122). Perhaps Monterroso did not set out to ridicule the Mexican critic’s absurd

efforts to “igualarse” with the centers of discursive power, but to defend what Reyes

called Latin America’s “consigna de improvisación” (“Notas” 83) from which an

emergent “crítica literaria” was trying to dissociate itself.112

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

America saw the rise of a new kind of criticism that sought to overcome the ignorance,

impressionism, and lack of rigor that had presumably characterized critical work in the

region. Paradoxically inaugurated by Reyes’s El deslinde, the “modernización

intelectual” (A. Martínez 7) of the 1960s and 70s broke with the humanistic tradition of

the essay epitomized by Reyes as well as with the literary discourse entangled with it. By

the late 1970s, when Lo demás es silencio was published, the unspecialized discourses

that still had a place in Reyes’s capacious “ciencia literaria” had lost legitimacy as serious

criticism and—as I will discuss in the following chapter—were no longer considered

valid elements of a truly “scientific” criticism. Reyes’s criticism was thus consigned to

the past and his ambiguous figure buried beneath a tombstone that made him, truly, an

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

(Cortázar, quoted in Monsivais, “Las utopias” 105). The attempt to relegate Reyes and

the discursive ambiguity that he championed to the past or to the realm of literary

discourse is what made Monterroso’s critical fiction particularly dangerous. With his

characteristic “ingenuidad sangrienta” (Vargas 45), Monterroso invited readers to pass

judgment on a critic whose “inability to distinguish between the figurative and the

literal… fiction and reality” (Parsons 941), literary and critical discourses was starting to

be seen as a mark of provinciality, a sign of Latin America’s deficient development in the

realm of intellectual thought. Mocking a critic who both confounded and helped establish

the limits between literary and critical discourses in Latin America, Lo demás es silencio

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

  118  
confronted critics with the question: is this real criticism? Critics’ unrestrained laughter at

the “absurdities” of Eduardo Torres immediately answered that question in the negative,

forgetting the fact that Reyes’s oeuvre also included and championed such “naive,”

undisciplined, apparently “literary” interpretations. Instead, most critics took it for

granted that Monterroso was ridiculing the provincial critic, that unspecialized reader

who in his infinite naiveté believes he can travel without passport through the vast

regions of knowledge as if they were an unparsed virgin territory. In their laughter, they

failed to consider the possibility that Monterroso’s real target was that newly minted

specialist whose laugher risks dissolving into the shame of his own hasty certainties.

One imagines Monterroso responding to Moreno Durán’s laughter at the naiveté

of those “Argentinean ladies” with an ironic, enigmatic smile. Torres might have been

more naive—more critical—and countered that laughter with a quote from Lo demás es

silencio:

cuando el lector se ha regodeado a sus anchas y soltado la risa complacido

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

As Monterroso suggests, the real fool in his texts is not Torres or the naive reader who

has read his writings as “critical” texts, but that presumably “critical” reader who

pretends to know for sure whether Lo demás es silencio was written in all seriousness or

in jest. Confronted with a text “que se le ofrece pero que en realidad no se le da, sin que

en su ignorancia pueda saber si esto ha sido así con intención o sin ella, o viceversa”

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

  119  
their desire to know the exact latitude and longitude of San Blas, they function like that

reader in “Peligro siempre inminente” whose naiveté teaches us to question the validity

of all other interpretations. Like few other readers, those “Argentinean ladies” took

Torres’s writing seriously enough to wonder whether that provincial critic might not be

somewhere in Latin America, whether Monterroso might not be vindicating rather than

ridiculing his naive perspective. Counterparts of every naive reader in Monterroso’s texts,

they awaken the suspicion of our own unwitting naiveté and bring us from the certainties

of laugher to the critical doubt of the smile. That smile is, however, no longer tinged with

the knowing irony of a doubting Hamlet who knows he is taking other men for fools.

Like those cautious friends in “Peligro siempre inminente” who simply cannot tell

whether they are reading literature or criticism, we now smile with the “inseguridad y

duda” (Monterroso Viaje 89) of a provincial critical tradition that—as Enrique Lihn’s La

orquesta de cristal would suggest—still wavered on the boundary between “crítica

literaria y/o literatura crítica” (Libertella, “Crítica” 346).113

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

  120  
 CHAPTER 3

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

In the late 1960s an obscure character began making the rounds of the literary

scene in Santiago de Chile. In August of 1969, Don Gerardo de Pompier came to light for

the fist time with the publication of a fragment of his novel El arte de nadar in the

inaugural issue of the literary magazine Cormorán. A bio-bibliographic note penned by

Enrique Lihn, the director of the magazine, and Germán Marín, its editor, accompanied

the fragment. In their note, the editors praised the writings of “el autor desconocido” and

compared Pompier to such eminent literary figures as Julio Cortázar and José Lezama

Lima (Lihn, “El autor” 541). Encouraged by responses like that of the prestigious

magazine Casa de las Américas, which saluted the appearance of the unknown author

(Sarmiento 11), Lihn and Marín enthusiastically promoted Pompier’s writing in the pages

of their magazine. Pompier became, from then on, a staple in Cormorán. In its pages, he

continued to publish articles and served as the addressee and object of various notes,

letters, and clarifications questioning the value and originality of his writing.114 Such

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

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

Pompier penned an “Adiós a Santiago” in the final issue of Cormorán and once more fell

silent. It was not until 1976 that Pompier reappeared again as one of the various

commentators featured in the book La orquesta de cristal. This time, however, Pompier’s

florid and inflated prose would barely elicit an echo.

The almost complete critical silence that followed La orquesta de cristal had,

nevertheless, little to do with the quality of Pompier’s writing or that of the other

“polígrafos hispanomericanos” featured in the book (Lihn, La Orquesta de Cristal 11;

henceforth cited as ODC).115 As early as 1970, a certain “Profesor Luis Iñigo Madrigal”

exposed Pompier as a fiction, noting that Pompier’s debut text had been lifted from A.P.

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

Pompier had been fabricated to “confundir a los redactores de Cormorán, al destino de la

cultura y al pueblo de América” (quoted in Lihn, “Nacimiento” 554).116 By 1976, it was

no secret that Lihn and Marín had created the character of Pompier as a way of parodying

the pomposity and affectation of an outmoded belletristic writing, and that La orquesta de

                                                                                                               
115
In La orquesta de cristal Pompier appears under the name “Gerardo de Pompiffier,” though he was
clearly intended to embody the same character who had previously penned the articles in Cormorán. As
Lihn notes in “Nacimiento, desarrollo e implicaciones de Don Gerardo de Pompier, el resumidero,” Lihn
changed the name from Pompier to Pompiffier on the suggestion of the Argentine novelist Héctor
Biancotti, who was living in Paris where Lihn had initially hoped to publish the novel. According to
Biancotti, the pejorative use of the name “Pompier” (which literally means “firefighter” in French but is
also used to refer to conservative critics) was too obvious and made the joke fall flat in France. Lihn thus
changed the name, though he later depicted the choice as an act of ridiculous provincialism much like the
ones committed by Pompier (562). For a further discussion of the name and figure of Pompier, see also
Lihn’s “Entretelones técnicos de mis novelas” (574).
116
The letter to Cormorán exposing Pompier as a fiction was actually written by the poet Juan Luis
Martínez under the pen name Luis Iñigo Madrigal (Germán Marín, footnote in Lihn, “El autor
desconocido” 542). Taking the pen name of an actual critic in Chile, Martínez engaged in the same kind of
literary-critical strategies that characterize both Monterroso’s creation of Eduardo Torres in Mexico and
Lihn’s creation of Pompier in Chile, making it more difficult to determine whether his letter was “serious”
criticism or part of a literary game. As Germán Marín notes, Martínez’s letter was the first to sound the
alert “que acá había gato encerrado” (Sarmiento 12).

  122  
cristal was actually a novel written by Enrique Lihn. As with Monterroso’s Lo demás es

silencio, the publication of La orquesta de cristal confirmed Pompier’s fictional status,

exposing him as a parodic reflection of a provincial intellectual milieu in which

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

Monterroso’s novel, however, Lihn’s novel elicited little laughter. The novel garnered, in

fact, surprisingly few reactions, particularly in light of the voluminous bibliography that

surrounds Lihn’s poetic oeuvre.117 As Lihn notes in an interview with Pedro Lastra, the

novel received scant reviews when it was published and generated few critical analyses in

the years that followed (104).118 As if it were a counterpart to the mute glass orchestra

discussed in its pages, La orquesta de cristal seemed capable of producing mostly silence,

or at most some faint critical tinkling.

Such critical silence is particularly ironic, given the fact that the novel turns on

and is built out of critical commentary. Taking the form of a literary monograph, the

novel is written in two parts: the first part gathers, quotes, and glosses various

commentaries about a glass orchestra presumably commissioned by the U.S. millionaire

                                                                                                               
117
Lihn was already well known in Chile and highly regarded as a poet when La orquesta de cristal was
published in 1976. The bibliography that Pedro Lastra published as part of Conversaciones con Enrique
Lihn attests to the numerous studies, reviews, and commentaries written about Lihn’s poetic works, yet it
also reveals a lack of attention to Lihn’s narrative, a situation that Lihn often commented on in his
interviews.
118
In an interview with Lastra, Lihn observes that when the novel first appeared only Antonio Calderón
reviewed the novel in Chile and in Argentina it was the object of one article by the young critic Luis Thonis
and a brief chapter in Héctor Libertella’s Nueva escritura en Hispanoamérica (Lastra 104). In his 1981 text
“Entretelones técnicos de mis novelas,” Lihn again comments on the scant critical studies of La orquesta de
cristal, which at that point were limited to Libertella’s chapter and George Yúdice’s article “Enrique Lihn:
parodia vs. retórica” (Lihn, “Entretelones” 570). Since then, other studies of La orquesta de cristal have
been published, though—with the exception of Rodrigo Cánovas’s “Circulando en torno a La orquesta de
cristal de Enrique Lihn Mancilla”—they focus on Lihn’s narrative fiction as a whole. For studies of Lihn’s
fiction, see in particular Christopher Travis’s chapter “Beyond Poetry: Inventing Dystopia” in Resisting
Alienation and Juan Zapata’s “La narrativa de Enrique Lihn: expresión de un referente cultural complejo.”
In his article, Zapata also discusses the marginal status of Lihn’s narrative in relation to his poetry. Since
the novel was re-edited in 2014, numerous articles and reviews have appeared, noting the critical silence
that has surrounded Lihn’s work until now.
 
  123  
Charles Royce, while the last third consists of critical endnotes that further clarify,

contextualize, and interpret those commentaries. Like other critical fictions, Lihn’s novel

uses fiction as a discursive mirror to reflect, refract, and distort various critical idioms. In

this case, the novel reproduces the symbolist allegories, subjective impressions,

psychoanalytic fables, and essayistic writing of Pompier and other fictional critics as they

trace the orchestra from its inaugural concert in the 1900 Paris World Fair to its untimely

destruction at the hands of the Gestapo in 1942. That story is, however, only faintly

discernible through the hazy lens of commentaries and interpretations, which repeat and

run into each other with little regard to authorship or bibliographic information. The

novel is thus evocative of that “estrado de cristal de un escenario amurallado de espejos”

(ODC 56), which stages and surrounds the crystal orchestra on opening night. Like that

glass stage surrounded by mirrors, Lihn’s novel works as a kind of kaleidoscope where

shards of critical discourse echo and collide, multiply and fade away as they turn around

that empty center: a crystal orchestra that is mute, transparent, and fictitious.

Lihn’s play with assorted shards of critical language is, in fact, what seems to be

responsible for the scant critical reflections that the novel produced beyond its covers. As

with other critical fictions, the mimicry of critical language in La orquesta de cristal

seems to have generated a kind of bewilderment, only in Lihn’s case it took the form not

of laughter but of silence. The absence of reviews or critical analyses in the years

immediately following the novel suggests that La orquesta de cristal was received as a

failed literary experiment, as an excessively abstruse text or one that simply did not merit

commentary.119 As Lihn himself observes in a 1981 essay, Chilean critics invariably

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

pobreza de su oscuridad, el despliegue que hago en ella de inteligencia ‘redactada’” (Lihn

“Entretelones” 569). According to Lihn, criticism in Chile tended to evaluate his fiction

according to exclusively literary criteria, subjecting it to the test of “aesthetic distance,”

stylistic clarity, originality, or creativity. In the case of La orquesta de cristal, they read

the novel as if it were an autonomous literary object divorced from both criticism and

from its critical function.120 Judged in those terms, the “obscure” and “cerebral”

arrangement of critical languages seemed merely bad literature, capable of producing

only boredom, tedium, and incomprehension in its audience (Lihn, “Entretelones” 569).

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

“aberración de la técnica y el arte” (ODC 97) that produced a monstrous objet d’art as

absurd as a set of instruments made out of glass.

The tendency to judge texts in terms of beauty, style, aesthetic distance, or other

exclusively “literary” values had nevertheless been the object of Lihn’s mockery since

the days of Pompier’s parodic writings in Cormorán. In various interviews and essays,

Lihn continued to resist such readings, particularly with regard to his novels. As he notes

in an interview with Cecilia Díaz, La orquesta de cristal was meant to be read not as a

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
the “Boom” such as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, or Vargas Llosa will only lead to boredom or
incomprehension. As he claims, “Frente a sus disquisiciones algunos se aburrirán, temiendo morir de tedio;
otros se indignarán hasta proferir insultos” (7).
120
With the exception of Héctor Libertella and Rodrigo Cánovas, few critics read the novel as commentary
on discursive boundaries and on social conditions. Libertella describes the novel as a text midway between
the procedures of literature and those of criticism (Nueva escritura 93) and Canovas suggests that literary
criticism is inscribed within the novel, which presents itself as antagonistic to the anti-cultural project of the
regime (Lihn 30). For Cánovas, the novel as a text in constant dialogue with critical theory and situates
itself in the tradition of the “anti-novela,” constantly questioning the different discourses that constitute us
as subjects (15). Cánovas also places greater emphasis on the cultural context in which Lihn’s novel was
written, though it is worth noting that Cánovas writes his article in 1983, at a time when restrictions on
critical thought were starting to thaw in Chile.

  125  
rarified literary experiment but as a critical commentary on the cultural and political

context in which the novel was written.121 Published three years after the military coup

that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, La orquesta de cristal appeared at a

time of social and political repression that had profoundly corrosive effects upon critical

discourse, leading to what many characterized as a widespread “apagón cultural”

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

38) produced by the military regime and its attempts to squelch critique or to displace it

away from the public arena. Read as a critical work, La orquesta de cristal serves, in

particular, as a reflection on the dictatorship’s impact on the realms of literature and

criticism. The crystal orchestra and the overwrought commentary in the novel function as

allegories for the dictatorship’s capacity to silence literature and to reduce critical

commentary to “cháchara” or a “volumen de estereotipos” (10). The hollow critical

languages parodied in the novel suggest that the resurgence of impressionistic criticism

during the years of the dictatorship was part of a broader critical aphasia, which also

reverberated in the dry, technical analyses that survived in Chilean universities and in the

avant-garde scene that tried to keep literature and criticism alive in authoritarian Chile.123

                                                                                                               
121
As he notes in an interview with Cecilia Díaz, Lihn wanted to create “una realidad en el lenguaje que
tuviera una relación de correspondencia con la realidad” (Díaz 54). In “Entretelones técnicos de mis
novelas” Lihn also defines his novel as a critical work, as an attempt to “pensar a partir de la literatura, en
ella, con ella y sobre ella, dentro, pues, de la literatura misma” (570).
122
The term “apagón cultural” is a highly contested one, as it both obscures the cultural activity that
continued to be carried out in non-official spaces and fails to account for the structural reasons behind the
apparent lack of cultural production during the dictatorship. As José Joaquín Brunner notes, the declaration
that Chile had entered a “cultural blackout” condensed the acute sense of crisis among the dominant class
in Chile. The declaration led to a series of reflection on the crisis in education, in the media, and in reading
habits, which attributed to the mediocre education of youth, lack of funding, or to the noxious effects of
democracy (86).
123
It is worth noting here that the authoritarian regime did not do away with critical discourse altogether,
but displaced it to the underground of cultural life or abroad. As Subercaseaux notes, there were three
“sectores de oposición” that maintained critical discourse alive during the dictatorship: critics with links to
  126  
Such critical silences had much to do with the new discursive and institutional boundaries

that the dictatorship tried to establish between literature and criticism, which both

undermined literature’s capacity to comment on society and eclipsed the vibrant critical

tradition that had emerged in the years before the coup.

From the vantage point of mid-1970s Chile, the silencing power of the

dictatorship was particularly foreboding, both for the writers who hoped to raise a voice

against authoritarian repression and for a continental literary-critical tradition that only

recently seemed to be finding its voice. The 1960s and 70s in Latin America had been a

period of extraordinary critical and literary vitality, which promised to bring the region

out of the dark center of the earth where Alfonso Reyes once envisioned himself. Latin

America’s renewed hope of ratifying its cultural independence was fueled by the success

of the Latin American literary “Boom” in Europe and North America and by the renewed

project to elaborate a “nueva crítica latinoamericana” (Rincón 174) that might rectify the

region’s perceived critical deficiency.124 In Chile, the continental efforts to update and

“modernize” the interpretation of literature (A. Martínez 6) had a local counterpart in

what Bernardo Subercaseaux has called an unprecedented “renovación crítica” (278).125

In the years before the military coup, a new generation of Chilean critics embarked on “la
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
the social sciences and to independent research institutions like FLACSO and CENECA, the literary-
critical avant-garde, and various writers who continued to practice criticism from exile (285). Lihn’s and
my emphasis on the silencing of criticism focuses here on the Pinochet regime’s capacity to eclipse,
marginalize, and obscure such critical interventions.
124
In chapter one of this dissertation I elaborate on the rise of the nueva crítica and the role that it played in
the broader efforts to elaborate a critical discourse in Latin America.
125
In the pages that follow, I will continue to use Subercaseaux’s term to refer to the new critical discourse
that was elaborated in Chile during the 60s and 70s during both its first and second stages. I keep the term
renovación crítica in Spanish, as the term “renovación” covers various key elements of the critical scene
that it refers to, including the notions that criticism was being updated, renewed, and modernized, and that
Chilean criticism had cast aside its old and antiquated forms in order to bring about a long-awaited critical
renaissance.

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

“ciencia literaria” (Cánovas, “Hacia una histórica” 162) that could provide a more

systematic and objective approach to literary analysis.126 The rise of the university as the

new locus of critical activity encouraged such efforts and provided a “canal de

modernización” to socialize the theories that had been produced in Europe and the United

States during the last forty years (Subercaseaux 281).127 The critical methodologies

imported during the first “momento imanentista” tended to focus on the linguistic nature

of the literary text and included French structuralism, Russian formalism, and North

American close reading (280). Their more “objective” theoretical frameworks opened the

possibility of finally overcoming the belletristic and subjectivist criticism that had

prevailed until then in Chile, thus bringing the country up to date with metropolitan

critical standards.

In the late 1960s, the so-called excessive formalism of the momento imanentista

came, nevertheless, increasingly under attack (Subercaseaux 280). The intensification of

political and class conflict in Chile initiated a second stage of the renovación that cast

literary criticism as an important part of an emancipatory cultural project. Influenced by

the Cuban Revolution, the student movements of the 1960s, and the rise of Eduardo

                                                                                                               
126
As Subercaseaux notes, the renovación established a polemical relationship with the critical approaches
that had previously dominated criticism in Chile. In their desire to create a more systematic and rigorous
literary criticism, critics of the renovación set themselves against the historical and positivistic school of
criticism exemplified by Raúl Silva Castro as well as the impressionistic criticism associated with Alone
(pseudonym for Hernán Díaz Arrieta) or Ricardo Latchman (Subercaseaux 279). After the coup, the
“crítica de orden impresionista” continued to be practiced by critics like Andrés Sabella, Luis Sánchez
Latorre, Gonzalo Drago, and Víctor Castro (291).
127
The expansion of the student body and increased government support to Chilean universities throughout
the first half of the twentieth century led to an impressive growth in intellectual production (Austin 33) that
fueled much of the “renovación crítica.” As Subercaseaux notes, during the 1970s the university became
the new “eje de la crítica que alimenta las funciones editorials, las del comentarista, la del reportero
cultural” (281).

  128  
Frei’s and Salvador Allende’s leftist governments, critics adopted a Marxist

understanding of “objectivity” as a full consideration of the social and historical forces

acting upon culture.128 In the midst of what many intellectuals perceived as an imminent

transition to socialism, socio-historical readings assumed a new importance as critical

tools compatible with dialectical and historical materialism, now widely considered “el

instrumento científico idóneo” (Fernández Retamar, Para una teoría 92). This led to yet

another expansion of the new “ciencia literaria” to include not only formal or structural

analyses but also methodologies from the newly prestigious social sciences in Chile, as

well as critical perspectives developed by European critics like Lukacs, Hauser,

Goldmann, and the Frankfurt School of Criticism (Subercaseaux 279).129 By 1972, the

critical scene in Chile was characterized by a plurality of approaches, which seem to have

freed Chile from its critical provincialism and created a vibrant “polémica virtual” that

kept “las inteligencias culturales alertas” (Lastra 125).130

                                                                                                               
128
As Cánovas observes, the rise of Marxist rhetoric in Chile was brought about by Eduardo Frei’s
“Revolución en Libertad” and Salvador Allende’s “Revolución Popular” (“Hacia una histórica” 162),
which stimulated writers to contextualize literature within “la realidad histórica bajo la óptica de la
izquierda” (Lihn, “Política y cultura” 453). Allende’s rise to the presidency was particularly galvanizing, as
it sparked the hope in Latin America that a socialist government could come to power by democratic
means.
129
Lihn played an important role in disseminating critical theory in Chile and advocating for a literary
criticism that paid close attention to the historical and social contexts of literary works. As he notes in
“Carta abierta a Padilla,” he had been described as “el director de orquesta de una nueva ilustración
socialista” (“Carta abierta” n.p.) and argued for the key role of culture in the transition to socialism. As he
advocated in his essay “Política y cultura en una etapa de transición al socialismo,” “las obras deben ser
debidamente presentadas, analizadas, comentadas como productos históricos portadores de connotaciones
específicas, rescatadas en lo que significaron a la luz de lo que significan o pueden significar” (451).
130
As Cánovas notes, the two “stages” outlined by Subercaseaux do not refer to two mutually exclusive
moments that follow each other in time: both tendencies coexisted, intertwined with each other, in a single
cultural space (“Hacia una histórica” 163). By 1973, the realm of critical discourse in Chile was marked by
a plurality of critical languages that included not just the formalist approaches of the momento imanentista
and the socio-historical tendencies, but also literary-historical frameworks and impressionistic
interpretations depicted by critics of the renovación as outdated or anachronistic.

  129  
 From the dismal standpoint of the “apagón cultural” in the late 1970s, that vibrant

critical scene nevertheless looked like “una metrópolis iluminada de la otra orilla” (125).

With the suppression of an important part of the country’s intelligentsia through exiles,

firings, censorship, and disappearances, Chile’s critical scene slipped into an eerie

silence. The attempts to eradicate the leftist discourse that marked Chile’s political and

cultural spheres prior to 1973 resulted in a radical restriction on the kinds of approaches

that were allowed to survive during the dictatorship. Particularly vulnerable to the forces

of repression were the historical and sociological approaches that had emerged during the

second stage of the renovación and their reflection on the relationship between literature,

politics, and society. In the midst of the dictatorship, interpreting a novel as a critical

commentary on social and political circumstances had suddenly become a liability,

putting in peril not just critics’ reputations but also their lives and livelihood.131 By the

time La orquesta de cristal was published in 1976, criticism in Chile had been stripped of

contextual frameworks and pared down to a few voices: a highly subjective, journalistic

criticism that reduced the work of art to matters of “beauty” and taste, a technical

academic criticism that escaped censorship through attention to the formal dimensions of

literature, and a cultural avant-garde that carved out a fragmentary and precarious

existence in the underground of Chilean culture.

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

Pompier and the other fictional critics in La orquesta de cristal failed to elicit even the

slightest disturbance. By blocking all socio-historical interpretive frameworks, the

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

  130  
military regime silenced any criticism that might read Lihn’s novel as a critique of the

dictatorship and its devastating repercussions upon literary and critical discourse.132 The

lack of criticism surrounding La orquesta de cristal serves, in this light, not as a measure

of the novel’s literary value, but as a kind of “crítica virtual, que puede estar actuando

negativamente” (Lihn, quoted in Lastra 104), revealing both current definitions of

literature and the state of criticism at the time of the novel’s publication. The

dictatorship’s capacity to silence critical discourse by compartmentalizing literature and

criticism into narrow and self-contained spheres, divorced from both their broader

context and from other discourses, is perhaps best illustrated by a description, in La

orquesta de cristal, of the orchestra’s last performance during a private concert for Nazi

officials. As one so-called Heinrich von Linderhöfer narrates, the orchestra’s stage, which

was surrounded by mirrors in previous concerts, is now “enlutado […] sus cinco caras

cerradas por una pintura opaca” (ODC 90). The black paint darkening the mirrors around

the orchestra allegorizes the authoritarian regime’s attempts to confine literature within a

closed and besieged aesthetic realm where it was barred from reflecting critically on

anything, including itself. The lack of all background or contextual information reduced

criticism, in turn, to an appreciation of the artistic object’s beauty or formal proficiency.

In the 1970s, the new boundaries placed on literature and criticism dealt a catastrophic

blow to a local critical tradition that had been defined, both in Chile and in Latin

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

                                                                                                               
132
The boundaries that the authoritarian regime placed between La orquesta de cristal and its cultural and
political context were both literal and metaphorical: not only did it prevent critics from linking the political
turmoil and totalitarian forces mentioned in the novel to the political events occurring in Chile but also kept
the novel from entering the country after its publication in Argentina. According to Lihn, only about 20
copies of the novel entered Chile after its publication in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana (“Doce
años” 182).
  131  
 Like a photographic negative of the “illuminated metropolis” that preceded the

coup, La orquesta de cristal offers a testament to its wreckage, a form of mourning and a

silent protest. Through the critical languages parodied in the novel, Lihn suggests that in

place of an emergent critical tradition the coup left an archaic critical landscape

reminiscent of the dark ages of Latin American criticism, which the nueva crítica had

heroically attempted to leave behind. Spanning the years between 1900 and 1942 La

orquesta de cristal situates itself in that prehistory, before Reyes’s 1944 “discovery” of

literary theory in El deslinde and much before the renovación or “renaissance” of the

1960s. From the “limbo de lo increado” (ODC 100) in the early twentieth century, Lihn

rescues scraps of subjective impressionism, historical positivism, essayistic writing, and

other critical antiquities from the dustiest corners of the Latin American archive.133 La

orquesta de cristal serves, in this sense, as the fictional rendering of an antiquated,

nineteenth-century realm of “letters” that seemed shamefully obsolete after the critical

ferment and literary success of the 1960s and early 70s.134 Apparently rescued from “un

pasado de anarquía y decadencia del que nos hemos purificado” (97), the critical

languages in the novel nevertheless reflect the very modes of criticism that were

                                                                                                               
133
According to a footnote in La orquesta de cristal, “en lo que respecta a la música del Nuevo Mundo
permanecía hacia 1900 en el limbo de lo increado” (100). The footnote is a long and bitingly ironic
disquisition on the marginality of Latin American culture with respect to France, particularly at the turn of
the century. Through a reference to Rubén Darío, the footnote makes a parallel between the realm of music
(in which the crystal orchestra presumable falls) and the realm of literature, and plays on the dual notions
that Latin America had no literature to speak of before 1900 and that its critics were a mere group of
“rimadores y polígrafos” whose writings “aportan la mayor dosis de ingenuo entusiasmo” (12). The ironic
phrase “el limbo de lo increado” could thus apply as much to nineteenth-century Latin American literature
as to the early-twentieth century criticism that the novel mimics.
134
In “Entretelones técnicos de mis novelas” Lihn depicts Pompier as “un sobreviviente paródico del
decadentismo y del modernismo, el ultimo cultor escéptico de la Religión del Arte, condenado a servirnos
de guía de las ruinas actuales de la Belle Epoque entre las que vivimos” (576). Lihn thus suggests that
Pompier embodies the persistence, in 1970s Chile, of presumably outdated languages associated with the
late nineteenth century.

  132  
prevalent when the novel was published in 1976. Parodying both the impressionistic

criticism that survived in the press and the dry, technical monographs created in

universities, Lihn implies that the dictatorship left only space for abstruse, outdated, and

marginal critical discourses no longer audible in the metropolitan centers of the

“developed” critical world.

If Pompier’s 1969 appearance in Cormorán highlighted the critical insufficiency

and marginality that the renovación crítica was supposed to overcome, his reappearance

in the 1976 La orquesta de cristal suggests that the dictatorship only perpetuated and

perhaps even aggravated the provinciality of criticism in Chile. Criticism during the

dictatorship thus continued to suffer from what Lihn called the “metequismo” that kept

Latin America as a second-class citizen in the international republic of criticism, both

dependent on the centers of discursive power and incapable of overcoming its

dependency.135 As Lihn described it, metequismo is

la ilusión del provinciano de integrarse en el mejor de los mundos

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

As belated imitators of the symbolist and impressionistic critical fashions in late-

nineteenth century France, the fictional critics in La orquesta de cristal are “metecos” par

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

  133  
proclaim their knowledge of metropolitan culture only to reveal their naive incapacity to

recognize that their interpretations of Plato, Poe, and Baudelaire come decades if not

centuries too late. They thus epitomize what Lihn characterized as Latin American

intellectuals’ long-standing propensity to borrow metropolitan discourses in order to

compensate for the perceived intellectual poverty of their “lugar subdesarrollado” (Lihn,

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

55), the 1973 coup only aggravated such metequismo. Reversing the progress of the

renovación crítica, it thrust Chile back into a dark ages where criticism was once again

condemned to keep repeating a foreign and anachronistic discourse that was, for that very

reason, anything but critical.

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

America’s critical project, but also the metequismo of the renovación crítica in its desire

to catch up with the centers of discursive power. Read through the distorting lens of La

orquesta de cristal, the renovación’s emphasis on scientific objectivity and theoretical

sophistication created a rift in the literary-critical realm that prepared the ground for the

rigid boundaries that the dictatorship later established between literary and critical

discourses. For although the desire to craft an objective criticism in Latin America was

not new, the particular construction of the new “literary science” in the 60s and 70s

excluded non-specialized forms of literary analysis, which still had a place within

Reyes’s more capacious version of “ciencia literaria.” Now banished from criticism were

both the “impressionistic” criticism that Reyes had made available to the common reader

and the essay form that had played such an important part in Reyes’s Latin Americanist

project. In Chile, the association between impressionism and the critics writing in the

  134  
conservative newspaper El Mercurio further reinforced the growing discredit of

unspecialized or impressionistic forms of interpretation, uninformed by current

theoretical frameworks.136 This led to a rupture between new “modern” forms of

professional criticism, which began to gravitate around the university, and unspecialized

modes of essayistic and impressionistic writing based in the press.

During the years of the dictatorship, the military regime capitalized on the rift in

the literary-critical realm in order to cement the divisions between the worlds of literary

fiction-writing, academic criticism, and journalistic reviewing. By isolating different

modes of critical production into self-contained spheres, the military regime threatened

both literature’s and criticism’s critical function, which had previously relied on writers’

capacity to move fluidly between the realms of fiction and criticism, between the world

of the university and the world of the media, between the languages of high theory and

the common reader’s unspecialized languages. The new divisions in the literary-critical

realm found, however, new resistance on the part of a cultural avant-garde, which sought

to retain the critical function of art, literature, and critical interpretation. Dispersed

throughout universities, gallery spaces, private homes, and often precarious cultural

institutions, the Chilean “escena de avanzada,” as Nelly Richard has termed it (Margins

2), also took advantage of the fragmentation in the literary-critical realm, turning it into

an instrument of critique against the totalizing narratives that characterized both the

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

  135  
dictatorship and the years that preceded it (La insubordinación 62). Lihn himself was a

key participant in that underground avant-garde scene and in La orquesta de cristal

implemented many of the techniques that became hallmarks of its literary-critical

practice. The novel’s collage of disperse literary-critical languages mimics both the

strategies and structure of an avant-garde scene that mobilized and embodied

fragmentation, marginality, precariousness, and discursive fluidity.

The novel is, in this sense, as much a critical reflection of the literary-critical

avant-garde as of the purportedly backwards languages that survived in the sanctioned

spaces of the military regime. Equally critical of his own discourse, Lihn mounts a

ruthless critique against a literary-critical scene that claimed to be at the cutting-edge of

aesthetic and critical practices. Reflected in La orquesta de cristal, the cultural avant-

garde remained as marginal and precarious as the novel’s provincial polygraphs, whose

obsession with French symbolism and fin-de-siècle decadence are as métèque as the

cultural avant-garde’s adoption of French post-structuralist theory. As Adriana Valdés

notes, Lihn maintained a critical posture with respect to discourses of all ideological signs

(Enrique Lihn 9), including his own (34). For Lihn, all efforts to deliver Chile from its

sense of backwardness or critical provincialism count as instances of pathetic

metequismo, as ludicrous repetitions of first-world structures of thought that only served

to falsify social and discursive realities in Chile. Lihn’s accusation of metequismo was

not, however, an appeal to authenticity or a call to overcome Latin America’s purported

provinciality. It served, instead, as a critique of global hierarchies, which had made of

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

  136  
 Reversing the negative connotations usually associated with the adjective

“meteco,” Lihn appropriated the term and harnessed the critical potential implicit in the

meteco’s propensity for falsification and inadequate imitation. Both in La orquesta de

cristal and after its publication, the character of Don Gerardo de Pompier became a

means to question the divisions that had been drawn between fiction and criticism in the

efforts to incorporate Latin America into an international order of thought. Like the naive

readers in Lo demás es silencio, Pompier functioned as a fool or a joker, a figure of

ambiguous sign whose “texto bufonesco” (Díaz 54) both critiqued and vindicated the

second-class turns of Latin American critical discourse. Flouting the new

compartmentalizations of culture, Lihn’s undisciplined anti-hero undermined the

bellicose disciplinary strategies of authoritarian and authoritative discourses both at home

and abroad with the pompous white noise of his literary-critical discourse. He thus

continued to work in quiet defense of all those metecos who in the new discursive order

“han quedado sin sitio, descolocadas, desitiadas, errátiles; errátiles como lo es la

imaginación” (Lihn, “Doce años” 192).

The Metequismo of Authoritarian Criticism

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

1981, “es porque—en algún momento—se ha marcado el divorcio entre un pensamiento

y la realidad, entre un lenguaje y sus signos, en fin: entre una cosmovisión y la historia

concreta. De más está decir que para nosotros, ese momento fue el 11 de septiembre de

1973” (7). Together with Zurita, numerous other Chilean writers and critics have

characterized the military coup of 1973 as a catastrophe of meaning, as a sudden

  137  
breakage between words and signification that interrupted all forms of collective

interpretation and making-sense of the world (11). According to Nelly Richard, the

military coup was experienced as a “loss of the word,” a traumatic suspension of speech

that led to a kind of cultural aphasia (“Reconfigurations” 273). In place of cohesive

meanings and shared models of signification, the coup left behind a trail of ruined

vocabularies, shattered discourses, and wasted social imaginaries that could not be pieced

together into a coherent whole (274). Like the destruction of the Tower of Babel, the

devastation of the collective systems of meaning led to what Zurita calls a “confusion of

tongues” that made it difficult to both communicate and to make sense (11).

With its fragmentary form and discontinuous collection of critical languages, La

orquesta de cristal works as a testament to this “coup against representation” (Richard,

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

Difficult and even willfully obscure, the book recreates, for the reader, the experience of

trying to piece a story together from fragments of critical discourses that no longer serve

as tools to make sense of culture and instead function as obstacles to understanding. The

shards of critical language in the novel thus invoke the physical and discursive violence

through which the Pinochet regime shattered the systems of interpretation established

before the coup. Yet they also reflect the broader process of atomization and

fragmentation that served as the ideological counterpart to the regime’s repressive

strategies (Brunner 131). As José Joaquín Brunner argues, the dictatorship imposed its

authority and worldview not only through direct repression but also through a

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

  138  
of communication and discouraged dialogue between realms of culture (86).137 As Zurita

describes it, “[n]unca se ha puesto tanto énfasis en que los universitarios, por ejemplo,

sean sólo universitarios, los estudiantes únicamente estudiantes, los científicos solamente

científicos, los trabajadores de una tienda sólo trabajadores de una tienda. Cualquier

intercomunicación se hace de por sí sospechosa y está sujeta a la censura” (12). By

breaking the social body down into small and isolated spheres, the regime sought to

prevent the emergence of oppositional structures and to disrupt pre-1973 patterns of

thought, combatting the impulse towards socialization through privatization at many

levels of society (Brunner 161).

The state of physical siege in which Chile found itself right after the coup was, in

other words, a form of intellectual siege (Austin 41) whose purpose was to break down

the totalizing narratives developed in the preceding years and refashion Chile according

to a neoliberal agenda.138 One of the primary casualties of the dictatorship’s process of

social and ideological reorganization was the new understanding of critical activity

configured by the second stage of the renovación. In the years before the coup, the

adjective “critical” had been associated with the ability to assess and weave various

                                                                                                               
137
In La cultura autoritaria Brunner argues that the military bloc exerted its power not only through direct
repression but also through a drastic reorganization in the modes of production in Chile and a
transformation of national culture “que debe expresar esa nueva dominación y volverla sentido del orden,
principio de integración social y cauce regulador de nuestas inteacciones cotidianas” (16). According to
Brunner, social fragmentation and compartmentalization at numerous levels of society was one of the
primary modes by which the military bloc sought to restructure both society and culture in Chile.
138
As Brunner notes, the ultimate purpose of the reorganization of Chilean society was to reinstitute market
forces under a neoliberal framework directly imported from North American universities (161). In 1975,
Milton Friedman, who had been working in the University of Chicago’s School of Economics, met with
Pinochet and recommended the adoption of a radical free-market economic policy, which henceforth came
to be known as the “Chicago experiment.” For a broad overview of the effects of the neoliberal experiment
on Chilean culture, see Brunner’s La cultura autoritaria. In “Armed Forces, Market Forces: Intellectuals
and Higher Education in Chile, 1973-1993” Robert Austin also provides a succinct overview of the
Chicago experiment and its effects upon both culture and higher education.

  139  
interpretive approaches into a coherent narrative that might guide society on the path to

cultural and political liberation (Richard, La insubordinación 70).139 From their position

as social and discursive mediators, “critical” intellectuals developed narratives that

emphasized society as a whole and sought to connect different realms of society by

moving fluidly between discourses, institutions, and media.140 After 1973, the adjective’s

recent association with leftist thought led the military bloc to interpret “critical” “as

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

33). Recasting the term “critical” as a mask for ideological tendentiousness, the Pinochet

regime used it to weed out methodologies that attempted to cross social and discursive

boundaries. In an effort to discipline the unruly forces that had threatened to throw Chile

into the chaos of socialist revolution, the Pinochet regime exiled, jailed, or disappeared an

important part of Chile’s literary intelligentsia, fired critics from their positions in

humanities departments, dismantled disciplines like sociology, and blocked intellectuals’

access to the mass media.141 The regime’s attack on critical activity thus eclipsed the

                                                                                                               
139
As Jeffrey Puryear notes in Thinking Politics: Intellectuals and Democracy in Chile, 1973-1988, the
“critical” role of the intellectual in the 60s and 70s was defined in contrast to the role of the expert,
specialized in a narrow subject area (8). Unlike the “technocrat,” engaged in instrumental or specialized
tasks, the “critical” intellectual sought instead to address broad social problems and to guide action for
society (8).
140
The critics associated with the renovación coupled their work in the university with participation in
various cultural media, including TV, magazines, newspapers, and the publishing industry. Both
Subercaseaux and Cánovas mention a number of university intellectuals who participated in the mass
media as part of their critical work. These include Pedro Lastra, Hernán Loyola, and Nelson Osorio, who
directed literary and critical collections in various publishing houses; Luis Iñigo Madrigal, Federico
Schopf, Antonio Skármeta, and Alfonso Calderón, who wrote for newspapers and magazines; and Ariel
Dorfman and José Promis who hosted two different TV programs. For more details, see Subercaseaux’s
“Transformaciones de la crítica literaria en Chile: 1960-1982” and Cánovas’s “Hacia una histórica relación
sentimental de la crítica literaria en estos reinos.”
141
In the initial years after the coup, the military regime used numerous forms of violence aimed at
suppressing critical discourse. Seeking to suppress the leftist discourse that had marked the social and
intellectual spheres before 1973, the military forces shut down all media spaces associated with the left,
instituted forms of censorship that took their most concrete form in the burning of books (Bianchi 52),
expelled about 2,000 academics from universities in the years from 1973 to 1981 (Austin 40), disappeared,
  140  
socio-historical and Marxist perspectives associated with the second stage of the

renovación and suspended the discursive and institutional fluidity that had granted

criticism a highly public function in the 1960s and early 70s.

Despite the notion that the military coup created a radical break with previous

systems of thought (Richard, “Reconfigurations” 273) and dismantled the renovación

crítica (Subercaseaux 282), the authoritarian bloc did not discard all previous categories

or critical methodologies. Instead, the authoritarian regime capitalized on the growing rift

between “literary” interpretations and a scientific criticism rooted in the university in

order to reconfigure criticism as an objective academic discipline best suited for a

specialized professional. The regime thus perpetrated the renovación’s call for critical

objectivity but recast objectivity as the detached and a-political perspective of a technical

specialist now located within the newly dividing walls of the university. The regime’s

new emphasis on specialized knowledge paradoxically allowed for the survival of the

formalist and structural methodologies that had been imported by Chilean critics in the

early 1960s (Subercaseaux 284). With the violent limits placed on socio-historical and

contextual readings, critics retreated back to the methodologies of the momento

imanentista as the only forms of interpretation allowed within a university system newly

reorganized as a series of “conocimientos ordenados técnicamente” (Brunner 151).

Seemingly free of any “critical” intentions, the formalist strain of the renovación crítica

found a niche within a new educational order in which knowledge was expected to be

free of ideological elements. The technical credentials of structuralism also promised to

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

  141  
provide the technical training for individuals to compete in an academic sphere, now

guided by the market as “el único lenguaje científico y moderno capaz de dar cuenta de la

realidad nacional” (87). The specialization and international prestige of the formalist and

structuralist languages imported in the early 60s thus facilitated the professionalization of

Chilean criticism, which was restructured as a purportedly modern academic profession

modeled after the specialized disciplines of international academic institutions.

Equally useful to the regime was the renovación’s attempt to distance itself from

the “impressionistic” critics associated with the right-wing newspaper El Mercurio, as it

allowed the regime to establish more rigid boundaries between university criticism and

journalistic commentary. By restricting a technical and objective criticism to narrow

“microcircuitos” within the world of the university (Subercaseaux 284), the mass media

became the exclusive domain of an impressionistic criticism no longer charged with the

task of guiding the public on the ultimate purpose of society but dedicated, instead, to the

task of assessing the literary value of books. Unlike the impressionistic criticism

advocated by Reyes, the one that survived in the dictatorship was not a form of

interpretation open to all readers but an exclusive privilege granted to a handful of critics

ideologically endorsed by the authoritarian bloc. By shutting down dissident newspapers

and barring critics from the mass media, the military regime turned the conservative

newspaper El Mercurio into one of the few “tribunas” for the public practice of criticism

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

Ignacio Valente—were allowed to transcend “el mundo privado de relaciones y proponer

interpretaciones y juicios” (Brunner 164).142 This led to a critical monologue that

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

Among those excluded from critical dialogue was not only the public, now made

dependent on the taste of a single critic whose judgments became the official version of

culture, but also the creative writer, now restricted to the task of producing aesthetic

objects to be judged by the reviewer and consumed by a passive public.

Lihn, however, resisted the narrow role assigned to literary writers and embarked

in La orquesta de cristal on a ruthless critique of the journalistic and the academic

criticism that survived in Chile during the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship. Both

strains of literary interpretation find a critical reflection in the two “cycles” that organize

the interpretations gathered in La orquesta de cristal. Running from 1900 to the early

1930s, the first cycle gathers more literary or belletristic interpretations, which the novel

describes as “los desarrollos opulentos y hasta de la decadencia refinada de un arte que

pueden entenderse bajo la categoría de la primitividad” (70). Full of grand personalities,

impressionistic renderings, and idiosyncratic interpretations, the first cycle is strongly

reminiscent of the impressionistic criticism that achieved new power and authority during

the dictatorship. The death of Charles Royce, the eccentric North American millionaire

who commissioned and sustained the orchestra, closes the first cycle and leads into a

second, more “technocratic” era spanning from the early 1930s to 1942, during which “el

mercado libre… sería prestigiado… por oposición al Realismo-Socialista” (71).

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

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

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

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
Valente—the pen name adopted by the priest José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois—was, however, the most
prominent of the critics writing in the mass media during the Pinochet dictatorship, and is often cited as the
only critic allowed to express his opinions on culture in a public forum.
  143  
histórica, científica y erudita del estable programa de la Orquesta de Cristal” (72). The

novel’s parodic reflection of both journalistic and academic criticism unmasks their

seemingly innocent neutrality, and exposes the illusion, perpetrated during the

dictatorship, that both subjective and technical analyses could claim isolation from the

political, economic, historical, and social realities in Chile.

Of the two languages, impressionistic criticism receives perhaps the most

elaborate critique, which takes up about three-fourths of the main section in the book.

The first seventy pages of La orquesta de cristal are taken up by the absurd interpretations

of the various metecos from Latin America and from other former European colonies

who have moved to Paris just after the turn of the century. The extended allegories

penned by fictional critics like Roberto Albornoz, Gerardo de Pompier, and M. Saltanek

are subject to a ruthless mockery that targets both the classical references and

overwrought metaphors used by these critics to interpret the symphony “Amor Absoluto”

commissioned for the orchestra. Their apparently erudite references to Narcissus, Plato’s

“divine androgyne,” and a gothic hero pining away for his dead lover are soon revealed

as mere products of the critics’ fancy, as wild inventions based on highly subjective

associations around the only true knowledge they have of the symphony: its title. As one

of the critics in the novel remarks,

Diga lo que dijere para ‘emborracharle la perdiz’ a sus lectores, lo cierto

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

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

The impossibility of actually listening to the music emitted from the mute bodies of the

glass instruments makes the interpretations of these “improvised musicologists”

tantamount to fictions. Built out of a patchwork of prestigious references from the aging

archive of European culture, those fictions are presented as a product of the “impunity”

that in a past era allowed critics to wax poetical on inexistent knowledge and to pass their

inventions off as criticism. This depiction of impressionistic criticism as an

unaccountable fiction allowed by the excesses of a past era assumes, however, new

dimensions when read as a veiled attack on the impressionistic criticism that at the time

of the novel’s composition dominated Chilean critical dialogue from the pages of El

Mercurio. “Dejamos pues, de lado a ese Moloch intelectual, a ese dómine de las Artes y

las Letras contra cuya autoridad en modo alguno—pedimos que se nos bienentienda—

hemos pretendido perpetrar un atentado de mala fe” (22) writes with biting sarcasm one

of the critics in La orquesta de cristal. The irony in that disavowal becomes even more

mordant when read as a reference, not to Le Mercure de France—as it appears in the

novel—but to El Mercurio from Chile.

It would not be the first or the last time that Lihn perpetrated an “atentado”

against the “dómines” who wrote in El Mercurio’s literary supplement Artes y Letras and

who sought to “tender entre [el poder] y lo Nuevo—terrible rival—una persistente cortina

de humo” (22). Both in “Alone, no,” published in 1964, and in “Artes y Letras

Mercuriales, un suplemento del anacronismo,” written in 1984, Lihn denounced the

“anachronism” of El Mercurio’s critics, whose attachment to the old products of

  145  
European culture and penchant for impressionistic interpretations place them in the

prehistories of culture. In his first article, Lihn critiques Alone’s “mentalidad ahistórica”

and depicts him as a product of the nineteenth century and a direct heir of the French

critic Sainte-Beuve, whom Lihn calls “el padre de la crítica impresionista” (436). In the

1960s, Alone’s predilection for the timeless “universality” of the European archive

seemed, no doubt, a product of outdated critical tastes amid the renovación’s enthusiasm

for historical interpretations. Yet, twenty years later, Lihn was still denouncing the same

tendency in the critics who replaced Alone during the alleged modernization that the

newspaper underwent after the coup (“Artes y Letras” 490). According to Lihn, the

critics writing for El Mercurio during the dictatorship continued to see culture as a

“tienda de antigüedades” under a “perspectiva de una eternidad espiritual que pone un

buen precio a los anacronismos y gusta de los valores que son cosas o piezas de

coleccionista” (490). In their desire to be “suprahistóricos y cosmopolitas,” these critics

only succeeded in remaining “provincianos y anacrónicos,” poor metecos belatedly

recycling the outdated fragments of a European culture that had long passed them by.

Like the critics in first part of La orquesta de cristal, the critics of El Mercurio continued

to function as “vestigios de nuestra antigüedad cultural” (“Alone” 436), as an unfortunate

devolution in critical thought whose lack of progress stood in stark contrast to the

dictatorship’s rhetoric of progress and modernization.

Perhaps more serious than the accusation of anachronism was the notion that the

interpretations of El Mercurio’s critics were literary masks that concealed ideological

values and political objectives. In both of his articles, Lihn took the indictment of

fictional mystification that the novel aimed at Albornoz and directed it against the critics

  146  
of El Mercurio, accusing them of using “una imaginería retórica y pintoresca” (ODC 31)

to hide their alignment with both “Mr. Dollar” (28) and with political power. In “Alone,

no,” Lihn depicted Alone’s “literary decadence” as a clever rhetorical strategy that

allowed Alone to base his interpretations on his emotional state (“Alone” 436), releasing

him from having to back up his judgments with supporting arguments or evidence. As

with Albornoz, Lihn accused Alone of basing his opinions on pure whimsy and of using

his artistic prose to mask his real intention of shooing away the boogeyman of Marxism

(436) without true “conocimiento de causa” (ODC 31). Alone’s “toga de hombre de

letras” functioned as a clever costume whose aura of isolated detachment hid Hernán

Díaz Arrieta’s association with “toda la oligarquía aristrocratizante” and his identity as

“uno de los ideólogos más burdos de la extrema derecha” (“Alone” 436). Guilty of both

obsequiousness towards European culture and of trying to pass off his political

fabrications as serious criticism, Alone became for Lihn the ultimate meteco, a

“falsificador al cuadrado” whose “inautenticidad y enmascaramiento” (Lastra 111)

threatened to mire Chile in perpetual marginality due to the backwardness of his critical

tastes and political intentions.

Lihn’s critique, which in 1964 was made in the public forum of the newspaper El

Siglo, became even more pressing after the coup, when the critical plurality and

discussion of pre-1973 Chile was reduced to a single newspaper. In a context that had

turned El Mercurio into an “imperio comunicacional” (Cánovas, “Hacia una histórica”

172), El Mercurio’s critics could advance their ideological agenda and economic interests

among a growing number of “lectores dóciles en un país donde el monopolio del papel ha

cedido al monopolio de los mass media” (Lihn, Sobre el anti-estructuralismo 21). Of

  147  
particular concern to Lihn was the writing of “Ignacio Valente,” the literary mask for the

Opus Dei priest José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, who in the late 1960s inherited Alone’s

critical reign in El Mercurio. As a lecturer on Marxism for the military junta

(Subercaseaux 288), Ibáñez Langlois enjoyed a privileged relationship with the

authoritarian powers. Valente acquired, in fact, a kind of dictatorial power in the world of

Chilean criticism, where he became a kind of “dictador ilustrado” (Díaz 51) who

exercised “casi absoluta hegemonía” (Bianchi 59) and an “autoritarismo personal

excesivo” (Lihn, Sobre el anti-estructuralismo 12).143 This relationship to both political

and economic power was, however, masked by Valente’s adherence to “valores

trascendentales” (Cánovas, “Hacia una histórica” 173), which allowed the critical to

claim detachment from worldly interests and assume an a-political stance (Díaz 53). The

claim that he never looked at the “color político” of a text in order to condemn or

celebrate it (53) granted Valente a critical impunity that was particularly troubling in the

context of a regime in which veiled ideological statements could have direct material and

existential consequences for both critics and writers.

In various texts and critical venues published before and after the dictatorship,

Lihn would try to unmask Valente’s “transcendental values” as fictional constructs that

not only hid the political and economic dimensions of his critical practice but also

allowed him to consolidate his quasi-dictatorial power.144 Yet in the heart of the

                                                                                                               
143
Valente become the newspaper’s primary critic during the dictatorship and was the only critic with a
regular column, which appeared every Sunday. In the context of a regime that placed ultimate value in the
market as the regulator of culture, Valente’s opinions acquired the force of an immediate advertisement that
could make or break literary fame (Díaz 51). As Cánovas notes, the power that Valente assumed in the
cultural realm established a master-slave relationship with writers, who were compelled to court and flatter
the critic in order to gain his attention (“Hacia una histórica” 173).
144
In his article “Artes y letras mercuriales,” Lihn argued, for example, that the “valores del espíritu”
promulgated by El Mercurio’s critics were really status symbols or political instruments used to consolidate
  148  
dictatorship, La orquesta de cristal assumed the critical task of exposing those “spiritual

values” as “mistificaciones que carecen de la inocencia que da la buena fe accessible

incluso a los pícaros” (ODC 31). Lihn targeted, in particular, the “spiritual” conception of

literature that allowed Valente to depict himself as a privileged interpreter with unique

access to the “misterio de la poesía” (Ibáñez Langlois 88). As Gacitúa observes,

Valente’s personal and private understanding of language led to a vision of literature as

the product of an inspired genius with a unique relationship to “lo inefable” (90). In La

orquesta de cristal, Valente’s invisible, ineffable realm assumes literal form through the

“Sinfonía de Amor Absoluto,” which various critics in the novel interpret as the

instantiation of some “belleza extraterrena” (ODC 118).

Evoking Valente, the critics in the first part of the novel similarly situate the

symphony in “una especie de isla, patria pura del arte, que el escritor nombrado confunde

con Citerea, reducto de Venus, y un poco más allá con alguno de los cielos de la tradición

gnóstica o bien cualquiera de esos interestelares espacios vacíos formados de los ángeles

que nos mientan las desaprensivas imágenes cristianas de la caótica ciudad de Dios” (36).

Trapped and isolated in a rarified and unearthly realm, the symphony assumes an aura of

supreme mystery. The mystery is largely generated by the alleged impossibility of

interpreting the divine, unearthly symphony with the material instruments of the crystal

orchestra. As one of the critics in the novel claims, doing so would have violated “la ley

de la imposibilidad de entremezclarse… la vida definitiva de los ángeles inorgánicos y la

vida primitiva que sobrellevamos en la tierra” (30). Because a mystical understanding of

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
their ideological power (490). Written in 1984 and subject to the restrictions placed upon critical discussion
during the dictatorship, that article remained, however, unpublished until 1997, much after Lihn’s death
and the demise of the authoritarian regime.

  149  
the artwork can only lead us to “regiones a las que no podemos seguir por medio de la

palabra” (43), interpreting the artwork requires some extra-linguistic perception of beauty

acquired through esoteric knowledge or spiritual grace. Interpreting the symphony thus

becomes an act of spiritual prestidigitation available only to a critic who can claim

instantaneous and wordless entry to the ethereal island of Cythera. In the first part of the

novel, the mystical understanding of both the artwork and of interpretation compels

critics to draw on the most esoteric of fin-de-siècle mystical practices. In the space of

authoritarian criticism, it granted special powers to the mercurial taste of critics like

Valente who could claim intuitive perception of literary beauty.

For Lihn, Valente construes literary criticism as a conjunction of taste and talent

plus respect for the “mystery of poetry” (Sobre el anti-estructuralismo 23) because it

grants him implicit authority. By turning art into a sacred phenomenon comprehensible

only to a reduced critical priesthood, Valente encouraged an apotheosis of taste that

secured him exclusive hold on his lonely, critical throne. In La orquesta de cristal Lihn

would suggest that construing both literary genius and critical insight as God-given gifts

was not only a mystification intended to buttress Valente’s sacred judgment but also an

outright fiction. In the novel, Lihn exposes the fiction of artistic mystery through ironic

quotation of Mallarmé’s dictum: “tout chose sacrée qui veut demeurer sacrée s’enveloppe

de mystère” (ODC 117). For the critics in the novel, the mystery surrounding the artwork

is not so much a product of divine inspiration as a result of complete lack of knowledge.

As Albornoz grudgingly concludes, if nobody is able to say anything about “Amor

Absoluto,” it is due to the fact that there is no available information about the

symphony’s creator Roland de Glatigny, the musical score, or what the music actually

  150  
sounds like. Played by an invisible and inaudible orchestra, the symphony provides

nothing but open space for wild speculation, which Albornoz fills with a torrent of

questions that paint a fantastical portrait of de Glatigny as the secret disciple of the

esoteric poet Stanislas de Guaita, as a criminal who murders his lover “por interpósito

cuerpo astral,” as a madman who attempts to “identificarse con Dios,” and as a possible

member of the Rosicrucian Order (29). All attempts to interpret and contextualize the

symphony of “Absolute Love” prove to be no more than fictions spun out of nothingness,

tales based not on evidence around which one can build consensus but on a single critic’s

claims to private knowledge.

Projected onto the authoritarian world of impressionistic criticism, the accusation

of fictional elaboration was particularly damning. In the midst of a regime invested in

maintaining strict boundaries between literature and criticism, between fiction and a truth

granted by either religious privilege or technical competence, painting impressionistic

criticism as the fantastical whimsy of a single critic undermined Valente’s critical

authority and cast doubts on his claims to a-political detachment. As with Alone, the

claim that Valente’s “spiritual” detachment was a form of “enmascaramiento” was meant

to expose the political dimensions of Valente’s critical practice, suggesting that behind

his fictional claims lay yet another “crítico que usa de su imparcialidad como del puñal

los amigos de Julio César” (ODC 30). If in Alone’s case, his critical costume perpetuated

an old form of Latin American metequismo, in Valente’s case the tendency towards

anachronism, mimetic repetition, and falsification had, in the midst of the dictatorship,

the chilling capacity to both silence writers and to shut down the few spaces for critical

reflection that had been left open by the regime. Valente’s power, hinted at in La orquesta

  151  
de cristal, became apparent a few years later during a small textual tussle between Lihn

and Ibáñez Langlois that revealed the political dimensions of Valente’s veiled attacks

against the critical discourses that resisted the dictatorship’s project. This time, the

attacks would come not through Valente’s impressionistic column in the Sunday paper

but through what seemed like a more “rigorous” text, signed by Ibáñez Langlois himself.

Published under Ibáñez Langlois’s own name, Sobre el estructuralismo purported

to be “la primera versión integral del estructuralismo en lengua española” (Lihn, Sobre el

anti-estructuralismo 3). It sought to provide a general overview of structuralist thought in

linguistics, anthropology, and literary theory. The book, which first appeared in 1983,

was immediately followed by Sobre el anti-estructuralismo de José Miguel Ibáñez

Langlois, an essay-length book in which Lihn attempted to refute what he would later call

“un libro de consulta para el oficialismo” (Díaz 51). As Lihn points out, it would not be

the first time that Ibáñez Langlois published a “manual” intended to provide easy

digestion of a complex theoretical topic for supporters of the regime. Ibáñez Langlois had

once before published such a manual on Marxism, a topic that seemed much more

politically explosive than structuralism. Yet Ibáñez Langlois’s attacks against structuralist

criticism also had potentially significant political consequences. According to Lihn,

Sobre el estructuralismo was not so much an objective overview as a “diatriba tardía”

against structuralism, which set Valente’s “spiritual” conception of literary beauty over a

supposedly newfangled “science.” The diatribe was particularly dangerous when made in

Ibáñez Langlois’s own name, for it distanced his book from the “spontaneous” and

“asystematic” impressionism of his alter ego Valente, who at one point declared himself

ignorant of “la jeringonza estructuralista” (quoted in Lihn, Sobre el anti-estructuralismo

  152  
15). Instead, Ibáñez Langlois used a more technical language as well as the

methodological prestige of his identity as a priest-scholar in order to undermine the

scientific and “objective” status of structuralist criticism. Especially damaging were the

terms that Ibáñez Langlois used to discredit structuralism, as they imperiled both the

agents and discourses that had taken up structuralism as one of the few critical options in

the restricted world of authoritarian criticism.

Using the same strategy that Lihn had employed against impressionistic criticism

in La orquesta de cristal, Ibáñez Langlois attempted to undercut structuralism by

depicting it as a shameless fiction dressed up in the deceitful costume of an inoffensive

and impartial science. One of the footnotes of La orquesta de cristal, which discusses the

“críticas negativas” that Pompier aimed against the structuralist theories of language

inaugurated by Saussure, anticipates Ibáñez Langlois’s attack.145 In terms that echo

Pompier’s critiques, Ibáñez Langlois takes up arms against what he called “una legión de

‘críticos estructuralistas’ que no tienen el gusto ni el talento de Todorov, Jakobson o

Barthes y que por eso mismo se encuentran a sus anchas en el ‘estructuralismo’, ya que

les entrega herramientas casi mecánicas de disección del texto literario al margen de la

apreciación de su belleza” (Ibáñez Langlois 88). Like Pompier, who also rails against “el

vicio de la abstracción al servicio de la mecánica” (ODC 132), Ibáñez Langlois chides

second-rate critics in Chile for naively assimilating a series of “mechanical tools” whose

scientific sheen obscures the fictional nature of structuralism’s linguistic system. In La

                                                                                                               
145
Footnote 35 of the novel details Pompier’s encounter in 1918 with Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique
Générale and outlines some of the critiques that Pompier aimed at Saussure’s work. The footnote claims
that Pompier anticipated many of the negative assessments that rained down on Saussure years later.
Ironically enough, Pompier’s critique also seems to have anticipated Ibáñez Langlois’s assessments of
structuralism, which were published seven years after Lihn’s novel, thus providing what we might call an
after-the-fact model for Lihn’s parody.
  153  
orquesta de cristal Pompier mocks that system as a kind of gothic fantasy, as “un espectro

de nadie emplazado en la nada: la lengua independiente de quienes hacemos el uso

pedestre o sublime de la misma nos hace hablar a todos a su amaño” (132). Utilizing a

similar strategy, Ibáñez Langlois depicts structuralism’s theoretical constructs not just as

“filosofía errada” but as outright “ficciones” (74). In his book, structuralism is an

“ejercicio poético” (94) that borders “la literatura amena” (98) and Levi-Strauss nothing

more than a “poeta culto y fantasioso,” author of a “novela de antropología-ficción”

where “las pocas verisimilitudes que han descubierto en el dominio de la cultura flotan en

un mar de fantasía y ensoñación” (94).

Ibáñez Langlois’s attack on the scientific status of structuralism was particularly

troubling in a critical context where only “scientific” languages could avoid the charge of

ideological mystification. Without the scientific alibi that allowed critical frameworks to

circulate with impunity, structuralism became yet another suspect discourse, carrier of

clandestine political intentions. As Ibáñez Langlois argues, it was “artificioso dar por

‘inofensiva’ o ‘puramente científica’ a la lingüística a partir de Saussure, Jakobson o

Bloomfield” (63). Presumably exposing its real intentions, Ibáñez Langlois depicts

structuralism as a materialist philosophy intent on undermining the bases of religious and

social institutions. Claiming that structuralism’s system of language devours “la realidad

extralingüística” (81) and leaves behind a language without man, Ibáñez Langlois accuses

structuralism of anti-humanism (53-63), “nihilism” (60), amorality (104), hostility

towards the family and society (105), and ultimately paints structuralism as a direct heir

of Marxist and Freudian thought.146 Such an attempt to link structuralism to the currents

                                                                                                               
146
The article 3.12 of the “Acta de los deberes y derechos constitucionales,” declared “que como una
manera de proteger los valores fundamentales en que se basa la sociedad chilena, debe declararse ilícito y
  154  
of thought that had been violently censored during the dictatorship amounted to a

deathblow at a discourse that was already regarded with caution by the regime’s

supporters (Cánovas, Lihn 17). As Lihn would put it in Sobre el anti-estructuralismo,

Ibáñez Langlois had taken up the role of a lion-slayer; only the lion was, in this case,

mendicant and blind (15).

If Gerardo de Pompier’s reaction to Saussure provides a kind of a priori parody of

Ibáñez Langlois’s arguments, the second part of the novel offers a glimpse into the

economic and political context that made structuralism particularly vulnerable in the

midst of the military regime. Unlike the archaic impressionistic critics, who in the first

part of the novel wax poetic with few restrictions on their mystical interpretations, the

“scientific” critics in the second part of the novel have to contend with the growing threat

of Nazi forces and increasingly precarious means of survival, made possible by the

impersonal “Fundación X” set up by Royce’s heirs. The Foundation’s demand for

academic excellence and technical competence generates a proliferation of “trabajos

sesudos y aplicados pero sin el menor interés en sí mismos… [que] tienen sin embargo el

mérito de ejemplificar el alto nivel de preparación intelectual alcanzado por la

Fundación” (ODC 72). In a newly technocratic and totalitarian era, the technical and

applied analyses of the young critics and musicologists (72) constitute their only means

of survival amid diminishing resources for criticism. Seeking to avoid taxes and increase

the prestige of Foundation X, Royce’s heirs expand the center for Musical Arts and

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
contrario al ordenamiento institucional de la República todo acto de personas o grupos destinados a
difundir doctrinas que atenten contra la familia, propugnen la violencia o una concepción de la sociedad
undada en la lucha de clases, o que sean contrarias al régimen constituido” (quoted in Brunner 83). As
Brunner notes, the article was later incorporated into the constitution. In this light, Ibáñez Langlois’s
description of structuralism cast it as a subversive discourse immediately subject to censorship.

  155  
Sciences while neglecting the orchestra and cutting off support to the scholarship

recipients, who come mostly from poor countries or former European colonies (71). The

ensuing competition leads to an improvement in the quality of interpretations: one of the

resulting interpretations by the Chilean meteco Eugenio Rodríguez is even called “sobrio

y exhaustivo, brillante – casi capaz de hacerse oír en los medios académicos” (73). In the

end, however, the Foundation provides little protection for the orchestra’s “intérpretes,”

whose suspicious connections to Africa and to Jewish culture subject them to violence at

the hands of the SS police.147

The second part of the novel functions, in other words, as the distorted reflection

of the political circumstances that in the late 1970s turned structuralist criticism into one

of the few if precarious means of sustaining a critical discourse. Amid the threats of

censorship by the regime, its scientific sheen and technical jargon made it possible to

present structuralism as “inoffensive” or “purely scientific” while still providing some

semblance of critical modernity that could grant it a voice in the centers of discursive

power. Being able to claim modernity and academic rigor was particularly important in a

context where foreign foundations had come to replace the Chilean university as the

source of livelihood for many critics. As Jeffrey Puryear notes, after the coup the

independent research centers that had emerged in the 1960s became a haven for displaced

scholars seeking refuge in institutions not controlled by the military and one of the few

remaining sites of critical thought (39).148 Independent research centers, however, were

                                                                                                               
147
The word “intérprete” in Spanish can mean both “musician” and “critic.” In the second part of the novel,
Lihn often uses the term ambivalently to refer to both the musicians who play the glass instruments of the
crystal orchestra and to the critics who provide interpretations of the orchestra and its music.
148
Alternative research centers like the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), the
Centro de Indagación y Expresión Cultural y Artistica (CENECA), the Instituto Chileno de Estudios
  156  
largely dependent on foreign donors like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, which

imposed the ruthless logic of their economic structure and research standards upon

critics. Like the impersonal Fundación X, foreign donors instituted new international

standards of critical excellence that in Brunner’s words subjected Chilean scholars to

“three Anglo-Saxon formulas: ‘publish or perish,’ ‘no nonsense,’ and ‘accountability’”

(quoted in Puryear 53). In addition to establishing implacable deadlines and new

demands for productivity, foreign donors also tended to value science over ideology,

empirical studies over literary writing, dispassionate research over impassioned critiques,

the social sciences over the humanities (53). Like the metecos in La orquesta de cristal,

who flaunt their acquired knowledge as a sign of gratitude to the impersonal Fundación

X, critics in Chile gravitated towards the technical languages valued by the foreign

donors on which scholars depended for their livelihoods.

As Lihn suggests in both La orquesta de cristal and Sobre el anti-estructuralismo,

adopting “blind” technical languages and demonstrating subservience to new

international research standards was not enough to guarantee the survival and vitality of

critical discourse. At the end of Sobre el anti-estructuralismo Lihn gestures towards the

continuing effects of censorship, reminding Ibáñez Langlois that he could not “emplazar

al representante de la filosofía perenne a un debate público en igualdad de condiciones”

(22). As Lihn argues, the creation of black lists continued to be a reality, one that Valente

obviated in his Sunday column and that Ibáñez Langlois enabled with his attacks on

structuralist criticism (22). Despite their benevolent façade, foreign foundations and

newly disciplined academic institutions were both unable and unwilling to guarantee the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
Humanísticos (ICHEH), and the Academia de Humanismo Cristiano became some of the few remaining
sites available to critical thought in Chile.
  157  
survival not just of structuralism but of the plurality of discourses and meanings on which

a truly critical discourse depended. In the end, even Fundación X in La orquesta de cristal

caves in to Von Abetz, the ambassador of the Third Reich in Paris who demands an

interpretation of Wagner’s “Percival” for a select group of German officials. As

“Heinrich von Linderhöfer” notes in his narration of the crystal orchestra’s final concert,

turning down the “invitation” from Von Abetz would have subjected Fundación X to an

investigation. Further scrutiny threatened to reveal both its attempts to repatriate various

Jewish musicians to non-belligerent countries and the fact that it harbored “en el seno…

de su precaria impunidad” musicians from French Africa and from various occupied

countries, including a distant cousin of Franz Kafka, escaped from the Prague ghetto

(ODC 81). Although the denouement of the Wagner concert is never explicitly narrated,

Von Linderhöfer’s narration ends with the sound of German shepherds announcing the

irruption of the “mensajeros de la muerte” who would turn the final concert into a swan

song, suddenly silenced before Percival’s final redemption (95).

As Lihn put the final period on La orquesta de cristal, there seemed to be no end

in sight to the critical darkness amid the metequismo of authoritarian criticism, torn

between the absurd interpretations of impressionistic critics beholden to the patriarchs of

Europe and a university criticism in thrall to the technical rigor of North American

academic standards. Yet there still remained a third option represented by a “tradición

independiente” sustained by various “intérpretes” of the crystal orchestra (74). Faced

with the neglect of Fundación X and the encroachment of totalitarian powers, the

independent tradition in La orquesta de cristal keeps the orchestra alive through

“unofficial” concerts and by replacing broken instruments with funds from their own lean

  158  
pockets (75). As the last of the orchestra’s critics, Von Linderhöfer both preserves and

perpetuates that tradition through a narration that seems to survive the destruction of the

orchestra at the end of the novel. Von Linderhöfer’s narration, which also opens the

collection of commentaries in La orquesta de cristal, grants the crystal orchestra a second

existence and acts as a form of negative opposition to the destructive forces of Nazism.

Like Von Linderhöfer, an “humorista descreído y sombrío que se ocultaba hasta de su

propia sombra” (76), Lihn too would serve as the critical narrator of an independent

tradition that would take the critical “espíritu de negación” (76) out of the university and

the official organs of the mass media and into the semi-private, improvised world of the

artistic underground. Eschewing the boundaries imposed by the economic and political

powers on the realm of culture Lihn, along with a cohort of fellow writers, artists, and

critics, would keep alive a critical utopia whose precarious and undisciplined disregard

for discursive boundaries would briefly function as a node of resistance against the

disciplinary actions of authoritarian culture.

Under the Radar: Critical Utopias in the Dictatorship

On December 28, 1977, Don Gerardo de Pompier once again emerged from the

shadows, this time in flesh and blood, to deliver a surprising reading at the Instituto

Chileno-Norteamericano. The reading, titled “Lihn y Pompier en el Día de los

Inocentes,” brought Pompier out of the dim outlines of text and onto the limelight of the

stage, which he shared with Lihn in a multimedia performance commemorating Holy

Innocents’ Day. The performance began rather conventionally, with Lihn reading his

poems from a lectern. Yet before he could finish that reading, Lihn was interrupted,

  159  
ushered out of the stage, and replaced with another poet “injustamente olvidado” (Lastra

121). Pompier, dressed in spectacles and a cravat, emerged in Lihn’s place and read some

of his modernista poems while a documentary film about his life in turn-of-the-century

Paris rolled in the background. Immediately after reading his poems, Pompier

disappeared and again reemerged from behind the scenes, this time riding something of a

hybrid between a lectern, a coffin, and an electric chair, from which he delivered a

dramatic speech that justified Herod for the massacre of the innocents (121).

The 1977 performance was not the first of Pompier’s appearances around

Santiago de Chile. Since 1974, Lihn had taken on the guise of Pompier in at least two

other readings, including one at the Centro de Estudios Humanísticos, where Lihn,

impersonating Pompier and some of the other critics in the text, read from La orquesta de

cristal (121). Like the novel, Lihn’s performances parodied and critiqued the archaic

nature of prevailing discourses, exposing the violence and repression veiled by their

florid and archaic languages. “Lihn y Pompier en el día de los inocentes” thus played a

key role in Lihn’s literary-critical work, perpetuating and extending Pompier’s critical

function, though it also embodied and brought together a broader community that crafted

an independent critical tradition on the margins of Chilean culture. As Lihn would later

tell Pedro Lastra, the performance emerged from the imaginative interaction of various

discourses, media, artists, and critics, whose collaborations resulted in the performance, a

video, and the illustrated book Lihn y Pompier (121).149 “Lihn y Pompier” was

                                                                                                               
149
The collaborators in this performance included filmmaker Carlos Flores, critic Adriana Valdés, visual
artist Eugenio Dittborn, and poets Jorge Ramírez and Alfonso Vásquez. As Lihn notes in an interview with
Lastra, the idea for “Lihn y Pompier” emerged from a conversation with Ramírez and Vásquez, who had
invited Lihn to participate in a poetry reading. Lihn declined the invitation, and asked instead to read
something by “El autor desconocido.” The idea to develop a performance around the character of Pompier
soon developed into a multimedia collaboration among various writers and artists in Santiago (Lastra 121).

  160  
representative of a broader cultural practice that emerged during the dictatorship and that

later came to be known as the “escena de avanzada” or—more broadly—“el discurso de

la crisis” (Cánovas, “Hacia una histórica” 165).150

As Cánovas describes it, the discurso de la crisis was a loose collection of related

practices by artists, writers, philosophers, and critics who joined theoretical speculation

with artistic experimentation in order to create an alternative intellectual space free from

the restrictions imposed by the dictatorship (166). Like “Lihn y Pompier,” the alternative

discourse outlined by Cánovas was carried out in rented halls, through ephemeral

performances on the street, upon the artists’ bodies, in the privacy of individual homes,

through homemade or photocopied texts. Situating itself on the margins of official

culture, it circulated through “microcircuitos alternativos” that opened up new spaces for

syntaxes and meanings otherwise blocked by the regime (Richard, Margins 72) and

blurred the boundaries between discourses, genres, and artistic media (Bianchi 59).151

Among the boundaries it ignored were the divisions between literature and criticism

created by the dictatorship’s fragmentation of the literary-critical realm. The convergence

of theory and practice became one of the signature elements of the escena de avanzada,

which encouraged collaborations between sociologists and performance artists, writers

                                                                                                               
150
The term “escena de avanzada,” coined by Richard, refers to a group of artists and artistic practices that
emerged during the initial years of the dictatorship. Cánovas’s “discurso de la crisis” is a broader term that
covers both the artistic practices and the critical works produced by the “escena de avanzada.” Neither
term, however, refers to an organized “movement” or style but covers, instead, a loose collection of related
practices that circulated around urban centers—particularly Santiago—in response to the cultural void left
by the repressive strategies of the dictatorship. In the pages below, I use the term “literary-critical avant-
garde” to refer, specifically, to the literary and critical practices that emerged from the “escena de
avanzada.”
151
Key players in the escena de avanzada include the artist collective CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte),
the theater group ICTUS, Adriana Valdés, Eugenio Dittborn, and Carlos Flores, Ronald Kay, Nelly
Richard, Lotty Rosenfeld, Raul Zurita. The publications CAL and Separata were created with the explicit
purpose of launching an assault upon the laws that marked boundaries between disciplines and
specializations (Richard La insubordinación 42).

  161  
and literary critics, art critics and visual artists, and allowed participants to move fluidly

between these roles.152 Lihn, for one, penned literary works and directed performances

like “Lihn y Pompier,” but also wrote critical works, organized reading workshops with

literary critics Adriana Valdés and Carmen Foxley, and led a seminar on poetics and

semiotics, which played a key role in the escena de avanzada (Cánovas, “Hacia una

histórica” 167). As Pablo Oyarzún puts it, erasing the boundaries between different

artistic genres brought with it “una imbricación riesgosa (y utópica) del discurso crítico y

la producción de arte, de la teoría y de la práctica” (44).

The utopian dimensions of the intersection between artistic production and critical

discourse would be key in Nelly Richard’s descriptions of the escena de avanzada. As she

notes in La insubordinación de los signos, the underground artistic scene during the

dictatorship redrew “utopías críticas” through aesthetic practices that subjected

established categories of thought to intense cultural revision (25). The avant-garde’s

“critical utopias” were, however, not just a product of the critical writing that emerged

alongside artistic practices or even of the new partnerships between critics and artists.

Rather, they were brought about by the “radicalismo crítico” of the avant-garde’s

experimental languages (39), which recognized that art and literature possessed critical

value and that criticism could make use of the techniques and strategies of art. The art

and literature of the cultural avant-garde came to be seen, in fact, as an important critical

discourse that stepped in to fill the critical void produced by the disciplinary actions of

                                                                                                               
152
Among the many partnerships between artists and intellectuals in the “escena de avanzada” one could
cite, for example, the collaborations between the sociologist Fernando Balcells, the artists Lotty Rosenfeld
and Juan Castillo, the poet Raúl Zurita, and the novelist Diamela Eltit in CADA; the participation of
literary critic Adriana Valdés in the performance “Lihn y Pompier”; and the key role that critics Nelly
Richard and Ronald Kay played in the visual arts scene during the late 1970s and early 80s.

  162  
the dictatorship.153 For both Richard and Cánovas, Lihn was a primary representative of

this form of critical thinking, which he enacted in works like La orquesta de cristal and

“Lihn y Pompier” (Cánovas, Lihn 16; Richard, La insubordinación 25). While subjecting

the monolingual, disciplined, and disciplinarian discourses of official culture to an

intense critique, Lihn’s works also revealed—according to Richard—the lack of a critical

apparatus capable of accounting for the critical dimensions of their aesthetic practices

(Margins 133). By declaring previous interpretive schemes obsolete, works like Lihn’s

reiterated the need to create a critical discourse that Chile had presumably lacked until

then (133). This gave rise to new forms of critical writing that borrowed artistic

techniques like collage, montage, and intertextuality from literary and artistic works and

adopted new interpretive frameworks suitable to the “critical radicalism” of the avant-

garde’s works.

The avant-garde works of the 1970s thus established a dialectical relationship

between literature and criticism that brought forth what Richard calls a “nueva escena de

escritura.” In its new critical function, the literature of the escena de avanzada

encouraged the emergence of new critical writing that could overcome the limitations of

the critical languages that had been prevalent until then in Chile. In order to adequately

interpret the new literary and artistic works, the emergent critical scene borrowed heavily

from the writings of Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, the Frankfurt School, as well as other

psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and post-structuralist theories. As Lihn observes, such

                                                                                                               
153
In their historical accounts of literary criticism in Chile, both Cánovas and Subercaseaux cite the avant-
garde scene of the 70s and 80s as an example of the new modes of critical thinking during the dictatorship.
In her account of Chilean literature from 1973 to 1990, Soledad Bianchi also emphasizes the critical
function that literature served, citing Lihn’s notion that poetry is “una forma del espíritu crítico y de la
lucidez o sería preferable que no fuera nada” (56).

  163  
authors tended to pass under the regime’s radar and allowed the new critical discourse to

sidestep the effects of censorship.154 The critical avant-garde’s new theoretical

frameworks also allowed it to contest dominant interpretive strategies and reflect on the

dislocations and breakages that the disciplinary strategies of the regime had produced in

language. The new critical writing did not, however, adopting these theoretical languages

systematically. Rather, it incorporated them through the literary and artistic techniques of

fragmentation, assemblage, and pastiche (133). Through a hybrid critical language “que

lleva jirones de toda clase de discursos” (18), the cultural avant-garde placed itself

outside the disciplined circuits of authoritarian criticism, challenging both the emphasis

on specialization within the university as well as the archaic values structure and lack of

theoretical sophistication associated with impressionistic criticism. Its “impurity” and

“theoretical heterodoxy” (71) broke the disciplinary compartmentalization that had

divided authoritarian criticism into a technical and a literary criticism, creating instead an

alternative “zona de convergencias e intersecciones de saberes mutilados y de disciplinas

rotas por el in-disciplinamiento de los géneros” (72).

At least as Richard describes it, the escena de avanzada was indeed utopian,

crafting in the no-spaces of the regime a previously inexistent critical discourse, capable

of both deconstructing and disregarding the disciplinary constructions of the regime and

of all totalizing discourses. As she depicts it in La insubordinación de los signos, its

critical utopias

alzaron sus precisos y preciosos vocabularios rebeldes a los discursos

totalizantes del pensamiento ideológico… fueron varias las obras que
                                                                                                               
154
As Lihn notes, “A nadie se le ocurre buscar en el Índice a un señor que se llama Walter Benjamin,
porque era demasiado sofisticado hacerlo… o pensar que Roland Barthes, por ejemplo, había sido
simpatizante de la izquierda francesa y del Partido Comunista Francés” (“Doce años” 185).

  164  
 buscaron deslegitimar las tradiciones del Pasado usando el subterfugio de
denunciar—parodiándolo—lo que cada disciplina había ritualizado como
herencia y patrimonio de lenguaje y convenciones (25).

With its parodic imitation of critical languages and its reflection on the persistence of

nineteenth century forms of thought, La orquesta de cristal is a paradigmatic example of

the critical utopias outlined by Richard. Used as a critical lens on the cultural avant-

garde, Lihn’s critical fiction nevertheless suggests that its critical utopias were not

entirely unproblematic. Despite Richard’s romantic portrayal of the escena de avanzada

and its heroic resistance to inherited disciplinary conventions, the literary-critical

discourse that it crafted continues to glint in the prismatic reflections of Lihn’s La

orquesta de cristal. There, it appears not so much as an emancipatory language than as yet

another métèque discourse subject to the same shortcomings as other critical languages in

Chile.

The new critical writing described by Richard was often self-published in

photocopied multimedia pamphlets, which echo in La orquesta de cristal where the

fictional Gabriel de Shaumard publishes a similiarly ephemeral analysis of the orchestra.

Like many of the critical works published and distributed by the writers and critics of the

avanzada, Shaumard’s interpretations initially appear in “un inencontrable folleto”

illustrated with numerous photographs (ODC 60). The text quickly becomes a

“curiosidad de las librerías de vanguardia” (60) but is rescued by the editors of La

orquesta de cristal, who gloss Shaumard’s ruthless critique of the orchestra’s North

American patron, of impressionistic criticism, and of the derivative nature of local artistic

production. Echoing Lihn’s own critiques, Shaumard denigrates the Yankee mogul whose

wealth supports the crystal orchestra (61), mocks the “apresurada[s] pluma[s] de cacatúa

  165  
hispanoamericana” who pen the impressionistic commentaries of the orchestra, and

disparages the symphony itself (66), claiming that it fails to reach the “heights” attained

by Debussy and French harmonic impressionism (67). Shaumard’s attempts to carry out

“una lectura crítica de las partituras de la sinfonía” are, however, immediately attacked

by another commentator, who classifies them as a presumptuous show of critical

incompetence (67). Non-fictional commentators would direct similar critiques against the

new critical scene in Chile, faulting it for its “digresiones técnicas… totalmente

improvisadas” (ODC 68), its preference for high culture, and its bias towards French

cultural products. As Cánovas remarks with regards to the cultural avant-garde, the

theoretical speculation contained in its literary-critical works was not always “bien

fundamentada”; its experimentation with expressive forms was done “a medio camino”;

its philosophical project was “realizado con errores”; and it placed “un énfasis demasiado

rotundo en la cultura de élite y el discurso crítico francés” (“Hacia una histórica” 166-

167).

In its fluidity between discourses, borrowings from European critical theory,

willful marginality and lack of discipline the cultural avant-garde was, in other words,

eerily reminiscent of the métèque discourse mocked in both La orquesta de cristal and in

Pompier’s various readings around Santiago de Chile. One might argue, in fact, that as

Pompier and his cohorts pontificated from the pages of the novel, their language was

parodying not only official authoritarian discourse but also the presumably “critical”

discourse developed by the avant-garde scene in which Lihn participated. As Cánovas

suggests, La orquesta de cristal can also be read as a parody of the “galicismo mental” of

a critical scene that attempted to compose fragmentary works in light of French post-

  166  
structuralist theory (Lihn 16) but that ultimately fell into relative obscurity and silence

during the years of the military regime. As with other critical discourses in Chile and

Latin America, the undisciplined bricolage of literary registers and imported critical

languages restricted the critical works of the cultural avant-garde to a small number of

“iniciados” (Subercaseaux 280) and minimized the cultural impact that they had during

the dictatorship (Cánovas, Lihn 18). Despite the ambition to wrest spaces away from

official discourse (Richard, La insubordinación 56), the purportedly heroic uprising of the

avant-garde’s rebellious languages remained—like the symphony composed for the

crystal orchestra—“una incierta toma de posición vagamente subversiva pero sin norte ni

guía” (ODC 68). As both Lihn and Adriana Valdés observe, its critical and aesthetic

strategies were often incomprehensible to the general public and removed the avant-garde

scene from “la vía pública” (Lihn, Eugenio Téllez n.p.). The resulting marginality, which

Richard celebrates for its capacity to provide alternatives to authoritarian culture, posed

extraordinary difficulties for writers and critics attempting to put literary-critical

discourse into circulation.155 La orquesta de cristal continues to emphasize the difficulties

of discursive precariousness through the figures of the crystal orchestra and its

commentaries. For their “debilidad que a su vez explica lo precario o deshilachado del

tejido sonoro” (ODC 68) threatened to sink the orchestra and its commentaries into the

same inconsequent silence as the literary-critical works of the “discurso de la crisis.”

                                                                                                               
155
As Richard herself observes, the effects of censorship and repression and the meager institutional
supports available to the escena de avanzada posed significant difficulties for the magazines that published
the work of the avanzada and condemned them to relatively short life-spans (Margins 134-5). Bianchi also
highlights the fact that the young authors writing in the first years of the dictatorship often had to self-
publish their works in poorly distributed and precarious editions often circulated by hand (53). Gacitúa
similarly notes that although artisanal productions became an aesthetic choice during the dictatorship, that
choice was determined by economic and social factors (68).
  167  
 In interviews, literary works, and critical writings, Lihn never ceased to insist on

the dystopian dimensions of precariousness and marginality, which contributed to what

he often called the “ninguneo” or silencing of Latin American literary-critical discourse.

As Adriana Valdés notes, Lihn’s texts used a bricoleur’s scrapbook aesthetic to reflect on

the precariousness of his cultural and intellectual milieu (Enrique Lihn 9). Using the

techniques of fragmentation, simulacrum, and pastiche, Lihn reproduced not just

dominant or metropolitan discourses such as post-structuralist theory but minor genres of

literary-critical discourse in Latin America. As he notes in an interview with Lastra,

Creo que me propuse sobre todo realizar una homología de otro tipo entre
el texto y la situación; dar cuenta—a través de la forma rudimentaria de
producción del texto—de la precariedad y la futilidad de esa situación. Es
por eso que allí el bricoleur no trabaja con intertextualidades prestigiosas
sino más bien, en general, con el detritus de las viejas literaturas, con
algunos restos del modernismo, del decadentismo, del simbolismo. O sea,
que para aludir a Hispanoamérica hay que hacerlo desde la precariedad
cultural de la que venimos y que el discurso histórico perpetúa. (103)

Embodied in “el estilo pompier,” Lihn’s technique became a way of reflecting on the

marginality of Latin American literary-critical discourse and its tendency to emerge “del

bolígrafo pero también del plumón que invita a subrayar viejos libros, pero además de los

periódicos del día en la medida en que unos y otros engranan, pues la vigencia de la

caducidad es ilimitada, como lo pueban libros, y artículos, editoriales, entrevistas de

prensa, declaraciones” (“Entretelones” 583). For La orquesta de cristal Lihn pillaged, in

particular, all those “trabajos destinados a la inedición” (“Doce años” 185) that have

characterized Latin American intellectual life: the impressionistic article, the crónica, and

the “undisciplined” essay. Reproducing such marginal critical forms became a way of

both salvaging them from oblivion and reflecting on the social, political, and cultural

reasons behind their decidedly unheroic and unromantic marginality.

  168  
 In other words, Lihn plays not on a major but on a minor key, taking us out for

stroll into the margins. Instead of exalting them for their subversive power Lihn insists on

their precariousness, poverty, and insufficiency in order to highlight the local and global

hierarchies of discursive value that have contributed to the ninguneo of Latin America’s

purportedly minor discourses. Lihn’s critique is directed, however, not just at the

discourses that presumed to possess legitimacy and authority—such as El Mercurio’s

“spiritual” criticism and a university criticism that boasted technical competence—but

also at his own. The charge of metequismo, which frequently seems like a weapon

wielded against dominant discourses, was also a form of self-vigilance. In Valdés’s

words, Lihn metequismo was also an instrument of critical “hara-kiri” (Valdés, Enrique

Lihn 29) aimed at preventing “toda comodidad retórica por donde pudiera colarse alguna

ilusión metafísica, algún fuego fatuo, alguna pompa sublime” (34). Lihn, in fact, forged a

whole aesthetics out of his own metequismo, openly flaunting it in interviews and essays

and invoking it as a form of self-parody that exposed his own métèque critical

pretentions. Lihn had no qualms about acknowledging his own metequismo or that of La

orquesta de cristal, which he openly called “afrancesada” (quoted in Lastra 103). In

“Nacimiento, desarrollo e implicaciones de Don Gerardo de Pompier, el resumidero,”

Lihn admits that he embarked on his pilgrimage to France in 1975 with a parodic attitude

but also with naive enthusiasm. Having arrived with the original manuscript of La

orquesta de cristal, Lihn tried to publish the novel in France and even fell into the

metequismo of adapting La orquesta de cristal to the tastes of French readers, but was

ultimately unsuccessful in granting it international appeal.156 The novel has never been

                                                                                                               
156
As Lihn notes, he both changed Pompier’s name (see footnote 115) and also added more footnotes to the
novel at the suggestion of the Argentinean writer Héctor Bianciotti, who was then living in Paris. Bianciotti
  169  
published into any language and was not re-edited until 2014, almost forty years after its

initial publication.157 True to its own aesthetic, Lihn’s would remain, for many years

minor, ninguneado in the international republic of letters, apparently fated to become one

of those “trabajos destinados a la inedición que se estaban deteriorando hasta

físicamente” (Lihn, “Doce años” 185).

In the grotesque “muecas” of Pompier, von Linderhöfer, Enrique Marin, Germán

Lihn, and the other métèque alter-egos in La orquesta de cristal, we hear Lihn’s silent

laughter at his own participation in a literary-critical scene trying to catch up with

metropolitan critical discourse but condemned to the dark corners of minor literatures.158

Lihn’s laughter also echoes critically against anyone who falls into the “ingenuidad

culposa… de constituirse (con ‘buena fe y mala conciencia’ a veces, y a veces sólo de

mala fe) como hablantes autonomos, como portadores legítimos” (Valdés, Enrique Lihn

37). Lihn’s self-critical metequismo functions, on the one hand, as a way of mocking the

absurd pretensions of Latin American discourses that attempt to constitute themselves as

legitimate by distancing themselves from purportedly minor forms of literary-critical

language. By emphasizing the ridiculous “mimetismo, inadecuación y falsedad” (Lastra

11) of Latin American literary-critical discourse, Lihn also exposes, on the other hand,

the falsehood of model discourses that try to consolidate their authority, veiling the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
had made the suggestion to Lihn thinking of the novel’s potential reception in France (“Nacimiento” 562).
157
The Chilean publishing house Editorial Hueders published a new edition of La orquesta de cristal in
2014. In contrast to its initial, silent reception, the new edition of the novel seems to have caused a ruckus,
eliciting numerous reviews and blog entries that highlight the parallels between the silence of the cristal
orchestra in the novel and the silence in which Lihn’s novel had fallen until now.
158
As Cánovas describes it: “Al parodiar ciertos lenguajes críticos, el discurso de Lihn toma la figura de la
mascara, el doble, la mueca. Es esta imagen ambivalente lo que permite al lector burlarse del pretensioso
proyecto del Autor de este Libro: escribir una antinovela desde el horizonte cultural de la semiótica
francesa” (Lihn 38).
  170  
inauthenticity of their own language. In “Entretelones técnicos de mis novelas,” Lihn

describes the meteco’s critical capacity to unmask the model discourse through his

sometimes naive or unwitting use of “pseudosematic mimicry.” Using a term from

biology, Lihn compares Pompier to inoffensive animals that mimic the marks of a

predator. Like the butterfly Caligo Prometheus, whose wings simulate the eyes and nose

of an owl, Pompier’s furrowed brow, spectacles, and dress coat are attempts to imitate

el símbolo atterrador de Minerva, la lechuza que, como la palabra

establecida es un ave de presa. Lo que importa en el caso de Pompier es la
flagrante insuficiencia del camuflaje que le obliga a exagerar su identidad
mimetica con el modelo al punto de hacerlo irrisorio y extender a la
lechuza misma, por contagio, la vulnerabilidad de su propio
enmascaramiento. Una mala imitación, se diría, desarticula el misterio sin
el cual se atasca el mecanismo del aterramiento. (583)

The inadequate, naive, or belated adoption of an authoritative language allows the

meteco, in other words, to expose the intimidating performance by which a dominant

discourse imposes itself as legitimate. As a footnote in La orquesta de cristal observes,

“los profanos también logran desenmascarar a quien ha fingido tal o cual conocimiento

sobre cual o tal materia, sin poseerlo” (151).

In their insufficient or precarious mockery of an autonomous and allegedly

legitimate critical discourse, Latin America’s profane—that is, vulgar or naive—critical

languages thus expose the spuriousness of North American and European critical

languages. The various “rimadores y polígrafos” in La orquesta de cristal thus function

much like Rubén Darío, whom the French writer and critic Jean Cassou once called an

“ingenuo venido desde la profundidad de sus trópicos para enriquecer con una mirada

nueva nuestro viejo patrimonio histórico, artístico y cultural” (quoted in ODC 100).

Instead of buttressing the sober authority of European critical discourse, the metecos’

  171  
naive and enthusiastic reproduction of European discourse exposes “el énfasis, la

ampulosidad, la prosopopeya, en la literatura de la época; la vacuidad también, la

vanilocuencia, y una series de características que están en el modelo también y, por

cierto, en la repetición son patéticos” (Lihn, “Entretelones” 193). Subject to delayed

repetition in a “minor” critical archive, European critical discourse proves to be no less

métèque, no less pompous, fraudulent and artificial than Latin American critical

discourse. La orquesta de cristal thus echoes the strategies of Eugenio Téllez’s painting,

which Lihn describes as “una pintura gozosa, orgásmica y divertida, hecha de la riqueza

de combinaciones de materiales ‘pobres’; lanzada como una red muy bien adiestrada al

mar de la precariedad latinoamericana y—ya lo dije—desdoblada burlescamente, en la

ridícula autosuficiencia de la mirada europea” (Eugenio Téllez n.p.). As in Téllez’s

painting, the “poverty” of critical discourse is what provides the “richness” in La orquesta

de cristal: the are no real jewels here, but only the tinkle and glint of glass breaking under

a demolishing laughter that turns all crystalline, self-sufficient discourses to refuse, ruin,

rubbish.

With its outmoded mimicry of critical languages, La orquesta de cristal thus

functions as the analogue of a Latin American critical discourse whose critical potential

lies in its very fraudulence and illegitimacy. Undertaking something of a salvage

operation for old forms of Latin American criticism, the novel reproduces all the white

critical noise in letters, essays, pamphlets, monographs, crónicas, and other “literary”

miscellany, which had been silenced by the efforts to constitute a “legitimate” and

“autonomous” Latin American critical discourse. In a novel where “todas las

antigüedades (legítimas o ilegítimas) nos parecen igualmente dignas de toda

  172  
conservación” (ODC 107), Latin America’s “rudimentary” critical forms assume new

critical power for their capacity to reveal the artificiality and fictionality of all critical

discourse, even the most “rigorous” and “scientific.” As if La orquesta de cristal were a

textual version of the Roche aux Quatre Vents—the castle that houses the crystal

orchestra—it offers us “un vertiginoso escenario en el que se han dado cita para alternar

en la armonía o armonizarse en la disonancia todos los estilos de todas las épocas” (18).

On the collector’s stage, the anachronistic shards of legitimate and illegitimate,

belletristic and technical languages acquire the aesthetic sheen of nostalgic trinkets or

conservation pieces. Dissociated from the contexts and gestures that granted them power,

those critical languages—like old tomes, library busts, and suits of armor—become

subject to a mocking gaze capable of seeing their “mecanismo de aterramiento,” the

manufactured nature of their transitory dominance.159

Lihn’s recuperation of Latin America’s “archaic” critical discourse thus reveals

the critical power of an undifferentiated realm of letters whose undisciplined amalgam of

the literary and the critical, of various styles, forms, and languages, predates the alleged

dawn of a proper critical discourse in the 1960s. For Lihn, the exaggerated mimeticism,

the overwrought belletristic style or dry technicality in the “prehistoric” forms of Latin

American criticism makes them exemplary instances of a discourse in which the literary

and the critical are indistinguishable from each other. As he contends in various essays

and interviews, literature was an intrinsically critical procedure, a “theoretical” language

(“Doce años” 199) capable of revealing the “inautenticidad congénita” of language

                                                                                                               
159
As Gacitúa notes in his analysis of Lihn’s “temporal investigations,” “Los estilos literarios que han
pasado de moda… ponen en evidencia las convenciones, los estereotipos, los prejuicios de una época. Lo
que ‘pasa a la historia’ deja en evidencia una característica de todo lo histórico: su mortalidad, su
precariedad, su carácter aleatorio y artificioso” (226).

  173  
(“Entretelones” 574). Through an awareness of its own fabrication, its unnaturalness and

artificiality, literature constitutes

una instancia de honradez que obliga a reconocer en el acto de escribir el

hecho de que se está escribiendo… o sea, mostrar cómo el discurso
aparentemente funciona en una dirección pero va en otra; está realizando
ciertas operaciones clandestinas el tipo que habla; convenciendo; está
persuadiendo acerca de cosas que son obviamente mentiras y que deben
quedar inscritas como tales en el texto. (“Doce años” 199)

La orquesta de cristal is one such “instance of honesty,” revealing through the

deficiencies of its critical discourse the “clandestine operations” by which various critical

discourses censored others in their attempt to impose themselves as legitimate. Unlike

those discourses, La orquesta de cristal continues to proclaim not the constitution of a

legitimate Latin American critical discourse, but its very absence, its dissolution in a

heterogeneous, undisciplined din of discourses illegitimately struggling for dominance.

Like the “Sinfonía de Amor Absoluto,” the novel provides an “instancia de objetividad

desmusicalizadora que se sirve del ruido para trazarla desde el reverso del sonido, por

entre el dibujo fantasmal de una música por hacerse” (ODC 73). In the purported white

noise of Latin America’s improvised critical forms, La orquesta de cristal draws the

outlines of a critical discourse but declares it unfinished, open, and in process.

Only in Latin America’s “utopía negativa, donde el triunfo constante del discurso

vacío, de la cháchara torrencial ha clausurado toda otra forma de hacer uso de la palabra”

(Lastra 109) could one craft such a critical utopia: a critical discourse that emerges from

its purported inexistence, from the phantasmatic image of an (un)constituted,

(il)legitimate (lack of) discipline. Lihn’s critical utopia, spectrally present in La orquesta

de cristal and projected unto the alleged prehistory of Latin American criticism, also

made a fleeting, almost ghostly appearance in the literary and artistic works of the

  174  
cultural avant-garde. To borrow the interpretation of Eugenio Ramírez, another fictional

meteco in the novel, the “deficiencies” of the pre-disciplinary Latin American realm of

“letters” provided “los gérmenes de una actualidad prematura” (ODC 73). They served as

seeds for a contemporary literary-critical scene paradoxically enabled by an authoritarian

regime that interrupted the constitution of a legitimate Latin American criticism and thus

allowed for the continuation of that undisciplined and precarious bricolage of discourses.

The military regime would thus perpetuate, in Chile, Latin America’s status as a “paraíso

de la precariedad” (Lihn, Eugenio Téllez n.p.), as a “tierra prometida del fraude” (ODC

139). Installed in such a negative utopia, the literary-critical avant-garde in Chile would

once again lay claim to an “impressionistic” Latin American tradition that validated the

scrapbook technique of a naive reader prone to borrow, falsify, and misuse all the

languages in the literary-critical archive, “aún las menos autorizadas” (ODC 139).

Through Pompier and his fellow “impostores y charlatanes” (139), Lihn would continue

to resist all attempts to legitimize such a critical tradition in the voice of an authorized

discourse, a métèque impulse that the literary-critical avant-garde could perhaps not

resist.

No Commonplace for the Reader

Until his death in 1988, Lihn lived within the discursive boundaries of the

dictatorship’s “paradise of precariousness.”160 After a battle with cancer, Lihn passed

away just a few months before the referendum that unseated Pinochet from power. After

                                                                                                               
160
Lihn lived abroad for a couple months at a time in Paris, where he was invited by the French
government in 1975, and in New York where he stayed after earning the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978.
Lihn also worked as a visiting professor in various U.S. universities. However, he continued to return to
Chile, and saw his stays abroad as temporary visits rather than as a permanent exile.

  175  
the triumph of the “No” to Pinochet’s bid to the presidency, the return of democracy to

Chile granted a new institutional stability to criticism and allowed for the reemergence of

critical discourses that had been silenced by the dictatorship. In the years before the

referendum, the social sciences, a reinvigorated leftist discourse, and the literary-critical

discourse elaborated by the cultural avant-garde began to position themselves as new

voices of critical thought, capable of both interpreting and challenging the discourses of

power. With the gradual loosening of repressive structures, the opposition’s

reorganization after the economic crisis of 1983, and the return of exiled intellectuals, the

three strands of critical thought began to emerge from their semi-clandestine silence and

moved into more public and visible circuits.161 By 1988 their new power of speech

promised to bring Chilean critical thought out of its darkness and precariousness,

transforming it once again into a “metropolis iluminada” by the democratic din of

discursive plurality.

Nevertheless, as Nelly Richard points out, not all was equal in that newly

illuminated metropolis. Despite the growing visibility of the escena de avanzada and the

role it played in challenging authoritarian discourse, its critical contributions continued to

be marginalized within the new discursive landscape, dominated by the emergence of

new academic institutions and prestigious research centers (Insubordinación 76).162

                                                                                                               
161
The return of exiled intellectuals, many of them associated with the left, gave new impetus to the
sociological readings developed both before and during the dictatorship and strengthened research centers
like FLACSO and CENECA as nuclei of dissident thought. Critics like Nelly Richard and Adriana Valdés
also gained recognition as a critical alternative to official culture (Richard Insubordinación 57).
162
Independent institutes of higher learning established by academics dismissed from their posts were
complemented in the 1980s by new academic institutions established after the Higher Education Reform of
1980. The Reform, passed by the authoritarian regime, grafted a neoliberal, free-market model onto higher
education that encouraged the proliferation of universities. By 1992, there were fifteen state and forty-two
private universities in Chile, in comparison to the two main universities that had existed prior to the
dictatorship (Austin 26).
  176  
Influenced in part by foreign donors’ privileging of the social sciences during the

dictatorship and by the key role that social scientists played in the transition to

democracy, the social sciences had become the discourse of choice in the world of higher

learning. By 1987, Pablo Oyarzún would echo the generally accepted notion that in the

world of the “inteligencia criolla” no other interpretive framework had the currency, the

structure of influences, the thematic reach (44), and the scholarly rigor of the social

sciences (Cánovas, Hacia una histórica 167). Their academic prestige ran counter to what

Richard calls the “audacious” interventions of the cultural avant-garde, which “violated”

the rules of objective proof and the technical realism of the “efficient” knowledge

epitomized by the social sciences (Insubordinación 71).

Under threat of being silenced beneath the voices of other discourses, the escena

de avanzada found its most passionate advocate in Richard, who argued for the critical

potential of its aesthetic practices and began to craft a new critical discourse that

recuperated and carried on its critical legacy. Much of Richard’s critical energy would be

directed towards crafting and positioning a new “crítica cultural” aligned with the cultural

avant-garde against both the paradigm of the social sciences and the return of a

“traditional” leftist discourse.163 Richard critiques both discourses for their tendency to

suture discontinuities and refashion totalizing narratives (Insubordinación 62), and

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
163
In Residuos y metáforas Richard emphasizes the fact that “crítica cultural” designates a diverse group of
practices, which nevertheless have some common characteristics. For Richard, the texts that fall under
“crítica cultural” mix discourses, position themselves on the margins of constituted disciplines, seek out
excluded or forgotten practices, and position themseles midway between the essay, reconstructive analysis,
and critical theory (142). In “The Reconfigurations of Post-Dictatorship Critical Thought” Richard
implicitly defines the new “crítica cultural” as a “critical poetics” in opposition to both the “mourning” of
the social sciences, which presumably sought to put behind and forget the wounds of the dictatorship, and
the “melancholy” of the traditional left, mired in the nostalgia of a frustrated social project
(“Reconfigurations” 273).

  177  
positions crítica cultural as a watchdog against all forms of totalization, against all

“figuras-del-sistema que reiteran la violencia de la intimidación discursiva en cada serie

de enunciados, cadena gramatical, subordinación de frases” (66). Crítica cultural assigned

itself, in other words, a critical role unavailable to the discourses of the left and of the

social sciences, whose desire to establish the absolute truth of one ideological system or

to impose consensus among different political agents threatened to repeat the discursive

violence inherent in the intimidations of authoritarian discourse. Crítica cultural, in

contrast, claimed a privileged critical role by virtue of its identification with the margins,

which remained a space of contestation at a distance from the calls for consensus and

commonality. As a critical discourse purportedly marginalized by the discourses of the

left and of the social sciences (64, 76) and with roots in an artistic scene that developed

on the margins of authoritarian culture, crítica cultural deliberately alighted itself with the

margins (Residuos 142) and defined them as a privileged space from which to question

the demarcations of symbolic power (Insubordinación 64).

The margin thus became, for Richard, a “concepto-metáfora para productivizar el

descarte social de la marginación y la marginalidad” (64). Like Lihn, Richard sought to

unleash the critical potential of what was marginal, precarious, and silenced, but did so

from a space quite unlike Lihn’s “paradise of precariousness.” Despite her claims to and

protestations against marginalization, in the late 1980s Richard’s particular strain of

criticism was no longer a marginal “aventura crítica” carried out in ephemeral leaflets

and photocopied pamphlets (Oyarzún 44). As Oyarzún observed in a 1987 discussion of

Richard’s Márgenes e institución (1986), “toda opción por el margen reconoce el centro,

lo proyecta y se proyecta en él negativamente, para extraer de esta relación de resistencia

  178  
la negatividad como disciplina, como retórica y como hábito en su propia práctica, y lo

que es más importante, como mecanismo de auto-certificación” (50). For Oyarzún,

Richard’s passionate defense of the margin had become mechanism that granted power

and stability to her own discourse while projecting marginality onto an artistic and

literary scene that became dependent on her critical discourse to advocate for its

undisciplined, and thus potentially unheeded, critical interventions. Amid a new

discursive landscape in which critical credibility was closely linked to the academic

prestige of technical and disciplined knowledge, Richard argued that “para hacer valer el

beneficio teórico de su furtivo detalle, lo menor y lo desviado necesitan del pequeño tajo

practicado por el análisis cultural” (Residuos 13). Recognizing the fact that the critical

sphere was now defined by “sectorialización y profesionalización” (Insubordinación

117), Richard emphasized the need for “públicos en posición de valorizadores” (77) who

could circulate the products of the avant-garde.164 Assuming the role of a “valorizadora,”

Richard took it upon herself to “salvage” or “rescue” art and literature from a sea of

silence or oblivion.165 As she claims in Residuos y metáforas, the aesthetic “fragments”

that she analyzes “carecen de una traducción formal en la lengua comunicativa de la

                                                                                                               
164
It is worth noting that this observation is made in a critical spirit. As Richard notes in Margins and
Institutions there was a “necesidad, también, de reexaminar la dependencia del objeto de arte a las
instituciones que administran no solo su distribución y consumo, sino sus valores de inscripción official y
de aceptabilidad dominante” (4). Despite her assertion, Richard recognizes the difficulties in changing
those conditions and rhetorically continues to situate herself in a position that would allow her to influence
the “valores de inscripción official y de aceptabilidad dominante.” In the margins/institutions dialectic
drawn out by Richard “crítical cultural” functioned as the “institutions” pole, relegating art to the margins.
Crítica cultural thus became a mediator between “los trazados oficiales que dibujan el horizonte de la
transición y el fragmentario detalle de construcciones de signos que hacen de lo menor su forma de ser”
(Residuos 13).
165
Richard often uses the terms to “salvage” and “to rescue” to describe the task of the cultural critic. As
she notes in a round-table discussion about La insubordinación de los signos, the book was conceived as a
kind of “salvataje y rescate” of practices and discourses that existed only as/in photocopies and other
ephemeral materials (Richard, Insubordinación 102).

  179  
sociología del presente y permanecerían a la deriva sin la crítica cultural” (13). Declaring

the language of art foreign to the social sciences, Richard positions “crítica cultural” as

the proper “translator” for art, as a discourse capable of rescuing the shipwrecked shards

of art and literature from eternal driftage.

Richard’s depiction of the critic as a heroic figure capable of drawing the secrets

of a marginal culture from the silence of its wreckage was particularly useful in a Latin

American context. It allowed Richard both to authorize crítica cultural in an international

context while establishing a local criticism in Chile that could finally claim theoretical

currency. In the late 1980s, amid the international dominance of postmodern

interpretations, Richard’s vindication of and identification with the margin granted a

privileged position to crítica cultural, setting it apart from an undifferentiated

“Posmodernist International” while bringing it into critical dialogue with metropolitan

criticism. As Richard claims in her “Response to Vidal (from Chile)”:

Although [the Revista de Crítica Cultural] takes up a metropolitan

knowledge-game in which the crisis of the center compels it to re-center
its attention on its borders and periphery, it does so from the margins,
borders, limits, periphery, interstices, in-between – actual liminal site-
postures from which it can dialogue critically, in a process of both
exchange and confrontation with the postmodernisms and their
metropolitan theorization as postmodern center-marginality. (230)

The “crisis of the center” in metropolitan circles granted a critical advantage to crítica

cultural, whose intimate knowledge of and positioning at the margin made it uniquely

capable of appropriating, reconverting, and embodying the terms of metropolitan

theorization (229).166

                                                                                                               
166
As Richard notes, the uses of the postmodern register for critical debate in Latin America permit the
appropriation and reconversion of figures like fragmentation, hybridism, and de-centering, which are
particularly fit for analyzing local problematics (“Response” 229).

  180  
 At the same time, however, Richard’s familiarity with the postmodern critical

canon, introduced into Chile through the new critical writing of the literary-critical avant-

garde allowed her to present herself as a necessary antidote to the “retraso del medio

cultural chileno” (Margins 134) and its failure to prepare the way for the consumption

and manipulation of “información internacional” (135). Using the language of

developmentalism, Richard blames the precariousness of critical thought in Chile for the

local incapacity to understand both the products of the avant-garde and their use of

cosmopolitan theory. As she argues in Márgenes e institución, the silencing of the

literary-critical avant-garde and its use of French post-structuralist theory was as much a

result of censorship as of the “oscurantismo cultural nacional,” which stood in the way of

“un desarrollo de pensamiento que necesariamente requiere de los avances analíticos de

la teoría contemporánea” (134). Speaking about the critical texts produced by the critical

scene of the late ‘70s and early ’80s, Richard notes that

la mayoría de los textos producidos durante ese periodo registran en su

interior la dimensión de conflicto que les significa operar con claves de
lectura tan escasamente divulgadas en Chile, tan difícilmente
identificables (y por ende, descodificables) por el destinatario local que se
siente violentado por el exhibicionismo cultural de un cuerpo de riquezas
que no hace sino evidenciar sus privaciones. (135)

Amid the “poverty” and “privations” of Chilean culture, crítica cultural assumed the

urgent pedagogical role of disseminating and providing the “claves de lectura” that would

open the rich treasure chest of post-structuralist theory hiding among the shards of the

“escena de avanzada.” In her role as a privileged interpreter, with the keys to both local

culture and international criticism, Richard would once again try to institute and

constitute a legitimate Latin American criticism that derived its authority from a

  181  
“marginal” culture but that set itself apart from that precarious and undifferentiated

literary-critical landscape.

Published in the late 80s and throughout the 90s, Richard’s most well known

critical texts appeared after Enrique Lihn passed away in 1988. One can still imagine,

however, the ridicule with which Lihn might greet such lofty ambitions to construct a

criticism that could lead Latin America out of the paradise of precariousness and into an

illuminated metropolis, finally freed from its poverty, its darkness, its “falencias”

(Richard, Margins 135). In his 1988 article, “Eugenio Téllez: Descubridor de

Invenciones,” Lihn anticipated such ambitions and critiqued the “nuevas ortodoxias” of

the “escena de avanzada.” Through his analysis of Téllez’s paintings and their use of

“poor” and “precarious” materials, Lihn vindicated the “poverty” of words and images,

setting it against “jergas especializadas y sus efectos de profundidad que apuntan,

gravemente, a la utopía de reemplazar la imagen por la palabra y la palabra por la teoría”

(Eugenio Téllez n.p.). More than ten years earlier, Lihn had elaborated a similar critique

in La orquesta de cristal, whose “poor” critical languages revealed and attacked the

metequismo of “specialized jargons” with their performance of expertise, profundity,

richness, and depth. Read through the refractive mirror of Lihn’s critical fiction Richard

appears as a kind of paradigmatic meteca who, like Pompier and his absurd cohort of

provincial interpreters, sets out to “integrarse en el mejor de los mundos compensatorios”

by promoting a more “developed” critical discourse that could liberate both her and the

culture in whose name she speaks from the oppression of “cultural provincialism” (Lastra

111). Her metequismo, absurd enough from Latin America, is perhaps even more

ridiculous given the fact that Richard was born and raised in France. Richard was twenty-

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two when she immigrated to Chile in 1970, after studying modern literature at La

Sorbonne during the 1960s. Her voyage from the City of Light to a Chile about to plunge

into the darkness of the dictatorship serves as the mirror image of Pompier’s voyage from

Santiago to Paris. Following the paradigmatic path of the meteco, she would go not from

the margins to the center of culture, but from the heart of the “avances analíticos de la

teoría contemporánea” to a marginal culture that she would try to “rescue” from oblivion.

Richard’s reverse metequismo, spectrally suggested in Lihn’s novel, comes into

sharper focus through the work of Adriana Valdés, a perhaps more witting meteca who

has often served as Richard’s interlocutor and as Lihn’s critical counterpart. Together

with Lihn and with Richard, Valdés played a key role in the literary-critical avant-garde

of the 1970s and is often cited as one of the most important critics from that scene. She

was also Lihn’s romantic partner at the time of the composition and publication of La

orquesta de cristal, which is dedicated to her.167 Although Valdés appears only once, in

the book’s dedication, she stands, in many ways, as the novel’s silent heroine, embodying

in her critical interventions something of the critical utopia that both Lihn and Richard

tried to defend in their work. Particularly incisive are Valdés’s interpretations of

Richard’s work, which often expose Richard’s efforts at self-authorization and her

contradictory relationship to the more precarious strategies of the literary-critical avant-

garde. Often included in conferences and publications meant to discuss and celebrate

Richard’s work, Valdés’s comments often have the opposite effect: instead of

establishing the authority of Richard’s discourse, they contest and contradict Richard’s

                                                                                                               
167
As Lihn comments in “Doce años de escritura en todos los géneros,” La orquesta de cristal was a direct
result of their romance and its first sentences were penned as part of “una nota irónica que dejé debajo de
una puerta hablando de las dificultades del amor absoluto” (191).
  183  
interpretations, recuperating, instead, a certain lack of discipline that Richard tends to

write away in her texts.

One of Valdés’s most critical interventions is “La escritura crítica y su efecto:

Una reflexión preliminar,” included in the 1987 Arte en Chile desde 1973 together with

other texts discussing Richard’s recently published Márgenes e institución. Valdés’s

article focuses on Richard’s analysis of the critical writing that accompanied the literary-

critical avant-garde and highlights the “autism” of that writing as its greatest weakness.

As Richard herself notes, the “escena de escritura” “presuponía un lector no sólo

cómplice sino también experto en maniobras transcodificadoras” (La insubordinación

64). According to Valdés, by positing its ideal reader as an expert, well versed in post-

structuralist theory, the critical avant-garde isolated itself from “interlocutores reales” and

restricted its “escrituras que quisieran ser contestatarias” to “un reducto o ‘reservation’

para sus actividades reservadas” (“La escritura” 84). Like Richard, Valdés attributes the

isolation of the critical avant-garde to the realities of the Chilean milieu: in a country

where even the “educated” reader only had access to literary categories from “la época

del impresionismo,” the writing of the critical avant-garde was perceived as “otro

lenguaje técnico, como el lenguaje de otra disciplina en la cual se carece de competencia”

(85).168 For Valdés, the lack of a proper reader is, however, not an inadequacy that needs

to be remedied but a reality that, in an unfortunate act of metequismo, the critical avant-

garde failed to take into account. As she notes, “al transformar el discurso sobre el arte en

una forma más de especialización y en un campo disciplinario que tiene sus propias

referencias inaccesibles a los legos, se presupone un tipo de público que en los países

desarrollados existe en gran número: un gran público académico que tiene sus
                                                                                                               
168
The quotations around “educated” are present in Valdés’s text.
  184  
necesidades de autoperpetuarse” (85). According to Valdés, the critics of the avant-garde

did not write for “common readers” in Chile but for an international audience made

possible by the institutional scope and stability of metropolitan academia.

Valdés shared with Lihn the concern that the writing and criticism of the literary-

critical avant-garde was “divorciado de la vía pública” and comprehensible only to a

small circle of specialists capable of theorizing it (Lihn, Eugenio Téllez n.p.). As Lihn put

it, the international and internationalizing proposals of the Chilean avant-garde and its

dreams of transgression got lost in their pathetic “hermetismo, su hipertrofia teórica, su

instalación en una tierra sin suelo, su colectivización sin colectividad” (n.p.). Installed in

that utopian “land without ground,” the escena de avanzada became, for Valdés, an

“esfuerzo trágico” insofar as it consumed itself in its own desire, in its will to exist

despite external conditions (86). Recognizing and participating in external conditions

was, however, of key importance for Valdés, who continued to emphasize critics’ need to

come out of the theoretical isolation of their “transgressive” or “oppositional” postures

and join the “common reader” in the “vía pública.” In various articles and public

discussions, Valdés questions Richard’s deliberate self-marginalization and argues in

favor of a less contentious common ground where reader and writer, critic and public

could meet. Undermining Richard’s attempts to privilege transgression, interference,

disruption, and controversy over “la tiranía lingüística de lo simple, lo directo y lo

transparente” (Richard, Residuos 14), Valdés argues that the transgressive gestures of

interference and disruption hold no special privilege (quoted in Richard, La

insubordinación 111) and vindicates instead the critical potential of the “lugar común”

(Valdes, “La escritura” 89).

  185  
 Drawing on its use in ancient rhetoric, Valdés defines the commonplace as an

element of discourse that both orator and audience recognize: it provides a temporary

space of consensus that the orator can then use as grounds to build a discourse and open

new discursive spaces. In 1987, in the final years of the dictatorship, the commonplace

defined by Valdés was a means of combating the compartmentalizations created by the

authoritarian regime and their capacity to disrupt dialogue across realms of culture.

According to Valdés, contributing to the atomization of discourse into small circuits of

specialized writers and readers can only further the ends of political repression.

Disregarding the compartmentalizations placed upon culture, Valdés thus dreams of the

commonplace as a spacious and welcoming “lugar desde el cual leer […] en que quepan

mayor número de interlocutores” (89). In the fragmented society of the 1980s and a time

when the collective narratives of the 60s and 70s had been declared unworkable, Valdés

recognizes the utopian dimensions of her “zona común [donde] todos pueden participar

en un mismo discurso colectivo.” Yet she continues to insist on the usefulness of her

“ficción humanista” and its capacity to create a much needed collectivity: “Con esto

apunto a un tema sobre el cual no me siento competente para opinar, pero lo recojo a

modo de deseo ingenuo: el de una confluencia possible entre los lenguajes de personas

que quisieran—al menos en las grandes formulaciones—ser capaces de una acción

común en el ámbito social” (85).

Mobilizing a form of strategic candidness, Valdés thus construes herself as a

“common reader” capable of sharing interpretive space with a purportedly naive or

unspecialized reader. As in the quote above, Valdés often disavows discursive authority

  186  
and expertise and depicts her critical strategies as partial and tentative efforts.169 In the

round table discussion on Richard’s La insubordinación de los signos, for example,

Valdés objects to Richard’s claims that Valdés’s reading strategies were a “foco

guerrillero”—the attack strategies of an insubordinate reader—and presents them,

instead, as a “táctica de escape” (quoted in Richard, La insubordinación 99). To borrow

the terms that Lihn used to describe Pompier, Valdés identifies not with the predatory

owl—symbol of Minerva’s power—but with the Caligo Prometheus, the “vulnerable”

and “inoffensive” butterfly that frightens off its aggressors through dissimulation (Lihn,

“Entretelones” 583). Like Pompier, Valdés is also adept in the critical strategies of

mimeticism, most notably in Enrique Lihn: Vistas parciales, her collection of essays on

Lihn’s work. In its prologue, Valdés recognizes that some of its essays are clothed in a

“disfraz académico” (20) but claims that she took on “distintos tonos y distintas

mascaras” to write the various essays in the book (17).170 As the title of the book

declares, Enrique Lihn: Vistas parciales is indeed a partial text: taking sides with Lihn, it

renounces all pretentions to objectivity and constructs its readings from partial and

fragmentary pieces of discourse drawn from conversations, academic presentations,

literary readings, anecdotes, high theory, poetry, and impassioned editorial articles.171 In

                                                                                                               
169
Valdés’s interventions are often full of caveats that undermine her authority even before she begins
speaking. Her claims that “no me siento competente para opinar” is echoed in the round table on Richard’s
Insubordinación de los signos where she similarly begins her interventions with phrases like “tal vez me
equivoque,” “lo digo sin ironía” (quoted in Richard, Insubordinación 111).
170
It is worth noting that despite Valdés’s rhetorical strategies to disavow her authority, Enrique Lihn:
Vistas Parciales offers extraordinary interpretations of Lihn’s work, and earned Valdés the Altazor Prize in
the essay category in 2010.
171
In her prologue to Enrique Lihn: Vistas parciales outlines the multiple meanings behind the title, and
emphasizes the fact that her former romantic relationship with Lihn prevents her from taking an objective
perspective on his work. As Valdés recounts, her incapacity to read Lihn’s texts dispassionately had
previously made her unsure of her capacity to contribute to the “estudios avanzados” about Lihn’s work
(21). In the end, however, the comments from old and new generations of academics convince her of the
  187  
contrast to Richard, who translates Lihn into her single deconstructive register, Valdés

offers the reader multiple points of entry into Lihn’s work, thus making her text

“accesible a todo público, y no solo a los especialistas en literatura” (21).172

“Una cuerda de reloj/ dedales e insectos, bolitas de vidrio/ la copa quebrada,’ algo

‘transfigurado en un efecto de joyas…’ ‘formalizado por el rigor/ de la ley que sonríe en

las cajitas de Joseph Cornell” (Lihn, quoted in Valdés, Enrique Lihn 24). Borrowing

verses from one of Lihn’s poems, Adriana Valdés ultimately characterizes her collection

of essays as a loose thread, a pinned butterfly, a broken branch, a bit of debris.173 Pieced

together like “retazos,” the partial bits of discourse that Valdés uses to construct her text

do not aspire to the richness of jewels except through a mirage, through the effects of the

“rigor” not of the specialist but of the assembler, the bricoleur. Over and over, Valdés

emphasizes the partiality, precariousness, and insufficiency of every attempt to write

about Lihn. Seeking to construct a temporary constellation that would not imprison Lihn

(23), Valdés draws on the same fictional mechanisms that Lihn used for critical ends.

Insisting on the fact that each text “tiene su propia pequeña historia” (15) and serves

specific rhetorical ends, she constructed each of her readings accordingly, weaving them

together like small fictions from the scraps of “mi memoria y mi imaginación” (24).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
text’s “derecho a existir” (21). Thus, instead of attempting to construct an implausible objective
perspective, Valés assumes the partiality of her perspective and explicitly states, “tomo partido por él” (15).
Valdés thus presents her book as a “texto enamorado” (21): a kind of critical love note that responds almost
thirty years later to that literary love note that is La orquesta de cristal.
172
In La insubordinación de los signos Richard presents Lihn as a paradigmatic example of the “utopías
críticas” created by the satirical thinking of the 1970s avant-garde. Richard characterizes Lihn’s writing as
“un discurso que pone en cuestión el acto mismo de conceptualizar cualquier cosa a través del lenguaje”
and presents it as a writing that sets the tone for the most strongly deconstructive works of the dictatorship
(23).
173
The quoted fragments are from Lihn’s poem “Para A” in the collection Pena de extrañamiento.

  188  
 Adriana Valdés’s criticism thus remains faithful to the “negative utopia” or

“paradise of precariousness” that Lihn tried to construct in his work. Taking the risk of

naiveté, she sides with both Lihn and Pompier and depicts herself as a witting meteca,

aware of the “carácter reparatorio” and “un poco victoriano” of her text (24). Not afraid

to fall into the “archaic” archive of the “literary” essay, Valdés continues to practice the

“escrilectura: bricolage de textos, collage de fragmentos” that characterizes Prompier’s

texts (Lihn, “Entretelones” 583). As she describes her critical writing: “la he armado así

como una especie de ilustración de una relación con el saber: menos discipulaje que

pillaje, una especie de extraña navegación por el mar de los Sargazos, una recopilación

fortuita de ideas encontradas” (“La escritura” 82). The capacity to “errar,” to err or roam

like a pirate through the sea of Latin America’s precariousness makes Valdés a

paradigmatic example of what Héctor Libertella calls a kind of “artesanía

Latinoamericana acostumbrada a revolver indiferente en las escrituras de cualquier época

y lugar” (quoted in Lihn, “Entretelones” 579). Errant and undisciplined, Valdés would

resist the impulse to constitute a legitimate criticism, an authoritative interpretation, a

closed discipline that would save Latin America from its precariousness. She joins, in this

sense, the community of Latin American “common readers,” those metecos “que han

quedado sin sitio, descolocadas, desitiadas, errátiles; errátiles como lo es la imaginación”

(Lihn, “Doce años” 193).

Perhaps only thus, with the discursive fluidity of their erring and errant readings,

can the metecos displaced by the authoritative discourses of late twentieth-century Chile

address what Richard calls the need to revitalize “other archives of knowledge with non-

canonical readings” (“Reconfigurations” 277). As Richard is well aware, only such non-

  189  
canonical readings can “revise actual processes of decentering and transversality with

which practices like cultural studies and cultural critique pretend to challenge the criteria

of autonomy and purity—of non-interference—associated with traditional criticism”

(277). Revising criticism’s critical strategies became ever-more pressing as the

millennium drew to a close and criticism found it more difficult to leave the discursive

realm of the university and make itself felt in the “extra-academic territories of action”

(277). As we will see in the next chapter, Héctor Libertella, Beatriz Sarlo, and Josefina

Ludmer would all respond to such challenges by mobilizing a Latin American literary-

critical practice that might undo the discursive, institutional, and social boundaries of the

late twentieth century. Undoing such boundaries would be particularly pressing as crítica

cultural and other forms of Latin American criticism consolidated their authority and

incorporated Latin America into an international critical market. Within that newly

powerful market, globalization would limit the critical diversity that had paradoxically

been allowed by the purported backwardness of a southern cultural milieu and threaten

the critical space claimed by Latin American literary-critical practices. It would then be

up to other naive readers—the primate, the savage, the illiterate—to elaborate non-

canonical readings that could escape the walls of the ghettos created by the late twentieth

century.

  190  
 CHAPTER 4

Héctor Libertella, Beatriz Sarlo, and Josefina Ludmer:

Critical Utopias for the Turn of the Millennium

“Demás que honra me ha causado hacerme obscuro a los

ignorantes, que esa es la distinción de los hombres doctos,
hablar de manera que a ellos les parezca griego…”

-­‐ Góngora, “Carta de don Luis de Góngora en

respuesta de la que le escribieron”

A couple customers are sitting at a bar. It is, as Josefina Ludmer would later put

it, “un nuevo mundo” (Aquí 9). We are at the end of the millennium, in the year 2000,

and Héctor Libertella has just published El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. In his text, the

customers gaze across the bar at a plaza where writers gather around its only tree. There’s

a certain festive air to the scene: the plaza is no longer under siege, and it’s market day.

All kinds of characters traverse the plaza’s oval perimeter: a fisherman, an architect, an

illiterate man, an obsessive reader, a monkey, a poet, critics and intellectuals from all

over the globe. There is, at first sight, nothing extraordinary here—the bar’s customers

drink and gaze while the plaza’s only bathroom fills up with graffiti. Yet there is also

something slightly askew. For this plaza is part of a ghetto, whose limits are those of the

plaza while being as large as the world. In that ghetto the fisherman’s objective is not to

fish, but to display his “red” or “net” for the architect, who is interested only in

measuring the holes in its network or web (Libertella, El árbol de Saussure 20; henceforth

  191  
ADS). In a similar way, the reader does not read but pricks his veins with a Parker pen;

the monkey wants to take a stroll through the jungle but cannot find his way out of the

ghetto; the threads of instant communication gag the global village; and literature has

become an illegible ghost: “un fantasma siempre un poco ilegible entre las líneas del

mercado” (21).

Yet such reversals do not faze our customers, who gaze at the plaza with “mirada

boba” (15). This is, after all, not just any bar, but the one that divides the signifier from

the signified, the word “arbor” from a scraggy picture with an upright trace, a leafy frond.

Drawn at the beginning of Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía (2000),

Saussure’s diagram of the linguistic sign offers a kind of map for the new world that

Libertella constructs out of its few and simple traces. As if the diagram were a form of

graffiti, found fortuitously and decontextualized, Libertella reads it literally, turning its

theoretical structure into the basis for a series of fictions. In them, Libertella sketches out

minimal characters. Thin and abstract verbal forms, his characters do not so much act as

pose in various scenes that Libertella juxtaposes, layers, and links together. The resulting

effect is that of a verbal mock-up or diorama where different scenes are successively

brought to the foreground. As the beginning of chapter three describes it: “El ghetto no es

un espacio sino una especie de mancha que emergió de un mapa. Junto con esa mancha

brotaron objetos y figuras. Todo funciona como una instalación en la que, por casualidad,

se destaca ahora uno al azar de los parroquianos del bar” (ADS 35). Like the fisherman

who does not fish, the architect who does not build, the monkey whose walk takes him

nowhere, this is a narrative that does little narrating. Although published in the collection

“relato” or “narrative” of Beatriz Viterbo Editores, El árbol de Saussure shuns both plot

  192  
and psychological development. Instead, it makes of reading a fictional mechanism that

not only turns Saussure’s diagram into a setting, but also opens its own figures to

interpretation. The ghetto’s abstract figures thus become the generative seed for a host of

reflections, theories, and readings that share the space of the novel with Libertella’s

minimal descriptions.

Like other critical fictions, El árbol de Saussure takes critical writing as the raw

material for fiction. In this case, Libertella takes Saussure’s diagram—along with other

critical texts and cultural products—as the basis for fictional worlds while using the

conventions of criticism to structure his text. Like a series of micro-essays, the seven

chapters in the book combine fictional scenes with interpretations supported by quotes,

references, and meticulous bibliographic footnotes. As Esteban Prado describes it, El

árbol de Saussure is a “postmundo leído por una postribu internacional” (617). In keeping

with the reading strategies at the end of the millennium, Libertella’s “post-tribe”

describes its “post-world” through a series of books, texts, and cultural references from a

wide variety of fields and disciplines. The referential status of their references is,

however, not entirely clear. As with Eduardo Torres in Lo demás es silencio and Gerardo

de Pompier in La orquesta de cristal, many of the texts and critics in this novel seem to be

fictional, or at least, nowhere to be found in the wide, wide world of the web. Yet in

contrast to Monterroso’s and Lihn’s novels, the appearance in the year 2000 of

Libertella’s book did not resolve the text’s discursive or referential ambiguities by

allowing readers to classify the book, and the critics within it, firmly within the realm of

fiction.174 In fact, the publication of El árbol de Saussure as a self-proclaimed “narrative”

                                                                                                               
174
In chapter 2, I argued that while the texts published by Monterroso under the pseudonym Eduardo
Torres were still ambiguously situated between the realms of criticism and fiction, the publication of Lo
  193  
only exacerbated the difficulties of distinguishing apocryphal authors from marginal or

well-known ones. As Prado notes, “el hecho de que el libro comience con una cita de un

autor del que el lector no puede recuperar ninguna referencia lleva a que el resto de los

autores que aparezcan citados también sean sometidos a la duda” (671). The so-called

“Winfried Hassler” cited in the book’s epigraph is a paradigmatic example of Libertella’s

capacity to blur fiction and criticism by luring the reader into a fool’s errand to determine

whether the cited authors are real or imagined, critics or fictions, authors or ventriloquists

of their words.

“El parque gráfico está lleno de fantasmas, espectros de libros,” writes one Clóvis

Carvalho, cited in El árbol de Saussure (68). Himself a kind of specter—a “real”

Brazilian politician but an unlikely author of this quote—Carvalho points to the source of

radical indeterminacy that in this novel challenges the most erudite of readers attempting

to pry fiction from criticism.175 For Libertella seems to attribute false quotes even to well-

known writers like Paul Claudel while correctly citing lesser-known works, like an essay

on Mirta Dermisache by the Argentine poet Arturo Carrera.176 In other critical fictions,

this indeterminacy led to a series of bewildered responses: it elicited the self-protective

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
demás es silencio resolved the ambiguities by allowing critics to depict Torres’s texts as literary parodies of
intellectual writing. In chapter 3, I noted how the publication of Lihn’s novel during the Pinochet regime
prevented critics from reading it as a critical commentary on society and encouraged the notion that Lihn’s
novel was a rarified literary experiment.
175
Carvalho was Secretary of State during the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-99) in
Brazil. Libertella’s book presents him as the presumed author of A cultura que nos olha (São Paulo: Arché,
1997). Both the book and the publishing house are, however, nowhere to be found in electronic
bibliographic resources.
176
Libertella attributes the following quote to Paul Claudel, citing it in Spanish: “El objetivo de la literatura
es enseñarnos a leer” (53). Finding the original source of this quote again proves a challenge: this may be
due either to misattribution, outright invention, or mistranslation, of which Libertella is also fond.
Carreras’s quote (68), on the other hand, is correctly cited as coming from the section “La escritura ilegible
de Mirtha Dermisache” in the essay “Tejidos esponjosos.”

  194  
laughter of Monterroso’s readers, eager to prove their critical competence at identifying

“fictional” works, and the silence of Lihn’s would-be critics, cautious of reading a novel

as a “critical” text. Yet to judge from various analyses of El árbol de Saussure,

Libertella’s critics seem to be completely cured of bewilderment. The book, in fact, has

been pronounced as the culminating point in Libertella’s efforts to connect the parallel

territories of literature and criticism (Prado 615). It has been called an “obra maestra de la

ficción teórica” (Damiani 11) and a “ficción ensayística” (Estrín 51), and classified as an

essay in which literature is both object of analysis and procedure (Crespi 110). As Prado

notes in a synthesis of various analyses, “En él no hay forma de diferenciar ficción de

crítica, no se presenta como un híbrido en el que puedan detectarse fragmentos

diferenciados: cada pasaje es ficción y crítica al mismo tiempo” (615). This tendency to

read El árbol de Saussure as a book that is simultaneously fiction and criticism provided a

framework for understanding the text and allowed critics to grant literary value to

Libertella’s unconventional textual strategies. It allowed them to position the novel as a

literary masterpiece and Libertella as an under-recognized master of Argentine literature,

inheritor of such literary giants as Macedonio Fernández and Jorge Luis Borges.177

Such depictions of El árbol de Saussure, however, had to wait until after

Libertella’s death in 2006. There has been little criticism of Libertella’s text and what has

been written is mostly found in the collection of essays El efecto Libertella (2010),

compiled by Marcelo Damiani in a canonizing effort to recognize Libertella’s literary

                                                                                                               
177
For example, in “Macedonio Fernández & Héctor Libertella: la escritura puesta en abismo” Ariana
Castellarnau engages in an extensive comparison between the writings of Libertella and Macedonio
Fernández. In his prologue to El efecto Libertella, Damiani establishes an implicit association between
Borges and Libertella by noting that Libertella was born on Borges’s forty-sixth birthday. According to
Damiani, this fortuitous circumnstance “quizá… marcó desde el comienzo su precoz destino literario” (11).

  195  
legacy. Yet immediately after its publication, Libertella’s book received little critical

commentary. As Damiani notes in his introductory essay, “durante bastante tiempo

(alrededor de veinte o treinta años), Libertella fue una suerte de código o clave secreta del

sentido y del afán literario argentino… muy pocos sabían realmente cuáles eran los

algoritmos de ese código misterioso, y menos aún los que podían explicarlos, aunque

muchos insinuaran conocerlos” (14). Damiani suggests that Libertella’s writing remained

a kind of mystery throughout his life, both the object of prestigious literary prizes and a

baffling literary experiment that publishing houses were only grudgingly willing to take

on (Idez 189).178 In his elegiac chronicle for Damiani’s compilation, Ariel Idez notes how

difficult it became for Libertella to publish his books after El árbol de Saussure, a turning

point that changed and reoriented Libertella’s writing (189). According to Damián

Tabarovsky, the number of unpublished manuscripts that Libertella left behind stemmed

not from the value of his writing but from the difficulties that his texts posed to readers

and publishing houses: “A lo largo de los años se ha escuchado (en redacciones, cátedras,

revistas culturales, editoriales, canales de television) que Libertella es un autor ‘difícil’,

que ‘vende poco’, que ‘es incomprensible’, que es ‘hermético’, que ‘no circula’” (43).

Libertella’s radical mixture of fiction and criticism remained a source of bewilderment,

perhaps not so much for his critics as for a market that did not know how to position or

what to do with his texts.179

                                                                                                               
178
Among other prizes, Libertella won the Premio Paidós in 1968 at the age of 23. In 1971 he received the
Monte Avila prize for the novel Aventura de los miticistas, and in 1986 he received the Juan Rulfo Prize
for Paseo Internacional del Perverso.
179
Libertella himself liked to perpetuate this view of his writing. When I met him in 2004 he mentioned,
with apparent pleasure, that booksellers had no idea in what section of the bookstore to place his texts.

  196  
 Perhaps more representative of El árbol de Saussure and its reception is Josefina

Ludmer’s reading of the book in Aquí América latina, which analyzes various Argentine

and Latin American novels published in 2000. The first part of the book, structured as a

diary penned during the sabbatical year that Ludmer spent in Buenos Aires in 2000,

allows Ludmer to present her analysis as the immediate reaction of a reader coming

across Libertella’s text for the first time. “Leo las cien páginas de El árbol de Saussure,

Una utopía y quedo fascinada pero no entiendo nada,” she writes in a surprising

admission of critical incomprehension, though she quickly recovers from it: “Después me

doy cuenta: es una ‘utopía puramente literaria’, un manifiesto de resistencia al mercado,

sin narración. Porque no narra sino, como en toda utopía, inventa y describe un mundo

desde cero” (95). With its two poles of confusion and insight, Ludmer’s reading serves as

a kind of miniature theory that highlights the interrelated roles of legibility and the

market in El árbol de Saussure. Ludmer’s initial dumbfounded reaction to Libertella’s

“literary utopia” echoes the “mirada boba” of the bar’s customers who gaze across the

plaza at the writers in El árbol de Saussure (15). The fact that it is always market day in

that plaza, and that the plaza is coterminous with the world is critical. As Ludmer notes,

this fictional construction allows Libertella to theorize what would happen to both literary

and critical discourses if the agora were not only to overtake the world but were also to

lose its meaning as a site of public discourse to become, exclusively, a market.180 By

staging her reading in the Argentina of the year 2000, at a time when the market had

                                                                                                               
180
The agora—a term originally used for the main plaza in Athens—had, in ancient Greece, a twin function
as both a center of civic life and a market place. This dual function is reflected in the two Greek verbs that
derived from the noun agora: ἀγοράζω, agorázō, “I shop,” and ἀγορεύω, agoreúō, “I speak in public.” The
twenty-first century use of the term “agora,” however, restricts its meaning to the first function, thus
reflecting the sense that the centers of political and civic life and the marketplace do—and should—occupy
completely separate realms.

  197  
achieved new prominence as the regulator of culture, Ludmer engages in similar

theorizing: her initial confusion suggests that at the turn of the millennium Libertella’s

“purely literary” text had become incomprehensible, a utopia incapable or unwilling to

make a niche for itself in a fast-paced and demanding market.

Despite Ludmer’s characterization of El árbol de Saussure as “purely literary,” it

is she—and not critics who depict Libertella’s book as “critical”—who links the book to

its cultural and historical milieu. Like Adriana Castellarnau, many critics tend to write

about El árbol de Saussure as if it were enclosed in the “estricto e íntimo reducto del

espacio literario,” as if the ghetto were “un territorio despojado de la unción regional y de

cualquier referencia al orden de lo real” (60).181 Ludmer’s diary entries, on the other

hand, situate the novel temporally, surrounding it with the sights and sounds of Buenos

Aires in the year 2000: the clicking of keyboards in internet cafés, people talking on cell

phones, a TV flickering back and forth from the show Okupas to newscasts of political

corruption, then shifting quickly to footage of a protest against the IMF. For Ludmer, the

eternal present of Libertella’s “purely literary” utopia is “una temporalidad puramente

formal que responde exactamente a la estructura de nuestro presente del 2000” (95).

Indeed, from its very first pages the novel marks its place and time: by changing the word

“arbre” to “árbol” in Saussure’s diagram (ADS 15) and by citing “1992” as the

publication date of its first reference (21) Libertella situates his novel in the Spanish-

speaking world at the turn of the millennium. From that temporal and spatial position, the

                                                                                                               
181
The essays in El efecto Libertella tend to fall into two categories. Some, like César Aira’s “Sin título” or
Ricardo Strafacce’s “Arena de verdad,” are elegiac remembrances of Libertella as both writer and friend
and situate Libertella’s writing in the context of daily life; others focus on Libertella’s works and
sometimes make reference to the broad cultural context of his works. Although most note Libertella’s
conflictive relationship to the market, few make reference to the historical context in which El árbol de
Saussure is embedded.

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book “postula una historia y una política de la literatura como resistencia minoritaria a los

discursos claros y jerárquicos del poder. Cuanto más illegible más literario y más critico”

(Ludmer, Aquí 96). Libertella’s strategy of illegibility as a literary politics would have a

particularly critical sting in the Argentina of 2000, where the acute recession associated

with the implementation of neoliberal policies was putting into question both the place of

literature and the possibility for critique.

Published in 2000, El árbol de Saussure appeared in the midst of a deep economic

recession in Argentina that would eventually lead to the economic, social, and political

crisis of 2001.182 Rising unemployment, economic uncertainty, deepening social

inequalities, and a growing disillusionment with the government intensified debates in

Argentina about the fate of culture in a changing economic and cultural landscape in

which the market had achieved new prominence as the regulator of culture. Although

such questions had been raised since the transition from military rule to democracy in

1983,183 they gained new urgency with the implementation of neoliberal policies during

Carlos Menem’s administration (1989-99) and the brief presidency of Fernando de la Rúa

                                                                                                               
182
Throughout the 1980s, Argentina experienced a number of socio-economic crises leading up to the
political and economic collapse of 2001. However, Argentina had also experienced a number of
socioeconomic crises throughout the 1980s that sparked food riots, rising inflation, and monetary shortages,
which led to the early transition from Raúl Alfonsín to Carlos Menem in 1989 (Newman 161). Although
some of the country’s economic problems seemed to improve during the first years of Menem’s presidency,
the implementation of neoliberal policies only intensified the problems bequeathed to Argentina by the
military dictatorship of 1976-1983. By 1998 Argentina had once again fallen into recession and by 2001 it
became the stage for an acute social and political crisis with particular repercussions for the lowest strata of
society. For economic and political analyses of the policies that led to the crisis of 2001, see Carranza’s
“Poster Child or Imperialist Globalization? Explaining Argentina’s December 2001 Political Crisis and
Economic Collapse” and Marisela Svampa’s La sociedad excluyente.
183
For a discussion of the changes in the cultural field after democratization but before Menem’s
government, see Oscar Landi, “Campo cultural y democratización en Argentina.” Although the dominance
of the market became especially prevalent after 1989, Landi had already argued in 1987 that the cultural
climate in the mid-80s was not a propitious one for intervention by the State. His article suggests that some
sectors—particularly private media companies—were already beginning to establish an opposition between
market and state and seeking the privatization of the mass media and of other industries.

  199  
(1999-2001).184 During their tenures in office, Menem and De la Rúa gave a new

centrality to the market in an effort to incorporate Argentina into a globalized economy,

bringing the country into the flows of both international media and transnational capital.

The policies implemented throughout the 1990s reduced the role of the state in dictating

cultural policy and turned over the circulation and distribution of culture to the market,

while giving new impetus to audiovisual media as the dominating cultural force of the

new social landscape.185 With the deregulation and privatization of culture and the

increasing power and prominence of large audiovisual conglomerates, literature and

criticism began to lose ground to a mass culture that was threatening to eclipse not only

distinctly “literary” products, but also the increasingly closed circuits of cultural

interpretation.

The weakening of the state through globalization, neoliberal policies, and a

growing distrust of the government seemed especially worrisome in the realm of culture,

for it threatened to undermine the state’s power and authority to make space for cultural

phenomena that failed to meet the demands of the market.186 Particularly vulnerable were

                                                                                                               
184
For a the effects of neoliberal policies on cultural production, see Francine Masiello’s The Art of
Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis as well as Argentinean Cultural Production
during the Neoliberal Years (1989-2001), edited by Hugo Hortiguera and Carolina Rocha. The introduction
to the latter volume provides a succinct overview of some of the major changes that neoliberal policies
wrought on the cultural field.
185
As Hortiguera and Rocha note, the privatization in the early 1990s of TV channels and radio stations
that had, until then, been in the hands of the State led to the formation of powerful conglomerates. With
increased advertising for audiovisual products, the mass media replaced word-centered cultural products
(Hortiguera 11). This led to the growing sense that Argentine literature was unable to respond to the
specific demands of its given historical times and that literature was being displaced to the margins of
cultural life (10).
186
In Ni apocalípticos ni integrados, Martín Hopenhayn argues that the crisis of paradigms and utopias that
occurred after the defeat of both socialism and the planning state led to the demise of culture as a public
discourse and thus contributed to cultural deregulation (103). In Argentina, however, the reduced role of
the state in the regulation of culture also had much to do with the growing suspicion of the state provoked
by the military dictatorship of the 1970s and early 80s (Landi 145).

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word-centered products like literature and criticism, which had to contend with the

shrinking of a previously robust publishing market in Argentina, the rise of translational

publishing houses (Hortiguera 11), and the growing power of a globalized academia

(Richard, “Globalización” 2-3). Literary works that, like El árbol de Saussure, did not

generate mass sales or media attention risked extinction, particularly at a time when

economic recession had significantly reduced the purchasing power of the middle class.

Similarly, in the realm of criticism, “la ‘función-centro’ del eje de reproducción y

transferencia academico-metropolitana hace que, muchas veces, sólo se reconozcan como

válidos, para efectos de la discussion internacional, aquellos discursos que se ciñen

linealmente a las demarcaciones de categorías y objetos ya recortados por el diseño

globalizante de la industria universitaria” (Richard, “Un debate” 841). For many

Argentine intellectuals of the 1990s, this situation fanned an old Latin American

problematic: the preoccupation that in the new globalized landscape, the fate of both

literature and criticism would be dictated by the centers of economic and discursive

power, which privileged literary and critical works that could easily be incorporated into

the global market.

One of the most vocal critics of such transformations was Beatriz Sarlo, whose

Escenas de la vida postmoderna lays out the difficulties presented by the joint forces of

postmodernism, globalization, and neoliberalism to “peripheral” countries like Argentina.

The opening of Escenas has become an iconic description of the new world ushered into

Latin America in the last decades of the millennium. This is how she describes her

cultural context in the Argentina of 1994:

Estamos en el fin de siglo y en la Argentina. Luces y sombras definen un

paisaje conocido en Occidente, pero los contrastes se exageran, aquí, por

  201  
 dos razones: nuestra marginalidad con respecto del ‘primer mundo’ (en
consecuencia, el character tributario de muchos procesos cuyos centros de
iniciativa están en otra parte); y la encallecida indiferencia con que el
Estado entrega al mercado la gestión cultural sin plantearse una política de
contrapeso. Como otras naciones de América, la Argentina vive el clima
de lo que se llama ‘posmodernidad’ en el marco paradójico de una nación
fracturada y empobrecida. Veinte horas de televisión diaria, por cincuenta
canales, y una escuela desarmada, sin prestigio simbólico ni recursos
materiales; paisajes urbanos trazados según el último design del mercado
internacional y servicios urbanos en estado crítico. (5)

Anticipating many of the issues that would come to the fore during the crisis of the late

90s, Sarlo’s book offers a critical counterpart to many of the issues raised in Libertella’s

novel. Like Libertella, Sarlo foregrounds the marginality of Argentina, its continuing

status as a “ghetto” that has nevertheless been absorbed into a global village.187 In that

ghetto, things look meager, contrasts are stark. The state’s absence has turned over the

plaza to the market, converting citizens into consumers. This transformation of the public

sphere not only dislodged politics from the plaza—a space that had played a key role in

Argentina’s political culture188—but also left little room for the intellectual as a potential

                                                                                                               
187
The notion that Argentina had been incorporated into the global village was particularly prevalent
during the Menem administration, which claimed that Argentina had, in fact, finally entered the First
World. The continuing marginality of Argentina, however, was brought to light by the crisis of 2001. This
tension between the purported dissolution of center-periphery models and Argentina’s continuing marginal
status can also be seen in the realm of criticism. As Jean Franco notes, despite the general sense that
postmodernism had dissolved the center and disseminated power, “there is still a tendency to continue
debating in terms determined by French or Anglo-Saxon criticism” (“Afterword” 513). Sarlo herself
analyzes the paradoxical occlusion of the center in postmodernism in the context of continuing inequalities.
See in particular her chapter “Abundancia y pobreza” in Escenas de la vida posmoderna. Román de la
Campa also discusses the problem in Latin Americanism, where he notes the tension between the
undifferentiation and free play advocated by poststructuralist theory and the hierarchies perpetuated by a
neoliberal logic. See in particular his chapter “Globalization, Neoliberalism, Cultural Studies.”
188
The political importance of the plaza in Argentina is perhaps epitomized by the importance that the
plaza assumed during Perón’s presidency and its subsequent reinvention by the Madres de la Plaza de
Mayo, who during the dictatorship recuperated the plaza as a space for public debate. Yet, in the 1980s, the
center of public life began to shift to the mall, both literally and metaphorically. As more shopping malls,
such as Patio Bullrich, were built in the 1980s (Newman 162), culture also turned from a public discourse
to a market phenomenon. A good example of the shift can be seen in the public debates about the
recuperation of memory after the dictatorship, whose public significance was put in question through their
absorption into a “market for social memory” (Masiello 6). It is worth noting, however, that the crisis of
2001 again seemed to revitalize the plaza as a political space and a site for public discourse.
  202  
critic of those transformations and of the inequalities that they perpetuate.189 As Sarlo’s

subtitle— “Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina”—suggests, the fate of the

intellectual in the new postmodern landscape is one of Sarlo’s key preoccupations. Like

Libertella, she is concerned, in particular, with the fate of art and literary culture, and the

possibility of constructing a discourse around art and literature in Argentina that might

offer resistance to globalization and the market.

Sarlo, in other words, is troubled by an old and perhaps now antiquated concern:

the possibility of constructing a specifically literary criticism in Latin America whose

critical response to internal and external inequalities could be heard in bustling plazas

both at home and abroad. That concern was especially pertinent after the transition to

democracy in 1983, which seemed to open new hope in Argentina for the long-postponed

project of constituting a Latin American criticism. As in Chile, the military dictatorship

that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 had barred all spaces for critique and sent

criticism underground. With the lifting of censorship, the critical discourses elaborated in

the informal intellectual circles that came to be known as the “Universidad de las

Catacumbas” promised to offer new bases for a criticism that could both claim critical

modernity abroad and respond to local problems. Sarlo herself had been a key figure in

the “University of the Catacombs” and helped import a number of critical tools,

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
189
In “Un debate latinoamericano sobre práctica intelectual y discurso crítico,” Nelly Richard attributes the
crisis of the intelectual to the “hegemonía mediática de los lenguajes audiovisuales,” which in late-
twentieth-century Latin America decentered the “canon erudito de la ‘ciudad letrada’ cuyo desciframiento
era tarea reservada del intelectual moderno” (842). In addition to the rise of the mass media, she also
attributes the crisis of the intellectual to two other phenomena: the corrosion of the modern concepts of
totality, generality, and universality, which had previously sustained the truth of intellectual discourse, and
the increasing “tecnificación de lo social,” which turns the intellectual into an academic “expert,” thus
suppressing “la conflictualidad de lo político… y la materia ideológica de donde el intelectual de antes
extraía sus argumentos de confrontación al poder” (842).

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particularly from cultural studies, that might strengthen criticism’s capacity for critique.

Yet after the fall of the dictatorship, Sarlo looked on with dismay as those very tools

consolidated criticism into an academic discipline, literature became yet another

commercial product, and the mass media took over the spaces for public critique.

In Argentina, the constitution of criticism as an autonomous discipline, with a

distinct set of practitioners and its own institutional home in the university, paradoxically

occurs “en un momento en que esa autonomía es amenazada por la economía y las

fusiones. En un momento en que el libro es una mercancía como cualquier otra o una

parte de la industria de la lengua” (Ludmer, Aquí 87). While these changes promised to

open new avenues for critical exploration and to undermine the elitism that marked

previous critical efforts, they also threatened literature as a relevant category, an object of

study, and as a discourse that had traditionally functioned as a space for critique.190 The

transformation of literature into another form of merchandise competing for consumer

attention led to what Jean Franco has called the “fall of the lettered city”: the erosion of

both literature and criticism, discourses that in 1960s and 70s Latin America still had

wide resonance among the general public.191 The public function of literature and

criticism had been made possible, in part, by the prestige of a literary-critical realm that

allowed intellectuals to move between discourses and bring new forms of reading to an
                                                                                                               
190
Some, like Nestor García Canclini in Mexico and John Beverly in the United States, claimed that the
erosion of literature’s privilege and “elitism” at the hands of the new mass culture constituted an effective
challenge to both local and global hierarchies, and hailed the rise of cultural studies as a substitute for an
old and inoperative literary criticism. John Beverly offers a succinct overview of this perspective in the
interview “A little azúcar: una conversación sobre estudios culturales.”
191
As Jean Franco argues in “Twilight of the Vanguard and the Rise of Criticism,” in the 1960s and 70s it
was intellectuals—and not academics—who undertook the task of revolutionizing the reading of literary
texts. Moving between literature and criticism, writers like Borges, Fuentes, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Onetti,
Lezama Lima, García Márquez, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Angel Rama, and Carlos Monsiváis developed
“an essayistic criticism which did not necessarily conform to academically imposed models and was
written in a language intelligible to a nonspecialist reader” (504).

  204  
unspecialized public. By the 1990s, the fragmentation of that literary critical realm had

professionalized the intellectual as either a writer of fictions for the literary market or an

academic expert. With the surge of a mass media dominated by celebrities and

audiovisual products, both literary and critical products—including “intensely literary”

experiments like Libertella’s and Sarlo’s academic language of Sarlo’s criticism—

suddenly seemed “illegible,” far removed from the “vía pública” (Lihn, Eugenio Téllez

n.p.). The Latin American intellectual of the turn of the millennium, in other words, had

been liberated from having to fill multiple roles but with that new liberty also lost the

“mayor vinculación social” that Alfonso Reyes had claimed for himself in the mid-

twentieth century (Reyes, “Notas” 86).

Like the rhesus monkey in El árbol de Saussure, it became increasingly difficult

for literary criticism in Argentina to exit its own ghetto and find a space from which to

launch a critique of society. The isolation of criticism was particularly troubling in turn-

of-the-millennium Argentina, where the lingering memory and threat of authoritarian rule

and the still-visible inequalities made it particularly urgent to elaborate a critical

discourse that could confront them. The need for a critical discourse was made even more

pressing by the increasingly powerful forces of neoliberalism and globalization, which

claimed to dissolve the old hierarchies in the cultural field while continuing to reinforce

systems of power both within the country and with respect to the first world. As Sarlo

suggests in Escenas de la vida posmoderna, the demise of artistic value and the flattening

of the cultural sphere made culture ripe for co-optation by the interests of international

corporations and the centers of discursive power, which continued to hold sway over the

distribution and circulation of discourses and cultural products. Countering proponents of

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cultural studies, who claimed that the new undifferentiated realm of culture provided an

effective challenge to both local and global hierarchies, Sarlo repeatedly pointed to the

growing power of the market and its capacity to form a-critical subjects, to shape

subjectivities disposed not to citizenship but to consumption. Despite the key role that she

played in the development of cultural studies in Argentina, Sarlo continued to question

whether the erosion of literature and literary criticism did not answer to a shift in the

interests of discursive and economic power, thus perpetuating the very hierarchies that

cultural studies claimed to contest. Her own criticism was, in consequence, crafted

through a complex dance between literary criticism that ultimately sought to bridge the

new rifts between literature, criticism, and society without doing away with the category

of literature altogether.

Sarlo set out, in other words, to rethink the place of literature in the new

postmodern landscape, as well as its relationship to criticism and to the general public.

She thus joined a broader discussion in Argentina about the form and the role of criticism

at the turn of the millennium and the possibility and worth of rescuing literature as a

category that still had an important role to play in Latin America.192 Together with other

Argentine intellectuals, including Ludmer and Libertella, Sarlo once again invoked

literature, not just as an old category that had once served as a space for critique or as a

meeting place between the intellectual and the public, but as a way of drawing a critical

space amid the currents of power at the turn of the millennium. For Sarlo, Ludmer, and

                                                                                                               
192
As in the pre-coup Chile of the 1960s and early 70s, the 1990s in Argentina were marked by intense
metacritical debate. Some of the central critics in this debate included Jorge Panesi, Nicolás Casullo,
Alberto Giordano, Maria Cecilia Vázquez, Miguel Dalmaroni, and Nicolás Rosa. See, in particular, Las
operaciones de la crítica, edited by Alberto Giordano and Maria Cecilia Vázquez, which includes essays by
or on many of the critics noted above and Políticas de la crítica: Historia de la crítica literaria en Argentina,
edited by Nicolás Rosa.

  206  
Libertella, literature would function as a kind of utopia, as a fictional island or terra firme

that might provide a respite from those currents and revive the project of crafting a

critical discourse from Latin America. Their project would once again require redrawing

the boundaries between literature and criticism, fiction and critique, critic and public,

critical and naive. In the case of Ludmer, Sarlo, and Libertella, it meant reactivating the

critical potential of fiction and reimagining a literary-critical space that once served as

evidence of Latin America’s critical inadequacy but that returned, at the end of the

millennium, with untapped critical potential.

As was the case with other twentieth-century Latin American critics, Sarlo’s

particular construction of literature as a discourse that could make criticism more legible

to the general public established a contradictory relationship to a reader whom she sought

to rescue from naive compliance with the market. Read through Libertella’s critical

fiction, Sarlo’s concern for legibility betrays an understanding of the general public as a

naive mass in need of education through the accessible forms of literature into the

difficult practice of critique. Libertella, in contrast, constructs literature not as a legible

but as an illegible discourse, whose incomprehensibility within the new logic of the

market grants it a critical position amid the savagery of late capitalism. In the face of the

market’s tendency to close all spaces for critique, Libertella revived a presumably

obsolete literary aesthetic and responded with the semantic guerrilla tactics of an

amphibious literary-critical discourse that called out: “Si la literatura en mi sien, entonces

el agujero en tu mercado” (Libertella, quoted in Estrín 52). From the rhetorical opening

he created, Libertella launched an intense critique of a global discourse that had declared

the world flat, forgetting the uneven flows of power that continue to create ghettos within

  207  
discourse.193 His critique was directed as much to international as to local intellectuals. It

challenged, on the one hand, the “función-centro” of metropolitan discourse and its

critical hierarchies of value. Yet it also questioned a critical scene that, at the end of the

1990s in Argentina, was still trying to craft a critical discourse in sync with the demands

and challenges of a global critical market while perpetuating the fiction of a naive reader

untutored in current strategies of critique. To those critical fictions, Libertella responded

with his own: a literary project that while confounding the savviest readers, made a

clearing for “retrograde,” “savage,” or “underdeveloped” readers who had lost their place

in the new world.

From Literature to Culture, or the Place of the Critical

The scene seemed well prepared for a critical comeback. It was 1984, less than a

year after Raúl Alfonsín assumed the presidency of Argentina, thus putting an end to the

Proceso de Reorganización Nacional that for seven years subjected the country to a

gruesome military dictatorship. Intellectuals who had been meeting clandestinely with

students in the living rooms of their homes were returning to the university. There was a

celebratory air in the Universidad de Buenos Aires, which, as part of a return to

democracy, organized a series of lectures titled “Los escritores, la producción y la crítica”

(Sarlo, “La crítica” 6). After almost a decade of terror that, according to Noé Jitrik

“damaged the critical capacity of society as a whole” (162) the lecture series at the

                                                                                                               
193
This notion that postmodernism has had a “flattening” is shared by both critics of postmodernism and
defenders of neoliberal policies. Jameson, for example, offers a detailed analysis of the “flattening” effects
of postmodern culture; its counterpart can be found in books like The World is Flat (2005) by Thomas L.
Friedman, which defends free-markt policies and presumably explains the “flattening” of the world at the
beginning of the twenty-first century.

  208  
University of Buenos Aires sought to reactivate critical discussion by inviting prominent

Argentine intellectuals to discuss the relationship between writing and criticism. A key

figure among them was Beatriz Sarlo, who had played a crucial role in the critical

underground during the military dictatorship. During those years, Sarlo participated in the

“University of the Catacombs” (Gerbaudo, “Literatura” 4) and also disseminated critical

readings and new methodologies through the magazine Punto de vista (Dalmaroni 94-96).

Her 1984 lecture in the newly democratic Argentina was, however, anything but festive.

As Sarlo herself admits in the opening paragraph, “Yo… vengo con una perspectiva

pesimista. O más bien con una perspectiva llena de perplejidades y de dudas acerca de la

efectividad de nuestro trabajo” (“La crítica” 6). Sarlo’s lecture, titled “La crítica: entre la

literatura y el público,” presented a rather dark picture of criticism in Argentina in the

mid-1980s. Whereas others hailed the return of criticism, she suggested that criticism was

at the threshold not of rebirth but of demise.

Anticipating many of the questions raised by El árbol de Saussure fifteen years

later, Sarlo expressed serious concerns about the place of criticism in the changing

landscape of post-dictatorship Argentina. As does Libertella’s novel, Sarlo wondered in

her lecture about the fate of interpretation in the wake of Saussure’s work and about the

critical transformations brought about by the importation of structuralism and other

critical methodologies into the Argentina of the 1960s and 70s. Paradoxically, critics’

happy return to the university after the fall of the dictatorship was one of the elements

that most preoccupied Sarlo about the new critical landscape. Sarlo was concerned, in

particular, by the possibility that reclaiming lecture halls and classrooms constituted not a

triumphant return to a lost public space but a one-way voyage to a cloistered

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environment. In her lecture, Sarlo compares the situation of Argentine intellectuals in

1984 to that of Roland Barthes and Raymond Williams who, in France and Britain

respectively, continued to use the university as a launching pad for polemical arguments

that had wide national resonance in the mass media and among the general public (9). In

contrast, “La Universidad Argentina hace años que perdió su posibilidad de emitir un

discurso autorizado y polémico. La Universidad se limitó a articular un discurso que

carece de relevancia para la crítica y para el público” (9). Sarlo’s main point of

contention was that by the 1980s the criticism being produced in the Argentine university

had become an esoteric discourse, uninteresting and unintelligible to the general public.

For Sarlo, criticism’s growing isolation was due not only to the turbulence of political

events in Argentina and their devastating effects upon critical discourse but also to

changes in the literary-critical field that helped remove criticism from political discussion

and stripped it of social relevance (9).

As in Chile, the Argentine university had played a critical role in the “intellectual

modernization” (A. Martínez 6) that swept through Latin America in the 1960s. Like the

critics of the “renovación crítica” in Chile, Argentine intellectuals of the 1960s turned to

the university as an engine of modernization and used it as a portal for introducing new

critical methodologies into the local critical repertoire, including structuralism and

various methodologies influenced by linguistics (Panesi, “Operaciones” 10).194 In

Argentina, however, the university’s public function was cut short earlier than in Chile by

                                                                                                               
194
According to Martín Kohan, the theoretical universe that emerged in Argentina during the 1960s and
70s can be found in Libertella’s literature, which displays an implicit theoretical universe that includes the
likes of Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, Blanchot, Bataille, Bakhtin, and the Russian Formalists. The theoretical
universe is, according to Kohan, “nítidamente fechado”: it is introduced in the 1960s, blossoms in the 70s
and 80s, and is henceforth domesticated and reduced to the status of a vulgate in the 1990s (137).

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Juan Carlos Onganía’s military coup and by the military takeover of the University of

Buenos Aires in 1966.195 After the shutdown of the department of “Filosofía y Letras” at

the University of Buenos Aires, the site of critical renewal and public debate began to

shift to magazines like Los Libros, Crisis, Literal, and Latinoamericana, which picked up

a task that had become impossible within the intervened university (11).196 Both Sarlo

and Libertella played key roles as contributors to the emergent “counter-institutional”

critical scene, which included both literary writers and critics and assumed the task of

literary interpretation as well as of political critique (11).197 With the rise of Juan Perón to

power in 1973, many of the magazines that emerged in the 1960s reframed cultural

activity—including both literature and criticism—as a direct response to current political

events.198 Their tendency to mix cultural and political critique made them particularly

                                                                                                               
195
The night of the military intervention of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, now known as “La Noche de
los Bastones Largos,” put an end to the ideal of autonomy from the government under which the University
had functioned. That night, Argentina’s Federal Police shut down five departments and exerted especially
brutal force in the department of “Filosofía y letras,” which had played an important role in the critical
renewal of the 1960s.
196
While the journal Los Libros, which Sarlo directed and wrote in, increasingly shifted its focus from
culture to politics in the years leading up to the coup (Croce 72), the journal Literal, in which Libertella
participated, aggressively defended the relative autonomy of literature but paradoxically did so in political
terms (Giordano, “Literal” 59). As Giordano notes, Literal was the site of a heated debate about the
relationship between politics and literature. It developed a politics of literature conceived as a negative
resistance to a populist polítical discourse that it termed “políticas de la felicidad” (63). Despite its
emphasis on the relative autonomy of literature, the magazine continued to publish documents, such as
“Para comprender la censura,” that direcly addressed political themes (71).
197
In its inclusion of both literary writers and critics, the “counter-institutional” critical scene of the late 60s
had much in common with the Chilean escena de avanzada, which took up the task of both literary and
political critique during the Pinochet dictatorship, discussed above in chapter 3. As in Chile, theoretical
ideas became fodder for literary production and literary writers—including Germán García, Ricardo Piglia,
Luis Gusmán, and Osvaldo Lamborghini—wrote criticism and participated in creating alternative
institutional spaces for criticism (Panesi, “Operaciones” 11). Like Lihn in Chile, Libertella was an active
participant in that literary-critical scene, and no doubt influenced by the permeable boundary between
literature and criticism.
198
As Giordano notes, Perón’s return to Argentina and the political polarization that it generated turned
politics into the ultimate benchmark against which all discourses were measured. During those years “la
política se impone como lugar común de reflexión y debate al que ninguna formación cultural puede
sustraerse” (“Literal” 59).
  211  
vulnerable to the political persecution after the military coup of 1976. As in the Chile of

Pinochet, all references to politics became suspect during the Proceso de Reorganización

Nacional, which led to the depoliticization of critical discourse and to the shutdown of

the counterinstitutional critical scene that emerged in the 1960s.199

The repressive strategies of the military government resulted in the suspension of

public debate, though as both Sarlo and Jorge Panesi argue, the changes brought about by

the “renovación discursiva” of the 1960s and 70s also contributed to the occlusion of

public spaces for critique (Panesi, “Operaciones” 11).200 As Sarlo notes in her 1984

lecture, the theoretical revolution of the 1960s “founded” a modern criticism and updated

the teaching of literature, yet it also shifted the center of public debate away from literary

magazines like Sur and Martín Fierro, where the essay had previously functioned as a

“common space” for a heterogeneous array of social actors (8). In the 1960s, however,

amid the continental rise of the nueva crítica, the new critical scenes in Argentina

dismissed the essay as too “anti-theoretical” and “impressionistic” to meet the new

requirements for rigor, disciplinary specialization, and conceptual specificity. Ensayismo

was thus dethroned from its position as the “príncipe del sistema literario” and exiled “del

otro lado del muro edificado por los discursos que se reclaman de la ciencia” (8). From

them on, critical discourse became increasingly technical and rarified, and the wide

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
199
For a discussion of the demise of the political discourses that dominated both the political and cultural
spheres before 1973, see Nicolás Casullo, Modernidad y cultura crítica, particularly the chapters “Una
temporada en las palabras” and “Los años 60s y 70 y la crítica histórica.” There, Casullo presents the
intellectual discourse of the 60s and 70s as yet another victim of the “disappearances” carried out by the
military dictatorship and argues that the current political climate in the 1990s threatened to perpetuate the
occlusion of that discourse.
200
In 1978 and from the North American university, Peter Earle had made a similar argument about
ensayismo and its demise, brought about by the enthusiasm in Latin America for structuralist theory. For
further details, see Earle’s “On the Contemporary Displacement of the Hispanic American Essay.”

  212  
circulation that it had previously enjoyed began shrinking to ever more narrow circles of

both production and reception.201 By the time of the 1976 military coup, the highly

differentiated circuits of production, readership, and distribution created by the “counter-

institutional” critical scene of the 1960s made it more difficult to respond to political

events and fulfill the revolutionary objectives it professed (Panesi, “Operaciones” 11).202

By 1984, criticism was restricted to a small circle of academic readers and critics

had been stripped of their mediating role between literature and the public.203 The

“fisura” or “desgarramiento” between criticism and society became the central concern of

Sarlo’s 1984 lecture, which took aim at the “rasgos fuertemente iniciáticos” of the critical

language that survived during the dictatorship and that returned triumphantly to the

university in the post-dictatorship years (10). As Sarlo argued for her academic audience,

“para leer nuestros textos es necesario realizar operaciones complicadas, a veces más

complicadas […] que las que exige la literatura misma. Y es posible que menos

placenteras” (7). As a discourse more inaccessible than literature, criticism could no

longer claim to be a tool or form of knowledge necessary to understand literature’s

discursive universe. Without that necessary function, the critic became a “despojado de

lugar,” quite unlike the reader, whose function as a consumer of texts continued to assure

                                                                                                               
201
As Panesi notes, the magazines that emerged in the late 1960s began to target specialized audiences and
featured a criticism whose “pathos objetivizante, metodológico, auto-inquisitorial, cargado de estentóreas
mímicas científicas” (“Operaciones” 11) restricted it to highly differentiated circuits of production,
readership, and distribution. According to Panesi, the shift from the journalistic medium used by ensayismo
to the university was a key element in the restricted circulation of critical discourse after the 1960s.
202
A similar argument about the marginalizing effect that imported literary theories had upon criticism can
also be found in Rafael Gutierrez Girardot’s “El ensayo y la crítica literaria en Latinoamérica.”
203
As Montaldo notes, the loss of the intellectual’s mediating role in Argentina was further complicated in
the 80s and 90s by the adoption of a neoliberal model that imposed strandards of professionalism on
various institutions, including the university, while cutting subsidies and public positions in the realms of
research and teaching (37).

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his/her place within the literary system (7). Critics, in contrast, found themselves exiled

to the no-place of a ghettoized discourse and marginalized within the walls of a university

that suddenly made them irrelevant. In 1984, this irrelevance had significant

consequences in the broader social landscape of post-dictatorship Argentina where,

instead of making critical discourse superfluous, the advent of democracy seemed to

require it more urgently than ever. The recent memory of the atrocities committed during

the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional called for a strong critical discourse that might

prevent such atrocities in the future and keep their memory alive within a new democracy

in which political expediency often led to excessive pardon and forgetfulness.204

In this context, Sarlo invited Argentine critics to resist the marginal place

assigned to criticism by both political events and by critics’ own discourse, and to make

space within the university for a discourse that—like the ensayismo of the 40s and 50—

would not alienate its readers (“La crítica” 10). Sarlo was nevertheless aware that the

definitive shift to the university as the locus of critical thought after the dictatorship made

it more difficult for intellectuals to move between multiple roles, as Sarmiento did in the

nineteenth century, or to deploy the kind of unspecialized, literary discourse used by

Borges in the early twentieth century. The so-called modernization of the 1960s and 70s

had forever changed Latin American critical production, drawing it into the currents of a

global critical discourse dominated by its academic variant. Globalization had caught

Latin American intellectuals within a “red transnacional de universidades y de

                                                                                                               
204
The growing concern with the leniency exhibited by political leaders came to a head with the “indultos”
that Menem passed between 1989 and 1990s. These laws officially pardoned cilivian and military leaders
for any crimes committed during the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional as well as the leaders of the
guerrilla organizations that had been active in the 1960s. Menem’s “indultos” went even further than the
Ley de Punto Final and the Ley de Obediencia Debida, which had set strict limits to possible sanctions for
crimes committed during the Proceso.

  214  
instituciones del conocimiento que administra recursos para la circulación de las ideas a

la vez que programa las agendas de debate intelectual” (Richard, “Globalización”).

Within the new transnational webs of knowledge, Saussure’s diagram and the theoretical

revolution that it sparked would henceforth provide a critical focal point. As Libertella

suggests in El árbol de Saussure, Saussure’s diagram would come to determine points of

view and define critics’ positions in the global critical market (15). No longer would

intellectuals be able to intervene as mere readers “en el sentido ingenuo de la palabra”—

as Borges once put it (“La supersticiosa” 222)—but would need to demonstrate their

knowledge of global critical debates and establish their position vis-à-vis the current

theoretical landscapes. Making a space in Argentina for a critical discourse capable of

intervening in political discussions, in other words, required validating that discourse

within academic circles increasingly judged in terms of theoretical sophistication and

international currency.

In the years before 1984 Sarlo had already set out to establish the institutional and

discursive bases for a criticism that could claim critical sophistication, connect with an

unspecialized reader, and occupy a prominent place in public discussions. Founded in

1978, in the midst of the Junta’s military dictatorship, the magazine Punto de Vista

became the vehicle through which Sarlo sought to maintain critical discussion in a

besieged Argentina and to redefine the terms of that discussion.205 As Miguel Dalmaroni

analyzes in detail, Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano used Punto de Vista to import a series of

                                                                                                               
205
Punto de Vista was founded by Sarlo, Carlos Altamirano, Ricardo Piglia, and Elías Semán in 1978 as a
way of continuing the work that Sarlo and Altamirano had carried out together with Héctor Schmucler in
Los Libros, which ceased publication in 1975. As Eduardo Pogoriles notes, Punto de Vista was one of the
few spaces for critical debate during the dictatorship. It became a key cultural reference throughout the 80s
and 90s and redefined the role of the critical intellectual. The magazine closed in 2008.

  215  
critical theories, particularly those associated with the Birmingham school of cultural

studies as well as sociological approaches to culture like those of Pierre Bourdieu and the

early Roland Barthes (94). Importing British cultural studies was a way of reorienting

cultural criticism and disrupting the local enthusiasm for French structuralist theory,

which according to Sarlo played a key role in the increased impenetrability of critical

language and its tendency to devolve into a series of critical fashions understandable only

by a small minority (Dalmaroni 94).206 In midst of the dictatorship and faced with the

obscurity of the new critical languages, authors like Raymond Williams, Bourdieu, and

the Barthes of Mythologies provided models for a socially relevant criticism that could

connect criticism with the general reader, stimulate reflection on the connections between

culture and politics, and avoid getting caught in the vertiginous succession of critical

fashions (94).

Although the editors of Punto de Vista rejected the notion that cultural studies

was simply another critical fad, translating authors like Williams and Richard Hoggart in

the late 1970s and early 80s nevertheless positioned the magazine as the avant-garde in

the intellectual field. Presenting itself as the scout and emissary of an unknown, exotic

critical repertoire, Punto de Vista quickly established its authority as a magazine on the

cutting edge of critical thinking (Dalmaroni 95). Punto de Vista in this sense worked

squarely within the late-twentieth-century logic of a global critical discourse marked by

what Román de la Campa calls “constant revolution” (155) and “hyperproduction”

                                                                                                               
206
As Sarlo notes in “La crítica: entre la literatura y el público,” the new discourses and methodologies
imported in the 1960s led to the increasing rarification of critical discourse (8) and turned criticism into a
series of “dated” languages (10). Sarlo points out that the adjective “fechado” or “dated,” widely used in
1984, is a galicism that was unknown fifteen years earlier. She thus suggests that starting in the late 60s
Argentine criticism began to exhibit the signs of its entry into a critical world marked by the rapid
succession of critical fashions.

  216  
(158).207 The importation of cultural studies into Argentina seemed like the latest

response to the insatiable demand for new theoretical frameworks that had come to

characterize global critical production. Yet the Birmingham School also allowed the

editors of Punto de Vista to sidestep that logic by presenting cultural studies not as a

fashionable theoretical language to imitate, but as an argument for a new critical

flexibility that could borrow from numerous discourses. As Dalmaroni notes, subscribing

to Williams’s theories “significaba constituirse como sujeto crítico ecléctico, móvil,

revisionista, metodológicamente escéptico”—that is, as a critical subject who could

transcend the dogmatic adherence to the “lenguajes de temporada” associated with

French structuralist and poststructuralist theory (96).208 Williams’s empiricism offered a

new way of approaching culture, authorizing criticism to rummage through the whole

archive of culture and theory at the level of both methodology and content. Cultural

studies’ theoretically sophisticated approach to culture thus allowed Sarlo to step outside

the precinct of literature, taking culture as a diverse text to be interpreted semiotically,

while avoiding the allegedly arcane vocabularies of high literary theory. Cultural studies

thus provided a means to “volver a las calles” (97), literally and metaphorically. It opened

the field of interpretation to a variety of social and political phenomena and connected

                                                                                                               
207
Román de la Campa borrows the term “constant revolution” from Joseph Tabbi and uses it to refer to the
rapid succession of technical and specialized languages that supplant one another in a vertiginous process
of critical revision. According to De la Campa, this state of “constant revolution” is one of the
distinguishing features of critical thinking in a globalized world subject to the late capitalism’s tendency
towards hyperproduction. See, in particular, the chapter “Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Cultural
Studies” in Latin Americanism.
208
The notion that cultural studies is a theory to end all theories can also be found in John Beverly’s
account of the introduction of cultural studies into the United States and its subsequent tranformation into
subaltern studies. As he says at the end of the interview, subaltern studies does not have an “afterwards”: its
efforts to connect criticism to the problem of social inequalities can only lose its interest with the end of
inequality (94). See “A little azúcar: una conversación sobre estudios cuturales.”

  217  
critics to a public whose practices were considered valid and valuable forms of

knowledge.209

The importation of British cultural studies thus allowed Sarlo, in a somewhat

paradoxical move, to return to some of the guiding tenets of ensayismo while avoiding

the notion that hers was a nostalgic return to a lost and provincial Latin American

discourse.210 Cultural studies’ “return to the streets” once again made criticism “más

avezada al aire de la calle,” as Reyes had once characterized Latin America’s

intelligentsia (“Notas” 86). It also opened criticism to the multiplicity of discourses that

Reyes had marked as necessary elements in a “fair assessment” of Latin American

literature and culture (“Fragmento” 155). Like ensayismo, cultural studies allowed the

critic to range over the entirety of culture, with the added benefit of bringing the critic in

contact with popular groups whose modes of knowledge were now authorized. Cultural

studies thus functioned much like Reyes’s “juicio,” which incorporated the “naive”

knowledge of an unspecialized, non-academic reader into its more capacious, more

“human” version of criticism. By virtue of its roots in Marxist thought, cultural studies

nevertheless obtained an association with radical political praxis and a theoretical

sophistication that in a post-1960s world Reyes’s humanism no longer commanded.

Cultural studies thus offered a fitting critical structure that allowed Sarlo to resituate

                                                                                                               
209
As Nelly Richard notes, in its beginnings cultural studies was characterized by the desire to democratize
knowledge, to open it up to practices and forms of knowledge situated outside the traditional corpus of
academic discourse: to popular culture, social movements, feminist criticism, and subaltern groups, among
others (“Globalización”).
210
For a discussion of the tensions and contradictions generated by the clash between late-twentieth-
century theoretical frameworks and a tradition of Latin American ensayismo see Hugo Achugar’s “Leones,
cazadores, e historiadores: A propósito de las políticas de la memoria y del conocimiento.” Achugar argues
that adopting postcolonial studies as a “new” place from which to read Latin America ignores the fact that
the very same questions it raises have been pondered “desde hace varios siglos o desde hace más de un
siglo” in Latin America (209). The same could be said for cultural studies in its relation to Sarlo’s project.

  218  
Argentine criticism within a longer Latin American critical tradition while bringing it into

step with both local needs and international trends.

After the return to democracy in 1983, Sarlo continued to disseminate and

champion the British strain of cultural studies both through Punto de Vista and through

the classes that she offered at the University of Buenos Aires.211 Sarlo’s adoption and

dissemination of cultural studies after the dictatorship, however, was not entirely

unproblematic. The new prestige granted to cultural studies throughout academic centers

in Europe and the Americas and the entrenchment of postmodernity as a kind of “cultural

logic” intimately connected to the workings of late capitalism, led Sarlo to reflect on the

effects of such phenomena on her project for a socially relevant criticism in Latin

America. In a kind of critical revision of those very critics and theories that she herself

had championed, Sarlo engaged throughout the 1980s and especially the 1990s in a

rereading of Williams, Bourdieu, Barthes, Hans-Robert Jauss, and other European critics,

marking the differences between their social and discursive world and the one in which

she produced her texts.212 Sarlo emphasized, in particular, the role that thinkers like

Bourdieu had played in the relativization of values, and the problems that such

relativization posed in turn-of-the-century Argentina. She explicitly laid out her doubts in

Chile during a 1997 lecture titled “Los estudios culturales y la crítica literaria en la

                                                                                                               
211
For an interpretation of Sarlo’s courses as one front of her broader critical work, see Analía Gerbaudo’s
“Intervenciones olvidadas: Beatriz Sarlo en la Universidad Argentina de la posdictadura (1984-1986).”
212
Sarlo’s efforts to differentiate her discursive world from that of European critics are most explicit in
Literatura/ Sociedad. There, Sarlo and Altamirano outline Bordieu’s construction of literature as an
autonomous field and note that the relative autonomy of the cultural field is problematic in of Latin
America, which has lacked the institutional structures and stable liberal-democratic systems needed for the
constitution of an autonomous realm. Sarlo and Altamirano also note that the autonomy of the cultural
realm in Latin America is complicated by the fact that its horizon of aesthetic paradigms is often situated in
centers of power located outside Latin America. See in particular the chapter “Del campo intellectual y las
instituciones literarias.”

  219  
encrucijada valorativa,” which Sarlo had also presented a year earlier at Duke University.

Sarlo opens the lecture by noting the changing place of literature in the face of cultural

studies’ increasing popularity and mounts a passionate defense of literary criticism’s role

as the keeper of aesthetic values.

As Sarlo goes on to argue, literary criticism cannot turn over to cultural studies

the task of defining the specificity of literature and establishing literary value, particularly

in turn-of-the-century Latin America. In her lecture, Sarlo recognizes the democratic

impulse of cultural studies and praises its attempt to rectify literary criticism’s withdrawal

from the public sphere by elaborating a less hermetic discourse that could serve as a

functional “compañero de ruta” for the social movements that emerged during the

transition to democracy (3). Sarlo, however, also highlights the role that cultural studies

played in the relativization of aesthetic values and observes that this relativization also

seemed to reinforce a postmodern, neoliberal logic.213 According to Sarlo, by the late

1990s relativism had become the touchstone of “nuestras convicciones multiculturales,”

yet it also turned over the task of establishing a canon to a market interested not in social

but in mercantile value (6). In post-dictatorship Argentina, aesthetic relativization

coincided with both neoliberal globalization and with the imposition of pluralism as a

regulatory political principle that by leveling all styles and opinions also made them all

equally unimportant (Escenas 156). Such pluralism was problematic in a context where

“el mercado, experto en equivalencias abstractas, recibe a este pluralismo estético como

                                                                                                               
213
For example, in Escenas de la vida posmoderna Sarlo notes how the sociological analysis of art, like the
one elaborated by Bordieu, reduced aesthetic positions to relationships of force within the intellectual field.
This not only desacralized the sphere of art but also dissolved artistic values by reducing them to questions
of institutional accord. As she notes, “sin fundamento en autoridades constituidas y sin fundamento
autosuficiente en el territorio del arte, la objetividad de los valores estéticos ha sido dada de baja” (153).

  220  
la ideología más afín a sus necesidades” (156). For Sarlo, the “efecto de superficie” (32)

that seemed to level old hierarchies was a deceptive illusion, which masked the market’s

tendency to create ghettos within the cultural sphere while privileging those products and

practices that reinforced the structural inequalities of a global capitalist market. Sarlo

observes that the market’s capacity to co-opt cultural pluralism is particularly threatening

in peripheral countries like Argentina, which lack the political institutions that in

Bourdieu’s France guaranteed the cultural field’s relative autonomy from both politics

and the market (Altamirano and Sarlo, Literatura/ Sociedad 159). The threat to the

independence of the cultural sphere had been particularly acute during the military

dictatorships of the 60s and 70s, yet it was no less disturbing in the 80s and 90s when

neoliberal policies threatened to absorb culture into a market whose centers of power still

lay in Europe and North America.

Amid the “new populism” that, according to Montaldo, redefined Argentine

culture and politics in the 1990s (25), insisting on the specificity of literature allowed

Sarlo to rekindle a debate that might wrest the determination of cultural and social value

away from the market.214 As the millennium came to a close, Sarlo continued to defend

aesthetic values and the capacity to differentiate art and literature from the mercantile

products of mass culture, which produced subjects compliant with an expanding market.

In various texts and articles, she argued that it was still possible and useful to define the

specificity of literature, that “algo siempre queda cuando explicamos socialmente a los

textos literarios y ese algo es crucial” (“Los estudios” 6). Sarlo viewed that “something”

                                                                                                               
214
According to Montaldo, the 1990s once again saw a resurgence of the ties between culture and politics
that in the 1950s and 60s had been defined by Peronist populism. In the 1990s a similar populism returns,
but with a “neoliberal” turn that leads both politicians and cultural producers to seek the regard of the
masses through mass cultural appeal. See in this regard the section “Una crítica al saber.”

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not as an ineffable essence like that which characterized literature for José Miguel Ibáñez

Langlois, but as a “resistance” created by literature’s formal and semantic density. In late

twentieth-century Argentina, literature’s resistance was indeed crucial, for it promised to

create a critical space capable of interrupting the easy consumerism in which other

cultural practices had trained the masses, thus disrupting the flows of power in the

globalized market. Sarlo most notably laid out this argument in her 1994 Escenas de la

vida posmoderna, where she makes a case for the continued relevance of practicing

literary criticism and defining aesthetic values from Latin America. In Escenas, Sarlo also

recognizes the challenges of a turn-of-the-millennium landscape that seemed to have left

no space for literature or for an intellectual interested in defining social and literary value.

One of the main challenges that Sarlo highlights is the risk of obsolescence,

exacerbated by the speed a global academic market that judged critical languages

according to their currency with respect to global critical trends. As Sarlo notes in the

section “Valores y mercado,” a handful of “exceptional” men and women had, for

centuries, discussed aesthetic values within the stable and self-sufficient realm of art

(156). Yet in the few decades that preceded the writing of Ecenas de la vida posmoderna,

that realm had been exposed as a “fiction,” aesthetic values revealed as “virtudes

imaginarias” (157), and the myths of artistic creation turned into “relatos” that hid the

true motives of self-interested positioning within the market (158). In that context,

Sarlo’s defense of aesthetic values risked being dismissed as the naive move of a

nostalgic or antiquated intellectual, not only by the centers of discursive power but also

by the Latin American cultural studies movement that she had helped shape.215 As Neil

                                                                                                               
215
Sarlo anticipates the critique of nostalgia or obsolescence in Escenas de la vida posmoderna, where she
outlines two possible responses to the demise of the role of the intellectual: that of the “viejos legitimistas,”
  222  
Larsen points out, one of the guiding impulses of that cultural studies movement was the

attempt to offer an alternative to the Frankfurt School’s view of art as the only possible

resistance to a mass culture complicit with the horrors of capitalism. In a post-Marxist

world in which total revolution no longer seemed possible, cultural studies “dissents from

this adverse stigmatization [of mass culture] and urges the recognition of an oppositional,

emancipatory dimension in mass capitalist culture” (191). Sarlo’s attempt to retain

literature as a relevant category seemed, in this light, like a return to an old and

inoperative conception of the aesthetic now associated not with the radical praxis of the

Frankfurt School but with a kind of retrograde elitism.

Cognizant of the challenge, Sarlo recognizes that it is impossible to return to a

time when both art and the intellectual still held a privileged position in society, but she

rejects the “conformidad acrítica” that accepts the complete occlusion of aesthetic value

(Escenas 178). She claims, in fact, that the discussion of values is “el gran debate en el

fin de siglo” (“Los estudios” 1) and characterizes her attempts to define literary value as a

newly critical strategy amid the naive enthusiasm for late-capitalist culture. Turning the

tables, she depicts the new proponents of cultural studies in Latin America as

“neopopulistas de mercado” (Escenas 6) and claims that they have a naive view of market

forces’ capacity to shape subjectivities through apparently liberatory cultural practices.

Their naiveté had not only made cultural studies unwittingly complicit with the market, to

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
who mourn the passing of the old figure of the intellectual, or that of the “neopopulistas de mercado” (118),
who celebrate and encourage its final entombment. Sarlo, however, tries to elaborate a third position that
does not fall into either camp. A number of critics nevertheless fault Sarlo for her presumed nostalgia and
her incapacity to let go of the categories of the past. Jean Franco, for example, recognizes Sarlo’s attempt to
find new critical spaces but dismisses her attempts on the grounds that “her remedies are no more
convincing because past practices are not necessarily viable models” (Fall 263). On a similar note, see also
Andrea Pagni and Erna von der Walde’s article “Qué intelectuales en tiempos posmodernos o de ‘cómo ser
radical sin ser fundamentalista.’”

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which it had left the formation of the cultural canon, but also reinforced certain

inequalities in the cultural and critical spheres. As Sarlo argued in her 1997 lecture,

cultural studies’ enthusiasm for the products of previously marginalized groups risked

perpetuating the notion that “los latinoamericanos debemos producir objetos adecuados al

análisis cultural, mientras que Otros (básicamente los europeos) tienen el derecho de

producir objetos adecuados a la crítica de arte. Lo mismo podría decirse acerca de las

mujeres o los sectores populares: de ellos se esperan objetos culturales, y de los hombres

blancos, arte” (“Los estudios” 11). Sarlo’s insistence on the continuing relevance of

literary criticism was, in this light, a form of resistance to a global critical market that

perpetuated social hierarchies within the cultural sphere under the pretense of pluralism.

Defying that market, Sarlo affirms the right to literature for Latin Americans, women,

and popular sectors. She argues that such groups should not be excluded from the spheres

of criticism and art, which still provide a necessary space for critique amid the

inequalities of the late twentieth century.216

Picking up a decades-long project, Sarlo thus vindicates Latin America’s right to

practice literary criticism and revives an old Latin American tradition that celebrates

literature as an emancipatory discourse against the forces of a global culture whose

centers lay in Europe and North America. A tradition that dates back to José Enrique

Rodó’s Ariel, it includes Reyes’s humanist argument against positivism and nueva

crítica’s depiction of literature as the crucible of a revolutionary consciousness, as well as

                                                                                                               
216
Despite recognizing that the modern figure of the intellectual is on the wane, Sarlo rescues critique as
the one element of modernity that she claims still has a function to play in postmodernity: “Sin embargo, la
función crítica, que, entre otras funciones, tuvieron los intelectuales y las vanguardias, todavía ejerce un
llamado poderoso porque no han desvanecido las injusticias que dieron impulse al fuego donde se
impugnaron poderes absolutos y legitimidades basadas en la autoridad despótica y la concentración de
riquezas” (Escenas 177).

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prominent late-twentieth century critics like Nelly Richard in Chile and Francine

Masiello in the United States.217 Like Richard and Masiello, who insist on the critical

potential of “the aesthetic” (Masiello 10), Sarlo depicts literature as a discourse that could

once again turn criticism into a socially relevant practice. To that end, Escenas de la vida

posmoderna serves as a way of demanding “el derecho a ambos mundos” (“Los estudios”

12): the worlds of popular culture and of literature, understood as a set of aesthetically

valuable texts and as a discourse that can be studied and wielded by the Latin American

critic. Although she recognizes the prominence of mass culture in the postmodern

landscapes of the turn of the millennium, Sarlo seeks to make space for literature both

amid those landscapes and in her own text as well. In Escenas de la vida posmoderna,

Sarlo continues to put in practice the methodologies she derived from cultural studies—

retaining, with them, the authority and sophistication expected of cultural criticism—

while making use of literary forms and a language unburdened by the “baggage” of

criticism’s “lenguaje… iniciático” (“La crítica” 10). In Sarlo’s case, this entailed

rekindling the literary practices of a Latin American essay tradition that had presumably

entered a period of “crisis” or “decadence” after the 1980s (Giordano, “La crítica” 92),

but that nevertheless saw a new resurgence in Argentina during the last decades of the

twentieth century.

Together with a number of Argentine critics and writers, including Ludmer and

Libertella, Sarlo invokes, once again, a literary-critical space that had presumably been

                                                                                                               
217
As Masiello notes, Richard and Sarlo are the two main proponents of the “aesthetic turn” in Latin
America. While offering a gloss of the critiques directed at Sarlo and questioning Richard’s reliance on the
fragment, Masiello nevertheless situates herself within this “aesthetic turn.” In The Art of Transition she
argues that art and literature force us to think of interpretative strategies of resistance in response to the
flattening gloss of the market (11-13).

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displaced at the turn of the millennium and resurrects it in her own writing as a way of

disrupting the professionalization, homogenization, and closure of criticism.218 Faced

with the growing rift between an uncritical consuming public and a ghettoized criticism

concerned with but unread by the masses, Sarlo turns to literature as a mediating

discourse that can make her own discourse more accessible and thus introduce common

readers into the difficult practices of critique. Within her own writing, literature

nevertheless remains a subordinate discourse: as with Reyes half a century earlier, for

Sarlo literature was not a form of critical thinking itself but a means to critical thinking, a

pedagogical tool that might bring the mass public out of its naiveté and into a new critical

consciousness.219

This characterization of both literature and the public would, however, elicit a

scathing critical response, both from the critical establishment and from the space of

literature itself.220 Assuming the critical function that Sarlo assigns to literature, El árbol

de Saussure questions whether depicting literature as an accessible discourse could in fact

resist market forces and disrupt the hierarchies between the intellectual and the masses,
                                                                                                               
218
As Giordano notes, despite the purported “decadence” of the essay, a number of Argentine critics—
including Jorge Panesi, Horacio González, Nicolás Casullo and Ricardo Piglia—set out to transform the
ethical and aesthetic conditions of criticism in the 1990s. Like Sarlo, they turned to the essay as a discourse
whose mixture of literary and critical registers was capable of restoring “la circumstancia literaria que las
palabras del saber, para constituirse como tales, necesariamente olvidan” (Giordano, “La crítica” 96). Jorge
Panesi similarly notes that Sarlo and other Argentine critics returned to “un programa viejo y renovado… el
ensayo cultural interpretativo que afianza y excede, como en el libro de Sarlo, los protocolos académicos de
la crítica literaria. El exceso es siempre la literatura” (“Marginales” 41). For a discussion of Sarlo’s
“revival” of the essay tradition, see Giordano’s “La crítica de la crítica y el recurso al ensayo.”
219
It is worth noting that in Escenas de la vida posmoderna Sarlo is more worried about the mass public
than about the popular classes, whose cultural products and forms of resistance have, she argues,
paradoxically been eclipsed by the rise of mass culture. Some critics, such as Benzecry, nevertheless fault
Sarlo for focusing more on middle-class consumers than on the popular classes and their emergent forms of
resistance. Sarlo’s relationship to “lo popular” is notably complex and exceeds the present discussion. For
an introduction to the debate, see Benzecry’s article “Beatriz Sarlo and Theories of Popular Culture.”
220
For an overview of the critiques directed at Sarlo from the space of criticism, see the introduction to
Francine Masiello’s The Art of Transition.

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the centers and the margins, north and south. Unlike Sarlo, Libertella suggests that

literature’s inaccessibility and its uncertain place in postmodernity is what opened the

possibility for contesting the workings of the market and for establishing a different

relationship to a reader whose naiveté need not be cause for pedagogical programs. For

Libertella, the resistance posed by literature’s formal and semantic density is not a tool to

educate the naive reader presumably stripped of critical capacities by the legibility of

mass culture. As a “zona siempre un poco resistente a la interpretación” (56), literature is,

instead, a space whose very inscrutability in the new postmodern landscapes allows it to

escape easy assimilation by both criticism and the market. Thus, while Sarlo continued to

insist on finding a place for literature, Libertella relegated it to the no-place of the

ghetto’s bathroom in the hopes that a naive reader might one day—as if coming across an

ancient hieroglyph—read it against the grain of the market.

Postmodern Scenes, or the Place of the Literary

A literary critic is sitting at a bar. This is, for her, a new world: at the counter

where she sits with her notepad and pen, a young woman has her last drink before

heading to the Buenos Aires night clubs. Dressed in a “brutal” miniskirt and a transparent

blouse, the young woman seems to leave little to the imagination. Everything is

immediately apparent and resists the gaze of an older tradition that oscillated “entre lo

visto y lo no visto” (Sarlo, Escenas 32). Her “costume” nevertheless elicits a perplexed

reading. Searching for a former conception of the aesthetic, the literary critic finds in the

girl’s carnavalesque clothing an opportunity for interpretation: in the various layers that

the girl puts on her body “por capas, por franjas, por pinceladas” (33), the critic reads the

  227  
signs of a profound shift in aesthetics that has traded depth for surface, memory for

amnesia, culture for style. Tracing the various elements on the girl’s body to the “movida

madrileña,” the French cabaret, or the Brazilian carnival, the critic observes the

dissolution of historical depth through the prefix “retro,” which empties the aesthetic of

signification and turns the past into a catalogue of styles for easy consumption.

Yet the bar is not the only place where Sarlo’s critic finds such profound

transformations. In her quest for an aesthetic sensibility perhaps best described by the

noun “art,” the literary critic takes her notepad and pen to a video arcade, to the

labyrinthine passages of a mall, to a restaurant where mother and daughter discuss the

plastic surgeries they would like for their birthdays, and to the intimate scenario of a

living room where a viewer clicks between channels before settling on a talk show’s

extreme form of non-fiction. From all of them, the critic comes out empty-handed: the

postmodern landscapes of turn-of-the-millennium Argentina seem to have left little place

for literature, understood as a practice defined by moral intensity (6), the tension between

permanence and variation of meaning, and formal and semantic density (“Los estudios”

7). By the end of the second chapter of Escenas de la vida posmoderna, the literary critic

depicted in its pages could very well summarize her findings with a phrase from El árbol

de Saussure: “Si los hilos de la Aldea hoy son invisibles—por satelitales e

inalámbricos—, el arte sera doblemente invisible y silencioso en esa red, y la literatura un

fantasma siempre un poco ilegible entre las líneas del mercado” (ADS 20-21).

Like Escenas de la vida posmoderna, Libertella’s text portrays a world in which

literature has become illegible, absent from the new surfaces created by fashion, the mass

media, and new interpretive strategies no longer so concerned with the aesthetic. Echoing

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Escenas de la vida posmoderna, the verbal sketches in El árbol de Saussure function like

a dreamscape of Sarlo’s scenes of postmodern life. In Libertella’s book, the bar’s

customers similarly inhabit a flat world where the eye, like “una perla de gelatina que late

y late” (ADS 49), is no longer an instrument for interpretation but a mere receptor for a

world without depth where everything is immediately visible. There, the plaza has been

turned into “la tierra del mercado” (41), where the writer has been reduced to a registered

trademark (67) and literary history turned into a vertiginous succession of styles or

fashions (40). Sarlo’s meditation on the fashion of Buenos Aires’s youth finds its

counterpart in the section of Libertella’s book entitled “Sobre la moda,” which describes

fashion as the layering of “moldes” on a body that has become little more than a

mannequin (40). There too, the aesthetic is depicted as a “vaciado”: a mass-produced

pattern emptied of historicity by the fleeting temporality of a market whose catwalks

create a fantasy of eternal youthfulness (39-40; Sarlo, Escenas 40). Amid the market’s

new temporality, the dream of creating an eternal and timeless literary work produces not

an enduring classic but a kind of hi-tech zombie, “un robot que lleva a cuestas el viejo

fantasma llamado literatura” (40). In such a world, Libertella declares literature dead, a

“ghost” or spectral survival no longer visible to the ghetto’s interpreters, who thus

concern themselves with other phenomena: fashion, new media, human sexuality,

architecture, science, the visual arts.

Like a map of the “new world” at the end of the millennium, El árbol de Saussure

thus presents both mock-up of various scenes of postmodern life as well as the sketch of a

critical landscape much like the one that Sarlo describes in Escenas de la vida

posmoderna. According to Sarlo, the new “scenes” of postmodern life have led

  229  
interpreters to seek out the new spectacular products and practices of late capitalist

culture while overlooking old aesthetic forms. This occurs, in part, because those forms

are nowhere to be seen. Yet for Sarlo there is value in seeking them out. In Escenas de la

vida posmoderna the literary critic persists as yet another survival who pursues literature,

no longer as an object or a hidden message to be uncovered but as an impalpable,

invisible, absent discourse. Sarlo’s literary critic functions, in this sense, like the architect

in El árbol de Saussure who “en la Aldea Global atada, amordazada con los hilos de la

comunicación instantánea… está calculando en aquellos huecos o agujeros entre nudos la

medida exacta de lo impalpable” (ADS 20). In Libertella’s book, the task of reading in

between the lines of the market is purely intransitive, yet for Sarlo it assumes a very

definite purpose. Perhaps a more accurate image for the literary critic in Escenas de la

vida posmoderna can be found in the guardian of the ghetto-plaza, who “duerme de día y

con los ojos abiertos. Duerme la siesta… y en ese sueño todo es evidente. Él no tiene que

descifrar ningún mensaje, ninguna leyenda escrita con –otra vez Macedonio—‘los pies de

tinta china de la siesta’” (ADS 73). In a world where “todo está para ser visto por

completo” (Sarlo, Escenas 32), where literature is no longer a hermeneutic game

structured in the interplay between permanence and variation, the hidden and the

apparent, the literary critic still has a role to play. She may no longer be the privileged

interpreter of a message or a discourse that needs to be “deciphered,” but she can still act

as the wide-eyed guardian of a world that continues to dream, and not always lucidly.

As the title of Sarlo’s second chapter puts it, postmodern culture is a kind of

“sueño insomne” in which we, as individuals, are no longer the ones who dream. For

Sarlo, we are being dreamed by a culture where the market has taken over the place

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previously occupied by the subject. This has turned our dreams over to a market that has

no intention of dreaming up a society other than the one in which the market reigns. As

Sarlo states,

El mercado es un lenguaje y todos tratamos de hablar algunas de sus

lenguas: nuestros sueños no tienen demasiado juego propio. Soñamos con
piezas que se encuentran en el mercado. Hace siglos, las piezas venían de
otras partes, y no eran, necesariamente, mejores. La crítica de los sueños
fue uno de los grandes impulsos en la construcción de imágenes de
sociedades diferentes. Hoy, entonces, son los sueños seriales del mercado
los que están aquí para ser objeto de la crítica. (25)

In this context, it falls to the literary critic to read the dreams of the market and to “hacer

ver” (8): that is, to make those dreams apparent to a subject who, amid the illusion of

total visibility, has forgotten how to read into messages or intentions. For Sarlo, one of

the main problems of the demise of literature is not only the occlusion of the moral and

experiential intensity that it provided, but also a decline in the capacity to read critically.

One of the recurring themes in Sarlo’s postmodern scenes is the blindness of the various

subjects engaged in the new cultural practices of a postmodern era. The girl heading to

the nightclub, for example, “testimonia la forma de una amnesia”: she ignores both the

origin of the styles that she combines on her body (35) and the exclusionary force that

acts as the flipside of the market’s promises of freedom (41). In a similar manner, the

mother and daughter who discuss plastic surgeries are not aware that they function as

ventriloquists for a culture that “nos sueña como un cosido de retazos, un collage de

partes, un ensamble nunca terminado del todo” (24). The player of video games is also

indifferent to the emptying of meaning (52) and television viewers continues to believe

that surfing channels is a way of exercising individual agency, without considering the

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possibility that the very syntax of their practice has been determined by others in

advance.

Sarlo’s depictions of the various subjects of postmodern cultural practices suggest

that the decline in reading practices has made us illiterate. Failure to read into the forms

of contemporary culture has turned us into naive readers, incapable of interpreting the

forms of late capitalist culture that determine our desires, our social position, and our

subjectivity. This is true not only of “uneducated” readers, such as youth or the popular

classes, but also of the very critics who are supposed to be directing their criticism at the

serial dreams of the market. For Sarlo, both “staunch neoliberals” and “neopopulist”

defenders of the market owe their enthusiasm to a blindness (6). In the first case, their

faith in the market is a result of a total disregard for inequality; in the second case, the

naive defense of the culture industry is made possible by a complete failure to read into

the forms of late capitalist culture. As Sarlo tries to show time and again in Escenas de la

vida posmoderna, a careful reading of the new forms of mass culture reveals how instead

of promoting individual liberty those forms train subjectivities in an ideology that

perpetuates the dominance of the market. For example, the practice of “zapping” or

surfing channels on television can only be construed as liberatory if one fails to read into

television’s particular aesthetic: Sarlo’s analysis of the “velocidad y el llenado total”

created by television’s use of montage ultimately seeks to show that television’s packed

visual discourse is meant to promote not individual choice but high ratings (63). As a way

of capturing and retaining attention, the quick succession of images follows the laws of a

market that knows how to elicit a “felicidad apacible” (64) by creating a discourse that is

easy to both interpret and understand (70). Such ease of interpretation is precisely what

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has boosted the “moda de intelectuales” (68) who depict zapping as an instance of

individual agency in the fight against cultural hegemony while completely ignoring the

aesthetic dimensions that refute the illusion of choice.

Sarlo argues, in other words, that both the public’s and critics’ new illiteracy in

the techniques of aesthetic interpretation leads to a kind of political naiveté that bolsters

instead of countering the cultural and social hegemonies of the late twentieth century.

Sarlo’s strategy to offset this interpretive naiveté is to invoke art and literature as

practices that, unlike contemporary criticism, are accessible to the public but can still

train readers in the difficult practices of critique. As Sarlo argues in the chapter “El lugar

del arte,” the current marginalization of art and literature is due not to their inaccessibility

but to the rift that the cultural industry has created between a pop culture aimed at the

masses and a group of writers and artists “cultos” now restricted to specialists or highly

“vocational” audiences (131). Yet, as the early twentieth century shows, it is possible for

the public to consume both “el cine más banal” but also “hechos estéticos singulares” like

John Ford’s “Rio Grande” and Yasujirō Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (132). For Sarlo, such

instances of “high” art are based on “experiencias que todos compartimos” and are thus

perfectly available to a mass public (134). Like Reyes, Sarlo construes art and literature

as discourses rooted in “condiciones comunes” to all human beings, which a few

“exceptional” men and women are capable of transforming into aesthetic objects. The

transformation grants aesthetic works a distance that allows us to see our common

conditions “de manera más tensa, más precisa, más nítida y también más ambigua” (134).

Throughout that chapter, Sarlo thus tries to retain literature as a useful “fiction” (154):

she shows that the aesthetic experience of “high” art offers a diversity of viewpoints and

  233  
a critical perspective not provided by the products of mass culture. What is more, Sarlo

makes that argument using the very literary techniques that she sets out to defend.

Like the various scenes of postmodern life, which Sarlo paints in her previous

chapters, the descriptions of artists and writers in “El lugar del arte” borrow the tone and

strategies of fiction. Under the subtitle “Instantáneas,” the descriptions are structured as a

set of portraits that depict the life and work of six Argentine writers and artists without

giving away their names. Using free indirect discourse, they combine descriptions of their

work with information that seems to be culled from the writers’ own descriptions of their

lives. Yet, as with the other “scenes” in Escenas de la vida posmoderna, Sarlo’s

“snapshots” are not meant to be read as the result of fieldwork or research.221 In contrast

to works of cultural studies that include ethnographic descriptions, the scenes and

portraits in Sarlo’s book do not provide evidence or testimony. They function, instead,

more like the scenes sketched out in El árbol de Saussure. Echoing Libertella’s minimal

descriptions, Sarlo’s vignettes work like small allegorical fictions that pare cultural

practices down to their most basic forms and code a certain form of the aesthetic.222

Through her “Instantáneas,” Sarlo pits the structures of artistic life against the forms of

postmodern culture described elsewhere in the book in order to show not only what is

missing in contemporary society but also how art might train us in new ways of seeing

                                                                                                               
221
One of the main criticisms aimed at Sarlo is that she restricts her “fieldwork” to locales in the middle-
class neighborhood where she lives. See, most notably, Benzecry’s article “Beatriz Sarlo and Theories of
Popular Culture.” In “Marginales en la noche,” Panesi situates himself in opposition to Sarlo who
presumably presents a “ficción de ‘trabajo de campo’” (40). Panesi tries to dispel the illusion that he
engaged in fieldwork of any kind and suggests that Sarlo, in contrast, tries to dupe the reader. Panesi,
however, does not consider the possibility that Sarlo in fact intended her “fieldwork anecdotes” to be read
not as evidence but as fictions.
222
Most of Sarlo’s scenes of postmodern life open chapters or sections and serve as introductory allegories
that Sarlo then analyzes and critiques. These scenes thus perform literature’s capacity to introduce readers
to difficult theoretical concepts.

  234  
the world and experiencing temporality. Her argument is perhaps most passionately set

forth in the last “snapshot,” titled “Insomnio,” which tells the story of a sleepless woman

who roams her house at night, attempting to write. Mindlessly shuffling blank pages, her

mind is consumed by the thought of her husband, sleeping calmly nearby and described

as “el escritor más grande… el poeta tocado por los dioses y por la fama” (Escenas 147).

The woman shares with him “un amor por la belleza” and a passion for writing that

nevertheless leaves upon her “una huella distinta” (147). Much younger than he, the

woman feels belated, envious of both his admirable work and the time that he has had to

accomplish it. Despite her envy, she nevertheless wishes he might continue to live so he

might one day recognize “por fin, que ella era su igual” (148).

There is no indication in the main body of the text that the woman in “Insomnio”

has any relationship to Beatriz Sarlo. Yet in the endnotes that list the names of the

various men who inspired Sarlo’s snapshots, Sarlo mentions Rafael Fillippelli as

someone who “también tiene mucho que ver con todas [las instantáneas]” (202).223

Fillippelli, an Argentine writer and filmmaker, is also Sarlo’s husband, a fact that casts

“Insomnio” as an autobiographical text. Yet Fillippelli in actuality is only two years older

than Sarlo. Perhaps one might more accurately portray “Insomnio” as a fictionalized

allegory of Sarlo’s experience as a female writer whose desire to prove her equality

disrupts her calm slumber in the present and propels her into a past in which the male

writer was recognized as an inspired poet. Despite living in the same house at the same

                                                                                                               
223
Instead of the bibliography listed for other sections of Escenas, the endnotes to “Instantáneas” list the
names of Juan José Saer, Sergio Chejfec, Eduardo Stupía, Daniel Samoilovich, and Juan Pablo Renzi and
claim that “de ellos he tomado, con una libertad que no autorizaron pero que seguramente comprenderán,
los rasgos de estas ‘Instantáneas’” (202). Except for “Insomnio,” the first five “snapshots” can be easily
mapped onto the lives and work of the five writers and artists mentioned in the endnotes.

  235  
time, the woman wonders what unites her with the male writer and questions whether it

would be possible for her to stake a claim to a shared “religión del arte, la república de

las letras, la persecución común de la belleza y de la verdad” (148). Knowing that such

concepts are on the wane, the woman is acutely aware that she risks being disregarded as

young, naive, belatedly attempting to revive a modern form of the aesthetic and to keep

an old figure of the intellectual alive at the very moment of its passing.224 Her experience

of split temporality, however, is precisely what keeps her awake, remembering the words

of “ese hombre que seguramente duerme” (149). Shuttling between the deep aesthetic

experiences of the past and the smooth blank page of the present, the woman dreams with

her eyes wide open, imagining a less uneven world where words like beauty, truth, justice

still have some purchase.

Through her fictionalized account of the female experience of writing, Sarlo

argues for a conception of the literary that in the postmodern era has become quaintly

old-fashioned and depicts the “naive” belief in that vision as the very basis for a critical

awakening. Like an antidote to the dehistoricizing force of the “retro,” the earnest desire

to recapture an “old” form of the aesthetic provides an experience of historical depth that

disrupts the serial temporality of the postmodern market. Behinds its “vaciados” or mass-

produced patterns, Sarlo reveals social hierarchies still coded in a seemingly flat present

and demands that we recognize her right to a form of the aesthetic already consumed or

exhausted by the centers of discursive power. “Insomnio”, in this sense, shares one of the

key aesthetic principles that structure El árbol de Saussure, which similarly invokes the

“old ghost” of literature in order to “leer los libros de acuerdo con otro calendario en la
                                                                                                               
224
Sarlo’s critics have often characterized her in these very terms. Benzecry, for one, depicts the book as a
swansong to “the modern dreams of Argentine culture” and Sarlo herself as nostalgic for those dreams (87).

  236  
tierra del mercado” (ADS 41). Responding to what Martín Kohan calls “una vocación de

desfasaje” (135), Libertella also toys with temporality. In his chapter “Sobre la moda,” he

overlays the straight and speedy runways of the postmodern market on the circular

pathways of the Aztec calendar (ADS 40). There, and in other parts of the book,

Libertella imagines a present that allows for the coexistence of different aesthetic

systems, not just through the ironizing force of the “retro” but in strong and contradictory

contemporaneity.225 His “desbaratamientos cronológicos,” as Kohan calls them, disrupt

both the idea of progress (136), and the very notion of progression. Their effect is both

temporal and spatial: by undoing the temporal organization of aesthetic forms, Libertella

seeks to make space in the present for other forms of reading. Like Sarlo, he demands

that we allow him to read and write according to another calendar, one rooted, perhaps, in

“México, en el corazón de la Aldea” (ADS 40): a place where the “old ghost” of

literature still haunts critical discourse.

Written in late twentieth-century Argentina, both Sarlo and Libertella’s claims to

literature thus validate the project of a criticism that was “literary” in its attention to

certain family of texts and in its use of fictional strategies. Reaching into the past, they

make present a “literary” approach to reading that in the latter half of the twentieth

century was dismissed as lacking in rigor, impressionistic, obsolete, theoretically

unsophisticated, or even naive. Invoking the ghost of a fluid and discursively

heterogeneous tradition, they practice two of its most disruptive strategies. They activate,
                                                                                                               
225
It is worth noting that the sense of contemporaneity in Libertella is unlike the temporal pastiche that has
been described as a key element of postmodernity (see for example, Jameson’s account in Postmodernism,
or Ingeborg Hoesterey’s Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature). Libertella, in contrast,
invokes a sense of the archaic or the “old-fashioned” that is dissolved by the capacity of the “retro” to make
present and empty older aesthetic forms of historicity. For a discussion of the sense of contemporaneity that
in Libertella disrupts chronological orderings see Martín Kohan’s “Héctor Libertella: La pasión hermética
del crítico a destiempo.”

  237  
first, the use of fiction as a valid form of interpretation based not on theoretical or

conceptual constructs but on images, descriptions, dialogue. In reactivating that “old”

form of interpretation, they also engage in what Libertella calls an “artesanía

Latinoamericana acostumbrada a revolver indiferente en las escrituras de cualquier época

y lugar” (Libertella, Nueva escritura 96). As Libertella argues in Nueva escritura en

Latinoamérica, practicing an apparently naive and temporally jumbled form of reading

and writing was—in 1977—a political literary strategy that sought to “disolver la illusion

de ‘progreso’, acusar todo proyecto que quiera revivir esa ilusión, y descreer de cualquier

superioridad de procedimientos modernos o de nueva síntesis teórica” (41). Its target was

as much a Western theoretical “Order” (44) as a local Latin American criticism that

explicitly defined itself by its critical function, but only according to the codes of a “new

system” established by an international theoretical “evolution” and the “progress” of the

latest interdisciplinary research (38).226 In the year 2000, Libertella once again invokes an

“artisanal” form of interpretation, this time through a narrative whose literary approach to

texts and cultural phenomena risks market suicide in the realms of both literature and

criticism.227 The strategy, however, is no less bold in Sarlo’s text, which places itself

                                                                                                               
226
In Nueva escritura en Latinoamérica Libertella emphasizes the market function of the nueva crítica of
the 1960s and 70s, which assumed the pre-programed role of a critical avant-garde in order to position
itself within an allegorical “Feria Internacional” (39).
227
Libertella had, in some senses, already performed that form of “market suicide” with Nueva escritura en
Latinoamérica. Although that book was written in a more recognizably “critical” register, it still garnered
the critical fire of Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who in “Nueva escritura latinoamericana [sic] de Héctor
Libetella” dismisses Libertella’s ideas as simple and simplistic. Rodríguez Monegal claims that Libertella
actually displays an unstated theoretical reverence to French poststructuralist theory, a fact that undermined
his claims to combat the Wester theoretical Order. In the end, Rodríguez Monegal argues that Nueva
escritura en Latinoamérica “no ofrece la condensación de un pensamiento crítico sino las notas de clase de
un alumno aventajado. En estilo telegráfico y mezclándolo todo, el autor usa y abusa del privilegio de la
lectura digestiva para dar sello propio a lo que han dicho antes y mejor estudiosos de Europa y la América
latina” (38). Libertella, however, seems to have pushed even further in the direction of Monegal’s criticism.
In El árbol de Saussure he creates a text that could more easily be characterized as a collection of notes
written in the “telegraphic style” of a naive reader who tends to jumble everything, most notably, critical
  238  
more recognizably in the realm of criticism while incorporating literature as a local

critical discourse that has not yet exhausted its critical potential (40).

Like the woman in “Insomnio,” both Sarlo and Libertella thus aggressively

demand that we recognize their critical right to literature, their right to “girar sobre ese

derecho, usarlo, hacerlo producir” (Sarlo, Escenas 150). If they do so for themselves,

from their positions of a female critic and/or Latin American writer, their claim to

literature also seeks to open interpretation to a presumably naive reader on the margins of

the critical market. Sarlo’s depiction of literature as a discourse that is both accessible in

its reliance on “common” experiences but dense enough to train us in the difficult

practices of critical reading promises to break the hermetic ghettos of academic criticism

and bring naive readers into a new critical consciousness. Sarlo, however, also construes

literature as a narrow portal or necessary initiation, without which readers remain

excluded from the realms of critical interpretation. As Sarlo claims in an interview for the

literary supplement “Cultura y Nación”:

Como es el discurso semántica y formalmente más denso y más resistente,

lo que aprendemos leyendo literatura puede migrar hacia otros objetos
pero no a la inversa. Alguien que se ha enfrentado con el Ulysses de
Joyce, como es el caso de Umberto Eco, puede migrar y mirar la
televisión. Quien se ha enfrentado sólo a la televisión no puede sentarse
frente al Finnegans Wake y esperar que diga algo. El camino es de una
sola mano. (cited in Prodlubne 100)228

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
and literary discourses. This occurred, of course, in the late-twentieth-century context of a critical market in
which the power of academia continued to perpetuate the illusion of theoretical “progress” or “currency”
and privileged “sophisticated” theoretical readings over “naive” and “simplistic” ones.
228
Escenas de la vida posmoderna is not the only text in which Sarlo depicts the reader of mass culture as
naive. Dalmaroni, for example, notes that in El imperio de los sentimientos Sarlo portrays the female reader
of “folletines” as a mere consumer captured by the text’s reading contract, which condemns her to
contentment, blindness, naiveté, and conformity. The naive reader in her text is thus portrayed as a kind of
“iletrada” (lacking in both education and reading capabilities) “incapaz de aferrar la conflicturalidad
estética o ideológica” (99).

  239  
Although Sarlo recognizes the masses’ capacity for critical insight, critical ability

remains dormant unless developed through engagement with literary discourse.229

Literature retains, in other words, a pedagogical function for Sarlo, who thus insists on

the importance of educational institutions to disseminate literature to a mass public who

would otherwise remain in thrall to the mass media’s uncritical forms. Sarlo’s insistence

on the accessibility and pedagogical function of literature finds, however, a critical mirror

in El árbol de Saussure. There, Libertella questions the presumed legibility of literature

while making a case for the critical capacities of a reader untutored in both the discourse

of literature and the languages of critique. For Libertella, the critical potential of literature

lies not so much in its legibility as in its illegibility, not only within a critical market

trained in devising, recognizing, and classifying languages, but also for naive readers

whose lack of interpretive training allows them to read against the grain of the market.

Perhaps the most emblematic example of Libertella’s critique can be found in the

description of the graffiti found in the ghetto’s only bathroom. On its white walls, a

fictionalized Augusto de Campos draws concrete poetry, which Libertella describes as an

“arte rupestre” and an “oficio milenario” (49).230 Instantiating the technique of temporal

disarray, Libertella codes in an avant-garde practice of the 1960s a kind of future

                                                                                                               
229
This structure is particularly important in the context of Sarlo’s argument about the popular classes,
whom she claims are capable of critical insight but also vulnerable in the face of postmodern forces that
undermine traditional social ties and institutions—like schools—that had served a libertatory function. The
absorption of the popular classes into mass culture makes it particularly urgent for Sarlo to identify a
discourse that might allow subjects to recognize the market’s role in shaping subjectivities. This is also
what leads Sarlo to insist on the importance of education in disseminating a literary culture that might train
the popular classes in critical practices while establishing communal ties that might provide a resistance to
the forces of globalization. For this argument, see in particular “Culturas populares, viejas y nuevas” in
Escenas de la vida posmoderna.
230
Agusto de Campos, a Brazilian writer and founder of the concrete poetry movement, appears in El árbol
de Saussure as a fictional figure who roams the ghetto. The graffiti on the walls of the ghetto’s bathroom
nevertheless looks exactly like the work of the “real” De Campos and is an excellent example of
Libertella’s capacity to blurr the realms of fiction and non-fiction, literature and criticism.

  240  
prehistory that relates concrete poetry to both the cultural practices of postmodern youth

and to ancient pictograms. Quoting an image-poem by De Campos in his text, Libertella

presents it as an example of the graffiti in the ghetto’s bathroom:

 (ADS 51).

In the ghetto, De Campos’ concrete poetry serves as a paradigmatic figure for writing,

which is impossible to interpret because “tudo esta dito,” because literature hides/means

nothing. Turned into a “cuerpo presente que expulsa cualquier comentario sobre él” (51),

literature has little to offer the critical market. Its best interpreter is thus one who does not

seek to read into the letter, who does not expect Finnegan’s Wake to mean anything. In

such a place, the best way to interpret literature is by taking the place/side of the most

naive of readers. As the fictional critic Clovis Carvalho claims in an “extreme and

militant argument,” Augusto’s work is best understood from an idiot’s point of view:

Es decir, en la posición etimológica de un distinto, un separado, un idiotés

que ya no quiere hacer profesión de la lectura ni de nada. O, en aquel
mismo uso y acentos antiguos, un imbécil que detuvo su desarrollo mental
entre los 3 y los 7 años de edad. Alguien que, por esa suerte de desgracia
de la naturaleza, sólo puede leer en el instante emblemático de un niño no
tocado por la obligatoriedad de la letra. (50)

The idiot, the child, and the illiterate, all serve in El árbol de Saussure as figures

for a reader situated outside established patterns of reading and writing. The naive or

primitive readers in Libertella’s text are extreme forms of a reader excluded from the

centers of interpretation, from those spaces where power over and through the letter still

exerts a kind of dominance. In his utopia, Libertella makes no attempt to incorporate

  241  
those readers into the realm of the lettered, no attempt to cure them of their naiveté, no

attempt to educate them into a discourse in which the ghetto’s graffiti would begin to say

or mean something. Instead, in those readers Libertella recognizes a unique capacity for

interpretation that allows them to understand concrete poetry through their literal reading

of De Campos’s textual and conceptual practice. As Libertella writes, “porque es bárbaro

y adora imágenes, el analfabeto sabe leer esta poesía salvaje y bárbara. Aquí la letra en

estado bruto hace jugar de otro modo los procesos del aprendizaje, la lectoescritura y la

transmisión por la mirada” (49). In their savage love for the image, untutored readers

engage in a ludic form of reading that unsettles and reshuffles the literary and critical

traditions that education has bequeathed to the lettered world. As such, naive readers

engage in a practice much like the one that Libertella instantiates throughout his book.

Like them, Libertella situates himself in the position of the illiterate or the barbarian and

misreads Saussure’s diagram. Instead of interpreting the diagram “correctly,” as the basis

of a larger theory, Libertella misreads it as a childish drawing or as the map of a fictional

world. Interpreting it literally, pictorially, Libertella reads Saussure as if he could unlearn

his own literacies and the whole critical history that the diagram helped define.

Libertella thus situates himself in the position of the naive reader so as to show

that the figures, fables, and landscapes, which the illiterate reads into the traces of

writing, are not just fabrications or made up interpretations. They are also critical forms

capable of revealing the persistent hierarchies of a critical market that continues to

privilege certain discursive formations and subjects by construing them as “critical” in

opposition to “naive.” When read through these critical forms, Escenas de la vida

posmoderna, for one, betrays Sarlo’s attempts to assert her own dominance by construing

  242  
the intellectual as a still-necessary figure, charged with shepherding the naive masses,

through literature, towards critique. Libertella disrupts this vision through the figure of a

naive reader uniquely predisposed towards a transhistorical reading-writing practice that

disregards temporal order and hierarchies and stands in critical opposition to

intellectuals’ strategic self-positioning according to the latest trends of the market.

Libertella’s revision of both the intellectual and the naive reader, in fact, echoes many of

the critiques leveled at Sarlo.231 The guiding thread in these critiques is Sarlo’s tendency

to belittle the masses, both popular and middle class, through what Panesi calls “un

responso reformista, sarmientino” (“Marginales” 41): because Sarlo holds little faith in

the common reader’s native capacity for interpretation, she turns to what Horacio

González calls “frameworks of communicability” (cited in Prodlubne 103) that might

make intellectual discourse “legible” to the public and thus allow criticism to compete

with the mass media for their attention. If this allows Sarlo to recuperate the public role

of the intellectual—which she envies in male European critics like Raymond Williams

and Roland Barthes—it also revives a civilizational project that reinforces old hierarchies

between the intellectual and child-like, a-critical subjects like the girl heading to the

nightclub, the working-class viewer of TV, or the young clientele of shopping-mall video

arcades.

Whereas Sarlo’s “Sarmiento-like, reformist” attitude constructs a civilizational

critical program that might ward against the savagery of the late twentieth century,

                                                                                                               
231
These critiques range from those of Horacio González, who claims that Sarlo’s attempt to make
intellectual discourse legible is in fact a form of market populism, to those of Benzecry, who critiques
Sarlo’s patronizing relationship to the popular classes and her failure to recognize agency in the popular
classes. Croce, for example, recognizes that Sarlo tries to avoid the positions of both the populist intelectual
and the mandarin academic, but ultimately “incurre en la desestimación del público al que uniformiza”
(79).

  243  
Libertella responds to the same conditions with what we might call a “barbarizing”

project, or what he termed in Nueva escritura en Latinoamérica “el proyecto

‘cavernícola’” (41). Libertella’s project, constructed through a web of readings that

disregard temporal organizations as well as the boundaries between literature and

criticism, is conceived as an “actividad de escribir ficción y de hacerlo a la vuelta de la

teoría” (34).232 Its purpose is to turn the tables on criticism, using fiction as a reading

strategy to “marcar similarmente a la crítica, desguarnecer sus supuestos y hacer que ella

misma pueda tomarse como trazo, como interés” (33). Libertella’s aim, in other words, is

to make criticism legible, not by sugarcoating criticism’s difficult languages in the more

digestible discourse of literature, but by subjecting critical discourse to a naive gaze that

lays its eyes on literature as easily as it does on criticism.233 The procedure is perhaps

best illustrated through an anecdote that, according to Laura Estrín, Libertella continued

to repurpose in a number of his works: “la anécdota aquella […] en la que en un congreso

de lingüística o semiótica en Misiones, en el baño rudimentario y selvático del lugar,

jesuita, una frase teórica enloquece por igual a guaraníes y críticos literarios” (Estrín 50).

The obscurity of the theoretical phrase puts it at the same level as every other mark vying

for space and attention on the walls of the rudimentary bathroom. It opens theory to both

“sophisticated” interpreters and “barbarians,” here equally capable of reading the

                                                                                                               
232
Estrín also describes Libertella’s project through a quote by Osvaldo Lamborghini: “montado como
intriga literal, el juego donde el texto teórico podrá ser portador de la ficción y la reflexión semiótica tejerá
la trama del poema” (50).
233
It is worth noting that Libertella’s aim is not only to open criticism to creative misreading but also to
reveal the extent to which critical strategies are also market strategies. In Nueva escritura en latinoamérica
he notes, for example, that although his “projecto cavernícola” turns its back on “la conquista de rápidos
efectos en el mercado” (28), it also understands that this gesture will inevitably be incorporated into the
market by a critical gaze that “lo registra y lo discierne en tanto ingenuo o deliberado, pasivo, violento,
seductor, burgués, marginal, terrorista, integrado…” His aim is to do the same with criticism, via literature.

  244  
theoretical fragment and turning it into a small fiction that can contest the hierarchies

between the critical and the naive.

By taking criticism as a trace, subject to creative misreading by any reader,

Libertella challenges the self-interested practices of a reading establishment that

continues to use the adjective “critical” not just as a mark of resistance against cultural,

economic, and political hegemonies, but also as the instrument of a critical order.

Challenging the critical order, Libertella’s poetics of obscurity opens up criticism to a

reader traditionally excluded from that space. Libertella’s literary-critical politics finds

one of its best articulations in the novel Zettel, where Libertella “translates” Luis de

Góngora’s famous defense of his obscure poetry. As Libertella renders Góngora’s phrase:

“Demás que honra me ha causado hacerme oscuro: hablar de tal manera que a los

ignorantes les parezca griego” (Zettel 28). Adding a colon and eliminating the claim to be

an “hombre docto,” Libertella redirects Góngora’s message. If in Góngora’s text the

phrase is dismissive of an “ignorant” reader incapable of understanding his literary

games, under the foliage of El árbol de Saussure it becomes an impassioned defense of

the intractable languages of literature and of a reader whose very “ignorance” places him

or her outside established currents of reading and writing. In Libertella’s texts, the naive

reader assumes a strategic position: no longer in need of mediation on the part of “learned

men,” the naive reader activates our capacity for critical reading by turning texts we

thought we understood into a new-old tongue, to be reread as if we too had forgotten to

read.

Libertella’s faith that any reader can interpret the sign—even, or especially, if

they read it incorrectly or inadequately—thus opens the ghetto of interpretation to

  245  
encompass the whole world. If Libertella agrees with Sarlo that the reader has been

“desalojado” by criticism’s “enorme bola o masa de comentario en expansion” (ADS 29),

his solution is not to make criticism more legible or accessible but to eliminate the

mediating role of the critic altogether. If, in another world, a self-designated tribe of

intellectuals sought to “completar” literature with their critical reading, “en el ghetto, en

cambio, las cosas ocurren instantáneas, sin tanta necesidad de mediación, sin tanto horror

vacui” (29). In Libertella’s utopian world, that immediate, instantaneous, literal reading

makes Saussure’s diagram much more hospitable: it opens theory to all readers, making a

space for them at the bar, not just as consumers but as interpreters. In El árbol de

Saussure, the critical and the naive reader sit together at the bar, like “prójimos,” like

“semejantes,” engaged in a raucous conversation in which “nunca nadie sabe cuál es cuál

en el seno de la tribu” (32).234 As they converse, they also watch the writers across the

bar, and as they watch, writing becomes a concrete body that expels all commentary

about it: “Tanto ‘extraña’ o echa de menos la interpretación (siente su falta), como en ese

mismo acto la vuelve exótica o extranjera: la extraña” (52).

Like Sarlo, Libertella believes that “el objeto de la literatura es enseñarnos a leer”

(ADS 53). Yet in Libertella’s utopian world, the pedagogical purpose of literature is not

to train us in civilized procedures of criticism, but to turn us—through the “bar, bar, bar”

of impenetrable texts—into naive readers capable of strange and barbarous

interpretations. As Damiani notes, Libertella’s amphibious, unpredictable style sought to

                                                                                                               
234
In El árbol de Saussure Libertella also redefines the concepts of “el prójimo” and “el semejante”—terms
used in Spanish to refer to one’s fellow human beings—by turning Rimbaud’s metaphor “je est un autre”
into a metonymy. Playing with “el prójimo” and “el semejante,” he turns the “other” from one who is
unlike me to one who is simply next to me: “el otro no es más que el semejante, en el sentido literal de lo
que es ‘símil’, parecido o idéntico. Y el prójimo, que es el próximo de uno, sería entonces su doble” (31).

  246  
make “la (propia) lengua (ajena) interpelando las certezas semánticas del lector (para que

llegue a sentir que lo que lee parece griego; o mejor: Bárbaro” (18). For Libertella, that

“savage” project has been taking place for years, enacted from the barbarous latitudes of

Latin America, where theoretical inadequacy, critical naiveté, or methodological

underdevelopment allowed readers to interpret the world differently, to explode both

Latin American and metropolitan traditions, making them illegible while recuperating

them for the future. This is the project of a “grupo de ¿cavernícolas? [que] aparece

decantando la historia literaria de Latinoamérica, violentando desde su oficio aquella

mirada doble—Civilización y Barbarie—y reconociéndose estructuralmente in situ,

practicantes en Continente” (35). Libertella, however, views the “Continent” not so much

as a space than as a position from which to organize the text’s resistance. Like the utopia

in El árbol de Saussure, it is a kind of mark that emerged on a map, where Libertella

draws the outlines of a naive community of readers whose literary-critical practices

might, at the turn of the millennium, help us learn, once again, how to read.

Fictional Utopias

Here we are, yet again, in Buenos Aires. Another literary critic is speculating

about the new world in which she finds herself. She insists that we need a new apparatus,

other words and notions in order to understand this new “etapa de la nación, que es otra

configuración del capitalismo y otra en la historia de los imperios” (Ludmer Aquí 9). The

old “moldes, géneros y especies” that used to divide and differentiate the world are no

longer useful or efficacious in reading the “realidadficción” that is Argentina in the year

2000. So our literary critic turns to speculation, in all senses of the word. She turns to

  247  
mirrors: images, doubles, symmetries, transparencies, and reflections (9). She turns to

thinking and theorizing “con y sin base real” (10). She turns to an imagination that is not

distinct from the real (11). She turns to the futuristic visions of speculative fiction. She

turns to gambling: to machination and the calculated risk of one who measures potential

gains (10). Speculation becomes the central strategy of a book that seeks new words and

forms to see and hear something of the new world, “porque ¿cómo,” our literary critic

asks, “se podría pensar sino desde aquí, América latina?” (9).

To say that the literary critic in Aquí América latina: Una especulación (2010)

would also be a fiction. For like the critic in Escenas de la vida posmoderna the literary

critic in Ludmer’s book is also part of a scene: although Ludmer did in fact travel to

Buenos Aires as part of her sabbatical from Yale University in the year 2000, in Aquí

América latina she appears as one of many characters who traverse Buenos Aires at the

end of the millennium. Written in the form of a diary, the first part of Ludmer’s book

offers a record of the critic’s speculations and observations of the subjects, spaces,

literature, and media that she encounters in turn-of-the-millennium Argentina, including a

copy of the recently published El árbol de Saussure.235 The place and time of the diary

are not merely accidental—a fortuitous location from which Ludmer happens to write—

but the tactical posture of an author whose “aquí” remains ambiguous. For the “here” in

                                                                                                               
235
It is woth noting that only the first part of Aquí América latina is written in diary form. To complement
the first part, titled “Temporalidades,” the second part of Ludmer’s text is titled “Territorios” and is written
in the more conventional form of an academic essay, with bibliographic references and extensive endnotes.
In the transition to the second part, Ludmer significantly describes the trajectory of “speculation” as
moving “de la ciudad a la isla urbana, de la isla a la nación, de la nación a la lengua y de la lengua al
imperio para poder cerrar el género especulativo allí en el imperio, como el inimitable Tlön” (121). While
Ludmer ends her book with an essay titled “El imperio,” which discusses the politics of language in the
context of migration, one could also argue that her book as a whole moves from the periphery to the center
of the empire in its formal transition from the literary and essayistic structure of the intimate diary to the
formal requirements of the academic essay.

  248  
Ludmer’s title is presumably a bar, a room, a library in turn-of-the-millennium “Latin

America.” Yet the publication of Aquí América latina in 2010 suggests that the book

could have been penned anywhere from the far south of America to the Anglo latitudes of

New Haven, where Ludmer returned at the end of 2000 and where she continued to teach

until 2005. One might say rather that, as in Libertella’s writing, Latin America is not so

much a geographical location as a textual position, a fiction that Ludmer assumes in order

to open new critical possibilities.

Like both Sarlo and Libertella, Ludmer too sets out to make a critical clearing,

and does so by positioning herself in an imagined Argentina that provides the literary

critic with a new perspective and a different apparatus with which to read the world. Part

of the new apparatus is the imitation of the diary form, which allows Ludmer to construct

Argentina not so much as a geographical location than as a community invoked through

the readings and encounters that she narrates in her entries. As the next-to-last entry of

the diary suggests, Libertella was a key figure in that community: the “diario sabático”

ends with the narration of a stroll that Ludmer presumably took with Libertella through

Buenos Aires on May 30, 2000.236 Written in the voice of Libertella, the diary entry takes

us through the streets of Buenos Aires, where the character of Libertella invokes a whole

host of writers, cultural events, fictional figures, and literary institutions. It is as if all the

cultural ghosts of Buenos Aires had suddenly awoken to accompany Ludmer and

Libertella on their walk. Here we find, all at once, Borges, Esteban Echeverría, and Cesar

Aira, Macedonio Fernández launching his presidential candidacy next to the books on art

                                                                                                               
236
That date is significant, as “Un paseo por Buenos Aires con Héctor Libertella, contado por él mismo” is
preceded and followed by entries dated in December of 2000. This diary entry’s particular location in the
book serves as a kind of “desbaratamiento cronológico” (Kohan 136) like the one illustrated in the
narration of that stroll.

  249  
and semiotics in the bookstore “Nueva Visión,” not too far from where Victoria Ocampo

edits Sur and Ludmer gets together with Libertella, Osvaldo Lamborghini, and Tamara

Kamenszein to plan the magazine Los nietos de Martín Fierro (109-11). A perfect

instantiation of Libertella’s textual and temporal strategies, Ludmer’s narrative draws the

outlines of a virtual-real space that embodies both an intellectual community and textual

strategies adopted in the rest of her text. For Aquí América latina also weaves indistinctly

between literature and criticism, fiction and reality, the public and the private, the now

and then. Like El árbol de Saussure, it takes fiction as a reading strategy that disrupts

these oppositions, disorganizes temporal and spatial orders, and establishes a critical

position in the new world where Ludmer finds herself.

Ludmer’s Aquí América latina thus serves, in this sense, as yet another double of

El árbol de Saussure. Yet Ludmer’s relationship to Libertella disrupts the hierarchical

structure that positioned Sarlo in the role of the pedagogue, who uses literature to guide

us through her interpretations of a new, postmodern Buenos Aires. In contrast, Ludmer

and Libertella take a stroll next to each other, crafting in their dialogical interpretations of

Florida, Viamonte, and Corrientes streets an intellectual community that opens up new

forms of reading, writing, thinking. As Ludmer suggests, claiming belonging to that

intellectual community grants her a necessarily critical perspective.237 For locating

                                                                                                               
237
In the introduction to the second part of her book, Ludmer defines a territory as a place to which one
claims belonging, whether or not that territory is defined by boundaries charted on a map. To do so, she
invokes the Mapuche understanding of territory: “La cultura indígena tiene una relación totalmente
diferente con su territorio. Los mapuches dicen que el ser humano es el complemento de la tierra y de todo
lo que le rodea; que es parte de un territorio y no su dueño. Y no piden el derecho a la tierra sino al
territorio. Reclaman sus territorios usurpados primero por los españoles y después por los militares
argentinos. Reclaman derechos territoriales como derechos humanos y piden una política de ordenamiento
territorial” (125). Regardless of the actual place from which Ludmer writes her book, she enunciates it from
Latin America. For her, Latin America is a territory to which she claims a right, one that has historically
been usurped by those in power, and one that she can reorganize as a creative political and textual practice.
One can compare this strategy, for example, to Hugo Achugar’s argument in “Leones, cazadores,
  250  
herself in Latin America entails recognizing, from the outset, the global inequalities that

continue to shape intellectual discourse. In the introduction to Aquí América latina

Ludmer asserts:

Especular desde aquí América latina es tomar una posición específica y

como prefijada, como un destino. Somos los que llegan tarde al banquete
de la civilización (Alfonso Reyes, “Notas sobre la inteligencia
Americana”) y esta secundariedad implica necesariamente una posición
estratégica crítica. No se puede no imaginar desde aquí algún tipo de
resistencia y de negatividad; no se puede siempre perder. (11)

Making reference to Reyes’s foundational declaration of cultural independence from

Europe and inserting herself within the first-person plural, Ludmer locates herself within

a marginal critical tradition and takes marginality not as destiny but as critical strategy.

For, unlike Reyes, Ludmer does not conceive of Latin America as a set geographical

location that condemns her to provinciality. Instead, like Libertella, she constructs Latin

America as an imaginary and re-imaginable intellectual community whose very

marginality allows it to work critically upon discourse.238 In step with Libertella, Ludmer

reconstructs that community and revives its project of creating a critical discourse from

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
historiadores,” where he recognizes that positionality and localization are the centers of political and
intellectual debate at the end of the millennium. Achugar’s aim is to highlight the differences between Latin
America and the British Commonwealth (to which postcolonial studies often refers) and between Latin
America and the space inhabited by Latino communities in the United States. In his desire to establish
differences, Achugar nevertheless claims that “los latinos en los Estados Unidos… no son argelinos pero
tampoco latinoamericanos” (216). Achugar thus denies the possibility of constructing a territory (“Latin
America”) that exceeds the boundaries of a region defined by political borders. He thus ends up reifying
Latin America as a physical referent, disregarding the fact that Latin America is a reconstructable map.
238
Ludmer’s strategy reflects Libertella’s in Nueva escritura en Latinoamérica, where he constructs Latin
America as a “stone” on which a group of “cavernícolas” projects the literary tradition of the Continent in
order to salvage it (36). “Latin America” is for Libertella more a textual practice than a physical referent,
though there is a relationship between the two.

  251  
Latin America, reactivating the many forms of negativity and resistance elaborated by a

tradition conscious of its own “secundariedad.”239

As does El árbol de Saussure, Aquí América latina begins by drawing the

boundaries of a utopia, a new world where reading, writing, and thinking function

differently. In that world fiction overflows and connects the realms of literature and

criticism while providing the critic entry into “la fábrica de la realidad” (12). For Ludmer,

Latin America’s awareness of its own “secundariedad” has bred the habit of imagining a

world different from the one we now know. It has fueled speculation, making fiction the

central instrument of an “imaginación pública” (11) that is common to literature,

criticism, and myriad other discourses and practices. Weaving indistinctly between them,

public imagination does not differentiate between fiction and non-fiction but rather places

fiction at the very heart of the production of reality. As Ludmer argues, public

imagination “no tiene índice de realidad, ella misma no diferencia entre realidad y

ficción. Su régimen es la realidadficción, su lógica el movimiento, la conectividad y la

superposición, sobreimpresión y fusión de todo lo visto y oído” (11-12). Ludmer’s

“public imagination” thus serves as a twenty-first-century version of Alfonso Reyes’s

“inteligencia Americana,” whose lack of specialization and capacity to jump from one

form to another, from the world of action and transaction to the world of reflection, made

it “más avezada al aire de la calle” (“Notas” 86). In Aquí América latina, we see it at

work in Ludmer’s imitation of the diary form, which performs the workings of public

                                                                                                               
239
In Ludmer’s case, the forms of negativity and resistance in Latin America include not only the strategic
use of critical forms and theoretical concepts from the metropolis, but also fiction as a “marginal” mode of
critical writing. The diversity of formal strategies in her book attests to the numerous rhetorical strategies
invoked by a Latin American literary-critical tradition anxious to liberate itself from its status as second-
class citizen.

  252  
imagination. By asking us to imagine the critic engaged in her day-to-day activities

throughout the streets of Buenos Aires, Ludmer weaves the presumably separate realms

of literature and criticism within a broader social fabric that includes bits of conversation,

clippings from newspapers, political commentary, and gossip from popular culture.

Like El árbol de Saussure and other critical fictions, Ludmer’s book embodies the

fluid and polymorphous realm of critical discourse in Latin America, and presents its lack

of differentiation as particularly opportune and rife with critical possibilities at the end of

the millennium. The lack of distinction between fiction and criticism allows Ludmer, for

one, to walk out of the academic cloisters from which Sarlo similarly sought exit, and to

come in contact with the myriad cultural practices of the turn of the millennium as well as

with the general public. Ludmer, however, conceives the public not as a mass of passive

consumers, but as fellow producers of “realidadficción” (12). For Ludmer, “public

imagination” is not restricted to intellectuals. It is, instead, a form of public property, a

resource common to all. Expropriating imagination and the capacity for fiction-making

away from their exclusive use by literature, Ludmer adopts them as primary tools of the

critic while construing them as universal capabilities that make critic and general public

co-participants in the construction of alternative worlds. As Ludmer claims: “Todos

somos capaces de imaginar, todos somos creadores (como en el lenguaje igualitario y

creativo de Chomsky) y ningún dueño. Así especula la especulación desde América

latina” (11). No longer do we find in Ludmer’s writing the critical “deslindes” that Reyes,

the “critical renovation” of the 1960s and 70s, José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, or Sarlo

established between critical and naive readers as they attempted to craft criticism as a

discourse separate from literature. Everyone is invited into this banquet where criticism

  253  
and literature commingle as both discourses and modes of thinking. No longer the

exclusive property of the critic, critical discourse is thus returned to the general public

and to the erstwhile “naive” reader, now turned into a key participant of speculation

“from Latin America.”

The lack of differentiation between fiction and criticism or between critical and

naive readers in Aquí América latina is made possible, in part, by the particular historical

moment in which Ludmer writes. To imagine or act as if literature and criticism still

retained some autonomy is, as she, suggest, a fiction. Citing Scott Lash’s Sociology of

Postmodernism, Ludmer notes that one of the central characteristics of postmodernism is

undifferentiation (138). We are, she say, in a time of fusions, when the traditional bipolar

categories that modernity used to organize the world no longer hold (87). Although some

texts continue to employ these divisions in order to position themselves at the “center” of

literary tradition, after 1990 we see the emergence of territories, subjects, and discursive

configurations that do not respect such distinctions (127). Among the new discursive

configurations are what Ludmer calls “literaturas posautónomas,” which disregard the

boundaries between inside and outside, literature and criticism, fiction and reality.

Whether they are literature or not is no longer important, nor even possible to define. For

although they continue to be included in genres like “the novel” and define themselves as

“literature,” they empty out old literary categories and turn them into a series of

“vaciados” much like the ones in El árbol de Saussure (Aquí 150; ADS 39). At a time

when “todo lo cultural (y literario) es económico y todo lo económico es cultural (y

literario)” the old molds are now only useful to “las empresas transnacionales del libro o

[…] las oficinas del libro en las grandes cadenas de diarios, radios, TV y otros medios”

  254  
(150). Hence, “post-autonomous literatures” give up traditional forms and categories and

instead take up literary forms once considered outside or on the margins of literature.

They include testimonial literature, autobiography, the journalistic article, the crónica, the

personal diary, and ethnography (151). To Ludmer’s list one could also add the letter, the

speech, the critical biography, the literary monograph, the formless and malleable essay:

in other words, all the discursive forms that inhabited the undifferentiated world of Latin

American “letters” at the beginning of the twentieth century. Almost a century later, they

return to grant “post-autonomous literatures”—which include critical fictions—a new-old

rhetorical and discursive flexibility that makes it possible to maneuver into critical

positions with respect to an ever-expanding market.

The capacity to maneuver is crucial in the new world, for the alleged end of

literature’s autonomy undermines not only the power of the institutions that sustained its

autonomy, including criticism, teaching, and academia (153), but also the “poder crítico,

emancipador y hasta subversivo que le asignó la autonomía a la literatura como política

propia, específica” (154). Literature, in other words, can no longer conceive itself in a

space “outside” reality, society, politics, or the market, from which it can launch a

critique of these previously differentiated realms. This does not mean, however, that new

textual forms have been completely emptied of critical possibilities. What changes in

postmodernism is that these texts must devise their critical strategies not from some kind

of “outside” but from within the system and in relation to what they critique. The critical,

in other words, is no longer a closed fortress but a mobile tactic, a position or stance that

one assumes at a certain place and time but that may, as the actors move, require a new

  255  
pose, a new form, a new syntax.240 In a world like Libertella’s ghetto, where “los bordes

de la mancha no son una muralla que uno pudiera atravesar para pensarse ‘afuera’” (ADS

35), the only option is to engage in “el arte de disponer”: the art of rearranging the pieces

into a new syntax that might provide an unforeseen perspective, new ways of reading and

writing the world.

This is what Ludmer and Libertella both propose in their texts, which challenge

the categories of “literature” and “criticism” in favor of a more fluid discursive realm that

might grant them greater tactical flexibility. Theirs is a syntactical art and a syntactical

politics that recognizes the importance of the position from which one speaks and of the

syntax that establishes that position. Their position is often a fictional “Latin America”

where one can still move fluidly between fiction and criticism, between invention and

argumentation without fluidity being dismissed as the naive habit of a backwards

territory. Yet both Ludmer and Libertella also take the risk of assuming even more naive

position and temporarily situate themselves within a utopian sphere of literature in order

to draw from it the critical and emancipatory power of a realm now rendered “invisible y

silencioso […] entre las líneas del Mercado” (ADS 20). For although Ludmer and

Libertella acknowledge the demise of literature at the turn of the millennium, they also

invoke the fiction of an autonomous literary realm as a potentially critical space among

the territorial reorganizations of postmodernity.241 As Ludmer argues in her interpretation

                                                                                                               
240
For a discussion of Libertella’s “positional” art and politics, see Martín Kohan’s “Héctor Libertella: La
pasión hermética del crítico a destiempo.” In that article, Kohan claims that Libetella sees art as the field
for a “war of positions”: “Toda guerra es para Libertella una guerra de posiciones y para resolverse o
decidirse le basta con la pose… La ficción territorial habilita un modelo de hostigamiento inmóvil. Esta
guerra se libra en estado de detención; con la pose de combate es suficiente” (144).
241
In the first part of her “diario sabático” Ludmer describes the cultural and social circumstances in a
Buenos Aires on the brink of the crisis of 2001. Although the first part of the book is situated in the year
2000, the book is published at a time when the hindsight of political circumstances opens the possibility of
  256  
of El árbol de Saussure, Libertella posits a “purely literary utopia” at the moment in

which literary autonomy is put in question by fusions and the market (95). Something

similar happens in Aquí América latina, where the fictional narration of Ludmer’s

sabbatical in 2000 situates the critic in a marginal location that makes it difficult for her

to access texts produced in other countries. This allows her to imagine “un Sistema

Literario Argentino… una organización formal de la literatura nacional, en el estilo de las

viejas construcciones de Bourdieu: una parodia del ‘campo literario’” (87). By invoking

literature as a fictional construct—a utopia or a parody of Bourdieu’s “literary field”—

Ludmer and Libertella reimagine literature as a temporary construction erected from

within the system. No longer imagined as an outside, literature is now a fabricated

interior that functions not as resistance itself but as a temporary shelter from which to

organize a strategy.

In a world where literature has been dissolved by a market that appropriates and

colonizes it, Ludmer and Libertella reimagine it as an open interior.242 Here, literature is a

ghetto, a bathroom, a bar, an “isla urbana” (Ludmer, Aquí 137), or a marginal territory

where one can imagine words, syntactical forms, relationships, and categories of thought

that escape the logic of the market. This is why, in Libertella’s text, there is a billboard on

Saussure’s tree that reads: “LA LETRA DEL LOCO NO GENERA DINERO” (85). In

the ghettos produced by the uneven flows of power, there are still spaces that allow for

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
reading Ludmer’s descriptions as portending the crisis. Ludmer thus highlights the urgency of elaborating a
critical discourse at a time when the joint forces of neoliberalism, postmodernism, and globalization seem
to leave no space for it.
242
According to Kohan, Libertella’s spatialization of literature defines various interiors that grant him the
possibility of “sigilo”—stealth or discretion. As Kohan notes, “No hay resistencia si no hay un interior”
(143).

  257  
different kinds of material and discursive economies. As a commentator notes in El árbol

de Saussure,

De semejante leyenda no habrá que inferir que los artistas del ghetto son
pobres sino, mejor, pobres posicionales. También aquí hay una circulación
de mercaderías, pero no como en Lodz o Varsovia (dos calcetines por tres
cebollas; las ropas del pariente recién fallecido a cambio de algún
alimento o elemento energizante). El régimen económico en este lugar
está intacto, pero los trueques o canjes no guardan relación de valor entre
unos y otros productos. Nadie sabe qué es la analogía. (85)

Rather than eliminate the market altogether, Libertella’s utopian literary realm functions

according to a logic that is incomprehensible to a system of exchange based on

relationships of value. Here the market works according to the fruitless and unfounded art

of “gratuidad.” As the fictional Thomas Sfez defines it in the fabricated Walking on the

Edge (1996): “yo te entrego algo que no me pediste ni necesitas. Tú lo procesas como

desperdicio y no habrá costo en esta cadena: nadie paga un precio” (86). Among the

many “desperdicios” or leftover waste exchanged in Libertella’s open interior are new

ways of imagining the world, small fictions that no one has asked for or needs. They

include speculations about what would happen in a world without the sign “donde, por

ejemplo, no hay dinero que valga como símbolo” (86). Libertella’s utopian speculation

about a world without money or sign may be processed as a waste of time, money, or ink,

yet it allows us to imagine a literary system where texts, discourses, and readers are not

measured against one another according to relationships of value.243

                                                                                                               
243
The alternative that Libertella imagines is much different from the one Sarlo devises. Sarlo seeks to
resurrect literary value as a form of resistance to a market that, in her view, determines value by mass
readership or sales. In Libertella’s utopia neither literary value nor mass readership is necessary for, where
“gratuidad” guides exchanges, “allí donde hay un interlocutor, un solo interlocutor, allí se constituye un
mercado” (94). In contrast to Sarlo, Libertella does not seek to work outside or in opposition to the market
but simply to create a market that functions according to different rules.

  258  
 If the utopia of literature makes it possible for Libertella to imagine a different

system of exchanges, the “adentroafuera” of literature serves as the basis for Ludmer’s

speculations, which are also forms of audacious gambling. For Ludmer risks the

obsolescence or naiveté of “reviving” an autonomous literary sphere in the hope of

greater gains. It is a strategic move that places all bets on the utopia of a critical space

that might allows us to see or think the new world in a different way. Utopia itself is one

of those critical spaces. As Ludmer argues in her discussion of El árbol de Saussure, the

neoliberal tendency to classify all great ideological projects as unrealistic utopias is one

of the great utopian projects of the modern world (Aquí 94).244 According to Ludmer, the

utopian impulse is alive as a global “genre,” particularly in a neoliberal discourse that

promises an optimal future for society through faith in the market. Yet utopia, understood

as the “ordenamiento topológico de un espacio sin territorio,” can also be deployed in

critical ways “para hacer presente y para criticar el presente” (94). Libertella’s book, for

example, invokes the utopia of an autonomous literature—with its own history and

politics—as a form of resistance to the market and to its clear and hierarchical discourses

(96). Ludmer’s exploration of Latin American literature, which she reads like an

imaginary autonomous system, reveals similar utopias. Central among them is the “isla

urbana,” an open interior where “se puede entrar: tiene límites pero está abierta, como si

fuera pública” (131). The urban island can be a physical territory, but also a subject or an

institution: it functions according to its own laws and rules and shelters subjects who

define themselves in the plural, creating a community not based on family, work, or

                                                                                                               
244
This point is also highlighted by both Martín Hopenhayn in Ni apocalípticos ni integrados and by Jean
Franco in Rise and Fall of the Lettered City. Franco, however, seems to take the “demise” of utopia as a
given and thus overlooks the kind of critique offered by Ludmer in Aquí América latina.

  259  
social class but on “algo diferente que puede incluir todas estas categorías al mismo

tiempo, en sincro y en fusión” (131). Like Libertella’s utopia, the urban island is a space

where exchanges and relationships are not organized according to the social divisions that

characterize the rest of the city (133). It too is a critical instrument found through the

exploration of literature—and in particular, Latin American literature—that allows us to

see, think, and fabricate a different kind of present.

This, in the end, is both Ludmer and Libertella’s calculated risk: the demarcation

of an imaginary territory that turns the world upside down, appropriating its terms and

categories but inverting them, as if in a mirror, in order to make us read in a different

way. Ludmer calls that territory “Latin America,” a space that functions like an urban

island.245 It too is located both inside and outside a world that sees Latin America as

“emerging,” “developing,” not yet constituted. Thanks to its “secundariedad,” Latin

America has nevertheless preserved critical spaces that have elsewhere been shut down or

thrown completely open. Those critical spaces have often been created as the result of the

“consigna de improvisación” by which, according to Alfonso Reyes, Latin America

sought to fall in step with Europe and North America. They have been made possible by

the “metequismo” of a discursive tradition whose status as a second-class citizen has led

it to make use of every rhetorical tool that might welcome it into the “best of all

compensatory worlds” (Lihn, quoted in Lastra 111). In its improvisation and metequismo,

                                                                                                               
245
In her book, Ludmer suggests that the demise of the nation as an organizational structure at the turn of
the century makes it possible to construct Latin America, once again, as a viable community. As the
borders of the nation become more porous and new forms of social organization emerge, Ludmer
recuperates the possibility of a transnational identity that she calls “Latin America.” At the turn of the
millennium, Ludmer recuperates a project articulated at the beginning of the twentieth century by Martí,
Reyes, Henríquez Ureña, and other Latin American thinkers, who articulated a “Nuestra América”
conceived not as a homogenizing identity but as a heterogenous association of subjects who saw in the
first-person plural the possibility of contesting an emerging empire.

  260  
Latin American writing has always been a speculative practice, a practice of strategic and

risky marking, rearranging, and self-positioning. The objective of its speculations has

been, as Ludmer explicitly defines it, to “dar la vuelta al mundo” (13): to gain a passport

into the spaces that have power to define the world but also to turn that world on its head.

Doing so entails not only inverting the hierarchies that have negatively defined Latin

America’s discursive strategies—as improvisation, mimeticism, or naiveté—but also

rescuing discourses and practices that have been processed by the centers of power as

“waste.” In Latin America, critics and writers have, for example, salvaged an

undifferentiated world of letters at a time when the bar between literature and criticism

admitted no passage, and made a clearing for literature at a time when postmodernism

seemed to leave no space for it. Always, critical discourse in Latin America has been

crossing from one side of the bar to the other, from literature to criticism, from fiction to

critique, from the naive to the critical according to the strategic needs of its own

speculations.

Sitting at the ghetto’s bar, the customers in El árbol de Sausurre, “acaso no saben

que, entre las mil y un lenguas del mundo, solo el castellano les da la posibilidad del yo

como algo que está constituido por una letra que une—y—y otra que a continuación

separa—o—” (ADS 45). Yet some inhabitants of this ghetto do seem well aware of the

discursive possibilities granted by their “mirada castellana.” Sitting at the bar, “cada uno

ata y/o desata desde esa barra que oscila” (45). Among them, I imagine Ludmer and

Libertella. Libertella is constructing a “yo” that is sometimes critical, sometimes naive,

sometimes real, sometimes fictional. The text his “yo” is writing looks like the mock-up

of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. It is an inverted diorama made of weights dangling by

  261  
threads from the ceiling, and needs only a mirror in order to give us the illusion of a

construction: “ahora la iglesia aparece erguida o refractada hacia el cielo, como una

majestuosa hipótesis. Más o menos así

” (78).

Ludmer looks over his shoulder and, animated, compares his image-text to Joaquín

Torres-García’s “América invertida” (1943). She notes that in Torres-García’s image, the

equator is the bar and the mirror, which has turned north into south and south into north;

or rather, Torres-García has created a north-south space whose map is recognizable as

mirage, fiction, or illusion. Enthusiastically, Ludmer turns to her own text. At the very

beginning of it, she constructs a “yo pájaro” that recognizes the north-south space as

habitat. Ludmer describes it as a migratory bird, with an acute sense of time and capable

of flying between presents, between hemispheres, between discourses (Aquí 23). Shifting

her position, she ravels and unravels the terms on either side of the bar. In the end, she

pauses, turns to Libertella, and then swivels the bar, which allows them both, with naive

delight, to “dar la vuelta al mundo.”

  262  
 CODA

Critical Fictions, “En Sincro”

“Quiero mudar de estilo y de razones.”

- Lope de Vega (via Augusto Monterroso)

On May 30th of the year 2000, Josefina Ludmer says goodbye to Héctor Libertella

on the corner of Viamonte and Riobamba. They have just taken a stroll through the

streets of Buenos Aires, invoking in the span of a few blocks the “manzana loca” of the

1960s, a gathering of the “Salón Literario” in 1837, and a recent dinner with Osvaldo

Lamborghini. In her diary, Ludmer would later remember that stroll and Libertella’s

particular way of disorganizing time. She would call it a “modo de hacer presente con la

pura memoria como instrumento, con la pluralidad de tiempos yuxtapuestos” (Aquí 116).

Playing on memory herself, Ludmer invokes Libertella, pausing at the threshold of a

video arcade and saying excitedly, “¡Si hasta en un local de videojuegos yo puedo ver

todavía una librería!” (112). Yet neither Ludmer’s reminiscences nor Libertella’s

“todavía” are forms of nostalgia. As Ludmer emphasizes, Libertella’s phrase “I can still

see” doe not reach back to an occluded cultural and historical past that he seeks to return

to, or that persists in us as if we were its heirs. Libertella’s “todavía” is, instead, an

instrument to create temporal chords: “un aquí-ahora-antes” that allows the present

persists as process and makes a space for the past in the present. Ludmer calls this way of

  263  
thinking and imagining “en sincro” (116). It is a mode of making-present that populates

every point in the city, every subject, idea, and image with its whole history, with all its

forms and pasts coexisting in simultaneity, providing myriad forms of being that break up

the singularity of the now.

When Ludmer writes, “Yo todavía lo veo a Héctor cuando nos despedimos en

Viamonte y Riobamba el 30 de mayo del 2000,” she also does so without nostalgia

(115).246 For Ludmer really sees Libertella in the present, making temporal chords with

an anachronistic or “uchronic” (115) mode of thinking characteristic of a whole “bandada

de los agitadores del tiempo” (117). Flocking from Latin America, temporal agitators

ignore the hierarchies or orders of time and juxtapose past cultural formations as if they

still had a place in the now. It is a habit acquired by living in a temporality at odds with

the centers of power, which has instilled the custom of arriving late, reshuffling times,

reclaiming unfulfilled possibilities, and making the most out of inopportune moments. As

Ludmer suggests, the tendency to define Latin America as “underdeveloped,” “archaic,”

“emergent,” or otherwise temporally behind has led to a series of repressive, modernizing

leaps that have impatiently sought to bring the region in step with the First World.247 The

                                                                                                               
246
Ludmer’s diary entry is a perfect example of thinking and imagining “en sincro”: dated May 30th, 2000,
it is placed out of chronological order in the “diario sabático”—between entries dated December 23rd and
December 31st—and its subtitle, “In memoriam,” refers to Libertella’s death in 2006. As Libertella did in
their stroll, Ludmer’s diary entry disorganizes time: it creates a temporal chord with May 2000, the turn of
the millennium, the death of Libertella in 2006, and 2010 when Aquí América latina was published.
Ludmer thus installs Libertella’s ghost in the present and invites us to conjure him every time we read her
narrative, which is conjugated in the present tense and makes ample use of “todavía.”
247
Ludmer’s depiction of “los saltos represores y modernizadores” relies on Reyes’s essay “Notas sobre la
inteligencia americana,” which suggests that the effort to catch up with Europe has created a disjoint
temporality in Latin America, marked by jumps or cuts in time. Although Reyes’s essay suggests that Latin
America has finally joined “el banquete de la civilización Europea” (82), Ludmer argues that a similar
phenomenon still persists at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As Ludmer claims, the definition of
Latin America as “underdeveloped,” “archaic,” or “emergent” in relation to an already-constituted First
World has led to the imposition “por decreto” of neoliberal frameworks whose speed is out of phase with
  264  
imperfect results have created an experience of disjoint temporality, marked by temporal

lagoons and patches of unlived time. For Ludmer, however, “el tiempo que nos robaron

los saltos represores y modernizadores” (117) is not a cause for nostalgia or melancholy

invectives, but the very reason why we can imagine “cambios sin etapas, progresos y

modernizaciones sin desarrollos” (27). It is why, from Latin America, we can still say

“todavía” without nostalgia.

I can still see Alfonso Reyes in the Buenos Aires of 1936, delivering his lecture

on “La inteligencia americana” at a conference of the International Institute for

Intellectual Cooperation. He is there with Ludmer in the year 2000, telling us that Latin

America is not so much a space,

sino más bien un tiempo, un tiempo en el sentido casi musical de la

palabra: un compás, un ritmo. Llegada tarde al banquete de la civilización
europea, América vive saltando etapas, apresurando el paso y corriendo de
una forma en otra, sin haber dado tiempo a que madure del todo la forma
precedente. A veces, el salto es osado y la nueva forma tiene el aire de un
alimento retirado del fuego antes de alcanzar su plena cocción. (Reyes
“Notas” 82-3)

Assuming the form of an “alegato jurídico” (90), Reyes’s lecture was itself an audacious

jump that sought, once and for all, to declare intellectual equality with Europe. It is a

paradigmatic example of the open and unconstituted realm of critical discourse in Latin

America, which Reyes once sought to parse into clear and differentiated territories. For

despite Reyes’s efforts, critical discourse in the region was and continues to be a

hodgepodge of forms that juxtapose, in the same space, myriad spheres, discourses, and

times. I can still see that open realm in 1978, reflected in the “Aforismos, dichos, etc.”

that make up the third part of Augusto Monterroso’s Lo demás es silencio. In

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
political temporality in Latin America, thus reinforcing and prolonging the experience of disjoint
temporality described by Reyes in the early twentieth century.

  265  
Monterroso’s novel, the “estudioso” don Juan Manuel Carrasquilla gathers Eduardo

Torres’s critical pronouncements from conversations in the bar “El Fénix,” diaries, loose

notebooks, bits of correspondence, and articles published in the Sunday paper

(Monterroso LDES 159). In the year 2000, the critical miscellany that a “proper” literary

criticism was supposed to overcome is still there in Aquí América latina. In her book,

Ludmer similarly draws critical discourse from conversations in bars and restaurants,

walks with friends and writers, a “sabbatical diary,” e-mails, and articles published in the

newspaper Clarín. Ludmer-Reyes-Monterroso: the temporal chord suggests that critical

discourse in Latin America has indeed seen changes without stages, modernizations

without development, and leaps into the future whose archaic residues still have a place

in our present.

Critical fictions are one example of such archaic residues. Mixing discourses of

sundry provenance and juxtaposing times, critical fictions in Latin America are

paradigmatic forms of thinking en sincro: as they imitate past critical forms, critical

fictions also recuperate them for the present, while emphasizing the extent to which the

development of criticism in Latin America is a story of late starts, rushed modernizations,

interruptions, and untimely critical formations. We can see pieces of that story, en sincro,

in Reyes’s 1936 lecture, where the imitation of a legal argument performs the tensions

between an emergent literary criticism and the realm of the “letrado,” still imbricated

with the spheres of law and politics. Other pieces are refracted in Monterroso’s Lo demás

es silencio. Through the figure of Eduardo Torres, Monterroso gestures at Reyes’s

contradictory attempts to claim independence and sovereignty over a critical realm,

whose forms nevertheless continued to be seen by the centers of power as provincial

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formations or things of the past. The story is followed, discontinuously, by Enrique

Lihn’s La orquesta de cristal, which stages the temporal disarray caused by the Pinochet

regime. In Lihn’s novel, the interrupted project of the nueva crítica coexists, in negative

form, with a nineteenth-century critical rhetoric, newly minted academic languages, and

avant-garde aesthetic strategies. By the turn of the millennium, the archaic persistence of

literature and literary-critical formations in Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure

emphasizes the contradictory structure of a postmodern moment, which claims temporal

and geographical inclusion, while continuing to exclude certain subjects, places, and

times from the authorized realms of critical discourse. In all cases, critical fictions

suggest that critical discourse in Latin America remained a u-topia: a discourse that had

to be imagined, that continued to be displaced into a future when its myriad and

inopportune forms would finally be organized into a stable sphere, discourse, or space.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, that stable realm has still not arrived.

Critical discourse in Latin America remains precarious, rife with outdated languages,

imbricated with literary forms, institutionally unstable, seeking authorization, and lacking

discursive coherence. Its imperfect constitution is, however, precisely what grants critical

discourse in Latin America the rhetorical flexibility to “mudar de estilo y de razones”

(Monterroso, Movimiento 9) in order to fit the changing needs of our critical moment.

Here we have, for example, the old form of the literary biography. It is still here, among

Sarlo’s postmodern landscapes, helping her argue that the modern formations of literature

may still have a place in our present. One might consider, too, the art of conversation,

which Reyes raised to the level of a critical genre.248 At the turn of the millennium,

                                                                                                               
248
Reyes’s participation in “tertulias,” his skill as a conversationalist, and his role as a mentor for writers
who attended gatherings at his home and library are often referenced in analyses of the author’s published
  267  
Libertella was still perfecting that art in the bar Varela Varelita, where according to

Ricardo Strafacce, Libertella composed and shared many of his critical fictions.249 The

avant-garde aesthetic of the Pinochet years is also not restricted to the 1970s. Its

strategies of marginality and precariousness are still there in Adriana Valdés’s essays,

which continue to make Lihn present through their methods of collage and fragmentation.

Or remember fiction, that old form of critical writing? I can see it running across the

boundaries that separate disciplines, discourses, and subjects. Here it is, at a conference,

in a theoretical treatise, in the cultural supplement of the Sunday paper, in a novel, in an

academic journal, still thwarting our expectations, still forcing us to switch styles and

reasons, still helping us learn how to read.

The list of critical forms is, of course, not exhausted. There is still much we could

do with Torres’s sayings and aphorisms, Pompier’s belletristic writing, or the literal

graffiti of Libertella’s ghetto-poet. Yet if we molt our style and change our reasons it is

not merely for aesthetic pleasure but to rethink criticism’s social function and its

relationship to subjects, practices, and discourses placed outside the boundaries of critical

activity. Taking on an unexpected form is one way of slashing through the boundaries

between “crítica literaria y/o literatura crítica” so as to traverse “en diagonal, como un

alfil, la fortaleza de las disciplinas constituidas para llevar y traer herramientas y

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
oeuvre and are de rigueur in accounts of his life. One of Reyes’s most notable mentees was Carlos Fuentes,
who in Tiempo mexicano recounts his visits to the “tertulias” at Reyes’s house.
249
Ricardo Strafacce’s essay “Arena de verdad” was written to commemorate Libertella’s death and is
organized around Strafacce’s conversations with Libertella at the bar Varela Varelita. Among various
anecdotes of Libertella, Strafacce narrates the jokes they would “compose” together and depicts them as
small performances set up as a dialogue between two people (33). Strafacce also quotes various
conversations with Libertella that function like miniature critical fictions: they are at once imagination and
interpretation, and they recuperate and reinvent critical genres like the aphorism, the dialogue, and the
anecdote.

  268  
preguntas de un lado al otro” (Libertella “Crítica” 356). On this side of the border, in the

United States and in the constituted realm of criticism, we might ask, for example: how

shall we construct our discourse, today, when the means of production are changing for

criticism and social realities are challenging its discursive and institutional walls? Where

will we find critical discourse past, present, and future: on the internet, in the streets, in a

journal, in Latin America, or only in the university, in Europe and North America? Who

will be the readers and writers of critical discourse, and will they be invited into a plural

space that recognizes the myriad and heterogeneous forms of cultural interpretation? Will

we continue to imagine a naive reader incapable of recognizing, understanding, or

producing valid forms of critical discourse? Or can we imagine a critical discourse in

which naiveté is not a tool of exclusion but a critical possibility?

In Latin America, from the perspective of critical fictions, it is not difficult to

imagine such a discourse. For in a place where time is unhinged, where critical forms are

not anchored in a particular moment but free-float through space and time, it is more

difficult to determine whether a critical language is current or dated, cutting-edge or

obsolete, developed or underdeveloped, literary or critical, sophisticated or naive. Having

produced a polymorphous critical language that continually changes shape and reasons,

writers and critics in Latin America have more easily assumed the position of the naive

reader. There we have, for example, the monumental figure of Alfonso Reyes, who

judged his own El Deslinde not as a high form of literary theory but as a mere clanking

on a keyboard, an excessive and laughable imitation of a theoretical treatise. Or Beatriz

Sarlo, whose attempts to rethink the place and use of literature have repeatedly faced

accusations of naiveté. Or Enrique Lihn, whose collage of critical language was deemed a

  269  
poor and obscure write-up of intellectual forms. Or even Monterroso, who observed that

“‘[i]ngenuidad’ suele equipararse con ‘tontería’” but challenged the notion, claiming that

he always strove to be candid and naive (Viaje 101). As Ricardo Piglia has observed,

naiveté and spontaneity are part of a complex and sophisticated theory (Crítica 10), which

the authors of critical fictions in Latin America have often deployed as a strategy to keep

our critical faculties alert.250 For as a subject position, naiveté forces us to doubt whether

naive critical forms are in fact “ ‘tonterías’ […] o parodia de las tonterías que lee en

libros de crítica aparentemente inteligentes” (Viaje 102). Never certain whether critical

forms are assumed ironically or in earnest, we must stay on guard, knowing that the

stability of our position as critical subjects can easily be turned on its head by a

seemingly naive reader who may turn out to be more critical than we are.

In the middle of the plaza sketched out by Libertella in El árbol de Saussure, there

is a banner that announces: “EL FUTURO YA FUE” (43). I can see a similar banner

hung above an imaginary Latin America where, as in Libertella’s ghetto, “el tiempo

existe sobremanera. No se trata de una ilusión. Al contrario, es tan visible y palpable

como esa inscripción al pie que actualiza todo” (44). I can imagine a place and time

where old critical discourses are actualized and made current, where ensayismo once

again finds its relevance as an open and hospitable form, the pamphlet returns to put

criticism on the streets, autobiography proves the most fitting form to interpret texts, and

                                                                                                               
250
Piglia makes this observation at the very beginning of the collection of interviews Crítica y ficción, in
response to a question on whether Piglia considers his writing “una escritura no-ingenua, en la que la teoría
tiene un papel importante” (10). Piglia responds to the question by both refuting the notion that there are
writers without theory and by vindicating naiveté and spontaneity as a sophisticated theory. However,
Piglia claims that naiveté, spontaneity, and anti-intellectualism have ruined many writers, thus placing
himself as a writer outside that “sophisticated” theory.

  270  
the school manual turns out to house unforeseen critical possibilities.251 One might claim

that such place and time already exist in Latin America, where the future has already

happened, where “La Historia no llegó / Aún / Hasta hoy / No llegó el Pasado a /

Todavía” (Libertella, quoted in Ludmer, Aquí 112-13).252 At the end of history, literature,

or criticism, we return to those places where they never arrived to begin with. We return,

for example, to 1930 when Borges was dreaming of the end of literature and the

beginning of criticism. In “La supersticiosa ética del lector” he starts by lamenting the

demise of readers, “en el sentido ingenuo de la palabra,” and their transformation into

potential critics (202). Turning on the word “ahora,” he later claims “quiero acordarme

del porvenir y no del pasado” and concludes his essay by sketching out a literature that

can prophesy its dissolution and court its end. Making Borges present, I too want to

remember a future in which the naive reader is also a potential critic, and criticism courts

its dissolution, and literature is still arriving at its end.

                                                                                                               
251
The essay, the pamphlet, the autobiography, and the school manual are all critical forms championed
and utilized by various contemporary Latin American critics. In Modos del ensayo: de Borges a Piglia
Alberto Giordano, for example, analyzes in detail various uses of the essay in the latter half of the twentieth
century, emphasizing its continued relevance for Argentine writers. In Margenes e instituciones, Nelly
Richard underscores key role that pamphlets played in the avant-garde critical scene that emerged during
the Pinochet dictatorship, and she emphasizes the critical function that the precariousness of its form served
at the time. Ricardo Piglia, in turn, defends the autobiographical dimension of writers’ critical
interventions, and redefines criticism as “una de las formas modernas de la autobiografía. Alguien escribe
su vida cuando cree escribir sus lecturas” (13). Finally, in El cuerpo del delito: un manual Josefina Ludmer
takes the school manual as the guiding structure for her book on crime in literature. In the note to the
second edition, Ludmer frames her use of the manual with what I might call a small critical fiction:
“Buscaba una escritura transparente y divertida para contar los cuentos, que el manual fuera popular, que
me leyeran en las escuelas. Conmigo la crítica llegaría por fin a las masas… ¡Por lo menos 10.000
ejemplares! En Estados Unidos quería hacerme rica, dejar de trabajar y dedicarme sin límites al puro
ejercicio del pensamiento y la imaginación” (11).
252
Hugo Achugar begins his essay “Local/Global Latin Americanisms” with the following quote by Emil
Cioran: “Quel será l’avenir? La révolte des peuples sans histoire” (126). In the conclusion to his essay
Achugar discusses Cioran’s quote and speculates that the “peoples without history” are those who live
“outside western (European) historical time” or those who live within the history of the West “but in a
marginal or subordinate position and therefore have an ‘invisible history’” (139). Achugar suggests that
among the peoples without history are those who produce critical thinking in Latin America but who
remain marginalized by a dominant discourse for which such critical thought is mere “babble.”

  271  
 I want to remember a time when I met Libertella at a conference on “Crítica y

literatura” held in Mexico City in 2003. I can still see Libertella amid various critics and

writers who were discussing “la intimidad de la creación y la crítica” in Latin America

(Ortega 9).253 At the end of the day, participants gathered at a restaurant or bar to discuss,

among other things, the day’s presentations, their naive or critical observations, their

expected and unexpected pronouncements. Let us suppose we could have followed

Libertella wherever he pleased. We might have walked out of that academic conference

in Mexico City and onto the Streets of Buenos Aires to arrive at the corner of Paraguay

and Scalabrini Ortiz, at the bar “Varela Varelita” where Libertella wrote an important

part of El árbol de Saussure (Damiani 12). Let us suppose we order a “Pepe Bianco” and

walk to the “mesa presidencial” at the very center of the bar (Strafacce 33). There, we run

into a couple of “Argentinean ladies” who have finally found Eduardo Torres and are

interrogating him about the state of literature in San Blas. Their features are oddly

familiar. Another woman tells me their names are “Josefina” and “Beatriz.” The other

woman extends her hand: “Manuela Mota, pleased to meet you.” Mota is sitting with

Adriana Valdés, and they are exchanging mordant stories of their partners, while

discussing children and the Foulché-Delbosc edition of Góngora’s poetry, thirty-minute

recipes and “ideas dispersas de Bakhtin, Hause, Iser, y Bourdieu” (Valdés “La escritura”

82). I interrupt them and inquire about Libertella. They tell me he is sitting at “la mesa de

los prófugos” with Lihn and Libertella. After much searching, I finally find them, hidden

                                                                                                               
253
In his introduction to the volume that gathers the presentations from the conference “Crítica y
literatura,” Julio Ortega depicts the intermingling of literature and criticism as the primary project of Latin
American literature. According to Ortega, “ese proyecto ha disputado con éxito la normatividad genérica y
ha debatido con brío las representaciones usuales. Si ése es un ejercicio de la modernidad y una exploración
de las vanguardias, fue también una estrategia de desplazamiento paródico, de temprana historia; y, desde
entonces, una vasta práctica de apropiaciones felices” (9). As Ortega notes, the project has a long history,
which links modernity and the avant-gardes with appropriations before and after them.
  272  
strategically behind a column (Strafacce 28), and I pull up a chair. I have a couple

questions to ask for a dissertation, and hope they can help with the many things that I still

need to “ordenar, copiar, verificar, cotejar, clasificar, revisar y archivar” (Monterroso,

LDES 84).

But things are proving difficult, for the bar is raucous, undisciplined. In one

corner, I hear conversations about politics; in another, fantastic fictions assembled from

pieces of arcane texts rescued from a dusty box, found somewhere in the back room of

the bar. Everywhere, the bar’s customers are exchanging stories, gratuitously, with

hidden designs but no apparent purpose. Masks and costumes abound. In a corner, I

recognize Ibáñez Langlois, wearing Valente’s mask and a jester’s costume. “El juglar de

entonación,” Libertella points him out, “se establece a las puertas del castillo y confunde

a los muchos invitados del Rey con palabras o cantos incomprensibles. Prepara la escena

para que, una vez en el interior, las palabras del monarca distribuyan clara y

entendiblemente a su audiencia: para que su discurso jerárquico sea más claro,

transparente y entendible” (ADS 60). Here, however, the king’s speech is delivered from

something of a cross between a lectern, a coffin, and an electric chair, where someone is

reciting the “Decreto Ley Nº 112” and the “Ley de Punto Final.” Nearby, a naive reader

nearby calls them extraordinary pieces of “política ficción.” Here, constitutions are hotly

debated, not quite permanent, somewhat precarious, subject to the unstable positions of

the bar’s constituents. There we see, for example, Alfonso Reyes, sitting at the bar and

trying to draft a constitution, whose terms keep changing as he shifts his position

uncomfortably from one side of the bar to the other.

  273  
 I am bewildered, and turn to Monterroso, hoping for clarification. He responds

with an inscrutable smile and quotes an article that Eduardo Torres once wrote about

Carlos Rincón: “Lograr con la imaginación la apariencia de realidad y con la realidad la

apariencia de imaginación” (LDES 168). Libertella notices my confusion and tries to

clarify, stating the obvious. He tells me this is not a state, a university department, or

other closed territory, but an open bar, an interior that his friend Josefina Ludmer might

call “íntimopúblico.” Here, we can construct identities according to maps that are not

found in political atlases and whose coordinates have been unhinged, as those coordinates

no longer help us orient ourselves. I ask him, perhaps naively, how on earth we are

supposed to find our place. He gestures at Lihn, who is switching back and forth between

two masks: an owl’s and a butterfly’s. Libertella says, enigmatically, that there are birds

that need neither signposts nor light to find their prey at night, and that certain insects

embark on long and exhausting migrations following only a homing instinct that respects

no borders in order to flock together, multiply. It is late, I am tired, and beginning to feel

dizzy. Ludmer notices, drops by our table, and says there’s a “bandada de los agitadores

del tiempo” who is about to head out. She invites me to join them: I accept and begin to

gather my bag, my notebooks, and my pens. Ludmer is already at the door. “Vamos,” she

says with no impatience, for we have all the time in the world, “vamos a dar la vuelta al

mundo.”

  274  
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