903 oe €0. THE FANTASTIC A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO A LITERARY GENRE TZVETAN TODOROV Translated from the French by RICHARD HOWARD With a Foreword by Robert Scholes } Cornell Paperbacks CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA, NEW YORKdefinition du fantastique definition of the fantastic Alvaro, the main character of Cazotte’s tale Le Dioble Amoureux, lives for two months with a female being whom he believes to be an evil spirit: the devil or one of his henchmen. The way this being first appeared clearly suggests that she is a representative of the other world. But her specifically human (and, what is more, feminine) behavior, and the real wounds she receives, seem, on the contrary, to prove that she is simply a woman, and a woman in love, When Alvaro asks where she comes from, Biondetta replies: “Tam a sylphide by birth, and one of the most powerful among them...” But do sylphides exist? (“I could make nothing of these words,"” Alvaro continues. “But what could T make of my entire adventure? It all seems a dream, I kept telling myself, but what else is human life? I am dreaming more extravagantly than other men, that is all... What is possible? What is impossible?”) Thus Alvaro hesitates, wonders (and the reader with him) whether what is happening to-him is real, if what sur- rounds him is indeed reality (in which case sylphides exist), or whether itis no more than an illusion, which here assumes the form of a dream. Alvaro is later induced to sleep wit definition of the fantastic 25 this very woman who may be the devil; and, alarmed by this eventuality, he questions himself once more: “Have I been asleep? Is it my fortune that all this has been no more than a dream?” His mother will reflect in the same fashion: “You have dreamed this farm and all its inhabifants.”” The ambiguity is sustained to the very end of the adventure: reality or dream? truth or illusion? Which brings us to the very heart of the fantastic. In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event ined_by_the laws of this same familiar world Th world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination — and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality — but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or else he really exists, precisely like other living beings — with this reservation, that we encounter him infrequently. ‘The fantastic occupies the duration of this for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesi only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. ‘The concept of the fantastic is therefore to be defined in relation to those of the real_and the imaginary: and the latter deserve more than a mere mention. But we shall post- one their discussion for the last chapter of our study. Is such a definition at least an original one? We may find it, though formulated differently, in the nineteenth cen- tury, First of all, in the work of the Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov: “In the genuine fantastic, there26 the fantastic is always the external and formal possibility of a simple expla- nation of phenomena, but at the same time this explanation is completely stripped of internal probabi There is an uncanny phenomenon which we can éxplain in two fashions, by types of natural causes and supernatural causes. The possi. bility of a hesitation between the two creates the fantastic effect. Some years later M. R. James, a British author specializ- ing in ghost stories, adopted virtually the same terms: “It is sometimes necessary to keep a loophole for a natural expla- nation, but I might add that this hole should be small enough to be unusable.”” Once again, then, two solutions are possible. Here is a more recent German example: ““The hero con- tinually and distinctly feels the contrac worlds, that of the real and that of the fantastic, and is hims amazed by the extraordinary phenomena which surround him’ (Olga Riemann). We might extend this list indefinitely. Yet let us note a difference between the first two definitions and the third: in the former, it is the reader who hesitates between the two possibilities; in the latter, it is the character; we shall Tetum to this difference. It must further be noted that recent French definitions of the fantastic, if they are not identical with ours, do not on the other hand contradict it. We shall give a few examples Grawn from the “‘canonical”? texts on the subject. Castex, in Le Conte Fantastique en France, writes: “The fantastic. . is characterized . . .by a brutal intrusion of mystery into the ‘context of real life.” Louis Vax, in L’ Art et la Litterature ‘Fantastiques: “The fantastic narrative generally describes men like ourselves, inhabiting the real world, suddenly confronted by the inexplicable."” Roger Caillois, in Au Coeur du Fantastique: “The fantastic is always a break in the acknowl edged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality." These definitions are all included within the one proposed by the first authors quoted, which already implied the existence definition of the fantastic 27 of events of two orders, those of the natural world and those of the supematural world. But the definitions of Solovyov., James, et al. indicated further the possibility of supplying two explanations of the supernatural event and, consequently. the fact that someone must choose between them. It was therefore more suggestive, richer; and the one we ourselves have given is derived from it. It further emphasizes the differ, ential character of the fantastic (as a dividing line between the uncanny and the marvelous), instead of making ita sub- Stance (as Castex, Caillois, et al. do). As a rule, moreover, @ genre is always defined in relation to the genres adjacent to it, But the definition still lacks distinctness, and it is here {hat we must go further than our predecessors. As has already been noted, they do not specify whether it is the reader oy) the character who hesitates, nor do they elucidate the nuances! of the hesitation, Le Diable Amoureux offers insufficient sub, Stance for a more extended analysis: here the hesitation occupies us only a moment. We shall therefore turn to another book, written some twenty years later, which permits us to raise more questions; a book which magisterially inaugurates the period of the fantastic narrative, Jan Potocki’s Saragossa Manuscript. A series of events is initially related, none of which in isolation contradicts the laws of nature as experience has taught us to recognize them; but their accumulation raises aproblem. Alfonso van Worden, the work’s hero and narrator, is crossing the mountains of the Sierra Morena. Suddenly his zagal (valet) Moschite vanishes; some hours later, the other valet, Lopez, vanishes as well. The local inhabitants assert that the region is haunted by ghosts, those of two bandits who had recently been hanged. Alfonso reaches an abandoned inn and prepares to go to sleep, but at the first stroke of midnight, “‘a beautiful negress, haif naked and bearing a torch in each hand,” enters his room and invites him to follow her. She leads him to an underground chamber where he is28 the fantastic received by two young sisters, both lovely and very scantily clad. They offer him food and drink. Alfonso experiences strange sensations, and a doub' T no Tonger knew whet cubae.”” They then tell him their story, revealing themselves tobe his own cousins. But as the first cock crows, the narrative is broken off; and Alfonso re ghosts have power only from I this, of course, does not as we know them. At most, one might say that they are strange inexpected coincidences. The next development is the decisive one: an event occurs which reason can no longer explain. Alfonso goes to bed, the two sisters join him (or perhaps he only dreams they do), but one thing is certain: when he awakes, he is no longer in a bed, he|is no longer in an underground chamber. ‘I saw the sky. 1 saw that I was in the open air. . .. I was lying under the gallows of Los Hermanos, and beside me — the bodies of Zoto's two brothers!" Here then is a first supernatural event: two lovely girls have tuned into two rotting corpses. Alfonso is not yet convinced of the existence of super- natural forces: a conviction which would have suppressed all hesitation (and put an end to the fantastic). He looks for a place to spend the night, and comes upon a hermit’s cottage; here he encounters a man possessed by the devil, Pascheco, who tells his story, a story which strangely resembles Alfon- so's own: Pascheco had slept in the same inn; he had entered an underground chamber and spent the night in a bed with two sisters; the next morning he had wakened under the gal- lows, between two corpses. This similarity puts Alfonso on his guard. Hence he later explains to the hermit that he does not believe in ghosts, and he gives a ‘natural’ explanation of Pascheco’s misfortunes. He ‘own ad- ventures: I did not doubt that my cousins were women of flesh and blood. Twas convinced of this by some emotion more powerful than 29 all I had been told as to the power of the demons. As to the trick that had been played upon me of placing me under the gallows — Twas greatly incensed by it. So be it — until new developments rekindle Alfonso’s doubts. He again encounters his cousins in a cave, and one night, they come to his bed. They are about to remove their ! belts, but first Alfonso himself must remove the Chris- tian relic he wears around his neck; in place of this object, one of the sisters bestows a braid of her hair. No sooner are the first transports of love over, than the stroke of midnight is heard. ... Someone enters the cave, drives out the sisters and threatens Alfonso with death, o| cup of some unknown liquid. The next morning Alfonso wakens, of course, under the gallows, beside the corpses; around his neck there is no longer the braid of hair, but in place a noose. Returning to the inn where he had spent the’ first he suddenly discovers, between the floorboards, the relic taken from him in the cave. “I no longer knew what I was doi I began to imagine that I had never really left this wretched inn, and that the hermit, the inquisitor [see below] and brothers were so many phantoms Produced by magic spells."" As though to weigh the scale more heavily, he soon meets Pascheco, whom he had glimpsed during his last nocturnal adventure, and who gives him an entirely different version of the incident: These two young persons, after bestowing certain caresses upon him, removed from around his neck a relic which had encircled it, and from that moment, they lost their beauty in my eyes, and recognized in them the two hanged men of the valley of Los Hermanos. But the young horseman, still taking them for charming persons, lavished the tenderest endearments upon them, Then ‘one of the hanged men removed the noose from around his neck and placed it around that of the horseman, who thanked him for it by renewed caresses. Finally they closed their curtain, and [,go,no Know what they di then, but I believe it was tome ideous sin.30 the fantastic What are we to believe? Alfonso knows for sure that he has spent the night with two lascivious women — but what to make of the awakening under lows, what of the rope around his neck, what of the relic in the inn, and what with torture, asks him: “Do you know two Tunisian prin- cesses? Or, rather, two infamous witches, execrable vampires and demons incarnate?” And later on Rebecca, Alfonso's hostess, will tel e know that they are two female demons whose names are Emina and Zibeddé.”” Alone for several days, Alfonso once again finds the forces of reason returning. He seeks a “realistic” explanation for these incidents. 1 then recalled the words which had escaped Don Emmanuel de Sa, governor of this city, which made me think that he was not altogether alien to the mysterious existence of the Gomélez ‘creatures. It was the govemor who had given me my two valets, Lopez. and Moschite. I took it into my head that it was upon his orders that they had left me at the disastrous valley of Los Hermanos. My cousins, and Rebecca herself, had often led me to believe that I was being tested. Perhaps at the inn I had been given some drug to put me to sleep, and subsequently nothing ‘was easier than to transport me, in my unconscious state, beneath the fatal gallows. Pascheco might have lost an eye through some other accident than his amorous relations with the two hanged men, and his hideous story might well have been an invention. ‘The hermit who had constantly sought to pluck out the heart ‘of my mystery was doubtless an agent of the Gomélez, who wished to test my discretion. Finally Rebecca, her brother, Zoto, and the leader of the Gypsies — perhaps all these people were in league to put my courage to the test. definition of the fantastic 3) Outside his window, he sees two women who appear to be the famous “I nearly reached formula which sums Who hesitates in this story? As we see at once, it is Alfonso — in other words, the hero, the central character. Itis Alfonso who, throughout the plot, must choose between” two interpretations. But if the reader were informed of the choose, the sit in the text), { is given in the text, jion as the movements of the characters The reader's hesitation is therefore the first condition of the fahtastic But is it necessary that the reader identify with a particular character, as in Le Diable Amoureux and in The Saragossa Manuscript? In other words, is it necessary | in the work? Most works n also satisfy nd ions: for example i de I'Isle-Adam’s **Véra."” Here the reader may question the Fesurrection of the count’s wife, a phenomenon which con- tradicts the laws of nature but seems to be ‘confirmed by a series of secondary indications. Yet none of the, characters32 the fantastic shares this hesitation: neither Count d’Athol, who firmly believes in Véra’s second life, nor the old servant Raymond. ‘The reader therefore does not identify with any character, and his hesitation is not represented within the text. We may say that this rule of identification involves an optional condi- tion of the fantastic: the fantastic may exist without satisfying this condition; but it will be found that most works of fantastic literature are subject to it. ‘When the reader emerges from the world of the characters and returns to his own praxis (that of a reader) a new danger threatens the fantastic: a danger located on the level of the interpretation of the text. There exist narratives which cont: supernatural elements without the reader’sever qu their nature, for he realizes that he is not to take them If animals speak in a fable, doubt does nbt trouble the reader's mind: he knows that the words of the text are to be taken in another sense, which we calll allegorical. The con- verse situation applies to poetry. The poetic text might often be judged fantastic, provided we required poetry to be repre- sentative, But the question does not come up. If itis said, for instance, that the ‘poetic I” soars into space, this is no more than a verbal sequence, to be taken as such, without there being any attempt to go beyond the words to images. ‘The fantastic implies, then, not only the existence of an uncanny event, which provokes a hesitation in the reader and the hero; but also a kind of reading, which we may for the ment define negatively: it must be neither “poetic” nor I Ifwe return now to The Saragossa Manuscript, We see that this requirement is fulfilled in both respects. On the one hand, nothing permits us to give, immediately, an allegorical interpretation to the supernatural events described; on the other hand, these events are actually given as such, Wwe are to represent them to ourselves, and not to consider the words which designate them as merely a combination of linguistic units. A remark by Roger Caillois gives us a clue as to this property of the fantastic text: definition of the fantastic 33 alfway between what I have chosen to ited image infinite images and sek incoherence as a principle and reject any translate specific texts into sym- bols for which an appropriate lexicon permits a term-by-term Teconversion into corresponding utterances. We are now in a position to focus and complete our defini- tion of the fantastic The fantastic requires the and to hesitate between a natural and a supern: tion of the events described. Second: this besitation may alsov be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so ak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the ion is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work — in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character, Third, the reader must ” adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as “poetic’’ interpretations. These three requirements do not have an equal value. The first and the third actually constitute the genre; the second may not be fulfilled. Nonetheless, most examples satisfy all three condi- ions. How are these three characteristics to take their place within the model of the work as we have articulated it in the preceding chapter? The first condition refers us to the yerbal aspect of the text, more precisely, to what are called “Visions”: the fantast category of the cal s the existence of formal units which spond to the characters’ estimation of events in the nar- ‘we might call these reactions,"" as opposed to which habitually constitute the argument of on the other hand, this second condition refers aspect, since we are concerned with a rep-34 the fantastic Lastly, tion has a more general nature and transcends the division into aspects: here we are concerned with a choice between several modes (and levels) of reading. ‘We may now regard our det In order to justi several other definitions, t us to see not how ours resembles them but how it 1s dis- tinguished from them. From a systematic point of view. may start in several s take the meaning which, though rarely to mind straight off (that of the dictionary) ic texts, the author describes events which are not likely to occur in everyday life. We might indeed charac- terize such events as supernatural, but the supernatural, though a literary category, of course, is not relevant here. We cannot conceive a genre which would regroup all works in which the supernatural intervenes and which would thereby have to accommodate Homer as well as Shakespeare, Cer- vantes as well as Goethe. The supernatural does not charac- terize works closely enough, its extension is much too great. Another endeavor to situate the fantastic, one much more widespread among theoreticians, consists in ident certain reactions of the reader: not the reader imp] text, but the actual person holding the book in his hand. Rep- resentative of this tendency is H.P. Lovecraft, himself the iated within the work but in the reader’s individual experience — and this experience must be fear. Atmosphere is most important, forthe ultimate criterion of authen- ticity [of the fantastic] is not plot structure but the creation of a specific impression... Hence we must judge the fantastic tale not so much by the author’s intentions and the mechanisms of the plot, but by the emotional intensity it provokes. ... A tale is definition of the fantastic 38 the reader experiences an emotion of profound fear and terror, the presence of unsuspected worlds and powers. iment of fear or perplexity is often invoked by ians of the fantastic, even if they continue to regard a possible double explanation as the necessary condition of the genre. Thus Peter Penzoldt writes: ““With the exception of the fairy tale, all supernatural stories are stories of fear which make us wonder if what is supposed to be mere imagina- tion is not reality after all.” Caillois, too, proposes as a ‘‘touch- Stone of the fantastic . .. the impression of irreducible stange- ness.” ‘is surprising to find such judgments offered by serious critics. If we take their declarations literally — that the senti- ment of fear must occur in the reader — we) should h: to conclude that a work's genre depends on the sang-froid of its reader. Nor does the determination of the’ sentiment of fear in the characters offer a better opportuni the genre. In the first place, fairy tales can be as in the case of Perrault (contrary to Penzol Moreover, there are certain fantastic narratives all tei Brambilla” and Villiers de often linked to the fantastic, but it is not a necessary condition of the genre. Strange as it seems, efforts have also been made to locate the essence of the fantastic in the author. An example of any case, has no fear Tevives the romantic must have something, something submitted to— an inter- of contradictions. Here image of the inspired poe! of the involuntary abo rogation as troubled as it ice again, the fantastic which does not proceed from a deliberate intention to disconcert but which seems to develop despite the work's author, if not36 the fantastic unknown to him, turns out to be the most persuasive of all.” Arguments against this ‘intentional fallacy" are today too familiar to be reformulated here. Other attempts at definition deserve still less attention since they could as well be applied:to texts which are not fantastic at all. Thus it is not possible to define the fantastic in terms of opposition to the faithful reproduction of reality, or in terms of opposition to naturalism. Nor in the terms used by Marcel Schneider in La Littérature Fantastique en France: “The fantastic explores inner space; it sides with the imagination, the anxiety of existence, and the hope of. salvation."" The Saragossa Manuscript has furnished us an example of hesitation between the real and (let us ‘say) the illusory: we wondered if what we saw was not a trick, or an error of perception. In other words, we did not know what interpre- tation to give to certain perceptible events. There exists another variety of the fantastic in which the hesitation occurs between the real and the imaginary. In the first case, we were uncertain not that the events occurred, but that our under- standing of them was correct. In the second case, we wonder if what we believe we perceive is not in fact a product of the imagination: “I have difficulty differentiating what I see with the eyes of reality from what my imagination sees,” says one of Achim von Arnim’s characters. This “error"” may occur for several reasons which we shall examine below; here is a characteristic example of it, in which the confused perception is imputed to madness: E. ‘t. A. Hoffmann’s “Princess Brambilla.’ Strange and incomprehensible events occur in the life of the poor actor Giglio Fava during the Carnival in Rome. He believes that he has become a prince, has fallen in love with a princess, and has had incredible adventures. Now, most of those around him assure him that nothing of the kind has taken place but that he, Giglio, has gone mad. This is the claim of Signor Pasquale: “Signor Giglio, I know what definition of the fantastic 37 has happened to you. All Rome knows as well, you have been forced to leave the theatre because your mind is de- ranged. ..."" Sometimes Giglio himself doubts his own reason: “He was even ready to think that Signor Pasquale and Mae- stro Bescapi had been right to believe him a little cracked.”” ‘Thus Giglio (and the imy reader) is kept in doubt, uncer- in if what surrounds him is or is not the product of his imagination. ‘This simple and very common procedure may be con- trasted with another which appears to be much rarer, and in which madness is utilized once again, but differently, in order to create the necessary ambiguity. Consider Nerval’s Aurélia: this book, as we know, is the account of certain visions seen by a man during a period of madness. Although the narrative is given in the first person, the / apparently comprehends two distinct persons: a character who perceives unknown worlds (and lives in the past), and the narratorwho. transcribes the former's impressions (he lives in the present). At first glance, the fantastic does not exist here: neither for the former, who regards his visions not as due to madness but as a more lucid image of the world (he is thus in the realm of the marvelous); nor for the latter, who knows that the visions are the product of either madness or dreams, not of reality (from his viewpoint, the narrative is merely uncanny). But the text does not function in just this way, for Nerval Tecreates the ambiguity at another level, where we did not expect it; and Aurélia thus remains within the bounds of the true fantastic after all. ~ In the first place, the character has not entirely decided what interpretation to give to events. Sometimes he too believes in his own madness, but never to the point of certainty. “I understood, seeing myself among madmen, that hitherto everything had been only ions. Yet the promises I once attributed to the goddess Isis seemed to turn into a series of ordeals I was destined to undergo." At the ‘same time, the narrator is not sure that everything the character has38 the fantastic yn. He even insists on the truth of the phenomena described: “I inquired in other quarters, no one had heard anything. And yet I am still certain that the cry was real, and the earthly air had echoed to ie? : Ambiguity also results from the use of two stylistic devices which suffuse the entire text: imperfect tense and ‘modalization. Nerval habitually employs them together. The latter consists, let us note, introductory locu- tions which, without changing the meaning of the sentence, modify the relation between the speaker and his utterance. For examy “It is raining outside” and “Perhaps it is raining outside” refer to the same fact; but the second also indicates the speaker’s uncertainty as to the truth of the sentence he utters. The si effect. If I say “I used to love Aurélia ['aimais Auré I do not specify whether or not I still love her tinuity is possible, but as a general rule unlikely. Now the entire text of Auré! two devices. Whole pages might be qi of this assertion. Here are several examples taken at random: 11 seemed to me that 1 was returning to. a familiar house. ‘An old servant whom I called Marguerite and whom I seemed jold me... I believed 1 was 1¢ globe. i felt painlessly swept ~ had the sense that these currents were constituted of It became cl , we should be plunged into the world th no reference to everyday reality. By both worlds at once. The Without these loct of the marvelous, means of them, we are kep' imperfect tense (less apparent in the English translation) introduces a further distance between the character and the ion of the fantastic 39 narrator, so that we are kept from knowing the latter's position. By a series of interpolated clauses, the narrator keeps his distance from others — from ”” or, more exactly, from the normal use of certain words (for in a sense, “Recovering what he writes somewhere. And again: “But appears that this was an illusion of sight.” Or once more: ‘My apparently meaningless actions were subject to what is called illusion, according to human reason,”” An admirablé sentence: the act ingless”’ (reference to the natural) but only * So (reference to the super- natural); they are subj ion (reference to the natural), sion" (reference to the supernatural). The imperfect tense, moreover, signifies that it 1s not the present narrator who thinks this way, but the character at that particular time. And again this phrase, which epitomizes the pervasive ambiguity of Aurélia: ““A series of mad visions perhaps.”’ The narrator here keeps his distance from the ‘‘normal man" and draws closer to the character: and the certainty that he is dealing with madness thus gives way to doubt Indeed, the narrator will go further: he will openly adopt the character’s view that madness and dreaming are only a higher form of reason. Here is what the character had said: “The testimony of those who had seen me thus caused me a kind of irritation when I realized that they attributed to mental aberration the movements or words Coinciding with the various phases of what for me constituted a series of logical events” (this corresponds to Poe’s remark: ‘Science has not yet told us whether madness may not be the sublime form of intelligence”). And again: “Having come to this notion of dreams affording man a communication with the world of spirits, I hoped. . . ."" But here is how the,narrator speaks; 1 shall try... to transcribe the, impressions of a long disease which has occurred entirely within the mysteries of my own mind40 the fantastic — and 1 don't know why L use this word disease, for I myself have never felt in better health. Sometimes I believed my strength and activity to have doubled; imagination afforded me infinite delights, (Or again: “Whatever the case, I believe that the human imagi- nation has invented nothing which is not true, in this world or in others, and I could not doubt what I had seen so dis- tinctly.”" (Again perhaps an echo of Poe's ““The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed.") In these two passages, Nerval’s narrator seems to declare that what he has seen during his so-called madness is only a part of reality — that he has therefore never been ill. But if each of the passages begins in the present, the final propo: tion once again occurs in the imperfect tense and it thus rein- troduces ambiguity into the reader's perception. The converse occurs in the last sentences of Aurélia: **I was able to judge more soundly the world of illusions in which I had lived for a time. Still, I feel happy in the convictions I have ac- quired. . . .” The first proposition seems to refer whatever precedes it to the world of madness; but then, why this happi- ness in the convictions acquired? ‘Aurélia constitutes, then, an original — and perfect — ‘example of the ambiguity of the fantastic. This ambiguity turns on madness, certainly; but whereas in Hoffmann’s “Princess Brambilla” we questioned whether or not the character was mad, in Aurélia we know in advance that the behavior of Nerval's protagonist is considered madness. What we are con- cerned to know (and it is on this paint that the hesitation turns) is whether or not madness is actually a ‘The hesitation previously concerned perception; now it con- cems language. With Hoffmann, we hesi for certain events; with Nerval, the hesit the name: to its meaning. Vétrange et le merveilleux the uncanny and the marvelous, The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from “reality” as it exists in the common opinion. At the story's end, the reader makes a decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other, and thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous. ‘The fantastic therefore leads a life full of dangers, and may evaporate at any moment. It seems to be located on the frontier of two genres, the marvelous and the uncanny, rather than to be an autonomous genre. One of the great periods of supernatural literature, that of the Gothic novel, seems to confirm this observation. Indeed, we generally dis- tinguish, within the literary Gothic, two tendencies: that of the supernatural explained (the “‘uncanny”), as it appears in the novels of Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliffe; and thatJEAN FRANCO Gritical Sassions: SELECTED ESSAYS POST-CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS EDITED, AND WITH AN SERIES EDITORS: STANLEY FISH AND FREDRIC JAMESON INTRODUCTION BY MARY LOUISE PRATT AND KATHLEEN NEWMAN Duke University Deve Durhamvand London ayEROM MODERNIZATION TO RESISTANCE ay ptin American Literature, 1959-1976 Fora discussion ofthe scapegoat character i Ediciones La Libre Julio Cortazar, Blw-up and Other Store, tans. Paul Blackburn (New York lier Books, 1974), ‘ow that the excitement that surrounded the “boom” of Latin American writing in the sixties has dissipated, itis clear that litera- ture itself was in crisis and that certain canons and assumptions that Bid, us, omit 6 modelo para arma, Suzanne Boland Barts, The Plane f eT (Nw Yor: Hillnd Wang. 197) José Maria Arguedas’s EI zorr de arriba l zara de abajo The Fox cixous, "Ocobrabaroco. A Teat-Iwistes” Review 74 (Winter 1974) pis José 7 war Severo Sardy, “El baro0o yel neobarvoco," Amerie Lang en su ltenses 3 pve and the Fox Below]?; at other times, there were marked changes ed. (Mexico: Uneseo, 974) 184. Ibid, 183 Dialogue with Tomés Segovia and Emir Rodriguez Monegal, “Nuestro Rul Dati" Mundo Nuevo (7 January 2967): 56 Octavio Paz, Conjuncinesy dsyunciones (Mexico: Editorial J. Mortiz, 969), Roland Barthes, “Myth Today." Myebolge, trans. Annetee Lavers (New Voi |* and the articles on which it was bz Tf crisis was felt Hil end Wang toy as and th s it was based. If this crisis was fel A derailed study of Cortézars later work is outside the scope ofthis atc grey in the novel, it was because certain of its integral features —its am at present at work on @ more extended discussi Brity, the mimetic (i.e, its claim to represent a moral or historical truth), For 2 historical survey of theories of revolutionary E concept of character and even the tense in which it was written—had ntes's La nueva novela bispancamericana (The New Spanish American "utopia in which arc becomes life, see Robert C. Elliot eto seem problematic. These characteristic features were criticized as ‘Suies om Voltaire andthe Bighteenth Century, CLI-CLN (3976) Fmany devices which “naturalized” the bourgeois order and thus repro- fed its ideology, while writing thet activated the reader’s perceptions assumed to transgress bourgeois ideology. Terms like modernism (in iglo-American sense), avant-garde, or the more recent éeriture? are ts of this break between the older reflectionist aesthetics* and new fing which, however, had contradictory aspects. On the one hand, this E> writing appears to be on the side of revolution and is directed toward ging people and society by breaking down rationalization and pre- ived ideas (in Surrealism); or by disturbing the apparently natural published in Latin American Pepecive 5, «(winter 1978) 77-97order of things which is in fact an ideological order (éeriture); ot, 38 in the Brechtian technique of estrangement, laying bare the soc which determines daily life. Despite the considerable differences betwee these groups, movements, and individuals, they share the assumption tha 4 revolutionary poetics must involve a revolutionary change of form ant language. Another aspect of the new poetics is associated with the cha in perception which have already taken place with urbanization and indus tialization. Itwas Walter Benjamin’? who first suggested a relationship be ‘oween shock devices and the urban experience and described the profoun changes in the social significance of art in the age of mechanical reproducy tion. Is t possible that the devices of shock, simultaneit of which activate perception, may not always of and a poeties of modernization’ ‘The debate between realism and modernism is scarcely new; what mai the contemporary discussion, however, is the virtual disappearance of argument for realism. Yet having discounted realism, critics on the Leff but be aware that the “revolutionary” tactics of surpri the active relationship between art and society theorized (for example) Brecht. What follows is an attempr to discriminate between these cent aesthetic projects over the last rwo decades. HISTORY AND THE REALISTS One of the crucial issues that separated the iconoclastic new now from those who still defended realism and tradit fe was the former's rejection of “referentialty,” tha erature’s obedience to or validation of an extraliterary order and moj of an already codified version of history. In rejecting such ext literary concerns in order to affirm the autonomy of art, these new nov ists sot themselves not so much agai art which they regarded nonexistent or beneath contempt but rather against a dogmatically defi realism on the one hand and provincialism on the other, both of whi¢ From Modernization to Resistance 287 cural anachronism, “Technique” and iberation from this backwardness. The ‘aid Mario Vargas Llosa, “is no longer ‘Latin America feed from that servitude, It no longer serves reality anachronism to which Latin American dependency condemned him. re radical claims would be made by Severo Sarduy and Octavio reflection of reality onstituted a transgression of the limits of bourgeois soc Such a general embarrassment with the referential (also common to is not confined to the more among the new novelists but invades realist texts of the realism (whether critical realism or a socialist real- ordinated events and characters to a transcendental goal) had ing. The realist was the mi cutes the historically and social the human brain of the objective sentiments and emotions contained in not only does literature truthfully reflect history rough the mediation of che writer but, by revealing connections and conscious, and diale tention and speaks di are attributed to nature and history, the very fact inuity and purposiveness has to be communicated through to throw into relief the subjectivity Neruda wishes to over- ies remain latent, nevertheless, for they are sub- inated to the unifying and totalizing intention of the poet. However,288° Critical Passions in the writings of José Maria Arguedas, Augusto Roa Bastos, and José Re4 vvueltas, whose central concern ive representation of reali separated them radically from the liberal-existential writers of the 1960 ‘was no longer possible to evade the fact that history had beco: but a problematic area, For all these writers hi lly a a continuous progressive development, m ing through predictable stages in revolutionary change, but it eventual If as a shifting panorama, a text subject to revisi and rereading. Understanding history was no longer a matter of liste to the oracles of the land and the people but rather involved atten to discern the rationality of the text of history that had been distort and partially erased by the dominant clas. As I shall go on to show, Fax Below (1972) and José Revueltas's increasing apprehension of irra forces behind society's rational facade make it impossible for them to a cept’the linear historical progress they had assumed in their early writing ‘examining The Fox Above and the Fox Below in which Arguedas can no longa rion between coastal cap he had done in Tdas las sangres late characters a ns, The urban immigrat land, and the breakdown of the traditional sierra community were lly devastating to Arguedas because a certain set of values that deri from roots were threatened by change and were already being replaced the modern values of mobility, adaptability, and professionalism, as ru peoples found their way to the slums of Lima and the coastal ports. A guedas was aware that what was needed in his novels was more than a ne theme or different types of characters, but he was unable to define this quality by anything more precise than “city,” by which he meant soph tication. His novel in consequence is spit by his uncertainty. Having ei visioned a socialist state developing out of the Indian commune, he 1 witnessed the erosion of this organic community and is left without fictional scaffolding. As a result, there isa division in the novel betweeti ‘personal diary in which he faces both the problem of writing and his projected suicide and a realist narrative whose ending he could not fo ‘see, He attributes the failure to his own weakness and inadequacy, his a ‘of professionalism and “technique? “I fear that co follow the thread oft ‘foxes; that I have to learn something or mu From Modernization to Resistance 289 that means not only having learned the ‘technique’ which they domi- Fate but also having lived somewhat as they have lived.” Yet he is also aware 5s may be a trap~“a false short cut to solve certain difficul- es, especially for those who seck the order of things in the manner of newly constitated lark rather chan of ‘Arguedas, so often regarded as ingenuous or provincial in ty froma differ- the main problem that be replaced by creative an jblem in much of his writing which stems directly from his re tends to adopt a third-person narrative and therefore an apparently ob- tive form which pri responses. The reader is involved the characters and the characters are ays imprisoned (literally or metaphorically). The reader can only fh an arrested form of consciousness and there is no “otherness” concealed in ched of the criminals. Analogies are thus set up between the uterus, drug, and the prison, all of which represent repetitive ¢ er than dialectical liberation. Yet the ion of the form itself always the omniscient writer outside the text who appears to have the ileged overview and who supplies the rational ordered consciousness available to the entrapped victim.290° Critical Passions the hidden presence of the author, and the characters caught in the tread- of repetition. The mai consciousness; the latent problem in which Revueltas himsel the separation of the rational (the mind) from the physical (and desire) Interestingly, this latent drama becomes the theme of the story, “Hlegel y yo” which Revueltas published just before he died and which he evidently intended as a fragment of a longer work.” tn it, “Hegel” is a crippled stu dent imprisoned in the same cell as a guilt-ridden murderer whose chief diversion is kicking him around in his wheelchair. Itis an almost allegorical confrontation of crippled reason with the nightmares of desire. By impl cation the dialectical process is blocked in this confrentation. In both Revueltas’ and Arguedas’s later writing, the unresolved prob lem is that of the author's relation to the text which realism tends to mask, their struggle with realism is precisely what makes their narrative more interesting than that of many writers who simply sloughed off the problem, asserting the superiority of their subjective fantasies. However, it was also precisely because realism had become problematic that people looked to Cuba for a new, revolutionary aesthet ‘THE CUBAN REVOLUTION: PRAXIS ‘Cuba was thus expected to provide a new culeural as well as political guard in the early sixties although, for reasons which I will outline briefly, the emphasis shifted very rapidly from the substance and form of art the question of praxis? The most specifi statement on cultural questioris were initially made by Che Guevara who was particularly interested in erature. Further, he was conscious of the fact that form itself constituted an ideological question, that socialist realism, for example, was rooted in nineteenth-century alienation of the writer in capitalist societies. He re ized that the Cuban revolution must affect the forms of art and not merely introduce new themes2 Yet because he felt that these forms could only. be produced by new men and women, he tended to suggest that the new art was still only a utopian pos Ity wes to the struggle itself, and the highest form of struggle was at the battle front. As he wrote in his Bolivian diary: “This kind of struggle gives us the chance to betome revo est level of the human species, but it also allows us to become men: those ttain one of another of these states ought to say so and leave In this hierarchy of revolutionary values, the other kinds of From Modernization to Resistance 29 praxis open to intellectuals were seldom specifically defined and tended to be subordinated to the armed struggle, as is clear from the declaration of the Congreso Cultural de la Habana: ‘The intellectual can serve the revolutionary struggle from different fronts: ideological, political, military. ... The activity of the intellec- tual may follow different paths: he/she may provide the ideology of the revolutionary classes, may ps ¢ in the ideological struggle; may conquer nature on behalf of the people by means of science and technology or by creating and popularizing artistic and literary works, and where the occasion reasons, he or she may commit themselves di- rectly in the armed struggle: real revolutionary responsibility was with the foo [ he fact that armed insurrection had taken place in many Latin Ameri- not surprising that many young writers ; Some of them ~ Javier Heraud Rogue Dalton (San Salvador), na)—would die participating in rural or urban warfare also became thematically important in in Pais Portdtil (Portable Coun- 965) by Adriano Gonzalez de Ledn, in Las fundadores del alba (The Founders of Dawn] (1969) by Renato Prado Oropeza, and in Libro de guerrilla and intellectual represent irreconcilable destinies clearly surfaces in a poem by Antonio Cisneros which describes his reunion with an old fiend who has become a Maoist: ‘And he spoke of the Long March along the Blue River of turbulent waters, ‘Along the Yellow River of cold currents. And we saw ourselves Strengthening our bodies, jumping and racing along the shore, Deprived of the music of flutes, without wine and ‘With no other wisdom than that of the eyes. ‘And the young stallions were iost behind the walls ‘And he went back that night to Sommerard street292 Critical Passions ‘Thus it was. Slow difficult gods, trained to gnaw at my liver each morning ‘Their faces are dark, ignorant of revelation.#6 i's neat dichotomy of § ic aspect of the revohution the | functions according to which. ‘man of action should be a vanguard for the intellectual, and in the sphere of art, thought, and scientific investigation, the intellectual should be « vanguard for the 168, Heberto Padill rion of poems, Fuera del juego [Out of the Game] “ambiguity” and because of a detachment contra ive engagement which characterizes revol logical outcome of a position which defined revo as participation in the armed struggle or on the economic front in Cuba itself. Works which were innovatory in form and language like Reinaldo Arenas’s El mundo alucinante (Hallucinations) (966); Lezama Lima's Para iso [Paradise] (2966); and Alejo Carpentier’s Bl sgio de las ues (Explosion. in the Cathedral] (1962) in fact spring from the writers’ sense of theit ‘own special mission rather than from any revolutionary praxis. Partly as an aftermath of the Cultural Congress of 1968, there devel- oped a broader and more ecumenical theory of intellectual commitment! of which the paradigmatic work is Ferndndez Retamar’s Calihén (x9 Inthis essay, the genealogy of culture is reconstituted in such a way that ‘Thitd World writers who can be said in some way to have liberated them-. the deformed image imposed by the metropolis come to be- long to the Third World revolution. Thus thinkers such as Alfonso Reyes co Rodé can be recuperated as precursors of this tradition This ecumenical approach was not without problems for the question of class did not enter into it, and it implied a nationalist (without internal in the fraternity of Third World nations. tended to become vulgarized into the conviction that Third! World peoples were pure and revolutionary as against the corrupt and un- revolutionary “First World,” a conviction that ‘vas encouraged by som members of the European Left. Sartre, for instance, would humbly beg the ltural Congress to be allowed to join the dazzling (“telampagueante” ‘Third World revolutionary vanguard and another delegate confessed t From Modernization to Resistance 293 the “sickness of the west” Estoy enfermo y contagios¢ y ‘A rather absurd aftermath was the cr | can writers who exposed themselves to the dangerous air of the metro tan nations. Neruda, for instance, was c meeting in New York and when in 197 iprisoned and released after a confession (which led to an international protest), the National Congress of Education and Culture would condemn writers ‘who made a reputation in Latin America only to settle in “the rotten and decadent societies of Western Europe and the United States in order to become agents of the imperialist metropolitan culture” (my translation). On the political level, this obfuscated the revolutionary ing the false notion of a quiescent metropolitan working stated “Desconfia de mis palabras ....'m sick and conta- Oscar Collazos to evaluate texts on the grounds of the writer’ closeness ‘0 Latin American experience in an essay, “La encrucijada del leng [The Crossroads of Language], was largely unsuccessful and brought im- mediate replies from Cortézar and Vargas Llosa* Indeed, itis significant that, toexplain why Cien aos de soledad (One Hundred Years of H should be more “authentic” than Carlos Fuentes’s Cambio de pie! [Change ‘of Skin], Collazos has to resort to the old romantic notion that the writer is somehow “impregnated” before “giving birth” to 2 work of art: ‘The work of a writer which mark him, which leave him in a heavy, alienated and preg- nant state and which each author owes to a specific social and culeural reality. .. . Creation is in the manner of a birth, an act of liberation, and the exercise of our own de-alienation.»4 inates in a series of individual experiences An explanation which depends on an analogy between childbirth and erary production must be inadequat putes a natural process for a ; theory. But more than this it glosses over the fact that the work of art does ‘ot simply come into being but is produced, using language and structures ‘which inevitably include ideological traces } Another possible explanation of why these Cuban (or Cuban-related) attempts to provide a universal theory did not work out was that there were fundamental differences between the situation within the island itself and inthe rest of Latin America~all the difference, in fact, between a coun- Firy struggling in the initial stages ofits liberation from global capitalism294 Critical Passions and experiencing social change, and countries which were being forcibly invegrated 69, ing a literate labor force d long-term social goals and able to make responsible decisions. This was clearly not a possibility in the rest of Latin America where the gradeal limination of focos of armed insurrection represented one more stage in securing the domination of the multinational corporations. In the integration of new sectors of the population into capi the dominant ideology took the form not only of the overt promotion development but also of the subliminal messages which inculeated the d sirability of modernization through media representation and lifestyl Speed, mobility, and change were signifiers of the modern. It was precisely this ideology which writers outside Cuba confronted or incorporated into new aesthetic tendencies. THE BOOM OF THE NOVEL AND THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION In the early sities, many writers who supported Cuba and thes national liberation believed that new techniques “revolutionized! ture, In this, they were the heirs of the European avant garde ‘conquest of “new” areas of experience. Yet in Latin American context, the ms of the new novelists often took on a strange lexical simi language of economic modernists and developmental novelist Juan Carlos Onetti would speak of the importation of technique from the metropolis: “we should import from there what we lack—tech- nique, professionalism, seriousness —but only these. We should apply these qualities to our redlity and trust that the rest will be given to us in ad 9” For his part, Carlos Fuentes would contrast the universality of culture with the backwardness of Latin American technology while claim- ing, “our universality will come from this tension between cultural credi and technological debit (my translation).® In Mario Vargas Llosa’ vi the new novel differed from the “primitive” novel precisely because of versification of technique. He specifically compares the primitive and the creative stages in the development of the novel with the unequal stages of economic development in Latin America where “skyscrapers and Indian tribes, misery and opulence” coexist (my translation)” This lexicon—of 1éenica [technique] of accounting mony] and deber technélogico {technological From Modernization to Resistance 295 development—suggests the subliminal structures of an economy of liter- ary production. Yet it would be a mistake to believe that the novels of these authors simply express modernity. On the contrary, their interest lies pre- jsely jn the fact that by introducing the “autonomous character” of the into Latin American environment, they set in motion lism within a dependency context. These contradictions are, in turn, related to their individualistic view of cultural production and their utopian concept of writing itself as an unalienated form of production practiced as yet only by the chosen few. The writer ‘woman; and Carlos Fuentes would greet May 1968 in the following words: Power to the Imagination! The French students gave a serious and im- mediate content to the visionary and rebellious words of artists: man, each man is capable of defining his own destiny as an artist defines his work in the act of creation. And like a work of art, individual respon- ry is the supreme instance of collective responsibility, and vice Vargas Llosa’s Garcia Marquez: Historia de um deicidio (History of a Dei- with its depiction of the artist as Lucifer rebelling against reality societies in order to create Yet in the liber fuced in the early sixties, there is ighly individualized characters and the deterministic network of events and structures in which they are caught, I refer here to Onetti’s EI ast , Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The .962), Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde (The Green 966), and La ciuiad dels perro (The Time ofthe Hero] El coronel na tiene quien le ecrita (No One Wet 1d One Hundred Years of S less directly, per- haps) Cortézar's Rayuela [Hopicotch] (1963). In these novels the indi- vidual, that motor-force of early bourgeois society, becomes a phantas- magoric hero or a grotesque, superfluous excrescence whose talents and ingenuity are out ofall proportion tothe limitations of the environment. sre entrepreneurs who id who are, in fact, deprived of that lement of the entrepreneur—an investment in the Future, In- d, though Vargas Llosa would gtress the diversity of the new novels, they ¢ remarkably analogous in situating their charact ind of impasse296 Critical Passions From Modernization to Resistance 297 in which the only freedom open to them is that of being able to recon- MMM ina reactionary cause. For right-wing students also wore long hair and I struct the past. (Te Time ofthe Hero is an exception because its characters f tened to pop music. are adolescents, though their future is already determined.) For characters like Larsen (The Shipyard), who lives off the debris of a deserted shipyard, Fushia (The Green House), who pirates the rubber in a jungle already con- trolled by a network of entrenched interests, Artemio Cruz who develops ) contradiction that sig is personal fortune out of property expropriated by the Mi J alternative ether in a mandarin pr ion, free enterprise means adapting to a situation whose bs in an utopian idea? already given and their only area of choice and free activity becomes the past \ey Feconstruct and reinterpret in a post boe endeavor whichis | analogous to that of the novelist. Creation and imagination have by im- plication no future dimension. The articulation of the novel around the 4 individual, “autonomous” character reaches its supreme expt ‘new communications systems and the increased awareness among the dis- Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel which exaggerates the i E advantaged of what they were missing. ‘The gulf between rich and poor, it deed the idiosyncrasies of the Buendias while constantly m j “made to seem all the worse by the facility of modern commu- transcendence of their actions. The very concept of “autonomous charac Yer the fundamental change was not the appearance of tele- ter” is made visible in this way, the tragedy being that there is no real space et in which individuals can folly realize their aspirations. 1 labor on which the Rockefeller Report also insisted It is not surprising that to the young generation which followed the incorporating masses of Third World work: ‘boom,” it would be “character” itself which now appeared as an outwor which the guerri convention or at best problematic. This subsequent generation (for in- stance, Hector Libertella of Argentina, José Agustin and Gustavo Sainz in | movements. Yet considering the obvious changes brought about by indus- ‘Mexico) would textualize modernity by adopting the language of the inter- as not hard to persuade Lat national youth style, The urban environment of their novels, the references drugs, and sexual ation. Carlos Fuentes would wri MANDARIN PRAXIS ‘we are up to the neck in the just like any gringo or Frenchman, we are dominated by the world lect, marked the gulf F of neon lights and Sears Roebuck and washing machines and James Bond between the old and the new. Groups like B/ Techo de la Ballena (The lms and Campbell soup tins.”*# ‘Whale’s Roof] (Venezuela), which held an “homage to necrophilia,” were ‘The argument that Latin America was “like the rest of the world” had able to provoke predictable scandals, Interestingly, however, what began Been advanced by Octavio Paz as early as the 1950s. In the 1960s, he de~ the sign of the modern sometimes turned into political protest prec fveloped a far more sophisticated argument to show that technology had because the youth rebellion demanded the same freedoms which existed drastically changed perceptions in the industrial nations. It was an argu- advanced industrial countries. Thus in Mexico, we have the paradox of. ment based on the fact that technology had destroyed previous images of atelolco, 1968, where young people were massacred to make the count Ethe world—whether Christian or secular—fundamentally changing lan- peaceful for the multinational sport of the Olympic games though, in fact g fechnology comes between us and the world, closes off every, ‘twas these young people who sat in the Vips, drank Coke, and promoted the glance: beyond its iron, glass or aluminum geometries the international style and thus acted as the vanguard of modernization here is strictly nothing, except the unknown, the region of the formless elf. The weakness of the youth rebellion was precisely its anarchistic’ which is not yet transformed by man”*? (Paz, 1971:316), individualism which, as Chile would show, could in some instances be used Under these circumstances, the “referential” disappears, giving way to298 Critical Passions the free play of the sign in empty space. Instead of a more cr less fixed s of codes there is a “repertory of signs invested with temporary and varia ‘meanings, a universal vocabulary of activity, applied to the transformation of reality and which becomes organized in one way or another according. the different resistances it meets.”4® Instead of a tradition and a contim ous development toward a recognizable future, technology offers a blank space to be filled and a play of signs which, by virtue of their indetermi- nate context, are constantly susceptible to new configurations, Technology ‘thus potentitly becomes a force of liberation which “liberates imagination from every mythology and confronts it with the unknown’ sion). On the other hand, Marxism is seen by Paz as an archaic theory, limited by its superseded historicism and out of touch with contemporary developments. His hope is for a “politics of the now,” analogous to mod. fern poetics as he conceives them. By making poetry the highest example of human creativity, Paz elimi nates daily life, popular culture, and the mass media from consideration, He is almost 6 ly concerned with high culture (or, at best, high- quality artisan culture) and tends to deploy his poetics not so much as a revolutionary theory but rather asa refutation of historicism, putting him- self beyond both bourgeois and Marxist chought since both these ignore poetry, the body, and the erotic and hence are blind to significant areas of experience. Stating that the age of revolution and of utopian polities has ended (but how?), Paz makes his own “poetics of the now” into the ‘model for all activity in postindustrial society, but in order to do this, he ‘must suppress difference and change in favor of a high degree of abstrac- tion. The more general the categories employed, the more they subsume, and this very generality makes his and all such archetypal theories ult ‘mately unsatisfactory. Yer the greatest inconsistency in Paz’s work—and ‘one which characterizes much contemporary writing—is that while at- tempting to reconcile the involvement of the reader in the text and the ged status of the author as the sole creator of ‘work, it continues to idealize “literature” and to address a highly spe- lized and competent readership. Paz is thus a good example of modern postics used to counteract the historical. However, itis perhaps more enlightening to consider a different example—for instance, that of Carlos Fuentes since here we have a writer whose thinking shifted dramatically in the course of the sixties and who ended by rejecting the mimetic, the representational and the very histor cal structure on which his early writing was posited. By the time Fuentes From Modernization to Resistance 299 came to write The New Spanish American Novel in 1969, he had already con- ist/socialist dichotomy to the status of an archaic myth, sum of facts—cold, marvelous, contradictory, ineluct- able, once again liberating, once again alienating—which are really trans- forming life in industrial societies: automation, electronics, the peaceful use of atomic energy.” A new aesthetic must now replace the older real- ism: “Just as the traditional economic formulae of industriaism cannot solve the problems of the technological revolution, bourgeois realism. cannot provide the ultimate: ns and answers of contemporary man, and this in turn means the adoption of a language “de la ambiguedad, de la pluralidad de significados, de la constelacién de alusiones, de la apertura” nnings, of a constellation of a interesting to note that a necessary relationship is established between “apertura” (that is openness to creative solutions and opportunities) and “ambiguity” (which may sometimes be synonymous with confusion or with euph ‘What is more striking however, is the fact chat apertura and pluralidad are also p used by Fuentes himself in his political essays. Fuentes adopted a new aesthetics in che very process of writing his ap- propriately named novel A Change of Skin. Originally having w under the title EI sueo (The Drea superseded by ions, of open- ical terms and, indeed, are here is no historical was a text which, he declared, “paralyzed history. progress—this is what the novel is saying: there is es tschatlogy there is pore perpetual present. There is the repetition of a series of ceremo- sac” (ny tat The the alternative to bourgeois idea of progress or to Christian eschatology becomes the suppression of change. Tis not surprising that the novel ends with an enactment of Fuentes’s own “change of skin” in which a narrative which had centered on character and on existential choice is destroyed and replaced by a “happening” produced by the mad narrator,;Freddy Lambert, in a lunatic asylum, The protago- nists of the happening are no longer “characters” but transformable figures who are freed from the burden of identity and hence from responsibility and ethical choice. They are signifiers for which the signified is “moder- nity” itself. And Freddy Lambert's name, an obvious reference to Balzac’s Lucien Lambert who was driven mad attempting to converse with angels is meant to signify the final aljenation of the author. Thus more than a hap- pening, A Change of Skin is an allegory of Fuentes’s own transition from the author who had once attempted to write Mexico's Balzacian novel tothe author whose destruction of “mimesis” is potentially self-destruct Tis sgnificane that in his more recent Terra Nostra (z975)* there isa full scale rearrangement of the past according to the author's whim so that Philip the Second marries Elizabeth of England. History thus becomes converted into a kind of science fiction in which the author projects his ‘own ideological fancies under the guise of “imaginatio ‘The attack on character is symptomatic; it implies the end of mime- sis and representation, a shift from the creation of recognizable identities to the concept of a permutable role, or a “figure,” from situations which are analogous to daily life to narratives which lay bare their own process of production. I refer here to the Mexican Salvador Elizondo's Faraboeuf (1965) and E! bipogeo secreto [The Secret Hypogeum], Cortizat’s 62 Modelo 168), the exiled Cuban writer, Severo Sar- 72) and the novels of Argentina’s Néstor Sénchez, among 4 refusal to narrate a “something” and a recourse to certain privileged techniques and figures — the pun, the polyvalent event, metamorphosis, tc. These texts invite a dif ferent kind of reading which preempts criticism while drawing the reader into the creative process, Their claim to be revolutionary rests on two arguments: firstly, that by showing the process of signification, they pene trate beneath the “natural” appearance of linguistic and literary structures, Secondly, by producing unconsumable texts, by breaking down the barriers between criticism and writing and attending more to pleasure than to the reality principle, they block society’s attempt to institutionalize writing’s subversive potential. 5 they re sent the ultimate transgression of bourgeois society in that supposedly they cen neither be reproduced nor exchanged (reproduced in the sense that every reading isa different reading, Since the texts are self-referential, they do not constitute use-values). Under the name of écriture first elaborated by Roland Barthes (1967) and the Paris journal Te! Quel, such a theory underlies much of the best contemporary Latin American criticism and some of the texts to which I have already referred. The most extravagant claims for its revolutionary potential were made by the exiled (Cuban writer Severo Sarduy who, for some years, has lived in Paris. He has declared that the self-referential text alone transgresses bourgeois society and further that, since every regime is based on a kind of a revolution that doesn't invent its own writing has failed. The role of the writer is so important that I would ask: what can be more than From Modernization to Resistence a writer? What's the point of all those acts of “confrontation” ex- cept for writing, because writing is a force that demythologizes, cor- rrupts, mines, cracks the foundation of any regime. The epistemologi- cal breakthrough that everyone talks about so much has not happened and cannot happen—we know that after all of Te! Quel’ efforts among others—unless it begins with and is nurtured in a piece of writing.* Even if we accept Sarduy’s premise here itis hard to see how such a sub- version could occur unless it were generalized throughout large sectors of society, something which his texts with their heavy reliance on readership competence exclude. Even if we set aside the elitist nature of texts which are addressed to readers already schooled in certain literary antecedents (especially Octavio Paz and contemporary French critics), their subversive potential rests on disputable premises. Firstly, these are said to reveal their own production process and hence to show the underlying ideological structure of tra- ditional narrative. Secondly, because they constitute closed systems, they ing everything to signs if the texts merely re- le more than techni tours de force and their authors “move into the proximity of industrial technocrats.”*” Further, far from being irrecuperable by society, their very ‘neutral itable for recuperation by university departments of literature, since established literary criticism has long de~ fended the autonomy of art. And, as the case of Borges shows, authors of self-referential texts may even be useful cult figures in the of re- actionary governments. ‘However, writers such as Sarduy and Elizondo do not simply display technical virtuosity, for their novels are also attempts to short-circuit the social connotations of language which they link directly to desire. The body and the text become analogous and writing becomes a corporal act. exts aim to overcome the od dichotomies of subjectivity ,, mind and body, thought and feeling, However, they do so ing the social aspects of language and behavior to mere automa- 3. At the same time, the body/text analogy tends to produce a literary hedonism, a private zone of enjoyment which can be quite comfortably contained and protected wit are said to defy a society which is bent on re and messages and which institutionalizes art. veal their own self-constitution, they becom makes them eminently in societies characterized by repressive tol-302 Critical Passions POLITICIZING THE AVANT-GARDE ‘A writer like Cortézar is particularly interesting because he attempts to tions of avant-garde ing, though only after he himself had passed through periods of militant hostility to committed writing. In his early stories (¢.g., Las armas secret [Secret Weapons}, 1959), he had often parodied naive realist assumptions and he had warned readers against reductionist interpretations which val fictional works from texts which commented directly on society, and daily life Even though he incorporeted newspaper cuttings into hi novel Hopscotch (1963) these were not intended to be read as references t a reality outside the text but were intended to reinforce the invasion o! reality by the absurd. His A Manual for Manuel (3973), however, marks break with previous practice: 4 ‘Though for years I have written texts linked to Latin American prob: lems, along with novels and stories from which these problems were absent or in which they appeared only tangentially, here and now thé waters have come together and their reconciliation has not been ea as perhaps is evident from the confused and agonized trajectory of & certain character 6° A Manual for Manuel, in fact, combines referential texts (newspaper c pings) with a fictional story of a group of urban guerrillas who plan carry outa kidnapping operation in Paris asa kind of avant-garde p action. Iti, therefore, an overtly political novel whose opposition to th status quo was explained by the author in the following terms: be the most solar and vital in man, his erotic and ludic thirst, his ibd eration from taboos, his demand for a shared dignity in a world that free from the daily horizon of jaws and dollars ‘This utopian element in the novel is represented above all by the grou young people brought together by love, personal cont ‘They stand against the organized state apparatus whose ideology is repr From Modernization to Resistance 303 Genre in the newspaper cuttings. Because the newspapers refer to actual ants of the early seventies referentiality is once again built into the text, “fictional” elements serving to offset the repressive anonymous lan- mage of advanced capitalism by constructing and suggesting new kinds of ‘lationships. However, the text is as interes for what it omits as for shat it includes, Historical experience has no place in the utopian commu- ty. Cortézar’s classless guerrilla group is without a past, without a basis the workplace, with no connect sand there is Hho learning from experience. Truth is in the action itse Manuel is still the structure of the avant-garde and the belief that a few. ative people can wreck the machine. ‘The avant-garde group is the central figure of many of Cortazar’s novels s [The Serpent Club] in Hopscotch — itly surface in one of his most recent to other organi s fable, a group of writers—Cortézar himself, Octavio Paz, Susan Sontag—alarmed at the destruction ational corporations and intelligence agencies, are Iped first by Fantomas (the hero of pulp literature and early French nema) and then by thousands of anonymous voices on the telephone. An Eshuman international system is pitted against “humanity” (but only the ters have names). The fable is, in turn, framed by a referential text for begins with Cortézar’s attendance at the Russell Tribunal on torture and Fods with the report of the tribunal. ‘The fable is thus intended to repre~ tthe utopian dimension of the work, yet its very disposition reveals its logy. For Fantomas is obviously intended to represent an older form of 3s culture (he precludes the multinational comics and was a cult figure mong the surtealists) though in fact, he embodies the myth of extreme dividualism. ‘Thus we have an opposition consisting of named writers, Zntomas (popular mythic hero) and the anonymous voices of the masses. iileges the writer as an exem- reply to Oscar Collazos when h jerarchic structure whic lary figure was made explicit in Corté stated: [> The sign of all great creation is that it comes from a creator who, in some way, has already broken these barriers and who writes from a different point of viewy,calling out to those who, for multiple and obvious reasons have not been able to cross the boundary, encourag- F ing them with appropriate weapons, to accept that profound liberty304 Critical Passions which can only come from the realization of the highest values of each individual. BREAKING OUT OF THE CULTURAL GHETTO Despite declorations to the contrary, the avant-garde text the writer hero though at the cost of abandoning a sense of history and place. This space came to be occupied by another kind of text which na rated the unofficial history of Latin America. I refer here to essays such Mérquez’s Historia de un néufrago 1965), Elena Ponistowska's La noche de Tiatelolo (The Night of Tlatelolr (1971) which went into 25 editions by 1975, Carlos Monsivéis's Dias de ‘guardar (Holidays], and Guillermo Thorndyke’s No, mi general [No $i General].** One might also include in this category, oral histories an tape-recorded memoirs of hitherto marginalized sectors (of which Migeel Barnet’s Biografia de un cimarrén (Biography of a Runaway Slave] is an example). Yet, however interesting, such texts cannot replace literature which, by virtue of its very fictionality, produces distancing and displace- discourse that allow critical understanding of processes and might otherwise be accepted as natural. However, it is crucially important, at the present juncture, for literature to break out of the cultural ghetto of the avant-garde where it has been reduced is by no means easy for in the age of the Even in situations such as that which prevailed in Chile during the Unida Popular (ve) government when the social function of art and could be openly debated, older aesthetic ideologies were retained even by some writers on the left. One radical solution, suggested just before the UP government took power was the radical seizure of culeure from the hands of the elite to restore it to the people. The writer, it was suggested, would have to be proletarianized. There were also embryonic attempts at this time to link cultural activities to mass mobilization through popular song, commando group art, and street theater. Such efforts were not, of| course, confined to Chile. A pioneer of a new kind of “teatro jornal” in Brazil, Augusto Boal had long affirmed that theater “can be practised by Such efforts, however, were closely bound to specific forms of From Modernization to Resistance 305 struggle and they depended on the minimum of democratic structures so that they have not survived repression. ‘There remains the Brechtian critical jadgment. Brecht stated, “the great and complicated things that go ‘on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding.” Such a recommendation has particular force at the present time since both information and historical experience are repressed or devirtualized by the mass media which make 4 radical separation between information and historical experience. On the other hand, two symptomatic texts show: these are Homenaje a las indios americanos [Homage to the American Indians] (1972) by Ernesto Cardenal and Roa Bastos's Yo el supremo (I the Supreme] (197. Cardenal’s poems deploy quotations from pre-Columbian texts, from travelers’ log books and historical records in order to convey the history of the genocide practiced on the Indians. One of the most interesting fea- tures of this collection of poems, however, is the demystification of poetic language by the virtual elimination of traditional poetic figures such as jor. The result of this is that the reader is made to con- front discourse of and about the American Indian with as little mediation by the poet as possible. Cardenal no longer draws attention to himself as sole producer of the poem but arranges different kinds of discourse in such. of discourse, including a private diary in which the dictator straggl self-expression. The text provides the reader with historical knowledge in such a way that the complexity cannot be seduced to Rather than merely reflecting history, it restores the concrete which historical discourse omits and at the same time reveals something which is produced and not a given or an eternal truth, At the same time, such texts are not simply rearrangements of history accord- to some countercultural subjective fantasy and hence they go beyond Reinaldo Arenas’s Hallucinations and Carlos Puentes's Terra Nostra. On the other hand, both Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s El oto del patriarca [The Au-306 Critical Pas [Reasons of Stat texts which by supplying knowledge about the past also focus a critical light on the relation between power and dependency in the present. Plainly the very status of literature has changed in the last decades and the potential readership of both novels and poetry. The change ‘can best be measured by contrasting the implicit appeal to the “puebl Neruda's General Song with the contemporary erudite text which is plainly directed to a public of students and university-trained people. Though literary crities often scoff at references to the writer’s public as vulgarly sociological, all texts have built-in codes which indicate their virtual audi-” ence, Neruda’s poetry, for instance, uses the devices of oral tradition so that even though his language is complex, it does not need an academic lis- tener to be understood. The contemporary “erudite” texts suppose com- petent readers and makes the writer either a culture hero or a member of a phalanstery of taste Teis against the elitism of this position and agains the paternalistic populism of certain realistic texts that Roa Bastos's novel stands. Ie opens up the possibility of literature, film, television program- ming which does not simply separate the reader/observer from identifi | tion with characters or situations in a text (most modern literature goes this far) but allows active participation in a process of pol Its along lines such as these that radical writing and criticism can begin. to separate itself both from the passive model implied by realism and the vacuity of the modernizing avant garde. Notes Carlos Fuentes, Cambio de piel (Mexico City: Joaquin Morti, 1968). José Marfa Arguedas, El zorra de arriba ye! zorr de abajo Matio Vargas Llosts farce, Pantaleén y las visitadoras (Barcelona: Sei Barral, 1973) constitutes a major change from his serious treatment of politics ich reached a peak in Conversation in the Cathedral, trans, Gregory Rabassa few York: Harper Row, 1970). Carlos Fuentes, La mueve novela latinzamerizane (Mexico City: Joaquin Morte, 1969). 5 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, erans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Cape, 1967). From Modernization to Resistance 307 6 Modernism in Spanish Amer refers toa group of poets writing be cween 880 and 198 In Anglo-American criticism, itis sed ina more general sense co refer o widespread rejection ofa view of poetry a the “expresion of autobiographical revelations and felings. Eecritare was firstused bythe French critic Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero; The Please ofthe Tet tosupplan the crm constitutes meaning. Reflecionat refers to theories based on the metaphor of the mirror which hold Iieracure to reflect, through its forms or conte - movements, See Georg Lukies is” In Marxism and Art, Maynard Si on Literature, ed. David Craig (London: Pelican Bot Mario Vargas Llosa, “Novela primitiva y novela de creacié Revises de a Universidad de México 22 (June 1969) Fuentes, La mucva novela latinazme UNAM, 1965), 5: Much contemporary Mas texts which dislocate the tendency of the spect acters and situation, Yes Marta Argues Th snr (Buena ies: Loa) deg: laoreet elo dea Joa Revs, apo Mein Ci Jeue Reve, Hegel ery eee entra: hangs in i