Latin American Literatures in Global Markets: The World Inside 9004523480, 9789004523487

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: A Few Turns of the Kaleidoscope
Part 1 Word and World: (Re)Inscriptions
Chapter 1 The Global Alt-Right as Prefigured by Roberto Bolaño
Chapter 2 “En tanto poeta, ¡zas!, novelista”: On Bolaño and Latin American Poetry in the World Literature System
Chapter 3 Rejoicing Materiality: A Geological Writing by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Chapter 4 New Media and New Technologies in Contemporary Latin American Writing
Chapter 5 The Consecration and Repositioning of a Border Writer: The Phenomenon of the Publishing Market in the Work of Yuri Herrera
Part 2 Latin American Genres, Themes and Writings in a Global World
Chapter 6 Latin American Crónicas: The World-Regional Circulation of a Local Genre
Chapter 7 The Archives of an Exception to Come: Literature, Cinema and the World in Irmgard Emmelhainz’s El cielo está incompleto (2017)
Chapter 8 Beyond (Cuban) Literature: Global Issues in Generation Zero
Chapter 9 The Digital Condition: Algorithms, Language, and Imagination in Latin American Digital Literature
Part 3 Literary Culture and Global Consumptions
Chapter 10 Materialities of Literature in Latin America
Chapter 11 Literary Culture and Spectacle: The Boom in Literary Festivals in Latin America
Chapter 12 Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity and Foreign Literatures in Translation Supply and Sales of Translated Books in Germany between 2007 and 2018
Afterword: The Latin American Writer and the Global Market

Citation preview

Latin American Literatures in Global Markets

Foro Hispánico Editorial board Brigitte Adriaensen (Radboud University Nijmegen, NL) Sebastiaan Faber (Oberlin College, USA) Konstantin Mierau (University of Groningen, NL) Dianna Niebylski (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA) Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (University of Warwick, UK) Valeria de los Ríos (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, CL)

volume 72

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/foro

Latin American Literatures in Global Markets The World Inside Edited by

Mabel Moraña Ana Gallego Cuiñas

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Photo by Jeison Higuita on Unsplash. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moraña, Mabel, editor. | Gallego Cuiñas, Ana, editor. Title: Latin American literatures in global markets : the world inside /  edited by Mabel Moraña, Ana Gallego Cuiñas. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2023] | Series: Foro hispánico,  0925-8620 ; 72 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2022034731 (print) | LCCN 2022034732 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004523487 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004523494 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Latin American literature—20th century—History and  criticism. | Latin American literature—21st century—History and  criticism. | Literature publishing—Latin America. | LCGFT: Literary  criticism. | Essays. Classification: LCC PQ7081 .L366 2023 (print) | LCC PQ7081 (ebook) | DDC  860.098—dc23/eng/20220909 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034731 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034732

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0925-8620 isbn 978-90-04-52348-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-52349-4 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Illustrations vii Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction: A Few Turns of the Kaleidoscope 1 Mabel Moraña

Part 1 Word and World: (Re)Inscriptions 1

The Global Alt-Right as Prefigured by Roberto Bolaño 41 Héctor Hoyos

2

“En tanto poeta, ¡zas!, novelista”: On Bolaño and Latin American Poetry in the World Literature System 58 Jorge J. Locane

3

Rejoicing Materiality: A Geological Writing by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara 78 Cristina Rivera Garza

4

New Media and New Technologies in Contemporary Latin American Writing 88 Edmundo Paz Soldán

5

The Consecration and Repositioning of a Border Writer: The Phenomenon of the Publishing Market in the Work of Yuri Herrera 109 Juan Rogelio Rosado Marrero

Part 2 Latin American Genres, Themes and Writings in a Global World 6

Latin American Crónicas: The World-Regional Circulation of a Local Genre 131 Juan Poblete

vi

Contents

7

The Archives of an Exception to Come: Literature, Cinema and the World in Irmgard Emmelhainz’s El cielo está incompleto (2017) 153 Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

8

Beyond (Cuban) Literature: Global Issues in Generation Zero 174 Catalina Quesada-Gómez

9

The Digital Condition: Algorithms, Language, and Imagination in Latin American Digital Literature 197 Carolina C. Gainza

Part 3 Literary Culture and Global Consumptions 10

Materialities of Literature in Latin America 219 Gustavo Guerrero

11

Literary Culture and Spectacle: The Boom in Literary Festivals in Latin America 241 Ana Gallego Cuiñas

12

Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity and Foreign Literatures in Translation Supply and Sales of Translated Books in Germany between 2007 and 2018 281 Marco Thomas Bosshard





Afterword: The Latin American Writer and the Global Market 303 Ana Gallego Cuiñas

Illustrations

Figures

11.1 Front page of the Hay Cartagena de Indias 2010 programme 249 11.2 Front page of the Filba Internacional of Buenos Aires 2014 programme 252 11.3 Word cloud of the most present artistic terms in Hay Cartagena and Filba Internacional. Source: own elaboration 266 12.1 Number of titles, by year and language of origin 287 12.2 Number of fiction/non-fiction titles with indication of the language of origin 288 12.3 Number of titles, by year and language of origin (minor languages) 289 12.4 Sold copies, by year and language of origin 291 12.5 Sold copies, by year and language of origin (French and minor languages only) 292 12.6 Sold copies, by year and language of origin (minor languages, publisher A only) 293 12.7 Average sales, by language of origin, 2007–2018 293 12.8 Publisher A: average sales of translated books in Guest of Honour year and overall between 2007–2018: comparison by language of origin (fiction only; excluding light fiction) 294 12.9 Publisher A: average sales of translated books in Guest of Honour year and overall between 2007–2018: comparison by language of origin (fiction only; including light fiction) 295 12.10 Publisher B: average sales of translated books in Guest of Honour year and overall between 2007–2018: comparison by language of origin (fiction only) 296 12.11 Publisher A: sold copies of books written by Latin American and Spanish authors (including light fiction) 297 12.12 Publisher A: sold copies of books written by Latin American and Spanish authors (excluding light fiction) 298 12.13 Publisher B: sold copies of books by Latin American and Spanish authors 298



Graphs

11.1 Percentage of writers invited. Source: own elaboration 265 11.2 Percentage of international writers invited. Source: own elaboration 271 11.3 Writers invited to Filba Internacional. Source: own elaboration 272

Notes on Contributors Marco Thomas Bosshard holds a Ph.D. in Romance Philology from the University of Freiburg in Brisgau, and is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture at the Europa-Universität Flensburg. His monographs include The Re-territorialization of the Human. Una teoría de las vanguardias americanas (2013) and Churata y la vanguardia andina (2014). He is the editor of several collective volumes, such as Return Migration in Romance Cultures (2014, with Andreas Gelz), Zonas de contacto en el mundo hispano (2019, with Laura Morgenthaler García) and Las ferias del libro como espacios de negociación cultural y económica: Vol. 1. Planteamientos generales y testimonios desde España, México y Alemania (2019, with Fernando García-Naharro). For ten years, from 2007 to 2017, he was the editor responsible for the series of Spanish and Latin American authors on the German label Wagenbach. Carolina Gainza (Sociologist and Master in Latin American Studies, University of Chile; Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh) is Associate Professor at the School of Creative Literature and director of the Digital Lab at Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago, Chile). Her main research interests are related to digital culture and digital literature in Latin America, in which she analyses the contemporary modes of cultural production and digital aesthetic experiences in the 21st century. Currently, she is the principal investigator of the research project “Critical Cartography of Latin American Digital Literature” (2018–2021). She has published more than twenty academic articles and book chapters, along with two books: Narrativas y poéticas digitales en América Latina. Producción literaria en el capitalismo informacional (2018) and La Batalla de Artes y Humanidades (2020, coauthored with Matías Ayala). Ana Gallego Cuiñas is Full Professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Granada. With undergraduate and doctorate degrees in Hispanic Philology and an undergraduate degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Granada, she has been a research contractor with the Ramón y Cajal Program and a visiting researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, Princeton, Paris-Sorbonne, Buenos Aires, and Yale. Her most recent authored books are Las novelas argentinas del siglo 21: Nuevos modos de producción, circulación y

Notes on Contributors

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recepción (2019) and Otros: Ricardo Piglia y la literatura mundial (2019). She has also published more than one hundred book chapters and articles and edited several books on topics such as transatlantic studies, self-writing, publishing and 21st century literature. She currently directs the LETRAL project, and the “Iber-Lab” Scientific Excellence Cluster: Criticism, Languages, and Cultures in Iberoamerica. Gustavo Guerrero is Professor of Contemporary Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Paris-Cergy and the Institute of Political Studies of SaintGermain-en-Laye. At the same time, he works as an editor for Gallimard in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. He has published La estrategia neobarroca (Barcelona, 1987), Itinerarios (1997), Teorías de la Lírica (1998), La religión del vacío y otros ensayos (2002), finalist for the Bartolomé March Prize for Literary Criticism (2003), Historia de un encargo: La catira de Camilo José Cela (2008), with which he won the 36th Anagram Essay Prize, and Paisajes en movimiento, literatura y cambio cultural entre dos siglos (2018). He currently directs the interuniversity project Mediation, Publication and Translation of Latin American Literature in France (MEDET LAT) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and is co-responsible for the international project Online Compendium of Lyric Poetry funded by the SNSF (Switzerland). Héctor Hoyos is Professor and Chair of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and Director of Modern Thought and Literature, at Stanford University. His book, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (2015), examines post-1989 Latin American novels of globalization and their relevance for world literature. He edited special journal issues for Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (2014), Cuadernos de literatura (2016), and Revista iberoamericana (forthcoming). His latest monograph, awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, develops the concept of transculturation as a way of integrating new and historical strands of materialism in the study of narrative: Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America (2019). Jorge J. Locane studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). In 2008 he moved to Berlin, where he obtained a master’s degree in interdisciplinary Latin American studies and his Ph.D. with the dissertation Miradas locales en tiempos globales. Intervenciones literarias sobre la ciudad latinoamericana.

x

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His thesis was awarded the German prize ADLAF. From 2015 to 2018 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project Reading Global. Constructions of World Literature and Latin America hosted by the University of Cologne. One result of this project is his second monograph De la literatura latinoamericana a la literatura (latinoamericana) mundial. Condiciones materiales, procesos y actores (2019). Since May 2020, he is an Associate Professor of Literature and Culture in the Spanish-speaking World at the University of Oslo. He co-edited several collective volumes, including Re-Mapping World Literature (2018) and Experiencias límite en la ficción latinoamericana (2019). Mabel Moraña is Willliam H. Gass Professor of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is the Director of the Latin American Studies Program. She was for ten years Director of Publications of IILI (Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana). She has published extensively on Latin American literature from the colonial period to the present, including topics of cultural theory, literary and cultural criticism, narrative and philosophy. She has published 16 authored books. Among them: Arguedas/Vargas LLosa: Debates and Assemblages (awarded with the Singer Kovacts Award, MLA, and the Premio Iberoamericano, LASA); The Monster as War Machine; and Philosophy and Criticism in Latin America. From Mariategui to Sloterdijk. These books are both in English and in Spanish. She has also edited more than thirty books on topics that combine the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Lineas de fuga. Ciudadania, frontera and sujeto migrante (2021, and Pensar el cuerpo. Historia materialidad y simbolo (2021) are her latest books. Edmundo Paz-Soldan teaches Latin American literature at the Romance Studies Department of Cornell University. He has published Alcides Arguedas and la narrativa de la nación enferma (2003), has coedited the book Bolaño salvaje (2008), and has published his book of essays Segundas oportunidades (2015). He has published twelve novels, among them La materia del deseo (2001), El delirio de Turing (2003), Norte (2011) and La materia del deseo (2017); he has published five books of short stories, among them Amores imperfectos (1998) and Las visiones (2016). He has been translated to twelve languages. He has won prizes such as the Juan Rulfo short story award (1997) and the Bolivian National Book award (2002) and has been awarded the Guggenheim fellowship (2005).

Notes on Contributors

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Juan Poblete is Professor of Latin/o American Literature and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of Hacia una historia de la lectura y la pedagogía literaria en América Latina (2019), La Escritura de Pedro Lemebel como proyecto cultural y político (2019), and Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: entre públicos lectores y figuras autoriales (2003); editor of New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power (2017) and Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (2003); and co-editor of Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America: Rethinking Creativity and the Common Good (2020), Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Non-citizenship (forthcoming), Sports and Nationalism in Latin America (2015), Humor in Latin American Cinema (2015), Andrés Bello (2009), and Redrawing The Nation: National Identities in Latin/o American Comics (2009). Catalina Quesada-Gómez teaches Latin American literature and culture at the University of Miami. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Spanish American Literature from the University of Seville in Spain. She has taught at several universities in Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Colombia, and Nicaragua. She has also been a visiting researcher at universities in Colombia, Chile, Nicaragua, Spain, France, and the United States. She is the author of La metanovela hispanoamericana en el último tercio del siglo XX (2009), Literatura y globalización: la narrativa hispanoamericana en el siglo XXI (espacio, tiempo, géneros) (2014), and more than fifty articles. She was the guest editor of “Cultura y globalización en Hispanoamérica” (2014), a special issue of Pasavento: Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. She is the coeditor of Cámara de eco. Homenaje a Severo Sarduy (2018) and El libro y la vida. Ensayos críticos sobre la obra de Héctor Abad Faciolince (2019). During the academic year 2021–2022, she will be an Engaged Faculty Fellow at the University of Miami. Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning author, translator, and critic and the only two-time winner of the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (2001; 2009). Originally written in Spanish, her works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and more. Born in Mexico in 1964, she has lived in the United States since 1989, receiving her Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Houston. She was the Breeden Eminent Scholar at Auburn University in Fall 2015 and a fellow at the UCSD Center for Humanities 2015–2016. Currently, she is Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and Director of Ph.D. in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.

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Her novel The Illiac Crest, translated by Sarah Booker, was published by The Feminist Press in 2017, and And Other Stories in 2018. The Taiga Syndrome (Dorothy Project, 2018) was translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana. Juan Rogelio Rosado Marrero teaches Mexican literature at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. His areas of interest are cultural studies, visual poetry, processes of creative writing, and topics related to Avant-Garde and neo-vanguardismo. His latest publications include “Comparemos escrituras: Bellatín y la ausencia del sujeto” (2018), “La escritura doliente en la obra de Lolita Bosh y Fernanda Melchor” (2019) and “Las palabras de los otros: la poesía post-autónoma de Cristina Rivera Garza” (2019). He is currently completing the doctorate in Spanish American literature at the BUAP. Ignacio Sánchez Prado is Jarvis Thurston and Mona van Duyn Professor of the Humanities at Washington University. His research focuses on Mexican literature, cinema and culture at large, focusing on the intersection between aesthetic form, institutional fields and political ideology. He is the author, among other books, of Screening Neoliberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema (1988–2012) and Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature. He has edited fourteen collections including A History of Mexican Literature and forthcoming volumes on poetry and the novel for Cambridge University Press, as well as Mexican Literature in Theory and the forthcoming Mexican Literature as World Literature. He is currently completing a book entitled The Transnational Paradox. Cultural Extractivism and Global Mexican Cinema.

Introduction: A Few Turns of the Kaleidoscope Mabel Moraña No space disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local. Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace

…

I am feeling like a society in myself. So broken up and fragmented. David Bowie

∵ 1

First Turn

During the last four decades, Latin American literary and critical production has undergone a series of important transformations, closely related to the changing parameters of knowledge production, symbolic consumption, and dissemination of cultural commodities. Paradoxically—but not unexpectedly—the dynamics of integration and the illusion of universal proximity that were part of the grand narrative of globalization were counterbalanced by the relentless fragmentation of the social. Nation-states have been impacted by the increase of inequality, violence, and exclusion, both in central and peripheral areas. The supposedly outdated dualisms (East/West, North/South, we/they) that had been common places during the Cold War and had supposedly decreased their currency by the end of the 20th century soon acquired new strength in the polarized scenarios of globalization, partly due to the lack of better categories to evaluate the turmoil that followed the fall of “real” socialism. But by then we knew (Derrida dixit) that those binary notions were conveying just a minimal part of the truth and, in that way, distorting or simplifying reality. Many people around the world, devastated by war and desolation, were attempting to find a new name for the apocalyptic feelings that accompanied the inauguration of the 21st century.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_002

2

Moraña

While we explored the residual descriptive and analytical usefulness of modern conceptual tools, we realized that the post-modern/post-colonial world called for innovative categories and platforms for the understanding of unseen cultural and political developments. In a world traversed by full-speed financial and immaterial exchanges, where unfamiliar forms of hegemony and marginalization were emerging in the complex realm of late capitalism, the proliferation of prefixes (post-, trans-, inter-, meta-) signaled the simultaneity of processes where the old and the new coexisted everywhere in unequal proportions and in—sometimes—promiscuous combinations. New terms emerged to name social and political experiences that departed from practices and concepts of the recent past: infrapolitics, Global South/Global North, precariat, meta-crises, soft capitalism, and the like. Racial, gender, and class antagonisms seemed to channel, more than ever, the tensions and frustrations of object-oriented societies where underprivileged sectors lack political representation and desire is always unsatisfied, insatiable, thus ensuring the eternal reproduction of capital. The modern notions of identity, nation, and consensus rapidly lost conceptual and political weight. This does not mean that these categories—and their referents— are destined to disappear, but new approaches will undoubtedly interrogate and redefine their critical and theoretical validity. Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil expressed this matter clearly when he indicated: Without a doubt, the nations will continue to be fundamental political unities and sources for communal imaginations in the future (particularly metropolitan nations), but the “cultural” supra-national and nonnational criteria will play, in my opinion, an increasingly important role as markers of collective identities (especially in the nations of the Second and Third World). What is at stake is not the disappearance of the nationState, but its redefinition. 2000, 1041

Since the 1980s, progressive thinkers in the fields of philosophy, critical theory and political sciences have been arguing about the urgent need to recuperate 1 “Sin duda, las naciones permanecerán siendo unidades políticas fundamentales y fuentes de imaginaciones comunales en los años venideros (particularmente las naciones metropolitanas), pero los criterios «culturales» supranacionales y no-nacionales, desde mi punto de vista, jugarán un papel más y más importante como marcadores de las identidades colectivas (particularmente en las naciones del Segundo y Tercer Mundo). Lo que está en juego no es la desaparición del Estado-nación, sino su redefinición” (Coronil 2000, 104) (the translation is mine).

Introduction

3

the political: to redefine it, to re-appropriate it, and to put it to work for a reevaluation of the contemporary world. Chantal Mouffe’s The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993) is a good example. A few years after its publication, the subtitle of the Spanish edition of this book included four concepts that were already changing the conversation at transnational levels: comunidad, ciudadanía, pluralismo, democracia radical. The technology of power, and the power of technology, showed the two indistinguishable sides of this new version of universalism which, just like the old one, was an ideologeme destined to promote false consciousness and even enthusiastic adherence to the new system of worldwide domination.2 Some thinkers distrusted the notion that “globalization” was naming a new social, economic and cultural experience. Pierre Bourdieu y Löic Wacquant indicated, for instance, that the term represented, rather, a “new planetary vulgate,” pointing toward the totalization of the social effects of neoliberalism and to the naturalization of the new stage in the continuing process of transnational reproduction of capital. While recognizing that, by the turn of the century, symptomatic lexical changes had taken place in social and political discourses, they detected the advent of a transformative political and economic dynamics. The symptomatic language of the new times included the disappearance of terms such as capitalism, class, inequality and the like—and also of unionism, revolution, progress, and proletariat—and the correlative introduction of the concepts of governmentality, multiculturalism, underclass, and so on. While analyzing the ideological implications of “multiculturalism” as a screen discourse that conceals the real forms and degrees of racial and cultural discrimination, the sociologists indicated in their short but fundamental article: The same demonstration [made about multiculturalism] could be made about the highly polysemic notion of ‘globalization’, whose upshot—if not function—is to dress up the effects of American imperialism in the trappings of cultural ecumenism or economic fatalism and to make a transnational relation of economic power appear like a natural necessity. Through a symbolic reversal based on the naturalization of the schemata of neoliberal thought, the reshaping of social relations and cultural practices after the US template, which has been forced upon advanced societies through the pauperization of the state, the commodification of public goods and the generalization of job insecurity, is nowadays accepted with resignation as the inevitable outcome of national evolution, when it is 2 I use the word ideologeme here in its sociological meaning: as a unit of thought with a specific ideological value.

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Moraña

not celebrated with sheep-like enthusiasm. An empirical analysis of the trajectory of the advanced economies over the longue durée suggests, in contrast, that ‘globalization’ is not a new phase of capitalism, but a ‘rhetoric’ invoked by governments in order to justify their voluntary surrender to the financial markets and their conversion to a fiduciary conception of the firm. Far from being—as we are constantly told—the inevitable result of the growth of foreign trade, deindustrialization, growing inequality and the retrenchment of social policies are the result of domestic political decisions that reflect the tipping of the balance of class forces in favour of the owners of capital. 2001, 43

While few people would dismiss, today, the essential analysis presented in this critical piece, the effects of the new strategies of capitalist expansion have assumed prominent and unseen characteristics in the last few decades as the materialization of global processes. Some of the components of our social experiences in the present time are related to notions of mobility, constant need for linguistic and cultural translation, and the manifestation of varied forms of hybridity. The processes of social and cultural homogenization and standardization attributed to globalization go hand in hand with feelings of uncertainty and in-betweenness. The proliferation of borders, the expansion and diffusion of the public sphere into transnational domains, and the dissolution of modern notions of individual and collective identity, produce a new sense of alienation and estrangement that translates into counter-normative social behaviors and distrust of dominant discourses and institutional logics. In my opinion, the consideration of this myriad of objective and subjective conditions, social experiences, and transformations in economic, political and natural environments is key for the understanding of literature and, in general, of all kinds of symbolic production. Simultaneously, literature produces intellectual and affective insights that illuminate aspects of society that otherwise would remain in the dark. The relationship between aesthetics and politics has varied historically, prompting the emergence of different theories about the referential value of symbolic discourse, and the kind of readings it proposes.4 3 Bourdieu and Wacquant’s article first appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique 554, May 2000. 6–7. 4 In an attempt to approach Latin American post-modern literature, Josefina Ludmer proposed the concept of post-autonomous literature to make reference to the supposed separation of the spheres of literature and politics. For Ludmer, the autonomy of literature corresponded to the period of “modernity,” a project initiated at the end of the 18th century, resulting from the Enlightened concepts of humanism, scientific progress, and nationalism. Latin American national literatures constituted an autonomous field characterized both by experimentalism and nationalism. After the 1960s Ludmer notices a clear alteration in the processes of literary

Introduction

5

One particular effect of this complex scenario has to do with local/global (dis)connections, as well as with the intertwined relations between real and virtual worlds, historic/mythical/imaginary levels, and intellectual/affective strata. Literature is, possibly, one of the most appropriate spaces for the elaboration of the disconcerting feelings and experiences triggered by global transformations. The element of excess has found a fertile terrain in contemporary literature, as in the works of Cristina Rivera Garza, Fernanda Melchor, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Mariana Enríquez, Mónica Ojeda, Rita Indiana and many other authors of the most recent Latin American literature. Corporeal, psychological and affective experiences of pain and devastation mirror the progressive destruction of the social body and of the body politic, not just by chance narrated prominently by women writers, who seem to be the main protagonists of the Latin American literary scene today. In a category of its own, and as an exception to many of the notions stated in these pages, Leñador (2013) by Chilean author Mike Wilson constitutes, in my opinion, a major accomplishment, and a solid point of departure for the deconstruction of still current literary conventions. The structure of the book, its singular articulation of subjectivity and material culture, and its impeccable linguistic construction allow for a serious discussion of the place of Latin American literature in current cultural and political scenarios, and of the ground-breaking propositions literature can make at aesthetic and structural levels. Dissimilar ideological insertions in the social, countless approaches to the notions of life, spatiality, and temporality, diverse degrees of alienation and despair, produce a wide spectrum of literary expressions coming from societies that primarily elaborate issues of history and memory, subalternization, discrimination, and necropolitics. Through this adherence to the specificities of culture and collective identity Latin American literature resists standardization and lightness and vindicates its right to define the terms of its insertion in the global. 2

Second Turn

In addition to the above mentioned social and political transformations, and through the incorporation of new technologies to all aspects of life, collective production and reception The main changes are, according to the Argentine critic, at the level of language, production of meaning, concept of reality and authorship. Post-autonomous literatures, for Ludmer, do not admit a literary reading; it does not matter if they are literature or not, if they belong or not to the realms of reality or fiction. They locate themselves in particular quotidian reality in order “to fabricate present” (“fabricar presente”).

6

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imaginaries redefined values, lifestyles, areas of interest, and expectations. In the new era, populated by zombies, robotic characters, vampires and superheroes, technology plays a key and multifarious role in the production of a kaleidoscopic and accelerated image of the world, in which the archaic and the post-human coexist.5 While in the last decades counter-normative, monstrous, anomalous, or uncanny images became a popular metaphor to express current destabilized notions of the human, a desperate pursuit of a new normal obsessively traverses collective imaginaries. In our super-technological reality and fascinated with the possibility of total trivialization and endless reproduction of our own image, globalization provides a world-wide mirror for the insatiable need for self-contemplation. This is an affective and psychological dimension of global sensibility that should be neither ignored nor underestimated. By the turn of the century the world started to become an unfamiliar place just as a sense of shared exhilaration took over the polluted atmosphere of the new century. Contradictions and aporias did not seem to disturb the enthusiastic adherence to a program of indiscriminate consumption and abolition of ethical and political engagements. After all, we find ourselves immersed in a post-utopian temporality, free of totalizations and idealistic projects, where social consciousness has retreated to a discrete space behind the scenes. Suddenly, we realize that we have never been so “popular”, we have never had so many “friends”, so much to “share” with strangers, so much social capital to dilapidate. We started to enjoy a manufactured “reality” that seems to be created “just for us,” and to revel in the pornographic performance of our “intimacy”, put on display to support bogus identities and our new discovered public happiness, only superficially sensitive to the miseries of the world. That does not bother us because, after all, who are we? What remains of “us” if we subtract all “virtual” features from our “public profile”? In any case, what counts is that so many unknown “friends” “like” us without even knowing who we really are, just by becoming immersed in the contagious fake self-satisfaction we created for the internet, our new global bubble of lightness and simulacra. If this is not a literaturization of the world, maybe “literature” needs to be also redefined, and re-evaluated. If this is not an allegorical representation of a technological delusion dreamt by Wells or Asimov for the 21st century, we need to read again the masters of the genre in order to discover the point in which reality surpassed nightmarish science-fictional narratives, without anyone noticing.

5 I studied this topic at length in my book El monstruo como máquina de guerra (The Monster as War Machine).

Introduction

7

With the good and bad of the new times, the Humanities became a predictable casualty, that continues to pay the price of a certain assumed—and maybe unavoidable—anachronism, at educational levels. And yet, this world in which we live needs to be allegorized, philosophically deconstructed, aesthetically scrutinized, politically turned upside down and inside out, ethically challenged, technologically contained, rationalized, re-adjusted. We live in a state of excess, going from the dramas of everyday life to the tragedies of the global (environmental crises, massive migrations, social imbalances, political atrocities), from which we take refuge in the comedy of virtual connections, where we play innumerable roles, all of them designed to be shared by others just like us, who have settled for a surplus of virtual existence with no end, and no hope. What is the political, historical, literary and philosophical imagination doing about that, in the meantime? It is certainly busy trying to replace memory with fantasy, uncertainty with make-believe, transcendence with transience. This does not mean that critical thought has given up, or that all poetics are futile and expendable. We just seem to inhabit an in-between temporality that has exhausted our ability to reinvent the human within the human, utopia within history, politics in ideology, at least for the time being. How about literature? Literature is, in this scenario, one of the spaces we have left for experimentation and self-invention, to dig into ourselves and to jump ahead, to understand or to deny reality, to interrupt dominant strategies and to interpellate existing powers and official discourses. Through literature, language tests the sensorium of the new times, nurtures subjectivities, explores desire, celebrates affection, beliefs, and intellect. It is also a territory where hate and abjection can also express themselves, opening the can of worms of truth and falsehood, analyzing the aesthetics of evil, and the intricacies of virtue, victimization, and guilt. Some possible questions that might guide our reflection on the new social, cultural, and political scenarios from the perspective of creative writing are “How does literature, and particularly Latin American literary production, fit at a global level?” “Have we arrived late (again) at the banquet of world literature or is still possible to ‘crash the party’, and maybe even enjoy, from the margins, some of the crumbs of the feast?”, “What can Latin American literature say by itself, about itself?” In many ways, literature is a sign of life in a battlefield where armies and birds of prey have left their mark. Literature has been already tested in a number of encounters (although the fight is never totally over): against Eurocentrism and fundamentalism, against war, xenophobia and discrimination, against the obsession with the past and the oblivion of history, against determinism, exoticization, and telluric mandates. Latin American literature is now facing the

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challenges of world literature, marketability and neoliberalism, and negotiating the space of imagination with new regimes defined by audiovisual representation and virtual realities. In other words, Latin American literature is finding a new voice as well as new languages and messages to be projected beyond borders, about borders. It is easy to predict that the new Latin American literature of the 21st century will operate without the boundaries of compartmentalized genres, themes, or styles, incorporating challenges, codifications, and expectations imposed by the new globalized regime of cultural production. In addition to the questions mentioned above, there are still other interrogations that I personally find even more challenging and relevant for peripheral societies: “How is globalization impacting our world?”. “How much of this planetary event penetrates our subjectivities, our bodies, our convictions and desires, and what are the collateral damages created by our—partial, subalternized—participation in the new universal?” From the perspective of the anthropology of culture it has been said that “The planet becomes incarnates in our existence, modifying our habits, our behaviors, and our values” (Ortiz, 2004, 18).6 If this is the case, is our unrelinquishable cultural and historical difference being coopted by tactical universalism? How does the global infiltrate the vulnerable but resilient bodies of postcolonial societies, whose historical memories have been forever impacted by the initial traumas of conquest and genocide, imperialism and dependency, violence and corruption? Is that part of our collective identity a tribute to be paid in order to be admitted as a legitimate opponent in global competitions? How much softening do we need to do around the edges in order to not irritate transnational sensibilities? When is our difference too little, or too much? 3

Third (Multiple) Turn

The analysis of the questions suggested above requires a more refined and extensive scrutiny of our current context, a mined terrain in which we need to find resources for survival and for social and political restoration. For our purposes here, I will consider just a few features of globalization that are particularly relevant for literary and cultural studies. a) Time/space compression has been proposed by David Harvey as one of the most disrupting and disorienting features of the globalized world. For the author of The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), this social, political, 6 “El planeta se encarna así en nuestra existencia, modificando nuestros hábitos, nuestros comportamientos, nuestros valores” (Ortiz 2004, 18).

Introduction

9

economic and cultural phenomenon, popularly known as “the shrinkage of the world,” has changed our geographical imagination, and is impacting the study of society not only in connection to environmental issues but also in matters of representational strategies. While the primary examples in Harvey’s analysis come from the field of labor control (subcontracting, outsourcing) and from the observation of financial markets, capital flows, and consumers’ behaviors, his reflections extend to the cultural domain, a symbolic economy that has more to do with infrastructural levels (to use here an outmoded word) than we are inclined to believe. William Scheuerman refers to this aspect of globalization when he indicates: Although sharp differences continue to separate participants in the ongoing debate about the term, most contemporary social theorists endorse the view that globalization refers to fundamental changes in the spatial and temporal contours of social existence, according to which the significance of space or territory undergoes shifts in the face of a no less dramatic acceleration in the temporal structure of crucial forms of human activity. Geographical distance is typically measured in time. As the time necessary to connect distinct geographical locations is reduced, distance or space undergoes compression or “annihilation”. Scheuerman 2018, 5, par. 2




The aesthetics of place, the notions of spatial justice (Soja), the new interest in personal genealogies and family roots, the revamping of ephemerality, and the new linkages between material culture and memory apply to all aspects of daily life and trigger new forms of literary representation. In the literary realm, the prolific field of science-fiction is the most obvious example, as a particular form of symbolic codification where elements of real and virtual interrelation depict a world of instantaneous contacts, mediated by technology. At this level, presence and disappearance are both material and phantasmagorical. But even in realistic narratives the sense of self is altered by the need to fictionalize the real, redefining it under new lenses. The reappearance of horror stories, the glamorization of the grotesque and the abject, and the preference for paranormal states are often undertaken through temporal and spatial manipulations that produce in the reader a sense of estrangement and de-familiarization. It is as if the world were being shown through the combinations of an

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accelerated kaleidoscope that glamourizes the images of chaos and delusion. The compressed time/space coordinates are clearly represented in visual arts, performance, and literature, contributing to the experience of simultaneity, a topic well analyzed by Colombian critic Carlos Rincón, years ago. From the perspective of literary criticism in the Anglo-Saxon world, Paul Jay states, in his book Global Matters. The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies:




Since the rise of critical theory in the 1970s, nothing has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism. It has productively complicated the nationalist paradigm long dominant in these fields, transformed the nature of the locations we study, and focused our attention on forms of cultural production that take place in the liminal spaces between real and imagined borders. This transformation has exploded under the forces of globalization, but it has its roots in political movements outside of the academy and theoretical developments within it that run back to the early 1960s […] During the same period postcolonial studies emerged to challenge the primacy of discrete national literatures and what seemed like their insular concerns, providing a framework for studying literature and culture in a transnational context that moved beyond and explicitly questioned older Eurocentric models of “comparative” analysis. However, the transnational turn in literary studies began in earnest when the study of minority, multicultural, and postcolonial literature began to intersect with work done under the auspices of the emerging study of globalization (1).7




An important point for debate has to do with the qualitative and political differences between transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, an issue that exceeds the limits of this introduction but which signals, by itself, the tension between different perceptions of time/space coordinates and the subsequent variations of symbolic representation.8 For now, we can just retain the idea that time/space compression also translates into

7 This turn leaves behind—or may be it just revisits, in a different way—what Fredric Jameson diagnosed years ago as the Latin American propensity to construct literary national allegories, a polemic notion well discussed at the time. See Jameson’s article on “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital” as well as the critique elaborated by Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’”. See also Szeman. 8 On cosmopolitanism see Siskind, and Muller and Siskind, eds.

Introduction

11

the ways in which the universal is viewed from different positions (both geo-cultural and ideological), and that distances or temporalities are, sometimes, relative and interchangeable. Cosmopolitanism constitutes a mode of apprehension of foreign (public, distant, imagined, utopian) spaces or, as Mariano Siskind indicates, “a desire of the world” (“un deseo de mundo”) that projects subjectivity beyond conventional parameters. This critic quotes Ernesto Laclau with respect to the topic of universalism, and the process of self-recognition, which involves the articulation of consciousness, affect, and identity: The universal is the symbol of a missing fullness […] the universal is part of my identity in so far as I am penetrated by a constitutive lack— that is, in so far as my differential identity has failed in its process of constitution. The universal emerges out of the particular not as some principle underlying and explaining it, but as an incomplete horizon suturing a dislocated particular identity. Laclau 1998, 28




b)

From this perspective, cosmopolitanism appears as one of the forms that subjectivity (interiority, immanence) assumes in the search for projection and totalization. Transnationalism, on the other hand, is a notion with more concrete connotations related to the debilitation of the nationState and the emergence of global interconnections between national formations and supra-national organizations. Transnationalism calls for a reflective analysis on issues of sovereignty and national autonomy, borders, global markets, and legal jurisdictions.9 While both ideas can be discussed in the context of the feature of globalization that we call time/ space compression, they open different political and ideological spaces for debate and interpretation and translate into different representations of subjectivity in literary discourses. Proliferation is another distinguishing quality of the global, particularly at the level of supply and demand, where the world becomes a stage of pluralization, diversification, competition, and creativity. Marketability is a notion that applies to all aspects of culture and society, from the

9 The term “transnationalism” was detected for the first time in the Storrs Lectures (Law School, Yale University, 1955) delivered by Phillip C. Jessup, judge of the International Justice Court under Harry Truman. The term is also used in his book Transnational Law (1956), focused on legal processes that exceed national jurisdictions and involve what Jessup calls “families of nations” or “State societies”. On transnationalism see Poblete.

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circulation of material goods to the accessibility of intangible products related to the acquisition of knowledge or skills, enjoyment of culture, travel, and food, all of which is offered in impressive abundance and diversity to those who have the means to reach their object of desire. In the arts, proliferation characterizes the coexistence of languages, styles, formats, spaces, and levels of reception. Constant fragmentation and reconfigurations of the social, as well as the multiplication of global interconnections created by the dynamics of the market and by the reproduction of media messages, advertisement, and informational fluxes, have an aesthetic correlate in the multifarious representations of the real, which now contains the virtual and the imaginary as natural components. Documentalism, testimonial narratives, and self-fiction, are literary forms activated by the need to rethink the relationship between individuality and reality, facts and invention, event and discourse. Anything we say with respect to literary undertakings, experimentations, innovations, accomplishments, and failures can be counterbalanced or contradicted with different examples, since the scope of supply and demand has never been so wide and diversified both materially and symbolically. There is, also, an open market for ideas, theories, and proposals. The multiplicity of audiences, publics, readers, and consumers, communicates the idea that everything fits the expectations of at least a sector of the buyer /customer/ user population, enough to justify the investment that somebody made (of money, labor, time) in the production of material or immaterial commodities. It could be said that the market has always functioned as a showcase of possibilities and opportunities, but with globalization commercialism has intensified exponentially due to the reproductive logic of late capitalism and the technological advances of transportation and communications, which facilitate production, exchanges, and distribution. This openness can be interpreted as freedom or as commercialism, as “the democracy of consumerism” or as the final relativism of value, as “commodity fetishism” or as the new space for participation in the public sphere, apt for the exercise of a new form of citizenship.10 This overarching presence of the market could be a new paradigm for the reevaluation of the principles that inform the construction of the literary canon, a topic that was passionately discussed decades ago, from cultural, political, and ideological perspectives. Today, in the name of simultaneity, the reader does not feel the need to choose or to reflect on







10

See, in this respect, García-Canclini, Consumidores y ciudadanos.

Introduction

13

the topic of value, since alternative intersectional criteria seem to rule prominently, guided as much by particular agendas as by aesthetic principles. The variety of tastes, reception, and value, immediately evoke the notions of simultaneity, pluralism, and abolition of hierarchies. In view of this multiplicity, it could be argued that in the literary field, instead of eradicating the canon, we have triggered its infinite and indiscriminate reproduction. Renato Ortiz offers a compelling interpretation of postmodern aesthetics in global scenarios: What does Lyotard say when he describes the postmodern situation? That we live in a context in which the plurality of rules and behaviors impedes the existence of a universal metalanguage, valid for everybody. The centrality of myths, of ideological universes and universal religions has been compromised by the fragmentation of consensus. The postmodern subject is, according to Lyotard, profoundly decentered and escapes the totality of the grand narrative that contained him in past societies. Social atomization prevails over collective organicity, promoting a number of possibilities for human interaction. […] It is possible that we have abandoned the idea of a hierarchy of genres, the notion of a gamut of oppositions replacing that of a truly unique style. Variation of preferences, adaptation to different options, are the new values that replace stylistic consistency and orthodoxy. Homogeneity leaves room to a diversity of aesthetic judgements that are reciprocally irreducible. 2004, 162–163, my translation11




Concurrently, as the elimination of cultural restrictions and the celebration of difference take, at some levels, the forefront in the global scene,

11 “¿[Q]ué es lo que nos dice Lyotard al describir la situación postmoderna? Que vivimos en un contexto en el cual la pluralidad de reglas y de comportamientos impide la existencia de un metalenguaje universalmente válido para todos los sujetos. La centralidad de los mitos, de los universos ideológicos y de las religiones universales estaría comprometida frente a la fragmentación del consenso. El sujeto posmoderno sería profundamente descentrado y escaparía de la totalidad del gran relato que lo envolvía en las sociedades pasadas. La atomización social prevalecería así sobre la organicidad colectiva, propiciando un conjunto de posibilidades para que los individuos interactúen entre sí. […] Es posible que hayamos abandonado la idea de una jerarquía de géneros, la noción de una gama de oposiciones sustituyendo el único estilo verdadero. Variedad de inclinaciones, adecuación de las elecciones, esos son los nuevos valores que sustituyen la consistencia y la ortodoxia estilística. Lo homogéneo cedería lugar a una diversidad de juicios estéticos irreductibles los unos a los otros” (Ortiz 2004, 162).

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the proliferation of borders is supported by practices of “differential inclusion” both at checkpoints and at national borders, in land and sea, reinforcing “security,” and compartmentalizing territories according to new systems of racialization and exclusivism. While this might not be an actual and personal experience for many, due to the fact that time/ space also works in parallel and disconnected sequences depending on location, class, race, and other variants, the imaginary in which expulsion is the name of the game also permeates the sensorium and the ethos of the 21st century. In literature, this results in cases of split consciousness, and of living experiences that combine real and imaginary narratives, where characters move in hybrid territories, and follow at the same time a contingent and transcendent teleology. Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015) proposes an illustrative articulation of mythical and historical dimensions, as well as of individual and communitarian interweaving. Works like this demonstrate that globalization, and all that comes as part of this new avatar of capitalist domination, proliferate in signals, announcements, premonitions, and ciphered messages that require a refined hermeneutics to be de-codified, interpreted, and assimilated. After all, the big question remains: how do we read globalization? As an event, as a stage (both historical and theatrical), as a catastrophe, as a transition, as a natural development, as a planetary device, or as a narrative created to facilitate the circulation of financial capital, that is to say, as an ideology? The feature of temporal and spatial densification coexists, paradoxically, with the prevalent experience of decentering, displacement, and dispersion of the social. The clear sense of living in a fragmented world, comprised of hierarchical and apparently disconnected segments (think, for instance, in the existing gap between the elites and the “disposable” sectors of society, or in the proliferating diversification of consumer groups around the world), is intensified by the recognition that some of the unifying parameters of modernity have become obsolete in the new scenarios of globalization. One of them is the notion of national culture (and, consequently, of national literature), which has been replaced by a myriad of concepts that translate into regional, transnational, global, or planetary levels of analysis. Along the lines followed by Renato Ortiz, who adheres to the notion of modialization, historial Eric Hobsbawm indicated, years ago that [World history] can no longer be contained within the limits of “nations” and “nation-states” as these used to be defined, either politically, or economically, or culturally, or even linguistically … It will see

Introduction

15

“nation-states” and “nations” or ethnic /linguistic groups primarily as retreating before, resisting, adapting to, being absorbed or dislocatedby the new supranational restructuring of the globe. Nations and nationalism will be present in this history, but in subordinate, and often rather minor roles. 2000, 191




For Renato Ortiz, “To reflect on the mondialization of culture is, in a way, to counter, even if not in an absolute manner, the idea of national culture” (2004, 123).12 This change from national to trans- or post-national realms constitutes a key shift in the way in which the planetary configuration is conceived and approached. Consequently, it requires post-disciplinary analysis, which would allow for the combination of epistemic categories and methodologies. At the same time, the national needs to be considered within regional—geo-cultural—and historical contexts, since the process of resignification of national cultures does not follow a homogeneous pattern around the world. In the present time, the understanding of the balancing act that is taking place between national cultures and transnational fluxes constitutes one of the challenges of critical thought. David Harvey turns to Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson (a good example of social sciences-humanities collaboration) to explain contemporary feelings of disengagement and disorientation related to our “insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable decentering of global capitalism itself” (Jameson, “Notes on Globalization” 351, in Harvey 16). What some critics have called “the death of the subject” is for Jameson the schizophrenic dispersion of consciousness, which could end up in the erasure of the political. According to Harvey […] if aesthetic production has now been so thoroughly commodified and thereby become really subsumed within a political economy of cultural production, how can we possibly stop that circle closing onto a produced, and hence all too easily manipulated, aestheticization of a globally mediatized politics? 2011, 16–17

12

“Reflexionar sobre la mundialización de la cultura es, de alguna manera, contraponerse, aunque no sea de forma absoluta, a la idea de cultura nacional” (Ortiz 2004, 123).

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For Harvey, the main concern is the possibility that time-space compression will permeate political and military decision-making processes, financial markets, capital accumulation, and labor organization, incorporating an ethos of ephemerality and lack of differentiation in the domain of the real. From his perspective, time-space compression, together with the dematerialization of money, constitutes one of the most relevant transformations of the 21st-century. This new scenario provides the “material basis for the rise of distinctive systems of interpretation and representation” (2011, 12). In the post-national reality, tradition is not just being “invented,” as suggested by Hobsbawm, but “commodified and marketed” (Harvey 2011, 15). Concurrently, simulacra, as Baudrillard warned us, are turning into our version of reality, to the point that everyday life is being exposed publically, on a giant screen, for everybody’s enjoyment and inquisitiveness. Worlds seem to proliferate around the self, allowing us to participate in all of them, at the same time, vicariously, eclectically, and unselectively (Harvey 2011, 13). Subjectivity does not only participate in collective performances, it is the performance—the exteriorization of the private, the intimate, the unintelligible. The exposure of the self, the multiplication of biographical forms, the development of self-fiction, the obsession with body image and genealogy, the popularity of queer subjects, counter-normative identities, science-fictional characters, rupture, estrangement and suspension of consciousness, show the need to rebel against totalitarian definitions of subject positions, which have become ever-changing constructions characterized by their fluidity and instability. At the same time, the individual and collective need for reaffirmation is obvious in a world where totalization and atomization coexist in tense antagonism. In literature, characters, in general, do not represent (in the sense in which Garabombo el invisible, in Scorza’s novel, says “Yo represento” [“I represent”]) anything more than themselves. Although there is often a community behind the main character, he/she is rarely guided by collective utopias or transcendent horizons or political platforms. There are, however, exceptions to this fact.13 But in the majority of cases, even devastation seems individual, a singular affair, somebody’s business; consequently, the projection of these catastrophes into the social realm appear










13 Ana Gallego-Cuiñas reminds me, in this respect, the strategies used, for instance, in narratives that approach the topic of travestism, in order to define an aesthetic and ideological locus of enunciation perceived as a utopian horizon for the creation of community.

Introduction

17

more like a personal gesture than as the result of historical processes. History as such cannot be read; instead, stories proliferate, showcasing characters always in desperate and skeptical search for a net to contain them if they fall from the tightrope. This might explain in part the success of border narratives, where the challenge of the limit clearly has real and symbolic connotations, allowing for the exposure of mixed languages, contaminated sensibilities, extreme subject matters and stereotypical personalities. Characters basically are against the system, because they have nothing else to lose, and because from their peripheral positioning they have gained an awareness often inhibited by social privilege. Split-consciousness and diasporic identity, thoroughly analyzed by Stuart Hall, dominate the latest scenarios of Latin American literature where horror, dirty realism, sciencefictional universes, violent environments, and tormented subjectivities struggle to make sense of the world.14 Many of us are those characters, one way or another, playing with boundaries, foreign to the dominant languages, skeptical of nationalism, elaborating the effects of political failures, never free of historical guilt, displaced, unrepresentative, always translating, decoding, becoming. Other representations of decentered poetics can be seen in the trajectories of characters and their spaces of choice in Latin American narratives. The current production tends to favor marginal, underground, peripheral, clandestine, transitional spaces over previously dominant urban and public scenarios, in order to insert plots and affective developments outside of the distributive and conventional order of modernity, symbolized in the blueprints of the city, the patriarchal residence, the organized division of work, and so on. The decentering and displacement of time/space coordinates allows for different processes of cognition, recognition, and interpretation of the real, as seen, for instance, in Fernanda







14

Stuart Hall indicates, for instance, when referring to the identity of migrants, that “[they] are people who belong to more than one world, speak more than one language (literally and metaphorically), inhabit more than one identity, have more than one identity, have more than one home; who have learned to negotiate and translate between cultures, and who, because they are irrevocably the product of several interlocking histories and culture have learned to live with, and indeed to speak from, difference. They speak from the “in-between” of different cultures, always unsettling assumptions of one culture from the perspective of another, and thus finding ways of being both the same as and at the same time different from the others amongst whom they live (Stuart Hall “New Cultures for Old”, 206, emphasis in the original). See also Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”.

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Melchor’s saturated and unstable atmospheres, whose darkness and indeterminacy highly contribute to the effectiveness of her writing. The balancing act between local and global dimensions entails a number of negotiations between both levels, as well as a complex system of representational strategies destined to inscribe social and cultural particularisms in the transcultural domain. Migration is one of the processes that better illustrates, both in its materiality and in its symbolisms, the dynamics of de/re/territorialization and displacement. The massive and dramatic realities of migration and the metaphors it generates refer to the reformulation of individual and collective identities, as well as to the fluxes of persons, commodities, and ideas across material and intangible boundaries. The concept of migration also suggests experiences of fragmentation and re-totalization of the self, the construction of otherness and the changing temporal and spatial parameters that constantly redesign political cartographies. At the subjective level, in-betweenness, hybridity, decentering, becoming, relocation, belonging, uprooting, alienation, and foreignness, are some of the psychological and emotional effects of the reinsertion of human beings in new and often hostile environments, which trigger Kafkaesque situations of depersonalization and estrangement. This constitutes one of the most challenging experiences of local/global articulations to be elaborated from interdisciplinary perspectives, and to be explored in literature and the visual arts. But this is not the only instance in which local/global (dis)connections challenge not only cognitive apprehensions of the social, but also representational strategies. The circulation of symbolized features of locality (regionalisms, marginal and subcultural expressions, border cultures) always face the risk of exoticizing, idealizing, romanticizing, standardizing, vilifying, or fetishizing the other, in order to make alterity intelligible and relevant. Representation, always an ideological operation, then becomes a space of manipulation, negotiation, vindication, and (self)recognition. The political implications of representation (of the self or the other; of dominant or subaltern positions) is key for the decoding of literary discourse. There is no representation outside of the limits of power relations, since the networks of power control real, symbolic, and imaginary domains. Literature, and art in general, are some of the few spaces of freedom, rebellion against the status quo, and counternormative resignification. But the construction of meaning has become a complicated process, due to the prevailing heterogeneity of referents,







Introduction

symbolic registers, and diversified expectations. While the global world facilitates communicational fluxes, it also defies codification, due to the amplitude and distinctiveness of cultures and societies. In this respect, the prevalent practice of translation provides a good metaphor for the apprehension and transferring of meanings between local/global dimensions. While translation constitutes a cultural device that regulates communicational exchanges, and is today celebrated as a creative and indispensable intercultural mediation, it also constitutes a vehicle of standardization that tends to erase the feeling of regional cultures, the particularisms of sounds, linguistic rhythms and semantic connotations. Concerned about transcultural fluxes Gayatri Spivak, a translator herself, has warned about the practice of linguistic conversion, an operation in which the past is interpreted from the present, and hegemonic languages dominate cultural exchanges, depriving other languages of their right to convey the particularisms of their cultures, the phonetics and semantics of their own tongues, the feeling of their struggles. For her, translation combines both pragmatism and intimacy, and also implies the submission of some codifications and meanings over others.15 But, more importantly, Spivak considers that “recognition begins in differentiation” (2000, 15), a notion that is useful not only to think about translation, but also about globalization as a whole, as an encompassing management of difference at economic, political and cultural levels. Spivak also indicates that the need to translate is the need to incorporate the Other to the sphere of the Self, to make communication a really dialogical process, since “no speech is speech if it is not heard. It is this act of hearing-to-respond that may be called the imperative to translate” (2000, 22). We just need to remember that incorporation is also appropriation, and often denaturalization. When thinking of translation, we must analyze the hierarchy of languages—the dynamics of hegemony and subalternization implied in the idea that we are not heard if we do not speak in the dominant languages or are not translated into them, an operation never free of abuses of power, and ventriloquism. Identity/differentiation are terms that can and should be used when referring to both social imaginaries and cultural/political processes today, with the understanding that those concepts have suffered radical re-significations in the last few decades. Many would recognize in these notions some of the ideological pillars of modernity, around which societies were articulated and developed. This is not the place to expand on




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19

About this topic, see Spivak, Death of a Discipline, and “Culture as Translation”.

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the debilitation of the semantic field that modernity organized around these concepts, or on the fluidity that their meanings acquired during the 19th and 20th centuries in Latin America, going from essentialism and determinism to a notorious relativization of their political implications approximately after the 1950s’.16 The modern notion of identity, which always suggested the fixation of distinctive and essentialized attributes (like in national identity) was debunked by the concept of difference as a celebration of otherness, alterity, diversification, and heterogeneity. As is well-know, if identity—both individual and collective—constituted one of the most important ideologemes in the period of nation formation, particularly related to the emergence and consolidation of civil society, the politics of difference was—and continues to be—central to the postmodern/postcolonial era in Latin America. Postmodernity was conceptualized as a process of exhaustion of totalizing projects and as the crisis of all-encompassing social and political theories, a phenomenon that resulted in the ideas of fragmentation, detotalization, and the shattering of political, ideological and philosophical systems of thought. Globalization constitutes, for many, nothing more—and nothing less— than a largescale narrative, a “vulgate,” as discussed previously, that recentralizes the reproduction of material and dematerialized capital. In this sense, globalization is presented as a new form of universalism, as the largescale, comprehensive doctrine that deflated the grand narratives of the 19th century, thus replacing them with a more complete and undisputable version of the world. While the reactive discourse against globalization included, decades ago, the qualms against the risks of homogenization and uniformity, nowadays many critics tend to believe that the technological advances that are part of the global environment rather lead to the sharpening of cultural contrasts. From this perspective, in global times localities are supposed to coexist in a common ensemble defined by intertwined technological and scientific practices. While this notion seems to reduce, to some extent, the anxiety of globalization, it disregards the main problem related to the coexistence of localities, that is, the relations of domination that will determine the dynamics between the parts. In fact, in recent decades the importance of the role each segment of the global will play in the struggle for accessibility of resources, control of information, and participation in decision making processes, has become increasingly apparent. In the




16

I have referred to these issues in “Identidad y nación: ¿más de lo mismo?” included in my book Crítica impura.

Introduction

21

same manner, while “identities”, as complex cultural systems of social (self) recognition, will survive one way or another the process of globalization, questions remain about the alterations that will be triggered at this level by the processes of adaptation, negotiation, and reformulation of cognitive, affective, and intellectual operations. Concurrently, according to some analysts, traditions, languages, collective memories, and beliefs will, to a great extent, be eroded or plainly succumb in the process of hybridization and re-articulation. The diminished role of national governmental institutions in economic affairs, and the disappearance of the welfare state model, have created uncertainty and distrust in many societies. These feelings have resulted in the increase of collective fear and the sense of vulnerability, as well as in the lack of confidence in the ability of the state apparatus to maintain social order and security without resorting to excess of force and demagogy. These conditions seriously impact collective imaginaries and occupy the forefront of symbolic representations that propose codified expressions of the political unconscious (Jameson) of globalization, which seems to contain tensions, contradictions and incongruities that still exceed total rationalization. For authors such as Hubert Hermans and Giancarlo Dimaggio, for instance, the experience of uncertainty presents four basic aspects: “(a) complexity, referring to a great number of parts that have a large variety of relations; (b) ambiguity, referring to a suspension of clarity, as the meaning of one part is determined by the flux and variation of the other parts; (c) deficit knowledge, referring to the absence of a superordinate knowledge structure that can resolve the contradictions between the parts; and (d) unpredictability, implying a lack of control of future developments” (2007, 34). While this characterization applies to the general domain of the global, it also bleeds into the fabrics of everyday life, permeating personal experience and influencing processes of aesthetic representation. In other words, these authors emphasize the fact that the experience of uncertainty characterizes a global situation of multivoicedness (complexity) that does not allow a fixation of meaning (ambiguity), that has no superordinate voice for resolving contradictions and conflicting information (deficit knowledge), and that is to a large extent unpredictable […] In summary, globalization is not to be equated with homogenization or uniformity but finds localization as its counterforce. Whereas globalization challenges people to extend their selves and identities beyond the reach of traditional structures, this extension implies the pervasive experience of uncertainty.

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Intensification of this experience motivates individuals and groups to maintain, defend, and even expand their local values and practices by establishing a niche for the formation of a stable identity. Hermans and Dimaggio 2007, 34




Finally, this brief synthesis cannot leave aside the impact of market relations and consumerism in the configuration of identities. As noticed by Néstor García Canclini, while modern identities were basically monolingual and based on territoriality, postmodern identities are multilingual and trans-territorialized. Marketability is the logic that rules the industries of economics and cultural production in postmodern times, and technological communication is the way in which they operate and organize both production and distribution of commodities. García Canclini proposes to reflect on the need to rethink citizenship as a dimension defined by the participation of individuals in the democratized space of market relations.17 For this critic, “Identity is a construction that narrates itself” (107).18 The foundational elements of modern identity were based on historical events, heroic acts, traditions, civic rituals, and pedagogical materials. In addition, in modern times the process of identity formation was nurtured by the influence of radio and film, particularly dominant during the first half of the 20th century. This situation started to change after the 1980s, when the popularity of difference and the abundance of transcultural relations diversified the dynamics and the study of society. For some critics, the social landscape became a multifaceted display of identities, (sub)cultures, and lifestyles clearly detached from folklore and telluric nationalism. A new wave of universalization through consumption triggered the emergence of new forms of subjectivity, configured according to the messages disseminated by the mass media. Fashion, music, food, etc., functioned like transnational currents that represented a new cosmopolitism that flooded society at all levels. The glamour of global brands, the valorization of foreign goods over national and local production, and the increasing impact of electronic entertainment and digitalized technologies propelled the rapid transformation of customs, preferences, and values. New forms of dependency and cultural penetration (to use here




17 About this polemic proposal to re-define citizenship and civil participation from the notion and the experience of consumption, see García Canclini, Consumidores y ciudadanos, particularly 18–24. 18 “La identidad es una construcción que se relata” (García Canclini 1995, 107).

Introduction

23

typically modern expressions) infiltrated the make-up of Latin American cultures. These changes permeated also the literary field, where feelings of alienation, anxiety, and distrust were represented in conjunction with political experiences of repression, economic insecurity, and social volatility. Diamela Eltit’s narrative is a good example of this shift. At this point, the (re)totalization of the social did not seem either possible or even desirable. The fragmentation of society was perceived and depicted through aesthetic procedures that distorted conventional views, proposing instead a disarticulated and dispersed version of the world. In his “Postscript on the Societies of Control” Gilles Deleuze describes the transition from societies of sovereignty to disciplinary societies (18th and 19th centuries), and in the latest stage, to the societies of control, indicating that these changes should generate neither fear nor hope. They should rather inspire us to find new weapons to be used against the challenges of contemporary life. What defines the ethos of societies of control is codification, a new form of depersonalized device that gives or denies access to information, the most important form of immaterial capital:




In the societies of control […] what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. 1992, 5




This indicates a change in priorities, methodologies, and objectives, but mostly a shift in the behavior of the economic system, aimed towards super-production and control, purposes that are supposed to capture “the soul of commodities”, thus promoting an affective approach to economic domination in global times: We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. 1992, 6




New regimes of production and distribution of resources, new logics of accumulation and marketability, go hand in hand with a language of virtual and autonomous algorithms, that constitutes, for some, a new

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conceptualization of the human as collage or pastiche of fetishized segments of the real filtered through by the logic of capitalist domination. These elements, that are presented here in abstract conceptualizations, acquire concrete symbolic resonances and aesthetic formalizations in literature and the visual arts, where representations of self and otherness constitute a constantly revisited subject matter. Representations of identity/alterity connect characters to alternative spaces, anomalous experiences, and parallel temporalities, and immerse them in affective atmospheres where feelings of awkwardness, fear, anxiety, and worthlessness dominate their world. The technologization of life is probably one of the most obvious effects of global times, due not only to the qualitative advances of electronic, cybernetic, and digital technologies, but also to their massive dissemination at all levels of society. The scientific applications of these advances cover areas as diverse as cyber-security, entertainment, medical interventions, robotics, artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality, with uses in treatment of physical disabilities, database creation, behavioral analysis, and the like. As technologies rapidly infiltrate all aspects of our individual and collective experience, they also become a substantial element in the production and reception of symbolic commodities (music, film, visual arts, literature). To consider technology an inseparable part of the processes of (self)recognition in the contemporary world is not an overstatement. This development, always characterized by ambiguous impressions about the contributions and the risks of technological advances, has a long history. In Latin America, technological innovations were considered an integral part in the processes of modernization, thus reinforcing the ideology of progress and the notions of cosmopolitism in peripheral societies. But as technology spreads its impact in society, concurrently with the changes of urban environments, the growth of market relations, and the debilitation of “high” culture, critics start questioning the benefits of these advances and the role of intellectuals as interpreters of social change and cultural processes. In the decade of the 1990s, the insightful Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo reflected on the impact of “videogames” and on what she named “the technical imagination”, noticing the influence of electronic and digital developments on social behaviors, habits, values and lifestyles. Escenas de la vida postmoderna. Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina (1994) constitutes a critical approach to the phenomenon of technological penetration in the porous texture of everyday life, including intellectual performance, affect, desire, and social interactions.




f)




Introduction

25




Since then, literature and visual arts have absorbed the challenges and possibilities opened by these developments, defying conventional critiques of the alienating effects of technical advances, a topic thoroughly discussed by philosophers, from Plato to the Renaissance, from Marx to Heidegger, from Bruno Latour to Donna Haraway and Peter Sloterdijk. For decades, Latin American literature has been registering the impact of these advances and the social transformations they bring about through a myriad of thematic and formal innovations. The elaboration of a poetics of technology goes hand in hand with an explicit application of technical procedures to the process of writing. In fact, literary writing has incorporated the language and structures of blogs, electronic mail, Twitter, and Facebook communications to narrative discourse. Cristina Rivera Garza’s work constitutes a conspicuous example of integration of digital advances. She has studied the possibilities of new forms of communication in literary discourse and has used them in her own creative processes.19 The unstable linguistic structure of El mal de la taiga (2012), for instance, incorporates elements of what we could call cyber-writing, facilitating intertextuality, and the use of heterogeneous forms of communication that contribute to the pluralization of meaning and aesthetic effects. Other authors, such as Edmundo Paz Soldán, have also elaborated on the challenges posed by technology particularly in postcolonial societies. In Sueños digitales (2000) this author depicts a world of simulacra, in which technology has infused all aspects of life and human interactions. As a representative work of “tecno-escritura” (Brown) El delirio de Turing (2003) articulates digitalization and totalitarianism, projects that converge in pursuing the goal of vigilance and control of the sectors of society that oppose the dictatorial regime. Hackers, codifications, virtual networks, and clandestine operations interweave in a narrative structure that represents the crossings and entanglements of the internet. Multiple and diverse narrative voices and languages intersect and overlap in a non-linear narration where virtual exchanges create an ambiance of ephemerality, uncertainty and concealment. Secrecy, prosecution, mystery, repression and digitalization give evidence of the dangerous alliances between technology and politics, and emphasize the persistence of oppression in a world that otherwise celebrates scientific advances and global integration as forces of emancipatory potential. Hackers, for 19

In this respect see Edmundo Paz Soldán’s analysis of Rivera Garza’s literary production, Henseler and Castillo’s “Introduction” to Hybrid Storyspaces, and Andrew Brown on “Tecnoescritura in Latin America”.

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instance, can also take the side of resistance, together with the most oppressed and conscientious sectors of society. But it is obvious that the rules of the game have changed, and now the battlefield is located in the virtual space as much as in the fragments of reality that still constitute “life” as we knew it. These innovative narrative scenarios show the impact of technology in literary imagination. But, concurrently, the reception of literary texts is changing accordingly, as well the hermeneutic approaches destined to their interpretation.20 In the foreword for a collective volume edited by Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman, Jesús Martín-Barbero indicates the following:




What cyber-literature means today in Latin America is precisely the melting down (and relaunching) of the world of languages and literatures, or oralities and writings, since it is taking shape in the place from which the relations between aesthetics and politics are being re-thought and re-made. An aesthetics much closer to emerging sensibilities—not only those of young people, but also of ethnic communities and marginalized or excluded populations or sexualities […]. 2007, xii




For Martín-Barbero, these changes in literary writing have an experimental and emancipating value, even if they generate some “theoretical uncertainty” due to the destabilization of previously known languages and styles. According to this critic, [t]he worldly globalism of the hypertextual has nothing to do with dilettante escapism, or making local problems any less important. What hypertextuality has to do with here is a new type of cultural experience in which its greatest originality lies in the capacity for interaction between writer and reader, between creator and spectator, between citizenship and political participation, between communities and cultural appropriation. 2007, xiii

20

On technology and literature in Latin America see the collective book edited by Taylor and Pitman, and also the volume coordinated by, Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic. Also see Brown, Test Tube Envy, Cyborgs in Latin America and Latin American Science Fiction.

Introduction

27




The liberating quality of digital cultures resides also, for this critic, not only in the democratic openness of this space, but also in the “creation of new forms of performative citizenship and mediation, which could replace the authoritarian, didactic practices of the traditional lettered cultures. For the subordination of the spoken, aural and visual cultures of the majority to the exclusionary order of the lettered is, nowadays, suffering a growing and unforeseen erosion” (2007, xv). The technologization of life also impacts the perception and treatment of the body, the conception of a post-human, post-corporeal existence, the totalization of all human organisms as a system that encompasses nature and culture, the techniques of robotization, cloning, automatism, and many other variants elaborated by literature and visual arts, in which global imaginaries are represented, discussed, and interwoven.21 These representations are not restricted anymore to the domain of science fiction but have permeated other aesthetic registers, since the differentiation between life and machine do not seem obvious or radical anymore, but a part of life and evolution. The materiality and perception of the body also requires a new understanding of humanity, humanism, human rights, and dehumanization; therefore, the elaboration of these topics involves philosophical reflections, and political involvement.22 4

Fourth and Last Turn

The ideology imbedded in the notion of totalizing paradigms is, perhaps, the most complex and decisive issue related to the dynamics of globalization. Some of the resistant currents of thought that have been working for decades in the deconstruction of the new grand narrative of globalization have encountered this obstacle and, in some cases, have tried to counterbalance one totalization with others. The false assumption that everything whole contains essential elements of truth and perdurability, is as deceitful as the mere celebration of fragmentation as a liberating condition associated with freedom and autonomy. In any case, it is useful to retain the idea that as globalization imposes the value of a re-invented form of universalism, the socially, economically and politically shattered reality of the world struggles to maintain enough cohesiveness to 21 22

An example of the literary representation of technology applied to corporeal modifications is Rafael Courtoisie’s La novela del cuerpo (2015). I have studied some of these topics in my book Pensar el cuerpo. Historia, materialidad, y símbolo (forthcoming).

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define the new ethos of contemporary times, and its correlative forms of social and political praxis. The dramatic connotations of fragmentation (an occurrence often associated with natural disasters, wars, and other forms of deliberate or environmental destructive events) have permeated global imaginaries since the end of the Cold War, suggesting the need to remedy the feeling of disintegration with the all-inclusive utopia of world-wide integration and connectedness. It would be impossible to undertake here an approach to the question of (re)totalization in the realm of the global, an interactive space characterized by the development of often ephemeral alliances, and also by the immediate distrust in all-encompassing scientific and humanistic projects supposedly based on largescale conceptions of the real. Fragmentation is a notion that points to the coexistence of different segments and separable parts, thus pointing to the idea of pluralism and concurrence of different truth regimes that nevertheless, do not conceal the power struggles and the asymmetric forces at hand. What it is worth considering for our purposes is the way in which these behaviors of the global translate into aesthetic paradigms particularly in the field of literary production. At this level, Latin American literature abounds in the representation of segmented realities, bits and pieces of an idea of wholeness that at least seemed to integrate elements of the collective imaginaries, as necessary components of utopian configurations. Since the beginning of the 20th century the notions of continentalism (or americanismo) and Occidentalism, and later on, the theory and practice of the socialist revolution, the ideologeme of the new man (hombre nuevo), the movements of national liberation and even the defeat of the left channeled sentiments of totalization. Latin America was conceived, within those parameters, as something more than the addition of its parts, a notion well represented in the literature of the boom, characterized by the depiction of total realities or, at least, by the ideal of totalization. Post-boom literature elaborated on the rupture of holistic conceptions and explored the atomization of the real, the aesthetics of ruins and split-consciousness, the effects of trauma, and the realm of collective memory. History was replaced by micro-history or, even better, by micro-stories in which the myth of revolution and the reality of authoritarianism had shattered civil society. Current literature, marked by the impact of neoliberalism, market relations and globalization, examines mostly the experiences of uncertainty, loss of national(ist) paradigms, pluralization of languages, debilitation of identities, proliferation of difference, and dissolution of traditional politics. The impact of these changes at individual and collective levels exposes the transformation of subjective realms. Current Latin American literature can be read as a nomadic movement in search of new existential territories, new

Introduction

29

languages and new readers. De-territorialization is a dynamics related not just to concrete living spaces but to the ample domain of belief, values, and restoration of the Self. Marginal spaces, so common in the latest Latin American literary production, do not point only to the exhaustion of modern correlates (the city, the family, the nation) but also to the rejection of a weltanschauung that resulted in planetary devastation and dehumanization. The nomadic poetics of our time might express a nostalgic feeling for belonging to a greater realm of cultural reconstruction, but for the time being, it seems to be mostly invested in introspection and exploration of the new and desolated spaces of the global, as seen from the contingencies and the urgencies of locality. In an oblique connection to these topics, explicitly or not, this book elaborates issues related to the notion of world literature, a concept reintroduced by Pascale Casanova in La République mondiale des lettres (1999), in which this critic described the advent and development of the literary field as an autonomous realm where symbolic production emancipates itself from the determinations of national cultures, and from the politics of nationalism. As it is well-known, the notion of world literature originated with Goethe’s statements in 1827 on the fading of national literatures, and the consequent advent of an integrated field of world literary production, that would enjoy transnational circulation.23 This opinion was reinforced by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1848) as a recognition of the cosmopolitan projection of bourgeois cultural production and its international reach.24 In spite of the fact that Casanova’s version of Weltliteratur recognizes that this domain is, as thoroughly analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu, a power field, her proposal has been discussed as a project to recentralize European hegemony as the space of consecration and legitimization of other world literatures.25 According to Casanova, national literary productions are destined, then, to circulate in the centers of capitalism in order to gain

23

In a letter to his disciple J. Peter Eckermann, Goethe indicated: “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” (1994, 132). Eckermann published his correspondence with Goethe in 1835. 24 As stated in the Communist Manifesto, “The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (chapter 1). 25 On the topic of world literature see Prendergast, D’haen et al, and Sánchez Prado, Ed. América Latina y la literatura mundial.

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transnational recognition. In this situation, translation becomes a mechanism for subalternization of peripheral productions, since, as previously indicated, and as elaborated by authors such as Gayatri Spivak, mentioned above, every translation also entails a process of transculturation. In linguistic and cultural recodification, particularisms lose their political and affective connotations, and social and political struggles diminish their impact on their expanded audiences. In yet another avatar of these conceptions of literature as an integrated and transnational field, Franco Moretti defines world literature as a “one and unequal” system, and displaces the emphasis to methodological aspects of literary history and criticism. Quoting Max Weber, Moretti states that “world literature is not an object, it’s a problem.” According to Weber, It is not the ‘actual’ interconnection of ‘things’ but the conceptual interconnection of problems which define the scope of the various sciences. A new ‘science’ emerges where a new problem is pursued by a new method. Moretti 2000, par. 4

Moretti proposes the notion of “distant reading” in recognition of the fact that world production is so vast and diverse that it constitutes a truly unfathomable object of study: Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This is why less is actually more. Moretti 2000, par. 9

Following the world-system analysis as defined by Immanuel Wallerstein, Moretti transfers the systemic economic model to the literary field, concluding that cultural power and literary dissemination follow the logic of centerperiphery distribution. According to this paradigm, while the centers reaffirm their control over the transnational system, marginal literatures absorb their proficiency. The countries that are central to the world system exercise their

Introduction

31

hegemony over peripheral and semi-peripheral national cultures which, in turn, will become able to produce their own products. This condescending view transfers to the level of cultural production a dependent version of Wallerstein’s refined model. But the main preoccupation for Moretti is, rather, to understand and make intelligible the logic of comparatist literary criticism, which he situates opposed to the function of national literatures. As he indicates in the final paragraph of his “Conjectures”: The point is that there is no other justification for the study of world literature (and for the existence of departments of comparative literature) but this: to be a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures—especially the local literature. If comparative literature is not this, it’s nothing. Nothing. Moretti 2000

This book is not the place to discuss either the arguments nor the ideological weight of these theories, but it is important to retain the idea that these proposals are in the horizon of contemporary criticism and connect, in different ways, with the ethos of globalization. For this reason, in a more developed analysis it would be interesting to study the implications between the paradigm of globalization and some of the totalizing approaches that emerge in the shade of the new grand narrative. In an article titled “The Rhetoric of Globalization: What’s in a Wor(l)d?” Claire Turenne Sjolander indicated that the concept of globalization constitutes an attempt to promote the idea of a world which is borderless and of firms which are stateless. Such an interpretation suggests that all peoples and states are equally subject to the logics of globalization, which are on the whole beneficial and necessary, and that societies have no choice but to ‘adapt’ to the new international economic conjuncture (1996, 603). Sjolander proposes, instead, that the notion of globalization needs to be understood in a different manner, perhaps from an even more holistic perspective, in order to grasp its reach and impact on contemporary life. For Sjolander, In essence, globalization needs to be seen as an economic, political, social, and ideological phenomenon which carries with it unanticipated, often contradictory and polarizing consequences. Globalization presents itself as a phenomenon of the late twentieth century which is lived globally, with homogenizing consequences for states and societies, and yet, paradoxically, it appears to highlight difference. 1996, 604

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While globalization creates an image of homogenization, real difference does persist and is often emphasized as a conscious choice in this ‘global’ political economy. Some groups are constructed as ‘others,’ as different from ‘us,’ as a result of their social (and socio-economic) status. […] The true first challenge of globalization is to acknowledge and appreciate the way it creates difference and constructs ‘others’ among us, despite its homogenizing pretenses. Only then can we use the benefits of the ‘compression of time and space’ to fashion a world in which those marginalized by these processes, including the assaulted global environment, can be more wholly integrated into, and thereby alter, the economic calculus which is globalization’s hallmark. 1996, 615–616

5

In Closing

The concept for the collective approach to the most recent Latin American literature contained in this book originated in a series of questions and concerns inspired by the studies of many analysts of cultural globalization regarding the impact of the new conditions of production, reception, and distribution of literary works, particularly on the production emerging from peripheral socie­ ties. In focusing these topics, some important considerations can be drawn. Traditionally, Latin American literature has been characterized by the relevance of locality and regional histories. The elaboration of topics closely connected to specific political, economic and social circumstances in the region also constitutes a feature represented in Latin American poetics of all times. This adherence to the contingencies of regional development did not preclude the transnational dissemination of a robust and variegated literary corpus. However, the diversity inherent to multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual societies, as well as the influence of factors such as violence, environmental imbalances, radical inequality, and social and political instability seems to challenge the homogenizing tendency attributed to globalization, in the construction of an all-encompassing narrative of universal value. One of the interrogations this book poses is, then, how the interconnectedness of globalization intersects, absorbs, rejects, or negotiates locality, and to what extent the new conditions of production and dissemination of symbolic materials affect poetic works (their themes, structures, aesthetic strategies, messages and readability) in literatures historically rooted in the contingencies of locality. Obviously, the reflection on literature is also, at this point, a meditation on the organization of power relations in the transnationalized literary field.

Introduction

33

The new forms of hegemony and marginalization generated by the processes of global integration, as well as by the debilitation of national cultures, have prompted the emergence of a new sensorium that affects the reception of aesthetic materials. The issues discussed in this volume all refer, one way or another, to questions of identity and otherness, power and subalternization, space and temporality, centers and margins, often under different denominations and focusing less on the binary distributions of influences and control, than on the fluid exchanges between those polarities, and on the hybridization and resignifications of the social. As a combined approach to these concerns, this book offers a wide array of critical views related to the ways in which thematic options and specific genres are being elaborated today, and to the new re-inscriptions of history and literary traditions in global scenarios. I will not offer here a systematic presentation or summary of the articles that follow, which engage with different topics and critical directions. A general view of these contributions will appear in the afterword. I will just map broadly the most prominent areas covered by these studies. Diversity and coherence articulate, in a complementary way, the three parts of this book and the links between chapters. It is interesting to see how so many perspectives, provided by recognized specialists in the field of contemporary literary criticism, gravitate toward common points of attraction. Among the most compelling topics in the field of Latin American recent narrative, the reader will find multiple references to the influential literature of Roberto Bolaño, considered by many a point of inflection in the development of Latin American fiction. But his writings are not limited to narrative texts, as one of the studies in this book will emphasize. A thorough examination of the strategies of canonization explains aspects related to the compartmentalization of literary production in genres and subgenres, a problem that will reappear, as well, in various chapters of this volume. Another recurrent element for critical reflection is the influence of the market, not only in the distribution and commercialization of literature but also in the production and aesthetic/ideological reception of literary products at a global level, and with respect to the importance of translation as a creative and transcultural dispositive, increasingly appreciated in the literary field. New forms of materialism, lyricism, autobiographical, testimonial and chronical writing also present a challenge to the critic who studies the remaking of (sub)genres and the refunctionalization of specific traditions in connection to new audiences around the world. Last but not least, the impact of new technologies and inter-media collaborations have changed, to different degrees, the material support and the languages of literature, proposing differential strategies of communication and

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contributing to reshape subjectivities in the intermixed networks of “high”/ popular/mass cultures. Some contributions focus specifically on the analysis of the cultural market as a whole and its reorganization under neoliberalism, paying particular attention to the tendencies of consumption in a variety of social contexts. Other essays concentrate on the effects of mediations such as publishing houses, festivals, book fairs, and other forms of literary promotion that contribute to the circulation of literary materials, and to their insertion of peripheral products in global spaces. Issues of gender, sexuality, affect, and locality reappear in these critical studies, offering insightful observations on a moving object: the reinstallation of particularisms in global scenarios, and the evolving re-articulations of language, imagination, and memory in re-codified systems of symbolic communication. All the elaborations gathered in this book are, as they should be, provisional, since both globalization and literary representation are developing in front of our eyes, subject to continuous changes of direction, and articulated in different manners to political and ideological projects. Articles that deal with literature as a circulating cultural object, analyze its marketability, often using quantitative analysis and sociological tools that complement and re-potentiate aesthetic approaches, thus applying a rich and productive transdisciplinary perspective on textual analysis. Sociological approaches stress the importance of analyzing literature as a specific commodity that reveals the relevance of new conditions of production, distribution and reception in the global world, giving evidence of the development of a new hermeneutics of technology, particularly important in the field of literary studies. At the same time, they bring to the forefront of literary criticism the incorporation of elements of the digital world that penetrate the sphere of literary poetics. As this volume attempts to demonstrate, in global times the world does not surround us anymore: the world is inside us, not as an option but as an inherent component of postmodern, post-colonial, post-national subjectivities. Does this situation constitute a new challenge for the projects of decolonization, a new structure of domination that is threatening our notions of humanity, from which we need to emancipate? Do these new realities impact differently the centers and peripheries of the world, or do we accept the notion that globalization will make these distinctions irrelevant in the near future? In approaching these topics and others related to thematic options, reelaborations of conventional genres, connections between ethics, aesthetics and politics, and the like, the essays that follow position themselves beyond the limits of national literatures, expanding their analyses to transnational spaces in which authors and texts, genres and themes, are interweaving in a productive and accelerated environment.

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Aside from specific aspects such as the reorganization of markets and the innovation in the processes of book design (production of traditional books, self-publication, printing by demand, production of audiovisual and digital versions), there is much to be learned from the work of the scholars who have made this book possible. Ana Gallego-Cuiñas and myself would like to express to them our sincere gratitude for their collaboration, generosity and patience. Bibliography Ahmad, Aijaz. 1987. Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’. Social Text 17: 3–25. Barnet, Richard J. and John Cavanagh. 1994. Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Behrent, Michael C. 2013. Foucault and Technology. History and Technology 29(1): 4–104. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant. 2001. NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate. Radical Philosophy: 2–5. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wpcon tent/files_mf/rp105_commentary_newliberalspeak_bourdieu_wacquant.pdf. Brown, J. Andrew. 2005. Test Tube Envy: Science and Power in Argentine Narrative. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Brown, J. Andrew. 2007. Tecnoescritura: literatura y tecnología en América Latina. Tecnoescritura: literatura y tecnología en América Latina, special issue of Revista Iberoamericana 73(221): 735–41. Brown, J. Andrew. 2010. Cyborgs in Latin America. New York: Palgrave. Brown, J. Andrew. 2012. Latin American Science Fiction: Theory & Practice. New York: Palgrave. Bush, Matthew and Tania Genetic, eds. 2016. Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era. New York: Routledge. Cárcamo-Huechante, Luis, Álvaro Fernández Bravo y Alejandra Laera, eds. 2007. El valor de la cultura: arte, literatura y mercado en América Latina. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo. Casanova, Pascale. 2007. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by Malcolm DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Coronil, Fernando. 2000. Naturaleza del poscolonialismo: del eurocentrismo al globocentrismo. In La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales, ed. Edgardo Lander, 87–111. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela/UNESCO. Courtoisie, Rafael. 2015. La novela del cuerpo. Montevideo: Ed. Hum. Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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D’haen Theo, David Damrosch and Djelan Kadir, eds. 2013. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature. New York: Routledge. D’haen Theo, César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, eds. 2012. In World Literature: A Reader. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59: 3–7. Dodgshon, Robert A. 1999. Human Geography at the End of Time? Some Thoughts on the Notion of Time-Space Compression. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17 (5): 607–620. García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Consumidores y ciudadanos. Conflictos multiculturales de la globalización. Mexico: Grijalbo. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1994. Conversations with Eckermann. San Francisco: North Point Press. Hall, Stuart. 1995. New Cultures for Old. In A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, eds. Doreen Massey and Pat Jess, 175–213. Oxford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1999. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In Migration, Diaspora and Transnationalism, eds. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 222–237. Edward Edgar Publishing. Israel, Nico. 2004. Globalization and Contemporary Literature. Literature Compass 1 (1): 1–5. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. Notes on globalization as a Philosophical Issue. In The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 54–77. Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1986. Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital. Social Text 15: 65–88. Jay, Paul. 2010. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kirsch, Scott. 1995. The Incredible Shrinking World? Technology and the Production of Space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (5): 529–555. Laclau, Ernesto. 1998. Emancipations. London: Verso. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ludmer, Josefina. 2007. Literaturas postautónomas. Ciberletras: Revista de crítica lite­ raria y de cultura 17: 236–44. https://www.scribd.com/document/161894063/LUD MER-Josefina-Literaturas-postautonomas. Martín-Barbero, Jesús. Foreword. 2007. Latin American Cyberliterature: From the Lettered City to the Creativity of its Citizens. In Latin American Cyberliterature and Cyberculture, eds. Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman. Liverpool University Press: xi–xv.

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Martín-Estudillo, Luis and Stephanie A. Mueller. 2012. Afterword: A Bookless Literature? Hybrid Storyspaces: Redefining the Critical Enterprise in Twenty-First Century Hispanic Literature, special issue of HIOL: Hispanic Issues On Line 9: 289–98. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. https://www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm. Moraña, Mabel. 2017. El monstruo como máquina de guerra. Frankfurt-Madrid: Ibero­ americana/Vervuert. English version: 2018. The Monster as War Machine. Cambria Editorial. Moraña, Mabel. 2021. Pensar el cuerpo. Historia, materialidad, y símbolo. Barcelona: Ed. Herder. Moraña, Mabel. 2004. Identidad y nación: ¿más de lo mismo? In Crítica impura, 25–31. Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London, New York: Verso. Moretti, Franco. 2000. Conjectures on World Literature. New Left Review 1: 54–68. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii1/articles/franco-moretti-conjectures-on-world -literature. Müller, Gesine and Mariano Siskind, eds. 2019. World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise. Berlin: De Gruyter. Ortiz, Renato. 2004. Mundialización y cultura. Bogotá: Convenio Andrés Bello. Paz Soldán, Edmundo. 2003. El delirio de Turing. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara. Paz Soldán, Edmundo. 2000. Sueños digitales. Madrid: Alfaguara. Paz Soldán, Edmundo. 2012. Cristina Rivera Garza’s Tweets. Hybrid Storyspaces: Redefining the Critical Enterprise in Twenty-First Century Hispanic Literature, special issue of HIOL: Hispanic Issues On Line 9: 38–39. Poblete, Juan. 2018. The Transnational Turn. In New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power, ed. Juan Poblete, 33.48. London: Routledge. Prendergast, Christopher, ed. 2004. Debating World Literature. London: Verso. Rincón, Carlos. 1995. La no simultaneidad de lo simultáneo: postmodernidad, globalización y culturas en América Latina. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Rivera Garza, Cristina. 2012. El mal de la taiga. Mexico: Tusquets. Robinett, Jane. 1994. This Rough Magic: Technology in Latin American Fiction. New York: Peter Lang. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. 2006. América Latina y la literatura mundial. Pittsburgh: IILI. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. 2018. Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature. Northwestern University Press. Sarlo, Beatriz. 1994. Escenas de la vida posmoderna. Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ariel. Sarlo, Beatriz. 1992. La imaginación técnica. Sueños modernos de la cultura argentina. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión.

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Scheuerman, William. 2018. Globalization. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018 /entries/globalization/. Scorza, Manuel. 1972. Historia de Garabombo, el invisible. Barcelona: Planeta. Siskind, Mariano. 2014. Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America. Northwestern University Press. Sjolander, Claire Turenne. 1996. The Rhetoric of Globalization: What’s in a Wor(l)d? International Journal: Canada’s Journal of Global Policy Analysis 51 (4): 603–616. Soja, Edward. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. University of Minnesota Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2000. Translation as Culture. Parallax 6 (1): 13–24. Szeman, Imre. 2001. Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization. The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (3): 803–827. Taylor, Claire and Thea Pitman, eds. 2007. Latin American Cyberculture and Cyber­ literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Weber, Max. 1949. ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy [1904]. In The Methodology of Social Sciences, Free Press. Wilson, Mike. 2013. Leñador. Buenos Aires: Fiordo. Wilson, Rob and Wimal Disenayake, eds. 1996. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Duke University Press.

Part 1 Word and World: (Re)Inscriptions

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Chapter 1

The Global Alt-Right as Prefigured by Roberto Bolaño Héctor Hoyos Abstract In the oft-heard utterance that circa 2016 the US became a “banana republic,” other than self-deprecating exoticism, lies a deeper truth. This chapter brings Latin Americanist critique to bear on the disturbing ascendancy of the global alt-right in contemporary politics. Through a comparison of several characters in Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996) with matching alt-right pundits, Hoyos describes the cultural literacy necessary to spot the incongruous subject of an acceptable fascist. The chapter explores the respectability, sexual orientation, and gender role politics of such characters and types. Following Chilean Benjaminean philosopher Willy Thayer's understanding of the aesthetics of the 1973 coup in Chile, the chapter concludes by offering speculative remarks about the January 6th, 2021 Capitol break-in and its paradoxical relation to avant-garde practices in an attention economy.

For years, one had to read Nazi Literature in the Americas, Bolaño’s 1996 encyclopedia of imaginary intellectuals with varied right-wing tendencies, in jest. Its increasingly improbable parade of characters—from an early twentieth century Argentine poet who takes the blood-and-soil undertones of criollismo too seriously, to a future Angeleno sci-fi author who fantasizes about a Fourth Reich Messiah—were sometimes disquieting, but ultimately good, perverse fun. I saw in the book a thought experiment that challenged assumptions about the centrality, periphery, and directionality of cultural exchange, shortcircuiting the tendency to think of globalization as post-historical, debunking the myth of the autonomy of literature, and eventually carrying out a negative critique of globalization from the left (Hoyos 2015, 59). Other scholars focused on the book’s interconnections with the rest of the author’s oeuvre, from its explicit continuation in Distant Star (Gutiérrez Mouat 2016, 115) to its role as turning point and incubator for future stories (Andrews 2014, 130). No one felt compelled to question the encyclopedia’s underlying pact of verisimilitude.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_003

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Then Trump happened. This second attempt at grappling with Bolaño’s poignant book, probably not my last, happens in the wake of resurgent fascism in the United States. From the 2016 campaign to the deplatforming of the instigator-in-chief, social commentary went abuzz with vitriol, leading to a siege of the US capitol on January 6, 2021. Explicit, self-serving rejection of globalization from the right—rather than thoughtful critique—became quotidian. Ethnocentrism made a comeback that is hard to ignore. What Bolaño wrote as dystopia or parody—per his own account after Rodolfo Wilcock, Marcel Schwob, and Borges (2006, 42)—started to look more like George Orwell’s famously thin allegory, Animal Farm (1945). This dramatic shift calls for a purposefully anachronistic exercise in hermeneutics. As Borges famously put it in “Kafka and his Precursors,” “The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant” (1964, 201). In that spirit, it is less of a surprise that Orwell’s other masterpiece, 1984 (1949), became a bestseller again after the election: it spoke to the times (Freytas-Tamura 2017). For her part, Yale historian Beverly Gage went as far as describing Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) as “the classic novel that predicted Trump” (Gage 2017). Bolaño will provide similar elucidation to the alt-right phenomenon, with a Borgesian twist: positing him as an unwitting precursor to the movement offers valuable lessons in the internal logic, or lack thereof, of the so-called “alt-right.” The term was coined by the infamous American white supremacist Richard Spencer (b. 1978). It refers to a motley crew of media-savvy pundits who, like the fictional characters in Bolaño’s book, could aptly be described, in Umberto Eco’s felicitous phrase, as Ur-Fascists (Eco 1995). For Eco, fascism has an underlying authoritarian sensibility (hence the “Ur-” prefix) and combinatorial properties: abc bcd cde def Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one. Eco 1995

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As I have argued before, that basic structure fits Nazi Literature in the Americas like a glove (Hoyos 2015, 78). If the historical National Socialist party, from early thirties Bavarian rallies to its Berlin defeat in the mid-forties, pardon the expression, were the “golden standard” of fascism, then it would appear that Bolaño’s novel starts in medias res, with the waning influence of that world historical event already going through bcd, turning rapidly into cde, and so forth, until becoming virtually unrecognizable. In this travesty of Eurocentrism, the empty center, the greatest achievement of European civilization, would be Nazism—and its inseparable horror, the Shoah. And yet Adolf Hitler, purportedly the a in abc, receives but a cursory, chilling mention, as he holds a baby in his arms for a photo-op early in the book (Bolaño 2008, 6). The Jewish Question only appears in characters’ conspiratorial anti-Semitism—blame the woes of the world on Jewish plutocrats—and in the book’s epilogue. There, short summaries of an imaginary Nazi library include the work of negationist, most French-sounding-named historian Étienne de Saint Étienne, who uses historical documents in an attempt “to prove” that only 300,000 Jews died in the camps (Bolaño 2008, 216). Now, that image of the centrifugal, radial propagation of Ur-Fascism, although insinuated by the book, is ultimately disavowed. What’s most disconcerting is that fascism, in fiction and otherwise, is homegrown. That extremists, like authors, create their precursors. It not only propagates, but converges. It can be both unpredictable and prescribed, like the cultural flows of globalization and its digital instantiation, the Internet. This is something that the alt-right, a rhizomatic phenomenon propelled by impoverished misfits and well-financed twitter-bots, bears out. Eco’s assessment of fascism as “structured confusion” could not be more fitting. The movement’s mutating sensibility has an empty center, oddly enough, like Nazi Literature in the Americas. New School historian Federico Finchelstein’s (2017, 23) suggestion that all historians should read Bolaño for his major insights into fascism applies also to history in the making. Ditto for the notion that the fraught relationship between fascism and literature, or fascism and cultural production more broadly, is crucial for understanding not just politics, but the political. Consider the above-mentioned Spencer, a Duke Ph.D. dropout in European Intellectual History. His haircut has aptly been described as “fashy” (tapered sides, long comb-over); his clothing I would call “neo-Tyrolean” (corduroy blazer, wool hunting vest). If his looks cite World War II film villains, as internet memes have gamely demonstrated, the writings of this self-fashioned intellectual cite the likes of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich Nietzsche. Selectively, of course, in support of disturbing views. Per Mother Jones reporting, Spencer believes that Hispanics and African Americans have lower IQ s than Whites (Harkinson 2016). In his mid-November 2016 “Hail Trump” speech, he roused

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his audience, calling Whites “children of the sun” (Spencer 2016). He repurposed the successful political motto “Make America Great Again” by claiming that “for us, as Europeans, it is only normal again when we are great again” (Spencer 2016). The original catchphrase combines conventional campaign sloganeering with racial dog whistle; Spencer doubles down on the latter. What seems improbable about the character is also what gives him a certain legitimacy: his rather privileged educational opportunities, not just at Duke, but at the Universities of Virginia and Chicago. Lest one be tempted to think that only an idiot could espouse such views, this dapper jock puts the notion to rest. Spencer is no less improbable than Bolaño’s Ignacio Zubieta, the fascist, well-wrought Wunderkind. Born in Bogotá in 1911, he dies in Berlin in 45 as a volunteer in the Wehrmacht. The character’s encyclopedia entry is worth citing at some length: The only son of one of Bogotá’s best families, Ignacio Zubieta was destined for pre-eminence from the start, or so it seemed. A good student and an outstanding sportsman, at the age of thirteen he could write and speak fluent English and French.… He was a first-rate horseman, the best polo player of his generation, a superb dancer, always irreproachably dressed (although with a slight tendency to favor sportswear), a confirmed bibliophile, and lively but free of vices; everything about him seemed to foretoken the highest achievements, or at least a life of valuable service to his family and the nation. Bolaño 2008, 31–2

Bolaño trains his readers to distinguish pomp from plain language, verisimilar from absurd, outrageous from ridiculous, playfulness from seriousness. His narrator blurs the lines between them for rhetorical effect. Spencer blurs those lines for political expediency. In this way, Nazi Literature communicates an essential cultural literacy about the mutability of Ur-Fascism that carries over into the public sphere. Zubieta’s unlikely trajectory from Bogotá to Berlin mirrors Spencer’s from Montana to Washington. Here “best families,” there elite schools. Zubieta, presumably, does not look the part of a Wehrmacht soldier, but he could; an educated person like Spencer does not really mean what he says, but he could. Doubting ourselves while reading Bolaño is part of the novel’s overall thrust of re-thinking fascism, I would claim, without trivializing it. Meanwhile, the Alt-Right cultivates uncertainty to affect policy and trivializes by design. Exacerbating contradiction among common tell-tale signs of fascism in Bolaño leads to thoughtful reflection—in Spencer, to outrage or, worse, acceptance. Parsing and weighing different elements of verisimilitude,

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a Bolaño reader will discern, however, that although idiocy is not a requisite for fascism, in a fundamental sense Spencer is merely playing a part. Disingenuous he may be or not, but in the storyline of unfolding Ur-Fascism, he is but an actor. There are other takeaways from this case study worth considering. Daniel Lombroso’s 2020 documentary White Noise (not a tribute to DeLillo) shows an embattled Spencer facing legal action over his role in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The first feature film by The Atlantic, the documentary is a serious piece of investigative journalism that, a sign of the times, borrows from the visual language of reality television. An embedded camera follows Spencer through his rise and fall, alongside telegenic Lauren Southern, the anti-feminist YouTube star, as well as other luminaries to which we shall return. Astonishingly, Spencer never breaks character. Neither does Bolaño, in a sense, for there is little in the way of authorial intervention to indicate that the book is just pretend. A work of fiction cannot just become a work of reference by fiat, jumping shelves in the Dewey catalog willy-nilly. But demagogue­ry can beget political institutions. Spencer believes what he believes, even if his “thought” cannot withstand scrutiny. What it lacks in substance, it makes up in praxis. A talking-point-generating machine, deployed in strategic ways in the public sphere, goes a long way. I suggested above that an improbable cha­ racter such as Zubieta would equip a Bolaño reader to better detect the fakery in a performer such as Spencer. Disturbingly, the opposite turns out to also be the case: though a combatant in Twitter wars alone, Spencer’s belligerence suggests that the Zubietas of the world are real. The Zubieta-Spencer pairing reconciles two seemingly incompatible topologies. On the one hand, reality opposes fantasy; on the other, reality and fantasy bleed into each other as in a Möbius strip. The narrativity of the alt-right and the implicit novel in Nazi Literature in the Americas illustrate this. As to the former, consider how pundits invoke freedom of expression (as do edgy novelists) while also vindicating political expediency. As to the latter, there is an unwritten, phantasmic tale that accompanies the idiosyncratic collection of vignettes. It is the story of an impossible couplet that agitates and moves the dozens of characters in the encyclopedia: Nazi literature. This is a nonsensical binomial, a contradiction in terms. The moment fascism walks in the door, literature walks out. “No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy” notes Derrida (1995, 28) in an uncommonly straightforward pronouncement from a notoriously circuitous thinker, for literature “ties its destiny” to non-censure and democratic freedom, asserting its right of tout dire. The precarious dual topology that sustains the character and the reality star have the engrossing appeal of the paradoxical. Nazi Literature in the Americas

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invites a substantive interpretation that it also gradually disavows. The story of the unfolding of a phenomenon called “Nazi literature” asks readers to look for an empty center that can bear such a name, but the only thing that fits the bill is rage, the sentiment that, early on in the book, founding mother Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce maintains until the last days of her life: “She remained lucid (or ‘furious,’ as she liked to say) to the end” (Bolaño 2008, 14). Lucidity belongs among the complex tropology of light and darkness that unfolds across Bolaño’s oeuvre; rage, muted or overt, is certainly a common denominator for the characters. Beyond this, a substantive reading of “Nazi literature” quickly becomes untenable. The conspiracy exists in form alone. A nominalist take on the alt-right phenomenon is also possible. It is not quite the case that there was no “there” there, but neither was there a fullfledged ideology lurking in the shadows, ready to take over if left unchecked. That said, the more disturbing thought is that such an ideology could well have been inchoate. German national socialism was cobbled together from conspiracies that came to validate each other in the minds of party members, such as anti-Semitism and World War I grievances. Ex post facto, once embedded in daily life (salutes, clothing) and draped in what Andreas Huyssen (2006, 15) has called an “image world” (swastikas, a certain hue of red), the ideology resignifies the past, appearing to have always been there. So conspiracy in form alone needs not remain there. It generates its own self-validating power, for lack of a better word, in reality. Trump mythemes such as the migrant invasion, the stolen election, and the lost national greatness cause did get to coalesce into something akin to a worldview for many loyalists. Inshallah, they lost all claim to hegemony. What Bolaño provides here is insight into fascism as narrative process, not as ideological product. Above, I have been careful not to compare the alt-right with Nazism or Trump with you-know-who, because what matters most here, again, is not the variables but the operations, not the content but the form—the unfolding itself. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now apparent that alt-right parroting was of a piece with the former president’s autopoietic, self-aggrandizing, socialmedia-enabled bullying. The alt-right accomplished two things: clickbait revenue and the shifting of the Overton window, making acceptable, via persistent messaging, proposals that would have otherwise remained in the fringes. It is up to the courts to decide to what extent certain pundits and Trump were in cahoots, and to what extent this was merely a convenient convergence of interests and communication practices. Still, “alt-right” and “Nazi literature” are empty signifiers that stand to gain, rather than to lose, from their vagueness and superficiality. Rage, a subtext in Bolaño’s novel, is a major currency in the attention economy: it literally drives profit (Hussain 2021). Storytelling at

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a certain remove from fascism outright turns out to be the better strategy for suspense building in avant-garde novels and in avant-garde politics. The January 6 seditious break-in was in some ways reminiscent of an avantgardist carnival. It was also the unwitting culmination of an arc of suspense. Short of Hugo Ball clad in gold-red cardboard with lobster claws and a chef’s hat, consider Jake Angeli, aka “Bison man,” of fur hat and horns notoriety. In a different context, such theatrical attire would be less sinister. The insurrection, less than a coup and more than a putsch, is a breach on various levels: narrative, aesthetic, political. What appears to separate the harrowed halls of the US capitol from Cabaret Voltaire is, foremost, violence. Shots fired, lives lost, weapons drawn, hurt and pain. Or is it? In a thought-provoking piece worth extrapolating from, Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer makes the case that the proliferating image of La Moneda going up in flames, a synecdoche for the State and the Republic themselves burnt to a crisp, is “the most appropriate representation of the ‘will to the event [voluntad de acontecimiento]’ of the avant-garde” (2006, 15). For Thayer, the Chilean Coup was a fulfilled promise of sorts, the sinister realization of vanguardism. Flirtations with aesthetic disruption met the unrepairable fracture of the social order. In the spirit of Bolaño’s tales, one could freely paraphrase by claiming, with a bit of untranslatable dark humor, that el colmo de la vanguardia es el golpe de estado [approximately, the avant-garde peaks with the coup]. Thayer prefers consumación to colmo, to signal exhaustion, realization, and perhaps even mystical devotion. The takeaway here is twofold. First, to make legible the perverse avant-gardism of the alt-right; second, to appreciate the role of the Capitol riot in its narrative structure. Fire at La Moneda was as powerfully telegenic in its days of black-and-white pictures and rotary printing presses as broken windows at the Capitol Rotunda are in our age of full-color ubiquitous screens and instant media. The 2021 social media-ready event consummates and exceeds the pre-climactic, horrifying proceedings at Charlottesville. The avant-gardist practices of one Richard Spencer, a demagogue and an Ur-Fascist artist, thus reach their culmination. This is both a victory and a loss for his “cause.” The alt-right became irremediably pinned down, compromised its generative power. Thankfully, violence led not to a metaphysics of presence but to a dead end. The Benjaminian dictum that Nazism is the aestheticization of politics meets the unheroic ugliness of the brawl. The well-clad and well-coiffed Spencer, like Bolaño’s Zubieta character, challenge the rules of respectability. But for that challenge to hold sway on the imagination, a more or less overt tension between the gentleman and the thug would have to prevail. At the time of writing, that tension is untenable. The same cameras that made possible the contradictory type of the gentleman

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fascist have instead fixated and codified the carnival as bloodshed. One could be tempted to concede the event was both, but that position is the new taboo. We are all the better for it. The alt-right stepped on its own hose. Its spectacular attempt to make violence palatable failed by succeeding.

The Incongruous Subject

Nazi Literature in the Americas contributes to establishing the sort of cultural literacy that prevents historical repetition. A treatise on fascism or a fictionalized critique of violence it is not. It remains a work of humor, the kind that makes you laugh, sometimes with nervous laughter. Elation is not one of its goals, but bittersweet reflection is. This happens in a certain register, less than philosophical, sometimes slapstick. Recall the book’s epigraph, from Augusto Monterroso: “If the flow is slow enough and you have a good bicycle, or a horse, it is possible to bathe twice (or even three times, should your personal hygiene so require) in the same river (Bolaño 2008, xi).” Monterroso knows what Heraclitus means, namely, that life is ever changing. But he plays dumb. Visualize what he is saying, though. A man bathes in the river, then mounts his horse, rides more quickly than the flow of the river, and catches up with the same water particles upstream. So, he catches up also with his own dirt? And does his personal hygiene require him to do this a third time, so as to better sully himself? This is absurd, of course. But worrying about the transience of life is absurd in its own way. Monterroso busts the pomp of the original aphorism with his understated tale. The most serious of pronouncements—and predicaments—can be the occasion for existential humor. Bolaño takes note. Like the Chaplin of The Great Dictator before him, Bolaño knows the value of smart laughter in the face of the deadly serious. Clowning about Hitler brings the satisfaction of mocking the powerful, but cannot be an end in itself. Having lost his power, the detestable figure could be preserved, even legitimized, in caricature. The cleverer operation is showing the clown in Hitler. This is something the other you-know-who preempted, rather successfully, by assuming his own toupeed clownishness and folding it into the gravity of his office. Other figures in the alt-right have been less successful at navigating their contradictions. In addition to the improbable gentleman Nazi, there are other incongruous subjects present both in Bolaño and in the alt-right, including feminine, motherly, and queer fascists. Enter Lauren Southern, the telegenic anti-feminist YouTube star; Lana Lokteff, eugenic white motherhood advocate; and Milo Yiannopoulos, the flamboyantly gay racist provocateur. The raison d’être of these unlikely media

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personalities is disrupting political discourse. They parallel characters in Bolaño who sustain the unstable pact of verisimilitude of a counterfactual, monstruous encyclopedia. In real life, they undercut an unspoken pact about what is verisimilar, let alone acceptable by the standards of common decency, in politics. Mommies for Mengele? What’s next, the Klan in drag? Pitting signifiers against each other, “disrupting” unspoken semantic pacts: the global altright here is a lousy parody of Bolaño. Women were largely disempowered subjects under hyper-patriarchal fascist rule, Finchelstein reports (2017, 29–31). However, both Bolaño and the alt-right portray them as shadowy forces. In the author, the better to create a topsyturvy fantasy; in the political phenomenon, the better to upturn society. Biopolitics, in a word: Nazism saw in racialized white women the mothers of the master race, hence idealized subservient maternity; Bolaño riffs off on idealized notions of maternity, left and right, to formulate paradoxical characters; the alt-right invokes maternity to move the center of the political spectrum to the right. Southern broadcasts makeup tutorials, complete with skin-care routine, and then proceeds to write “FUCK” on one of her cheeks and “ISLAM” on the other (Lombroso 2020). Lokteff calls on “lionesses and shield maidens and Valkyries” to inspire men to fight for white civilization (Darby 2017, 26). Ugly stuff. Recall how Bolaño’s novel opens on the matron of Nazi literature in the Americas, Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, mordantly modelled on both Victoria Ocampo and Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson. As a teenager, the grande dame will dedicate her youthful poetry “to daddy,” providing also something of a mock dedication for the book. The first lines are about the absent father figure of fascism and, paradoxically, about emancipation: At fifteen, Edelmira Thompson published her first book, To Daddy, which earned her a modest place in the vast gallery of lady poets active in Buenos Aires high society. And from then on, she was a regular presence in the salons of Ximena San Diego and Susana Lezcano Lafinur, dictators of taste in poetry, and of taste in general, on both banks of the Río de la Plata at the dawn of the twentieth century. Her first poems, as one might reasonably have guessed, were concerned with filial piety, religious meditation and gardens. She flirted with the idea of taking the veil. She learned to ride. Bolaño 2008, 3

Line by line, Edelmira negotiates her empowerment and her powerlessness. She lives in a world where dictators (of taste) are women, yet reaches the upper

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echelons only by inscribing herself as a man’s daughter. She does not learn to ride horses instead of flirting (coquetear) with the idea of becoming a nun. She does both, in succession, with the gaping hole of a non-sequitur in between. She becomes an autonomous subject by internalizing the paternal gaze, playing out the age-old drama. But, for her, dialectics do not lead to sublation. Her Janus face is contradiction contained. Such incongruous subjecthood is not sustainable. At one point in Lombroso’s documentary, he presses Southern on the topic of her husband being a person of color. She replies defensively, asking “what does that have to do with anything,” as if oblivious to the jarring disconnect between her public and her private face, while also never breaking character. She does concede to having trouble balancing her family life and her career—a career built on incendiary statements along the lines of “women should not have a career to begin with.” Bolaño’s characters reach their moment of crisis in similar ways. Edelmira has a son and a daughter, Juan and Luz. Entries for the three of them constitute “The Mendiluce,” the first section of the encyclopedia. Taken together, the entries have a narrative arc that heightens contradictions. First the fascist matriarch, then the insubstantial firstborn, leading to the philo-Nazi alcoholic butch lesbian. By internal necessity, Luz’s fate must come to a crashing end. She falls in unrequited, comically impossible love with a younger poet, Claudia, twenty-five years her junior. Not only is Claudia not queer; she openly detests Luz, declaring: “I’m a Trotskyite and you’re a Fascist shit” (Bolaño 2008, 26). Luz courts her nonetheless and, despite the inauspicious rebuke, Claudia entertains her phone calls every night. But the year is 1976 and Claudia has been disappeared. Her corpse turns out in a garbage dump, victimized by the military regime despite Luz’s best efforts to pull strings on her behalf. Laconically, the section ends “The next day Luz set off for Buenos Aires in her Alfa Romeo. Halfway there she crashed into a gas station. The explosion was considerable” (Bolaño 2008, 27). In a clever mise en abyme, fascist reality thus catches up with fascist fantasy. The B-movie cinematic ending, the “blue-sky” convertible, and the ambiguous nod to Gabriela Mistral and Doris Dana, or to Alejandra Pizarnik and Olga Orozco, are all thought-provoking Bolaño idiosyncrasies, deserving of multiple interpretations. At present, what matters is the self-destructing logic of characterization. One reason why the novel is composed of short entries is because longer accounts of these unstable personages could, in a manner of speaking, explode in the hands of the writer. The final section on Ramírez Hoffman, which will later grow to become the Carlos Wieder of Distant Star, signals the moment when Bolaño has been able to stabilize the elusive compound. He has rendered plausible the fanciful conceit of the writer perpetrator

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that ultimately leads to 2666’s Archimboldi. But the brevity of most entries has to do with a necessary superficiality. For the encyclopedia to work, it cannot be more than micropedia. Mutatis mutandis, spending time with Southern beyond tweets and videoclips brings down her façade. Lombroso’s sustained, unscripted conversation reveals inconsistencies in worldviews and actions, self-serving sensationalism. Alt-right pundits, like the encyclopedia entry title figures in Bolaño, cannot withstand character development. In recent years, Samuel Clowes Huneke (Shashkevich 2017) unearthed sources that show there was a limited tolerance of lesbians in Nazi Germany. He attributes this to several factors, including the complexity of gender writ large and the idea that seemingly arbitrary, limited tolerance of certain groups actually strengthens authoritarianism. Milo Yiannopoulos’s open gayness could very well follow that model. A British man of Greek descent, “Milo” for short, is, in the parlance of modern marketing, a brand with a soul. A jester, he is in more ways than one the gay face of the alt-right. At a 2016 university speech after the attack on Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub massacre, he greeted attendees with a distorted image of a stand-up comedy routine: “Good evening Houston, and welcome to the Dangerous Faggot Tour! I am your ringleader, Chief Executive Triggerer, and the aforementioned faggot, Milo Yiannopoulos. I’d like to congratulate you on no longer being America’s fattest city, how about a round of applause for slimming down a bit? (Yiannopoulos 2016)” After the de rigueur rallying against political correctness, he went on to make the case to criminalize Black Lives Matter, build the fucking wall [sic], rebuff “feminist sting operations” and others. Early 2017, Milo made another splash in the tabloids with his Hawaii marriage to a mystery African-American man. It would appear that, in the crude word cloud of the alt-right web, Hawaii, as Obama’s birther-debate state, and a Black man getting married there to a white man were, somehow, too much already. Provocation by association and the hint of conspiracy were masterfully rendered in a savvy charade. While the conspiracy in La literatura nazi en América had only crossreference, text, and bibliography, the alt-right had hyperlink, multimedia, and an alleged intellectual backdrop à la Spencer. The gay man against gay rights and the mommy or young female professional against feminism confound and perplex much like Bolaño’s fascist poets: no less fascist for being poets—or gay or female, for that matter. Alt-right pundits who sing the praises of ethnonationalism and even produce, in a sense, “art” about suppressing others exploit a blind spot of democracy. Namely, the need to tolerate the intolerant. This necessity is put to the test in latter-day legislation on hate speech and hate crimes, whose subtle distinction between deeds and aggravating words, though valid in the courtroom,

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makes for vague adjudication in everyday life. Alt-righters and Bolaño might all agree on something, should they happen to look in the same direction: the right of a vitriolic work like Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) to exist, or of the Colombian maudit Fernando Vallejo’s many rants, for that matter. But the agreement ends there. For all that Ernst Jünger fascinates Bolaño, there is an unequivocal line between the German author’s cavorting with fascism and the military exploits of the battalions he once incorporated, let alone the ideology of the political party that engulfed all of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Here it is useful to turn to Bolaño’s exacerbation of the tension between sexual diversity and fascism. The theme runs throughout the novel. There’s innuendo about above-mentioned Wehrmacht volunteer, Ignacio Zubieta, and his sidekick companion-in- arms, Jesús Fernández Gómez. Numerous characters lambast homosexuals, Blacks, and Jews in their imaginary writings. Between the lines, however, it appears it is their own sexual orientation they are trying to suppress by adopting such extreme views. The openly gay Nazi is, after all, an impossible trope. Milo does not prove that wrong at any profound level. He deftly conjures the image at the level of the surface, if you’ll indulge the comparison, as a Pedro Lemebel photoshopped into a Patria y Libertad uniform would. Decoding Bolaño’s bizarro poetics gives readers critical tools to face real-life masters of disruption.

No Safe Haven from Misinterpretation

I have been showing how Bolaño offers insights into the alt right. But this has limits, of course. Anachronism is not one of them, for it is embedded in the narrativity of their respective undertakings. What does constitute a limit is revealed again by Willy Thayer. It has to do with a consequential date that binds Chile and the United States, namely: September 11th, the cipher for the 1973 Coup and for the 2001 Twin Towers attack, two sucesos of hemispheric and global relevance. Thayer calls the 2001 September 11th “the event of mediation itself, in which every taking place activates and happens; the big bang of mediation as non-co-incidence with the event” (Thayer 2005, 35). Pictures of the attack do not merely index the event. They are integral to it and yet not identical. Rather, this is an instance of “mediation as event [suceder]” (Thayer 2005, 35). In the 1996 horizon of Nazi Literature in the Americas, printed culture and literary fiction have a major role in mediation that, if Thayer is right, fundamentally changes in 2001. By the time of the 2021 storming of the Capitol, unliterary, unprintable mediation has an outsize, central role in this golden age of social media. The present conjuncture, too, shall pass. But in the meantime,

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whatever insights one may derive from Bolaño’s dealings with the narrativity of Ur-Fascism are limited by the multimedia, algorithmically driven thrust of today’s digital Mendiluce. For all that he could not have anticipated techno-dystopianism, Bolaño is there to remind us that there is no escaping dialectics. The utopian and the reactionary are often two sides of a coin. In 2016, rightist anti-globalization disowned the very utopian elements that leftist critique had previously denounced as disingenuous. How unfortunate to have been proven right. Picture an imaginary encounter. An activist walks into a bar, bemoaning that all that talk of human rights and borderless harmony is nothing but a ruse to further concentrate resources and screw over the little guy. Donald Trump, sitting two stools down, mutters under his breath: my thoughts exactly. Inspired, he then decides to forego the veneer of respectability from the exercise of power. To be sure, this short critical fabulation provides little comic relief. What it does provide, in the spirit of Bolaño’s storytelling, is a willingness to see political “positions” as forces not just in tension, but eventually also in flux. The unscripted, as in the surprising denouements of Nazi Literature vignettes, is there. Alas, things do not always turn towards the utopian. The imagination is not the exclusive province of the left. (With apologies to the fateful year 1968.) The bar conversation continues. The activist comes to believe that his interlocutor cares about small Midwest farmers, which happens to be his pet peeve. It’s a slippery slope towards being persuaded that border lessness, and Mexicans, are to blame. The work of politics, and its complex transactions with aesthetics, is never over. Even if its targets are written several times over, satire plays a role worth highlighting. Sophia McClennen and Remy Maisel’s findings apply: “satire is a unique sort of comedy in that it depends on creating a cognitive space for the audience that allows them to recognize that things that they have taken for granted need to be questioned (2014, 7).” A case in point would be the unquestioned nationalism that structures literary historiography in Latin America. However, this essay has called for an expanded cognitive space that builds upon the hemispheric, proleptic aspirations of Nazi Literature in the Americas. I have called upon Bolaño to satirize the alt-right avant la lettre. This is in keeping with the author’s own rewriting of Marx’s offhand-quoted dictum that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as comedy. Bolaño’s 1998 The Savage Detectives variegates this motif to delirious extreme: “everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy (2008b, 456),” says one Iñaki Echavarne, a character based on the author’s literary executor, for others in the following pages to shift the second part of the couplet to “tragicomedy (514),” “cryptographic exercise (516),” “horror movie (519),” “dirge in the void (526),” inter alia. The point is to

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remain attentive, through all this genre-bending mock philosophizing, to the political entanglements of form. In McClennen and Maisel’s terms, what is taken for granted vis-à-vis the alt-right is the good faith of free speech. Bolaño’s earnest fascist moms, butches, gays, gentlemen, and so forth create the cognitive space to call into question incongruous subjectivities. The untenable types they came to represent leapt from the pages of a South American author into a North American media storm of worldwide consequence. In social media, surface-depth personalities, much like the characters of a lighthearted novel meant to be read in one sitting, became weapons of mass distraction. They were exponentially more successful at providing entertainment than a literary fiction bestseller could ever aspire to be. If only they had had no other aspiration. Anachronistic social commentary adds a perhaps unnecessary, but viable source of relevance for Bolaño. This is not an end in itself. More consequential contributions include a revision of the emergent-dominant-residual triad, in Raymond William’s capacious description of cultural change, that underlies both book and reality. Troublingly, the novel also provides a way into comprehending the fascination with Ur-Fascist sensibilities. If we are to lure fanatics out of their trance, a modicum of understanding without justifying would serve us well. This non-compromising strategy, unlike the more common call to ostracization, avoids the pitfall of feeding the alt-right’s self-fulfilling prophecy. Right extremists galvanize in the face of mainstream rejection. I would go as far as suggest that it is time to have antiglobalization in the left converse with their counterpart in the right. Finding common ground would deflate those who seek to peg racist agendas to polemical, but not irrational, demands about legitimate issues like, say, outsourcing. Alternative historical depth in Bolaño forestalls surface-level attempts to alter history. What better irony for advocates of a border wall than to find their precursors in a Spanish-language, sudaca book? Bolaño in the wrong hands, though, I would like to stress, could be very dangerous. If decontextualizing Carl Schmitt is so harmful, imagine a model of circulation for Nazi Literature in the Americas that banks on its playful posing as non-fiction. Years ago, before Bolaño became a household name, bookstores would classify the work as reference—as they also did around the same time, to great comedic effect, with César Aira’s masterful Diccionario de escritores latinoamericanos (2001). The Chilean author’s aesthetically risky periphrasis of taboo could be cast as recklessness and defiance. It is not just bad works badly read, like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that rouse Ur- Fascist sensibilities. A good work badly read, examples abound, is just as easily weaponized and retweeted. Nazi Literature in the Americas would offer formidable resistance,

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however, due to its meta-literary awareness and reiterative, recursive selfironizing. The novel challenges political platitudes and easy generalizations left and right. Moreover, it shows that such a simple two-dimensional topology of the political, a major legacy of the French Revolution, has outlived its usefulness. Similarly, juxtaposing the likes of Richard Spencer and Max Mirebalais suggests that more complex topologies are necessary in the age of, coupling Benjamin with Debord, the spectacularization of politics and the politicization of the spectacle. Here’s an urgent task: mooring the drift of Ur-Fascist combinatorics to something other than violence. Persistence in delegitimizing word-deeds, rather than exposing their inanity, will further push our enemies to seek consequence in hurt. Ramirez Hoffman/Carlos Wieder serves as cautionary tale, providing the return-of-the-repressed, climactic moment in the novel when ritual murder, this time under the aegis of Pinochet, lays claim to the language of art. In 2666, a similar eschatology frames the Juárez femicides. We must not let such things happen to people, not even to signifiers. Bolaño reads the signs: boredom and banality can, alas, turn into horror. I have shown how Bolaño illuminates the global alt-right and how, unavoidably, the phenomenon affects the literary work. Young readers who, as of late, come of age reading Bolaño, much in the same way that earlier generations did reading Orwell, carry in their pockets a powerful device. A so-called “smartphone,” it’s an affective organ that buzzes and delivers jolts of indignation, instilling presentism. The alt-right seeks to coopt it, dictating not just public conversation but nervous dispositions, creating veritable weather systems of affect. Orwell trained readers to approach the newspapers of their day critically, with an eye out for doublespeak, a piercing term coined in the novel 1984 to describe the state’s deliberate, strategic obfuscation of language. In so doing, Orwell provided a distorted mirror that revealed underlying truths. May Bolaño’s blinding “cascade of mirrors” (2008, 38) do something similar with today’s multidirectional, immersive media, where more actors than the state lay claim to attention hegemony. Some have the means to get on our nerves.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Thomas Nolden and Marjorie Agosin for the invitation to present an earlier version of this essay at Wellesley College on November 4, 2017. Also to Joseph Wager for his assistance in preparing the manuscript.

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Bibliography Andrews, Chris. 2014. Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe. New York: Columbia University Press. Bolaño, Roberto. 2006. Bolaño por sí mismo: Entrevistas escogidas. Andrés Braithwaite, ed. Santiago: Diego Portales. Bolaño, Roberto. 2008. Nazi Literature in the Americas. Chris Andrews, trans. New York: New Directions. Bolaño, Roberto. 2008b. The Savage Detectives. Natasha Wimmer, trans. New York: Picador. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. Kafka and his Precursors. In Labyrinths, 199–201. James E. Irby, trans. New York: New Directions. Darby, Seyward. 2017. The Rise of the Valkyries. Harper’s. September. sec. Report. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Passions: An Oblique Offering. On the Name, 3–34. David Wood, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1995. Ur-Fascism. The New York Review of Books, June 22. Finchelstein, Federico. 2017. On Fascism, History and Evil in Roberto Bolaño. In Roberto Bolaño as World Literature, eds. Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro, 23–40. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. de Freytas-Tamura, Kimiko. 2017. George Orwell’s ‘1984’ is Suddenly a Best-Seller. The New York Times, January 25, sec. Books. Gage, Beverly. 2017. Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump. The New York Times, January 17, sec. Books. Gutiérrez Mouat, Ricardo. 2016. Understanding Roberto Bolaño. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press. Harkinson, Josh. 2016. Meet the White Nationalist Trying To Ride The Trump Train to Lasting Power. Mother Jones sec. Politics. Hoyos, Héctor. 2015. Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Hussain, Murtaza. 2021. How to Understand the Rage Economy. The Intercept, February 13. Huyssen, Andreas. 2006. Nostalgia for Ruins. Grey Room 23: 6–21. Lombroso, Daniel, dir. 2020. White Noise. The Atlantic. Lombroso, Daniel. 2020b. Why the Alt-Right’s Most Famous Woman Disappeared. The Atlantic, October 16. Sec. Politics. McClennen, Sophia and Remy Maisel. 2014. Is Satire Saving Our Nation? Mockery and American Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shashkevich, Alex. 2017. Stanford Researcher Sheds Light on Life of Lesbians in Nazi Germany. Stanford News Service.

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Spencer, Richard. 2016. Hail Trump. Speech at the Annual Conference of the National Policy Institute, 20 November, in Washington D.C. Thayer, Will. 2006. El Golpe como consumación de la vanguardia. El fragmento repetido: escritos en estado de excepción, 15–46. Santiago: Metales Pesados. Yiannopoulos, Milo. 2016. How To Destroy The Alt Right. Speech at the University of Houston, 19 September, Houston, TX.

Chapter 2

“En tanto poeta, ¡zas!, novelista”: On Bolaño and Latin American Poetry in the World Literature System Jorge J. Locane To Bruno Montané Krebs

…

La poesía no

Mario Montalbetti, Interview with Gerardo Jorge 2018, 137

…

Ese algo es la sílaba No, una sílaba que ha sido siempre el anuncio de grandes afirmaciones Octavio Paz 1990, 112

∵ Abstract This chapter addresses the current status of Latin American poetry in the world literature system. Through an analysis of the case of Roberto Bolaño, who, despite his interest in poetry, achieved recognition and prominence as a novelist in the international market and academic debates, this contribution draws a contrast and suggests the hypothesis that, in tension with the novel, poetry embodies a definition of literature resistant to the patterns of production determined by global capitalism. To reinforce the hypothesis, the approach also examines Mario Montalbetti’s postulates, mainly set out in his Notas para un seminario sobre Foucault, and Alejandro Zambra’s novel Poeta chileno. It is concluded that the complex tension between novel and poetry is a distinctive feature of current Latin American literature.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_004

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1

This chapter aims to shed light on poetry as a conceptual variable that can contribute to a more comprehensive insight of Latin American literature on the global market. The starting point is the observation that recent research on the production, circulation, and reception of literature in the context of the current phase of globalization tends to focus primarily on novels.1 However, despite the narrow generic scope, hypotheses and conclusions drawn from these approaches acquire a universal or at least wider validity. To borrow one of Héctor Hoyos’ ideas (2015)—and to respond to its implications—it can be said that just as Roberto Bolaño’s novels act as a synecdoche for all Latin American novels, so the novel, in many hegemonic critical discourses, tends to be held up as a stand-in for all literature. In other words, in the same way that to give an account of Bolaño’s narrative would not be to report on that of Diamela Eltit, Fernando Vallejo, and César Aira, to broaden the spectrum and make the hypotheses more complex by including the production of the latter would not be to give an account of literature, but only of the novel. The following pages attempt to go one step further and shed light on certain tensions that are generated today between different elements, some of them often omitted, of the whole body of literature. As a hegemonic genre,2 the novel not only monopolizes criticism, but also readings. A recent essay by Ignacio Sánchez Prado, for example, gives an account of “new Mexican literature” through an examination of Lost Children Archive (2019) and La historia de mis dientes (2013) (The Story of My Teeth) by Valeria Luiselli. The conclusions reached by Sánchez Prado—the “Luiselli effect, a new form of canonicity of Mexican literature in English”3 (105)—are transferred, in this case explicitly, to poetry solely by means of the introductory syntagma “Not to mention poetry” [“Ni que hablar de la poesía”] and four conclusive lines. 1 Rebecca Walkowitz, for example, explains in Born Translated (2015), which includes some reflections on Roberto Bolaño’s narrative, that “While I discuss the translation of several genres of literature, including poetry and digital art, my account of translation focuses on the novel because the novel is the most international genre, measured by worldwide translation, and because the novel today solicits as well as incorporates translation, in substantial ways” (2015, 2). 2 For an analysis of the global expansion processes of the novel, see Mariano Siskind who writes that “The universality of the novel-form was the historical outcome of the formation (through colonialism, trade, and promises of emancipation) of a world in which bourgeois culture was increasingly hegemonic, if not forcefully dominant” (2010, 340–341). 3 All translations of originals in Spanish are my own.

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In connection with these observations, the following arguments are motivated by the question about the evolution of the status of poetry within the system of (Latin American) literature. From the modernists to Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz, poetry was the genre par excellence: to earn the status of “writer,” one needed to provide evidence in verse.4 Then a transformation took place. Since the Boom, the ontology of Latin American writers within the world literary system has revolved around the novel. What can explain this shift in the canonization regimes of the (Latin American) literary system? Poetry was and continues being an intensely cultivated genre in Latin America. Some national traditions have an outstanding position, perhaps foremost is Chile’s, but also the Peruvian and Nicaraguan. For some time, these national traditions projected themselves into broader domains, even, in some cases, at the global level. Thus, since modernism, Latin American strains of poetry have been prominent in the international scene. Rubén Darío, for example, became a leading figure in the vast territory of Hispanic letters, even being the first Latin American writer translated in China. In 1945, Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world” (nobelprize.org). Paralleling these developments, poets like Pablo Neruda and Nicolás Guillén were gaining international recognition. Neruda’s star rose from the 1940s until he was distinguished with the Nobel Prize in 1971. A similar process occurred with Octavio Paz, culminating in 1990. While the Cervantes Prize, an instrument of canonization and systemic recognition for writers in the Spanish language, presents evidence of being sensitive to Latin American literature as polygeneric, the Nobel’s proclivity for poetry—in an intersection between languages and traditions—seems to have stopped at Paz. This was more than thirty years ago, precisely when the current phase of globalization began. This fact informs about a potential reordering in the valuation of Latin American literature within the world literature system. In the new valuation scheme, intimately associated with the dynamics of the global publishing industry, poetry would have been relegated to a less prominent position. In the context of the current phase of globalization, poetry has therefore lost its capacity to turn institutional screws, to interpellate the reception and, finally, to participate in symbolic trade on an international, inter-linguistic scale. As an iconic figure of Latin American world literature and especially the “global novel” (Hoyos 2015; Kirsch 2017; Walkowitz 2015), Bolaño was 4 For a critique of novel-centred theoretical models that also highlights the importance of poetry in the Latin American tradition, see Kristal 2002.

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assimilated in the mid-90s by both the culture industry and international criticism as a novelist. This was to the detriment of his poetic production, even in spite of it. This phenomenon can also be observed if one examines the trajectories of other versatile writers such as Julián Herbert and Alejandro Zambra and how the enunciation platforms of the international circuit rewrite them.5 Since the Boom, which, just as it is scarce in women, is also scarce in poets, the novel has gained ground becoming now not only the hegemonic genre but also, perhaps due to analytical inertia or laziness, the one most commonly associated with Latin America. It can be argued, therefore, that the process of globalization inaugurated by the Fall of the Berlin Wall has brought with it a progressive invisibilization of Latin American poetic production that is duly manifest in the most influential publishing catalogues and international awards. My main subject of inquiry is therefore this evolution. Based on a study of Bolaño’s trajectory, and from a materialistic perspective attentive to the conditions of literary production and circulation, the following pages attempt to account for the transformations brought by globalization, with its characteristic mechanisms of value addition—awards, fairs, agents, etc.—, on the integration and conceptualization of Latin American literature in the world literature system.

2

The abstract to one of the many volumes dedicated to Bolaño announces: “Roberto Bolaño as World Literature provides an introduction to the Chilean novelist” (Bloomsbury 2017). How does one explain a versatile writer with a keen interest in poetry being assimilated and reconceptualised as a novelist— even by academic critics? The answer may seem obvious, but I believe that its implications deserve some attention because illuminating them serves to explain not only the logic that governs Bolaño’s case but also contemporary authors with similar profiles and, finally, Latin American literature in the context of the current phase of globalization. 5 Ignacio Echevarría has reflected on the non-correspondence between Bolaño’s profile as a writer in Latin America, in the realm of his language, and the one he acquires by being transferred, through translation, to the English-speaking system. On a more general level, which transcends the specific case, he concludes that “This dissociation usually occurs quite often when the work of any author is translated into another language, and it is important not to underestimate the consequences it may have on their fortunes within that language, both in terms of acceptance and understanding” (2013, 185).

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Bolaño’s backstory is well-covered, so I will not go into great detail here. He published his first poems in Mexico in the second half of the 1970s, and mostly remained in the genre until 1990. Now in Barcelona, the birth of his son suggested to him that poetry would not be enough to respond to his growing material needs (Corral 2011, 211). From that point forward, he concentrated his efforts on narrative. His first timid attempts from the 80s and early work in the 90s can be seen as a sort of warm-up for the subsequent ascent of his career from the mid-90s on, when he found his place at Jorge Herralde’s publishing house. La literatura nazi en América (Nazi Literature in the Americas) and Estrella distante (Distant Star) appeared in 1996 to positive critical reception. From then on, Bolaño’s successes would continue until reaching its peak with the publication of the monumental 2666 in 2004 (by this point at the hands of his executor Ignacio Echevarría). Los detectives salvajes (1998) (The Savage Detectives) and the prizes Herralde de Novela (1998) and Rómulo Gallegos (1999) marked the highest point of his career and placed him in a circuit dominated by the novel and great authors like Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez. However, during this phase devoted mostly to narrative, Bolaño remained an active poet. Not only because poetry is a recurrent topic of his novels, but also because he continued working on his verse, publishing and even winning prizes that could have given him some visibility as a poet. In 1993, he won the Premio de Poesía Rafael Morales with Fragmentos de la Universidad desco­ nocida (1992) (Fragments of the Unknown University). A year later, he was awarded the Premio Literario Kutxa Ciudad de Irún for his book of poems Los perros románticos (1994) (The Romantic Dogs). In 2000, he published another volume, Tres. With the exception of a few studies published after his death (Casado 2015; Corral 2011; Montané Krebs 2010; Osorio 2013; Zambra 2010),6 Bolaño’s poetic output has remained overlooked by critical approaches to his work, to the point that he has even been placed in literary trends completely alien to poetry. “Bolaño,” Jorge Volpi writes, “read [the narrators of the Boom] as a young man, he read them as an adult and perhaps he would have reread them as an old man: naming them or not naming them, all of his books strive to be an answer, a way out, a fresh breath of air, a reply, a refutation, an homage, a challenge or an insult to all of them” (2008, 78). Beyond a tendency to construe the facts towards one’s own critical aims, I believe that statements like this may be explained by structural factors and by the rules governing the international cultural industry. 6 Among this bibliography, see particularly Ayala 2008, who proposes hypotheses to explain Bolaño’s transition from poetry to narrative.

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Since the Boom, the only genre authorized for international circulation seems to be the novel. Founded on mimetic principles that lead to the mechanical reproduction of a template for success conceived of in the 60s, international promotion platforms usually do not have the resources for poetry. Thus, the whole productive structure of “big publishing” is geared to an overvaluation of the novel and to getting it to the sales outlets. This consequently cuts out the spectrum of the potential production around the artefact known as novel. As I have already advanced—following Echevarría, and as also Corral warns— the Bolaño known in translation is not the Bolaño we have read in Spanish. However, I believe that the gap is already present within the language and corresponds to the split between the hegemonic publishing industry, centred on the novel, and underground, local, alternative production systems, organized around poetry. In other words, what publishers from other linguistic domains tend to translate are the texts that find space at European publishing houses which accumulate social, symbolic, and economic capital. This phenomenon is heightened when these texts are favoured by global industry’s value-adding mechanisms. Thus, a well-established principle is that Latin American texts only enter into interlinguistic circulation if they manage to access the Spanish promotion platforms—the catalogues, the agents, the awards. The problem is that, as a general rule, these platforms are organized around the novel. Thus, filtered by the peninsular cultural industry—already on the international circuit, but not yet the interlinguistic one—Bolaño already appeared formatted as a novelist. Anagrama does not award a poetry prize. Neither do the two groups that control the major flows of literature in Spanish, Planeta and Bertelsmann, nor their most emblematic imprints, Seix Barral, Destino, Random House, and Alfaguara. Poetry is thus cornered in discreet niches, with Visor and Pre-Textos sharing the greatest visibility. The prizes obtained by Bolaño in poetry—which were numerous—are prizes of little impact. They do not reach beyond their genre, locale, language. Since the major publishing houses do not offer them, there are no poetry prizes that contribute to the transcendence of this genre, as it is the case with narrative production. Thus, any poet who intends to gain market coverage, especially in international terms, will be forced to migrate towards narrative and, if necessary, compete for one of the many specific prizes for novels. The structural logic operates, therefore, as a conditioning factor—yet not only on this level. During his life, Bolaño did not publish his poetry in Anagrama, even though this publishing house, which he joined in 1996, accompanied his international success so intimately that today it is impossible to explain the fate of one without referring to the other. La universidad desconocida (2007) (The Unknown

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University), a selection of poetry based on a finished portfolio of manuscripts from 1993, only appeared posthumously at the Catalonian publishing house, once Bolaño—his author’s name—had already achieved an advantageous position in the world literature system. Thus, the construction of Bolaño by Anagrama on offer to readers—and here I mean readers of the original Spanish—he only became a poet at a late stage. What is interesting is that, in the absence of a specific collection for poetry, or perhaps because Bolaño had already been turned into a novelist, La universidad desconocida appeared in the collection called “Narrativas hispánicas” (Hispanic Narratives), so that even while incorporating his poetry into his “complete works,” the author’s identity continued to be construed as that of a narrator. The collection Poesía reunida (2018) (Collected poetry), published by Alfaguara after Roberto Bolano’s widow’s break with Anagrama, also fails to rectify this conceptual dysphoria, since the book appeared in the collection titled “Narrativa hispánica” (Hispanic Narrative). Furthermore, on the publisher’s official website, Pedro Almodóvar’s blurb promoting the book states: “I like everything by Roberto Bolaño, his great, immense novels, but also the short stories” (Me gusta leer 2018). Except when they confirm already consecrate authors, there are no prizes or catalogues in the circuit of Latin American world literature open to poetry. The relationship to literary agents, another unavoidable mechanism for international projection, does not show signs of being empathetic either. As a general rule, contemporary poets are unrepresented. Unlike narrative, which seems to have established a marriage of convenience with literary agents, poetry has turned its back on those that, subtly or not, push literature toward heteronomy. The agents themselves, an indispensable dispositif for the addition of value in the transnational domain, do not show any great interest in poetry.7 As it were—and I cannot formulate another diagnosis—poetry is not profitable; it is simply not in the position to cover the high costs involved in putting it into international circulation, including those of representation. The translation of poetry, therefore, is undertaken primarily on the arthouse, underground circuit. This pairs independent publishers from one linguistic and cultural system with those from another, without the mediation of agents and royalties. Bolaño’s poetry is currently represented by Andrew Wylie, who also represents his prose. Previously, even during his heyday, his poetic production was not represented by anyone, since Jorge Herralde acted as a de facto agent for the Bolano’s books published by Anagrama. Bolaño’s poetry, like all poetry, was left to its own devices until the author was completely canonized. At this point 7 On the literary agents, see Locane 2022.

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Wylie also assumed the management of the poetry publication and translation rights.8 The awards, the catalogues, and the literary agents, these three fundamental articulators of the international publishing industry, are therefore organized around the novel. In order to avoid suspicions about Bolaño’s possible capitulation to narrative, some critics have proposed attractive rhetorical solutions. Bolaño himself put into play an alibi often cited: that the best poetry of the 20th century was written in prose. Joyce and Proust are held up as evidence of this (Osorio 2013, 133). It follows that Bolaño’s narrative contains his best poetry. “[William] Deresiewicz,” Wilfrido Corral writes, “avoids the quagmire of Zambra, by stating that the novelist’s passages ‘are symbolist prose poems. Bolaño did not renounce his poetry, after all; he simply hid it inside his novels’” (2011, 214). I believe that this solution is nothing more than a boutade destined to elude a problem that transcends the case of Bolaño. The same can be said for the idea that Bolaño’s work is inter-generic. Some critics indicate that his poetry, characterized by a sparing use of metaphor and a conversational register influenced by the anti-poetry he admired, tends towards prose; and that his novels slide towards the poetic. “The resolution of the poetry-prose equation in the author,” Santiago Guevara points out, “tends then to a constant tension on the narrative plane, which generally results in the poetic being present in the prose and vice versa; the two literary substances (the poetic and the prosaic) can be affected, mixed, and joined. Stories, essays, articles, and novels are embossed with poetry” (2013, 59). From my point of view, these ways of resolving the tension are nothing more than an elegant way of circumventing a deep-seated problem that Bolaño himself experienced as a conflict in his authorial identity: his romantic idealization of poetry was increasingly incompatible with the state of the literary institution in the context of global capitalism. More plausible than Guevara, then, is Rafael Lemus when he admits Bolaño’s resignation: After The Savage Detectives the question is no longer: can a good novel about poetry be written? The question is: why does Bolaño prefer to write novels and not poems? I am afraid that the answer will not please the poets: Bolaño writes novels, and not poems, because today poetry cannot 8 With which, it is worth mentioning, it was commodified and transferred from the artisan to the professional domain. The consequence is that self-published anthologies that gather the infrarealist group’s poetry, such as Perros habitados por las voces del desierto (2014). (Dogs inhabited by the Voices of the Desert), cannot include Bolaño’s. See the note and the blank pages in the mentioned volume (2014, 105–122).

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be written. That is the conclusion that can be drawn from his narrative work: poetry is now impossible, we find ourselves in a post-poetic world. See the characters in The Savage Detectives: they claim to be poets but do not write a single poem over the more than six hundred pages of the book. 2011

But to accept Bolaño’s capitulation as a poet is not the same as affirming poetry’s defeat. I believe that the most accurate thing to say is that poetry has stopped participating—because it cannot and because it is not admitted—in major symbolic and economic transactions, particularly with regard to transnational domains. Bolaño distances himself from poetry to gain traction in the market, but poetry with or without him—and Bolaño knew this—continues to exist, ensconced in alternative modes of production. The distinction between poetry and novels today cannot be defended from within. This is an exercise destined to failure. Of course, some of Bolaño’s poems move towards the narrative and vice versa, but even so, Bolaño knew he had to opt for one mode or the other. This was first and foremost because, as noted earlier, the market operates within these categories; because awards, catalogues, agents, and even sections in bookstores—the entire material infrastructure— determine them. In an essay that argues in favour of a hypothetical current dissolution of genres, Catalina Quesada Gómez, however, warns: Let us not forget that the horizon of expectations of most readers is still generically determined, many things contribute to this in no small measure: the habits of the old days, paratexts (publication collections, material on the front or back cover, etc.), and the influence of the market, which, in the interest of offering recognizable products for the potential buyer, leads publishers and their advertisers to resort to blatant distortions or simplifications, such as qualifying a novel (an expanding genre where genres are to be had) more and more broadly. 2015, 250

Following on this notion, I would argue that between novels and poetry there is not necessarily an intrinsic dichotomy, but that it does exist in the extratextual domain: to begin with, the major force of the market establishes difference. At the same time, each one has its own circuits, which seem to be increasingly irreconcilable and dominated by antagonistic logics. Furthermore, there is a “gesture” in poetry, supported by an affective structure, that makes it resistant to the principles that govern the major publishing industry. This is, precisely, what Bolaño assumed when he portrayed communities of poets that

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constitute alternative and dissident networks of socialization. To renounce poetry, therefore, would not be to renounce a form characterized by verse, but an idealized—and from the perspective of the novel, anachronistic—way of thinking and experiencing literature. The novel—following this hypothesis— is then the result of a pact (not without its tensions) between literature and the market. Poetry, on the other hand—and also regardless of its concrete form—would be a kind of intransigent gesticulation, oriented towards the redemption of literature. This is thus a way of explaining Bolaño’s project: as literature issued from a forced, reluctant pact. This tension runs through Bolaño’s work, but is also characteristic of our time. The poet today embodies a romantic hero destined to redeem literature. This is the reason why numerous characters in contemporary novels, that is, enunciated from the pact, are poets, as it is the case of Varamo (2002) by César Aira, Los ingrávidos (2011) (Faces in the Crowd) by Valeria Luiselli, and Poeta chileno (2020) (Chilean Poet) by Alejandro Zambra. Particularly Zambra’s book is illuminating. Zambra’s profile is very similar to Bolano’s—a versatile writer who the international market and critics perceive primarily as a novelist.9 He also writes in his footsteps, often referencing him and even having written essays on Bolaño’s poetry. Poeta chileno may be read as a parodic tribute to the specific field of contemporary Chilean poetry. The story is centred on the amorous misadventures of two poets of consecutive generations, Gonzalo and Vicente. They are connected through Carla, partner to the former and mother to the latter. In addition to reporting on the experiences of the protagonists, the novel reconstructs the state of the field of poetry, its habitus, its actors, its governing rules. Gonzalo Millán, Nicanor Parra, Raúl Zurita are cult names that project the story towards empirical references. The mapping, however, does not stop there: through the documentary work of Pru—a journalist and Vicente’s ephemeral lover—contemporary generations and trends are also presented to the reader. Sent to Chile from the United States to write an article, Pru’s job is to interview Chilean poets. “We are going to discover a lot of savage detectives” (“Poetry in motion”),10 says Gregg, her commissioning editor-in-chief. In conversation with Vicente and his friend 9

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Originally from Chile, Alejandro Zambra began his career in the late 1990s as a poet. In 2006 he published Bonsái and in 2011 Formas de volver a casa (Ways of Going Home), both in Anagrama. These novels were translated into several languages and gave him a significant international recognition. He has also published essays and short stories. With the publication of Poeta chileno in 2020, he returned to poetry, now thematised within a novel of more than 400 pages. I quote from the e-book version. Given the absence of page numbering, I refer to the chapter.

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Pato, the first sentence that Pru says in Spanish is “You are like characters from Bolaño” (“Poetry in motion”). Thus, for foreigners, Chilean poetry only exists through the mediation of Bolaño’s novels. It is presented as a highly romanticized, fictional object. That object, it seems, commands demand in the United States; not the poetry itself, but an image of a cultural field that manifests itself as passionate, “savage,” ultimately, in disharmony with the capitalist order. The mechanisms that regulate the field are also portrayed: the initiatory act of visiting Nicanor Parra, the poetry readings, “the statement of the Neruda Foundation” which “is the first flirtation with fame” and “a platform to cultivate friendly relations” (“Poetry in motion”). Thus, Zambra’s novel gives an account of the dispositifs that generate symbolic and social capital in Chilean poetry. These are—and this is what I am interested in highlighting—specific mechanisms that delimit the field of poetry as a disaggregated one, one in tension with the field around the novel. Asked in an interview about his link to poetry, Zambra replies: “I believe more in fluid genres,” “I think that, as readers, the questions we pose to a poem or a novel are exactly the same” (Anagrama 2020). His novel, however, offers a different assessment, in line with some ideas already suggested in these pages. Even though it may no longer be possible to differentiate between genres, the truth is that Poeta chileno stages a world of poets, jealously guarded by passwords and a codification only recognizable among peers. Zambra’s poet characters never read narratives or share spaces with narrators. Vicente and his biological father sit in a café that certain prose writers tend to frequent, which Vicente hates—he doesn’t hate the narrators, he couldn’t hate them because he hasn’t even read them (he very rarely reads prose), but he knows that his father has taken him there to see them, which in a way is like going to the zoo, even though his father never took him to the zoo as a child (maybe he wants to rectify that). “Poetry in motion”

The division of labour, in the eyes of these poets, also differs: “Vicente thinks that it is the poets and not the narrators who must capture absolutely every detail of every lived experience” (“Poetry in motion”). Since the labour is divided and there are specific territories, mechanisms, and rituals, poetry ends up giving rise to parallel and alternative networks of socialization that rarely intersect with those of narrative. According to Rita, a woman who meets Pru at a party, “poets are poets. They are believers, but in other huevás. […] they believe in talent […]. In the community” (“Poetry in motion”). Poetry, then,

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rather than a genre, is defined as an affective structure, founded on certain affinities around literature. To close my arguments about Poeta chileno, I am interested in highlighting what I think is the conceptual core of the novel. As mentioned above, the three protagonists, Gonzalo, Carla, and Vicente, form a concrete affective community. This community is marked both by fracture and transcendence. One of its vertices is unstable, “weak,” until it ends up falling: Carla. Gonzalo knows and is linked to Vicente as a stepfather, a bond that is fragile by nature and that, despite Gonzalo and Carla’s separation, is maintained through the book up to the final scene, where both poets share a jovial beer. The transcendence of the affective bond—and this is key—is thus subject to literary genre. Vicente grows up under the influence of Gonzalo, becomes a poet and thus establishes a transcendent affinity with his stepfather. With Carla, on the other hand, the relationship is intermittent and fragile: “sooner or later, Gonzalo surmised, the relationship would end and she would become the girlfriend of some commercial engineer, some dentist, or some novelist” (“Obra temprana”). Once again, poetry operates as an affective amalgam, moreover one openly distrustful of the novel. The relationship between Gonzalo and Vicente is sustained by it, by that imprecise element that also makes them part of a field. Gonzalo and Carla’s relationship, on the other hand, fails because between them there will always be the abyss of genres: “Over the years Carla’s interest in poetry had not increased—she had no time, actually: every now and then she picked up a novel by Amélie Nothomb or Yasunari Kawabata or Salman Rushdie, but never poetry” (“Familiastra”). To conclude this section, I would like to return to Bolaño’s production, to the apparent ingenious solution affirming that his books are located in a zone of intersection between the novel and poetry. As I argue above, since the two genres constitute two rival modes of understanding literature, and two affective-material economies, that solution appears unconvincing. Zambra, a poet and a systematic and attentive reader of Bolaño, knows this. He also knows that in poetry there is an irreducible component, which does not bend to the whims of the public and the market. For this reason, in his assessment of Bolaño’s poetry, Zambra shows a particular sensibility: “In 2002 he published Amberes, a book of poetry […] that in any case he was pleased to present as a novel, as—he said—‘the only novel of which I am not ashamed,’ ‘perhaps because it remains unintelligible.’ So novels make poetry intelligible. Novels are more understandable, they sell more because they are more understandable” (Zambra 2010, 109). The intelligibility of the text will be the subject of the next section. To conclude here, the words of Bolaño quoted by Zambra are also an explicit enunciation of principles that neither the market nor critical approaches have heeded. For Bolaño, in perhaps desperate nod to the field of

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poetry, the only element in his entire oeuvre that deserves his own attention is “Amberes, a book of poetry” dressed up as a novel.

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By our definition poetry—whether short or long, verse or prose—would be distinguishable through its intransigent attitude. In addition to bringing together a specific community with its own ritual acts and consecrating instruments, poetry, regardless of its formal aspects, operates on premises different from those of the novel. Foremost is the idea that language is an opaque material, dissociated from, or at least in a discordant relation to empirical reality. In short, it may be argued that the novel would beany fictional text that attributes to language a mimetic capacity. The novel, therefore, tends to transmit messages. Poetry, on the contrary, would be a text that is not oriented towards communication; that distrusts language and makes it its object. Hence, the (un)intelligibility of a text becomes a variable capable of delimiting genres. Amberes—according to Bolaño—is worthy of consideration because it is unintelligible. Bolaño the narrator—if one gives credit to Zambra—makes the poet intelligible. The argument—whether one wants to accept it or not—appears frequently when characterizing contemporary (Latin American) literature. There is another element in the equation, one that Bolaño himself puts forth on several occasions. Poetry’s experimentation, mistrust of language, and inquiries are destined to commercial failure. The novel, on the contrary, by not questioning the mimetic principle of language, is the formula with the greatest market acceptance. “The rupture,” writes Bolaño in “Sevilla me mata” (“Sevilla kills me”), “does not sell. Writing that immerses itself with its eyes open does not sell. For example: Macedonio Fernández does not sell” (2004b, 18). In “Los mitos de Cthulhu” (“The Cthulhu Myths”), he adds that popular novelists “sell and enjoy the public’s favor because their stories are understandable. That is to say: because readers, who are never wrong, not as readers, obviously, but as consumers, in this case of books, understand their novels or their stories perfectly” (2004a, 24). The equation would read, on one side: novel-legibility-acceptance and, on the other: poetry-opacity-rejection. The novel offers answers. Poetry poses questions. The intransigent attitude of poetry could be defined, then, as a position tending to question the dragging of literature towards heteronomy through the pact between the novel and the market. In Notas para un seminario sobre Foucault (2018). (Notes for a seminar on Foucault), a seminar-essay-poem that includes an ars poetica, Mario Montalbetti unfolds a series of hypotheses about the relationship between novels,

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poetry, and language. According to his ideas, 1995 was a decisive year since at that moment the dialogue between novel and poetry broke down definitively, and an irreparable schism between the genres was generated. […] the novel became visual art in San Francisco in 1995 (there the waters parted and the novel decided to go with visual arts which was where the money from entertainment was)11 It happens that in that place and in that year, the State of the World Forum was celebrated with the participation of figures like Mikhail Gorbachev, George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Gates, and Ted Turner. The discussion, according to Montalbetti (Rapacioli 2017), revolved around how to contain the 80% of the population that does not belong to leading sectors. The answer was that the entertainment offer needed to be increased. Here the novel can be said to have agreed on a pact with the market: it would have renounced its critical inquiry of language and opted for communicative transparency for pastime purposes: “So that people can be entertained, spend the time”.12 Since then, the function of poetry and the novel have become significantly different: “Distinguishing novel from poem will help”.13 To illustrate this split, Montalbetti uses the images of travelling by airplane and by submarine. The former allows one to see, to take measure of the world, and to be reassured. The elements that compose the empirical reality are “Clearly distinguishable through the windows”.14 The novel offers a representation of this type, placid and comforting. The poem, for its part, is a blind dive into the depths. It is about groping and uncertainty in a rarefied atmosphere. “The submarine is blind, the poem is blind”15 (66). Poetry confronts the reader with language in its pure state, eludes certainties, and makes him/her restless.16 The object in question, therefore, is language, how it is defined and what is done with it. Somehow, novel and poetry can be thought of as two ways of conceiving language. Either as a transparent material, docile and capable of

11 12 13 14 15 16

[…] la novela se convierte en arte visual / en San Francisco en 1995 / (ahí se partieron las aguas / y la novela decidió irse con las artes visuales / que era donde estaba el dinero / del entretenimiento) (2018, 70). para que la gente se entretenga, pase el rato (69). Distinguir novela de poema ayudará (65). claramente distinguibles a través de las ventanillas (65). El submarino es ciego, el poema es ciego (66). A more detailed approach to Montalbetti’s ideas can be found in Prieto 2019.

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transmitting useful information, or as an opaque material, resistant and in tension with the world. Why is a poem worthwhile? Well, not because it circulates because it doesn’t circulate much.17 For the hegemony of the market, then, the poem is a devalued and dangerous object. It is justified only for reasons that exceed the logic of the cultural industry: […] the value of a poem does not lie in what it says / but in what it does to language18 If the novel says, the poem provokes language. All that the latter can affirm, in any case, is conjectural. The novel, on the contrary, without hesitation, tries to put itself in the place of reality. But, in doing so, it operates from an illusion, sweeps away critical suspicion and promotes an innocent understanding of the world. It cancels out the Cartesian cogito, neutralizes the radical doubt, and thus puts itself at the service of the status quo: The thing is, language forces speaking on the condition that we have nothing to say (that’s the business: Planeta, Random, Alfaguara, Penguin, …)19 The argument, with a slight spin of my own, is that in the current phase of globalization, the market has proposed a deal to literature. While one part of literature—the novel—has decided to cooperate and is receiving its dividends; another part—poetry—remains suspicious (as well as solipsistic). It is not a problem of genre in the classical sense, because there is evidence that, in cases, verse is in on the deal. The problem lies in the evolution of capitalism, in its expansive program and in the impact it has on the literary fields shaped by Western modernity. 17 ¿por qué vale un poema? / Bueno, no porque circule / porque no circula mucho (17). 18 […] el valor de un poema / No reside en lo que dice / sino en lo que le hace / al lenguaje (18). 19 Es que el lenguaje obliga a hablar / a condición de que no tengamos nada que decir / / (ese es el negocio: Planeta, Random, Alfaguara, Penguin, / …).

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What is at issue here is not the novel itself, but its more recent drifts, its inclination to condescension and its consequent tendency to relax critical tension. “The contemporary novel.” Montalbetti says in an interview, “is easy, boring, harmless. It is a kind of ornament to the capitalist system of which it is a daughter. I am not saying that the poem is not, capitalism is still present in the paper on which a book of poetry is published. In the case of the novel, I find it more shameful the way the narrators have loved flirting with big capital. I find it extremely boring and unworthy of literature” (Ayma 2016). This observation, moreover, suggests an aspect that I have already introduced and that I am interested in highlighting: in the current phase of globalization, literature has bifurcated—perhaps as never before. The novel is then, regardless of any formal attribute it might have, the name given to literature that accepts the rules of the game and concedes to capitalist management logic. Poetry, on the contrary, tends to be stubborn and, with its variations, more or less intransigent; from its marginal place, it can operate as an idealistic reservoir of critical autonomy. Octavio Paz wrote about this as early as 1990, surprisingly chiming with both Montalbetti and Bolaño: The arts that have been most damaged by getting absorbed by the financial market have been converted into objects of consumption. How can we evaluate these changes? On the one hand, by introducing the criterion of profitability into a domain governed by different values, the arts have been degraded; on the other hand, artistic production has been stimulated. The general mediocrity of production does not matter: excellence always ends up standing out and imposing itself. As for poetry: it has survived, although been condemned to hide in the catacombs. From all of this, we can see that the circumstances are arduous and difficult—when have they not been?—but they are not desperate. 1990, 106



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The initial motivation for this chapter was the novel’s exclusionary protagonism in the market and in the critical debates about Latin American literature in the framework of the current phase of globalization. The more specific issue of Bolaño’s evolution from poet to novelist is interesting because it is also a question about the status of literature. That Bolaño, like other versatile writers, enters the international market as a novelist suggests that the novel has become “professionalized” and has managed to harmonize with the publishing

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industry, while poetry, with its intransigent attitude, is “condemned to hide in the catacombs.” But even there, in that barely visible, silent place, poetry is present. In fact, we can identify a gap between the globalized cultural industry and the uneven dynamics of local fields. In Latin America, as Paz points out in his essay, poetry is active; it manifests in underground scenarios, alternative fairs and the catalogues of artisan, self-managed publishing houses. This activity, however, is not reflected in the catalogues, fairs, and awards of the transnational cultural industry. Neoliberal globalization has fostered editorial concentration and, consequently, the international traffic of literature has ended up in the hands of a few groups that manage literature on the basis of mercantilist premises. The novel tends to accept these premises. It garners prizes and royalties. It has agents that represent it and a privileged place in the catalogues with the greatest reach of public. This is what is known as professionalization. Poetry, on the other hand, is that zone of the literature that has not accepted the pact; that remains reticent and opts for handcrafted, small-scale production. The tension between these two circuits, which is also a caesura in the field, is what novels like Bolaño’s and Zambra’s stage in their insistence on portraying poets as anachronistic or out-of-step characters. This is not, in any case, exactly a genre problem in the classical sense. This debate is already worn out: Is Martin Fierro (1872–1879) a novel or a poem? It is, first of all, a question of attitude and what is meant by literature. Poetry tends to focus on form, on ‘the how.’ The novel, on the story, on ‘the what.’ But what really parts the waters is the position a work adopts in the face of big publishing. In line with some of the arguments set out in this essay, Fabián Casas says: Sometimes I get excited about an author who published at an independent publishing house and then ends up being weakened by mainstream publishers, because they end up writing for what the publisher needs. […] Independent publishing houses are where the best literature is published because they are testing grounds. What the big publishers do is to take what has already had some impact within independent literature. Big publishing houses risk less. […] Poetry is a genre that nobody reads. Poetry raises questions and people buy certainties. Great poets ask great questions and great questions make you open your mind and start to question things in your life. 2020

There is, then, a correspondence between, on the one hand, independent and low-profile publishing, poetry, and critical power; and, on the other,

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professional or mainstream publishing, novels, and acceptance. The novel, again, communicates certainties; poetry triggers questions. The former is at the centre of international scholarship and leads to conclusions of general value; the second, at best, is the realm of a few specialists, usually local, who offer evaluations of a specific nature. If the novel gives rise to an industry, with subjects linked by their shared interests; poetry summons a community, amalgamated to a large extent by the idealistic rejection of the pact between literature and the market. Research on the evolution of Latin American novel/literature in the 21st century is already abundant. It has essentially recorded thematic or surface features. The most banal point out that Latin American literature no longer takes place in Latin America, others point to migration—a literary topic from at least The Bible—, probably the more insightful contributions highlight the diversification of gender perspectives. Less has been written about form and perhaps it would be interesting to examine—as Casas suggests—how the professionalization of the field has impacted this. There are practically no studies on contemporary poetry from a transnational or global perspective. One reason is because today it is relegated to its localized “catacombs,” but also, perhaps, because it does not show greater solidarity with the market. I would like to propose, in closing, that if there is one defining feature of Latin American literature today (considered as a whole, without privileging any of its parts) then this would be the absolute gap between novel and poetry. Novels have accepted the guidelines established by the global order since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Poetry (still) insists on remaining disaffected in the face of the changes brought by globalization. Bibliography Anagrama. 2020. Alejandro Zambra contesta a los lectores. 16 April. https://www .anagrama-ed.es/noticias/general/alejandro-zambra-contesta-a-los-lectores-474. Ayala, Matías. 2008. Notas sobre la poesía de Roberto Bolaño. In Bolaño salvaje, eds. Edmundo Paz Soldán and Gustavo Faverón Patriau, 91–101. Barcelona: Candaya. Ayma, Diego. 2016. Mario Montalbetti: La novela contemporánea es aburrida, fácil e inofensiva. Correo, 28 October. https://diariocorreo.pe/cultura/mario-montalbetti -la-novela-contemporanea-es-aburrida-facil-e-inofensiva-707470/. Bloomsbury. 2017. Roberto Bolaño as World Literature, eds. Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/roberto-bolano-as-world-literature -9781501316081. Bolaño, Roberto. 2018. Poesía reunida. Barcelona: Alfaguara.

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Bolaño, Roberto. 2007. La universidad desconocida. Barcelona: Anagrama. Bolaño, Roberto. 2004a. Los mitos de Cthulhu. In Palabra de América, AA.VV., 22–37. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Bolaño, Roberto. 2004b. Sevilla me mata. In Palabra de América, AA.VV., 17–21. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Casado, Miguel. 2015. Literalmente y en todos los sentidos. Desde la poesía de Roberto Bolaño. Madrid: Libros de la Resistencia. Casas, Fabián. 2020. Fabián Casas: El virus con el que hay que convivir es el capitalismo. Página/12, 20 December. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/312894-fabian-casas -el-virus-con-el-que-hay-que-convivir-es-el-capi. Web. Accessed 03-31-2021. Corral, Wilfrido H. 2011. Bolaño traducido. Nueva literatura mundial. Madrid: Escalera. Echevarría, Ignacio. 2013. Bolaño internacional. Algunas reflexiones en torno al éxito internacional de Roberto Bolaño. Estudios públicos 130: 175–202. https://www.cep chile.cl/cep/site/docs/20160304/20160304100318/rev130_IEche varria_en.pdf. Guevara, Santiago. 2013. Dos notas acerca de la relación entre poesía y prosa en Bolaño. La palabra 22: 55–66. http://search.proquest.com/openview/85ae5ad4215e5122b45 833c123dbf632/1.p df?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2033852. Hoyos, Héctor. 2015. Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Jorge, Gerardo. 2017. Me interesa pensar con la ceguera del poema. Entrevista a Mario Montalbetti por Gerardo Jorge. In Huir no es mejor plan. Antología (1978–2016). Mario Montalbetti, 123–139. Buenos Aires: Mansalva. Kirsch, Adam. 2017. The Global Novel. Writing the World in the 21st Century. New York: Columbia Global Report. Kristal, Efraín. 2002. ‘Considering Coldly …’: A Response to Franco Moretti. New Left Review 15: 61–74. Lemus, Rafael. 2011. Los detectives salvajes (una relectura crítica), de Roberto Bolaño. Letras libres, 1 June. https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/libros/los-detect ives-salvajes-una-relectura-critica-roberto-bolano. Locane, Jorge J. 2022. De Carmen Balcells a Indent Literary Agency. Para un mapeo y caracterización del agente literario de la literatura latinoamericana. Revista chilena de literatura 105: 151–175. https://revistaliteratura.uchile.cl/index.php/RCL/article/ view/67109. Medina, Rubén, ed. 2014. Perros habitados por las voces del desierto. México: Aldus. Me gusta leer. 2018. Roberto Bolaño. Poesía reunida. https://www.megustaleer.com /libros/poesia-reunida/MES-083763. Montalbetti, Mario. 2018. Notas para un seminario sobre Foucault. Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Montané Krebs, Bruno, coord. 2010. Dossier: Bolaño poeta. Quimera. Revista de literatura 314: 32–61.

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Nobelprize.org. Gabriela Mistral—Facts. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature /1945/mistral/facts/. Osorio, José Jesús. 2013. La poesía de Roberto Bolaño: tópicos y ensueños. Revista de humanidades 27: 123–153. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288902738.pdf. Paz, Octavio. 1990. La otra voz. Poesía y fin de siglo. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Prieto, Julio. 2019. La ceguera del poema: una lectura de Mario Montalbetti. Theory Now. Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought 2 (2): 42–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.30827 /TNJ.v2i2.9588. Quesada Gómez, Catalina. 2015. Adaptaciones, evoluciones y mutaciones históricoculturales: sobre los géneros literarios en Hispanoamérica en la era global. Hispanófila 173: 249–262 10.1353/hsf.2015.0013. Rapacioli, Juan. 2017. Mario Montalbetti: El sistema no quiere saber nada con la poesía, no la entiende y no le interesa. Télam, 17 May. https://www.telam.com.ar /notas/201705/189354-poesia-mario-montalbetti.html. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. 2021. El efecto Luiselli. Notas sobre la nueva literatura mexi­ cana y la lengua inglesa. In World Editors. Dynamics of Global Publishing and the Latin American Case between the Archive and the Digital Age, eds. Gustavo Guerrero, Benjamin Loy, and Gesine Müller. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter: 95–108. https://doi .org/10.1515/9783110713015-007. Siskind, Mariano. 2010. The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global. A Critique of World Literature. Comparative Literature 62 (4): 336–360. Volpi, Jorge. 2008. Bolaño, epidemia. Revista de la Universidad de México 49: 77–84. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Zambra, Alejandro. 2020. Poeta chileno. E-book. Barcelona: Anagrama. Zambra, Alejandro. 2010. La poesía de Roberto Bolaño. In No leer. Crónicas y ensayos sobre literatura, 109–117. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales.

Chapter 3

Rejoicing Materiality: A Geological Writing by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara Cristina Rivera Garza Abstract This is a reading of novelist Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of the China Iron as a piece of geological writing, that is a writing practice attentive to the fraught relationships between body and territory, especially the formation of human-nonhuman assemblages, the making and circulation of objects and commodities, as well as non-binary and polymorphous social interconnections. Cabezón Cámara’s detailed description of the fringes of the Argentine nation in conjunction with a rewriting of Martin Fierro shed light on an alternative history of Argentinian literature and the roots of both accumulation and the search for justice.

The characters of The Adventures of the China Iron seem to be going deeper into the confines of the Argentine territory and history, but they are, in fact, following the tracks that have connected this land and its peoples to international markets and global capitalism. Much-acclaimed contemporary novelist, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, skillfully, joyously rewrites an Argentine literary tradition (la gauchesca, via Martín Fierro) in order to criticize the problems brought about extractive economies and heteronormative mandates of masculinity governing everyday life, finding answers to the impasse of the Capitalocene and patriarchy in the resilience of indigenous communities of the interior. The desert is paradise, says China Iron voraciously, joyfully, as she looks into the horizon while the wagon in which she travels moves forward at a slow but steady pace. Her husband, a Martin Fierro who has for long wandered the roads of Argentinian literary history, has just been recruited by the army and, finding herself destitute, unable to fend for herself, she has just given up the two children she had borne before turning 14 years old. Young and free, unscathed by the tragedy of her upbringing, exuding energy and curiosity, this china—a poor girl in Argentinian slang—who still bears the last name

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_005

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of the missing husband—Iron, the English translation for Fierro—gladly surrenders body and soul to the journey through this territory of “boundless life” (Cabezón 2019, 59) she has just defined as a paradise. The girl is accompanying Elizabeth, whom soon she will only call Liz, a strong and beautiful red-headed Englishwoman, in turn looking for a lost husband and a ranch (although not necessarily in this order) for which she has property titles. This ranch lies beyond the pampas and even beyond the forts, in the inland inhabited by indigenous peoples they know little about. That’s where they are headed. This is the territory that welcomes their footprints, which rest over the footprints of many others. The China Iron assemblage is thus made up of a wagon full of commodities made in the factories of the empire, two “lonely” women, a dog named Estreya, and the initiation territory of a nation that, over time, will become modern Argentina. It is, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing would say in The Mushroom at the End of the World, a “polyphonic assemblage resulting from world projects that involve human and non-human elements” (Lowenhaupt 2015, 24). We are about to start. But the adventure could not be carried out without the language that brings together and provides meaning to all its participants: Spanish certainly, but a Spanish always close to a translated version of English that gets in the way from time to time; and the indigenous languages that make their presence felt both in the nomenclature of topography, the names of plants and animals, and among their few speakers that will join the troupe later in the novel. In all that coming and going, in a time lapse in which the city centers ruled by the empire become “remote,” China Iron learns a vocabulary and a syntax that allows her to recognize and interact with all living or non-living beings she runs into— less as inert entities that passively await her baptism, and more as material agents with the capacity to affect and be affected by others. These are strategies of attention and description that deviate “from the narcissistic reflection of human language and thought,” to fully touch, with a radiant and contagious joy, what Jane Bennet called “vibrant matter,” that which leaves its mark on “the presence of impersonal affect” that it produces (Bennet 2010, xv). Like all re-writing, this uterized version of Martín Fierro—at some point in the novel the narrator declares “our thing is the uterus”—takes the source text seriously only to turn it inside out, like a pair of freshly washed pants, to then hang them outdoors as a skirt, upside down. Cabezón Cámara not only dis-appropriates the material belonging to Martin Fierro in Argentinean literature, strategically showing his well-known features and mores, but does it in a way that emphasizes gender transgression.1 Unveiling her source-text, the 1 For an exploration of disappropriation see Cristina Rivera Garza, The Restless Dead. Necrowriting and Disappropriation (Vanderbuilt Press, 2020).

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novel first introduces Fierro as an untamable beast and, ultimately, as a poor and lonely widow. La China, baptized by the English woman as Josefina, thus enters the territory of the gaucho sharing his spirit of irredeemable freedom, but radically detaching from dominant notions of masculinity (and even masculinism) that have historically shaped the content and form of his payadas. Although more than a handful of readers have noted the sexual ambiguity of the tale of Martín Fierro, who finds in Sergeant Cruz his travel and life companion, Cabezón Cámara goes much further with the China Iron assemblage in terms of gender and other transgressions: the travelers are ready to cross all borders, both bodily and territorial, in joyously polymorphous configurations that articulate strategic solidarities of race, gender, and class.2 Adventures, according to Franco Moretti, “expand novels by opening them to the world” (Moretti 2013, 166). Adventure, he adds, likes war, thus becoming “the perfect blend of might and right to accompany capitalist expansions” (Moretti 2013, 177). Just as she does with the gaucho Martín Fierro’s coplas and perspective, Cabezón Cámara twists and disrupts this adventure that pioneers and paves the way for the onslaught of capital. Moving slowly, allowing time to delight in living matter through an opening up of all the senses, the China Iron adventure faces enemies and makes friends in a journey that flexibly, even joyfully, accommodates itself to the forms of production and life of the natives inland. A backwards adventure, then. An adventure that advances slowly and lets itself be affected by, even assimilated to, the conditions of the land and the material desires of its inhabitants. This geological writing not only poses the question about justice but also, perhaps more importantly, about pleasure— about the radical critique pleasure enacts against the extractive nature of capitalism.3 We’re headed there now. 1

The Journey through Vibrating Matter

In the beginning there is the pampa and the dust, but soon there will be much more. The plains. The dune. The ombú tree. The lagoons surrounded by reeds, coots, or herons. The flamingos. The rheas. The wolf fish. The wild cattle. The viscachas.4 The armadillo that has to be slaughtered and then cooked in its own shell. The legends of ‘bad light’ bones. The scattered skeletons. All this 2 See “El amor,” included in Martin Kohan, Cuerpo a Tierra (Eterna Cadencia, 2015). See also “Disidencia sexualen re-escrituras de Martín Fierro,” Sociales y Virtuales, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Vol. 8, Núm. 8, September 2021. 3 See Cristina Rivera Garza, Escrituras geológicas (Iberoamericana Vervuet, forthcoming). 4 See similar use of local names as a strategy of translucency (to use Edward Glissant’s terminology) in Selva Almada, No es un río (Literatura Random House, 2021).

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without forgetting the smell of lavender, the shape of one’s first letters, the porcelain, the petticoats, the silk, the shoes with heels and laces, the whisky. The well-sharpened knife for butchering and self-defense. And, on top of all this, the vicissitudes of the light, and a celestial dome that opens to the imagination. The names appear in cadences that come from other centuries, and from other texts, but that, nonetheless, remain as palpitating and rhythmic as if they were born yesterday. Here the pampa names itself in a language that not only escapes “human narcissism” but also productive instrumentalization. The territory does not hide its corners, its nooks and crannies, its hopeless entanglements: there are flies and corpses, dust clouds that clear only to reveal immense herds of cattle, and too much of the road to share. Nothing can be known for sure and every dialogue opens like a sieve filtering and revealing matter to common delight. Given her age and territorial origin, we could imagine that China has everything to learn from the native of the empire, but it quickly becomes clear in this novel of adventures and reversals that Elizabeth not only needs a translator but also an interlocutor, that is, an accomplice. What one does not know the other does, and in an act of reciprocal exchange Liz and China and Estreya establish the terms of an inter-species community that, far from fearing and hiding from its surroundings, unfolds upon it, agile and flexible.5 The pedagogy of this continual apprehending isn’t vertical or static, but rather marked by curiosity and pleasure. Like the learning among women imagined by Sor Juana in the Carta Atenagórica, here Liz and China do away with the formality of masculine instruction, that tends to be abstract and vertical, opting instead for processes of knowledge that stem from immediate necessity and the path of practice.6 From hunting to cooking, drinking to bathing, between covering ground and conversation, the women savor the world as two. Nothing on the path the wagon takes is easy and yet, the pleasure of being let loose, the surprising abundance of the desert and the voracity with which the two women and the dog open up to meet it is such that each step is transformed into shared learning. In more than a few novels from the 19th century the incorporation of the “barbarian” into the civilized world takes place via the bath. In quasi-religious scenes that in many ways resemble baptism, more than one poor man (or above all, woman) has left behind the filth of a wild past in the transparent

5 For an introduction to inter-species arrangements, see Donna Haraway, Staying With The Trouble: Making Kinin the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016). 6 See Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Answer / La respuesta: Including Sor Filotea’s Letter and New Selected Poems, trans. by Electa Arenal (The Feminist Press, 2009).

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waters of a river. Perhaps one of the most paradigmatic scenes in this sense is the immersion of Marisela, the undesired daughter of Doña Bárbara in the novel of the same name by Rómulo Gallegos. Santos Luzardo, the articulate licenciado, invites the dirty and disheveled adolescent to plunge into the river to carry out the ritual that will deposit her into the world of men as a desired woman (Gallegos 2009). China Iron also plunges into the river and yet—even though the ablution separates her from the brutal past of her childhood and, now clean, prepares her to switch out her dirty rags for petticoats of cotton and silk (that she’ll later substitute for the shirts and drawers of the Englishman)— this plunge does not insert her into the lowest rungs of the gender hierarchies of the era, but instead into the wagon of wonders and the arms of a woman. “I felt things acutely,” the China Iron of these days declares, “my whole body, my whole skin was completely alive as if it was made of hunting animals, of felines, of the pumas that we were afraid to meet in the desert. I was awake and aware that life has a perimeter, almost as if I could see it” (Cabezón 2019, 50). 2

Nothing Comes from Nothing

Many a comparison is established, favorable and unfavorable, between the customs of the empire (in which speed above all is emphasized) and those of the pampa. In dialogues that are halfway bilingual, amid swigs of whisky and the slow advance of the wheels over the prairie, Elizabeth tells tales of the tireless machines and raincoats of England, but also of the curries of India, the elephants of Africa and the rice fields of China. The geography of the globe slowly unfolds before China’s curious gaze, and her questions do not stop. Maybe it is due to the ceaseless questioning, and to the materiality that blankets all, that every object appears before them unseparated from its entire genealogy: its history, context, the way in which it was produced, its mode of extraction, its work.7 “Everything alive lives off the death of someone or something else,” Elizabeth assures. “Because nothing comes from nothing.” But objects are more than objects. Recognized for their use value—the silk of the petticoats, the cotton of the towels, the aroma of the tea—but also for their long trajectory given their exchange value, these objects are rather commodities that are produced and exchanged in the circuits of capital until they

7 For an analysis of things as repositories of history, with an emphasis on their circulation under globalization, see Héctor Hoyos, Things with History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America (Columbia University Press, 2015).

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reach these women on their journey through the pampa.8 To raise the question about accumulation, as Sergio Villalobos Ruminott suggested in Heterografías de la violencia [Heterographies of Violence], is to recognize the labor exploitation on which this long trajectory is built.9 For this reason, when the two women willfully take part in the English ceremony of tea, China Iron describes a voyage and a process as well: The smell of near-black tea leaves torn from the green mountains of India that would travel to Britain […] we drink green mountains and rain, and we also drink what the Queen drinks. We drink the Queen, we drink work, and we drink the broken back of the man bent double as he cuts the leaves, and the broken back of the man carrying them. Cabezón 2019, 49

And the same occurs with other goods of everyday use, like the towels: Both of us would get in the wagon and take off our clothes, dry ourselves with those towels from the mills of Lancashire, that before that had come from the Mississippi Delta and form the cracks of the whip on the backs of black people in the United States; almost everything that I touched knew more about the world than I did, and was new to me. Cabezón 2019, 55

It remains clear here that Cabezón Cámara’s materialism goes well beyond a fascination for things. She is not a collector, but an observer that looks into the mechanisms that link materiality to wider contexts and larger histories. Hers is not only a writing oriented towards objects, but rather a radical materialism that recognizes in the object the labor that grants it not only existence but value, and that, thus, places it from the start in a context of inequality never oblivious to exploitation and conflict. Goods are part of wider processes of production, reproduction, and distribution that, analyzed in their most trivial materiality, question the otherwise incorporeal and harmonious images of the world. It might be said that, the further this wagon travels away from the centers of the empire, the less effective is the enchantment that deforms or occludes the cruel genealogy of goods themselves. 8 See Karl Marx, Essential Writings of Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Communist Manifesto, Wage Labor and Capital, Critique of the Gotha Program (Red and Black Publishers, 2010). For a critique to the Marxist concept of accumulation see Sylvia Federicci, Calibán and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004). 9 Sergio Villalobos Ruminott, Heterografías de la violencia. Historia. Nihilismo. Destrucción (Chile: Edicionesla Cebra, 2016).

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The Crying of the Cow Made Us Feel Awful

China Iron, at 14 years old, has already given birth to two children and yet, as she herself recounts in her adventures, she had much to learn of a world that appears new to her at the slightest provocation. Her joy at being let loose is comparable only to her will to question everything, especially points of view. From her conversations with Liz, it soon becomes clear that for some (such as the Queen) the world is “a sphere filled with riches belonging to her, and that she could order to be extracted from anywhere,” whereas for others it is no more than “a flat surface where you galloped about rounding up cows, cutting the throats of your enemies before they cut your own throat, or fleeing conscription and battles.” (Cabezón 2019, 24). The Queen and the gaucho certainly do not experience the world equally. But nor does China Iron overlook the peculiarity of animals. Estreya, this radiant presence fighting against the dullness of poverty, is a dog, but never a minor character in this journey. His humors and moods, troubles and gestures, constitute a fundamental aspect of this tribe of three that crosses the pampa. And maybe it is this intimate closeness—the closeness of the horizontal plane on which the interactions with Estreya take place (Estreya, a male dog with a feminine name)—that gives birth to such interest in seeing the world from the bodily position of the animals that surround her. As China Iron tells us: In those days of discovery I tried looking from lots of different angles: I walked on all fours seeing what Estreya saw, the pasture, the creepy crawlies that went about on the surface of the earth, cows’ udders, Liz’s hands, her face, food on plates, and everything that moved. I leant my head on the heads of the oxen and I put my hands next to my eyes and I saw what they saw[…]. Cabezón 2019, 23–24

Seeing one’s territory through other eyes, something promised by literature as much as by love, is the biggest risk Cabezón Cámara embarks upon throughout these pages. The de-centralization of the human perspective occurs via the establishment of non-hierarchical relations with animals that, to begin, have a name: “The lamb’s called Braulio. He’s male” (Cabezón 2019, 40) says Rosario, the gaucho that they meet up with on the road and whom the women will soon call just Rosa, adding yet another gender twist to the voyage. Far from any kind of vegetarian utopia in the middle of the pampa, the travelers willingly take part in an asado when hunger and the pleasures of appetite require it. The process

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of food production, however, is not the same as that undertaken in the big slaughterhouses in the city where the livestock is anonymous, pure instrumentalized meat. Here, Rosario, “grabbed a calf, stunned it with a stone to the head and slit its throat. Its mother’s distressed moaning made us all feel awful” (2019, 40). Almost immediately after, the same Rosario “after having killed the calf […] went up to the cow and stroked it, asking her forgiveness and feeding her some grass from his hand” (2019, 40). Argentina’s relationship with meat is legendary, economically and culturally speaking. It is notable that, in these adventures throughout the paradigmatic territory of beef, cattle aren’t mere goods in the making or numbers related to the gross domestic product of a nation, but rather characters with names: China Iron baptizes with the name Curry the cow she has to milk before enjoying the asado. In a ‘we’ that places them both on the same level, China glimpses the subjectivity of the cow in eyes that have become an abyss: The runaway and I looked at each other, she batted her eyelashes in what I took to be gratitude, as if the milk had been weighing her down. I kept looking and saw in her round, untroubled eyes, her good cow eyes, an abyss, a deep longing for pasture, for a track, for fields of sunflowers even. All this I seemed to glimpse in her pupils along with her urge to lick her calf. Cabezón 2019, 39

But the cow is only one of the many animals that populate the constantly moving country of the pampa. There are birds, of course, and pumas, which they fear. And there are more: hares and worms, armadillos and red deer, wild boar, grubs and cuys, partridges, rats. Far from being the tabula rasa that the conquistadors imagined or the always unpopulated lands longed for by capital, Cabezón Cámara’s in-between territories of various mestizajes are born inhabited, dwelled in.10 They are, themselves, pured welling. 4

The Two-Spirit and Big Families

As often occurs with the official history of the United States, Argentina’s is frequently presented as the result of migration or, in any case, without the 10

For a political definition of dwelling or ubicación, as termed by Mexican writer José Revueltas, see “El escritor y la tierra”, en Visión del Paricutín, José Revueltas. 6. Obra Reunida. Crónica (Era 2014), 548.

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nuisance of the original presence of indigenous peoples, in contrast to other regions of Latin America such as Peru or Mexico. In this anti-adventure that does not love war but rather melds with the territory and its inhabitants, Cabezón Cámara, on the contrary, exalts the inland indigenous presence in an ending that is decidedly utopian and Pantagruelian. After crossing the hyper-masculine and liminal space of the fort, run by no less than a coronel Hernández who is accused of plagiarizing Fierro’s coplas; after the confirmation there of Liz and China’s joyful lovemaking, and stirring up the orgy that questions the masculine regime in its very foundation, the wagon continues on towards the hinterland of Indigenous Territory. The encounter with the other, with the selk’nam nation, of which according to contemporary reports there remains only one living speaker, takes place in “a stillness in which we all just looked” which is later sealed with song and festivity. Instead of the exploitation that led to the genocide of indigenous peoples during the 19th century, this re-writing of the history of this land of fire, the Tierra del Fuego, imagines an alternative in which the predominant elements are forms of work in accordance with the rhythms of the land, as well as communal organizations that go beyond heteronormativity and the dictates of the nuclear family. China Iron, who has been both woman and man throughout the journey, finally finds the place where it isn’t necessary to opt for one identity or the other: China is now a two-spirit. And her chosen family grows every larger, now including not only the wagon’s passengers but also Fierro, who has returned to the na­rrative in a queer tone (widower by a man and mother-father of two creatures), and Kauka, the woman with whom China Iron becomes a fish in the Kutral-Có lagoon, and Kauka’s daughters. Like Gonzalo Guerrero who became Mayan during the travels of the invasion of the American continent, the China Iron assemblage melds here, like their hosts, with the land that takes them in. They give themselves a name, they call themselves the Iñchiñ (which in Mapuche means ‘we’), and they soon learn to coexist with the Guarani in the frontier and migrate slowly via the Paraná. And there they go, carrying the adventure on their backs, moving as nomads through a territory that they do not claim as their own, migrating “to escape the cold, […] so that we’re never where they expect us to be.” Cabezón Cámara delves into literary history and the history of the territory less to represent them, or to uphold their existence as is—or as they both have been taught over time—and more to offer a reversal afforded by pleasure and the perseverance of commons. It’s not a mere coincidence that thinkers and activists such as Maya quiche sociologist and public intellectual Gladys Tzul Tzul, Mixe linguist Yasnaya Aguilar, and Sylvia Federici, among others, have devoted precious intellectual energy to explore the recent history of nonstate

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forms of production and ways of life that Cabezón Cámara recreates in this novel.11 There is a similar critical energy and, why not, a shared conviction that our futures as a species will very much depend on the endurance of the very possibility of the commons. A disappropriative re-writing that incorporates plural post-anthropocentric points of view, these multi-layered adventures of the China Iron are perhaps the very embodiment of such commons in the field of writing. Translated by Lauris McQuoid-Greason, Washington University in St. Louis; and Cristina Rivera Garza

Acknowledgments

A Spanish version of this text was published in Literal. Latin American Voices / Voces Latinoamericanas, https://literalmagazine.com/el-regocijo-de -la-materialidad/. Sections of this text were translated by the author, and others by Lauris McQuoid-Greason. The final English revision belongs to Lauris McQuoid-Greason. Bibliography Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Cabezón Cámara, Gabriela. 2019. The Adventures of China Iron. Translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre. Edinburgh: Charco Press. Gallegos, Rómulo. 2009. Doña Bárbara. México: Porrúa. Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant Reading. London: Verso. 11 See Sylvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2018); Yasnaya Aguilar, Ää Manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística (Almadía, 2020); Gladys Tzul Tzul, Sistemas de gobierno communal indígena: Mujeres y tramas de parentesco in Chuimeq’ena (SOCEE, 2016). For a general history of nonstate peoples see James Scott, Against the Grain. A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2018).

Chapter 4

New Media and New Technologies in Contemporary Latin American Writing Edmundo Paz Soldán Abstract Contemporary Latin American literature shows how internet and new technologies have become a generative space of narrative forms spanning from realism to science fiction. The texts being produced not only reflect about the transformation of the contemporary landscape but explore as well the way in which human subjectivity itself is being altered. The essay analyzes the work of Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra and Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda, whose focus on the relationship between writing and its machinery takes the form of an array of positions ranging from symbolic postures of resistance against the system (Zambra’s stories in My Documents [2013]) to showing how internet structures the subjectivity of the characters (Ojeda’s Nefando [2016]). Globalized technologies, far from restraining literary processes, have accelerated them and contributed to redefining the role of the writer, who remains close to new literary practices.

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New media and new technologies influence writing as well as our perception of objects. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was well aware of this; in 1882 he was one of the first to adopt the typewriter, which made his writing more aphoristic: “The tools we use to write are working on our thoughts,” he wrote (Kittler 1999, 200). In the 20th century, the avant-garde took advantage of the typographical games typewriters made possible. From Apollinaire’s calligrams to Vicente Huidobro’s concrete poems in Canciones de la noche (1913), literature of the period took pleasure in showing the material elements from which it had been created. It was not just about registering modern landscapes, but of making art with modern techniques, as Huidobro pointed out: “No es el tema sino la manera de producirlo lo que lo hace ser novedoso. Los poetas que creen que porque las máquinas son modernas, también serán modernos al cantarlas, se equivocan absolutamente” [“It’s not the subject but the

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_006

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way of producing it that makes it new. Those poets who believe that because machines are modern, they too will be modern if they sing about them, are absolutely wrong”] (744). In 1950, Charles Olson wrote in his influential essay “Projective Verse”: “It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and bar a musician has had.” Olson mentions E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams among those who benefited from the typewriter to compose their poems. The avant-garde reflected on its use within their texts, producing writing highly conscious of its materiality. Bolivian poet Hilda Mundy plays with the typewriter’s presence in the composition of texts in her Ultraist canto to the modern metropolis, Pirotecnia (1936). She points out that writers use ellipses above all as a means of omitting risqué love scenes they prefer not to narrate (“un tecleo imaginario de Intertype en 20 puntos seguidos”) [“an imaginary Intertype text consisting of 20 points one after the other”] (113); her own text, riddled with ellipses, suggests they can have other uses. Those “munditos en la máquina” [“little worlds in the machine”] (167) can signify a light, graceful, progressive style opposed to the old rhetorical prose of “claúsulas largas vaciadas en plomo” [“long empty leaden clauses”] (68). The typewriter’s graphic elements contribute to a modern style: “Tres puntos suspensivos, una frase en bastardilla, dos paréntesis amorosos que enlazan a una frase por ambos ‘costadillos’ tienen una elecuencia absolutiva … única … incontrastable” [“Three dots, an italicized phrase, two parentheses that lovingly endcap a phrase possess an eloquence that is absolute … unique … incomparable”] (73). In contemporary Latin American literature, new generations of writers have also creatively appropriated these new mediums in both form and in content. At the level of content, even a writer so seemingly “disconnected” as the Chilean Alejandro Zambra reflects in his short stories and essays on “liquid love” in the Internet era and the change the adoption of the computer entailed for his writing. At the level of form, Mexican writers Cristina Rivera Garza and Merlina Acevedo, among many others, have taken advantage of the spatial limitations of Twitter to create, as Rivera Garza puts it in his essay Los muertos indóciles, “formas de escritura que responden con creces a la pregunta/abracadabra de todo tuit: ¿Qué le está pasando al (lenguaje)?” [“forms of writing that amply respond to the question/abracadabra of all tweets: What is happening (to language)?]” (2013, 184). Poems compiled from Facebook status updates, novels in WhatsApp format, epistolary tales written in chat language, and experimental texts emerging from the possibilities of a software word

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processor dependent on an aesthetic of “keyboard shortcuts” (Craig Epplin, “Aesthetics”) also abound. There are also several novels and stories which are exploring the new technological landscape. Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda’s Nefando (2016) is the narrative representation of a new media ecology, in which the novel has to make its way into a space marked by the predominance of internet. In Los cuerpos del verano (2012), Argentine Martín Felipe Castagnet narrates a transhumanist story in which the possibility of life after death becomes a reality, and the internet is the afterlife where our brains will stop before they return to life in another body after a long state of “flotation.” The internet is a space where technology is not aseptic, but rather something infected by our bodies: “quiero evitar tocar la pantalla transparente y fría. Podría jurar que huele a sangre, a líquido amniótico; sé que son mis sentidos, sobreestimulados por regresar al espacio donde viví una vida entera”; [“I want to avoid touching the transparent and cold screen. I could say it smells like blood, like amniotic fluid; I know it is my senses, over-stimulated from returning to the space where I lived an entire life”] (2012, 14). In the short story “Astronautas,” by Denis Fernández (2016), the internet is a metaphor for the entry into another reality: visiting the Deep Web as a body that has transformed into a bot becomes literal; the human, however, assumes non-human contours: “los astronautas que navegan a través de la Internet Profunda … deambulan con formas monstruosas, moldeadas como si estuvieran hechos de plastilina, y tienen una capacidad de transformación doscientos millones de veces superior a la capacidad que tienen los pulpos de imitar a otros animales” [“the astronauts who navigate through the Deep Web … wander around with monstrous forms, molded as if they were made out of play dough, and they have an ability to transform that is two hundred million times superior to an octopus’s ability to imitate other animals”] (2016, 11). In Mapas terminales (2017), by Lucila Grossman, technology and the internet are the points through which the communication of the characters passes; in fact, they are the points through which everything passes: rather than interacting with the web, the novel is about being the web. In this manner, a new form of perception is born, which the narrator captures in a sort of generational declaration of intent: Nosotros no queremos comer, nosotros no dormimos, a nosotros nos duele la espalda de estar buscándonos en el celular, desesperadamente, entrando a Invirox, sin poder comunicarnos, esperando la llamada, nosotros somos adictos a la red que nos comunica con nosotros, de hecho no estamos seguros de querer estar con otros que no sean nosotros, menos todavía de querer estar en el medio de la montaña con otros, así estamos

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bien, es que es nos comunicamos, y cuando no nos comunicamos no hay nada, porque afuera de la línea está vacío, nadie nos pregunta si pasa algo, porque a todo el mundo le pasan cosas todo el tiempo, todos acá tienen el eje sensible a volumen máximo … We don’t want to eat, we don’t sleep, our back doesn’t hurt from looking at our cell phones, desperately, entering Invirox without being able to communicate, waiting for the call, we are addicted to the web that connects us to each other, in fact we are not sure of wanting to be with others who are not ourselves, even less so of wanting to be in the middle of a mountain with others, we’re fine like this, this is how we communicate, and when we don’t communicate there is nothing, because outside of online is vacancy, no one asks us if something has happened, because things happen to everyone all the time, everyone over here has the dial turned to maximum volume … 2017, 107–8

In all of these fictions, the internet becomes the generative space of narrative forms spanning from realism to science fiction. The internet can be read, in fact, as a form that structures the subjectivity of the characters and of life itself.1 The internet opposes the totality of the city or country where the characters move, the narrowed lifespan of those same characters, and the regulation of certain hierarchies that function in social institutions by creating webs that allow characters to find a mode of escape: ruptures with biological rhythm and the hierarchies that regulate the day to day. The internet is a web: the tension between the exterior world and hyperspace threatens to dissolve, and in some cases begins to break: characters go to the internet to wait to be revived (Castagnet), transform into binary codes to explore digital space (Fernández), find the vestiges of their trauma (Ojeda), and are not aware of their existence because they live there all the time (Grossman). As the narrator of Los cuerpos del verano says, “internet modificó la realidad al convertirse en objeto; la red tiene una existencia tan concreta como las ciudades de una civilización” [“the internet modified reality when it turned into an object; the web has an existence as concrete as the cities of a civilization”] (2012, 66).

1 In Mexican Rodrigo Márquez Tizano’s Yakarta (2016), the screen turns the characters into cyborgs who are obsessed with a game administered by the Secretary of Chaos and Chance: to play, cables should be connected to the very bodies of the players.

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In the case of writers like Zambra—or, say, Mexican Mario Bellatin or Argentine Sergio Chejfec—, reflection on the relationship between writing and its machinery can take the form of an array of positions ranging from celebration of the new writing machines as artifacts that help a writer increase productivity within a capitalist system (Bellatin), to symbolic gestures of resistance against the system (Zambra), which encourage the late adoption of new technologies and a cultlike respect for artisanal elements such as the notebook and writing by hand. Although there is resistance, it does not lead to much: the machine always triumphs, and the writer always returns to the fold to assemble a style on the basis of the new technology. The hegemonic presence of the computer, as well as cell phones and tablets in contemporary textual production, tolerates nonconformists and rebels, accepting their nostalgia and romanticism. This is the way a system becomes ubiquitous and indispensable. It is no coincidence that Mario Bellatin’s memoirs about his books is titled Underwood portátil: modelo 1915 (2005), an homage to the typewriter on which he began composing his works. The machine provides him with sensory pleasure: “Siempre me ha deleitado el sonido que surge de la teclas. El olor de la tinta sobre el papel” [“The sound that surges from its keys has always delighted me”] (487–8); there is also conflict, as the text speaks of his enjoyment when partaking in “la lucha que, de cuando en cuando, debía establecer contra la enredada cinta bicolor de la máquina” [“the fight that, now and again, must be undertaken against the tangled two-toned tape of the machine”] (488). When the writer was living in Cuba, a scarcity of writing instruments meant that his Underwood was used by many people who needed to send a message to the Central Committee or compose a permit to leave the country. For him the device seemed to embody the spirits of all who touched it: “Fue entonces que se me ocurrió cierto Sistema para, de alguna manera, exorcizar mi Underwood de la cantidad de energías que le pasaban por encima. Igual que durante los primeros tiempos de escritura, empecé a copiar fragmentos completos de algunos de mis autores preferidos, hasta que consideraba que las teclas recobraban la neutralidad necesaria para seguir escribiendo” [“It was then that a system to occurred to me to, in some way, exorcise my Underwood of the sum of the energies weighing upon it. Just as in the earliest days of my writing, I began to copy complete fragments of some of my favorite authors until I felt the keys had recovered the neutrality necessary to continue writing”] (2005, 488). Bellatin copies his favorite quotes on the typewriter in order to erase the negative energies of previous texts. It is the exercise of someone who needs to make explicit his way of constructing a “carga de escritura” [“charge of writing”] (2005, 491). Writing can be an artisanal product, the work of an artist

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that faces a blank page and polishes the artistic object every day. That product, however, remains part of a capitalist system in which productive machines help the artist become more efficient and productive, a fact Bellatin clearly notes in an interview: [P]ensamos que no cambiaba [el contenido] cuando hubo esta discusión con el paso de la máquina a la computadora, pero yo sí sentí que cambiaba; después llegaron los procesadores de texto que no duraron mucho porque inmediatamente hubo la posibilidad de las computadoras caseras y noté que muy rápidamente la gente se calló, y yo creo que fue mi caso: pensaba en ese momento que el cambio estaba a favor mío porque me volví más productivo, más efectivo. [W]e thought the (content) wouldn’t change when we discussed the move from typewriter to computer, but I did feel it was changing; later, word processors arrived that didn’t last long because immediately the possibility of home computers immediately came along, and I noted very quickly how people went quiet, which I believe was my case: I thought then that the change was in my favor because I became more productive, more effective. “iPod”2

Total production time is reduced because the artist-artisan can accelerate the conditions for the writing of his books. Bellatin was born without a right arm and over the years has used a number of different prosthetic limbs. This has had an influence on his work, which is full of reflections about how the use of a prosthesis affects the body. Reflection upon the writing instrument as another form of prosthesis seems logical in his case; the typewriter is a supplement, a mediation. The paradox for Bellatin consists in his search for a prosthesis allowing a more natural and less mediated relationship to writing, one which one might say is like that of a man writing by hand. The iPod touch’s stylus is like writing with a pencil: “mientras más pequeña la máquina es más íntima la relación que se puede establecer con las palabras, hay una conciencia mucho más grande de la relación con el lenguaje” [“the smaller the machine, the more intimate the relationship that can be established with the words. There is a 2 I mention Bellatin here in order to complement my main argument, but, following his own suggestion, it would be interesting to analyze how his work has changed according to the writing tools he has used, from typewriters to iPods. This theme should be developed in another essay.

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much greater consciousness of the relationship with language”] (“iPod”). It is a curious change: a century ago, when writers moved from writing by hand to writing with machines, many complained that the machine was unnatural. Kafka said that “[e]l inconveniente de escribir a máquina es que uno pierde el hilo” [“The inconvenient thing about writing with a machine is that one loses the thread”] (Piglia 2005, 167). For Kafka, the typewriter produced an impersonal style, associated with his work in the insurance company. Writing by hand, in contrast, was in harmony with the body: “Forgive me if I do not write with a machine,” he says in a letter to Felipe Bauer, “but I have an enormous number of things to tell you, and the machine is there in the hallway […] what’s more, it doesn’t let me write quickly enough” [“Discúlpeme si no escribo a máquina, pero es que tengo una enorme cantidad de cosas que decirle, la máquina está allá en el corredor […] además la máquina no me escribe lo suficientemente veloz”] (2005, 167). Valeria de los Ríos points out that the complaints of writers a century ago had a real foundation: “Esta tecnología opera desconectando la mente, la mano y el ojo. La substitución del acto de escribir a mano por el gesto mecánico del tipeo, lleva a una concepción despersonalizada de la escritura, la que ya no se considera una artesanía única e individual” [“The technology operated by disconnecting the mind, hand and eye. The substitution of the act of writing by hand with the mechanical gesture of typing led to a depersonalized conception of writing, which was now no longer considered a unique and individual craft”] (2011, 133). Today that depersonalization by the machine has become normal. Bellatin’s praise for his iPhone is not an anomaly; other writers have reflected on how the computer seems more natural to them than the typewriter. Sergio Chejfec has said that: I prefer to write with a word processor. From my point of view it most closely approximates writing by hand in terms of the text’s flexibility and immediacy. Writing with computers is more intimate and involving … the typewriter for me was a mechanical obstacle that could only be gotten around by using an assortment of minor devices. Only with the computer did I discover the simplicity and naturalness of writing by hand—without writing by hand. 2013, 2

The resonance of certain words in the language of Bellatin and Chejfec points to the emotional relationship of the writer with his machines: “intimate”, “natural”, “simple”. In writers’ political unconsciousness, the computer has already

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won the battle, for it has become normal; it is seen not only as an extension of the human being—as McLuhan saw new technologies—but as something itself part of the human being. With the computer, the writer feels that he has returned to writing by hand. 2

Zambra

“Quizás puedo decirlo de esta manera: mi padre era un computador y mi madre una máquina de escribir” [“Perhaps I can put it like this: my father was a computer and my mother a typewriter”] (2013a, 10), says the narrator of “Mis documentos” [My documents], a short story by Alejandro Zambra that also reflects on the impact of the new technologies for writing. The narrator remembers the two options presented to the boy who will later be a writer: the computer and the typewriter. In Zambra’s case, in a premeditated gesture of clearly political content, his characters often opt for technologies that are outdated or on the way to being so; the idea is to slow down the productive speed of capitalism by backing the nostalgic gesture as a form of resistance to programmed obsolescence (Hoyos). But that political gesture of resistance, that rebellion with a cause, are defeated. Nostalgia does not bring about a change in sensibility, a change in style or even a change in the machine of textual production. Zambra and his characters can resist, but in the end we read, in a scene that is part of the same story, that Zambra’s literature is produced with the very word processors and computers to which he would have liked to oppose it. The writer is thus simultaneously a possibility of resistance and change to the system, and a “symptom” of global capitalism (Epplin, “Aesthetics”). In “Mis documentos”, when the father shows his son a huge computer for the first time, “espera[] una reacción maravillada” [“he expects[] an amazed response”]. The boy “fing[e] interés, pero apenas podía me iba a jugar al escritorio de Loreto” [“feigns interest, but as soon as I could I went to play at Loreto’s desk”] (2013a, 9). In contrast, it is his mother’s typewriter that calls his attention: “una Olivetti convencional de color negro … Mi madre había estudiado programación, pero más temprano que tarde se había olvidado de los computadores, y prefería esa tecnología menor, que seguía siendo actual, porque estaba todavía lejos la masificación de los computadores” [“a conventional black Olivetti … My mother had studied programming, but soon she’d forgotten about computers, preferring that minor technology which remained in use because the days of mass-production of computers hadn’t yet come”] (2013a, 9).

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Zambra remembers the time in which a writer still had the option of choosing between the typewriter and the computer. Everything changed later, with the computer imposing itself on the typewriter. “Mis documentos” registers that transition. At the start, the choice of the Olivetti, that “minor technology”, is in line with its use for transcribing a “minor work”. The typewriter at the narrator’s house is used specifically by the mother to transcribe the grandmother’s short stories and poems, texts that only circulate within the family. In the ’90s, the narrator is converted to a new technology, at the start secretly: “Había en casa un reluciente computador negro. De vez en cuando lo usaba para hacer mis trabajos o escribía poemas que luego imprimía, pero borraba los archivos, no quería dejar huellas” [“At home there was a shiny new black computer. Once in a while I used it to do my work or write poems that I later printed, but I deleted the files, I didn’t want to leave traces”] (2013a, 26). An ambiguity exists in this story of the erasure of archives. On the one hand, the gesture is understood to be the modesty of a beginning writer, who writes his texts but does not want anybody to know about them. On the other hand, given what has been previously narrated about his preference for the typewriter, “I didn’t want to leave traces” can also be understood to mean that the narrator does not want to reveal how he has sold out to the mass cult of the personal computer. From rejection to ambiguity to acceptance: the narrator ends by setting up a scene in which we are present during the final process of the writing of the short story that we are reading: “Releo, cambio frases, preciso nombres … Corto y pego, agrando la letra, cambio la tipografía, el interlineado. Pienso en cerrar este archivo y dejarlo para siempre en la carpeta Mis documentos” [“I reread, change phrases, specify names … I cut and paste, blow up the font, change the typography, the line spacing. I think of concluding and leaving this forever in the folder My documents”] (28). His phrase “copy and paste” highlights the material role of the word processor in the writing of a short story, and the effects of the new technology on literary production. All of us cut and paste today while we write; in fact, Zambra makes that gesture one of the fundamental means by which the computer affects style, pointing out that it’s not his characters’ nostalgia for the typewriter or writing by hand at work in the writing process: “Es innegable”, he says in his essay “Cuaderno, archivo, libro” [Notebook, file, book], “que los procesadores de textos sistematizaron la lógica del montaje … hasta en los textos más conservadores se adivina el montaje: incluso si se niega toda fragmentariedad, incluso si, como hace Jonathan Franzen, se imita el paradigma clásico, el texto le debe más a la estética de las vanguardias históricas que al modelo del realismo decimonónico.” [“It can’t be denied that word processors systematize the logic of assemblage … even in

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the most conservative texts, one can discern that they have been assembled: even if one denies all fragmentation, even if, as Jonathan Franzen does, one imitates the classical paradigm, the text owes more to the aesthetic of the historical avant-garde than to the realist 19th model”] (2013c, 251). Thanks to the computer, all of us are avant-garde, experimental writers: “Hoy más que nunca el escritor es alguien que construye sentido juntando pedazos. Cortando, pegando y borrando.” [“Today, more than ever, the writer is someone who constructs meaning by gathering fragments. Cutting, pasting and deleting”] (2013c, 251).3 In another short story by Zambra, “Recuerdos de un computador personal” [Memories of a personal computer], there is a detailed analysis of the form in which the computer has become an inextricable part of literature and daily life. The short story recounts how a computer not only accompanies the protagonist, Max, but also has an influence on his writing and his daily life, from the moment it is bought at the start of 2000 and the protagonist is only a consumer innocently enjoying the fetishist pleasure of the machine,4 to when, later on, it ends up negatively affecting his relationship with his girlfriend Claudia. Zambra skillfully shows how, once the stable phase of the relationship between Max and Claudia has begun and they begin to live together, the computer begins to conquer the domestic space. It becomes a monster that not only takes over its own room, but also interferes in the couple’s relationship, destroyed first because both of them are addicted to the Internet, and later due to Max’s obsession with pornography and emails to secret girlfriends. Max is presented as an outdated figure, behind the times in his transition from typewriter to the computer.5 The story makes it clear that the adoption of 3 Cf what Katherine Hayles says in this respect: “The relationship between striking a key and producing text with a computer is very different from the relationship achieved with a typewriter … the text can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible if it were to exist as a material object rather than a visual display” (26). 4 “Antes de iniciar solemnemente el sistema, se dio tiempo para mirarlo todo con detención, fascinado: el teclado le pareció impecable, el monitor perfecto, y hasta pensó que el mouse y los parlantes eran, de algún modo, agradables.” [“Before solemnly starting up the system, he had time to look at everything carefully, fascinated: the keyboard seemed impeccable to him, the monitor perfect, and he even thought the mouse and speakers were in some way agreeable”] (51). 5 “Trabajaba como ayudante en la universidad, quizás podría digitar ahí los controles de lectura, o transcribir esos apuntes ya viejos, escritos a mano o tipeados con tanto esfuerzo en una antigua máquina Olympia, con la que también había escrito todos sus trabajos de la licenciatura, provocando la risa o la admiración de sus compañeros, porque ya casi todos se habían pasado a los computadores” [“He encyclopedia of imaginary intellectuals with varied right-wing tendencies, in jest worked as an assistant at the university, so perhaps he could key in the reading register there, or transcribe his old notes, written by hand or typed with such

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the computer is an imposition of the time he lives in: “… no sabía con certeza para qué lo quería … Pero era necesario tener un computador, todo el mundo opinaba eso” [“… he didn’t know with certainty why he wanted it … But it was necessary to have a computer, everyone thought so”] (2013b, 51). Shortly afterward, Max notes the impact of the new machine on his poems, as he transcribes them from the notebook in which he handwrites them to the computer screen. Suddenly, they lose meaning; “dudaba de las estrofas, se dejaba llevar por otro ritmo, quizás más visual que musical, pero en vez de sentir el traspaso como un experimento, se retraía, se frustraba, y era frecuente que los borrara y comenzara de nuevo …” [“he doubted the verses, he let himself be carried by another rhythm, perhaps more visual than musical, but instead of experiencing the transfer as an experiment, he drew back, grew frustrated, and frequently erased them and started over again …”] (2013b, 52). The presence of the poem on the screen encourages that emphasis on the visual Max finds in his poems, but the new device also produces insecurity in the writer and leads him to create continuous drafts. Indeed, in his essay Zambra suggests that drafting is another of the central qualities of the procedure of writing conditioned by the new machines: “debido a los computadores, el texto es cada vez menos definitivo. Una frase es hoy, más que nunca, algo que puede ser borrado” [“because of computers, the text is increasingly less definitive. A phrase is today, more than ever before, something that can be erased”] (2013b, 251, author’s italics). In “Recuerdos de un computador personal”, at the same time Max is attempting to write on the computer, he maintains the outdated practice of writing by hand: “No abandonaba sus cuadernos y su pluma, con la que al primer descuido regó de tinta el teclado” [“He didn’t abandon his notebooks and fountain pen, which at the slightest moment of inattention would spill ink on the keyboard”] (2013b, 52). This gesture already appears in Bonsai, Zambra’s first novel, but is there related to a generational difference, for Gazmuri, an older writer looking for someone to transcribe an entire novel handwritten in a notebook, turns down a student offering to do it upon learning that he does not write by hand: “Entonces no sabes de qué hablo, no conoces la pulsión. Hay una pulsión cuando escribes en papel, un ruido del lápiz. Un equilibrio raro entre el codo, la mano y el lápiz” [“Then you don’t know what I’m talking about, you don’t know the drive. There’s a drive when you write on paper, a sound to the pencil. A strange equilibrium between elbow, hand and pencil”] (2006, 58). effort on the old Olympia typewriter with which he had also written all his university work, provoking laughter or admiration in his peers as nearly everyone had already transitioned to computers”] (52).

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In Zambra there is a resistance to the acceptance of use of the computer for writing a work, but that does not lead to an antitechnological position (Hoyos). In both short stories we find the protagonist writing by hand, but in one, the narrative arc ends with the author writing the short story we are reading with the help of a word processor. The last line tells us a great deal about the way in which this process was carried out: “Yo era un cuaderno vacío y ahora soy un libro” [“I was an empty notebook and now I am a book”] (2013a, 28). Different machines and technologies for writing coexist today, from the artisanal to the digital. Even if, in the literary culture of late capitalism in which we are immersed, one can choose to write by hand in an empty notebook, like Zambra’s characters, in the transition to the printed book writing will necessarily see itself transformed into code.6 Nostalgia may be a theme in Zambra’s stories, but what is ultimately narrated is the inevitability of a computer’s presence when a text is finalized. 3

Ojeda

In Mónica Ojeda’s Nefando (2016), the six young people who share an apartment in Barcelona try to represent, through art and technology, the most sordid ghosts of their childhood and the present; the novel offers a reflection on their desires of representation. The fate of the Terán brothers is the most complicated: abused by their parents as children, they decide to create an illicit videogame called Nefando, which reveals something about that experience that identifies them, and they put it in the Deep Web; after all, as Cuco, their roommate and a videogame designer, says, “¿para qué servía la tecnología si no era para narrar nuestros horrores?” [“what is technology for if it doesn’t narrate our horrors?”] (107). The internet is not the utopic space of freedom its creators dreamed of, but a replica of the moral perversions found in the world. In El universo de las imágenes técnicas (1985), Czech-Brazilian theorist Vilém Flusser suggests that technological images—photographs, videos, holograms: in contrast to traditional images produced by devices—would overtake the predominance of lineal texts in human communication, which would produce “mutaciones en nuestra vivencia, en nuestro conocimiento y nuestros valores” [“mutations in our experience, in our knowledge and our values”] (29). Flusser

6 As Craig Epplin writes in his book Late Book Culture in Argentina: “Literature today almost inevitably passes through various digital applications on its path from writer to reader— word processors, typesetting programs and distribution networks” (5).

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incorporates cybernetic theories on information into the debate on the place of the image in contemporary society and points out that in the emergent virtual universe, what matters is not how true or false an image is, but how probable. Images are “surfaces made with points,” products of revolutionary science and technology that level all “sacred forms” and then recompute them in their own way: [“Daguerre y Niepce son más peligrosos que Robespierre y Lenin” [“Daguerre and Niepce are more dangerous than Robespierre and Lenin”] (91). For Flusser there is a perverse side to the predominance of technological images; the nucleus of information society is no longer “being in the world,” but “being in front of the image.” A certain determinism regarding the heavy weight of technology in the present leads him to suggest that technological images produce a disperse totalitarian society of “solitary and programed” individuals. The challenge consists of looking for ways of reuniting what has been dispersed; that can only be done through the politicization of images and the injection of values into them. That is not easy if one does not know what is in the “black box” of devices or have a grasp on the new languages that create images. We assume that computers are rational as if they were neutral, objective, without taking into account the artificial intelligence programs that often replicate the prejudices of their creators. Again citing the narrator of Los cuerpos del verano: “la tecnología no es racional; con suerte, es un caballo desbocado que echa espuma por la boca e intenta desbarrancarse cada vez que puede. Nuestro problema es que la cultura está enganchada a ese caballo” [“technology is not rational; with luck, it is a runaway horse that foams at the mouth and tries to fall off a cliff whenever it can. Our problem is that culture is hooked on that horse”] (32). Flusser would then say that to subvert the programs you need to know the programs. In Nefando, Ojeda is conscious of the weight of technological images and of the fact that today, ethical questions are resolved in an ecology marked by new technologies: a new language is a new vocabulary. In this manner, the novel displays a coexistence of languages, from the literary, through Kiki, the pornographic novelist, to the language of computer programing, through Cuco, the videogame designer (both roommates of the Terán brothers). The language of programing is an other language; its otherness can be seen starting with its operation codes: #include int main (){ // camuflate camaleón. (39)

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Through the ethics of the hacker, Cuco discovers his own values, those of creativity and freedom. Moreover, he discovers a way of understanding the world: “La vida, para que fuera armoniosa, se dijo a sí mismo arrugando la frente, debía ser una sucesión ordenada de algoritmos” [“Life, in order to be harmonious, he said to himself, scrunching his forehead, should be an ordered succession of algorithms”] (40–1). The language of computer programing is also a form of perception: in the previous citation, Cuco is not programing a computer, but writing a message to his friends to rob wallets from tourists in Barcelona: creativity arises out of precariousness (41). A Latin American hacker knows about that precariousness. Cuco robs wallets on Las Ramblas and is also a thief on the web. We know little about the language of programmers, but what they do permeates our days. Cuco suggests that poetry—ergo, literature—is the language of the useless when compared to the capacity of the language of programmers to turn ideas into actions (41). That language could even be the basis of democracy and civil disobedience: hackers are often the ones on the forefront of antiglobalization social protests. The politicization of technological images—and, by extension, of the language that programs them—that Flusser talks about resides in programmers. Programmers are the new revolutionaries: they seek to inject values, politicize images (they are also, of course, the new reactionaries, repeating old prejudices in the circulation of these images). The paradox is that we know little about their work, hidden in the “black box” of technological apparatuses. We face our machines every day without any idea how they function. It is here that we have to consider the politicizing gesture of technological images in Nefando. The Terán brothers, victims of sexual abuse by their father, contract Cuco to create a videogame called Nefando, which will be placed in the dark web. To allow Cuco to create the game, they give him videos of when they were abused, taken by their father. In deciding to face their trauma not from the more traditional perspective of victims, but by speaking about the subject as if it were normal and acting like nothing big happened, the Terán brothers also act politically, appropriating the videos and allowing Cuco to re-signify them. The brothers’ memories are the point of departure for the existence of the videogame: “Veo los senos chicos de [mi hermana] Cecilia rebotando … A papá le gustaba más antes, pero crecimos … Mi madre nos miró siempre desde una esquina filosa. Sabía lo que papá nos hacía” [“I see the small breasts of [my sister] Cecelia growing … Papa liked them more before, but we grow … My mother always looked at us from around a sharp corner. She knew what Papa was doing to us”] (126).

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The novel constantly puts various hierarchies into play in the discussion about the images. The father who filmed his children while abusing them is a well-known documentary producer. This could be interpreted as a simple critique of the hypocrisies of the system; it is more productive, however, to read this gesture as part of the networks that weave the novel into the characters’ use of technological images. The father is connected to the public sphere through his work making documentaries; in the private sphere, with his family, he is connected to his children, beyond the ties of blood, through sexual abuse and images of that abuse. Before the brothers use them, these images are also articulating their own network in the private/public sphere of the Deep Web, where they circulate among pedophile groups. The continual presence of the deep web as one of the central points of meaning in the novel is not a coincidence. It is not only a metaphor for everything that has been kept in darkness, but also for the fact that the global webs created in the novel appear as much in the visible part of the internet as in the invisible: Nefando suggests that the formation of communities—legal as well as illegal—begins with the circulation of technological images. Still, it is not only their circulation, but also the impossibility of stopping it, their continual capacity to propagate and regenerate, virality as a central element of contemporary culture: the web unfolds into infinity and is able to break social limits and national borders, weaving everyone into its global map. As essayist Hito Steyerl suggest in “Internet is Dead?,” the image today doesn’t get its power from its aesthetic quality but from its capacity to be “postproduced, made to circulate, and accelerated” (206). Once the brothers get the videos, they do not try to short-circuit their movement, but rather to keep making them circulate, resignifying and reappropriating them. In the postphotographic age of mechanical reproduction, the brothers seem to understand that the only way to contend with a web created by images is to join it on their own terms. They say there is no disappearance on the internet: once images arrive, they are stored up somewhere, huddled, waiting for the best moment to attack. The Terán brothers not only face their trauma through their resignification efforts, but they also enter into the symptomatic game of circulation. It may be a useless ethical gesture, since what they do is little given the possibility that those images are circulating through various pathways on the internet, viralizing and recreating themselves into diverse gifs and memes and every type of archive; in any case, it functions as a gesture: in the communicating vessels of the web nothing remains except for the small resignifying gesture of the image.

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Nonetheless, just as much was said about the utopic potential of the web in its beginnings, the anarchic, subversive capacity of the Deep Web was also mentioned at a certain moment of its history. The deep web was the place of the silk road, which was not only where one could buy and sell drugs; it was also the place where, through avatars and false identities, the subject could let loose its fantasies, the malleable possibility of being another without giving up itself (this fantasy, unfolded in Denis Fernández’s “Monstruos,” finds its limits in Nefando). The novel is aware of the utopic potential of the internet as the space of a new moral capable of challenging the bourgeois subject. That is the internet that Cuco defends when he creates the videogame Nefando where he incorporates the abuse images of the Terán brothers. However, he himself knows the limits: the internet has basically turned into a “carbon copy” of the world, replicating its social problems, with one difference: one is more daring online, more capable of moral transgressions (70). Today the internet is not, according to Nefando, another space, where another moral can be constructed. Those who circulate videos of child sexual abuse, those who consume them, are transgressing the moral in which real life functions, not creating another moral. The de-territorialist/re-territorialist tension of capitalism also enters into this space. The space of anarchy is made sacred as a place of guilty pleasures, where the outside law also applies. Cuco should give explanations of what they have done to the police, even though he says that the Terán brothers, who in a certain way own the videos and have been the victims, can do what they want with them (164). What has been done with the videogame, nevertheless, is a political act. According to the law, Cuco has committed a transgression because he is using real recordings of acts of sexual abuse, not representations; however, to him there is no difference: everything is a representation. That does not lighten the responsibility, but rather exacerbates it. Cuco puts the moral responsibility of the artist on the line. All art is a political intervention: those representations are real. Both he and the Terán brothers are conscious of that transgression. Cuco knows that, in art and in cybernetics, it is not about truth or falseness, but rather possibility. But then, who is responsible here? It was the Terán brothers’ idea, but they put it in Cuco’s hands, the one who knows about programming. He takes care of resignifying the traumatic videos of the brothers in the game called Nefando. It is an artistic creation in which both content and form are important. Nefando is a complex videogame, an artistic installation that mimics the voyeuristic act of the spectator. The content is the videos, but the form is even more important, as it puts the spectator into a passive role, not the active one of the traditional videogame player (Oviedo). To play Nefando is to

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see it, to replicate the pornographic and abject act through which pedophiles seat themselves in front of the screen. “Esta vez”, a player of Nefando says, “no sé por qué, hago clic sobre la última pregunta. Enel cuerpo de la dormida, en la cama y en las paredes, se proyecta el video de un hombre cercenándose el pene. Me obligo a verlo. Tengo que verlo todo. Ese es mi papel aquí. Ese es mi único deber.” [“This time, I don’t know why, I click on the last question. On the sleeping body, on the bed and on the walls, the video of a man cutting off his penis is projected. I force myself to watch it. I have to watch everything. That is my role here. That is my only responsibility”] (152).7 Ojeda’s novel suggests that the Nefando player’s scopophilic act is the act of contemporary culture. Not only players, but victims too, like the Terán brothers, are incapable of separating themselves from that logic: Veo a Pae. Tiene cuatro años. Su madre le introduce la lengua en la vagina y el dedo índice en el ano. Veo a Verónika. Tiene doce años. La veo penetrada por su padre y su hermano al mismo tiempo. Veo paisajes de cuerpos que se destiñen. Veo todo lo que ha sido consumado. Veo a papá meneándosela con los videos. Veo sepulcros de risas, llanuras de miedos. Polvo. Viento. Veo mi necesidad de contar que veo paisajes de cuerpos que destiñen el color de todas las noches. Veo un montón de cuerpos que son el mío: lo único. Dientes. I see Pae. She is four years old. Her mother puts her tongue in her vagina and index finger in her anus. I see Verónika. She is twelve. I see her entered by her father and brother at the same time. I see landscapes of bodies that fade away. I see everything that has been consumed. I see Dad jerking off to videos. I see tombs of laughs, plains of fear. Dust. Wind. I see my need to tell that I see landscapes of bodies that fade the color of every night. I see a heap of bodies that are mine: the only one. Teeth. 128

The insistent use of the verb “to see” underlines the compulsion of the spectator. Thanks to the internet, today’s imagination is a “pornographic imagination” (121). The inflation of images, critic Joan Fontcuberta notes (2017), “no es la excrecencia de una sociedad hipertecnificada sino, más bien, el síntoma de

7 Iván Herrera, another person who lives in the apartment, says “Todo lo que hacías en Nefando era mirar y esperar sin saber muy bien a qué. Podría decirse que era un juego para voyeuristas” [“Everything you did in Nefando involved watching and waiting without knowing exactly what for. You could say that it was a video for voyeurs”] (96–7).

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una patología cultural y política” [“is not the excrescence of a hypertechnified society, but rather the symptom of a pathological culture and politics”] (7).8 The novel’s mention of the legend of the first porn movie is understood in this manner. According to Nefando, that movie, titled El Sartorio, was supposedly filmed in Argentina.9 In Nefando, El Sartorio is also a movie born out of an act of voyeurism/scopophilia: it is the story of a satyr who gets aroused while watching a few young girls and kidnaps and rapes one of them. We do not know if El Sartorio is real or not; more important, as with Nefando, is that the story incites the pornographic imagination because it is considered possible. In that context, it is important that the other central character of the novel, Kiki, wants to be a writer and is writing a pornographic novel. The web is closed off on many levels. On one hand, the media ecology in Nefando shows a complex series of media that compete with each other, sometimes one covered up inside of another: literature, videos, videogames, the internet, interviews, drawings, chat rooms, etc. On the other, in the excess of devices that populate the contemporary landscape and form the “pornographic imagination,” Kiki’s sections enter into conversation with those of her other roommates. Provocatively, Kiki’s “novelette” also deals with child sexuality: the three main characters are children (one of them is also obsessed with photographic images, in this case of dead animals). While Mónica Ojeda takes on the taboo of pedophilia and presents the child as victim (a victim who later, once grown, refuses to accept that role), in Kiki’s sections the children are sexually active beings, perverse polymorphs. The “pornographic imagination” could be understood as a compensatory response to social hypocrisy, but its appearance is not excluded from the exacerbation of technological images and devices that privilege the sense of sight and surround us. Fontcuberta notes that “estamos instalados en el capitalismo de las imágenes, y sus excesos, más que sumirnos en la asfixia del consumo, nos confrontan al reto de su gestión política” [“we are placed in the capitalism of images, and their excesses, more than weighing us down in the asphyxia of consumption, confront us with the threat of their political process”] (7). That is precisely what Nefando does in insisting that art, literature, should create a language capable of facing the horror and abjection that populate the surface of the web and the deep internet. Nefando is not only a novel about the creation of a videogame; it is also a political novel about the writing of a novel 8 Susan Sontag writes in her essay “The Pornographic Imagination” (1969) that she understands why pornography is seen as a “group pathology, the disease of a whole culture” (207), and notes that occidental societies became pornographic as an inevitable response to the fact that they were “so hypocritically and repressively constructed” (207). 9 All of this also alludes to the mention of snuff films in Bolaño’s Distant Star (1996), in which horror converges with perversion and makes literal the idea that to film is to kill someone.

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named Nefando, which presents itself as an artistic object at the same level as the challenge that the internet provokes in our perception and imagination. 4

Conclusion

Zambra’s writing machines play a fundamental role in the literary atmosphere on the continent. Globalized technologies, far from restraining literary processes, have accelerated them and contributed to redefining the role of the writer, who remains close to new literary practices, at times hypertechnological and other times primitive. Zambra demonstrates that when it comes to representing new forms of perception and sensibility, the writer is inevitably influenced by the machines with which writing is produced. Nor are conditions of writing only given by machines; the places in which a text is produced also play a role. Sometimes a writer sits at a desk, but the mobility of cell phones and tablets enable him/her to work from anywhere, and the Internet helps him/her spread his/her work. In this way he/she becomes a true writing person of sleepless contemporary capitalism. For its part, Ojeda’s Nefando captures the intensification of the cultural change produced at the end of the last century through the arrival of new technologies and forms of communication related to the internet and suggests that today all imagination is pornographic, marked by excesses and compulsions produced in the subject through its interaction with the internet. That interaction, in effect, transforms the psyche and perception of the subject. Contemporary Latin American literature shows the traces of its tense dialogue with the new technologies of writing while at the same time it navigates a complex new media ecology dominated by internet. The texts that are being produced from this encounter show a critical literary gaze which not only reflects about the transformation of the contemporary landscape but explores as well the way in which human subjectivity itself is being altered. Because of this, sooner than later, new pieces of this complex landscape will emerge: as Verónica Gerber writes in a recent essay, our paradigm of the individual author siting with a typewriter/laptop in front of a desk comes from the nineteenth and twentieth century (34). We may now see in Latin America the emergence of a more diverse set of writing practices, from communal and multilingual writing to another one preoccupied by the fact that our technologies of writing are also geological: literary production will be shaped by the awareness of the environmental crisis and its influence in our aesthetics and the tools we use to produce them. Translated by Julie Lind and Janet Hendrickson

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Bibliography Bellatin, Mario. 2013. Underwood portátil: modelo 1915. Obra reunida, 483–506. Madrid: Alfaguara. Bellatin, Mario. 2013a. El hombre dinero. México: Sexto Piso. Bellatin, Mario. 2014. El iPod calza con mi cuerpo. Luis Carlos Sánchez. Excelsior. Web. Accessed 04-09-2021. Castagnet, Martín Felipe. 2012. Los cuerpos del verano. Buenos Aires: Factotum. Chejfec, Sergio. What Comes Next. Translated by Jessica Gordon-Burroughs. The Quarterly Conversation. Web. Accessed 04-10-2021. De los Ríos, Valeria. 2011. Espectros de luz. Tecnologías visuales en la literatura latinoamericana. Santiago: Cuarto Propio. Epplin, Craig. 2015. The Aesthetics of Keyboard Shortcuts. In Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era, eds. Matthew Bush and Tania Genetic, 231–245. New York: Routledge. Epplin, Craig. 2014. Late Book Culture in Argentina. New York: Bloomsbury. Fernández, Denis. 2016. Astronautas. Monstruos geométricos. Buenos Aires: 17 Grises. Flusser, Vilém. 2014. El universo de las imágenes técnicas. 1985. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. Fontcuberta, Joan. 2016. La furia de las imágenes: notas sobre la postfotografía. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutemberg. Gerber, Verónica. 2021. Poner el lenguaje en las vías (para que estorbe). In En una orilla brumosa, ed. Verónica Gerber, 13–34. México: Gris Tormenta. Grossman, Lucila. 2017. Mapas terminales. Buenos Aires: Marciana. Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hoyos, Héctor. 2015. The Tell-Tale Computer: Obsolescence and Nostalgia in Chile After Alejandro Zambra. In Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era, eds. Matthew Bush and Tania Genetic, 109–126. New York: Routledge. Huidobro, Vicente. 1976. Obras Completas: Tomo I. Int. Hugo Montes. Santiago: Ed. AndrésBello. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Márquez Tizano, Rodrigo. 2016. Yakarta. Ciudad de México: Sexto piso. Mundy, Hilda. 2004. Pirotecnia. Ensayo miedoso de literatura ultraísta. 1936. La Paz: La Mariposa Mundial. Ojeda, Mónica. 2016. Nefando. Barcelona: Candaya. Olson, Charles. 1950. Projective Verse. http: //writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Projective _Verse.pdf. Web. Accessed 04-08-2021. Oviedo, Matías. 2020. Programar una novela, leer un videojuego: Nefando y la lectura aumentada. Úrsula 4 (20): 61–78.

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Piglia, Ricardo. 2005. El último lector. Barcelona: Anagrama. Rivera Garza, Cristina. 2013. Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y desapropiación. México: Tusquets. Sontag, Susan. 1969. The Pornographic Imagination. 1967. In Styles of Radical Will, 205– 233. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Steyerl, Hito. 2018. ¿Internet está muerta? Art Duty Free. El arte en la era de la guerra civilplanetaria, 197–212. Translated by Fernando Bruno. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. Zambra, Alejandro. 2006. Bonsai. Barcelona: Anagrama. Zambra, Alejandro. 2013a. Mis documentos. In Mis documentos, 9–28. Barcelona: Anagrama. Zambra, Alejandro. 2013b. Recuerdos de un computador personal. In Mis documentos, 51–65. Barcelona: Anagrama. Zambra, Alejandro. 2013c. Cuaderno, archivo, libro. Revista Chilena de Literatura 83 (April): 243–52.

Chapter 5

The Consecration and Repositioning of a Border Writer: The Phenomenon of the Publishing Market in the Work of Yuri Herrera Juan Rogelio Rosado Marrero Abstract Every literary work, as Franco Moretti mentions, is the result of a struggle to position itself within a certain geographical and symbolic space. Many are the writers who, subject to this very particular way of operating on the part of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “field of artistic distribution and circulation”, have been “visibilized” and/or “silenced” by the literary tradition itself. A clear example is the Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, whose recognition and prestige in Spain allowed him a claim within the canon of Mexican letters. Taking as reference the theoretical postulates of Pierre Bourdieu, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti and James English, this article aims to demonstrate how the publishing market acts as an extra-literary mechanism that directly affects the artistic work. In this sense, by focusing on the publication processes of Herrera’s novels, this work seeks to clarify the reasons why certain literary manifestations, which were initially denied and/or forgotten, can revalue and position themselves strongly within the cultural field.

The war between the government of President Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) and the different drug cartels, especially the Sinaloa Cartel, has left in Mexico innumerable deaths and a socio-legal system that could be called, using Achille Mbembe’s concept, “necropolitical”.1 It also managed to create a new 1 In the absence of a strong justice and social security system, the State has ceased to fulfill its function, and became a repressive machine at the service of an elite that decides, based on its economic and political power, who lives and who does not. Under these circumstances, Michel Foucault’s “biopolitics” has become something much more complex, damaging, and corrosive: “The state may, of its own doing, transform itself into a war machine. It may moreover appropriate to itself an existing war machine or help to create one […] A war machine combines a plurality of functions. It has the features of a political organization and a mercantile company. It operates through capture and depredations and can even coin its own money. In order to fuel the extraction and export of natural resources located in the territory

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_007

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way of perceiving and living with the “narcoculture”. Today, drug trafficking materializes in a series of social, economic and cultural products, that include elements of “narco-religiousness” (the worshipping of Jesús Malverde, considered the “saint of drug traffickers”) and narcocorridos. This “narcoculture” has also developed its own literary production: the narrative of the narco or the “narco-novel”, which has been associated, in principle, with the border territories of northern Mexico. A clear example is the literary work of Yuri Herrera (Actopan, 1970), who, without being properly of northern origin, appropriates the discursive forms of the “narco-novel” to create his own vision of this conflictive world in Trabajos del Reino (2004), translated into English as Kingdom Cons (2017), followed by Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (2009) (Signs Preceding the End of the World) and La transmigración de los cuerpos (2013) (The Transmigration of Bodies), thus gaining both national and international recognition. The main goal of this study is to analyze the editorial process, the conditions imposed by the literary market, and the critical reception of Herrera’s literary works through the concepts of “literature in a space,” coined by Franco Moretti, and of “the capital of literary market values,” proposed by Pascale Casanova. This approach will be instrumental for the analysis of the process of Yuri Herrera’s consecration, and his positioning within the Mexican Republic of Letters. 1

Yuri Herrera: A Counter-hegemonic Vision

For Sara Carini, Yuri Herrera has made of his literature a space full of symbols in order to reconstruct a daily and metaphorical reality about possible relationships on the border between Mexico and the United States (2012, 52). In other words, in Herrera’s work we do not find a reliable portrayal of drug trafficking or migration, on the contrary, what we observe is an archetypal universe articulated in order to describe events from a more symbolic and personal perspective. During the gestation process of what would be his first novel, Herrera was pursuing a Master’s degree in Creative Literature at the University of El Paso, Texas. This academic period was momentous for the Mexican writer, because his status as an “outsider” in the United Sates allowed him to detach himself to a certain extent from the life and problems that occur daily in the border states,

they control, war machines forge direct connections with transnational networks […] War machines are implicated in the constitution of highly transnational local or regional economies” (Mbembe 2003, 32–34).

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especially Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. From this position, Herrera visualized the Kingdom Cons as a sort of marginal mythical story. He made “narcoculture” his own, and redirected it in order to make visible the part of society beaten impacted by the narco and whose existence was ignored by official discourses. The main character of the novel is a singer in “seedy” bars, who becomes a composer of narcocorridos: He’d learned there was to be a party that night, set off for the Palace, and played his only card. “I come to sing for the chief.” The guards glanced at him like a stray dog. Didn’t even open their mouths. But the Artist recognized one from the cantina encounter and could tell that the man recognized him, too. “You saw he liked my songs. Let me sing for him and it’ll be good for you, watch.” […] “He better like you.” Then dragged him in, and when the Artist was on his way, he warned, “Round here, you blow it, you’re fucked.” […] People already knew the story, but no one had ever sung it. He’d asked endless questions to find out what went down, to compose this song and present it to the King. It told of his mettle and his heart, put to the test in a hail of bullets, and had a happy ending not only for the King but also for the down-and-outs he kept under his wing […] He sung his song with the faith of a hymn, the certainty of a sermon, and above all he made sure it was catchy, so people would learn it with their feet and their hips, and so they, too, would sing it later. When he was done, the crowd showered him with whistles and applause, the elegant musicians clapped him on the back […]. Herrera 2017, 18–21

The use of this “narcoculture”, symbolically reflected through the figure of the Artist, is what allows for the development of a narrative that completely differs from other novels representing drug trafficking. In Herrera’s novel there are no drugs, no persecutions, and no shootings. The transactions and the words narco and drug trafficking do not appear in Kingdom Cons. Instead, Herrera manages to portray the feelings of border people, particularly of social sectors that have adopted the narco-lifestyle. José Eduardo Serrato Córdova mentioned that what is most relevant in this novel is that the reader has to fill the empty spaces of the narrative.2 The reader who reads Herrera’s book comes across 2 This idea of making the reader an agent of constant participation within the narrative is also one of the central themes in Sara Carini’s critical works “The work to the reader: new forms

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the answer to an obvious but crucial question: how do the narcos live? In this sense, the success of the novel is based on the attempt to respond to the imaginary morbidity of this question in a symbolic, archetypical way. By eliminating crucial words like narcos, cartels or drugs from his writing, Herrera presents a reality that the official discourses have suppressed: drug traffickers’ daily life: It is a mystery how the world of narco really functions, we do not know well the way in which the social life of narco-trafficking is organized, what we know is that its shadow is present at all social levels. Yuri Herrera proposes to imagine how the characters that live around the power generated by money and violence really think and feel. 763

In the novel the names of the characters are replaced by mere archetypes, thus allowing the reader to be involved in a reality far removed from the moral principles and ideological constructs that the State has created as a restrictive measure against the local demonstrations of “narcoculture”. For Herrera, what is important is not drug trafficking itself but its social, economic and cultural repercussions. Consequently, the novel actually revalues the collective imaginary: the misadventures of a narcocorrido singer in the supposed heavenly domain of the narcos (the palace and the royal courts). In other words, Herrera’s novel is founded on disillusionment, on the collapse of dreams and irrational illusions: after all, the Artist, who fights tirelessly as a court jester, ends up not fulfilling his desire to sing corridos and songs to the lord of a certain drug cartel.4 of representation of power in Kingdom Cons (2012), by Yuri Herrera” and “Border Identities through language in Kingdom Cons, and Signs that Will Precede the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera.” (“El trabajo, al lector: nuevas formas de representación del poder en Trabajos del reino de Yuri Herrera” (2014) and “Identidades fronterizas a través del lenguaje en Trabajos del reino y Señales que precederán al fin del mundo de Yuri Herrera” (2014)). 3 “Cómo funciona el mundo del narco es una incógnita, no sabemos bien a bien la forma en que está organizada la sociedad del narcotráfico, lo que sabemos es que su sombra está presente en casi todos los sectores sociales. Lo que se propone Yuri Herrera es imaginar cómo piensan y sienten los personajes que viven alrededor del poder generado por el dinero y la violencia del narco” (Serrato Córdova 76). 4 About this, Felipe Adrián Ríos Baeza mentions that Herrera’s characters are subjects “punished” and “forgotten” by social violence (91). In such a way that disillusionment about the possibility of a better future is a constant feature in Herrera’s narratives. In the case of Kingdom Cons, Ríos Baeza states the following: “The final scenes of Kingdom Cons are illfated: as any other kingdom in this world, excellency and power collapse, leaving all characters exposed to the dangers of the republic […]” (89). (“Las escenas finales de Trabajos del reino son infaustas: como todo reino de este mundo, la excelencia y potestad se derrumba dejando a sus personajes a expensas de los peligros de la república […]” (89)).

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However, it also seems important to us to emphasize the textual complexity surrounding Herrera’s work. While it is true that Kingdom Cons presents a narrative totally different from that of other novels about drug trafficking, for Oswaldo Zavala the novel is part of a set of aesthetic manifestations that mythologize the figure of the narco (2019, 35).5 This is due to the fact that these narratives transform “ the historic and political dimension of narcoculture into a series of mythical attributes that naturalize violence and moralize criminal actions; these novels offer a decontextualized caricature of narcoculture, which minimizes or even erases, its most complex elements […]” (Zavala 2019, 30).6 Part of Zavala’s approach can be observed in the figure of the King, because as Ríos Baeza points out, the archetypal image of the narco acquires a mythical, supernatural dimension, as if it were a god: If in Our Lady of the Assassins (1994) by Fernando Vallejo, catholic faith reemerged in an unusual and vigorous manner due to the youngsters that, carrying crucifixes and virgins, would entrust themselves to God so their aim would not fail, in Kingdom Cons such a faith is directed towards the King, who is the one who can really provide them with protection […]. 867

If we take as reference this process of mythologization proposed by Zavala, it can be said that Kingdom Cons functions within the limits of an aesthetic community that sustains the collective imaginary built by power groups. In other words, the figure of the Artist is directly related to the image of the narcorancher; which demonstrates the geo-politization of the matter of public security by the State. For this reason, it is interesting the article “Communities that jarchan: language politics and dwelling in three novels by Yuri Herrera”

5 Zavala presents the works of Élmer Mendoza, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Heriberto Yépez, Orfa Alarcón, Bernardo Fernández Bef, Diego Osorno, Anabel Hernández, Alejandro Almazán, Teresa Margolles, as part of a mechanism that repeats a discourse that mythologizes drug trafficking. 6 “[…] la dimensión histórica y política del narco en una serie de atributos mitológicos que naturalizan la violencia y moralizan las acciones criminales, estas novelas ofrecen una caricatura descontextualizada del narco que minimiza, o incluso borra, sus elementos más complejos […]” (Zavala 30). 7 “Si en La virgen de los sicarios (1994), de Fernando Vallejo, la fe católica resurgía inusitada y vigorosamente debido a que los jovencitos que, portando cristos y vírgenes, se encomendaban para que no les fallara la puntería, en Trabajos del reino dicha fe se canaliza hacia el Rey, quien verdaderamente puede darles protección […]” (86).

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(2019) by Eugenio Santangelo.8 In his article, Santangelo, following Zavala’s ideas, mentions that Herrera’s narrative is a repetition of the representative discourse and paradigm of the Mexican government: the novel configures a threatening enemy that must be “eradicated” (2019, 27). This question, as we will see later, is vital to understand the confrontation between Rafael Lemus and Eduardo Antonio Parra. Independently of the aesthetic-political complexity pointed by Zavala, the reality presented by the Artist is transformed into a counter-hegemonic and counter-imaginative vision: the mission of Herrera’s narrative is to show how to really subsist on the border, that is, within this “narcoculture”. For this reason, Yuri Herrera’s gaze ends up being a political and cultural vehicle for the re-signification of this topic. In this sense, the critical reception that Herrera’s work has had abroad has been crucial for the consideration of this “other” reality, which is constantly trivialized or disregarded in Mexico. 2

The Symbolic Capital within the Publishing Market

In his book Atlas of the European novel 1800–1900, Franco Moretti proposes the concept of “literature in a space”. With this expression he refers to extraliterary relationships that, in one way or another, directly affect the publication and circulation of literary works in certain historical contexts and geographic spaces. From a complete study of the space within literary works and its subsequent location on historical maps, Moretti concludes that the literary work is subject to the ruling of a publishing market that is governed by the confrontation of center and periphery, the new and the old (158–163). According to Moretti, each literature has its specific geography, that determines its emergence and subsequent distribution. The literary universe is, for Moretti, a constant struggle to conquer a certain market and a certain geography (1998, 170). Pascale Casanova, like Moretti, also observes this mercantile phenomenon related to literary production and consumption. For Casanova, the geographical positioning for each literature is related, to a large extent, to the literary capital that the artistic work possesses in certain contexts. This literary capital, which may as well be compared to a credit score in a bank, acts as a way to see, admire, value and position a work within a world market. For Casanova, the struggle between the periphery and the center, (similar to the “provincialism” and the “centralism” described by Moretti), results in connection to the literary 8 “Comunidades que jarchan: políticas de la lengua y el habitar en las tres novelas de Yuri Herrera” (2019).

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capital that provides each artistic work with the necessary recognition and legitimacy that allows it to penetrate the field of distribution and circulation of aesthetic value. Consequently, the publishing market ends up imposing a specific geography to the literary universe, where certain “credit centers” manage literary transactions and the corresponding economic exchanges (Casanova 2004, 23–24). In this sense, Pascale Casanova calls this geographical space, also visualized by Franco Moretti, the great Republic of Letters. This world republic of letters has its own mode of operation: its own economy, which produces hierarchies and various forms of violence; and, above all, its own history, which, long obscured by the quasi-systematic national (and therefore political) appropnat1on of literary stature, has never really been chronicled. Its geography is based on the opposition between a capital, on the one hand, and peripheral dependencies whose relationship to this center is defined by their aesthetic distance from it. It is equipped, finally, with its own consecrating authorities, charged with responsibility for legislating on literary matters, which function as the sole legitimate arbiters with regard to questions of recognition […] In thrall to the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal, the contestants of literary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of its peculiar economy, the “unequal trade” (to quote Braudel once more) that takes place within it. Casanova 2004, 11–12

Following Moretti and Casanova, we can affirm that the initial “oblivion” and the subsequent re-valorization of Yuri Herrera’s work can be understood, both abroad and in Mexico, within the parameters proposed by those critics. In Herrera’s work, we have a clear example of how the publishing market—the Republic of Letters—really works. 3

Yuri Herrera and His Reception in the Publishing Market

The novel Kingdom Cons won the 2003 Border of Words Binational Young Novel Award and, with it, Herrera became one of the most promising Mexican writers of his generation. This recognition was accompanied by the publication of this book in 2004 under the Tierra Adentro publishing label, sponsored by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA), which aims to promote young Mexican talents (competing authors must not exceed thirtyfour years of age). For Herrera, the award not only brought great financial

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and editorial benefits, but also allowed him to appear at the very center of the national critical scene. Great established writers such as Eduardo Antonio Parra and Elena Poniatowska took on the task of praising Herrera’s daring narrative. Many thought that this would be the propitious endorsement for his literary work to reach a special place at a national level. However, the award itself ended up causing him a fatal setback: over time, Herrera’s voice began to fade little by little. One of the guidelines of the contest’s announcement itself launched by Tierra Adentro for the Border of Words award emphasized that only those Mexican writers who were residing, at the end of the contest’s announcement, in one of the border states of Mexico (Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas and Nuevo León) or in the United States (in border states such as California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico) could be considered. Due to this incredibly special clause, the award was considered by many critics a “fixed” contest for northern writers. This was, among other things, one of the reasons why the direct confrontation between Rafael Lemus and Eduardo Antonio Parra arose in 2005. Lemus affirmed that the north was in reality another universe where its writers only recreated novels based on the themes offered by drug trafficking. For Lemus, northern literature is the result of a traditional practice that exploits drug trafficking to the maximum, as a central theme (2012, 218). In this sense, Lemus argues, the violence that has prevailed within northern literature has become a “domesticated” horror, that is, an innocuous, unreal, unreflective, and even regionalist fear, that generates a banal form of editorial marketing: Look above: the north fabricates a sub-genre. Look across: every book sales table includes at least three books on narco-trafficking. Essays, testimonies, novels. There are so many of these novels that a sub-genre, not just a tradition, is taking root. We can see how its elements are getting arduously established: colloquial language, plastic violence, regional pride, populism, picaresque […]. 2209

Later on, Lemus mentions the following: 9 “Mírese arriba: el norte fabrica un subgénero. Mírese enfrente: toda mesa de novedades tiene al menos tres libros sobre el narcotráfico. Ensayos, testimonios, novelas. Son ya tantas estas últimas que un subgénero, no una tradición, echa raíces. Podemos ver cómo se fijan trabajosamente sus elementos: lenguaje coloquial, violencia plástica, orgullo regionalista, populismo, picaresca […]” (220).

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A true narco-novel would enunciate opposite certitudes. It would not comfort, it would disturb. It would not simplify; it would respect complexity. It would say: knowledge does not save; read books and one day a bullet will gratuitously defy the wind and will blow your brains out. A novel that does what great novels do: to expand obscurity instead of reverting it. That spells out what is obvious: we are insects, we are in danger. 22310

Years later, Rafael Lemus’ perspective was taken up by Valeria Luiselli when she expressed that there is an incomprehensible and mean fascination for the marginal and the violent in Mexico: “In a good sector of the new national narrative there is an abundance of prostitutes, narco-traffickers, travesties, decapitations, drug overdoses, sordid scenarios—the subaltern and the abject, to put it in few, but charged, words.”11 In her essay, rather than questioning literature itself, Luiselli decides to attack the criticism that has made the marginal and violent aesthetics a grandiloquent representation of the rupture with traditional Mexican literature.12 Like Lemus, Luiselli states that in northern literature, more specifically the “narco-literature”, there is nothing innovative, refreshing, or radical; on the contrary, Luiselli affirms that many of the 10

11 12

“Una verdadera narconovela pronunciaría certezas contrarias. No consolaría, perturbaría. No simplificaría, respetaría la complejidad. Diría: el conocimiento no salva; lee libros y un día una bala desafiará gratuitamente al viento y te volará los sesos. Una novela que haga lo que las grandes novelas: extender la oscuridad en vez de revertirla. Que deletree lo obvio: somos insectos, corremos peligro.” (223). “En buena parte de la nueva narrativa nacional abundan las prostitutas, los narcotraficantes, los travestis, las decapitaciones, las sobredosis de drogas, los escenarios sórdidos—lo subalterno y lo abyecto, para decirlo en pocas palabras, aunque cargadas.” (229). As we have said before, this question described by Lemus and Luiselli is directly related to Zavala’s ideas. For Zavala, “the most commercial trend of black novel represents consequently the view of a post-sovereign Mexico in which a multiplicity of cartels controls whole regions above the diminished state configurations, violated by the corruptor power of clandestine global capital. In the same manner that the vast majority of newspaper investigations, songs, films and pieces of conceptual art on narco-trafficking, this kind of novels focuses on the violence inscribed on dead bodies through the strategies of ahistorical and mythological narratives, in sum, depoliticized.” (29). (“[…] la corriente más comercial de la novela negra representa consecuentemente la visión de un México postsoberano en el que una multiplicidad de cárteles controla regiones enteras por encima de las disminuidas configuraciones estatales, vulneradas por el poder corruptor del capital global clandestino. Al igual que la gran mayoría de investigaciones periodísticas, canciones, películas y piezas de arte conceptual sobre el narco, este tipo de novela se enfoca en la violencia inscrita en los cadáveres a través de estrategias narrativas ahistóricas y mitológicas, en suma, despolitizadas” (29)).

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writers have transformed northern literature into a kind of “spectrum”, a “tourism of marginality” that uses violence and the peripheral as a kind of moral, political, aesthetic and commercial flag (2012, 230). Therefore, for Lemus and Luiselli, northern literature has become a fairly light literature, a new literary mainstream. Of course, Eduardo Antonio Parra’s response was immediate, and in an article entitled “North, drug trafficking and literature” (“Norte, narcotráfico y literatura”) (2005), the Mexican writer mentions the following: On several occasions, writers from the north have pointed out that none of us has addressed drug trafficking as an issue. If it appears in some pages it is because it is a historical situation, that is, a context, not a theme, that involves the whole country, although it is accentuated in certain regions. It is not, then, a choice, but a reality […] If the critic sees it where we say it is not, his sagacity should be applauded. Even many authors do not even allude to it, and they feed their work with intimate, poetic experiences, family stories and even with abstractions and theoretical artifices.13 At this point, Parra reminds Lemus that the topics that could be considered as supposedly “northern” are being used and mythologized by the writers of the center of the country. By mentioning the names of Bernardo Fernández (Bef) or Yuri Herrera himself, Parra certifies this notion of literary geography expounded by Moretti and Casanova. Lemus’s attacks on border literature turns out to be a desperate attempt to magnify the “novel” centrality over the supposed “canonical and backward” provincialism. Proof of this is that both Lemus and Luiselli do not discuss certain literary works on northern themes (violence, prostitution, drugs) that have been written by representatives of the center of the country, such as Yuri Herrera, Antonio Ortuño (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1976), Julián Herbert (Acapulco, Guerrero, 1971), Juan Pablo Villalobos (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1973), Carlos Velázquez (who despite being a native of Torreón, Coahuila, Luiselli in her essay treats as a native of Guanajuato by

13

“En varias oportunidades, los escritores del norte hemos señalado que ninguno de nosotros ha abordado el narcotráfico como tema. Si éste asoma en algunas páginas es porque se trata de una situación histórica, es decir, un contexto, no un tema, que envuelve todo el país, aunque se acentúa en ciertas regiones. No se trata, entonces, de una elección, sino de una realidad […] Si el crítico lo ve ahí donde según nosotros no está, habría que aplaudirle su sagacidad. Incluso muchos autores ni siquiera lo aluden, y alimentan su obra con experiencias íntimas, poéticas, historias de familia y hasta con abstracciones y artificios teóricos.”

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linking his work to that of an heir to Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s).14 In Moretti’s words, we can say that the dispute between Lemus and Parra is a struggle to win a certain space of legitimation: […] with the premise of “distribution is destiny”, he indicates that Northern narrators are from the North, but publish preferably in the capital, and “are being read in the lethargic central cities. From there, they are seen at a different light, iconography”. Leaving aside the fact that may be Lemus portrayed himself as a reader in the preceding lines, which would explain many of his positions regarding the issues he criticizes, I think it is not redundant to repeat that in this country the only publishing houses with satisfactory distribution are located in the DF, and that if one wants to be read in Tijuana or Mérida, one must publish in the DF, although this is topic that belongs more to the fields of marketing or sociology that to the field of literature. However, it seems that these words mean that if Northern narrators exist is because readers (and critics) in the center graciously condescend to notice them, something that, from my humble perspective, accounts for nothing less that the recognition of their work. Parra 200515

What was expressed by Parra lets us see the great rivalries and conflicts that arise within this Mexican Republic of Letters.16 Parra is very lucid in mentioning 14 Regarding Lemus, his essay seeks more than anything to discredit the literary work of Élmer Mendoza (Culiacán, Sinaloa, 1949), Eduardo Antonio Parra (León, Guanajuato, 1965) and Luis Humberto Crosthwaite (Tijuana, Baja California, 1962). 15 “[…] con la premisa ‘distribución es destino’, señala que los narradores del norte son del norte, pero publican de preferencia en la capital y ‘se leen en las apáticas ciudades del centro. Desde allí se los mira distantemente, con cierto morbo, sin afán de comulgar con su iconografía’. Fuera de que quizá Lemus se haya autorretratado como lector en las líneas precedentes, lo cual explica muchas de sus posiciones frente a lo que critica, creo que no resulta ocioso repetir que, en este país, las únicas editoriales con distribución satisfactoria se ubican en el DF, que si uno quiere que lo lean en Tijuana o Mérida debe publicar en el DF, aunque eso es un tema que pertenece a la mercadotecnia o a la sociología, más que a la literatura. Sin embargo, pareciera que estas palabras pretenden afirmar que si los narradores del norte existen es porque los lectores (y críticos) del centro les conceden la gracia de su mirada, lo cual, desde mi humilde punto de vista, no sería otra cosa que un reconocimiento de la obra” (Parra). 16 This rivalry between northern writers and those from the center of the country has resulted in a poor mythologization of what it means to live on the northern border. For Heriberto Yépez, this has been the reason why many of the northern writers, upset or saddened by this supposed idea of living in “provincialism”, have emigrated both geographically and thematically. The myth of the northern writer is, for Yépez, the result of the great

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that Lemus’s attack is a self-defense of the literary capital that is boasted by the cultural capital. In this sense, the editorial conflict between the center and the periphery ends up showing us that, indeed, there is a highly restricted market for certain works and certain geographies (Moretti 1998, 158). In this regard, Pierre Bourdieu says that any literary conflict produced within what he calls the “field of production and distribution” (the publishing market) is actually a struggle for the “monopoly of imposition” between the dominant parties, positioned in the center, and the dominated ones, who find themselves withdrawn to the literary peripheries (Bourdieu 2008, 157). It was during this stage of conflict that Yuri Herrera’s work was being forgotten. The positioning that the Tierra Adentro award had given him (by printing 1,000 or 1,500 copies of his book) was not enough for it to be viewed and accepted within the great publishing market. In fact, either due to the small number of copies to be distributed or to the lack of corresponding reprints and translations, many of the winners of the Tierra Adentro awards find it necessary to seek new spaces for publication, with greater commercial openness. It would not be until 2008 when Yuri Herrera would make the great leap into the publishing field. It was thanks to the Spanish publishing house Periférica that Kingdom Cons (with the original Spanish title of Trabajos del reino) came to light again with a larger print run. Periférica Publishing House, as its name indicates, is an independent Spanish publishing house that has taken the task of publishing young writers who, despite their existence still outside of the literary canon, have a certain reputation in their countries of origin. In this sense, following this vision, we can affirm that the publication of Yuri Herrera by Periférica Publishing House supports this commercial strategy, designed by small publishers. Bourdieu points out that, in order to survive within the cultural environment, publishers in the process of consecration must discover (or rediscover) authors that are convenient both economically and literarily (2008, 132). Let us remember that by the end of the 2010s, Periférica was just beginning to function within the great international market, under the premise of stigmatization that the center of the country has placed on its border states: “The myth says: we must resist the center, we must oppose it, as Jesus Gardea opposed in Chihuahua or Abigael Bohórquez in Sonora. The myth of the frontier writer becomes the myth of the prophet in the desert. The writer of the north must be a foreigner. It must be isolated […] the northern writer sees himself as part of a resistance, of a centrifugal force” (86–88). (“El mito reza: hay que resistirse al centro, hay que oponérselo, como se le opuso Jesús Gardea en Chihuahua o Abigael Bohórquez en Sonora. El mito del escritor fronterizo deviene del mito del profeta en el desierto. El escritor del norte debe ser un extranjero. Debe ser aislado […] el escritor del norte se ve a sí mismo como parte de una resistencia, de una fuerza centrífuga” (86–88)).

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what Pierre Bourdieu designates as the “market for symbolic goods”, which is nothing other than an economy based on the exchange of aesthetic, cultural, and symbolic capital (1996, 141).17 Proof of this is that the first collection called “Biblioteca Portátil”, inaugurated in 2006, was intended to constitute a selection of “modern classics”, that is, the works of a series of authors that could be considered, over time, part of a literary canon; this aspect is extremely vital for every small publisher, since, as Beatriz Viterbo’s own editors mention, every independent publisher has as its main objective the “creation of a new catalog of authors” (Astutti and Contreras 2001, 768). Consequently, the literary prestige granted by the Tierra Adentro award allowed Yuri Herrera to enter the ranks of Periférica Publishing House, because his profile adapted to the commercial and cultural strategies that the publishers had set: to be a distinguished author in the country of origin, and to have a good possibility for international success.18 As its own editors refer, Periférica Publishing House tries to constitute a publishing market framed within the aesthetic-symbolic values proposed by a certain literary avant-garde. That is why the main vision of the publisher, under the seal of the “Biblioteca Portátil” collection, is to “rescue” from oblivion highquality literary “oddities”. Knowing the unique and particular way of narrating Mexican drug trafficking, coupled with the great support given by Eduardo Antonio Parra, Periférica “rescues” Herrera from the shadows, and locates him at the center of contemporary Latin American literary production.19 In this manner, Yuri Herrera’s work is positioned in a publishing market that 17 These premises and commercial strategies presented by Bourdieu turn out to be very interesting, because many of the small emerging publishing houses fuse their literary vision with these economic postulates; a situation that Adriana Astutti and Sandra Contreras have pointed out when talking about the Argentine publishing house Beatriz Viterbo. This formula can well be applied to all independent publishers, such as Sexto Piso publishing house or Sur+ in Mexico. 18 As indicated by Jorge Locane, a prize would be any “[…] performative act of distinction: from an X corpus of elements, necessarily preselected, one is chosen according to criteria already established in the ‘basis’ [of the competition]; then, it is usually identified by a reduced group of ‘experts’ on that particular topic.” (Locane 2017, 61). (“[..] acto performativo de distinción: de un corpus de elementos X, necesariamente preseleccionado, uno es puesto de relieve según criterios establecidos en las ‘bases’ y luego identificados, habitualmente, por un reducido grupo de ‘especialistas’ en la materia” (Locane 2017, 61)). 19 Based on his study carried out on the Herralde Novel Prize awarded by Anagrama Publishing House, Jorge Locane manages to distinguish a certain pattern on Spanish-American literary works published in Spain. For Anagrama, the label “Hispanic American literature” is exclusively intended for novels that have uprooted characters, political violence, a nonstructuring or determining regionalism, and that also belong to countries whose place of enunciation is vital for Latin America (Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru

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prioritizes more symbolic capital than commercial value.20 In other words, his literature resurfaced thanks to those private publishing houses that, as Ángel Rama specified, are “cultural” publishing houses, as opposed to the others that manifest themselves as “strictly commercial companies” (173). However, this does not mean that the opposition between small publishers and large publishing companies is based exclusively on literary taste but, on the contrary, the struggle between the two groups occurs more than anything on the economic plane. Bourdieu affirms that the criteria for selecting the authors to be published are based on a purely economic question: as they do not have sufficient monetary capital to purchase the rights to world-famous works, small publishers focus their resources on the search for good novels or outstanding authors that, although do not have significant sales potential, do have a profitable literary quality (2008, 138). Thus, the reissue of the novel Kingdom Cons is the result of this editorial struggle that occurs within the cultural field. In this sense, Bourdieu mentions the following: “Clearly, the real bastion of resistance to market forces is to be found among these small publishers […]” (2008, 150). Herrera’s second novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World, was also well received by the “Biblioteca Portátil” publishing label. As the work was published in Madrid, international critics began to pay some attention to it.21

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and Cuba) (2016, 49–52). Under these parameters, the commitment of the Periférica publishing house to a work like Yuri Herrera’s is even more clearly understood. About this, Beatriz Viterbo’s own editors mention the following: “but is it worthwhile, then, to publish these books? And the answer we give ourselves every time is, decidedly, yes. We are convinced that even if only 300 copies are sent in a five-year period these are necessary books that must be published, due to the simple and unavoidable reason that they are signs of current critical and intellectual production, and of cultural life” (772). (“¿Pero, vale la pena, entonces, publicar estos libros? Y la respuesta que cada vez nos damos es, decididamente, sí. Estamos convencidas de que aun cuando se vendan 300 ejemplares a lo largo de cinco años son libros que necesitan y deben ser editados, por la sencilla e insoslayable razón de que son los signos de la producción crítica, intelectual, del momento, de la vida cultural” (772)). Santangelo points out that the media recognition of Herrera in the literary field came about after his second novel: “In 2011 Signs that Will precede the End of the World was selected among the finalists of the Romulo Gallegos Award, and literary reviews proliferated, as well as interviews, reunions with the author all over Latin America, and translations of his works. The expectations created by his third novel were, then, very big; the author’s strong ethic and political position regarding the productivity of the editorial market must be recognized.” (45). (“En 2011, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo fue seleccionada entre las finalistas del Rómulo Gallegos, se multiplicaron las reseñas, las entrevistas, los encuentros con el autor en toda América Latina y crecieron las traducciones a otros idiomas. La expectativa hacia su tercera novela es, entonces, bastante grande y hay que reconocerle al autor una posición ética y política fuerte ante los tiempos productivos del mercado editorial” (45)).

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As Moretti indicates, it is not the same to participate in the publishing market from a “provincial” location (El Paso/Ciudad Juárez/Mexico) than from a “central” one (Madrid/Spain). Spain, nowadays, is considered the main “literary capital” of Hispanic America, because its great power is supported by its geographical location: Spain concentrates in its territory the main publishing houses (Alfaguara, Tusquets, Anagrama, Planeta) who are the owners of the vast majority of literature written in Spanish, by authors such as Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Vila-Matas, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Bellatin, Cristina Rivera Garza, Alejandro Zambra, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Ricardo Piglia, Gioconda Belli, Cristina Peri Rossi, among others.22 However, Herrera’s most momentous achievement came with the publication of his second novel. In 2009 Ámbito Cultural of El Corte Inglés (a cultural promoter of the Spanish distribution group El Corte Inglés that is responsible for holding cultural events) and the Hotel Kafka (an educational and cultural project created by a group of artists and writers residing in Spain) decided to inaugurate the Otras voces, otros ámbitos Award. The main objective of the award was to reward and promote literary works written in Spanish, published in Spain and whose sales did not exceed 3,000 copies. This award was given to Herrera’s novel, Kingdom Cons, thus catapulting exponentially his literary figure and the sale of his books. As we can see, this distinction was not only beneficial for the author, but also for the publisher itself, and for the company that sponsored the award. In other words, the award given to Herrera served as a “pure marketing strategy”, since the significance of any distinction from private companies lies in the massive increase in sales.23 In fact, the statutes of the Otras voces, otros ámbitos Award mention that the award consists of a sculpture by Jaime Martínez and the reissue and redistribution of the book nationwide with the support of the 83 bookstores of El Corte Inglés (El País). Thus, a mutual benefit is established between the participants: the company El Corte Inglés and Periférica Publishing House grant Yuri Herrera a “literary prestige” in order to increase their sales thereby achieving a considerable increase of economic capital. But the point is that the prizes 22 Fernando González-Ariza affirms that the publishing houses of Spain occupy the fourth place in the world and the second in Europe (119). In this sense, it is not uncommon for Spain to have become in recent years an important “showcase” for Latin American literature (Locane 2016, 47). 23 It is necessary to specify that the Otras voces, otros ámbitos Award only served as a kind of immediate consecration: the award only lasted for six years (2009–2014), thus benefiting a small group of Hispanic American writers: two Mexicans (Yuri Herrera and Emiliano Monge), two Spaniards (Luis Magrinyà and Jon Bilbao), an Argentine (Aurora Venturini) and a Colombian (Juan Sebastián Cárdenas).

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awarded by private companies end up benefiting the publisher more than the author, economically speaking. Hence, awards and distinctions proliferate in the literary world (González-Ariza 2007, 126; Locane 2017, 61).24 The award not only allowed Herrera the possibility of reissuing his novel and launching it on the world market under other publishers, but it also gave him what Casanova calls “literary prestige”. For Casanova, all “literary prestige” is preceded by a series of economic, social and cultural factors that allow a certain writer to convert from an “amateur” to a “professional of literature”, that is, having a specialized audience, the interest of certain bourgeois sectors, the admiration of the specialized press, the publication in the most recognized seals and editorial collections, and the connection to the circle of translators (2004, 15). However, it is important to emphasize that this “literary prestige” is granted by a private and international company. Although Herrera received in Mexico the prize granted by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA), it was not until his recognition in Spain that his work achieved worldwide visibility. This situation connects with James English’s notion about the “deterritorialization of prestige”: What I wish to emphasize at this stage is that the recent frenzy of prizes and awards has begun to foster not merely a denationalization but a more radical deterritorialization of prestige, an uncoupling of cultural prizes, and even of symbolic fields as such, from particular cities, nations, even clearly defined regions. 2005, 282

24 González-Ariza mentions the following: “A small twist in the call for the prize you get to kill two birds with the same stone. Something as simple as ‘the endowment will be granted in advance of allowances’. The author is rewarded and, in passing, the work is contracted with an interesting advance that, in any case, should be granted. However high the amount, there is always a chance to recover it with sales, because anyway that money will go to the author. A simple operation (if one takes into account that the copyright usually hovers between 8 and 10% of the price of the book without VAT), will convince us that very little money is risked by publishers.” (126). (“Con un pequeño giro en la convocatoria al premio se consigue matar dos pájaros de un mismo tiro. Algo tan sencillo como ‘la dotación será otorgada en concepto de anticipo de derechos’. Se premia al autor y ya de paso se le contrata la obra con un interesante anticipo que, de todas formas, habría que concederle. Por muy alta que sea la cantidad, siempre hay oportunidad de recuperarla con las ventas, pues de todas formas ese dinero va a ir al autor. Una sencilla operación (si se tiene en cuenta que los derechos de autor suelen rondar entre el 8 y el 10% del precio del libro sin IVA), nos convencerá de que es muy poco el dinero que se arriesgan las editoriales” (126)). Confirming what González-Ariza said, we have that to date Periférica Publishing House continues to retain the rights to the literary work of Yuri Herrera.

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In English’s words, the “deterritorialization of prestige” occurs from the symbolic valorization of a work outside its place of origin. In fact, if we analyze well the bibliography made by Marcela Santos for the collective book From allegory to word: Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom (De la alegoría a la palabra: el reino de Yuri Herrera), edited in 2019 by the UNAM, we realize that several of the academic articles on Yuri Herrera’s works circulate outside their country of origin. We can also observe that, of the fourteen theses registered so far, only five have been written in Mexico; and significantly these investigations were the last to be carried out (two in 2015, one in 2017 and two more in 2018; while the nine theses written abroad range from 2012 to 2015) (Santos 2019, 184–185). This bibliographic record demonstrates the process of “deterritorialization of prestige” that underlies Herrera’s work. In this sense, as Locane mentions, the current value of Latin American literature is defined abroad, in foreign political and commercial cultural headquarters, such as the publishing houses located in Spain (2017, 69). Based on the success and prestige granted by the award, Kingdom Cons, as well as Signs that Will Precede the End of the World, were reissued in 2010 by Periférica Publishing House under a brand-new collection, “Largo Recorrido”, whose catalog focuses on those authors of the 20th and 21st centuries who have already been consecrated by specialized critics. In this way, by making that great leap from one collection to another, Herrera positioned himself as a consecrated author in Mexican and Latin American letters.25 4

The Repositioning of a Literary Work: Yuri Herrera’s Narrative

In conclusion, we can say that the consecration obtained in Spain through Periférica Publishing House was the way in which Yuri Herrera’s work could be revalued and put into circulation in the Mexican publishing market. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas, we can assert that Herrera’s success has much to do with the commercial openness of small independent publishers (such as Periférica), which, thanks to their criteria of aesthetic and symbolic valorization, manage literary works in a more “autonomous” way (1996, 146–147). The reception of a literary text is directly related to its position within the publishing market (the literary field of production and distribution) (Moretti 1998, 158–163; Casanova 2004, 23–24). Following the media visibility granted by the publishing market, Herrera has not only been translated into several languages 25

Based again on the bibliography made by Santos, we can appreciate that Herrera’s literary recognition occurred, precisely, in the year of 2009; while the visibility by specialized critics only arrived in 2012 (176–185).

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(English, and French, among others),26 but his narrative has also begun to be noticed by specialized literary critics. The best proof of this is, in addition to the articles and academic theses, the collective book published by UNAM in recent years: From allegory to word: Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom. In the introduction to the book, Mónica Quijano Velasco highlights Herrera’s inclusion in the Mexican literary canon: “[…] with just three novels, two books for children and a book of stories (comparatively the lowest of the production), the writer from Hidalgo quickly became a reference point of the Mexican literature of the last three decades […]” (2019, 10).27 In fact, the publication of the text alone gives an account of this, since, as Quijano Velasco points out, this book is part of a project that contemplates the most important writers in the country; which positions Herrera at the same level as Cristina Rivera Garza, Julián Herbert and Jorge Fernández Granados (the other three celebrated authors of the collection). For this reason, despite the fact that Herrera’s work was initially linked to a certain “provincialism” on the part of literary critics in the center of the country, today his novels enjoy great international fame, thus promoting his return to the universe of Mexican literature: making the periphery a hegemonic center of consecration (Bourdieu 1996, 159–160). Our publishing market is governed by certain canonization processes that are granted by certain historical and geographical contexts (English 2005, 282). At the end of the day, all literature is an intrinsic struggle to take over the publishing markets (spaces of enunciation and legitimization) in order to make itself visible in the vast and competitive Republic of Letters.

Acknowledgments

A first version of this article was published in Revista Iberoamericana XVIII (68), Jul 2018: 187–200. 26

27

Casanova states that translation is also a form of “literary recognition”: “Translation is the foremost example of a particular type of consecration in the literary world. Its true nature as a form of literary recognition (rather than a mere exchange of one language for another or a purely horizontal transfer that provides a useful measure of the volume of publishing transactions in the world) goes unrecognized on account of its apparent neutrality. Nonetheless it constitutes the principal means of access to the literary world for all writers outside the center. Translation is the major prize and weapon in international literary competition, an instrument whose use and purpose differ depending on the position of the translator with respect to the text translated […]” (133). “[…] con apenas tres novelas, dos libros para niños y un libro de cuentos (comparativamente el menor de la producción), el escritor hidalguense se convirtió rápidamente en un punto de referencia de la literatura mexicana de los últimos tres lustros […]” (10).

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Bibliography Astutti, Adriana and Sandra Contreras. 2001. Editoriales independientes, pequeñas … Micropolíticas culturales en la literatura argentina actual. Revista Iberoamericana LXVII (197): 767–780. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2008. A Conservative Revolution in Publishing. Translation Studies. Translated by Ryan Fraser 1(2): 123–154. Bourdieu, Pierre. The rules of art. 1996. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Carini, Sara. 2012. El trabajo, al lector: nuevas formas de representación del poder en Trabajos del reino de Yuri Herrera. Ogigia. Revista Electrónica de Estudios Hispánicos 12: 45–57. Carini, Sara. 2014. Identidades fronterizas a través del lenguaje en Trabajos del reino y Señales que precederán al fin del mundo de Yuri Herrera. Revista Liberia 2: 1–24. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. El País. 2009. Yuri Herrera, ganador del I Premio Otras Voces, Otros Ámbitos. El País, 21 December elpais.com/cultura/2009/12/21/actualidad/1261350003_850215.html. Web. Accessed 02-20-2021. English, James. 2005. The Economy of Prestige. Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. González-Ariza, Fernando. 2007. Los premios literarios: entre la cultura y el marketing. Nueva Revista de Política, Cultura y Arte 114: 119–127. Herrera, Yuri. 2017. Kingdom Cons. Translated by Lisa Dillman. London: And Other Stories. Lemus, Rafael. 2012. Balas de salva. Notas sobre el narco y la narrativa mexicana. In Tierras de nadie. El norte en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea, eds. Viviane Mahieux and Oswaldo Zavala, 217–226. México: FETA. Locane, Jorge. 2017. El Premio Herralde de novela: literatura latinoamericana para el mundo y desterritorialización del prestigio. INTI 85–86: 61–73. Locane, Jorge. 2016. Más allá de Anagrama. De la literatura mundial a la literatura pluriversal. In Pluralismo e interculturalidad en América Latina en tiempos de globali­ zación, eds. José Luis Luna Bravo et al., 39–61. Buenos Aires: Grama. Luiselli, Valeria. 2012. Contra las tentaciones de la nueva crítica. In Tierras de nadie. El norte en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea, eds. Viviane Mahieux and Oswaldo Zavala, 227–236. México: FETA. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture. Translated by Libby Meintjes 15 (1): 11–40. Moretti, Franco. 1998. Atlas of the European novel 1800–1900. London: Verso.

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Parra, Eduardo Antonio. 2005. Norte, narcotráfico y literatura. Letras Libres, 31 October letraslibres.com/mexico/norte-narcotrafico-y-literatura. Web. Accessed 04-10-2021. Quijano Velasco, Mónica. 2019. Presentación. In De la alegoría a la palabra: el reino de Yuri Herrera, ed. Ivonne Sánchez Becerril, 7–11. México: UNAM. Rama, Ángel. 2005. El boom en perspectiva. Signos Literarios 1: 161–208. Ríos Baeza, Felipe Adrián. 2019. El entramado post-religioso de Yuri Herrera. In De la alegoría a la palabra: el reino de Yuri Herrera, ed. Ivonne Sánchez Becerril, 81–105. México: UNAM. Santangelo, Eugenio. 2019. Comunidades que jarchan: políticas de la lengua y el habitar en las tres novelas de Yuri Herrera. In De la alegoría a la palabra: el reino de Yuri Herrera, ed. Ivonne Sánchez Becerril, 23–52. México: UNAM. Santos, Marcela. 2019. Bibliohemerografía de y sobre Yuri Herrera. In De la alegoría a la palabra: el reino de Yuri Herrera, ed. Ivonne Sánchez Becerril, 169–191. México: UNAM. Serrato Córdova, José Eduardo. 2012. Arquetipos de la narcocultura en Trabajo del reino, de Yuri Herrera. In Nada es lo que parece. Estudios sobre la novela mexicana 2000–2009, ed. Miguel G. Rodríguez Lozano, 69–82. México: UNAM. Yépez, Heriberto. 2005. Made in Tijuana. Mexicali: ICBC. Zavala, Oswaldo. 2019. Los cárteles no existen. Narcotráfico y cultura en México. Barcelona: Malpaso.

Part 2 Latin American Genres, Themes and Writings in a Global World

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Chapter 6

Latin American Crónicas: The World-Regional Circulation of a Local Genre Juan Poblete Abstract The essay focuses on the Latin American crónica as a genre (a techno-social and cultural configuration) that is, simultaneously, global and local, literary and yet mass circulating. It is interested in two types of tensions. On the one hand, the tension between literature and journalism as specific examples of ways of organizing readers’ attention and as concrete genres or discursive forms enabled by such forms of attention. On the other, it studies the tension between the deep localization of the crónicas, which has made their translations so difficult, with the clear global nature of many of the topics they engage and the regional form of globalization they enjoy (i.e., a circulation beyond nations but within the Spanish language world). The essay ends with a focus on the work of crónica writers Martín Caparrós and Leila Guerriero.

I propose to study the Latin American crónica as a particular form of national literature in times of globalization. My central hypothesis is that the mediation the crónica produces between local, national and supranational spaces is a specific manifestation of a broader logic governing the relations between culture and globalization. After explaining this hypothesis, I will proceed to develop these ideas in relation to the Latin American crónica as a genre within national and transnational literatures. My goal will be to establish a form of studying national literatures in times of globalization, capable of avoiding the alleged incompatibility between the global and national levels of the analysis, through an emphasis on the regional-global level. I see the Latin American crónica as a genre (a techno-social and cultural configuration) that is, simultaneously, global and local, literary and yet mass circulating. 1

Culture/Globalization

As John Tomlinson points out, often critical thought on this area has limited itself to emphasizing one aspect of the much more complex connections © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_008

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between culture/globalization. That aspect has been the world-wide expansion of certain metropolitan products and services (from Hollywood to McDonalds). Alternatively, what is sometimes highlighted is the commodification of certain shared experiences of consumption such as the shopping center or cable TV. Contrary to those two ideas—that the globalization of culture is simply the planetary spread of a certain type of products or commercial experiences with their logical consequences—Tomlinson proposes, based on the ideas of Anthony Giddens, that what is globalized is an abstract cultural principle that deterritorializes all experiences, including those of Third and First World countries. By deterritorialization Tomlinson, following Néstor García Canclini, understands the loss of a natural or naturalized relation of culture with social and geographical territories. The reactions to this general cultural principle are, however, multiple and diverse, depending on the local context in which the cultural principle manifests. In this way, the same principle that creates a certain unity of the world (deterritorialization) engenders, simultaneously, its fragmentation (reterritorialization) in the form of what Renato Ortiz has called heterogeneous mundialização. Thus, the cultural experience of globalization is the result of the mediation of experience itself in a dual sense: its mediatization through the channels of the cultural industries, including social media, and its constitutive distancing of new relations between space, time and experience itself. National literatures always mediated the social production of the national, as experience, in Latin American modernities. They were one of the central instruments in the construction of the national imaginaries, experiences and sensibilities of populations that were, simultaneously, nationalized and modernized. They, in other words, were central to the construction of a national order. At the time of neoliberal globalization, when we move from (unfinished) industrializing societies (i.e. centered on the construction of a national market) to allegedly post-industrial societies (oriented towards export economies, deregulation, weakening of the capacity to intervene and the size of the public sector, radical flexibilization of the labor force and labor markets) national literatures attempt to explain/represent the disorder of this new modernization. Frederick Stirton Weaver has called the combined results of such economic and social policies, neoliberal democracies. Additionally, according to Stirton Weaver, they are also defined by a third principle: the relative decrease of the national as a significant sphere of real politics, economics and culture, and thus, a weakening of the kind of mediation between the local and the global that the nation provided most strongly until recently. This has meant that many decisions affecting the quality of life at those three levels take place

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beyond the nation and therefore, beyond democratic control (Stirton Weaver 2000, 169–208). Among the more positive effects of some of these transformations it is also important to mention the proliferation, within the national territory, of forms of association that expand the limited realms and actors of traditional national politics. In addition to political parties, unions and the state (the traditional actors of politics in the region), there is now a series of new social actors that demand collectively a radical change in the ways and meanings of politics, expanding in the process the definition of what is politics and what can or should be politicized. This has also resulted in a revalorization of culture (including, but now as one among many, national culture) as a sphere in which the full heterogeneity of the forms, spaces and actors of the social can be experienced. Citizenship is not only weakened by some dynamics of globalization, but actually transformed and expanded by others. From the forms of cultural homogenization that defined national modernizing processes, we move to multiple, and sometimes contradictory, forms of heterogenization of the national in times of neoliberal globalization. There is then, a culture of globalization and a significant globalization of cultures. Both processes involve an increase in the intensity of the exchanges and travels of cultural forms and contents, and, for literature, a high degree of intermediality. By intermediality I mean that literature as a discursive medium receives the strong impact of the forms of discourse, the narratives and formats of other media. To summarize my hypothesis about national literatures in times of neoliberal globalization: I propose that they account for a transformation of the meaning of the national literary and its forms of territorializing the cultural and social space of the nation. They also make evident a renewal of the critical potential of literary texts in such globalizing times. The point at which globalization connects with these national texts is not external to them, nor is it simply a referential content or a narrative style, it is, instead, an internal way of structuring, and a practice of the experience of the national as such: the mediatization of the global-local connection. From this perspective, national literature appears as a technology of social mediation and a technology of mapping the social through which society makes itself visible and imaginable to itself. This involves both a confirmation and a transformation of Benedict Anderson’s influential idea about the connections between written discourse (novels and newspapers) and national(ist) imaginaries. It is a confirmation, insofar literature continues to be one of the discourses through which the nation actively imagines itself as a coherent and intelligible cultural configuration. It is a transformation of Anderson’s thesis to the extent that, at the time of globalization, that same literature—which in the

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past naturalized the relationship between a certain territory, a language and a culture, on the one hand, and a national population, on the other—is now insistently devoted to questioning the naturalized unity of national culture. At the very least, national literature highlights now the mediated and mediating character of the national horizon. Paradoxically, however, these two aspects of national literatures under globalization can be combined in order to state that they perform—in any specific context and in their own reflexive practice on the mediation of the global/ local—the always unfinished but ultimately coherent and intelligible nature of national culture. This could be considered a new version of Antonio Cornejo Polar’s famous idea of Latin American national literatures as contradictory totalities. In addition to the contradictions between the oral/written, elite/ popular, hegemonic/counter-hegemonic, which defined national literatures, according to Cornejo Polar, we would need to add now, during times of neoliberal social and cultural globalization, the constitutive role that the mediation local/global and intermediality (literature, film, radio, journalism, television) have for national literatures. Or, extending Abril Trigo’s thesis about the cybernation (Trigo 2003), one could point out that national literature—precisely because it is a strictly symbolic elaboration of the national form of mediation between the local/global in a multimedia and complex context—can be experienced as one key site of the national, a site in which the constitutive virtuality of the nation becomes concrete and real. There is a different way of tackling the relations between cultural globalization and the cultures of globalization. According to William Mazzarella there has been in this regard an oscillation between two positions. On the one hand, the celebration of the capacity of social movements and microactors to mediate and produce the true and experiential meaning that macro social and economic structures have in their everyday lives. On the other, there is an emphasis on the policies of cultural globalization as highly regulated forms of administering difference by way of controlling structures of knowledge and institutional practices. In this second form, global culture would then be not the repetition of uniformity at a global scale but, instead, the planetary organization of diversity (Mazzarella, 2004, 351). George Yúdice has in fact, fully developed the latter thesis in his book The Expediency of Culture. Uses of Culture in the Global Era. According to Yúdice, the new meaning of culture as usable resource involves a displacement of all previous understandings of the term. Culture would not be today as relevant as a vehicle for ideological reproduction or symbolic distinctions among social classes; neither would it be as an ensemble of disciplinary institutions capable of generating habits or a machine to separate elite form popular culture. At the

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time of its true globalization, culture would be, above all, a resource for other ends, which call for a full reorganization of the social according to the administrative logic of governmentality. What is administered is cultural diversity, and that involves a new episteme, i.e., a new relationship between thought/ discourse and the world, which Yúdice calls “performative” in order to refer to the constitutive role symbolic and sign systems and models acquire in relation to social reality (including identities and products). Culture becomes a social resource to the extent that it becomes useful to administer a given population’s multiculturalism and diversity, or insofar as it allows the implementation of development strategies based on cultural goods or services that function as the basis of a mode of production grounded on knowledge and information. Culture becomes, then, part of a new economy that transforms the cultural and the social into administrable and appropriable property. Thus, disputes about copyright, patents and, generally, intellectual property rights, which affect all products based on information and the symbolic, have become one of the main scenarios of the struggles between different ways of administering and conceptualizing cultural diversity (Goldgel and Poblete 2020). In this regard, there have been three big global actors: the transnational corporations of culture, the semi- and peripheral countries often represented by UNESCO, and European governments. These last two actors have been resolute about what is called “cultural exception” or “cultural specificity”. I would like to use these general considerations on the relationship between globalization and cultures in Latin America—as mediated by the media, their relations, and the regional Latin American space—to better understand a specific Latin American genre, the crónica.1 2

The crónica as Genre

2.1 Institutionalization The crónica as a genre is enjoying a mini-boom. There are now multiple continental and national anthologies determining a canon of consecrated and emerging writers working within the form. Among them: Idea Crónica: Literatura de no-ficción iberoamericana edited by María Sonia Critsoff; Antología de la crónica latinoamericana actual, edited by Darío Jaramillo Agudelo; Mejor que ficción, edited by Jorge Carrión. There are paper and web-based oufits dedicated to the publication of new crónicas: Etiqueta Negra (Perú), Gatopardo and Letras Libres (Mexico), El Malpensante and SoHo (Colombia), Anfibia, 1 For an expanded version of this introductory framework, see Poblete 2006.

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Latido, Orsai, and Rolling Stone (Argentina), Pie Izquierdo (Bolivia), Marcapasos e Historias que laten (Venezuela). Some of them have produced their own anthologies such as Lo Mejor de Gatopardo and Soho Crónicas. There are Latin America-wide contests such as the collaborations of the Fundación para el Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI) with Seix Barral for their Crónica prize and CEMEX for the Premio CEMEX / FNPI, and the FNPI’s own Premio Gabo. Each one of them producing texts and anthologies. There is significant scholarly activity on the genre both historically and theoretically and even a specialized journal: Textos híbridos: Revista de estudios sobre crónica y perio­ dismo narrativo.2 And, as I will show in the last part of this essay, the crónica has now at least two meta-reflective textbooks: Martin Caparrós’ Lacrónica (2016) and Leila Guerriero’s Zona de obras (2014). 2.2 History of the Genre The connection between social life and written discourse (in its various genres and formats) is a historical and thus changing relation in which the forms of representation, acquire, lose or recuperate their capacity to express and give an account of a given concrete reality, depending on the variations in social demands and the technological possibilities that carry forward such vision. The crónica has been born many times. First, as colonial crónica de Indias, through which the Spanish soldiers and bureaucrats found a discursive and bureaucratic instrument to give an always partial (invested and incomplete) account of what they saw in the newly appropriated lands. These crónicas reflected both the interest of the Spanish officers and those of the native informants, who shaped their accounts to their purposes and followed their own affects in relation to the request to tell itself. Then, in the nineteenth century, the crónica was reborn first as a cuadro de costumbres and then as a mediation between Europe and Latin America in the so-called “editor de Tijeras” or scissors editor, whose job was simply to choose, cut, and paste the written materials that came from the other side of the Atlantic and thus reflected European and then American priorities and lives. Then, later in the same century, the crónica, as crónica roja or crime crónica was also the point of entry for a popular sensibility focused on the spectacular or sensational case. In this way, the textual space of the crónica performed the role of cultural mediation between a popular form of narrative—what Jesús Martín Barbero calls a cultural popular matrix—and the protomassive and industrialized cultural imaginary of the newly emerging Mass-oriented press (Martín Barbero 1987, Sunkel 1985). 2 https://textoshibridos.uai.cl/index.php/textoshibridos/%20article/view/6.

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In the last part of the nineteenth century, a different type of crónica emerges. It is the genre through which the great Latin American writer (Rubén Darío, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, and José Martí, among many others) specializes or professionalizes their craft, acquiring, for the first time, a degree of independence from state or church related sponsorship (Rama, Rotker, González). As shown by Angel Rama and Julio Ramos, the crónica is also the textual vehicle through which the writer builds their own discursive specificity as a critic of modernity and the positivist modernization of Latin American society. The crónica functions here as both a space that allows the articulation of the writer and the market, and the surface that registers the negative critique program of such market and its modernity which, as a form of self-definition, the writers give and embrace for themselves (Rama 1970, Ramos 1989). Once the big and massive newspapers and magazines are operating in the Latin America of the 1920s to the 1950s, a fully professional line of modern cronistas develops, including writers such as Roberto Arlt, Joaquín Edwards Bello, Salvador Novo, Mario de Andrade, Alfonsina Storni, Cube Bonifant and culminates in others such as Rodolfo Walsh, Rubem Braga, and the early Gabriel García Márquez (Bielsa 2006, Mahieux 2011, Reynolds 2012, Donado 2003, Rotker 2005, Corona and Jorgensen 2002, Bencomo 2002). The contemporary crónica could, finally, be connected to the so-called crisis of modernity in postmodernity, which, in Latin America, could be dated to the 1968 social upheaval in Mexico and the imposition of dictatorial and neoliberal regimes starting in 1973. Both historical events signal an epochal social and political transformation that would find in the new crónica a vehicle of critique and expression with great capacity for wider circulation. Here we can mention better known contemporaries such as Carlos Monsivais, Elena Poniatowska, Julio Scherer García, Pedro Lemebel, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Martín Caparrós, Leila Guerriero, Julio Villanueva Chang, Juan Villoro, Boris Muñoz, Cristián Alarcón, Alberto Salcedo Ramos, etc. 2.3 Definitions of the Genre Carlos Monsivais has referred to the crónica as a mestizo genre, one in which the text responds to its social condition without shame or aesthetic inferiority complexes but also without utilitarian or programmatic restrictions. The crónica emerges here as a textual territory that is neither purely high culture nor exclusively popular culture, halfway between journalism and the democratization of culture and the nation. In Monsivais’ own words: “Everything is still to be written, recorded, accounted for. To understand, deploy, and investigate this new country is fundamental (…) What can the crónica and the reportage [long form journalism] tell us about the current situation? At the very least,

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quoting Valle Inclán, that the present is not yet History and it has more realistic ways” (quoted by Egan, “Lo marginal en el centro”, 99). The crónica decides then to intervene in that liminal space between already established narratives and the evanescent now of the everyday life of the nation. Or to put in terms of Alain Touraine’s theorizing of social movements: the crónica intervenes at the level of the struggle for ‘historicity’ in a given context, that is to say, where the meaning of social life is produced and disputed culturally through the discursive codification of experience (quoted by Escobar, 71). This is why Susana Rotker defined the crónica as an archeology of the present. Given these multiple historical origins, it should not surprise us if today— at a different crossroads constituted by deep cultural transformations with the corresponding challenge to traditional cultural hierarchies—the crónica (re)appears, at least in my hypothesis, as the textual space for mediations between the new organization of intellectual production and new forms of public discourse, between new practices and demands of cultural and reading consumption and the dominant genres of written discourse; and, finally, between the new national and urban imaginaries and the new forms of global discourses. It is interesting in this context to remember José Joaquín Brunner’s hypothesis about the epic nature of sociology (big narratives and processes, such as modernization) and its secular struggle with the novel for the right to claim the best representational capacity to render the complexities of the social. Great style sociology, insists Brunner, the one that pushed the great epics of development or modernization, may be close to extinction now that the big metanarratives of progress have lost their power and micro-representations of daily life are better served by the mass media and the novel (Brunner 1997). The Chilean sociologist also attributes to the novel the merit of providing “a current point of view about what is contemporary”. I propose that such capacity has found in the crónica a new vehicle with a long history in the interfaces between orality and literature, everyday life and discursive systems of representation and circulation in Latin America. As the novel for Brunner, the crónica, in my hypothesis, proposes a different articulation between temporality, representation and reception. It also emerges as an alternative in the production of these new manuals to live the everyday. Alain Touraine has pointed out that the goal of social movements, multiplying in Latin American politics, is “the control of historicity”, understood as “the set of cultural models that govern social practices” (quoted by Escobar, 71). Taking both proposals together, it is possible to posit that the crónica offers the possibility of articulating the meanings of daily life in the reading or listening of texts transmitted through the mass media. Or, as Susana

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Rotker, speaking about the experience of urban violence in Latin America, points out: that where the language of numbers and statistics loses its capacity to truly communicate such experience, because of sheer repetition or its technical nature, oral testimonies and the crónicas that collect and empower them, emerge as “original knowledges” to narrate what is otherwise inexplicable or incomprehensible (Rotker 2000, 8). In this regard, the crónica assumes, as a contemporary replacement, the role historically assigned to the national novel, whose guidelines functioned, simultaneously, as socialization and nationalization manuals for citizens. In contrast to the order of the national in the novels of the past, in the contemporary crónica we can see processes that are partially similar and partially very different. The contemporary crónica, in Monsivais or Lemebel, is still trying to connect daily life and its languages with the written text as way of reaching a wider public with a message communicated through mass media. However, when the state shrinks and retreats the contemporary crónica no longer has long term strategic pretensions or totalizing ambitions animating the 19th and early 20th century novels. Instead crónicas often deploy today what Monsivais called re/signation (but also the multiple possibilities) of the media pamphlet seeking to explain, always contingently, a new disorder or reordering of the social. From the here and now, the crónicas intervene tactically in the everyday cultural realm of publics that are heterogeneous and face new technologically mediated communicational scapes. Chilean Pedro Lemebel, whose work I have studied elsewhere (Poblete, 2019), defines his own crónica writing as the “temptation to illuminate the raw event and turn the power off from ontological truth” (Blanco and Gelpí 1997, 94). This gay knowledge is opposed in Foucauldian tones to other more institutionalized forms of discourse: I always hated philosophy professors, all professors in fact. I detested their doctrinary positions about knowledge, about poor and indigenous people, queer people. A traffic [of discourses] that excluded us. That is the reason my writings go first through mass media before they become books. It is habit inherited from the dictatorship. Something like ‘doing graffiti in the newspaper’. Blanco and Gelpí 1997, 93–94

The crónica, then, as an alternative to two forms of knowledge: regular journalism with all its limitations and academic knowledge on the other and their problems. The crónica, also, as an alternative to certain literary knowledge: “Maybe the crónica is the writing gesture I adopted because I couldn’t fake the

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fictional hypocrisy of the literature being written at the time”. The crónica, therefore, as a distrust of literary representation or as Lemebel states: “all those aesthetics trappings of the bourgeoisie”, ‘a passport to cross a border’, “the surplus of a journey, the illiterate leftovers of a theory” (Blanco and Gelpí 1997, 93–97). What Lemebel is referring to is the strict and police-like separation of the aesthetic from what is real. Here fiction as a category would function as the safe quarantining of literary textuality behind the wall of the imaginary, safely separated from the real or historical. In this regard, the contemporary explosion of interest in non-fiction—of which the testimonial and documentary film booms first, along with the crónica’s later, are a manifestation—is a telling example of the current evolution of such previous cultural classification systems. Non-fiction can then be more objectively or subjectively oriented, while still remaining on the side of real and direct referentiality. What makes the crónica different from fiction, and closer to a certain understanding of journalism, is the commitment to factuality which creates a horizon of expectations and a framework for an understanding of the text as such. What brings it to the proximity of the literary is its emphasis on the active subjectivity of its organizing dominant perspective. The crónica says that, in order to be powerfully relevant and diversely meaningful to a reader, the perception of the real is as important as the real itself, the subjective processing as much as the—at any rate, always already constructed—description of the facts. In the case of the Latin American crónica this means that the genre adscription creates a framework of relevance that is an important part of the meanings of the text. Leila Guerriero and Martín Caparrós—two of the best Latin American crónica writers, whose meta-genre work I study below—define this relation to the real in the crónica thus respectively: If the question is what is the border between journalism and fiction, the answer is simple: not to make things up (…) The implicit contract is that nonfictional histories have no flights of fantasy, and that is a contract that should be respected. Guerriero 2014, 58

The difference, of course, is the reading pact, the agreement the author proposes to the reader: I am going to tell you a story that did take place (…) would be the pact of the non-fictional story. I am going to tell you a story I made up, would be the pact of fiction. Caparrós 2016, 45

Both of them, however, also understand that the specificity of the crónica as a non-fictional genre resides on its insistence, contrary to the objectivity claims

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of standard journalism, on the active and present subjectivity of the journalist’s gaze and voice in the text. The crónica is thus textually dense non-fictional prose empowered as much by its carefully worked on language as by its strong structuring subjectivity organizing perspective and voice. This relevance frame also insists, as a natural corollary, on the idea that this is a culturally and linguistically close subjectivity engaging with a reality that more often than not, is also regionally circumscribed and/or relevant. Even when the crónica is about an elsewhere beyond the region’s borders, there is always at its center a recognizable Latin American eye and voice organizing the visible and the sayable. 3

The Macro-regional Context: Cultural Proximity and the Vernacular Advantage

The proper democratic administration of culture in a macro-region under globalized condition is one of the central topics of El Espacio Cultural Latino­ americano (2003), edited by Manuel Antonio Garretón and collectively elaborated by a group of distinguished Latin American intellectuals.3 The authors of El Espacio Cultural give to the nation-state, at the start of the 21st century, a double mission in the area of the administration of culture: to create cultural policies that respect and encourage cultural diversity, and generate consensual perspectives on social national life and its meanings. Political struggles will increasingly be clashes and debates about the cultural model of society, i.e. for models of individual and collective life, models of modernity. The centrality and autonomy of culture […] makes spaces become more and more communicational spaces, […] it is necessary to insist that what is new is that the world is organizing around cultural spaces…. Garretón et al. 2003, 27–28

In such cultural spaces, as I already mentioned, new actors join the traditional protagonism of others related to the national industrialization processes and thus to labor and formal politics. These new actors, including new publics and identity-based ones, are related to consumption, information and communication. National culture then, is heterogenized from below and interconnected from above, diversified from within and newly linked beyond and inside its 3 Manuel Antonio Garretón, Jesús Martín Barbero, Marcelo Cavarozzi, Néstor García Canclini, Guadalupe Ruiz-Giménez, and Rodolfo Stavenhagen.

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borders. The movement is double and wants to revert both the ethnocentrism that defined dominant national imaginaries in Latin America through most of the 19th and 20th centuries and the nationalist insular impulse that has prevented, until very recently, the formation of a Latin American cultural space. Cultural industries would be key for such an articulation since: The everyday culture of the majorities in Latin America does not take place in high culture, not even in folklore, but happens, instead, in an urban culture densely populated by imaginaries of modernity communicated, to a great extent, through the mass media. Garretón et al. 2003, 202

In this context, there are two steps that go beyond the political and cultural limits of the nation that are fundamental: first, to develop integration policies between governments and cultural producers within and among the different countries of the region “to allow Latin American cultural production to circulate effectively through the region” (168). Secondly, those states must fight for imposing in international trade agreements the cultural exception clause which excludes cultural goods from the exclusive control of the logic of the economic market (195). I want now to advance my reading of the contemporary crónica as a) precisely one of those communicational spaces and practices that have dived deeply into the heterogeneity of the social in Latin America; and b) one of those culturally specific practices that have enjoyed certain natural protections from the expansive force of the dominant global communicational flows. Rethinking media imperialism theories in the late 1980s, Joseph D. Straubhaar developed, for Communication Studies, what has been called the cultural proximity theory to explain why Latin American societies were producing and consuming more and more national and regional Latin American TV in the midst of the expansion of metropolitan media around the globe. It proposes that Latin American audiences were attracted by the cultural relevance, familiarity and understandability of nationally or regionally produced TV. Cultural proximity, always mediated by technology, had two levels: the national and the Latin American regional. Straubhaar’s ideas about cultural proximity could be said to imply a form of natural market protection against external competition from more developed industrial actors in national and regional markets. I have elsewhere explained what I called the vernacular advantage or the advantage of the vernacular in the case of Latin American film comedies, which from the 1930s to the 1950s constituted the basis of a veritable import-substitution phenomenon in relation to Hollywood in the region. The idea being that film comedies are one

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kind of film in which the national product can compete with Hollywood in a much more leveled field than in almost any other film genre. What in big historical dramas, action movies or science fiction films sometimes manifests as the poverty of production-values in Latin American films (at least from the viewpoint of hegemonic cinema) is compensated, perhaps with an advantage, when it comes to comedies. In this genre, the settings are often simple, the actors are frequently already well known nationally for their work in similar comedic national radio or TV shows, and a significant portion of the primary material is itself the national situation and the national language, i.e., something that Hollywood can do best only for the American context (Poblete 2015, 7). I propose that, like comedies, the crónica has enjoyed a similar advantage and for similar reasons. To which one should add the technological development represented by the expansion of the internet which has made possible a relatively sustainable explosion of platforms for regionally circulating journalism and literature. In the case of the crónicas, cultural proximity, or more precisely the double—linguistic and cultural—advantage of the vernacular, has been a plus constituting their condition of possibility. The Latin American crónica as a genre must, then, be understood as a technosocial and cultural configuration. I am interested in two types of tensions that I will not have the space to fully deal with here. On the one hand, the tension between literature and journalism as specific examples of ways of organizing readers’ attention and as concrete genres or discursive forms enabled by such forms of attention. On the other, the tension between the deep localization of the crónicas, which has made their translations so difficult, and the clear global nature of many of the topics they engage and the regional form of globalization they enjoy (i.e., a circulation beyond nations but within the Spanish language world). From these premises, a series of corollaries that I can only present as thesis here, derive. III.1. A phenomenology of the crónica as genre would include, centrally, the way it manages the relations between the close and far, the degree of connection or disconnection between these distances. I am interested in the material dependence of the crónica on the mass newspaper or magazine (whether printed or virtual), that is to say in its mediatized nature creating a regionally global cultural proximity through language that administers precisely the relations of depth and distance between what is far but relevant and what is close but hidden or invisible.4 4 An interesting position in this regard, one that also significantly expands the scope of the Latin American crónica, is Tania Gentic’s book, The Everyday Atlantic. Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper chronicle.

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III.2. The crónica as a genre holds the promise of a literature or cultural written discourse that is closer to the people, closer to the body, closer to the now and the street. As everyday readers incorporate the crónica to their cultural consumption they connect formal and informal ways of reading. Perhaps because of that, the crónica seems a genre perfectly suited for the times. This may help explain a paradox Guerriero and Caparrós—whose theorizing on the crónica as genre I study below— point to. In Guerriero’s words: “the paradox of the alleged boom of the crónica along with the idea, often taken for granted, that readers no longer read” (Guerriero 2014, 119). In other words, the crónica is a specific discursive position on the structuring of attention through textual means. This involves a tecnique and a politics of what should or can be told, to whom and for what purposes or effects? III.3. In order to understand how the Latin American contemporary crónica as a global-regional genre operates—mediating experience itself in the triple sense of mediatization through the channels of the cultural industries, (including social media), its constitutive distancing of new relations between space, time and experience itself, and the intermedial connections it establishes between journalism and literature—it is useful to adduce a few key concepts from Jesús Martín Barbero. Following Martin Barbero, we could then say that the contemporary crónica as a genre and cultural practice belongs to and reflects the transformation of our communicationally constructed spaces and of our technically mediated social imaginaries. By social imaginaries Martín Barbero understand spaces for the projection of identities and the constitution of what is public and its publics. A social imaginary is an imbrication of a certain form of social reason, a way of organizing sociality, with a certain thick communicational context (with its institutions and technicities, including media, and their logics, i.e., their formats and grammars for production and reception). Martín Barbero’s emphasis on this imbrication of the social with technologies and communicational contexts, his highlighting the denseness of what he calls mediation, allows him to think media as spaces for the manifestation of a form of communal thinking on the meaning of society and the social in a given context. It allows a consideration in equal parts of the thickness of mediatic mediation of the social and the social (histórico-cultural) mediation of the media. Martín Barbero calls such articulation of politics and culture with media technologies, a cultural matrix, i.e., the interaction of an imaginary, a social memory (with its historically acquired knowledges) and a sensorium (a way of imagining, thinking, feeling, seeing) (Martín Barbero 1987). The

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crónica is part of a cultural matrix that responds to both the non-fiction based resurgence of the real against the separation of fictional and nonfictional, and one expression of a language and culture-based world regional social imaginary heightened by certain techno-social configuration and their affordances. III.4. While the crónicas of the first wave of international culture in Latin America, Rubén Darío and José Martí among them, were often focused on describing to the Latin American reader the marvels of material wealth and change in the first world and especially in its great metropolis (Paris, London, New York), the contemporary crónica, at the time of full globalization, is often more focused on the invisible or the not apparent in the life of cities, both local and international. III.5. Crónicas may be one example of a form of world literature that connects the national situation to macro-regional capitals like Madrid, Barcelona, Buenos Aires or Mexico City, rarely going beyond those limits. In that sense, the crónica would be an example of a form of world literature (an actually existing literature in the world) that is connected to an alternative power structure (different from the one organizing worldliterature in Franco Moretti or the world republic of letters in Pascale Casanova) insofar as it would circulate transnationally, but almost exclusively within the sphere of the Spanish language. This is what I had in mind, politically, when I proposed in 2003 the idea of a Latin/o America world-region, connecting Latin American populations in the United States and Latin America (Poblete 2003, XXIII) or what Alexander Beecroft is thinking of, historically, when he describes Spanish as a regional-world language (Beecroft 2015, 269). What the crónica highlights—in both the specificity of its textuality (the relationship between the near and far, the combination of subjectivity and objectivity, of literature and journalism) and its actual circulation within Latin America media—is the correspondence and cultivation of the historical and cultural fit between the cronista and their readership. Or as Caparrós puts it: “La crónica made me think Latin America in a different way. I already said it: I did not believe in Latin America, because I did not have any experience of Latin America, no occasion in which that concept had been operative—until la crónica” (Caparrós 2016, 415). III.6. The crónica is, in its origin, as much the penetration of the new media (printed journalism) in the daily life of the national population at a time of increasing international integration of markets and news, as it is the vehicle through which literature and journalism come together, i.e., a form of writing and reading practices that connect high and popular

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culture. In my hypothesis, the crónica also responds to the early politicization of the sensible in the, not by accident called, sensational press or news, and to the further developments of such process, later in the twentieth century. I am referring to the form of articulation of the sensible (the aesthetic as much as what Gómez and Mignolo call the aisthesical) and the political in long form journalism, testimonios and crónicas.5 The latter are all forms of writing and reading that bring together spheres of life and experience normally separated by cultural divides. In this light, the crónica would be both a defiance of such cultural forms of distinction and social classification through culture, and a particular communicational form resulting from the coming together of certain technologies (their formats and logics), and cultural practices (involving a specific articulation of the sensible, attention, and meaning). Moreover, this encounter involves a specific form of temporality that brings this type of journalism closer to the literary. This happens both at the moment of production and at the moment of reception, as this quote from Guerriero makes clear: “A crónica is, by definition, the opposite of the news, and the crónica writer is, by definition, someone who arrives late, who takes their time to see and even more time to tell that which they saw” (Guerriero 2014, 94). 4

Leila Guerriero and Martín Caparrós: Theorizing the Genre from Its Practice

In “El Bovarismo, dos mujeres y un pueblo de la pampa”, an extraordinary practical demonstration of how literature and the crónica are related and different, but also compatible and co-dependent, Argentine crónica writer Leila Guerriero (born 1967) tells the parallel story of her own love for Madame Bovary—a literary text that has accompanied her all her life, acquiring different meanings as she grows older—and the real-life story of her best childhood friend who after marrying, having babies and an unfaithful husband, commits suicide in a small town in the middle of la pampa in Argentina. In this text, Madame Bovary is left standing as a permanent and evolving presence in the author’s life, while her friend, seemingly, simply dies: “Today, while I write, I think that Luisa is no longer among the living, but Emma Bovary, with her volcanic contradictions, with her excitements, with her oversized Bovarism, is still alive. To my infinite delight, to my deep indignation” (Guerriero 2014, 32). 5 On the Latin American connections among these three forms of journalism, see Calvi 2019.

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But Guerriero’s text is a demonstration of the opposite, as the story of her friend Luisa and the contrast between her and Guerriero—as two possible Bovaristas, one alive and one dead, and thus separated only by a crossroads and a couple of accidents—and Emma Bovary herself, will be forever etched in the reader’s mind. Luisa lives in Guerriero’s memory and that obscure destiny is now part of the reader’s experience. The crónica turns out to be a doubleheaded hybrid, retelling the real-life story of Guerriero’s relation to a text of fiction and the real-life story of her friend told in a non-fictional text. Its power on the reader resides in its capacity to reflect on this literature/crónica relationship with life, using both the resources of the literary and the stark and driving facticity of the crónica. Guerriero alludes to both when she says: “And that one, exactly that one, was the end of everything. There is no conclusion, no fireworks. There is no epiphany. In the end, one doesn’t know what to think.” (33). The allusion is to the expectations to the literary reader as much as it is to the generic borders of the crónica. Their coming together in this text makes it much more powerful and memorable, more deeply felt and more thoughtful. This is structurally reinforced in the text by the basic alternation between the story of Guerriero’s relations with one fictional suicide and its real-life counterpart. The fiction is made real in its real relations with a reader, twice. The crónica is made literature-like in its capacity to recreate a fictional nineteenth century French character in the real-life trajectory of a modest Argentine woman in la pampa. Literature feeds on the non-fictional and the real-life story is driven by the context fiction creates for its semic possibilities. Guerriero says: “And again, there is no conclusion, no fireworks. No epiphanies. There are evidences: Luisa is dead, and Madame Bovary, like a machine capable of going through the centuries, keeps on whispering her powerful message, her terrible song: careful, careful. Careful” (35). And we must understand this as a form of literal truth that is now, however, endowed with a resonance that inextricably combines the literary with the non-fictional: “Conclusions? Their obviousness is disgusting: that the potentially most Bovarist of the two of us ended up being the least Bovarist. And that the least Bovarist of the two us ended up a literal Bovarist. Is it necessary to say the obvious?” (Guerriero 2014, 34). What is most obvious and true is often in need of restatement in a new way so that its true nature can be forcefully perceived again, as if seen for the first time, as Viktor Shklovsky put it. When Guerriero states “That is what I have come to say: the collected reasons [by which Flaubert’s text became important to her], and the life and death of María Luisa Castillo. Everything else is completely irrelevant.” (22), we must understand what she is doing. She is claiming the capacity to resonate throughout a life that some literature has on

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its readers, along with the importance the facts of a personal experience may have for others when presented as such, as facts full of meaning, with the help of certain expressive techniques and an unbreakable faith in the power of the real and the fictional to generate lasting, relevant and important effects. Is it necessary to emphasize that she is responding, in practice and through her writing, to the usual efforts to absolutely distinguish literature from the crónica and vice versa? “One, or some, or all these things happened, happened to us” (36) is the beginning of Guerriero’s “El Síndrome” in which she describes the beginnings of her literary vocation and that of many young writing-oriented kids across Latin America: “Our hearts were broken, or our hearts were not broken at all and we were a living fury; or our hearts were broken and we were, also, a living fury” (37). Those kids were only a few, endowed with a different capacity to see otherwise, to pay attention to the revealing detail, to read in the real the depth of its actual and potential meanings: “We were young and we wanted to write and we were dispersed. There was no more than one of us per high school, per neighborhood, per hectare” (38). Guerriero’s aforementioned first few lines are a beginning that reminded me immediately of the dance between fiction and reality, truth and verisimilitude, that constitutes so many of the texts of Alejandro Zambra, who, in addition to being one of most important writers of fiction in Chile now, is also another great writer of literary crónicas in Chilean newspapers. One beginning that came to mind was that of Bonsai, Zambra’s 2006 short novel, and it reads: “In the end, she dies and he is left alone, although in fact he had been left alone a number of years before her death, before Emilia’s death. Let us say her name was Emilia and that his name is, was and continues to be Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end, Emilia dies and Julio doesn’t die. The rest is literature: The first night …” (Zambra 2006, 13). In both texts, the oscillation between claims of actuality and potential, what is and what could perfectly be insofar as it is lodged as a possibility in the realm of reality or fiction, are ways of affirming and subverting the relevance and nature of the texts that contain it. Fiction becomes an extension, or at least a possible extension, of non-fiction, and the latter is suffused with the potential for meaning extrapolation that fuels in literature and the crónica, from two different sides of the real, the relationship between singularity and universality. In fact, a few pages later in her book, Guerriero mentions in “Aterrador” precisely that beginning of Zambra’s short novel as exemplary of the arrival of a voice to the mind of the blocked writer, a restitution of order to the world by way of the right set of words.

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Some of those words came to Guerriero—whose crónica work has been compiled in the expanded version of Frutos extraños 2001–2019. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2020—via the works of another great Argentine crónica writer: “above all in the crónicas of Martín Caparrós; reading him I discovered that one can tell a real-life story with the rhythm and the prose of a good novel” (121). Martín Caparrós (born in 1957) is the author of many novels and books of crónicas, but for our purposes here he is, above all, the author of Lacrónica (2015) a sui generis how-to essay on the crónica as genre, accompanied by a selection of Caparrós’ own texts as examples of his ideas on the genre. Quoting an essay by Tomás Eloy Martínez, one of his admired mentors, Caparrós reminds us of the importance of the genre: “The crónica is, perhaps, the central genre of Argentine literature. Our literary tradition starts with a masterful crónica, Facundo.” (Caparrós 2016, 22). Because Caparrós is tired of what he considers the overwhelming crónica vogue, he proposes the corrective and defamiliarizing expression “Lacrónica” to refer to the genre. He defines it, concisely, as “a journalistic text that deals with what is not news” (47). Perhaps echoing Benjamin, he contrasts information and what the crónica is capable of capturing, what Benjamin would have called experience: Information, as it exists, is telling a lot people what happens to very few people: those in power. (…) Information posits, imposes, an idea of the world: a model of the world in which what matters are just a few (…) Lacrónica rebels against that, when it tries to show, in their stories, the life of all, of anybody, what happens to those who could also be our readers. 49–50

From this democratizing thematic focus, Caparrós derives a politics of epistemology and intervention: “Lacrónica is a way of confronting the world, information and its politics about the world” (50) which involves not just potentially representing a world closer to the reader in its everydayness, but also charging against the indifference of the many towards the many, borrowing from literary genres to empower a sui generis journalistic discourse, insisting that “Journalism is increasingly to tell the things many don’t want to know. Because they think is not of interest to them. Because they never thought about them. Because nobody narrated those things to them well” (49). This politics involves a technique that is the opposite of traditional journalism, with its inverted pyramid designed to attract, to different extents, the dwindling attention it expects any reader to pay it. Instead of the pyramid, insists Caparrós, the crónica centrally depends on its powerful beginning. Rather than convincing

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the reader that the title and subtitle of the piece are enough to capture the gist of the news, and that there is no reason to continue reading, the crónica grabs the reader from the start and never lets go: “They are two totally different ways of telling: informational prose synthesizes what happened; the crónica prose scenifies it” (127). In so doing, the crónica repositions “a form of writing between what is narrated and the reader”, which is a way of also saying this is non-fiction, but it is also not the only way of telling this story. Through its insistence on “the impossibility of absolute truth” and “the existence of infinite versions of things” (128) the crónica trusts as much the power of its denser language to enact a politics of journalistic textuality as the actual attention capabilities of its readers and the demands that is not only feasible but necessary to make on such attention spans. Finally, the crónica insists on questioning, which is both the source of its own genesis and its epistemological and political self-positioning: “Information cannot tolerate doubt, information states (…) Against the Newspaper-Machine as producer of truths, doubt [in the crónica] is a way of saying I did my best (…) the crónica, the crónica writer, allows themselves a doubt. The crónica writer is the one that looks and asks, and wonders” (298). Both Guerriero and Caparrós clarify, however, that this constitutive subjectivity of the crónica cannot and should not be confused with a license to speak mostly about oneself. The crónica’s value resides first on the research and journalistic work its author is capable of performing before writing. Then, “everything else is easy: all you have to do is to stay first and then disappear” (Guerriero, 43–44) or, as Caparrós puts it, to make visible the presence of the author in order to let the others speak. Bibliography Beecroft, Alexander. 2015. An Ecology of World Literature. From Antiquity to the Present Day. London: Verso. Bencomo, Anadeli. 2002. Voces y voceros de la megalópolis. La Crónica periodísticoliteraria en México. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Bielsa, Esperança. 2006. The Latin American Urban Crónica. Between Literature and Mass Culture. Lanham: Lexington Books. Blanco, Fernando and Juan G. Gelpí. 1997. El desliz que desafía otros recorridos. Entrevista con Pedro Lemebel. Revista Nómada 3: 93–98. Brunner, José Joaquín. 1997. Sobre el crepúsculo de la sociología y el comienzo de otras narrativas. Revista de Crítica Cultural 15: 28–31.

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Calvi, Pablo. 2019. Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Caparrós, Martín. 2016. La crónica. Mexico: Planeta. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Boston: Harvard University Press. Corona, Ignacio and Beth E. Jorgensen, eds. 2002. The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle. Theoretical Perspectives on the Liminal Genre. Albany: SUNY Press. Donado Viloria Donaldo Alonso. 2003. Crónica anacrónica. Un estudio sobre el surgimiento, auge y decadencia de la crónica periodística en Colombia. Bogotá: Panamericana Editorial. Egan, Linda D. 1993. Lo Marginal en el centro. Las Crónicas de Carlos Monsiváis. Doctoral dissertation, UC Santa Bárbara. Escobar, Arturo. 1992. Culture, Economics and Politics in Latin American Social Movements Theory and Research. In The Making of Social Movements in Latin America. Identity, Strategy and Democracy, eds. Arturo Escobar and Sonia Alvarez. Boulder: Westview Press. Garretón, Manuel A. et al. 2003. El Espacio Cultural Latinoamericano. Bases para una politica cultural de integración. Santiago de Chile: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Gentic, Tania. 2013. The Everyday Atlantic. Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper chronicle. Albany: SUNY Press. Goldgel, Víctor and Juan Poblete, eds. 2020. Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America: Rethinking Creativity and the Common Good. Routledge. González, Aníbal. 1993. Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guerriero, Leila. 2014. Zona de obras. Madrid: Círculo de Tiza. Guerriero, Leila. 2014. Frutos extraños 2001–2019. 2020. Madrid: Alfaguara. Gómez Moreno, Pedro and Walter Mignolo. 2012. Estéticas decoloniales. Bogotá: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. Mahieux, Viviane. 2011. Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America. The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life. Austin: University of Texas Press. Martín Barbero, Jesús. 1987. De los medios a las mediaciones. México: Gustavo Gili. Mazzarella, William. 2004. Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 345–367. Moretti, Franco. 2000. Conjectures on World Literature. New Left Review: 54–68. Moretti, Franco. 2003. More Conjectures. New Left Review 20: 73–81. Ortiz, Renato. 1997. Mundialización y cultura. Buenos Aires: Alianza Editorial. Poblete, Juan. 2019. La Escritura de Pedro Lemebel como proyecto cultural y político. Santiago: Cuarto Propio.

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Poblete, Juan and Juana Suárez, eds. 2015. Humor in Latin American Cinema. New York: Palgrave. Poblete, Juan, ed. 2003. Critical Latin American and Latino Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Poblete, Juan. 2006. Globalización, mediación cultural y literatura nacional. In América Latina en la ‘literatura mundial’, ed. Ignacio Sánchez Prado. Pittsburgh: IILI. Rama, Angel. 1970. Rubén Darío y el Modernismo: circunstancias socio-económicas de un arte americano. Caracas: Ediciones de la Universidad Central de Venezuela. Ramos, Julio. 1989. Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Reynolds, Andrew. 2012. The Spanish American Crónica modernista, Modernista Temporality, and Material Culture. Modernismo’s Unstoppable Presses. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Rotker, Susana. 2005. La invención de la crónica. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Rotker, Susana. 2000. Ciudades escritas por la violencia (a modo de introducción). In Ciudadanías del miedo, ed. Susana Rotker. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad. Stirton Weaver, Frederick. 2000. Latin America in the World Economy. Mercantile Colonialism to Global Capitalism. Boulder: Westview Press. Straubhaar, Joseph. 2019. Class, pay TV access and Netflix in Latin America: Transformation within a digital divide. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 14 (2): 233–254. Straubhaar, Joseph. 2009. Beyond Media Imperialism: Asymmetrical interdependence and cultural proximity. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8: 35–59. Sunkel, Guillermo. 1985. Razón y pasión en la prensa popular: un estudio sobre cultura popular, cultura de masas y cultura política. Santiago: Ilet. Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trigo, Abril. 2003. Cybernation (Or La Patria Cibernética). Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 12 (1): 95–117. Yúdice, George. 2003. The Expediency of Culture. The Uses of Culture in a Global Era. Durham: Duke University Press.

Chapter 7

The Archives of an Exception to Come: Literature, Cinema and the World in Irmgard Emmelhainz’s El cielo está incompleto (2017) Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado Abstract The distinction between the process of spatial and socioeconomic totalization of the planet and the multiplicity of forms of being-in-the-world remains one of the core conceptual discussions regarding our global times, and, more concretely, the cultural forms and institutions within the infrastructure of world literature. This essay reads Irmgard Emmelhainz’s El cielo está incompleto. Cuaderno de viaje en Palestina (2017) to engage on the question of the geopolitical world in world literature criticism. El cielo está incompleto is a hybrid work in which Emmelhainz constructs a parallel between her personal engagements with peoples and places in Ramallah and the ways in which violence and securitization in the occupied territories of the West Bank conform a geopolitical paradigm of territoriality, with effects in the U.S.-Mexico border and other latitudes. The article studies Emmelhainz’s book, her dialogue with the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and the way her concept of the world intersects with the one put forward by theorists like Eric Hayot and Pheng Cheah. In doing so, the article discusses Emmelhainz’s account the transition between the idea of the world tied to anticolonial solidarity in the 1960s with contemporary forms of the world under neoliberalism, as well as the paradoxes between the idea of the world in literature and politics, and the cultural infrastructures that sustain it.

In a sequence of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s essay-film Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976), five actors are shown holding five still photographs representing different aspects of engaged cinema: “the people’s will, armed struggle, political work, extended war, until victory”.1 The unseen narrator of the scene explains that the goal of showing all five things together in film is impossible, because ultimately, images are linear and when one is shown on 1 “La volonté du peuple, la lutte armée. Le travail politique, la guerre prolongée, jusqu’à la victoire”. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

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screen, the others become erased. The film is a postface of sorts to Godard’s work in the Dziga Vertov Group, alongside Jean-Pierre Gorin. The Dziga Vertov Group sought a redefinition of militant cinema through highly vanguardist work that intersected radical Left messaging with a high-level of self-reflection about the relationship between cinema, audience and society. Godard’s deconstructive and self-critical reflection in Here and Elsewere is a radical recast of an incomplete Dziga Vertov Group documentary, Jusqu’a la Victoire (Until Victory) which ceased production in 1970 after the Black September massacre of Palestinians in Jordan in 1970.2 Godard not only reflects on the failure of a utopian project of political militancy and Third-World solidarity. Ici et ailleurs also marks a radical shift in his rendering of the idea of world at large, and its geopolitical and geocultural shaping, in an era of technological upheaval and ideological shifts. Many years later, in 2004, Godard would return to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict under a much different guise. In Notre Musique (Our Music 2004), Godard stages a writers’ conference in Sarajevo, using the post-Balkan war juncture as a framework for Israeli and Palestinian characters with double nationalities and conflictive relationships to their own geopolitical struggle. Daniel Morgan notes in his study of the film that one of Godard’s central questions is “how we are to make sense of this world of complex and competing identities” (2013, 261). In other words, the nearly three decades between both films constitute a fundamental reconstitution of the world as such. The films register the movement from a world imagined by the planetary articulation of militant political solidarity to a world that is at the same time strongly and violently affixed to identity (embodied in Notre Musique by the stage of the Balkan War) and deterritorialized by the flux of globalization and migrancy. As Mexican theorist and writer Irmgard Emmelhainz puts it, the French director’s engagements with Palestine embody a transit “from Third Worldlism to Empire” (2009, 649). In the first pages of El cielo está incompleto (Heaven is Incomplete, 2017), Emmelhainz echoes the political concerns behind the evolution of geopolitics from the age of radical militancy to neoliberal multiculturalism. Described in the subtitle as a “travel notebook to Palestine”, El cielo está incompleto deploys a collage of personal writings, which range from Emmelhainz’s memoirs and essays to poetry and fictionalized chapters. She assembles these materials towards the development of a project of political critique:

2 For a discussion of this event, see Williams 2016, 30.

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Besides rummaging the traces left from the 1960s and 1970s anti-imperial solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, I was interested in thinking the conflict by questioning the discursive place assigned to Palestine by the instauration of ‘Empire’ and the liberal theories that sustain tolerance and antagonism as the basis of democracy. 2009, 153

Emmelhainz’s visits to Ramallah took place between 2007 and 2016 and, in her own telling, are influenced both by the deterioration of multiculturalism in the wake of 9/11, as well as the effervescence and bust of the Arab Spring in the first half of the 2010s. In this juncture, influenced by theorists focused on questions related to the occupation of Palestine such as Ariella Azoulay (2009) and Eyal Weizman (2007), Emmelhainz contends that the occupation of the West Bank, as she experienced it, shapes and mirrors neoliberal governance around the world, including Mexico, through the differentiation of populations and spaces and the unequal distribution of resources. Concretely, Emmelhainz underscores that the model of oppression, militarization and security applied by Israel against Palestinians is being exported at the international level as knowhow for the control of populations deemed undesirable or redundant due to their disconnection from global processes. 2017, 224

Emmelhainz notes that the rhetoric of the “human shield” prevalent in the conflict was used by Rafael Moreno Valle, the governor of the Mexican state of Puebla, to justify the murder of a 13-year-old boy by the police during a protest, while also citing parallels between the management of Bedouin populations in Negev and indigenous populations in Guerrero. She points towards yet another configuration of the world, a necropolitical construct defined by 3 “Además de hurgar los rastros que quedaban de la solidaridad antiimperialista con la lucha palestina de los años sesenta y setenta, me interesaba pensar el conflicto cuestionando el lugar discursivo que le habían conferido la instauración del ‘Imperio’ y las teorías liberales que sustentan la tolerancia y el antagonismo como bases de la democracia”. Throughout this article, all translations from Emmelhainz are mine. 4 “El modelo de opresión, militarización y seguridad que aplica Israel en contra de los palestinos está siendo exportado a nivel internacional como know how de control de las poblaciones que se consideran indeseables o redundantes por estar desconectadas de los procesos globales”.

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settler colonialism and resource management, enforced by a technological savoir-faire that links Palestine with the political struggles of contemporary Mexico.5 El cielo está incompleto can be posited as a site of encounter between various categories of the “world” around which the idea of “world literature” has come to be designed and debated. Eric Hayot uses the idea of “aesthetic world” to speak about “the diegetic totality constituted by the sum of all aspects of a single work or work-part, constellated into a structure or system that amounts to a whole” (2012, 44. Emphasis in the original). More usefully for my purposes, Hayot argues for the need to evaluate “aesthetic worldedness” as a form of relation between “the world inside and the world outside the work. The history of aesthetic worldedness is thus always, simultaneously, a history of the idea of the world as such” (2012, 45). As a disjointed articulation of highly subjective texts (poems, remembrances, imagined dialogues, reflections) with political essays and cultural analyses, El cielo está incompleto establishes itself in the process of definition and redefinition of the idea of the world between the forms of radical political solidarity of the 1960s and the paradigms of neoliberal culturalism of the contemporary era, as embodied in geopolitical interpretations and experiences of the Palestinian struggles. It is constructed through mechanisms of aesthetic worldedness that weave the subjective, political and material assemblages into the book’s various texts. El cielo está incompleto deliberately resists unified narrative and exceeds any clear definition within genres like the essay or the memoir. In doing so, its fragmentariness provides a suggestive path to gauge questions of Otherness and worldling. Emmelhainz diagnoses in the mid-1970s—the same period of Godard’s political about-face in Ici et ailleurs—a shift from solidarity to empathy as the affect guiding political assemblages. This is consequential because, in Emmelhainz’s telling, neoliberal versions of worldling perform a move from a focus on struggle and solidarity to a focus on representation. In the concrete 5 In another essay, I have discussed the idea of “anti-world literature” as a mode of direct response to the necropolitical realities of contemporary Mexico (Sánchez Prado 2019). In that piece I place the conceptual considerations of theorists cited below, like Pheng Cheah and Eric Hayot, in dialogue with works that I pose as written against the grain of the politics of globalization and mundialization, by authors such as Cristina Rivera Garza, Sayak Valencia and Sara Uribe. Emmelhainz, as I seek to illustrate in this essay, defends the spatial politics of the idea of the world, but does so in a space that is dissonant but not directly opposed to the concept of world literature. A recent piece by Angela Naimou (2021) is also relevant. Naimou engages with my concept of “anti-world literature” to discuss parallel stories of borders and citizenship, as well as imaginations of futurity, tying migration regimes related to Mexico and the Middle East. I think that Naimou’s analysis develops in productive ways the connections between Mexico and Palestine established in Emmelhainz’s book.

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case of Palestine, Emmelhainz continues, the Third-Worldist solidarity with Palestine liberation morphed into what she calls “two figures of alterity”: the victim, defined by empathy and subject of humanitarian aid, and the terrorist, excluded from the discourse of empathy due to the fact that the unacceptability of their actions cancels even the validity of their political cause (2017, 95–96). Emmelhainz diagnoses an affective displacement that could be described, following Jodi Dean, as trending towards “the Individual (as a locus of identity) [as] an ‘Other’ of the comrade” (2019, 77), which is to say that the focus on alterity and empathy preempts the kind of political assemblage that solidarity may beckon. In Emmelhainz’s telling, the movement from solidarity to empathy changed both the practical aspects of political mobilization—shifting, for example, from the empowering of colonized subjects to the mediation of activists through NGO and “human shield” action—and the goal of politics itself, which moves from empowering liberation movements to documenting atrocity (2017, 99). In this, Emmelhainz presents herself as part of what Michael Rothberg calls “affirmative internationalism”, which “seeks to construct lines of solidarity across national borders in order to combat transnational capital and statesponsored imperial projects” (Rothberg, 153). In doing so, she also grapples with the contemporary movement towards “critical internationalism”, understood as an “engagement with transnational configurations of power without retreating into nationalist or localist frameworks, but also without committing to particular internationalist projects” (Rothberg 2019, 153). Emmelhainz can thusly be described as a participant of what Rothberg calls “a multidirectional politics of differentiated, long distance-solidarity” that critiques “a politics premised on identification, purity or absolute separation between locations and histories” (2019, 203). El cielo está incompleto is thoroughly crisscrossed by the critical recovery of radical sixties internationalism as a path towards aesthetic and political engagement with global conflict and violence in the present. Since her early theoretical work, Emmelhainz has strived to create an account of contemporaneity, as manifested in cinema and the visual arts, through a set of “axes that recombine themselves allotropically”. She names issues such as the concept of the Other in Third-Worldism, the idea of the “in-between” in multiculturalism, the crisis of aesthetic and political representation in the wake of 9/11 and the “ethical turn” that replaced the decline of Third-Worldism with narratives of humanitarianism.6 While each of these 6 All terms in quotation marks are in my translation. The full paragraph in Spanish I am abridging here speaks of “ejes que se recombinan alotrópicamente replanteándose en distintos contextos: el concepto del Otro del tercermundismo, al espacio multicultural del ‘entre’ en

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categories would merit its own discussion, I simply lay out her general framework here as a point of reference. This conceptual and ideological project takes a personal turn in El cielo está incompleto. Following the work that positioned her as a leading critical theorist in Mexico, Emmelhainz changes her writing coordinates in El cielo está incompleto, moving into a particular kind of literary space within a global trend of hybrid autofictional and autotheoretical texts. Autofiction has emerged as a significant response in various corners of world literature to the identification of narratives of the self with the modes of (neo) liberal subjecthood, including those critiqued in Emmelhainz’s interventions: humanitarianism, victimhood, identity politics, etc. As Ralph Clare argues, “autotheory avoids the charge of essentialism that haunts identity politics by countering it with a notion of embodied experience that underscores the malleability of identity itself” (2020, 86). It has played a significant role in the new global articulations of literature from the English language world, as well as in the work of widely read literary authors across the globe. Emmelhainz writes in a style analogous in many ways to U.S. writers like Chris Kraus, who has developed autotheoretical work at the crossroads of narrative, poetry, gender theory and political critique. Emmelhainz frequently refers to Kraus, in part because her work includes endeavors both as an experimental filmmaker whose work has strong echoes of Godard and as a theorist who has played a role in the formation of the Los Angeles-based theory press Semiotext(e).7 Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia (2000), an unclassifiable text that moves between fiction, memoir, cultural criticism, academic discourse and other genres constitutes an important formal reference for El cielo está incompleto. Another book by Kraus, Torpor (2006), weaves fiction with a trip to Eastern Europe laced with reflections on the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the Holocaust. Emmelhainz’s writing similarly traverses fictional and non-fictional writing, the essay, poetry and even the Platonic dialogue. She also refers to Kraus as a source to understand the relationship between los noventa a su desaparición y transformación en Otro aterrador y desesperado después del 09.11; la crisis de la representación estético-política y su posibilidad como autocrítica y subjetivación; el giro ético ante el ocaso del tercermundismo planteado como ‘Geoest(é)tic’” y la ‘humanitarianización’ de guerras y catástrofes; el neoliberalismo como modulación de formas de vida y su ininteligibilidad como ideología; la culturalización como técnica gubernamental; la intersección entre las prácticas estéticas y los medios de comunicación y el régimen del videlicet (en el que todo se hace visible y por eso nadie ve nada); la sustitución de la alteridad por la noción del allá, u otro lado, un sitio ya sea de catástrofe o idílico y locus de una forma de vida distinta; finalmente, la división entre ‘ellos y nosotros’ establecida ya sea por la diferencia de condiciones de trabajo o estatus jurídico en el territorio en el que se vive “ciudadanos y no-ciudadanos”. All emphases are in the original. 7 On Kraus and Semiotext(e), see Schwarz and Balsamo 1996.

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trauma and affect, focused on “experiences that were not altogether registered in the moment of the event” (2017, 254).8 In this manner, Emmelhainz echoes Kraus in the ways in which she uses embodiment, feeling and affect as ways to inscribe the self in her work, without falling into identitarian reflection: “After a year of absence, my body promptly molds itself to Ramallah’s topography, to the undulating rhythms of red-earth hills and the dry green of olive trees speedily mutilated” (2017, 263).9 In passages like this, departing away from Kraus’s work and from affective engagement through empathy, Emmelhainz does not appeal to frames in which gendered affirmations of the body would in themselves constitute political work. Rather, the book’s defamiliarizing method rests on the opposite gesture, an axiomatic impossibility of embodying the political in the personal: Becoming is first and foremost a linguistic operation to soak oneself with pain and then with pride, insolence and the pressing need of resistance. The complete fusion of the I with writing for a cause announces itself as futile, just like getting lost in the real of the kind of reportage that records the song of victims, so the spectator enjoys the shameful nature of horror. 2017, 144. Emphasis in the original10

In this passage, Emmelhainz considers “vulnerable narcissist confession” to be a feature of “mediocre writers” and advocates instead for “writing against myself”, citing the approach of Jean Genet’s own conflictive autobiographical work on the two years he spent in Palestinian refugee camps during the early 1970s (Genet 2003).11 Binding her theoretical work with her personal narrative, Emmelhainz appeals to a form of literary worldling that constantly 8 9 10

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“experiencias que no fueron registradas del todo durante el momento del evento”. “Después de un año de ausencia, mi cuerpo se amolda de volada a la topografía de Ramallah, al ritmo ondulante de las colinas de tierra roja y del verde seco de los olivares mutilados a toda velocidad”. “El devenir es primero que nada una operación lingüística para empaparse de dolor y luego de orgullo, de insolencia y de necesidad imperiosa de resistencia. La fusión por completo del yo con la escritura por la causa se avisa fútil, al igual que el perderse en lo real del reportaje grabando el canto de las víctimas para que el espectador goce de lo vergonzoso del horror”. It is worth mentioning that Godard and Genet are working in Palestine roughly in the same moment and their approach is bound to a representation of Palestine aimed both at questioning the global communicational discourse around the conflict and at questioning their own positioning as activists engaged with the region. Emmelhainz clearly derives from them in both ends. For a discussion of Godard and Genet in comparison, see Krieger 2017.

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defamiliarizes the direct relationship of the politics of the self with the politics of the contemporary. In doing so, her book articulates a literary and theoretical constellation to locate itself in a space of confluence between literary autofiction, visual culture theory and Arabic traditions of literature. Emmelhainz’s critique of the self as a literary and political position departs from methods of textual and visual defamiliarization that trace back to dialogues between poststructuralism and cinematic discourse intensified in the 1970s. Godard in particular looms large in her work. During her travels, Emmelhainz was completing her dissertation, later published in book form, on the filmmaker. Emmelhainz’s critical work centers itself on Godard’s understanding of cinema during the radical period of the Dziga Vertov Group, in the intersection between dialectical materialism and the poststructuralist account of language: “materialism seeks to render the world visible by producing reflections or consciousness of the relationships of production by means of the dialectic between essence and appearance, thereby producing objective knowledge of the world” (Emmelhainz 2019, 3). Textual fragmentation, a strategy of critical engagement and narration that Emmelhainz shares with Godard, provides the reader or spectator a sense of the materiality and structure of narration, which in turn elicits critical thinking. They both echo the poststructuralist understanding of the literary work, encapsulated in a widely cited formula of Roland Barthes’s S/Z: “for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network—all the movements and inflections of a vast ‘dissolve’, which permits both overlapping and loss of messages” (Barthes 1974, 20).12 In both Godard and Emmelhainz, the disarticulation of discourse, visuality and ideology, strongly influenced by both Marxism and structuralism, is concerned with moments of representational crisis resulting from the collapse of forms of political mondialisation—Third-Worldism in Godard, Altermundismo and the Arab Spring in Emmelhainz.13 El cielo está incompleto constitutes a 12 13

For a discussion of the connection between Barthes’s idea of the fragment with Godard’s use of the fragment in his essay films, see Bensmaïa 2000. The untranslatable term “mondialisation” in French or “mundialización” in Spanish refers to a process of worldmaking distinct to the one named by the more common English term globalization. Like the theorists cited below, I follow Jean-Luc Nancy’s distinction between “globalization” as world-forming under capital, value and the market, and mondialisation as the space in which “that what Marx calls production and/or creation of humanity, is being played out” (2007, 36–37). Nancy’s translators render mondialisation as “world-forming” in English, but I think that given that I am working with Godard and with Emmelhainz, the French or Spanish originals are more adequate in the context of this essay. As seen in the paragraph below, this distinction is mirrored in Cheah’s work

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notable example of a literary text that renders visible its aesthetic worldedness by appealing to the fragment as a form. She deploys a version of the obliterated network of signification described by Barthes. Like Ici et ailleurs, El cielo está incompleto operates by breaking the allegorical correspondence between individual and world—central to both the modern novel form and the discourses of identity politics and humanitarianism in the neoliberal era—through the rendering visible of the limits of writing as a mechanism entrusted with signifying and articulating the idea of the world as such. In this regard, Emmelhainz’s work raises concerns that run parallel and even contrary to theoretical conversations regarding the nature of the world within the idea of world literature. Scholars like Hayot and Pheng Cheah (2016) emphasize literature’s own capacity to represent and even produce lived worlds with the more prevailing idea of world literature as an effect of editorial markets. As Cheah puts it, this criticism seeks to upend the “patent conflation of the globe, a bounded object in Mercatorian space, with the world, a form of belonging and community” (2016, 30). Cheah advocates for a notion of the world focused on “form and ideational content” in tension with, rather than as a reflection of, the “postindustrial techniques of marketing, advertising and value-adjudication” (2016, 30–31). Drawing heavily on Heidegger’s concept of “worldling”, Cheah conceives literature as a force resisting the capitalist totalization of the globe which deploys “world-making and world-opening” and “discloses and enacts the unerasable promise of the opening of other worlds” (2016, 96–97).14 An updating of both postcolonial and liberal understandings of the literary, this idea of the world advocates for the notion that literary form is not merely subsumed or reflective of its material conditions of possibility, but the articulation of a space of resistance and utopian imagination. El cielo está incompleto, in contrast, conceives itself as written from a horizon of historical defeat resulting from the pre-emption of radical politics under the guise of human rights discourse and global extractivism. Building upon the reflexiveness afforded by Emmelhainz’s autofictional style, the book is very critical of discourses of activism, grassroots organization and the idea of recognition as an act of restitution:

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(and in the English language in general) by the distinction between the nouns “globe” and “world”. A full discussion of the idea of “worldling” in Heidegger and the role of language and art in this process exceeds my purposes here. Cheah draws particularly from Being and Time. See Heidegger 2010. A very useful discussion of language and the world in Heidegger can be found in Lafont 2000.

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Activism as the mirror of oneself, looking at one’s own “good” side, projected into the face of the less fortunate. Empathy transformed in adrenaline to seek the limits of courage and bravery to the point of trauma to test oneself, and save or help the other, remind oneself that one is alive. Activism and anonymity: subjectivity completely surrendered to a struggled dissolved in the critical mass, blending singularity in a multitude of white, sweaty, anguished faces. In the journey, my peers exchanged tactics to provoke soldiers in the checkpoints; they were all vegetarian, globalized, and residents in prestigious Occupy houses in Europe or in the campus of third-rate universities in North America; they listen to Manu Chao, they admire Marcos. 2017, 13115

Across the book, Emmelhainz guides her reflection through a recurrent criticism of the idea of giving voice to the victims of violence as the ultimate horizon of both politics and aesthetics, by noting that “today, the withdrawal of representation, alongside the ubiquity of global-scale catastrophes and the substitution of politics for humanitarian ethics, easily mistakes the insufficiency of representation of catastrophe with victimization as such” (2017, 59).16 An axiomatic underpinning of Emmelhainz’s heterogenous collection of texts is the critique of difference as a technology that underpins contemporary forms of power, insofar as population differentiation constitutes it basic logic (2017, 188). The contemporary world, in these terms, is never a totality. Instead, one can map different worlds by linking differentiated populations through territorializing narratives. Globalization would be one, tied to networks of economic territorialization, and the kind of geopolitics that connects

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“El activismo como espejo de uno mismo viendo el lado propio ‘bueno’, proyectado en la cara de los desafortunados. La empatía transformada en adrenalina para empujar los límites del valor y del coraje hasta llegar al trauma para probarse a uno mismo, y al salvar o ayudar al otro, recordarse que uno está vivo. El activismo y el anonimato: la subjetividad entregada por completo a la lucha disuelta en la masa crítica, licuando la singularidad en una multitud de caras blancas, sudorosas, angustiadas. En el trayecto mis compañeros intercambiaban tácticas para provocar a los soldados en los puntos de control; todos era vegetarianos, globalizados, y con residencia en prestigiosas casas ocupa en Europa o en campus de universidades de tercera en Norte América; escuchan a Manu Chao, admiran a Marcos”. 16 “En la actualidad, el retiro de la representación, aunado a la ubicuidad de catástrofes a escala global yla sustitución de la política por la ética humanitaria, confunde con facilidad la insuficiencia de la representación de la catástrofe con la victimización en sí”.

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necropolitical forces (the Israeli IDF with the Border Patrol and the Mexican Army for instance) would be another.17 Works like El cielo está incompleto raise the question, within world-literature studies, as to how we complement the account of a world articulated by the material circulation of books with a more proper account of the various cultural imaginations of the geopolitical. This is particularly significant in a time when the writing, production and circulation of literature has become ever more robust thanks to the mercantile networks of editorial circulation. (El cielo está incompleto has not reached translation networks yet, although an English translation was in the works at the time of this writing). Nevertheless, its form of thinking is possible due to the circulation of both thinkers and writers in the global book market, and Emmelhainz’s own transnational circulation as a student and intellectual across North America, Europe and the Middle East. As Nancy notes, “commerce engenders communication, which requires community, communism. Or: human beings create the world, which produces the human, which creates itself as absolute value and enjoyment [jouissance] of that value” (2007, 27). The networks of commerce and economic circulation established in both the global sixties and the neoliberal era are essential for the political and aesthetic conceptualization, respectively, of Godard’s Third-Worldism—which results from the decentralized map of revolutionary and anticolonial cultures around 1968—and Emmelhainz’s critique of humanitarianism—which is elicited by the circulation of both critical theory and literature in the era of corporate publishing.18 In other words, the conditions of possibility for aesthetic and theoretical rendition of worldliness in both Godard and Emmelhainz are a direct consequence of the gradual rise of cultural and communicational industries (transnational publishers, film festivals, portable media, television, the internet, etc.). The rise of a “geopolitical aesthetics” that render possible a “cognitive mapping” of the world, to use terms popularized by Fredric Jameson (1988; 1992), provides a space to imagine a politics founded on what Nancy describes as “the accession of this global

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Another part of Emmelhainz’s work worth remembering, even if it would require an altogether different conversation to the one I develop here, is her strong critique of neoliberalism as “tyranny of common sense” and its naturalization, partly afforded by art institutions, of structural violence. See Emmelhainz 2021. The description of the global sixties and its cultural networks far exceeds my purposes but a very good recent compendium can be found in Jian, Klimke, Kirasirova et al. 2018. For an excellent study of the book market that allows the circulation of both literary and academic works, see Thompson 2013.

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connection to consciousness and through it the liberation of value as the real value of our common cultural production” (Nancy 2007, 37).19 Unsurprisingly, the relationship between global communicational industries and the world as a space of consciousness is mirrored in conceptual discussions surrounding world literature. Scholarship has gradually evolved from a specific focus on the material conditions of editorial circulation and the spatial mappings of the literary towards a more holistic account that encompasses the political and philosophical underpinnings of the world as constructed and imagined in circulating works. Part of the political consequences of this move is a desire to wrest world literature away from its perceived reflection of the capitalist system.20 Theorists like Cheah, as mentioned before, advocate for the world as a mechanism of engagement with others, and perhaps even otherness. Cheah’s sophisticated philosophical framework, traversing from Hegel to Heidegger, ultimately affirms the exemplarity of fairly canonical postcolonial writers. Cheah’s densely rich work is at times unsatisfying due to the conventionality of their literary corpus, tied to mainstream forms of the global novel, which is not only a matter of their canonicity in editorial and academic circuits. They are also authors that ultimately elicit (even in self-reflective writers like Coetzee) a certain horizon of possibility based on the belief of the power of literature to create an experience of the Other, more or less self-evident in Cheah. At times, he appears to continue advocating varieties of an ethos grounded on a genealogy of the novel’s epistemic abilities—traceable to Georg

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Jameson borrows the term “cognitive mapping” from the urban planner Kevin Lynch to discuss the way in which aesthetics mediates the gap between “the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class structures in which he or she is situated” (1988, 353). Jameson coins the ideas of “geopolitical aesthetic” and “geopolitical unconscious” to argue that cinema is a form of representation that, in an increasingly complex worldsystem, provides a space for the representation of social totality under capital (1992, 2). A very useful discussion of cognitive mapping as framed by Jameson’s “symptomatologies and Intimations of the global” can be found in Wegner 2014, 60–60. It is worth noting that one of Jameson’s examples is Godard’s work in the eighties. Various texts discuss this particular question, but the most compelling discussion is perhaps “World Lite” (Blumenkranz, Gessen and Saval 2013), by the editors of the literary magazine N+1, that strongly attacked the commercial function of world literature as shown in festivals and other instances, the focus of world literature on nostalgia and belatedness at the expense of engagement with contemporary politics and the role of the university in constructing the concept. Another strong take in this regard is developed by Sarah Brouillette (2014), a great study of the ties between literature and neoliberal creative economies. In any case, it is not coincidental that the more philosophical takes discussed here come in the wake of such critiques.

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Lukács’s theorizations of realism as a quest to adequately present the “complete human personality” (1964, 7).21 Autofictional and fragmentary books like El cielo está incompleto become readable in the context of this conceptual displacement. Its aesthetic worldedness—the inside of Emmelhainz’s lived experience with the outside of Israel-Palestine geopolitics—functions through a refusal of narrative closure or even suture. It is the kind of text that challenges the idea of world literature as an aggregate of texts defined by their frictionless readability across markets, “born translated” as Rebecca Walkowitz (2015) states in her oft-cited formula. Unlike many products in global cultural markets, El cielo está incompleto does not express any faith in literature’s ability to imagine worlds. Instead, it posits the fragments and traces of the contemporary world by embracing, as Godard does through cinema, what Emmelhainz calls “the ambivalence of the material apparition of immateriality, an ambivalence that is sustained by the voice” (2019, 15). Her writing collects both the dead ends of the public language of politics and culture, and the possible openings of political radicality and affective engagement, at the level of signification and thought. Emmelhainz is not the only Latin American writer representing the Middle East through these aesthetic and ideological coordinates. She writes perhaps one of the most radical iterations of a concern expressed in various literary works linking Mexico and Latin America to the Levant. One could invoke here Jorge Volpi’s novel El jardín devastado (The Devastated Garden 2008), a fragmentary novel originally published in blog form, in which a Mexican intellectual that returns to the country after leaving in the wake of the 1988 electoral fraud imagines the parallel and distanced life of an Iraqi woman named Laila during Operation Desert Storm.22 The novel enacts worldling through a tension between the detachments of the narrators and the intensive affective legacy of the name Laila. The name explicitly ties the Iraqi woman to longstanding traditions of Arabic and Persian poetry. Working though fragmentation, albeit in a different way than Emmelhainz, Volpi proceeds in a way similar to the one described by Cheah in relation to postcolonial fiction, using the novel as a mechanism that mediates “the political aporia between the teleological time of self-determination and the opening of a world by the coming of time” (Cheah 2016, 302). In the novel this is achieved in allegorical mode, between a narrator that embodies the process of democratization in Mexico between 21 22

For an in-depth discussion of Lukács and the question of consciousness in literature, see Bewes and Hall 2013. I have discussed this novel in more detail in my book Strategic Occidentalism (Sánchez Prado 2018, 112–15).

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1988 and 2006, and Laila, who rather than being represented as a victim, is constantly referring to the past, present and future of Iraq. The point is that Emmelhainz, like other Mexican contemporaries, engages in forms of worldling that bind the low-key war that has defined Mexico in many ways in the 21st century—including the Drug War and the resistance movements to the so-called democratic transition—with global forms of politics, echoing the failures of political activism in Latin America with those of the Middle East. This is evident as much in Volpi’s narrator as in Emmelhainz’s constant connections to Mexico’s present. In El cielo está incompleto, for instance, Emmelhainz underscores that the International Solidarity Movement—the group that coordinates resistance to Israeli occupation through nonviolent protest—and offers potential volunteers the warning: “don’t come here if you think this is the next Chiapas” (2017, 126). In a description of the contemporary novel that would fit Volpi well, Debjani Ganguly argues that “the world in the contemporary world novel is not a literary simulacrum of our current geopolitical world order” but rather “a temporal and spatial collage” that “contains may worlds that travel with, haunt, layer and disrupt other worlds even as it is informed in our present time by technologies that amplify our sense of the interconnections among these myriad possible worlds” (2016, 84–85). As a non-fictional book, and a fragmentary one, El cielo está incompleto is not premised on the “sense of interconnections” as much as in a disruption of the imagined worlds created by geopolitical and geocultural narratives. A similar procedure is at play in Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina (Becoming Palestinian 2015) which raises the question of return to the Occupied Territories.23 This particular book has points of intellectual and even institutional intersection to El Cielo está incompleto, including a joint presentation by Meruane and Emmelhainz in the Zócalo Book Fair in Mexico City in October 2018, and their release by imprints of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest conglomerate in Spanish language publishing. Volverse Palestina raises a debate with world literature’s engagements with Israel, and the politics of Israeli writers of global circulation, in a text that occupies roughly the second half of the book, entitled “Volvernos otros” (“Becoming Others”). Meruane contrasts her own worldmaking in relationship to her Palestinian heritage in critical dialogue with writers and thinkers such as Edward Said, David Grossman, Susan Sontag and Amos Oz, who have represented the conflict in 23

At the moment of this writing, an expanded edition of Meruane’s book entitled Palestina en Pedazos (Meruane 2021) was forthcoming. Although it was not consulted for this essay, it is worth noting that the press describes the text added to this version as engaged with individual and collective identities and the question of the bodies.

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the region in the context of world literature. Meruane’s polemic stance turns the book into a reflection about the ways in which language marks and erases the Palestinian people, and on the ways in which public speech about the conflict. Meruane’s “becoming Palestinian” is not, as one would expect, a recovery of her roots. Instead, it enacts the impossibility of such a recovery. Although framed as a narrative of return (Abdel Nasser 2018, 244), Meruane traces the process of becoming Palestinian in the present and future tense, through the development of a discourse of solidarity with Palestinian liberation and a writerly ethics in dialogue with the potentialities of a Palestinian state. In contrast, El cielo está incompleto invests itself in the question of the limits of representation and lived experience to put forward the question of the foreigner in solidarity with the people of the occupied territories. Read together, one can see that the difference of positionality and identity between both writers and their own locations in the world ultimately align into forms of political commonality. Meruane speaks of the subjective and personal consequences of the Israeli model of government, which established models of extractivism based forms of internal segmentation of the populace through necropolitical technologies that gradually replaced those used by European colonialism and neocolonialism. Both Meruane’s perspective as the descendant of a diaspora and Emmelhainz’s claim to worldly solidarity belong to a longstanding relationship between Latin America and the Levante that, as Tahia Abdel Nasser describes, in a “Palestinian Latin American geography” that shows the confluence between diasporic experience and solidarity (2018, 251). World literature would, thusly, become an instrument to account for these geographies through a framework of aesthetic and political assemblages. Authors like Emmelhainz and Meruane implicitly envision a world literary practice based on a common yet distinct understandings regarding political conflicts against the grain of hegemonic processes of globalization and their aesthetic and ideological configurations. Emmelhainz points to a different direction than Meruane in style, towards a method that gathers the shards of various forms of literary and visual representation, conveying not so much the need to mount a counter-language or resistance, as Meruane does in some parts of her work, but rather the archiving of the traces of Palestinian life and history. Emmelhainz mounts a critique of liberal understandings of international politics that turn Palestinians into subjects of humanitarianism and of wars of representation, while at the same time allowing for the continued encroachment of Israel in the occupied territories. In this, Emmelhainz closely follows Godard, although not fully surrendering her poetics to the radical departure from language as such that characterizes

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the French filmmaker’s most recent works. In one of the late chapters of the book, Emmelhainz focuses on a protest in the West Bank village of Bil’in, in which a group of five Palestine, Israeli and international activists are dressed like characters of James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009). She compares the plight of the Palestinian people to the colonial oppression of the fictional alien race of the film, the Na’avi. Emmelhainz notes that the reference to such a hyper-visible product of the Hollywood field of spectacle achieves a level of legibility and identification, in effect using the Na’avi as stand-ins for any colonized or indigenous groups (including groups in Mexico and Brazil) fighting security or megadevelopment projects, like border walls or hydroelectric dams. But ultimately, Emmelhainz continues, the politics of “pure visibilization” in such a protest render evident the “current gap between real politics and a public sphere saturated with spectacle” (2017, 292–94). In passages like this, Emmelhainz continues the critique from the ways in which Godard portrayed in Ici et ailleurs the saturation of the field of vision by media images, to the point of making political articulations of the world unthinkable. In other words, rather than assume that the imagined worlds of literature and other representative realms are in themselves a form of resistance—the presumption of critics like Cheah and works like Avatar— the deconstructive legacies of sixties radicalism locate in writing and filming the task to never allow for the narrative and imaginary closure of subjectivity and geopolitics. To conclude, I wish to point to Mahmoud Darwish, a figure that appears in the work of both Emmelhainz and Godard and embodies possible ways to think beyond the representational impasse of globalist forms of worldling. Emmelhainz recounts an encounter with Darwish three weeks before his passing in 2008, in the Grand Park Hotel Ramallah (2017, 244–45). They spoke about Darwish’s appearance in Godard’s Notre musique. As part of the fictional literary festival, Darwish reenacts an interview with Israelí poet Helit Yeshurun in Amman in 1996, replaced by the film’s protagonist Judith Lerner (Sarah Adler).24 In the interview, Darwish reflects on the idea of being defeated by the Jewish people, and the visibility afforded as a consequence of being defeated by an enemy that is in the line of sight of the whole world. In the film, we also see three Native American people reciting Darwish’s poem “The Red Indian’s Penultimate Speech to the White Man”, which reflects on the effects of Indian removal in the United States (Darwish 2009, 69–82). The poem is notable by being part of a collection in which Darwish also represents the expulsion of 24

For an in-depth discussion of Darwish’s filmic representation by Godard, see Dyer and Mulot 2014.

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Muslims from Spain, entitled “Eleven Planets at the end of the Andalusian Scene” (Darwish 2009, 57–62). The scene concludes with Darwish reminiscing about Octavio Paz and his role after the Tlatelolco massacre, as well as in recalling an anthology of Mexican poetry published in Palestine in translation by a Syrian Mexican writer, Ikram Antaki.25 Both Godard and Emmelhainz enact Darwish as a poet whose work is centered on the language of the defeated amidst both histories and the present of global settler colonialism. Darwish’s passing, in El cielo está incompleto, signals to what we may call an exhaustion of worldling, and of the abilities of the literary and visual fields to articulate political representation. In a significant passage, Emmelhainz narrates her search of the drawings of Ernst Pignon, who intervened various walls of the West Bank with drawings of Darwish in the wake of his death (2017, 272).26 This search elicits a reflection on the spectral character of Palestinian struggle and its ties to the past. She reproduces Darwish’s poem “In Her Absence I Created Her Image,” in which the Palestinian poet reflects on the power of ghostly representation: “There is enough of unconsciousness/ to liberate things from their history. And there/ is enough of history to liberate unconsciousness from its ascension” (Darwish 2007, 213). Following this poem, Emmelhainz recalls the work of theorist Mark Fisher, who argued that attachment to the spectral forms of the past entail “the slow cancellation of the future” (2014, 6). Yet, Fisher also advocated for a hauntological approach that focuses not on concrete objects but on processes (2014, 25), to find a position of thinking that does not overestimate the past through nostalgia, but also avoids the overestimation of the present and its hegemonic cultures. In invoking Darwish, Emmelhainz aims for both forms of literature and visual art, and of politics, that deploy the liberation of culture from their history, while resisting the erasure of the history of revolutionary mobilization in the speed of the present. My reading of Emmelhainz seeks to raise the question of whether the idea of world literature can move beyond the stalled dialectic between its organic integration to the hegemonic field of global culture and the idealistic impasse that locates politics merely on the fictional representation of idealistic worlds. Godard’s most radical response, in his experimental 3D film Adieu au language (Goodbye to language 2014). is to blow up language and seek a pre-linguistic 25

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Born in Damascus, Antaki moved to Mexico in the 1970s and became a mainstay in the cultural world as a radio personality and writer. Her work was very invested in the promotion of a secular version of Levantine, Arabic and Islamic culture in Mexico, as well as in the popularization of philosophy and literature. The drawings may be found in Pignon’s website: http://pignon-ernest.com.

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encounter with the world at large represented by the film’s adoption of the perspective of a dog. More to the point here, Godard presents in an early sequence of the film a clearer model. In a scene shot deliberately through an irregular diagonal frame—providing a very dissonant experience when seen in the original 3D—we watch a group of people perusing secondhand works while others seek for information in their smartphones. This scene is set up by an ironically extrapolated recording of a student question, “is it possible to produce a concept about Africa?”, which Jocelyn Benoist discusses in his book Concepts (2010, 31). The film’s answer is that the very possibility of such a question— which applies to the world as such—is in itself a symptom of the absence of language at large, which Godard emphasizes by mockingly presenting an intellectual type praising Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s idea of “literary investigation” as an element that possesses an inherent ability of understanding and requires “not to Google”. Emmelhainz defines the films central preoccupations as consequence of “the dictatorship of digital media and the destruction of language by mediatized communication” (2019, 284). The film makes this appeal through a significant amount of literary and theoretical works cited and recombined across the running time, to the point that there is a website compiling its works cited (Fendt). In the film, literature’s representational thought is a space to break away from the destruction of language, but always through a self-reflexive form in which we are also aware of its own trend towards hegemonic mediation. Emmelhainz’s response to this question points towards the possibilities of literature as an archive of aesthetic worldedness that gives way to the task of grasping of the present. In an essay for her pandemic diary “Letters against Separation”, Emmelhainz speaks of the exercise of ordering her library. She points directly to a collection of contemporary writing in English, which includes the aforementioned Kraus and Nelson as well as other writers thinking about the limits of literature to engage questions of politics and the body. She asks whether she can “subsume them to a ‘Universal Literature category’ or break them away from works of activism and politics that influence her work” (2020). “The freshly shelved books”, she notes, “remind me of something about myself, I do not know exactly what”. Emmelhainz counters this with a long reflection about the ways in which the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has dismantled part of the cultural apparatus of the Mexican government to replace them for forms of neoliberal culture, which accompany the role of artists and intellectuals in naturalizing neoliberalism. The indefinition of what exact memories they elicit, hinted solely by the reference to a suitcase that accompanied Emmelhainz to Ramallah and other places, points towards the act of shelving her canon as an opening to something new.

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This is patent in the final text of El cielo está incompleto, where the encounter with her lover allows Emmelhainz to allegorize politics through desire: “The conspiracy of creating together a place of exception, and the exception, temporary by necessity, is that of the unmitigated pain that flesh inherits” (2017, 302).27 The world is not in the material commerce of literature or in the presumed power to imagine the world through writing. It is instead a constellation of shards, fragments and traces that writing and visual representation can grab and assemble to ephemerally envision a future invisible to us through the saturation of information and discourse and the necropolitical violence of the present. World literature is one of the archives of the exceptions to come, in the terms of the citation above, but one that only operates in modes of self-reflexive writing (or filming) that constantly break through the “tyranny of common sense”, as Emmelhainz has termed the neoliberal era (2021). Emmelhainz’s aesthetic worldedness ultimately seeks to envision such exceptions, articulating networks of world literature, theory and cinema— Kraus, Darwish, Azoulay, Genet, Godard, Fisher and many others—in which the fragments, residual images and ghosts of the past remain an archive not for an alternative world imaginable now, but for possibilities of the future we cannot imagine yet. Bibliography Abdel Nasser, Tahia. 2018. Palestine and Latin America. Lina Meruane’s Volverse palestina and Nathalie Handal’s La estrella invisible. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54.2: 239–53. Azoulay, Ariella. 2009. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone. Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Benoist, Jocelyn. 2010. Concepts. Introduction à l’analyse. Paris: CERF. Bensmaïa, Réda. 2000. Barthes/Godard. L’essai cinématographique et-il posible? Sites 4(2): 435–46. Blumenkranz, Carla, Keith Gessen and Nikil Saval. 2013. World Lite. What is Global Literature? N+1 17: 1–14. Brouillette, Sarah. 2014. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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“La conspiración para crear juntos un lugar de excepción, y la excepción, necesariamente temporal, es del dolor sin mitigar que hereda la carne”.

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Cameron, James, dir. 2009. Avatar. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox/Lighthouse Entertainment. Streaming. Disney+. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Chen, Jian, Martin Klimke, Masha Kirasirva, et al. 2018. The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties. Between Protest and Nation-Building. London: Routledge. Clare, Ralph. 2020. Becoming Autotheory. Arizona Quarterly 76.1: 85–107. Darwish, Mahmoud. 2007. The Butterfly’s Dream. Translated by Fady Jouday. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon. Darwish, Mahmoud. 2009. If I were Another. Translated by Fady Joudah. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Dean, Jodi. 2019. Comrade. An Essay on Political Belonging. London: Verso. Dyer, Rebecca and François Mulot. 2014. Mahmoud Darwish in Film. Politics, Representation, and Translation in Jean-Luc Godard’s Ici et ailleurs and Notre Musique. Cultural Politics 10(1): 70–91. Emmehainz, Irmgard. 2009. From Third Worldism to Empire. Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestine Question. Third Text 23(5): 649–56. Emmehainz, Irmgard. 2012. Alotropías en la trinchera evanescente. Estética y geopolítica en la era de la guerra total. Puebla: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Emmehainz, Irmgard. 2016. La tiranía del sentido común. La reconversión neoliberal de México. Mexico: Paradiso. Emmehainz, Irmgard. 2017. El cielo está incompleto. Cuaderno de viaje a Palestina. Mexico: Taurus. Emmehainz, Irmgard. 2019. Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Emmehainz, Irmgard. 2020. Letters Against Separation. Irmgard Emmelhainz in Mexico City. E-Flux https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/letters-against-separation-irmgard -emmelhainz-in-mexico-city/9700/13. Web. Accessed 01-27-2021. Fendt, Ted. Adieu au langage—Goodbye to language. A Works Cited. MUBI. https:// mubi.com/notebook/posts/adieu-au-langage-goodbye-to-language-a-works-cited. Web. Accessed 01-27-2021. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books. Genet, Jean. 2003. Prisoner of Love. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: New York Review Books. Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. 2004. Notre Musique. Paris: Les Films Alain Sarde/Avventura Films/France 3 Cinéma. DVD. Wellspring Media. Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. 2014. Adieu au langage. Paris: Canal+. Blu-Ray. Kino Lorber. Godard, Jean-Luc, Anne-Marie Mieville and Jean Pierre Gorin, dirs. 1976. Ici et ailleurs. Paris: Gaumont/Sonimage. DVD. Olive Films.

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Jameson, Fredric. 1988. Cognitive Mapping. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 347–357. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Cinema and Space in the World-System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kraus, Chris. 2000. Aliens and Anorexia. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Kraus, Chris. 2006. Torpor. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Krieger, Antoine. 2017. On Jean Luc Godard, Jean Genet and Representing the Palestinians. Journal of European Studies 47(1): 54–66. Lafont, Cristina. 2000. Heidegger, Language and World-Disclosure. Translated by Graham Harman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1964. Studies in European Realism. Translated by Alfred Kazin. New York: Grosset and Dunlap. Meruane, Lina, 2015. Volverse Palestina. Barcelona: Literatura Random House. Morgan, Daniel. 2013. Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2019. The Implicated Subject. Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 2019. Writing the Necropolitical. Notes around the Idea of Mexican Anti-World Literature. In World Literature and Dissent, eds. Lorna Burns and Katie Muth. New York: Routledge. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 2018. Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Schwarz, Henry and Anne Balsamo. 1996. Under the Sign of Semiotext(e). The Story according to Sylvere Lotringer and Chris Kraus. Critique 37(3): 205–20. Thompson, John B. 2010. Merchants of Culture. The Publishing Business in the TwentyFirst Century. Cambridge: Polity. Volpi, Jorge. 2008. El jardín devastado. Mexico: Alfaguara. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated. The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Wegner, Phillip E. 2014. Periodizing Jameson. Dialectics, the University and the Desire for Narrative. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land. Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Williams, James S. 2016. Encounters with Godard. Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Chapter 8

Beyond (Cuban) Literature: Global Issues in Generation Zero Catalina Quesada-Gómez Abstract This article analyzes the strategies used by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias and Jorge Enrique Lage to align themselves with other “global” writers, paying attention to distribution and reception processes. Both are writers whose work echoes changes in the perception of space and time or the impact of internet and social media, while problematizing some of the traditional categories such as literary genres or the very notion of the literary. Far from seeing their books reduced to the national market, both authors have seen them published in Spain and, in the case of Rodríguez Iglesias, translated into several languages. Thus, their productions are more in tune with other contemporary practices outside the island—in which literary references have less relevance and are closer to pop culture or cinema—as well as with authors who are located on the edges of the Cuban canon. While Lage’s recent Everglades (2020) questions if literature is losing the battle against audiovisual materials and his novel La autopista: the movie (2014) explores the experience of life on a hyphen, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, who recently moved to Miami, resorts to textual, visual, and performative self-fictional strategies, to ironically problematize aspects such as lesbian sexuality, links with the nation, body writing, or the construction of a queer, Latinx identity, among other issues. Finally, their work thematizes the loss of centrality of writing and the lettered city in contemporary culture, while moving away from figures such as the learned writer or the Latin American intellectual.

Critics seem to agree that, despite the diversity that characterizes the members of the so-called “Generación Año Cero” or “Generación Cero”—a group of Cuban writers who begins to publish in the twenty-first century—, in their work there is a strong will to escape from what Gilberto Padilla called the Cuban factor, the tiresome iteration of “the Cuban” in the market (2014a, 114), an element that these writers would consider as a burden, a residue, which has become embarrassing (2014b, 116), both in its sweetened version—the image of Cuba as a locus amœnus—and in the dirty or ruinous form typical throughout

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the Special Period. More likely to opt for “non-spaces” and to build “global fictions,” these authors would move away from both versions of the island—the angelic and the demonic one, which would be nothing more than the opposite sides of the same iteration in the Cubanness—, to propose a neutral space, devoid of the flavor of Cuba. Beyond the differences between each writer, there are indeed certain generational traits that have allowed critics to identify them as members of the same group (Dorta 2015, Dorta and Simal 2017, Sández 2017, Maguire 2017, De Maeseneer 2018b), despite the fact that the tag has also come under fire: “Never in the history of our literature had such a term so dysfunctional and ambiguous, and with so little conceptual content been established” (Mora and Pérez 2017, 13). And although I will here focus above all on the narratives of two authors of that generation, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias and Jorge Enrique Lage, it is impossible, especially in the case of Rodríguez Iglesias, to establish a clear rubric between prose and poetry, since the author likes to experiment with genres and to explore them playfully. Her poetry responds to what Katherine Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez have established as constants in Generation Zero poetry: “It is poetry with vast experience in the representations of subordinations (nation, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality) in order to subvert them, that has consciously participated in both social and cultural transformations, that has drawn closer to popular language and culture, and that has decolonized itself in content and in form.” The fact that her poetry is not communicative and that it requires an active reader to generate meaning, coupled with its lack of Cuban exoticism, has contributed to her relative disregard at the international level, something that has recently changed, when her novel Mi novia preferida fue un bulldog francés (2017; Mi Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog, 2020) was published by Alfaguara, the publisher with the widest distribution network in the Spanish-language market. In fact, hers is a very interesting case, because while Rodríguez Iglesias is published and distributed by Alfaguara, thus presumably becoming part of what Víctor Barrera called the process of alfaguarización of Latin American literature, Rodríguez Iglesias also continues to be edited by independent publishers, such as Cardboard House Press, where she recently published her poetry book Spinning Mill (2019), and she maintains high doses of illegibility in her writing. In “Arqueologías globales de la literatura cubana: de las ruinas al chicle,” I examined how the indifference to the Cubanness of the authors who began to publish well into the 21st century does not consist so much of an attempt to annihilate or ignore the autochthonous as an eagerness to redefine it, somewhat by resorting to a whole series of foreign substances, which they appropriate. Through this resemantization, these writers seem to be erecting a barrier that separates them both from the tropical fruit, coffee, or sugar of

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their grandparents and from the ruins of their parents (305–6). In the same way, by not giving a prominent place to food in their texts, the writers of this Generation Zero mark distances with the authors of the Special Period in whose works the obsession with food was the answer to the scarcity and hunger of that period, as Rita De Maeseneer (2018b) demonstrates from a gastrocritical point of view. As Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo states in the prologue to Generation Zero: An Anthology of New Cuban Fiction (2014), these writers “are willing to deconstruct all previous discourses of what ‘cubanness’ is supposed to be, whether erotic or political, ultimately betting it all on a kind of Cubanless Cubanness” (9). In the same vein, in “Slippages in Cuban Literature: Global Fictions,” I analyzed the works of these two Generation Zero authors who abandoned or subverted the commonplaces of scarcity, decay, or ruins, constructing texts whose center, present or absent, is not necessarily Cuba. There I dealt again with Jorge Enrique Lage and Legna Rodríguez Iglesias in order to understand not only how this distancing from the previous generations came to occur but also how their work aligns with that of their contemporaries abroad. Unlike what we find in the work of well-known Cuban authors in the international market such as Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Leonardo Padura, or Zoé Valdés, they do not speak “of opportunistic bureaucrats, prostitutes with college degrees, blackouts and endless lines, the splendor of the black market” (Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez). Hence, on the back cover of the anthology Malditos bastardos. Diez narradores cubanos que no son Pedro Juan Gutiérrez ni Zoé Valdés ni Leonardo Padura ni … (2014; Damned Bastards: Ten Cuban Writers Who Aren’t Pedro Juan Gutiérrez or Zoé Valdés or Leonardo Padura), which contains stories by Jorge Enrique Lage, Ahmel Echevarría, Osdany Morales, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Raúl Flores Iriarte, Michel Encinosa Fú, Abel Fernández Larrea, Erick J. Mota, Anisley Negrín, and Orlando Pardo Lazo, the editor Gilberto Padilla proclaims the distance between these writers and those Cuban authors: “And this is perhaps the key difference that separates these ‘children that nobody wanted’ from other Cuban writers: Gutiérrez, Valdés, Padura all seek to represent Cuba; these ten damned bastards—devotees of lost causes—only want to replace her” (trans. by Emily A. Maguire). For his part, Walfrido Dorta (2015) underlines the differences between these authors and Novísimos or the Diáspora(s) group, pointing out the specificities of Generation Zero, although he acknowledges that this does not mean that certain links cannot be established between Generation Zero and Cuban literature (129). Furthermore, as Rafael Rojas notes, with the twenty-first century well underway, these writers are no longer interested in an ideological questioning of national themes, but rather in being part of a “global literature” that is “produced from new connected and interchangeable

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communities, which no longer imagine themselves as isolated or exceptional” (2014, trans. by Emily Maguire). Consequently, they are writers who possess the certainty of belonging to the new century and for whom belonging to a temporality is more decisive than belonging to a territory (Rojas 2016). In this paper I will deepen the analysis of the strategies used by Jorge Enrique Lage and Legna Rodríguez Iglesias to align themselves with other “global” writers, paying special attention to their distribution and reception. Although Dorta reminds us that many of the young writers on the island complain about the precariousness of access to the contemporary literary archive published globally (2017a, 362), the works of these two authors relate to others such as Mario Bellatin or César Aira in their concern “with the mutability of the human body and species and with the fate of cultural production in an era of mashups” (Price 2012). Far from seeing their works reduced to the national market, both have seen their texts published in Spain in recent years and, in the case of Rodríguez Iglesias, translated into several languages. While Lage’s recent Everglades (2020) questions whether literature is losing the battle against audiovisual materials and his novel La autopista: the movie (2014) explores the experience of life on a hyphen, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, who recently moved to Miami, resorts to textual, visual, and performative autofictional strategies to ironically problematize lesbian sexuality, nationhood, body writing, or the construction of a queer identity, among other issues. Thus, they both represent in their texts questions that have grown in popularity in our global world. Finally, both are writers whose work echoes changes in the perception of space and time or the impact of social media, while questioning some traditional categories such as the notion of science fiction or literary genres. 1

Writing, the Body, and Identity as a Performance

On March 15, 2019, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias began what she herself would call in her Facebook account the “Olivetti mission,” a literary project in which she improvised poems written with a typewriter on Miami’s Calle Ocho (in the well-known Little Havana) and given to the reader in exchange for an unfixed sum: “Misión Olivetti: / Escritora ambulante. / Se venden poemas escritos al momento con dos o tres dedos nada más. / Precio: lo que tú creas que vale”.1 She documents the first installment with a partial photograph of the resulting 1 “Olivetti mission: / Traveling writer. / The poems I have written right now with only two or three fingers are sold. / Price: what you think it is worth.” The translation is mine. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.

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poem and a short video of her placing the paper in the typewriter and writing indoors. This staging brings to the table not only some of the writer’s own obsessions (the foregrounding of the materiality and theatricality of writing, its relationship with the sound, or the wandering condition of the writer), but also points to issues such as the value of the work of art, the representation of the creative act and the generation of the work, its limitations (imposed or not), the expansion of the fictional space to the author’s own public appearances (or, as in this case, its presence on social media), the twists and turns of autofiction… Going even further, we could understand it as an ironic vindication of digital poetry (literally composed with the fingers), opposite to that other digital poetry that proliferates in our days but which in Cuba, until now, has been conspicuous by its absence. But above all, it tells us about how symbolic capital is not acquired in our times solely through writing itself, but through other public activities in which the writer intervenes to gain remuneration and recognition (Gallego Cuiñas 2019, 48). Within this tendency to expand the space of fiction and to add fuel to the fire of the possible autofictionality of the texts—“Any resemblance to actual events can be blamed on me. I don’t care,” says her last novel’s initial epigraph—, we find the use of photographs, not only on social media, but also on book flaps themselves, with which the text establishes a presumed referential relationship. This is what happens in Mi novia preferida fue un bulldog francés, whose flap image seems to refer to one of “those interesting phrases she places between one story and the next” (Rodríguez Iglesias 2020, 195) and that according to the protagonist of the story “Soba”, the French bulldog, emulates the writing of Facebook statuses: I try to think that writing this book in some vintage glasses is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. The more I think, the more tears I shed.

Rodríguez Iglesias 2020, 21

And, as if to establish a kind of playful dialogue, on the flap of the first edition of that book, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias is shown wearing precisely the type of glasses that the text mentions. In the same way, on February 28th, 2019, the author published as a Facebook profile picture, one in which she appears apparently naked covering herself with a map of Cuba that reveals different tattoos on her body. The final text of the story “Tatuaje” (“Tatto”) accompanies the photograph:

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The good thing is I won’t have to keep going from place to place. No family. No house. A body without family isn’t a person. Aren’t you going to ask me what Cuba means to me? Look. The map of Cuba, I got it tattooed in ninety-nine. As a young girl. By the same guy I told you about, with the gloves. Who’s rough, but I like it. And none of that outline shit. No. Filled in. On the ribs, where it hurts the most. Man, your nation is your nation. Rodríguez Iglesias 2020, 159–60

Thus, the fictional nature of a text that would be in some way a copy of reality is called into question (in different flaps of her works, the number of the author’s tattoos is emphasized) when in fact she uses these items ironically. And not only that, but taking advantage of this autofictional confusion, the text aims at transforming the perception of the figure of author, with a backand-forth strategy that comes to project onto her the extreme nature of the character of “Tattoo,” a prisoner sentenced to death, who contracts AIDS when she gets one of those tattoos. Rodríguez Iglesias thus makes it clear that the possibilities for constructing the figures of author of writers in our time widely transcend the space of the pages of books, as Aníbal González reminds us. On the other hand, both the photograph, with the highlighted island, and the literary image with the island tattooed on the inmate’s ribs, deceptively point to an obsession with the Cuban condition that is not present in the novel at all. Rather, as Michael H. Miranda points out, Cuba is a diluted presence, a kind of watermark that thinly reveals the island without focusing on it, but rather underlining its invisibility. Whereas that representation contributes in some way to accentuating the enfant terrible image of Legna Rodríguez Iglesias constructed by editors and critics, perhaps as a marketing strategy, the veiled allusion connects her to the apathy that other contemporary writers have shown in recent years when it comes to continuing to represent Cuba (or any other nation) in their texts. Indeed, her editors have insisted both on the iconoclastic condition of her writing and on the alleged formal innovation it undertakes, in addition to her “literary depravity” (Padilla), which in a way evokes the “poetics of scandal” of El Establo in the 1980s. While Alfaguara recurs in Mi novia preferida fue un

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bulldog francés to the promotional claim of the term tsunami and to the absolute exceptionality of the author (“The ‘Legna tsunami’, a new and powerful voice that comes from Cuba with a radical and modern style that is unlike any other, speaks to us about sex, love, politics and daily life in Cuba as never before”), Gilberto Padilla invokes a generic promiscuity on the back cover of No sabe / no contesta (2015; Don’t Know / No opinion): “she publishes bastard, degenerate books and wins competitions with her literary depravity. […] But Legna has the prose, agility, and unscrupulousness of an enfant terrible.” Of course, the recurrence of scatology in works such as Hilo + hilo (2015) aligns Rodríguez Iglesias with other authors of the Generation Zero with whom she would coincide in the use of “bad words” (Dorta 2017a, 350), and invites us to think in a certain type of literary perversion, rude to certain ears, which, however, is far from being a hallmark of her work. Perhaps the most iconoclastic feature is the way in which her work combines a multidimensional transvestism (generic, scriptural, and circumscribed to the characters or the poetic voice), a queer sensitivity, in which the non-heteronormative desire and scatological details are interwoven, with a writing that tends to orality and that voluntarily seeks the stuttering of the infant, especially in its etymological condition of “who does not speak.” It is there, in the intersection of the disjointed babbling with the abject-but-innocent and the deactivation of socially established categories where her work acquires belligerent overtones. As Nanne Timmer has noticed, orality, voice, and body in her literature entail a positioning with the archive and the polis (2016, 51). Therefore, although it is undeniable that, compared to other contemporary literary practices on the island, that of Legna Rodríguez Iglesias may be innovative or radical in some way, the truth is that such radicalism is questionable if we look at the entire body of literature written in Spanish in recent years, or if we think of authors like Severo Sarduy, also from Camagüey—a figure that had already been claimed by the Novísimos as an excluded writer of the Cubensis canon. In fact, saving the differences, there are many elements that allow linking the writing style of one to the other, from the questioning of the generic borders to the rejection of the realist regime (Rojas 2013), as well as the self-reflexivity, the use of repetition through the déjà lu technique, the literary use of tattoos, the presence of disease in their texts, the writing of the body or, even, the way of “diluting” Cuba. Because, leaving commercial claims aside, we see that the author herself feels comfortable joining a certain Cuban literary tradition and establishing a dialogue not only with Sarduy himself, but also with Virgilio Piñera, Reinaldo Arenas, José Kozer, the theater group El Ciervo Encantado, or even José Martí, as well as foreign authors, who include several playwrights in the wake of the theater of the absurd. Nevertheless, as Rojas

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emphasizes, there are differences in the way in which the writers of Generation Zero relate to the tradition of the island and the way in which, for example, the Novísimos did, since the heterogeneity of that archive does not respond to an arbitrary eclecticism or an integrating will of tradition (2016). This, of course, does not prevent us from perceiving what is novel or audacious in Rodríguez Iglesias texts, once that tradition has been digested and we place Rodríguez Iglesias in the contemporary transnational context to which her work belongs. For example, it is difficult not to read Si esto es una tragedia yo soy una bicicleta (2016; If this is a Tragedy, I am a Bicycle) without thinking of Sarduy’s Pájaros de la playa (1993; Beach Birds, 2007). Despite the obvious differences between one text and the other, both works build a literary framework around the disease in which romance is also combined. Although Pájaros de la playa has a marked autofictional and existential tone, particularly in the sections “Diario del cosmólogo” (“The Cosmologist’s Diary”), where the sick body is presented as a ruin without a future, as a waste doomed to death, the novel is not absent of the farcical characters so characteristic of Sarduy, something that, in the case of Rodríguez Iglesias, is exacerbated by her proximity to the theater of the absurd. But her play also alternates, like Pájaros de la playa, narrativedescriptive and dialogue parts. The narrative-descriptive parts, which explore disease, are located at the beginning of each scene and can be read as stage directions, while in the dialogue parts, the Independent Cyclist and the Cyclist’s Girlfriend, with other minor presences, discuss a love in which biblical resonances intersect with a somewhat morbid sexuality. As a final note, the “Último delirio” establishes this spatial and thematic duality: En realidad, a mí como autor me gustaría que la obra fuera representada en dos espacios. Mientras en un espacio acontecen las consultas médicas y todo lo relacionado con el hospital, en el otro acontece el romance. Ambos espacios serían paralelos, respecto al tiempo y a la importancia narrativa del acontecimiento.2 Rodríguez Iglesias 2016, 101

2 “Actually, / as an author I would like the work / to be represented in two spaces. / While medical consultations and everything related to the hospital / take place in one space, / in the other, romance happens. / Both spaces would be parallel, / regarding the time and narrative importance /of the event.”

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While in Pájaros de la playa, the name of the illness that afflicts the inhabitants of the house is obliterated—the reader deduces, however, that it is AIDS—in Si esto es una tragedia yo soy una bicicleta, as in other texts by Rodríguez Iglesias, there is a delight in the explanation and detailed description of the disease, its origin, and its symptoms. Thus, as in the story “Lepidóptero” (“Lepidoptera”) of Mi novia preferida fue un bulldog francés, the beginning of the 3rd scene of the play, “Con quitamanchas quitas la mancha,” and later the text that precedes the 5th scene, takes pleasure in medical details: Ya sentadas frente a él, despreocupadas y saludables, oyeron al Doctor decirles: el cáncer es un conjunto de enfermedades en las cuales el organismo produce un exceso de células malignas, conocidas como cancerígenas o cancerosas, con crecimiento y división más allá de los límites normales, invasión del tejido circundantes y, a veces, metástasis. La metástasis es la propagación a distancia, por vía fundamentalmente linfática o sanguínea, de las células originarias del cáncer, y el crecimiento de nuevos tumores en los lugares de destino de dicha metástasis. Estas propiedades diferencian a los tumores malignos de los benignos, que son limitados y no invaden ni producen metástasis. Las células normales al sentir el contacto con las células vecinas inhiben la reproducción, pero las células malignas no tienen este freno. La mayoría de los cánceres forman tumores, algunos no como la leucemia. Ustedes dos, pequeñas, tienen leucemia. Ambas se echaron a reír.3 Rodríguez Iglesias 2016, 41

But in a text that, like Sarduy’s, puts its finger on the sore spot of realism and delves into it and subverts the most basic principles around linearity or sequential logic, the coherence of dialogues, or the construction of characters with a defined psychology, the disease of the protagonists is not presented as something conclusive or definitive. In Mariana Percovich’s words, what we are facing here is “the encounter with the true meaning of queer: The trace of 3 “Sitting in front of him, carefree and healthy, they heard the Doctor tell them: cancer is a group of diseases in which the body produces an excess of malignant cells, known as cancerous or carcinogenic, with growth and division beyond normal limits, invasion of the surrounding tissue and sometimes metastasis. Metastasis is the spreading, mainly via the lymphatic or blood, of the cells originating from cancer to the distant parts of the body, and the growth of new tumors at the destination sites of said metastasis. These properties differentiate malignant tumors from benign tumors, which are limited and do not invade or metastasize. Normal cells when they feel contact with neighboring cells inhibit reproduction, but malignant cells do not have this deterrent. Most cancers form tumors, some not like leukemia. You two little ones have leukemia. They both laughed.”

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a failure in linguistic representation” (103). Death, in fact, which sweeps the entire work, is presented in different disguises, ranging from tuberculosis to leprosy, through cancer or syphilis, in an effort to explore a morbid eroticism between diseased bodies that love each other literally in sickness and in health: Por eso nos besamos el pus y las rodillas. Nos besamos la ropa aunque no tengamos ropa. Cogemos catarro por el aire. Cogemos neumonía. Mi roncha te gusta mucho.4 Rodríguez Iglesias 2016, 20

On the other hand, the disease does not appear as a consequence of homoeroticism, nor as a punishment, as happens in the work of other previous authors (Percovich 104), but rather precedes it. In addition, in an extravagant display of irony, we witness the reappropriation of what was for so long an insult coming from suffocating heteropatriarchal structures, thus turning these lesbian lovers into real sick persons: “Mi boca está tan sucia como tu lepra. / Si se me cae en pedazos la boca cómo nos besaríamos”5 (Rodríguez Iglesias 2016, 24). In this way, the body, and in particular the diseased body, is used as a political weapon, a battle ground, which results in the individual being marginalized, from multiple and assumed deviations of the norm, a waywardness that is projected even in the religious discourse of “no me libres del mal”6 (Rodríguez Iglesias 2016, 65). As the editors of Resentir lo queer en América Latina: diálogos desde/con el Sur emphasize, “assuming the place of resentment with ease entails being ironic and positioning oneself from a counter-ideological revision” (13), and this is precisely what the author does. An atypical regime is thus established in which the sick body is not a problem—the disease as nomos, an entity outside all morality (Miranda)—, but is presented as a place as legitimate as a healthy one, even preferable to a cleansed one: “Este país me cauteriza. […] Vámonos de aquí”7 (Rodríguez Iglesias 2016, 45). Despite the progressive wear and tear of the body, the love relationship and, above all, the language that builds it, act as a neutralizing element in the face of death throughout the entire work. The mechanism refers, in some way, to what for Roberto Esposito constitutes the basis of immune protection: life fights what denies it, but according to a 4 “That’s why we kiss the pus and our knees. / We kiss our clothes even though we don’t have clothes. / We catch a cold in the air. / We get pneumonia. / You really like my welt.” 5 “My mouth is as dirty as your leprosy. / If my mouth falls apart, how would we kiss”. 6 “Do not deliver me from evil.” 7 “This country cauterizes me. […] Let’s go from here.”

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law that is not that of frontal opposition, but rather a detour. Disease must be faced, but without taking it away from its own confines (17–8). This is why it is easy to perceive romance and words here as a biopower capable of denying that negation that emerges from the hospital segments. A good part of that morbid love constant beyond death is a parodically built on the structure of the Song of Songs, not only on the subject, but also formally. In addition to revolving around the love of wives, Rodríguez Iglesias’ text imitates the condition of the dramatic poem of Song of Solomon, with verses that make up something similar to a dialogue, as well as the syntax, with abundant imperatives, future verbs, repetitions that emulate the internal accusative, parallels, and comparisons (for your love is better than wine): Junto a mí los frutos secos y los frutos tropicales. Mi amigo es tu amigo. Tu amistad me gusta más que mis amigos. Me pides el manjar y te lo doy. En una taza de yeso más fina que las tazas de porcelana. Vienes equilibrando tu peso y el jarrón. Tu peso me colma como la leche al polvo.8 Rodríguez Iglesias 2016, 76–7

Despite maintaining that pattern, there is an obvious substitution, as well as a parodic use, of the contents. In this repetition with critical distance, the poem gives (or restores) a homoerotic character to a text that for centuries has been read as an emblem of heterosexual love. Nevertheless, far from establishing any homonormativity, Rodríguez Iglesias’ work advocates queer identities, in the sense that Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel gives the term; that is, it talks about identities that question hetero and homonormative discourses and practices (1040). Indeed, queer and mutant identities predominate in her work, because far from simply joining the gay nation, Rodríguez Iglesias explores the confines of human desire with androids, animals, even endowing the process of reading / writing with sexual content, as can be seen in Mi novia preferida, a sexuality passed through the filter of oddness, thanks not only to what could be called her “surgical style”, but also to the prominent use of absurdity, nonsense, ugliness, and scatology. We can thus see in her works what 8 “Next to me, nuts and tropical fruits. / My friend is your friend. / I like your friendship more than my friends. / You ask me for a delicacy, and I give it to you. / In a plaster cup even more refined than porcelain cups. / You come balancing your weight and the vase. / Your weight fulfills me like milk to powder”.

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Emilio Bejel labels as an aesthetic of destabilization, through which different codes (national, cultural, sexual, authorial) are transgressed (222). However, Rodríguez Iglesias goes beyond the mere enthronement of homosexual codes and bets not only on the feminization but also on the ambisexualization of narratives of desire. I use the notion of ambisexualization as used by Martínez-San Miguel, to explore sexual identities that do not necessarily identify as heterosexual, gay or bisexual, but that oscillate between these various sexual identifications without assuming any of them as defining nor definitive for these characters (1044). To these characteristics, which connect Rodríguez Iglesias with other contemporary writers from the Caribbean and Latin America like Puerto Rican writer Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro in their interest for alternative intimacies, we should add the aforementioned delight in ugliness and scatology, the result being that kind of queerness that we find in Si esto es una tragedia yo soy una bicicleta, in My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog, or in her recent Título / Title (2020). For example, in My Favorite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog she puts into practice a poetics of asphyxiation that verges on the deplorable (Solano), in a novel that, like all her work, not only plays to subvert literary genres, but also aspires to generate a feeling of oddness in the reader. Although the author has stated that her writing has not changed because of her moving to the United States, we can perceive a qualitative leap between My Favorite Girlfriend and her previous novel, Mayonesa bien brillante (2012; Very Bright Mayonnaise). While both have a similar structure, with fifteen chapters in which narrative segments are mixed with poetry or theatrical dialogue, it seems formal experiments gain special prominence in My Favorite Girlfriend, as also happens in No sabe / no contesta. Featuring Teki Heromu Cho [Ilo Veyou Somuch], Mayonesa bien brillante has the unity of the presence of a single protagonist, something that disappears in the latter. Published by Alfaguara in Spain and translated into English in 2020, My Favorite Girlfriend takes up the trend, so common in recent years, of presenting a set of narrative segments as a novel, the organizing constituent of the literary field as opposed to other genres (Guerrero 97). However, the stories (even if they are not ordinary short stories either) are not so heterogeneous that they cannot pass as a more or less harmonious set, leaving for the reader the task of conferring unity to the whole and perceiving in it a polyhedral, multigenerational image of insular Cuba and the diaspora. Further, in the last story or chapter, the bulldog, metafictional and ironically, proposes a unitary interpretation of the book. In these stories, changing identities that question gender boundaries coexist with the excesses of an absurd bureaucracy, the detachment from origins, the ravages on the bodies of certain lethal diseases, or meta- and autofictional games. The

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result is a book that projects a ruthless gaze on a universe dominated by absurdity and discontinuity, with sufficient doses of globality that, however, do not completely eclipse the local, and that, therefore, works perfectly in a catalog like Alfaguara’s (Gallego Cuiñas 2018, 240–241). We could thus perceive a distance between these two books, the same as between some of her latest publications, with international diffusion and aimed at a much more global audience (No sabe / no contesta, published in Spain by Ediciones La Palma in collaboration with the Cuban Editorial Cajachina, or Mi pareja calva y yo vamos a tener un hijo, published by Ediciones Liliputienses, also in Spain), and her first ones, edited by small and not so small publishers in Cuba (Editorial Ácana, Ediciones Ávila, Ediciones Sed de Belleza, Ediciones Matanzas, but also Editorial Letras Cubanas or even Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas), frequently with a more restricted circulation. Even if it cannot be said that there is a radical and total transformation, we could argue that with the change in perspective (from Cuba to Miami) and the conversion of the writer into someone internationally recognized, her writing, and in particular her narrative, more subject to the market’s reception than poetry, has been transformed in some way. In recent years, her texts begin to be advertised, especially on sites in English, such as those of a Latina (and no longer exclusively a Cuban writer), under fashionable labels in the United States such as LGBTQIA or queer studies, Latinx literature, etc. And even though many of these contents pre-existed in her texts, now her condition as an expatriate is noticeable, both in the subject of the immigrant experience in the 21st century (see the “Miami” chapter of My Favorite Girlfriend, or her poetry book Miami Century Fox) and in the emphasis placed on certain authors of the Cuban tradition, whose presence becomes palpable as part of the fiction (as in “Tree,” also in My favorite Girlfriend). Finally, we can see that, despite her idiosyncrasies, there is no doubt that texts like My Favorite Girlfriend start to look more and more like some of the works by Latin American authors with a wide international projection, such as Mario Bellatin. Not only is the use of irony in strange, suffocating, or uncomfortable situations similar but both writers also resemble each other in the way in which local elements are used. When those appear, they are quite blurred, thus escaping accusations of resorting to exoticism to seduce international readers and rejecting the doxa that Latin American (or Cuban) authors are expected to write their reality. On the other hand, contrary to what happens in the narrative of some McOndo authors, the international scenarios, and the aseptic spaces characteristic of the neoliberal effervescence (airports, malls) are viewed with skepticism and irony, without displaying any hint of excitement about consumerist prosperity. Just as there is no gloating in ruin or scarcity, abundance is not uncritically embraced either:

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Dolphin Mall, mid-morning. A little like an airport but without the need to get anywhere. Buy. Buy. Buy Forever 21, underwear. Aéropostale, a shirt. Gap, a dress and a pair of shorts. Chocolate. Stairs. Lights. Android. Transgender. Triumph. Bienvenido al paradise. Sit down and breathe. You’re in control. Rodríguez Iglesias 2020, 104

Unlike that “post historic and neoliberal euphoria quite widespread at the end of the century” among some Latin American writers (Becerra 267), the narrator of “Miami” is not seduced by the mirage of abundance—“We have the right to potato chips, hamburgers, apples, soft drinks. Airline’s treat. I don’t take anything” (Rodríguez Iglesias 2020, 109)—or by technological development. The American dream does not even beckon her; it is simply countered by a remarkable apathy and devoid of any sense of wonder. 2

The Undreamed Dystopia

Jorge Enrique Lage is another of the well-known authors of the Generation Zero, whose texts have been published outside Cuba (mainly in Spain). His work being very different from Rodríguez Iglesias’, it also presents odd universes ruled frequently by the uncanny or the absurd, amalgamates styles and genres, while subverting the idea of how (or about what) a Cuban writer should write. Far from presenting an isolated Cuba, anachronistically pure in its essence, Lage brings to the fore a hybrid space in which the American culture constantly resonates. Although many of his novels are set in a vaguely dystopian Havana, he projects not only imaginaries belonging to the American culture, but also uses Spanish interspersed with English terms, as can be seen in the novel La autopista: the movie [The Freeway: The Movie], where Cuban geography is changed by a monstrous freeway that will connect Cuba to the US across the Straits of Florida. Fragmentary and manifold, like most of his narrative, this cyber punk dystopia (Rojas 2015) or transutopia (Timmer 2019, 125) also contains a subplot about the recording of a documentary on the

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construction of the highway. The freeway can be read as a symbol that unites the irreconcilable, a kind of line or hyphen that connects opposites, as Lourdes Molina points out: “This hyphen bridges categories that may appear hopelessly irreconcilable: the body and the machine; post-industrial overdevelopment and post-socialist underdevelopment; Cuba and the US; the plasticity of identity and rigid, imposed categories such as gender, class, and profession; utopian promise and dystopian reality; and foreign influence and autochthonous desire.” But the highway is also a symbol of late capitalism and its flows, while it tells us about other problems of our global present. Whereas one might be tempted to see the presence of ruins in Lage’s work as an extension of this recurring motif used widely by so many Cuban writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially by Antonio José Ponte, one of the most relevant authors of the “Special Period,” we quickly see that this is not the case. These future ruins serve to imagine a different past to the city, and hereafter build, like other dystopian fictions of the early 21st century, “a story about the impact of certain drifts of globalization on Latin American societies, the result of political and economic programs of neoliberalism that have had similar effects in vast regions of the international scene” (Becerra 273). Hence, his enumeration of the elements that the construction of the highway will take in its path invites us to think of any other large city of late neoliberalism conceived around consumerist policies: “They say the freeway will crisscross the city. What’s left of the city. By the day the bulldozers advance, sweeping away parks, buildings, shopping centers. By night I wander close to the sea, amid the ruins, the machinery, the containers, trying to catch a glimpse of the magnitude of what’s coming” (trans. by Guillermo Parra). Additionally, like his previous novel, Carbono 14: una novela de culto (2010; Carbon 14. A Cult Novel), La autopista problematizes literary categorizations, by resorting to the frame of a science fiction that is not science fiction (Timmer 2019, 117) and carries out, as Dorta points out when comparing it to a novel by Juan Abreu, “deflationary gestures that question [the] exceptionalism and the oracular and allegorical drive of cyberpunk and science fiction, present not only in Abreu’s novel, but also in other texts of the Cuban cyberpunk” (2017b, 37). Therefore, rather than considering its dystopian condition in line with the scheme proposed by Odette Casamayor (utopia / dystopia / weightlessness), thinking about it in relation to previous Cuban poetics, it seems more appropriate to read Lage as an element that transcends weightlessness and, far from any philosophical stance or disappointment, is closer to other contemporary Latin American dystopian proposals. The bridge/hyphen metaphor continues in his novel Everglades, which reverses the process of Cubanization of South Florida to present an Evergladized

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Cuba, encapsulated by the symbol of the bald eagle, while the narrator maintains irrational dialogues with prominent American writers. The bald eagle, which, as we know, is one of the national symbols of the United States, migrates from the neighboring peninsula, performing a reverse trip to that of so many Cubans who emigrated to Florida. The book mocks the emblematic elements of Cubanness (in particular socialist clichés, but also clichés about Caribbean exoticism) by presenting them as a kitschy lure for tourists: Desde hacía años, una serie de agregados y aderezos holográficos se proyectaban regularmente contra la figura del Cristo. Lo normal: atracción tramposa para turistas. Cristo tocando las consabidas maracas, o sosteniendo una pancarta de bienvenida esponsorizada por Monster Energy Drink. Cristo con el rostro marmorizado de Fidel Castro, del Che Guevara, del trovador Silvio Rodríguez, de Benny Moré y Compay Segundo ensamblados, así como Willy Chirino y Celia Cruz y un largo etcétera de slide show tridimensional. Un Cristo afrocuban® incluso, además de travesti: sin barba y con la cara de aquellas negras santeras, robustas, collares de cuentas al cuello y tabaco en la boca (tabaco igualmente adosado a las bocas de CristoCastro y CristoChe), que leían la buenaventura en la Plaza de la Catedral.9 Lage 2020, 45

These elements, seen from a future distorted by dystopia, are a good example of the revision of nationhood carried out in recent years by so many authors in the post-national Hispanic world. As Jorge Enrique Lage himself suggested, his intention was to examine the signs of Cubanness as if they were fossils (Padilla 2020), something that he already literally accomplished in Carbono 14. Rachel Price underlines how this novel, as well as Vultureffect (2011), show both universal and local concerns and tell us about how to live in the island with a planetary consciousness (2015, 11). Those concerns remain in his latest novel, in which Lage also engages with global matters such as environmental and health 9 “For years, a series of holographic additions and garnishes had been regularly projected against the figure of the Christ. The normal: tricky attraction for tourists. Christ playing the usual maracas, or holding a welcome banner sponsored by Monster Energy Drink. Christ with the marbled face of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, troubadour Silvio Rodríguez, Benny Moré and Compay Segundo assembled, as well as Willy Chirino and Celia Cruz and a long list of three-dimensional slide shows. An Afro-Cuban® Christ even, in addition to being a transvestite: without a beard and with the face of those robust black santeras, necklaces of beads around his neck and tobacco in his mouth (tobacco also attached to the mouths of CristoCastro and CristoChe), who read the good fortune in the Plaza de la Catedral”.

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issues. Thus, in Everglades, he even anticipates the pandemic theme by creating a narrative space (La casona) where a group of women and a detectivenarrator are locked up, and around which a quarantine operation is deployed. Without an open mention, but invoking it indirectly, he also resorts to climate change to imagine a Havana symbolically turned into a swamp, invaded by the Everglades swampland, turning the Benítez Rojo’s pan-Caribbean image upside down under the slogan “the repeating puddle” (“el charco que se repite”; Lage 2020, 231). That planetary awareness, along with all the typical elements of the 21st century (from booktubers to Facebook status) connects seamlessly with the 19th, thanks to the readings of El Ginecólogo [the Gynecologist], as well as with the 20th. With irony, numerous puns, intertextualities, and a distorting humor, Lage subjects Cuba to a de-exoticizing exoticism while creating a suspended temporality where the future and the past go hand in hand, thus demonstrating that the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous is the true chronotope of modern times, as Gustavo Guerrero points out (51). Emily Maguire precisely draws attention to the use of time in the work of the authors of this generation. She argues that “the existence of multiple temporalities in fiction by Generation Zero writers represents an explicit attempt to create a temporal space in contrast with that of the dominant temporality” (9), and sees this as “an exit from the national space and the narratives that dominate it” (9). In fact, we could see in the novel a kind of “swamp aesthetics,” where the various times and themes mentioned float adrift, mixed with each other, without being completely diluted, overlapping, like the novel we read (Everglades) and the notes of the posthumous and unfinished novel of the Gynecologist (also called Everglades). This proposal for a “swamp novel” of the 21st century—“a test tube where quotations, multilanguages, intertexts are mixed” (Minipunto)— presents as an ironic point of non-departure one of the canonical proposals of the 20th century, such as that of the “marvelous real” and the “jungle novel,” from which Lage’s text ironically steers clear: Cada vez tengo más claro por dónde puedo hacer daño, qué movimiento me está funcionando y qué movimiento no. Donde digo movimientos puedo decir hundimientos. Provocar hundimientos, por aquí y por allá. Los pasos hundidos. Ahí los quiero ver, Alejitos Carpentier. Pajarones. Pájaros carpentieros y compañía, qué bonitos, cuánto mercado. Como si quedaran troncos medianamente sólidos en pie.

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El problema no es escribir. La literatura no importa. El problema es causar problemas. La última palabra la tiene el terreno.10 Lage 2020, 170

Just as 25 years ago the authors of McOndo’s preface showed their willingness to move away from the exoticism of magical realism, Lage marks distances with the aesthetics of the marvelous real (and also, as in previous works, with realism of any kind, whether post-Soviet or dirty), something that would confirm Rita De Maeseneer’s idea that some tendencies similar to those of McOndo can be seen in recent Caribbean authors (2018a, 124). However, unlike some of the McOndo members who somewhat uncritically embraced the “walkman morality” and the so-called “magical neoliberalism,” Lage opts to build a swamp novel, which, while in line with the aesthetics of the 21st century, also shows a certain interest with the atavistic. But he presents the ancestral here through the filter of irony, a tool that helps to dismantle one of the foundational moments of the magical-realist literature of the Caribbean: the conversion of manatees into mermaids by Christopher Columbus. Thus, drawing on the imagination of medieval bestiaries, Lage ends up covering the creature that hatches from the eagle’s egg with imaginary manatee skin patches. And then, through an invented etymology and a series of chained images, he ends up degrading even more the foundational confusion: “La entrada al Caribe—y el Caribe no es más que eso: una entrada, una simple entrada, o más bien una entradita—fue la confirmación de este hecho. Las sirenas estaban sobrevaloradas”11 (Lage 2020, 211). Nevertheless, his proposal does not stop here, but goes a little further. In response to the male canon, the group of women abducted and abused by the Gynecologist is a gynocentric and illiterate alternative that not only liquidates the Gynecologist, but also threatens the narrator himself with his 10

“It is becoming increasingly clear to me where I can hurt, which movement is working for me and which movement is not. / Where I say movements, I can say sinkings. / To cause sinkings every here and there. / The sunken steps. / That’s where I want to see you, Far Alejo Carpentier. / Flashy birds. / Carpentier birds and company, how beautiful, how much market. As if there were fairly solid logs left standing. / The problem is not writing. / Literature doesn’t matter. / The problem is causing problems. / The last word is the land”. 11 “The entrance to the Caribbean—and the Caribbean is nothing more than that: an entrance, a simple entrance, or rather a little entrance—was the confirmation of this fact. Mermaids were overrated”.

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different way of seeing things or paying attention to different elements (Lage 2020, 226). Writing at a disadvantage (the fountain pen versus the Bic pen, the literate character of the Gynecologist versus the illiteracy that the women fly as a flag), they end up imposing and rebelling against the male motto: “¡A escribir, a escribir! ¡A escribir por el bien de la Nación!12” (Lage 2020, 83). Among the novel’s many metafictional dimensions, perhaps the most interesting is precisely the way in which differences are marked not only between generations (the lettered city versus the Wikipedic knowledge) but also between genders in the literary field. Although the novel does not offer any conclusion or claim, rather everything is suspended,13 the presence of this group of non-writer women who are forced to write showing their hysteria is revealing, as well as all the metaliterary reflections scattered throughout the work and the structure of the text itself. The resulting whole could thus be regarded as a kind of poetics of (or apology for) the neurotic writing in the 21st century reminiscent of Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’ proposal in Las analfabetas (2015; The Illiterate), where “orality tries to replace writing and the archive. As a sort of project of de-literacy, the novel implies a deconstruction of founding patriotic discourses about Cuban Modernity of the 19th Century” (Timmer 2016, 38). Not surprisingly, the narrator of Lage’s novel has several conversations with one of those women, whose name is precisely Legna. As in Las analfabetas, there is in Everglades a position vis-à-vis the lettered city and, implicitly, vis-à-vis the literacy projects of the revolution: “Me consideran un ‘intelectual’, pero tengo claro que no soy ese tipo de intelectual. Yo no vengo de bibliotecas. Yo no soy de libros, nunca lo fui. Yo soy de internet”14 (Lage 2020, 62). We see, therefore, a playful positioning throughout the novel in which the bulwark of knowledge and, ultimately, of the civilizing project, the Gynecologist, is subverted (annihilated) by those who embody alternative forms of knowledge in the 21st century, just as the authors of the McOndo’s preface did, with an attitude that distanced themselves from the Crack and their vindication of high culture (Guerrero 164–5) and many other Latin American authors continue to do (Quesada-Gómez 2015). The apology of the swamp thus becomes an ironic commitment for a type of barbarism that comes to contradict the nineteenthcentury civilizing obsession as well as the literacy projects of the revolution: “Lo vencimos. Lidiamos con su inhumanidad. Pulgares arriba. Los pulgares

12 13 14

“Let’s write, let’s write! Let’s write for the good of the Nation!” “Estas muchachas son puntos suspensivos” (Lage 2020, 234) [“These girls are ellipsis.”] “They consider me an ‘intellectual,’ but I am clear that I am not that type of intellectual. I don’t come from libraries. I’m not from books, I never was. I am from the internet”.

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oponibles de la evolución. Muchachas salvajes. Muchachas virales”15 (115). Clearly, Lage’s text connects with one of Rodríguez Iglesias’s poems, “Woman in the Everglades Who Doesn’t Understand the Fire” and her awareness of being “on a vast expanse of mud” (2017a, 31). Similarly, the novel approaches, as Timmer also sketched regarding Las analfabetas, the concept of Carlos A. Aguilera’s transfiction, characterized by false depth or ludic erasure, the presence of an indefinite time or a kitschy time, the irrelevance of the nation (what he calls “a peripheral nation or hollow nation”) in a text that must be read from its exteriority, and, finally, by delirium-writing (Aguilera 143–4). It is in particular with that delirious writing, typical not only of Everglades, but of all his work, that Lage undoubtedly relates to Rodríguez Iglesias. From that playful and self-assumed marginality of the ravings (a marginality, let me say, very different from that of the texts of the Special Period), both offer an “illiterate” alternative well anchored in our wild present that speaks to us about the loss of centrality of writing and the lettered city in contemporary culture, while moving away from figures such as the learned writer or the Latin American intellectual. 3

Conclusions

Without losing sight of their (conflictive) relationship with the Cuban tradition, I have tried to highlight some of the features in the works of Legna Rodríguez Iglesias and Jorge Enrique Lage that allow us to read them from outside the island, with other horizons in mind. In this way, their condition of disinherited from the cubensis canon (Padilla 2014, 119) and, therefore, their much-vaunted exceptionality within a specific tradition, is transformed into an alignment with other contemporary practices from outside the island, including less literary references, closer to pop culture or cinema, as well as with authors such as Severo Sarduy who, although belonging to the Cuban tradition, have probably left more of their mark abroad than on the island. We can thus see in their voluntary displacement of the lettered city not so much the intention to destroy or rewrite the national canon as a commitment to expand it so that they are not read exclusively with Cuba in the background. Undeniably, as Rojas points out, the heterogeneity of the archives of these writers is an invitation to read the Cuban tradition from another place (2016), but it is also a suggestion that we look at their own texts from other perspectives and approaches. 15

“We beat it. We dealt with his inhumanity. Thumbs up. The opposable thumbs of evolution. Wild girls. Viral girls.”

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Bibliography Aguilera, Carlos A. 2015. El gran mentiroso vs. el gran paranoico. Istor. Revista de Historia Internacional 63: 137–46. Barrera, Víctor. 2002. Entradas y salidas del fenómeno literario actual o la ‘alfagua­ rización’ de la literatura hispanoamericana. Sincronía 22. Web. Accessed 01-07-2021. Becerra, Eduardo. 2016. De la abundancia a la escasez: distopías latinoamericanas del siglo XXI. Cuadernos de Literatura 20(40): 262–75. Bejel, Emilio. 2001. Gay Cuban Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Casamayor-Cisneros, Odette. 2013. Utopía, distopía e ingravidez: reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana. Madrid: Iberoamericana. De Maeseneer, Rita. 2018a. ¿Pos-McOndo? La narrativa hispanocaribeña del siglo XXI, In McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana, eds. Pablo Brescia and Oswaldo Estrada, 123–35. Valencia: Albatros. De Maeseneer, Rita. 2018b. Poéticas de la comida: de protagonista en la ficción del Período Especial a accesorio en la Generación Cero. Casa de las Américas 292: 34–50. Dorta, Walfrido. 2015. Políticas de la distancia y del agrupamiento. Narrativa cubana de las últimas dos décadas. Istor. Revista de Historia Internacional 63: 115–35. Dorta, Walfrido. 2017a. Narrativas de la Generación Cero: escenas de traducción, cosmopolitismo y extrañamiento. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 51: 349–67. Dorta, Walfrido. 2017b. Fricciones y lecturas del archivo cultural cubensis: diálogos entre Juan Abreu y Jorge E. Lage. Revista Letral 18: 37–55. Dorta, Walfrido and Monica Simal. 2017. Literatura cubana contemporánea: lecturas sobre la Generación Cero (introducción). Revista Letral 18: 2–8. Esposito, Roberto. 2005. Immunitas. Protección y negación de la vida. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores. Falconí Trávez, Diego, Santiago Castellanos, and María Amelia Viteri. 2014. Resentir lo queer en América Latina: diálogos desde/con el Sur. Barcelona: Editorial Egales. Gallego Cuiñas, Ana. 2018. La Alfaguarización de la literatura latinoamericana: mercado editorial y figura de autor en Sudor, de Alberto Fuguet. In McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana, eds. Pablo Brescia and Oswaldo Estrada, 235–52. Valencia: Albatros. Gallego Cuiñas, Ana. 2019. Poéticas del mercado global en América Latina. In Literatura y globalización. Latinoamérica en el nuevo milenio, eds. Eva Valero Juan and Oswaldo Estrada, 37–57. Barcelona: Anthropos. González Pérez, Aníbal. 2014. Figuración y realidad del escritor latinoamericano en la era global. Pasavento: Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 2(2): 273–84. Guerrero, Gustavo. 2018. Paisajes en movimiento. Literatura y cambio cultural entre dos siglos. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora.

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Hedeen, Katherine M. and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. 2018. Generation Zero. New Cuban Poetry. Kenyon Review 40(1). Web. Accessed 01-27-2021. Lage, Jorge Enrique. 2011. Vultureffect: cuento. La Habana: Unión. Lage, Jorge Enrique. 2012. Carbono 14 (una novela de culto). La Habana: Letras Cubanas. Lage, Jorge Enrique. 2014. La autopista: the movie. La Habana: Cajachina. Lage, Jorge Enrique. 2015. Archivo. Madrid: Hypermedia. Lage, Jorge Enrique. 2020. Everglades. Madrid: Hypermedia. Maguire, Emily A. 2017. Freeze-frame: temporalidades especulativas en la escritura de la Generación Año Cero. Revista Letral 18: 9–22. Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. 2008. Más allá de la homonormatividad: intimidades alternativas en el Caribe hispano. Revista Iberoamericana 225: 1039–57. Minipunto, Martica [Verónica Mars]. 2020. Everglades: la literatura no importa. Hypermedia Magazine. Revista de Literatura, Arte y Sociedad, 29 June. Web. Accessed 12-27-2020. Miranda, Michael H. 2017. Cuba diluida (algunas notas). Hypermedia Magazine. 27 September. Web. Accessed 02-07-2021. Molina, Lourdes. 2018. The Desert of the Real Havana: Translating Jorge Enrique Lage’s Cyberpunk Prose. Latin American Literature Today 1.6. Web. Accessed 01-03-2021. Mora, Javier and Ángel Pérez. 2017. La desmemoria: lenguaje y posnostalgia en un selfie hecho de prisa ante el foyer del salón de los Años Cero (prólogo para una antología definitiva). In Long Playing Poetry. Cuba: Generación Años Cero, 9–39. Richmond: Editorial Casa Vacía. Padilla Cárdenas, Gilberto. 2014a. El factor Cuba. Apuntes para una semiología clínica. Temas 80: 114–20. Padilla Cárdenas, Gilberto, ed. 2014b. Malditos bastardos: antología. Madrid: Ediciones La Palma, 2014. Padilla Cárdenas, Gilberto. 2020. Jorge Enrique Lage: ‘Si te gustó La autopista…, te gustará Everglades.’ Hypermedia Magazine. Revista de Literatura, Arte y Sociedad. Web. 01-07-2021. Pardo Lazo, Orlando Luis, ed. 2014. Generation Zero. An Anthology of New Cuban Fiction. Pittsburg: Sampsonia Way Magazine. Percovich, Mariana. 2017. Lo personal es político: Si esto es una tragedia…, de Legna Rodríguez Iglesias. Conjunto 184: 102–4. Price, Rachel. 2012. Planet/Cuba. On Jorge Enrique Lage’s Carbono 14: una novela de culto and Vultureffect. La Habana Elegante. Web. Accessed 02-05-2021. Price, Rachel. 2015. Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island. London: Verso. Quesada Gómez, Catalina. 2015. Adaptaciones, evoluciones y mutaciones históricoculturales: sobre los géneros literarios en Hispanoamérica en la era global. Hispanófila 173: 249–62.

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Quesada Gómez, Catalina. 2016. Arqueologías globales en la literatura cubana: de las ruinas al chicle. Cuadernos de Literatura 20(40): 301–12. Quesada Gómez, Catalina. 2018. Slippages in Cuban Literature: Global Fictions. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 96(51): 21–7. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. 2012. Mayonesa bien brillante: una novela de amor. Matanzas: Ediciones Matanzas. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. 2015a. No sabe / no contesta. Madrid: Ediciones La Palma. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. 2015b. Hilo + hilo. Leiden: Bokeh. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. 2015c. Las analfabetas. Leiden: Bokeh. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. 2016. Si esto es una tragedia yo soy una bicicleta. La Habana: Casa de las Américas. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. 2017a. Miami Century Fox. New York: Akashic Books. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. 2017b. Mi novia preferida fue un bulldog francés. Madrid: Alfaguara. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. 2019. Mi pareja calva y yo vamos a tener un hijo. Cáceres: Ediciones Liliputienses. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. 2020. My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog. Translated by Megan McDowell. San Francisco: McSweeney’s. Rojas, Rafael. 2013. El realismo como régimen. Libros del Crepúsculo. 17 October. Web. Accessed 01-17-2021. Rojas, Rafael. 2014. Hacia la ficción global. Libros del Crepúsculo. 13 April. Web. Accessed 01-07-2021. Rojas, Rafael. 2015. Lage: de la utopía al apocalipsis. Libros del Crepúsculo. 21 February. Web. Accessed 02-07-2021. Rojas, Rafael. 2016. Un ‘ethos’ de la lectura. Hypermedia Magazine. 17 November. Web. Accessed 02-07-2021. Sández, Laura. 2017. Generación Cero: pasado, presente y pecado. Emociones/tiempo/ espacio en la narrativa de un grupo de escritores cubanos. Revista Letral 18: 85–100. Solano, Francisco. 2017. Un talento estridente. Babelia. 27 March. Web. Accessed 12-28-2020. Timmer, Nanne. 2016. Cartografía de la no-nación: escritura y oralidad en Las analfabetas, de Legna Rodríguez Iglesias. Telar 17: 38–53. Timmer, Nanne. 2019. Una torre y una autopista: distopías y territorialidades en novelas postcubanas de Carlos A. Aguilera y Jorge Enrique Lage. In Devenir/escribir Cuba en el siglo XXI: (post) poéticas del archivo insular, eds. Graciela Salto and Nancy Calomarde, 105–27. Buenos Aires: Katatay.

Chapter 9

The Digital Condition: Algorithms, Language, and Imagination in Latin American Digital Literature Carolina C. Gainza Abstract This paper aims to explore the aesthetics of the algorithmic language in Latin American Digital Literature by analyzing computer and human languages from a posthumanistic perspective. The first part of the article presents the discussion of algorithmic language and the digital condition of literature by examining different types of digital literary creations in Latin America. The second part of the article concentrates on the analysis of two digital works: Lagunas by Milton Läufer, which uses an algorithm that changes the novel every time a reader requests it, and Mexica, a collection of twenty short stories generated by a computer program developed by Rafael Pérez y Pérez. The goal is to identify the network of interactions among different languages and aesthetics to propose a practice of “trans-reading” or “trans-critique” that considers human and non-human practices that are affecting the conditions of subjectivity today, focusing on Latin America.

The traditional forms of creation, circulation, and reception of literature have been highly impacted by digital technologies. In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdowns forced us to stay home and find ways to continue with our lives. This produced an acceleration of online work and education, as well as a proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI)1 meant to accompany us, such as assistant robots. Also, in the cultural domain, independent booksellers were forced to enter online circulation, museums adapted to online visits, even virtual ones through tablets which allowed visitors to experience “being” at the museum, as well as many other forms of spectacles, such as concerts, online theater and other experiences that made obsolete the distinction between the virtual and the real. In fact, we begin to ask ourselves what is real in this context or how the very concept of the real must be rethought. In summary, the pandemic forced us to enter a new stage of the penetration of technologies in 1 From here on out I will use AI to refer to Artificial Intelligence in the article.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_011

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our lives, where the question about our relationship with technologies cannot be avoided anymore, especially in the humanities. Some cultural forms and expressions have emerged in these past years, whose limits we may not be able to see. But way before the pandemic, we had already observed the birth of new conditions for the production of literature that might be affected by this acceleration. In this context, we have established a relationship with technology that is present not only in literature as a topic but can also be seen in the experimentation with technology in the field of digital literature. This relationship with technology is what I call digital condition, where algorithmic language interacts with other languages that have traditionally been a part of literary writing. These changes refer not only to the transference from one medium to another but mostly to an aesthetic transformation at the heart of literary work: language. Algorithms, as García Canclini proposes (2019), are already affecting people’s decisions, from the ways in which we consume to the political choices we make, and even what we desire. However, few people know how these algorithms work and how they are managed and controlled. Flusser (2017) discussed, way before algorithms reached the levels we are experiencing today, that we move in the superficiality of the codes, not being able to decipher their logic or decodify the black box that they have become. If digital literature is based on algorithms, as a first layer of writing that allows it to exist, how does this affect writing, aesthetic experience, and the very definition of literature? As Ed Finn (2017) poses, algorithmic languages configure a cultural system where this language is mediating our whole life, not only changing the medium of thinking and perceiving but also its modes. This operation is invisible to us, but it has an enormous impact on our subjectivity. In Latin America, the growth of digital literature has been exponential since early 2000. How does Latin American Digital Literature reflect and problematize the relationship with algorithmic languages? How does it deal with algorithms, obsolescence, human-machine relations, and transformations in authorship? What are its politics, in terms of situated modes of creativity and imagination regarding digital forms of colonization? In this paper, I aim to explore the aesthetics of the algorithmic language in Latin American Digital Literature by analyzing computer and human languages from a post-humanistic perspective. In the first part of the article, I will present the discussion of algorithmic language and the digital condition of literature by examining different types of digital literary creations in Latin America, mainly referring to the works collected in my current research project “Digital Cartography of Latin American Digital Literature”, where we have collected around 193 works, with different degrees of complexity depending on the programing language used. In the second part

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of the article, I will analyze two digital works: Lagunas by Argentinian writer Milton Läufer, which uses an algorithm that changes the novel every time a reader requests it; and Mexica a collection of twenty short stories produced by a computer program developed by Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Mexican specialist in artificial intelligence. In these two works, we can examine how algorithms can be decentered from their function of “effectiveness and efficiency” (Finn 2017) in computing, to make visible the aesthetic potentialities of humannonhuman interactions, as well as the specific status that digital technologies and algorithms are acquiring in Latin American literary creation. In these works, written language and its imagination interact with an algorithmic kind of imagination. Digital literature reflects but, at the same time, responds creatively to this operation, where we can observe forms of interaction between human and machine language, where both affect each other. It is not a matter of separately reading codes on one hand and literary objects projected on web interfaces on the other. On the contrary, the task is to identify the network of interactions among different languages and aesthetics. In this sense, I propose a practice of “trans-reading” or “trans-critique” that considers these diverse languages that are affecting the conditions of subjectivity today. 1

Digital Aesthetics: Cartography of Digital Literature in Latin America

In a 1935 text, the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral wrote about a “turn in taste”2 in relation to cinema, and how it had been “vilified”: Cinema is accustoming children to a faster kind of feat, more vertical. It would be good for the sluggish novelists to notice this kind of rhythm within the upcoming reading generation. Cinema itself is pulling them back to pure imagination, disposed and laughed off by our parents, who were educated in bald Reason. Now begins, also through the vilified cinema, the love for the one armed reading of natural sciences. It is a matter of harnessing the event and seizing its possible benefits. 2303

2 The title in Spanish is “Mudanza del Gusto”, a text from 1935 included in “Pasión por leer”. 3 El cine está habituando a los muchachos a un tipo de hazaña más rápida, más vertical. Bueno será que los novelistas morosos se den cuenta de este ritmo de la generación lectora que

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Every single new technology has generated fears, preoccupations, and apocalyptic discourses about forms of cultural degrading. Written literature would inhibit our ability to think, photography would put an end to the aura of artwork, and cinema would alienate the masses. Since around the 90s, a certain fear has been surrounding literature. First, it was the appearance of electronic reading devices. “E-books will replace books” people would shout in an apocalyptic tone, signaling that electronic readers would never be able to replace the smell of a book’s pages. Plenty of cultural critics have exclaimed “Writers will be replaced by artificial intelligence, what a nightmare!”, “machines will never be capable of intentionality or transmitting experiences like humans”. In the face of these declarations, I think to myself “but of course, these aren’t human existences of which we are speaking”, and I ask myself, what are the conditions of existence of these intelligent machines? What are their aesthetics and their languages? So many deaths have been proclaimed within literature in the last few decades. Instead, what we can see is the coexistence of different aesthetic regimes, creative experiences, and subjectivities, in respect to which we should begin to reflect. The development of digital literature in Latin America has grown exponentially since the beginning of the 21st Century (Gainza, 2018; Gómez, 2021; Kozak, 2018; Meza, 2020; Rocha, 2021). Even though the field of electronic literature is of longer standing and includes works that experimented with analog technologies, we could say that Latin American digital literature as such arise along with hypertextual and hypermedia experimentations towards the end of the nineties. Here we understand digital literature as those works which experiment with code language directly, by programming, or indirectly, through web platforms or “user friendly” software. The firsts are based on a programming language that allows generating expanded, interactive, and multimedia experiences, which would be impossible to translate to, or access on, printed format. On top of this, we have literatures based on algorithms or artificial intelligence programmed to intervene in the creative process on different levels. In the ones where the code is indirectly used, we refer mainly to those literatures that experiment with digital media, where creators don’t work directly with code but harness the tools provided mostly by social media. In this dimension, we find twitterature (Twitter), Instapoetry (Instagram), transmedia and viene. El mismo cine les está retrotrayendo a la imaginación pura, tirada y reída por nuestros padres, que fueron educados en la calva Razón. Ahora comienza, y también por el cine vilipendiado, el amor de la lectura manca de ciencias naturales. Es cuestión de aprovechar el suceso y sacarle el beneficio posible (Mistral 1935, 230).

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multimedia narrations in diverse platforms, literature in WhatsApp, among others. Literatures that experiment with mediums have been the least studied in the field of Latin American digital literature, being, therefore, a research field yet to be explored. In this article, we will be referring to the field of literatures that experiments with code, that is, those which, through interaction with programming languages, give rise or make possible that which we have named “digital aesthetics” (Gainza 2018). Lev Manovich (2001) points out that objects within new media are structured around databases and algorithms. This is a new way of organizing creativity, which runs in parallel with those we are already familiar with: writing, books, narratives, linear temporality. These were not only new techniques in their times, or technological innovations. Let us remember that writing and the book are not only techniques but were actually constituted into cultural forms that had a historical, social, cultural, and political impact. The management of writing techniques, reading, and everything later related to the book system (circulation, production, reception) became a cultural battleground that went on for centuries, which produced exclusions, dominations, and forms of colonization. This is something that Angel Rama (2004) describes in “The Lettered City” in relation to Latin America. This new way of organizing creativity within our contemporary societies has to do not only with “technical innovations”, but, as studied by Manovich (2001) as well as Ed Finn (2017), we are in the presence of the rise of cultural forms and systems that rest upon the algorithmic logic. As posed by Manovich (2001): “Any process or task is reduced to an algorithm, a final sequence of simple operations that a computer can execute to accomplish a given task” (223). When we watch a film on our computer, play a videogame, or surf the web, what we are doing is activating algorithms and discovering what these operations generate. We attend new ways of perception and experience, which leads us to wonder not only about the functioning of algorithms, their efficacy and efficiency dimensions described by E. Finn in “What Algorithms Want” (2017), but also about their aesthetics and poetics. Digital literatures, as mentioned, are structured through languages that codify different combinations of zeros and ones, the mathesis that is behind every single existing form in digital media. And within this process, there is an aestheticization of information processing (Manovich 2001, 217). This aestheticization, and the experience it generates, occurs within the imbrication between human and non-human processes, natural languages, and code languages. Digital literature, therefore, is a product of these interactions between two cultural systems or forms, which currently affect our experience, subjectivity, and our being within the world.

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The interaction between different languages allows the birth of an experience in which we can “feel” the codes. This is to say, a language that allows for manipulation, extension, intervention, as well as that which I have called “cultural hacking” (Gainza 2018). As a matter of fact, “Computational algorithms may be presented as merely mathematical, but they are operating as culture machines that dramatically revise the geography of human reflexivity” (Finn 2017, 50). In consequence, algorithms are languages that mold contemporary human experience. Digital literatures, by existing within these languages, which can be manipulated, give the reader/operator/player a “desire” to intervene in reading paths, images, and in this way, opportunities for appropriation are opened. People, therefore, not only interpret the works but must also materially act upon them, activate their codes, which in time activates different actions on the devices, which go from activating simple codes to forms of automatically generated writing. In this way, the digital aesthetic experience that we can observe in these works is marked by forms of intervention and interaction with machinist languages that are performed by the devices we use. This is how possibilities “emerge”, as pointed out by Berardi: “History is the space for the emergence of possibilities, embodied in subjectivities endowed with potential (…) to convert such possibility in a form, the subject endowed with potential must ignore power, which is opposed to the expansion of a possibility enrolled within it which it finds conflictive”4 (Berardi 2019, 18). Digital literature contains a potential that opens up the possibility of imagining a decolonization of algorithms, decentering their dominant functions and meanings within current capitalism, to free them from the ties of efficiency and to de-automate them. Digital literature calls us to take command of the language, as “interactors”, that is to say, appropriating and changing the meaning with respect to our relationship with machines. To investigate these literatures in Latin America and tackle the aforementioned topics, we built a Cartography of Latin American Digital Literature,5 an investigation project I have directed since 2018 along with Carolina Zuñiga, as co-investigator. The project’s goal was to generate a visualization of data and an archive of the compiled works. The data visualization part has the potential to expand and transform as we incorporate new works. By these means, we wanted to show how digital literature questions geographical borders through 4 “La historia es el espacio de emergencia de las posibilidades, encarnadas en subjetividades dotadas de potencia (…) para convertir dicha posibilidad en una forma, el sujeto dotado de potencia debe hacer caso omiso del poder, que se opone a la expansión de una posibilidad inscripta que le resulta conflictiva” (Berardi 2019, 18). 5 https://www.cartografiadigital.cl/.

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the mobility of authors and artists, as well as the very definition of literature, its genres, and languages. When entering a certain work, a file containing information is accessed along with a link leading to the archive, which in turn contains images of the works and videos that show how the pieces work. Along with this, it is also possible to find interviews with authors in the project’s YouTube channel, dealing with their creative processes, the uses of digital languages in literature, and the problem of technological obsolescence. This cartography contains 193 works of digital literature in Spanish and around 100 in Portuguese. To include the Brazilian works, we worked in close collaboration with the ATLAS6 project run by the Brazilian investigator Rejane Rocha (Federal University of San Carlos, Brazil). The criteria for collecting works obeys the definition of digital literature that we worked with: “Works created to be reproduced in an electronic device and which present hypertextual, hypermedia, and interactive structures that could not be transferred to a book format, or those which intensely use programming languages or artificial intelligence technology (bots, generative projects, or others) in their creative processes”. Apart from the close work with Brazilian research group at Federal University of San Carlos, we collaborated in this project with Broken English7 (Canek Zapata) and with E-literature8 in the Center for Digital Culture in Mexico (Mónica Nepote), and with various researchers and creators who provided us with information and material on the works. Besides this, we counted with qualified consulting from Daniela Schutte, general coordinator of the Memoria Chilena,9 a project belonging to the Chilean National Library, in aspects related to archive structure, taxonomy, and protocol. Mapping the works10 constitutes an important activity not only because it seeks to preserve and guarantee access to the works in the future, but also because there is a political objective: making Latin American digital literature visible in the context of global literature. American and European digital literatures have a strong presence, with their associations, organisms, and archives 6 7 8 9 10

https://atlasldigital.wordpress.com/. http://brokenenglish.lol/. https://editorial.centroculturadigital.mx/eliteratura. http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl. Besides the aforementioned projects, the Anthology of Latin American and Caribbean Electronic Literature was recently launched, edited by Claudia Kozak, Leonardo Flores y Roberto Mata. The project was set out in a meeting of researchers from the Latin American Network for Electronic Literature (LitElat), which took place in the IILI Congress of 2018 (Bogotá, Colombia). This first anthology gathers 81 works by 51 authors and follows a similar logic to the one developed by the Electronic Literature Organization. It can be accessed at http://antologia.litelat.net/.

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that give them bigger visibility, whereas Latin American digital literatures have had less space. The aforementioned projects allow giving regional literary production a seat at the table, and to counter not only the perpetuation of ways of literary colonialism but also the logic of “algorithmic visibility”. As a matter of fact, these projects account for a decolonizing movement. Not only do they group together and make visible works and authors, but they also install questions in respect to forms of appropriation, the existence of different relationships with technology, how it is re-signified, and how it permeates the construction of Latin American subjectivities in the current global context. In a certain way, these literatures account for what Yuk Hui (2020) calls “cosmotechniques”, meaning that they interrogate the particular ways in which algorithmic languages are used, themed, and appropriated, configuring aesthetics that place technologies in specific cultural contexts. This breaks away from the idea that, in the global south, we are “consumers” of technology and literature, since in these works we can see a decolonizing action in respect to how we think about, incorporate, and transform technology. 2

Of Human and Non-human Languages: What Do Algorithms Imagine?

Among the literatures included in the cartography, we can find hypertexts, hypermedia, generative poetry and novels (part or all of it being generated by an algorithm), poetic bots, and literature created by artificial intelligence. In all of them, there is an interaction, big or small, with programming languages. In some, such as hypertexts and hypermedia, the programming encourages the interaction between these languages and the operators/readers, where the latter are called upon to activate the codes in these works through different resources, from clicking on links to activating moving images, carrying out writing exercises, giving the work certain information, and more. In bots and literature generated by artificial intelligence, we can find automated writing where algorithms carry out combinatorial exercises, starting from a database of written works, to the point of “learning” from the information given by the programmer, generating a text of its own. Among the latter appears Lagunas by Milton Läuffer. On his website we can find the following message: To download your unique version (there are no two identical texts) of the novel «Lagunas», all you have to do is fill out the following form. You will receive an e-mail with a download link.

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The download link will be active for 48 hours following your first download, Afterwards, you will have to wait one month in order to download a different copy of the novel.11 It’s a fact, there are no two identical texts. I have two copies of the novel, one downloaded in 2015 and another in 2017, where it can be observed that certain chapters undergo changes in the way the acts are presented. The changes occur in the chapters where the main character, Martín, travels on a train in which, through an algorithm, some parts of the story are recombined each time the novel is downloaded. In one of these train episodes, Martín thinks to himself “The only thing that ever changes is when the repetitions happen”12 (Läufer 2017, 62). In fact, the algorithm does not create changes in the tale’s main axis, it simply recombines certain memories and thoughts within the main character’s head when he is traveling on the train. What the algorithm does is fill in the gaps that we can find in the narrating of memories carried out by the character. The story changes in the same way that it would if we revisited our own memories: the algorithm fills in the memory gaps within the character, where we can see a hypertextual framework in which the story is told in different ways throughout these chapters, depending on which version of the novel we have. Just like with memory and the different ways in which we remember, the algorithm recombines, generating different versions of a single event each time we access a certain version of the novel. In reading the novel, especially when we compare its versions, we can access the algorithm’s logic, in the same way in which Martín describes his decoding of Éve’s actions: He began to understand that what happened with her obeyed an order which he did not understand, but he had intuited before. Her way of navigating moments seemed to him increasingly unique as if she were designed not only to navigate moments with the agility of a sea animal but also possessed the even stranger quality of making others ride along with her with the same ease. Läufer 2017, 8313

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Para descargar su versión única (no hay dos textos iguales) de la novela «Lagunas» sólo debe completar el siguiente formulario. Recibirá un mail en su cuenta de correo con un link para descargarla. El link de descarga estará activo por 48 horas a partir de la primera descarga que realice. Luego deberá esperar un mes para descargar otra copia distinta de la novela. 12 “Lo único que cambia es cuándo suceden las repeticiones” (Läufer 2017, 62). 13 Comenzó a entender que lo que le pasaba con ella obedecía a un orden que desconocía, pero que había intuido antes. Cada vez más se le hacía único algo en su modo de navegar

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The novel’s algorithm goes to show the capacity that these, just like us, have of intervening in the course of events. Code language and its execution in the novel simulate the way in which information is modified and updated in the net. Each time we access the Internet, do we find the same information? We have this idea that nothing is ever lost in the virtual world but, given the fact that everything is under constant transformation, each time we access a page on the web the information changes or is reconfigured. This is what algorithms do: they are under a constant activation that sets off actions within the machine in response to our actions, which at the same time, affect our perception and experience. In the case of Lagunas, the algorithms participate in an imagination exercise, where they simulate different variants of the events, and the main character reflects on how this is similar to the way in which we organize our memories. In this sense, the algorithm dialogues with us and is activated by our actions, but it creates diverse stories from this activation. A symbiotic relation between code language and natural language is generated in this novel, where the story that we access is only possible due to the interaction between the two. In a certain passage, the novel speaks of the movement of trees, but we could just as well carry out this comparison in relation to the interaction between languages, which is nothing more than the interaction between two different modes of existence that intertwine within these literatures: He looked around and saw that every tree in the valley repeated the same dance directed by the wind. He then thought about how a fundamental error resided in the idea of trees as inanimate, static objects: the unjustified principle that designs animate only that which moves at will. The tree does not need its own impulse in order to perform the movements essential to its perpetuation. The wind is part of the tree’s organism.14 Läufer 2017, 26

los momentos, como si ella estuviera diseñada no sólo para bucear en el tiempo con una agilidad de animal acuático, sino que además poseía la propiedad, más extraña, de lograr que los otros lo surcaran junto a ella con la misma naturalidad (Läufer 2017, 83). 14 Miró a su alrededor y vio que todos los árboles del valle repetían la misma danza dirigida por el viento. Pensó entonces que la creencia en los árboles como objetos estáticos, inanimados, residía en un error fundamental: el principio injustificado que denomina animado a aquello que se mueve por sí mismo. El árbol no necesitaba su propio impulso para realizar los movimientos imprescindibles para su perpetuación. El viento era parte del organismo árbol (Läufer 2017, 26).

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In this interaction, we affect the algorithm each time that we request a version of the novel. In this way, the novel makes us wonder about that algorithm that generates changes. How does it work? How does it affect us? How do we affect it and adapt to its logic? As pointed out by Ed Finn: “All symbolic systems, all languages, contain a particular logic of possibility, a horizon of imagination that depends on the nature of representation and semantic relationships” (Finn 2017, 55). When we see that certain passages of the novel change, we can be conscious of that other language, where our experience and way of perceiving the world are disrupted. Algorithm language produces an effect of estrangement and exerts a symbolic and aesthetic force. The autonomy that the algorithm acquires by modifying the stories, puts us face to face with the experience that we have of the world nowadays, where technique is constituted at a level that, in some way, works in parallel to human experience. The algorithm in Lagunas is a simple one, it only affects certain parts of the story and recombines that which the author had originally written. It does not write anything new, but it does write alongside the author by affecting the structure of the novel, carrying out a creative act. Could the author create with his own human abilities, with his writing, a different version of his work each time that somebody requests it and send it in 48 hours? The algorithm becomes a coauthor of sorts, taking care of a task that the human would not be able to. In this way, the algorithm writes and interacts with human writing. Where an even greater intervention of intelligent algorithms can be observed is in the short story collection Mexica, by the Mexican programmer Rafael Pérez y Pérez, pioneering the field of writing with AI in Latin America. Though the earliest versions of Mexica date from the late nineties, the collection of twenty stories in print format, in Spanish and English, was published by Counterpath Press in the year 2017. The work was created by an artificial intelligence system, also named Mexica, which generates storylines about the Meso-American people, also known as Aztecs. The objective behind using AI was to investigate the processes involved in creative writing, through its simulation in this system. Here we have an extract from Story 2 contained in the book: The princess was angry and insulted the enemy. The jaguar knight struck the enemy furiously. With all his strength, the enemy hurt the jaguar knight. The princess used tepezcohuite, the magic plant, to cure the jaguar knight. He was grateful! Suddenly, the jaguar knight and the enemy were involved in a violent fight.

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The jaguar knight felt a deep hatred for the enemy. Invoking Huitzilopochtli, god of the war, the jaguar knight cut the enemy’s jugular. The jaguar knight freed the princess. She will never forget this! The end. Pérez y Pérez 2017, 4

In this story, we can see how the Mexica system generates a narrative sequence in which a conflict and its resolution are narrated. To generate these stories, the program employs a database formed from “Example-Stories”. That is to say, it is provided with stories from which it generates new ones, according to learning processes that the algorithm has on the “logic sequences” of these. Pérez y Pérez describes the operation as follows: For example, the system records that when the jaguar knight is in love with the princess (a context with one emotional link), it is logical to bring her a bouquet of possible logical actions to execute). In the same way, if the knight is injured (a context with one conflict), a reasonable event to continue the story is that the princess heals him or the knight dies (two possible logical actions to execute). Pérez y Pérez 2017, 55

After dealing with these options, the computer program decides which is the more logical way to continue the narrative, following the traditional structure consisting in an introduction, development, climax, and resolution, to finally “carries out a self-evaluation exercise where it qualifies its own story and produces a report with the results” (Pérez y Pérez 2017, 57). This process is carried out by the algorithm, comparing the story it creates with the ones found in the database. As the author points out, Mexica has its “very own style” (Pérez y Pérez 2017, 53) and he adds, “Perhaps one day these types of stories will be recognized as belonging to MEXICA’s style” (Pérez y Pérez 2017, 54). While in Lagunas the algorithm works upon existing and pre-established forms, on Mexica the algorithm develops its own stories and forms from the “Example-Stories”. In this sense, in the latter, the algorithm’s action is not limited to repeating or recreating a narrative, but it is actually capable of learning from the given information and generating its own aesthetic. The objectives behind each work are, of course, different. In Lagunas the use of algorithms has an aesthetic-literary end, while in Mexica the poetics are a secondary goal in relation to studying the process of writing through the use of an AI. This does not mean that the AI does not, in fact, develop its own poetics, which happens to be exactly what is being discussed. Although we can question Mexica’s literary quality and the gender biases reproduced by the algorithm, it

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is also important to reflect upon the possibility of thinking up an “algorithmic aesthetic”, whose characteristics we have not yet analyzed in depth and might escape from the criteria for quality currently established in the literary system. As hinted in “The Day that a Computer Wrote a Novel”, a novel written by an algorithm and finalist to a literary contest in Japan in 2016:15 “I basked in joy, which I was feeling for the first time, and continued to write enthusiastically. The day that a computer wrote a novel. The machine, prioritizing the search of its own pleasure, ceased to work for humans”16 (qtd. in Blanco). In relation to this, in the preface written by For Harrel for Mexica, he describes a situation within a reunion inside an association which very well resumes the current discussion in the field of humanities in respect to the creativity of algorithms, their literary status, and the problem of quality: “‘The computer’, they raged, ‘only does what you tell it to do!’ ‘But some of the content is prewritten by the programmer,’ they frothed. ‘But understanding whether a story is creative or not is a subjective matter,’ they seethed. ‘Will it put human authors out of business?’ they wailed” (Harrel 2017, vii). The situation described by Harrel shows the prevailing apocalyptic discourse regarding the idea that technologies are going to replace us—authors, books, and the very exercise of art. Others say that machines cannot think, they simply do as they are told. And this is true, they probably arrive at the expected results; but how do they get there? In the field of AI, many times the programmers are not even aware of the learning process and of how the machine obtains the expected results. There, the machine’s language is underway, which operates under a logic many times impervious to our knowledge. In this context, as a researcher, before emitting judgment, I prefer to raise questions that will later allow me to emit an informed critique. The focus, therefore, goes to analyzing and thinking about the relationship of co-creation between human-program, from a perspective that recognizes the mode of existence of this system and its potential for aesthetic creation. Taking the literary expressions previously reviewed as a starting point, it is possible to imagine a human-machine relationship where, as often occurs in digital literature, the work with technologies blurs the division between disciplines, and even makes us ask ourselves what literature is. The experimentation with languages leads us to make disciplinary inquiries as well. But, given 15 16

Novel written by an artificial intelligence, created by Japanese researchers and finalist for the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award in 2016. Me retorcí de alegría, que experimenté por primera vez, y seguí escribiendo con entusiasmo. El día que una computadora escribió una novela. La máquina dando prioridad a la búsqueda del placer propio, dejó de trabajar para los humanos.

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that literature is not alien to the context where it emerges, it is also useful to analyze the questions that arise from digital literature for our coexistence with machines. It is true that in the examples presented the machine does not understand what it is processing, and, in this sense, it is an automaton that processes information given by humans. But, let’s give this another thought. We are comparing the machine with human parameters, and perhaps that is exactly the problem: not acknowledging its “mode of existence”. AIs and algorithms simulate human writing in these literatures, but at the same time, they go beyond human capacities; for example, in the possibility of processing great quantities of information and creating something in time periods impossibly short for us humans. Both Lagunas and Mexica allow us to reflect not only on programming and poetic languages along with the literary function they fulfill but also upon that special configuration of the human-machine relationship that these literatures deliver. In an era where it is fundamental to think about technique and our relationship with it, Latin American digital literature installs possibilities, where the “subjects endowed with potential”17 (Berardi 2019, 18) establish situated relationships with digital technologies, linking these experimentations with the Latin American experimental literary tradition, as well as a unique incorporation of technologies within culture. They also invite us to analyze the postcolonial conditions opened up by datafication and digitalization and, from a literary point of view, how these technologies insert themselves in our subjectivity, opening up spaces to imagine new aesthetic regimes. 3

The Digital Condition: Human and Algorithmic Languages in Digital Literature

In a 1963 short story Juana and the cybernetics18 by the Chilean author Elena Aldunate, the protagonist, Juana, establishes a relationship of desire and affection towards the machines of the factory where she works. In a certain passage of the story, a first approach to her machine is described, which will end in a sexual-love like encounter: “Her distracted hand leans on one of the levers, and her steps, moved by the daily routine, drive her to her work station. To ‘her’ machine. She stares at it tenderly. It has been two years since she has been working with it; she knows it, knows its movements, knows all about its 17 “Sujetos dotados de potencia” (Berardi 2019, 18–19). 18 “Juana y la cibernética”.

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gears”19 (Aldunate 2016, 14). In respect to the relationship that she develops with the machine, the protagonist begins to question our relation to these: Do machines have eyes? Do they have a mouth? Are they in any way similar to man, their creator? Man, God, and Lord of Creation. She remembered conversations among her coworkers, pages read from newspapers or magazines: ‘One day machines will rebel against their masters. They will no longer need them and will have initiatives’. On the other hand: ‘The rise of machines, a thousand times faster, more precise and safer than human hands or eyes, produces the working class’ unemployment. Robots …’20 Aldunate 2016, 15

The interesting thing about this story is that it slides across a relationship with machines that is not one of domination or submission but one that accounts for the existence of an otherness, where the protagonist describes its movements, its flows, and its noises. Here, there is no fear of the machine. Quite the opposite, there is an acknowledgment of the existence of an “other”. In a way, the protagonist frees herself from the demands of her time. Here we find an interesting narrative for reflecting upon our current digital condition, beyond the celebratory visions of a limitless technological development, or the pessimist and apocalyptic ones, in respect to the dominion that intelligent algorithms could exert upon humanity. In Juana and the Cybernetic story, we find a posthuman kind of relationship. It is interesting to note that Gilbert Simondon (2007), in the same decade that this story was published, proposed something similar in respect to our relationship with machines. The technical systems acquire a certain autonomy, precisely because we, humans, create technologies that later detach from us. Let’s think about the book, as a technology, a piece of art that has its own existence as a technical, aesthetic object and fulfills a certain function within 19

“Su mano, distraída, se apoya en una de las palancas, y sus pasos, movidos por la rutina diaria, la conducen hasta su puesto de trabajo. Hasta ‘su’ máquina. La mira con cariño. Hace dos años que trabaja con ella; la conoce, sabe sus movimientos, sabe de sus engranajes” (Aldunate 2016, 14). 20 ¿Tendrán ojos las máquinas? ¿Tendrán boca? ¿Se asemejarán en algo a la imagen de su creador, el hombre? El hombre, Dios y Señor de la Creación. Recordó conversaciones entre sus compañeras, páginas leídas en diarios o revistas: ‘Un día las máquinas se rebelarán contra sus amos. No necesitarán de ellos y tendrán iniciativas’. Por otra parte: ‘El aumento de las máquinas, mil veces más rápidas, precisas y seguras que la mano o el ojo humano, produce la desocupación obrera. Los robots …’ (Aldunate 2016, 15).

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culture, with which we establish a social/aesthetic relationship. Simondon (2007), in a way, appeals to this same relationship, and to technical objects having a mode of existence where, though they are expressions of humanity, they acquire autonomy in the world of signification and leave our human bodies behind, in order to function. In this space, our human function is that of being regulators and coordinators, understanding the singularity of the existence of technical objects and how we mutually affect each other. In this recognition of technical existences, according to Simondon, we can liberate ourselves: “It is difficult to be freed by transferring the slavery to other beings, be them humans, animals or machines; ruling over a population of machines that makes the entire world into servants is still ruling, and every rule supposes the acceptance of systems of servitude”21 (Simondon 2007, 144). In our times, what allows the existence of machines and their action is code language, based on algorithms. And, as A. Galloway well points out, “It is my position that the largest oversight in contemporary literary studies is the inability to place computer languages on par with natural languages” (Galloway 2004, xxiv). In Latin America, there has never particularly been much preoccupation over the problem of technique, from a postcolonial or decolonial frame of mind. Latin American cultural studies have occupied themselves with technological media such as movies, radio, and TV, but have very much ignored, since the nineties, the new technologies that have populated the world. The exceptions are Beatriz Sarlo (2018) and Néstor García Canclini (2019), who have written about the new writing technologies and algorithms. The first has analyzed how they affect writing and the second, how algorithms govern us. Jesús Martín Barbero (2005) is perhaps the only one who has attempted to comprehend the later technological phenomena from a view that emphasizes appropriation processes. Despite this, the speed at which digital technologies have changed our existence seems to have left us with our arms crossed, with few theoretical and conceptual tools to approach these phenomena. Latin American literary studies, on their side, have tended to watch digital literature with a look of disdain. In a time in which the penetration of algorithmic languages and the development of artificial intelligence advance with giant steps, what kind of narratives are we building in Latin America with respect to these technologies? What is the status of algorithms as a language and what doors are opened to 21

“Es difícil liberarse transfiriendo la esclavitud a otros seres, sean hombres, animales o máquinas; reinar sobre un pueblo de máquinas que convierte en siervo al mundo entero sigue siendo reinar, y todo reino supone la aceptación de sistemas de servidumbre” (Simondon 2007, 144).

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think of them in relation to literature? How do we address these questions from a Latin American frame of mind? In what way can literature help us think of the relationship with algorithms and machinic existences from a posthuman perspective? That is to say, one that does not reproduce the modern occidental vision of humanity and allows us to take hold of cosmovisions and knowledges subordinated by eurocentric epistemologies. I have in mind, for example, indigenous world views, sometimes categorized as magic realism, that could well allow us today to think of these other relationships, not of opposition between humans and natures and, why not, applicable to our relationship with machines. I consider that a different relationship with contemporary technologies can be found in digital literature, one which invites us to consider our digital condition not from a position of fear towards machines but from the present conditions of existence. Should we develop a literary critique of algorithms? A kind of “transcritique” that considers the poetics and aesthetics in the interchanges between natural and algorithmic languages? Ed Finn poses, “The algorithmic object of study extends far beyond the surface manifestation of a particular fragment of text or multimedia” (Finn 2017, 53). Digital literature is not just an avant-garde form of creation. Like all literature, it also fulfills a certain function within the culture and society in which it is developed. In this case, Latin American digital literature invites us to reflect on the place that technology holds in the region, the characteristics it acquires, the appropriations, the interventions, and the “hacks” of the established forms and tendencies. It challenges the new forms of digital colonialism, not only within western literature, in which digital literature renews its forms but also in respect to a new narrative of progress related to the demands of datafication, digitalization, and the development and incorporation of AI. Latin American digital literature is evolving within the framework of free versus private technologies, technological universalisms versus diverse “cosmotechniques” (Hui 2020), forms of technological colonialisms, and new colonialisms of knowledge. The forms of appropriation of technology in Latin American digital literature allow us to observe these processes, but also to think about the possibilities. An algorithmic reading, or a “trans-critique”, as I have called it, demands, as pointed out by Finn, “we must take the culture machine itself as the object of study, rather than just its cultural outputs” (Finn 2017, 53). That is to say, the procedures, the languages, the forms of imagination, and the digital algorithmic aesthetics. A critique of algorithms is not only a matter of incorporating them as a poetic language within the upcoming literary approximations. It is also a political imperative. As if dealing with a type of Neo-formalism, these literatures,

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by de-automating code language, by tearing them away from their functions of efficiency and utilitarianism, can be perceived through our navigations, in our interactions with them, in the possibility of manipulating them. And in this way, we can come closer to their mode of existence in the particular context of Latin America. To think of techniques from diverse epistemologies becomes fundamental to counter contemporary digital colonialisms. The literatures examined, which form part of the Cartography of Latin American Digital Literature described, invite us to think about a specific relationship with technology that shapes our Latin American digital condition. In this way, literature, now in digital formats, maintains and reinvents its function of opening up imaginaries, so much in respect to new forms of social, political, and aesthetic lives, as to our relationship with technique from situated epistemologies.

Acknowledgments

This article is part of the FONDECYT research project n°1180771, “Cartografías de la literatura digital latinoamericana”, funded by Fondo Nacional De Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (FONDECYT-ANID). The English translations of Spanish text quotations are mine. Bibliography Aldunate, Elena. 2016. Juana y la cibernética. Santiago: Imbunche Ediciones. Berardi, Franco Bifo. 2019. Futurabilidad. La era de la impotencia y el horizonte de posibilidad. Buenos Aires: Caja negra. Blanco, José Manuel. 2016. Este libro lo han escrito mano a mano una persona y un robot. El Diario.es, 22 de abril 2016. https://www.eldiario.es/hojaderouter/tecnologia/soft ware/narrativa-novela-algoritmo-robots-inteligencia_artificial_0_507800409.html. Web. Accessed 17-01-2021. Finn, Ed. 2017. What Algorithms Want. Imagination in the age of Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Flusser, Vilém. 2017. El universo de las imágenes técnicas. Elogio de la superficialidad. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. Gainza, Carolina. 2018. Narrativas y Poéticas digitales. Santiago; Cuarto propio, (impreso). Ciudad de México: Centro de Cultura Digital, Ebook. https://editorial.cen troculturadigital.mx/libro/produccion-literaria-en-el-capitalismo-informacional -narrativas-y-poeticas-digitales-en-america-latina. Web. Accessed 01-03-2021.

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Galloway, Alexander. 2004. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. García Canclini, Néstor. 2019. Ciudadanos reemplazados por algoritmos. México: CALAS. Gómez, Verónica. 2021. Glotopolíticas de la literatura digital latinoamericana, en Philologia Hispalensis 35/2: 129–142. Harrel, Fox. 2017. Preface. In Mexica, ed. Pérez y Pérez, Rafael. VII–XI. Denver: Counterpath. Hui, Yuk. 2020. Fragmentar el futuro. Ensayos sobre tecnodiversidad. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. Kozak, Claudia. 2018. Comunidades experimentales y literatura digital en Latino­ américa. Virtualis, Revista de Cultura Digital 9/17: 9–35. http://www.revistavirtualis .mx/index.php/virtualis/article/view/272/270. Web. Accessed 04-02-2022. Läufer, Milton. 2017. Lagunas. Copia única, código 568. Versión: 0.98.3. http://www .miltonlaufer.com.ar/lagunas/> Web. Accessed 10-11-2020. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Martín Barbero, Jesús. 2005. Cultura y nuevas mediaciones tecnológicas. In América Latina, Otras visiones de la cultura, 13–38. Bogotá: Convenio Andrés Bello. Meza, Nohelia. 2020. Women creators of Latin American electronic literature: a geographical overview. Texto Digital 16/1: 183–2016. https://doi.org/10.5007/1807 -9288.2020v16n1p183 Web. Accessed 04-02-2022. Mistral, Gabriela. 1935. Pasión por leer. In Magisterio y niño. Selección de prosas y prólogo por Roque Esteban Scarpa (1979). Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello: 101–104. http:// www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-8310.html Web. Accessed 05-01-2021. Pérez y Pérez, Rafael. 2017. Mexica. Denver: Counterpath. Rama, Ángel. 2004. La ciudad Letrada. Santiago: Tajamar Editores. Rocha, Rejane. 2021. Fora da estante: questões de arquivo e de preservação da literatura digital. Nueva Revista del Pacífico 74: 290–309 http://www.nuevarevistadelpacifico .cl/index.php/NRP/article/view/211/461 Web. Accessed 04-02-2022. Sarlo, Beatriz. 2018. La Intimidad pública. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral. Simondon, Gilbert. 2007. El modo de existencia de los objetos técnicos. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros.

Part 3 Literary Culture and Global Consumptions

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Chapter 10

Materialities of Literature in Latin America Gustavo Guerrero Abstract The material conditions that influence contemporary Latin American literary writing are crucial to understanding what Latin American authors write today and how their work travel and can be read. Like all material artifacts, contemporary texts do not reach their readers or audiences in a sort of magic isolation, but through a dense and extremely complex system of production, circulation, and reception at a national, regional, and international levels. Since the publication of Angel Rama’s founding essay “El boom en perspectiva” (1984), criticism of Latin American literature has increasingly emphasized the engagement with material conditions and the study of different forms of production, modes of circulation and horizons of reception, expanding the space of our field far beyond traditional literary interpretation of the texts, to the analysis of the intricate history of literary works as books and as commodities in national and international markets.

This article builds upon these previous works to propose a wide-ranging account of the dense and diverse material conditions through which Latin American writing is produced, transmitted, and received in our Global Times. It focusses both on the decisive economic and technological changes that took place within the publishing sector in the last twenty years and on the specific transformations of the global literary market and its impact in the process of international circulation of peripherical or semi-peripherical literatures. We would like to address a certain number of questions included in the proposal of this volume: How are the general conditions of productions affecting the themes, the language, the styles, and the goals of literary texts? Are we just witnessing a transformation in the material support of literary artifacts, or are these profound changes related to the emergence and development of new forms of subjectivity? Is late capitalism a space in which literature can still have meaning, impact and effect? In his controversial and influential essay, The Business of Books (2001), André Schiffrin drew a broad picture of book publishing’s history after World War II and while arriving at the end of the 20th century and the new millennia’s

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beginnings, he ended up with a prediction and a warning: “It is safe to say that publishing has changed more in the last ten years than in the entirety of the previous century. These changes are more obvious in English-speaking countries, which are in many ways models of what is likely to happen in the rest of the world in the coming years” (Schiffrin 2001, 6–7). Two decades later one can agree that the seasoned editor of Pantheon and The New Press was right, since many of the changes that he described in his essay are now part of the very fabric of the international publishing industry and, as such, they have a decisive influence on the production, circulation, and reception of printed matters and on our intellectual horizon. Indeed, phenomena such as the digital revolution, corporate restructuring and mergers, and the rise of new and powerful actors have been setting the pace of the industry’s evolution with unprecedented speed, intensity, and depth. At the same time, they have recently provoked other waves of changes that Schiffrin did not foresee and that today give a particular profile to the old trade of publishing books. The Humanities have not ignored these changes nor their consequences for the study of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts. On the contrary, although there still exists a strong idealist current within more traditional methodologies, the Humanities have lately developed different ways of approaching the publishing industry’s new configuration and its products’ redefinition, trying to integrate these aspects into cultural and literary analysis through inter and transdisciplinary perspectives. For some years now, the history of books and reading, textual criticisms, bibliography, the sociology of texts and its materialist’s turn’s rich theoretical approaches, are all in a dialogic exchange that combines their different contributions, broadening the hermeneutic contexts for the study of authors and works. Their goal is to examine the various material conditions that interact with the writing practices and whose comprehension is a key element to the understanding of how texts are produced, how they circulate and how they can or should be read. Even more, all these studies assume a materialist turn with a strong dose of realism to finally accept that, just like other objects and artefacts, texts do not reach their readers and publics as incorporeal monads, as if in a magical and spiritual isolation, but through a dense and complex system of networks and mediations that preside the arbitration between economic and symbolic values and contribute to generate meaning. Thus, the regular criticism made in these inter and transdisciplinary frameworks towards notions like “creation”, “writing” and “textual production” as exclusively individual actions determined by an author’s will; or the necessary relativization

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of the concept of “reception” as a form of pristine and unconditioned reading and judgement. Within the Latin American area of studies, Ángel Rama’s works on literature, publishing and book markets—for instance, Los poetas modernistas en el mercado económico (Rama 1968) or “El boom en perspectiva” (Rama 1984)— serve as the starting point for a methodological approach that has been gaining momentum in the last years, one that emphasizes the importance of the history of the regional publishing industries, as well as of the actors, circuits and networks of circulation of the literary works as books, i.e. simultaneously as commodity and cultural object. This approach not only represents an effort to extend Literary Studies beyond the traditional hermeneutic methods, but also to add to the already existing trans and interdisciplinary perspectives, regional and international lenses. As Robert Darnton (Darnton 2009) and Roger Chartier (Chartier 2015) have shown, the book is a mobile object that, since its beginnings, travels between languages, borders, and markets: we can say that it is the informational vector and the linking device in a collective conversation, always deferred and decentered. Consequently, many of the main contributions to the field have today a clear post or supranational profile. We can mention here the encompassing Latin-American perspectives of the most recent essays of Argentinian José Luis de Diego (De Diego 2019), the Atlantic scope of the Spanish Ana Gallego Cuiñas’ research on contemporary novels’ markets (Gallego Cuiñas 2017, 2018, 2019a) or the incursions into the geographies of the Global South coordinated by the German scholar Gesine Müller (Müller, Locane & Loy 2018; Müller & Siskind 2019; Müller, Guerrero & Loy 2020). Based on these and other recent studies I am going to attempt a short exploration of the main changes in the global publishing landscape during the last years and the impact they seem to have in the Latin American context. This exposition is organized in three sections: the first one touches on the digital revolution and the new ways of reading and writing that it enables; the second one reviews the formation of the big conglomerates that control the industry today and whose financial dependency on the stock holders is imposing a new face to the Latin American national and international literary offer; and, lastly, the third one focuses on the figures of the agent and the scout, two actors that have gained unprecedented power and faculties within the publishing industry, to the extent that one can affirm without exaggeration that they have become the principal mediators or gatekeepers in the processes of international circulation of Latin American authors and literary works.

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Digitalization, Electronic Book, Self-Publishing

If the success of the pocket book in the second half of the 20th Century is inseparable from the development of the offset printing techniques that made possible to lower the production costs and to increase notably the number of copies printed, in its turn, the digital revolution happening for thirty years already continues to produce a series of fast paced mutations whose consequences we are still trying to thoroughly describe and analyze, but that may well represent another turn of the screw in the process of democratizing reading and even writing and publishing. These mutations do not concern, at first, the printing techniques themselves, because, although they overlap, what has been initially digitized is not the printing of physical books but the graphic design and the pre-printing processes. In a 1999 article on publishing policies, the Uruguayan critic Fernando Ainsa, by then director of publications at UNESCO, outlined the changes as follows: Computer (digital) imaging has expanded the tools of graphic design and today this means big savings in time and materials, from paper and ink to test prints. New technologies allow for the simulation of the production in different formats, inks and a variety of colors, expanding the design options and reducing costs. This also promotes the automatization of repetitive drawing and composition tasks, and the optimization and flexibilization of enterprises of traditionally rigid structures. The increase in performance is calculated between 200% and 400% compared to traditional production.1 Thanks to digitalization, starting at the end of the 20th Century, the whole process of composition, graphic and layout design becomes simpler, automatized, and streamlined; but the printing technique itself continues to be predominantly in Latin America, as in the rest of the world, the offset method, up to a 90% of the regional production, according to a recent report by the

1 “El procesamiento de la imagen por computador (digitalización) ha ampliado las bases del trabajo gráfico y hoy se traduce en un gran ahorro en tiempo y materiales de todo tipo, como papeles, tintas e impresiones de pruebas. Los nuevos procedimientos permiten la simulación de la producción en diversos tipos de soportes, tintas y variedad de colores, ampliando las alternativas de diseño y reduciendo los costes, así como también favoreciendo la automatización de tareas repetitivas de dibujo y composición, y la optimización y flexibilización de empresas de estructuras tradicionalmente rígidas. El aumento de rendimiento se estima entre un 200 % y un 400 % en relación con la producción tradicional” (Ainsa 1999, 29). For all the Spanish quotations in this article the translation is mine.

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Catalonian consulting firm RCC Casals (Casals 2017, 65). Digital printing, technically speaking, is still uncommon in the region, although it is destined to grow in the near future, particularly for small print-runs and on-demand printing models. For now, the essential outcome is that the digitalization of the multiple production steps of the physical book, from manuscript to printing, already implemented in this turn of the century, allowed a prodigious reduction of production costs, promoted an unprecedented increase in the number of titles printed and caused a vertiginous growth of the supply both regionally and globally. Recent data provided by the CERLALC (Centro Regional para el Fomento del Libro en América Latina y El Caribe), based on data from the ISBN national branches, point to that direction: if in 2001, the new century started with 70,694 new titles (CERLALC 2006, 50), in 2013 the numbers reach 182,096 and in 2017, decreasing lightly and correctively, 172,153 (CERLALC 2019a, 32), which represents an increase of more than 100% in less than 15 years. Spurred on by the technological revolution, Latin American production reaches in the second decade of the 21st Century its historically highest levels. It is to be noted that, as whole, the number of new titles produced by the continent are not very far from those of giants like China that, with 203,000 new titles, was the second world largest market in 2018 (BIEF 2020a). Unfortunately, the other side of the coin is less bright: this impressive increase in production in the last years, as I wrote in Paisajes en movimiento, literatura y cambio cultural entre dos siglos, did not go together with a proportional increase in readers nor in sale points, because, as in other parts of the world, in Latin America the proportion of readers do not increase at the same rate and bookstores are scarce (Guerrero 2018, 79). What is more, Latin American reading rates continue to be comparatively low: around 51.5% of the population do not read books and those who do, only read an average of 3.5 books per year (CERLALC 2012, 8–10). As it is apparent, the result is an acute imbalance between offer and demand that is well expressed in Gabriel Zaid’s famous diatribe against “the too many books”, a complaint repeated afterwards many times (Zaid 1996). The curious paradox is that, for years now, this oversupply undermines the book’s symbolic and economic value as a cultural object and commodity within the, in general, very reduced, disarticulated and volatile Latin American markets that are continuously saturated with novelties and where the print-runs are getting increasingly smaller. In countries with an influential publishing industry, like Argentina, for instance, the average printrun in 2017 did not reach the 4 thousand copies for the commercial publishing houses and was even lower for the rest (CERLAC 2019, 88). The consequences of this situation for Literary Studies are many and diverse—we can mention the obvious impossibility of wholly encompassing such corpus or the difficulty of analyzing it with a relative coherence and

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exhaustivity. It is not possible to list here all the repercussions, consequences, and derivations, but I will mention two trends that, in my view, must be taken into account when approaching contemporary texts. Firstly, the worsening deficit of local readers, hidden behind the vast and growing Latin American literary production—between 15% and 40% of new titles published, depending on the country (BIEF 2017, 2018, 2020b). In the mid-1970s, when those percentages were more modest, Gabriel García Márquez could publicly affirm that his ambition and that of his pairs was to exclusively live from his pen, because to have many readers was, for him, the only acceptable form of economic relation (García Márquez 2017, 51–52). That ideal, possible and legitimate for the boom generation, today is more utopic and unreachable, since, in the present conditions of oversupply, it is increasingly difficult for a novel and even an established writer to find a public and maintain it. José Luis de Diego explains the problem in one sentence: “today, what is really difficult is to have readers, not be published”.2 Gaining the favor of a readership and achieving recognition became rare events, which in turn have modified the status of the writer and the public function of authors, as well as the role of the publishers and editors. For the latest, each new book means now a fierce competition for acquiring space in bookstores, the traditional media and the social media; for the former, this includes assuming the functions of a promotional campaign agent in bookstores, universities and book fairs. In fact, a significant part of the publishing functions has been progressively transferred to authors who, under the double necessity of creating a public and selling copies, and by doing promotional tasks, become the main spokespersons and advertisers of their own works. As Ana Gallego Cuiñas notes, in the new conditions of oversupply, precarity and competition imposed by neoliberalism: “Such is the overexposure of the writer, his or her permanent performance, his or her extension of his or her virtual space, that he or she seems to supplant his or her work”.3 In other words: for many contemporary authors, subjects of an intrinsically transmedia and promotional logic, promotion has become almost as important as the act of writing. This consumes a significant portion of their time and is constantly associated with authors’ media presence, so that they end up being almost indistinguishable. We could say that, as the book is the material medium that modulates the tone of a novel or essay, so it seems that an author’s continuous presence in the public sphere communicates specific hermeneutics and the

2 “Ya no es difícil publicar; lo verdaderamente difícil es ser leído” (De Diego 2019, 208). 3 “Es tal la sobreexposición del escritor, la performance permanente, la extensión de su espacio virtual, que parece suplantar a la obra” (Gallego Cuiñas 2019, 18).

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promise of belonging to a community of readers. Needless to say that in the overstocked markets of today, what is at stake in these discursive fields where marketing and criticism collaborate and contradict each other, is the identity of a work as it is defined and foretold by the process of configuring its horizon of expectations and its reception. The second consequence of the overproduction of books and the lack of readers is tightly connected to the previous one: the change in the meaning of internationalization. This does not present itself only as the result of a desire for cosmopolitanism nor as an affirmation of the universalism of values of this or that national tradition. In fact, for an author in search of autonomy in shrinking and overcrowded markets like the Latin Americans, publishing his books in Spain or in other countries of the region, and selling the translation rights to other languages, are often bigger sources of income than local sales and, for that reason, may guarantee financial and reputation wise and a relative independence. Thus, the resort to the literary agent, even among the younger writers, as we will see later, and the frequent multiplication of editions of the same title with different Latin American or foreign publishers. One should not confuse this acceleration in the circulation of texts within and outside the continent with a new boom, as the media usually does. The key difference is that, during the 1960s and 1970s, the internationalization of the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes or Julio Cortázar, for example, extended or prolonged to a global scale the successes in public and sales already happening in Latin America. In this vein, as Cortázar and García Márquez expressed at the time, the boom was a boom of Latin American readers (Rama 1984, 60–61; García Márquez 2017, 53). On the contrary, the present-day globalization process rather reflects a deficit of readers, as during the modernismo period, since there are few contemporary works that reach the European, North American or Asian markets having enjoyed a reading public comparable to the one once gathered by Rayuela (1963) or Cien años de Soledad (1967). It follows from there that there is a marked difference between today and previous periods in the international or global appreciation of Latin American literature, which is based on the preliminary conjunction or disjunction, at the local or regional level, between economic and symbolic capital, to use Bourdieu’s terminology. Among the transformations that the impact of the technological revolutions has brought we must keep a special place for the transformations provoked by new formats. The most recent numbers show that the electronic book is contributing substantially to the increasing volume of titles registered in the region, since, from the already mentioned 172,153 novelties published in 2017, 44,789 were digital, i.e., 26.02% from total production (CERLALC 2019,

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56). Today the big transnational conglomerates operating in Latin America, be they Planeta or Penguin Random House, publish in electronic formats a significant part of their production and have ad hoc distribution and business platforms like Libranda. On the other hand, many independent publishers— Rey Naranjo in Colombia, Almadía in México or Amanuta in Chile—have tried alternative digitization methods of production and distribution and are reaching an increasingly bigger readership at the local, regional and global levels (Bookwire 2016, 45). Natively digital independent publishers that bet on the future of the electronic format and defend the Latin American character of their catalogs have appeared simultaneously in different countries. This is the case of Malaletra Libros in México, E-libros in Colombia or Ebooks Patagonia in Chile. Some of these also take advantage of the technological resources of the enhanced eBook or develop digital poetics, like the case of Jaime Reyes’s novel Mastodonte published by Nieve de Chamoy. No doubt this kind of experimental literature that continues by other means the explorations of the avant-garde and neo avant-garde movements of the 20th Century, will play an important role in the continent’s production in the coming years, as the studies and anthologies by Carolina Gainza (Gainza 2018) and Leonardo Flores, Claudia Kozak and Roberto Mata suggest (Flores 2014; Kozak 2012, 2017; Mata 2012; Antología Lit(e)Lat). Several specialized virtual library projects, like Minha Biblioteca or Nuvem de Livros in Brasil, and many online bookstores, like Orbile in México or Bajalibros in Argentina—not to mention the ubiquitous Amazon—, complete this panoramic approximation to the landscape of the electronic book in Latin America and show results that allow for certain optimism. Indeed, as studies by Alianza Internacional de Editores Independientes and the German platform Bookwire show, the electronic book has progressively been expanding its scope, reaching places and publics not touched by printed books and reconstructing a common space that alleviates the balkanization of territories (Bookwire 2019, 7–8). In this context, the progress of internet and the expansion of mobile phone technology can favor an unprecedented broadening of the book’s influence, since, as in other parts of the world, like China, in Latin America the most used medium for reading, according to the latest data available, is already the digital medium (Informe Latinobarómetro 2018, 82). Let us add that the e-book format, more ductile, affordable and adaptable, has a mobility difficult to control and has formal and informal circulation networks in a region where the high prices of the printed books and the scarcity of selling outlets has allowed for many years piracy to become an alternative to access texts.

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To this promise of a broadening of reading, one must add a growing and very contemporary broadening of writing and publishing, since, as it is happening in other places of the World, in Latin America new technologies have given rise to a massive and unexpected phenomenon: the practice of self-publishing. Until very recently this process has been downplayed by assimilating it to the old vanity press business model or simply to yet another user generated content; but the truth is that we are facing a much more complex phenomenon whose appearance is provoking a series of disruptive changes within the book ecosystem and the literary field. To describe in a few words what is happening let us say that in the last ten years, a growing number of writers is publishing and distributing their works in electronic format and sometimes in paper (under the on-demand model), with very low or practically non-existent costs and avoiding the usual editorial channels (public or private, institutional or commercial) that had until now regulated the publishing and distribution of texts in Latin America. According to the report Radiografía de la autopublicación en América Latina from 2018, the quantity of self-published books represents already 12% of the regional production with literature as its principal category, although this applies also to other genres like the essay and scientific divulgation (CERLALC 2018, 21–28). The writers who are resorting to this editorial device, be they novel or veteran, not only escape the multiple mediations that come by working with a publishing house, but also could be gaining autonomy in writing and graphic design, distribution and the relationship with readers, income, management of copyright, and they may be also even regaining some control over the geographical circulation of their works. Julio Alonso Arévalo, José Antonio Cordón y Raquel Gómez-Díaz in “La autopublicación, un nuevo paradigma en la edición digital del libro” underscore the important critique that is implicit in this new publishing model: Self-publishing has become a powerful system for transferring all kinds of information, both scientific and recreational. This phenomenon is attested by its increasing presence in sale and distribution platforms, its insertion in very reputed book lists, and the traction gained by organizations like Alliance of Independent Authors. Also, the traditional legitimation systems and its editorial filters, which look after the quality of the works in a catalogue, are giving up its prominence to other kinds of valorizations based on viral recommendations processes, where the reached visibility does not depend on traditional marketing.4 4 “La autopublicación se ha conformado como un poderoso sistema de transferencia de información de todo tipo, tanto científica como recreativa. Su presencia cada vez más numerosa

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Both the big transnational conglomerates and the local and independent publishing industry had to react to the importance of this practice, and not only have they been incorporating to their catalogues some of the best-selling or best evaluated self-published authors, but also have opened collaboration spaces in their websites so authors may be able to self-publish. These spaces have been incorporated to the offer of online services through imprints as, for example, Penguin Random House’s Caligrama or Planeta’s Universo de Letras. Nevertheless, this opportunistic response cannot hide the underlying problem of which self-publishing is maybe only a symptom. For, besides what one can think of the quality of self-published books (often genre novels) or of the hidden agenda of mega companies, like Amazon, that have promoted the phenomenon to occupy the content creation niche, it seems obvious that the self-publishing trend questions the way the publishing system has functioned during these first decades of the 21st Century and opens a legitimation crisis in the industry. The self-published authors explicitly denounce the publishers’ inability to find new readers and question their selection criteria, pricing policy, circulation strategies, distribution and even the limitations imposed on the circulation of books (CERLALC 2018, 15–16). At the same time, by working outside the usual circuit, they put into question the publishing industry’s institutional, intellectual, and aesthetic legitimacy and prestige as the guardian and manager of the literary field and its markets. It is impossible for now to know the consequences of this conflict nor the path the unexpected surge of self-publishing will take; as it has already happened within the musical industry, it could be opening the doors to a new class of actors but, within the specific economics of publishing, it may also be showing the way to a general rearrangement of the relationships between book, literatures and value that could have been inconceivable without the technological revolution and its effects in the cultural field. 2

Acquisitions, Fusions and Offers

Whatever the future consequences of this new publishing practice, the truth is that the swift emergence of self-publishing, which already has dedicated en las plataformas de venta y distribución, su inserción en la lista de libros más reputados, la fuerza que van cobrando organizaciones como Alliance of Independent Authors, dan fe de este fenómeno. Paralelamente los sistemas de legitimación tradicional que implicaban la existencia de filtros editoriales que velaran por la calidad de las obras incluidas en un catálogo, van cediendo su protagonismo a otro tipo de valoraciones basadas en procesos de recomendación viral, en los que la visibilidad alcanzada por los autores no depende del marketing tradicional” (Arévalo, Cordón & Gómez-Díaz 2014).

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spaces in major international fairs like those of Frankfurt or London, seems to have altered the polarization of the market, as it was being consolidated so far this century, between two types of main actors: on one side, the big publishing, press and communication conglomerates, and, on the other, the independent publishing houses. Let us remember that the latter represents, according to a well-established interpretation, the publishing ecosystem’s artisanal and literary pole, while the former one embodies the industrial and commercial pole resulting from the generalization of the Anglo-Saxon model of extreme corporate concentration—a tendency described by Schiffrin, as I already mentioned, as one of the main trends and threats to come. Twenty years later, it is undeniable that his predictions have come true, since conglomerates dominate today the world’s publishing landscape. But it is also true that, by the time Schiffrin’s essay was published, in 2001, business concentration was already largely a tangible reality in many places on the planet, such as Europe or Latin America. Indeed, the configuration of publishing, press and communication mega groups has a previous history, one that starts at the beginning of the 1960s, when financial investors discovered North American publishing houses’ high performance and the great yield they were producing. Supported by the public policies promoting reading and the book during the 1940s and 1950s, these companies grew and made grow a sector that had been traditionally a family business, modest and independent, but that in the middle of the 20th Century became a very desired prey for Wall Street because of its performance and growth prospects. It is considered that the beginning of this process is the absorption of the prestigious publishing company Alfred A. Knopf by Random House in 1960 (Whiteside 1981, 3). During the next twenty years around 573 acquisitions and mergers occurred within the industry. Capital coming from publishing, press, television, or radio, both North American and foreign, took part equally in these acquisitions and mergers (Greco 1995, 231). In this sense, this corporate concentration process, that starts in the United States and later expands over the whole planet is, from its beginnings, a globalized process, for in it partook since the beginning groups from France (Hachette), United Kingdom (Pearson) or Germany (Bertelsmann). In Latin America, the emergence of big transnational conglomerates in the publishing industry, began in the 1980s, as Ángel Rama noticed (Rama 1984, 67–68), and their presence increased during the 1990s and 2000s until reaching today’s size. These numbers may give us an idea: today the publishing, press and communication groups represent a small 1% of all editorial agents and produce no less than 30% of the books published in the continent (CERLALC 2019, 54–55). Such imbalance clearly shows that the corporate concentration implies as well a concentration of the book offer in a few hands and this concentration has influenced decisively the notable production growth,

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provoking big changes in the profession of publishing. If previously an editor or publisher was only in charge of choosing the manuscripts to be published and promoting the books that would come to light, from the moment he or she joins a group, he or she ceases to be the owner of his own means and becomes the manager of someone else’s capital. And this capital brings with itself welldefined financial expectations that not only make him or her responsible for its decisions before his or her authors and readers, as in the past, but before the shareholders who govern the conglomerate. In fact, the whole production chain is traversed by this pressure until it reaches the authors and pushes them to promote their works themselves. We can also observe this in the oversupply phenomenon, since producing more and more is a way to increase the probabilities of finding the books that will become bestsellers: the blockbusters that will placate the group’s financial expectations. Robert Follet formulated the problem back in 1995: “since it is impossible to predict which projects will be bestsellers, it is necessary to invest in a great many projects in order to guarantee that a few will turn out to be highly successful. Similar strategies have been pursued in such disparate fields as venture capital investing and crap table betting” (Follett 1995, 83). The analogy with venture capital investment and gambling gives a good idea of the way in which book’s offer is configured in today’s literary market: it is configured as image and likeness of the world of finance that ends up imposing its modus operandi and its own imaginary, as Paul Crosthwaite shows in his analysis of recent fiction from the United States and United Kingdom (Crosthwaite 2019). What guides this diverse and massive publication of new titles is not anymore a form of rationality behind the personal taste of the editor or publisher or the will to remain faithful to a certain aesthetics, but a speculative desire and the beliefs and calculations behind risk-taking, a kind of betting whose results are always uncertain, particularly when it involves young and lesser known authors or difficult or non-commercial works. In principle, this section of the market, risky and low in profits, is the one that is occupied by independent publishing houses, which function with methods more closely related to the traditional profession of a trade publisher. Financially sovereign and identified with generational, genre or local niches, the majority of independent publishers are still in search of a certain balance in the conformation of their catalogues and vindicate, with their attitude, the autonomy of the publishing sector and its contribution to cultural diversity. The history of independent publishing in Latin America (and the economic concentration to which it is opposed) has been told in various occasions and we will not review it here (Yúdice 2001; Astutti & Contreras 2001; Guerrero 2018; De Diego 2019; Gallego Cuiñas 2019b). But one should mention that

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this two-circuit system that operates with different expectations has become more fluid and permeable in the last years, since the independent publishing houses are not simply talent incubators for the big conglomerates, but sometimes share authors with them depending on the type of work and the country where they are published, as in the cases of the Argentinian César Aira, the Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa or the Peruvian-Mexican Mario Bellatin, among many others. Besides, today the independent publishing houses welcome books by widely known authors and, inversely, some imprints of the big conglomerates publish and promote works by young and debutant authors. The situation is then less Manichaean, but what remains real is the gigantic divide that separates the two circuits in terms of the resources available and the persistent problem of bibliodiversity [“bibliodiversidad”] that refers not to the kind of work that is being published, but to the distribution, the presence and visibility of independent production in libraries, the media and public space generally. This is the reason why any literature research project conducted now in Latin America, as in other parts of the world, presupposes a parallel inquiry into what circulates from a global perspective and into what is being spread through alternative channels or at a very local level, which is often invisible or invisibilized. Seen broadly, the market, nevertheless, does not allow us to lay out the question of the literary legitimacy of an author or the problem of the relative autonomy of literature depending on the circuit in which a work is published. In fact, between the literary market and the literary field there is no absolute correspondence, since the vindication of a relative independence of the work of art and the mistrust towards the market, two attitudes that we have inherited from the modern tradition, have not disappeared totally and continue to be shown by authors and publishers of both circuits, even in the present conditions of intense economic and financial coercion. What has changed are the gestures and strategies of assimilation or resistance with which the challenge of autonomy is confronted from within the market itself, opening spaces for a critique of neoliberal ideology and its systems of value production through an ambiguous play between conformity and unconformity. A more oblique and less mechanic way to understand this, following Eloy Fernández Porta (Fernández Porta 2007) and the already mentioned Paul Crosthwaite, could be to rethink in terms of risk the opposition in the catalogues between genre literature’s various modalities (police/detective novel, terror, romance, science fiction, etc.) and what is being written and published outside these parameters or in its interstices, where innovation and experiment tend to occur. We can say that, if in their efforts to manage the risk that any betting on literary value implies, the big conglomerates have been concentrating a big part of the

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present book’s offer in the generic fiction niche and reserving some imprints for other forms of fiction with more free and less fixed profiles, then one cannot fail to see that during the last decades, there have been several attempts to modify, transgress and reduce the distance between these two worlds by doing genre (or pseudo-genre, if you will) literature with a powerful critical and emancipatory content within the heart of the more simple, popular and conventional fictional forms. Colson Whitehead and his work Zone One (2009) are often cited as the most paradigmatic example of this global trend that gives a twist to postmodernism and its rewritings of the popular. In Latin America Manuel Puig was without a doubt the great precursor and master of this trend, which has little to do with the romance novels written in his name in the 1990s, but that today we could link to an important group of women writers that is reworking genre literatures to present key problems of our societies in our neoliberal times. I am referring to the terror novels of the Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda, like Mandíbulas (2018), or the gothic and the supernatural novels of the Argentinian Mariana Enríquez, like Nuestra parte de noche (2019), or the technological dystopias of the also Argentinian Samanta Schweblin, like Kentukis (2018), or the influence of science fiction in Liliana Colanzi’s short story collection Nuestro mundo muerto (2017). To confront the logic of the market from within its categorization of literary production (i.e., the risk that it represents for investment) and, at the same time, to occupy the two circuits of this very segmented territory in order to disrupt expectations and imaginaries by changing the rules of the game, these are undoubtedly two ways of opening spaces to think critically our present. As Crosthwaite has shown, it is not a matter of a simple repositioning of the modern and postmodern debate between the elite and the popular, high art and mass culture, but something more subtle and that, I insist, Puig saw before anyone in Latin America. The problem, rather, is the way in which the notion of popularity has come to serve as cover for the imposition of the iron of the law of the market: how (so this ideological argument goes) can there be anything wrong with markets if they are simply an unmediated manifestation of the will of the people? The critiques, deconstructions, or subversions of popular genre forms (…) perform meaningful political and cultural work, not insofar as they attack those forms per se, nor even insofar as they attack them as popular, but insofar as they counter an ideology of the market that has arrogated the category of the popular to itself. Crosthwaite 2019, 51

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Agents and Scouts

In 2001, the same year André Schiffrin wrote his essay, Jason Epstein asserted in Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future: “Forty years ago agents were mere peripheral necessities, like dentists, consulted as needed, not the dominant figures in the lives of authors that many of them have since become” (Epstein 2001, 6). Today we should add that not only they are key in the lives of authors, but that they occupy a central place within the publishing industry, as shows the continuous growth of the spaces reserved for them in the main book fairs of the world, from Frankfurt to Guadalajara, from London to Bologna or Shanghai. Unavoidable mediators and decisive gatekeepers that install themselves in the intersection between market and literary field, the literary agents are acquiring more power in the exchanges between different industry’s actors and their presence has ceased to be anecdotal or circumstantial: they are among the biggest actors in the sequence that leads from the idea to the manuscript, then from the manuscript to the book and finally from book to its local readers and its translations into different languages. It is well known that in Latin America the agent appears during the boom and was epitomized by the Catalonian Carmen Balcells (De Diego 2019, 214–215). After this legendary figure came during the 1980s and 1990s other Spanish agents that professionalized the job and developed catalogues where Latin American writers had often a prominent position. Many of the emergent Latin American writers at the end of the 20th Century—one can mention the Argentinian Rodrigo Fresán, the Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez or the Mexican Jorge Volpi—hired from the beginning Spanish agents and still today continue to be represented by them. But if it is true that in the 90s globalization seemed to favor the mediation of the Iberian Peninsula, the last twenty years bear witness to the disappearance of this monopoly and were the scene of a quick diversification of Latin American writers’ representation at the national and international level. At present, and the trend becomes clearer after the 2008 crisis, the agencies that work with Latin American authors are not located exclusively in Barcelona or Madrid, but also in Buenos Aires, Berlin, London, or New York. Examples abound and are eloquent: the Michael Gaeb Agency, in Berlin, represents the Argentinians César Aira, Martin Felipe Castagnet and Ariana Harwicz, together with the Mexicans Antonio Ortuño and Juan Pablo Villalobos; also in Berlin, but with one foot in Frankfurt, Nicole Witt, director of the Mertin-Witt Agency, has built a catalogue where almost 70% of the authors are Latin Americans, among them the Colombian Héctor Abad, the Cubain Marcial

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Gala or the Brazilian Paulo Lins; in London, the agency Roger, Coleridge & White represents the Brazilian Daniel Galera, the Mexican Valeria Luiselli and the Chilean Alia Trabucco Zerán; and, finally, in New York, the famous Andrew Wylie agency has a long and diverse list of Latin American authors where one can find the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the Chilean Roberto Bolaño, the Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa, the Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán and the Venezuelan Alberto Barrera Tyzska. As one can see, not only veteran and prestigious authors use the services of literary agencies, but also the younger writers, no doubt because they understand that today, to have that option is, for many publishers, the first sign of success and carries a positive appreciation of the author’s work. In other words: to be represented by an agent is, today, mutatis mutandi, what in previous periods was the literary debut of publication. In this sense, the agencies have become, in the last twenty years, a filter of the Latin American corpus that circulates nationally and internationally. As such, they are producing symbolic value that is, at the same time, economic, even before the publication itself. Their intervention in the transition from manuscript to book, which is the space that puts apart author and editor, has gained traction in regard to the editorial and writing processes to the point of often putting them at the center of the genesis and format of a work. Indeed, strategically situated in that interstitial space, the agents can participate in editorial decisions that are negotiated in contracts that do not only concern the economic aspect, like the amount of the advance payment, the calculation of royalties or secondary rights, but extend to such essential aspects like choosing a collection, cover art or the launching of a book and its press and communication strategy. It is a cliche to affirm that no other sector of industry has grown more than the literary agencies during the last twenty years; this growth means also more involvement in tasks that were the exclusive domain of publishers. Not one should be really surprised. As the writer’s representatives, agents are a writer’s spokespersons regarding the writer’s interpretation of the work, which can or cannot coincide with that of the publisher’s, generating discussions and conflicts between the author’s sovereignty as the text’s creator and that of the publisher as the creator of the book. One of the main functions of agencies is to foresee and manage these conflicts in advance, which open the door for their significant participation in editorial processes, all of which show them as collaborating in the production of the work’s meaning. Today, research on editorial mediation cannot ignore this phenomenon when identifying the

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gatekeepers responsible for an interpretative proposal that will accompany the material characteristics of the final printed copies. It is true that if, at the beginning, these kinds of interventions were typical of the Anglo-American agencies and were only for widely appreciated authors, today they have become more common among agencies from different parts of the world and, of course, in the publishing process of Latin American authors within and outside the continent. The agents also intervene at other less evident or explicit stages, but no less consequential for the production of the work. On the one hand, they are often the first readers of the manuscripts and, as such, participate in the text’s genesis through the exchange of opinions with authors; on the other hand, they are equally often the first to elaborate a critical discourse on the text that not only attributes it general characteristics of style, theme or structure, but also that situates it within the local or global literary field in the context of the author’s own work and/or the work of others, thus giving it a value and identifying the potential publishers and readers of the forthcoming book. A good agent knows who can be interested in certain manuscripts and, in principle, what kind of argumentation can be used to present it to the prospective publishers. Hence, the working of the agencies depends, more so than that of the publishing houses, on their capacity to generate and manage information networks that, as in the financial sector, could allow them to effectively intervene in the market and place their authors in different cultural and linguistic areas. This was Carmen Balcells’ strategy during the boom years and is now the same for many agencies. To understand the circulation of authors’ global dynamics in this century it is not sufficient any more to sketch the editorial networks in which they are inserted but is also necessary to link them with the agencies’ own networks, which could give us a map of the elective affinities between agents and publishers and a visual projection of manuscripts’ movements and the publication of works accompanied by their trajectories and chronologies. Even then, our cartography of the gatekeepers would be incomplete, because often between the proposition of the manuscript made by an agent and the interpretation made by the publisher, in the very moment of the evaluation, intervenes a scout, a third party in the dynamics of global circulation that operates between agent and editor. In his thesis How Books Travel. Translation flows and Practices of Dutch acquiring Editors and New York literary Scouts (2015), Thomas Franssen reminds us that the figure of the scout is still so secret and unknown that almost nobody knows for sure who they are and what role they have in the editorial processes.

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Hence the necessity of describing them explicitly: Literary scouts are intermediaries who act as gatekeepers by filtering information and as cultural brokers by match-making manuscripts and people. They are co-producers in the valuation process of new manuscripts on the American and global book markets, brokering information between actors such as foreign and American editors and creating new relationships between them. Their role as co-producers is especially important because manuscripts are not yet books. Franssen 2015, 64

In contrast to the agent, the scout does not represent an author and, different from the editors, never publishes books. In a century in which the increase in publications makes impossible to read everything, the scout’s task is to identify the main manuscripts that circulate among different languages and various editorial environments and elaborate a detailed reading of them that allows the publisher to have a clear understanding of the type of text at issue and the possibility or necessity to publish it. In fact, the scouts are basically readers, often polyglots, that work for publishing houses and whose evaluations enter in the decision-making process. Their reports are frequently conclusive in the dialogue or confrontation between agent and publisher in regard to the description, characterization and the forms of argumentation over the value of a manuscript. As Franssen has shown, this previous evaluative debate is one of the capital moments in the editorial mediation process, because it brings to light the arbitration of different evaluation modalities that range from narratives of emotional or affective identifications with the manuscript to institutional or political argumentations, like the editorial profile of the collection that would receive the text or the author’s positions regarding feminism, war or abortion (Franssen 2015, 65–83). Evidently, scouts’ reports include also elements for the manuscript’s appraisal and the desired advance payment, but these economic aspects are not detached from the literary discussion and take part in the fixing of a specific way to read the text and the forthcoming book, so it is not uncommon to find echoes of these discussions in the back covers, in the descriptions in catalogues and even in the press releases. Acting in the shadows, with discretion, scouts operate also by networking with publishers and agents in order to obtain as soon as possible information on manuscripts in preparation or in circulation and get ahead of other scouts in preparing a description and evaluation. If some years ago their presence and influence was very limited, in the 21st Century they have a decisive if quasi secretive role in the circulation

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of Latin American authors’ texts and, of course, of texts from other parts of the world. 4

Material Trends

To end these brief observations, one must accept that it is difficult to discern a specific significance or direction in the various and contradictory trends that emerge in the present conjuncture. If, on the one hand, thanks to digitalization, it seems as if we are witnessing a triumph of the printed book, against the predictions of its demise, on the other hand, maybe it is a pyrrhic victory that marks a ceiling for the production of this format, while the digital format is spreading both within and outside of Latin America. In many markets there coexist an editorial offer more and more segmented and modelled by after the big conglomerates’ financial risk management and an abundance of independent publishers and of writing projects that try to subvert precisely the composition of that offer. Never have the authors been so present in the public sphere to embody and represent their works and never has the literary text been so perceived as a composite and choral artifact resulting from a series of editorial mediations and product of a collaboration of a network of visible and invisible actors, whose influence can vary in the different moments of production, circulation, and reception. To the question regarding the effect of some of the main changes provoked by globalization, there is not a coherent and univocal answer. Nevertheless, we know that the vindication of a critical spirit and of the relative autonomy of the literary field have not disappeared. The texts, as Bakhtin taught us, react against that which marks them and create a dialogue intensely with the material and immaterial scenes that preside their writing, producing subjectivities that bear witness to our condition and theirs. From this perspective, one of the challenges for literary criticism is to rethink the relationships between literature and materiality in the light of the drastic changes that have happened in the different sectors of the publishing industry and that today connect in different ways the local and the global. How to articulate a reading of the text as book and of the book as text without recurring to old determinisms and taking into account the complexity of the production, circulation and reception processes in interconnected markets and cultural fields? In my view, maybe this is one of the questions to which we should pay attention in the coming years in order to complete the material turn in the Humanities and to recenter Latin American Literary Studies in their contemporary conjuncture.

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Müller, Gesine, Jorge Locane and Benjamin Loy. 2018. Re-mapping World Literature. Writing, Book Markets and epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South. Berlin: De Gruyter. Müller, Gesine and Mariano Siskind. 2019. World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality. Berlin: De Gruyter. Müller, Gesine, Gustavo Guerrero and Benjamin Loy. 2021. World Editors: Dynamics of Global Publishing and the Latin American Case. Berlin: De Gruyter. Rama, Ángel. 1968. Los poetas modernistas en el mercado económico. Montevideo: Universidad de la República, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias. Rama, Ángel. 1984. El boom en perspectiva. In Literatura y mercado, coord. David Viñas, 51–110. Buenos Aires: Folio Ediciones. RCC Casals Consultants. 2017. Informe sobre la situación y la evolución de la industria gráfica 2015–2017 y sus tendencias en el futuro inmediato centradas en Estados Unidos, Europa y América Latina. Barcelona. Schiffrin, André. 2001. The Business of Books. How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso. Whiteside, Thomas. 1981. The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Yúdice, George. 2001. La reconfiguración de políticas culturales y mercados culturales en los noventa y siglo XXI en América Latina. Revista Iberoamericana 197. Zaid, Gabriel. 1996. Los demasiados libros. Barcelona: Anagrama.

Chapter 11

Literary Culture and Spectacle: The Boom in Literary Festivals in Latin America Ana Gallego Cuiñas Abstract The 21st century has seen a veritable boom of literary festivals in Latin America, although there are no studies to date on this phenomenon, and those that exist in other languages have focused mainly on the areas of sociology, anthropology, quantitative analysis of sales, audience experience and economic impact in the guest countries. None of them propose an epistemology that draws on concepts from criticism or theory to interpret the festival event as a literary form. However, the combined qualitative and quantitative method this work presents is based on a notion of festival programming not only as praxis but also as theory or politics of literature. In this way, I have carried out a close reading of the programmes of the two most important festivals in Latin America, the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias and the Filba Internacional in Buenos Aires, where I have identified four recurring politics that can be considered as procedures of valuing current literature: 1) (self-)legitimising politics of literary culture; 2) bibliodiverse, egalitarian and inclusive politics; 3) politics of the performativity of literature in relation to other arts; 4) politics of the spectacularization of the image of the writer. These signifiers have a double impact, commercial and rhetorical, which gives rise to certain imaginaries, valuation patterns or discursive meanings that are reproduced both in Latin American lettered communities and in the global market.

Literary festivals1 have become a notable subject of study in departments of Sociology and Literary Studies in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and France.2 However, in the sphere of Hispanic Studies, the practice 1 I opt for the term literary festival, instead of writer’s, book or literature festival, because I consider it to be less exclusive and more encompassing. For the state of the issue on the term “festival”, see Molina (2015, 227). 2 The authors who have published significant academic essays on literary festivals are: Falassi (1987), Carter et al (2001), Lurie (2004), Meehan (2005), Ommundsen (2009), Stewart (2010, 2013), Giorgi et al (2011), Johanson and Freeman (2012), Driscoll (2014, 2015, 2016 y 2018), Sapiro (2016a), Sánchez (2017), Weber (2018). I could also include the study by Fabiani on the

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has not received sufficient attention, whether from the social sciences or from literary critics,3 in spite of the large number of festivals that have been taking place on both sides of the Atlantic since the beginning of this century. A question naturally arises, therefore: why this lack of attention? In Latin American sociology, a great deal of interest has been given to other phenomena of litera­ry culture, mainly devoted to the publishing sector as a (alternative) model of entrepreneurship and to book fairs, but not to festivals. Regarding literary criticism, the last material turn of Hispanic Studies has triggered a return to the sociology of literature from various angles: the history of the book, the publishing market, fairs, prizes, translations and literary agents.4 These approaches call for a political and social reflection on the materiality of literature, a perspective that has been marginalized by the critical agenda in the last few decades in favour of cultural, postcolonial, feminist, and queer studies, among others.5 However, I believe that one of the tasks of literary criticism in the 21st century is to reflect on the ways in which these material phenomena generate value, in order to gain a fuller grasp of the Latin America literary product as a social fact. Several subfields have emerged, particularly for the approach to English and French literatures (English 2010): i) The sociology of texts, which addresses the history of the book (Chartier, Darnton, McKenzie) and publishing (Miller, Thompson, English, Schiffrin);

Avignon Theatre Festival (2003) and 3 unpublished doctoral theses on specific festivals in Australia and the USA: Jones (1981), Starke (2000), and Stewart (2009). 3 The exceptions being Molina (2015), Gallego Cuiñas (2019) and Coppari (2019). 4 Other phenomena have received little attention: festivals, literary workshops, creative writing Master’s courses and residences of writers, among others. 5 Remember that the (Marxist) sociology of literature was developed in the 1960s at the Birmingham School by names such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. After this, in the seventies and eighties, a generation of cultural sociologists (Tony Bennett, John Frow, Andrew Milner, Pierre Bourdieu) and sociologists of literature (Lucien Goldmann, Robert Escarpit, John Hall) emerged, who led the discipline to its finest period of brilliance. Later, from the 1990s, it was supplanted by the advance of New Materialism in US departments of literature, at a time of globalization, which entailed the application of a methodology—anti-hermeneutic and anti-aesthetic—of data analysis, called “distance reading” by Moretti, “surface reading” by Best and Marcus, and “postcritical reading” by Felski. The weaknesses of this distinctly positivist method have already been pointed out (Rosetti 2014), although this, in my opinion, does not invalidate the fact that the sociology of literature and its materialist outlook do not prove politically advantageous for literary criticism in the 21st century. This is because literature is a commodity—historical and ideological—tied to the real economy, and it depends, in its arrangements, sociabilities, and affects, on the logic of the market that, undoubtedly, transforms literary taste (Brouillette 2017, 280).

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ii)

the sociology of reading, which focuses on readers (class, gender, ethnicity, education, habit, etc.), in the practice of reading and in reception (Jauss, Iser, Radway, Griswold, McDonnell, Wright); iii) the sociology of fields, centred on the formation of the literary canon (Bourdieu, Guillory, Rama, Bennett, Sapiro, Moraña); iv) reflexive sociology, which takes the discipline itself (and its conditions of possibility through the authority of certain schools and theoretical approaches) as the subject of study (Eagleton, Graff, Hunter, Viswanathan, Liu); v) the sociology of globalization (or world literature), whose subject is the texts that circulate on a global scale, and translations (Casanova, Moretti, Damrosh, Parks, Bennett, Müller); vi) the sociology of evaluation or valuation (Ohmann, Herrnstein Smith, Woodmansee, Osteen, Lamont), which deals with the evaluative pluriarchies and heterarchies and the production of value. This area ranges from Marxist theorists of value (Marx, Simmel, Adorno) and the sociology of culture (Williams and Frow) to the sociology of the organization or the latest “critique of value” associated with the sphere of labour (Kurz 2014). Of all these, the summarizing proposal established by Lamont (2012) seems the most useful. It transcends the descriptive and pragmatic method in order to give a twofold qualitative and quantitative analysis6 of the complex processes of inclusion and exclusion that privilege the matrices of value produ­ cing recognition and acclaim in the artistic world. Nonetheless, I believe that we should aspire to a kind of literary criticism of value.7 As well as using Lamont’s combinatory ethnographic, statistical and theoretical method, this would specifically consist of applying techniques such as close reading for the interpretation of the expanded8 “form-value” that appears in the practices of the agents who today make literary public culture. These could be called: 6 Not because of the scientificist imposition of incorporating empirical value regimes in the humanities, but as objectification of the cultural practices that are carried out and that can no longer be addressed only through qualitative models. 7 To clarify, the “question of value”, with an extensive genealogy in the aesthetic and economic disciplines, since the concept of value of John Frow, based on the Bourdieusian theory that understands it as the effect of a particular organization of the social and of an active critical judgement (that is negociated and relational), which involves taking a political position (1995, 4): “value is always value-for, always tied to some valuing group; what does raise a problem is the fact that in our world the boundaries of communities are always porous, since most people belong to many valuing communities simultaneously” (Frow 1995, 143). 8 Obviously, I use the expression in the sense of Rosalind Krauss in The Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979): as a dialogue between the arts and as the arts’ interest in the public space.

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Criticism of the writer, which consists of the study of the construction of the figure of the author, as a framework of readability/visibility, in interviews, images, personal archives, and social networks,9 along with the analysis of the forms of literary work, types of professionalization, and so on. ii) Criticism of the mediator, which would be based on the study of publishing catalogues, fair programmes, festivals, masters’ degrees in creative writing, literary workshop techniques, prize-winner lists, behaviour of intermediaries, et cetera, which could be mixed with audience surveys and interviews of organizers and participants. With this outlook, it is not only necessary but urgent to examine literature in the present day as material culture and to look at the new modes of production and circulation of literary values that are promoted by mediators10 such as festivals, which are those responsible for the (in)visibility and (un)readability of certain subjects and objects. This means reading literature against the grain of the public sphere11 and the global market, since this does not only affect the commercialization of literary works but also of the works themselves and the writers who produce them. That is to say, it affects literary praxis: the material and symbolic relationship of the subject-reader/writer with the object-book. The market of literature has been expanded, hyper-segmented and virtualized in the 21st century, as has the literary and its values, and this circumstance leads to renewed processes of democratization, professionalization and spectacularization of culture. To this we must add the new forms of intermediation that have taken up strategic places for the construction of literary value (Sapiro 2016a, 12). Of all these, the festival has had the most impact on the mechanisms of recognition, due to the fact that their expansion has gone hand in hand with neoliberal globalization. Because of this, festivals have today become the global gatekeepers12 of Latin American world literature. Taking these premises into account, I here present a hermeneutics of the literary festival, based on a series of questions: how do the economies of festivals affect the literary? What i)

9

10 11 12

The impact of the bibliometric index of the social networks in the writer’s (and increasingly for other agents, see Gallego Cuiñas et al. 2020) is ever greater, highly indicative of the networks of sociability and value exchange that is established in the literature market (see also Latour 2005). The festivals act as a mediation device, like a gatekeeper, since as well as rating and filtering values, they have a reflective role on the field/market of the literary. Understanding this category beyond the Habermasian concept (1981), which refers to a consensual unitary national ideology of promoting the democratization of culture. For an idea of the public sphere as a space for political dissent, see Chantal Mouffe (1993). I don’t consider the notion of gatekeeper as only a mediating agent (as Cosser, Glass, Greenfeld, Marling, among others, do) but as a mediation device (Gallego Cuiñas 2019).

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politics of (Latin American) literature lie behind them? What idea of literature and what values-concepts do their programmes contain? What literary genres are promoted? What policies of bibliodiversity, equality and inclusion do they put into practice? How does the writer relate with the public sphere and with the spectacle in the festival? 1

Origin, Function and Typology of the Literary Festival: The Cases of Hay Festival Cartagena and the Filba International in Buenos Aires

The first literary festival to be held as we know them today was the Cheltenham Literary Festival (1949), although it was not until the 1990s that the format was exported worldwide on the back of economic globalization and the “cultural turn”, associated with the development of the creative industries. This entailed the expansion and exportation of new (multi-)cultural models in the public sphere through activities that the creative class could participate in, such as festivals, which are backed by public and private policies to promote cultural excellence, literary patrimony, tourism and social inclusion. Broadly speaking, the literary festival consists of the holding, at a specific space and time, of a series of activities that are ritualized and related to literature, and which have been produced by and for a community with common interests (Weber 2018, 12). Strictly speaking, we can identify various factors as catalysts for the growth of the literary festival in the global market. On the one hand, there was the expansion of the creative industries,13 immaterial labour, and the UNESCO ci­ties of literature. On the other hand, the depletion of publishing and the intensification of other socializing experiences are promoted at the same time as spectacularizing the figure of the writer as never before. Thus, one can see a pattern of action and function that is repeated on both sides of the Atlantic: i) The literary festival is the best signifier of the effect of globalization in the literary field and of the development of the creative industries. ii) The literary festival is a device for the public self-legitimization of the social function of literature, as well as effect and cause of the hierarchy that literary genres, agents, the politics of literature and writers in the field/market represent, according to three lines of force: production, circulation and capital accumulation. iii) The literary festival is the space of the writer, of literary celebrity and of public acclaim. The politics of the festival holds a judgement of authority 13 Creativity is central to the contemporary economy, hence the political association between festival and creative industry.

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that was previously wielded by the state or the academy, which still predominates because of the need for public prescription—in other words, how literary value is assessed.14 iv) The literary festival reveals the extraordinary performativity of literature and makes the tension between high and low culture unproductive in its programme of activities. Hence the expanded forms of literary culture in the 21st century are trans-(medial), heterogeneous and hybrid. v) The literary festival returns to premodern traits of literature: orality, affectivity and sociability, all practices that signify the literary community of the 21st century. It is undeniable that in the 21st century we have seen too a boom of literary festivals in Latin America. These have a multicentric and multi-peripheral cha­ racter, since they are held both in large capitals and in provincial cities or small towns, which aim to promote a literary image of themselves upon the base of cultural credentials. They come in all types: rural, urban, digital format,15 devoted to poetry, highly popular genres (noir, fantasy, children’s, et cetera), to women and LGBTQ communities (Grito de mujer [Woman Scream]) and to literature in general. The funding model is mixed, as in other cultural fields: with private sponsorship and government funds. Broadly speaking, I can distinguish three types of festival: global, local and communal. I will not examine the last one in this study, since these concern small and specialized festivals (mainly of poetry), whose format has expanded greatly over the last decade, with a counter-cultural and alternative nature, associated with self-managed, artisanal or independent publishing entrepreneurship (Gallego Cuiñas 2022).16 The festivals I label as global are larger in size, sharing a global model of procedure, such as Hay Cartagena. They are focused on what is new in the publishing sector—presentations of the latest books or topical themes—and the spectacularization of the writer as individual figure. The selection criterion therefore tends to be hierarchical and with a very heterogeneous kind of 14

15 16

However, Weber maintains that festivals do not represent any position in literary debates. It is true that the power of intermediaries and mediators is progressively shifting to media agents and autodidacts, with power of action in social networks and the media. Nevertheless, in festivals such as Filba Internacional, literary authority still obtains. The digital turn has also affected the festivals, and they are increasingly appearing in a virtual format, through social networks, blogs, et cetera, for example The Digital Writer’s Festival in Melbourne or the Twitter Fiction Festival (Weber 2018). For example, the International Festival of Poetry in Rosario; PM in Chile; PoeMaRio in Colombia; Caravana de Poesía in Peru; Poesía en tu sofá in Uruguay; Poesía en voz alta in México; the Festival de oratoria ancestral y nuevas narrativas in Ecuador, etc. For the case of poetry festivals, see Molina 2015 and Coppari 2019. For a more precise definition of a ‘communal festival’ see Gallego Cuiñas 2022.

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festivalgoer. Furthermore, there is an economic and geopolitical agenda, since they tend to be held in rather peripheral cultural cities, with a philosophy of democratic access to culture, promoting local economies and identities, for a cultural tourism and a global public (Moeran and Strandgaard 2011, Weber 2018). Thus, the line of force that runs through it is glocalization.17 The festivals I call local, such as the Filba International in Buenos Aires, are celebrated in national capitals or large cities, with a cosmopolitan desire to promote national identities and economies in order to consolidate global prestige. In this case, the line of force is what we might call locaglization—that is, reinforcing local creativity and national imaginaries in order to gain visibility and legitimacy on the regional/global literature circuit. In their programmes, heterarchies predominate, and their eagerness is more profession-based than educational or to promote cultural diversity. Lastly, these festivals are distinctive as a source of cosmopolitan ideals,18 aimed primarily at an educated and local audience that is in sync with the global. 1.1 The Colombian Hay: A Global Festival The British Hay-on-Wye, a well-known literary festival, created in 1988 in the town of the same name, has expanded its events throughout Europe, Asia and America, most of them connected to cities designated World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.19 This is a drive by its director, Peter Florence, to show that culture is not located only in capitals and that through it we can create identity, as took place in the epoch of the literary salons and industrial capitalism. It is no small thing that the first non-English-speaking site chosen for the Hay Festival20 was 17

A large proportion of the festivals signed up to the Global Association of Literary Festivals or to Word Alliance would fall into this category. The Global Association has its base in Dubai and the Word Alliance in Berlín. Filba Internacional is signed up to both, and is also the only Spanish-language festival in the Word Alliance. See: https://www.gaolf.org/ and https://www.wordalliance.org/our-members. 18 There is a change from internationalism (pure competition of national cultures on the world stage) to cosmopolitanism, understood as a hybrid and pluralistic space where global issues are connected with particular contexts (Giorgi et al. 2011). 19 Hay-on-Wye began in the United Kingdom as a poetry festival, and now it is a non-profit company sponsored by firms, such as The Guardian and MAPFRE, and by local and national governments of their locations. It is dedicated to the promotion and books of fiction and particularly non-fiction. Hence it is an initiative with private and public capital that aims to promote cultural difference as part of that democratizing process I have discussed above. 20 The Hay Festival’s funding tends to be framed in local and national public policies, although the funding is mainly private (Mapfre, Cerrejón-Minería, RCN, BBVA, Pinturas Pabón, SURA and Acción Cultural España, among many others). Tickets for each activity tend to cost around 30000 Colombian pesos (7 euros or 6 pounds sterling), for concerts

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Cartagena de Indias, a city that was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1984 and was associated with the most globalized Latin American writer, Gabriel García Márquez. The Hay Festival forms a transnational network (Segovia, Arequipa and Querétaro) of outlying but prestigious literary circuits (English 2005, Weber 2018). The aim, on the one hand, is to show that there is a community of readers, and on the other, to increase the value of nonmetropolitan, culturally rich expression, such as the Spanish language, promoting the ideal of a world without borders or symbolic hierarchies (Sapiro 2009, 8). Today, Hay Cartagena is the paradigm of a macroliterary festival in Latin America, lasting four days and having an average attendance of between 45,000 and 50,000 people. It is the first festival in the year (being held in January or February), which gives it a privileged place in the structural hierarchy of Spanish-language festivals. Its structure is pluralistic, designed for urban regeneration, cultural democratization and social cohesion. Hence, schools and universities also participate in its activities (in Hay Joven [“Young Hay”], Hay Festivalito [“Little Hay Festival”] and Hay Festival Comunitario [“Community Hay Festival”]) to promote educational and intellectual inclusion and development. The figure of García Márquez—and his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the greatest example of the international circulation of literature in the Spanish language—is central to the festival. The Nobel prizewinner was one of the star guests and a decisive factor in choosing Colombia as the literary epicentre of the Latin American world. The Boom, magic realism, and those yellow butterflies won the day for Latin American literature. Or, rather, it was won by the encapsulation of the hegemonic idea that the literary in Latin America should be exotic, fantastical and primitive in style. Hay Cartagena is currently the foremost Latin American festival dedicated to world literature (as the title of the 2010 programme declares), and this is shown in the high number of international guests, as we will see below in my study corpus that encompasses the festival from 2010 to 2020.21 The model that is reproduced at every festival location is the culture of the book based on a star system of acclaimed writers, although the bestseller is avoided. Most of its activities revolve around these venerated figures and the presentation of their latest books. They do not focus exclusively on the creative process, but also on the act of publication in any speciality, particularly non-fiction books. Yet the

21

and large events around 50000 Colombian pesos (12 euros or 10 pounds), while tickets are free for Hay Joven and Hay Festival Comunitario. All the data that appear in this paper involve the average of the statistical analysis of the programme activities of these 11 editions, bearing in mind that the 2020 festival, as with Filba Internacional, took place virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Figure 11.1 Front page of the Hay Cartagena de Indias 2010 programme

performance of the writers is also important in their role as public intellectuals in dialogue with other mediators such as translators, academics or journalists. Hay Cartagena thus resuscitates the dialectic tradition of literature and politics through the hypermediatic genre of the interview, where the writers act as the bearers of truth on current problems such as national and international politics, immigration, inequality, multiculturalism, ecology, and so on. 1.2 The Filba in Argentina: A Local Festival Founded in 2008, the Filba International began as a medium-sized project. It is held in the months of September or October, at the start of the Argentine spring.22 Located in Buenos Aires, capital of the country that, along with Mexico, has the most developed publishing industry in Latin America, it is the first large literary festival of Argentina.23 This, combined with the fact that 22

23

The Filba Internacional is a festival funded mainly by the FILBA not-for-profit foundation, Eterna Cadencia, the MALBA museum and Mecenazgo Cultural of Buenos Aires (a public funding programme of the Ministry of Culture). At a later date, NH Hoteles, Escoriehuela Gascón, Petrobras, various embassies, the Centro Cultura de España and different publishers (Alfaguara, Literatura Random House, Anagrama, Tusquets, Paidós, Adriana Hidalgo, Caja Negra) and universities also contributed. On its website, Pablo Braun (president of Filba, of the foundation of the same name and of the well-known publisher Eterna Cadencia) and Soledad Costantini, vice-president, explain: “the principal mission [of this festival is] to get closer to readers and creators, and to give the city of Buenos Aires the festival of literature that it needed”. See: https://filba .org.ar/filba-internacional. In 2012 the Filba Nacional was also inaugurated, which every

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the Argentinians, according to the 2018 report from CERLALC, spend the most money per person on books, means that the design of this festival and its success are unique in Latin America. Held annually its success has grown each year, reaching an attendance of 10,000 in 2018. In addition, in 2013 it began to hold a Filba festival in Santiago de Chile, and in 2014 in Montevideo, thus creating its own festival network—the first genuinely Latin American—in the Southern Cone, in order to foment literary debate in the region. What most defines Filba is its cosmopolitan, creative, technological24 and democratizing character in the presentation of figures (there are no headline guests) and in the concern for the reading education of children and young people in the city of Buenos Aires and in Greater Buenos Aires, through its programmes Filbita (“Little Filba”) and Filba Escuelas (Filba Schools). In all these instances, its programming asserts the values of a particular literary culture (Argentina/Latin America),25 through a decolonial outlook that is encapsulated by the dialogic invitation to Latin American countries (Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Bolivia) in six years of the event. However, it should be stated that in this map of literary relationships that Filba draws, Buenos Aires is its centre, as a locaglizing effect. It is no coincidence that countries such as Peru, Cuba or Venezuela have not yet been invited. Gabriela Adamo became the festival director for the 2015 event, a post she held until 2019, and in that period the model of having a guest country was abandoned in favour of dealing with specific problems in the global literary debate: the future, the body, violence and the fiesta. Another characteristic of Filba Internacional is, paradoxically, its lack of internationalization,26 which is made clear by an analysis of the nonArgentinian and non-Latin American guests appearing in its programmes between 2008 and 2020, as I will show further on. In reality, the festival is overwhelmingly centred on Buenos Aires (most of the writers are from there, as is the case in the Argentine literary field itself) and on the idea of literature by a cosmopolitan avant-garde that has traditionally defined the national culture

24 25 26

year has its location in a different provincial city (Bahía, Rosario, Santa Fe, Mar del Plata, Ciudad de Azul, La Cumbre, Bariloche, Santiago del Estero, etc.). See: https://filba.org.ar /filba-nacional/festival-nacional-rosario-2020_103/ediciones-anteriores. The new technologies have featured in 21 activities from 2008 to 2020. Many concern literature and digital, audiovisual and hypermedia tools, technological narratives, technical development in the publishing industry, and so on. This does not mean that the culture of the book has been abandoned, as there were even book fairs in 2010; in 2013, it was dedicated to alternative cultural magazines, and in 2017 the festival’s own book fair was unveiled. Although we can find names such as Valerie Miles, Marta Sanz, Edmundo Paz Soldán and J.M. Coetzee on its international committee.

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of Argentina. It is therefore constituted as an “imagined field”—playing with Benedict Anderson’s formula—which is, at the same time, radically contemporary in its heterogeneous, expanded idea of the literary (which is mixed with cinema, performance, music, painting, et cetera). In fact, the inaugural event—which is very much a declaration of intent, that is, of ideological intervention—was named “Circuitos” [“Circuits”] and shone the spotlight on literature as artistic fact that goes beyond the book and writing. This conception then evolved into an essential trait of this festival, as is expressed in its 2008 programme: “Filba came into being to map these multiple shifts of the word, to examine its new maps and its metamorphoses, one of which is the return of the poetic word to its original place: orality and the stage”. Thus, that first event focused on the “shifts, decentrings, migrations, changes and transformations that literature is currently undergoing, through an intense passage through the circuits of expression that are being endlessly reinvented”.27 A panel was also organized on the importance of literary festivals as modes of representation since the end of the 20th century. This somehow functions as a self-legitimizing discourse, projecting an image of a (self-)critical space that differentiates it from other Latin American and Spanish festivals. We therefore find ourselves with a performative community of letters, which gives centre stage to certain tropes of memory (to the detriment of others) and national, aesthetic and political symbols. In this way, the themes that have been repeated the most in those sections that have remained unchanged (Tinta active [“Active Ink”], En primera persona [“In first person”], Lado B [“Side B”], Talleres [“Workshops”], Filba barrio [“Filba neighbourhood”], Filba noche [“Filba night”]) since the festival began, are, in this order: i) the connection between literature and the urban space of Buenos Aires;28 ii) the use of the crónica, which has a distinguished tradition in Argentina, from Arlt and Walsh to María Moreno; iii) the subjective turn; iv) the theme of the body and illness; v) the concept of literature as resistance/salvation; vi) and the presence on three occasions (two in 2016 and one in 2018) of activities related to the group Oulipo, which gives further weight to the avant-garde literature in the Argentine field. Even the very posters of Filba have a design that recreates the linear shapes and primary colours of avant-garde art: 27

I should explain that, in the case of Filba Internacional, it is not a question of a mere juxtaposition of literature with other arts, as occurs with other festivals (Sapiro 2016a, 14), but of a truly transmedia dialogue. 28 Performances are held in the city and activities are moved to bars and bookshops, where literature mixes with song or food (as in 2013 and 2014). There is also a poetry workshop in the metro (2016), an activity for recovering reading in public spaces (2017), or a random tour of Buenos Aires, taking a poem as a map and starting point (2019).

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Figure 11.2 Front page of the Filba Internacional of Buenos Aires 2014 programme

This politics of literature that Filba promotes is shaped for a public of fans and professionals of letters—people with a high level of education and from the middle class,29 since a certain amount of cultural capital is needed to participate in the many activities of critical reflection that are organized. Nevertheless, it should be highlighted that there are no reserved tickets to the festival, and entry is either free or one donates a book to a library to gain access.

29

There are no specific studies, to date, on the Filba Internacional audience, but by the type of programme, the press coverage and the interviews that I have done with some attendees, this seems to be the profile.

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From Literature to Literary Culture. The Study of Festivals from Literary Criticism of Value

Since postmodernism, we have observed an increasing epistemic flattening of theoretical and critical notions that act in discourses as an empty or a-conceptual signifier.30 This is what has occurred with the idea of literary culture, which today needs to be (re)defined using its new aesthetic, social and material uses. For this, we need to go back to the Raymond Williams of Culture and Society (1958), in which he describes the culture of literature not only as an intellectual body or imaginative work but as a way of life (in Milner 1996, 15). More recently Hernán Vanoli defines it as a “complex web of social practices” that are organized “like a sect”: “Literary culture is a system replete with emotions, beliefs, profane rites and also myths and priests. A network of sociability constructed around the written word and diverse performances, which always had an ambivalent relationship with the cultural industry” (Vanoli 2019, 13–14). I essentially agree with Vanoli, although I would like to make a series of clarifications and specify the outlines of this definition a little further. Firstly, I consider that literary culture is not, strictly speaking, so much a system—if not it would be the same as speaking of literary field—but the (exasperated) social expansion of the literary into the public sphere, beyond the book object: festivals, fairs, workshops, talks, congresses, et cetera. Secondly, more than organizing itself in—or being organized by—a sect, it is produced and consumed by lettered communities that makes up an elite (Brouillette 2017), since belonging to the “reading class” means having time to read and/or write, something that most of the world’s inhabitants cannot even imagine. Thirdly, another characteristic of literary culture is its not-being in the Great Aesthetic31 but its being in common, public or social: when we talk of literary culture, in reality we are referring to literary public culture, understanding public culture to be a space for dissent, for the “appearance” of political commonality (Arendt 1993). As Ruffel explains, current artistic production “massively invests in public spaces”, in which literature plays a “determining role”, even though its elitist, individual and silent nature has been extolled more frequently in comparison to its spatial, public and oral nature, which has always existed 30

31

I say this using Kurz’s meaning when he notes the huge deconceptualization of the human and social, which tend to be merely descriptive and reject grand theories (2014, 41). Nonetheless, neither should we forget that every concept is “a chaotic state par excellence; it refers back to a chaos rendered consistent, become Thought, mental chaosmos.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 208). That aesthetic that is also a reflection of bourgeois ideology, as Terry Eagleton noted. For a definition of aesthetic see Bennett 2010, 261.

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(2015, 1–3). However, since globalizing postmodernism, the literary increasingly commits to and exhibits itself in these public spaces, through readings, debates and performances. Although some say that this is not literature, there is a publication—a making public—of literary creation outside of publishing and the book, which succeeds in postponing its execution to seek a new public and to attain survival. In other words, it explores new imaginaries—or ideas of literature—in its becoming literary public culture. The last characteristic that I would like to highlight is its material being, as an object or as space, since when we speak of literary culture, we also refer to the material culture of literature, to the modes of production and intermediation that do not only generate literary value. All these features are hitched to a “pluralized concept of publication” that transcends author copyright and the sale of books, to propose other economies of the literary based on social communication: If these transformations have anything in common, it is passing from a representation, and therefore from an imaginary of the literary centred on an object-medium—the book—to an imaginary of the literary centred on an action and a practice: publication. To publish regains its original meaning: to make public, to pass from private expression with valuable interlocutors to expression for an ever more diverse public. The publication of literature, historically, was not limited to books. Literature’s public is not limited to readers. There are as many literatures as there are possibilities of publication: books, performances, readings, salons, groups, virtual spaces. Each of these forms of literature creates a specific public space. Ruffel 2015, 9

Therefore, literary (public) culture could be defined as the socialized experience of the material performance of the literary, which has been in the process of replacing literature, understood as the symbolic experience of reading alone.32 This is due to the collectivizing turn that has been taking place since the end of the 20th century, which has brought about the return of the original 32 There is less and less time for silence and intimacy, and this has an impact on the low predisposition to reading, which requires a lot of time and personal investment. At the same time, there is not backing of access to classrooms or of an education that teaches people the values of the literary and other aesthetic experiences. This means that literary reading is constantly waning (as there are ever fewer bookshops, although there are more and more publishers), and that only the elite practice it, or university students in their classrooms. In contrast, the consumption of literary culture is ever higher.

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social matrix of reading and the assertion of literature as a public or common good, shared through networks of sociability that transcend the lettered city, as Ángel Rama conceived it. We now find a myriad of lettered communities (Gallego Cuiñas 2022),33 inside and outside the city, integrated in local, communal and often resistant identities. Against the hegemonic, modernizing writing at the service of the colonial and institutional power, typical of the urban literati that Rama described, the lettered community is heterogeneous and formed in dissent, not in consensus, and is made public in non-state and non-institutional spaces. With these considerations, I will analyse the current literary culture in Latin America through the example of its festivals, which entails thinking about the way in which Latin American literature is produced socially, as a public cultural category and as a material product. I therefore propose that Hispanist literary criticism examine new objects, beyond the book, and that it consider reflecting on the modes of reading of these types of phenomena in the modern day. Most of the studies one can find, in English or French, on the object literary festival have a sociological entry point, with data extracted from surveys and/or interviews (structured or semi-structured) of organizers and attendees (Sapiro 2016a, Weber 2018) or through participant observation. It is striking that the literary festival is not considered “for its contribution to cultural democratization, cultural diversity or democratic debate more than for its role in the process of recognition and of legitimization of works and creators” (Sapiro 2016b, 122). It should not be forgotten that in recent years it has undoubtedly fulfilled a legitimizing function of symbolic and economic recognition, to the benefit of writers and publishers. If we review what are called festival studies, we notice that, at first, above all in the 1990s, they had a negative or terrible assessment of this phenomenon, in the school of thought of Adorno and Horkheimer, such as Lurie (2004) and Meehan (2005).34 It was not until the start of the 21st century that a more positive or integrated reading emerged, via Benjaminian theory, for which the art 33

34

In my opinion, there has been a slide in Latin American literary (counter)culture of the 21st century from the lettered city of the 1980s, as Ángel Rama understood it, to the lettered community—a plural and reduced space—where what is privileged is the articulation of subjectivities and (de-)works that are planned in common in different places of sociability of literary culture. What remains in both groups is the “aesthetic disposition”, as Bourdieu (2002) would say. This sector maintains that festivals do not attract “true” lovers of literature (Weber 2018, 136)—that is, committed readers. This interpretation is very similar to Finkel’s on art festivals and the “McFestivalization” process that they have undergone due to the “cultural framework” policies of the cities that hold them (in Sassatelli 2011, 20).

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of masses can produce estrangement and rupture. In this area, we can include Millicent Weber (2018), author of the first monograph devoted to the topic of literary festivals in the English-speaking world. Broadly speaking, the predominant approaches have been those concerning the historiography of the book, transmedia and performatics, the experience of the public, the celebrity of the author, the development of cultural policies, et cetera. These analyses are not exempt from a theoretical framework of thought, but, of course, none of them proposes a literary-based epistemology, a toolbox that starts with concepts of criticism or theory to interpret the event of the festival as literary form. For what is the programming of a festival if not a form given to a set of activities? Those who come closest to this are Stewart (2010), Giorgi (2011), and Johanson and Freeman (2012), but again from cultural theory or the sociology of culture. However, the method I propose here sets forth from a notion of festival programming not only as praxis but as theory—as the crystallization of a politics of literature, that reinforces the social practice to which literary culture accedes. Or, what amounts to the same, it is the collective dimension of literary experience or the sociability of literature in two senses: as maker of lettered communities and as performatic power in its dialogue with other artistic forms. Furthermore, the festival produces and puts symbolic and economic values into circulation through a literary supply that functions as a legitimizing discourse of an ideology of literature. If, as Guillory stated, “the selection of texts is the selection of values” (1993, 23), the selection of activities and authors in a festival is also a selection or chain of values, a dynamic of powers represented in the textuality35 of the programmes of festivals. And if we do a close reading36 of these, in the last decade we see that four symbolic and material policies stand out, which can be identified as procedures of valuation of current Latin American literature: 1) (self-)legitimizing politics of lite­ rary culture and its socializing experience; 2) bibliodiverse,37 egalitarian and inclusive politics; 3) performative politics of the literary in relation to other arts; and 4) politics of spectacularizing the image of the writer. These signifiers 35

All textuality is formed of intertextual relations (with other festivals and agents of the field), which is why comparative analysis is an ideal formula for elucidating not only common or divergent characteristics, but standards of value, since this is a text with agency. 36 This is not so much about carrying out a hermeneutic analysis as a close and strategic reading of the festival programme as signifying text for the (re)production of aesthetic, political, social, and ethnic (etc.) values, as symptoms of the politics that operate in a literary field and/or the global market. 37 This is a question that tends to leave aside most (sociological) studies on festivals, and— from a literary point of view—it is fundamental to see what genres and subgenres are made more visible.

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have a twofold impact, both commercial and rhetorical, that gives rise to certain imaginaries or discursive meanings, which are mediated by devices such as the festival, but which are also socially constructed by the literary communities that participate in them. 3

Politics and Values of Literary Festivals

The aim of this section is to analyse, both up close and from afar, the different regimes of literary value38 that festivals (re)produce. I clarify that the values that I have chosen are the result of the close reading, or interpretation (Frow 2010), of the programmes of two of the most important festivals in Latin America: Hay Cartagena and Filba Internacional. I should also make clear that my approach is materialist (Adorno, Horkheimer, Williams, Goux, Thorsby, Guillory, Herrnstein Smith), as I believe that value is produced—and historically and socially negotiated—by the literary field, market agents and institutions. This means, first, that value is radically contingent and, second, that the value of cultural products, as Valéry has already shown, is essentially economic by virtue of the law of supply and demand. The community produces and puts into circulation certain values and not others, hence Damrosch (2003) defines world literature from that paradigm, which is the same as saying, from globalization, because today more acclaim is garnered from the global market than from the national field. Thus the binarisms (high culture/mass culture; evasion/subversion; centre/periphery; value of use/value of change) are shown to be futile, and the values that the festivals promote are the fruit of a particular distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2012)—or “structure of feeling”, as Raymond Williams called it—which has temporal and geopolitical variations, as we shall see. It goes without saying that the hierarchies of value that concern aesthetics, as Baudrillard (1997) has already stated, have been dissolved by literature’s loss of hegemony in the culture of the spectacle, in favour of the triumph of the audiovisual image, along with the relativism or crisis of the sole standard

38

The expression “regime of value” is from Appadurai, although the notion of value (utility, price and worth) that I use refers both to the economic and the cultural, as I have already mentioned. One should remember here that Throsby distinguishes six types of cultural value: aesthetic, spiritual, social, historical, symbolic and of authenticity (2001, 43–44). We should also be aware that “regimes of value are mechanisms that permit the construction and regulation of value-equivalence, and indeed permit cross-cultural mediation” (Frow 1995, 144).

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of valuation (Grossberg 2012).39 But this does not mean that what Adorno called the “aesthetic productive forces” (2009) have completely disappeared, either from the literary work or its instances of mediation. Literary festivals, as gatekeepers, are generators of standards, of a chain of dissimilar values. I use this concept in allusion to Roland Barthes’ “chain of texts”, in order to show that the valuation system has also expanded in the following values: political (it has use value for governments and businesses), ideological (for the literary field/market), social (it provides a network of sociability with peers and other gatekeepers), symbolic (it is authentic and situational), aesthetic (of reading and writing), and material (techniques of translation, publishing, et cetera). All these are given form in terms of aesthetic and commercial legitimacy in each festival’s programme, through different symbolic classification categories of genres, writers, artistic works, and so on. Which leads us to ask: what values stand out more in one festival than another? What position does each one take in the literary festival market? We should not forget that these festivals, as agents of valuation, are competi­ tive, like the fairs, and “provide a venue for the (re)enactment of institutional arrangements in a particular industry’s field and for the negotiation and affirmation of the different values that underpin them” (Moeran and Satrandgaard 2012, 10). Appadurai called them “tournaments of value” (1986, 27), because they also crystallize modes of organizing/negotiating/regulating the field and the market of literature. In effect, as Simmel reminds us, values are not intrinsic to objects, but respond to a particular evaluation or value judgement, which is exercised from inside the literary system. Thus, the activities that Hay Cartagena and Filba Internacional present make a politics of literature (Ranciére 2009), whose values I will analyse along four main axes: 3.1 Politics of Self-Legitimization of Literary Culture Foremost in the Latin American festivals is the persistence of a symptom: the festival is a space for public reflection on the question of literature. This rhetorical and recursive clause opens two well-known questions, which reappear in the critical foreground in these contexts: what is literature—whose performativity does not expect a closed answer—and which is the issue—question or problem—of literature today (Beaumont-Bissell 2002). What these questions discuss in reality is the idea of the value-truth of the literary object in the present. Thus, from the political point of view, the festival acts as a catalyst of the 39

Although valuation has always been a problem of the literary discipline: “Moreover, literature’s disciplinary focus has typically fallen not so much on how to write valued writing as on how to value it” (Milner 1996, 6).

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social value of literature and the notable place it occupies—the large public attendance is the proof—in public culture (Sapiro 2016a, 13). Paradoxically, however, the lettered community does not stop asking itself about the nature of its object, about its problems and perennial crises—that is, about the ways in which the writing of the moment is situated in the interior or exterior of the literary, depending on whether it is appreciated by the market (academic or publishing). In this way, the literary festival also acts as a legitimizing agent and mediator of the use value of the literary product. For example, at Filba Internacional 2017 and 2018, they held debates both on reading and art as lifesavers. At Hay Cartagena, they debated the relevance of the commentary of books (2011) or the novel as artefact (2012). No less symptomatic is the consideration of the phenomenon of the literary festival, which, for a specific sector, as I have already mentioned, is a negative effect of neoliberal globalization and delves into the crisis or destruction of literature (Lurie 2004). But for others (Ommundsen 2009; Weber 2018) it is a positive sign of the intensification of the literary experience. This polarization means that the festival is revealed as a symbol of the tension between literature (an activity tied to social privilege) and market, between the figure of the independent creator (autonomous, disinterested) and the successful creative (commercial, self-interested). Thus, in these spaces the dichotomy is dissolved through the performativity of the autonomy of the literary, which, paradoxically, is carried out from the commercial side (Weber 2018, 156). In short, the main value of literary festivals is in the rhetorical promotion of the value of literature. The literary festival also has a specificity with regard to other arts festivals: it “somehow aspires to make the moment of creation and the moment of consumption coincide in time and space, thus changing the fundamental dynamics of the experience” (Ommundsen 2009, 21). Strictly speaking, it alters previous experience (individual, solitary, reflexive in the processes of writing and reading), making it public and communal, in Nancy’s meaning of the idea of community (2000). For the festivals are defined by the re-entry of literature into society, for the communitization of the symbolic and material experience40 of the literary as a kind of “residual sociolect” (Brouillette 2017, 284). In these spaces, an intellectual atmosphere is recreated that gives rise to the continuous and self-legitimizing (re)view of contemporary meanings and the future possibilities of literature, under the premise and acceptance of its social functionality. Paradoxically, both in festivals and fairs, there is a return 40

I speak of experience as “pure activity, in that its undertaking does not depend on a final product, but above all on the presence of others” (Virno 2017, 15).

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of the sublime, of the utopia of an autonomous literary world sustained by the lettered community of the 21st century, whose sociability is founded on the production and consumption of literary culture. Therefore, it is ultimately a question of keeping alive this faith or credit in literature being a thing in itself, a language that is celebrated in common. This is not to gain more readers but to generate more lettered communities, made up of polyvalent figures who are reader-writers (or wreaders)—in other words, who are simultaneously producers, consumers and even mediators of literature.41 In these cases, Intellect (theory), Labour (poiesis or production) and the Action (political praxis) (Virno 2017, 104) become intertwined for the sake of a collective project (e.g., Belleza y Felicidad, Eloísa Cartonera, Estación Pringles, Papel Caliente, etc.). In other words, they are “committed”42 to a cosmopolitan idea of literature that is the one the festivals reproduce, but on a grand scale. Every festival, as part of a public literary culture, therefore implicitly conveys an interpretation of the aesthetic and political experience of the festival as artefact, although it is not made evident most of the time. This is exemplified by initiatives such as Corriente alterna (2018), which is an anthology of ten stories that could be downloaded for free from the Filba website (participating authors included Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Mariana Enríquez, Iosi Havilio, Pedro Mairal and Eduardo Sacheri). Their stories tied writing to the streets, and personal memory to politics. These central themes connect with the critical and theoretical reflection that Filba makes in its programme on the status of the literary, which is presented tied to the rhetoric of the avant-garde, autonomy, hybridity, cosmopolitanism and the urban. The Argentinian lettered community, comprising a set of people who read using similar procedures and strategies in a shared space and time, give a privileged place to translation (2012), the tension between literature and life (2014), the new Argentine literature (2015), violence (2017) as a founding myth of the “Argentine body” (2016) or the crónica as an essential genre and the city as a place of experimentation of the literary. Hay Cartagena also organizes metadiscursive activities about the nature and acts of the festival itself, such as the conversations held with its director, Peter Florence, or the commemorative book of the festival’s 10th anniversary: 41 42

Above all in the Southern Cone, where literary sociability is greater than in other areas of Latin America. I use this term less in a Sartrean sense that in a biopolitical one, as a “form of life” connected with the pristine values of the literary tradition (the experience of reading the classics) and with its ritualization in spaces alternative to text (fairs, festivals, readings, conferences) that (pre)suppose a resistant critical consciousness.

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Diez años. Conversaciones Hay Festival de Indias 2006–2015 [Ten Years: Hay Festival de Indias Conversations 2006–2015], which compiled the best conversations with illustrations by Mordzinski. It was not free, but was placed on sale in bookshops, published by Penguin Random House, Hay Festival and Publicaciones AECID. Lastly, it must be stated that the book is simultaneously an object and a concept. In literary festivals, this is shown through the inclusion of activities related to the professionalization of writing and publishing—that is, the book industry. According to Weber, this concerns the fact that the festival is designed to advance creative careers and attract professionals from the sector (2018, 164). In almost all the editions of the Filba festival, there have been creative writing and publishing workshops (2010 and 2019—in the latter year, the section called “La fábrica” [“The factory”] was created, where they gave workshops on artisan publishing, self-publishing, bookbinding and fanzine). There have also been panels on cultural industry (2010) and the technological impact on the publishing industry (2011, the “Industria en foco” [“Industry in focus”] section). At Hay Cartagena, meanwhile, they gave workshops on publishing in 2010 and 2011, on handling historical figures (2013), on creative writing (2011, 2014, 2016 and 2020) and on memes in 2019. That same year saw the first Encuentro de Talento Editorial [Congress of Publishing Talent], lasting for two days, with the participation of publishers and cultural managers, and showing young publishing projects from Latin America and Spain. Moreover, independent publishing has been an important strand in the Hay Cartagena ideology, always paying attention to the most recent cultural phenomena, as shown by the Bogotá39-2017 list. 3.2 Politics of Bibliodiversity, Equality and Inclusion The 21st century commenced at the end of the 20th by welcoming the socalled metamodernity (Vermeulen and Van Den Akker 2010), which coexists with postmodernity and even with the remains of modernity. At the turn of the century, the return of a romanticism started to emerge, political and utopian in style, and was intensified in the second decade of the new millennium, both in literary texts and in literary culture events. The climate disaster, financial crises, the drama of refugees, the increase in poverty and inequality, animal and plant exploitation, the latest pandemic threat and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, have led to cynicism, relativity, and postmodern suspicions being left behind for the sake of political (micro-)activism. We only need to consider the “small revolutionary acts” (Oliveras 2019, 33) of the last decade, such as the “mareas verdes argentinas” (“Argentina’s green waves”), the Arab Spring or the 15-M Movement, among other collective projects. We can also

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find proposals in the cultural field that seek to function again as a “laboratory of social utopias” (Vanoli 2019, 10), in the same way as fifty years ago: the actions of the British collective Assemble; the Argentine publishing project of Eloísa Cartonera; the reading programmes on public transport and community libraries in Bogotá, Santiago de Chile and Sao Paulo; the art installations on refugees by Olafur Eliasson; the phenomenon of Banksy; the Fundación de los Comunes [Commons Foundation] in Spain, et cetera. All these assert a kind of being-in-the-present as an answer to the “state of emergency”, to use Boris Groys’ expression, that we are faced with. This does not mean that the postmodern literary statements associated with irony, eclecticism and looking to the past have disappeared; neither have the modern statements associated with the future and with the epitome of the avant-garde. Rather, it means that they range from one pole to the other in a logic or dialectic temporality that reveals the high degree of entropy and recursivity of current literature and lite­ rary culture. This return to the romantic category of the authentic is captured in the recovery of oral literary practice, which gives the illusion of the putting on stage, or performance, of a premodern culture that also connects with the rituals that tend to be repeated at festivals: “This ‘ritual of authentication’ takes literature back to a pre-industrial era where the writer might be a comfortingly familiar, physical presence whose oral performance of the work certified it as their own creation” (Murray and Weber 2017, 68). Every festival is an oral event in itself, promoting public readings of works out loud—even the so-called Talk Fiction (Kacandes 2001)—and in social spaces, just as is observed in Filba, where orality permeates the whole festival in every year. To be explicit, as a percentage orality ranges between 25% and 30% of programmed activities, although in the last three years it has increased to 40%.43 For Hay Cartagena, the writer, like in the Greek tradition, acts as a professional reader before an amphitheatre (this is why the festivals tend to be outside in spring or summer). As Chartier (1992) stated, reading is not only in the individual reading of the text. The premodern practice of public reading is a form of vindication of lite­ rature as a social experience, as it is expressed in different activities such as the Hay Festival Reading Club (delivered by a famous writer), dramatized readings in various years, the reading of poems of migration and from the Arab world (2016), or the activity, “El gozo de leer” [“The joy of reading”] (2017), where various authors read excerpts from One Hundred Years of Solitude. In total, oral

43

From 2015, when Gabriela Adamo became director, it increases more and more until reaching 45% in 2017, and then lowers to 33% and 34% in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

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reading counts for between 2% and 7% of all activities programmed at Hay Cartagena, which is far less than at Filba. Another use value for attendees of the literary festival is the sociability. I understand this notion via the parameters of Simmel (2015) and through what Beech calls a “collective use value” (2017, 355) of the festival experience. Processes of socialization emerge in those spaces that influence the creation of new professional contacts, but also the making of imaginaries of the literary. Writers, critics, intermediaries and attendees share a social biosphere, a common atmosphere that becomes its own critical space, crossed through with multiple discursive and emotional experiences. For the public does not only consume culture; they also actively participate in it. They are integrated as another actor in this literary event. The festival even strengthens the participant’s identification with the city where it is held, for the sake of a cultural citizenship. By way of example, there are the readings and image projections of cities of writers that are tied to their way of narrating in the 2018 Filba Internacional festival. And there was a reading in which authors invited others to their personal tours of the city in the 2020 festival. This last activity also took place at Hay Cartagena, although on few occasions: in “Berlineses” (2010), where three authors spoke about the city of Berlin, “Una mirada a las grandes ciudades” [“A look at the big cities”] (2015), in a round table discussion of three Colombian authors who live in the US, or in “Literatura de la ciudad” [“Literature of the city”] (2020), on Medellín and Barcelona. The festivals also have a clear impact on literary ecology. Regarding the politics of bibliodiversity and inclusion, which ensure diversity in the ecosystem of the book, poetry is always present—although taking up barely 10% of the programmes44—due to Hay Cartagena’s desire to separate itself from mere marketing, and Filba’s interest in the extensive national poetic tradition. In this case, what are promoted the most are certain aesthetics and dissident genres (such as the graphic novel, the comic or the crónica), although, of course, when we focus on guest writers, the star genre is fiction. Nonetheless, 44 Poetry continues to be considered an elitist genre, which attracts a small audience and whose community defines itself against the market. However, the aim of literary festivals—which are not devoted to just one genre—is the democratization of literature and cultural diversity. Yet the proliferation of poetry festivals since the 1990s is a fact, and it is worth considering that poetry has been the literary genre that has best resolved “the tension with those hegemonic forms of the present-day capitalism of the spectacle, surviving them, in a renewed and radical way, changing, in relation to its own definition” (Molina 2015, 228). To put it another way: the performativity of the literary, paradoxically, is produced out of its most exclusive (and yet most elastic) formulation—poetry—which thus acts as a kind of social laboratory of fiction.

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Filba Internacional has devoted one of its “opening words” to poetry, in 2019 (by Fabián Casas), and since 2013 has organized the Slam Copa Filba of poetry, which it also conceives as an intermedial act. The workshops that have been most common during these years are: poetry (10 occasions), followed by translation (on 9 occasions), fiction (7 occasions), crónica (4 occasions), short story (3 occasions),45 comic (3 occasions), playwriting (2 occasions) and queer literature (1 occasion, in 2019). Moreover, in Filba Internacional the minor genres appear more because the tables are organized by theme and crossdisciplinary problems of the field. In the case of Hay Cartagena, the general programme has few workshops on genres (the odd one on dramatic writing, filmscripts or graphic fiction) and the most visible activities involve the novel and non-fiction. The latter is strongly linked to the journalism that stands out in the number of acts devoted to it each year, which relates to the strong Colombian tradition of literary journalism, incarnated by the figure of García Márquez. Poetry also has its own space every year, through the “Gala de poesía” [“Poetry Gala”]. However, the minor genres (including theatre and the short story) do not make up more than 10% in the programmes. Yet Hay Cartagena does promote—much more than Filba Internacional—politics of literary inclusion of other communities such as the indigenous community, with activities on Wayuu fiction, or the section called “Cosmovisiones indígenas” [“Indigenous world views”], and also from South Africa or Portugal, for example. In terms of politics of gender equality, one must take into account that the new material conditions of production of the literary object have resulted in the new visibility of women writers, since with more books being published, more women are also being published, along with more imprints emerging with feminist politics. In fact, feminism is an essential aspect of bibliodiversity, given that female writers have been sidelined and discriminated against in the history of literature, and they are indispensable, as with the rest of subjugated actors, for a balanced, rich and diverse ecosystem of the book. In the case of Filba Internacional, this translates into the giving of an opening talk by Catherine Millet on whether women exist (and the performativity of this category), although neither a specific theme nor specific tables have been dedicated to feminisms or dissident subjectivities. If we look at the total number of women writers invited, the average is 34%, although it should be pointed out that in 2008 only 20% of writers invited were women, since when the number 45

We see an increase in the presence of the short story at the debating tables in the most recent festivals, above all in its dialogue with other arts. The drama genre is the least visible, and statistically is in last place. Between 20% and 30% of the activities of the programmes published between 2008 and 2020 deal with minor genres.

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2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Hay Festival

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

Filba Internacional

Graph 11.1 Percentage of writers invited Source: own elaboration

has risen, reaching 51% in 2019 and 53% in 2020. The number of trans, transvestite and non-binary writers invited in 2008, 2013, 2016, 2017 and 2018 does not exceed 1% (only one participant), and only 2% (2 participants, one trans and one non-binary) in 2016, 2019 and 2020. Hay Cartagena, meanwhile, has, in the last three years, devoted specific tables to activism and feminism—in tandem with the movements of dissident subjectivities—although this does not translate into equality in the number of women writers invited, whose total average in the last 11 years barely exceeds 33% over the general whole, and the number of trans, transvestite or non-binary writers hardly reaches 1%. 3.3 Politics of the Performativity of the Literary In the last few decades, literature, which has always been inside and outside of itself, has dematerialized and expanded greatly beyond the book format, up to a paroxysmic point, as Roberto Esposito would say. According to Sapiro, this is a consequence of the application of the capitalist laws of the mass market, and the imperialism of desirability, to the space of high culture (2016a, 15), which has meant that literature is deliteraturizing and deindustrializing more and more. What does this mean? On the one hand, that literature generates desire in public spaces such as festivals through its interrelation with other cultural goods such as music, video-games, shorts, photographs, performances, et cetera, in order to attract a non-specialized, young public (Murray 2012), and thus to slough off its elitist tag.46 Looking at the Filba Internacional activities, 46

The festivals have over time been more oriented toward a young audience, and they have done so by incorporating other arts, particularly music.

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Figure 11.3 Word cloud of the most present artistic terms in Hay Cartagena and Filba Internacional Source: own elaboration

music appears in all the editions (on 38 occasions) and in 2021 even has its own section: “Concordancias: música y literatura” [“Harmonies: music and li­terature”]. It is intertwined with poetry readings, fiction, literary songs, dance, projections, rap, and visual art. Additionally, there is cinema (with 18 activities that run from the screening of films and documentaries on writers or publishers, such as Yerba Mala Cartonera, to cinematographic narratives or workshops on screenplays or audiovisual language); drawing and the graphic image (with 8 activities in this period, strongly tied to the graphic novel and illustrated li­terature); dance (with 6 activities, mixed with beatbox and poetry); pictorial art (with 4 activities located in the museum, particularly in the MALBA); and, lastly, photography and video (both with 4 activities, in which poetic performance stands out). Of the total of programmes, they make up between 12% and 23%. If we analyse the same category in the Hay Cartagena festival, we can see that music is equally present in every year, through many acts, followed by film. The explicit overlapping of literature with other arts only takes up between 5% and 10% of programming, and photography, painting, and dance are mainly mixed with poetry or story. What is especially striking is that performance as such has only appeared in two activities from the 11 years: completely the opposite to Filba Internacional. This de-definition is also a symptom of the extraordinary performativity47 of the literary, which does not lessen the impact of current literature on the critical level. Quite to the contrary, it presents it as a form of thought as well as a form of sociability. The festivals thus project the idea of a live, living, expanded literature confronting the—academic—proclamation of its death at the end of the 20th century (2016a, 15), as proof of its power and capacity to adapt to history. This dialogic and dialectic capacity to transform into new materialities only reinforces the ontological vitality of literature and demonstrates that the problem is rather of an epistemic or academic nature. Better still, it shows that one of the biggest questions of literature in the 21st century is still its political and even literary use value (or lack of), which is 47 Here I follow the theory of performativity of Judith Butler, Michel Callon and Jeffrey Alexander, focused on the mode in which social (and literary, in our case) actions/performances are (re)produced and transformed.

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exactly what the festivals assert and strengthen. These spaces act as a field of validity for the politics of literature that it has most interest in promoting and that fits to the most visible or fashionable critical uses: gender studies; stu­dies of immigration, violence and human rights; ecocriticism, intersectionality; bilingualism, languages and cultures in contact and translation; the making of books and material culture; and, of course, literary and comparative analysis. For example, in Filba Internacional, classes and open seminars are given on Barthes and his translations (Beatriz Sarlo in 2014); social networks and copyright (Daniel Molina in 2015); universal history of imposture (Luis Chitarroni, 2016), et cetera. Regarding Hay Cartagena, there are fewer activities aimed at the thought/evaluation of the literary field, although there is a section devoted to “Literature”, where they include critical debates on the state of commercial genres such as the gothic (2010), noir (2012), the graphic novel and non-fiction (2013), zombie literature, the uses of memory, and Granta magazine (2014), the historical novel and literature written by women (2015), travel literature (2016), the family novel (2017), et cetera. In this way, the contingent nature of the literary becomes clear. Of course, when I use the concept of contingency—which is a metaphor—I do so via the classic studies of Hegel and Schelling, and above all I refer to the valuable three-way conversation between Butler, Laclau and Zizek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000) and the recent Recursivity and Contingency (2019) by Yuk Hui. These affirm that contingency is beyond the mere possibi­ lity or probability as necessary movement for the creativity and productivity of the artistic act, since the unexpected always forms a part of the expectations that arise inside a system. If the contingency of the accident was a condition for the possible transformation, for the emergence of the “new” in the historical avant-garde, in the 21st century contingency has become a mode of production, in raw material and a consubstantial part of the work of the writer and the critic: “The artist is not someone who produces a work of taste, but rather someone who is capable of and responsible for creating a circuit that allows a transindividuation between the I and the we through the sensible exteriorized in the form of an artwork” (Yuki 2019, 103). This means that the literary, as a historical and contingent notion, is as much as it is not. And I am not referring to the epistemic problem of literature as a category of knowledge, but to its ontological expansion, as literary festivals demonstrate, and to the need for criticism also to expand, outside itself, like its object. The performativity of literature had not been explored as much as music or art until the massive arrival of these festivals, which are characterized precisely by their transdisciplinarity. They establish correspondences between the literary work and other artistic and political practices, in both senses, because

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there is also a reliteraturization drive, which shows the importance that the Saussurean relational value takes on in the global market of literature. Contrary to the postmodern idea of an opposition between performance and narrative text, Breger (2012) maintains that in the last decade both take place in analogy due to a mutation; the narrative turn of the arts and to the performatic turn of literature beyond the book format. All narrative is a performance and vice versa, hence to talk of narrative performances is now established, in general, with different aesthetic configurations, depending on the field of study they are read from, according to the reader’s interests. This is, in my opinion, what certain literary festivals have shown since the 1990s, as Filba Internacional did later: another new crisis of representation that results, on the one hand, in critical thought on the limits of the boundaries of art and of political subjectivities— that is, in a post-representational notion of culture. And on the other hand, it has brought about the (re)production of making(oneself ) present, in the act of presentation, just as writers in the literary field whom we could call performatic have been doing: César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Mike Wilson, Dani Umpi, Rita Indiana and Ariana Harwicz, among others. These poetics and figures are defined by their theatricality, elasticity and being-in-the-present, in other words, by theatrical narration through the self-fictional format or through the incorporation of other materials such as photographs or images. This is an archive of fictions that work with an ideology of the literary as festival, in various senses: as party or carnival, as public culture, as expanded literature and as “aesthetic bastards”, in the words of José Amícola (2012). So the question then arises: what came first, the literary festival or literature as festival? The only thing that is clear is that both are made sayable and visible in the framework of the spectacle of literary public culture that the global market promotes. 3.4 Politics of the Spectacularization of the Writer The first reason the surveys give for why the public attend a literary festival is the “live”, “human” encounter with the writer. We live in a society marked by the cult of celebrity and of life (Marshall 1987; Glass 2004), which is why the figure of the writer and their biographical space occupy a central place in the production, circulation and consumption of literary culture. The writer has gone from being the producer of the literary object to the production or pro­ duct of self, based on a process of spectacularization and commercialization of the public image that is increasingly demanded by the market. The practice of this self-exhibitory exercise shows the survival of the aura, shifted from the book to the author. Today this symbolizes the “here and now” of the work of art—bourgeois—produced at a particular time and space, as Benjamin wrote (2010), guarantee of the originality of the creative labour and judged, in a

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neoromantic impulse, as a kind of tragic genius (Weiberg 1993) bearing the aesthetic and political transcendence of Art. Thus, the writer becomes fetish and creates a myth of self, a biographical story that confers literary identity as anti-/epic expression of an authentic creator, whose media paradigm is Jorge Luis Borges, the most fetishized Latin American writer of the age. Why do I say this? Because Borges embodies, on the one hand, the fetish of genius, holder of one of the greatest values in academia and the literature market: the value of influence. But, on the other hand, he also embodies the fetish of the writercommodity that aestheticizes his life and is spectacularized in the mass media (television programmes, prize juries, more conferences, interviews, et cetera), repeating deliberate biographemes (childhood, library, erudition, and so on) in order to make the intellectual discussion a mass spectacle. Thus the oral Borges is today one of the most viewed writers on YouTube, as incredible as that may sound. What is the public looking for in Borges in this medium? His performativity: the enacted reading of his poems, the brilliant answers in interviews, the spectacular myth. This is such that in 2018, Filba Internacional organized the handover of the (not awarded) Nobel Prize for Literature to Borges, in the very year that the Swedish Academy cancelled the awarding of the prize due to scandals and complaints. With an autonomous gesture of self-legitimizing power, Filba Internacional created its own International Jury to posthumously award Borges the prize that had been refused by the hegemonic centre of re­cognition, turning it into a parodic and provocative spectacle. For Hay Cartagena, the fetish writer who signifies the celebration of literature in Cartagena de Indias and possessed the value of influence is, undoub­ tedly, García Márquez. The image of Gabo appears large on the 2013 poster and his figure and work in an illustrious group of tributes and activities (in comic, portraits or on the representation of Colombia in his texts, unknown anecdotes of his life or his conflict with Vargas Llosa) in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019. They even invited the winners of the Premio Hispanoamericano de Cuento Gabriel García Márquez [Gabriel García Márquez Latin American Short Story Prize] in 2018, and in 2019 the opening lecture of the festival became called “García Márquez”. In the current age the spectacle has become a kind of meta-value or value of values, a consequence of the post-Fordist historical situation in which the conditions of production changed and the subjectivities were transformed according to three specific values: communicative ability, mutability, extimacy. Debord was therefore wrong when he said: “The spectacle does not sing of men and their arms, but of commodities and their passions” (1999, 66), because although the spectacle is the sign that best symbolizes the fetishism of commodities, the best commodity in the 21st century is ‘man’: his subjectivity. It is

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the great theme, and problem, of literature, and has been ever since Ulysses left Ithaca; except that now, in an era when “the product is inseparable from the act of production”, the act invokes the person who carries it out (Virno 2017, 113) in order to sell the spectacle of his performatic being, his wisdom and his capacity for improvisation. In light of the above, I can state that festivals are the artefact that best encapsulates the dominion of celebrity and the spectacle as cultural ideology in the literary market. This statement justifies the valuative relativism that the market has imposed on the literary text in favour of a unanimous valuation of the author as commodity, because the aesthetic value is replaced by the social value. But what is consumed when it is a writer being consumed? Aira gives us the answer: “literature, conscious of its futility, knows that its only chance of surviving is to produce pleasure and admiration” (2017, 55). Thus, festivals organize themselves around the idea of the “aesthetics of the signature” (English and Frow 2006) and the “live work” (Kurz 2016) of the writer as value of exchange incarnated in his bodily and discursive performance that the spectator identifies with, moved by “admiration” of the value-truth of literary creation. The “abstract work”—or dead work, as Kurz (2016) says—of energy expenditure that the writer undertakes in literary work barely generates economic value or capital gain, because the time of writing is not regulated in the labour market.48 In contrast, the story the writer constructs about himself as a character is consumed at the same level—or more—as the book, because it is carried out live and because his speech reveals the value-truth of his poetics, even though it is another fiction. Therefore, the notion of literary celebrity or literary spectacle is fundamental to understanding festivals (Weber 2018, 23). Evidently, these spaces fetishize the author and live from its festivalization, but they also thrive off the image or public performance of the rest of the intermediaries (publishers, translators, agents), who were previously made invisible and who participate in fairs and festivals more and more. Because the consumers of literary culture, as I stated earlier, are also, ever increasingly, producers: writers, publishers, translators, et cetera. Both at Filba Internacional and Hay Cartagena, reflection on the practices of the trades of publishing and translation is frequent, by which these 48

On the one hand, it is true that literary work, as occurs in the rest of the arts and creative labour, is exceptional in economic terms (Beech 2017, 55), but only due to the difficulty of gauging the relationship between working time and value, which does not mean that it is on the margins of capitalist commerce but that it becomes a form of “exploitation of infowork” that is constantly expanding (Berardi 2007, 12).

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sectors gain in visibility and in control of the meaning of their practices. It is the same for the writers themselves, who trace, in their interventions, a framework of readability for their life and for their work, as well as economic, symbolic and social capital gain. If publishing means becoming public, the festivals not only contribute to recognition and legitimization, but to professionalization, since participation in certain festivals (such as Hay Cartagena), increases the chances of being invited to another festival: of being more public. If we pause to examine the study cases, we can observe that Hay Cartagena is highly ritualized and established on the image of the celebrity writer (who literally occupies a page of the programme in the section “headline writers”), as object of desire and generator of more desire. In this way, the capitalist ideology that Marxism has described ad nauseum operates: fetishization of the commodity and desirability. This is also notable in the space dedicated to the biography of participants, where their latest works, prizes, translations, and so on, are reviewed. However, as I mentioned above, the guests are not pure bestsellers but rather those acclaimed by academia (Coetzee, Rushdie, Junot Díaz, Vargas Llosa, Almudena Grandes), not only by the market, due to that urge to keep a distance from the commercial side of things. All the weight of the programme falls on the name of the renowned writer, above all international (since Hay Cartagena behaves as a global festival), and on their “latest book”, which is to say, on the most recent and on the conception of the festival as a circuit of professional promotion of the work. Another characteristic of Hay Cartagena is that it returns the role of the intellectual to the writer in the public socio-political debate, in order to occupy once more the place of ethical value and truth. The themes that repeat the most in this area are politics, science, economics, well-being, philosophy, football, gastronomy, human rights, feminism, et cetera. 40 30 20 10 0

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Hay Festival

2015

2016

2017

Filba Internacional

Graph 11.2 Percentage of international writers invited Source: own elaboration

2018

2019

2020

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Filba Internacional, in contrast, is not a space for encountering celebrities presenting their latest book, but of mostly Latin American and nationally re­cognized writers (Guillermo Martínez, Nona Fernández, Lola Arias, Oliverio Coelho, Mariana Enríquez, Washington Cucurto, Vera Giaconi, etc.), who are presented on the same hierarchical level, and who participate in local and global debates that currently affect the Latin American literary field/market. Filba Internacional, as a local festival, backs the value of the native, regional, literary space, as is shown by the number of writers invited from Latin America (above all from the Southern Cone) and from Argentina itself, as well the greater presence of novice and female Argentine writers, which, as I have commented, has been growing in recent years: 80 60 40 20 0 2008

2010

2011

2012

Escritores internacionales

2013

2014

2015

Escritores latinoamericanos

2016

2017

2018

2019

Escritores argentinos Escritoras

2020 Noveles

Graph 11.3 Writers invited to Filba Internacional Source: own elaboration

However, Filba Internacional has a section that is called “En primera persona” [“In First Person”], devoted (according to the presentation page) to the sharing of “myths and experiences” through oral narration and the direct encounter between the artist and their public. It includes interviews, readings, recitals, performances, and so on. In this category, the activities that stand out are dedicated to subjectivity and its relation to the literary, through the way in which the figure of the writer creates meaning: memories, experiences, exchanges, et cetera. Similarly, there is a section called “Soy tu librero” [“I’m your bookseller”] (2012), where the writer recommends a book to an audience member. The imaginary of writers’ correspondence is also used, characteristic of the French festival Les Correspondances de Manosque, which has been held since 1999, to organize activities in which authors and attendees send letters to each other, before and during the festival. Later, the initiative called “Filba 10. Mapa

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de un festival” involved compiling a small sample of the texts produced in the festival community (by Piglia, Kohan, Moreno, Schweblin, etc.) and made free to download. Lastly, in all the editions of Hay Cartagena we also find an activity in the “Literature” section that is associated with the subjective turn: “Literary Lives” (2012); “The Double Life” (2013); “My beginnings as a writer” (2015), and “Everyday Literature” (2017). If we compare the literary actors who are repeated in these years (2010– 2020) at Hay Cartagena and Filba Internacional, we see that, in reality, there is little concurrence between the two, and this is very enlightening of the politics that they each practice. The most invited (on two occasions at each festival) were the Argentinian writer of detective novels, Guillermo Martínez, the Colombian intimist writer based in Buenos Aires, Margarita García Robayo, and the Peruvian-Mexican poet, Mario Bellatin, whose poetics is very experimental but with high recognition in the market and academia.49 What is common to both, and to the rest of world festivals, is the use of the interview as the vehicular model of the activity programme. One must not forget that the literary interview came into being as a genre with the expansion of industrial capitalism and the press in the 19th century, but it was the postmodernity of the 1970s, with the celebrated interviews by Plimpton that were published in The Paris Review, when it became the prevalent form of literary performance of the writer. For Rodden, it is a question of an emerging literary genre—although in criticism it has had an ambiguous and marginal status— that is used in the literary market to publicly project a certain authorial image and biographical discourse. It is a rhetorical, creative and commercial act of self-invention and self-promotion that swings between the presentation of the writer as a person/character, and the literary work (2001, 1–5), which takes on vital importance in the context of literary festivals by their use of being live, spontaneous and oral. The interview offers a portrait, testimony, anecdote and secret, but above all it offers more entertainment than critical thought. Hence, at Hay Cartagena, the structure “X in conversation with X” is repeated frequently. At Filba, the interview appears much less than the democratic label of “dialogue” or “conversation”, although in 2011 it rose to a prevalence of 20% of the programme activities. Lastly, there is the value of the new and the young. The large publishing houses are investing ever more resources into scouting, in order to promote 49

The writers invited the most to Filba (who have also participated at Hay) are Pedro Mairal, Alejandro Zambra, Emiliano Monge and Lina Meruane, among others, who have very political and avant-garde poetics. In the case of Hay, more readable authors predominate, who have more prizes and translations: Héctor Abad Faciolince, Santiago Gamboa, Valeria Luiselli and Guadalupe Nettel, among others.

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young writers, ahead of consolidating those they already have on their lists (Sánchez 2010, 9). However, these young writers do not make the step up to the festivals until they have earned a certain amount of recognition or acclaim, or, which amounts to the same, until they are well known. There are no large Latin American festivals devoted to new or emerging authors,50 unlike in Britain, Australia and France, where Les correspondances de Manosque stands out. And if we focus on Hay Cartagena and Filba Internacional, the backing for new talent is scant, because the hierarchy of capital accumulation prevails. At Hay Cartagena, it is around 8%, and in Filba Internacional it hovers around 7%, although there have been several significant spikes: 19% in 2013, 14% in 2017, 19% in 2018 and 16% in 2019. This tells us that the interest in emerging talent has been growing over time, probably in virtue of the consolidation of the festival as a model of literary values. It is therefore clear that Hay Cartagena is far more inclined than Filba Internacional to invite established writers, since their three fundamental pillars are the figure of the writer, the latest publication, and the themes of the day. 4

Conclusions

I began this study by reviewing the historical, economic and social conditions of possibility that have enabled the expansion of literary festivals in the Latin American space. I would like to conclude it with a final note on the relationship between literary culture and the spectacle, that is, on the festivalization of the culture since neoliberal globalization. This process of democratization is similar to the one that occurred in the mid-twentieth century, when the technologies of television and cinema burst onto the cultural scene and caused literary criticism to sound the alarm. Raymond Williams saw it as an opportunity for education and democratic participation, with the latter ultimately being produced more than the former. In the 21st century, we find ourselves in a hypersocialization of the literary experience, which can also be seen as an opportunity to celebrate literary culture and keep it alive. The festival is the most important space not only of spectacularization of the writer but also of the power of lite­ rature and the festival itself in its struggle for prestige and material resources. In my opinion it is not, as Ommundsen, Lurie and Driscoll maintain, a question of literary culture replacing the culture of the book (replacing literature), but rather that both live side by side, as the ebook lives with the paper book,

50

There are festivals of young or emerging poetry in Argentina (see Molina 2015), and in other Latin American countries, as well as in Spain.

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and as cinema or radio do with television. What occurs, quite simply, is an effect of the aestheticization and performativity of these formats. For Weber (2018), festivals reproduce, at the macro level, the tensions and dynamics of power of the literary field that Bourdieu (2006) described. However, I consider that festivals do not merely reproduce a field but that they are gatekeepers, devices that act in the chain of authorial, aesthetic, thematic and social values of the national literary field and/or global market. They therefore have an impact on literary creation itself (Greenfeld 1998, 903). Thus, the festival is cause and effect of the literary field/market, as shown in the comparative analysis that I have carried out. Hay Cartagena’s impact on the global market is greater than that of Filba Internacional, whose effect is more limited to the national and regional context. They also differ in the type of politics of literature that emerge from each programme, co-dependent on an action of interpretation of the literary, which has a direction and an ideology. In Hay Cartagena, we have seen that a hierarchical structure predominates, where the figure of the writer presenting their latest book is central, along with the discussion of highly topical literary, political and social themes (such as immigration, the environment, feminism), which are accompanied by music, cinema and activities that strengthen global values, such as cultural diversity and educational development (through the pedagogical value of reading), aimed at a mass public. Filba Internacional, conversely, is conceived in a more heterarchical structure, where center place is taken by debate on themes and problems of the critical field of literature, which is addressed in continuous performances that extend to other arts, giving priority to the relational value. This is a mode of intervention in that market, making the very performati­vity of the national literary identity visible, based on cosmopolitanism and the avant-garde. Educational and inclusive politics are also present, but the activities of professionalization of the sector (publishing, creative writing, genre workshops, et cetera) are more prominent, which tells us that it is aimed at a more specialized public. What takes place with these festivals, therefore, is the opposite of that propounded by Giorgi, who maintains that the literary festivals celebrated in large cities have an international or commercial orientation (as in Berlin or New York), but those in smaller cities tend to be focused on the national and on a local context (2011, 37). Nevertheless, there are many similarities between them: in both, non-fiction (it is not insignificant that Hay Cartagena uses the English term) and the crónica (it is equally significant that Filba Internacional makes use of the local term) are a constant in almost all the editions, mirroring that is the genre that accumulates the most value in the literary system of the last decade. Other feature that Hay Cartagena and Filba Internacional share is that they both make the relation between economics and literature visible, as well as that of the writer,

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the public sphere and spectacle.51 The objective of the two festivals is to spread an aesthetic canon that it wishes to be absorbed by the public, understood in the case of Hay Cartagena more as mass culture, and for Filba Internacional as cultured community. Yet the gesture in both cases of shifting the contents of the lettered community toward other contexts (as happens in the Hay Festival “Comunitario” initiative or with the Filba International scheme situated in the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires) makes it possible to examine and evaluate the processes of legitimization from different points of view, given that in the festival space, highbrow and popular literature are fused together. The aesthetic experience becomes plural, more democratic and at the same time dissident, since the public sphere is understood as a space for dissent, not consensus. However, this does not bring with it a large-scale emancipatory project, that is, of the politicization of the aesthetic, as Benjamin envisaged, or another distribution of the sensible, as Rancière proposes. Ultimately, what is achieved is more (re)productions and (re)producers of lettered communities that guarantee the continuity of making public literary culture. The second common feature is the relation between the festival and li­terary identity. Filba International commits to the (decolonial) idea of the Latin American/Argentine as cultural strength that is a signifier of literature in the Spanish language. And Hay Cartagena sets out more as a space of selfrepresentation of literature in the Spanish language for the world in dialogue with other literatures. However, both festivals rekindle the political dimension of the literary, creating a space for critical debate (Fabiani 2011, 102). Lastly, the third feature they share is cosmopolitanism, which we find in both the global and local dimension of the two events. In Hay Cartagena, it concerns bringing global culture (and world literature) to the local context, juxtaposing temporalities. In Filba Internacional, they explore the global/worldly in the context of the literary tradition and the city of Buenos Aires, since their basis is an idea of cosmopolitan Argentine metropolitan culture, in its critical and dissident sense. Ultimately, this study of the models of Hay Festival de Cartagena de Indias and Filba Internacional de Buenos Aires helps us to think about the phenomenon of literary festivals in the Spanish language, in the role that they undertake as promotors of the social function of literature and as devices of mediation of literary, social, cultural and political values. This is only a beginning, a strand to pull from the fabric of Latin American literary studies that, like its object, literature, needs to be radically historical and also to think about the events

51

If the basic form for novelists in the 19th century was the serialized story market, in the 21st century it is the festival market. Today, festivals function as spaces of regulation of the economy of writing and of literary culture.

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that mark the visibility, readability, and materiality of Latin American letters in the 21st century. Translated by James Hayes

Acknowledgments

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Glass, Loren. 2004. Author Inc. Literary Celebrity in the Moderns United States, 1880– 1980. New York: New York University Press. Glass, Loren. 2008. Markets and Gatekeepers. In A Concise Companion to American Fiction 1900–1950, eds. Peter Stonely y Cindy Weinstein, 77–93. Oxford: Blackwell. Greenfeld, Liah. 1988. Professional Ideologies and Patterns of “Gatekeeping”: Evaluation and Judgment within Two Arlt Worlds. Social Forces, 66: 903–925. Grossberg, Lawrence. 2012. Estudios culturales en tiempo presente. Cómo es el trabajo intelectual que requiere el mundo de hoy. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Groys, Boris. 2005. Sobre lo nuevo. Ensayo de una economía cultural. Valencia: Pre-Textos. Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. Historia y crítica de la opinion pública: la transformación estructural de la vida pública. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. 1991. Contingencies of Value. Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Johanson, Katya and Robin Freeman. 2012. The reader as audience: The appeal of the writers’ festival to the contemporary audience. Continuum, 26: 303–314. Kacandes, Irene. 2001. Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1979. Sculpture in the Expanded Field. October, 8: 30–44. Kurz, Robert. 2014. Los intelectuales después de la lucha de clases. De la nueva aconceptualidad a un nuevo pensamiento crítico. In El absurdo mercado de los hombres sin cualidades. Ensayos sobre el fetichismo de la mercancía, eds. Anselm Jappe, Robert Kurz y Claus Peter Ortlieb. Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza. Lamont, Michele. 2012. Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation. Annual Review of Sociology, 38: 201–221. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Lurie, Caroline. 2004. Festival, Inc. Australian Author, 36: 8–12. Marshall, P. David. 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Meehan, Michael. 2005. The Word Made Flesh: Festival, Carnality and Literary Consumption. TEXT: The Journal of Australian Association of Writing, 4. http://www .textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue4/meehan.htm. Web. Accessed 04-13-2021. Milner, Andrew. 1996. Literature, Culture & Society. London: University College London. Moeran, Brian y Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen, eds. 2012. Negotiating Values in the Creative Industries. Fairs, Festivals and Competitive Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Molina, Cristian. 2015. La poesía como Festival. El jardín de los poetas. Revista de teoría y crítica de poesía latinoamericana, 1: 223–242. Mouffe, Chantal. 1993. The return of the Political. London: Verso.

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Murray, Simone. 2012. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literaty Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Murray, Simone and Millicent Weber. 2017. Live and local?: The significance of digital media for writers’ festivals. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 23: 61–78. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. La comunidad inoperante. Santiago de Chile: LOM. Negri, Antonio. 2002. Imperio. Madrid: Paidós. Ommundsen, Wenche. 2009. Literary Festivals and Cultural Consumption. Australian Literary Studies, 24: 19–34. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. La palabra muda. Ensayo sobre las contradicciones de la literatura. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia. Rodden, John. 2001. Performing the Literary Interview. How Writers Craft Their Public Selves. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Rosetti, Miguel. 2014. A contraluz: World Literature y su lado salvaje. CHUY, 1: 60–93. Ruffel, Lionel. 2015. Los espacios públicos de la literatura contemporánea. Cuadernos LIRICO, 13: 1–9. Sánchez, Matilde. 2010. Un salto que nos deposita quién sabe adónde. BOLETÍN, 15: 1–13. Sánchez, Silvia. 2017. Festivals & Cultural diversity. Literary Review: 1–4. Sapiro, Gisèle, ed. 2009. Les contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale. París: Nouveau Monde. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2016a. The metamorphosis of modes of consecration in the literary field: Academies, literary prizes, festivals. Poetics, 59: 5–19. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2016b. La sociología de la literatura, Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Sassatelli, Monica. 2011. Urban festivals and the cultural public sphere. Cosmopolitanism between ethics and aesthetics. In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, eds. Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli and Gerard Delanty, 12–25. London/New York: Routledge. Simmel, Georg. 2015. Sociología: estudios sobre las formas de socialización. México: FCE. Stewart, Cori. 2010. We Call Upon the Author to Explain: Theorising Writers’ Festivals as Sites of Contemporary Public Culture. JASAL, XXX. Stewart, Cori. 2013. The Rise and Rise of Writers’ Festivals. In A companion to Creative Writing, ed. Graeme Harper. Oxford, 263–277. Wiley-Blackwell. Throsby, David. 2001. Economía y cultura. Madrid: Cambridge University Press. Vanoli, Hernán. 2019. El amor por la literatura en tiempos de algoritmos. 11 hipótesis para discutir con escritores, editores, gestores y demás militantes. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Virno, Paolo. 2017. La idea de mundo. Intelecto público y uso de la vida. Buenos Aires: La marca editora. Weber, Milicent. 2018. Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 12

Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity and Foreign Literatures in Translation

Supply and Sales of Translated Books in Germany between 2007 and 2018 Marco Thomas Bosshard Abstract Many international book fairs invite every year so-called ‘Guests of Honour’ which usually are countries. Thanks to this practice and the founding of translations linked to these invitations there is, normally, a considerable increase of the supply of books translated from the languages spoken in the invited countries, leading at the same time to an increase of bibliodiversity available on the local book market. Considering several surveys with the public attending international book fairs, the consumption and concrete sales of these books nevertheless do not seem to increase in the same way as their supply. Therefore, this article tries to verify this finding going beyond simple interviews with fair visitors, collecting and analyzing sales data of two selected German publishing houses that have exclusively provided access to the book sales of their complete catalogues between 2007 and 2018. Modifying Bénhamou/Peltier’s model to measure bibliodiversity, this article focusses on the Guest of Honour status of Argentina (2010) and Brazil (2013) at Frankfurt Book Fair, discussing its impact on the consumption of translated books from these countries by German readers, completing the data available on the supply and sales of translations from (Argentinean) Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese and correlating them to the sales of German translations from other languages such as English, French, Italian, Dutch, etc.

1

Introduction

Researching book sales can be very challenging. Normally, sales data are only accessible in the case of (very) successful books: those that appear on official bestseller lists generally based on representative polls among booksellers.1 1 In Germany, the most important bestseller list based on such polls is the one published in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel. However, this public version free of charge only registers the ranking of the best sold books, without indicating the real number of sold copies. Despite its

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_014

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Except when promoting their bestselling titles, publishing houses do not publicize their sales and instead treat them as company secrets. Hence, it is almost impossible to measure and discuss the real consumption of the vast majority of published books in any market—books for which sales are regular at best, and bad, or even very bad, at worst. Focusing on the German book market, which is one of the biggest and most important such markets worldwide, this study was only possible thanks to the support of two major German independent publishing houses that provided exclusive and confidential data registering the sales of every single book in their catalogues published between 2007 and 2018.2 Still, the results of this article are clearly far from representative: While future studies can broaden and augment the base data and samples we present here with those drawn from other publishing houses, scholars will never be able to cover the whole publishing field, especially the more commercial publishing sector. Nevertheless, we assume that our results point to some general tendencies characteristic of the economic dynamics and (contra-)logics in what Bourdieu (1992) called the ‘field of restricted production’ and the more ‘autonomous pole’ within the publishing sector, which is not—or less—focussed on economic profit. Although independent publishing houses also compete to produce bestsellers, their catalogues are usually full of titles that never aimed to be economically successful in the first place. Especially in countries such as Germany, which controls book prices and sets fixed retail prices, this helps to create and conserve a certain degree of diversity on the book market.3 Very often, this lack of commercial ambition also characterizes translations of books originally written in languages other than those (e.g., English, French or German) that Heilbron (1999) has called ‘hyper-central’ or ‘central’ languages. On the global book market—and as we will see, the German book market is name, the Spiegel bestseller list is not a service of the magazine itself, but is run by the private company Media Control, which offers a series of more in-depth marketing analysis for publishing houses and other registered clients. Nevertheless, small and independent publishing houses rarely use these services due to its high cost. 2 They did so in support of the Flensburg research project “Book Fairs as Spaces of Cultural and Economic Negotiation” (project no. 317687246), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) between 2017 and 2020. This article is a product of these efforts. 3 This phenomenon is generally referred to as ‘bibliodiversity’. The role of Latin American publishers and the Guadalajara book fair is crucial in this context, since the concept was first promoted in the “Declaración de los editores independientes del mundo latino” at FIL Guadalajara in 2005. It was later implemented in the Anglophone discourse (see Hawthorne 2014). For more information on bibliodiversity within the context of the Flensburg research project, see the case study by Hertwig (2019).

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no exception—translations from Spanish are visible but not overly frequent, occupying a ‘semi-peripheral’ status. Furthermore, despite its more than 250 million of speakers Portuguese is actually considered a ‘peripheral’ language. Thus, it would be presumptuous to expect to find many bestsellers originally written in Spanish or Portuguese on the German book market (although of course there are outstanding examples, such as the popular novels by Paulo Coelho, Isabel Allende or Carlos Ruiz Zafón). Much more interesting is the question of whether and to what extent nonbestselling translations from Spanish and Portuguese—which represent the vast majority of books in this context—serve to introduce into the German market new authors writing in these two languages, which later may help them overcome their semi-peripheral and peripheral status in the global market. In light of the increased efforts of several German publishing houses to establish Argentinean and Brazilian writers since the early 2010s (as a direct effect of Argentina’s and Brazil’s Guest of Honour status at the 2010 and 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair; see below), this article focuses on the existing sales data for translations from Spanish and Portuguese in general, with special attention to Argentinean and Brazilian authors in comparison to Spanish ones and those from other Latin American countries.4 Yet it is impossible to analyze and interpret these data separately from those of translations from other (more central, or even more peripheral) languages. It makes no sense to consider and compare absolute sales figures for books translated from Spanish or Portuguese; what is important is to measure and interpret sales as they developed over time, correlating and comparing this data to the sales figures for translations from other languages during the same period. For this reason, we focus on a longer twelve-year-period (2007 to 2018) and also consider sales data for translations from English, French, Italian, Dutch, and Finnish in order to gain insight into the sales figures for the translated Spanish and Portuguese books that are the main focus of this study. Before doing so, however, it is necessary

4 The official statistics on published books in Germany, released every year by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels—the national publishers’ and book sellers’ association of Germany—not only fail to differentiate between books written in Spanish and Portuguese, lumping them in a single category (as does the Dewey classification system used by librarians all over the world); they also fail to differentiate between authors’ countries of origin. To clarify the exact hispanic or lusitanic origins of all translated authors registered in the catalogue of the German National Library is, thus, an almost neverending task. However, it has been quite easy to identify them in the much smaller data samples provided by the two collaborating publishing houses.

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to briefly sketch the importance of the Frankfurt Book Fair in promoting and funding translations in the German book market. 2

The Impact of the Frankfurt Book Fair on Translation Funding and Book Sales

Promoting Spanish literature, especially that by Latin American authors, in the German book market has always been a challenge; indeed, German readers have seldom shown much interest in this literature. That the boom of Latin American literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s did not reach Germany until several years later, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is not surprising. However, the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1976 played a decisive role in this belated but important broader reception of Latin American literature in Germany (see Einert 2015 and Moreno Mínguez 2019), and even helped bring the most outstanding boom authors into the German market. It was then that former fair director Peter Weidhaas created a special program feature designed to promote books and authors from regions more or less unknown to the German public at the time. During the 1980s, this precursory feature would develop into today’s ‘Guest of Honour’ tradition, that is, the practice of inviting a specific country (or, more recently, a specific transnational linguistic area) to the Frankfurt fair as a featured guest and thematic focal point. Considering Frankfurt’s crucial function not only for the German book market, but also for the global market in general—as the Frankfurt Book Fair is still the biggest and most important book fair worldwide (see Niemeier 2001, Bosshard/García Naharro 2019, Anastasio/Bosshard/Cervantes Becerril 2022)—the ‘Guest of Honour’ feature is conceived as an international showcase for the whole literary production of each invited country. To serve as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt fair, moreover, a country is required to create and itself finance a sustainable translation funding program. This is why Frankfurt’s Guest of Honour feature always generates a considerable spike in the number of new translations and translation licenses—and not only for the German book market. Publishing houses in many other countries throughout the world use these translation funding programs to push through translations of books by invited-country authors, whose works often would have no hope of ever being translated without such state-run subsidies. In these national book markets, the Guest of Honour feature of the Frankfurt Book Fair usually significantly increases the number of available translations of works from the guest country, thus contributing to or consolidating a certain degree of bibliodiversity. This was certainly the case for guest countries Argentina (2010) and Brazil (2013); how their participation

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in the fair as Guests of Honour affected the supply and demand of books in translation, and how this result compares to that for other Guest of Honour countries (Finland in 2014, the Netherlands and Flanders in 2016, and France in 2017), will be discussed below.5 Nevertheless, the general function of Frankfurt Book Fair has been questioned from an economic point of view. Studying how Germany’s two largest book fairs impact on the book market, Clement/Bölke/Schulz (2019) point out that the influence of the Frankfurt and Leipzig book fairs is basically nonsensical and counterproductive from an economic perspective. Since most German publishing houses time the promotion and sales of their books to coincide with the Leipzig Book Fair in the spring and the Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall, supply is always concentrated in these two periods. Since demand is distributed throughout the year, this selective oversupply means that many books find fewer buyers than they would otherwise. These general observations suggest that the same problem might also affect the translated literature of guest countries of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Whereas in recent years the debate on bibliodiversity has often focused onesidedly on the supply to be expanded, how this diversity is consumed is still significantly understudied. Using Francfort en français (as France termed its Guest of Honour participation in the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair) as a case study, and on the basis of a first proposal of Benhamou/Peltier (2011), Hertwig (2019) developed a model for measuring the bibliodiversity of translated literature in connection with Guest of Honour appearances at international book fairs.6 Hereinafter, we apply some of her criteria to the analysis of supply and consumption of translations from Spanish and Portuguese (and of works by Argentinean and Brazilian writers) in comparison to those from other languages mentioned above.

5 For studies with different concerns linked to Argentina 2010, see Bosshard 2014 (including to a lesser extent some considerations about Brazil 2013) and Dujovne/Sorá (2010); for Finland 2014 see Körkkö (2017); for France 2017 see the many articles included in Bosshard/Brink/ Hertwig (2018). 6 It is still quite a challenge to adapt Benhamou/Peltier’s model to the specific context of measuring the consumption of translated books, since the model is not focused on translations in particular. Benhamou/Peltier measure consumption on the basis of sales data from national bestseller lists. Since translations from Spanish or Portuguese very seldom appear on those lists, the only way to generate useful data has been to ask the aforementioned publishing houses to share their internal and confidential sales figures.

286 3

Bosshard

Supply and Demand of Translated Books

For the purposes of this study, the two independent publishing houses that provide complete sales figures for all of the books they published between 2007 and 2018 will remain anonymous.7 Publisher A is one of Germany’s biggest independent publishing houses. It has an extensive paperback series, including many licenses of titles originally published by other German publishing houses. Publisher B is a smaller and more specialized independent publisher, with an important backlist of translations—especially from the Romance languages. Despite its smaller size, publisher B also has its own paperback series alongside its more important hardcover publications. While both publishing houses also publish ebooks, the ebook sales for publisher B could not be completely identified due to technical restrictions. For this reason, we have removed ebook sales figures from our data samples for both publishers, choosing to focus only on print publications. We distinguish between non-fiction and fiction titles for both publishers, with the ‘fiction’ category being broken down into two sub-categories for publisher A: ‘commercial light fiction’ and ‘normal’ (generally more ambitious) fiction series.8 Considering these basic facts, we can state that during our twelve-year period publisher A published 2725 titles including light fiction (227 titles per year on average), and 1577 titles excluding light fiction (131 titles per year), whereas publisher B published 538 titles (45 titles per year).9 The overall 7 For technical reasons, the data provided only include sales figures from Germany and Switzerland, but not from Austria (which is also considered to be part of the German book market) from January 2007 until July 2020 (publisher B) and September 2020 (publisher A). On the German book market, book sellers are allowed to return to the publishing houses, at any time and for a full reimbursement of the purchase price, any unsold books that they had purchased. These returns usually occur several months (sometimes up to a year or even later) after the book has been released. This is why we decided to consider only the sales figures of all books published until the end of the year 2018, knowing that the final sales figures of books released in 2019 (or later) still can differ considerably from actual temporary figures gathered in 2020. 8 For publisher A, light fiction (‘Unterhaltung’) is an internal category with its own and autonomous editorial office, which competes within the publishing house with the fiction (‘Belletristik’) department. In the case of publisher B, light fiction is of no importance. 9 ‘Title’ here is defined as any publication with its own and unique ISBN code. Accordingly, revised and augmented editions (every time they are released with a new ISBN code) figure as new and independent titles. In addition, any title that has gone from previous hardcover edition to a paperback edition with its own new ISBN code is counted as two independent titles, even though the titles actually correspond to the same book. In a few cases, this may lead to some negligible distortions for translations that were first published in hardcover and were later re-released as paperback editions.

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Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity Publisher A, excluding light fiction

80 60 40 20 0

2007

2008

2009

2010

German

30 25 20 15 10 5 0

2011 Italian

2012

2013

English

2014

2015

French

2016

2017

2018

2017

2018

Spanish

Publisher B, excluding two English superselling titles

2007

2008

2009

2010

German

Figure 12.1

2011 Italian

2012

2013

English

2014

2015

French

2016 Spanish

Number of titles, by year and language of origin Note: Here and in the following figures, anthologies in translation have been considered if the included writers all are from the same country of origin. Hence, translated anthologies including writers from several countries have been eliminated from the data samples. Additionally, one superselling translation from English was eliminated from the data sample of publisher B due to its overwhelming distorsioning effects: The sales figures of this single book (published twice with two different ISBN codes; therefore it appears as “two English superselling titles” in the figures above) excel the complete overall average sales figures per year three to four times!

output of publisher A is thus five times higher than that of publisher B, but only three times higher if we exclude commercial light fiction, which is usually absent from the catalogue of publisher B. Figure 12.1 shows the number of titles originally written in German that are published each year, together with the number of published translations from languages such as English, French, Italian, and Spanish. As can be seen, the profiles of the two publishing houses differ significantly regarding the number of published German, English and Italian titles, so that no real comparison is possible. For translations from French, Spanish and, as we will see, also from Dutch and Portuguese, however, the data is largely amenable to comparison. Figure 12.2 shows a significant disproportion between the number of fiction and non-fiction titles for German works, translations from English and

288

Bosshard Publisher A, excluding light fiction Fiction only

6 6

French

22 22

English

2 2

Italian

23 23

139 139

62 62 German

238 238

432 431

653 637

Fiction and non-fiction

Spanish

Portuguese

Dutch

Finnish

Other languages

Publisher B, excluding two english superselling titles Fiction only

Figure 12.2

Spanish

15 13

French

10 8

English

10 10

61 58

Italian

65 55

German

46

33

74

92

148

153

Fiction and non-fiction

Portuguese

Dutch

Other languages

Number of fiction/non-fiction titles with indication of the language of origin, 2007–2018

(in the case of publisher B) translations from Italian.10 By contrast, we see few or no non-fiction titles for translations from all other languages. Hence, in the pages below we will focus on non-commercial fiction sales of translations from French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and (in the case of publisher A only) Finnish—bearing in mind that these languages have significantly gained in importance in connection with five different Guest of Honour appearances at the Frankfurt Book Fair within the past twelve years, as noted above. When we omit German, English and Italian titles from publisher A’s catalogue, the French titles dominate. By contrast, there is no great difference between the overall number of translations from French and Spanish for publisher B (see figure 12.3). If we contrast the data for non-commercial fiction vs. light fiction with respect to publisher A, the dominance of French titles (beside the German and English ones) becomes even more pronounced. 10 Yet it should be emphasized that the data sample provided by publisher A does not include all non-fiction titles of the catalogue. Publisher A publishes around 60 nonfiction titles per year which do not appear in the analyzed sales data sample. Including these titles, the overall output of publisher A is even higher than described above.

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Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity

20 15 10 5 0

Publisher A, including light fiction

2007

2008

2009

2010

French 20 15 10 5 0

2011 Spanish

2012

2013

2014

Portuguese

2015

Dutch

2016

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2018

Finnish

Publisher A, excluding light fiction

2007

2008

2009

2010

French

2011 Spanish

2012

2013

Portuguese

2014

2015

Dutch

2016

2017

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Finnish

Publisher B

15 10 5 0

2007

Figure 12.3

2008

2009

2010 2011 2012 French Spanish

2013 2014 2015 2016 Portuguese Dutch

2017

2018

Number of titles, by year and language of origin (minor languages)

As a first result, we can conclude that the catalogue of publisher A reproduces the general patterns of linguistic dominance within the global book market. Among its non-German books, the catalogue shows the overwhelming dominance of translations from ‘hyper-central’ English, followed by those from ‘central’ languages such as French. By contrast, translations from ‘semi-peripheral’ and ‘peripheral’ languages such as Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, Dutch and Finnish are not very plentiful. With its focus on Romance literatures, however, publisher B’s catalogue of fiction titles tends to highlight translations not only from Italian, but also to a great degree from French and Spanish—with, again, few translations from Portuguese and Dutch. Only in 2013 (for Portuguese) and 2016 (for Dutch) do we see a visible and quite unique peak for these two languages. Not very surprisingly, these peaks correspond to the years when Brazil

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and the Netherlands/Flanders served as Guest of Honour at Frankfurt Book Fair. Similarly, two other peaks can be seen for translations from Spanish in 2010 (which, as we will see, is mainly linked to Argentina’s Guest of Honour status in Frankfurt that year) and from French in 2017 (when the honours in Frankfurt went to France and the French language). For publisher A, however, we see only small peaks in connection with minor languages (Portuguese in 2013, Finnish in 2014 and Dutch in 2016)—once again due to the Guest of Honour status of Brazil, Finland and the Netherlands/Flanders on those years—but not for Spanish and French (despite the fact that Argentina and France served as Guest of Honour in 2010 and 2017). As far as we have adopted a very conventional approach, focusing on what Benhamou/Peltier would call ‘supplied diversity’ (that is, the mere number of available translations), there is nothing astonishing about these outcomes. Clearly, the Guest of Honour feature at the Frankfurt Book Fair has a visible, even pleasing impact on the number of translations especially from peripheral languages. At least for more specialized publishing houses like publisher B, this is also true for translations from semi-peripheral and even central languages such as Spanish and French. Thus, Guest of Honour features are successful when it is about increasing quantity and visibility of translated titles from foreign literatures on the German book market. They are—and probably still will be—very useful strategies for promotion and branding. All available statistics about Guest of Honour results constantly register such increased numbers of published translations, interpreting them proudly as proof of a successful cultural policy. However, these data do not say anything about ‘consumed diversity’—that is, the real book sales that are totally absent from official statistics. To start with a general overview of the development of book sales over the whole period from 2007 to 2018, and the composition of these sales regarding the original language of a published book (see figure 12.4): unsurprisingly, for publisher A we once again find that German and English titles sold the most, even though the percentage of sold French titles had been considerably higher than that for English ones prior to 2010. In the case of publisher B, for specific years, Italian titles also make up a very high or—uniquely—even higher percentage of overall sales than German or English titles. Whereas the number of published titles used to be only three times higher (without light fiction) in the case of publisher A, such a large independent publisher usually sells ten to twelve times more copies than smaller publisher B. For all other languages, however, the numbers of sold copies are quite marginal and hardly visible in this figure. So let us zoom in and concentrate on these minor languages, contrasting the data for them with that for French

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Publisher A, excluding light fiction

2,500,000 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 0 2007 2008 German Italian

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 English French Spanish Portuguese Dutch Finnish Other languages

200.000 180.000 160.000 140.000 120.000 100.000 80.000 60.000 40.000 20.000 0 2007 2008 2009 German Italian

Figure 12.4

Publisher B, excluding two English superselling titles

2010 English

2013 2016 2018 2015 2011 2017 2012 2014 French Spanish Portuguese Dutch Other languages

Sold copies, by year and language of origin Note: All sales figures include sold copies from the first year of publication (including second, third, fourth etc., editions, if a book was re-released with the same original ISBN code) until the cut-off date of July 2020 in the case of publisher B and September 2020 in the case of publisher A, when the data was processed. That is, the years indicated in this and all the figures to follow always denote the years of publication, with cumulative sales between that year and July/September 2020. They do not refer to sales figures in specific years. In the case of more recently published books (especially long selling paperback editions) sales figures still could increase considerably, whereas the sales figures for older books will remain more or less stable. Again, the superselling title of publisher B, which has been published twice with different ISBN codes (see note to figure 12.1), has been eliminated from the sample.

(see figure 12.5). Again, in the case of publisher A we observe an overwhelming dominance of sold copies of translations from French. The same can be seen for publisher B, although to a lesser degree. For publisher B, all peaks in sales for Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French titles correspond precisely to the years when Argentina, Brazil, the Netherlands/Flanders, and France were Guests of Honour at the Frankfurt fair. At first glance, this seems not to hold for publisher A; in particular, we find no visible sales peak for French translations in 2017, even if we include light fiction titles. Eliminating publisher A’s all sales of French translations from the figures above, it finally becomes possible to observe the very marginal sales development of translations from Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Finnish (see

292 700000 600000 500000 400000 300000 200000 100000 0 2007

700000 600000 500000 400000 300000 200000 100000 0 2007

Bosshard Publisher A, including light fiction

2008

2009

2010 French

2013 2011 2012 Spanish Portuguese

2016 2015 Finnish

2017

2018

2014 Dutch

2016 2015 Finnish

2017

2018

2014 Dutch

2016 2015 2017 Other languages

2018

2014 Dutch

Publisher A, excluding light fiction

2008

2009

2010 French

2013 2011 2012 Spanish Portuguese Publisher B

50.000 40.000 30.000 20.000 10.000 0 2007 Figure 12.5

2008

2009

2010 French

2013 2011 2012 Spanish Portuguese

Sold copies, by year and language of origin (French and minor languages only)

figure 12.6). There are minor sales peaks for translations from Portuguese in 2013 and from Finnish in 2014, whereas the sales of translations from Dutch did not increase in 2017. Adding the sales of light fiction, it becomes obvious that the overall sales of translations from these languages were even higher before the year of the Guest of Honour status at Frankfurt Book Fair. Correlating the number of published translations to the number of sold copies since the year of publication, we can now calculate the average sales per title and language during the whole period from 2007 up to 2018 (see figure 12.7). Focusing on the bars that indicate average sales of non-commercial fiction titles only, we see that—astonishingly—publisher A sold most copies

293

Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity Publisher A, excluding light fiction

100000 80000 60000 40000 20000 0 2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

Spanish

2012

2013

Portuguese

2014

Dutch

2015

2016

2017

2018

2016

2017

2018

Finnish

Publisher A, including light fiction

250000 200000 150000 100000 50000 0 2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

Spanish

Figure 12.6

2012

2013

Portuguese

2014

Dutch

2015 Finnish

Sold copies, by year and language of origin (minor languages, publisher A only)

Italian

English

French

Spanish Portuguese

Dutch

Finnish

5.518 5.518

6.308 6.308

3.916 3.916 German

Fiction only

3.443 3.443

Fiction and non-fiction 7.714 7.714

9.240 9.259

13.172 13.172

13.232 13.232

11.333 11.358

Publisher A, excluding light fiction

Other languages

Figure 12.7

French

Portuguese

Average sales, by language of origin, 2007–2018

Dutch

1.922 1.953

Spanish

Fiction only

1.232 1.358

2.623 2.611

3.685 4.611 English

1.891 1.891

Italian

Fiction and non-fiction

1.570 1.559

German

3.044 3.877

2.461 3.545

Publisher B, excluding two english superselling titles

Other languages

294

Bosshard

Average sales translations (1,92/year) from Spanish 2007‒2018: 7,714 copies Average sales translations (3) from Spanish 2010: 12,534 copies Average sales translations (1) of Argentinean authors 2010: 5,327 copies Average sales translations (0,17/y.) from Portuguese 2007‒2018: 3,916 copies 3,916 copies Average sales translations (2) from Portuguese 2013: Average sales translations (0,5/year) from Finnish 2007‒2018: 3,443 copies Average sales translations (3) from Finnish 2014: 3,121 copies Average sales translations (1,83/year) from Dutch 2007‒2018: 6,308 copies Average sales translations (3) from Dutch 2016: 2,082 copies Average sales translations (11,58/year) from French 2007‒2018: 13,232 copies Average sales translations (8) from French 2017: 2,455 copies Figure 12.8

+62,5% -30,9% +0% -9,3% -67,0% -81,4%

Publisher A: average sales of translated books in Guest of Honour year and overall between 2007–2018: comparison by language of origin (fiction only; excluding light fiction)

of translations from Italian and French on average (with translations from Spanish not selling very well), whereas publisher B sold more copies of translations from English than from any other language, despite its focus on Romance and especially Italian literature. At the same time, although we had noted a quite well-balanced proportion of Italian, French and Spanish fiction titles in the case of publisher B, we also see considerable differences regarding the average sales of translations from these languages: Italian is clearly in the first place, French clearly second, and Spanish only third. In comparison to average sales of translations from other languages, therefore, the average sales of translations from Spanish for both publishers show that German readers have a minor interest in the literatures of the Spanish-speaking world. But to what extent does the Frankfurt fair’s Guest of Honour feature impact, event temporarily, on translation sales? For this purpose, we will finally compare long-term average sales over the course of our twelve-year period with average sales on the specific year when the corresponding language/country held Guest of Honour status in Frankfurt. At first glance, publisher A seems to have achieved tremendous success in 2010, when Argentina was the invited country at Frankfurt (see figure 12.8). On that year, long-term average sales of Spanish translations (7.714 sold copies per book) rose to an impressive 12.534 sold copies per translated book from Spanish—an increase of 62,5%. But when we omit from our calculation books by Spanish-speaking authors without Argentinean citizenship, these impressive average sales suddenly fall to 5.327 copies, indicating a decrease of 30,9% compared to long-term average sales of books by Spanish-speaking authors in general. Brazil (Guest of Honour in 2013) presents a more unusual case: on that

295

Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity Average sales translations (3,5/year) from Spanish 2007‒2018: Average sales translations (6) from Spanish 2010: Average sales translations (2) of Argentinean authors 2010: Average sales translations (0,33/y.) from Portuguese 2007‒2018: Average sales translations (3) from Portuguese 2013: Average sales translations (1,67/year) from Finnish 2007‒2018: Average sales translations (3) from Finnish 2014: Average sales translations (2,75/year) from Dutch 2007‒2018: Average sales translations (4) from Dutch 2016: Average sales translations (14,33/year) from French 2007‒2018: Average sales translations (17) from French 2017: Figure 12.9

10,498 copies 12,097 copies 4,521 copies 3,925 copies 3,965 copies 6,199 copies 3,121 copies 7,245 copies 3,251 copies 14,135 copies 4,229 copies

+15,2% -56,9% +1,0% -49,6% -55,1% -70,1%

Publisher A: average sales of translated books in Guest of Honour year and overall between 2007–2018: comparison by language of origin (fiction only; including light fiction)

year Publisher A decided to publish works by Brazilian authors for the very first time since 2007, for which it had them translated from Portuguese. This is why the 2013 data shows no difference between the average sales of Brazilian titles over the entire 12-year period and on that specific year (2013). However, translations from Finnish decreased by almost 10 percent in 2014, Finland’s Guest of Honour year. But that was nothing compared to the strong decline in average sales of Dutch and French translations in 2016 and 2017, when sold copies of translations from those two languages decreased by 67% (Dutch) and 81,4% (French). Including the light fiction titles of publisher A (see figure 12.9) produces a slightly improved result for translations from Dutch, French and Portuguese; however, it worsens the result for translated works by Finnish and Argentinean authors. Yet, these disappointing figures11 for large independent publisher A should be put into perspective for smaller independent publisher B (see figure 12.10). Here, average sales per language show themselves to be much more stable over the years—although always on a lower, quite modest level. Over the course of twelve years, publisher B on average sold about 1.500 copies of every translation from Spanish. There was no significant difference in average sales in 2007 and 2010, when Catalonia (2007; that year, publisher B released two translations by 11

Once again, it must be stressed that publishing house A includes many of these translations in its paperback series, which tends to support sales longevity. So it is possible that the low sales during the first year of publication nevertheless can increase considerably over the mid- or long-term.

296

Bosshard

Average sales translations (4,83/year) from Spanish 2007‒2018: 1,559 copies Average sales translations (4) from Spanish 2007: 1,536 copies Average sales translations (12) from Spanish 2010: 1,581 copies Average sales translations (10) of Argentinean authors 2010: 1,632 copies Average sales translations (0,83/y.) from Portuguese 2007‒2018: 1,891 copies Average sales translations (8) from Portuguese 2013: 1,442 copies Average sales translations (0,66/year) from Dutch 2007‒2018: 1,358 copies Average sales translations (7) from Dutch 2016: 1,359 copies Average sales translations (4,58/year) from French 2007‒2018: 2,611 copies Average sales translations (13) from French 2017: 2,095 copies

-1,5% +1,4% +4,7% -23,8% +0,01% -19,8%

Figure 12.10 Publisher B: average sales of translated books in Guest of Honour year and overall between 2007–2018: comparison by language of origin (fiction only)

a Catalan author who nevertheless writes in Castilian Spanish) and Argentina (2010) served as a Guest of Honour; there is even a slight (4,7%) increase, if we only consider Argentinean authors. By contrast, average sales of translations from Portuguese clearly decreased between 2007 and 2018, although it must be noted that these numbers are not really representative: apart from 8 Brazilian fiction titles in 2013, over the entire twelve-year period publisher B included in its catalogue only 2 other translations from Portuguese. There is a similar problem with the quite low number of translations from Dutch. However, the almost 20% decrease in sold copies of frequent French translations in 2017 would again seem to suggest that, in terms of impact, the Guest of Honour feature unilaterally favors supplied diversity at the expense of consumed diversity. 4

Sales of Books by Argentinean and Brazilian Authors versus Sales by Other Latin American and Spanish Authors: Trends and Developments

As we can deduce from the above figures, the preexistent hierarchies on the global book market between hypercentral, central and (semi-)peripheral languages are hard to overcome. Additionally, there are problematic eurocentric patterns12 that highlight European authors at the expense of non-European 12

Our surveys of fairgoers carried out within the scope of the Flensburg research project show a higher predisposition among the public to read and buy books written by less ‘exotic’ authors. This was especially true of interviews conducted outside the fair’s Guest of Honour pavilions. Inside the pavilions, however, the number of persons seriously considering buying a book by an author from the guest country was quite stable, almost independently of the country in question (see Bosshard 2022). Eurocentric attitudes can also be perceived in the case of many professionals in the book market, since German

297

Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity

140.000

4.536

120.000

0 25.574

100.000 80.000

6.179 0 9.042

60.000

97.085

40.000

57.648

0 0 2.658 15.403

20.000

00 0 1.924

2007

2008

2009

57.360

5.696 0 13.793 31.182

2010

2011

2.397 0 2.889

2012

1.326 11.895 951 1.788

2013

7.938 00 13.416

2014

0 3.803 0 21489

297 17.658

2015

2016

3.085 00 2.404

2017

from Spain from Argentina from Brazil from other Latin American countries Figure 12.11 Publisher A: sold copies of books written by Latin American and Spanish authors (including light fiction)

ones. This is especially true in the case of translations from Spanish. Whereas translations from Spanish are quite marginal within the general sales of our two publishing houses, Spanish authors nevertheless occupy a dominant position within these sales (see figures 12.11, 12.12 and 12.13).13 Although the market for translated books from Spanish is dominated by Spanish authors, Argentinean authors are clearly the most important group of Latin American authors on the German book market. Most likely, the salience of these authors can be attributed to Argentina’s long and internationally visible literary tradition, as well as its efforts to increase this visibility by creating

13

and French professionals almost never visit non-European book fairs (see Bosshard 2021, 306–308). Finally, a similar eurocentrism—that is, the general assumption that European countries are politically more important than Latin American ones—must also be considered on the political macro-levels of Frankfurt Book Fair. After years of silence and non-reaction from the Sarkozy and Hollande administrations to its invitation to France to serve as Guest of Honour, the Frankfurt Book Fair asked Mexico to replace France in 2017. However, the invitation was quickly retracted after the new French Prime Minister Manuel Valls finally accepted the invitation. Newly-elected president Emmanuel Macron (ab)used the book fair inauguration to promote his political agenda outside of France for the first time by introducing himself to an international audience (see Bosshard 2019). The unspectacular sales of the very few translations from Catalan (4 in the light fiction catalogue of publisher A and 2 in the catalogue of publisher B) have also been included in the sales data samples for Spanish authors in figures 12.11 and 12.13 above, with author nationality being the main criterion.

1.675 0

2018

298 40.000

Bosshard 6.179

4.536

35.000

0

30.000

0 5.327

25.000 20.000

7.938

25.574

15.000

26.097

10.000 5.000 0

6.744 0

2007

2008

from Spain

0 0 2.658 661

2009

297

0 4.432

0 1.326 7.831

12.427

2010

2011

from Argentina

812 0

2012

951 1.788

2013

from Brazil

17.658

13.416

2014

0

2015

2016

3.085 0

2017

0

2018

from other Latin American countries

Figure 12.12 Publisher A: sold copies of books written by Latin American and Spanish authors (excluding light fiction)

30.000

1.326

25.000 20.000

11.533

0 0

15.000 10.000 5.000 0

1.271

0 0 1.729 4.416

2007

708 0 0 8.510

2008

from Spain

340 0 0

16.316 0 0 3.714 1.174

2009

0 570 1.818

2.656

4.654 0 1.135

3.710

2010

2011

2012

from Argentina

from Brazil

14.135

2013

12.153

2014

0 0 1.362

0 0 1.661 1.952

0 0 1.225 1.437

6.373

2015

2016

2017

from other Latin American countries

Figure 12.13 Publisher B: sold copies of books by Latin American and Spanish authors

the ongoing Argentinean translation funding programme SUR in connection with the Argentinean Guest of Honour year 2010 at Frankfurt Book Fair (see Hertwig 2020). Especially in the case of publisher B, after a unique peak of sold copies in 2010, books by Argentinean authors continue to sell at much lower rates, but in steady and stable trend. Brazilian authors, on the other hand, seem to hold the most precarious status in the catalogue of the two publishing

724 0 2.128 4.278

2018

Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity

299

houses, and possibly in the German book market in general: During the twelve years we studied, almost all efforts to translate and publish Brazilian books were directly linked to Brazil’s Guest of Honour status at the 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair; thereafter, the quantity of translated authors and sold books once again dwindled to almost nothing. Of course, translations of books by authors from other Latin American countries are also to be found, but these are even more marginal than their Argentinean and Brazilian counterparts.14 Publisher A’s light fiction series (see figure 12.11) sometimes yields quite good sales data for other Latin American authors, but generally, the sales for this group of authors are not outstanding, especially regarding the more ambitious general fiction program (see figure 12.12). We find the same tendency for publisher B. Consulting the imprints of its translated books from other Latin American countries, it can be observed that these translations are seldom financed by the publishing house alone, but very often with the support of litprom, a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of books from the Global South and financed by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At this point, the crucial importance of translation funding programmes— required by the Frankfurt Book Fair as a prerequisite to nomination as Guest of Honour—becomes clear. Although it could be argued that many countries of the Global South possibly cannot afford to finance such programs over the long term, and that the subsidies they grant and finance could actually be benefitting the publishing houses of wealthy countries (albeit in a rather inadequate way), there are no real alternatives that could increase the visibility and impact of these countries and its literatures on the global book market. It can even be stated that, over the course of the past decade, Argentina’s SUR program has become the most important translation funding resource in the Spanish-speaking world, alongside the Spanish translation funding program run by Spain’s Ministry of Culture. Whereas Argentina is making an enormous effort to maintain the success of SUR despite the new economic crisis, the majority of other Latin American countries continue to make do without such systematic funding policies.15 At the same time, many German 14

15

In our data samples covering the 2007–2018 period, there are (only) 6 translated books written by a Nicaraguan author, alongside 3 books by Cuban, 2 by Chilean and 1 by Bolivian and Guatemalan writers in the case of publishing house A (including light fiction). In the case of publishing house B, for the same period there are (only) 2 translated books written by Mexican, and 1 translated book per country for authors from Chile, Peru, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Although Mexico, too, has a long and stable tradition with edition grants and translation fundings—see the PROTRAD programme promoted by the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) of the Mexican Ministry of Culture which is, however, quite

300

Bosshard

publishing houses are reluctant to translate and promote authors from such Latin American countries without financial support, given their predictable unprofitable sales figures on a still very eurocentric market. 5

Conclusions

Our analysis of sales data provided by two independent German publishing houses confirms the hypothesis that there is indeed a discrepancy between supply (oversupply) and demand (slightly increasing at best; declining at worst) for guest country literature in translation.16 For smaller independent publishing houses like publisher B, the Guest of Honour feature may have a slightly positive influence on overall sales. The average number of sold copies per translated title from the guest country may be lower than that from previous years or from other countries, but having a higher number of books on offer may compensate for the lower number of sales per title, even as it contributes to the general oversupply. For larger independent publishing houses like publisher A, however, this general oversupply yields disappointing results from an economic point of view. In this respect, the economic function of book fairs would appear to be highly ambivalent. Although the fairs do mean greater visibility, prestige and symbolic capital for authors from Guest of Honor countries (and, at least sometimes, for the German publishing houses themselves), oversupply causes average sales per translated title to stagnate or even decrease. Under these circumstances, the promotion and reception of Latin American literatures in the German market—and likely other European markets as well—can hardly be expected to improve in the near future. Persisting eurocentric attitudes among German and European readers (see footnote 12), and the contradictions inherent in the existing Guest of Honour feature, with most Latin American countries lacking sustainable translation funding programs, would seem to impede the further expansion of Latin American literatures on the global book market. complicated in comparison to the Argentinean SUR program—there are only two translations of Mexican authors in the catalogue of publishing house B between 2007 and 2018 and none in the catalogue of publishing house A. In Brazil, the Programa de Apoio à Tradução e à Publicação de Autores Brasileiros no Exterior is run by the National Library of Brazil. 16 Previous surveys of professional and non-professional fairgoers indicated a benevolent attitude towards the Guest of Honour feature, in the context not only of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but also other Spanish and Latin American book fairs. More than a third of professional interviewees really believe in the positive influence of the Guest of Honour feature on sales figures (see Bosshard 2021, 309–312). However, their impact on real sales must be relativized in the light of the outcomes in this article.

Measuring the Consumption of Bibliodiversity

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Bibliography Anastasio, Matteo, Marco Thomas Bosshard and Freja Cervantes Becerril, eds. 2022. Las ferias del libro como espacios de negociación cultural y económica. Vol. II: Conclusiones y nuevas trayectorias de estudio. Frankfurt a.M./Madrid: Vervuert/ Iberoamericana. Benhamou, Françoise and Stéphanie Peltier. 2011. How should cultural diversity be measured? An application using the French publishing industry. Bibliodiversity 1: 11–27. Bosshard, Marco Thomas. 2014. Länderschwerpunkte auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse. Zur Selbstinszenierung von Nationalkultur anhand der Gastlandauftritte Argentiniens und Brasiliens. In Verlag Macht Weltliteratur. Lateinamerikanisch- deutsche Kulturtransfers zwischen internationalem Literaturbetrieb und Übersetzungspolitik, ed. Gesine Müller, 147–163. Berlin: Walter Frey/Tranvía. Bosshard, Marco Thomas. 2019. Las ferias del libro y el campo del poder: Los políticos y el capital simbólico en la feria de Fráncfort o la polémica entre México y Francia por ser invitado de honor en 2017. Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 41: 89–107. Bosshard, Marco Thomas. 2021. Las ferias del libro de Frankfurt, Guadalajara, Buenos Aires y Rio de Janeiro y la promoción de las literaturas extranjeras a través del formato del “invitado de honor”: perspectivas y datos empíricos del público general y profesional. In World Editors. Dynamics of Global Publishing and the Latin American Case between the Archive and the Digital Age, eds. Gustavo Guerrero, Benjamin Loy and Gesine Müller, 297–319. Berlin: De Gruyter. Bosshard, Marco Thomas. 2022. Experiencias y expectativas del público relacionadas con el formato de los países y ciudades invitados de honor en las ferias internacionales del libro de Frankfurt y Guadalajara: un repaso por las encuestas realizadas entre 2017 y 2019. In Las ferias del libro como espacios de negociación cultural y económica. Vol. II: Conclusiones y nuevas trayectorias de estudio, eds. Matteo Anastasio, Marco Thomas Bosshard and Freja Cervantes Becerril, 237–258. Frankfurt a.M./Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana. Bosshard, Marco Thomas and Fernando García Naharro, eds. 2019. Las ferias del libro como espacios de negociación cultural y económica. Vol. I: Planteamientos generales y testimonios desde España, México y Alemania. Frankfurt a.M./Madrid: Vervuert/ Iberoamericana. Bosshard, Marco Thomas, Margot Brink and Luise Hertwig, eds. 2018. Der Frankfurter Buchmesseschwerpunkt Francfort en français 2017: Inszenierung und Rezeption frankophoner Literaturen in Deutschland. Lendemains. Études comparées sur la France 170/171: 7–144. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Éd. du Seuil. Clement, Michel, Kristina Bölke and Petra Schulz. 2019. The Impact of Book Fairs on Book Sales. In Las ferias del libro como espacios de negociación cultural y económica. Vol. I: Planteamientos generales y testimonios desde España, México y Alemania, eds.

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Marco Thomas Bosshard and Fernando García Naharro, 133–144. Frankfurt a.M./ Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana. Dujovne, Alejandro and Gustavo Sorá. 2010. Un hecho de política cultural: Argentina en la república mundial de la edición. In Argentina país invitado de honor Feria del Libro de Frankfurt 2010, ed. Magdalena Faillace, 218–223. Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio y Culto. Einert, Katharina. 2015. Chronik einer angekündigten Entdeckung: Die Frankfurter Buchmesse 1976—ein Rückblick mit Archivalien aus dem Lateinamerikabestand des Siegfried-Unseld-Archivs. In Buchmarkt, Buchindustrie und Buchmessen in Deutschland, Spanien und Lateinamerika, ed. Marco Thomas Bosshard, 161–191. Berlin/Münster: LIT. Hawthorne, Susan. 2014. Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Heilbron, Johan. 1999. Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System. European Journal of Social Theory 2(4): 429–444, https://doi .org/10.1177/136843199002004002. Accessed 01-25-2021. Hertwig, Luise. 2019. Bibliodiversity in the Context of the Presence of Guests of Honour at International Book Fairs. An Outline of the Analysis of Francfort en français 2017. In Las ferias del libro como espacios de negociación cultural y económica. Vol. I: Planteamientos generales y testimonios desde España, México y Alemania, eds. Marco Thomas Bosshard and Fernando García Naharro, 109–132. Frankfurt a.M./ Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana. Hertwig, Luise. 2020. State-funded Support of International Trade in Rights and Licenses: Translation Funding Programs of Guests of Honour Argentina and France at the 2010 and 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair. Mémoires du livre/Studies in Book Culture 11(2), https://doi.org/10.7202/1070264ar. Accessed 01-25-2021. Körkkö, Helmi-Nelli. 2017. FINNLAND.COOL—zwischen Literaturexport und Image­ pflege. Eine Untersuchung von Finnlands Ehrengastauftritt auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse 2014. Vaasa: Vaasan yliopisto (= Acta Wasaeinsia 374). Moreno Mínguez, Carmen. 2019. La feria como espacio político: el caso de la Feria del Libro de Frankfurt de 1976 como plataforma de denuncia de las dictaduras del Cono Sur. Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 41: 69–87. Niemeier, Sabine. 2001. Funktionen der Frankfurter Buchmesse im Wandel von den Anfängen bis heute. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Pedota, Enzo. 2015. Der argentinische Pavillon auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse 2010. In Buchmarkt, Buchindustrie und Buchmessen in Deutschland, Spanien und Lateinamerika, ed. Marco Thomas Bosshard, 223–266. Berlin/Münster: LIT-Verlag.

Afterword: The Latin American Writer and the Global Market Ana Gallego Cuiñas The title of this afterword could perfectly pass as an homage to the Argentinean writer César Aira, whose oeuvre is quite the symbol of the impact of the global market on current Latin American writing. Any reflection we might make about the functioning of the figure of the writer and the book object in times of globalization is not only performed—dramatized or parodied—in several of Aira’s novels, but also in their various ways of becoming public. Fictional texts such as El congreso de literatura (1997), Varamo (2002), El mago (2002), La princesa Primavera (2003), Cumpleaños (2004), La vida nueva (2007), Festival (2010) o Prins (2018) are genuine critical essays on the work of the writer and the modes of production and circulation of Latin American literature. Aira’s poetics thus becomes the best refutation of the idea of the (economic) exceptionality of literature, the romantic mythology of the creator genius, and the authenticity of the work of art. A writer is not someone who writes a text but rather whoever publishes a book, since without the author figure there is no literary trade. In a way, it is as if Aira exasperated Osvaldo Lamborghini’s famous maxim that he himself had repeated like a mantra: “first publish, then write”, to which he adds three more mottos: daily writing, improvisation, and non-correcting.1 We could even affirm that the Latin American literary field, dominated by a man of genius named César Aira, sooner produces ‘writers and books’ than ‘works.’ Fine-tuning even more, we could go as far to conjecture that if Bourdieu had written The Rules of Art in the twenty-first century he would have chosen Aira, not Flaubert, to demonstrate how fiction reveals the (economic) structures of (literary) reality. However, paradoxically, Aira the writer is (almost) erased from the public arena, while his hundreds of books—published à la japonaise, that is, as if super-production were a way of pressuring or boycotting the publishing industry by saturating it—occupy every kind of genre and technique in imprints 1 Aira’s literary work has been compared to the self-managed modes of production of independent publishers, with which the author has always maintained a special relationship (Beatriz Viterbo, Mansalva, etc.): “A book published by Beatriz Viterbo […] tends toward being a unique object—a singular, contingent one—if only because there are few objects identical to it (for print runs are small). Aira’s artisanal aesthetics thus seems to approximate a limit case of these small publishing projects” (Epplin 2014, 49).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004523494_015

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small, medium, and large.2 This has provoked, on the one hand, mythomaniacal collecting (“how many Airas do you have?” is a recurrent question among his readers) that raises the price on certain texts and rejects the museumifying demand for the closed, final, complete works.3 On the other hand, the Aira fetish, his image and stories, are also (re)produced in a myriad of other texts—by Argentinean, Latin American, and Spanish authors—as if this were the selfsame aleph of all economies of literature. An Aira who is absent and out of his bounds, simultaneous and expanded, acting like literary culture in the twenty-first century. A poetics that is grossly present, recursive, and contingent, that shows the literary world from inside as an act of resistance4 by a Latin American writer—who is all writers and none at the same time—before the global market. With this reflection of Aira in the mirror, Latin American Literatures in Global Markets: The World Inside also presents a sampling of how globalization has affected the practices, imaginaries, and economies of the most recent Latin American literature. The first article that opens the book is by Héctor Hoyos and focuses on Bolaño’s foreshadowing of the global alt-right in La literatura Nazi en América, understood not from the paradigm of dystopia or pandemic, as has been done until now, but from a pact of verisimilitude seated in the well-known anachronistic reading of Borges in “Kafka y sus precursores.” This stance necessarily takes up the debate over the politicization of aesthetics in the field of Latin American Studies, which allows Hoyos to explore the potentialities of the literary through such a central figure as Bolaño, who narrates the global social question—that is, phenomena such as Trump, the advance of the right, ethnocentrism, the anti-globalization and anti-feminist movements, and homophobia. Locane also bases his contribution in Bolaño’s oeuvre, but 2 This is what is interesting about Aira’s oeuvre—that it reproduces in the literary scene the modes of production of the capitalist economy (accumulation, desirability, commodity fetichism, exchange value, etc.). Surprisingly, this provokes an effect of biblio-diversity, since the enormous quantity of publications faces up to the oligopolistic action of the large groups, in the interest of a more democratic literary culture that questions the presumption of the writer as a specialist or professional. Moreover, this attitude calls into question the role of mediators in the global market: publishers (the future, for Aira, is in self-publishing), literary agents, critics, festival directors, etc. The ultimate end goal is a market without intermediaries between author and writer. 3 This vanguardist gesture in favor of experimentation and against the finished, perfect work can also be read as resistance to capitalist modes of consumption of literature, which tend to erase the means and techniques of production. 4 This is not a resistance to the commercialization of the work, of course, but rather to the prevalence of certain literary values in the global market (plot versus technique, the consumption of the figure of the writer versus the book, etc.).

Afterword

305

as the epitome of the supremacy of the novelistic genre in the circulation of world Latin American literature, even if poetry also possesses prestige in the international scene. From a materialistic perspective, Locane undertakes a thorough review of Bolaño’s narrative and poetic production to demonstrate the mode by which the romantic idea of the poet character that appears in his texts—and in those of another genealogy of authors such as Aira, Luiselli, and Zambra—has become literature’s redemptive symbol, the last reflection, as Hoyos mentions as well, of its pristine autonomy. Cristina Rivera Garza’s essay attends to one of the most recognized Latin American novelists: Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and her novel Las aventuras de la China Iron. The analysis employs the notion of geological writings to deconstruct the form in which Cabezón Cámara displaces and rewrites the foundational Argentine myth of Martín Fierro through an anachronistic reappropriation (we return to this same operation) of themes and problems of current global capitalism, and of voices and structures of language that allow China, protagonist of the tale, to communicate as much with animated beings as with objects, to end up constructing a transgender and post-anthropocentric discourse. In this way, Rivera Garza demonstrates the radical materialism and the pre-capitalist conception of (use) value that the work entails. The follo­ wing article in the book is by Edmundo Paz Soldán, who addresses the influence of global technology in the most recent generations of Latin American writing. He situates within a series, in which he includes Cristina Rivera Garza, Martín Felipe Castagnet, Merlina Acevedo or Denis Fernández, among others, two writers who act as catalyzing poles for the way in which literature is affected and produces itself from the new technologies: Mario Bellatin and Alejandro Zambra. Both reveal that global technology has changed our perception and our sensibility, as Mónica Ojeda also does in Nefando. This work is analyzed as indicative of the “new media ecology” in which the novel expands and appropriates (again we see this same operation) the internet to propose a kind of politicization of technologies of the image, which go hand in hand with the politicization of art. On the other hand, Juan Rogelio Rosado Marrero proposes an approach to the phenomenon of the narconovela, based on a case study: the modes of editorial production and the reception in the global market of the work of the well-known Mexican writer Yuri Herrera. This sociological analysis, which draws on Moretti, Casanova, and Bourdieu, demonstrates the process of consecration of his fiction, and the role that the mediation of the Spanish imprint Periférica has played in it. Additionally, Rosado Marrero compliments this work with a symbolic reading of Herrera’s poetics, which reveals the “counterhegemonic” and “counter-imaginative” vision that it displays to show how one

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survives in the border. Continuing, Juan Poblete presents us with a fruitful reading hypothesis for thinking through the tension between national literatures and the global today. The idea is to understand the genre of the crónica— associated with the Latin American tradition—as a form of national literature in times of globalization. Poblete maintains that the crónica is produced in a “between” (the local, the national, and the supra-national), as a privileged sign of the relation (temporal, spatial, and subjective) that is produced “between” the experience of (Latin American) culture and the (material and symbolic) processes of globalization in the twenty-first century, as is illustrated in the examples addressed of Leila Guerriero and Martín Caparrós. The dialogue between literature, cinema, and world is the reflective axis of the essay by Ignacio Sánchez Prado. The nucleus of his study involves El cielo está incompleto by Mexico-based writer and critic Irmgard Emmelhainz, understood from the exhaustively discussed category of “world literature,” which Sánchez Prado approaches from Hayot’s notion of “aesthetic worldedness.” We have here a displaced articulation of the subjective, the political, and the material that crystalizes in an archive, hybrid and without genre, incarnated in the global tendency towards autofictional and autotheoretical texts that are read with a cinematic lens, of residual and ghostly images. Or rather, images made ghostly. Afterwards, Catalina Quesada addresses the Generación Zero, referring to the group of Cuban writers that begins to publish in the twenty-first century, eschewing cubanidad in favor of global fictions and representations of nonplaces. Quesada selects the writers Jorge Enrique Lage and Legna Rodríguez Iglesias to construct a hermeneutics of their poetics, while also considering the material aspect in offering us a map of the distribution and reception of their respective oeuvres. For her part, Carolina Gainza reflects on the way in which digital technologies have had an impact on the modes of literature’s creation, circulation, and reception—as has been demonstrated in these times of pandemic—as well as on the ways in which literature has experimented with technology, with algorithms, in the field of digital literature. As Gainza demons­trates in her project Cartography of Latin American Digital Literature and in the cases of Milton Milton Laüfer and Rafael Pérez y Pérez, all this has evolved into a real transformation in literary language. Finally, we end with a section dedicated to the publishing market. Gustavo Guerrero underscores the recent attention in the area of the humanities to the history of the book, the sociology of texts, and the materialist turn. He defends the need to examine the material conditions that intervene in the writing practice and the analysis of how texts circulate and are read. With this overall program, he articulates three sections: one on the impact of the digital revolution on the forms of reading, writing, and publishing; another on the Latin

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American publishing industry (large conglomerates and independents); and another on the role of the literary agent and the scout. In the same orbit of thinking, Ana Gallego Cuiñas addresses the phenomenon of Latin American literary festivals in the twenty-first century with the cases of the Hay of Cartagena de Indias and the Filba Internacional in Buenos Aires. Her proposal vindicates the importance of “literary (public) culture” today and the exercise of a “literary critique of value” in order to distinguish four characteristics that are repeated in festivals: literary self-legitimization; orality and sociability; performance and the relation to other art forms; and the spectacularization of the writer. Lastly, Marco Thomas Bosshard closes the volume with a study on the German publishing market, in which he takes as his starting point the sales data (from 2007 to 2018) of two large independent imprints from Germany, in order to delve into the business of translation. Thus, Bosshard examines the impact of the Frankfurt Book Fair on sales and funds obtained to undertake translations of Argentinean and Brazilian authors, whose sales are compared with those of other Latin American and Spanish authors. Definitively, we have procured, by way of diverse academias of America and Europe and from different critical and political perspectives, to think together the mode by which literature responds to the global market, as well as the mode in which the market alters the trajectory of Latin American literary production in the twenty-first century. Of course, the final objective is not to close doors but to open windows onto thinking, as suggested in this colophon. 1

From the (National) Field to the (Global) Market of Literature

The term globalization, as our book proves, is not only said in many ways, but also continues to be the object of intense debate. The first discussions around globalized capitalism go back to the decade of the 1980s, on the part of economists, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers, among which the theories of Beck (1998), Bauman (2001), Appadurai (2001), Yúdice (2002), and Jameson (2002) stand out. All coincide, in one way or another, in that globalization was not something new,5 but rather a re-composition, complex and contradictory, of different factors: the intensification of information flows; industrial dislocation and concentration; the internationalization of the goods and services markets 5 There is no agreed-upon date for the beginning of globalization, although the majority situate it in the 1980s.

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(“global village”); the financialization of processes of accumulation (the multiplication of securities markets); the dismantling of the welfare state, and the redefinition of the specific weights of the various economic powers. Marazzi 2008, 87

Moreover, globalization implied the de-fetishization of the center-periphery model in favor of a circular action (Marazzi 2008, 72), which for many is what has fostered the homogenization of culture in connection with the Anglo-Saxon model and the standardization of imaginaries on the basis of the “hollywoodesque society of the spectacle, the consideration of English as lingua franca, consumerism, a regime of superficial culture and narrative centered around melodrama or innocuous storytelling, etc.” (Mora 2014, 322).6 Intellectuals such as Nicolas Bourriaud rallied against the “homogenization of the planet under the pretext of economic globalization” (2009, 14), while for others globalization promotes hybridization and the revalorization of minority cultures, pushed aside by the nation state: a world without borders or symbolic hierarchies (Sapiro 2009, 8). From another angle, Appadurai (2001) insisted that globalization does not produce standardization because the reception of Western products is different in each cultural context. Each culture would appropriate the West in a concrete manner to the point of changing it, for which reason globalization should not be reduced to the mere idea of the Westernization or Americanization of the markets: the local dynamics are potent and very complex (Jay 2010, 65). In this orbit, Juan Poblete specifies, following the trail of argumentation of Tomlinson, based on his part in the theory of Giddens, that in reality what is globalized “is an abstract cultural principle that deterritorializes all experience,7 as much that of the tercermundistas as that of the metropolitan nations” (2016, 272). From such is derived the complexity of the link between globalization and culture, given that the dislocation or deterritorialization is responded to with re-appropriation or re-territorialization of these fragments or global cultural dimensions in each local frame,8 which Appadurai (2001) reduces to five spheres: ethnic, mediatic, technological, financial, and ideological landscapes. All fundamental for Latin American culture. 6 This is my translation. All translations going forward are mine as well, except where otherwise indicated. 7 It would be a matter of articulating a communitarian experience at a global scale shared by all. 8 Thus, we see such terms proposed as glocalization, local globalisms, or global localisms, among others.

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And so, what are we talking about when we talk of literature and globalization? We find the answer to this question in the interventions of our volume: we are talking of literature and the global market. Or rather, of literature as a global economy. Because the truly novel aspect of globalization is the transformation that occurs in the market, in the modes of production, which affects the literary object. Currently, the mechanisms of literary (re)production (creation, publication, editing), circulation (dissemination and distribution), and reception (criticism, both social and cultural) respond to an economic logic in which, increasingly, the nation state9 plays less of a role and the financial market more of one (Marazzi 2008, 78). It is this financial market which has fomented the establishment of large conglomerates (German, English, and Spanish) and the current publishing oligopoly. Likewise, the place that literature holds in the cultural imaginary has shifted, as it ceases to fulfill the pedagogical role in the construction of national identities that it once did. Literature has seen itself impacted by the “an increase in the intensity of exchange and travels of textual forms and content, and by a high degree of intermediality” (Poblete 2006, 275), as well as of intermediation, which has reinforced not only its transnational character, but also its commercial, ludic, and leisurely aspect. The consequences are clear: the predominance of certain forms (the novel) and contents (historical, crime, gothic); the migration of the literary to other discursive media and vice versa; as well as the proliferation of mediators that promote the circulation of world literature. These “agents spécialisés” (Sapiro 2009), “agents of market forces” (Bauman 2013), “arbiters of taste” (Parks 2014) or “gatekeepers” (Marling 2016) function as editors, translators, literary agents, directors of fairs and festivals, etc., who, since the irruption of the global market occupy the positions of legitimization once belonging to the State, institutions, and academia. Their practice has become deterritorialized; it is outside of the (Latin American) national fields and within the hegemonic centers of power (USA and Spain), since they have specialized and professionalized much more (Sapiro 2009, 11). It is clear that these gatekeepers of world (Latin American) literature greatly affect our perception of the literary object, given that they function as a kind of agent of the market and of value, whose tools interact in the economic and symbolic system of literature at various levels. If we pause now to consider the specific studies that have been published until now on the effect of globalization on Latin American literature, the fi­gures that stand out are Sarlo (1988), García-Canclini (2001), Achúgar (2006), 9 Although we cannot sidestep that there is no global economy without local economy: globalization takes into account local and regional determination in production and distribution of wealth, as Christian Marazzi (2008) explains.

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Cedeño (2009), Quesada-Gómez (2014), Hoyos (2017), Guerrero (2018), Müller et al (2018), and Valero and Estrada (2019), among others. Ignacio Sánchez Prado synthesizes the continental debate thus: “In general, the discussions on literature and globalization in Latin America have emphasized questions such as the circulation of cultural capital, the emergence of the culture industries, or the incorporation of capitalism into the public imaginary of the middle classes” (2009, 118). These matters continue to engage us today, although other problems have emerged that also interest us for their critical producti­ vity. The first has to do with the economic plane and the question, ‘what is a market?’ which points to the changes that the capitalist system has suffered with globalization (see Rifkin 2000). Marazzi proclaims that, even though the distinction between Post-Fordism of the 1970s and the New Economy of the 1990s—epicenter of globalization—is, to a certain extent, tenuous, it is pertinent for establishing the modifications in the nature of work and the production of goods (2008, 13). The new technologies have increased flexibility in the processes of production—the factory substituted by the house, the machine for the mind—and the current capitalist organization of work has evolved into the union between work and worker.10 These circumstances are not new for literary activity, given that the union (and problematic) of literature and life is consubstantial to the trade of writing. What is new of this global cultural economy is the greater loss of value—both symbolic and economic—in the work of writing and the acceleration in the modes of production—creation and publishing—that result in the super-production of books, the profusion of mediators and gatekeepers, and the over-exhibition of the writer as a mediatic figure in public activities celebrating literature. The second problematic is oriented towards the plane of the literary criticism and the question, ‘what is Latin American literature?’ included in the current dialogue on the sociology of globalization or world literature.11 The latest theories on this matter have centered on the implications of the global circulation of books, as argued by Pheng Cheah in What is a World? (2016, 5). For the well-known critic at Berkeley, the fact that the category world is associated with the transnational circulation of goods and the global market is an error, because that would involve considering that globalization has an imperialist, Western, and Anglocentric bent, given that it also incentivizes local or regional 10 Paolo Virno (2003) inquires into the relation between language and economy in PostFordism, in which the modes of production are outside of the factory, of Taylorist rationality, and in which the work model is put to the service of linguistic capacity and the communication of ideas. 11 In the same orbit, such labels have circulated as “global,” “transnational,” “transatlantic,” “postnational,” or “post-autonomous” literature, etc.

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identities.12 However, from a materialist perspective, the neocolonial and Eurocentric reading—the process of conglomeratization and cultural standardization (see Mastrini and Bolaño 1999)—is undeniable when we speak of the production of Latin American world literature: It can be registered in a more or less obvious way how the publishing industry of Hispano-American narrative in the last fifty years has incentivized the transition from the total novel to the global novel, from the cosmopolitan style to the international, from publishers of catalogs to tables of new releases, from authors who delineate collective proposals to payrolls that gather signatures in the manner of rent contracts within the current market of literature written in Spanish. Bencomo 2009, 43

It is clear that the global market needs “simple categories and recognizable images to facilitate the distribution of its products” (Bourriaud 2009, 37); for this reason, Latin American literature continues to circulate at the international level, on the one hand, under the same Eurocentric axioms of the novelesque of the Boom (political commitment, violence, exoticism, magical realism) and, on the other, under those of the global novel (Parks 2014), with those themes that are privileged in the hegemonic centers of power: ecology, feminisms, migration, human rights, affect, bilingualism, etc. Of course, we also find ourselves with more resistant aesthetics, such as those of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara or Yuri Herrera, although not in the same proportion as in the national fields, whose markets are much more diversified and dissident. In the end, the world-system of literature spoken of by Wallerstein, Moretti, and Casanova does not act as a literary supra-field, but rather as simply one more global market. Strictly speaking, since the moment Bourdieu coined the concept of the literary field up until the present, it has been the object of multiple controversies that account for the social, economic, and cultural transformations that impact the behavior of works, writers, and other agents of literature in the market of cultural goods (Moraña 2014). The critical discussions on the effectiveness of this category occurred in the 1990s, when the publishing sector entered into a phase of global expansion and segmentation without precedent, marked by the processes of absorption and concentration of the 12

For Cheah, world literature should explore how certain literary texts contribute to the comprehension of the world, to its change—to the “worlding of the world”—from a normative and temporal, not spatial, perspective. Compare this with Achugar (2006).

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large corporate conglomerates (Bertelsmann, Planeta, or Feltrinelli). Pascale Casanova proposed to speak in this globalizing context of a “literary system” (2006) instead of a field—more delimited to the national space—even though in general terms the concept of field remains valid for referring to the production and circulation of books at the global level.13 However, the new commercial logics of neoliberalism have affected not only the materiality of the literary object but also its symbolic aspect, to such an extent that its nature responds currently more so to the simple, and paradoxically complex, category of global literary market (Gallego Cuiñas 2019). Writers also are obligated to its economic and ideological laws, thrown into the continual reinvention of a grossly spectacularized image (Sibilia 2008), which is consumed more than the work itself in spaces of sociability (festivals, fairs, workshops, talks, conferences, etc.) that expand the literary beyond the book-object until what prevails is literary (public) culture (Gallego Cuiñas 2021). 2

The Figure of the Writer

In the twenty-first century there has prevailed, as can be ascertained from several chapters of this book, the development of a sort of sociology of the writer that attends to the analysis of various fundamental aspects for the understanding of the literary question: the construction of the figure of the author (in biographical archives, presentations, interviews, and social media); the nature of writing work (types, techniques, cultivation of various genres at a time); the means of professionalization (partial or complete dedication); intellectual property,14 etc. In effect, in the last quarter century neoliberalism has entered into a new ontological phase, in which the market has saturated all spheres of life, including politics and subjectivity. This has resulted in a meaningful change in the legitimization and valorization of the cultural, social, and economic status of the writer, given the subjective and digital turns that literary culture has experienced since the end of the twentieth century. The writer’s

13

14

And Lamont (2012) has already explained that the world (the global market) does not function like a (national literary) field, given that Bourdieu emphasizes—too much—the importance of high culture in (national) literary fields, which fades away in the global market of literature where mass culture operates at the same level. For an analysis of Bourdieu’s blind spots, see as well Boltanski and Thévenot (2006). This last category has been increasingly of interest, principally from the branch of studies of literature and law, for example: Ferguson, Gordon, Tolentino.

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resemantization and over-exhibition as a mediatic character,15 their formation into an article of consumption, and the multiplicity of gestures or scenes that mediate their public image has made fundamental the study of the figure of the author in the agenda of literary criticism of the twenty-first century. It could even be maintained that it is one of the most revealing signifiers of the changes that have occurred in the relation between literature and the market. And it is the case that few social actors depend as much as writers, and artists, on a context, a public, and a market, “in what they are and in the image they have of themselves, on the image that the rest have of them and what the rest are” (Bourdieu 2003, 21). In this social image, in this performance of the public character, which is cause and effect of the meaning of the work, is where the value of literature is at play. As such, “the aesthetics are relative to the positions that the authors occupy in the field” (Sapiro 2016, 37), because their public interventions also form part of the work, insofar as they construct an interpretive direction for their poetics. Moreover, writers dispute the exegesis of their production with editors, critics, and reviewers in the public arena of biographical presentation. This focus is nothing new (Chartier 1992), but it is the case that until the twenty-first century we do not see an interest in author figures in literary criticism studies (Díaz 2007; Meizoz 2007; Premat 2009; Louis 2013; Gallego Cuiñas 2015).16 However, there has not been sufficient deep consideration of the relationship between author figurations and the logics of the market, considering that there is no ‘author’ without intellectual property, that is, without publication or circulation. The conditions of the market in each era affect the professionalization of the writer and the nature of literary work, as I will explain further on, which has a bearing on the creation of a figure and on the manner of making oneself, with a name of one’s own and a signature, that is to say: with money. Thus, we ought to analyze the figurations of the writer ‘backlit’ by the market, from a sociological, materialist perspective, to see how they operate in the cultural field of networks and public tensions, via mechanisms of confrontation, concealment, and appropriation:

15 16

Not only in the public arena, but also in the very production of the book object, “in which the author has a body taller than the title of the work and even in many occasions is embossed or has the dominant color” (Sánchez 2010, 3). This topic has traditionally been reviled in the Hispanist tradition. The explanation perhaps resides in the nature of this kind of analysis, considered to be extra-literary or extratextual, associated with the little-cultivated sociology of literature, as if the writerly image were not also a fictional text that produces the real author.

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The self-legitimization of creation, associated with a property and a production—that is, the author figure—implies a network of various positions, plotted by consensus and dissensus, since writing is not only making a work, but also situating oneself in relation to the dynamics of invention of a national literature, in which the conditions of public existence of this same author figure are generated. Luppi 2016, 77–78

At this point we must remember that the modern notion of auctor is born in the seventeenth century to refer to the individual origin of the word, to the authority and property of texts, paratexts, epitexts and peritexts, in contrast to the anonymous cultural production of oral tradition. When Foucault addresses in 1969 the concept of authorship he does it, like Barthes (1968), in the vein of literary discourse, not as an economic or professional category, but rather as “biographical space” (Arfuch 2002), given that it is a question of enunciations in first person, forms of subjectivation that erase the border between reality and fiction. Therefore, I prefer the term writer figure over author figure, to emphasize the specific exercise of the literary profession within the cultural market, given that its forms of valuation are different than those of other artistic professions. Writer figures not only offer a vision of themselves, of life and work as an insoluble unit, but also of the various modes in which the writer situates themselves before the global market. Of course, the articulation of an “overall self” is impossible because the self-figuration is disseminated in fictional texts, criticism, oral interventions, news articles, interviews, posed photos, televised interventions, in blogs or social media, etc. Among all of these symbolic and material selves, those that have been least perceived by literary criticism have been those relating to interviews, a privileged format today in presentations, fairs, and festivals. This fact is due, in part, to the using of one’s public image as a marketing strategy, and, on the other hand, to it being a form of biographical (self-)representation and of artistic (self-)legitimization. What sells and attracts readers is the illusion of truth, of rawness and immediacy that this format offers via a language that tends to be stripped of ornamentation— paired with orality—and which leads to a forgetting of its artificiality, the fictional making of any discourse on the self. Ommundsen goes even further, to suggest the existence of an “economics of representation” based on “presence,” on the re-inscription of the writer in different modes of autobiographical textuality that certify the “authenticity” of the idol (2004, 54). As such, the question around modes of representation in literature would no longer only concern the book-text but also the writer, the texts that define them as a mediatic figure (interviews, talks, press notes, etc.).

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The meaning, the truth, is thus displaced from the text onto the author. This supposes that we think about an epistemology of the writer figure that would need to be addressed—and this is my tentative proposal—parting from three gestures that are always repeated in one way or another: i) the posture: the mode in which the writer holds a public position through various instances of mediation, such as publications, editing, translation, teaching, etc. ii) the pose: the performative strategy of circulation of the image and the staging that they display in audiovisual media iii) the myth: result of the reception, of the fulfillment of the horizon of expectation of the readers that legitimizes the writer. Of course, these gestures are, first of all, scenes of (self-)legitimization that arise from a particular historical, economic, and geopolitical context, which in turn refers to a central problematic: the relations of domination—and positions of prestige—of the national literary field and the global market. 3

Professionalization and Precarization of the Writer Trade

The questions pick up speed in this last epigraph: what is a professional writer? The one that is successful? One that lives full time from writing? What class of literary works do they make? Under what conditions? Does a part-time writer fully participate in the rules of the field/literary market? In reality, there are many who self-designate themselves as writers and few who live from writing alone. It is clear that a professional writer is one that receives a sustained compensation derived from their public literary activity (Charvat 1992, Galligan 1998). This leads us to infer that there are hardly any Latin American professional writers (and that these tend to publish novels, the most commercial genre) and that the remaining part-time writers (Lahire and Wells 2010, 443) have other jobs—typically made invisible—for which reason they continuously enter and leave the field/literary market,17 revealing the extraordinary contingency of the profession of writer. The only requirement for being one is to have published a book, the social moment in which the writer becomes also an author: guarantor of an authority, of a creation in the symbolic plane, and intellectual proprietor of copyrights in the economic plane. In fact, copyright 17

In fact, Lahire and Wells even speak of how the literary field is always a derivative field, not a fundamental field (2010, 453). Likewise, they propose a triple division between: occasional writers (amateur); fanatic writers (who have a second job but consider themselves vocational); and professional writers (who live from their writing) (2010, 460).

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expanded in the nineteenth century with industrial capitalism, when invention was considered to be a source of economic means. The remuneration per published book is very meager (if it is not a bestseller) and no writer has the guarantee of permanence—the rules are uncertain and not explicit—in a business ruled, increasingly, by novelty and youthfulness. With time, and above all starting with Post-Fordism, the global market has increasingly been paying attention to culture as a commodity and to the need to commercially regulate ideas, that is, creative products,18 because, from an economic perspective, there is no difference between a brick and a book (Berger 1972). This explains why in the 1990s there is a reactivation of the culture industry, now called creative industries, as differential value added to national economies that seek the transnationalization of their cultural goods. Intellectual property—no longer land—has become a central piece of the globalization process, given that the country with the most patents—the most innovative—is the one that accumulates the most wealth (Sádaba Rodríguez 2003, 6). In the case of Latin American literature, what is sold on the global market of creativity—in biennials, book fairs, and festivals—is the singularity of the literary contents—copyright—produced by local authors, whose books provide more benefit to the publisher than to the writer. Given these circumstances, in recent decades “the function of the artist goes beyond that of the author and resembles that of producers who carry out curatorial, administrative, educational, marketing, and informational functions, and who serve as intermediaries in global politics” (Yúdice 2001, 641). Concurrently, the material work of writing has changed notably with the advance of new technologies:19 previously the time employed in writing was greater and more artisanal, given that one composed by hand or typewriter and the search for information was always in the library. In this way, the writer incorporates capitalism (in each of its phases) in their modes of production (dedicating oneself to literature was to make books),20 for which reason in the era of the digital New Economy, of copy-paste and self-publishing, the first thing that has changed has been the literary economy of authorship based on 18

Even though paradoxically ideas continue to be considered as social patrimony (even if they are a private good), thus copyright goes ‘free’ (each country regulates this aspect) after some decades. 19 However, the work of reading (the time invested in reading) has not changed since the Renaissance, aside from the fact that now time spent in concentration is less and the reading more often in fits and starts. 20 Of course, I allude to Terry Eagleton and his idea of connecting the modes of production of literature with modes of production in general, whose character varies over time (see Milner 1996, 63).

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copyright, that is, on the book. The writer now no longer lives from the de-value of the literary text—which is constantly pirated and reproduced—but rather from other economies of literary culture:21 festivals, fairs, performances, master’s degrees, workshops, etc. Aira is astute in his explanation: the novelist used to pass their life in learning such a difficult trade, and in the construction of such complex machines […] The relationship of the author person with their work was, happily, exhausted in this requirement. Today this relationship has invaded everything, to the point of exhibitionism, and the work has faded; if its claim were maintained, the libidinal weight of self-esteem would disperse. Today the novel flows directly from the author, without passing through the intermediation of literature; the work that supports it is no longer that of writing, but publishing. Aira 2017, 34

This implies the transformation of the writer’s presence in the public space22 and the obligatory construction of a mediatic subject that participates in festivals, signs in fairs, presents in bookstores, gives talks in institutions, does public readings, etc. The (over-)exhibition of the writer, the permanent performance, the extension of their virtual space, etc., is such that it would appear to supplant to the work itself. Writers evolve into franchises in which they must (re)produce, in a more or less sustained manner, work and spectacle. Hernán Vanoli explains it well: “We assert that writers become publicists and multimedia artists since, picking back up on Boris Groys, just like the majority of mortals they cannot escape the design of their self, to which the internet condemns them” (2019, 32). We pass then from a literary field based on the bookobject “to an imaginary of the literary centered around an action and a practice: pu­blication. Publishing recovers its original meaning: to make [the writer] public” (Ruffel 2015, 9). For this reason, twenty-first century writers incorporate more than ever before the experience of celebrity into fiction (Lever 1993, Woodmansee 1994), as a way to account for a cultural phenomenon or as a way to (self-)promote their author figure in order to professionalize. Without a doubt, in the twenty-first century writers currently are educated in the (capitalist) necessity to professionalize as early as possible, conscious as they are of the fact that the process of inserting, successfully, a text into a market requires a great number of mediators and a wide network of contacts 21 22

Literary activity tends not to be a salaried job, but instead autonomous. Elmer Rice described this as the “industrialisation of the writer” (in Milner 1996, 107).

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that must be accessed and enlisted (Marling 2016, 144–147). This acceleration in the professionalization of the writer trade is, without a doubt, one more effect of neoliberal globalization. As I mentioned previously, there exists the need to regulate this kind of creative work in order to earn the greatest profit on the little economic yield provided both by publishing and literary studies in universities.23 The writer profession is not highly codified, absent of organization and rules that might lead to training in the writer trade (Sapiro 2017, 6), which is why professionalization has developed through master’s programs in creative writing and workshops.24 This has had two clear consequences for the case of Latin America. First, a greater deterritorialization in the modes of consecration, which now also occur via new mediators who function as authorities: the aforementioned master’s programs in creative writing (NYU, Houston, Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona), commercial book fairs (Frankfurt), literary festivals (Hay, FILBA), literary agents (such agencies as Barcells, Schavelzon or Casanovas & Lynch in Barcelona), and the most important prizes—and translations—that are based in the United States, Spain, and Germany (Man Booker Prize, Alfaguara, Anna Seghers). Second, we can observe an increase in number—and a professionalization—of those agents who intervene in the business of literature, because their field of action has expanded beyond pu­blication and the reading of books, as is the case with fairs and festivals. These same events have currently become privileged mechanisms for the production and valuation of the new, an activity previously carried out by cultural and academic criticism, (national) prizes, and anthologies. Today, the magazine Granta, the lists of Bogotá39 2007/2017 of the Hay Festival, or “Los 25 secretos mejor guardados de América Latina” of the FIL of Guadalajara serve as genuine creators of Latin American world literature. Halfway between the antho­logy and the prize, a jury—typically composed of writers—awards legitimacy to a selected group in the name of youth, the new, and the not-visible, as well as the quality of their work. The value itself is conferred through international transmission of these lists and their high impact in cultural and social media, since they are sponsored by very popular magazines, fairs, and festivals that are driven by an anxiety to influence the creation of taste in local and global reader-consumers. This gesture reproduces the symbolic capital previously granted by reviews in cultural sections of publications, which have lost cre­dibility, and by anthologies, which no longer have the capacity as mediators 23 The sociology of professions has taken on accounting for the changes produced in the activity of artists. See Abbott (1988) and Sapiro (2017). 24 It is not by chance that master’s programs and literary festivals are sponsored by large and medium-size publishers (e.g. Planeta, Alfaguara, Eterna Cadencia).

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(e.g., El futuro no es nuestro (2009); Asamblea portátil (2009), Voces-30 Nueva Narrativa Latinoamericana (2014)), converted as they are into a sort of “business card” with little impact, for writers who want to become known beyond their national fields (Mesa Gancedo 2020). Lastly, even though writing continues to be an elite profession (Brouillette 2017, 288), it has become notably precaritized in recent decades—if we take book sales as a guide—as well as diversified: the writer now also edits, makes music, performance, theatrical, film, and television scripts, publicity, subtitles for series and films, runs workshops and classes, etc. If around the middle of the twentieth century the economic support of the writer was, principally, journalism (Arlt, Onetti, Borges, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, etc.), and after the boom, university teaching (Piglia, Saer, Rivera Garza, Eltit, Paz Soldán, Kohan, Herrera, Meruane, etc.), in the twenty-first century the writer lives off the pu­blic construction of their image (from their digital identity, their participation in cultural events, etc.): they are an “entrepreneur of the self” (Vanoli 2019, 42). Or, what is basically the same—a generator of content and a producer of meaning, to use Nelly Richard’s (1994) expression, given that they become a personal mechanism of recognizable and consumable representativity. This work with every kind of cultural material has been described by Hernán Vanoli as “aesthetic bio-professionalization” (2019, 41), which occurs in other creative trades (artists, designers, web programmers, etc.) based on self-exploitation, flexibility, lack of differentiation between amateur and professional, and nonexistent social coverage: “bio-professionalization finds its space of substantial execution in the culture of book fairs, panel discussions, conferences, roundtables, and literary festivals” (Vanoli 2019, 46). The impossibility of separating the product from the act of production makes it such that the surplus value that the writer subject generates is the hermeneutic value of their public discourse when they reveal themselves as a human being with interests, needs, worries, or as a genius (Oliveras 2019, 114).25 As such, the precarity of cognitive and creative work is a fact in “capitalist absolutism” (Berardi 2007, 10), no longer a marginal characteristic but instead the general form of the labor market. In the end, precarity is the condition of non-salaried work, therefore, it is the

25

Virno, on the contrary, affirms that only productive work produces surplus value (that work which, in Marxist terms, is separated from its producer) and that “intellectual virtuosity” is unproductive because “no capital is invested. The interpreter artist, subjected and parasitic at the same time, falls in the end into the limbo of servile work” (Virno 2017, 106). I do not agree: there is an investment in the elaboration of a biodiscourse, in the execution of a job that also has agency; it is performative.

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condition of the trade of the writer in the twenty-first century and what contributes to a “community of writers,” as Escarpit understood it.26 Likewise, other trades of literary culture are precaritized (workers in fairs and festivals, editors, translators, professors, cultural critics, etc.) and they do not attain a living wage nor a stable job. The economy of literature does not manage to integrate itself successfully into the real economy,27 which in turn reinforces in a misleading way the idea of art’s autonomy, its irreducibility to a marketing status or its ability to function within and outside of commercial logic. This results in the belief that literature is a category of artistic expression that needs to be protected by the artistic institution, by the state or other private sponsors,28 which in turn acquire symbolic and political capital through this protective attitude. Why? As a result of the clear loss of power/influence of literature in the public cultural sphere—if we understand it in its radical historicity—and of the development of the business of the creative industries, which continues to make it attractive. These are two sides of the same coin, given that without the presumption of autonomy of the literary there is no protection (sponsorship) and without protection there is not (sufficient) business: there is no professionalization or mediation. Then, nor is there a writer or a spectacle. And we already know that The Show Must Go On, as in the novels of César Aira. The market, like capitalism, like César Aira, is omnipresent. Bibliography Abbot, Andrew. 1988. The System of Professions. An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press. Achúgar, Hugo. 2006. Apuntes sobre la “literatura mundial”, o acerca de la imposible universalidad de la “literatura universal”. In América Latina en la literatura mundial, ed. Ignacio Sánchez Prado, 197–212. Pittsburg: IILI. Aira, César. 2017. Evasión y otros ensayos. Barcelona: Literatura Random House. 26

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The greater the level of professionalization, and success, the lesser the sense of collectivity (as in other professions). Milner has compared the ‘star system’ in literature to professional sports, given that both share various imaginaries around innate talent and genius (2010, 106). The literary economy is integrated into the global market, but the scant regulation of the literary trade and the loss of the centrality of letters in the cultural sphere has made it increasingly precarious and unstable, as occurs with other creative jobs (Sapiro 2017, 7). For Williams there have been three principal forms of sponsorship or patronage: those that seek commission, those who protect and support, and those who act as a ‘sponsor’ (in Milner 1996, 105).

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