Tropical Kitsch: Mass Media in Latin American Art and Literature 9783964565747

Table of contents :
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION
PREFACE TO THE SECOND SPANISH EDITION
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
I. AGAINST NATIONALISM
Chapter 1: Manuel Puig and Conceptual Art
Chapter 2: Brazilian Tropicalism
II. KITSCH, MASS CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE
Chapter 3
III. KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA
Chapter 4: Luis Rafael Sánchez: Dandyism in the Twentieth Century
Chapter 5: Severo Sarduy: A Post-Everything Author
IV. THE CANONIZATION OF KITSCH
Chapter 6
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
WORKS CITED
RECORDINGS CITED
FILMS CITED
VISUAL ARTS CITED
APPENDIX

Citation preview

Tropical Kitsch

Tropical Kits eli Media in Latin American Literature and Art

L Ì Jla Santos

Translated by

Elisabeth Enenbach

M ^ ^

Markus Wiener Publishers Princeton

IBEROAMERICANA MADRID

Copyright © 2006 by Markus Wiener Publishers and Iberoamericana for the English translation Translations of quotations in the text are by Elisabeth Enenbach unless otherwise noted. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies for permission to reproduce portions of Lidia Santos, "Los hijos bastardos de Evita, o la literatura bajo el manto de estrellas de la cultura de masas," published there in 1999; and to Graciela Carnavale, the curators of the Helio Oiticica Project [Projeto Helio Oiticica], photographer Joio Ripper, and painter Rubens Gerchman for permission to reproduce visual material in this book. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission of the copyright owners. For information write to: Markus Wiener Publishers 231 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ 08542 www.markuswiener.com Book design by Wangden Kelsang Cover design Maria Madonna Davidoff Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Santos, Lidia. [Kitsch tropical. English] Tropical kitsch : mass media in Latin American art and literature / Lidia Santos ; translated by Elisabeth Enenbach. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-55876-353-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-55876-353-8 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Latin American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Arts, Latin American—20th century. 3. Mass media and the arts—Latin America. 4. Kitsch—Latin America. 5. Popular culture—Latin America. I. Tide. PQ7081.S2713 2005 860.9*357—dc22 2005017246 ISBN-13: 978-1-55876-354-8 (paperback) ISBN-10: 1-55876-354-6 (paperback) Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix

PREFACE TO T H E TRANSLATION

xi

PREFACE TO T H E SECOND E D I T I O N

xiii

L I S T OF ABBREVIATIONS

xxii

INTRODUCTION

I

I. AGAINST NATIONALISM

n

Chapter 1: Manuel Puig and Conceptual Art • Tucuman Arde (Tucuman Burns): The Forgotten Predecessors of Manuel Puig • Heartbreak Tango: The Personification ofTango • Betrayed by Rita Haywortb. The Rise of Melodrama

13 13 16 2.6

Chapter 2: Brazilian Tropicalism • The Language of Spectacle: Tropicalism in the Visual Arts • U.S. Mythology: Tropicalism in Literature • Culture as Copy: Musical Tropicalism • National or Cosmopolitan? Academic Reception ofTropicalism . . . . • The Aesthetic of Violence: Tropicalist Cinema

35 35 43 51 54 61

II. K I T S C H , MASS CULTURE, AND CRITICAL D I S C O U R S E

67

Chapter 3 • Kitsch and Mass Culture in Postmodernism • Kitsch as Demarcation of Social Barriers and Class • Kitsch and Conceptions of Taste • Emotion x Commotion: The Frankfurt School • Art x Kitsch • Mass Culture: A French Analysis • Mass Culture: The U.S. Case • Pop Art and the Concept of Camp • Kitsch, Cursi, and Camp as Aesthetic Devices

69 69 72 79 81 84 89 91 93 96

v

vi

TROPICAL KITSCH

III. K I T S C H I N T H E N E O B A R O Q U E E R A

99

C h a p t e r 4 : Luis Rafael Sánchez: D a n d y i s m in t h e Twentieth C e n t u r y • Macho Camacho's Beat: The Cursi as Social Barrier • La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos: Cursilería x Testimonio . . .

IOI 101 112

C h a p t e r 5: Severo Sarduy: A Post-Everything A u t h o r • The Abstract Roots of Severo Sarduy • Cobra: From the Illegible Text of High Modernism to the Text of Bliss • Toward a Neobaroque Aesthetic • Colibrí: The Lower Dwellings of Camp

125 125 128 133 138

IV. T H E C A N O N I Z A T I O N O F K I T S C H

143

Chapter 6 • Haroldo de Campos: The Incorporation of Orality • Clarice Lispector: The Working Class Does Not Go to Heaven • César Aira: The Guerrilla as Pulp Fiction

145 145 153 162

CONCLUSIONS

167

NOTES

179

WORKS CITED

209

RECORDINGS C I T E D

228

FILMS C I T E D

229

VISUAL ARTS C I T E D

230

APPENDIX

231

INDEX

000

[...] song of the barefoot America, of the bitter America, which distracts from the vertigo that is history, around here; song of eternal truths that ages its stimulating bouquet on the altar that is every jukebox, around here. [...] canción de la América descalza, de la América amarga, que distrae del vértigo que es, por acá, la historia; canción de las verdades eternales que añeja su buqué estimulante en el altar que es por acá toda vellonera. LUIS RAFAEL SÁNCHEZ, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has shared my journeys through three continents. Each trip not only brought it bibliographic elements and theoretical contributions, but also lent it new perspectives and unexpected intellectual choices. The contact with other cultures significantly changed the version of several chapters that originally were part of my doctoral thesis, presented at the University of Sáo Paulo, Brazil, under the direction of professor Irlemar Chiampi. The new version of these chapters benefited from relevant observations by professors Waldenyr Caldas, Nicolau Sevcenko, Luiz Tatit, and Bella Jozef, who formed the reading committee. I also owe Bella Jozef, who directed my master's thesis at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, my initial curiosity about the subject. For the doctoral research, I received a grant from the Centro de Aperfeig:oamento do Pessoal de Ensino Superior (CAPES) and institutional support from the Federal Fluminense University (Universidade Federal Fluminense), where I was then a professor. I was also able to rely on the grant for Foreign Hispanists offered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Spanish Government, which allowed me to carry out research at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, with the support of professor Roman Gubern. I also owe my gratitude to the team of librarians and staff at the School of Information Science at that university, and to Margarita Rivière, who shared with me valuable information about lo cursi in Spain. I owe the final version of this book to the stimulating intellectual environment of Yale University, where I have now been for some years. I am especially grateful for the support and diverse contributions of the Latin Americanists of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, professors Rolena Adorno, Roberto González Echevarría, and Josefina Ludmer. I thank professor Emilia Viotti da Costa for her attentive reading of the original, and valuable comments. I owe similar respect to professor K. David Jackson, regarding the chapter on Brazilian tropicalism. Other colleagues and friends, such as Georgina Dopico-Black, Ernesto Grossman, Susana Haydu, Guillermo Irizarry, Antonio Ladeira, Maria Rosa Menocal, Cris-

ix

X

TROPICAL K I T S C H

tina Moreiras-Menor, Jordano Quaglia, Stuart Schwartz, Noël Valis, Alicia van Altena, and Margarita Tortora, gave me much support. Debates that arose in my seminar on the topic with graduate students also pointed out new paths for the research. I thank John Charles for his help with the bibliographic research and a separate translation of one chapter to English. I also give special thanks to Fernanda Macchi for her faithful and competent assistance, especially in the translation of the original to Spanish. To César Rodríguez, curator of the Latin American collection of the Yale libraries, I am grateful for his unending good will in helping me to find bibliographic treasures. Finally, the generosity of the Hilles Publication Fund of the Whitney Humanities Center facilitated publication, for which I am also indebted to the patience and attention of editor Klaus D. Vervuert. Other friends and colleagues, from all parts of the world, aided me in all of the places where I have been in the writing of this book, and through written suggestions or comments. In the U.S., I especially appreciate the stimulating words of Randal Johnson, Leo Bernucci, and Lucia Helena Costigan. From Canada, I received supportive commentaries from Rita de Grandis, Eva Le Grand, and Walter Moser, who have had contact with several of the initial versions of different chapters. Petra Schumm introduced my work in Germany. In Brazil, my country of birth, the list of colleagues who offered friendly contributions would be endless; however, I must highlight professor Silviano Santiago, for having had faith in my work at a very decisive moment, and Silvia Cárcamo, for her promptness in sending me material whenever necessary. Adrimaria Rocha, Alair de Carvalho, Cláudio Leitáo, Elesbáo Pinto Novo, Eliane Perez (from the National Library, in Rio de Janeiro), Horacio and Rose Matela, Lygia Vianna Peres, Liv Sovik, Luiz Roberto Veloso Cairo, Maria Bernadete Velloso Porto, Maria do Carmo Cardoso da Costa, Maria Elizabeth Chaves de Mello, and Ryssia Alvarez Floráo also sent valuable information and friendship. I dedicate the result to my daughter Manuela Leal, for the courage of having shared with me the adventure of writing a book in the middle of a change of country and culture. I also dedicate it to Enrique Mayer, partner in everything I do.

PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION

It is with pleasure that I give my English-speaking readers this excellent English translation of my Tropical Kitsch, originally in Spanish, following two editions in that language. In addition to its usefulness in the fields of cultural studies, communication, and Spanish-American and Brazilian literature and art, the book offers those exposed to U.S. and European culture a new perspective of their own cultures. Seen from below (abajo)—both in terms of geographical perspective and of the metaphorical sense of the word, as it was used by Azuela to designate the subalternity of Latin Americans in relation to hegemonic cultures—the cultures of the North became (if we take into account the analyses of the sixties) a model to be imitated by some, and re-created by others, during the period in which the aesthetic and cultural events described here were taking place. In the seventies and eighties, Latin American critics grounded in post-structuralist ideology rejected the idea of imitation. Reaffirming the reflections of Foucault, they called attention to the inexistence of an original from which copies could be made. In contrast to the pessimism of the preceding generation, they affirmed, during that time, that Latin American cultures were characterized precisely by being an affirmative and cheerful copy of hegemonic cultures. Provokers of this discussion, the Latin American writers and artists treated here dedicated themselves for some two decades to reinventing the dichotomy of original/copy offered by their cultures, using similar references to those employed by artists to the north. I considered titling this book Marilyn Monroe Goes South, because practically all of the authors and artists I analyzed made reference to the actress in their works, in one form or another. This shows the "pop" nature of the art and literature dealt with in this book. The kitsch utilized in these works also refers to art from the U.S., which broadens the understanding of artists such as Andy Warhol and the conceptualists from the U.S. and Britain who followed him. The global phenomenon of this last artistic movement and its temporal placement around the year 1968 can also aid the réévaluation of its range of

xi

xii

TROPICAL KITSCH

events as part of the protest against youth participation in the Vietnam War, and of the defense of minority civil rights in the United States; or of the rebellion of youth in Europe at around that time. The role of mass media in the global awareness of these events lends them a certain positive quality that is simultaneously recognized and denied in the works dealt with here. The reverberations of Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" in Latin America are also visible, particularly in the second part of the book. Tropical Kitsch also contributes a southern vision of consumer society. Transforming their strategies into experimental tools, the Latin American artists and writers I have chosen foresee phenomena discussed only later, such as the permanence or impermanence of the Utopia as a catalyst of artistic change. On the other hand, the reader will be surprised by the new readings that Latin American artists have made of universal canonical literature. Thanks to their works, poems by John Donne and Maiakowsky have not only been translated, but are also sung as lyrics of popular music. I leave to the reader the encounter of new connections between the cultural and artistic universes of both hemispheres. Questions which arose in the act of translation brought forth several changes. Thus, I have both revised and expanded this edition, including new citations and other information. The accuracy of this edition would not have been possible without the seriousness and competence of my translator, Elisabeth Enenbach, nor without the support, patience, and attention of the publisher, Markus Wiener. To both, my profound thanks.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND SPANISH EDITION

It was with joy and surprise that I accepted the challenge proposed by Klaus Vervuert, editor of Iberoamericana. "Now," he told me in Dallas, during the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in 2003, "you have to prepare the prologue for the second edition!" The proposal seemed like a second award. Tropical Kitsch had just been recognized by LASA as the "Best New Book on Brazil in a Comparative Perspective." I interpret this distinction as a recognition of my active presence in the intellectual field of both the U.S. and Brazil. I would like to extend my gratitude to the LASA committee, as well as the many readers who helped the book sell out in less than two years. I especially thank those who expressed their interest and attention directly, sometimes through personal messages sent by electronic mail. The reviews published about Tropical Kitsch reconstruct the reception of the first edition. Several adjectives are reiterated in them: for example, many describe the book as "ambitious." Considering that dictionaries list, as a synonym of ambition, the courage and audacity to realize a project, I can only feel proud of this description. I know the difficulties involved in attempting to summarize, in a single volume, the fruits of over ten years of research on the relation between literature and the media in Latin America. However, I can only gauge the book's reception by carefully following readers' responses. Perhaps it is best to define them: who might read this book? A professor, a graduate student—someone, in short, related to the academy in a literary field? In this case, it would be a reader trained to receive a theoretical introduction followed by an analytical continuation, in which that discussed earlier is generally applied. What this type of reader will find in the initial chapters of my book, however, are interpretations: not only of books, but also of visual works, cultural events, films, and music. Each of these interpretations carries its own theoretical oudine, for the most part situated in the temporality of the production of works and of the events themselves. This reveals one of the foundations of my work. It has to do with reweaving the web of ideas that were in circulation during

xiii

xiv

TROPICAL KITSCH

the time that the works studied were produced. The theoretical chapter, which occupies the central part of the book, thickens the plot created in the first part, while the final chapters add recent views. The result is a permanent juxtaposition in which theoretical lines intersect, contradict each other, and yet enhance each other. In short, my intention—ambitious, I recognize—was to counterpose the reception of several theories that were in Latin America in the middle of the twentieth century with recent critical experiments, helping the novice reader to orient him- or herself in contemporary debates. Much more than merely describing these debates, or inserting my writing within them, I first sought to clarify their starting point for this type of reader. I wanted to focus on a precise moment. The predominance of the culturalist approach to literature and art, in the last two decades, has obscured the earlier theoretical base, constructed around social classes. Returning to the sixties and seventies, as I did in the first two chapters, attempts to provide a snapshot of a moment of transition, when Marxism still had not lost its appeal, and the dominance of cultural criticism still had not fully crystallized. The reader who is patient enough to arrive at the analytical index included in this edition may be amused by the number of terms added to the words class and culture. Their repetition is intentional, and attempts to portray the slippery theoretical terrain trodden by Latin American artists and intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century. Adding kitsch to this slippery ground increases the uncertainty. The concept of kitsch fragments the category of cultural identity, also defined in diverse ways, to the point of pluralizing it definitively. Restricting my study of kitsch to the cultural products of the media augments this plurality with the matter of repetition and series. I deliberately avoided the term simulacrum to describe this plurality. I was interested in emphasizing—and, fortunately, this was observed in almost all of the reviews of the first edition—the foresight with which artistic production proposes, as one reviewer indicated, later "hot spots of theoretical discussion." The concept of a simulacrum, which was also foreshadowed by Latin American culture, since it can be found in the tide of a story by Jorge Luis Borges, still had not been introduced in the Latin American intellectual sphere (L. Santos, Eva 103; Borges). Rather, those who initiated the recycling of kitsch in Latin American art and literature were practic-

XV

ing—through direct contact with the media—the famous modern experience that was later rejected by postmodernists: the erasure of the boundary between original and copy. That would be the central point, several years later, of the concept of simulacrum constructed by Baudrillard, based on Borges. Before the establishment of that concept in French philosophy, but after the first works studied in Tropical Kitsch, the topic sparked animated Latin American debates about the culture of the continent as a copy. I dedicated the description of those polemics to the more experienced academic. If that person is older, he or she will be able to identify in them a common history. It is that which carried us from revolution to counterculture, from resistance to military dictatorships to disenchantment with democracy (since this last element, for the most part, coincides with Latin American governments' alignment with neoliberalism). If the reader is younger or more attentive to the comings and goings of critical theory, he or she will also be able to find responses to contemporary inquiries about Latin America. I thank my friend Silvia Cárcamo, who, in her review, observed that the route taken by this book is not as easy as it seems; perhaps this contradicts what was affirmed earlier about my lack of insertion in theoretical debates. The withdrawal of cultural studies from the academic stage, announced by those who were its supporters, confirms many of the arguments of Tropical Kitsch (Revista Iberoamericana 203, among others). Having been completed at the very end of the twentieth century, the conclusions of the book reflect perplexity regarding the waning of the very concept of resistance, a sentiment shared with colleagues who divide the scraps of the last vestiges of Marxism in Latin American literary studies, that is, Gramscian thought. As a backdrop for this book, one could draw the elegant gated neighborhoods of our Latin American cities, which reproduce the segregation of wealth in the countries to the north with their imported electronic security devices (Caldeira). One could also portray the children armed with the latest technology of destruction, characters from novels and films like the Brazilian City of God, by Paulo Lins/Fernando Meirelles, or the Colombian Our Lady of the Assassins, by Fernando Vallejo/B. Schroeder, in which the demand for social inclusion is confused with oppression coming from "the underdogs." As such, the barriers of Goblot were an unexpected discovery, as the reviewers understood so well. It seemed incredible, to me, to assert

xvi

TROPICAL KITSCH

that taste can also serve to express segregation and exclusion, and that this had already been described metaphorically in the first half of the twentieth century. The interpretation of gates, private police, and electronically controlled security as the embodiment of the metaphoric barriers created by elites would undoubtedly seem like heresy to Goblot. His model shows precisely the rejection of confrontation and violence in social contact. In spite of that, the French author showed me a direction. Concerned about describing the banalization of consumerism that, almost three centuries old, now begins to seem ugly, I chose not to consume theories available in the academic market, and deemed it better to recycle—as do the selected authors—an excellent and entertaining theory about consumption itself. If we all agree about the ineffectiveness of the class-based model, why not return to a model that describes the permeability of class, and the difficulty of determining a fixed concept of poverty when societies only sell wealth? Dismissing the interplay of the elites with other social classes, Goblot defines social life as a dynamic marked by the consumption of goods. In contrast to models based on hegemony, that of Goblot never supposes conflicting forces. Wealth, like an attractive magnet, dominates everything, and extends its tentacles to those who do not have it. The behaviors and tastes of the elites include the possibility of acquiring them through imitation, which also reveals that the imitators are not passive. The recycling of this theory seemed particularly effective for describing the moment in which consumerism begins to be driven by the very governments of Latin America. The resulting fever of consumerism allows us to see not only the reproduction of the elites' way of life, but also the values—not always ethical—underlying its maintenance. The union between Goblot's theory and art and literature is shown when one considers the transformation of kitsch into an aesthetic artifice that forms an allegory of the consumerism introduced in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. The inclusion of the Baroque in my reflection does not merely indicate a literary preference. It is also not limited to the similarity of its discursive techniques to those of the selected authors. With the aid of the history of mentalities, I discovered the birth of consumerism and the establishment of standards of taste in the time of the historical Baroque. The evidence leads me to disagree with definitions of kitsch as a product of the nine-

xvii

teenth century and industrialization. The kitsch of the twentieth century, recycled by the art and literature with which I deal in this volume, could be defined as the possession of inaccessible consumer goods through imitation or reduction. Here, however, the subject, not the object, is privileged in the process of possession. Reclaiming the anthropological-phenomenological interpretation of what is cursi, by means of Giesz, yielded the discovery of unexpected nuances of contemporary Latin American kitsch. The split identity of the end of the century is very clearly expressed in the enjoyment of kitsch, since it offers a pleasure situated between aesthetic taste and the joy of upward social mobility. In addition, the durability of this sticky and ambivalent taste became evident. If the different words used to designate the search for social inclusion by means of aesthetic criteria (kitsch, cursi, and camp) only appear in European languages in the nineteenth century, this does not mean that the phenomena they name did not already exist in Baroque courts. It is important to remember that the eighteenth century marks the distancing of the word taste from the exclusive sphere of sensory perception. In the courts which rid themselves of absolutism, taste also comes to designate aesthetic preferences. In this way, the domain of taste created or approved in those environments allowed access to new members who were not necessarily born into the aristocracy. As such, the establishment of good taste begins to erode the elites, erasing the impermeability that impeded social mobility. The imprint of history can be seen in the organization of the book. The background established in the first part develops rapidly in time, because I believe that the excess of spatial reflection in contemporary criticism requires a temporal counterpoint, without which the different temporalities that characterize the cultural life of Latin America cannot be properly evaluated. However, privileging history does not mean abdicating theory. The long span of my research has allowed me to engage the works of innumerable authors dedicated to media and taste. I selected those who presented methods of approach to not only the reception of media by consumers, but also the double edge of pleasure found in the enjoyment of kitsch. Following that line of approach, I decided that reception theory would be the best instrument for working with the chosen literary texts. Its foundation in the pleasure of reading has allowed me to unite the phenomenology of kitsch (see Giesz) with the aesthetic enjoyment offered by the artworks

xviii

TROPICAL KITSCH

examined in Tropical Kitsch. The blend of reception theory with spatially oriented reflections on the everyday creates the combination necessary for this narrative. Thus, the story told in Tropical Kitsch is not subordinated to history as a discipline or method of study. Rather, the book contains an ordinary account, following the paths of the theories and fictions being studied, and seeking to imitate their humor, as well as the flavor of jokes from the streets. Several readers have told me that they laughed while reading this book. This has been one of the responses that have pleased me most. Another reviewer pointed out the presence of my ability as a writer of fiction, which according to her is fully utilized in its writing. I am very happy that she has recognized this. The choice of my occupation was made, above all, because of my passion for literature, to which I dedicate myself through more than just criticism. I am also an author of fiction, and for this reason, I am almost saddened by the little attention that my colleagues in criticism dedicate to the literary text today. The affirmation, unanimous among all the reviewers, that this book can be read—and is being read—by a third type of reader, situated outside the academy, is due, in my opinion, to my familiarity with the writing of fiction. The currency of the themes undertaken in Tropical Kitsch is measured in the quantity of books that were published about them around the time of the first edition. The peculiarity of kitsch resides in the fact that the analysis of the phenomenon includes that of two other related concepts: the notion of camp, to which José Amícola devotes himself in Campy posvanguardia: Manifestaciones culturales de un siglo fenecido (2000), to which I did not have access before the publication of my own book; and the concept of cursi, analyzed by my colleague Noël Valis in relation to Spain, in her book The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class in Modern Spain (2003). Regarding the media, Juegos de seducción y traición: Literatura y cultura de masas, by Ana María Amar Sánchez, was published at almost the same time as the original edition of Tropical Kitsch, the year of my first edition, 2001, also saw the publication of a collection of short essays organized by Edmundo Paz Soldán and Debra Castillo, Beyond the Lettered City: Latin American Literature and Mass Media. The majority of articles in that book, for the most part, confined themselves to an earlier phase than that which I study here. Concerning the relation of art and literature, there are points

xix

of contact between my work and several articles in the collection Corpus Delicti: Performance Art of the Americas, edited by Coco Fusco in 2000; and The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis, by Francine Masiello, published in 2001. In the same year, Paola Bernstein Jacques published Estética da Ginga: A Arquitetura das Favelas através da Obra de Hélio Oiticica. Christopher Dunn, also in 2001, published a work on the musical facet of tropicalism, Brutality Garden, following the 1997 publication of Tropicalia: A história de urna revolugao musical, by Carlos Calado. The translation of Caetano Veloso's biography into English, which appeared in the United States, in 2002, with the title Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil, provides another source on musical tropicalism to researchers in the U.S. With the exception of the books by Calado and Veloso, cited in Tropical Kitsch, I did not have the opportunity to read those works before the publication of this book. After having read them, I can say that the colleagues cited and I show the interrelation and interconnection of literature not only with other forms of artistic expression, but also with technique. We also call attention to the presence, in verbal art, of tastes that did not belong to those who supposedly outlined the very model of literature as art. If each of the books mentioned is dedicated to a subdivision of these relationships, Tropical Kitsch, again ambitious, takes on all of them. I was asked in an interview if I did not run the risk of (over)simplifying such diverse authors. I repeat the answer: I do not think so. My intention, in the first place, was precisely to establish unexpected connections and differences, in accordance with the title of the collection in which this volume appears in Iberoamericana, "Nexosy diferencias." Second, I do not intend to make an exhaustive analysis of the selected authors. I read them with a particular topic, or group of related topics, in mind; this requires a special analytic approach. Although the chapters are subdivided into the diverse works of different authors, the object is to offer the reader the possibility of evaluating the important role of literature and art in the physiognomy of an era. As opposed to the old concept of art as a reflection of an external reality, here there is recognition of the problematization of even reality itself. There is also a fight for the recognition of the active role of art and literature in the formation of the habits and mentalities of a nation's citizens during a specific period of time. As this cannot be separated from

XX

TROPICAL K I T S C H

space, the space-time depicted here spans many countries and assumes two languages. Although Tropical Kitsch is written in Spanish, my native Portuguese presents itself in the book beyond the possible "Portuguese-ized" syntactic constructions that appear in it. My knowledge of Latin America comes from Brazil. Based on the experience there, I have found converging ideas among Caribbean authors and Argentine artists and writers, as well as artistic solutions similar to those devised by Brazilians. Some works were omitted from the bibliography because of my overfamiliarity with them, as is the case with Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America, by William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, whose reading I had so well assimilated that I took it for granted. In the literary treatment of mass culture, I approach studies about cultural recycling that were carried out years ago at the University of Montreal, under the direction of Walter Moser. My participation, by invitation from the group, in a seminar in Leiden, the Netherlands, during a conference of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) in 1997, has undoubtedly left its mark on this work. Although I have cited several articles published in books that summarize the trajectory of that group's investigations, it is important to highlight here its presence, which can largely be seen in the humor of my approach to kitsch. If the kitsch discussed in this book can also be defined as the recycling of the cultural trash presented by the media, the artistic act of recycling kitsch includes its parody, its pastiche, and even its quotation. Thus, it has to do with a construction en abîme, in which the idea of originality would be a contradiction. Hie distance separating this lost original from its copies guarantees the characteristic humor of these artistic productions, as well as of the criticism written about them. As such, Tropical Kitsch also makes fun of the omnipresence of consumerism in Latin America. In other words, it describes it with humor, reminding the reader that in art, imagination tends to be more productive than documentation and criticism. In the year and a half that separated the first and second editions of Tropical Kitsch, the debate about cultural studies, to which I referred in the first introduction, has become heated. The return to the study of the literary text, upheld by many of the debate's participants, confirms the accuracy of my position. It seems as though we are convincing ourselves that, in a world increasingly dominated by narration—especially that transmit-

xxi

ted through the media—we, as researchers of literary works—that is, specialists in narrativity—have much to offer. This, of course, does not mean that we should minimize the possible achievements contributed to our field by cultural studies. Rather, my intent in this book was—and is—to bring the literary text back to the research of cultural studies about literature. Recognizing the great opening that these studies offered to the field of criticism, I believe that we now have to redirect it to the production of art and literature, before the marketplace becomes the only possibility for their evaluation and consumption. Likewise, the intersection between writer and critic, present not only in the critic as a person, but also in the work of the writer, often makes it possible for the literary text to be read simultaneously as a critical text. My next work continues this line of inquiry. Pursuing an aspect that is hardly explored in this book—that would be too ambitious!—I am developing, in a new volume, the intersection between the serial narratives of literature and the media, seeking traces of rhetoric in both manifestations of narrativity. Hie starting point of that project is here, in Tropical Kitsch, which I present to new readers with the same enthusiasm as I did the first edition. I am grateful, in advance, for your feedback, and I await you in my next book. New Haven, August 2003

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

HT BP BR TR MB G C Dal C Sud Hour Hora

Heartbreak Tango Boquitas pintados Betrayed by Rita Hayworth La traicion de Rita Hayworth Macho Camacho's Beat La Guaracha del Macho Camacho Cobra, edited by Dalkey Archive Press Cobra, edited by Sudamericana The Hour of the Star A Hora da Estrela

xxii

INTRODUCTION

This book attempts to address a fundamental question. Why does bad taste, mainly that present in the products of mass media, become incorporated into Latin American narratives considered significant to the course of the culture in which they are inscribed? What is the significance of this use? In other words, I seek to understand to what extent media and kitsch acquire a role in Latin American literature and criticism, starting from their utilization in literary works.1 As a corollary, I intend to identify in what manner the introduction of these two new elements in the corpus of critical thought modifies or enhances its perspective on the continent. The research justified itself by the significant—and ever-increasing— number of writers and visual artists who, since the end of the sixties, have parodied mass culture in their works, especially in products created around kitsch.2 Radio and soap operas, folletines and romance novels, rhythms considered out of fashion, like the tango and the bolero, and B-movie narratives are all cited, in various forms, in the works of this artistic approach.4 The authors included here were selected for inscribing the use of these products in the intention of breaking away from their contemporary aesthetic and political modes of thought.5 Hie corpus was reduced to seven authors and two movements centered on the visual arts and popular music. Even if it is the literary text which marks the development of this book, the movements of Tucumán Arde (Argentina) and tropicalism (Brazil) serve as counterpoint, respectively, to the works of two pioneers: Manuel Puig (Argentine) and José Agrippino de Paula (Brazilian). Those who carried on this type of literature, Luis Rafael Sánchez (Puerto Rico) and Severo Sarduy (Cuba), stand out for their reading of kitsch in the context of new camp identities and for the contributions their works make to queer theory in Latin America.6 The presence of kitsch and the media in the mature work of Haroldo de Campos and Clarice Lispector—authors today considered canonical in Brazilian literature—confirms that the critical utilization of these elements has achieved a unique place in the cultural discourse of Brazil, especially as an avant-garde

i

2

TROPICAL K I T S C H

stance in the course of its national literature. The inclusion of César Aira (Argentina) permits the reevaluation, in the nineties, of the contributions of the pioneers both in terms of their aesthetic proposals and in relation to the sociopolitical context in which the works were produced.7 From the textual point of view, mass culture and kitsch have served as instruments for the contestation of the literary practices that preceded the authors analyzed here. Transformed into aesthetic devices, they become used as experimental tools fitted to question the realist project contained, for example, in the narratives of the literary Boom of the sixties, especially those of magic realism, or lo real maravilloso.8 From the historical point of view, this response is inscribed in the cultural and political atmosphere that marked the beginning of the downfall of Marxist utopias.9 At the same time, the echoes of U.S. counterculture helped to weaken the call for collective revolution. The individual revolution began to be included in the project of social transformation. A new critical understanding, capable of incorporating lived experience {vivencia), aesthetic and individual, was asserted.10 For many of the artists treated here, mass culture and kitsch fulfill that role. At the same time, these elements allow the artists to consider social class with alternative parameters to those of the Marxist method, as with the study of the everyday and of the subjectivity of the working class (Martin-Barbero). The reception of mass culture by this class appears in Latin American art through parody. From the socioeconomic and political point of view, the industrialization that began to grow in the thirties and forties had provoked an intense internal migration from the countryside to the city. In the sixties, the profile of agrarian societies, characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century in Latin America, is quickly replaced by that of consumer societies, as a result of the expansion of multinational capitalism. Mass media, fundamental in maintaining the momentum of consumption, expand proportionally to all of these changes. The recording and film markets increase, and irreversibly broaden the reach of television, established on the continent during the fifties.11 The media were not a novelty in Latin America. A pillar of the populist seduction of the thirties and forties, radio had been, at that time, the principal vehicle for political propaganda and for melodramas. In Argentina,

INTRODUCTION

3

the intersection of these two discourses became evident in the rise of Eva Duarte, a radio/television actress, to the stage of state government as Eva Perón. Melodrama also drove cinematic expansion in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, made possible by the support granted by the populist governments of those three countries to the emerging entertainment industry. 12 The expansion of the reach of television in the sixties introduces the show into daily life, since the imaginary codified in sounds and images takes on the possibility of being present in the homes of all social classes. 13 Through television also arrives, to this mass of potential consumers, the stimulus for the purchase of new products introduced to the market by the diversification of the industry of consumer goods. Many of the socioeconomic changes described above herald the arrival of postmodernity, for many critics. Accepting such a premise, one might interpret the utilization of mass culture and kitsch by Latin American art and literature as a practice typical of postmodern works. Even if this sort of classification seems pertinent to me, the deep reading of Latin American art in this book demonstrates that it is insufficient to explain the wide gamut of aesthetic-cultural reflections revealed by the works chosen. In like manner, the revision of the concept of postmodernism by the same critics who helped to construct it indicates that the indiscriminate use of the idea made it lose much of its theoretical effectiveness. 14 In the field of Latin American literary criticism, on the other hand, the concept of the post-Boom was used to explain, especially, the discursive changes represented by works that parodied kitsch and the media. Even if the creation of the term post-Boom implied an opposition to the canonization of Boom narratives, the Boom still persisted as the canonical framework on which contrastive comparisons with later works were based. 15 In addition to having too constructivist and chronological a vision of literature, this type of analysis does not allow the inclusion of countries that did not participate in the literary Boom of the sixties, such as Brazil. Furthermore, it impedes the consideration of other arts in which the phenomenon has been expressed. New possibilities for the reading of the texts analyzed here are opened by the coincidence and, often, the dialogue of the first literary uses of mass culture and kitsch with a similar phenomenon in the visual arts of Latin America, especially conceptual art. Recent reassessments of the concep-

4

TROPICAL KITSCH

tual movement envision it as a global expression. The interpretations made possible by this understanding seem more productive to me—because conceptualism adheres exclusively to the intrinsic aspects of art—than those offered by solely postmodernism. However, not all of the texts of my corpus belong to the realizations of conceptual art. From the connection I establish between the two arts—verbal and visual—there remains the certainty that, in both fields, kitsch and the media are included in an experimental project by artists who remain faithful to the principles of rupture held by the historic avant-gardes of the twentieth century.16 Ascribing not only an artistic meaning to the term avant-garde, but also a political significance, the critical line I adopt here outlines a third position in the present theoretical debate: a line that seeks to recognize the achievements of the literary avant-garde without forgetting that such feats are often the fruits of sociocultural changes.17 Hie connection I make between the proposals of cultural studies and a literary theory based on rhetoric and philology arises from the selected texts themselves. Of these radical works, almost all present difficulties to the reader; this led me to construct the concept of an aesthetic of d i f f i c u l t y to characterize them. To establish this concept, I principally used critics of the aesthetics of perception and reception (Steiner; and Iser). The principle that every poet is always an "etymologist" (Steiner 19) helped me understand that the treatment of kitsch, cursi, and camp by the most significant authors of this set of Latin American literature has been driven by the very etymology of these words.18 The contrastive comparison of the three terms, also carried out in a historicist manner, brings the reader to the second theoretical line adopted in this book. Generated in different European languages and cultures toward the ends of the nineteenth century, kitsch and cursi are transplanted in Latin America in association with the social classification of subalterns. Other terms will join them, terms created in this new environment, which will complement the concepts contained in the European words. On the other hand, the Marxist model of social classes, based on strictly economic criteria, is rendered problematic by the introduction of culture and customs as parameters of social analysis. This makes Latin American art, developed to a great extent around Marxist ideology, incorporate taste in the representation of the everyday life of different social classes. Transformed

INTRODUCTION

5

into an artistic tool, the bad taste of the subaltern enters the discussion. 19 One perceives, especially with works created since the eighties, how the theoretical debates surrounding these matters underlie the texts.20 In relation to mass culture, these narratives introduce the perspective of reception. The choice of this point of view—the reception of mass culture by its consumers—opposes the authors of my corpus to the criticism of the seventies in Latin America. This was centered on production, following the thought of the Frankfurt School, and Adorno in particular.21 The introduction of mass culture in the text of high literature served to question the essentialist model of the cultural identity of the continent, built on the intersection of the two only cultures considered authentic: high culture and the folklore-based low culture.22 With mass culture, the artists of the corpus managed to include in this binary model factors such as foreign (cultural) contributions and cultural products for immediate consumption. The view of these new elements based on their reception offers an ironic treatment of the question of cultural identity, in which mass culture is simultaneously presented in a positive and a negative light. The echoes of pop art in the treatment of consumerism make evident the exchange, in the ideology of these artists, between the political choices of the urban guerrilla, inspired by the Cuban revolution, and the influences of the artistic avant-garde of the U.S.—not only those of conceptual art, but also pop art. The anarchic nature that this mixture confers on these works is completed by the use of allegory. National or continental allegories are often constructed by means of kitsch and mass culture.23 In the authors of the eighties, allegory is combined with an epigonous spirit proper to the end of the century. Dandyism is reintroduced through the concept of camp. The book ends showing how the discussions of nationalism in the sixties are transformed, beginning in the eighties, into reflections on the effects of the globalization process in Latin America. The categories of taste are converted, with the authors of the most recent decades, into allegories for the barriers and levels with which urban culture marks the territories of the different "tribes" inhabiting contemporary Latin American cities.24 In terms of aesthetics, these latest narratives dialogue with national literary traditions in a critical and contrastive fashion. For example, characters from the rural countryside present in Latin American narratives until the sixties, are

6

TROPICAL KITSCH

now found set up in the metropolises. Their cultural universe, instead of the folkloric traditions described in earlier narratives, is now made up of a repertoire that includes everything from outdated popular musk to the contributions of foreign mass culture, such as Hollywood cinema. The chapters are organized into four parts, not following a chronological order. The first part, made up of two chapters, inscribes the use of kitsch and mass culture in the debates and ideological disputes that marked the Latin American intellectual field at the end of the sixties. If it is the literary text which drives this book, its reading incorporates a historical chronicle of the period to facilitate the reader's access to the choices made by the authors concerned. The second part consists of a theoretical chapter. Its organization was determined by the same narratives, since they are built around words which, through the superimposition of meanings, make its semantic delimitation difficult. This is the reason why both the etymological analysis of the words kitsch, curst, and camp and the different definitions associated with the three phenomena throughout the twentieth century occupy a large part of this central chapter. The result allows one to observe why the concepts contained in these terms are utilized by the authors of the corpus both to carry out an interpretation of Latin American culture and to propose alternative models of social analysis. Even if they cannot be considered political texts, the selected works levy a criticism, through kitsch and the media, of the political proposals of their contemporaries. The third part, composed of two chapters, confirms this hypothesis. While the authors described in the first part responded to the national-popular ideology and dialogued with the revolutionary projects of the sixties, the authors of the eighties proposed a local reading of Latin America as a counterpoint to advancing globalization. Furthermore, their neobaroque approach indicates that artifice and the aesthetic of difficulty were already well established.25 The last part, comprised of a single chapter, carries out a retrospective reading of the authors studied, contrasting them with more recent production. In the conclusion, I explain the relation between the authors and the contributions their works made to a new interpretation of Latin American culture. The first chapter concerns Manuel Puig (Argentina), viewing him in relation to the conceptual art of the Tucuman Arde movement. Although incorporations of the visual arts in the work of the Argentine author have

7

INTRODUCTION

been pointed out, I have not found references among critical works to correlations between this aspect of Puig's work and the pioneering work of those artists. Their use of the products of mass culture is seen, by the majority of critics, solely as an importation of something criticism has generically termed "pop culture." 2 6 1 show, on the other hand, how this narrative election by Puig is inserted in the immediate response of Latin American art and culture to the introduction of consumer society to the continent. I adopt a historicist perspective in the approach of his first two novels, and I make use of analyses concerning cinematic narrative, sentimental culture, and interpretations of tango to clarify the détournements of the products of mass culture realized by the author in transporting them to literature. Without obeying chronological order, I begin the chapter with Heartbreak

Tango (Boquitaspintadas,

1969) and follow with Betrayed by Rita Hayworth

{La traición de Rita Hayworth, 1967) and materials preceding the publication of that first novel. The second chapter is dedicated to Brazilian tropicalism. I contextualize the novel PanAmérica (1967; Panamerica) 17,

by José Agrippino de Paula,

in the tropicalist movement, relating it to the work of Hélio Oiticica and presentations of film and popular music during the period. The academic debate generated by tropicalism is also incorporated in the analysis. The position against the ideological conceptualization of Latin American culture as a copy or imitation, already adopted by Roberto Schwarz (representative of one of the disputing factions), is one of the principal points of critical support on which this book is based. 28 Taking the work of Schwarz as a base ( Misplaced 1-18), kitsch is understood here as an allegory of the ideologeme of the copy. 2 9 1 grant this subject, as it has been generated in Brazilian literary criticism, a dominant place in order to show that Latin American thought has already dealt with the imitation of European cultures, today a central concept of postcolonial theory, for a century. 30 The intentionally historicist analysis of the artistic phenomenon of tropicalism aims to help the reader understand the ties between historical events and the political ideologies being spread in Brazil toward the end of the sixties. The theory of Steiner, on the difficulty of the text, is the principal instrument for the analysis of the work of José Agrippino de Paula. The third chapter contains the theoretical proposal of the book. The decision to place it in the center was due to the fact that it was necessary

8

TROPICAL K I T S C H

to first offer the reader a general view of the analyzed phenomenon, from the point of view not only of art and literature, but also of their relation to the socioeconomic and cultural changes that were taking place in Latin America during the sixties and seventies. At the same time, the chapter marks the division between two different uses of kitsch. The chapters which follow it reveal more deliberate work on the part of the artists, with an emphasis on camp and deconstruction as a result. In this chapter, I review existing analyses of kitsch in relation to taste, to highlight how taste often serves to delimit social barriers and levels, following the proposal of Edmond Goblot. Goblot's analysis, because it is situated in that set of studies which, since the nineteenth century, have been dedicated to the study of consumerism (that begun among European elites in the seventeenth century), lends my work a perspective close to that of the history of mentalities.31 As for the aesthetic proposals, I work with several contributions of queer theory. This type of approach resulted particularly useful for the analysis of the influences of the visual arts in literary discourse. It also allowed me not only to reflect on conceptual art, but also to understand the connection between the offerings of pop art and the conceptual influence in Latin America.32 The fourth chapter deals with two novels by Luis Rafael Sánchez. Macho Camacho's Beat {La guaracha del Macho Camacho, 1976) permits me to exemplify how the model of social barriers and levels can be suitable for analyzing the Latin American society represented by the narratives analyzed here. The issue of "high" bilingualism, a concept from Pierre Bourdieu (Anatomie) that amplifies the model of Goblot, is central to the analysis of this work by the Puerto Rican author. In it, the matter of bilingualism is also literal. The oscillation between Spanish and English is employed in the context of Puerto Rican immigration to the mainland United States.33 By means of the novel La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988; The Importance ofBeing Daniel Santos). I discuss how the works that make up my corpus maintain a constant dialogue with the accomplishments of their contemporaries. A contrastive analysis with testimonial narratives helps to identify how Luis Rafael Sánchez questions the canonization of that genre in U.S. criticism. In another direction, theories from cultural studies on the phenomenon of popular music in Latin America are also used as instruments for analysis.

9

INTRODUCTION

H i e fifth chapter is dedicated to Cuban Severo Sarduy. The novels Co-

bra (1975) and Colibrí (1984; Hummingbird)

are the point of departure

for understanding the author's undertaking of the neobaroque, relating it to the utilization of kitsch. Sarduy's close relation to the visual arts allows the inclusion of new elements in the interrelation of verbal and visual arts in the phenomenon studied here. His participation in French poststructuralist circles is also taken into account. Finally, his scientific knowledge enables me to incorporate criticism based on the mathematical theories of the theoretical body from which I draw. The last chapter demonstrates that media and kitsch are even taken into account by canonical authors, such as Haroldo de Campos and Clarice Lispector. Within this frame, Galdxias (1984; Galaxies) by Campos, is read with an eye on its intersections with the neobaroque project of Sarduy. I also underline the incorporation of orality into the text, analyzing how recent recordings of portions of the poem onto compact disc confirm the choice. From Clarice Lispector, I choose The Hour of the Star (A Hora da

Estrela, 1977) to demonstrate how this work represents the parodie inversion of romance novels from mass culture, in addition to foreshadowing critical analyses about the phenomenon of globalization. Several commentaries on the novels Los dos payasos (1995; The Two Clowns), La costurera y

el viento (1996; The Seamstress and the Wind), Cómo me hice monja (1996; How L Became a Nuri), and La prueba (1992; The Test), by Argentine author César Aira, close the book as a sample of this movement's legacy in the nineties. The reading of Aira's narratives not only elucidates the proposals of the authors from the first two chapters, but also demonstrates the way in which the political ideas of the sixties were reevaluated in the nineties. The work undertaken in this book is not strictly dedicated to the analysis of literary texts. Its objective is to contribute to research about the cultural phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America. I seek to demonstrate how the selected authors attribute a metalinguistic function to the discursive manifestations of bad taste in Latin America. The qualitative difference between kitsch and art is exhibited in the very composition of the works. The authors, in ironic fashion, bring high culture nearer to autochthonous kitsch, which is produced by the imitation or distortion ( détournement ) of the local canonical repertoire. The kitsch found in stereotypes associated with Latin America, especially by means

IO

TROPICAL KITSCH

of mass culture, is also strongly represented in these works. Hie adjective tropical in the title of this book shares the irony of the authors studied, regarding this last type of kitsch. As in the works that justified my analysis, Tropical Kitsch gathers both local and foreign theories, almost complementary disciplines and methods. If something has resulted from the mixture, it is due to the Latin American art with which I am concerned: it itself has pointed out the path of critical treatment.

I. AGAINST NATIONALISM

CHAPTER 1 M A N U E L PUIG AND CONCEPTUAL A R T

• Tucuman Arde (Tucuman Burns): The Forgotten Predecessors of Manuel Puig When Manuel Puig published his first book (La traicion de Rita Hayworth, 1967, translated into English as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), "media art" (el arte de los medios) was already an expression in use in the Argentine intellectual field.1 Visual artists associated with the Instituto di Telia in 1966 used this term to designate their work. The choice of the designation was based on the fact that they aimed at producing art within the very circuit of mass communication itself.2 Combining the appropriation of media and its criticism, media art was characterized by productions structured simultaneously as receivers and transmitters of political messages. The ultimate objective of these works was not their display in itself. Rather, their goal was to denounce the false information transmitted by the media at the national level, and their shows were formulated as a great circuit of counter-information (Ramirez 67). The apex of media art was the collective action called Tucuman Arde (Tucuman Burns). Bringing together artists from Buenos Aires, the nations capital, as well as from cities in the interior such as Rosario and Santa Fe, Tucuman Arde consisted of three phases. In the first, the artists journeyed to Tucuman, a province in the north of Argentina, to collect information about the socioeconomic and political conflicts which typified relations between the state (under the dictatorship of General Ongania) and the local populace (especially the workers of the region's sugar refineries). A second trip developed the contacts of the first, documenting the experience on film, in photos, and in sound recordings. At the same time, an intense campaign was staged in the streets of Rosario and Santa Fe, using wall-sized posters with the word Tucumdn. Later, posters saying Tucuman

Arde substituted the first ones. The campaign ended with a poster that

13

14

TROPICAL KITSCH

announced the Primera Bienal de Arte de Vanguardia (First Biennial of Avant-Garde Art), which took place in the offices of the CGT-Confederacion General de los Trabajadores (General Confederation of Workers) in Rosario in November, 1968.3 This show featured newspaper clippings that reported the political interests involved in the Tucuman conflict, but it also managed to utilize formal resources of avant-garde art from the period, such as happenings and installations. Toward the end of November, the Biennial was set up in Buenos Aires, at the CGT de los Argentinos (General Confederation of Workers from Argentina)—a dissident wing of the CGT—but was closed down by state censorship only hours after opening. This repression proved that a Utopia such as political art would not be tolerated by the state. Tucuman Arde is considered today as one of the pioneering manifestations of conceptual art. The U.S. artist Lucy Lippard, for instance, who was present at the event, underlined its importance for her own political awakening (Lippard ix). In the same vein, she has interpreted its attempt to establish alternative routes for the circulation of the visual arts as one of the first realizations of the dematerialization of the art object, the main goal of conceptual art. The privileging of theory over the work, to the detriment of its own execution, transformed the conceptual artist into a cultural militant. In the Argentine case, cultural militancy increasingly paved the path for political militancy. Many of the artists who participated in Tucuman Arde later opted for direct confrontation with the state through guerrilla action. In this political ideology of confrontation, people from the interior of the nation, represented in this case by the distant and poor province of Tucuman, were called upon to take part in the composition of a nationalpopular identity.4 In this way, artists and intellectuals wanted to rescue and, at the same time, further the advancement of cabecitas negras carried out by Peronism during its first period.5 One notable aspect of this formulation of national identity was the revalorization of folkloric music—recently rediscovered with this resurgence of interest in the inland—over the tango, considered an "un-national" music (Cohen Imach 73). With this context in mind, it is not surprising that intellectual magazines of the Argentine left received the work of Manuel Puig somewhat coolly.6 An immigrant writer from the interior, he utilized in his works

Cfiârarhodrvt

prowita

Q3&6 OQaïid gm, i 'New York B1onaes onci1 Mary, Peggy, Betty, Julie, New York blondes Their pretty little heads Make the stars jealous. I can't live without them: Mary, Peggy, Betty, Julie, Their luscious lips. The crazy laugh Of Julie, It's like crystal. It's like the song Of a waterfall. The sweet spell Of Peggy Disturbs my dreams, Her blue gaze Deep as the sea. Delicious perfumed creatures, I want to kiss their painted little lips. Fragile dolls Of obliviousness And pleasure, Their joy rings Like a litde bell. A blonde cocktail that makes you drunk That's Mary. I want your flowing hair, like silver, All to myself. If the love you offered Lasts one brief day, Your passion, Betty, Is on fire like a hot coal. It's like crystal.. J

"Lyrics to the song "New York Blondes" ("Rubias de Nueva York"), musical theme of the film El tango en Broadway, with poster release reprinted on the same page. See The Tango. For the music, see Gardel 23, liner notes. For the poster, see Gardel 56, liner notes. Trans, by Elisabeth Enenbach.

16

TROPICAL KITSCH

either films from the United States or the tango, which had fallen into disgrace. In addition, the media art he practiced in his books was not concerned with the production of various media, but what their audiences did with them. Puig did not seem interested in political art, either. His characters belonged to the lower middle class of small cities in the interior, and he did not give sufficient protagonism to the few cabecitas negras included in his first two works for one to label them as political novels. Finally, as opposed to the documentary aspect of the national-popular aesthetic, focused on the criticism of the false referentiality of journalistic language, Puig put forth an aesthetic centered on the imaginary and the poetics of language, further stylizing the already affected "realism" of U.S. cinematic narratives. Recycling bad taste and the cliché, his emergence on the Argentine intellectual scene promoted a type of tradition of the old, in response to the "tradition of the new" found in the aesthetics of rupture inherited from high modernism and still persistent in conceptualist movements. The reading of Puig's works I present here attempts to reevaluate not only their initial reception, but also the majority of later critical writings, which so rarely perceived the political aspect of his first two novels.81 also aim to demonstrate that his writing can be viewed in synchrony with the ideas that surrounded him. Finally, I understand his initial works as a first thrust of the long move of Latin American art and literature toward using mass culture and kitsch as allegories for profound changes in the body of Latin American society. Just as in the visual arts of the continent—considered anticipatory of the global reach of the conceptualist movement—this branch of literature prefigures not only a new narrative cycle, but also later reflections about Latin America in the humanities.9

• Heartbreak Tango: The Personification of Tango

The contrast between Heartbreak Tango (.Boquitas pintados, 1968)10 and the national-popular aesthetic begins with the title, extracted from the theme song of a Carlos Gardel film shot in the United States, El tango en Broadway (1934). The tune "New York Blondes" ("Rubias deNueva York"), besides de-regionalizing the tango universe by transporting it thematically and concretely to New York—the film was made at Paramount Studios in

Above: First stage of the "Tucuman Arde" publicity campaign, Rosario, 1968.

Below. Argentine General Workers' Confederation, Rosario, November 1968. Entryway to the exhibit. (Banner reads: "Visit Tucuman, Garden of Misery.") Archivo Graciela Carnevale, Rosario, Argentina.

i8

TROPICAL K I T S C H

Long Island—is not actually a tango, but a fox-trot, despite being composed by the most popular duo of the Argentine tango (Gardel and Le Pera).11 As such, Puig did not merely choose a world outside of the tango as a point of departure: with a foreign rhythm, he reinvented the tango and its universe. This reinvention, extended to other native "media" genres also parodied in Heartbreak Tango, make the novel the crowning achievement of the early part of Manuel Puig's literary career. The techniques created in the book nourished his later poetics, which he was to summarize: "Nothing is realistic, everything stylized, including the character's speech" (Puig, Under 1; the part in italic was added in the published English translation) (Nada es realista, todo es estilizado, Bajo 13).12 The fact that Heartbreak Tango was written during a residency in New York may indicate that the quotation from El tango en Broadway acts as a metaphor for Puig's own condition as an Argentine immigrant. In fact, the similarities between the Gardel film and Heartbreak Tango go beyond the title. Adding temporal dislocation to geographic distance (the story of Heartbreak takes place in the thirties), Puig manages to construct, just like that of the Gardel films shot in the United States, a stylized Argentina quite different from the tougher, more realist images that characterized the approach of the national-popular aesthetic. In addition, the Argentine interior of the novel's setting does not receive the epic treatment of the national-popular tendency. The conflicts between the workers and the state are substituted by the private life of characters from the middle class. The limited horizons of these people do not allow them to be elevated as heroes. El tango en Broadway also offers the possibility of Latin-Americanizing the contrivances of U.S. cinema. The characters of Heartbreak Tango, like the blondes of the fox-trot by Gardel and Le Pera, are, on a first reading, stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood stories of the thirties and forties. The protagonist Nelida, for example, is also a blonde; however, unlike the blondes of New York, she is Argentine, provincial, and naive. The other "pretty little mouths" (literal translation of boquitas) of the novel also differ from the Peggys and Judys of Le Pera's tango with their Argentine names: Mabel, Celina. However, no attempt to classify this as an identification with national culture rings true. Even the national-popular culture (in which one might include the tango, which despite its later rejection was a creation of Argentine popular culture) appears to be stylized. In contrast

AGAINST NATIONALISM

19

to the tango, in which the man laments the departure of the woman he loves, the female characters gravitate around Juan Carlos, the male protagonist who is born to embody the desire contained in the verses of Le Pera: "Delicious perfumed creatures/ I want to kiss their painted little lips..." (Deliciosas criaturasperfumadasl quiero el beso de sus boquitaspintados..!). Handsome but tuberculous, he does nothing throughout the entire story but seduce and cough. Able to awaken passion in all the available young women in the small town of Coronel Vallejos, the young man has a number of similarities to the idol of El tango en Broadway, Carlos Gardel (Londres). The chronology of the novel, marked by dates which head each chapter, reinforces the parallel with the life of the icon: Carlos Gardel died in June, 1935, and his mortal remains were transported to Buenos Aires in 1936. In the story of Heartbreak, 1936 is the year in which Juan Carlos first met Nélida, his fiancée, at the annual Springtime Dance (Baile de la Primavera). Gardel was the son of a single mother who earned a living washing clothes, just like the character Raba in the novel. Also, the lumpen life of Juan Carlos following the discovery of his illness is similar to that of the compadrito.li From this stereotypical character, the source of Gardel's manner of dress and affected style of singing, Juan Carlos also inherits his characteristic of being an exploiter of wo men (of his mother, his sister Celina, and the widow with whom he lives toward the end of his life), even to the point of sexual violence. In conclusion, Juan Carlos is not a hero of the working class, as the national-popular art used to construct their protagonists. Using an academic classification fashionable during Puig's times, he belongs to the group of the lumpen, where Carlos Gardel also originated. As has been stressed in the biographies of the Argentine singer, the transformation of Gardel into an icon of mass culture was only possible after the "cleansing" of the marginal aspects of his life. The team of Gardel and Le Pera also lent Puig a formal instrument. The artificiality present in the approach to tango culture in Heartbreak Tango is based on actual songs composed by the pair, considered faux by many specialists.14 The characterization of Nélida and Mabel also utilizes the devices of the film genre which Puig chose to recycle: melodrama. Melodramatic models, which are not exclusive to Hollywood films, but which belong to melodrama in general (soap operas, romance novels, Latin American cinema), are so pervasive in the cultural repertoire of the characters that

20

TROPICAL KITSCH

they begin to think in terms of them. For instance, in a seduction scene between Juan Carlos and Nélida, the narrator describes how the young woman's desire evokes images she recalls from movies, used symbolically to represent the sexual act: trees shaken by the wind, like the "knotty rugged trees of the wild pampas" {HT 51) {los imbatibles árboles de la pampa, BP 61).15 Carried over and twisted into literary language, this icon is transformed into cliché, associated with others in the same scene, such as the "luscious honey jars" {HT 51) {lujosos vasos de miel, BP 60) to which Nélida compares the eyes of her lover, or the "spreading eagle wings" {HT 51) {alas abiertas del condor, BP 60) equated to Juan Carlos's eyebrows. The structuring of the chapters also utilizes another rhetorical resource gleaned from cinematic melodrama. The bastard son of classical tragedy, melodrama came to film, especially in Latin America, utilizing music as a Greek chorus. In Mexican cinema, for example, boleros provide an emphatic and redundant running commentary on the action (Oroz 94). The epigraphs of each episode oí Heartbreak Tango have an identical function. In the thirteenth episode, the climax of the novel, a verse by Le Pera ("... the hours which pass will never return"/. ..las horas que pasan ya no vuelven más, BP 195)16 summarizes the chapter: a reckoning with the past between Nené and Mabel, her rival for the love of the protagonist and ladies' man Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos is described metonymically, as a film camera would do. Métonymie descriptions also characterize the two stereotypes represented by the female characters: the dark-skinned morena and the fair blonde. Román Gubern underlines the reiterative nature of certain female types in mass culture. Morenas are tied to Latin-ness, seen as symbols of carnal passion. Blondes have had other attributes. At the beginning of American cinema (such as in the films of Griffith) they were considered to represent innocence. After the Scandinavian muses invaded Hollywood, they became first a symbol of the liberated foreign woman, then of the femme fatale (Gubern 201-201). They appear in this form in Le Peras lyrics to "New York Blondes." In the novel by Puig, however, the blonde Nélida is a dreamy young ingénue destined for marriage. In opposition to this, the indifference of Mabel, together with her style of dress, metonymically set up the morenas character as a frivolous loose woman for the remainder of the story. Finally, melodrama is present in the parody of the sentimentalism of romance novels, explicit for the most part in the novel's treatment of lan-

AGAINST NATIONALISM

21

guage. The letters (a rhetorical device typical of sentimental novels) of Nene—written to the mother of Juan Carlos—discuss the feelings which the news of the young mans death has awakened in her. These letters are full of melancholy, which is shown in clichéd expressions such as "I am alone in the world, alone" (HT24) (Estoy sola en el mundo, sola, BP 27). In the same way, the overwhelming emotion the news brings out in her—to the point of making her reject her husband, provoking a temporary separation—evokes that hyper-emotivity which identifies readers of romance novels as separate from common people, incapable of the same intensity of feelings (Gubern 244). The moira of classical tragedy, reduced in its conflicts, appears in clichés like: "If only she hadn't come, but it was already written that it had to be, in the Book of Destiny" (HT23) (Ojalá no hubiese venido, pero ya estaría escrito que debía ser así en el libro del Destino, BP 27). If we take into account the definition by Román Gubern, for whom melodrama is the kitsch of classical tragedy, we can affirm of Heartbreak Tango that kitsch is the cornerstone of the novel's construction. It is present, first of all, in objects selected as descriptive elements. It also appears in the parodie form in which stereotypical texts are used, such as letters, diaries, or articles from provincial newspapers (Jameson Postmodernism).17 The continual combination of parody, pastiche, and quotations in the narrative discourse presents difficulties to the reader and confers the attributes of an avant-garde text to the novel, which the subject matter may seem to deny. The narrator, for example, is almost absent, quite reduced to the function of the compiler of these kitschy texts (Ludmer 336). On the other hand, description is used to break up the homogeneity of the text, always in an incisive and ironic manner. Cinematographically, the description in Heartbreak Tango is, from the point of view of the economy of the story, much more active than the narration.18 It is the description which clarifies the gaps in the narrative text, at the same time that it creates new gaps. The juxtaposition of these blanks (Iser, esp. 167)19 gives way to contextual interstices in the lives of the characters, who seem to be taken from a serial.20 According to Severo Sarduy, there is no distance between the commonplace and the character of the newspaper serial: "there are no characters in the serial. That is, between the clichés and the actors who inhabit them, between these named entities and the structure that contains them, there are no voids, no cracks; they are perfecdy meshed" (628). For Sarduy, this

22

TROPICAL KITSCH

does not occur in the case of Manuel Puig. The distance that separates the characters of Heartbreak Tango from the commonplaces is evidenced in the fact that the latter only have in the novel a function of fantasy, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term; that is to say, they are purely an illusory production. I would further add that the imaginary sequence becomes emptier (or has more gaps, as Iser would say) to the reader the less it has to do with the character: it is imposed by a codified rhetoric which the characters repeat without consciously realizing it. This fantasy—prepared by others, as we have seen, as with images from film and romance novels—transmits to the reader a sense of décrochage, as written about by Sarduy, and functions as an oudine which the reader must supplement.21 Sarduy's approach is not unlike that of Iser, whose notion of "gaps" or "blanks" is based on the same ideas. In the case of Heartbreak Tango, the reader fills out these gaps using that same codified imaginary, to which he or she is also exposed. Finally, the act of describing allows us to affirm that Heartbreak Tango is not a cheap serial. The hegemony of passionate love, so characteristic of the sentimental novel, is barely apparent. Beyond the love triangle Nené/Juan Carlos/Mabel, there are many other plotlines at work. As Beatriz Sarlo emphasizes, "in the tradition of high culture, when this hegemony [of the passionate love] is implanted, it is always unstable, accosted by other feelings and passions tied to finances, politics, prestige, social mobility, intellectual or everyday success" (86, emphasis added). The subtlety of these other passions in Heartbreak resides in the parsimony with which they appear, always by means of narrative description. Exactly on this point, the description creates a gap which can be brought together with the political objectives of conceptual art: where to place, within that universe of apparent frivolity, the social and political matters exposed by the act of describing? The description of the new house of Nené—who achieves social upward mobility through marriage, and leaves her city in the interior for the outskirts of Buenos Aires—for example, sheds light on the character's issues, explicit in her letters and telephone calls, with receiving her old cohorts in her new apartment in Buenos Aires. Like a camera taking pictures, description makes visible to the reader what the letters try to hide: Nélida does not have enough money to purchase the furniture that a middle-class

AGAINST NATIONALISM

person should own. "In the small foyer, intended to be a living room, there is also no furniture; she looks at the empty space wondering if she'll ever raise enough money to buy everything for cash, so that she can avoid the extra charges for interest in installment plans" ( H T 140) (En el pequeño vestíbulo de entrada, destinado a living, tampoco hay muebles: mira el espacio vacío preguntándose si jamás reunirá el dinero para comprar todo al contado, pues ha resuelto evitar el pago adicional de intereses implícito en una compra a plazos, BP 162). The matter becomes more complex in the case of the two cabecitas negras included in the storyline. The difference between Pancho, who has the goal of social ascent, and his brother is defined by the bed that each possesses: "He looked at his brother's cot, that had no mattress. He thought of the fact that his bed had both springs and a burlap mattress; it had cost him more than a month's salary, on a whim he had refused to buy a second-hand bed" (HT70) (miró el catre de su hermano, sin colchón. Pensó que su cama en en cambio tenía elástico a resorte y colchón de estopa: le había costado un més de sueldo, por capricho no había querido comprar una cama de segunda mano, BP 83). The prosaic details of the forms of payment and the cost of these objects indicate the relationship between social mobility and consumption. To gain a higher status means to have access to a market of determined goods, material or symbolic. Raba (the servant whom Pancho seduces and leaves pregnant), for example—the only character whose social elevation results from moving from the city to the country—feels a great joy at the end of the novel, upon buying her daughter's trousseau. The latter emphasizes that "she didn't want to buy something just because it was cheap, but because she really wanted it, in sheets and towels she didn't want to save money" (HT222) (no compraría lo más económico sino lo que más le gustase, en sábanas y toallas no quería ahorrar, BP 255). Puig seems to refer a phenomenon more evident at the time of the writing of Heartbreak Tango-, the consumer society. Since its introduction in Argentina, the access to material goods likewise signified the possession of certain symbolic capital. That is, the goods were material and symbolic at the same time. The analogy established by Rodriguez Monegal between the films cited in Heartbreak and the radio soap operas read by Eva Perón indicate the collective dream she represented for women who arrived to Buenos Aires from the pampa: moving was the first step toward the possi-

TROPICAL KITSCH

bility of rising into the star system, which extended beyond film to politics (Narradores 365-366). In Heartbreak Tango, each rung of the social ladder signifies a particular type of taste. Although Raba continues to prefer the tango, the other female characters distance themselves from it the more their social status improves. Nene, once in Buenos Aires, aspires to the taste of Mabel who, placed at the top of the pyramid, shows a style shaped by Hollywood cinema. And none of these characters like art! For Josefina Ludmer, Puig marks the passage from "library art" to "media art" in Argentina (335). It is possible to add to this that the trademark which differentiates Puig from his predecessors and contemporaries is the search for subject material which was considered spurious by intellectuals at that point: bad taste, the tackiness so prevalent in the media. The mix of a text based on the avant-garde, with its gaps and obstacles to reading, and old forms of tackiness results in a type of archaeology (in the Foucauldian sense of the term) of the aesthetic taste of the Argentine middle classes. To better understand this archaeology, I will take the concept of "the culture of the poor," utilized by Alfredo Moffatt (89-141), as an initial point of departure.22 This author, studying the state mental institutions of Argentina, establishes tango lyrics as an elaboration of the psychological conflicts characteristic of the marginalized sectors of the working class in that country. Manuel Puig utilizes tango lyrics in the same way. The characters who express themselves through the tango are Raba and Pancho, the only ones belonging to the social stratus Moffatt refers to, and for whom the verses of a tango constitute a programmed memory of a feeling of loss, belonging to that sector of the working class. Raba returns to this memory to organize, to understand losing Pancho and to justify his murder. In the eleventh episode, bits of tango verses, placed in quotation marks, are mixed with the character's interior monologue, composing the story of seduction which has been her lived experience. Other points brought up by Moffatt can be perceived in these two characters of Heartbreak Tango. Pancho, for example, is the typical representative of what Moffatt calls the upper working class, inasmuch as he has petit-bourgeois aspirations. His savings, for instance, show his desire for stability. Raba is the typical representative of the lower working class: she has only temporary jobs and is the victim of marital nomadism, turning into a single mother. The two both have absent fathers and have the same

AGAINST NATIONALISM

2-5

living conditions: they live piled up (i.e., in tiny, crowded spaces). Their first encounter takes place at a "popular pilgrimage," an event not unlike a folkloric festival. Moffatt points out that, in this class, depressive elements are quite strong; hence, the facility with which tango is used, for example, as "spontaneous therapy" in state mental institutions. Raba uses it in the same way to shape her behavior in the énoncé of the novel. Above this class, in Heartbreak, there are characters who belong to the middle class. To distinguish the working class from the middle, Moffatt relies on conditions of "visibility." While the lower class is directly visible, the middle class has certain mainstays which allow it to transform the humility and insecurity of the lower class into the extreme security which typifies it. These are serious dress, laws, and regulations. Within these, the individual categorically considers him- or herself a "cultivated person," unlike the poor person, who understands perfecdy well that, categorically, he or she is just poor. Heartbreak Tango is a true inventory of these avatars of the middle class. The suits and dresses, described in detail, the regulations parodied in various forms and, fundamentally, cultural consumption and aesthetic taste all delineate the profile of the middle-class "cultured person" embodied by the female characters, Raba excepted. However, this is a culture which never goes beyond women's magazines or Hollywood movies. This is especially the case with Nené s obsession with seeming "cultivated," appropriating for this purpose a list of movies which Mabel supposedly liked. Let us return, then, to our original point of departure. Heartbreak Tango presents a cultural aspiration analogous to the lyrics of "New York Blondes." It is the personification of the de-regionalized tango initiated by Le Pera. Nené, a poor young woman, wants to be Mabel, a rich young woman, who in turn wants to be in New York, or anywhere that is not Argentina. Pancho, a construction worker, becomes a policeman to raise his social position and to earn the favors of Mabel, leaving behind tango shows on the radio and popular dances, the recreational activities of his social class. In short, the énoncé of Heartbreak tells, subtly, tales of social mobility always driven by imitation of the group the characters aspire to reach. Renato Ortiz, analyzing Brazilian culture, observes how this phenomenon took place in the thirties and forties in Brazil, and how radio and other new means of communication came to symbolize the process (82). Unknown singers became stars overnight. In Puig's Argentina, Eva Perôn

26

TROPICAL K I T S C H

epitomizes the same phenomenon, though carried over into politics. Marked by certain ways of dressing and carrying themselves, these personalities dictated taste at the same time they could be identified with, giving a sense of belonging lost with urban growth back to the common people. However, Heartbreak Tango is not inscribed in the tradition of "documentalism [which] is content with describing the visible, and [with] its commitment to perceptual reality" (Lima 181-182). Always conflictive, the very construction of the text superimposes a collective imaginary codified by mass culture with a social context stratified by factions of different aesthetic tastes. At the heart of this conflict, the reader must sort the literary out from the cliched trash, discover the fictional in the interior of the codified imaginary. The result is an augmentation of the imaginary which does not, as we have seen, exclude the social context. This fact has finally been recognized by recent approaches to the work of Manuel Puig, though these critical readings rarely admit that the objectives of the Argentine writer dialogue with the political ideology of his contemporaries, proposing new alternatives to it (Amicola and Speranza 196-226).

• Betrayed by Rita Hayworth: The Rise of Melodrama The insertion of his characters into the urban social mobility that took place in Latin America during the thirties and forties makes Puig an anticipator of criticisms to the verticality of the Marxist model of social classes, put forth in the humanities only much later. These criticisms began with the fall of the left (during the late sixties in Brazil, and the seventies and eighties in the Southern Cone) and were integrated in a broad analysis of the causes of that fall. First, Marxism-Leninism was criticized for the structural weakness of its model of social interpretation. Second, leftists who subscribed to this ideology were acc\used of being completely unfamiliar with the day-to-day existence of the working class. The attempt to make the abstract model created by Marxism more concrete translated into efforts toward a more direct contact with the poor populations of big cities. This movement coincided with the birth of the action of N G O s in Latin America, but also can be identified in university investigations of the time.

AGAINST NATIONALISM

27

In the Brazilian academic sphere, there have been an amazing number of dissertations, in many different areas, which are dedicated to workingclass neighborhoods. Arising particularly during the eighties, they involve themes from lower-class lifestyles, including consumption goods like electric appliances and furniture, to inquiries as to the perception of living spaces. The latter is the case of the thesis of Carlos Egidio Alonso, which I cite as an example because it provides interesting points of contact with the work of Manuel Puig. The title, " Voce vé o que eu vejo?' ("Do You See What I See?"), summarizes the intellectual's mistrust of his way of viewing that reality. The main theme is the affirmation of a clash between the expectations of architects who projected living spaces and the ones who consumed the designs. Photographic language from both angles—from the perspective of the user and the perspective of the architect—is used to investigate the anguishing and fundamental matter: "The ambiguity was obvious. We thought of the worker without knowing how he thought, felt, or perceived; we spoke in his name without understanding his language: we designed bathrooms, bedrooms, dining rooms, laundry rooms, everything collectively, as if that was what he wanted" (Alonso 4). The photographs obtained for the thesis reveal, as a particular characteristic of the workingclass home, accumulation. Of objects inside a bedroom: "Television, radio, kitchen cupboard, bed, crib, all share the same tiny space" (Alonso 115). Of people in a crowded space. Regarding this type of accumulation, which the photos depict to perfection, the occupants comment: "it's bad because we always have to take turns sleeping, since there is no room for everyone to sleep at the same time"; but also, "it can be convenient because the children grow up as friends, they have fun, they take care of each other and even warm one another up in the cold; if I had a larger house, they would still sleep together the same way" (Alonso 115-116). The novel Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (Puig, Betrayed)/ La traición de Rita Hayworth (Puig, Traición) anticipates these issues by ten years.23 Its second chapter consists of direct discourse between two maids. One describes the details of her daily life: "'I'm very young but I'm an aunt already, and tonight I am letting Inés sleep in my bed, between me and Fuzzi, so Inés will keep warm and cozy between her two aunts'" (BR 17) ("Yo soy chica pero ya soy tía, esta noche a la Inés la voy a poner a dormir en mi cama, entre mí y Pelusa, así la Inés duerme calentita entre las dos tías" TR 23). In terms of

28

TROPICAL KITSCH

the consumption of goods, Puig already highlights in this novel an obsession in his characters for buying furniture, as seen in the dialogue of two females in first two chapters. As such, social mobility accompanied by the imitation of behaviors considered models by the rising classes, depicted in the stories of Puig, finds its social scientific description ten years later. In the case of the episode of the domestic servants in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, fiction was able to engender an image of society just as productive as the research of a social scientist. The scene functions, in the same way as the social aspect of Heartbreak Tango, as a gap for the reader. Distanced from the central énoncé of the novel, concerned with the cheap dreams of a middle-class family, this scene demands a more attentive reading, since Betrayed is not a document on working-class reality. If this were so, perhaps it would have had a better reception by the Argentine left. Puig also dialogues with the canonical narratives that preceded him. From the Boom, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth maintains techniques of U.S. and European novels, such as interior monologues and elisions in space and time (which César Aira would later call Puig s obedience to the doctrine of his times [Aira, Sultán]). At the same time, the rhetoric of melodrama and cliché is superimposed on this "cultivated" montage. From the serial comes the opposition between the rich and the poor. In Betrayed, that dichotomy transforms the established polarities of Argentine culture, city/countryside or civilization/barbarity, into the opposition urban/suburban: "Night had already fallen on my suburb as in the most aristocratic niche of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, the sun has set for all, one of the many consolations for the poor" (BR 163)24 (Ya cayó la noche en mi suburbio, así como en la esquina más aristocrática de la urbeporteña, para todos se ha puesto el sol, uno de tantos consuelos del pobre, TR 268). For Esther, the character who writes these phrases in her diary, politics are also described as a consolation. Constructing herself in the image of a melodramatic hero—the poor young woman, the excellent daughter who worries about the sacrificed life of the father—Esther invokes Perón as a god in a discourse replete with exclamations and clichés. The rhetorical devices—the excess of exclamations, redundancies, and onomatopoeias—of Perón and Evita are noticeably present in Esther s speech, as can be seen in the following comparison. Esther says:

AGAINST NATIONALISM

29

Now that we the poor people have our newspaper, its many pages the expression of our leader, in a word the heart of a nation is contained... Perón! During the one year that you've been our president, there is no room for all the things you have done for us in the pages of every day of every month of this year of newspapers [...] and nevertheless in your heart there's room: toys for your children! all the needy children of the Argentine republic, and laws for the workers, not to be longer humiliated [...]! {BR 167).25 Ahora que los pobres tenemos nuestro diario, sus múltiples páginas la expresión de nuestro líder, en una palabra encerrado el corazón de un pueblo [...] ¡Perón!, en un año que eres presidente no caben en las páginas de cada día de todos los meses de este año de periódicos las cosas que has hecho por nosotros [...] y sin embargo caben en tu corazón ¡juguetes para tus niños! todos los niños desvalidos del territorio nacional, ¡leyes para tus obreros! ¡que no han de ser ya humillados! (TR 223-224). Eva Perón, who declared herself a "Perón fanatic," stated: For a woman to be Peronist is, above all, fidelity to Perón, subordination to Perón, and blind confidence in Perón! [...] Our Leader is General Perón alone [...] (7/26/49). Perón is in the thoughts of your husband, of your brother, of your friends from the shop, the factory, the school, the office. Make sure, then, that this same Perón is always part of your womanly advice (Eva Perón, 4/4/47). Para la mujer ser peronista es, ante todo, ¡fidelidad a Perón, subordinación a Perón y confianza ciega en Perón! [...] Nuestro Líder único es el General Perón... (26-7-49). Perón está en la conciencia de tu esposo, de tu hermano, de tus amigos del taller, la fábrica, la escuela, la oficina. Haced, pues, que ese mismo Perón esté en todo momento cerca de vuestro consejo de mujer (Eva Perón, 4-4-47, Perón 54). If the similarities have gone unnoticed in the majority of critical works, it is because Puig does not give a prominent role to the context. The practice of documentary literature is what interested him least. Peronism remains, throughout all of his work, as just another melodramatic discourse, occupying the same level of importance as Hollywood films, nineteenthcentury serials, or romance novels written for the female public. Histo-

3o

TROPICAL KITSCH

rians have duly noted these historical references. Marysa Navarro quotes Heartbreak Tango in her biography of Eva Perón, emphasizing that the novel provides an exemplary portrayal of the glamorous and sentimental atmosphere conveyed by radio and film in the thirties, in which, according to the testimony of one of Eva Perón s sisters, the icon had grown up. "Eva Maria always offered to do the dishes for her sister Erminda, in exchange for movie photographs" (Fraser and Navarro 10). On the contrary, literary criticism has all too rarely taken the time to relate the dates which open each chapter to the emotional atmosphere in which the characters are involved, in light of the context.26 If the dates, on one hand, reveal a response to realism—that is to say, they criticize the documentary intention of realist retellings, which Puig perceived as much in novels of the Boom as in Italian cinema from the era (Puig, "Cinema" 288)—on the other, they delineate a temporal space mostly filled by Peronism. Dates, which in Heartbreak were tied to the life of Gardel, here mark the rise of Perón. The chapter quoted above is titled "Esthers Diary, 1947," and the storyline of the novel takes place between 1933 and 1948. Perón dominated Argentine politics between 1946 and 1955. The difficulty of undertaking a historical reading of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, for literary criticism, lies in the fact that the social context of the novel always appears as filtered through the serial. The word consolation, for example, the metaphor Esther uses to define "the sun [that] sets for all," is also used by Umberto Eco (Rhetoric) to characterize the enthusiastic reception of the serial by the public. If the sun, according to Esther, is "one of the consolations of the poor," melodrama in film is certainly among the others. In the chapter "Mita, Winter, 1943," the intrigues of Hollywood films console the character after the death of her newborn baby. In the chapter "Toto, 1942," they allow the character to escape a hostile environment and disagreeable memories. Umberto Eco, in the article cited, makes a structural analysis of the serial of Eugène Sue, which he includes in the category of "consolation novel." Hie chain of montages in this kind of narrative, meant to produce continual and renewable satisfactions, locates it within the "aesthetic of effect" which characterizes kitsch. The mode in which melodramas appear in both Betrayed and a later novel, Puig's The Kiss of the Spider Woman {El beso de la mujer araña, 1978), is exacdy through the "effect" they produce on their readers. This is pri-

AGAINST NATIONALISM

3i

marily because, instead of being parodied, as with the texts written by their characters—letters, diaries, scholarly writings—they are narrated by the characters themselves, which robs them of a more visual language. In both novels, the visual specificity of film undergoes a distortion which reduces it to the emotion produced by the plot. The characters equate this emotion with that of novels which, classic or romantic, are also reduced to pure emotion: "[...] the shipwreck of Paul and Virginia [...] how did it go? One of the saddest books [...] and if I would read it and cry? Berto would wake up, he wouldn't wake up just for the tears, falling tears don't make noise, movie tears, tears from reading Maria by Jorge Isaacs" (BR 111)27 [...] el naufragio de Paulo y Virginia [...] ¿Cómo era? de lo más triste [...] ¿y si la leyera y llorara? Berto se despertaría, no se despertaría con lágrimas solas, corren sin ruido las lágrimas, las lágrimas en el cine, las lágrimas al leer María, de Jorge Isaacs, TR 146). This emotion, according to the character in this monologue, separates women from men. With this process, Puig anticipates another theoretical analysis, this time of the history of tears. As Anne Vincent-Buffault has shown, until the eighteenth century, it was chic to cry in public. Men and women were actually encouraged to display and share their emotions. In the second half of the nineteenth century, tears were gradually displaced from sensibility and relegated to sentimentalism, their devaluation being both social and sexual. Since then, tears passed exclusively to the realm of the feminine and were often seen as pathology, transforming the women who cried them into the hysterics who were such a concern to medicine at the end of the nineteenth century. In Betrayed, tears are one more way in which Toto, the protagonist, formulates the conflict between masculine and feminine, experienced in Manichean fashion. Cultural consumption is added to tears—film as a pastime for women, and football, for men. Finally, the opposition between the worlds of the masculine and feminine is defined by Toto's preference for melodrama (the kingdom of tears), the most faithful expression of female taste. The temporal space, circumscribed by selected dates, also documents the way in which media of mass communication were expanding in Argentina. Hie cosdier investment in Hollywood dramas, mainly aimed at the feminine public, allowed them to make their way weekly to the distant

32

TROPICAL KITSCH

Coronel Vallejos of the novel's setting. The masculine audience had a Sunday schedule of soccer games guaranteed on the radio. As portrayed in the novel, the erudite culture was quite forgotten. Besides being the only one that reached the town via short wave transmission, the radio station that aired the operas of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires also had to compete with soccer games on Sundays. Once again the masculine world imposed its tastes and preferences. Puig never denied the autobiographical nature of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. The regularity with which Toto went to the movies, accompanied by his mother, corresponds to that of Puig during his childhood. The melodrama he describes covers the Hollywood repertoire from those years. If we accept the point of view of Paul De Man, according to whom autobiographical fiction tends to mask, to veil what it tries to de-face, there we can locate Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. According to De Man, the convergence of aesthetics and history, more clear in autobiography, is transformed into autobiographical fiction in a way of reading that involves both author and reader. The permanent substitution between the experience of the two—author and reader—regarding the events narrated, makes it impossible to totalize or close the narrated experience. Thus, the figurative nature of literary language covers the external reference of this experience. In the case of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, this figurative language is multiplied by the incorporation of outside fictions into the énoncé. Tacky and melodramatic, these stories function as a device which breaks the expected unity of a "documentary" account. Initial materials from the writing of Betrayed reveal that the use of tackiness as an artifice was a conscious option. The Spanish word cursi (tacky) appears twice in an outline of Chapter 10, always related to Delly, a French author of romance novels (Amicola and Speranza 292). The screenplays Puig wrote before publishing his novels show that this contrivance was the result of an attempt to distance himself from the realism that predominated in those scripts. One of his screenplays, La tajada {The Slice), is about the actress Eva Perón and the darkest depths of Peronist corruption (Puig, Tajada 127-230, and Puig, Tajada 8-137).28 Puig took the name Nélida from this script, to use for one of the characters in Heartbreak Tango. Other marginal themes later reemerged, stylized, in the novels, especially the melodramatic gaze at Eva Perón. In La tajada, Nélida-Evita is a poor

AGAINST NATIONALISM

33

young girl who rejects her family, which she is ashamed of, as she climbs the social ladder. Her ambition is intensely focused on the world of theatre and she is seriously interested in gaining fame as an actress. A neorealist storytelling is evident in the report of the corruption in which the character is involved. Nélida returns to the social group of her origins to seek marriage, but, moved melodramatically by love, she betrays her husband with an aristocratic ex-boyfriend; for vengeance, she also betrays the moral values that justified her action, supposedly for the benefit of the people. It is interesting to note that the vision Puig presents of Eva Perón is quite different from her revalorization as a "political militant," forged at the time by the nascent Peronist Youth. Beyond this, despite the neorealist plot, the seed of tackiness has already been sowed in La tajada. Defining herself, the heroine yells: '"I am something ... I am tacky!'" {"algo soy...¡soy cursi!" 64).

La tajada never became a film, and luckily for all the readers of Puig, we thus have the opportunity to agree with his ending his career as a screenwriter—not only because his decision gave us more novels from him to read, but also because his performance as a screenwriter hadn't the same level as his narratives. His turn toward novels also has guaranteed the distinctive mark of his work, the rejection of realism. His only point of contact with that type of narration lies in a certain melancholy which permits the use of his country's history and culture as a subtext. For example, Puig takes rhetorical forms from Peronism and integrates them in the recycling of bad taste which typifies his innovative poetics. Although he was exposed to pop art from the U.S.— Betrayed was written in sixties-era New York, and the presence of Andy Warhol was undoubtedly known to him—Puig went on to Latin-Americanize U.S. icons of film and mass culture. In the letter written to Rita Hayworth seeking authorization to utilize her name in his title, Puig referred only in passing to pop art, seeing it more as a promotional aspect of his work, put forth by the publisher, than a predetermined classification on his part (Puig, Materiales 434). Starting with the Hollywood actress, Manuel Puig tells of a betrayal that could be as much by Eva Perón as by Rita Hayworth. La tajada, the forgotten screenplay of his beginnings as a writer, was clear in relating Evita to treason. In this sense, the pretty woman who does bad things is Hayworth, the stereotypical Latina who betrays the symbolic culture of bullfighting in the film Blood and Sand {1941), but she can also be the Eva Perón who,

34

TROPICAL K I T S C H

among many betrayals to herself and to the social class she came from, seems to have started—in the vision of our author—by tinting her hair blonde to achieve the image of a Hollywood star. If we return to La tajada, this supposition can be confirmed. One way that change is marked in the protagonist is the introduction of a hairdresser who "lightens [Nelida's] roots," ( aclara las raices del cabello [a Nelida\) before the heroine enters the scene herself, 216). Thus, the pop aspect which so many critics have shown in Manuel Puig is molded by a set of national issues. Just like Heartbreak, which mixes Gardel and Hollywood in its parody of El tango en Broadway, Betrayed makes Rita Hayworth into the dark-skinned face of Eva Peron. In both cases, the rupture with the concept of nationalism in Puig's era prefigured theoretical questions which did not take shape in the humanities for another ten years.

CHAPTER 2

BRAZILIAN TROPICALISM

• Hie Language of Spectacle: Tropicalism in the Visual Arts Tropicalism appeared in Brazil at the same time that Manuel Puig was publishing his first novel {Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1968). The movement provoked a scandal among Brazilian intellectuals, not unlike the rejection of Puig by certain sectors of the Argentine left. In contrast to Puig, whose opposition to his contemporaries was individual and ongoing, tropicalism is known as an avant-garde group that was multidisciplinary and short lived. However, the controversial and challenging tone of its works was centered, as was the work of the Argentine author, on the stylization of the cliché and of the bad taste utilized by mass culture. Tropicalism was prefigured in 1967, by works in three different media: in the visual arts, with the paintings of Rubens Gerchman 1 and the Tropicdlia installation of Hélio Oiticica; in the theater, with the staging of Oswald de Andrade's play O rei da vela ( The Candle King), by José Celso Martinez Correa; and in literature, with the publication of the novel PanAmérica (Panamerica), by José Agrippino de Paula. Hie movement itself, however, only fully took shape through popular music. Bringing together musicians who were active in scholarly spheres, such as Rogério Duprat; poets such as Torquato Neto; and popular composers like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil; musical tropicalism expanded the debate ignited by this new artistic tendency. Its manifesto was the LP Tropicdlia, released in 1968 (Veloso, et al.). The cover art of the record presents a mixture of clichés of the tropical landscape, namely, palm trees, and images taken from Carnival and hippie culture. In this way, the photo embodies two features of the anarchic expression of tropicalism: a rejection of official boasting about Brazilian nationality, and echoes of counterculture. Television was the first object of the movement's aggression. In Hélio Oiticica's Tropicdlia, the spectator traversed a labyrinth, which ended in a

35

36

TROPICAL KITSCH

wooden box constructed to resemble the precarious houses of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.2 The negligible interior space of the box was occupied by a television that had been left on continuously. In finding his or her way through the labyrinth, the spectator had to aesthetically experience (vivenciar) visual, tactile, auditory, and gustatory sensations contained in exotic, tropical images such as two live parrots, palm trees, and the sand and salt of the sea.3 In a similar fashion, the sets of Hélio Eichebauer for the play O rei da vela "abused kitsch, slapstick humor, the verde-amarelo (the Brazilian flag), and bad taste" (Mostag:o 12). In both cases, kitsch was limited to stereotyped images of Brazilian culture, alluding to the clichés used by the dictatorial state to diffuse its ideology through televised propaganda. Mentioning the national colors (the green and yellow of the Brazilian flag), for example, was a reference to the empty patriotism imposed by the military dictatorship that took hold of Brazil in 1964. Consumerism was also imposed through television. Supported by the sizable patronage of the dictatorship, propaganda agencies flooded urban spaces with excellently designed ads, complemented perfectly by catchy jingles on the radio and on television. Red Globo, which expanded through the capital of the U.S. company Time-Life, began to employ playwrights from the Marxist-Leninist left for the creation of its most saleable product: soap operas.4 Meanwhile, intellectuals defeated by the military coup continued to operate with an abstract model of Brazilian culture based on the alliance of workers and the bourgeoisie against U.S. imperialism. Without understanding that the expansion of mass culture was bringing about a radical transformation of the categories of popular low and high culture, the Brazilian left continued to divide national artistic production into those two categories. In both, it valued that which was authentic and national, which implied the condemnation of any foreign contamination in the popular sphere.5 In the area of high culture, outside influence was acceptable as long as it served the projection of Brazil as a nation to other parts of the world, facilitating the creation of a national image for export.6 The activities of leftist intellectuals were limited to academic environments, since contact with the working class, previously made through its organized unions, had been complicated by military repression. Nonetheless, works of protest including theater, film, and popular music continued

Hélio Oiticicas Tropicâlia, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro in April, 1967. Hélio Oiticica Archive Project, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The morro (hill) of Mangueira, Rio de Janeiro, 1965. Hélio Oiticica Archive Project, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Iropicalia Caelano VeLoso Above the head, the airplanes Under my feet, the trucks Pointing against the prairies My nose I organize the movement I guide the carnaval I inaugurate the monument In the country's central plateau8 Hooray to the Bossa —sa —sa —sa Hooray the palhoça (hut) —ça —ça —ça The monument is made of crepe paper and silver The mulata (mulatto woman) s green eyes The long hair hides behind the green forest [The moonlight of the sertâo (remote inland of Brazil) The monument doesn't have a door The entrance is a dead and narrow Crooked, old street, on its lap, a child smiling, ugly and dead extends her hand Hooray the mata (green forest) -ta -ta -ta Hooray the mulata —ta -ta -ta In the courtyard there is A swimming pool With the blue water of Amaralinet' Coconut tree, sea breeze and northeast accent of Brazil And lighthouses]

In the right hand there is a rose tree Sealing eternal spring And the in the gardens, the black vultures stroll All afternoon Among the sunflowers Hooray Maria —ia —ia —ia Hooray Bahia —ia —ia —ia In the left pulse, bang-bang In his veins there's too little blood But his head oscillates to a Tambourine's samba Emitting dissonant chords From the five thousand speakers Ladies and Gentlemen, he lays his big eyes On me Hooray Iracema -ma -ma - m a [a canonical romantic character of Brazilian literature] Hooray Ipanema -ma -ma -ma Sunday is the "Elegance of Bossa"10 Tuesday goes to the country However The monument is very modern Didn't comment anything of my suit That everything goes to hell My dear" Hooray the band -da -da —da12 Carmen Miranda —da -da -da

*Translation of the song " Tropicdlia" by Meire Murakami (Veloso et al. Tropical Essentials) with additional translation and comments (in brackets) by Elisabeth Enenbach.

Photograph from the cover of the LP Tropicalia ou Partis et Circensis, 1968. In the back row, from left to right, the three members of the group Os Mutantes: Arnaldo Baptista, Rita Lee, and Sergio Dias. O n the right, Tom Zé. In the middle row, from left to right: Rogério Duprat, Caetano Veloso, showing a photo of singer Nara Leao, Gal Costa, Torquato Neto. In front, Gilberto Gil.

40

TROPICAL KITSCH

to be produced, completely ignoring advances in television and mass culture. The military dictatorship tolerated this protest until 1968. Its strategy has been described as follows, by Flora Sussekind: Intellectuals were left to moan protests and denunciations, but their potential audience had been stolen by television. The protests were tolerated, in front of the mirror. Meanwhile, a population converted into an audience consumed the show into which the nation and its history were being transformed. The Utopia of the great Brazil of the post-'64 military governments was constructed through television, through the language of spectacle (Sussekind 14). 1 3

The understanding that television was the principal medium of mass communication responsible for spreading the ideology of the military dictatorship also determined an original way to approach it. The tropicalists were the first in Brazil to relativize the interpretation of mass media. In works of this movement, attention was displaced from production to reception. This was the purpose, for example, of the permanently operating television inside a wooden shack (a barracào), in the work of Oiticica. This image could be interpreted as a metaphor of the unlimited reception of television programs in Brazilian homes, even the poorest, which transformed their inhabitants into potential consumers. Tropicalist works, for the most part, were constructed around the reception of the televised spectacle by different social classes, in the Marxist sense. The staging of the play Roda Viva (Living Wheel) by Teatro Oficina (Office Theater) analyzed this reception on the part of the intellectual petite bourgeoisie.14 The text of Chico Buarque de Hollanda, at that time a composer of popular music dedicated to "protest music," acquired a theatrical treatment centered on aggression toward the spectator. With that technique, the director José Celso Martinez Correa sought to denounce, to the general public, the disruption of their own everyday life by consumerism, implanted by ceaseless television marketing. Hélio Oiticica's Tropicdlia, on the other hand, showed the reception of TV programming by the working class, embodied by the sambista of the morro in the agit-prop of national-popular art.15 In counterpoint to the heroization of the worker effected by that political discourse, Oiticica sought to highlight the marginalization experienced by the de-classed (in

AGAINST NATIONALISM

4i

the Marxist sense) of the morro. He concretized, through the contact of living part-time on the marginal side of thcfavela, the abstraction contained in the national-popular metaphor.16 The labyrinth of Tropicdlia, for example, was conceived in the concrete experience of walking up the morro, as Oiticica himself explains: "It seemed to me, while walking about the environs and set of Tropicdlia that was going through the gullies and over the curves of the Morro, which were organic, like the fantastic architecture of the slums; another life-experience: I had the sensation of treading the earth once again" (Oiticica, Catalogue 124). In 1965, in a pioneering essay about the work of Oiticica, Mario Pedrosa described him as postmodern (Pedrosa 13).17 On the bolide-caixa entided Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo (Homage to Horseface, 1966), the name of a bandit thus transformed into a hero,18 Pedrosa comments: "A box without a lid, covered modestly by a cloth which must be raised to see inside, is lined on its internal walls with reproductions of the photo that appeared in newspapers at the time, in which 'Horseface' appears facing the camera, riddled with bullets, on the floor, arms open like a crucified Christ" (Pedrosa 13). The apex of that phase by Oiticica was a parangole (actually, a flag later used on the set of one show by tropicalist musicians, in 1968; Calado 229-234) that displayed the sentence, "Be marginal, be a hero!" (Seja marginal, seja heroi\). Parangoles were much more than objects, colored capes that only took life with the movement of the participant's body (the spectator, in this case, was designated as the participant by Oiticica). They were, above all, experimental processes integrated into the exhibit New Brazilian Objectivity (Nova Objetividade Brasileird) shown in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, today considered one of the most important occurrences of Latin American conceptual art (Ramirez 57). To model the parangoles, Oiticica invited the dancers of the Samba School of the Mangueira, who brought them to life with the evolugoes (steps and bodily movements) of samba. This demonstrated that the artist's interest in the favela was not documentary, as generally was the case with national-popular interest, but aesthetic. In his work, the shacks (barracdes) were transformed into shapes, cited as examples of "organic architecture," or "spontaneous, anonymous constructions in the great urban centers—the art of the streets, of unfinished things, of vacant lots, etc." —clearly a proposal with a conceptual

42

TROPICAL KITSCH

base (Oiticica, Catalogue 124). His focus on life in the favela emphasized dance and creative leisure, converting them into an assertion of "sensorial participation" (later integrated into Oiticica's work during his Crelazer phase). As such, Brazilian conceptual art, of which Oiticica is considered the greatest pioneer, was marked by the opposition to national-popular tendencies; thus, it contrasted with conceptual art in Argentina, which proponed a national-popular ideology. This difference can be explained since, in the Brazilian case, the national-popular ideology was, in addition to having been debunked by the actions of the military dictatorship, rejected by the new leftist movements that had arisen after the coup. Thanks to these political events, the Mangueira dancers' use of the parangoles portrayed Brazilian culture as the "confrontation" of cultural factors belonging to different social groups, always organized in a festive or carnivalesque fashion. However, the party-like entertainment did not produce the positive feeling that emanated from the works of the nationalpopular left. Rather, the results achieved by the work of Oiticica were permanent fragmentation and tension, which according to him, rendered explicit the "shit" in which Brazilian culture was submerged. Needless to say, this formulation was very different from that of the positive and unitary model defended by the members of the Centers for Popular Culture (•Centros Populares de Cultura), or CPCs.19 In the works of Oiticica, the rejection of the protectionism of "popular culture," as a form of resistance to the invasion of foreign culture, was transformed into a more nuanced vision of the dichotomies of high/low or authentic/false. The television of Tropicdlia also symbolized, according to the author, "the image that absorbs the spectator into the global sequence of information" (Oiticica, Aspiro 100, my italics). Helio Oiticica, with his Tropicdlia, thus anticipated later analyses of the phenomenon of globalization, in the social sciences. Although the adjective {global) might also refer to the Globo network, which expanded as a monopoly, the context of Oiticica's commentary also indicates an awareness of the reach of globalized information into all levels of society, including the working class. On the basis of this affirmation, a defense of the "authenticity" of Brazilian popular culture ceased to make sense. The Tropicdlia of Oiticica also broke away from the national-popular model; it both broadened it outward to the global level, of which televi-

AGAINST NATIONALISM

43

sion was the metaphor, and concentrated on the local level by restricting nationality to the morro and the favela. Oiticica declares: " Tropicàlia is the very first conscious, objective attempt to impose an obvious Brazilian image upon the current context of the avant-garde and national art manifestations in general" (Oiticica, Catalogue 124, my italics). In the same text, the artist recalls having invoked Oswald de Andrade and his Cannibalism (Antropofagia) in the conception of the New Brazilian Objectivity (.Nova Objetividade Brasileira), thus leading one to assume a continuity and a permanence of those objectives.20 As such, the succession is still constructive: the avant-garde is regarded as a continuous, parallel line from Cannibalism to the construction of a national identity.

• U.S. Mythology: Tropicalism in Literature A novel forgotten by the Brazilian canon was responsible for breaking that continuity: PanAmérica, by José de Agrippino de Paula, expanded the concept of nation within its very title. Contradicting the U.S. ideology of Pan-Americanism, Paula constructed a novel in which the narrator is a Hollywood film director responsible for the entire Californian Olympus of the fifties, reigned over by Marilyn Monroe. Brazilian national identity, or the nationalism of brasilidade, is thus negated. In its place arises a Brazil that is a consumer of myths fabricated en masse by the U.S. film industry. From the inside of this myth factory, like Jonas from the belly of the whale, the hero of PanAmérica leaves to confront the enemy. Faithful to the epic form promised by the subtitle—Epic Poem {epopéia)—there is no psychological depth to the characters, whose symbolism is codified by Hollywood cinema. The aspect of the marvelous, characteristic of the canonical Greco-Roman epic, is embodied in mythological beings from the consumer industry, such as winged jaguars (as in the brand of automobile) (Paula 35-36). The portrayal of U.S. cinema as a catalyst for consumerism indicates the undeniable dialogue with pop art that was inaugurated by José Agrippino de Paula. It is fitting to recall that various series of Warhol's portraits of Marilyn Monroe had been circulating the world since 1962. Much later, José Agrippino de Paula declared, "the mythology of our time, including

44

TROPICAL K I T S C H

the Brazilian mythology, is from the United States" (Paula, Retorno). This affirmation may justify the inversion of terms which PanAmérica represents in relation to the canonical epic of Brazilian Modernism, Mario de Andrade's Macunatma (1928). The popular national myths that are the foundation of Macunaima's construction are substituted, in PanAmérica (1967), by global myths of mass culture. Ci, the leader of the Amazons in Mario de Andrade's novel, is transformed into Marilyn Monroe. José Agrippino de Paula denied the influence of Mario de Andrade in his work, but professed that of Oswald de Andrade (Veloso, Tropical 92). In the autobiography of Caetano Veloso, José Agrippino de Paula appears as one of the principal mentors of the Bahian composer at the beginning of his career. According to Veloso, it was Paula who introduced him to the work of Oswald de Andrade. Meanwhile, Cannibalism appears discreetly in PanAmérica-, this is different from the work of Oiticica, in which Cannibalism is a clearly recognizable and stated influence. Hie metaphor of the ingestion of foreign influence, central to the Cannibalist poetry of the twenties, appears quite literally in the novel of José Agrippino de Paula. The act of devouring on the part of the powerful characters, presented as giants, strengthens the allegory of the struggle between the strong and the weak that is the core of the novel's construction. An example of this process is the fight between studios in Hollywood and the Italian Cinecità: a cow-eating contest between Joe DiMaggio, turned into a Hollywood producer, and Carlo Ponti is a metaphor for the struggle between the two film industries. Sophia Loren, the wife of the Italian producer, appears as a giantess towering 12 meters tall and bearing 400 nipples, with which she feeds Ponti. In the last chapter, the Statue of Liberty is also a giant eater of men, women, and cattle. It is interesting that the film of Macunatma by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade (1969), built around the same allegory, debuted two years after the publication of PanAmérica. In that film, the capitalist Pietro Pietra is also a devourer. His cannibalistic soup is transformed, at the level of the poor characters, into a self-devouring (Stam 233-255, esp. 239). There is, therefore, a base of Brazilian culture on which the epic of PanAmérica is erected. However, unlike the Cannibalism of the twenties, which converted the consumption of the foreign Other into a positive sign of Brazilian culture, the work of José Agrippino de Paula and several of

AGAINST NATIONALISM

45

his contemporaries in film treat such influence in a negative fashion. The mixture of the national and the foreign, seen as inevitable, seems to suggest a self-devouring of nationality itself, a concept which Paula explored at length, as did all tropicalist artists who were to follow. Paula's engagement with the notion of nationality includes his expansion of the concept through the inclusion of Latin American (i.e., widerreaching) political myths in PanAmerica, at times as characters. Paula constructs the second part of the novel around urban guerrilla warfare, which had appeared in Brazil as a political strategy of combating the dictatorship.21 The myth of Che Guevara appears beginning with a reference to his book, which served as a manual for the foquista theory of revolution for the guerrillas (Jameson, Periodizing 116). 12 As such, the utopic and collective ideals of the guerrilla formed quite a contrast with the individual journey of the hero in PanAmerica, which was actually inspired by the echoes of U.S. counterculture in Brazil. The protagonist's individualism also contradicted the classical convention of the collective hero, inherent to the epic as a literary genre. This aspect of the work was perceived by Brazilian literary critics as the revolution of the individual who, influenced by counterculture, began to supersede collective revolution in the ideology of Brazilian youth (Hollanda 23). As a consequence, the local cultural cement—that of Cannibalism—was not seen as a progressive form by the young tropicalists. In PanAmerica, two contradictory ideologies are superimposed upon Oswaldian Cannibalism to subvert its nationalist character. First, guerrilla strategies imported from Spanish-speaking Latin American ideologues transform the political struggle against U.S. imperialism into a continental effort. Second, the use of ideas from the aesthetic avant-garde, which came from the U.S. in the forms of pop art and hippie counterculture, incorporated unusual elements, such as the instruments of mass culture, into the political struggle.23 These two foreign influences—the urban guerrilla from Cuba, and the artistic avant-garde from the U.S.—rendered explicit in a single work, make PanAmerica one of the principal sources for understanding later developments in Brazilian tropicalism. The dialogue with the aesthetic avantgarde of the U.S. continued with composers of popular music, as well as with Helio Oiticica, whose work became progressively more integrated into the globalized movement of conceptual art, beginning with the ex-

46

TROPICAL KITSCH

hibit Nova Objetividade Brasileira. The guerrilla aesthetic survived mainly in the theater of José Celso Martinez Correa and in productions of cinema marginal.2* Considering these innovations, my analysis of PanAmérica attempts to answer a question posed by both Caetano Veloso and Evelina Hoisel: Why has criticism ignored such a seminal novel? The first possible answer might be that the book is built upon the difficulty of reading, an area that literary criticism touches upon without offering a definitive theory. Working with Steiner's theories, for example, one can affirm that PanAmérica is a difficult text because the novel fits at least two of the modalities of a difficult text established by that critic.25 The first is a tactical difficulty, that based on transgressions of the operation of the linguistic code, such as morphology or syntax. This type of difficulty appears as the result of the use of certain words from English adapted to Portuguese morphology and syntax: for example, the abuse of the personal pronoun, characteristic of colloquial English, which serves in Portuguese (and especially the written form) as a mark of crude discourse. PanAmérica also presents an ontological difficulty, which obliges the reader to question the very capacity of language to be transformed into literature. One of Caetano Veloso's assessments ( Tropical) of the novel exemplifies this type of reception. According to Veloso, the text of the novel does not even maintain the graphic aspect of narrative works: "every chapter consists of one paragraph" (91). Each page is "a succession of identical rectangles, formed by words that fill them almost completely" (91). Veloso affirms, in his conclusion, that "PanAmérica had nothing to do with what I knew and loved as literature" (91). Let us investigate the reason for such unfamiliarity using the critical instruments already cited. José Agrippino de Paula had responded to a commentary regarding the excessive use of personal pronouns in the novel, saying: "the repetition of the / must be from the habit of reading in French and English" (Veloso, Verdade 155).26 Beyond its irony, the statement offers a clue to the explanation of the tactical difficulties the novel contains: PanAmérica comes from the author's intention to write a book in literal translation. The presentation on the original book jacket, penned by Mario Schenberg, defines the novel as "a contemporary epic of the U.S. empire." To write such an epic, as such, it was better to use the language of that empire direcdy. Let us view an example. In the first chapter, the narrator

AGAINST NATIONALISM

47

ostensibly repeats the verb to command {comandar). In Portuguese, this transitive verb signifies to lead, though such meaning does not correspond to that utilized in the book. Its use as a literal translation of the English verb to command can be verified in the following sentence: "I commanded all of the extras to go to the wardrobe building [...]" [Eu comandei que todos os extras poderiam ir para o edifìcio que servia de guarda-ropa, 16; my emphasis). The use of English also extends to interjections: the hero greets the other characters with a U.S. Hi!, adapted to Portuguese as "Hei!" (9). Schenberg also points out that "one of the sources of the contemporary mythology is, without a doubt, film." In this respect, Paula's point of departure is similar to that of Argentine writer Manuel Puig. The films both choose are not works by prestigious directors, but B movies from California; in other words, productions considered to be in bad taste. However, the two authors differ both in their choice of genre and in the treatment they give to the cinematic narrative. Puig opts for melodrama, from which he extracts the emotion that permits him to create a détournement of the visual discourse of film, transforming it into the verbal discourse of literary narrative. José Agrippino de Paula chooses the superproduction, and does not seem interested in verbalizing cinematic images. Each chapter is a sequence, in the cinematographic sense of the term, and the capital letters that initiate it mark the setting where the sequence is to take place. The objectivity of the narrative alludes to the use of the cinematographic camera. Paula and Puig coincide, in addition, in their rejection of the realist narrative. Just as in the works of the Argentine author, that type of tale is satirized in PanAmérica. The narrator's repetition that he is making a "realist" film is simultaneously "denied," if we may use another author already cited, who theorizes about the difficult text. Returning to Iser, the negation of information previously given to the reader is one of the most effective strategies utilized by the author of a difficult text. This strategy is carried out within the very first chapter of PanAmérica. The narrator describes what would define the realism of his film, in two ways. First, through the cost of the film, in numbers (machinery—twenty helicopters for panoramic shots—and personnel—250 extras—whose salary would have to include accidental death and disability insurance, due to the many accidents to which workers in the film industry are exposed). Second, he describes the techniques used to create that illusory reality on screen. The

48

TROPICAL KITSCH

sea that parts for the passage of the Jews is made of gelatin—the film is titled The Bible and clearly parodies biblical films from the fifties—and the cloud of dust raised by the Egyptian army in its persecution of the Jews is created by workers who toss talcum powder in front of a hundred enormous fans (23). Thus, the narrator is not only a translator of language, but also of the visual images fabricated by the film industry. Hie "clean" reality of Hollywood cinema is transformed, as in the work of Oiticica or in the novels of Manuel Puig, into a direct experience: the narrator participates in its construction through the production of his film, and "translates" it for the reader. As a result, the novels reader is offered not only that illusory reality normally created in literary tales, but also a reality which he or she must produce on each page, using the icons of the time—both those of mass culture, and those taken from the Latin American political iconography of the agitated sixties. The experience of guerrilla warfare is also direct. By page 85 of the book's 259 pages, the film set has already been substituted by military barracks, where different Latin American nationalities are represented. Venezuelans, Bolivians, and Dominicans simultaneously form part of both the guerrilla forces and the U.S. Army. The U.S. forces serve "to train soldiers," combat guerrilla fighters, or, in the case of the "Military Attaché" (Adido Militar), be "in charge of coups in Latin American countries" (encarregado dos golpes do estado nos países latino-americanos, 116). In his interminable journey through this setting, the narrator attends general executions and ephemeral victories of the "communists" until meeting Che Guevara and a group of Venezuelan guerrilleros, whom he joins only to be immediately defeated (147). The following chapter-sequence begins with the entrance of the narrator to a movie theater which is showing a film with Marilyn Monroe. From this point forward, the story returns to Hollywood, where the narrator renews his sexual encounters with the actress, described at the beginning of the novel. The final battle of the epic is a massacre carried out by the Statute of Liberty and a giant Lyndon Johnson. Against such powerful enemies appears only Don Quixote. The ingenuous plot, inspired by the cartoons and superheroes that made their way into Brazilian television programming at the time, seems to contradict the difficulty of the text.

AGAINST NATIONALISM

49

For that reason, this novel still challenges the reader today; it offers no possibilities for the interpretation of its narrator's gratuitous actions. The oneiric images that appear to describe dreams or hallucinogenic trips, replete with sex scenes, are the only interruptions in an otherwise endless series of visual images. In this way, the book also dialogues with road movies and the works of the beatnik generation in the U.S. Compounded by the utter lack of spoken dialogue, the excess of description in PanAmérica makes the act of reading a difficult and hardly gratifying adventure. The only explanation might be found in the commentary that a communist student makes to the narrator. According to him, the woman asked how "he managed to remain indifferent to what was happening" (como que eu conseguía permanecer indiferente ao que estava acontecendo, 100). As are the giants of the opposing side, the "communists" are described like the characters of a farce, since their heads, "preserved in the freezer of the Department of Social and Political Order" (conservadas no frigorífico do Departamento de Ordem Política e Social),27 "were very large and reminded one of the painted papier-máché heads worn at Carnival" (eram muito grandes e Umbravam caberas de papeláo usadas no carnaval, 100). Hence, PanAmérica, from the point of view of Brazilian culture, is a farcical representation of the behavior of a generation—and of a social class—paralyzed by the collision of contradictory references. Perhaps a commentary by Caetano Veloso might help to resolve the enigma posited by this novel. If the author seemed like a foreigner to his peers, because of his behavior and aesthetic preferences (Veloso, Tropical 66), the character-narrator he constructs for PanAmérica embodies that image. He is a foreigner in the capital of the empire (the Hollywood that served as point of departure for the Latin American imaginary, in the conception of the author). He is also a foreigner on his own continent, where he does not manage to successfully integrate himself into the guerrilla forces. Finally, he is a foreigner within his own country and in the bosom of his own culture, reduced to a kitsch mythology that embarrasses him. This becomes evident in the scene of the "Brazilian Indian adorned with feathers, who was exposed, naked, in the window" (indio brasileiro enfeitado de penas que estava exposto nu na vitrina, 66), whose "enormous, flaccid penis" (enorme e mole penis) the narrator attempts to hide with his body, however possible, so that Marilyn Monroe and her friends do not see it. It also occurs in the scene

5°

TROPICAL KITSCH

with giant soccer players: "I heard one of the curious onlookers who was watching the two giants play soccer say that they had come from Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, and that more giants from Brasilia would be arriving in a few days" {Eu ouvi um dos curiosos que observavam os dois gigantes jogando jutebol dizer que eles vieram de Brasilia, a capital do Brasil, e que devenant chegar mais gigantes vindos de Brasilia dentro de alguns dias, 206). This last scene alludes to the kitschy and patriotic exploitation of world soccer championships on the part of the military dictatorship, which turned every Brazilian victory into a celebration of national pride. Other references to the reduction of nationality to kitsch appear in the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, visited by hordes of foreign tourists (122-123), or in the monkeys that appear in the urban house of the narrator as a metaphor of the "jungly Brazil" sold as a tourist attraction (124). The narrator of PanAmérica is one of the first post-utopic characters of Brazilian literature (H. Campos, "Poesia").28 He embodies the realized Utopia, transmitted by mass media. Unlike the Utopia of social revolution proclaimed by Marxism, this version is reduced to the "economic level and lifestyle of the U.S. middle class, which appears in comedic Hollywood movies or TV sitcoms. That way of living becomes, for the middle citizen of a society on the periphery, a Utopia to be achieved" (Ruiz Collantes 143). The narrator describes that Utopia in the following fashion: The actors entered the scene and began to play an American middle-class family. I smiled at the scene that was taking place on stage, and felt content. The actors represented a happy family, and I saw a vase with flowers in the doorway of the house, and I felt happy to see that American middle-class family, the father conversing with the mother and the siblings. The harmony and happiness of the scene were transmitted to me, and I smiled, imagining that in the future I could make a family similar to that one. Os atores entraram no cenârio e começaram a representar umafamilia americana classe média. Eu sorria coma cena que transcorria no palco erne sentiafeliz. Os atores representavam uma familia feliz, e eu via na porta da casa um vaso de flores, eu me sentia feliz de ver aquela famtlia classe média americana, o pai conversando com a mâe e os irmâos. A harmonia efelicidade da cena se transmitiapara mim, e eu sorria imaginando que eu finalmentepoderia formar umafamilia igualdquela (30-31 ).

5i

AGAINST NATIONALISM

Just like the characters of Manuel Puig, the narrator of PanAmérica is part of the middle class. As with the blondes o f Heartbreak Tango, his aspirations do not go beyond the mass-produced dreams fabricated by Hollywood. His personal fulfillment is to copy the style of life of the middle class in the U.S., seen as superior and, therefore, worthy of imitation.

• Culture as Copy: Musical Tropicalism Roberto Schwarz, one of the first critics to examine tropicalism, proposed the best model for its analysis, in spite of the many criticisms he levied at the movement. Unifying Brazilians and Spanish-Americans in the experience of culture as copy or imitation (Schwarz, National),

Schwarz

toned down the negative assessment of tropicalism he had first made in 1970 (Schwarz, Culture), during his exile from Brazil by the military dictatorship. In that first essay, he emphasized the use o f allegory as the greatest virtue of tropicalist art. Both articles meritoriously observe that tropicalism was the first cultural movement in Brazil to include mass culture as an important factor for consideration in the analysis of culture. Both also contain a Marxist-based condemnation of the cosmopolitan position of tropicalism. As the two articles principally use tropicalist works from popular music as their frame of reference, it is worth reviewing the trajectory of that movement to best understand the analysis. 29 After the works of Oiticica and José Agrippino de Paula, musical tropicalism not only reached a wider public, but the collective work it undertook also coalesced as a cultural movement. This occurred because it did so through television, confirming the omnipresence of the apparatus in Brazil. At the end of the sixties, after ten years in the country, Brazilian television managed to reach a young, middle-class public. O f this sector, there were two defined groups. The first, free of political attachment, called itself the Jovem Guar-

da (Young Guard) and idolized composers and singers who produced a national rock'n'roll, one based on the international rock that began to arrive in Brazil. The second group consisted of the university-based public, which differed from the first in the political nature of the music it celebrated; its composers were dedicated to the task of renovating and spreading authen-

tic Brazilian popular music (my italics), such as samba or the distinctive

52

TROPICAL KITSCH

rhythms of the Northeast. The strategy for reaching both audiences was to broadcast shows with performances by the idols of each group. This marketing strategy began with a Sao Paulo-based network, Record, which sought to compete with the monopoly of Red Globo, based in Rio de Janeiro (Globo still had not achieved the "Globo standard of quality" with which it also seduced the middle class, several years later) [Mattelart 39] .30 From the university side, protest music—rooted in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo—had the greatest audience. The expansion of the market, however, made room for a new trend by artists fresh from the provinces, such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Torquato Neto. The group's emergence on the music scene was defined by a style that maintained the politicization of lyrics found in protest music, but introduced foreign musical instruments, such as electric guitar, into their performance. In addition, the festive staging of tropicalist concerts made them seem closer, in part, to the danceable rock of the other alienated faction of the middle class, embodied in Jovem Guarda shows; the tropicalists, furthermore, referred to those shows with affection. At the same time, the group attacked television, the very medium through which they reached the public. Supported by the opposing network that included them in its programming, the tropicalists dedicated themselves to condemning the programming of Red Globo. That network's "aesthetic of the grotesque" (Sodré, Comunicagào), inherited from radio, became its principal target. The singular alliance of earlier productions by the nascent Red Globo with poor sectors, or those excluded from consumerism, was viewed ambiguously by the tropicalists. At times, the television programming of Red Globo was seen as representative of kitschy taste, inferior to the taste of the tropicalists; at times, it was viewed as the pathetic expression of those excluded sectors. Regardless, it was fundamental to the tropicalists' establishment of their allegory for Brazilian culture, anarchically composed of fragmented images which tropicalist composers and singers presented to the public. On the other hand, the innovation of the televised medium allowed the artists to incorporate the different repertoires commanded by each member of the group, thus transforming its performances into unique, interdisciplinary spectacles. For instance, José Agrippino de Paula, who also played an active role in avant-garde bodily spectacles in the city of Sào Paulo, contributed to

AGAINST NATIONALISM

53

the visual conception of televised performances by Os Mutantes, a musical group that participated in tropicalist shows since their inception.31 The "master kinetic-auditory line" identified by Aracy Amarai in the sets designed by Paula and his companion Maria Ester Stockier for one of the group's shows, was translated into a wardrobe that incorporated industrial materials, such as plastic, as well as references to characters from shows broadcast by Red Globo (Amarai). Hie lyrics of one song by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, performed by Os Mutantes—"Batmacumba" a title which itself indicates a mixture of the foreign universe of U.S. superheroes (i.e., Batman), introduced by Red Globo, and the Afro-Brazilian rhythm of the macumba ritual—indicate, through their visual and graphic form, the dialogue of the two writers with the concrete poets.32 Gilberto Gil and Torquato Neto made Décio Pignatàri's metaphor of Brazilian culture, "general jelly" {geléia gerat), the title of a song. Torquato Neto glossed the metaphor in the lyrics of a song that allegorizes the conservative modernization carried out by the military dictatorship: the fragmentation and antithesis present in images that indicate "the relics of Brazil" (as reliquias do Brasit) as the "sweet wicked mulata" {doce mulata malvada), a "Sinatra LP" (um elepé de Sinatra), or the "Baroque Bahian saint" (santo barroco baiano, an allusion to the nationalism of the right, which valued the tradition of national culture) are developments of the image of the "general Brazilian jelly," described as a behavior similar to the apathy of the narrator of PanAmérica. Conservative modernization continues to appear in the enumeration that follows the stanza just quoted. New industrial materials—formica, cited through the brand Formiplac (a word which, through its final voiceless consonant, also sounds foreign)—are mixed with the cliché "deep blue sky" (céu de anil), reiterated in patriotic Brazilian hymns. A quotation from the Cannibalist Manifesto by Oswald de Andrade, "Joy is the proof by nines" (O. Andrade, Cannibalist 40) [a alegria é a prova dos nove (O. Andrade, Pau-Brasil 18)] reveals Torquato Neto's (the songwriters) attempt to reappraise this facet of the Brazilian modernist tradition. The same fragmentary aesthetic, derived from Cannibalism, was present in the lyrics of the Caetano Veloso song " Tropicdlia," the title of which came to designate musical tropicalism as such. The song "Geléia Gerat alternated the rhythms of folkloric parties in the Northeast, such as the Bumba meu Boi, with a martial rhythm that alluded to military parades.

54

TROPICAL K I T S C H

The empty rhetoric of traditional political discourse and poetic musical evenings in the provinces were also parodied in the declamation of singer Gilberto Gil. The music of the song " Tropicdlia," on the other hand, alternates the xote, a traditional rhythm of the Northeast, with a slow ballad that evokes a iuneral march. The lyrics of the same song undertake a sort of archaeology of the tradition of popular music in Brazil. References to the traditional repertoire begin with the canonical "Luar do Sert&o" (The Moonlight of Sertao),33 pass through Carmen Miranda, and end with the same generation as Caetano Veloso, with "A Banda" ("The Band"), the song that launched Chico Buarque to fame. The mention of the "very modern monument" (monumento bem moderno) of Brasilia, the recendy inaugurated seat of the Brazilian government, is complemented by the rhyme of the words banda and Miranda to complete the allegorical nature of this song; like " Geleia Geral," it takes an inventory of Brazilian culture. These explanations are necessary for the present-day listener of tropicalist songs, which shows that tropicalist musicians also used the "aesthetic of difficulty" proposed by the other artistic genres of the movement. The gaps can only be filled with information contemporary to the composers and original listeners, which allows their classification as contingent difficulties, in Steiner's terminology. It is essential to remember that a large part of that "aesthetic of difficulty" was determined by the way that artists of the period had to outwit the censorship imposed by the military government. Ellipses and codes were easily recognized by the public as circumlocutions made necessary by the impossibility of directly denouncing the political oppression practiced by the military.

* National or Cosmopolitan? Academic Reception of Tropicalism The controversy provoked by musical tropicalism found its way into the Brazilian academy, which still maintains the opposing positions it formed with respect to the movement (those which attack and defend it, respectively). The earliest attack came from Roberto Schwarz, who saw tropicalism as an antinationalist movement. He was joined by other theorists, among them Antonio Carlos de Brito.34 The theoretical base of their criticism was Marxism, as well as the sociology of dependency on which analyses of

AGAINST NATIONALISM

55

Brazilian society were based at the time the dictatorship was established. Schwarz attacked the "absurd" vision of Brazil offered by the tropicalists, in the name of the necessity of gaining a true national autonomy. According to Schwarz, this would be the only way to overcome the relationships of internal and external dependency proclaimed by the sociology of dependency. The only merit he saw in tropicalism was its use of allegory, as mentioned earlier; this shows the presence of theories from the Frankfurt School in his readings, and especially those of Walter Benjamin. Antonio Carlos de Brito, also inspired by Benjamin's theories on allegory, understood the cultural inventory of tropicalist songs as an accumulation of scraps and relics necessary for the activation of allegory. According to Brito and Schwarz, the allegory of Brazil presented by tropicalism was a result of the "white light of the ultra-modern" (Brito 24; and Schwarz, Misplaced 140) that the movement shed on the anachronism (i.e., the bad taste, or kitsch) of the cultural vision of the military dictatorship. Its "destruction, ruin of real history" was tropicalist art's only hope for salvation, since on the other hand, Brito (29) and Schwarz (144) condemned that movement's "atemporal idea of Brazil." The vision of Latin America as an ensemble of national societies, found in the sociology of dependency, also led Schwarz to reject the Latin Americanism of tropicalism, which he considered a "generality" that attempted to encompass "all of the countries of the continent, at every stage of their history" (Schwarz 144). The legitimation of Latin Americanism was the principal argument of the concrete poets in their defense of tropicalism. Also faithful to the model of overcoming underdevelopment that was begun in the fifties, the concretists admired the cosmopolitan reading of Brazilian reality that these musicians had undertaken. The concretists, furthermore, would later try to enlist the tropicalists in their ranks, thanks to the avant-garde esprit de corps that they had always had (L. Santos, "Kitsch y cultura").35 The fragmentary aesthetic of the new group and its incorporation of foreign elements into its songs allowed the concrete poets to include the tropicalists in the "exceptionality" of Brazilian society, a distinction they had also given previously to Oswald de Andrade.36 The paternity offered by the concretists was based, above all, on the rejection of the narrow nationalism which, according to them, diminished the reach of the discourse of national-popular art. Antonio Riserio recalled that "in 1966, Augusto de

56

TROPICAL KITSCH

Campos was already confronting the leftist choir, emphasizing what there was of new information and aesthetic virtue in the Jovem Guarda, at the same time that he made objections to protest music." "If few understood the message" sent in Campos's article by the paulista poets, among them, at least, were surely the composers of tropicalist popular music who, with the backing of the concretists, would later become part of the intellectual sector of Brazilian culture (Risério 260). Augusto de Campos considered the song "Soy loco por ti, América ("I'm Crazy for You, America"; lyrics by Capinam, music by Gilberto Gil) the most "Americanist" of all tropicalist songs, the embodiment of the "AntiMonroe Tropicalism: America for Americans" (A. Campos, Balango 150). Portuguese and Spanish appear simultaneously in this song. Presented as a woman, the America of Capinam's verses is metonymically described in both languages: from her "white foam" (espuma blanca, in Spanish) to her "sky" {cielo, also in Spanish) to her "smile" {sorriso, in Portuguese). The first stanza asks the name of this woman, posited as "lover/of this nameless country" {amante!'dessepais sem nome, in Portuguese). The enumerations that characterize that America are always the sum of Brazilian and Spanish-American cultures: "that tango/that ranch/that people" {esse tango!esse rancho!essepovo, in Portuguese). Solidarity with the Cuban revolution is evident in the reference to Marti as the possible name of the America praised by the song. To bypass military censorship, Marti's name was disguised in the phrase "let her name be to love you" {que su nombre sea amarte, in Spanish), which sounded like "let her name be Marti" ([...] sea Marti) when sung. "The dead man" alludes to Che Guevara: "The name of the dead man/Can no longer be said" {el nombre del hombre muerto/ya no se puede decirlo, in Spanish). Images of the guerrilla predominate, as well as an epic tone that has little to do with humor or parody. The final allegorical image is one of death and sadness: "I am here in passing/I know that in the future/one day I will die/of fright or by bullet or vice" {Estou aqui depassagem/sei que adiante/um dia vou morrer/de susto de bala ou vicio, in Portuguese). The lyrics end up transforming that feminine entity into the opposing dualities that marked the cultural diversity of Latin America, according to the current political ideology of the time (rural/urban; commitment/alienation): "I am going to die/.../in the arms of a woman/.../ within the arms of the peasant woman/mannequin guerrilla fighter/oh

AGAINST NATIONALISM

57

poor me/in the arms of the one who loves me" (eu vou morrerl.. Jnos bragos duma mulher/.. .Identro dos bragos da camponesa/guerrilheira manequim/ai de mim/nos bragos de quern me queira, in Portuguese). This exposition of the uneven development of Latin America was complemented by Caetano Veloso's interpretation of the piece. Hie Caribbean rhythm of the percussion, while lending a playful joy to the lyrics, also exposed a cafona world, now out of fashion.37 Considered as such by the emerging middle class, this rhythm remained associated for them with either the image of Carmen Miranda fabricated in the U.S. during the forties and fifties, or the underdevelopment of countries that were poorer than Brazil. Juxtaposed with the political protest of the lyrics, which denounced the repression suffered by Latin American countries at the time, Gilberto Gil's music contributed to an allegory for the continent that was hardly positive. In terms of their meaning, therefore, tropicalist songs were not much different from those written by their national-popular contemporaries. The great novelty was the way in which they were performed. The national-popular composers wrote lyrics that compensated for the negativity of the present with a proposal for transformative action. In their music, that attitude was reinforced by rhythms and harmonies from the popular tradition, which, along with epic performances, corroborated the heroic quality of Brazilian nationalism. In tropicalist songs, however, the denunciation did not point to a solution, but rather, metalinguistically exposed the public itself. Commenting upon the rendition of "Enquanto seu Lobo new vem" ("As Long As Mr. Wolf Doesn't Come"), Celso Favaretto remarks: "While Caetano sings in his characteristic, descriptive style, the musical harmony forms unpredictable counterpoints, generating ambiguity" (Favaretto 65). As in "difficult" texts, negation is utilized to neutralize the illusion of realism. The thin body of the singer, who at that time was the essence of the star who could get away with anything, covered with adornments—sometimes female outfits—and shaking his hips "without moderation," contributed to underscoring the negation (Santiago 151). The final product is still, in addition to being ambiguous, one of pure aggression; this aggression is very similar to that which could be detected in the shows of Teatro Oficina. Once more, the spectator was an integral part of the show. As Antonio Carlos de Brito astutely observed, the "inventory" that made up those

5«

TROPICAL KITSCH

musicians' performances only made sense with the complicity of a public that grew as a result of the televised performances of its idols. Broadening its sphere of action, TV Record of Sao Paulo had created Music Festivals (in Portuguese, Festivais de Mùsica) that brought those stars to the national network, and marked the irrevocable presence of television in the imaginary of the nation's politicized youth (Dunn). The televised format of the show also determined that the allegory would not be made up of solely the lyrics and music of the songs. The tropicalist song was an event. The aesthetic experience (vivendo) of the spectator, in the sense conceptualized by Oiticica, allowed for different decodifications of what was happening on the stage. The "party" of the musical performance simultaneously included all the different repertoires from which images had been extracted, rendered explicit metalinguistically. Those same images also originated in the experience of the artists themselves, whose musical repertoire had largely been acquired through radio and other inconspicuous forms of culture. As Caetano Veloso confessed early in his career, "I never listen to high music, the music on the radio has always moved me" (Santiago 149). It is appropriate to recall José Miguel Wisnik's analysis regarding the role of radio in Brazil in the transformation of music to a "kind of habit, a kind of habitat, something that completes the place where one lives, where one works" (16). Wisnik establishes that if high music in Brazil "never managed to form a system in which authors, works, and the public entered a relationship of a certain correspondence and reciprocity" (13), popular music "formed as a craft that developed in the folds and in the left-overs, in the face and on the fringes of the country's process of modernization" (14). Wisnik sets apart tropicalism as the last productive leap within the "open system" that was popular music in Brazil, because it promoted A seismic movement in the ground that seemed to support the balcony of MPB (Mùsica popular

brasileira,

or Brazilian popular music), focusing on the

populist pact and sophisticated harmonies, ripping them out of the circle of good taste that made [MPB] reject other manifestations of commercial music as inferior or mistaken, and filter Brazilian culture through an idealizing political-aesthetic aura, falsely above the markets and class conditions (16).

AGAINST NATIONALISM

59

Rather than utilizing that filter, tropicalism preferred to plunge itself wholeheartedly into the "focal point of cultures." From thence sprung the "reinterpretation, rereading, and quotation from the [popular] songbook" (Wisnik 47) which included everything from music of the sertao and the melodramatic songs of singer/songwriter Vicente Celestino to the kitschy and disparaging populism of Abelardo Barbosa, the Chacrinha, host of a program of musical numbers on the Globo network. References to the penetration of foreign music included references to the national rock of the Jovem Guarda, lead by the singer Roberto Carlos, and the use of electric guitars. Roberto Schwarz used Roberto Carlos and the electric guitars of the Jovem Guarda to create his model of what is "national by subtraction" (.National),38 applied in his analyses of Latin American culture. Based on the cultural production of Brazil in the sixties and seventies, Schwarz mitigated the virulent critique he had previously levied at tropicalism during its nascent stages. Although he continued to attack the antinationalist stance of the movement, Schwarz recognized that the definition of the "national" by the subtraction of all foreign influence—as it was determined by both the right and left in those years—was flawed by an illusory essentialism that presumed to ascertain, with that elimination, the "essence of Brazil" (4). Twenty years later, Schwarz acknowledged that the enslaving advance of the media in Brazil made such a discussion lose all verisimilitude. In spite of the fact that Schwarz recognizes the "often [...] good artistic results" and the "guildessness of the act of swallowing up" (8) that characterized tropicalism, he continues to utilize the theoretical instruments of the sixties (in this case, the Marxist model of class struggle) to censure the art of the period. Lacking a perception of class, that art fell into "generality," using the same word that Antonio Carlos Brito had applied to condemn the "Latin Americanism" of the tropicalist movement in 1972. Although Schwarz takes a number of opportunities to refer to the incipient study of the role of consumption and mass culture in Brazilian culture, he does not hesitate to criticize the art of the seventies on the basis of new facts: "The culture industry would cure the sickness of Brazilian culture—at least for those who were willing to delude themselves" (4-5). In criticizing the fact that, "in this 'world' environment of uniform mythology, the struggle to establish an authentic culture appears as a relic

6o

TROPICAL K I T S C H

from the past" (5), the author reasserts himself as a recalcitrant nationalist fighting once again for "genuine" culture, which the essay as a whole seems to deny. Meanwhile, the central point of Schwarzs essay—the ideologeme of the copy generated within the Latin American intellectual elite because of its sense of inadequacy to Western culture—is the principal discussion of the tropicalist movement, which sought to relativize originality and the copy in Brazilian culture, in the diverse works analyzed here. The scandal it provoked was based precisely on the movement's rupture of the evolutionary line belonging to the ideology of the copied culture; this, as underscored by the historical perspective of Roberto Schwarz, had its origins in the nineteenth century. The problem with that ideology, that is, the attribution of prestige to the countries that serve as our models, was perfectly detected by the tropicalists. What is, for example, the novel PanAmerica, if not a denunciation of the prestige that Brazilians attribute to the mass culture of the U.S.? The same solution proposed by Schwarz—understanding that the copy is inevitable, and can be utilized as a theoretical concept as long as ideological prestige is not given to copied models—was proposed by the tropicalists in a creative manner. This is especially so in their use of kitsch, the most accepted definition of which is that of a copy reduced to an original work. The cursi Brazil that musical tropicalism displayed to its public, for example, rendered explicit both of the parts into which Roberto Schwarz subdivided the treatment of the dialectic of the copy. The "share of the foreign in the nationally specific" (16) was clear in the use of electric guitars. The "[share] of the imitative in the original and the original in the imitative" (16) could be seen, for example, in the wardrobe of the shows, as recalled by Regina Boni, who was responsible for its conception: I had the exact impression of copying. What I did was only taking forms and images from the collective unconscious: biases from Jane Harlow (sic), satin from the thirties, ribbons from the forties, fabric linings from little music boxes [...] feather boas, [...] metallic tights. Furs—not mink, but rabbit—and aniline dyes of pink, yellow, purples. Draped violet jerseys, [...] plastic acting as leather [...] felt instead of English cashmere [...] banana-fiber fabric with silver threads that was made in the Philippines (Boni 57).

AGAINST NATIONALISM

61

This description is an inventory of kitsch, but it is also informed by the wardrobe used by the rebellious youths of student movements in Europe and the U.S., which leaned progressively more toward counterculture. The originality of tropicalist art consisted of adapting that rebellion to the cultural moment in Brazil, not only exposing the incapacity of the left—of which it was a part—to perceive its own downfall, but also questioning the reasons for its defeat.

• Hie Aesthetic of Violence: Tropicalist Cinema Among the reasons for the downfall of the left was the intellectuals lack of awareness of how the poor really lived, and the role played by mass media in their cultural consumption. The cultural training of the tropicalist artists facilitated the treatment of that new component. The majority of the tropicalists were born between the two Vargas governments, which were responsible for the drive to establish mass culture, originating in the expansion of national film and radio, centralized by the state. Thus, the cultural repertoire of those artists was formed more by mass culture than by high culture. Caetano Veloso cites the chanchada, a successful type of comedic film long considered the spurious product par excellence of Brazilian culture, as part of his cultural consumption: "We were excited about Bunuel and were ashamed of the pleasure our fellow countrymen took in seeing the chanchailas of Atlantica (a film studio) and the films of Mazarropi, but we wouldn't miss a single one" (Santiago 149). The class origin of those artists is also responsible for their formation. Antonio Riserio, analyzing a song by Gilberto Gil, thus defines the 'existential trajectory' of the composer: "In this sense, a composition like 'Ele falava nisso todo did ('He Talked About That All Day) should be seen not only as a biting criticism of a tragically alienated dimension of the modus vivendi of the middle class, but also, from a more specific perspective situated in the existential trajectory of Gil himself, as a type of pitiless requiem for an exemplary black man" (Riserio 260). Caetano Veloso reiterated his identity as a mulatto in many of his songs. In his autobiography, the Bahian composer makes constant references to the inferiority of his class origin, in relation to that of his peers. Raul Seix-

62

TROPICAL KITSCH

as, a composer of Brazilian rock, for example, is cited as "a guy from the Bahian bourgeoisie [...] much richer—or much less poor—than we were" (Veloso, Tropical 29). The pronoun we refers to both Veloso and Gilberto Gil, who is described as "a dark mulatto, so dark that even in Bahia he is called black" (180). Comparing himself to Gil, Veloso defines himself as "a light-skinned mulatto, so light that even in Sao Paulo I am called white" (180). Although both came from the middle class, the black Gil outdid the white Veloso in the reckoning of social benefits: "Gil, the son of a doctor and having only one sister, had known certain bourgeois privileges that I, the son of a federal employee with my seven brothers (sic) could scarcely dream of" (180). Veloso described the path of Gil, the "exemplary black man," in the following manner: "Upon leaving the Marist Brothers [priests], Gil went to the School of Administration of the University of Bahia, in accordance with the station attained by his father" (180). From that perspective, the autobiography of Caetano Veloso seems a testimony about the process of social mobility studied by Renato Ortiz. The text also shows how mass culture was able to project, in a brief span of time, a group of provincial mulattoes (here I am deliberately reducing Veloso's commentaries) to the stars of Brazilian artistic and intellectual life. However, the achievements of tropicalism are not limited to the social ascension of several of its artists, nor is its success due exclusively to the action of mass culture. The same class division that Veloso uses to situate himself in Brazilian society was the principal target of the tropicalist offensive, a model that no longer accounted for the excluded mass made visible by consumer society, implanted by the conservative modernization of the military dictatorship. In that mass, there emerged alongside the working class the lumpen, the underemployed from the informal market, and the marginal. This last character, already stylized by the forward-looking work of Helio Oiticica, was discovered as the protagonist of the aesthetic of violence that characterized cinema marginal-, this also proves that tropicalist innovations in visual language were not limited to the expansion of television. Contrasting with the "aesthetic of hunger" proposed by cinema novo, against which it rebelled, cinema marginal held allegory as a point in common with the other languages used by tropicalism.39 Ismail Xavier analyzes the breaches and lacunae of its films in a way similar to that in which Iser describes gaps in literature. According to Xavier, the breaches and lacunae

AGAINST NATIONALISM

63

of the movies of cinema marginal make the spectator analyze them as if trying to solve a code. In this way, cinema marginal also aligns itself with the "aesthetic of difficulty" which, as I explained previously, characterized the other works of the movement. Meanwhile, the concept of an "allegory of underdevelopment," applied by Ismael Xavier to define cinema marginal, does not seem sufficient. The concept is suitable in referring to cinema novo: that movement's analysis of the downfall of the Brazilian left was based on the left's sociology of dependency, which saw it necessary to overcome the stages of development that would permit the nation to reach the level of bourgeois democracies. However, such a definition ceases to make sense when applied to a group of cineastes whose emergence is distinguished by a rupture from this line of sociological analysis. From my point of view, the greatest contribution of cinema marginal is having taken the avant-garde spirit of tropicalism to an extreme, in terms of both aesthetics and politics. In the aesthetic sphere, cinema marginal substituted the epic treatment of a left that heroized the working class with a pathetic treatment, since its characters, who were poor, were too incompetent for class struggle (Sperber).40 With its kitsch construction, that pathos offers the viewer a distancing that is markedly different from the catharsis of classical tragedy. In cinema marginal, the pedagogical tone of cinema novo is substituted by "the grotesque, the caricature, the dirty and badly defined image of poverty and garbage" (Monteiro 123). Films like The Red Light Bandit (O Bandido da Luz Vermelha:), by Rogerio Sganzerla, present the characters through kitsch. In that film, kitsch is visible both in the house assaulted by the protagonist of the tide, which has an accumulation of packaging, containers, and objects placed on the table, and in the room of the protagonist himself, decorated according to the principle of accumulation that defines kitsch: a collection of women's stockings, a statue of St. George, the image of Our Lady Aparecida, the portrait of a radio singer, and an old and meager set of furniture (Xavier). Bad taste is further presented in scenes in which the characters pick their noses or ears in front of the camera, showing a face-to-face view of the excluded. The juxtaposition of those two levels of kitsch attempted to displace social analysis from a purely economic and political point of view. The burglary scene exemplified how consumer society exacerbated exclusion and made the contradictions between social classes more complex. In ac-

64

TROPICAL KITSCH

cordance with the ideology of guerrilla action, images from cinema marginal films affirmed that the daily marketplace offered by television could only be consumed by most of the population through violence. On the other hand, the "popular" kitsch of the environment in which the bandit lived showed the excluded classes in their social and cultural aspects. On both levels, the description of the everyday concretized the abstractions contained in Marxist concepts such as "lumpen" "petite bourgeoisie," or "working class," and presented the customs of those classes as possible data for interpretation. Aggression toward the viewer, undertaken by tropicalism's use of kitsch, can also be located in the areas of behavior and subjectivity, overlooked by Marxist analysis. For the epigones of cinema novo, for example, good taste and the rules of good behavior were considered the avatars with which the middle class, deemed responsible for the nations political situation, attempted to secure the small dose of power promised by the bourgeoisie through consumerism. Kitsch is the means by which those cineastes not only contradict good taste, but also expose it as the copy it represents. This attack also attempted to reach to politicized middle class, at the same time that it exposed the cinema novo filmmakers' true ignorance about excluded classes. On the other hand, the dialogue with that film genre is the raison d'être of cinema marginal. Its blurry images are simultaneously quotations and radicalizations of the "aesthetic of poverty" found in cinema novo. The utilization of the marginal as a character also radicalized the cinemanovista intention to denounce the reality of the excluded classes created by the new economic model of the military dictatorship. Both the marginal and middle classes are viewed in cinema marginal through the lens of heterogeneity. The kitsch aesthetic of the old is transformed into an experimental tool, as in the other artistic languages of tropicalism, and utilized to break with the tradition of the new promoted by the aesthetic and political vanguards that preceded them. Tropicalism in popular music was declared extinct in 1969, in large part by the action of the military government. During its first four years, the dictatorship had taken care to destroy all connections between intellectuals and workers, imprisoning en masse the leaders of the left in both groups. It now attempted to destroy connections between intellectuals and university students through the Institutional Act No. 5, known as AI-5, decreed in

AGAINST NATIONALISM

65

December 1968. Pursuant to the Act was the imprisonment of professors, students, and artists, among them the most famous popular music singers tied to the university public. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were jailed on December 27, 1968 (Veloso, Tropical 216). Freed several months later, they were "invited" by the military to leave Brazil in 1969. With both composers exiled, tropicalism ended as a cultural movement. The requiem was not at all solemn, according to Gilberto Gil's declaration several years later: "Tropicalia is already gone, no? It was only an engagement we made with consumer society, which was very visible, and which had to be made by someone" (Werneck 8). Its definitive ruptures, however, can aid in the reflection on theoretical problems that go beyond literary discourse, as the next chapter makes explicit.41

II. KITSCH, MASS CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

CHAPTER 3

• Kitsch and Mass Culture in Postmodernism Mass culture and kitsch were essential themes in the establishment of the concept of postmodernism: mass culture because it was incorporated into scholarly works during the advent of postmodernity, provoking a reevaluation of the very concept of scholarship; kitsch because its frequent citation or parody in artistic productions, beginning in the sixties, necessitated a relativization of its condemnation as a spurious product. As a result, postmodern art is largely defined by the interpénétration of the concepts of scholarly culture, mass culture, and kitsch. The influence of Latin American narrative in this theory is clear. Fredric Jameson cites not only the narrators of the Boom, but also Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, by Manuel Puig, as an example of the new narrative forms produced in the Third World under multinational capitalism (Jameson, Third 82). Borges and García Márquez were also present in hypotheses which were precursors to that of postmodernity (Beverley 13). Borges, cited by Foucault in the introduction to The Order of Things (7-16, esp. 7), was also a point of departure for John Barth's foundational text on postmodernity (Barth, Exhaustion). Together with García Márquez, the Argentine author appears in an essay in which Barth, reformulating his initial "apocalyptic" (Huyssen 189) ideas, positively evaluates the universal adoption of the term postmodernism (Barth, Replenishment). For Latin American critics, the authors utilized in these first approaches to postmodernity, with the exception of Manuel Puig, fit neady into the canon(s) of high modernity in Latin America. How, then, could they be seen as postmodern in the United States? In the first place, due to the overwhelming nature of the heterogeneity so characteristic of Latin American social and cultural formation (Cornejo Polar), in relation to the canons of high modernism, considered by Barth as "literature of exhaustion." For Latin Americans, the narrative of the sixties represented a moment of literary-theoretic synchronization with the literatures of the then-called First World—as evidenced by recurrent references to those authors and critics.

69

7°

TROPICAL K I T S C H

However, the "First World" received it as an expression of "freshness of information and a social interest that we cannot share" (Jameson, Third 66). The utopie gaze that Jameson directs toward Latin America in this sentence runs throughout his writings, projecting his desire to unite criticism with political action onto Latin American intellectuals. The greatest contribution of Latin American narrative to U.S. theories on postmodernism is the very fact of having offered new themes to a critique which, abandoning the excessive cult of textual immanence, began to revalorize context as the determination of the literary work. O n the other hand, it cannot be denied that in Jamesons conceptualization of postmodernism, political-economic deeds are confused with formal realizations of culture. All the same, the rapidity with which many of Jamesons followers subordinated formal realizations of artistic works to sociological events justified the criticisms which the analyses o f postmodernism received.1 The need that Jameson—one o f the theoreticians most competent in the characterization of postmodern works—feels to clarify the use o f the concept that he himself helped to construct, indicates the unstable base that sustains this concept of postmodernism. The greatest source of problems seems to reside, as the author himself recognizes, in the confusion between the periodization of the new "style" and its characterization (Jameson, Cultural 3). Keeping these last analyses by Jameson in mind, the works I analyze here are undoubtedly postmodern, both in terms of periodization and style. Considering the periodization, it became evident in the first chapters of this book that not only the work of Puig, but also the different manifestations of Brazilian tropicalism are situated in the context of the emergence of "a new type of social life and a new economic order. Modernization [though conservative, my addition], post-industrial or consumer society, society of the media or spectacle, multinational capitalism" (Jameson, Cultural 3), all these terms with which Jameson defines the new economic order are applicable to the moment in which these Latin American works arose. From a stylistic point of view, in these works are found pastiche in place of parody, (as appear kitsch and the media in Manuel Puig's works, as well as in José Agrippino de Paula's PanAméricd)-, the end of individualism (evidenced in the mode of narration and the composition of characters in these novels); nostalgia (present in the pastiche of mass culture of the thirties and forties); and urban life marked by the incessant movement of the

Pictured here are Antenor Gonfalves, his wife Maria Aparecida Gonfalves, and two of their children: Rafael and Marieta. This is a family of rural workers, small landowners recently immigrated from the south of the state of Amapá, located at the far north of Brazil. They live off the land and seasonal work. The photo has been taken in the living room of the wooden house where they live in Macapá, the state capital. According to the photographer, "the mix that characterizes the decoration of the house is common in the different regions of the interior of Brazil." Photo by Joáo Ripper, April, 1996. Archive of the artist.

72

TROPICAL KITSCH

technological city (as in both PanAmérica and the songs of the tropicalist movement). Finally, with the exception of José Agrippino de Paula, an author still today almost unknown to critics, all of the artists studied here were or continue to be successful with both critics and the public, knowing how to take advantage of the resources offered by consumer society. I touch on these points briefly to demonstrate that, in themselves, they would not justify a deep analysis of the presence of mass culture and kitsch in Latin American artistic works. I maintain that only an analysis that considers these contributions as a new rhetoric can make sense of them as a theoretical proposal. My analysis thus attempts to inscribe itself in a position that is outlined within the U.S. academy: that which involves taking up again a rhetorically and philologically based approach to literary works (Jameson, Cw/iwrcz/93-135; and Sommer 1-31). Taking Steiner's affirmation that "[the poet] is an etymologist" (Steiner 21) as a point of departure, I seek to demonstrate that the use of kitsch in literary works corresponds to more specific motives than those determined by the new economic order. In spite of the inevitable inclusion of the authors studied here in the postmodern aesthetic, as far as kitsch is concerned they behave as etymologists; that is, their rhetorical use of the concept is rooted in their native languages. I will describe later how the different senses of kitsch present in Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese not only facilitated the inclusion of kitsch in the continent's art, but also furnished instruments for the critique of its cultures.

* Kitsch as Demarcation of Social Barriers and Class Kitsch as a social and historical issue first appears in Spanish culture, since the Spanish word for the phenomenon—cursi—possesses the same semantic charge in its own etymology. Contemporary to the German word kitsch—both emerge around I860—it differs semantically in that its meaning connotes the "ethical aspect" of the phenomenon, as underscored by Gillo Dorfles (Divenire 27). The aesthetic aspect predominates the semantics of kitsch, by contrast. According to Moles, the word is derived from the German kitschen, which denotes the act of "making new furniture out of the old" (5). It is also related to verkitschen, which "means to cheat,

KITSCH, MASS CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

73

to buy stolen objects, to sell one thing instead of that which was agreed upon" (Moles 5). Moreover, the etymology of kitschert, which would mean "collecting trash off the street," is also cited; hence, the derivation of the concept of "artistic garbage" (Dorfles, Kitsch 4). Matei Calinescu points to the English word sketch, from which the sense of "bagatelle" is extracted. It was "mispronounced by artists in Munich and applied derogatorily to those cheap images bought as souvenirs by tourists, especially the AngloAmericans" (Calinescu 234). Kitsch is derived from this, especially when utilized in the artistic circles of the 1870s. Calinescu adds to this hypothesis a derivation from the Russian word keetcheetsya, which signifies "to be haughty and puffed up" (235). This sense, extended to "vulgar showoff," is rapidly discarded with the affirmation that the principal characteristic of kitsch is its "aesthetic inadequacy" (236). As such, his concept "cannot be applied to objects and situations that are completely unrelated to the broad domain of aesthetic production or aesthetic reception" (235). The application of the Spanish word cursi to that discarded area is central in the analysis of Ludwig Giesz, whose work differentiates kitsch from cursi, concluding with a semantic comparison between the two words: The term kitsch which is thought to come from painting—those cheap souvenir postcards or sketches must have been its etymological godfathers—owes its rapid spread to other areas, since cursi was not only a technical deficiency, but rather a structural unity of human experience. Kitsch becomes an aesthetic qualification in that it deals with the reflection or cause of a cursi existence. [...]. As such, kitsch is the representation of something cursi, its objectification in the aesthetic sphere (Giesz 98). Human experience appears in both the seme of the word cursi and its etymology. This denotation basically diverges from the German word, in terms of the primacy given to the kitsch-man (Broch, Notes 49). 2 According to Margarita Rivière (83), the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española accepted the adjective cursi in 1869, and of the three meanings listed, two are associated with human qualities. The first indicates the "person who presumes to be elegant and fine without being so" (my italics). The second, "it is said of artists and writers, or of their works, when they attempt to show refinement or elevated sentiments in vain" (Real 400). Although

74

TROPICAL KITSCH

the Diccionario presents a third sense very similar to that of the German kitsch—"of or relating to that which, with the appearance of elegance or wealth, is ridiculous and in bad taste"—this preserves the notion of appearance contained in the other meanings. Corominas dates the first use of cursi to 1865 (300-301). He establishes the etymology of the term in kursi, from Moroccan Arabic. Since 1505, according to Corominas, the term meant "a wooden seat, a chair." According to dictionaries of Classical Arabic, it also stood for "science, knowledge" and "wise, learned." From "chair" it passed on to "professor," and from there to "science" and "wise," from which it then proceeded to "pedantic" and "tacky" (curst).3 As such, the modern term retains the original semantic charge of ostentation, referring to the person who attempts to seem what he is not. It was transplanted as such to Latin America, where that sense was expanded to that of social devaluation, in words that almost always denote people who are discriminated against. Huachafo, or mestizo, is used in Peru as "aperson with bad taste" (Real 1400, my italics).4 Pavoso is used in Venezuela; though I only found the variant pavonada, this is "a brief stroll or other similar diversion which is taken for a short time; the ostentation or pomp with which one lets oneself be seen" (Tascon, my italics). A similar meaning appears in the word perua, in Brazilian Portuguese (literally the feminine of turkey, or peru in Portuguese), used to refer to the nouveau riche that displays its wealth through the excessive use of cosmetics and trinkets, considered overall to be in bad taste (Ferreira).5 In Cuba, there is the term picuo, also used in Puerto Rico. This has a second meaning of picuda, a type of fish and, by extension, "whore, slut" (Santamaria). The word brega, used recendy in Brazil, has a similar connotation. Brega originated in the city of Salvador de Bahia, where there was a street named Nobrega in its red light district (Houaiss).6 The accent must have been obscured by oxidation over time, as the sign came to read Nobrega—thus arose the expression ir no Brega, or "to go into the brega" to literally go toward the place. The current meaning, a person of bad taste, must have come from the association with the appearance of a whore. In Brazil, the word cafona, used by tropicalist artists, also signifies an individual with bad taste; this has roots in the Italian cafone, someone who is lowly, criminal, foolish (A. Cunha). 7

KITSCH, M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

75

Thus, in Iberian languages, tackiness is always viewed with disdain— not only aesthetically, but more importantly, socially. In conjunction, the words used to refer to the phenomenon of tackiness lend it the property of serving as a metaphor of the feeling of marginality from Western culture, particular to Latin American culture. This sentiment is shared in Spain, since "Spain has always been characterized by its belated reception of external trends and also for its sublimation of everything which arrives from outside. This is what has converted it into a great receptor/creator of kitsch" (Sánchez Casado 13). Modern references to that which is cursi have antecedents in Spanish writers. In the nineteenth century, some novels included the word cursi in the title, giving it the sense just described (Ortega y Frías, La gente cursi. Novela de costumbres ridiculas-, and Taboada, La vida curst). In 1901, Jacinto Benavente wrote a comedy named Lo cursi, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna published his Ensayo sobre lo cursi in 1934. Benavente's concept of cursi is close to the perspective I adopt in this book on the treatment of kitsch. The play is a costumbrista comedy (one in which local color and customs are fundamental elements), centered on the behavior of a young bourgeois couple. Hie comic ins-and-outs of the plot result from attempts to construct a marital relationship that deviates from conventional patterns the husband finds cursi: "Hie chosen few, as you say, fleeing from the multitudes; the multitudes following them wherever they go. Some are cursi because they try to imitate others; others are more so, because they try so hard to distinguish themselves from everybody else" (Los espíritus escogidos, como usted dice, huyendo de la multitud; la multitud siguiéndoles por donde vayan. Unos, cursis por el afdn de imitar a otros; otros, más cursis por el afdn de distinguirse de todos, Benavente 133-134). Here we see, again, the notion of imitation or copy which, as seen in the previous chapter, Roberto Schwarz (National) analyzes as an ideology strongly present in the formation of Latin American cultures. The Benavente play reaffirms the ethical character surrounding the word cursi in Spanish. Applied to human behavior and habits, the Spanish author's sense of what is cursi anticipates modern reflections on social stratification. Ramón Gómez de la Sernas consideration of cursi includes both the ethical and the aesthetic aspects. Opposing a g o o d tackiness (cursi bueno) to a bad tackiness (cursi malo), the author brings out the intertwined nature of

76

TROPICAL KITSCH

kitsch and social matters. He includes, in the notion of cursi bueno, a certain spontaneity and ingenuity peculiar to undistinguished expression—in the sense in which Bourdieu defines distinction. This type of cursi brings together gentleness, beauty, and passion, feelings repressed by the rationality of the eighteenth century, which excluded emotions from the analytic universe (Buffault). Hie concept of cursi malo pertains to mass-produced objects of dubious taste, charged with the redundance of those who rise to power too quickly. Gomez de la Serna absolves cursi in the name of the "human depth of the world" (31), underscoring "its cleansing condition to avoid war and hatred" (27). Affirming that cursi "wants to be more than what it is and celebrate birthdays, hope, and happy lives" (41), Gomez de la Serna foresees the "art of happiness" of Abraham Moles. Brazilian architects Dinah Guimaraes and Lauro Cavalcanti create a similar dichotomy in analyzing houses constructed by their own inhabitants on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and in rural areas of the surrounding state.8 According to these authors, the builders construct a kitsch aesthetic based on a combination of ingenuity and traits derived from modern architecture. The houses are characterized by their creative kitsch, an "effective intervention in the conceptualization/elaboration of the spaces/objects" (Guimaraes 21) that surround the builder. In contrast, passive kitsch is that "peculiar to a rising middle class—composed of nouveaux riches—in which the relation to the environment is principally defined by the search for a certain sociocultural status." Thence originates an "unchecked flow of industrialized products, generally in imitation of typical elements of an elite class" (21, my italics). Creative kitsch, on the contrary, represents a real example of "metalanguage by the masses" (21). Its metaphor is cannibalism. By means of creative kitsch, the masses absorb the codes of the Brazilian elite, reinterpret them, and re-create them in conjunction with their own repertoire to produce a particular style of raw architecture. The other conclusion of the authors is that the architecture in question displays the owners' desire for personalization. This goes back to the ideas of Eclea Bosi on the working class's personalization of residence through objects considered in bad taste. According to Bosi, workers' living space is reduced to popular shares, the bits of land left over from factories' invasion

KITSCH, M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

77

of neighborhoods. In that space, the workers' culture as they live it shows a diversity founded on the "daily resistance to massification and uniformity" (Bosi 23). Over time, the neighborhood "disabsorbs" the factory, altering the architecture of the houses put into place by the factory. In the modified houses, living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens change constantly, even though space continues to be limited, thus reducing personal privacy. Outside each house, squash and flowers are planted as a way of reinstalling the lost rural life; inside, decorations include "everything that commerce imposes and refined people deem to be in bad taste" (Bosi 21). As a finishing touch, the environment is personalized with reminders of the family and of the group (family portraits, calendars, reproductions which are always on the wall). This description inevitably recalls the living spaces of the poor characters in Manuel Puig's novels, or the house of the robber in the film The Red Light Bandit, by Rogerio Sganzerla. If we take into account Alfredo MofFatt's view that the lower class is the only "visible" one, we might ask ourselves if, in the utilization of this second form of kitsch, there might be the need to accentuate such visibility through the exacerbation of visible traits. Thus, the bright colors, sharp tone of voice, and a certain way of walking might be held over from the prostitute, associated with the term brega. From pavoso, ornaments of solid gold, come certain styles of dress and of shoes, ostentation rejected by the "distinguished" classes. Seen collectively, the etymology of words used to designate SpanishAmerican kitsch leads one to conclude that artists who included different facets of the phenomenon in their works focalized kitsch more as a marker of social status than one of artistic quality itself. The fact that works such as those by Manuel Puig and the Brazilian tropicalists emerged at a time of crisis for Marxism meant that kitsch served these artists as part of an allegory for the new stratifications created by worldwide change in the economic order (Jameson, Cultural A8-49).9 Relating Latin American kitsch to the ideology of copy or imitation of more prestigious models (Schwarz, Misplaced; and Bhabha), it can be seen that the authors describe not only what those who copy do with their models, but also the method by which they learn to copy them. This proposal refers to the theory of Edmond Goblot, which will be my principal theoretical instrument for understanding the use of kitsch and mass cul-

78

TROPICAL KITSCH

ture in the authors I examine. It is useful, above all, because it allows the engagement of differences inside the social classes into which Marxism divided society. It is important to remember that one of the most recognized flaws of the Marxist model of social classes was the fact of analyzing them as homogenous blocs (Puterman). The salient aspect of Goblot's work, for this study, is his affirmation that "every social demarcation is, at the same time, a barrier and a level" (9). Like Schwarz, Goblot centers his analysis on the copy, focusing not on the class that copies, but rather the one that creates the original.10 According to Goblot, a society's elites—which he calls bourgeoisie, though not in a sense directly corresponding to the Marxist concept—not only create the model, but also establish the norms for its imitation (Balandier).11 However, Goblot's model does not assume the passivity of the non-elite classes. The copying of elite behaviors and tastes corresponds to a continual search for equality with this class. The bourgeoisie is aware of this process, constantly renovating the barriers of access to those behaviors and tastes. Each barrier harbors a determined set of tastes, thus outlining the social levels to which one must rise during the process of social mobility. Interestingly enough, the Benavente comedy discussed earlier anticipated this theory. Goblot's method prefigures the analyses later performed by cultural studies and the history of mentalities. His study of "social reality" includes fashions and education (not that education which develops personal merit, but rather that which classifies the individual by means of a code of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic conduct). A bourgeois appearance, then, would be the result of obeying the rules of this code. As any appearance can be imitated, the raison d'etre of the bourgeoisie, or its "code of life" in the words of Goblot, is to defend the means by which that appearance is acquired. It is evident that his work anticipates the theories and methods of Pierre Bourdieu, to which I will return later. Considering the Latin American art and narratives analyzed up to this point, one can perceive in them the description of the process of copying bourgeois behaviors and tastes via kitsch and cursi. In both Manuel Puig, whose stories are of social mobility, as I have shown, and the Brazilian tropicalists, whose work exposes the different levels of Brazilian society, the incorporation of kitsch allows for commentary on a phenomenon which expanded throughout the last thirty years: the creation of levels and barriers not

KITSCH, M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

79

only by the bourgeoisie, but also by the classes that represent its antithesis. Thus, two levels of kitsch appear in these works. One, which could be classified as passive-kitsch, defined by Dinah Guimaraes and Lauro Cavalcanti, is circumscribed at the level of an emerging middle class, or nouveau riche, whose social ascension happens so quickly it does not allow them to learn the behaviors and tastes of their new class. The second level is circumscribed as creative-kitsch, also called good cursi by Gomez de la Serna, marked by the ingenuity with which those less rich—here I take the affirmation of Goblot, for whom "there is no demarcation between rich and poor: one is merely more or less rich" (12)—re-create the taste of the more rich. Combining this analysis with Erving Goffman's study about stigma, I seek to demonstrate in the following chapters that that ingenuity gradually transforms itself into aggression, converting social barriers into physical, concrete ones. Stairs, walls, and hidden-camera surveillance systems show that the "less rich" turned the game upside-down, using the same rules as the more rich and visibly obligating them to defend their "territory." The less rich are now imposing their behaviors and tastes in the abandoned space of the inner city in rich countries, and disputing the privileged territory of upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Latin American cities. Thus, barriers and levels are also imposed from the bottom up, transforming urban life into a trench war (Mattelart; and Caldeira). The authors I study perceived this process early on and used kitsch as its metalanguage.

• Kitsch and Conceptions of Taste The concept of distinction, central to the theories of Goblot—since, in his perspective, it is what defines the bourgeoisie—reappears in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction). Considering taste as a type of cultural competence, Bourdieu establishes his theory in opposition to the Kantian ideology of natural taste. The latter, in Bordieu's view, naturalizes real differences, thus converting differences of nature into differences of how culture is acquired.12 Far from being an expression of subjectivity, taste reflects, according to Bourdieu, the internalization of class struggle. Distinction defines the highest level of this competence, characterized by good taste and also seen as "cultivated bilingualism." (Bourdieu, "Anat-

8o

TROPICAL KITSCH

omie"). This might be the ability, arising from the mastery of all codes, to make distinctions between codes; that is to say, to distinguish the cultural repertoires which dominate the different social classes. As the model is based on the Marxist division of social classes, Bourdieu classifies different levels of distinction as the taste, or repertoire, of the working class, of the petite bourgeoisie, and of the bourgeoisie. On top of these levels is the "dialectic of pretension and distinction" practiced by the reduced bourgeois tribe, whose precocious and continual apprenticeship of legitimate culture ensures an ethical indifference, the product of the perpetual need for symbolic transgression. This generates a type of class ethnocentrism, that is, this restricted group's denial of any other taste outside the patters of the legitimate culture. Once more the influence of Goblot can be perceived in Bourdieu's work. The result is a very immobile model of cultural competence. Bourdieu seems to have abandoned the most original factor in Goblot s theories: a more ample view of education than the strict consideration of formal education, acquired through educational institutions. For Bourdieu, on the other hand, cultural competence is based on the reproduction guaranteed by the educational system, which generates and reproduces the habits (and tastes) of the dominant class. If, in this affirmation, there is recognition of the educational system as a reproducer of bourgeois ideology, there is also an identification of the culture transmitted as the only legitimate one. Bourdieu has the merit of questioning the populism of the defenders of "popular culture," which he considers a concept imposed by the "distinct" (i.e., upper-class) social group. The insufficiency of that concept for Bourdieu is demonstrated by the difference he establishes between the art of peasants in precapitalist societies and that practiced after the advent of capitalism. This difference renders the attachment of popular culture to peasant culture ineffective. Moreover, both forms of art practiced by rural workers are completely different from the art of the urban working class. However, his definition of good taste as distinction and pretension ends up excluding any possibility of legitimizing tastes established outside the patterns of the "more rich" class. Thus, both working-class culture (which, in Bourdieu's model, substitutes the old concept of popular culture) and petit-bourgeois culture are guilty of reproducing, in a backward way, the taste of the culture of the

KITSCH, M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

81

"more rich." This taste, for Bourdieu, is unavailable to the working and petit-bourgeois classes, since it is acquired through a precocious and continuous learning process to which they do not have access. However, by including social and historical factors in his analysis of taste, Bourdieu creates a fundamental rupture from a tradition that treated taste as a formal or structural matter. This tradition culminated in the thought of Kant, who defines taste as a purely subjective way of judging and appreciating objects, or the representation through which these appear {Critiqué). Born from the feeling of pleasure or displeasure in front of an object which should necessarily be beautiful, this capacity is subordinated to aesthetics and is based on a moral vision of the analysis of artworks. One can also find in Kant, and later developed by Adorno, the condemnation of taste based on the satisfaction of emotions. The product of a harmonious relationship between intuition and understanding, the pure and universal judgment of taste (principally based on the form or representation of a given object) is opposed to "barbaric" taste—that is, what is revealed when satisfaction is mixed with emotions and sensual attractions; or, rather, when sensations are made the criteria for approval (Kant 65). The anticipation of bad taste found in definitions of kitsch is evident here.

• Emotion x Commotion: The Frankfurt School The theories of the Frankfurt School regarding art, especially those of Adorno, are imbued with Kantian philosophy. The Kantian disdain for emotion reappears in the theory of commotion, or that feeling which Adorno places in opposition to emotions found in works produced by the "culture industry" (Adorno, Cultural 98).13 Adorno envisions commotion as a "shaking up" which occurs not because the work provokes repressed emotions (thus making this, in addition, a criticism of psychoanalytic theories on art), but rather because the work itself brings the viewer to forget himself, making him submerge himself in it. Hegel is also present as an influence in the Adornian concept of commotion. The notion of artistic enjoyment as a genuine relationship between the spectator and the art derives from Hegel's idealism. Subsequently, Adorno identifies all sensory

82

TROPICAL KITSCH

pleasure in response to works of art with the inferior enjoyment offered by commercial works. He proposes that this kind of pleasure is always derived from the illusion of ownership (of a commodity). The belief in the autonomy of art from society allows Adorno to identify an authentic art, differentiating it from that which, intermixing itself with social praxis, seeks effect, style. The German philosopher also condemns the contemporary tendency to associate the enjoyment of a work of art with the occupation of free time. Understanding free time as an illusion created by the capitalist division of work to maintain the productivity of the system, Adorno asserts that non-authentic art tends to be "pleasing and nonthreatening." Here, again, it is possible to see how the Marxist base of his theory meshes with Hegelian idealism. In Aesthetics, Hegel denounced the step from an "ideal" style to a "pleasing" one (Hegel 618-619). The center of Adorno's definition of non-authentic art, found in the second theoretical corpus on which his work is founded—that is, the Marxist economic model—is production. Inserted into the capitalist work system, such art is produced for purposes determined by the capitalist superstructure. The fundamental contribution of the Frankfurt School's theories to social sciences in Latin America was the possibility they offered of including mass culture in a strategic space inside the analysis of cultural contradictions, thus breaking from the negative concept which conservative thought always attributed to the word mass by associating with social chaos. However, the Frankfurt thinkers continued to consider the masses as an object. As a result, the consumer of that culture appears in the majority of the school's works as a passive, depersonalized being. Walter Benjamin was the only one who brought light to the contrary. The importance he gave to the reception of mass culture became one of his primary divergences from other members of the Frankfurt School, and from Adorno, in particular. Benjamin highlights the polarity of the reception of artworks, simultaneously determined by cultural and exhibitive value. His understanding that the technical reproducibility of the artwork modifies the relation of the masses to art was also pioneering. Benjamin defines the reaction of the public, en masse, as the sum of the reactions of each of the spectators (Benjamin, Work). Thus, the individual reception of commotion is substituted by collective reception, in which the "masses" come to have a more active role. Seen

K I T S C H , M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL D I S C O U R S E

83

as "a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form" (239), Benjamin's concept of the masses is direcdy opposed to that of Adorno: Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator [...]. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. [...] In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art (239). On this particular point, Benjamins thought founds the Marxist legacy which, identifying itself with researched reality, takes the experience of this same reality as a point of departure. States Benjamin: "For what is the value of all our culture if it is divorced from experience? What good are the benefits of education if experience does not tie us to them?" (Benjamin, Experience 732). This is one aspect in which his work is distanced from that of Adorno, whose reflection is based on the "benefits of education," fundamentally in academic culture. The experience and use which, according to Benjamin, characterize the masses' collective enjoyment of art, are facilitated by the new perception that the loss of the art objects' aura enables (this, in turn, is generated by mass culture). Here is extracted Benjamin's most positive vision of the masses; this is not related, as is frequently considered, to a glorification of technique, but rather to the understanding that technology might offer the abolition of privilege and separation. On the other hand, the introduction of the city as a topic of analysis allows Benjamin to elaborate the theme of the experience of the masses. The latter is not conceived as an amorphous, socially abstract conglomeration, but rather a popular, contradictory multitude capable of both dissolving the marks of bourgeois identity and concealing those of the criminal. Martin-Barbero (57) sees in this thought the origin of reflection on the cultural industry based on reception; parallel to the "experience" of Benjamin, this allows one to conceive modes of resistance by the "less rich" in the circulation of mass culture. Although Walter Benjamin may be present in the theories of Roberto Schwarz, and particularly in his conception of allegory, his influence was not enough to give way to a more positive analysis of the use of mass cul-

84

TROPICAL K I T S C H

ture in the authors in question by Schwarz. Adorno's ideas were dominant in the Brazil of the sixties, at the same time that theorizations of kitsch arriving to the Latin American continent were disseminated. To better understand the reach of the criticism undertaken by Latin American artists in this first period, I will quickly review those hypotheses.

• Art x Kitsch The first critical reflections on kitsch appear as corollaries to the idea of the autonomy of art proposed by the Frankfurt School, which condemned kitsch. Hermann Broch (Kitsch), in 1933, and Clément Greenberg, in 1938, establish this disdain on the comparison of art and kitsch, the latter being disqualified in both cases. Broch, trapped in an ethical-aesthetic philosophy, considers kitsch as a derivation of the spiritual attitude of Romanticism, an immediate concretization of the platonic idea of Beauty contained in the Romantic imaginary. According to Broch, the term kitsch designates the production, cheap and en masse, of objects and/or works using techniques approved and accepted in originals consumed by aristocrats. Its raison d'etre is the dogmatic imitation of art, as it attempts to achieve only the effect, rationalizing what is not rational; that is, the great conflicts and inquiries which art transmits. The proximity of this position to Adorno's theory of commotion—of which kitsch is the perfect antithesis, in that it barely offers emotion—is evident here. Hie chronological propinquity of Broch's essay to Nazism leads him to conclude that kitsch is an "ethical evil," impossible to be valued aesthetically. The term art ofevilWiÛi which Broch describes kitsch applies to mass-produced objects generated by the same. Thus, he adds to the Frankfurt Schools arguments the dichotomy between aesthetic truth and falsity present in works that are mass-reproduced, and which therefore have a false aesthetic conscience. Clément Greenberg limits the contrastive comparison to avant-garde art.14 And so kitsch appears in his analysis as the "rear guard," or opposite, the "product of the industrial revolution that urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America, and established what is called universal literacy" (Greenberg 9). Greenberg describes it as a substitute culture "des-

KITSCH, M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

85

tined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide" (10, my italics). The author repeats notions such as true culture and opposes this to kitsch, which "is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times" (10, my italics), and like Hermann Broch, defines the objective of kitsch as the search for an effect. Greenberg's position is aligned with the perception of the masses as threatening, which always terrorized conservative intellectuals. In the final conclusions of his article, he was unable to understand the manipulation of the popular resentment of totalitarian regimes, and saw this behavior as manipulated by a frightening force emerging from the masses themselves. At the same time, the oscillation of the concept of kitsch itself remains clear, when ethnocentric class values are utilized to define it. In addition, the position of "cultural decadence" revives the concepts of Spengler and Ortega y Gasset. In the sixties, European researchers relativized both the pessimism of the Frankfurt School and the optimism of American empiricism in relation to mass culture. Umberto Eco summarized those positions in the adjectives apocalyptic, referring to the pessimists, and integrated, directed toward the optimists (Eco, Apocalyptic). This opposition, established by previous engagements of the true as an intrinsic quality of art and the false as a characteristic of kitsch, is transformed by them, in Eco's analysis, into a "structural lie" (Eco, Structure). Regarding the structure, the artwork should be characterized by unity, a mode of formation recognized as its style, the elements of which Eco terms stylemes (Structure 201-202). Kitsch, making this mode of formation more banal, is composed of stylemes, which have already been consumed, extracted from other contexts many times over. Based on these affirmations, Eco refutes definitions of kitsch which either conceive it as a catalyst of certain effects or construct it on the basis of formal imbalance. He proposes that kitsch "refers to the kind of work which tries to justify its provocative ends by assuming the garb of an aesthetic experience, by palming itself off as art" (203). The structural model of Umberto Eco permitted a better articulation of the kitsch-object. Circumscribing it in the field of poetic messages and defining it as their fraud, Eco sorts out the generalizing questions proposed by previous ethical-philosopical analyses. At the same time, however, Eco

86

TROPICAL K I T S C H

himself falls into the net of their concepts. "At times Kitsch (sic) is on the side of the message, at times on the side of the receivers intention, and more often than not, on that of the sender who tries to palm his product off for something it is not" (214). Leaving the realm of the message, one returns to subject judgment: the concept of the lie, applied to another sphere beyond that of the message, ends up substituting previous dichotomies with yet another, still inefficient: that of sincerity/insincerity. Anticipating theories on postmodernism, Eco views culture as a process in which, to the contrary of Greenberg's thought, the avant-garde and kitsch are not separated into static compartments, but are constantly exchanged as instances of the process. However, the Italian author concludes that kitsch, as a planned product, always wins out over the avant-garde, since it follows the fast pace of modern industrial society. Theories on the kitsch-object were clearly established by Abraham Moles. Working in the area of social psychology and utilizing the application of statistical laws to structuralist investigation as his method, Moles's typology of kitsch is based on human situations and actions. Its properties are a "macaroni" style (tending towards curved, perpetually generated forms), replete with surfaces, contrasts of pure colors, substitute materials (wood for marble, plastic for cloth), and distortions (enlargement or reduction of the originals). Its relation to original objects is set apart by accumulation, heterogeneity, anti-functionality, sedimentation. Its ornamental function, as opposed to the functional one of other objects, leads to the accumulation, within a single object, of dialectical oppositions such as exotic and domestic, tradition and modernity. According to Moles, the origins of kitsch would be those of inadequacy (there is always a deviation from some aspect of the original); accumulation (that of all the borrowed forms); synaesthetic perception (which is tied to that of accumulation); the middle brow (which is radically different from the avant-garde); and comfort (the feeling of harmony and fulfillment). By means of the statistical method, Moles absolves kitsch, understanding it as an adaptation of the aesthetic criteria of the majority. Seeing a socioeconomic function in it, insofar as it makes possible a certain spontaneity in pleasure, and a pedagogical function, in that it allows one to arrive at good taste through a succession of purifications, Moles defines kitsch as the "art of happiness" (L'artdu bonheur, the subtide of his relevant study).

KITSCH, M A S S CULTURE, A N D CRITICAL D I S C O U R S E

87

Excluding the transcendence offered by art, kitsch promotes the incorporation of aesthetic criteria into everyday life. Associated with the triumph of the middle class, kitsch exposes the alienation to which this class is subject, being the living portrait of man's conditioning by objects. In spite of the diversity of their methods, these theories of kitsch share a point of convergence: all of them focus their analysis on the subject of production. Always used to refer to objects mass produced for the consumption of the greater public, kitsch is constituted by the copy of artistic works or objects carrying an aura, as Benjamin might express, belonging to learned culture. On the other hand, these theories also coincide on the reiterative character of kitsch, which extracts from an original work only that effect which can be reproduced en masse. Authors who take up the study of postmodernism repeat this point of view (Calinescu 225-262). In the meantime, an important reference present in one the essays of Hermann Broch was underestimated by the majority of analysts—that of the kitsch-man, defined as "the lover of kitsch; as a producer of art he produces kitsch and as a consumer of art he is prepared to acquire it, even pay quite handsomely for it" (Broch, Notes 49). Ludwig Giesz highlights that this concept displaces the attention of the researchers toward human lives and experiences enveloped by kitsch, as opposed to the majority of studies, which almost always concern themselves with the kitsch-object. If phenomenology attempts to describe phenomena on the basis of the revelation of the subject, the object in this description is of secondary importance. Defining his method as an aesthetic anthropology, Giesz advises that he renounces a description of the kitsch-object in favor of an observation of kitsch-experience. Of course, his divergence from Adorno's theory is noticeable. In Aesthetic Theory, the Frankfurt philosopher makes clear his repudiation of experience: Every aesthetic and sociological theory of need makes use of what bears the characteristically old-fashioned name of lived aesthetic experience.15 Its insufficiency is evident in the constitution of lived artistic experience themselves, if such exist. The supposition of lived artistic experience is based on the assumption of an equivalence between the content of experience—put crudely, the emotional expression of works—and the subjective experience of the recipient (Adorno 244).

88

TROPICAL KITSCH

The theory of enjoyment and pleasure derived from experience is also radically opposed to Adornos theory of commotion. According to Giesz, "objective aesthetics and critics tend to judge a work as such, in itself, excluding its human origin and its dedication to the public" (29). Its analysis begins with distrust of the criteria offalse and true utilized in conceptualizations of kitsch. It underlines that in kitsch, there is a confusion of subject/object relations present in a "state" where predicates of sweet, viscous, penetrating, perfumed, all nearly always applied objectively to kitsch, are impossible to evaluate without taking these relationships into account. The most important of this is the "enjoyment" which sets apart the kitsch-mans relation to that which belongs to him. In contrast to pure pleasure, which comes forth in the mere presence, full, exuberant, and vigorous, of the object of enjoyment; and in contrast to aesthetic pleasure, in which the aesthetic distance of the object transforms the object of enjoyment into an aesthetic object, the enjoyment of kitsch would signify, in reality, a specific indecision between pure and aesthetic pleasure, in which precisely this vague intermediate state of being is enjoyed. Neither the transcendence of aesthetic pleasure, nor the immanence of pure pleasure, is proposed; but, rather, an intermediate, ambivalent state between grabbing and falling, to which we must add: [the kitsch-man] almost lets himself fall (and thus he enjoys [kitsch], in a manner of speaking, one and a half times over) [53]. This is the type of enjoyment kitsch offers in transforming the extreme situations of human existence "into moving romances, and substituting numinous dramas (fear, veneration, oration, desperation, etc.) with an agreeable emotivity" (56). Its principal task is to create states of mind. These include sentimentalism, sticky-sweetness, nostalgia for the past, "all sponsors of the fusion of a kitsch world with me" (56). The details of kitsch production, such as the accumulation of symbols, allegories and metaphors, reveal the insecurity of kitsch, which lays hand on all possible devices to ensure the continuity of the enjoyment it knows to be fleeting. Even if he dismisses the social implications of the kitsch phenomenon, reducing its circulation to personal choice, and reduces the concept of the collective to that of the masses, Giesz has the merit of considering an ele-

K I T S C H , M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL D I S C O U R S E

89

ment forgotten by most other others: that of the reception of kitsch. On the other hand, Giesz does not dichotomize kitsch and art, but is aware that kitsch permits an understanding of how controversial the very concept of art has become in the present. The description of theorizations of kitsch and their trajectory thus far demonstrates that throughout forty years there is a move from unrestricted condemnation, provoked by the identification with political kitsch fabricated by Nazism and Stalinism, to a relative absolution, fundamentally born out of the displacement of the point of departure used by theoretical analysis. Authors of the sixties, focusing the analysis of kitsch on its reception, perceive it as a kind of mediation between art and its potential public. In Latin America, where the network of museums, libraries, and other institutions that harbor high culture are precarious, functioning unstably, kitsch is often successfully transformed into a substitute for art (Monsivâis, Escenas 186). Some Latin American thinkers see in mass culture the mediation that traditional cultures need for their elevation in modern culture (MartinBarbero). Aligning myself with this position, I will demonstrate that the intersection of European references analyzed up to this point with U.S. concepts of mass culture was a determining factor in the perspective with which Latin American artists approached the phenomenon. In Europe and the United States, artists shared an avant-garde proposal, peculiar to postmodernism, which included the abolition of borders between art and mass culture. To the interpénétration of those two levels, Latin American artists add a nature specific to the configuration of their societies.

• Mass Culture: A French Analysis If many of these theories on kitsch arrived in Latin America only after the works by artists studied here, the discussion about mass cultures was in full swing on that continent at the end of the sixties. In Brazil, they principally arrived through French thought, as Caetano Veloso attests in citing the theories of Edgar Morin as his great discovery during those years (Morin, Esprit). The French author's theory about the mythology established by mass culture would have been fundamental to the elaboration of

9°

TROPICAL KITSCH

the novel PanAmérica, by José Agrippino de Paula. According to Veloso, Morins research included trips to Brazil in the sixties, when he dedicated himself to, among other topics, the study of the popularity of television animator Chacrinha (Veloso, Tropical 101). The work of Edgar Morin set out to analyze the great rupture effected by the new industrialization that now invaded the imaginary. Recalling the aggressive form in which Brazilian television expanded, it is not surprising that Morins work produced such an impact on the avant-garde that emerged in that country during the sixties. Recognizing the new colonization as being directed "no longer at things, but rather at images and dreams," thus penetrating "the great reserve which is the human soul," (Morin, Industria 23-25), Morin offered Brazilian artists appropriate theoretical instruments for analyzing the invasion of the imaginary that the military dictatorship carried out over the television. Theories about the manipulation and robotization of the spectator by mass communication, contained in the thesis of the society of spectacle (Debord), adjusted themselves perfecdy to the Brazilian reality of the time. The confusion between information and storytelling Morin detected in mass culture defined, rather concretely, the interpénétration between the fiction of soap operas and the novelistic way in which the news was presented in Brazilian television programming in the years of the military dictatorship. Confirming previous analyses, Morin also asserted that, tending toward a universal language—that is, directed to various kinds of public—the "cultural industry" did not abolish cultural stratification, but instead introduced new stratifications that went beyond the concept of social class. Through an identity with the values of consumption, individuals from diverse classes could be exposed to mass communication at one and the same time. The current relevance of Morin's thought consists of his notion of culture as a conflictive process. He criticizes, in a relevant way, those who attack mass culture and treat it as the great destructor of a universal cultural golden age which, from his point of view, never existed. Let us remember his observation that Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rimbaud were not known by the public at large, blinded by the mediocrity of academies and literary salons. This observation is complemented by Walter Benjamin who, in a radio piece titled "What the Germans Read While Their Classics Were

KITSCH, M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

91

Writing" (1932), creatively developed that same theme. Yet, Morin recognizes that, although the movement of mass culture offers greater expressive opportunities, it castrates creative possibility through the promotion of average quality.

• Mass Culture: Hie U.S. Case Hie widespread acceptance of average quality in U.S. society was first analyzed by Santayana and his disciple Van Wyck Brooks, around the second decade of the twentieth century (Jay; and Brooks). Using the concepts high brow and low brow, Brooks represented the dichotomy between the two Puritan-based traditions he considered foundational to U.S. culture in the manner of Hegelian dialectics, although without such terminology.16 Hie high brow included the tendency toward transcendentalism and refinement, both particular to an elite located at the bourgeois level, with all the benefits which the education of that class bestowed upon them. The pragmatic side of Puritanism led into the low brow, the other side of that same class, marked by materialism and a "vulgar" interest in business (Brooks). Tending toward liberalism as a driving idea, Brooks postulated the emergence of a third possibility, a genial middle ground, which would unite the two ends of U.S. cultural consumption at the beginning of the twentieth century. The great optimism of the U.S. bourgeoisie at the time, allied to the successful new conquests of technology recently invented in the country (the telegraph, in 1838; the telephone, in 1836; and electricity, in 1879, are all U.S. inventions and discoveries, accomplished outside the academic sphere), seems to have contributed to the attempts of Brooks's generation, and that of the following, to concretize their prophecy.17 The high brow!low brow alliance was present in the creation of museums of art and science at the beginning of the (last) century in the United States. The expansion of high culture to the great public was part of the program for these institutions (Kroes). During the forties and fifties, U.S. society had already created a stable and efficient network of cultural and academic institutions based on the barriers and levels through which the bourgeoisie controlled the distribution of privileges. In this context, the U.S. invention of the term mass culture is also a corollary to the realization of the

92

TROPICAL KITSCH

genial middle ground dreamed up by Van Wyck Brooks; he aimed to define, as culture, the production of mass media being implanted in the nation, above all by means of the film industry. The transfer of the Frankfurt School to the United States, at the end of the sixties, introduced negativity as the theoretical-analytical frame of a context already changed by the pessimism resulting from the Great Depression, starting in 1929. The conflictive relation of the newly immigrated European researchers, especially that of Adorno, with empirical analytic methods utilized by American sociology and psychology was responsible for the formation of a new criticism of art, one that only valued the high brow. However, the liberal roots of U.S. thought did not prevent the low brow from being taken into account by other sectors of academic study, especially in sociology. The confluence of European and U.S. models resulted in the subdivision of the low brow. The culture of the masses, under the influence of the Frankfurt School, becomes the lowest rung of these subcategories in models such as that of Dwight McDonald.18 On the other hand, taste is included in sociological analyses that are more faithful to liberalism, and becomes taken as an alternative to the model of social classes, as in the case of Gans (71).19 Lowenthal, a member of the Frankfurt School who took part not only in academic investigations, but also in research on radio promoted by the U.S. government, summarized the attempt at interaction between the philosophical speculation of the Frankfurt School and empirical investigations of the U.S.20 Some issues treated in this book had begun to appear earlier in his work—reception, taste (which Lowenthal affirms as the invention of liberalism), and the opposition serious/not serious used to differentiate communication reproduced for the masses from more traditional forms of communication. However, they are treated earlier as problems that are formulated, but not resolved. On this point, Lowenthal's thought advances in relation to that of Adorno, whose weak point was the wager for the homogenization of mentalities by mass culture. As with other analyses based on the same principle, Adorno s theory erred in its very foundations: social groupings, understood as mass or as class, have never been homogenous. In the second place, the concept of cultural industry had been conceived in defense of the individuality of an author or group of authors that, through their art, were distinguished from the amorphous and robotized masses.

KITSCH, M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

93

In summary, the great contribution of U.S. sociology has been to nuance the division between erudite and popular culture, as the first to attribute to mass culture the possibility of establishing communication between different social strata. The criticism of Martin-Barbero on this position seems relevant: in not separating culture and work, the U.S. reflection reaffirms the aristocratic pessimism of the nineteenth century, according to which the incorporation of the masses into society, for better or for worse, would mean the dissolution/transcendence of social classes. Apdy, once again, Martin-Barbero recognizes that that reflection gives us the opportunity to think, for the first time in a positive way, about what happens to the masses from the cultural point of view.

• Pop Art and the Concept of Camp If this was true in the area of American social sciences, in the field of artistic and literary criticism, the high brow was the barrier, in the sense given by Goblot, with which institutionalized art from the forties defended itself against the influx of new artists. Pop art took it upon itself to destroy that barrier. This art represented a rebellion against the canon established by different versions of New Criticism, which tyrannized both literature and the visual arts. Greenberg, defender and promoter of abstract expressionism, which he considered the only avant-garde representative of the arts in the U.S. during the fifties, was the first critic placed under fire by this new movement.21 To affront the power of good taste (the high broui) represented by abstract expressionism, pop art in the U.S. advocated "consumer taste," which included not only kitsch (which Greenberg considered as backward) but also commercial images and propagandist techniques used to stimulate consumption.22 These were incorporated to the works of American artists in the sixties as a way of annulling cultural hierarchies, chiefly marked by levels of taste, as Cécile Whiting (60-64) has pointed out. Such works were not only constructed on the middle brow. The scandal they caused, according to Whiting, was elicited by their presentation as "hybrid cultures" that mixed the categories of middle brow and high brow. The critical reaction to those works represented not only the challenge Whiting noted to critical

94

TROPICAL KITSCH

authority, but also the recognition by that same criticism that these artistic declarations represented a new avant-garde. Pop art also fought notions of the artist as subject. Criticism had mythicized the private lives of the abstract expressionists. Their solitude was associated with difficult and tortured personalities. As a reaction, refusing privacy became the main banner of Andy Warhol, for example. In contrast to the predominantly male world of abstract expressionism, the new identity of the artist created by Warhol included an artificial, androgynous pose typical of dandyism. He added to this the search for permanent notoriety. These behaviors, taken together, transformed Warhol into one of the most authoritative "arbiters of taste" of his time (Core 156-169). Vested with this authority, he could collect and recycle images and objects from the universe of consumption. Among them, he selected the "good taste of bad taste" called camp, in English, since 1909 (Meyer 75-109, esp. 75). This term, according to Moe Meyer, was first recorded in a dictionary that documented slang from the Victorian period. According to that dictionary, the word came from French and referred to "actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis" (75). Meyer, taking this definition a bit further, posits that the gestures themselves, expressed by the term, came from French culture, which was quite different, at the time, from Victorian rigidity. According to Meyer, the term places the idea of the Victorian subject (unique and continuous) in opposition to a concept of the subject based on performative, on-and-off improvisation. Thus, the camp subject is one that is constructed by a process of stylized, repetitive acts. Like the word cur si in Spanish, and all the words used in Latin America to designate the kitsch-man, camp names human behaviors and actions, distancing itself from the notion of the aesthetic object inherent to kitsch. Just as with the semantics of the Spanish cursi, kitsch is the objectification of camp experience, as one form of being camp involves surrounding oneself with kitsch-objects. Legitimized by critics such as Susan Sontag, who defined it in 1964 as a homosexual sensibility, camp also designates a type of taste through which different sexual minorities recognize each other. According to Sontag, camp corresponds to "modern dandyism" (288), different from the older version in its treatment of vulgarity: "The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the

KITSCH, M A S S CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

95

dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted" (289). Beyond that, camp is a response of how to be a dandy in the era of mass culture. The transformation of camp at the level of recognizing certain minorities can be attested by queer theory; rejecting its initial conceptualization as a "sensibility" by Sontag, queer theory lays claim to camp as an important part of the collective "practices that processually constitute queer identities" (Meyer 1-22, esp. 1). U.S. feminists also vindicate the "consumer taste" practiced by pop art as a liberation. Cécile Whiting demonstrates that abstract expressionism's defense of the high brow slighted the tastes of women even though they were part of the same social class as the artists and critics. Prevented from rising to the distinction of the high brow until the fifties, women in the United States, according to Whiting, were condemned to remain in the low brow sector, rising at most to the middle brow. She affirms that if pop art had been practiced by women—at the time when the rebellion of this art was declared—it would not have "left the kitchen." The idea of stigma is again present in both commentaries. However, there is one characteristic that distinguishes camp from Spanish and Latin American tackiness {lo curst): the notion of appearance. While cursi is defined by identities that try to appear as something they are not, camp redeems appearance as essence. As such, while cursi is a qualifier attributed by society's "arbiters of taste," generally at a level above that of the subject receiving the attribution (and thus it can be understood as a stigma), camp is a self-attributed quality with which the subject both recognizes himself and sees himself in the behaviors of those similar to him. With this self-recognition, the group brings itself to bear on society as a distinguished group because it exposes the learned bilingualism to which Bourdieu referred; that is, the mastery of the distinct codes through which different levels of society express themselves. Finally, the cursi subject is marked by ignorance of the codes by which he might recognize those of the level(s) superior to his own. His ingenuity often makes him unaware that he might be seen as cursi. The camp subject, in contrast, makes his practices and habits a political banner, transforming them into a barrier with which he selects others' access to his level of knowledge. Such a difference is rooted in the concepts that the societies where these words are generated have of themselves. Cursi has the implicit traits

96

TROPICAL K I T S C H

of the copy, or the reproduction of models, used by Spanish and Latin American cultural ideology to define itself. In camp, and primarily the U.S. variety, the invention of models is included, along with the creation of fashions belonging to groups who proclaim themselves as arbiters of taste. Spanish-speaking cultures are subdivided vertically, by the word cursi and other related terms, into a multiplicity of groups. With the moniker of camp, culture in the U.S. carries out a horizontal division, multiplying identities in the interior of vertical levels. However, Spanishspeaking and Anglophone communities share a common degree of aggressiveness with which they establish their barriers. In Latin American communities—both those configured as nations and those of enclaves in North America and Europe—cursi is a stigma that marks socioeconomic unevenness. In the United States, camp is a strategy for combating moral and aesthetic stigma. Both, in common, are configured in the resistance to segregation, attempting to rush the barriers created by discrimination. Hie dispute of territory between stigmatized and non-stigmatized groups is what transforms the great cities, only differentiated by geography, at the present change of centuries.

• Kitsch, Cursi, and Camp as Aesthetic Devices From the literary point of view, camp is also a textual strategy. The predilection for artifice and exaggeration, a trait present in both Sontag's conception and in queer theory, determined to a great extent the narrative options of the authors analyzed here. Even if the concept of camp as such only appears in the narrators I will examine in the following chapters, the use of cursi and kitsch as artifice, or device, was already present in the early narratives of Puig and in the tropicalist art of Brazil. If the founding pose of camp was based on a "system of gestures" (Meyer 75)—in other words, on a language—Latin American kitsch and cursi appear in different Latin American narrators as a language or group of languages that expresses the social inequalities of the continent. Adding to this the seme of appearance present in camp and in the various Latin American terms for kitsch and cursi, one can formulate the hypothesis that its incorporation into works of high fiction also obeys the desire to

KITSCH, MASS CULTURE, AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE

97

create a new textual appearance. In the same way, mass culture is utilized as a new rhetoric. Observing that such culture is constituted as a file (in the electronic sense of the term) of permanently available genres—melodrama, Far-West, historical novel, testimonial—Latin American fiction adds a repertoire of taste to this file, by means of kitsch and cursi, that allows literature to include themes rejected by the good taste of bourgeois distinction (D'Haen). If rhetoric was the point of departure for Baroque aesthetics, it is not surprising that Latin American authors who use mass culture and kitsch in their works have aligned themselves, in the last few decades, with what they themselves call a neobaroque aesthetic. In the works of these authors, mass culture acquires a textual appearance similar to the social appearance constructed by cursi or camp subjects to stake out their territory. In the first chapters, I showed how the analyzed novels and works oscillated between being and seeming tacky. This was the case, for example, with the text of the novel Heartbreak Tango. Starting with the concept of camp, we can assert that tropicalist artists also alternated between being and seeming camp. In Caetano Veloso, this fluctuation was based, as demonstrated earlier, on an artificial and androgynous pose. In the novels analyzed in the following chapters, the allegorical strategy of artists from the sixties (also a legacy of the Baroque) was allied to verbal plays and ciphered language, integrating its authors in a textual behavior typical of those who consider themselves determiners of taste. The need to recognize the different codes, even on the part of the works' readers, demonstrates that art utilizing kitsch and mass culture reaffirms the principles of an avant-garde that has its origins in the Baroque. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the historical Baroque can be considered one of the first avant-garde gestures (L. Santos, Kitsch y cultura 343). Its "aesthetic of difficulty," or its perpetual recourse to emblems, allegories, and plays on words, represented a knowledge restricted to small groups, which thus created their barrier. In the courdy groups of this Baroque, having and being were tied to a distinguished behavior that, as the history of mentalities has shown, was not exclusive to the aristocracy. It is interesting to note that Oscar Wilde used the type of costume worn in a Baroque court to construct the first appearance with which he scandalized Victorian aristocracy.

98

TROPICAL K I T S C H

The authors of the twentieth century go even further. They utilize the aesthetic of difficulty to elaborate new contradictions introduced to the social body by means of mass culture. Hiey use the same strategy as this culture, in other words the invasion of the imaginary. Transforming the imaginary of curst or kitsch, transmitted in rhetorical figures used by Latin America media, the aspect of Latin American literature I analyze here rejects any possibility for a documentary treatment of social contradictions. The binary and Manichean oppositions of the valorization of taste, which excluded the false in the name of the true, and the spurious in defense of the genuine, are replaced by permanent inclusion. These poetics are, without a doubt, consistent with the complex heterogeneity that exemplified the end of the twentieth century in Latin America.

III. KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

CHAPTER 4

Luis

RAFAEL SÁNCHEZ:

D A N D Y I S M IN T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y

• Macho Camachos Beat: The Cursi as Social Barrier Hie narrative of Puerto Rican author Luis Rafael Sánchez lends itself to analysis of the new perception the eighties brought to the use of kitsch and mass media in Latin American literature. The Brazilian tropicalists and the Argentine Manuel Puig, though they dealt with the encroachment of foreign mass culture, formulated hypotheses of national culture in their respective works. Toward the end of the seventies and throughout the eighties, issues of the nation began to be substituted by localized nuclei of cultural consumption: in works centered around a city, as is the case with San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the novels of Sánchez; and in those focusing on a neighborhood, or even a bar, as occurs in the story "El inquieto anacobe-

ro" ("The Restless Anacobero") by Venezuelan writer Salvador Garmendia. Preserving the use of allegory from earlier authors, such as those already analyzed, writers in the eighties radicalized it through the fragmentation of their tales. Less and less is told. The narrative environment is reduced, as are the characters themselves, who are portrayed as consumers. Their habits and customs, gestures and social practices are presented as strokes, or features, that give them no depth. 1 The frequent mention of Foucault in the works of Luis Rafael Sánchez, especially in La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988; The Impor-

tance of Being Daniel Santos), indicates that the microscopic vision described above is based on the work of the French philosopher. However, the political meanings the author attributes to the urban practices of his characters can be better understood through the reflection that Michel de Certeau added to Foucault's thought: there are microscopic responses to disseminated power and disciplinary technology. These tactics (Certeau 29-42), utilized by local groups in a creative and dispersed manner, appear in the

IOI

102

TROPICAL K I T S C H

branch of Latin American literature I am describing as barriers (in the sense given by Goblot) imposed from the bottom up. Hie literary treatment of these tactics and barriers materializes is carried out in light of the insights of narratives from the sixties. Twenty years later, literature is still looking into the issue of the reception of media, picked up on earlier by Puig and the Brazilian tropicalists. The central theme of Luis Rafael Sánchez's narratives is the increasingly active role of media consumers, together with a campy treatment of the tastes of social groups scorned by both conservative and progressive criticism. Attributing a dandyish elegance to the de-classed {desclasados, nomenclature of the narrator), to whom he dedicates his narrative effort, Sánchez puts into effect the "legalization of tackiness," or the "legalización de la cursilería," in his own words (Sánchez, La importancia 5). Also deepening the rejection of realism that marked the works of Sánchez's predecessors in the sixties, kitsch and cursi are offered to the reader as neobaroque artifices. The neobaroque aesthetic, which I will analyze in depth in the following chapter on Cuban author Severo Sarduy, allowed those authors to practice the art of difficulty within the body of a more defined poetic proposition. The linguistic experimentation in the novels of Sánchez, recycling the ever-present inclusion characteristic of the historical Baroque, also incorporates stylistic resources belonging to a "de-classed" rhetoric: that of the radio and popular music. It is with this rhetoric that Sánchez establishes the different social levels, in the sense used by Goblot, of his characters. In the novel Macho Camacho's Beat {La guaracha del Macho Camacho, 1976), the consumption of the products of mass culture both shapes the construction of the narrative and situates the characters within the social scale. The success of the song referred to in the title is so great that it itself becomes the protagonist. The narrative is given a secondary place. The narrator arranges the characters according to their addiction to the tune, grouping them into advocates and critics of the infectious beat. The group of detractors includes the family of Senator Vicente Reinosa: the senator, his wife, Graciela Alcántara y López de Montefrío, and their son, Benny. The fans are the characters surrounding Reinosas lover, who appears only as "the Mother," since she has a child with a mental disability who is killed when Benny runs him over at the end of the book. These two groups are also social opposites.

Life is a Pkenomenal Tiling

L a vida es una cosa fe tenomen;ial

Life is a phenomenal thing, frontwards or backwards, however you swing. But life is also a groovy street, Its coffee for breakfast and bread that you eat. Oh, yes, life is a nice chubby chick spoiling herself in a Cadillac trick. The trumpet breaking up the ball, don't let the maracas back down, the drums heard way across town, the thing can't have any stop, black women want sweat to mop, black women are getting hot.

La vida es una cosa fenomenal lo mismo pal de alante que pal de atrás. Pero la vida también es una calle cheverona, arrecuérdate que desayunas café con pan. Ay sí, la vida es una nena bien guasona que se mima en fabuloso Cadillac. La trompeta a romper su guasimilla, las maracas que no cejen pa tras, y los cueros que suenen a la milla, que la cosa no puede reposar, que la negra quiere sudar, que la negra se va alborotar.

(Trans. Gregory Rabassa)

(Sánchez, G, 313).

I04

TROPICAL KITSCH

Reiteration, especially in phonetic figures, is a device used even through the epilogue. Onomatopoeias, alliterations, interjections are repeated ad infinitum. This playful excess in orality hints at a neobaroque proposal. If one adds to this the repetition of almost identical phrases in the introduction of each of the secondary narratives, one can decipher the difficulty of this novel: it is organized as the script of a "hit-parade" radio broadcast. The fictional space and time, restricted to a gigantic traffic jam that prevents the two groups of characters from meeting, transforms the city of San Juan into a soundscape (Schafer).3 At the beginning of the novel, Senator Reinosa attempts to go to his garçonnière, where his lover awaits him, but cannot get there because of the bottleneck. While they wait for the traffic to start flowing, the drivers listen to their radios. All of the stations are playing the tune "Life is a Phenomenal Thing" ("La vida es una cosa fenomenal'). On the other side of the city, the same song is heard over the radio at the house of Reinosa's lover, and at the psychoanalyst's office where his wife is. As such, the novel parodies radio programming since, according to broadcasting manuals, "Frequency Modulation (FM) basically consists of transmitting music, intercalated with entertainment from the announcers" (César; quoted in Nunes). Between songs, the discourse of the announcers preserves the redundancy and repetition used in oral narratives to keep the listener tuned in. Its cumulative organization is also guaranteed by certain verbal formulae, such as rhymes, epithets, or antithetical statements, in which an excess of adjectives ensures the scattered attention of the listener on the move. All of these devices are used by Luis Rafael Sánchez in his novel from 1976. The neologism guarachar (roughly, "to groove"), used by the narrator to describe Reinosa's lover as she sings in the bath—"Did they hear her showering? Impossible; she was guarachaing" ( M C 5 ) (¿La oyeron ducharse? Imposible: guarachaba, G 105)—can be applied to the text itself. In addition to the phonetic repetitions already mentioned, the text displays symptoms of contamination by radio discourse and lyrics from popular music, in the prevalence of coordinated clauses separated by commas and of chains of nominal sentences. Tautologies are used to mimic the weakness of political propaganda, as attest the song-like slogans promoting Vicente Reinosa: "Vince is a prince and easy to convince" (MC 17) (Vicente

KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

105

es decente y buena gente, G 119); "Vince is a prince for the poor long since" {MC18) (Vicente es decente y con el pobre es condoliente, G 120). Besides hearing the song, the group of characters that includes the Mother also dances and sings to it, giving meaning to the hedonistic nature of the first verse: "Life is a phenomenal thing." While she waits for the senator, the Mother sings and dances the song in the shower. In the midst of the traffic jam, the drivers respond in chorus, singing and dancing to the tune proclaiming that the country does not function. Combining the studies of Goblot with those of Michel de Certeau on everyday practices, one can conclude that the song and dance of these "ordinary characters" constitute a tactic by means of which they penetrate the space placed offlimits to them by the "more rich." The unawareness of these tactics, on the part of the class that creates the barriers, can be summarized in the description of playboy Benny, son of Senator Vicente Reinosa: "Benny has never sung in the shower in order to take his mind off the coldness of the water. Nor in the bus that was taking a graduating class to Luquillo did he sing the plena 'What a Beautiful Flag,' the plena 'Mama, the Bishop's Here'" {MC 102) (Benny no ha cantado nunca en la ducha para olvidar el frío del agua. Ni en la guagua que transporta a Luquillo una clase graduanda ha cantado la plena "Qué bonita bandera," la plena "Mamita llegó el Obispo," G 206-207). 4 As such, the difference between the two groups can be found in the pleasure that the consumption of the song gives the "less rich" characters. Through song and dance, they utilize popular music as an effective means to put pressure on the social barriers imposed by the "more rich," reflected in the metaphor of the traffic jam that paralyzes the city. Recent studies of Latin American popular music and dance have begun to demonstrate the relationship between these forms of creative expression and a project of national culture. This is also true with genres present in the United States, considered expressions of the Latino diaspora, and above all that of the salsa which emerged in New York in the sixties (Delgado; Arteaga; Glasser; Duany; Báez). Mayra Santos Feb res shows how certain popular genres of music, including salsa, have a similar characteristic in Puerto Rico. According to her testimony, salsa in particular was considered by her parents' generation as "music of unrepentant commoners, hustlers, Blacks" (;música de arrabaleros, de tráfagos, de negros sin arrepentir, Santos

io 6

TROPICAL KITSCH

Feb res 175). Hie family considered the rhythms of their own cultural consumption "decent," in contrast to this genre: old boleros by Tito Puente, Rafael Hernández and Sylvia Reixach. The novel by Luis Rafael Sánchez seems to transfer what Mayra Santos Febres had described to the discourse of fiction. This is easily understood from the comparison of the two female characters' taste. The wife of the senator frequents the Casals Festival, which marks her "refined" consumption of classical music. She had her "début in society" {MC 31) {presentación en sociedad, G 133)—her debutante ball—livened up by "César Concepción^ orchestra with his exclusive vocalist Joe Valle" {MC 32) {orquesta de

César Concepción con su cantante exclusivo Joe Valle, G 134). The orchestra's repertoire included a bolero with lyrics written by the same Puerto Rican composer esteemed by Santos Febres's parents: Sylvia Reixach. Santos Febres also highlights that salsa inhabits the world of multinational communication, transforming its musicians and dancers into consumers. Once again, the literature anticipated such analysis. Puerto Rico appears in Macho Camacho's Beat as a society dominated by consumption. Under this point of view, there is no difference between the more and less rich, and thus the novel confirms another verse of the apocryphal lyrics of the protagonist, the guaracha: "Life is a phenomenal thing/ frontwards or backwards, however you swing" {MC 211) {La vida es una cosa fenomenal/ Lo mismo pal de alante que pal de atrás, G 313). The dualistic opposition between the groups of characters, extracted by José Luis Beauchamp from the chorus—"los de alante" (the rich, the privileged, the exploiters) and "los de atrás" (the poor, the de-classed)—is barely apparent. Mass culture, urging for indiscriminate consumption, actually transforms those two groups into "the same," as the narrator points out. The distinction between them is only produced by the levels at which culture is consumed. Using Goblot's terminology, one can affirm that, as the novel shows, groups within Puerto Rican society are more divided by levels of taste than by barriers. Vicente Reinosa, for example, wears Oscar de la Renta ties and Old Vic cologne {MC 170); {G 119-120). His son Benny (the name itself indicates the family's taste for U.S. culture) wears "a polo shirt, and tennis shoes, also known as Champions" {MC 51) {polo shirts and tennis shoes, también llamados zapatos champions, G 155). Benny has a Ferrari, a birthday gift received to the sound of the tune of "Happy Birthday" in English,

KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

107

sung by the family to the protests of the "first teen-ager in the country." (MC 57) The "primer tineger (sic) del país" (G 161) considers himself too old "for a party with a cake and candles" (MC 53) (para un party con cake y velitas, G 157). At the office of Gracielas psychoanalyst, while the receptionist reads the thirtieth edition of the novel La otra mujer de su marido (Her Husband's Other Woman) by Corin Tellado (the most popular author of romance novels in Spanish-America) the senator s wife does her best to imitate Jane Fonda in the film Klute, as the narrator notes. "Footnote without the foot: the receptionist will function as a nurse if things get too hot: and things get too hot when one of the clients or one of the patients resist the comedy of manners and morals, of pleased to meet you, the handkissing, the pipe-dream of all quiet on the western front, of Jane Fonda in Klute-. coolness and analysis" (MC 29-30) (Foot note sin elfoot: la recepcionista funge de enfermera si la cosa se pone caliente: y la cosa se pone caliente cuando uno de los clientes o uno de los pacientes se resiste a la comedia de manners and morals, delplease to me, del besamanos, del guille de all is quiet in the western front, de Jane Fonda en Klute: coolness y análisis, G 132). Here I reproduce sentences from the original text of the novel, because they allow one to see that the true barrier is imposed by the use of language. Comparing the discourse of the fans and critics of the hit song in the novel, it is notable that both groups intercalate English and Spanish words. Meanwhile, words from a correct English are used to characterize the privileged. The poor characters, on the other hand, are set apart by Spanglish. This is the case, for example, with the adjectives isi, rilds, redi (for easy, relaxed, ready), in the direct discourse of the Mother: "I take it easy, relax, ready for the flattering" (MC67) (me pongo isi, rilás, redi para el toqueteo, G 172). The song of the novel's title is already defined as "music of the poor" by its lyrics, which reflect the transformation of /r/ into III at the end of syllables and words in Puerto Rican colloquial language, in addition to the vulgarism in the use of the adverb: "lo mismo pal de alante que pal de atrás" (G 313) for "lo mismo para el de adelante que para el de atrás." As far as its meaning is concerned, the tautology of life as a phenomenal thing, as it does as much in front as it does in back, refers to the "street philosophy" Mayra Santos identifies in salsa lyrics. The discourse of the less wealthy characters registers a higher number of ciphers and linguistic enigmas for the reader, which should be interpreted,

io8

TROPICAL KITSCH

from the standpoint of reception, as contingent difficulties—that is, they should be accompanied by consultation with speakers from Puerto Rico.5 In this sense, Macho Camacho's Beat is, as Efraín Barradas pointed out, a novel to read in Puerto Rican. With this expression, the critic denotes the use of argots and vulgarisms by Luis Rafael Sánchez. The following quote, excerpted from the direct discourse of the Mother, contains several examples: "Freak as he is, flaky as he is. [...] Since I am the one who's got to put up with the pawing I get on the bus and not him" (MC 8) {Bien friquitis que es, bien wilis naiquin que es. (...) Como yo soy la que me tengo que aguantar el chino que dan en la guagua que no es él, G108-109); First, there are syntactic transgressions in the Spanish sentence that are characteristic of orality: anacoluthons and inversions ("comoyo soy... que no es él" [lit., since I am... that isn't he] for "como soy yo y no él' [since it is I and not he]). But there are also words and expressions created on the streets of San Juan, such as friquitis and wilis naiquin, that refer to arrogant or haughty people. Chino refers to sexual harassment in which the offender takes advantage of a crowded situation. Thus, in the perspective of the social map drawn by the novel, the use of language by the poor identifies both the tactics of their daily lives, as well as a barrier imposed from the bottom up, in terms of the social ladder (Sommer 1999).6 In reproducing that language in a novel considered to belong to the educated strata of Puerto Rican society, Luis Rafael Sánchez legalizes such linguistic usage, as cultural studies did similarly with salsa and Caribbean popular music much later. That set of criticism perceives salsa as an expression of ghetto violence through its themes of prison, drugs, and exile. However, it also recognizes salsa as a vehicle for the barrio, declared by popular music as the "free territory of the Americas" (Quintero Herencia 218). Through its level of success outside the ghetto, it decolonizes the barrio and gives it the status of a nationality. Macho Camacho's Beat takes an inventory of that new nationality. While the distinguished layers of society, as Bourdieu would say, acquire fluent English in good schools, the "less rich" rely on learning by ear, in the street. The barrier of the poor is thus built by the union of this broken English with the leftovers of cultural consumption by the more rich, who have cast them aside as tacky. Luis Rafael Sánchez recycles those leftovers in the text of this novel, also defining the poor characters by the surround-

KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

109

ings they live in and their consumption of cultural products besides the famous guaracha, all of which are "second class." The décor of Reinosa's garçonnière, for example, includes "a curtain that hides some gaudy windowpanes: The architecture of our time influenced by the art of our time: The latest hit" {MC 6) (una cortina que oculta unos cristales de alegres ventanales: arquitectura de nuestro tiempo influida por el arte de nuestro tiempo: Ë1 último cuplé,' G 106-107). Hie term, in italics in the original, is the title of an archetypical Spanish melodrama (Gubern 251-266). Its plot revolves around a singer of cuplé—a genre of Spanish music fading in popularity and subsequently considered tacky. The universe of the Mother is complemented by a cultural repertoire she has mastered: "an unpleasant aftertaste in the superego of a time from days gone by: María Cristina wants to govern me" {MCI) (resabio en el super ego de un son de otra época: "María Cristina me quiere gobernar," G 108),7 or the "magnificent snakelong soap opera The Son of Angela Maria" {MC 13) (grandioso teleculebrón "El hijo de Angela María, " G 115). Alternating her taste between "tacky" musical genres and television, which gives her soap operas, and the model on which to base her everyday dream—the star Iris Chacón—Reinosa's lover is presented as a consumer of mass culture in its tackiest forms. However, this consumption also appears in the novel as a metaphor of national culture, designed as a badly made copy of wealthier nations. The distortion of the copy puts the original objects "out of place,"8 as can be seen in the following example. a body that she sits down, lays out, and plops onto a sofa upholstered with a woolen material that's useful for overcoming polar chills but most unreal for any use in these tristes tropiques: the sun carries out an ungodly vendetta here, it stains the skin, prostitutes the blood, roils the senses: here in Puerto Rico, the successive colony of two empires and an island in the Archipelago of the Antillas {MC 5). cuerpo que ella sienta, tiende y amontona en un sofá tapizado con paño de lana, útil para la superación de los fríos polares pero de uso irrealísimo en estos trópicos tristes: el sol cumple aquí una vendetta impía, mancha el pellejo, emputece la sangre, borrasca el sentido: aquí en Puerto Rico, colonia sucesiva de dos imperios e isla, (sic) del Archipiélago de las Antillas (G 105).

no

TROPICAL K I T S C H

With the inversion of the signifiers that title Lévi-Strauss's canonical work about his travels in Brazil ( Tristes trópicos, as it appears in Spanish and in Portuguese, 1955), the narrator defines Puerto Rican culture with an ironic empathy. It is characterized as an "aesthetic inadequacy," in Calinescu's line of thought, or as a "structural lie," in the words of Eco, since it consumes products transformed from original European models as kitsch; these are, as Moles would note, anti-functional. Luis Rafael Sánchez, along with other authors I analyze in this book, uses that copied culture to mark his opposition to the Latin American Boom of the sixties. In Macho Camacho's Beat, the presence of canonical narrative from that period is evident in the thematic choice of the traffic jam, in accordance with the explicit quotation from Julio Cortázar's "The Southern Thruway" (MC 17) ("La autopista del sur" G 119). These authors de-normalize the concept of popular culture of the Boom, based on folklore and myth, substituting it with the wider concept of urban culture. The notion of Mestizo America typical of the sixties expands into mestizaje between the local and the foreign, the erudite and the popular, art and mass culture. In this new model, kitsch appears as just another experimental material incorporated into the narrative construction of the text. The distinguished culture's appropriations of kitsch sensibility transform it into rhetoric. Using kitsch and bad taste, Luis Rafael Sánchez crafted a text that is pure artifice, artifice utilized in the creation of the characters, who are reduced to slogans and refrains. Rejecting the realist option of Latin American narrative in the sixties, Sánchez allies himself with a neobaroque aesthetic; positioned as an arbiter of taste, in that he dominates both distinguished and vulgar codes, he also approaches a camp aesthetic. The Marxist class model, adopted by most narratives of the Boom, is also questioned through the use of bad taste. One of the keenest analyses of Macho Camacho's Beat observes this, though it lacks sufficient critical elements to interpret it. José Juan Beauchamp, practicing a Marxist-Lukacsian analysis of the text, locates its discourse in the avant-garde repudiated by Lukács. However, the critic highlights two important factors present in the novel: first, the "absence of the [personalized] proletariat"; and second, the presence of "everydayness" which he points out a number of times. On the basis of those two factors, I can assert that Luis Rafael Sánchez

K I T S C H IN T H E N E O B A R O Q U E E R A

HI

fully allies himself with the group of politically left writers that not only critique society, but also the models that attempt to interpret it, including those of the left itself. It is essential to keep in mind the exclusion of several groups of agents—women, homosexuals, the underprivileged, among others—from Marxist analyses of the working class. That set of criticism also failed to take into account aspects such as the daily life of the workers. It is precisely these last factors that allow Luis Rafael Sánchez to relativize the unchecked alienation of mass culture, in focusing on its reception by the "less rich" classes. If, as Martín-Barbero affirms, theoreticians of communication in Latin America have finally understood that "the receptor is not merely a decoder of what the emitter has put into the message, but a producer as well," and if the method to discern the process of the receptor's production consists of a "nocturnal map of inquiry based on gaps, consumption, and pleasure," we believe that Macho Camacho's Beat shows the way (Martín-Barbero 228-229). Interpreting the omnipresence of the song as a denunciation of mass communication's role in the alienation of the Puerto Rican people does not take into account the ambiguity with which it is treated by the novel's narrator (Morales 10 and 25). If on one hand the song appears as a symptom of such alienation, revealed by metaphor in the words "plague" or "epidemic" (MC 180) {peste, or epidemia, G 286), on the other hand, —through its description as "ecumenical" {MC 203) {ecuménica, G 305)—the identification of popular music with the island's urban culture is quite clear. This culture includes kitsch. The above elements in the lyrics of the tide's song both serve as a metaphor for the ideologeme of the copy, and render explicit the way in which the copy is carried out in Puerto Rican society. The characters' use of language demonstrates that the prestige attributed to the copied model is bestowed upon the more wealthy. The less rich "recycle" it, utilizing the creative kitsch that Dinah Guimaráes and Lauro Cavalcanti encountered in the houses built by dwellers on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Recycling the English language, that of the most recent colonizers, as well as popular rhythms inherited from those better off, the multitudes of "de-classed poor" mark their insertion into society by exacerbating their stigma. Making this their barrier, they not only reject the behavior of "decent citizens," but often, also citizenship itself.

112

TROPICAL KITSCH

• La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos: Cursilería x Testimonio The following novel by Luis Rafael Sánchez, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, takes such positions to an extreme. To begin with, it is dedicated exclusively to the less rich, referred to in the narrative by a long string of nouns that portray the poor negatively: "hampones, gentuza y gentucilla tildada de plebe de mierda, chusma, moralla, broza" (88). These people are also qualified as "de-classed" (as they are not found in any of the social classes accounted for in the Marxist model) or as "the indescribable guttertrash" {el inefable lumpen) ? Preserving the musical prose of the previous novel, now mentioned explicidy in the prologue ("I took upon myself a very danceable prose, a prose I will bolero-ize with swaying rhythms") (una prosa danzadísima me impuse, una prosa que bolerizé con vaivenes, 5), the refrain becomes "bitter America, barefoot America, America in Spanish" {la América amarga, la América descalza, la América en español). This is the America that idolizes Daniel Santos, the bolero singer famous throughout the Caribbean since the forties, still alive at the time of the novel's writing. The intention is to "disarm the myth" of the singer, or to deconstruct it, using the critical language of the eighties included in the text through numerous mentions of the name Foucault. The second critical reference to which Luis Rafael Sánchez refers is the canonization of the testimonial novel in Latin America, already criticized by the second paragraph of the prologue, in the phrase "documentary smell." It is interesting to discover that in one of its most relevant self-criticisms, U.S. theory on the testimonial genre uses a metaphor very similar to that of Sánchez, to describe its own action (Sklodowska). Upon comparing the two metaphors, one can assert that Sánchez promotes the "legalization of bad taste" (5) in opposition to the increasing "institutional legitimization" of the testimonial genre in the U.S. during the eighties (Sklodowska 84). The intention of Sánchez's term can be clarified in more depth through a contrastive comparison of his narration with those of the testimonial genre. First, there are similarities in the construction of the genre. In defining La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos as a "hybrid borderline narration, exempt from generic regulations" {narración híbrida y fronteriza, exenta de las regulaciones genéricas, 5), Sánchez prepares the reader for a parody of different genres—literary and not—with which he will compose

KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

113

the work. He extracts the organization of the first part from the testimonio, constructed as the transcription of taped interviews in the same setting where the Daniel Santos myth flourishes, that is, in dive bars (bares de mala, muerte).10 The informants are his ex-lovers, drinking buddies, or simply faithful admirers of the singer, who recount his anti-heroic deeds to the "professional intellectual" who writes the narrative. The parody continues in the second part which, titled " Vivir en Varón" ("Living in Male"), describes the machismo on which the myth is based, as a counterpoint to the U.S. feminism attributed to testimonials by Latin American women. The narrative proper is limited to the third part, in which the narrator, as he advises, imagines the lives of his "informants." The genre parodied in this section is that of the bolero lyrics sung by Daniel Santos, replete with melodramatic misfortunes and other aspects that are in bad taste. The book closes with a parody of academic bibliographies, titled "Despedida" ("Farewell"). The names of theoreticians popular in the eighties are alternated with bolero composers cited throughout the work. Other similarities to testimonial novels can also be found in the construction of the characters. The recognition of the testimonial genre's "familiar similarity" to the picaresque novel (Sklodowska 85) appears parodied in the treatment of Daniel Santos as a rogue {picaro). The "informants" in the novel are also rogues. On one hand, the desire for truth to which most of the first critical discourses on the testimonio succumbed, according to Elzbieta Sklodowska, also appears in Sánchez's novel through parody. Over the course of the narration, the tape recorder used by the "professional intellectual" appears as an "apparatus" {aparato), as a "thingamajig" (cachivache), and only finally as a "tape recorder" {grabadora)." The editing of testimonials is also satirized a number of times, both by informants ("I'll speak like I always do, and then you can erase and splice it" \Yo hablo como siempre hablo y después usted borra y tacha, 14]) and by the narrator ("I correct his/her preaching {predicación)" [Yo corrijo su predicación, 13]). As the critics who helped to promote it have recognized, the testimonial narrative represented a type of neorealism, which, as seen earlier, was rejected by those who initiated the branch of Latin American literature I analyze in this book (I refer the reader to Puig's case). More than this, the testimonio treated literature as a document, as it considered excluded those who had witnessed "urgent situations" such as war, the explicit oppression

ii4

TROPICAL KITSCH

of military dictatorships, or political persecution, or those who had been live witnesses of a revolution (Yúdice 44). Finally, the critical works that "legitimized" it tended to see the excluded through the lens of U.S.-style multiculturalism. Hence, the prevalence of the indigenous, whose linguistic diversity necessitated translation, women, or Blacks among testimonials selected as exemplary. The premise of "giving voice to those who don't have it" also led them to privilege representatives of rural communities, whose scarce access to the cities of their own countries impeded the awareness of their constant struggle for recognition as citizens. Luis Rafael Sánchez, in contrast, privileges the mass marginality of big cities.12 The urgency of the poor to whom he is dedicated is the daily search for means of survival. The persecution they suffer from police is not due to their political activities, but to crime and unemployment. Their meeting places are not political planning sessions, but bars ruled by the "three b's" that characterize the life of Daniel Santos: "boleros, drunkenness, mistresses" (boleros, borracheras, barraganas, 53).13 As such, the exemplary lives of the victims of state oppression have nothing in common with the hedonistic existence of Daniel Santos. His passport as a citizen of the night and of the world—at least of the Latin American world where he was received as a king—and his rhetoric, recognized and accepted by different social levels of the universe through which he skillfully navigated, indicate that Daniel Santos not only had a voice, but made his own the voice of the marginalized masses in Latin America's large cities, or in the ghettos of Latino immigrants in the United States. The arguments that Luis Rafael Sánchez found for the "legalization" of such a controversial character, as well as of his repertoire, laden with bad taste, are extracted from the second genre parodied in La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos: the essay. Bearing in mind the literary tradition of the Latin American essay, Daniel Santos is set apart as a representative of Mestizo America, a term he opposes to others used in his refrain "Sick America, America in Spanish" (.América Enferma, América en Español). This opposition makes a clear reference to the debate that occupied most of the nineteenth century in Latin America, with respect to the model of racial mestizaje; this was finally adopted as a sign of advance, in relation to the "disease" that positivism and hygienism used to characterize the mix of Latin American racial and cultural heritages. Against this notion

KITSCH IN THE N E O B A R O Q U E ERA

"5

of "modernization," which signified a radical change in everything that Latin Americans had been, the twentieth-century essay of the continent constructed a series of ideologemes with respect to the topic: Cannibalism, in the Brazil of the twenties (O. Andrade) transculturation in the Cuba of the forties (Ortiz); mestizaje, or mixture, throughout Spanish America in the sixties (Carpentier; and Lezama Lima); and hybridism in the nineties (Garcia Canclini).14 Therefore, the authors greatest opposition to the testimonial narrative is based on the foundations of the model that guided the critical writing that canonized it. Whereas this defended the testimonio on the basis of U.S. multiculturalism, Luis Rafael Sánchez was working with the Latin American concept of mestizaje. His narrative is faithful to a literary tradition founded on the rejection of the notion of literature as a document. Furthermore, he is directly affiliated with the Latin American essay written in Spanish. However, there are differences between the concept of mestizaje used as the basis of Sánchez's narrative and the perspective adopted by the novel of the Latin American Boom in the sixties. The latter, in its totalizing zeal, annexed facts and deeds to the character, converting it into a symbol of the Latin American anti-hero. This is the case, for example, with Aureliano Buendia, participant in dozens of failed revolutions in One Hundred Years ofSoltitude (1967), by Gabriel García Márquez; or with the protagonist of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (1955), whose search for his roots ends in the encounter of ghosts inhabiting a village dominated by the latifundio (large estate). The narrative that makes up the works I analyze substitutes such political myths with myths fabricated by mass culture. Inverting the constructive process of narratives from the Boom, these authors compose their characters by means of a deconstructive process. Using fragments, they design schematic characters that stop being symbols and become allegories for the continent. La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos's parody of the essay also makes it a foreshadowing of the line of criticism that defends the bolero as the product of cultural mestizaje alluded to earlier. According to this concept, the verbal and melodic repertoire of the bolero is of Hispanic origin, while the rhythm and instrumentation come from the African cultural heritage (Castillo Zapata). As such, the bolero is analyzed with the interpretive parameters of the old concept of popular culture. The musical

ii 6

TROPICAL K I T S C H

genre would correspond to a need for the collective expression of amorous sentiment and is included among "community-based aesthetic practices" (Castillo Zapata 33). For some of these essayists, the bolero of the forties cannot be included in the realm of kitsch because it is a "genuinely" popular form of expression, as much in its creation as in its consumption (Acosta). In these reflections, there is both a continuation of the opposition genuine/spurious as a criteria for the validation of cultural products, and a rejection of the possible inclusion of kitsch and bad taste in the composition of boleros. However, even Castillo Zapata adds to the Spanish and African heritages of the genre not only an "out of fashion" use of melodrama, romantic poetry, and Spanish-American modernist verse, but also the contribution of "all of those typical expressions of so-called mass culture—stories broadcast on the radio, serial novels, love advice—that gravitate around kitsch" (36). Although the success of that musical genre is the result of show-business deals and the international recording industry, it also translates the capacity for recycling products received "secondhand" by the popular classes. In terms of Daniel Santos's repertoire, critical views coincide: his belong to a certain trend of marginal boleros, with respect to big sales. Composers, performers, and listeners of that style of bolero are found predominantly "in proletariat, subproletariat, and even marginal media" (Acosta 61). The image of Daniel Santos, in turn, is always "ascribed to the underworld, to the outskirts, to the marginal class of our community, at a time when it was beginning to be a city" (Ulloa 476). Therefore, choosing Daniel Santos as the center of an allegory for "America in Spanish" also implies the intention to perform, with the type of bolero he sung, an "archaeology" of Latin American modernity, in the Foucauldian sense of the term. The following passage is quite explicit in this respect: Latin American nightlife which, in the thirties, distributes its slaveries and seductions from three metropolitan ports that seem to be equidistant: Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico City. [...] nights of endless lines in front of box offices of a typically democratic art: Tito Guizar in There on the Rancho Grande, Jorge Negrete in The Devil's Godmother. Havana is a myth with carnal, satyric license. The tango is an creolization of Parisian idealizations. Mexican film is a blender

KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

117

of ancestral mythologies. Myths, mythifications, mythologies that adorned the Latin American night in the thirties with negotiable leisure. Cultura latinoamericana de la noche que, en la década del treinta, distribuye sus esclavitudes y seducciones, desde tres puertos metropolitanos que parecen equidistar: La Habana, Buenos Aires, Ciudad de México. (...) noches de colas interminables frente a las expendedurías de un arte típicamente democrático: Tito Guizar en Allá en el Rancho Grande, Jorge Negrete en La madrina del diablo. Mito es La Habana de una permisión carnal satyricona. Acriollamiento de idealizaciones parisinas es el tango. Limadora de mitologías ancestrales es el cine mexicano. Mitos, mitificaciones, mitologías que alhajaron la noche latinoamericana de los años treinta con el ocio negociable (117-118). One can also identify in this quote the formal choice of the bolero, with the nostalgia that postmodern art has for past ways of life (Huyssen 25). If we consider that the Boom represented the art of high modernity on the continent, we can understand why the writers that followed, in aligning themselves with postmodernity, disputed the foundations of the Boom in their works. In this specific case, there is an attempt to displace the attention to rural communities, the focus of Latin American narratives from the sixties, to the outskirts of Latin American capitals. Castillo Zapata's essay on the bolero helps to unite the two ends of this reasoning. According to Castillo Zapata, the bolero can only be valued outside the "dimension of modern Western art," since the composer of a bolero is marked by his lack of engagement with the modern aesthetic. While modern works are distinguished by originality, novelty, and intellectual ownership, the author of boleros is like a speaker who must re-create the whole language at each act of speech. And, like an anonymous speaker, he is not always remembered by the consumer of boleros. For the public, the great artist is the singer, and for this reason he is always presented as the interpreter (intérprete), with the responsibility of dramatizing the overly studied rhetoric of the lyrics, or the confessional tone of the song's declarations. Once more, the bolero is circumscribed in the universe of urban culture. Contextualizing it historically, it is clearly impossible to dissociate its popularity from the growth of Latin American cities and the development of mechanisms for commercial mass distribution. The accelera-

II8

TROPICAL KITSCH

tion of those two processes guarantees the bolero an increasingly localized space. For this very reason, it becomes a rhetoric collectively adopted by those peripheral localities-. "With musical films, and later with the jukebox, distributed as a portable altar in every town canteen, the bolero ends up saturating the universe of the melodic expression of love on the continent, installing itself definitively as an argot of the masses, as a rhetoric of undeniable popular adoption" (Castillo Zapata 35; italics in the original). The value that Luis Rafael Sánchez gives to bolero lyrics is based on the recognition that they obey this kind of codified rhetoric, which he elevates by placing it on a level equal to that of the learned idiom of canonical authors from the Latin American and Spanish traditions. In the first two parts of La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, many sentences alternate the rhetoric of those two traditions, as in the following example: "Lo que se venera [en Daniel Santos] es su aceptada responsabilidad para con el cuerpo que te quiero cuerpo como dijo el venezolano sentado en El reino de San Judas Tadeo" 53) (What is venerated [in Daniel Santos] is his accepted responsibility for with the body that I want you body as the Venezuelan seated in The Kingdom of St. Jude ThatMeus said). It is noteworthy that quotations from popular culture (in the case, the name of a bar) are placed in italics, while more "cultivated" references are seamlessly mixed into the text without graphic alteration. In the sentence quoted, this is seen with the famous verse of Spanish poet Garcia Lorca, "Green, how much I want you green" (Garcia Lorca 65) (" Verde que te quiero verde" García Lorca 64). Among other classic authors cited similarly in this work, the most notable are Baroque poets such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Francisco de Quevedo, and Luis de Góngora. Rubén Darío is also cited (in a clear analogy of the permanence of modernist rhetoric in bolero lyrics), as well as Pablo Neruda, mainly from his love poems. The quotation of "cultivated" works obeys the tradition of the less cultivated; in other words, it is done "by ear," as with the English learned on the street that appeared in Sánchez's earlier work. Appearing sans quotation marks, verses by canonical poets are altered from the original. Their words, reduced to quotes passed on in school or read by the middle classes, are equated to the amorous language of boleros, acquired through the "education" transmitted via radio, film, and the jukebox. Thus, the proper recognition of authorship is a contingent difficulty for the novel's reader, who must be familiar with sources

K I T S C H IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

119

from both spheres. The continuity of such difficulties transforms them into gaps, in the sense given to the term by Iser, that are only resolved by the inventory of authors at the end of the novel. The rhetoric of the bolero is also gestural. As an interpreter, the singer must dramatize its lyrics, relating amorous experiences that are all the more direct because of their proximity to that melodramatic goldmine that connects "popular taste for emphatic gestures, solemn postures, and ritual" (Martín-Barbero 232). This taste is formed "not through private reading and individual meditation on poetry and art, but through the collective expressions of oratory and theater" (Gramsci 374). Hence, it is easily seen in conjunction with the features of collective recognition that, according to Martín-Barbero, marks the presence of the "popular" in the "masses." Hiematically, on the other hand, Daniel Santos's bolero re-creates his own biography, and both are imbued with values rooted in the Western tradition of love. Daniel Santos and his boleros embody both the "fast-talking" (guapería) of courtly love and the licentiousness introduced to European courts during the eighteenth century.15 The fact that Daniel Santos has embodied the Puerto Rican "public dream" can be justified by the machismo of one who has had a rocky love life over the course of twelve marriages. This is also due to the fact that he was born in Puerto Rico and was a success throughout the Caribbean, and that he passed through two of the most famous big bands of the forties: that of Xavier Cugat, where he remained until he was drafted by the U.S. Army, and the Sonora Matancera, beginning in 1948. It may also be because he performed songs by the greats, such as Pedro Flores, and left imitators, like singers Bienvenido Granda and Charlie Figueroa. What made Santos a legend, however, was primarily his voice and his "exaggerated and mannered singing" style (Ulloa 477). Joining this style to elegance ("he was the principal actor ... and owner

of elegance" [que de la elegancia era accionista principal [...] que de la elegancia era propietario, 28]), Daniel Santos finally becomes the prototype of the modern dandy, defined by Susan Sontag as the repository of camp sensibility, par excellence. The influence of Sontag's thought in Luis Rafael Sánchez's work is evident from the tide of the novel, which parodies The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. The wordplay in the tide of Wilde's play (that of the adjective and the proper name) mirrors the play

I20

TROPICAL K I T S C H

between reality and appearances in the society of his time, and parodies the writer's own life; the dandy rejects the "earnest" Victorian façade (Wilde; and Ludmer 187-189, for definitions of the Latin American dandy during the nineteenth century). Beyond that, the fact that Sánchez terms Daniel Santos a dandy anticipates later theorizations of camp found in queer theory. The performative improvisation of his musical interpretation, and namely his repetitive affectation, are used by the author as features constituting a camp subject. Yet, the choice of this singer as a character indicates that the author attributes a camp sensibility to himself, since it positions him as a "guru of taste." From that privileged position, Sánchez formulates not only literary hypotheses, but also political ones related to Latin American society. Distinguished by the author as the representative of the "good taste of bad taste" that defines camp, Daniel Santos also stands for the "urban church" of the de-classed. Then, he is a dandy in reverse, solidly tied to the world he comes from and represents: the local world of the slums (barriadas) in the big cities of Latin America or in Latino neighborhoods in the U.S. Using vocabulary current in post-structuralist theory of the eighties to define that universe, such as periphery, margin, and difference, Sánchez attempts to transcend the social "de-classification" to which Marxism relegated such poverty. In the same allegorical manner as the other narratives I analyze in this book, the author constructs a fragmented biography of Daniel Santos (the genre of biography being parodied as well), from which he selects representative aspects of the community of the singer's origins. Born in a poor area of San Juan: "By coming from the bottom of the urban pot, by coming from Tres Talleres—a slum that was peripheral in a country that is peripheral" (Por crearse en el fondo del caldero urbano, por crearse en Tres Talleres—que jue barriada periférica de un país que es periférico)-, and having moved as an adolescent to the Hispanic neighborhoods of New York: "the perforated utopia of the Hispanic barrio of New York, [both] made him dare to do everything, to prove that he was unbeaten [...] He either was or wasn't going to stand out!" {la utopía perforada del Barrio Hispano de Nueva York, la sentenciaron a atreverse a todo, a mostrarse invicto [...] ¡Iba o no iba a ser distinto!, 84). His music goes beyond the "expectations of marginalization" (expectativas de la marginaciórí). Daniel Santos also "fulfills the hopes of the sentimental outcasts that burst out crying fresh rears

KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

121

at the sole mention of his name" (colma las expectativas de los marginados sentimentales que escupen lagrimones inéditos a la mención solitaria de su nombre, 87). These are enumerated by the narrator: the bourgeois, the oligarch, the rich young man and woman, and of course, "the indescribable lumpen' (el inefable lumpen, 88). The placement of the lumpen at the apex of the enumeration reveals the ennoblement of that "de-classification" through the reference to the poor who are "indescribable" (pobres desadjetivados) by the "Perfect Right" (Derecha Perfecta) and the "Perfect Left" (Izquierda Perfecta), as both reduce them to the "nobody class" (clase cualquiera). "Since preferably, it is guaranteed, it is stigmatized" (Como preferentemente, se la avala, se la estigmatiza, 89). The touting of the stigma is clearly a tactic against the barriers imposed by the more wealthy. Based on this hypothesis, Daniel Santos easily lends himself to embodying the distinction of the periphery, the visibility of those "of the 'backward'" (de atrás) who are devoid of "class" and are without social location. His repertoire becomes, in the work of Sánchez, a collective memory of those social actors forgotten by Marxism. As in Brazil, there seems to be a connection between this literature and a "boom" of popular music. At the time when Luis Rafael Sánchez penned the novels analyzed here, salsa was experiencing a huge expansion: "It is without a doubt that the Latino-Caribbean musical panorama changed after the Cuban Revolution. The primary source was still Cuba, but the epicenter of production for Latin America was in Puerto Rico and New York" (Ulloa 1476). At the end of the eighties, when La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos was written, salsa was an export product equally expressive as the tango in the thirties, or the bolero in the forties. This is noted in the novel in one of the testimonies, taped on the way to the "cathedral of New York Latinness, the Palladium" (63) the famous dance-hall for which that era of Latino music in the U.S. has been named (Leymarie 59-78).16 The informant who gives this testimony, using the familiar treatment with which the author is known Puerto Rico—Wico Sánchez—shows not only that he is close to the author (actually, his alter-ego), but that he also shares the same "personal code" that marks the camp subject. In this testimony, it is explicit that the bilingualism of those Puerto Rican intellectuals—both the writer and the character—is not only the learned bilingualism referred to by Bourdieu. That is present in the reading list of the informant, for

122

TROPICAL K I T S C H

example, which contains Cervantes, Benedetti, and Foucault. Bilingualism can also be seen in the reference to Sánchez's literary work as an expression of the homo ludens, as well as of the "homo closet" where he would "unsurely" (inseguramente, 63) be.17 Likewise appears the concrete bilingualism in which Spanish, equally bastardized, is seen as the language of Latino citizens in the United States (Sommers 1999). Through the use of popular music, one can establish points of contact between the narrative of Luis Rafael Sánchez and the rereading of popular songs from the forties and fifties by Brazilian tropicalists. In both cases, there is an attempt to recuperate a cultural identity threatened by the monopoly of the U.S. recording industry. Hie new identity, however, is built according to other parameters. Displacing the focus of economic and political models, cultural aspects theretofore absent from social interpretation—such as mass culture—managed to be included in it. In the new model, the consumers of that culture are no longer the authentic peasants of the Boom novels, nor the workers of the Centers for Popular Culture {Centros Populares de Cultura), or CPCs in Brazil. Often distanced from citizenship, as with the bandit Horseface (Cara de Cavaló) of Hélio Oiticica, or the lumpen that admires Daniel Santos, the characters created by the artists studied here are no longer symbolic unities of nationality. Set aside by their customs and practices, they serve an allegorical project in which the local supersedes the national. The "second-class citizenship" that befalls them in their own countries brings them nearer to Latino immigrants in the U.S. and Europe (Rosaldo). The mass culture chosen by Latin American artists in the seventies and eighties expresses this second-class citizenship. From the perspective of production, their works are marked by a kind of "urban-popular" (lo popular urbano). In other words, they maintain roots in an older concept of popular culture (Monsiváis, Cultura).18 Born in the peripheries of Latin American cities (the common ground of samba, tango, salsa, and boleros), they return there (in the case of music, as outdated rhythms) after fleeting success in mass culture; they remain there as a repertoire that assures the self-recognition of the community. Even if, on the other hand, their circulation is enhanced by the opportunity for global distribution, those products remain limited, from the standpoint of consumption, to "second-class citizens," be they from Latin America, the United States, or Europe.

K I T S C H IN T H E N E O B A R O Q U E E R A

123

In terms of production, mass culture—also second class (the first class is represented by products that became dignified, like jazz)—might interest the "cultivated" artist as an opportunity for recycling, or reworking the "backwardness" of Latin America. However, thanks to a second viewpoint, that of reception, that slowness is no longer seen as a sign of inferiority. Starting with Oiticica, music appears in these works as a factor that is inseparable from a collective leisure primarily expressed through dance. For our authors, that creative energy is used to keep time to increasingly diverse ways of life, which are evermore radically distanced from the pattern of national society. The social pockets found at the local level assume, in the last few novels, not only a "second-class citizenship," but a sort of anticitizenship; hence, the opposition of these novels to the testimonio, the authors of which aspire to bring about the recognition of their "informants" as citizens. In the novels of mass culture, in contrast, citizenship appears not to be of interest, or not to be needed, for the narrator's treatment of the characters. Recall, for instance, the case of the maid Raba in Heartbreak

Tango, who is compelled by tango lyrics to kill her lover, and is absolved by the author through the happy ending of the novel (Ludmer 132-133, on the implications of that absolution for Argentine history and culture). Or that of Sánchez's characters, whose dance lets them ignore national politics in Macho Camacho's Beat. In this last case, the setting described in the work assumes marginality, or its place on the periphery, through a more gestural than verbal language; this is due, in part, to the introduction of camp into its interpretive universe. The aesthetic of the body is reinterpreted by the artists I study here, in the very constitution of their works. The aesthetic experience {viven-

cia) of Oiticica, which presupposes the spectators' sensory experience of the work, is similar to the direct contact with the tacky plots of Mexican melodramas, or the clichés of lyrics to the guarachas, tangos, and boleros of the thirties and forties, assumed of the novels' readers. The literal quotation of those lyrics converts the simulacrum present in mass culture into direct experience. In addition, since tropicalism, the groups represented by this fiction have finished being social classes and have become urban tribes identified by their gestures, customs, and more importantly, their idiosyncrasies of taste. As with the Brazilian tropicalist song, each of those works is an event marked by a ludic tradition (hence, the homo ludens to

124

TROPICAL KITSCH

whom Sánchez refers). The old and the new are mixed: the permanence of "no time" {destiempo) at the local level in Latin America is added to the reflection on space by theories of globalization.

CHAPTER 5

SEVERO SARDUY: A POST-EVERYTHING AUTHOR

• The Abstract Roots of Severo Sarduy The use of camp in the works of Cuban writer Severo Sarduy is related to a literary project with (still) modern roots. First, he was strongly connected to post-structuralism (Huyssen 179-221),1 and was part of its heyday in Paris, where he wrote the majority of his works. Second, his activity as an art critic while still in Cuba,2 and later his own artistic expression through painting (González Echevarría, Sarduy), brought his literature closer to the visual arts which, beginning in the sixties, approached verbal language as a form of questioning the limits of plastic expression.3 With Sarduy, there is an attempt to find in the visual arts a broadening of the limits of verbal expression. His first choice was the visual practice most related to high modernism: abstractionism. Sarduy's citation of abstraction began with Gestos (1963; Gestures). The title of this, his first novel, is related to the attempt "to reconstruct Cuban reality based on (artistic) visual intentions," reducing these to gestures (Rodríguez Monegal, Severo).4 (Note that this still does not refer to deconstruction.) By means of the gesture, abstractionism attempted to achieve action painting, a substitution for decorative art with utilitarian ends. Transferred to literature through détournement, the gesture is converted into a type of action writing set apart in the novel Gestos by the dissolution of the traditional character. This last literary technique leads the reader to perceive these (the characters) in an intuitive, direct fashion, as in abstract art.5 Thus, the gesture of Sarduy prefigures the camp gesture, since it functions as an integral artifice of a textual strategy rooted in the Baroque. With the choice of the Baroque, the Cuban writer also defines his affiliation with the post-Boom, in other words his contrast with the writing of the Latin American Boom of the sixties.6 Although he may have maintained the Boom's obsession with an essentialist cultural identity, which he identified

125

I wanted To change everything I changed everything N o w p o s t everything ex everything I am mute Augusto de Campos, "pos-tudo," 1984. Translation by Elisabeth Enenbach.

Trio Matamoros

They A r e from ike Hill" Mama, I want to know -Where are the singers from? -I find them so charming And I want to meet them With their fascinating ballads That I want to learn. -Where could they be from? -Are they from Havana? -Are they from Santiago, That sovereign land? -They are from the hill And sing on the plain. -You will see, you will see -Mama, they are from the hill. -Mama, they sing on the plain. (Lyrics of the song "Son de la loma" by Miguel Matamoros. Design: Urra, Egrem recording studios, Havana, Cuba. The original verses can be found in the Appendix. Translation by Elisabeth Enenbach)

128

TROPICAL KITSCH

in numerous interviews as "the search for cubanidad," this "Cubanness" was not defined by the anthropological or sociological models associated with that concept in the sixties. In contrast, Sarduy's search was based on the literary models constructed by his Cuban predecessors (González Echevarría, Celestinas). These models also prefigure the microphysical perspective of the literature that followed the Boom. Sarduy's "Cubanness" was defined by a national identity, in opposition to the search for a Latin American continental identity, such as that constructed by writers of the Boom. Above all, he drew on a literary interpretation of Cuban culture. In this sense, Sarduy also reveals an approach aligned with a Baroque project: that of forming groups whose affinity is based on curiosity and difficulty. In this way, the construction of his literary cubanidad is carried out with the legacies of Alejo Carpentier and, above all, Lezama Lima. Carpentier, great scholar of Cuban music, can be recognized in the use of a popular song and rhythm for the title of the following novel by Sarduy. (Once more, cultural identity is related to popular music.) The title From Cuba with a Song (De donde son los cantantes, 1967) transcribes a verse of the song "Son de la loma" by Miguel Matamoros. 7 The enigma contained in the lyrics of this son (a rhythmic genre of popular music in Cuba) is extended by Sarduy to the narrative: what is the origin of the singers, what is the origin of Cuban culture? (Gonzalez Echevarría, Ruta). In From Cuba with a Song, Sarduy furthers his use of the aesthetic of difficulty: he abandons certain narrative conventions, including the name and genealogy of the characters. This choice of the enigmatic narrative is rooted in Lezama Lima, whom Sarduy declared as a role model, to the point of affirming his pride in having been born during the "Lezama Era" (Sarduy, quoted in H. Campos, Limiar).

* Cobra: From the Illegible Text of High Modernism to the Text of Bliss Cobra (Sarduy, Dalkey Archive Press) (Cobra, 1972; Sarduy, Sudamericana), 8 crystallizes a strange union of two high modernist poetics, abstractionism and post-structuralism, with the Baroque. Beginning, once again, with a Baroque enigma— Cobra is an anagram formed by the first syllables

KITSCH IN THE N E O B A R O Q U E ERA

129

of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, respectively—Sarduy drives the narrative without temporal cuts: the events flow in a linear fashion. There are no backward movements in spatial terms, either; each episode occurs within its own space. The problem resides in the event itself: the search by Cobra, the protagonist, who obsessively reinvents herself throughout her two episodes in the novel. This process becomes so amplified that the character practically disappears, transforming herself into permanendy redesigned strokes, moving in continuous mutation. 9 The novel's disengagement of mimetic representation is so great that it is impossible to conclude who the character actually is: a transvestite; a blouson noir, a Tibetan lama; a tourist; or all at the same time (Rodriguez Monegal, Narradores 421-422). 10 Literary genres are diluted in this text. Cobra is composed of tattooing manuals, tales of alchemy, travel diaries, chronicles of customs, historical accounts, sacred text—all articulated as narrative, poetry, or drama. There are poems, even those by other authors, as with the case of "La boca habla" ("The Mouth Talks") by Octavio Paz, inserted into the discourse. Fragments notated as if they were theatrical works also appear. Above all, paintings are included in the development of the narrative. As these paintings become the backdrop of the story, a reader unfamiliar with them misses much of the novel's enjoyment. Sarduy appropriates visual works in the same way that Manuel Puig used films in his works; that is, through détournement. In Sarduy's case, the basis of this technique alludes not only to the situationists but also to Oscar Wilde. 11 The intentional disorder brought about by this mixture of discourses makes the reader's access to the text more difficult. Rejecting the idea underlying the Boom of Latin American culture as a synthesis of many different cultures, Sarduy looks to Lezama Lima for the proposal of a superimposed culture. Like the Parisian theory of Foucault, developed in parallel, this concept is also associated with the idea of an "archaeology": Cuba is not a synthesis, a syncretic culture, but rather a superposition. A Cuban novel must make explicit all the strata in that superposition, must show all this "archeological" planes—they could even be separated into tales, for example, one Spanish, another African and another Chinese—and achieve Cuban reality through the meeting of those tales, through their coexistence in the book's volume, or as Lezama does with his accumulations, in the structural unity of each metaphor, each line. (Sarduy, Written 56, italics in the original).

I30

TROPICAL KITSCH

From Cuba with a Song is the fulfillment of the first objective: the three stories of the novel correspond to the Chinese, African, and Spanish cultures, respectively. In Cobra, the realization of the second proposal is most important: "language in itself, the phrase in itself." This aim is also related to another great reference in Sarduy's text: the group o f the magazine Tel

Quel, on which Sarduy collaborated beginning in 1965. From this he derives the concept of text as a significant practice, based on the pleasure of writing and the consequent bliss as an act of rewriting (Barthes). The post-structuralist facet of Sarduy's literary theory, made explicit in his group of essays entitled "Horror of the Void" (Sarduy, Written, 4375) is embodied in the rejection of realism and representation (Sarduy,

Written). His particular concept of metaphor, based on the distancing o f signifier/signified, is parallel to the notion of fissure, a gap where the desire present in the reader-text relationship operates, as elaborated by Roland Barthes. Barthes himself considered Cobra an example of the excess of verbal pleasure he sought in literary texts (Barthes 8). Andreas Huyssen vehemently attacks the post-structuralists in the name of the permanence, in their theory, of values from the high culture o f modernism. According to him, post-structuralism is no more than "a modernism quite dogmatic in its rejection of presence and in its unending praise of lacks and absences, deferrals and traces which produce, presumably, not anxiety but, in Roland Barthes' terms, jouissance, bliss" (Huyssen 209). In the case of Sarduy, high culture (not only the modernist) shapes the text such that it functions as a gap (Iser). The function of these gaps is twofold: they make the reader's access to the énoncé difficult, at the same time that they put the reader's competence in high culture into action. The narrator of Cobra, for example, rejoices in creating a narrative that quotes the canonical paintings of the Flemish school of the seventeenth century, in other words, of Baroque painting. Appropriating those paintings, he immerses the characters within them. In contrast to Puig, who distorted

(détourne) the verbal expression of film narratives, Sarduy seeks to visualize the literary tale. The process is articulated explicitly: "Only a moron could swallow the obviously apocryphal comic strip of the fighter who, out of the clear blue, appears in a Flemish painting and renounces his heman strength" (Sarduy, C, Dal 12) ( Solo un tarado pudo tragarse la a todas

luces apôcrifa historieta delpugilista que, de buenas y primeras, aparece en un

KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

cuadro flamenco y renuncia a su fuerza, Sarduy, C, Sud 26). This reference is to the character Eustachio, who is included in a series of images that are a collage of different Flemish paintings. "Through the Gothic arched windows rings of opaque glass filtered a gray and humid day" (C, Dal 8) {Por las ventanas ojivales rondeles de vidrios opaco filtraban un día gris y húmedo, C, Sud 20) for example, is possibly an ideal image of the windows ofVermeer, and the light-filled atmosphere of his paintings. The image of "A convex mirror and another dozen smaller ones which surrounded him multiplied his image when with a puff-cheeked servant he entered in a house of white walls and white doors closed in by black knockers" (C, Dal 8) (Un espejo abombado y otros doce más pequeños que lo rodeaban cuando entró con una una sirvienta mofletuda en una casa de muros blancos que cerraban aldabones negros, C, Sud 20) can be extracted from the same artist. In the first Velázquez we find the "smoked herrings and silver cluster of garlic" (C, Dal 8) (arenques ahumados y racimos plateados de ajo, C, Sud 20) (from the painting Christ in the House of Martha and Mary)-, "on a table there was a scale and an open Bible" (C, Dal 9) {en una mesa había una balanza y una biblia abierta, C, Sud 20) is the description of an image from the painting Jan Uytenbogaert, the Gold-Weigher by Rembrandt. In the presentation of the second part, a gap is formed with the names of four contemporary painters; once filled, this gives us the key to the enigma contained in the title of the novel. Questioning the limits of syntax and the printed page, Sarduy highlights in italics the names of three European cities. After a small paragraph of similar graphic style, the names of four painters appear. Copenhagen

brussels

amsterdam

Outside, beneath palms of an acrylic green, a mulatto woman dances. Over the sand, orange light; kites over the black bands of the sidewalk. appel aleschinsky corneille jorn (C, Dal 76). Copenhague

bruselas amsterdam

Afuera, bajo palmas de un verde acrílico, una mulata baila. Sobre la arena, luz naranja; barriletes sobre las bandas negras de la acera. appel aleschinsky corneille jorn (C, Sud 136).

132

TROPICAL KITSCH

Thus, the gap is completed. The three cities are the birthplaces of those four painters, founders of the group CoBrA. Their work is set apart as abstract painting with expressionist roots, programmatically opposed to the abstractionism of Mondrian. They defended complete freedom for the abstract expression of form, seeking to achieve the primacy of the gesture over the signification of the work (Arnason 446). Despite the fact that the group was formed in 1948 and its last publication dates from 1951, the four painters continued their work in Paris for several decades, making possible an interchange between Sarduy and the artists of this group. The "real end" of the movement occurred with the death of Jorn in 1973 (Alechinsky 8-9 and 20).12 In Cobra, the novel of Sarduy, the gesture is the technique through which the protagonist nearly disappears, transformed through continuous change into reconfigured strokes. What is instrumental to this permanent movement is another lacuna theorized by Iser: negation.13 This guarantees the plurality of readings of the novel, since not only is information omitted from the novel, but the text is constructed by the refutation of what information has already been given. Beyond the second part which negates the first, there are abundant allusions to painters and writers, and even selfreference on the part of Sarduy (via explicit references to From Cuba with a Song and Written on a Body. The very tide of the book, invented by others, questions the authorship of the text and its originality. The character Cobra stops existing as such, transforming herself into the multiplicity contained in the anagram of her name: ubiquity, a handful of characteristics, the open possibility for different attributes, just a body to be filled by Cobra the text. At the same time, the narrative brazenly reshapes the reader s repertoire. The diversity of options weakens the bases of the work's own code of reading, finally transforming Cobra from a radically illegible text of modernism into a text of bliss (Barthes 80).14 All of these aspects confirm the novel as a radical realization of poststructuralist fiction. The questioning of authorship alludes to the death of the subject. On the other hand, the text that Barthes privileges is characterized by an exclusively linguistic, interwoven construction, showing the permanence of the search for the autonomy of art objectified by the post-structuralists.

K I T S C H IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

133

• Toward a Neobaroque Aesthetic The presence of high culture is also felt strongly in another aspect of the novel Cobra: the Baroque. Vindicating the power of universal knowledge, a characteristic of the historical Baroque, Sarduy bases the narrative techniques of Cobra on scientific theories of the seventeenth century. Ellipsis, which he considers a basic rhetorical device of Baroque discourse, is considered by many critics to be the foundational element of his work (González Echevarría, Celestinas; Chiampi, Barroco; Guerrero, Neo-baroque; and Costa, Sarduy). The choice of this figure is rooted in astronomy.15 Beyond a literary device, the ellipse refers to a geometrical figure based on the Baroque cosmology of Kepler. In Sarduy's vision, Kepler ruptured with the epistemology of his predecessors in opposing the Baroque ellipse to the Copernican circle, leaving the legacy of a new symbolic énoncé (Sarduy, Barroco). While a circle has only one fixed center of rotation, an ellipse gravitates around two foci: one real, another that may only be virtual (Depuis 96). Terms utilized in his theoretic texts, such as retombée and épure, are derived from the mixture of literary and scientific discourse with which Sarduy constructs his work. Retombée, for example, is related to the decentralization put into effect by the advent of the ellipse. In this device, words obey a very particular form of organization within the text, unfolding and transforming themselves as do the celestial bodies in their trajectory through the universe. The "unfolding" or expansion of Cobra the character (by means of a double, the dwarf Pup), the fruit of an extended metaphor, is also related to the path of the star Sirius. Pup is the companion of Sirius, a double star in the constellation Canis Major, and is included in one of the postulates of Einstein's theory of relativity: it is the first "white dwarf" in the spectrum of which the scientist detected a red gravitational marker (Sarduy, Big 56-57). Cobras transformation corresponds, therefore, to astrophysics. A "red giant" always precedes the stage of "white dwarf" in the evolution of stars: "The 'red giant' from millions of years ago is a 'white dwarf today; perhaps in the future it will be a 'black hole.' Thus, Pup is a phase in the existence of the divine Cobra, and Pup's stormy appearance, in turn, makes

134

TROPICAL KITSCH

Cobra a 'red giant'" (Gil and Iturralde 339). In the novel, Pup is Cobras provisional name when she shrinks because of the drug she takes to make her feet smaller. Changed into Cobras double, Pup remains in the cabaret while the full-sized Cobra travels to Tangier. The attempts to return Pup to her normal size fail, and the miniaturized double dies. Cobra returns at the end to retake her place at the cabaret. The last cultivated tradition found in the work of Sarduy respects the theory of the Baroque itself. His concept of metaphor, for instance, based on Góngora, attempts to retake the reading of Aristotle undertaken during the Spanish Baroque. Gracián, one of the most refined theorists of the Spanish Baroque, begins his Agudeza y arte de ingenio referring to "the ancients" and underscoring that their work was characterized by imitation. Nevertheless, the result lacked variety, because they used few comparisons. ("La imitación suplía alarte, pero con desigualdades de sustituto, con carencias de variedad" 14.) The notion of "living metaphor," central to the thesis of Paul Ricouer (Ricoeur 9-43, esp. 43), can already be found in Gracián when he affirms: There are some fortunate men of taste so crammed with sensitiveness, so accustomed to the pleasure of thought, that they will not let pass anything but subtlety. Their works are living bodies with artful souls; for the others are cadavers lying in dusty sepulchers, eaten by moths. The small body of Chysologuss work enclosed a gigantic spirit; the brief panegyric of Pliny is measured by eternity (Chambers, trans, of Gracián y Morales 88, my italics) Hállanse gustos felices tan cebados en la delicadeza, tan hechos a las delicias del concepto, que no pasan otro que sutilezas. Son cuerpos vivos sus obras, con alma conceptuosa; que otros son cadáveres que yacen en sepulcros de polvo, comidos de polilla. Pequeño cuerpo de Crisólogo, encierra espíritu gigante; breve panegírico de Plinio, se mide con la eternidad. (Gracián y Morales 15, my emphasis) One can see that Baroque thinkers take their point of departure from a reading of Aristode now distanced from us by modernity. In the center of that reading is the metaphor. When Gracián defines the Baroque concepts "an act of understanding that expresses the correspondence found between objects" (Chambers, trans, of Gracián y Morales 91) ("En una armónica

KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

135

correlación entre dos o tres conoscibles extremos, expresada por un acto del entendimiento," Gracián y Morales 18), he utilizes the Aristotelian notion expounded by Ricouer: that things should be presented "as in action"; that is, not merely described, but made into metaphors via a network of correspondences. Such a system, from verbal wit to the "exaggerated use of metaphor," is responsible for the verbal richness of the Spanish Baroque aesthetic; it makes Baroque art, and above all that of Góngora, an art of "transformism and mutation" (Carreter 38). The connection between writers of the Spanish historical Baroque and the Latin American neobaroque is found exacdy on this point. Lezama Lima, for example, makes the rereading of Góngora one of the foci of his poetics. Thus, he inscribes his filiation from the aesthetic of the Spanish poet within that infinitely mutating network of meanings, driven by metaphor. The tide he chooses for his essay on Góngora affirms the changing nature of this mise en abîme: Sierpe de Don Luis de Góngora (Lezama Lima). Sierpe is another word for serpiente (serpent), symbol of transformation. It is the same choice that Sarduy makes in naming his novel Cobra. Lezama Lima characterizes Góngora's poetry as rejecting singular meaning. According to Lezama Lima, this stance was based on the Baroque reading ofAristode's vindication of clarity; the interpretation of this notion during Góngora's time was not, contrary to later understandings, based on the strict use of the referential function of language. Sarduy, whose poetics are deliberately modeled on Lezama Lima, takes up this point of the maestro's essay in discussing metaphor. According to Sarduy, Lezama's metaphors weave a web of forced comparisons and similarities, corresponding to the Lezamian attempt at the total occupation of a body, similar to the ocupatio of the Stoics (Sarduy, Written 43-75). The importance attributed to Eustachio in the introduction of the characters of Cobra is thus understood. "Dermic goldsmith" (C, Dal 7) (Orfebre dérmico, C, Sud 18) is the epithet that defines the cosmetic and tattooing work of the character (it is he who prepares the transvestites for their entrances). Eustachio's activities are set apart precisely for their total occupation of the body: And so he'd decorate the divas with his arabesques, tit by tit, since these, for being round and protuberant, were much easier to adorn than the prodigal bellies and Boucherian buttocks, pale pink with a tendency to spread. The hoarse

136

TROPICAL KITSCH

divinities would parade before the inventor of butterfly wings and there remain static the time to review their songs; devoted, the miniaturist would conceal in vivo the nudity of the frozen big-footed queens with silver fringes, eye hieroglyphs, arabesques and rainbow fringes, which came out thinner or thicker depending on the insertion and watery brew; he would disguise the shortcomings of each with black whorls, and underline their charms, surrrounding them with white circles (C, Dal 6-7). Iba pues decorando las divas con sus arabescos teta por teta, que éstas, por redondas y turgentes, más fáciles eran de ornar que los pródigos vientres y nalguitas boucherianas, rosa viejo con tendencia al desparramo. Desfilaban las divindades roncas ante el inventor de alas de mariposa y allí permanecían estáticas, el tiempo de repasar sus canciones; aplicado, el miniaturista in vivo de las heladas reinas de grandes pies iba encubriendo la desnudez con orlas plateadas, jeroglíficos de ojos, arabescos y franjas de arcoiris, que según la inserción las adelgazaban o no; disimulaba de cada una ¡as desvantajas con volutas negras y subrayaba los encantos rondeándolos de círculos blancos (C, Sud 16-17). Like Eustachio, the narrator of Cobra occupies the space of the text with the opposite of nudity and clarity. Just as Eustachio alters the natural shape of the body with designs, changing it to an abstract form, the narrator also occupies the spaces between the narrative functions, until they lose their functionality and go to waste. At the origin of this waste, there is almost always a metaphor. Hie Madam's attack on the orgy of Eustachio and two of the "dolls" (transvestites or drag queens), one of whom is Cobra, sets off one of these series of metaphors. Hie initial metaphor—the Madam as one of the devoted who flagellates a penitent—begins a descriptive process that lasts for two pages. Its journey through the chambers of the Lyrical Theater of Dolls becomes an enumeration of Baroque architectural works, such as ornate rooms composed of artifice: She crossed / whitewashed corridors, with wooden ships hanging from the ceiling and silver lamps in the form of ships, / high-domed octagonal chapels, whirlwinds of plaster angels whose walls supported shelves filled with crowns,

KITSCH IN THE NEOBAROQUE ERA

137

arms and hearts of gold, opened heads revealing a wafer, small glass tubes with ashes (C, Dal 10). Atravesaba / corredores encalados, con barcos de madera suspendidos al techo y lámparas de plata en forma de barco, capillas octogonales de altas cúpulas, torbellinos de ángeles de yeso cuyas paredes soportaban estantes cargados de coronas, brazos y corazones de oro, cabezas que se abrían mostrando una hostia, tubillos de cristal con ceniza (C, Sud 28). The spaces that are described, in turn, approach what Dominique Fernández observes in the palace of Luis de Baviera, whom Abraham Moles had already termed the "king of kitsch" (Moles 94-96). The feature that marks the "no-style" style of the castle the German king had ordered to be built in the center of a lake—"amalgam and caricature of all styles, absolute bad taste" (Fernández 156)—seems to run through the homoerotic atmosphere of the novel's setting. Without taking kitsch as a degeneration of the Baroque, the last passage of the Baroque to rococo (as does D o m i nique Fernández), I think, like Gómez de la Serna, that there are areas of contact between kitsch and the Baroque. According to Gómez de la Serna, the Baroque is the primary explanation of and the earliest precursor to lo cursi: first, through the "liberation of classical rules"; second, through its "anxious and exultant meaning"; third, through its recourse to perfection; fourth, through its human dimension, which allows it to unite realism and idealism in a de-centeredstyle

(Gómez de la Serna 17-21, my italics). This

last trait turns out to be, as we have already seen, fundamental in the appropriation of the Baroque by the post-structural lens of Severo Sarduy. According to Gómez de la Serna, there is an evident relationship between lo cursi and the Spanish Baroque, rendered explicit in a word created from the name of the Spanish architect Churriguera. H i e word churrigueresco thus refers to that which is "pertaining or relative to churriguerismo" a masculine noun that denotes the "style of overelaborate ornamentation used by Churriguera and his imitators in Spanish architecture of the eighteenth century. By extension, it sometimes designates exaggerated ornamentation in general, in a disparaging sense" (Real Academia Española 461).

I38

TROPICAL KITSCH

• Colibrí: Hie Lower Dwellings of Camp In the work of Sarduy, this type of ornamentation re-creates the transvestite cabarets where Cobra and Colibrí (1984; Hummingbird) take place. In this last novel, fundamentally, those environments are covered with the taste that Susan Sontag attributes to camp. Taking up the reasoning of Huyssen, who sees the antithesis of post-structuralism in Sontag's criticism, one can observe that the use of that taste produces a change in Sarduy's poetics. Published twelve years after Cobra, Colibrí outlines a certain abandonment of the dogmatic positions of post-structuralism via camp, thus allowing the work of Severo Sarduy to be included in the subset of Spanish-American narrative I am studying in this book. According to Huyssen, the opposition to Sontag's critique of poststructuralism has to do with the U.S. author's insistence on the "sensual experience of cultural artifacts" (Huyssen 211). Questioning "the stuffy and stifling project of academic interpretation" (Huyssen 211) through an eroticization of art, Sontag, according to Huyssen, "attacked rather than legitimized a socially sanctioned canon, whose prime values were objectivity and distance, coolness and irony; and in that it licensed the flight from the lofty horizons of high culture into the netherlands of pop and camp" (Huyssen 211). In the work of Sarduy, the proximity of "bad taste" to the high-culture elements of his poetics is brought about in similar fashion, via camp. According to Sontag, camp corresponds to a sensibility that selects something that previously belonged to the realm of bad taste, to elevate it to the category of good taste. Such selection is always brought about by a "creative minority" that claims it as a sign of identification, thus configuring camp as a mark of determined "minorities in contemporary urban cultures" (Sontag 290). In this sense, there is an evident connection between the work of Sarduy and that of Luis Rafael Sánchez. The latter dedicated himself to expressing the voice of the various minorities of the urban underworld, choosing to represent them with a singer known for "living in male." Through this lifestyle, the singer Daniel Santos can be associated with a homosexual sensibility, especially in terms of the taste for camp discussed by Sontag.

139

K I T S C H IN T H E N E O B A R O Q U E E R A

Sarduy radicalizes the underbelly of the urban world by locating it spatially in the interior of gay bars. O n e of the urban minorities most active in promoting camp, according to Sontag, is that of homosexuals, as corroborated by queer theory. Sontag mentions the need that minority had to legitimate itself through aesthetic sense. "Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense" (Sontag 290). Thus, she maintains that one of the features of camp—"its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and projection of a certain aspect of the situation of the homosexuals" (290). If in Cobra, camp is designed with the churrigueresco taste of tattoos and body decoration, in Colibrí It has the power to "dethrone the serious," another trait of camp as defined by Sontag. This is the case with the jocular tone acquired by the story of desire contained in the novel. This desire is embodied by Colibrí, the most handsome stud to pass through the brothel of the Director (la Regente); and it leads her to waste her life in passionate pursuit, without ever reaching him. The novel is also a smiling commentary on Spanish-American literary culture. Using an explicit dialogue with the reader, the narrator alleges the "theft of the story" {"El robo del relato" 97-110), and takes the plot to the kitsch landscape of those pastoral paintings that adorn houses in the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of Latin America. Also noteworthy is how the work calls upon the reader's literary repertoire, as with the episode "The White Monkey" (" La mona blanca," 160-168), when the Director turns from hunter to the hunted in a sort of tropical rewriting of Moby Dick. Tropicality, which is limited in Cobra to isolated signifiers, reappears radically in Colibrí. For instance, in a parody of the stereotypical use of Brazilian culture in U.S. musical films, Colibrí is received with a "glass of seedless guanábana juice" (un vaso de champola de guanábana

sin semilla,

120). The waitperson was a drag queen with "a thousand carioca affectations" {con mil remilgos cariocas, 120), who "had put on a tutti-frutti hat a la Carmen Miranda, and huge platform shoes, saying she was as fussy as the cross-eyed queen of the batucada'

{Se había puesto un tutti-frutti hat

a la Carmen Miranda y unos zapatones de plataforma,

arguyendo que tan

nimia como ella era la reina bizca de la batucada, 120). 1 6 Sarduy finishes

140

TROPICAL KITSCH

the paragraph rendering the poetics of the commonplace explicit with an apocryphal quote: "in art everything was in finding novel variants for a single model" {en arte todo estaba en encontrar variantes novedosas para un mismo modelo, 120, italics in the original). This theme unfolds in the parody of a type of Spanish-American novel that was in vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century, the jungle novel; the themes of this genre became commonplace due to overuse. This is the key to understanding the extravagance of lianas and "bamboo palisades" in the episode "Death, Dressed in Green Jade" {"La muerte, vestida de verdejade" 38-56). Each of those episodes corresponds to one of Colibris escapes from the prison into which the Director turns the cabaret, in her attempt to possess him. Like the protagonist of Cobra, Colibri always returns, so that the story always returns to the same point. However, this Baroque retombée does not signify belief in a cyclical conception of time. Rather, Sarduy uses it to propose a conception that distances itself from both linear and cyclical notions of history. In terms of linear time, Sarduy contests, for example, the Utopia of Alejo Carpentier's magic realism {lo real maravilloso). Sarduy places a Baroque sense of waste and bliss {jouissance, as described by Barthes) in opposition to the desire for a transparent description of Latin American reality, advocated by Carpentier. What Sarduy rejects, essentially, is the totalizing and homogenizing project of Alejo Carpentier's utopie conception of mestizaje. In its place, Sarduy defends the position of Lezama Lima; although Lezama justifies the Baroque as the most representative element of Latin American culture precisely because it is based on mestizaje, his vision of it allows for all-inclusiveness. In the mestizaje of Lezama's Baroque, popular art by mestizo artisans is present, along with the mestizaje constituted by the crossings of diverse references to universal knowledge. Lezama transforms the Baroque into an art of counter-Conquest (contra-conquista), inverting the term Counter-Reformist art {arte de la contra-reformd), as Baroque art is generally defined. In that way, Lezama liberates it from the linear chains of historical progress. The Baroque can be thus observed as a sign peculiar to Spanish-American modernity, which does not always correspond to the parameters of European modernity (Chiampi, Barroco 10-12; and Chiampi, Expresiôri).

K I T S C H IN T H E N E O B A R O Q U E E R A

141

In order to be faithful to such sophisticated intellectual reasoning, it is necessary to interpret the work of Sarduy with the parameters of a criticism aligned with the scientific spirit of the era and the intellectual environment to which he belonged. This is the case with European theories that analyze the Baroque on the basis of the mathematical sciences. Such theories use fractals, in particular, to analyze the complexity of postmodern Latin American societies. Serge Gruzinksi, for instance, affirms that iconography in colonial Mexico was a product of the "fractal society" of the sixteenth century (Gruzinski, Barroco 77-79; and Gruzinski, Mestizo). This adjective refers, in mathematics, to incomplete dimensions—fractions—as the only ones capable of measuring fractal objects; in other words, those possessing polygonal form with an extremely high number of sides (Calabrese 122). The application of the adjective to colonial society in Latin America renders it, with its multiethnic and multicultural nature, 17 into a monster (in the fantastic sense of the term, a figure that repulses and attracts at the same time). It is this sense of a monster that relates colonial and contemporary Latin American societies, seen as neobaroque by Gruzinski. Sarduy employs a similar image in defining the transvestite who embodies (in both the literal and psychoanalytic senses of the word), allegorically, the complexities of Latin America in his work. The protagonist of Cobra, made artificial by various surgeries including the sex change that motivates her long journey, is described as a monster: " U p her neck she is a woman; above her body becomes a kind of heraldic animal with a baroque snout" (C, Dal 70, in italics in the original) (Desde los pies hasta el cuello es mujer; arriba su cuerpo se transforma en una especie de animal heráldico de hocico barroco, C, Sud 126, in italics in the original). Like the body of Cobra, the narrative of Sarduy is also an artificial and monstruous corpus. The permanent inclusion of different cultural references points toward a limidess mestizaje which, instead of synthesizing its components, scatters them. 18 Sarduy's work allegorizes the permanent "relation" of that mestizaje through a cubanidad that reaches through time and space. Contemporary Caribbean migration is allegorized in the remoteness of Africa (the city Tangier), where transvestites go to modify their bodies, finalizing their quest for transsexualism. O r even in Asia, converted into a "trashy India," with Eastern religions reduced to kitsch consumption by Western counterculture. At the same time, Cobra's trip

142

TROPICAL KITSCH

to the East inverts historical time, making the wandering immigrants a variety of new Columbuses who, in search of their homelands, end up on the wrong soil. In the journey through the Asian countries, one can also identify a rereading of fin de siècle orientalism, brought into line with a feeling of decadence and novelty. Using the metaphor of a Brazilian poet, also neobaroque, it can be asserted that Sarduy was a post-everything writer (A. de Campos). 19 The time and space in which he lived positioned him consecutively in the postBoom and in post-structuralism. He can further be considered a postneobaroque author because the concept of neobaroque had already been created by his predecessors. The epigonous spirit for which he is known took the modern roots of his work in the direction of postmodernism, but also made him a twentieth-century dandy. Like the rebellious dandies of the nineteenth century, he did not propose political changes because, finally, he lived in a post-utopic time. However, like the dandy Oscar Wilde, Severo Sarduy expressed a permanent aesthetic dissatisfaction, paying a high price for the pleasures and pains of dissonance.

IV. THE CANONIZATION OF KITSCH

CHAPTER 6

• Haroldo de Campos: The Incorporation of Orality The use of kitsch and mass culture has been thoroughly established in Latin American literature during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Having always been a contestation of narratives based on realism, kitsch also introduced new parameters, starting from literature, for interpreting Latin American society. The writers and artists who first incorporated media and kitsch were virtually unknown at the time, toward the end of the sixties. Today, the legacy of their choices can be seen in the works of well-established authors. In Brazil, later works by authors considered canonical at the advent of tropicalism reflect the impact that movement had on Brazilian culture. Hiis is the case, for example, with the concrete poets and with writer Clarice Lispector. Among the concrete poets, the poetics of Haroldo de Campos are an exemplary model. In a similar fashion to that of Severo Sarduy, the Brazilian poet shifts his initial affiliation with an aesthetic based on the principles of high modernism toward a neobaroque characterized by a mixture of written "high culture" and manifestations of orality. The universe of consumption is also included in the work of Haroldo de Campos as an aesthetic device.1 His Galdxias, written between 1963 and 1976 (that is, partly during the height of tropicalism), lies on the border between prose and poetry. As with the majority of the works analyzed earlier, the book is marked by a mix of genres. As did Sarduy, Haroldo de Campos sought a basis for elaborating his text in scientific knowledge (Mata Sandoval): the writing of Galdxias obeys, a process similar to that of "galactic expansion," in the words of the poet himself. He asserts that "this permutable book has the semantic backbone of a recurring theme, varied throughout: the journey as a book, and the book as a journey (even if—and therefore—it is not exactly a travel book...) (H. Campos, Ora 2).

Galdxias, as such, is tied not only to the "aesthetic of difficulty," but also to the "poetics of relation" (Glissant). Characterized by all-inclusiveness,

145

axias, excerpt 'rounded by flowers under god's under the devil's mercy god shall guide you for I myself can't guide godbless those who give me 'rounded by flowers and those who are still to give sounding like a shamisen made of a tensed wire a stick and an old tin can at the end of the partyfair at highnoonhigh but for many that music did not exist it could not because it could not popplay if not sung that music is not popular if not in tune it does not atone nor tarantina and yet struck in the gut of misery in the tensed gut of the meagerest physical misery aching aching like a nail in the handpalm a rusty blind nail in the palm clasping palm of the handheart exposed as a tensed nerve retensed a renigrated blind nail everlasting in the palmpulp of the hand in the sun while selling for meager cruzeiros gourds in which the good form is fine meagerness of matter morphing famineform of halfbaked clay in the rottenroot of distress until others vomit their plastic plates of embroidered borders empirestyle for mistress misery for this is popular for the patrons of the people but people create and people engender and people wonder people are the languageinventor in the malice of the mastery in the smartness of marveling in the vein to improvise stuttertrying to traverse oiling the sun's axis for people know no servitude pure or quasi metaphor people are il miglior fabro in the hammering gait aiming the impossible in view of the nonviable in the crux of the incredible oiled hammergait and the sunaxis but the wire that wire bladewire painpained like a demented plangent wire hammering its widowed dischord in blazing brasses of howling hunger 'rounded by flowers 'rounded by flowers rounded by flooowers for I myself cant guide check this book this object of consumption this undergodunderthedevilsmercybook which I arrange and disarrange which I unite and disunite voyages of a vagamonde in the vagaries of vague moons god shall guide the devil shall guide you then for I can't don't dare or care don't trick nor touch or trade but only for my change my pennies my pains my rings my fingers my minuses my nadas in the antennas in the galenas in these nests in these rests as we'll verify in the verbenas in the sugary a^ucenas or minor circumstances I know all this don't count all this disappoints I'm not sure but listen how it sings value how it tells savor how it dances and don't propose that I guide don't pose dispose that I guide unguided that I pray for promise that I trust you leave me forget me let me go untie me so that at the end I stand erect at the end I revert at the end I concert and for the end I reserve myself as it will be seen that I am correct it will be seen that there is a way it will be seen that it's been done and that through wrongs I made it right that from a scent I made a cent and if I do not guide I do not lament for the master who taught me does not teach any longer baggage of mirrormoon in the mirage of the second that through inversion I was dexterous being inverted by the sinistrous I do not guide because I do not guide because I can not guide and don't ask me for mementos just dwell on this moment and demand my commandment and do not fly just defy do not confide defile for between yes and no I for one prefer the no in the knowing of yes place the no in the ee of me place the no the no will be yours to know

C a m p o s , Haroldo de. Galdxias. Translated from Portuguese by A. S. Bessa (H. C a m p o s , Galdxias, frag). 2

A««BELA M «S«swu MÉLÌNDONÉIA MNMÉMÌ

LinJt loneia 3 Gilberto G i l and Gaetano V e l o s o In front of the mirror Without anybody seeing Miss Beautiful, ugly Vanished Lindoneia

Lindoneia, dark color Fruit in the market Lindoneia, single Lindoneia, Sunday Monday

Smashed Runned over [sic]4 Dead dogs in the street Police on the lookout The sun shinning on the fruits Bleeding Ai, my love

Vanished Lindoneia In the church, in the walk Vanished Lindoneia In the laziness, in the progress Vanished Lindoneia In the hit parades Ai, my love The loneliness will kill me of pain

The loneliness will kill me of pain

In the back of the mirror But missing She appears on the photos O n the other side of life Smashed, runned over [sic] Dead dogs on the streets Police on the lookout The sun shining on the fruits Bleeding Ai, my love The loneliness will kill me Will kill me Will kill me of pain (Veloso, Tropicalia).

Above: Reproduction of the painting "Lindonéia, " by Rubens Gerchman, archives of the painter. Below: Lyrics to the song "Lindonéia, " by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil (Veloso et al., Tropicalia).

Circulado ' (Veloso) 5 Haroldo de Campos, excerpted by Caetano Veloso 'rounded by flowers under gods under the devil's mercy god shall guide you for I myself can't guide godbless those who give me 'rounded by flowers and those who are still to give sounding like a shamisen made of a tensed wire a stick and an old tin can at the end of the partyfair at highnoonhigh but for many that music did not exist it could not because it could not popplay if not sung that music is not popular if not in tune it does not atone nor tarantina and yet struck in the gut of misery in the tensed gut of the meagerest physical misery aching aching like a nail in the handpalm a rusty blind nail in the palm clasping palm of the handheart exposed as a tensed nerve retensed a renigrated blind nail everlasting in the palmpulp of the hand in the sun 'rounded by flowers under god's under the devil's mercy god shall guide you for I myself can't guide godbless those who give me 'rounded by flowers and those who are still to give people are the languageinventor in the malice of the mastery in the smartness of marveling in the vein to improvise stuttertrying to traverse oiling the sun's axis 'rounded by flowers under god's under the devil's mercy god shall guide you for I myself can't guide godbless those who give me 'rounded by flowers and those who are still to give and don't propose that I guide don't pose dispose that I guide unguided that I pray for promise that I trust you leave me forget me let me go untie me so that at the end I stand erect at the end I revert at the end I concert and for the end I reserve myself as it will be seen that I am correct it will be seen that there is a way it will be seen that it's been done and that through wrongs I made it right that from a scent I made a cent and if I do not guide I do not lament for the master who taught me does not teach any longer 'rounded by flowers under god's under the devil's mercy god shall guide you for I myself can't guide godbless those who give me 'rounded by flowers and those who are still to give (Translated from Portuguese by A. S. Bessa)

M

MARIA TEREZA

M A U I A HQJuVA

MAUtA

Reproduction of the painting "As Professorinhas," 1966, by Rubens Gerchman. Archive of the painter.

IJO

TROPICAL KITSCH

it nonetheless does not attempt to achieve totalization. Rather, it nullifies all possibilities of synthesis. A circular journey, the beginning is also the end of the trip that, once finished, begins anew. Again, if the Baroque principle of recuperation organizes recurrence in the text, the principle of dispersion projects an infinite cycle of variables with no possibility of measuring them. The principles of causality and chronology are watered down. Concretized above all in its language, Galdxias, meanwhile, does not obey the principle of the autonomy of art. The mixture of the "ordinary" (reles) and the "extraordinary" (raro), cited in the book as the "ordinary of the extraordinary" (reles de raro), permits the author to include everyday experiences in the journey. Taking the word reles—"ordinary," in Portuguese—in its etymological sense of nula res, allows for the trajectory's inclusion of both the fait-divers, allegorized in the neologism "journalistary" (jornaldrio), and the universe of mass culture and consumption. As in the works of conceptual art, which Campos engaged in dialogue during the sixties, mass culture is included in Galdxias as an aesthetic experience (vivencia).6 Similar to the de-materialization of the art object, objectified by conceptual art, Campos subverts the very concept of a book. The pages of Galdxias are unnumbered. For each written page (on the right), there is a corresponding page left blank (on the left), serving as the occasional silence or pause natural to oral reading.7 It is, fundamentally, the underlying presence of orality in Galdxias that brings it together with the facet of Latin American writing I describe here. With this, the Brazilian author promotes a rupture from the linguistic domestication effected by the written text (Duvignard 82).8 Galdxias, a fluid text sans capitalization, sans punctuation, is purely rhythm. This rhythm was recorded in a reading by the author on two compact discs in the nineties, converting Galdxias to an "audio-text" (H. Campos, Isto; and H. Campos, Crisantempo CD). In the presentation of the first of these discs, Campos affirms: "The oralization of GALAXIAS was always implicit in my project" (H. Campos, Isto 3). As in works by the previous authors, quotations from canonical texts of universal literature are included, without quotation marks. There are verbatim quotes from Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Joyce, and Basho, among others (all in the original languages), side by side with colloquial phrases from Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Italian. Those phrases introduce the presence of sub-

T H E CANONIZATION OF KITSCH

jectivity and the everyday, to the text; and they displace Galdxias from the realm of autonomous art to the aesthetic experience {vivendo) particular to conceptual art. The journey then wanders by U.S. counterculture in the sixties, with the reproduction of dialogues with hippies in the States, for whom the war with Vietnam is a constant preoccupation. It stops by Spain under Franco, and the murder of Garcia Lorca. It passes through the events of World War II in Europe, via dialogue with a Lithuanian taxi driver who immigrated to Brazil.9 It goes, once again, through a citation of consumption, mainly in episodes set in the United States. There, Coca-Cola, "the golden tie" and "the pumpkin-colored pants" (coca-cola, a gravata dourada, and as calgas cor-de-abóbora) of hippie fashion convey a pop atmosphere also contained in the mention of Marilyn Monroe, the preferred icon of all the authors read here. The global breadth of the "trip"—spatial and linguistic—demonstrates that the concept of national culture is no longer taken into account. However, the permanence of the debate over the national-popular conception of Brazilian art in the sixties is explicitly addressed when the journey heads toward northeastern Brazil. The poem reaffirms the denouncement of the regions poverty that occupied most of the canonical Brazilian modernist narrative during the thirties. The Northeast appears in Galdxias as the site of "most meagere physical misery" (mais megera misèria fisica). However, Campos rejects the paternalism of the defenders of "popular culture," whom he terms the "the patrons of the people": "for this is popular for the patrons of the people" (pois isto épopular para os patróes do povo). Instead, Campos opts for promoting a place of equality with the more educated authorship cited in Galdxias, where the people appear as "/7 migliorfabbro" (o melhor artifice), where the people are, in the end, the "languageinventor" (o inventalinguas).10 As an example of the capacity of popular linguistic invention, the narrator presents a refrain heard in a Northeastern market during the trip: "'rounded by flowers under god's under the devil's mercy god shall guide you for I myself/ can't guide godbless those who give me 'rounded by flowers and those who are still to give" (Circuladó defilò ao deus ao demodara que deus te guie porque eu nàolposso guià eviva quemja me deu circuladó de filò e ainda quem falta me da).

152

TROPICAL KITSCH

There is an enigmatic meaning to the first two nouns. Circulado and fulo are vulgarisms, due to the apocope of the final hi, particular to popular Portuguese. Thus, circulado can be understood as circulado, someone surrounded by flowers (in this context), but also as circulador, someone who surrounds people or objects with flowers. The polysemy extends to the rest of the refrain, characterized by a mystical appellation that recalls the ciphered language of a Baroque poem. Campos glosses the refrain in different ways, always returning to the same point and adding other expressions of popular wisdom, such as proverbs. Fortifying a relationship begun in the sixties, this fragment of Galdxias was set to music in the nineties by Caetano Veloso (Veloso, Circulado), making a big hit and also fulfilling a destiny the poet had prophesied in the episode from Galdxias: "check this book this object of consumption" {veja este livro material de consumo). According to Haroldo de Campos, Veloso first saw the fragment at the height of tropicalism (1969). From that time forward, the collaboration of the composer and the poet was constant. In Veloso's discography, one can find the majority of the authors whom Haroldo and his brother, Augusto de Campos, used to compose their paideuma, the group that constitutes the aesthetic ancestry to which they aim to belong (Campos, Campos, and Pignatari, Teorid).u Veloso made musical versions of poems by the Baroque poet Gregorio de Matos and the Romantic Sousandrade, who was rediscovered by the Campos brothers in the sixties.12 He also set translations by the Campos brothers to music, such as the Maiakowsky poem "Love," and John Donne's Elegy XIX, "To the Mistress Going to Bed," which became a very popular bolero.13 All of these facts confirm Haroldo de Campos as an integral part of the literature I analyze here, set apart by the postmodern coexistence of erudite and popular references. On the other hand, the conceptual roots of his work do not preclude experimentalism. To the contrary, Haroldo de Campos can be considered one of the highest representatives of Latin American avant-garde art. As with other authors studied here, his work is set apart by an archaeology of modern culture, trying to deconstruct the established canon in order to build, from its ruins, a new tradition that allows the permanent inclusion of new materials and new authors.

T H E CANONIZATION OF K I T S C H

153

In this sense, Haroldo de Campos is one of the few writers of this subset of literature that remain attached to a Utopia. Commenting on his most recent work, the translation to Portuguese of canonical texts from several cultures, Campos asserts himself as a "post-utopic" poet (H. de Campos, Arco-iris 158-159). In this same definition, however, the author confirms the utopic ideal of his work: his translations seek the "elevation of the culture of the people." The closeness of "high" and "low" culture, in his aesthetic project, corresponds to what he calls a "process of hope," contained in a "possible Utopia." He considers this type of aesthetic compromise the most effective political work he can undertake, as a poet.

• Clarice Lispector: Hie Working Class Does Not Go to Heaven The Northeast region of Brazil, known as a place of the most extreme poverty, is also the subject of the last book written by Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (A Hora da Estrela, 1977).14 Hearkening back to her Northeastern childhood—a Ukrainian Jew, she spent her early years with her family in the city of Recife, after their immigration to Brazil—Lispector chooses the northeasterner Macabea, who has moved to the city of Rio de Janeiro, as a protagonist. The Hour of the Star reveals more than the insipid life of this character: her first job; her first boyfriend, who abandons her for one of her co-workers; her visit to a fortune-teller following her romantic disillusionment; and her death, having been run over by a car.15 More important, with regard to the economy of the narrative, are the difficulties with which the erudite narrator is confronted, in his attempt to design a poor character whose experience is so different from his own. The narrator's estrangement from Macabea begins with the transvestism of the female author writing from the perspective of a male narrator, justified as: "for a woman would weep her heart out" (Hour 14) {porque narradora mulher pode lacrimejar piegas, Hora 28). Thus, the melodrama appropriated by Manuel Puig years earlier reappears in this novel—but this time, the female perspective is used to point out the inferior position to which women are relegated in the corpus of canonical literature. The only roles befitting them are those of consumers of melodrama or, at most, its nar-

154

TROPICAL KITSCH

rators. In naming the narrator Rodrigo S. M., Lispector satirizes the position of the canonical narrator of novels about northeastern Brazil, almost always male and politically motivated. S. M. is the abbreviation of His Majesty in Portuguese, Sua Majestade. Of course, His Majesty, the Narrator, is a man (Roussoto 91). Rodrigo, like Lispector herself, grew up in the Northeast and needs to northeastenerize himself, that is, to stop eating and shaving, to be at the level of the protagonist, the nordestina (northeasterner) Macabea. The author's dialogue with her masculine peers is evident if we keep in mind that, at the time of The Hour of the Stars publication, the social novel of the Northeast was experiencing a comeback. A new generation of writers from the region, almost all men, recalled their place of origin in a fashion similar to that of the novels of social injustice from the thirties. Antonio Torres and Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro began their careers with novels that reproduced a similar vision of the region. Torres included the northeastern immigrant of Sao Paulo in an autobiographical novel, the plot of which expresses the search for a restoration of values lost through immigration. The nuclear family sought out by the narrator back in the Northeast is made up of rough, but worthy men, like the father of the narrator-protagonist (Torres).16 In this regard, The Hour of the Star arises as a radical break from the masculine tradition of the Brazilian novel, in which the figure of the nordestino is always symbolic, connoting social resistance. In Lispector s work, on the other hand, the character serves to shape the allegory of the region, and is thus composed of dispersed fragments. Macabea, the protagonist, is repeatedly described as a nordestina. However, this adjective is charged with a similar stigma to that held by the canonical novel with which the author dialogues. Supplementing (Derrida 444) 17 the view held by writers from the thirties, Macabea is an immigrant whose transition to the city makes her lose, first of all, the ties and references in place with a nuclear family. Macabea is a cyborg (Haraway, Manifest; and Haraway, Simians ).18 "Lacking in origin (without mother or father, whose names she does not even know), incapable of reproducing (having 'withered ovaries'), separated from the city from which she came and isolated where she now lives, friendless" (Waldman 93-94), Macabea represents, nevertheless, a collective entity. She is not only the heroic nordestina, but he (and principally

T H E CANONIZATION OF KITSCH

155

she) that "doesn't know how to protest" {Hour 9) {que náo sabe gritar, Hora 28). She belongs to this collectivity because "There are thousands of girls like this girl from the North-east to be found in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, living in bedsitters or toiling behind counters for all they are worth" {Hour 14) {como milhares de mogas espalhadas por cortigos, vagas de cama num quarto, atrás de balcóes trabalhando até a estafa, Hora 28).19 According to the narrator, "Few of them ever complain and as far as I know they never protest, for there is no one to listen" {Hour 14) {Poucas se queixam e ao que eu saiba nenhuma reclama por náo saber a quern, Hora 28). Suzi Frankl Sperber has noted how Lispector's characters, mostly female, are marked by an "organic, vital resistance" to the oppressive and alienating misery in which they live, distinguished from the "social resistance" of class struggle. I would add that, by means of this vital resistance that Lispector attributes to her characters, she inverts the position in which many canonical authors place poor characters. The empathy involved in the construction of Macabéa frees the character from ignorance and crudeness, as a starting point. Likewise, she also liberates the narrator from the superior position of a guide for the people. The first example of this treatment is the fact that Macabéa's lack of bourgeois habits, which the narrator uses to mark the distance between the character and himself, does not keep her out of touch with her own organic sexuality, in observance of Sperber's adjective. The second example is similar to the case of the protagonist of The Passion According to G. H. {A Paixáo Segundo G.H., 1964). In that earlier novel by Lispector, the bourgeois life of the narrator is destabilized when, upon entering the room of the servant who has just left her job, she discovers the striking figures drawn by the other woman on the walls. The work of the servant, who is reduced to merely a name—Janair—causes a commotion within the narrator, similar to the concept with which Adorno defines the enjoyment of the art work. Macabéa possesses qualities similar to those of Janair, as her own enjoyment of the arts is seen in her response to the aria " Una Furtiva Lacrima" ("A Furtive Tear") from the Donizetti opera L'Elisir d'Amore {The Elixir of Love), broadcast by radio. In both cases, the characters are far from the "coarse" nordestinos such as Fabiano in the Graciliano Ramos novel Barren Lives {Vidas Secas), whose only reaction to the "civilized"' city is to become

156

TROPICAL KITSCH

even more "brutish" through drink and tight shoes to which he is not accustomed. Fabiano and the gallery of male characters in the canonical novel of the Northeast were marked by a strong work ethic—even when they failed—and through this they became heroes of resistance. Macabéa, in contrast, quickly learns to miss work and gain a whole day of free time, which she uses entirely for leisure.20 Thus, we see once more that this text questions viable models of social interpretation. Going against the grain of dominant thought, Lispector exposes the crisis that affected Marxist thought in her time, without affiliating herself with any particular school of Brazilian sociopolitical interpretation. In this way, she anticipates discussions which would be incorporated into critical thought in the humanities much later. Only in the eighties, with the analysis of the downfall of the revolutionary utopia, is there a discussion of the extent to which the idealization and heroization of the working class were determining factors in the decline of Marxism-Leninism, with the difficulty of intellectuals in connecting with that class. The configuration of the text also resists stereotypes. Entering a realm between novel and essay, between the story itself and the anguish of narrating it, The Hour of the Star adds a female point of view to the set of literature I am analyzing in this book. Lispector, like Sarduy and Haroldo de Campos, makes reference to the scientific context in which she lived, through the difficulty of reading the text. Taking an ironic stance once more on the place attributed to women by masculine thought, science appears, as in other works by Lispector, disguised as common sense. In this way, it is used to describe the place occupied by knowledge in the feminine universe, the semantic area in which the first difficulty of the novel is inscribed: "Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born" (Hour 11) {Judo no mundo comegou com um sim. Urna molécula dissesim a outra molécula e nasceu a vida, Hora 25). The construction of The Hour of the Star oscillates between the personatom that is Macabéa and the insertion of the narrator-character in the passage of its time. Rejecting any and all utopic projection in relation to the future, the narrator holds on to the present, the conception of which anticipates by several years the formulations of critical theory.21 At the level of the story, the projection to the future motivated by the divinations of a fortune-teller causes the death of Macabéa. Also dialoguing with the

THE CANONIZATION OF KITSCH

canonical tradition of Machado de Assis in the story "The Fortune-Teller" ("A Cartomante"), Lispector endorses the bitter irony of that author 22 ; not only does she deny visions of the future, she also transforms the moment of Macabéa's death into her only "hour" (or "fifteen minutes") as a film star. At the level of the narration, it is clear from the outset, or the declaration of faith in the dedication, that the narrative is dedicated "to today." It continuously returns to this, the present, over the course of the plot, in a literary technique similar to Sarduy's retombée. The subordination of that concept to physics, which in postmodernism replaces reflections based on the mechanics of modernism, is also rendered explicit. In her dedication, the author states: "And we must never forget that if the atom's structure is invisible, it is none the less real. I am aware of the existence of many things I have never seen. And you too" (Hour 8) (E—e nâo esquecer que a estrutura do dtomo nâo é vista mas sabe-se delà. Sei de muita coisa que nâo vi. E vos também, Hora 22). The foundations of the rejection of realism and its visual aesthetic can also be found in these sentences. Macabéa is constructed through satire of the realist process. After affirming that, for Macabéa, "Besides, the word reality meant nothing to her" (Hour 33) (Aliâs, a palavra realidade nâo Ihe dizia nada, Hora 49), the narrator concludes: "Not to me, dear God" {Hour 33) (Nem a mim, por Deus, Hora 49). As with the works read earlier, it is by means of consumption that the omnipresence of the present is marked. Regarding his hesitation in beginning the narration of Macabéa's story, the narrator states: "the record that is about to begin is written under the sponsorship of the most popular soft drink in the world even though it does not earn me anything; a soft drink that is distributed throughout the world" (Hour 23) (o registro que em breve vai ter que começar é escrito sob o patrocinio do refrigerante mais popular do mundo que nem por isso me paga nada, refrigerante esse espalhado por todos os paises, Hora 38). After referring to the "servility and subservience" with which consumers the world over love the soft drink, the author concludes: "Also because—and I am now going to say something strange that only I can understand—this drink which contains coca is today. It allows people to be modern and to move with the times" (Hour 23) ( Também porque—e vou dizer agora uma coisa dificil que sô eu entendo—porque essa bebida que tem coca é hoje. Ela é um meio da pessoa atualizar-se e pisar na hora presente,

158

TROPICAL KITSCH

Hora 38). As such, Coca-Cola is fundamentally an allegory of globalization, though the word was only incorporated into critical thought several years later. However, its use in the context of the novel is integrated into the rhetoric of mass culture, which Lispector also practices throughout her oeuvre as a whole. As with the other authors analyzed here, Lispector recycles the cliché. She does so first in the very title of this novel, the antithesis of the title of the Hollywood melodrama A Star is Born. According to the narrator, a persons "hour of the star" {a hora da estreld) is the moment of his or her death. Second, the story develops as in a romance novel: love—disillusionment—prediction of a happy future (by a soothsayer) and death caused by the "prince" foretold by the fortune-teller. Words charged with melodramatic connotations, such as bliss (felicidade), proverbs, and even fables are incorporated into this tale. "The feminine ideal for Macabéa is, once again, the Marilyn Monroe multiplied by pop art. "Did you know that Marilyn Monroe was the colour of the peaches?" ( Hour 53) (Sabe que Marilyn era toda cor-de-rosaì, Hora 70). Finally, as in the works of other authors analyzed here, formal devices are extracted from the rhetoric of mass culture. The only cultural consumption by Macabéa is that of Radio Clock {Hour, 36) (Ràdio Relógio, Hora 53), a radio station in Rio de Janeiro that transmits the time from the National Observatory minute by minute, intercalating it with trivia known in the educated sphere of Brazil as "useless information" (cultura inútilHowever, as Victor Burgin has pointed out in relation to film in the universe of the poor, radio is not only a source of memory, but most of all, of authority (Burgin 229). Hence, the repetition of facts which Macabéa has heard on the radio annoys her boyfriend and destabilizes his male power. On the other hand, the recycling of Radio Clocks programming permits a second level of articulation for Lispector. The overt presence of the passage of time, in its broadcasts, reveals the authors perceptive anticipation of the crisis of representation provoked by phenomena such as globalization, and the conception of space—time implicit in electronic media. More radical than all of her predecessors in this study, Lispector not only denounces the de-classification of the non-organized poor, but also excludes the writer from any position whatsoever on the Marxist social

T H E CANONIZATION OF K I T S C H

159

scale. H i e writer is thus defined: "Yes, I belong to no social category, marginal as I am" ( Hour 18) {Sim, nào tenho classe social, marginal como sou,

Hora 33). The identification of the narrator with Macabéa is established on the basis of that equality of positions. Macabéa's continual inquiry into the meaning of words is the method by which the narrator attempts to render explicit the difficulties of communication caused by the character's ignorance. This obstacle is a salient aspect of the life of this girl, "living in a hostile city" ( Hour 15) (em urna

cidade toda feita contra eia, Hora 29). Macabéa's lack of knowledge, including that of her own position within society, is translated into "succulent words" ( Hour 15) (palavras suculentas, Hora 29); Lispector utilizes this adjective to define the sophisticated linguistic repertoire of the scholarly writer. Datilógrafa (typist, Macabéa's profession) and metalúrgico (metallurgist, the occupation of Olímpico, her boyfriend) are both words with dactylic stress (accented on the antepenultimate syllable), the most unusual in the Portuguese language. Thus, the importance they acquire in the universe of the "simple talk" of these characters. The narrator relates, in the form of indirect discourse by Macabéa, that '"Metallurgist and typist' were categories of some distinction" (Hour 45) ("Metalúrgico" e "datilógrafa"formavam

um

casal de classe, Hora 61). The use of the term metallurgist also refers to the Brazilian political context at the time of the writing of the novel, namely, the burgeoning leadership of a Northeastern immigrant among the metallurgists of the state of Sáo Paulo. However, in contrast to the canonization of the worker by the writer who seeks "to guide the people," in the words of Haroldo de Campos, Lispector creates the opposite of the workingclass hero in Olímpico, Macabéa's boyfriend: he is individualist, a social climber, and dishonest. 23 The selection of names for the characters is also significant. Olímpico, another word with dactylic stress, defines the ambition of the male character. The feminine form of Macabeu, however, was reserved for Macabéa. According to Suzi Sperber, "Macabeu is the illustrious vengeful warrior, in a struggle in which the Jews are losers but Macabeu is glorified" (Sperber 159). The interpretation is correct, particularly considering the Jewish background of Clarice Lispector. However, I would like to add another interpretation. Masculine names feminized by the suffix —èia, in Portuguese, are much more common among Brazilian women who are poor.

i6o

TROPICAL K I T S C H

The choice of the name Macabéa can also be understood in relation to the title of two works of Brazilian tropicalism: a work by painter Rubens Gerchman (Gerchman 26) and a song by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, both called Lindonéia (Veloso, et al., Tropicàlia). Note that the echoes of tropicalism in the works of Lispector are an important factor to be considered. In the daily chronicles she wrote for the Jornal do Brasil, for instance, numerous quotes from singer Roberto Carlos can be found, along with other attributes originally found in mass culture, incorporated in a like fashion to that of tropicalism (Lispector, Discovering). The similarity between Macabéa and Lindonéia lies, above all, in the artistic treatment of the two characters as poor Brazilian women. In stark contrast to the epic treatment utilized by politically active writers, Lispector proposes a pathetic treatment, as did the tropicalists. In both cases, the female characters are at the margins of any political struggle: Lispector promoted poor women in their pathos, describing them as ugly, forgotten, and outside of time. The national-popular left, in contrast, ignored them entirely. The painting Lindonéia, by Rubens Gerchman, is thus described by Caetano Veloso: "a representation, in distorted lines by painiul purity, of what looked like a photographic blowup of a poor girl who had been given up for lost; it was framed in the kitschy style of suburban sitting rooms under glass, decorated with flower" (Veloso, Tropical 171). Lindonéia, the painting, is part of a phase by Gerchman that anticipated tropicalism in painting (1965-1967), characterized by reproductions of the images transmitted by television, or by retelling selected stories from the daily police blotter. Another point on which the painters works coincide with Lispector's novel is the painting Professorinhas, also included in this book (Gerchman 13). The names chosen by Gerchman for the "little professors" who are portrayed are nearly identical to those of Macabéa's roommates: "Maria da Penha, Maria Aparecida, Maria José and plain Maria" {Hour 31) (Maria da Penha, Maria Aparecida, Maria José e Maria apenas, Hora 47). Veloso has commented that he and Gilberto Gil wrote the song "Lindonéia" upon the request of singer Nara Leao. The music and lyrics were inspired by the Gerchman painting of the same tide. Gil composed the music—a bolero mixed with rock—and Veloso, the lyrics to the song, in which the title and the story of a disappeared woman are preserved. Caetano refers to the conserving the character of the painting, a "melancholy

THE CANONIZATION OF KITSCH

161

chronicle of nameless loneliness, done in a pop tone with metalinguistic overtones" (Veloso, Tropical 171) in his lyrics to the song. The musical version entails an intentional distancing in relation to the character, thus putting into question the matter of what may be the best treatment of such concretely unrecognized poverty. Lindonéia, protagonist of the lyrics to the song by Veloso and Gil, is the opposite of pretty {linda), just as the Dulcinea of Cervantes is the opposite of sweet {dulce). The Quixotic origin of the name marks the character's lack of adaptation to the consumer society that was taking root in the country. Television and the invasion of U.S. culture offer the internal rhyme of the second verse—"visse/miss"—and reinforce the ugliness of Lindonéia, completed by the antithesis "Miss/pretty/ugly" {miss/linda/feia). Lindonéia is still a "dark flower" {florparda)-, pardo is a term used to define the skin tone of mestizos of uncertain origin in Brazilian identification documents. As with other characters in postmodern Brazilian narratives, Lindonéia is defined by her daily life: a trip to the market, a visit to the church, a life limited to the chronological passage of time. Finally, she is single, which serves to place her within the stereotype of the solitary spinster, displaced from the time in which she is living. As such, she is fundamentally a poor, suburban young woman whose dreams are inspired by radio "hit parades" and televised beauty contests, known in Brazil as "concursos de miss" ("Miss contests"). The foreign influence of those competitions indicates, also, the presence of U.S. culture in the Brazilian imaginary. The political atmosphere, contained in the adjectives in pieces {despedazados), run over {atropelados), and the phrase "police keeping vigil" appear as the setting through which Lindonéia moves, without noticing it. That atmosphere is confirmed in the polysemy of the adjective disappeared {desaparecida), which may refer either to disappearance through political machinations, or to another female symbol of Brazilian culture, that of the sacred "appeared" {aparecida), patron saint of Brazil. This term refers to the statue of a black virgin, considered divine, that fishermen retrieved from the ocean. In addition, the rhyme between Lindonéia and Macabéa is not simply coincidence. Clarice Lispector's Macabéa has a similar profile to that of Lindonéia. As with the Lindonéia of both Gerchman and Veloso, Macabéa is surrounded by a universe of images and words that she does not comprehend. As occurs with Lindonéia, the life of Macabéa is restricted to the

i6z

TROPICAL K I T S C H

chronological passage of time, as marked by radio programming. Thus, she is situated among the pathetic characters moved by mass culture, which has often served in Latin America as a type of pedagogy for poor immigrants arriving at large cities (Monsiváis, Rituales 186). The unhappy and melodramatic end—Macabéa is killed by the Prince Charming the fortune-teller has just predicted for her—demonstrates the critical perspective with which the author utilizes melodrama. With a treatment similar to that of tropicalism, Clarice Lispector, scholarly author par excellence, removes the oppressed character from her pedestal as a hero of resistance. In both cases, the result does not promise the redemption of the subaltern, advocated by utopie thought. Rather, she obliges us to rethink the role that mass culture plays, not only in Brazil, but also in all of the globalized societies at this turn of the century.

• César Aira: The Guerrilla as Pulp Fiction In Argentina, the echoes of the end of the sixties appear most clearly in the work of César Aira. His production of several short novels per year responds to the author's intention, which he has indicated in a number of interviews, to be simply a writer of mass culture. However, the aesthetic of difficulty with which he has constructed his narratives defies the definition. Aira presents the most difficult contemporary texts in Argentina. The reader of his novels, unlike the reader of pulp-fiction serial works, is obligated to grapple with plots without conclusions, stories which change direction without forewarning, and, fundamentally, tacit references to other authors. Like Severo Sarduy and Haroldo de Campos, Aira draws the détournement of his narratives from the Baroque. The difference is that he considers the Baroque of his heritage to be the plots of radio soap operas, as affirmed in the novel Cómo me hice monja (1993; How I Became a Nuri). The narrator declares he has found in radionovelas the "golden rule of fiction: it is too complicated not to be true" {La regla de oro de la ficción: es demasiado complicado para no ser cierto, Aira, Cómo 65). Aira also has his paideuma, which can be identified in the short essays he occasionally publishes. He selects Manuel Puig, Copi, and Osvaldo Lamborghini as his most immediate predecessors in Argentine literature.

T H E CANONIZATION OF KITSCH

163

From the first two, he takes the taste for stylization and verbal artifice, in addition to the perspective with which he treats mass culture. From Osvaldo Lamborghini, he utilizes the theme of violence. This subject, in spite of establishing an apparent link between his novels and detective narratives, rejects the ideology of detective stories in that his works do not limit themselves to presenting a succession of enigmas for the leisurely entertainment of the reader. In the works of Aira, the narrated enigmas command a reflection on art of the narration in the contemporary context, on the part of the reader. In the short novel Los dospayasos (1995; The Two Clowns), the artist is designed, as the characters in the works of Clarice Lispector, as a displaced professional in a universe of unchecked consumption. Set at a circus show, the novel describes the number of the two clowns, only included in the spectacle to kill time between stronger acts which draw more attention from the crowd, such as the lion tamer. The clowns' sketch, focused solely on verbal language, is similar to the work of the writer, since it consists of updating and re-creating situations typical of a circus comic. The clowns' pathetic presentation ends with their near-expulsion from the stage, with the commanding arrival of the lions and their tamers. Aira critiques the national-popular interpretation of the arts in the sixties in several of his narratives. The reference to Puig as one of his mentors in this regard is principally found in the novel La costurera y el viento (1994; The Seamstress and the Wind), set in a city in the heart of the Argentine pampa. It is useful to recall the parallels between the life of Aira and the background of Manuel Puig. Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, similar even in name to General Villegas, the city where Puig was born, and transfigured in his works as Coronel Vallejos. In addition, the universe of private life in some of Aira's narratives, centered on the relationship between a son and his mother, as in Como me hice monja, is similar to the fictional universe of Puig's early novels. The parody of detective novels, found in both La costurera y el viento and Como me hice monja, is more closely related to the work of Osvaldo Lamborghini, an author still considered "alternative" by Argentine literary criticism.24 From Lamborghini, who transforms the closed structures of guerrilla organizations of the sixties into sado-masochistic rituals, Aira extracts the violence of many of his novels, especially La prueba (1992; The

164

TROPICAL KITSCH

Test). This novel may serve as a closure for the counterpoint constituted by the literature I have studied in this book to the political options of the sixties. The names of Lenin and Mao-Tse-Tung, the Marxist leaders who guided the two opposing factions of the left in those years, that is, communist parties or guerrillas, are united in the urban war of the nineties. Reduced to the nicknames of the two lesbian punks who assault a supermarket as proof of their love of a third young woman whom they are attempting to seduce, the two Marxist leaders seem useless in explaining the extreme violence with which Lenin and Mao (the characters in the novel) annihilate the people present at the market. (The work of Aira foreshadows the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, by Quentin Tarantino). However, La prueba includes melodrama in the plot (Contreras). The two young women make their attack in the name of the "Commando of Love" (Comando del Amor), breaking the appearance of hyperrealism which the novel appears to suggest, a tonic to U.S. film. In this novel by Aira, as in other Latin American novels described here, the use of violence (which also parodies the violence of more recent Hollywood films) is based on a critical perspective of narratives of Latin American modernity. With the phrase "Commando of Love," which is extended in commentaries such as "love can do everything" and "with the unpunished force of love" {el amor lo puede todo\ con la juerza impune del amor, 87), Aira also critiques another ideology of the sixties: that of the counterculture. Passionate love and passion, on which Sandra Contreras centered her analysis, can also be seen as a distortion of the slogan "Peace and Love" of the sixties, now transformed into its opposite, "Love and War." Josefina Ludmer analyzes this novel as an expression of the gratuitous violence of the nineties (Ludmer 133-135). I prefer to maintain that such violence is not gratuitous. Rather, it expresses the new social configuration established by neoliberalism. With the state exempt from managing conflicts between social classes, the violence directed toward the state in the sixties is now intertwined with private life. Mao and Lenin are attacking, as Ludmer observed, consumers. However, they are also consumers, a fact highlighted by the narrator in citing the television programs they watch or the type of rock music they buy. Consequently, the war between the consumers represented in the novel occurs on a single level, in the sense which with Goblot employs the term. It is merely the tastes, behaviors, and sexual

T H E C A N O N I Z A T I O N OF KITSCH

165

preference of Mao and Lenin which separate them from other consumers. It is no coincidence that the new guerrillas are two young lesbians. As with the other authors read here, César Aira analyzes the society in which he lives, in Laprueba. The novel exposes how both those targeted by and excluded from consumerism now coexist without intervention by the state. With opulence protected by bodyguards and sophisticated electronic security systems (as appears in one episode of the novel), ordinary consumers (Certeau) are left with the daily exposure to violence learned from the winners of the ideological war of the sixties. Aira's text allows me to conclude that the works I have studied here are the most concrete literary representation of the trench war that substituted proletarian revolution in contemporary societies. In this sense, these works help to comprehend the physiognomy of the twentieth century, the greatest political expressions of which were wars and revolutions, according to Hannah Arendt. At the end of the century, with the Utopia that justified the revolutions greatly reduced, there remained only the war that erupted in every microphysical conflict. The duration and persistence of this theme in Latin American literature and art indicates its contribution to the establishment of new models of interpretation, not only artistic and literary, but also social and political.

CONCLUSIONS

Mass culture emerged in Latin American art through political art. The verbal language of the media, a point of departure for conceptual art in the sixties, was utilized in visual works to denounce the manipulation of information by the government. Giving art a civic responsibility, early expressions of media art were collective actions against state power, especially in Argentina. In the seventies, this aesthetic trend guided the majority of the artists involved toward guerrilla action in the political field. Literature challenged the conception of art as the record of a national truth, particularly in the narratives of Manuel Puig. Preferring to reinterpret the imaginary transmitted through the media—and not its referentiality, as with the plastic arts—Puig displaced the public discussion of the visual arts to the private sphere. The quotation of foreign mass culture, such as Hollywood cinema, and the recycling of genres considered spurious, such as melodrama, displaced attention toward the reception of mass culture. The recycling of kitsch present in the products of the media, foreign and spurious at the same time, indicated the proposal of an art of artifice that countered the documentary art practiced in the visual arts. Expressing the ideological radicalizations that marked the end of the sixties in Latin America, the polemic became, especially in Brazil, an inflamed debate among the representatives of the two positions, obligating critical theory to take sides. In spite of the aggressiveness of the confrontation, the two groups shared two common foundations. Not only did they defend a national art, but also the models of modernization from the fifties and sixties, which had been abruptly interrupted by the conservative modernization introduced by the military dictatorship since 1964. The group that attacked the new movement, with Roberto Schwarz as its greatest proponent, remained faithful to projects of developmentalism (desarrollismo) and understood national art from the perspective of the Marxist model of social classes. The group that championed it, comprised of concrete poets such as Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, privileged the internationalist experience of the developmentalist ideology.

167

i68

TROPICAL KITSCH

Based on this perspective, concretism accepted the quotation of foreign culture as a continuity of the dialogue that artistic experiences based on developmentalism had maintained with international avant-garde movements. The concretists, most of whom were artists, based their support of the tropicalists on the export quality (qualidade de exportagdo) they recognized in their works. This also justified their hope that the emerging young group would guarantee their own legacy of avant-garde experimentation. The new artists, for their part, reevaluated the ideology of both groups of critical theory—that is, development theories and Marxism-Leninism—beginning with the defeat suffered by the Marxist interpretation of society; this model, both in Brazil and Argentina, was based on a nationalpopular cultural identity. Recognizing the modernization, albeit conservative, introduced by the military dictatorship, Brazilian art and literature at the end of the sixties sought critical insight that was capable of evaluating the new process. The answers found in two contradictory models—the urban guerrilla, especially in its Spanish-American version, and the counterculture imported from the United States—expanded the concept of nationalism. At the same time, they were responsible for conferring an anarchic and ambivalent nature to their artistic achievements. Rejecting the symbolic model inherited from earlier tradition, which elevated the working class to a heroic position, the narrators of mass culture fragmented nationality by means of allegory. Substituting political symbols for the myths belonging to mass culture, the works of this trend of Latin American art were organized through fragments that prevented a totalizing vision by the viewer or reader. Toward the end of the sixties, there persisted a constructive intention that showed itself clearly in the Brazilian tropicalists. The movement was conceived as a continuation of the journey begun by the Brazilian avantgarde of the twenties, especially by the Cannibalist group. Tropicalism, however, also broke away from the model of a homogenous nationality molded by the national-popular aesthetic. The concept of the popular in tropicalist art was displaced to urban reality, thus differentiating itself from the earlier model, in effect until the sixties, in which the concept ofpopular was generally identified with the traditions of rural communities. The new artists would come to consider the mass productions present in expanding cities as an expression of an urban-popular taste (lo popular

CONCLUSIONS

169

urbano), the complexity of which could not be accounted for by the Marxist model of social classes. The kitsch present in products of mass media becomes utilized as a manifestation of the everyday life and subjectivity of the working class. These categories would replace economically based interpretations in the Latin American cultural field, those belonging to a Marxist-Leninist theoretical approach. Social actors forgotten by Marxism were also vindicated. In the works analyzed here, the major role of characters who move in the informal market, underemployment, and the old Marxist de-classification of the lumpen indicates that these authors have clearly focused on these social groups. The etymological analysis of the Ibero-American words used to designate kitsch demonstrates the interrelation of their meanings and social de-classification. In Latin America, being cursi might signify being Indian or mestizo (in the case of Peruvian expressions cholo and huachufo), being a peasant (in Brazil, cafona), or participating in morally rejected behaviors and social practices (in the case of pavo and pavoso, or picúo and picúa, in Spanish; or ofperu andperua, or brega, in Portuguese). Set apart by defining personal attributes and not objects, several of these terms also connote ostentation or the desire to appear as something more than one is. In this last case, in particular, the kitsch-man constructs himself through the copy of behaviors he believes are proper to social groups he perceives as more prestigious than his own. Based on concepts such as these, inherent to the languages that were their working material, authors who recycled kitsch conceived it as a language that expressed the culture copied by the socially de-classed, who increased along with the expansion of consumerism. Since the copy was an ideologeme long used in the Latin American essay (since the nineteenth century), it is not surprising that kitsch might be used by artists in the second half of the twentieth century as an allegory of that ideologeme. The critical theory that made its way to Latin America at the end of the sixties facilitated the choice of those artists. During the same period, the reflection on kitsch begun in the thirties was taken up anew in Europe and the United States. From the frame of thought of the Frankfurt School, the theory of that time condemned kitsch, considering it a reductive imitation of high art. Using the principles that formed high modernist art, kitsch was defined as the antithesis of art from that period. As a corollary to his con-

170

TROPICAL KITSCH

cept of cultural industry, which Adorno used to counter U.S. concepts of mass culture because he did not view productions for the masses as culture, Adorno also considered kitsch a spurious product, opposed to both genuine poles of art: that of high culture and that of low, or popular, culture. In the sixties and seventies, such positions began to be relativized. Despite the fact that the word cursi had provoked reflections in Spain that foresaw this relativization, it was only in the sixties that a more defined theoretical body was configured around the idea of kitsch. Umberto Eco summarized the two positions on mass culture with the adjectives apocalyptic (the pessimists) and integrated (the optimists). Included in the debate, kitsch was presented in Eco's semiological theory as a mediation. Abraham Moles, continuing this line of investigation, locates mediation in the triumph of the middle class, which demands the incorporation of aesthetic criteria in everyday life. For Moles, kitsch would have a pedagogical function since it would grant the middle class, by means of successive refinements, access to high culture. The intersection of the last two authors' definitions seems to support, in the eighties and nineties, Latin American critical theory related to the mediation represented by kitsch and the media in Latin America. Jesús Martín-Barbero maintains that Latin American mass culture is responsible for the mediation between traditional cultures and the modern subject. Carlos Monsiváis sees, in kitsch, a type of pedagogy for rural peasants who have recently arrived in the city. Monsiváis includes kitsch among the manifestations of urban-popular taste, a concept that brings together the old categories of elite culture, mass culture, and popular culture in a new type of culture that assumes the permanent interaction of the three previous categories without ever constituting a new synthesis. In both theorists, one observes the incorporation of the experience of populism as an analytical instrument. Hie "less rich" understand their abrupt emergence in the city during the thirties and forties as a relative social promotion. Their new visibility as a mass gives them an indisputable presence in the different national contexts of Latin America. Experiencing more benefits than losses in this process, the "less rich" acquire a new mode of existence in big cities. This is distinguished by the permanent mixture of rural values and urban behaviors, added to contact with the products of foreign mass culture. The implementation of consumer society

CONCLUSIONS

171

in Latin America during the sixties, accompanied by the globalization of the market of mass culture, intensified the process. According to Barbero and Monsivais, the massive popular presence in the great Latin American cities has since been marked by a permanent recycling of behaviors and customs. The effectiveness of this model, which also has roots in the thought of Walter Benjamin, consists of attributing a more active role to the masses. It also represents an advance in relation to the interpretations of European situationists such as Guy Debord; in 1967, he deemed mass culture responsible for establishing the society of the spectacle, a concept that gave the spectator a passive and robotized role. The study of habits and behaviors in the theories of Barbero and Monsivais also corresponds to the new theoretical body of social interpretation that was built in the eighties, especially in France. In both philosophy and the history of mentalities, attention to critical theory was displaced from Marxist totalizations to the microscopic aspects of social experience. The idea of collective revolution was atomized, and a new theoretical vocabulary segmented the idea of total revolution. The eighties were marked by the analysis of tactics, strategies, and microscopic resistances to disciplinary technology, defined earlier by Foucault. In this new theoretical configuration, categories such as taste acquired a role in critical thought about society. Rooted in different theoretical bases, in both France and the United States, stratifications of taste were eventually proposed as alternatives to the model of social classes devised by Marxism. Edmond Goblot was the great predecessor of these ideas. His reflection on consumerism, in 1925, already took into account both the social stratifications expressed by differences of taste, and the tactics and strategies generated by the ideologeme of the copy. Based on analysis of the social elites, Goblot maintained that the "more rich" not only create models of habits and behaviors, but also establish rules for their copy. The style and education that classify an individual through a code of moral behavior contribute to the creation of bourgeois appearance. The efforts of the "less rich" to imitate that appearance by copying tastes and behaviors is controlled by the elite, with the permanent reconstruction of barriers that prohibit access to those habits. On the other hand, the "less rich" strata are characterized by their constant attempts to break down those barriers. To each of their advances, according to Goblot, there corresponds the de-

172

TROPICAL K I T S C H

marcation of a social level defined by a determined combination of habits, behaviors, and tastes. This model was useful for the reading of narratives written since the eighties. In the novels of Puerto Rican author Luis Rafael Sánchez, Goblot's model of barriers and levels proved useful for me to identify how the author described popular music and dance as tactics which, combined with the use of language, comprised a barrier built from the bottom up, in terms of social scale. This factor adds a new element to the analyses of Barbero and Monsiváis: the "less rich" now show their visibility to the elites as a confrontation with those "distinguished" classes, whose representatives are largely unaware of their codes. The active role of consumers is thus transformed into an aggression that copies the way that the "more rich" have always treated the "less rich." With the stage cleared of the project of social inversion represented by the revolution, and the government excused from its role as a mediator of social conflict (thanks to the advent of neoliberalism), class struggle is reduced to a symbolic trench war designed by the model of Goblot, principally in large cities. The contrast between the narratives of Sánchez and testimonial novels is based on the assertion that, compared to pockets of revolutionary resistance that are progressively more isolated, both geographically and ideologically, the wars fomented by the exclusion caused by indiscriminate consumption are expanding in large cities. On the other hand, the rise of consumerism subdivides the popular mass into progressively more heterogeneous groups, rendering models based on the homogeneity of the different strata—namely, Marxism—obsolete. Aside from all of these changes, the notion of a unique cultural identity corresponding to a unique and continuous subject is shattered in the eighties. The use of the word identities, in the plural, has since encompassed sectors forgotten by Marxist theory. Artists begin to take interest in not only the lumpen way of life, but also prostitution, marginality, and homosexuality. This last category offered this tendency of Latin American art its characteristic strategy of artifice and exaggeration. Viewing the universe of kitsch through the lens of camp, the writers of the eighties and nineties, principally, have privileged a formulation of the subject based on discontinuity and improvisation. According to queer theory, these qualities constitute that which, in the nascent version of camp, was

CONCLUSIONS

173

opposed to the continuity of the Victorian subject. M o e Mayer, for instance, affirms that camp is part of the collection of practices that constitute queer identities. The presence of camp in this trend of Latin American art has been evident since the sixties. Repeated references by the different authors to Marilyn Monroe originate in the serial works by Andy Warhol, whose position as an "arbiter of taste"—that is, his camp sensibility in distinguishing good taste from bad taste—was reappropriated by both Manuel Puig and the Brazilian tropicalists. In the eighties, camp appears most visibly in the novel La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, by Luis Rafael Sánchez. The bolero singer who warrants the writing of the book is characterized as a dandy of the era of mass culture, a definition contained in an essay on camp by Susan Sontag. The parody of the Oscar Wilde work, present in the novel's title, both indicates Sánchez's affiliation with the ideas of Sontag, and puts forth the intention of locating camp dandyism in the stylization of a homosexual sensibility. The use of kitsch and mass culture by Cuban author Severo Sarduy is also found in a similar area. Including both elements in the neobaroque poetics that distinguish his works, the camp of Severo Sarduy is limited to the homosexual environments through which his characters move. In this sense, a change is observed in works of the eighties, in the treatment of the theme of nationalism. The national is increasingly configured as the local. The characters, for the most part, are rogues who travel throughout a globalized Latin America, as with the singer Daniel Santos. O n the other hand, the action of these novels is concentrated in cities, neighborhoods, and even bars and cabarets, as in the novels of Severo Sarduy. Displacement from the countryside to the city is now transformed into migration. The characters of the Cuban author, for example, are nomads who journey across three continents in search of a lost "Cubanness," or cubanidad. However, it is not easy for the reader to understand the journey of the characters in these novels. Ciphered language, especially that of Sarduy in

Cobra and Colibrí, takes to an extreme the poetics of difficulty that have characterized all of these authors. Such language, in the case of Sarduy, is based on the principles of the neobaroque, inherited from Cuban authors of the fifties and sixties, such as Lezama Lima.

174

TROPICAL KITSCH

The filiation of Sarduy from Lezama suggests that these last manifestations of camp were rooted in the tradition of the Latin American essay. As with Luis Rafael Sánchez, who recognizes the features of the mestizo America outlined in the Latin American essay since the nineteenth century, in bolero singer Daniel Santos, Sarduy seeks the expression of cultural mestizaje in the definition of the historical Latin American Baroque proposed by Lezama Lima. For this reason, French theories based on mathematics, which update the model of mestizaje by means of their capacity for the continuous inclusion of new data, supported my reading of these texts by Sarduy. This choice was also due to the fact that Sarduy participates in contemporary scientific knowledge. Maintaining ties to the scientism that has always excited authors affiliated with the Baroque, the Cuban author incorporates in his works both art and science, visual and verbal language. More so than other authors, Sarduy expresses a fin de siècle sensibility that not only has roots in the dandyism of Oscar Wilde, but also is based on the epigonous condition that he described of himself in his essays. In addition to his own inclusion in the Latin American post-Boom, Sarduy participated in post-structuralism. Chronologically, he is located in postmodernity and in the post-neobaroque, since that concept had already been established in the fifties and sixties. I have found the best metaphor to summarize this path—post-everything—in a poem by Augusto de Campos. Campos gives the adjective (in Portuguese, pós-tudo) a similar connotation to that of the noun post-utopia (pós-utopia), created by his brother Haroldo de Campos. The reading of Galdxias by Haroldo de Campos proved that a post-utopia does not necessary signify a pessimistic position regarding social change. With echoes of Michel Foucault s notion of archaeology, all of these authors carry out an archaeology of Latin American modernity in their texts. The texts of Haroldo de Campos, Clarice Lispector, and César Aira, whose distance from early debates allows a less impassioned reflection, propose new parameters to improve the achievements of the modern tradition. Including the writer in the very marginality of the characters with whom they deal, the last three authors attempt to define their role in the possible utopia they propose. In the case of Campos, this is found in the choice to translate canonical works of universal literature into Portuguese.

CONCLUSIONS

175

In the case of Lispector, the possible utopia is observed in the promotion signified by giving a poor Brazilian woman the stature of a literary character. In the case of Aira, finally, the possible utopia is translated into the incursion of the high-culture author into the market of literature written for the masses, such as pulp fiction. In all three authors, the aesthetic of difficulty that characterized their predecessors is preserved. Their texts demand an active participation from the reader. This allows them, as in the texts of the historic avant-gardes, to decodify different assumptions that almost always arise from the union of a tradition of the old—clichés, quotations from oral history and mass culture—with the avant-garde tradition of the new, present in the experimentation that organizes these texts. Understanding mass culture as a rhetoric peculiar to the twentieth century, these authors approach it through parody or literal quotation. In both cases, the use of that new rhetoric spurns narratives based on a documentary intention. Following the polemics of the sixties, which opposed the documentary with the imaginary, these works use kitsch and mass culture with humor and irony. They are fundamentally centered on the heterogeneous imaginary of Latin America, with social and political problems as merely the subtext. Much of the experimentation found in these texts also holds similarities to the aesthetic enterprises of conceptual art. The dematerialization of the art object, for example, can be observed in the manner in which all of these authors treat the literary character. In the majority of cases, the character appears as a rhetorical figure; that is, it is characterized by a collection of features that refer to mass culture. The frequent use of parody seems to question the plot. Almost all of the authors read here also propose subverting the traditional concept of literary genre. Finally, even authorship and the book as an object, in the case of PanAmérica, by José Agrippino de Paula, and Galdxias, by Haroldo de Campos, are called into question. As the self-attributed classification of post-utopic implies a political commentary, the art of artifice proposed by this tendency of Latin American art has, in reality, far more points in common with the political projects of conceptual art than could be imagined at first glance. O n e indication is the permanent opposition of its works to national canonical literature. This is the case, for instance, with Clarice Lispector, whose last novel ( The Hour of

the Star) dialogues with the canon of the Brazilian novel of the Northeast.

176

TROPICAL KITSCH

Albeit ironically, these authors responded to the political events to which they were exposed. The case of Aira might be the most exemplary in this respect. Commenting on the neoliberal model introduced in his country, the Argentine author permits a summary of the contribution of this literature to critical thought about Latin American societies. The reading of these texts reveals responses to the different modernizations put into effect on the Latin American continent during the second half of the twentieth century. Revolutions and guerrillas, globalization and neoliberalism were not merely theories. The stands taken against these waves of modernization have not always been coherent, because contrasting ideas often arrive to the continent simultaneously and/or behind the times. The originality of these artists lies in not perceiving this particular insertion of Latin America into the international market of messages as a constitutive step backward. Accepting kitsch as part of the unevenness inherent in Latin American modernity, the art of the seventies to the nineties transforms it into a metalanguage of this temporal imbalance. The aesthetic elaboration of this metalanguage revealed both positive and negative aspects. As a positive force, the ironic kitsch artificialized by Latin American art mimics the active reception of the products of mass culture by the "less rich." In almost all of the works, kitsch appears as a product of the recycling of a repertoire received through diverse and even contradictory referents. Instead of perceiving kitsch and mass culture as causes of an impoverishment of the cultural expressions of the "less rich," these two elements are understood as stimuli for popular creativity. As a negative force, kitsch appears as an assimilation of the values of the "more rich." In this case, this includes both the kitsch utilized by the high and middle classes of Latin America, and the taste used by the "less rich" as a form of social aggression. In this last case, taste appeared in my corpus as a metaphor of social confrontation. In several novels, this confrontation even came to be represented as literal trench war, in which levels of taste and behavior closed the barriers of social mobility. At times, the differentiated cultural consumption of the characters prevented negotiation, even in the horizontality of the social strata, as in the case of the novel La prueba, by César Aira. In this novel, the imaginary is used to develop the affirmation that, once the option of revolution has disappeared, those excluded

CONCLUSIONS

177

from unfettered consumerism are left only with war, plain and simple, without the justification of liberation. In the majority of the authors, there is a mixture of two conceptions, confirming the recycling of kitsch as a metalanguage that interprets Latin American contradictions as a dialectic process, belonging to a modernity that has brought benefits and losses. A product of the crisis of modernity, the confrontation with the present replaces the projection of the future that belonged to the utopically based art that preceded them. The negative tendency is gready increased, especially in Latin American cinema from recent years. Constructed with an extreme violence, many recent films point out a crisis in the very idea of resistance to social oppression. Radicalizing the anticitizenship observed in the works analyzed here, filmmakers let us see a type of inversion of oppression, in which the marginalized and the oppressor switch roles. We see, once again, the foreshadowing by the works analyzed in this book. In them, the aesthetic choice of mass culture did not necessarily signify a promotion of this type of culture. Rather, it indicated that the pedagogy transmitted in mass culture brought with it the ideology of the "more rich," based on individualism and competition. The stance taken with the cursi also corresponded to a position against the dogmatic left, present in the Latin American cultural arena at the time of the publication of the books analyzed here, and the exhibition of the works of visual art. As a result of its complete rejection of mass culture, that left did not even perceive the advance of this ideology through mass culture. The artists recognize that the continual capacity for recycling, on the part of the "less rich," has allowed their own reappropriation of much of the cultural trash transmitted by mass culture, created around lo cursi-, however, they do not deny the negative aspect of the phenomenon. Finally, the choice of the urban-popular imaginary, also often included in products of mass culture, transformed the condemnation of the negativity of the media into a more imaginative and amusing artistic approach than that of hyperrealist works. That, however, is a topic for other debates, and a new book.

NOTES

• Introduction 1. I will elaborate on the different concepts of the phenomenon of kitsch in the third part of this book. In this introduction, I refer largely to those established in the area of taste. Summarizing them, one can arrive at a definition of kitsch as a reduced imitation of artistic works. Its manifestations may be identified with bad taste, which is opposed to the good taste belonging to art. 2. I share the opinion of Latin American critical theory which conceives of mass communication in Latin America as a means of mediation between traditional society and the modern subject. However, I prefer to use the term mass culture in regard to literary texts. I understand this as the collective ensemble of media products parodied by the selected artists. My work on the corpus has demonstrated that such parody has been founded on the appreciation of the transformation of codes utilized by the media into a sort of rhetoric, which thoroughly pervades both the production and the reception of cultural products of the twentieth century (Martin-Barbero). Martin-Barbero's work incorporates the semiotic concept of mediation (Eco, Apocalyptic) in the réévaluation of Marxism, principally that carried out by the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies on the basis of Gramscian thought (A. King). 3. The word is the Spanish translation of the French feuilleton., which refers to narratives published in weekly installments in newspapers of the nineteenth century. 4. Kitsch and mass culture are always utilized critically by these authors. This is sometimes as parody, in other words as a re-creation of the discursive forms of mass culture and of kitsch; sometimes as pastiche (Jameson, Postmodernism 17) or as an almost unaltered quotation of these forms. This last mode of critically appropriating the products of mass culture is through quotation. In this vein, verses of popular songs are placed on the same level as the verses and phrases of writers and academic authors, cited to an equal extent. Most heavily used since the eighties, this last technique is associated with the questioning of authorship proposed by French poststructuralists.

179

i8o

TROPICAL KITSCH

The best example of this can be found in the work of Puerto Rican author Luis Rafael Sánchez. 5. The understanding of mass culture as a spurious culture was common in the critical theory of the sixties. This interpretation alludes to the anthropological relativism of Sapir, according to whom spurious culture would be characterized by rapid changes and immediate and fragmented productions which resulted in a "spiritual hybrid of contradictory patches." This opposed it to genuine culture, which could be recognized by its capacity to offer an individual a harmonious ensemble of ideas and values, from which is derived a tight relationship between this concept and that of cultural identity (Sapir 90). It is interesting to note how literature and the plastic arts anticipated the contemporary response to the anthropological concept of genuine culture, the height of which was reached in Latin America within anthropology itself in the nineties, with the work of Néstor García Canclini. The Argentine author's notion of "hybrid cultures" takes as its point of departure the metaphor with which Sapir has defined spurious cultures (Garcia Canclini). 6. The word camp is appropriated in the sixties to define the promotion of bad taste to good taste (a selection of kitsch objects, of certain forms of dress and gestural behaviors), characteristic of homosexual practices (Sontag). Queer theory, dedicated to symbolic transgressions which are generated in the homosexual universe but can be applied to other cultural fields, include camp in the ensemble of practices that constitute queer identities (Meyer). The different etymologies and concepts of camp will be examined in the third part of this book. 7. My choice of the simultaneous analysis of visual and verbal works is also due to the fact that, in the artistic products of both languages, kitsch and mass culture are used in the intersection of verbal and visual expression. Just as literature carries out a distortion of visual works to incorporate them into verbal texts, conceptual art distorts verbal discourse with its utilization of the plastic arts. Understood as a "cultural practice" by the French situationists, whose ideas have gready influenced conceptual art, this "twisting" (in French, ditoumement) is characterized by a circular motion. To begin, an object (texts, paintings, films, comics) is displaced from one sphere of production, circulation, and consumption, to another. In the case of the authors of my corpus, this has to do with displacing productions of the different languages of mass culture to the sphere of literature. The détournement is the second phase of this displacement, in which the object gains, in its new use, an entirely different function from that which it would have if utilized as originally conceived. The situationists took the term, which is also used in critical literary theory to refer to the technique described above, in the present era (Hébrard), from the Universal Dictionary (Furetiére). I will deal

NOTES

I8I

with the situationists in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 5. Situationists also influenced conceptual art (Gintz 31-32). 8. The term lo real maravilloso (literally, marvelous reality), designates the narratives which, contained in the Latin American (publishing) Boom of the sixties, were marked by the search for transparence in the description of Latin American reality, a goal present in the term's inclusion of the noun real. The second sign of the syntagm, the adjective maravilloso, aims to express the mythic components incorporated in the texts through characters often located in rural settings (Chiampi, Realismo). The myths were perceived by these characters as part of reality. Alejo Carpentier's definition has lent a theoretical base to this literary technique, which was amply used by authors who succeeded the Cuban author, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Roa Bastos, and others (Carpentier, Reino ix-xv; I am quoting the Spanish edition, because the English translation (Carpentier, Kingdom) does not include this introduction). Literary criticism has increased the circulation of the term. It is surprising how this concept was taken on by postcolonial theory under the rubric of "hybridity," without reference to the establishment of the term by Carpentier, nor to its use in Spanish-American literature (Ashcroft, et al. 183-231, especially Aléxis; and Dash). 9. When the first artistic works that concern me here appeared, Argentina was under the dictatorship of General Ongania, and the Peronist Youth was being organized in the country. In Brazil, the military had assumed state power in 1964, after overthrowing the national-popular government of President Joáo Goulart. 10. The concept of lived aesthetic experience (vivencia) was repudiated by Adorno, for representing the "emotional expression of works" (Aesthetic 244). However, it is vindicated by Brazilian conceptual art as the principal objective of its works; this is, above all, in relation to the spectator, who should vivenciar (aesthetically experience) the work as a participant (Oiticica, Aspiro 100; and Oiticica, Catalogue 124). 11. The expansion of television is particularly important in the case of Brazil, where it was the medium par excellence for the propaganda of the military regime. For this reason, works that anticipated Brazilian tropicalism, such as the conceptual art of Hélio Oiticica, or the theater ofJosé Celso Martínez Correa, were largely constructed as a criticism of the omnipresence of television in the country. I will delve into this subject at more length in Chapter 2. 12. The governments of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Getúlio Vargas (in the period 1930-1945) in Brazil, and Juan Domingo Perón (1945-1955) in Argentina maintained their propaganda through government-run radio stations. In the Mexican case, the film industry was also run by the state. Sérgio Augusto {Este) describes the relation between populism and film in Latin America, especially in Brazil.

I82

TROPICAL K I T S C H

13. The concept of imaginary adopted in this book is not restricted to imagery. It should also not be confused with imagination. Rather, it views the latter by means of its effects: the imaginary can be defined as the collective results of the action of imagination when imagination is directed at society. Particularly valued by the fields within history and the social sciences that were structured around the crisis of Marxism, the inclusion of the imaginary among their investigative pursuits not only allowed scholars to study imagery and myths, traditionally attached to the seme of the word; it also allowed them to take into account the attitudes, feelings, and interpretations which, in a given society and for a given time period, enable communication among and the recognition of individuals who belong to that society. The concept of imaginary is fundamental, although with the slight differences pertinent to the field of each of the authors, in the work of Castoriadis and that of various historians of mentalities. In like manner, it has been present in the foundation of English cultural studies, under the rubric "structure of feelings" (Castoriadis; Gruzinski; and Williams). The similarities between the ideas of Williams and Castoriadis, regarding the imaginary, are incorporated into literary critical theory (Rowe 23-64). 14. In an article which was to be interpreted many times, Fredric Jameson ("Third-World") related the literature of the Third World to the advent of postmodernity. The article provoked a response (Ahmad). In a more recent book, Jameson reevaluates the concept of postmodernism, observing that the term confuses the periodization of the postmodern "style" with its characterization {Cultural 3). 15. The concept of the post-Boom began to circulate in the seventies and eighties. The authors themselves, as in the case of Severo Sarduy {Written), defined their works in this way. Antonio Skarmeta ("Al fin") has been more emphatic in his condemnation of the canonization of Boom literature, to which he opposes the literary practices of his own, subsequent generation. In spite of the fact that this discussion is now many years old, recent critical works continue to utilize the concept to define works written beginning in the seventies (Swanson; and Shaw). 16. Critical theory affirms that the conceptual movement was foreshadowed by Latin American art. In reality, the productions of the movement Tucuman Arde and the work of Brazilian artists Hélio Oiticica and Ligia Clark, all considered conceptual artists today, were constructed before the term was in use. In addition to the chronological coincidence, the narratives analyzed here share with the conceptual artists the desire to break away from realism and the "fetishism" of the art object. The priority given to the theoretical discourse, often more important than the work itself, reaffirms the permanence of avant-garde tendencies in conceptual art. I attempt to show that the originality of the authors selected here resides in the mixture of a

NOTES

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

183

"tradition of the old" (in this sense, they reaffirm by antithesis the "tradition of the new" of historic avant-gardes), represented by the use of cliché and kitsch, with an experimental tradition based on permanent rupture from established art. Mari Carmen Ramirez stresses the specifity of conceptual art in Latin America (53), and Lucy Lippard offers a testimony about the Tucumàn Arde movement in Argentina (43, 49, and 59). The concept of "tradition of the new," referring to art of the high modernity of the twentieth century, became widely known in the 1950s (Rosenberg). I agree with Jameson regarding the necessity of taking up anew the textual analysis of literature, which he terms (based on the tradition of German literary criticism) "philological analysis." Following the reasoning of the previous note, however, I do not share the idea that literary works chronologically located in postmodernism have only recently returned to the avant-garde spirit (Jameson, Cultural 93-135). The word curst, used by almost all of the Spanish-American authors studied here in relation to the phenomenon they parody in their works, is the Spanish word with the closest meaning to the German term kitsch. I use kitsch here as a generic term for the bad taste and cliché put forward by the narratives analyzed here. I clarify the differences among the terms kitsch, cursi, and camp in Chapter 3. The principal theoretician that orients my reasoning in this direction is Michel de Certeau. His idea that the practices and habits of the everyday are responses to the microscopic power described by Michel Foucault will be utilized, above all, in the analysis of works that were written beginning in the eighties (Certeau; and Foucault, Discipline). In this sense, the works I analyze here appear as an opposite trend from that of testimonial literature, which is its contemporary. Although the characters in both are those marginalized by the new economic system introduced with consumer society, the way in which they are treated sets the two movements apart. Operating in underemployment, in the lumpensinado, or marginality itself, the characters of media art often find themselves on the margin of citizenship. In the testimonial genre, there is an attempt to promote these marginalized individuals to citizenship, manifested in the alternative classification given to them—subalterns—based on Gramscian thought. The solutions of some of the works I deal with here, however, reach the point of vindicating an anticitizenship. In the conclusions of this book, I clarify the meaning of this option in narrative terms. The theories of the Frankfurt School are taken up by the Latin American left immediately after the crisis provoked by the continent's communist parties' fidelity to Stalinism. Later dissidences, tied to the defeat of those parties' alliances with national bourgeoisies, paved the way for Frankfurt theories to be seen as an alternative to Marxist-Leninist praxis in the field of culture.

184

22.

23.

24. 25.

TROPICAL KITSCH

Although the most utilized part of the theoretical corpus of the German school has been Adornos condemnation of mass culture, Benjamins reading introduces the analysis of reception in this field. I analyze these matters in detail in Chapter 3. Such a model for the interpretation of cultural identity, in this case based on Adornos concept of authentic culture, alternated with the concept of genuine culture created by anthropology in the twenties (see note 3). Allegory is the figure that defines these narratives. Its use suggests yet another opposition to the poetics of their predecessors, works constructed by means of the symbol. Useful for the totalizing project of Boom narratives, the symbol is atomized, in the narratives selected here, into fragments that render totalization difficult. One of the first critics to call attention to this fact was the Brazilian Roberto Schwarz, above all in regard in tropicalism (Misplaced 126-159). On Schwarz, also see notes 27, 28, and 29 of this Introduction. In Chapter 2,1 comment on his theories in detail. I owe this interpretation fundamentally to the theory of Edmond Goblot, which will be explained in Chapter 3. The neobaroque tendency is represented in this book by three authors: Luis Rafael Sánchez, Severo Sarduy, and Haroldo de Campos. The last two theorized on the Baroque. Both grounded their theories on the work of Cuban writer José Lezama Lima. In the fifties, Lezama Lima ( Expresión ) championed the notion that the historical Baroque was a Latin American cultural product. The fact that the Lezamian defense of the Latin American Baroque is rooted in mestizaje indicates that it is still this model which underlies the work of the neobaroque authors. The permanence of mestizaje in the neobaroque model of interpretation can also be observed in the works of the Martinican poet Edouard Glissant and the French historian Serge Gruzinski {Mestizo). In the case of Glissant, the concept of mestizaje is included in the theoretical corpus of the French Caribbean. There, one finds the combination of a rereading of the theories of Franz Fanon with mathematical analyses like chaos theory and the concept of fractals. Glissant s theories are characterized by the privilege of the analysis of language, especially that of orality, with memory as a corollary.

26. As they do not distinguish between conceptual art and pop art, these works end up negating originality, both that of the groups of visual artists that worked in association with the Instituto Torcuato di Telia (on the work of this institute, see note 1 of Chapter 1) and that of Puig himself. I will refer more to this criticism in Chapter 1. 27. The title here has been freely translated, as will happen in the following pages with works that do not have published translations in English. 28. Schwarz extracts this concept from the work of Brazilian literary critic Silvio Romero, a thinker of the nineteenth century, regarding the presence of the

NOTES

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

185

feeling of the copy in Brazilian culture. It is interesting that Silvio Romero (121-123) also uses the word pastiche to designate the presence of the copy in Brazilian culture. I employ the concept of ideologeme following the same thought by Schwarz, who asserts that "the thesis of the cultural copying thus involves an ideology in the Marxist sense of the term—that is, an ¡Illusion supported by appearances" (Misplaced 14). Besides contemplating the thesis of Schwarz, the concept of the ideologeme, established by Medevdev and Bakhtin (Formal) in 1928, seems appropriate because it has a long tradition in critical theory. Julia Kristeva (12) used it to refer to the social and historical accounts of the text, that is, to its intertextuality. Irlemar Chiampi uses the word to mark "the discursive and interdiscursive character of Americanist interpreters" (94) in the study of Latin American literature. I also look back to the origin of the concept in Russian formalism to justify the anticipatory capacity of literature. Medevdev and Bakhtin affirm that literature is produced in the "social laboratory" (17) where ideologies are modeled and formed. Precisely because of this, it is independent from them, and often anticipates the ideologemes present in philosophy and ethics (21-25). In a later book, Bakhtin uses "ideologeme" to designate the "social language" belonging to the novel, in the particular perspective of the subject that speaks in it: "The speaking person in the novel is always, to one degree or another an ideologue, and his words are always ideologemes" {Dialogic 333, italics in the original). Although the Schwarz article may have come after the essay in which Homi Bhabha establishes his concept of mimicry, it is important to underscore that the concept of the copy referred to by the Brazilian thinker goes back to nineteenth-century thought in Brazil. This fact shows that the consciousness of the imitation of colonizing cultures is crucial in the gaining of autonomy by nascent postcolonial cultures. In Latin America, the constant preoccupation about the copy of cultural models deemed more prestigious indicates that cultural autonomy did not accompany the political independence proclaimed in the nineteenth century. This is the case, among others, with the work of Philippe Aries and others (Flandrin). It is interesting to note that these two conflicting tendencies complement each other upon arriving in Latin America. The majority of theories about conceptual art suggest that it was established in opposition to pop art, which was criticized by conceptual artists for remaining faithful to the fetishist cult of the art object. The mixture of the two movements in the set of Latin American art analyzed here shows the heterogeneous nature of the reception of foreign ideas in Latin America. In this sense, Luis Rafael Sanchez's text seems to prefigure recent analyses on bilingualism. Understood by Doris Sommer as one manifestation of the

i8 6

TROPICAL KITSCH

double consciousness typical of individuals exposed to more than one culture, this phenomenon requires, according to that author, a new critical approach. The search for a new rhetoric that might help to comprehend the particularity of this situation, amplified by the mass of contemporary immigrants, leads the analyses of the Latin and North American authors that make up the Sommer book.

• Chapter 1 1. I use here the term created by Pierre Bourdieu (in Spanish, campo intelectual), by which I mean a setting of competitive intellectual relationships specified in the following paragraphs. 2. The Instituto Torcuato di Telia owes its name to its founders, brothers Guido and Torcuato di Telia. Heirs of a powerful Argentine industry, the two created a foundation in the sixties which became the financial lifeblood of the Institute. Of an interdisciplinary nature, its activity during these years consisted of collecting and supporting a variety of proposals of avant-garde art. The attempt to modernize national art and bring it up to date was based on the ideology behind the Institute's development. The Institute, above all, gathered visual artists interested in experimental techniques which included the influences of avant-garde movements active in the United States and Europe. Conceptual happenings were promoted, as well as experiences related to consumption and mass culture, which came forth from contact with pop art (J. King). 3. The CGT, the Confederación General de los Trabajadores, was founded in 1930 as an attempt to unify the principal workers' unions, which were divided between socialist, communist, and purely unionist stances. The power the organization accumulated during the first Peronism (1945-1955), of which it was a fundamental supporter, resurged in the sixties with new characteristics. Recuperating the very ideological dissidence which led to its creation, it became divided following disputes for power among the differing political-ideological factions (Munck). 4. The expression nacional popular, current in the Latin American left during the sixties, indicates the influence of Gramsci. The Italian political theorist created the concept of a national-popular identity as a counterhegemonic one. I will use the expression national-popular in this book also as a designation of the emergent left of that time, which used Gramscian rationale as a foundation of its dissidence to Marxism-Leninism, or to communist parties. 5. The term cabecitas negras (literally, "little black heads") was used to designate the mass of inhabitants from the Argentine interior who immigrated

NOTES

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

187

to the nation's capital, Buenos Aires, in the forties. It referred pejoratively to the color of the skin and hair of these people (for the most part mestizos of indigenous origin), who mostly became factory workers upon arrival. However, the expression was reappropriated by early Peronism, which transformed the cabecitas negras into a pillar of its mythology as a party for the people. In the sixties, although its origin as a politically incorrect term began to be questioned, the term once again recovered its mythic function upon being reevaluated by the national-popular discourse of the Peronist Youth (Juventud Peronista). Although Heartbreak Tango (Boquitas pintadas, or "painted little mouths") was well received by the public and critics alike, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth {La traición de Rita Hayworth) followed a rough trajectory before it was accepted by editors. In reality, the initial reception of the novel, once published, was also not far from all-out rejection. In particular, the magazine Crisis (1973-1976), which catered to an audience that associated anti-imperialism with revolutionary utopia, refused to consider Puig's novels as good literature. Julia Romero (464-465) refers to problems regarding the novel's publication. Silvia I. Cárcamo (138) describes its reception. The original lyrics are included in the Appendix. The analysis of Jorgelina Corbatta must be included among the exceptions. For a specific interpretation of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, see 122-126. Although many critics have dedicated themselves to Puig's use of mass culture and kitsch, they have rarely gone beyond situating the author in a "pop culture" which they do not define. Thus, it is fitting to emphasize an article by Alberto Giordano which elaborates on this concept, integrating Puig's work into the artistic environment in which he was circumscribed. Quotations are taken from both English and Spanish editions, cited as HT and BP, respectively. The U.S. film career of Carlos Gardel began in 1931, with the film Luces de Buenos Aires. His last film was Tango Bar (1935). Le Pera, besides being a coauthor of Gardel's songs, participated in other areas of the films' production as well. For example, Le Pera was responsible for the scenery in El tango en Broadway. Besides the fox-trot "Rubias de New York" Gardel sang two tangos (" Golondrinas" and "Soledad") and an Argentine zamba (" Caminito soleado") in the same film (Eichelbaum 211). Here, as with citations from other works, quotations are taken from both English and Spanish editions. The compadrito was a popular type in Buenos Aires at the beginning of the twentieth century, who found his roots in the legendary gaucho. He embodied the strategies of a man caught between the city and the country. He maintained the peasant gauchos symbols of manliness, such as keeping a knife for defense. His misogyny, also a stereotypical gaucho trait, some-

i88

TROPICAL K I T S C H

times blurred his identity with that of the cafiche, or ruffian. His elegant dress, including a long coat, leggings, and a black hat, was derived from the immigrant of European origin, who shared the periphery of the nascent urban center with those who had recently arrived from the interior. The mix resulted in a sort of dandy of the marginalized periphery. The type created by Carlos Gardel utilized, principally, the dress and dandyism of the compadrito, cleansing the character of his marginal aspects. The word compadrito is a diminutive of compadre, a noun which designates a "gaucho absorbed by the city who maintained his independent attitude in both behavior and dress." The same source lists compadrito as "a young man of the slums who imitated the attitude of the compadres" (Gobelo 6). The definition brings this Argentine type closer to the Marxist category of lumpenprolerariat (i.e., an uncompromised individual, an unemployed, unproductive adventurer). Etymologically, the word comes from the German lumpen (rag, tatter) and Lump (a worthless person, a rogue; crooked). 14. Alicia Borinsky refers to an "artificiality of the lyrics by Le Pera which we cannot avoid when hearing them sung by Carlos Gardel. That tango is the opposite of realism and feeling; its plays on words and tackiness show a consciousness of its own exaggerations. The ironic voice of Gardel, always oblique about what he is singing, raises the level at which the tango contemplates itself, thus complementing the artificiality of Le Peras verses" (Borinsky 38). Martin Kodan refers in passing to the growth of this artificiality in "Carlos Gardel's North American phase" (esp. 313-314). 15. According to Román Gubern, filmmakers in the U.S. elided the sexual act until the reform of censoring codes, in deference to social mores, in 1966. The passionate kisses shown in the foreground were metaphors of the same act which more typically led, in European cinema, "to the creation of a code of expressive metaphors such as the breaking waves of the sea, flowers shaken by the wind, sparks in the fireplace, etc." (Gubern 106-107, esp 107). The same strategy is found in romance novels, as Gubern has described. One might say in both cases that there is a ditournement of erotically neutral symbols since, placed at strategic points of the narrative, they are converted into "signs of unmistakable comprehension by the recipient of the message," as Gubern states (107). 16. This connection is lost in the English translation, by Suzanne Jill Levine. In the case quoted here, the translator substituted the single line chosen by Puig with the four last lines of the same stanza of LePera's lyrics to the tango " Volvió una noche": "Her eyes of blue did open wide,/my timeless grief she understood,/and with a snarl of woman scorned/said life plays tricks and left for good" (from LePera's tango "She Returned One Night," HT170). In other chapters, the translator substitutes the quotations made by Puig with other ones from Hollywood movies of the thirties and forties.

NOTES

189

17. In this essay, Jameson distinguishes parody from pastiche, considering the latter as the characteristic procedure of postmodern authors. According to Jameson, such authors directly incorporate materials of mass culture into their texts. I consider Manuel Puig one of the first Latin American authors to utilize this technique, including "quotations" in his work such as that of verses from boleros. By the same token, there is also distinct parody in his work, such as with diaries and newspaper clippings, since these are texts created by the author himself. 18. I am using here the term narration, created by Gérard Gennete, for defining the act of narrating itself. The latter is opposed in my analysis to the act of describing; moreover, I show here the interaction of these two literary techniques in Heartbreak Tango. 19. Iser affirms that reader-text interpretation inevitably passes through the experience of negativity. Despite its similarity to interpersonal interaction, it lacks the common situation and given frame of reference found in face-toface relationships: the text can never respond to the reader about lacunae generated by reading. Those gaps, inherent to any act of communication, counterbalance the asymmetry of the act of reading. Conceptualizing them in two types—blanks or gaps, and negations—Iser holds these responsible for stimulating the reader's activity. Thanks to these gaps, the reader must continually restructure the relation established between him- or herself and the text, thereby transforming reading into a creative act. In this terminology, the gaps consist of omissions in the text, that which is unsaid. Upon encountering a gap, the reader tends to activate, to create a representation of what was omitted, according to the alternatives available in his/her repertoire. Over the course of a reading, that process generated by one gap overlaps with that of another gap, tracing out a new image. The result is a process of incessant interactions. A horizontal progression of images, this process organizes the syntagmatic axis of the reading, regulating interference between diverse thematic segments. 20. This is the English word used by the translator. In the first edition of the novel, Puig subtitled Boquitas pintadas as a folletín, a Spanish word for feuilleton. For the chapters, he used, in all the editions, the word entregas, a Spanish word that specifically refers to the feuilleton of the nineteenth century (see note 3 of the Introduction). Since folletín can go either way, contemporary Latin American soap opera or newspaper serial, I agree with the translator that the latter can be more effective than other translations. In the critical text by Sarduy discussed in the following paragraph, the Cuban writer also uses folletín to designate the serial narrative he is comparing with Puig's work. 21. This term is used by Sarduy in a post-structuralist sense. Created by Derrida, the idea of supplement in post-structuralist thought means an idea that

190

TROPICAL KITSCH

fills out a gap with a hint previously present in the gap itself. It is interesting to note the similarity of this theoretical tool to the one I mainly use here, which is the theory of reception and reader-response theory (see note 18). 22. Based on the concept of a "culture of the poor" introduced by the North American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, Moffatt subdivides the working class into an upper working class (the "working bourgeoisie") and a lower working class (the "marginalized"). Moffatt, whose Peronism at the end of his analysis is almost propagandist, draws from this reasoning the conclusion that the marginalized stratus is the only true poor. The visibility of its poverty identifies this class in any large city on the planet, and allows the characterization of a "culture of the poor" developed by this group, founded on the pauperization of the everyday. Lewis's concept of a culture of the poor received many criticisms from within anthropology, as it ignored the structural conditions which determine poverty. In the Argentine intellectual sphere, such criticisms have sprung forth, above all, from those who understand the notion as the basis of a populism which revived the Peronism of the seventies. In spite of all this, the penetrating analysis of tango culture which Moffatt has made prompts me to utilize his work as an initial approach. For more on the "culture of the poor," see Lewis. 23. Quotations from the English and Spanish editions will be cited as BR and 77?, respectively 24. It is worth noting that the word suburbio in Spanish means a lower-class or working-class neighborhood. 25. Jorgelina Corbatta (124) clarifies that the newspaper to which Esther refers was called Democracia and had been bought by Perón to counter the attacks of La Nación and La Prensa. This fact attests to Puig's attention to contextual matters in this novel. 26. This theme is developed in (L. Santos, Eva; and Goldchluk). 27. Cf. Bernadin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814): Pablo y Virginia {Paul et Virginie, 1787), a precursor to French Romantic novels; and Jorge Isaacs (18371895): Maria (1867), a costumbrista novel (one which is concentrated on regional customs), built around the theme of love; it gave celebrity to the Colombian author and became one of the Latin American models for the Romantic novel. 28. Quotations from La tajada are taken from these editions. See bibliography.

• Chapter 2 1. It is fitting to recall Gerchman's pioneering work with respect to the utilization of kitsch as an experimental tool. The painting on the cover of the

NOTES

191

Spanish edition of this book, O ret do mau gusto (The King of Bad Taste), is included in his phase of painted reliefs, or "boxes" (caixas) also anticipated the treatment of television by musical tropicalism (Freitas Filho 18). The boxes, in reality, were allegories for the expansion of televisions influence over the Brazilian cultural universe. I make reference to two other paintings by Rubens Gerchman, in Chapter 6. 2. The noun favela designates a typical shrub of the semiarid northeastern region of Brazil, the sertdo. Its semantic displacement to signify a group of poor homes without an infrastructure for sanitation is related to the War of Canudos. Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909), in his book Rebellion in the Backlands (Os sertdes), describes the Hill of the Favela (Morro da Favela) as a geographical accident that dominated the landscape of the town of Canudos (18). The origin of the word is attributed to the grouping constructed by soldiers who returned from the War of Canudos, on one of the hills (morros) of Rio de Janeiro (Nascentes; and Funda^ao). The use of the terms favela and morro by the authors cited here demonstrates their evolution into semantic equivalents, even though the Portuguese morro is only the generic name of the topographical phenomenon on which the first favelas were situated. In the sixties, the term morro was considered more politically correct for describing this type of poor neighborhood. 3. The use of the verb vivenciar, employed repeatedly by Oiticica to characterize the relation of the spectator to his work, indicates the implicit conceptualism of his aesthetic project. 4. The most notable instance is that of playwright Dias Gomes. His move from theater to television, where he became one of the most productive soap-opera writers, is one of the principal themes of his autobiography (Gomes). 5. It must be said that the word popular in Portuguese does not possess the same sense as in English. The sense of the word used here refers to culture; regarding the period of time dealt with in this chapter, popular culture functions in opposition to erudite culture, corresponding to the opposition of low and high culture, in English. 6. This sentiment was related to the international projection achieved by several products of "high culture" in Brazil during the fifties and sixties, such as the architecture of Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, concrete poetry, and even bossa nova, placed on the same level as jazz by international criticism. Contemporary to the underlying Utopia of the sociological model of development, these products reinforced the positive features of the "Brazilian character" which, according to Dante Moreira Leite, have always been the basis of Brazilian nationalism. 7. The original lyrics are included in the Appendix. 8. Reference to Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, recently inaugurated at the time the song " Tropicdlia" was composed.

192

TROPICAL KITSCH

9. 10. 11. 12.

A beach in the town of Salvador. Reference to a musical TV show. The last three lines quote lyrics from Roberto Carlos's songs. Quotation of one of the most popular songs by Chico Buarque, titled "A Banda ("The Band"). 13. It is noted in this commentary how French ideas of mass culture dominated Brazilian critical theory until the eighties. Of particular importance is that fact that, beginning with Guy Debord, the founder of situationism (see note 5 of the Introduction), mass culture appears to be responsible for the robotization of the spectator, who is relegated to an entirely passive role in relation to mass media. These ideas of Debord have recently been revised, in criticism (Apostolidès). 14. Teatro Oficina, a theater group directed by José Celso Martinez Correa in Sao Paulo, represented the tropicalist rupture in the area of theater. Its scenic formulation added the ideas of Brecht to the theater of cruelty of Artaud. Teatro Oficina proposed a "revolutionary theater" in which productions were based on the relationship with the audience—transformed, in most cases, into aggression. Brecht and Artaud were also the basis for the work of the Living Theatre, another model for Correa. This U.S. group, founded in 1947 by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, actively participated in the events of May 1968 in France, which also reverberated with Brazilian tropicalism. It is important to remember that the Living Theatre group was thrown out of Brazil by the military dictatorship, when it visited the country in the seventies, upon the invitation of José Celso Martinez Correa (Arrabal). 15. José Arrabal uses the term agit-prop to define the actions practiced by nationalist-popular theater, to which the tropicalists were opposed. Russian in origin (agitatsiya propaganda), that theatrical technique was created during the Soviet revolution to sensitize the public during times of political crisis. Characterized by improvisation, apt-prop shows were designed to last only as long as it took to stabilize the crisis. This idea was the root of the concept of the "theater of the oppressed" by Augusto Boal, against whom José Celso Martinez Correa rebelled. Until the mid-sixties, Boal enjoyed great popularity among university students due to his activity with Teatro Opiniào (Opinion Theater). The first play of this group, the musical Opiniào (Opinion), outlined in 1965 the aesthetic of protest against the military dictatorship, according to the nationalist-popular sensibility. The act of bringing not only the sambas of the morro, but the sambistas (samba composers) themselves, to a theater located in a middle-class neighborhood served as a powerful example of the alliance between intellectuals and the people in their objective to overcome the military dictatorship. For a more precise definition of the "theater of the oppressed," see Boal. 16. The defense of experience, derived from the concept of vivència in writ-

NOTES

17.

18.

19.

20.

193

ings of Oiticica, demonstrates that the ideas of Marcuse were being read in Brazil. The notion of the body as a vehicle of organized artistic experiences, such as parties or collective rituals, as well as the questioning of authority through the insertion of the spectator into a work itself, partly echo the reaction against massification and the expansion of technology, as disseminated by Marcuse. For a deconstruction of the ideas of counterculture in tropicalism, see Santiago. There is an interesting inversion of that concept, on the other hand, in contemporary conceptions of performance, in which what was precarious and expendable in the sixties has become the only possible authority on the avant-garde. In addition to having been a pioneer in his use of the term postmodern in 1965, Pedrosa rightly observed that the work of Oiticica divided the waters between modern and postmodern art in Brazil. I will further elaborate the relationship of the works dealt with in this book and the concept of postmodernism in Chapter 3. Oiticica refers to the bolides (bolides) as transobjetos (transobjectsj, that is, receiving objects chosen by the artist to achieve that end. Examples might be transparent glass barrels, which came to contain colored pigments, or baskets which were filled with eggs. His definition clarifies not only the difference between the bolides and the ready made objects of Duchamp, but also the conceptual underpinning of his work, since the bolides were sought by the artist with a specific idea already in mind: "the objective form was later found" (Oiticica, Catalogue 67). Bólide-caixa (bolide-box) was the generic name Oiticica gave to such objects when they had the form of a box. The bólides-caixas followed the penetráveis (penetrables), boxes with a door through which the spectator could penetrate the interior space of the object. Tropicdlia was an installation composed of various elements, two of which were penetráveis that were a metaphor of the barracáo of a favela. The Centers for Popular Culture (Centros Populares de Cultura, or CPCs) put into practice the alliance between the people and intellectuals through community centers dedicated to the promotion of "revolutionary popular art." Their administration was shared by committed artists and intellectuals. The CPCs were quite active until 1964, during the national-popular government of Joáo Goulart. They were the first to suffer the repression of the military police during the dictatorship, for bringing together not only popular groups organized into unions, but also intellectuals (Hollanda). One can observe in that author's affirmation that the CPCs conceived art as an instrument for taking power (19) that their position was closer to that of Argentine conceptual art, than to the work of Hélio Oiticica. The term Cannibalism was the name of a facet of Brazilian modernism, a cultural movement begun in 1922. Founded in 1928 by Oswald de Andrade, the Cannibalist branch of the modernist movement was launched

194

TROPICAL K I T S C H

by the Cannibalist Manifesto (Manifesto antropófago) of the same year. It came together in the Revista de antropofagia (1928-1929). Its intention was to turn upside down European interpretations of the cannibalistic practices of the pre-Cabralian inhabitants of Brazil. The Cannibalism of Oswald de Andrade, in contrast to those European interpretations, had a positive connotation. It called for the recuperation of the tupi (general name of the native inhabitants) roots of Brazilian civilization, through the swallowing of foreign influences. With these, appropriately digested after mixture with the tupi roots, it would be possible to form a third type of cultural product, original and uniquely Brazilian, that was fruit of the mixture of the local and the foreign. The tropicalists made a rereading of this digestive metaphor, updating it to broaden the foreign influences beyond products of European high culture, and to include the "spurious" products of mass culture, especially that of the U.S. 21. Carlos Marighella, a dissident of the Brazilian Communist Party, founded the Action for National Liberation (A