Exchange: Lemus vs. Faverón
A few months ago, two of the most insightful critics and writers in the Spanish speaking world, Mexico's Rafael Lemus and Peru's Gustavo Faverón, exchanged emails on the state of literary criticism today, the "Latin American literature" produced and marketed by Spanish publishers, and the opportunities and risks of discussing Hispanic culture while living abroad. Read their correspondence here.
From: Rafael Lemus
January 7, 2014
Hi, Gustavo.
Here we are: two literary critics called upon to discuss literary criticism. Not literature or certain authors or certain works but –redundantly– literary criticism. If I’m not mistaken, more and more often we’re asked to speak less about the work of others and more to meditate on what we do. As if we had to explain ourselves. As if we had to justify ourselves. As if, once it’s been accepted that literary criticism is in crisis, we were afforded one last chance to prove ourselves. (Look: they don’t sell anything, they don’t write novels, they barely smile!)
But, is literary criticism really in crisis? I’m afraid that in order to answer that question, we’d have to begin by defining literary criticism, and at this point there’s no way we’ll reach a convincing definition. Before literary criticism, there are critical operations that take place in different sites: books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, academic publications, social networks. Before critics, there are subjects that write –constantly or intermittently– about literary matters: academics, writers, journalists, bloggers, twitter users who discuss books or talk in real time about what they’re reading. Before a manner of practicing criticism, there’s a battery of procedures and perspectives, often at odds with each other. Today literary criticism is all that –that vibrant and disorganized sum of subjects and spaces and knowledges– and I’m glad that is the case: better that than the tidy guilds which attempted to read correctly and on their own.
The truth is, I don’t see any kind of crisis in this setting. Almost the opposite: the space of literary discussion has expanded and new voices now participate –with more or less potency, with more or less impact– in a debate which, on the other hand, always occurs in tension with the mechanisms of publicity and recognition of the market. What’s really in crisis, I think, is a kind of literary critic: one who dwelled almost exclusively in supplements and cultural magazines and attempted to regulate the literary discussion of his national camp from there. Today that critic is a dying animal. To begin with, he’s losing his dwelling: cultural supplements disappear and cultural magazines grow thinner. The framework within which he worked has also been breached: that notion of national literature in which he performed a specific function. Even the object he deals with –literature– has been beaten down by critical theory and cultural studies and has been displaced from the center of culture. Even worse: that critic can no longer claim any kind of authority, any epistemological privilege, and his cultural capital has become devalued. Anyway: this is getting too long and I’m interested in knowing what you think.
* * *
From: Gustavo Faverón
January 7, 2014
Hi, Rafael.
The issue is we’ve wanted to see the work of the literary critic as an eternal thing, which has existed since always, when in reality the professional critic is a modern character, perhaps fleeting and maybe dying, much more temporary than criticism as an intellectual operation, which exists before him and will exist after him.
The kind of criticism which is now starting to disappear is linked to social forms which, as you say, are vanishing in our time. The arbitrating and canonizing critic, who was always the least interesting, is the one falling apart today, overrun by exercises which tend to place literature in a higher field (that of culture in general) instead of defending the borders of the literary before the onslaught of other forms of production and other ways of reading.
It’s interesting that the destruction of the modern-traditional critic’s task comes both from the field where he sought support (academia) as well as from the field he feared (the overflow of popular opinion, of the non-initiated opinion). On one hand, theorists and critics –especially English Marxists– who halfway through the XX century established the foundations for cultural studies and, on the other hand, the reader-communicator of the XXI century, who reads and responds to his readings through electronic media (blogs, social networks, etc.), eat away at that critic’s territory but broaden that of criticism. Both are noteworthy developments and both have a democratizing inclination.
In this whole process, I must say, however, there is also a fearsome element, which you mention and about which I need to note something. It’s the market itself, which has no interest in preserving criticism, and which has, more so, a particular interest in abolishing it. And I don’t mean it wants to abolish the newspapers’, magazines’, and academia’s institutional criticism (the latter could in fact still be used by it), but rather that it’s interested in abolishing criticism as an intellectual operation in general. The market tends to value volume over the symbolic quality of the commodity, and it doesn’t care to sell one thing over another. A market that moves from selling one hundred thousand noteworthy novels to a million self-help manuals is a healthy market according to its own criteria, and the necessary and sufficient condition for that banal success is the weakening of critical operations.
If the best part of the contemporary media-literary revolution is that the mechanic arbitrage and canonization which were linked to the modern-traditional critic’s sanctification of the word disappear (a critic frequently laden with prejudices and reactionary towards change), the very practices of arbitrage and canonization, however, still exist, except they’re now directly in the hands of editors, agents, promoters and publicists, whose criteria are even more suspicious than those of any critic emitting judgments from op-ed pieces. Today, a writer can access fame and success before his first book is read, if it’s preceded by the right campaign, and that implies the mobilization and construction of prejudices –operations which precede reading– which take over and asphyxiate judgment –an operation which necessarily follows reading–. The cannon is being replaced by the bestseller table at the front of bookstores of the display case featuring new releases (or should I say: the landing page of portals such as Amazon), and all that is created, above all, with commercial criteria. It would interest me to know what you think of this matter.
* * *
From: Rafael Lemus
January 9, 2014
Gustavo,
It’s true: one always ends up running into the damn issue of the market. There simply is no way of thinking about literature today without paying attention to the voracious commercial field in which it is inscribed. In fact, I believe that any reflection about contemporary cultural production must have one starting point: the neoliberal turn, which begins around the seventies in Chile and which has, by the nineties, changed the socioeconomic configuration of the planet and, while at it, the space and function of culture.
I’m particularly interested in the effects which that neoliberal crusade had –and has– on the Spanish American literary circuit. It is known: in the nineties the Spanish publishing corporations expand to Latin America. It is also known: a constellation of devices (awards, contests, festivals, anthologies, magazines) whose objective is to publicize and consecrate the authors these companies sell is created around those corporations. What is seldom told is that the Spanish publishing industry, in addition to merchandizing a series of Latin American writers, produces a certain “Latin American literature”. That is to say: not only do they sell “that which is Latin American”, they also produce it. They create a “Latin Americanism” which, instead of bragging once again about its exotic “identity”, now boasts about its cosmopolitanism, its fit with global times, its docile insertion in the international book market. To oppose those devices, to disarm that Latin-American-literature-made-in-Spain, to contribute to shine on other circuits: these are some of the critical operations that matter to me.
You say that the arbitrage and canonization practices are today in the hands of editors, agents, promoters, publicists. I agree and I don’t: it’s true that all of them intervene and insist on placing their authors, but it’s also true they face the resistance of many other actors –critics, academics, independent editors, web surfers, readers– who pay attention to other kinds of writing. An example: the criteria of the Spanish cultural industry don’t always apply inside each Latin American country, where other interests are at work, different agents exist and other cannons are formed. Proof of this are the cases of authors popular in the Iberian American market who –despite or perhaps because of all the publicity they receive– don’t enjoy of much critical acclaim in their countries of origin. Well, this is a battlefield and, despite the advances of the market, all is not lost.
You spoke about academia. Besides practicing “journalistic criticism” on your blog and in Peruvian media, you are a professor at a university in Maine. How do both tasks coexist? How does that double affiliation work –belonging to the Peruvian cultural field and to American academia? I ask you because your case is starting to be that of many others and because in some places, as in the Mexican literary world, there is a strong resistance against academia –even more so American academia–, not to speak of an extended phobia of “theory”.
* * *
From: Gustavo Faverón
January 18, 2014
Dear Rafael,
The Peruvian cultural field is weak and phantasmagoric. I know that things such as the gradual vanishing of cultural sections or book review pages are part of a phenomenon taking place almost anywhere in Latin America, but I really think the Peruvian case is extreme. Some scary facts: in Peru there are only two newspapers which still have weekly columns for reviews. One column in each paper, that is, two permanent columns of journalistic literary criticism which, added, don’t reach one thousand words per week. Only one newspaper has kept its cultural section, although it’s been progressively becoming a supplement of banalities, where gastronomy can perfectly well take up more space than the discussion of books, authors, or artists. On TV there is only one show dedicated to literature and, on the radio, maybe a couple. On the other hand, the disconnect between the public sphere and the knowledge produced by the academy has transitioned from being a ravine or gorge to being a canyon, a deep and wide precipice with edges so far from the ones across that the latter are not visible. In any case, I feel my position is that of an extraterrestrial observer: my spaceship just landed and I’m in no-one’s land where I sometimes see without being seen and am sometimes seen without seeing. That’s a very particular position because, on one hand, I am a journalist and write op-eds, almost always on political issues, on Peruvian media; I am also a novelist who was first a critic for many years and that makes me a platypus in the national literary fauna; I’m an academic, which in Peru sounds exotic and often grants one a priori a reputation of being gruff and elitist; and, to make things worse, as you point out, I live abroad, and that makes others see me as a kind of man without a country who doesn’t have much right to give his opinion about what happens inside a country which, apparently, I can’t have left for any other reason than disregard, resentment, frustration, the simplest of hatreds or the most abundant arrogance.
I have discovered, however, as surely many Latin American writers living outside their countries and forming part of a foreign academy –such as the American– have, that all that strangeness, by multiplying itself, ends up forming a new normalcy: little by little I learn how to orbit around the Peruvian and the Latin American, to look at it from the inside and from the outside, to see it with a new gaze, perhaps more panoramic, and learn, too, to elaborate my own vision of that world, one made with pieces of the things I’ve learned outside and the things I’ve lived inside those borders. Of course, part of that learning implies the recognition that what one learns outside tends to be in conflict with experience, and that sometimes trying to understand Latin America from what is studied in the United States or Europe is like walking down the streets of your town without raising your head, with your eyes fixed on a map drawn by a foreigner who once went through it, a long time ago. My way of counteracting that possible hindrance is to stay in touch with what is produced, at a critical level and, as far as I can, at a theoretical level, inside the region. Sometimes, in fact, I have the feeling that my contact with Latin American criticism is more frequent and natural that that of other writer colleagues who are in Latin America but who often live with their backs to the intellectual production in the region.
Because the main obstacle, I think, the most serious problem which must be overcome when wanting to “return” to what is Latin American after having been part of the foreign academic world, is the de-intellectualization of the literary sphere in the country of origin, and that must be a repeated phenomenon for other Latin Americans in other countries. One finds that the task of writers is no longer reflection, but rather a kind of writerly exercise which fears being confused with an intellectual practice. As if writers, suddenly, would rather be identified with jet-set stars than with class nerds, and had cultivated a rejection towards that confusion: “Intellectual, me? No, I am a writer, an intuitive being who transforms sensations into words without the intervention of my judgment; my work travels directly from my nerve endings to the page without crossing ideological filters and much less theories or philosophical elaborations.” In the world following the neoliberal turn you mentioned, Rafael, the writer seems to have defined his role by pushing it outside the intellectual sphere (a radical transformation in relation to the tradition of the Latin American intellectual, of course), among other reasons because intellectualism is not one of the goods most valued by the market, and is sometimes a stain.
To go along with that, one doesn’t have to have gone through exile or self-deportation in order to fall into that hole: I’m sure you have many things to say about the way in which the literary sphere has reduced, shrunken and ignored the role of critics in the past two decades. Half a century ago, the emergence of the Boom was accompanied by the visible work of several relevant critics (Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Ángel Rama, José Miguel Oviedo, Roberto Fernández Retamar, to mention a few), who seemed to go hand in hand with the novelists, consecrating them but also judging them, such that the dialogue between critic and creator was an inalienable part of the literary process. That pairing (I was going to say bipolarity, but I’d rather not) seems to have now disappeared. Or am I being too apocalyptic?
* * *
From: Rafael Lemus
January 30, 2014
Dear Gustavo:
If the Peruvian cultural field is ambiguous and phantasmagoric, the Mexican one is obvious and heavy. There it is: a bunch of stuff and spaces and groups and institutions more or less administered by the State. It’s the cultural apparatus which proposes and finally decides: not only does it fund and sponsor; let’s say it also publishes the terms (for scholarships, contests, events, festivals, publications) which define the calendar, the cycles, the cultural life in Mexico. Of course it’s no surprise that for some years now the cultural discussion in the country has become more solemn and officious, focused as it is on handing out the booty and commemorating itself under any pretext and only seldom shaken up by a scuffle which blows up on social networks and dies down on social networks leaving everything just as it was.
It’s true that there, in that field, there also prevails a kind of shameless anti-intellectualism. You just have to pop your head in: hoards of narrators who, unconcerned with just about anything, wander in search of their “voice”; bands of essayists allergic to theory and addicted to the “literary” essay; critics who boast about criticizing book by book, in an impressionistic manner, supposedly at the margin of any theoretical paradigm. I also think this is a consequence, in part, of the neoliberal turn. It happens that the end of history was suddenly announced, the end to ideological antagonisms, and many novelists bought into the idea and, convinced since then that there is nothing important to discuss, limit themselves to putting together some entertainment. It also happens that literary writing, previously homeless in Latin American societies and therefore connected with diverse fields and issues, found a place in the neoliberal economy, right next to the entertainment industry, and it is from there that novel after novel is produced mechanically.
You probably know that in a place like this, with its own weighty logic and its proud anti-intellectualism, the academy is not nor could it be very popular, and even less the American academy, and least of all the American academy which favors critical theory or cultural studies. Even so it’s more and more of us who come here, or end up here, in some American university, and from here we keep participating in the discussion on culture taking place over there. Who knows if this will have any relevant effects on the discussion of culture in Mexico in the long run. As of now, it’s produced some disagreements in the cultural sphere and has spiked the anxiety of some rusty intellectual groups, suddenly obsessed with polishing their canon, indulge in their references and maintain the debate in the (liberal humanist, let’s say) terms which work in their favor.
It’s Wednesday and it’s already night and I’m repeating myself.
Hugs.
* * *
From: Gustavo Faverón
March 12, 2014
Dear Rafael,
I apologize for the delay getting back to you. During these last days I found myself going over –without ever having set out to do so– the chapter in Mariátegui’s 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana that talks about what he called “the process of literature”.
It’s incredible to come across this book written in haste and in one sitting by a very sick man who was soon to die, a book written urgently, which covers so many different topics, from ideological to social and from economic to political, educational and cultural, and not only find in it an avant-garde take on the literature of past decades, the first three of the XX century, and also of his own time, but also, additionally, pages which foresee how the literature of future decades would or should be.
Mariátegui, for example, talks about the indigenous issue and the miscegenation in the poetry of Vallejo, and celebrates his boldness and his ability to penetrate the complex fabric of Andean culture, but he does other things which are more impressive than the exercise, incredible as it is, of understanding Vallejo in the twenties. The passage which most moves me (and I can say it is undoubtedly that: pure poignancy and emotion) is one in which, quickly and without further ado, without getting embroiled in formal flourishes or infinite theoretical games, after going over indigenista literature and the novela de la tierra, Mariátegui predicts the advent of a modern indigenous literature, written from within the Andean world but also tied to a new modernity, not reluctant to engage in avant-garde experimentation and innovation, but capable of seeking in it a voice to express the link between indigenous tradition and its present and future.
One reads those pages and feels the power of the critic, who is thinking, undoubtedly, about the novels and stories of José María Arguedas. But at that point Arguedas is just a teenager and is still a decade shy from publishing his first book. Of course, romantically, one can fall in the trap of thinking of Mariátegui as a wizard or magician or fortune teller before a crystal ball.
Less romantically, one can imagine Arguedas, a brainy student of the humanities, sociology and anthropology, in the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, years after Mariátegui’s death, reading his 7 ensayos and discovering in it a calling and a guiding light. Arguedas, in fact, halfway through the thirties would found a magazine called Palabra, one of the first Latin American literary publications which took Mariátegui seriously not only as a social and political theorist but also as a literary one. Reading Mariátegui transformed Arguedas into Arguedas: in the 7 ensayos, Arguedas saw the road he had to travel and the future shadow of the books he had to write, and from there came Los ríos profundos and Todas las sangres, the controversy with Cortázar and the infinite and silent controversy with Vargas Llosa, who drew the contours of decades of Peruvian literature and continues to do so.
That was once the power of criticism and literary theory in Latin America. That’s what we no longer have. That’s what we have to recover. Is it a dream? Probably. And maybe because of that it’s so much better than our current reality.
Big hug,
Gustavo
Previous entries:
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
[Ignacio Echeverría vs. Damián Tabarovksy]
[Tryno Maldonado vs. Álvaro Bisama]
[Emiliano Monge vs. Juan Cárdenas]
[Emilio Fraia vs. Antônio Xerxenesky]
From: Rafael Lemus
January 7, 2014
Hi, Gustavo.
Here we are: two literary critics called upon to discuss literary criticism. Not literature or certain authors or certain works but –redundantly– literary criticism. If I’m not mistaken, more and more often we’re asked to speak less about the work of others and more to meditate on what we do. As if we had to explain ourselves. As if we had to justify ourselves. As if, once it’s been accepted that literary criticism is in crisis, we were afforded one last chance to prove ourselves. (Look: they don’t sell anything, they don’t write novels, they barely smile!)
But, is literary criticism really in crisis? I’m afraid that in order to answer that question, we’d have to begin by defining literary criticism, and at this point there’s no way we’ll reach a convincing definition. Before literary criticism, there are critical operations that take place in different sites: books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, academic publications, social networks. Before critics, there are subjects that write –constantly or intermittently– about literary matters: academics, writers, journalists, bloggers, twitter users who discuss books or talk in real time about what they’re reading. Before a manner of practicing criticism, there’s a battery of procedures and perspectives, often at odds with each other. Today literary criticism is all that –that vibrant and disorganized sum of subjects and spaces and knowledges– and I’m glad that is the case: better that than the tidy guilds which attempted to read correctly and on their own.
The truth is, I don’t see any kind of crisis in this setting. Almost the opposite: the space of literary discussion has expanded and new voices now participate –with more or less potency, with more or less impact– in a debate which, on the other hand, always occurs in tension with the mechanisms of publicity and recognition of the market. What’s really in crisis, I think, is a kind of literary critic: one who dwelled almost exclusively in supplements and cultural magazines and attempted to regulate the literary discussion of his national camp from there. Today that critic is a dying animal. To begin with, he’s losing his dwelling: cultural supplements disappear and cultural magazines grow thinner. The framework within which he worked has also been breached: that notion of national literature in which he performed a specific function. Even the object he deals with –literature– has been beaten down by critical theory and cultural studies and has been displaced from the center of culture. Even worse: that critic can no longer claim any kind of authority, any epistemological privilege, and his cultural capital has become devalued. Anyway: this is getting too long and I’m interested in knowing what you think.
* * *
From: Gustavo Faverón
January 7, 2014
Hi, Rafael.
The issue is we’ve wanted to see the work of the literary critic as an eternal thing, which has existed since always, when in reality the professional critic is a modern character, perhaps fleeting and maybe dying, much more temporary than criticism as an intellectual operation, which exists before him and will exist after him.
The kind of criticism which is now starting to disappear is linked to social forms which, as you say, are vanishing in our time. The arbitrating and canonizing critic, who was always the least interesting, is the one falling apart today, overrun by exercises which tend to place literature in a higher field (that of culture in general) instead of defending the borders of the literary before the onslaught of other forms of production and other ways of reading.
It’s interesting that the destruction of the modern-traditional critic’s task comes both from the field where he sought support (academia) as well as from the field he feared (the overflow of popular opinion, of the non-initiated opinion). On one hand, theorists and critics –especially English Marxists– who halfway through the XX century established the foundations for cultural studies and, on the other hand, the reader-communicator of the XXI century, who reads and responds to his readings through electronic media (blogs, social networks, etc.), eat away at that critic’s territory but broaden that of criticism. Both are noteworthy developments and both have a democratizing inclination.
In this whole process, I must say, however, there is also a fearsome element, which you mention and about which I need to note something. It’s the market itself, which has no interest in preserving criticism, and which has, more so, a particular interest in abolishing it. And I don’t mean it wants to abolish the newspapers’, magazines’, and academia’s institutional criticism (the latter could in fact still be used by it), but rather that it’s interested in abolishing criticism as an intellectual operation in general. The market tends to value volume over the symbolic quality of the commodity, and it doesn’t care to sell one thing over another. A market that moves from selling one hundred thousand noteworthy novels to a million self-help manuals is a healthy market according to its own criteria, and the necessary and sufficient condition for that banal success is the weakening of critical operations.
If the best part of the contemporary media-literary revolution is that the mechanic arbitrage and canonization which were linked to the modern-traditional critic’s sanctification of the word disappear (a critic frequently laden with prejudices and reactionary towards change), the very practices of arbitrage and canonization, however, still exist, except they’re now directly in the hands of editors, agents, promoters and publicists, whose criteria are even more suspicious than those of any critic emitting judgments from op-ed pieces. Today, a writer can access fame and success before his first book is read, if it’s preceded by the right campaign, and that implies the mobilization and construction of prejudices –operations which precede reading– which take over and asphyxiate judgment –an operation which necessarily follows reading–. The cannon is being replaced by the bestseller table at the front of bookstores of the display case featuring new releases (or should I say: the landing page of portals such as Amazon), and all that is created, above all, with commercial criteria. It would interest me to know what you think of this matter.
* * *
From: Rafael Lemus
January 9, 2014
Gustavo,
It’s true: one always ends up running into the damn issue of the market. There simply is no way of thinking about literature today without paying attention to the voracious commercial field in which it is inscribed. In fact, I believe that any reflection about contemporary cultural production must have one starting point: the neoliberal turn, which begins around the seventies in Chile and which has, by the nineties, changed the socioeconomic configuration of the planet and, while at it, the space and function of culture.
I’m particularly interested in the effects which that neoliberal crusade had –and has– on the Spanish American literary circuit. It is known: in the nineties the Spanish publishing corporations expand to Latin America. It is also known: a constellation of devices (awards, contests, festivals, anthologies, magazines) whose objective is to publicize and consecrate the authors these companies sell is created around those corporations. What is seldom told is that the Spanish publishing industry, in addition to merchandizing a series of Latin American writers, produces a certain “Latin American literature”. That is to say: not only do they sell “that which is Latin American”, they also produce it. They create a “Latin Americanism” which, instead of bragging once again about its exotic “identity”, now boasts about its cosmopolitanism, its fit with global times, its docile insertion in the international book market. To oppose those devices, to disarm that Latin-American-literature-made-in-Spain, to contribute to shine on other circuits: these are some of the critical operations that matter to me.
You say that the arbitrage and canonization practices are today in the hands of editors, agents, promoters, publicists. I agree and I don’t: it’s true that all of them intervene and insist on placing their authors, but it’s also true they face the resistance of many other actors –critics, academics, independent editors, web surfers, readers– who pay attention to other kinds of writing. An example: the criteria of the Spanish cultural industry don’t always apply inside each Latin American country, where other interests are at work, different agents exist and other cannons are formed. Proof of this are the cases of authors popular in the Iberian American market who –despite or perhaps because of all the publicity they receive– don’t enjoy of much critical acclaim in their countries of origin. Well, this is a battlefield and, despite the advances of the market, all is not lost.
You spoke about academia. Besides practicing “journalistic criticism” on your blog and in Peruvian media, you are a professor at a university in Maine. How do both tasks coexist? How does that double affiliation work –belonging to the Peruvian cultural field and to American academia? I ask you because your case is starting to be that of many others and because in some places, as in the Mexican literary world, there is a strong resistance against academia –even more so American academia–, not to speak of an extended phobia of “theory”.
* * *
From: Gustavo Faverón
January 18, 2014
Dear Rafael,
The Peruvian cultural field is weak and phantasmagoric. I know that things such as the gradual vanishing of cultural sections or book review pages are part of a phenomenon taking place almost anywhere in Latin America, but I really think the Peruvian case is extreme. Some scary facts: in Peru there are only two newspapers which still have weekly columns for reviews. One column in each paper, that is, two permanent columns of journalistic literary criticism which, added, don’t reach one thousand words per week. Only one newspaper has kept its cultural section, although it’s been progressively becoming a supplement of banalities, where gastronomy can perfectly well take up more space than the discussion of books, authors, or artists. On TV there is only one show dedicated to literature and, on the radio, maybe a couple. On the other hand, the disconnect between the public sphere and the knowledge produced by the academy has transitioned from being a ravine or gorge to being a canyon, a deep and wide precipice with edges so far from the ones across that the latter are not visible. In any case, I feel my position is that of an extraterrestrial observer: my spaceship just landed and I’m in no-one’s land where I sometimes see without being seen and am sometimes seen without seeing. That’s a very particular position because, on one hand, I am a journalist and write op-eds, almost always on political issues, on Peruvian media; I am also a novelist who was first a critic for many years and that makes me a platypus in the national literary fauna; I’m an academic, which in Peru sounds exotic and often grants one a priori a reputation of being gruff and elitist; and, to make things worse, as you point out, I live abroad, and that makes others see me as a kind of man without a country who doesn’t have much right to give his opinion about what happens inside a country which, apparently, I can’t have left for any other reason than disregard, resentment, frustration, the simplest of hatreds or the most abundant arrogance.
I have discovered, however, as surely many Latin American writers living outside their countries and forming part of a foreign academy –such as the American– have, that all that strangeness, by multiplying itself, ends up forming a new normalcy: little by little I learn how to orbit around the Peruvian and the Latin American, to look at it from the inside and from the outside, to see it with a new gaze, perhaps more panoramic, and learn, too, to elaborate my own vision of that world, one made with pieces of the things I’ve learned outside and the things I’ve lived inside those borders. Of course, part of that learning implies the recognition that what one learns outside tends to be in conflict with experience, and that sometimes trying to understand Latin America from what is studied in the United States or Europe is like walking down the streets of your town without raising your head, with your eyes fixed on a map drawn by a foreigner who once went through it, a long time ago. My way of counteracting that possible hindrance is to stay in touch with what is produced, at a critical level and, as far as I can, at a theoretical level, inside the region. Sometimes, in fact, I have the feeling that my contact with Latin American criticism is more frequent and natural that that of other writer colleagues who are in Latin America but who often live with their backs to the intellectual production in the region.
Because the main obstacle, I think, the most serious problem which must be overcome when wanting to “return” to what is Latin American after having been part of the foreign academic world, is the de-intellectualization of the literary sphere in the country of origin, and that must be a repeated phenomenon for other Latin Americans in other countries. One finds that the task of writers is no longer reflection, but rather a kind of writerly exercise which fears being confused with an intellectual practice. As if writers, suddenly, would rather be identified with jet-set stars than with class nerds, and had cultivated a rejection towards that confusion: “Intellectual, me? No, I am a writer, an intuitive being who transforms sensations into words without the intervention of my judgment; my work travels directly from my nerve endings to the page without crossing ideological filters and much less theories or philosophical elaborations.” In the world following the neoliberal turn you mentioned, Rafael, the writer seems to have defined his role by pushing it outside the intellectual sphere (a radical transformation in relation to the tradition of the Latin American intellectual, of course), among other reasons because intellectualism is not one of the goods most valued by the market, and is sometimes a stain.
To go along with that, one doesn’t have to have gone through exile or self-deportation in order to fall into that hole: I’m sure you have many things to say about the way in which the literary sphere has reduced, shrunken and ignored the role of critics in the past two decades. Half a century ago, the emergence of the Boom was accompanied by the visible work of several relevant critics (Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Ángel Rama, José Miguel Oviedo, Roberto Fernández Retamar, to mention a few), who seemed to go hand in hand with the novelists, consecrating them but also judging them, such that the dialogue between critic and creator was an inalienable part of the literary process. That pairing (I was going to say bipolarity, but I’d rather not) seems to have now disappeared. Or am I being too apocalyptic?
* * *
From: Rafael Lemus
January 30, 2014
Dear Gustavo:
If the Peruvian cultural field is ambiguous and phantasmagoric, the Mexican one is obvious and heavy. There it is: a bunch of stuff and spaces and groups and institutions more or less administered by the State. It’s the cultural apparatus which proposes and finally decides: not only does it fund and sponsor; let’s say it also publishes the terms (for scholarships, contests, events, festivals, publications) which define the calendar, the cycles, the cultural life in Mexico. Of course it’s no surprise that for some years now the cultural discussion in the country has become more solemn and officious, focused as it is on handing out the booty and commemorating itself under any pretext and only seldom shaken up by a scuffle which blows up on social networks and dies down on social networks leaving everything just as it was.
It’s true that there, in that field, there also prevails a kind of shameless anti-intellectualism. You just have to pop your head in: hoards of narrators who, unconcerned with just about anything, wander in search of their “voice”; bands of essayists allergic to theory and addicted to the “literary” essay; critics who boast about criticizing book by book, in an impressionistic manner, supposedly at the margin of any theoretical paradigm. I also think this is a consequence, in part, of the neoliberal turn. It happens that the end of history was suddenly announced, the end to ideological antagonisms, and many novelists bought into the idea and, convinced since then that there is nothing important to discuss, limit themselves to putting together some entertainment. It also happens that literary writing, previously homeless in Latin American societies and therefore connected with diverse fields and issues, found a place in the neoliberal economy, right next to the entertainment industry, and it is from there that novel after novel is produced mechanically.
You probably know that in a place like this, with its own weighty logic and its proud anti-intellectualism, the academy is not nor could it be very popular, and even less the American academy, and least of all the American academy which favors critical theory or cultural studies. Even so it’s more and more of us who come here, or end up here, in some American university, and from here we keep participating in the discussion on culture taking place over there. Who knows if this will have any relevant effects on the discussion of culture in Mexico in the long run. As of now, it’s produced some disagreements in the cultural sphere and has spiked the anxiety of some rusty intellectual groups, suddenly obsessed with polishing their canon, indulge in their references and maintain the debate in the (liberal humanist, let’s say) terms which work in their favor.
It’s Wednesday and it’s already night and I’m repeating myself.
Hugs.
* * *
From: Gustavo Faverón
March 12, 2014
Dear Rafael,
I apologize for the delay getting back to you. During these last days I found myself going over –without ever having set out to do so– the chapter in Mariátegui’s 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana that talks about what he called “the process of literature”.
It’s incredible to come across this book written in haste and in one sitting by a very sick man who was soon to die, a book written urgently, which covers so many different topics, from ideological to social and from economic to political, educational and cultural, and not only find in it an avant-garde take on the literature of past decades, the first three of the XX century, and also of his own time, but also, additionally, pages which foresee how the literature of future decades would or should be.
Mariátegui, for example, talks about the indigenous issue and the miscegenation in the poetry of Vallejo, and celebrates his boldness and his ability to penetrate the complex fabric of Andean culture, but he does other things which are more impressive than the exercise, incredible as it is, of understanding Vallejo in the twenties. The passage which most moves me (and I can say it is undoubtedly that: pure poignancy and emotion) is one in which, quickly and without further ado, without getting embroiled in formal flourishes or infinite theoretical games, after going over indigenista literature and the novela de la tierra, Mariátegui predicts the advent of a modern indigenous literature, written from within the Andean world but also tied to a new modernity, not reluctant to engage in avant-garde experimentation and innovation, but capable of seeking in it a voice to express the link between indigenous tradition and its present and future.
One reads those pages and feels the power of the critic, who is thinking, undoubtedly, about the novels and stories of José María Arguedas. But at that point Arguedas is just a teenager and is still a decade shy from publishing his first book. Of course, romantically, one can fall in the trap of thinking of Mariátegui as a wizard or magician or fortune teller before a crystal ball.
Less romantically, one can imagine Arguedas, a brainy student of the humanities, sociology and anthropology, in the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, years after Mariátegui’s death, reading his 7 ensayos and discovering in it a calling and a guiding light. Arguedas, in fact, halfway through the thirties would found a magazine called Palabra, one of the first Latin American literary publications which took Mariátegui seriously not only as a social and political theorist but also as a literary one. Reading Mariátegui transformed Arguedas into Arguedas: in the 7 ensayos, Arguedas saw the road he had to travel and the future shadow of the books he had to write, and from there came Los ríos profundos and Todas las sangres, the controversy with Cortázar and the infinite and silent controversy with Vargas Llosa, who drew the contours of decades of Peruvian literature and continues to do so.
That was once the power of criticism and literary theory in Latin America. That’s what we no longer have. That’s what we have to recover. Is it a dream? Probably. And maybe because of that it’s so much better than our current reality.
Big hug,
Gustavo
Previous entries:
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
[Ignacio Echeverría vs. Damián Tabarovksy]
[Tryno Maldonado vs. Álvaro Bisama]
[Emiliano Monge vs. Juan Cárdenas]
[Emilio Fraia vs. Antônio Xerxenesky]
