Postcolonial Latin America and the Magic Realist Imperative: A Report to an Academy
SYLVIA MOLLOY
The first part of my title refers to the discomfort of many Latin American intellectuals when faced with a postcolonial “model” into which they feel they are expected to fit; a model whose terms have been formulated from, and in reference to, a “center” whose interventions, however well intentioned, continue to be seen as imperialistic and/or simplistic. This is a postcolonialism with which modern Latin American intellectuals and scholars have, at best, a mediated relation, one necessitating multiple reformulations and translations. Furthermore, this is a postcolonialism the nature of which very much depends on its site of enunciation, a postcolonialism that is constituted by shifting perspectives. In other words, it is a postcolonialism that formulated “over here” (and by this I mean the U.S. academy), signifies one thing while “over there” (in Latin America, itself a site of multiple enunciations), it signifies something quite different; or, better said, signifies many different things.
As a Latin American studying in France back in the early 1960s (I should say as an Argentine, therefore a Latin American: these things happen in two stages), I received a fairly traditional training in comparative literature. When the time came to write my dissertation, I gravitated toward an adviser and was practically assigned a dissertation topic: I was from Latin America, I would therefore write on the reception of Latin American literature in France, a project I remember my adviser describing as “immensely useful,” although it was unclear who or what (myself, my reader, the discipline?) would benefit from my compilation, conclusions and, mainly, my conjectures. I protested I knew very little Latin American literature, having trained in French, and was curtly told: “Vous l’apprendrez.” Even then, I knew I was being assigned the role of the native informant, a role I have been asked to play more than once since then, a role many scholars from other countries working in the United States no doubt find familiar.
What certainly was “immensely useful” to me was to study certain preconceived French notions of what Latin American literature “should” be. In other words, I noted early on how, even as Latin American literature became available in France, it was already spoken for. Thus for example Jean Cassou, as early as 1900, regretted that Rubén Darío had opted for what he, Cassou, considered derivative symbolism, instead of writing about what he termed, with considerable geographical license, “ce dont nous rêvons, sa forêt et sa pampa natales.” (Molloy, Diffusion 58). The writer who discredited these preconceptions was of course Borges, a figure that puzzled French critics to no end because he did not fit. “Ne cherchons pas en lui un ‘écrivain argentin’—bien qu’il aime et évoque souvent son pays—Borges n’est pas un représentant de la littérature argentine, il est un monstre et un génie,” wrote a reviewer (Molloy, Diffusion 219). Borges did not match French expectations of a Latin American specificity and was therefore a monster (albeit a brilliant one) devoid of nationality. Darío, had he written “regional” poems, probably would have matched those expectations. Alejo Carpentier certainly did, partly because of magic realism (to which I shall return) and partly through reverse snobbery: he was erroneously believed to be Afro-Cuban. “M. Alejo Carpentier qui, sauf erreur de ma part, est un écrivain noir,” wrote Max-Pol Fouchet in his enthusiastic review of The Kingdom of This World (Molloy, Diffusion 191). Parallel to the construction of the “Orient” there was here a very active fabrication of a Latin American “South,” one that had to be, of necessity, free of Western alliances so that Western fantasies could generously play themselves out.
I have gone back to personal history, and to that first shock of recognition—I was, on the one hand, the native informant, on the other, the native spoken for—because some aspects of that same vexed construction of Latin American literatures and cultures (I use the plural deliberately) is often at play today in a different but not unrelated setting, that of departments of literature and/or comparative literature in the United States, intent, if not on “exoticizing” Latin America, at least on acritically, even ahistorically, “postcolonizing” it and channeling it through magic realism. The two gestures have more in common than it would, at first, appear.
Mexican anthropologist Jorge Klor de Alva has written astutely on the pitfalls of applying post-1960 constructions of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism retroactively and anachronistically to the Americas in general, and to Latin America in particular. I will not go into his arguments in detail, but will retain what is obvious to historians and is often neglected by theoreticians and literary scholars, namely, the specificity of the Latin American colonial experience both temporally, politically, and ideologically. With the exception of parts of the Caribbean, Spain’s colonies seceded very early in the nineteenth century; the confrontation was not between indigenous peoples and metropolitan colonizers (although it may have been that too) but between Euro-Americans (criollos), Westernized mestizos, and even some Europeans (Peninsulares) against other Europeans; an experience more akin, say, to the North American experience, than to that of British colonies a full century later. As Latin Americanists working on nineteenth-century literature know full well, the points of contact and friction between the two Americas, their literatures and cultures in the nineteenth century, even in their relations to Europe, are many and fruitful, yet remain largely underexplored. It is in the nineteenth century that Latin American cultures “write back,” it is then that they plagiarize, translate and misread,1 with the difference that there is no real “empire” to write back to nor to substantially dissent from. Even before secession, Spain, a decaying metropolis already superseded by its energetic colonies, was no longer a model to subvert; she had long been replaced by France (and to a point by England) in the cultural imaginary of Latin America. So, if Latin America is “writing back” anywhere—and, given the identification of its new national cultures with Enlightenment models, one wonders whether the expression applies—one could argue that it is doing it to the “wrong” address. It is not striking back, in name of a recuperated indigenous past,2 but constructing itself afresh, as an alternate, transculturated West.3
The distinctiveness of Latin American postcolonialism, which does not necessarily exclude neocolonial situations within its very boundaries (a situation the United States itself should not be unfamiliar with), lacks a place, however, in the legitimating narrative the U.S. academy usually tells itself about Latin America. Instead, in that narrative, Latin American literature “begins” at another time and in another place, is made to “emerge” (“emerge” into U.S. awareness, as in “emergent” literatures that always seem to emerge when the First World discovers a need for new cultural goods) in the early 1960s, an emergence coinciding, roughly, with the Cuban revolution—a “new” beginning—and with the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude—a “new” genre, magic realism, a genre against which all Latin American literature would be read in a sort of ahistorical, postcolonial present. This is a literature endowed with a new, snappy genealogy and new interlocutors: Perry Anderson “dates” One Hundred Years of Solitude by calling it a typically Third World “shadow configuration” of First World modernism (García Canclini 44) and relates García Márquez’s novel to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Yilmiz Güney’s Yol. “It is necessary to question above all the mania that has almost fallen out of use in Third World countries: to speak of the Third World and include in the same package Colombia, India, and Turkey,” observes Néstor García Canclini of Anderson’s homogenizing gesture (45), echoing the concerns of other Latin American critics and not a few postcolonial theorists from non-Western countries.4 Above all, it is necessary to question the short-sighted view that García Márquez’s novel, in this new configuration, is the symptom of Latin American modernism when that modernism, as García Canclini rightly argues, has been the subject of cultural reflection and aesthetic experimentation in Latin America since the turn of the century. Familiar to any Hispanic reader, this earlier modernist experimentation, however, was only spottily translated into English.
Crucial in this recycling of Latin America into a “new” postcolonial, which sacrifices the thick texture of a process to the superficial similarity of its effects, is, I think, a problem of language, more specifically, with language. Critiquing the metropolitan urge to homogenize so-called “Third World literatures” and contain their representations, levelling them with “the rhetoric of Otherness,” Aijaz Ahmad reflected a good ten years ago on the problematic availability of certain cultural traditions. These texts may become available directly, through translation, wrote Ahmad; more often, however, they arrive indirectly, in critical essays about those texts that offer “versions and shadows of texts produced in other spaces of the globe” (127). Despite an admirable effort to tease apart “Third World literatures,” Ahmad drew a not altogether convincing distinction between these unavailable texts (mainly from the Indian subcontinent) and Latin American literatures, whose “direct” availability he stressed:
Literatures of South America and parts of the Caribbean are directly available to the metropolitan critic through Spanish and Portuguese, which are after all European languages. Entire vocabularies, styles, linguistic sensibilities exist now in English, French, Italian, for translations from these languages. Europeans and American theorists can either read those literary documents directly, or in case one is not entirely proficient in Spanish or Portuguese, he/she can nevertheless speak of their literatures with easy familiarity because of the translatability of the originals. (127; my emphases)
The notion of easy familiarity is both rich and problematic here, since it appears based on a translatability that is presented, at the same time, as a trope and a linguistic reality. As we know only too well in departments of foreign languages, linguistic competence is a highly charged ideological issue and nothing is “easy.” If Spanish and Portuguese are “after all” European languages, they may be a little less European than others. And even if they are “after all” European, I would argue that they are certainly not considered metropolitan languages and that their complex cultural traditions, on both sides of the Atlantic, are largely ignored. In this country, the purported “easy familiarity” and “translatability” of Spanish (Portuguese, a less “familiar” language is, I would argue, in a different situation), usually work to its detriment, crediting the language with an unwarranted transparency that seriously limits its range. Rarely, if at all, does the academy view Spanish as a language of authority or of intellectual exchange: Latin American critics who have debated long and hard on postcolonialism from Latin America, specifically addressing Latin American difference—say Nelly Richard in Chile, Néstor García Canclini in Mexico, Jesús Martín Barbero in Colombia, to name but three—are rarely if ever brought into general debates about postcolonialism, even when their texts are available in English, that is, there are “real” translations of their works. Despite this very direct availability, their interlocutors in this country (with a few notable exceptions) seem to be other Latin Americanists working on postcolonial issues, such as Walter Mignolo, Mary Louise Pratt, George Yúdice, or John Beverley, scholars who, themselves, are not always recognized as productive participants in the more general postcolonial debates.5
Let me then render Ahmad’s statement a little more complicated and say that Latin American texts appear to offer the illusion of an easy familiarity, the illusion of translatability, and thus create the illusion of cultural competence, not to mention the illusion of institutional expertise, usually based on a smattering of texts. This apparently “easy” translatability is further complicated by ideologies of reception that “choose,” as it were, certain vehicles (but not any vehicle) for that translatability, certain representations and texts (but not any representation or text). Selected Latin American texts are thus uncoupled from their particular mode of functioning within their respective Latin American traditions and then turned into a corpus that purports to be “fully” representative of an “entire … sensibility” called “Latin America,” “Third-World modernism,” or “postcolonial literature.” (What exactly does it represent?, Who selects the criteria of representativity?, and From where, ideologically speaking, is that selection being made?, are of course the key questions that should be asked here.) What is missing from these reductive attempts at reconstructing “entire … sensibilities,” is the understanding of culture as relation; one ends up with a dehistoricized, “manageable” corpus but not with modes of reading, with cultural genealogies, or with theoretical speculation.
Several years ago Juan Goytisolo, in a melancholy piece in the New York Times Book Review, pondered on the politics of cultural representation in general, the reception of Spanish-language literatures in particular and their place in a dialogue of literatures and, importantly, the marketing tactics of publishers. He spoke mostly of Spain, a country, he said, that was doomed to being a single-faced culture, allowed only one image that would “translate well” in the international market and “represent” Spain. The image might change with the passing of time but there was always a quota: one image. Latin America, in itself a more fluid cultural composite, suffers from readings that are even more reductive, at least when they come from the North. Real geographical proximity seems to increase the cultural divide; the nearer the border, the more anxious the containment and policing of cultural representativity becomes.
The history of magic realism has been written elsewhere and it is not my intention here to retrace its long and tenacious life. It should be recalled, however, that from its very inception, this figuration of Latin America was a self-conscious, literary effort by a self-conscious, literary writer, Alejo Carpentier. An excrescence of French surrealism “transculturated” to Cuba and, by extension, to the rest of Latin America, magic realism was a strategical, polemical element in a transnational literary quarrel. It was Carpentier’s response both to the Surrealists’ conception of poetic image and to the avant-garde’s discovery of “primitive” art. More than sprouting then “naturally,” from Latin American “reality,” as Carpentier himself, in a burst of nativistic fervor, would have his reader believe,6 magic realism was born on the same operating table on which Lautréamont’s umbrella hobnobbed with the sewing machine. A transculturated mode, in the way Fernando Ortiz and Angel Rama (two other Latin American critics rarely cited in postcolonial debates) understood the notion of transculturation, one more product of what Gustavo Pérez Firmat has called Latin America’s “translation sensibility” (1), magic realism is a mode among many other modes of literary figuration in Latin America; yet it has been singled out by First World readerships to signify, as surely as Carmen Miranda’s fruity cornucopias, “Latin America.” What magic realism loses, in this cultural transaction that privileges one form of representation to the detriment of others, is precisely its relational quality. Latin American magic realism becomes a regional, ethnicized commodity, a form of that essentialized primitivism that continues to lurk in the minds of even wellintentioned First-World critics.7 For a country that persists in representing itself as a Western country (I speak of the United States), it is also a handy way of establishing spatial distance and, perhaps more importantly, temporal distance vis-à-vis a region that may be too close for comfort, of practicing what Johannes Fabian has called “the denial of coevalness.” Magic realism is refulgent, amusing, and kitschy (Carmen Miranda’s headdress; José Arcadio Buendía’s tattooed penis)—but it doesn’t happen, couldn’t happen, here.
With its exotic connotations, its potential for stereotypical casting, its “poetic” alienation into the realm of the “magical,” that is the very far away, the very other, magic realism has become, for the United States, a mode of Latin American representation, not a mode of Latin American production. As such—as representation, not as production—it is used to measure Latin American literary quality. It is used to both effect and confirm First-World “discoveries” of undetected Latin American talent: readerly expectation (abetted by canny publishing strategies) explains, for example, the huge success of Isabel Allende outside Latin America, a phenomenon akin to the reception of Jerry Lewis in France. Applied retrospectively, magic realism may be used to enhance past texts: witness the way in which, in many reviews written in the United States, magic realism rubs off on Borges, recycled as a “precursor” of sorts, the scope of his work considerably diminished. More alarmingly, magic realism serves to banish many Latin American writers to the wasteland of the “different-but-not-in-the-way-we-expectyou-to-be-different” or, even worse, to the ever-expanding purgatory of the forever untranslatable. That perception of Latin American literatures should primarily be confined to this mode seems lamentable; that, additionally, magic realism should be seen as the favored expression of a homogenized postcoloniality and as such exclusively representative of “Latin America” narrows perspective even further.8 Postcolonial studies should afford a way of teasing apart differences instead of erasing them, of unpacking preconceived notions instead of prepackaging cultural commodities. Unfortunately, they seldom do.
I would like to mention very briefly the predicament of the Latin American writer in the complicated reception scene I have described, a scene ignoring the heterogeneous composition of Latin American literature, its distinctive, mediated relations to its diverse metropolitan centers, its transculturated Westernism. A well-meaning observer, Timothy Brennan, notes for example that among Third World writers there “has been a trend of cosmopolitan commentators on the Third World, who offer an inside view of formerly submerged peoples for target reading publics in Europe and North America in novels that comply with metropolitan literary tastes. Some of its better known authors have been from Latin America: for example, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Asturias [sic], and others” (Brennan 63). This notion of a metropolitan “taste” waiting to be satisfied with “an inside view of formerly submerged peoples,” a view so redolent of the most imperialist anthropological approach, does not even contemplate (cannot even imagine) that the target reading publics of Latin American writers are, primarily, Latin American; that it is for the literary taste of those publics, and not to comply with metropolitan demands, that the Latin American writer primarily writes. Awareness of the conditions of production and reception of texts in Latin America, awareness of what Spivak calls “the staging of the language as the production of agency” (“Politics” 187), would show precisely how the text functions in relation to its many contexts and not as a token commodity.
I am not proposing quick fixes, just calling attention to these operations in the hopes of generating a more thoughtful debate on Latin America from within the U.S. academy, a debate (and exchange) recognizing in Latin American cultural production not only multiple representational strategies and aesthetic practices but a theoretical and critical agency that Latin America has been denied until now. This appears particularly urgent at a time when the growth of Spanish has reached uncalculated highs in this country, when it is no longer possible to dismiss it as a merely utilitarian language, although the temptation to do so may persist;9 particularly urgent when border crossings and bilingualism are no longer “mere” sociological issues but have become, in many cases, aesthetic choices demanding competent readings; particularly urgent, finally, because Latin American literature, both as creative and institutional practice, and its relation to other literatures, is also being reformulated in specifically Latin American settings, and those “outside” reformulations (“outside” the U.S. academy) should be an integral element of a truly transnational debate. If the U.S. academy, and within it, not just departments of Spanish and Portuguese but departments of literature at large, cannot relate to such reformulations and debates and cannot engage in exchange, if only to realize the importance of the local in any transnational dialogue, then we will have little more than incidences of cultural tourism.
A parting note. The second part of my title, unmentioned until now, is less an allusion to Kafka than to an essay by the Argentine critic Claudia Gilman, titled “La literatura comparada: informe para una academia (norteamericana),” a piece critical of certain aspects of the Bernheimer report for the American Comparative Literature Association, mainly of its prepackaged multiculturalism with which it has trouble relating, perceiving it as one more attempt by the United States to dictate cultural policy. The essay, which has its own, not insignificant problems—it bypasses the issue of location, never pauses to consider the where (Argentina, Latin America) of its reflection10—closes on a rebellious, petulant phrase, one that perhaps only an Argentine would write, a phrase fully measuring the crossed connections between Latin America and the United States: “Ironically, we Third-Worlders, we ‘postcolonials,’ women, Jews, homosexuals, are not threatened [by this report] and can safely go on making our own mistakes. For once, we are not threatened by something” (43). The essay appeared in Buenos Aires, in the 1997 issue of Filología devoted to a reflection on comparative literature. By titling my own essay to echo Gilman’s Kafkaesque allusion, I had initially thought that I would report to the U.S. academy about a Latin American report on a report to the U.S. academy. And perhaps, in a manner or speaking, that is what I have done.
NOTES
1. See Sylvia Molloy, “The Scene of Reading,” and Doris Sommer, “Plagiarized Authenticity: Sarmiento’s Cooper and Others.”
2. In The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America, Carlos Alonso persuasively reflects on the “narrative of futurity” that informs Latin America’s secession from Spain and blots out the recuperation (or in some cases the invention) of an indigenous past: “[T]he indigenous populations received the same treatment in this ideological narrative of Creole hegemony as their erstwhile Spanish oppressors: they as well as the Spaniards were simply written out of it by being subsumed under the mantle of the preterit, by being assigned to what from the perspective of the narrative of the future could only be described as the non-place of the past” (16). The fact that mestizaje was a most distinctive effect of Spanish colonialism in Latin America, further complicates the notion of recuperating a “pure” indigenous past.
3. I take this notion of alternate Westernness from George Yúdice’s excellent essay, “We Are Not the World,” He writes:
There is a well-founded reaction against Eurocentrism within multiculturalism that seeks to valorize other, non-Western cultural experiences. The transfer of this tendency to Latin American cultures, however, can produce serious distortions, not the least of which is to argue that Latin America is non-Western…. Latin American cultural experiences, I would like to argue, constitute alternate ways of being Western…. [It] is not that Latin American cultures are Western in the same way as the US or France but, rather, that they are inscribed in a transcultural relation to Western modernity just as much as, say, Eastern Europe (or for that matter multicultural US).” (209–10)
4. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes, “[A]11 the literature of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan” (“Politics,” 180).
5. None of these names appears, for example, in the “postcolonial theory” bibliographical section of Susan Bassnett’s Comparative Literature. As a matter of fact, there are only three entries related to Latin America in that bibliography: Carlos Fuentes (who can hardly be claimed as a theoretician), a rather old anthology of Chicano fiction (Sommers-Ybarra Fausto, 1979), and a more recent collection of essays in Chicano cultural studies (Calderón-Saldívar, 1990). The pertinence of the last two to Latin America is, at best, indirect. The inclusion of Fuentes as a Latin American postcolonial thinker is one more case of what Yúdice calls “a politics of reception of so-called Third World figures that gives priority to high profile positions and gestures and neglects the contradictions of those figures in their national settings” (204).
6. A position murkily echoed by Miguel Angel Asturias, in an interview after receiving the Nobel Prize, in which magic realism is strangely equated with social justice (See Morris).
7. To give but one example: Susan Bassnett, when speaking of Nicolás Guillén’s book, Motivos de son, concludes that these are “ ‘sound’ poems”—misinterpreting the word son which refers to a highly sophisticated musical composition and not to mere sound. Carrying the primitive sound motif even further, she adds that in Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, the protagonist is “led to the primeval forests of his origins ostensibly by the search for a primitive instrument” (84). The observation is worthy of Cassou’s demand for forests and native pampas from Rubén Darío. For an acute analysis of Cuban son as a transculturated form, see Pérez Firmat, 67–79.
8. To quote Spivak again: “[T]he interesting literary text might be precisely the text where you do not learn what the majority view of majority cultural representation or self-representation of a nation state might be” (“Politics” 187). The apparent lack of interest in “non-representative” Latin American texts in this country is reflected in its particularly problematic translation politics.
9. “Departments of Spanish may flourish, but not because of the attraction of Latin-American literature courses,” contends William Moebius (253). While this may or may not be true, the mere possibility that cultural reasons and not base pragmatism might explain the success of Spanish departments seems to worry the author. Interestingly, in quoting the MLA statistics for English and foreign language majors from 1993 to 1994, Moebius only reports statistics for French, German, and English.
10. But then neither did the conference on “Comparative Literature in Transnational Times” at Princeton, where I first read this text. When, in a general discussion on national literatures, I asked why the issue of U.S. literature as a national literature never came up, the answers were surprisingly unsatisfactory, going from the vague (“we don’t think in those terms”) to the flippant (“probably because we’re like a clearinghouse”). Notably, in both off-the-cuff answers a communal “we” was used. Also remarkably, no one stopped to think that while they did not think “in those terms,” they were indeed being thought of “in those terms” by other cultures. For acute comments on location and cross-cultural readings, see Millington.
WORKS CITED
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———, “The Scene of Reading,” in At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 13–76.
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