retamar caliban (7 page)

The extraordinary vogue enjoyed by linguistics in recent years has moved more than one person to conclude that ‘ ‘the twentieth century, which is the century of so many things, would seem to be above all the century of linguistics.
^,,7
° We, in contrast, would say that, among those “many things,” the establishment of socialist governments and decolonization carry much more weight as outstanding features of this century. I might add as a modest personal example of this vogue that as recently as 1955, when I was a student of linguistics under Andr6 Martinet, linguistic matters were confined in Paris to university lecture halls. Outside the classroom we talked with our friends about literature, philosophy, and politics. Only a few years later, linguistics—whose structuralist dimension, as L^vi-Strauss described it, encompasses the other social sciences— was in Paris the obligatory theme of all discussions. In those days literature, phi-losopphy, and politics all ran afoul of structuralists. (I am speaking of some years ago; presently, structuralism seems to be on the decline. However, in our part of the world the insistence on such an ideology will last for sometime yet.)

Now I have no doubt that there exist specifically scientific factors to which we can credit this vogue of linguistics. But 1 also know that there are
ideological
reasons for it over and above the subject matter itself. With respect to literary studies it is not difficult to determine these ideological reasons. Indeed, the virtues and limitations of critical strategies ranging from Russian formalism to French structuralism cannot be shown without them. And among them is the attempt at ahistorization peculiar to a dying class: a class that initiated its trajectory with daring
utopias
in order to chase away time and that endeavors now, in the face of adversity, to arrest that trajectory via impossible
uchronics.
In any case, one must recognize the convergence between these studies and their respective conterminous literature. However, when Fuentes glosses over the concrete reality of the current Spanish-American novel and attempts to impose upon it systems derived from other literatures and other critical methodologies, he adds—with a typically colonial attitude—a second level of ideolization to his critical outlook. In a word, this is summed up in his claim that our present-day narrative—
like that of apparently coetaneous capitalist countries—
is above all a feat of language. Such a
contention,
among other things, allows him to minimize nicely everything in that narrative having to do with a clear historical concretion. Furthermore, the manner in which he lays the foundations of his linguistic approach demonstrates a pedantry and a provincialism typical of the colonial wishing to demonstrate to those in the metropolis that he too is capable of grappling with fashionable themes namely, themes
from abroad—and
wishing at the same time to enlighten his fellow countrymen, in whom he is confident of finding an ignorance even
greater
than his own. This is the
sort
of thing he spews forth:

Change comprehends the categories of process and speech, of diachrony ; structure comprehends those of system and language, of synchrony. The point of interaction for all these categories is the word— which joins diachrony and synchrony, speech and language through discourse; along with process and system, through the event, and even event and discourse themselves. [33]

These banalities (which any handy little linguistics manual could have taken care of), nonetheless should arouse in us more than a smile. Fuentes is elaborating as best he can here a consistent vision of our literature, of our culture—a vision that, significantly, coincides in its essentials with that proposed by writers like Emir Rodrfguez Monegal and Severo Sarduy.

It is revealing that for Fuentes the thesis of the preponderant role of language in the new Spanish-American novel finds its basis in the prose of Borges, “without which there would simply not exist a modem Spanish-American novel,” since, according to Fuentes, “the ultimate significance” of that prose is “to bear witness, first off, that Latin America is lacking a language and must therefore establish one.” This singular triumph is achieved by Borges, Fuentes continued, “in his creation of a new Latin-American language, which, by pure contrast, reveals the lie, the acquiescence and the duplicity, of what has traditionally passed for ‘language’ among us’’ (26).

Naturally, based on such criteria the ahistorization of literature can attain truly delirious expressions. We learn, for example, that Witold Gombrowicz’s
Pornography

could have been related by a native of the Amazon jungles and that neither nationality nor social class, in the final analysis, explain the difference between Gombrowicz and the possible narrator of the same initiation myth in a Brazilian jungle. Rather, it is explained precisely by the possibility of combining discourse in different ways. Only on the basis of the universality of linguistic structures can there be conceded, a posteriori, the peripheral data regarding nationality and class. [22]

And consequently, we are told as well that “it is closer to the truth, in the first instance, to understand the conflict in Spanish-American literature
as related to certain characteristics of the literary endeavor
” (24; my emphasis), rather than to history; furthermore:

The
old
obligation to denounce is transformed into a
much more arduous
enterprise: the critical elaboration of everything that has gone unspoken in our long history of lies, silences, rhetoric, and academic complicities.
To invent a language is to articulate all that history has concealed.
(30; my emphasis]

Such an interpretation, then, allows Fuentes to have his cake and eat it too. Thus conceived, literature not only withdraws from any combatant role (here degraded by a clever adjective: “the
old
obligation to denounce”), but its withdrawal, far from being a retreat, becomes a
“much more arduous
enterprise,” since it is to articulate no less than
"all that history has concealed."
Further on we are told that our true language is in the process of being discovered and created and that ‘‘in the very act of discovery and creation it threatens, in
a revolutionary
way, the whole economic, political, and social structure erected upon a vertically false language” (94-95; my emphasis).

This shrewd, while at the same time superficial, manner of expounding right-wing concerns in left-wing terminology reminds us—though it is difficult to forget for a single moment—that Fuentes is a member of the Mexican literary mafia, the qualities of which he has attempted to extend beyond the borders of his country.

Furthermore, that these arguments constitute the projection onto literary questions of an inherently reactionary political platform is not conjecture. This is said throughout the little book and is particularly explicit in its final pages. Besides the well-known attacks on socialism, there are observations like this one: “Perhaps the sad, immediate future of Latin America will see fascist populism, a Peronist sort of dictatorship, capable of carrying out various reforms only in exchange for a suppression of revolutionary impulse and civil liberties” (96). The “civilization vs. barbarism” thesis appears not to have changed in the least. But in fact it has—it has been agravated by the devastating presence of imperialism in our countries. In response to this reality, Fuentes erects a scarecrow: the announcement
that there
is opening before us

a prospect even more grave, That is, in proportion to the widening of the abyss between the geometric expansion of the technocratic world and the arithmetic expansion of our own ancillary societies, Latin America is being transformed into a world that is
superfluous
[Fuentes's emphasis] to imperialism. Traditionally we have been exploited countries.
Soon we will not even be that
(my emphasis]. It will no longer be necessary to exploit us, for technology will have succeeded in—to a large extent it can already—manufacturing substitutes for our single-product offerings.[96]

In light of this, and recalling that for Fuentes the revolution has no prospects in Latin America—he insists upon the impossibility of a ‘‘second Cuba” (96) and cannot accept the varied, unpredictable forms the process will assume—we should almost be thankful that we are not “
superfluous
” to imperialist technology„ that it is not manufacturing substitutes (as “if
can already
”) for our poor products.

I have lingered perhaps longer than necessary on Fuentes because he is one of the most outstanding figures among the new Latin-American writers who have set out to elaborate in the cultural sphere a counterrevolutionary platform that, at least on the surface, goes beyond the coarse simplifications of the program “Appointment with Cuba,” broadcast by the Voice of (the United States of) America. But the writers in question already had an adequate medium: the review
Mundo Nuevo
[New World], financed by the CIA,
⁷¹
whose ideological foundations are summed up by Fuentes’s short book in a manner that the professorial weightiness of Emir Rodriguez Monegal or the neo-Barthean flutterings of Severo Sarduy— the magazine's other two “critics” —would have found difficult to achieve. That publication, which also gathered together the likes of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Juan Goytisolo, is to be replaced shortly by another, which will apparently rely upon more or less the same team, along with a few additions. I am speaking of the review
Libre
[Free]. A fusion of the two titles speaks for itself:
Mundo Libre
[Free World].

• The Future Begun
  

The Future Begun

The endeavor to include ourselves in the “free world”—the hilarious name that capitalist countries today apply to themselves and bestow in passing on their oppressed colonies and neo-colonies—is a modem version of the nineteenth-century attempt by Creole exploiting classes to subject us to a supposed “civilization”; and this latter, in its turn, is a repetition of the designs of European conquistadors. In all these cases, with only slight variations, it is plain that Latin America does not exist except, at the very most, as a
resistance
that must be overcome in order to implant
true
culture, that of ‘ ‘the modern peoples who gratify themselves with the epithet of civilized.”
⁷²
Pareto’s words here recall so well those of Marti, who wrote in 1883 of civilization as “the vulgar name under which contemporary European man operates.”

In the face of what the conquistadores, the Creole oligarchs, and the imperialists and their flunkies have attempted, our culture —taking this term in its broad historical and anthropological sense—has been in a constant process of formation: our authentic culture, the culture created by the mestizo populace, those descendants of Indians and blacks and Europeans whom Bolivar and Artigas led so well; the culture of the exploited classes, of the radical petite bourgeoisie of Jose Marti, of the poor peasantry of Emiliano Zapata, of the working class of Luis Emilio Recabarren and Jesus Menendez; the culture “of the hungry Indian masses, of the landless peasants, of the exploited workers” mentioned in the
Second Declaration of Havana
(1962), “of the honest and brilliant intellectuals who abound in our suffering Latin-American countries’
¹
; the culture of a people that now encompasses “a family numbering two hundred million brothers” and that “has said: Enough! and has begun to move.”

That culture—like every living culture, especially at its dawn
—is
on the move. It has, of course, its own distinguishing characteristics, even though it was bom—like every culture, although in this case in a particularly planetary way — of a synthesis. And it does not limit itself in the least to a mere repetition of the elements that formed it. This is something that the Mexican Alfonso Reyes, though he directed his attention to Europe more often than we would have wished, has underscored well. On speaking with another Latin American about the characterization of our culture as one of synthesis, he says:

Neither he nor I were understood by our European collegues, who thought we were referring to the résumé or elemental compendium of the European conquests. According to such a facile interpretation, the synthesis would be a terminal point. But that is not the case: here the synthesis is the new point of departure, a structure composed of prior and dispersed elements that—like all structures—transcends them and contains in itself new qualities. H
₂
0 is not only a union of hydrogen and oxygen; it is, moreover, water.
⁷³

This is especially apparent if we consider that the “water” in question is formed not only from European elements, which are those Reyes emphasizes, but also from the indigenous and the African. But even with his limitations, it is still within Reyes’s capacity to state at the end of that piece:

I say now before the tribunal of international thinkers within reach of my voice: we recognize the right to universal citizenship which we have won. We have arrived at our majority. Very soon you will become used to reckoning with us.
⁷⁴

These words were spoken in 1936. Today that “very soon” has already arrived. If we were asked to indicate the date that separates Reyes’s hope from our certainty—considering the usual difficulties in that sort of thing—I would say 3959, the year the Cuban Revolution triumphed. One could also go along marking some of the dates that are milestones in the advent of that culture. The first, relating to the indigenous peoples’ resistance and black slave revolts against European oppression, are imprecise. The year 1780 is important: it marks the uprising of Tupac Amaru in Peru. In 1803, the independence of Haiti. In 1810, the beginning of revolutionary movements in various Spanish colonies in America— movements extending well into the century. In 1867, the victory of Juarez over Maximilian. In 1895, the beginning of the final stage of Cuba’s war against Spain—a war that Marti foresaw as an action against emerging Yankee imperialism. In 1910, the Mexican Revolution. In the 1920s and 1930s, Sandino’s resistance in Nicaragua and the establishment on the continent of the working class as a vanguard force. In 1938, the nationalization of Mexican petroleum by Cardenas. In 1944, the coming to power of a democratic regime in Guatemala, which was to be radicalized in office. In 1946, the beginning of Juan Domingo Peron’s presidency in Argentina, under which the “shirtless ones” would become an influential force. In 1952, the Bolivian revolution. In 1959, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. In 1961, the Bay of Pigs: the first military defeat of Yankee imperialism in America, and the declaration of our revolution as Marxist-Leninist. In 1967, the fall of Che Guevara while leading a nascent Latin-American army in Bolivia. In 1970, the election of socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile.