The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1999. pp. 1-22.
 
 

INTRODUCTION

. . . the possible which enters into reality as that reality itself dissolves, is operative and effects the sense of dissolution as well as the remembrance of that which has been dissolved . . . In the perspective of ideal recollection, then, dissolution as a necessity becomes as such the ideal object of the newly developed life, a glance back on the path that had to be taken, from the beginning of dissolution up to that moment when, in the new life, there can occur a recollection of the dissolved.
        (Friedrich Hölderlin)

             At the most basic level a book on post-dictatorial fiction is expected to deal with the theme of memory, and this will indeed be the case here. The literature produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, however, confronts not only the need to come to terms with the past, but also to define its position in the new present ushered in by the military regimes: a global market in which every corner of social life has been commodified. This book will thus proceed with two parallel goals in mind, on the one hand attempting to assess how and under what conditions of possibility contemporary post-dictatorial literature and culture engages the past, and on the other interrogating the status of the literary in a time when literature no longer occupies the privileged position it once did. In fact, my effort is to think both questions simultaneously. If the dictatorships’ raison d’être was the physical and symbolic elimination of all resistance to the implementation of market logic, how has the triumph of such project informed Latin America’s cultural and literary memory? How can one pose the task of mourning - which is always, in a sense, the task of actively forgetting - when all is immersed in passive forgetting, that brand of oblivion which ignores itself as such, not suspecting that it is the product of a powerful repressive operation? If the neoliberalism implemented in the aftermath of the dictatorships is founded upon the passive forgetting of its barbaric origin, how can one, to use Walter Benjamin’s anthological expression, seize hold of a reminiscence as it flashes up in a moment of danger, such danger being represented today by a commodification of material and cultural life which seems to preclude the very existence of memory? Can literature still play any role in this mnemonic and political task?

             Growing commodification negates memory because new commodities must always replace previous commodities, send them to the dustbin of history. The free market established by the Latin American dictatorships must, therefore, impose forgetting not only because it needs to erase the reminiscence of its barbaric origins, but also because it is proper to the market to live in a perpetual present. The erasure of the past as past is the cornerstone of all commodification - even when the past becomes yet another commodity for sale in the present. The market operates according to a substitutive, metaphorical logic in which the past must be relegated to obsolescence. The past is to be forgotten because the market demands that the new replace the old without leaving a remainder. The task of the oppositional intellectual would be to point out the residue left by every substitution, thereby showing that the past is never simply erased by the latest novelty. The anachronistic, obsolete commodity, the recycled gadget, the museum piece, are all forms of survival of what has been replaced in the market. These images of ruins are crucial for post-dictatorial memory work, for they offer anchors through which a connection with the past can be reestablished. In incessantly producing the new and discarding the old, the market also creates an array of leftovers which point toward the past, as if demanding restitution for what has been lost and forgotten. The texts I examine here insistently confront the ruins left by the dictatorships and extract from them a strongly allegorical meaning. Whereas the hegemonic political discourses in Latin America would like to “put a final stop” to “the fixation in the past,” the tradition of the vanquished, of those who were defeated so that today’s market could be implemented, cannot afford to live in oblivion. In different forms, the texts analyzed here bear witness to this will to reminisce by drawing the present’s attention to everything that was left unaccomplished and mournful in the past. In the very market which submits the past to the immediacy of the present, mournful literature will search for those fragments and ruins - remainders of the market’s substitutive operation - that can trigger the untimely eruption of the past.

             The imperative to mourn is the post-dictatorial imperative par excellence. The literature I address in this book engages a mournful memory that attempts to overcome the trauma represented by the dictatorships. My focus will be those post-dictatorial texts that remind the present that it is the product of a past catastrophe; these texts thus carry the seeds of a messianic energy which, like the Benjaminian angel of history, looks back at the pile of debris, ruins, and defeats of the past in an effort to redeem them, being at the same time pushed forward by the forces of “progress” and “modernization.” There is a belatedness proper to this endeavor, for it establishes a salvific relation with an object irrevocably lost. This is an engagement that cannot but be perpetually catching up with its own inadequacy, aware that all witnessing is a retrospective construction that must elaborate its legitimacy discursively, in the midst of a war in which the most powerful voice threatens to be that of forgetfulness. In the conceptual repertoire of modern criticism one particular notion will be crucial to understanding the nature of this engagement with the past, namely the notion of allegory: “whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face - or rather in a death's head.”

             One of Benjamin's greatest contributions to the theory of the allegorical is to have shown the irreducible link that binds allegory and mourning. In much Baroque drama the final condensation of meaning around a corpse imposes upon the audience a pressing consciousness of its own transitoriness and mortality. Allegory thus entertains a close connection with the awareness of death: “the allegorization of the physis can only be carried through in all its vigor in respect of the corpse. And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it only thus, as corpses, that they can enter the homeland of allegory.”  Allegory elevates corpses to the status of epochal emblems. The corpse embodies the allegorical object because mourning lies at the very origin of allegory. The mournful subject who confronts the loss of a loved being displays a special sensibility toward objects, articles of clothing, former possessions, anything that might trigger the memory of the one who died. The mournful self, much like a collector (two figures that Benjamin often saw as akin to one another), makes of the act of remembrance a rescuing operation. Her mute and melancholy stare upon an object detaches it from all connections, turns it into an emblem of what has been lost, an allegorically charged monad.

             Allegory maintains a fundamental relationship with time. Whereas the symbol privileges timeless, eternalized images, allegory, by virtue of being a ruin, is necessarily a temporalized trope, bearing within itself the marks of its time of production. If mourning is in a fundamental sense a confrontation with time and its passing, allegory, as the trope that voices mourning, cannot but bear in itself unmistakable temporal marks. Paul de Man once noted that in the symbol the relationship between image and substance is one of simultaneity, where the intervention of time is merely a contingent matter, “whereas, in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category.”  If post-dictatorial texts cannot, by definition, obviate their temporal predicament, if their thrust is to come to terms with a past catastrophe, it is expectable that they will display that pressing awareness of time proper to allegory. As opposed to the market’s perpetual present - where the past must incessantly be turned into a tabula rasa to be replaced and discarded with the arrival of new commodities - the allegorical temporality of mourning clings to the past in order to save it, even as it attempts ultimately to produce an active forgetting of it.

             To recall the famous Marxian dichotomy, mourning does not deal with use values - there is no “use” for an epitaph or a memorial, they dwell outside all utility. The work of mourning includes, as well, a moment of suspension of exchange value, for the mourner will always perceive her object as unique, resistant to any transaction, substitution, or exchange.  To be sure, mourning’s ultimate horizon is itself a relationship of exchange: as the libido reinvests a new object, the “accomplished mourning work” will be the one that manages to carry out that metaphorical operation whereby the lost object is subsumed under a newly-found object of affection. The horizon of completion for mourning is thus a metaphorics not unlike that of the market. However, what is most proper to mourning is to resist its own accomplishment, to oppose its own conclusion: “this is what mourning is, the history of its refusal.”  The mourner is by definition engaged in a task that s/he does not want to conclude. Therefore, even if the goal of a successful mourning work turns out to be an act of substitution in its own right - in the sense that the completion of mourning work entails the discharge of libido into a surrogate object - this substitution never fully erases the past, which is to say that mourning is never simply completed. It is in this sense, then, that one speaks of the interminability of mourning work: mourning necessarily poses itself an unrealizable task. Unlike the replacement of old by new commodities, the substitution proper to the work of mourning always includes the persistence of an unmourned, unresolved remainder which is the very index of the interminability of mourning. That is to say that the exchange implied in mourning includes an acknowledgment of the limits of exchange. If no true introjection of the lost object, no healing of the loss will ever take effect without leaving behind an unassimilable residue, mourning work will always preserve a dimension irreducible to the metaphorical operation proper to the market. What cannot be replaced, what lingers on as a residue of memory, is precisely the allegorically charged ruin. Hence the contention that mourning suspends exchange value to posit a third dimension, irreducible to use and exchange, and not contemplated by Marx’s opposition: that of memory value, a paradoxical kind of value, to be sure, since what is most proper to it is to resist any exchange. It is due to that insistence of memory, of the survival of the past as a ruin in the present, that mourning displays a necessarily allegorical structure.

             The attempt to define the concept of allegory runs into many obstacles, not the least of which is an entrenched Romantic prejudice which, continuing the Neoclassical reaction against Baroque “exaggeration,” saw in allegory nothing more than a didactic and quasi-religious catechism. The Classical-Romantic reading of allegory coalesces in Goethe, according to whom the true nature of poetry consisted in creating symbols, that is, in seeing the general in the particular, whereas in allegory “the particular serves only as an instance or example of the general.”  Likewise, Hegel identified in allegory a  “frostiness” which consisted in its being
 

the abstraction of a universal idea which acquires only the empty form of subjectivity and is to be called a subject only, as it were, in a grammatical sense. An allegorical being, however much it may be given a human shape, does not achieve the individuality of a Greek or of a saint or of some other actual person, because, in order that there may be congruity between subjectivity and the abstract meaning which it has, the allegorical being must make subjectivity so hollow that all specific individuality vanishes from it.

            This is the view that led to an understanding of allegory as an aberrant, pathological deviation from the organic, disinterested, translucent ideal of symbolic poetic language. In Hegel’s view of allegory the conceptual element, the realm of meaning, “dominates” and subsumes under itself a “specific externality [which] is only a sign.”  The symbol avoids this subsumption by rounding up a closured totality in which image and meaning, sign and concept are indistinguishably unified. In the symbol, Hegel argues, the reabsorption of the conceptual element into its aesthetic actualization is such that the separation between the two, proper to allegory, is bridged. If “digestion is for Hegel the assimilation and appropriation of an outer into an inner, and as such a figure for dialectic in general,”  it is the sublative, ascending mediation of the symbol, not the abrupt, undialectical discontinuity of allegory that must be privileged. The symbol is thus affirmed as the aesthetic ambassador of the dialectic, the trope capable of appropriating the outer into the inner and carrying out that successful digestion which is itself the privileged gastronomic symbol of dialectic thought.

             In England it was up to Coleridge to direct enraged attacks at allegory as a “mechanic” form, to which he opposed the “organic,” “natural,” “transparent” quality of the symbol.  There was thus an element of untimeliness to allegory in the 19th century. Benjamin noted in the Passagen-Werk that only Baudelaire's poetry articulated a full response to the primacy of the symbol: “as an allegorist, Baudelaire was isolated.”  Goethe, Hegel, and Coleridge agree in seeing in allegory a degeneration in which the particular is only a sheer externality in which the conceptual-universal lodges itself. It is as though in allegory singularities referred back too quickly to the universalities for which they stand. What Goethe, Hegel, and Coleridge condemn in allegory is the lack of mediation. The abrupt, dizzying manner in which allegory alludes to its object made it unfit for the Romantic project, which tended to privilege the progressive ascension of meaning into a well-rounded totality. As the symbol was designated the mode of signification par excellence, allegory was reduced to a “mere mode of designation.”

             A revealing passage by Benedetto Croce chastises allegory for submitting spirit to the materiality of writing: “allegory is not a direct mode of spiritual manifestation, but a kind of cryptography or writing.”  In Croce's idealist aesthetics this represented, to be sure, a shortcoming. Beyond the value judgment, however, Croce captures a fundamental component of the problem, namely the link between allegory and writing, more specifically between allegory and crypt. In its origins, in medieval iconography and baroque emblem books, allegory took the form of a relationship established across an image and its caption. Karl Giehlow, an instrumental figure in the early 20th century rehabilitation of allegory, postulated a relationship between the 16th century reemergence of allegory and the then newly-initiated deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The importance accorded by the Baroque to the physical arrangement of print upon the page is certainly well-known. Croce is thus right in noting the link between allegory and inscription, for in baroque allegory all interiority is evacuated into the exteriority of the page: “[in] allegorical personification ... there is not the faintest glimmer of any spiritualization of the physical. The whole of nature is personalized, not so as to be made more inward, but on the contrary - so as to be deprived of soul.”  Allegory thus maintains a relationship with the divine, but with a fallen, incomprehensible, Babelic, written divinity. Allegory flourishes in a world abandoned by the Gods, one which preserves, however, a trace of memory of such abandonment and therefore has not been eaten away by oblivion quite yet. My job here will be to track down the cryptic manisfestation of this allegorical trace in the corpus of post-dictatorial literature.

             Revisiting one of Freud’s most illustrious cases, that of the Wolf Man, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have developed the notion of cryptonymy to allude to the organized system of partial synonymies which is incorporated into the Ego as a sign of the impossibility of naming the traumatic word. The crypt, for Abraham and Torok, is a figure for the paralysis that maintains mourning at a standstill.  In the now classic Freudian distinction between mourning and melancholia - itself elaborated under the impact of the Wolf Man case  - mourning designates a process of overcoming loss where the separation between the ego and the lost object can still be effected, whereas in melancholia the identification with the lost object reaches an extreme where the ego is engulfed and becomes itself part of the loss. Cutting across this distinction, Abraham and Torok differentiate between introjection and incorporation as two modalities of internalization of loss. Introjection designates the horizon of a successful completion of mourning work, whereby the lost object is dialectically absorbed and expelled, internalized in such a way that the libido can now be discharged into a surrogate object. Introjection thus secures a relation to the deceased at the same time as it compensates for the loss.  In incorporation, on the other hand, the traumatic object remains lodged within the ego as a foreign body, “invisible yet omnipresent,”  unnamable except through partial synonyms. Needless to say, as long as this object resists introjection it will manifest itself in distorted and cryptic form. Expressing a “refusal to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost,”  incorporation erects an intrapsychic tomb where the loss is denied and the lost object is buried alive, as it were. For Freud art and literature constitute, along with dreams and parapraxes, a privileged mode of manifestation of this unresolved trauma and loss. What Abraham and Torok named crypt will be here understood, in all its manifestations, whether in literature or in cultural and political practices, as allegorical crypt, that is to say, the remainder that names the phantasmic persistence of unresolved mourning work. And it is here that the allegorical nature proper to all ruins forces us to reflect anew on the specificity of post-dictatorial mourning.

             If post-dictatorial mourning manifests itself in certain semiotic practices as allegory, then it is the possible link between the crypt of a love object buried alive within the Ego - the insistence of incorporation, or the refusal to mourn -  and the structure of allegory that must be pursued.  For in allegory too the sign undergoes resistance to figuration, or the usage preemptive of the very figurative capability of signs seen by Abraham and Torok as characteristic of incorporation. The establishment of an intrapsychic tomb implies a use of words that reduces them to phantasmic doubles of the object itself, fantasized materializations of the word’s unnamable traumatic referent. Melancholia thus emerges as a reaction against a threat to the protective crypt, since the subject begins to identify with the love object as way of protecting him / her from the possibility of being mourned. Much like the allegorical tradition of hieroglyphs and baroque emblems - where the very materiality of the object takes over the image and its epigraph - the incorporative refusal to mourn becomes manifest in the subject as a subsumption of all metaphoricity under a brute literalness identified with the object itself.  As writer Tununa Mercado has explored extensively in En estado de memoria - highly fragmented and reflexive memoirs analyzed later in this book - the labor of mourning has much to do with the erection of an exterior tomb where the brutal literalization of the internal tomb can be metaphorized. Such attempt to crystallize the recognition of Antigone, that is to say, to install the irreducibility of mourning in the polis (and have that irreducibility acknowledged by the state) counters the putative takeover of melancholia. This attempt is itself mediated, however, by allegorical structures. As Mercado writes her way through melancholia into mourning work her very text becomes a mediating force between the ghost of a becoming-universal of allegory (the melancholic’s abyss where the gaze can only find allegories) and the Antigonal struggle to erect civic symbols where the imperative to mourn can be sanctioned in the polis.  This struggle itself faces not only psychic obstacles, of course, as a transnational political and economic order repeatedly reaffirms its interest in blocking the advance of post-dictatorial mourning work - as the digging of the past may stand in the way of accumulation in the present.

             In spite of the fact that allegory has occupied a major space in the Southern Cone’s aesthetic and cultural debates, the whole complex that links allegory to memory, experience, and writing qua inscription is still virtually unthought, often explained away in more or less sophisticated versions of a specular reflexivism: in times of censorship, writers are forced to resort to “indirect ways,” “metaphors,” “allegories” to “express” what is invariably thought to be a self-identical content that could remain so inside another rhetorical cloak in times of “free expression.” More thinking than this into allegory can be drawn from Ricardo Piglia's brief anecdote of how the Argentine dictatorship, right after his trip abroad and return to the country in 1977, had renamed bus stops as “zones of detention.”  In the very slippage of detención through its wide spectrum of meanings - detain, stop, incarcerate - and the expansion of those zones to bus stops across the entire city, the inscription lent itself to be read allegorically and reconnected with collective history. The image and its caption experimented under dictatorship a becoming-allegory, for they condensed the significance of an experience lived throughout the polis. If the dictatorships have resignified every corner of the city, if the catastrophe is blocked from public memory by the absence of monuments to the dead, post-dictatorial literature depicts the urban space as an allegorical ruin. It is through these ruins that post-catastrophe literature reactivates the hope of providing an entrance into a traumatic experience which has seemingly been condemned to silence and oblivion.

             To the melancholy gaze, history is inevitably spatialized, only redeemed in a freezing gesture that captures the past as an allegorical monad. Such salvific relation with memory must petrify the past as image and sever it from all cushioning associations, thus making of “memory not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater.”  This brings us to one of the major discontinuities between Benjamin and the more orthodox Hegelian tradition that culminates in Lukács: whereas the latter could only privilege the sublative, progressive flow of becoming, Benjamin, more schooled in the teachings conveyed by catastrophes, made of the recollecting act an interruptive machine, much like Brecht sought to present his scenes as independent shots juxtaposing and contrasting separate situations. The metaphor of memory-as-theater, as opposed to memory-as-instrument, makes the remembered image condense in itself, as a scene, the entire failure of the past, as an emblem rescued out of oblivion. Trapped between the imperative of memory and a general inability to imagine an alternative future, post-dictatorial fiction maintains an estranged, denaturalized relation with its present. Pressed by the demand to bear a certain remembrance, it attempts to respond to an unprecedented atrophy in our memories, epitomized in our incapacity to synthesize the past as a coherent totality. The demand that literature become the reserve of memory is, to a great extent, an impossible demand, and it is in this impossibility, as an expression of it, that allegory emerges.

             In an article which is more often attacked than actually read, Fredric Jameson connected third-world literary production with the primacy of the allegorical. I will not rehearse Jameson's arguments again here, but I will draw on one of his observations about the relevance of allegory for post-colonial situations: “it was not difficult to identify an adversary who spoke another language and wore the visible signs of colonial occupation. When those are replaced by your own people, the connections to external control are much more difficult to represent.”  The impossibility of representing the totality is one of the sources of allegory, since allegory is a trope that thrives on breaks and discontinuities, as opposed to the unfractured wholeness presupposed by the symbol. What Jameson describes as the predicament of post-colonial societies is, mutatis mutandi, also the dilemma of post-dictatorship. When the enemy has disappeared, or at least become much more difficult to locate, literature will “speak otherwise” (allos-agoreuein). In Hotel Atlântico, by the Brazilian João Gilberto Noll, the protagonist goes into a bookstore and leafs through a book where “a British catholic spy walks into a church to thank God for the grace of living in an age when there is clearly an enemy, someone against whom to fight.”  This stands in ironic counterpart to Noll's texts, where this enemy is nowhere to be found, invisible amidst a post-catastrophe scenario. The enemy has become invisible or unrepresentable, of course, because his victory has been so resounding. If “resistance” was once the banner under which a certain Latin American literature was written, the advent of allegory in post-dictatorship certifies that resistance has become a rather modest agenda. If resistance was the axis that connected individual and collective experiences under dictatorship, now this connection must be established otherwise. How to reestablish that connection is, then, one of the major threads that I will pursue in the analysis of post-dictatorial literature.

             Since my theoretical argument presupposes, to a great extent, a historical framework, I take as my starting point not the dictatorships themselves, but the period immediately preceding them. My underlying hypothesis is that the dictatorships, as ushers of an epochal transition from State to Market, represented the crisis of a specific form of cultural politics proper to the boom of Latin American literature in the 1960s. I will attempt to make clear why I take the boom to represent an aestheticization of politics, or more precisely a substitution of aesthetics for politics. Thus the first chapter flashbacks to the ways in which Enrique Rodríguez Monegal, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Alejo Carpentier all converged, despite their many differences, in presenting Latin American literature’s extraordinary achievements not only as detached from the continent’s social backwardness but also as an effective surrogate for it. The boomers’ notorious disavowal of any links with the tradition and their insistence on the foundational, almost Adamitic role played by their generation are interpreted in the context of this rhetorical operation. The discarding of the past was part of the portrayal of their own writing as a resolute catching up with history, an Oedipal assassination of the European father which finally integrated Latin America into the universal movement of modern literature. Monegal’s diatribes against a “backward” rurality, Cortázar’s proclamations of the boom as a moment of illumination and consciousness of the Latin American people, as well as Fuentes’s insistent announcements that “now, for the first time we...” were all different instances of this sacralization of a writing which appeared to have achieved transparent coincidence with its contemporaneity. Such sacralization had its fictional counterpart in several novels which depicted symbolic figures of demiurge-founders encoded in their writers’ alter egos: La casa verde, Los pasos perdidos, Cien años de soledad, etc. All in all, the boom found in this surrogate politics - this compensatory role for literary writing - its historical vocation.

             This would not have been paradoxical had it not entailed a reestablishment of the very auratic, pre-modern, quasi-religious quality that these fully modern narrative projects strove to eliminate. The traditional aura of the letrado thus had a dubious status in the boom. On the one hand, it appeared to have been driven away by what undoubtedly was a modernizing, updating, secular, and forward-looking enterprise. On the other, it reemerged in the form of foundational literary figures who installed their writing as the primordial, inaugural moment in which contradictions of a social, political, and economic nature could definitively be resolved. The lettered religion sneaked cult value back in by the side door. What I will attempt to analyze as the compensatory vocation of the boom takes shape in this restoration of the aura in a post-auratic historical moment.

             I look at the experience of the dictatorships against the background of this epochal paradox - the paradox of an auratic, quasi-religious form of cultural modernization - because the dictatorships, by making modernization the inescapable horizon for Latin America, by voiding such modernization of all liberating, progressive illusions (after the dictatorships, after all, modernization irrevocably came to spell integration into global capital as minor partners), pre-empted the compensatory operation proper to the boom. After the thorough technification imposed by the dictatorships, the magisterial and regulative role assigned to literature by the boom was bound to meet its historical limit. Whereas the boom had attempted to reconcile a modernizing thrust with the compensatory reestablishment of the auratic in the post-auratic, such reconciliation was now all but impossible, pre-empted by a new hegemony which reproduced itself by relentlessly annihilating the aura of the literary, unveiling that aura as a remnant of a moment still incomplete of the unfolding of capital. Hence my argument that the date of the decline of the boom, consensually located around 1972-73, was (and not gratuitously) coincident with the fall of the great alternative social project to emerge in Latin America at that moment, Salvador Allende's Popular Unity. Thus in the same sense that Peter Blake proposed 15 July 1972 as the date of the end of modernism (when several functionalist-style apartments built in St. Louis in the 1950s had to be dynamited because they had become uninhabitable) I follow John Beverley in proposing 11 September 1973 as the allegorical date of the decline of the boom.

             The second chapter maps out this new hegemony of the technical such as it manifested itself in the social-scientific theory of authoritarianism as well as in the transformations undergone by the university. In the latter I observe what can roughly be described as the passage from the humanist university, set up to form ideologues to administrate the executive, juridical, and ideological apparatuses, to a new university whose main function is to produce technicians. I argue that whereas the former could nurture within itself a contradiction that allowed intellectuals to emerge and compete with ideologues for space, the latter bears witness to the decline of intellectuals, now defeated by the figure of the technical expert. The rift separating technicians and intellectuals, although uncertain and mobile, is argued to be essentially irreducible, for while the former intervene only insofar as they are legitimated by the normativity of a specific field, the latter interrogate the previous slicing up of knowledge which is the requisite for the very constitution of particular fields. Whereas technicians instrumentalize a certain expertise in order to understand a given object, intellectuals forcibly think the totality that makes possible the emergence of particular objects, which is to say that intellectual reflection necessarily addresses the ultimate foundation, the fundamental principle, the ground not grounded by anything other than itself. The task of intellectuals is thus understood to be coextensive with the site assigned by Immanuel Kant to the Faculty of Philosophy, that of reflecting upon the ultimate conditions of possibility of all knowledge. With the thorough technification of the social body - carried out by the dictatorships as part of the epochal transition from State to Market -, the possibility of such reflection is argued to have definitively dissolved.

             A dramatic instance of this blocking out of the visibility of the ultimate ground is offered in my critique of José Joaquín Brunner’s and Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s social-scientific theories of authoritarianism. In these hegemonic accounts of the nature of the recent Southern Cone regimes, the dictatorships were equated with authoritarianism in such a way that liberal democracy emerged as their universal antithesis. Thus, in Brunner’s work the identification of age-old authoritarian elements in Chilean culture was to prove that liberal and democratic values had not been continuous in the country, in a naturalization of the opposition which precluded, for example, any investigation of a possible complicity between the two. This line of analysis led Brunner to associate the intellectuals’ loss of status not to the epochal transition from State to Market - with the correlative transition from intellectual to technician -, but rather, and most astoundingly, to democratization as such. An analogous, and ideologically more serious, operation takes place in Cardoso’s work, where the Brazilian and Spanish American dictatorships are repeatedly explained as products of bureaucratic clusters somehow not reducible to, and mysteriously contradictory with, capitalist class interest. Since a bureaucracy, unlike a ruling social class, can be unseated without any transformation ensuing in the economic model, Cardoso’s positing of the dictatorships as a result of aberrant bureaucratization laid the ground for a “transition to democracy” strongly hegemonized by neoliberal-conservative forces. The social-scientific theory of authoritarianism is then argued, on the basis of this analysis, to be itself a symptom of the technification ushered in by the dictatorships, a product of the epochal transition rather than a theory of it.

             Such generalized immanentization or de-transcendentalization - the blocking out of the visibility of the ultimate ground - is subsequently studied in some of the allegorical literature written under dictatorships. In the grand allegorical machines devised in the Brazilian J.J. Veiga’s A Hora dos Ruminantes, the Chilean José Donoso’s Casa de campo, and the Argentine Daniel Moyano’s El vuelo del tigre, I observe the waning of the earlier magical-realist or fantastic contrasting of opposing logics. Whereas in magical realism a pre-modern cosmogony was invariably mobilized (and tamed) by the dominant modernist narrative machinery, in a process that entailed a demonization of the indigenous or pre-capitalist logic, in these allegorical fables the entire text is subsumed under the logic proper to the tyrannies portrayed. All co-existence of modes of production (and their respective logics) having been eliminated, the ultimate foundation underlying such tyrannies or catastrophes becomes invisible to characters, narrator, and reader alike, most often appearing unascribable to the will or action of any subject. The strict spatiotemporal circumscription common in these texts is analyzed within this frame, as they display the petrification of history characteristic of all allegory. Allegory is thus shown to have nothing to do with a mere encoding of a self-identical content that masks itself in order to escape censorship (the notion of allegory hitherto hegemonic in the criticism of the literature produced under dictatorships). In contrast to such instrumentalist view I contend that the turn toward allegory spelled an epochal transmutation, parallel to and coextensive with a fundamental impossibility to represent the ultimate ground, a constitutive failure that installed the object of representation as a lost object.

             The general framework developed in the two first chapters, despite the seemingly chaotic mixture of references - the boom, the role of the intellectual and the university, the social-scientific theory of authoritarianism, and the renewed relevance of the allegorical -, has a unifying thread: it delineates, so to speak, a topology of defeat. By showing the impact of historical defeat upon these practices (many of which merely symptomatized it), I lay the ground for an analysis of post-dictatorial texts. The leap is not only a temporal, but also a qualitative one, insofar as post-dictatorship is taken not only to allude to these texts’ posteriority in relation to the military regimes (one of the novels analyzed, Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica, was actually written and published at the height of the Pinochet regime), but also and most importantly their reflexive incorporation of said defeat into their system of determinations. Thus, in a way similar to the definition of the postmodern as the critical and denaturalizing moment of the modern, postdictatorship comes to signify, in the context of this endeavor, not so much the epoch posterior to defeat, but rather the moment in which defeat is unapologetically accepted as the irreducible determination upon literary writing in the subcontinent. In this framework, I analyze five of the finest novelists writing in Latin America today: the Argentines Ricardo Piglia and Tununa Mercado, the Brazilians Silviano Santiago and João Gilberto Noll, and the Chilean Diamela Eltit.

             After a brief third chapter in which I address Ricardo Piglia’s highly original interpretation of the Argentine literary tradition, my fourth chapter analyzes Piglia’s futurist / cyberpunk detective story La ciudad ausente. The novel confronts the reader with the image of a storytelling machine constructed by the early-20th-century avant-garde writer Macedonio Fernández; the machine is based on the recombination of narrative nuclei that it develops from a first story fed into it, Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.” In a moment in which the past has been blocked from memory, in a post-dictatorial city corroded by oblivion, the machine represents the survival of the possibility of circulating narratives. Macedonio’s machine has a fundamental connection with mourning: it is as an attempt to mourn the death of his beloved Elena that Macedonio invents this mechanical and political device for preserving the past. Junior, a sort of alter ego of Piglia’s, attempts to track down this unsettling machine which progressively emerges as the very image of counter-hegemonic memory. The painful dissociation between literature and experience is countered with a strategy made possible by the machine: the recombination of stories allows for the appropriation, dissemination, and de-subjectivation of proper names. Narrative becomes a way of producing apocryphal experience. A rich arsenal of embedded narratives maps out Argentina’s past and present, climaxing in the story of a Joycean island where no document ever remains because its inhabitants periodically wake up speaking a different language, and Finnegans Wake is the only text that remains legible in all of them. For Piglia storytelling can reconstitute memory because experience can made apocryphal, i.e. narrated under false names, as if it belonged to another. Hence the titles of some of his books - Nombre falso, Respiración artificial - always combining a noun that designates the sphere of the proper, of the unique, of the absolutely and irreducibly personal, with an adjective that makes it false, artificial, apocryphal. In La ciudad ausente, that combination of the personal and the apocryphal produces a utopian allegory in which memory has both an individual and collective, affective and political dimension.

             My fifth chapter addresses Silviano Santiago's rewriting of 1930s Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos in Em Liberdade. As a counterpoint to G. Ramos’s Memórias do Cárcere, the classic memoirs of his incarceration in 1936-37 by Getúlio Vargas’s regime, Em Liberdade invents a diary of his first days “in freedom,” that is to say, of the period marked no longer by a victimization ultimately recoverable by a voyeuristic, compassionate empathy with suffering (the pity and commiseration that Memórias do Cárcere, throughout its 600-plus pages, is very Nietzscheanly at pains to ward off), but rather by a new predicament: the sheer absence of events, the anguish of the blank page, the “post” moment in which not even heroicization and martyrdom are possible or desirable options. Taking on G. Ramos’ self, writing his imaginary diary by using his name and fabricating a whole narrative according to which the diary’s originals had been handed by G. Ramos to a friend with the request that they be published only twenty-five years after his death - a narrative only disavowed by the subtitle on the cover, which reads “fiction by Silviano Santiago” - Em Liberdade shuffled proper names to the point of creating hilarious misunderstandings among some critics, who went to great lengths to show how Santiago had performed a superb “editorial” job with G. Ramos’s “manuscript.” The pastiche is replicated en abyme in the diary when G. Ramos projects a story in which he would speak through the voice of 18th-century poet and republican insurgent Cláudio Manuel da Costa, in a reinterpretation of the 1789 anti-colonial and anti-monarchic insurrection in Minas Gerais. The story imagined by G. Ramos, in its turn, displays several coincidences with the assassination of reporter Wladimir Herzog by the Brazilian dictatorship in 1975, in a dizzying proliferation of replicas which encodes a true philosophy of history after political defeats. As in La ciudad ausente’s appropriation of Macedonio Fernández, the rewriting of the past is never tainted by any ironic will; never does any parodic distance emerge between the novel’s writing self and G. Ramos’s historical voice. Unlike La ciudad ausente, however, in Em Liberdade there is no room for utopia. One of the goals of my analysis will be to show that instead of mobilizing the past for an affirmative present project, Santiago pushes the present back, making of the unaccomplished past the very allegory of a present in crisis.

            My sixth chapter begins with an analysis of Diamela Eltit's Lumpérica, published at the height of the Pinochet regime and connected with a remarkable resurgence of visual and performative arts in Chile. In Lumpérica the protagonist’s communion with the destitute bodies of beggars at the public square imagines a politics and a sexuality alternative to the terror that hovers over the city. The encounter between the protagonist and the lumpen collective is, however, filtered by the phallic violence that emanates from spotlights located above the square. It is in the conflict between the anonymity made possible by the night and the unbearable reality of “lights and proper names” that the drama narrated by Lumpérica takes place. The dominant trope in Eltit’s text is prosopopoeia, for L.Iluminada’s voice is the only instance whereby the inarticulate, voiceless lumpen can inscribe their plight on the metropolitan concrete. Woman, lumpen, and America meet in the word “Lumpérica,” and Eltit’s black mass comes to represent a marginal, utopian space which nevertheless does not survive the morning light, although it is announced again for the following night. Subversion is thus foregrounded but voided in a narrative structure modeled after the eternal return. In Los vigilantes, a post-dictatorial and mournful novel published eleven years later, Eltit becomes remarkably more redemptive: the protagonist is now isolated as the only uncontaminated reservoir in a polis completely eaten away by oblivion. Lumpérica’s destitute collective now fades into the background, dimly envisioned, at best, as a chased, victimized, and powerless mass, all in all reliant on the protagonist’s charitable philanthropy. The Christian motif, present in Lumpérica but submitted to a heretic, atheistic eternal return, takes a position of dominance in Los vigilantes. This change is also expressed in the temporality that organizes the novel, which takes leave from the eternal return to embrace the apocalyptic. My reading explores the leap from Lumpérica’s temporality of the eternal return to Los vigilantes’s temporality of the last day, interpreting that shift as emblematic of the trajectory of post-dictatorial literature.

            My analysis of João Gilberto Noll’s texts in the seventh chapter contrasts Noll with Piglia and Santiago, since for Noll the void emerging from the divorce between literature and experience is not to be filled, but rather embraced and radicalized. Noting how Noll’s characters and narrators dramatize an impossibility of telling stories, an atrophy in memory, and a fundamental incapacity to synthesize experience, I contrast Piglia’s and Santiago’s apocryphal saturation to Noll’s strategy of rarefaction. The proper name here no longer circulates apocryphally, but fades away as an index of a crisis in the subject. Depicting failed, jobless, nameless 40-years-olds whose attempts to learn from experience meet with a paralyzing inability to organize lived moments in a rounded-up narrative, Noll undoes the dialectical model of the Bildungsroman so central to the modern novel. In Bandoleiros, a trip to the US during the Reagan years provides a rather disquieting look at this privileged source of learning represented by the genre of travel literature. Unlike Wim Wenders’s early cinema or Baudrillard’s US diary, Noll’s travel through American mythology no longer provides any true encounter with otherness or any alternative source of narratives: mass-cultural banality has pre-empted all hopes of encountering the virgin, uncontaminated reality popularized by European travel narratives in America. Noll’s characters recall the Baudelairean flâneur, but the cities through which they drift no longer offer any epiphanic moment that could raise experience above the brute succession of events, the tired repetition of its own facticity. Noll’s is thus a literature that starkly refuses to affirm anything and remains cynically suspicious of all restitution. As opposed to Piglia’s and Santiago’s projects, in which there is still room for an affirmative role for literature - utopian in Piglia, critical in Santiago - Noll produces a purely corrosive, negative picture of the voiding of memory and impoverishment of experience after catastrophes. This negativity is emblematized in the dissolution of the proper name which becomes, in Noll’s fiction, an allegory of the impossibility of living personal, individual stories.

            Finally, in my eighth chapter I tackle Tununa Mercado’s En estado de memoria, a text which provides the most radical and uncompromising reflection on the nature of post-dictatorial trauma. Narrated in first person, En estado de memoria relates a series of events in the protagonist’s life from her exile in France (1967-1970) and Mexico (1974-1986) to the return to Argentina after the restoration of democracy. Working through the ruins of historical failure, the experience of exile, an intense engagement with psychoanalysis and, most decisively, a reflection on the abyssal status of her writing - a Herculean labor permeated by a confrontation with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit - En estado de memoria will accept no compensation, no facile imaginary healing, no eluding of mourning. Mercado delves into various post-dictatorial phenomena (the spurious attempts to cling to national identity in exile, the oblivion of the catastrophe afterwards, the weight of the memory of the dead), without accepting any substitutive mechanisms. In the laborious process of personal and political reconstruction engaged by the protagonist, her confrontation with the imperative to write becomes the major axis through which the work of mourning begins to be carried out. Mercado’s is, then, a post-dictatorial novel par excellence in that it accepts the inheritance of the trauma and is written as an attempt to come to terms with that trauma.

            The differences among these writers emerge, it should be noted, out of a common terrain, namely the defeat of the political practices that could have offered an alternative to the military regimes. Piglia, Santiago, Eltit, Noll, and Mercado share the will not to elude that defeat. For all of them, the epochal defeat represented by the dictatorial transition from State to Market binds two parallel phenomena: the imperative to mourn and the decline of storytelling. Mourning and storytelling are, even at the most superficial level, coextensive with one another: the accomplishment of mourning work presupposes above all the telling of a tale about the past. Conversely, only by ignoring the imperative to mourn, only by repressing it into neurotic oblivion can one proceed to narrate today without confronting the epochal crisis of storytelling and the decline in the transmissibility of experience. This has been, of course, the hegemonic strategy, the victorious version. Had I chosen to study the current dominant forms of literary prose in the subcontinent I would have of necessity had to turn elsewhere, e.g. to casual, experimentation-free, “pop” best-selling postmodernism, or to demagogic-populist, phalogocentric mythifications of national or continental “identity” in magical or regionalist key, or yet naïve realisms and testimonialisms of various kinds, neo-mystical prose bordering on self-help, etc. The representative is by definition the dominant, the doxic, that which is in accord with its present. In contrast, I would submit that the authors treated here, along with a few others, have in common that untimeliness that makes them foreign to their present. The untimely - in the strong Nietzschean sense [unzeitgemäss] - alludes to that which runs against the grain of the present, “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.”   The untimely takes distance from the present, estranges itself from it by carrying and caring for the seeds of time. An untimely reading of the present will, then, at the same time rescue past defeats out of oblivion and remain open to an as yet unimaginable future.

            This untimeliness is, today, in times of defeat, the very essence, the very constitutive quality of the literary. Indeed, literature seems today, to us as well as to many outside literary circles, an untimely enterprise. This may be the sole justification to tarry with it, without making any concessions to aestheticist-reactive defenses of the literary institution against challenges coming from culturalism. For if literature can no longer be the surrogate redemption that the optimistic, positive ontology of the boom wished to make of it, it may also be, on the other hand, a little too early to give in to the apocalyptic, pronounce death sentences over the literary and start searching for surrogate objects upon which to apply the same positive optimism. For these would remain, in spite of all euphoria, just that: objects of a compulsive substitution, that is to say, of a neurosis still ignorant of itself. They would simply instrumentalize, once again, the will to elude the defeat, the unwillingness to accept it and think through it which was for Benjamin the most horrifying crime you could commit against the memory of the dead. Against culturalist optimism, this book accepts the defeat of the literary coextensive with the advent of the telematic moment of global capital (implemented in Latin America, as we know, over the corpses of so many). Such acceptance is precisely the reason why it tarries with it: so that the recollection of the dissolved can begin, as Hölderlin, writing at the threshold of madness, seems to have understood.