Zona. Carga y Descarga. Minor Literature in a Penal Colony

The critic is the guardian appointed to follow the insane everywhere he goes trying to bring order to the chaos he leaves behind. But the guardian can never overtake the insane. Because the imagination of the insane is an instantaneous creation, the explosion of a star that later the critic will spend years ordering by means of the astrolabe and compass. After he is finished with his most careful measurements, the critic will say: Alpha Centauri is a star. But millions of years will have passed before its light reaches him and by then Alpha Centauri will have exploded into the fragments of a new constellation. And Alpha Centauri will be no more.¹

The authors of the few articles, conferences and essays dedicated to the short-lived Zona. Carga y Descarga seem to agree when they describe the journal (published from 1972 to1975) as an important contribution to the history of Puerto Rican literature, and particularly to a moment of crisis and rupture in that history when a young generation of writers violently broke with an earlier generation by challenging its moral and aesthetic values. To some degree, all these critics describe Zona as an unusual and sudden moment of openness in the literary history of Puerto Rico when new modes of reading and writing were tried, and out of which emerged what Juan Gelpí calls "the three fundamental texts of Puerto Rican narrative during the seventies: Papeles de Pandora by Rosario Ferré, La guaracha del Macho Camacho by Luis Rafael Sánchez and La novelabingo by Manuel Ramos Otero" ("Apuntes al margen" 134, Jorge Ibañez 333, Donna Perry 89).

Here, I would like to go beyond the binary model of a geographical outside and inside that appears to govern these interpretations of the reach of Zona and of its impact on Puerto Rican culture. Instead, I would like to place the Puerto Rican journal in the paradoxically larger context of what Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a "minor literature," which nevertheless promises to return a mode of meaning-making, signification, or sense, to a region, to a subject, and to a cultural expression much larger than its "own." In their influential work on Franz Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari identify three characteristics of a minor literature. It is "impossible" in practice (its writers find it impossible to write both inside and outside a major literature), political in range, and collective in value (Deleuze and Guattari 16-17). While I think that their description of the collective value of minor literatures is romantic, I find that their diagnosis of the impossible situation facing the writer of a minor literature, and their description of its inherently political range applies to Zona. What I find most compelling about their analysis (and what I will focus on in this essay) is not so much their definition of a minor literature as it applies to the journal, but their metaphorics and what these metaphorics suggest. Deleuze and Guattari insist on describing minor literature as a mode of techne, as a machine, or as what they call an "assemblage" (18). With these metaphors, Deleuze and Guattari approximate what I believe to be crucial about minor literatures in general and about Zona in particular: to wit, their objectification by moral, cultural and literary majorities on the one hand, and their reanimation, or re-energizing, of the material that is rendered inert and machine-like by what Deleuze and Guattari call "powers to come" on the other (18).

Deleuze and Guattari help me to place the literature, the language, the writers and the writing of Zona in the context of a minor literature. Zona contains the work of similarly "minor writers" (Latin American, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, but also women and homosexual writers) who return signification, who learn to write in a zone (both literal and imaginary) of "booms," explosions literary or otherwise, in a context where all writers (but the minor writer in particular and most intensely) are sometimes literally, but most often symbolically, burned to a crisp of unrecognizable meaning, in a zone of conflict...