The Dirty Realism of Enrique Medina

The Dirty Realism of Enrique Medina David William Foster Arizona State University Since the publication in 1972 oÃ- Las tumbas, a novel dealing with the reformatory experiences of a child abandoned by a single mother who cannot care for him (Foster, "Rape and Social Formation"), Enrique Medina has esrablished himself as the majoi voice in Argentine literature of the urban lumpen proletariar. The author of over twenty works of fiction (novels and short stories), chronicles, and a work of children's theater, Medina was, during the military dictatorship known as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (1976-83), the author with the largest inventory of books banned by the censorship apparatus. Las tumbas, which has been one of the best selling novels of contemporary Argentine fiction , was unavailable until the end of the dictatorship, and it was once again a bestseller after it was reissued.1 Las tumbas established the basic features of all of Medina's writing, and it is difficult to know which order of importance to assign to them: 1) a determined effort to engage in "dirty realism," understood as the commitment to describe the daily experiences of life with no attempt to euphemize them, either by turning away from certain aspects as somehow too gross to be related in literal terms or by supplementing them with a transcendent (social, political, ieligious) meaning that would detract from the imperative to examine the facts of life as unflinchingly as possible. Such a commitment is as much a defiance of the censorship imposed directly and indirectly on cultural production by tyrannical govArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 1, 1997 78 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies ernments as it is a repudiation of the norm of good taste that usually serves as a de facto censorship with an obligation, precisely, to augment the depiction of reality with transcendent meanings. Dirty realism also means a strict regard not just for what gets expunged from the "artistic" contemplation of the social record. It basically refers to the choice of which segment of the social record one focuses on. While it may not always be subaltern groups and marginal individuals— certainly, there are plenty of dirty hidden stories to tell about the privileged sectors of society—and those on which a writer like Medina will choose to focus are those social entities that, because their reality cannot be euphemized and transcendentalized, simply do not get reported on. Argentina has a long tradition of proletarian (Portantiero) and social realist writing (Foster, Social Realism in the Argentine Narrative), and there are many antecedents to Medina that can be mentioned: Roberto ArIt, Elias Castelnuovo, Leónidas Barletta, Bernardo Verbitsky, Bernardo Kordon, José Rabinovich, Alvaro Yunque, Max Dickmann are a few of the names that come to mind, and various versions of a literature of commitment continue to produce other writers and artists, now enhanced by the strong presence of women's voices, whose work bears degrees of resemblance to Medina's project. However, most of these writers either wrote in a period in which to write about certain things and to utilize certain linguistic registers of expression would have either meant not to publish at all or to experience an unbearable degree of social opprobrium. Also, many writers of social commitment are, in fact, tied to a transcendent signifier (e.g., social revolution, the fulfillment of History, salvation through commitment itself) that imposes a supplementary level of rheir writing, as much as it may serve to distract them from executing a full account of the social iecord: rhe movement toward the transcendent signifier necessarily means leaving the concrete details of social life behind. Medina has claimed that the discovery of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's books was a factor in his empowerment as a writer and showed him how one could write without yielding to a chimerical criterion of transcendence . Although Medina wrote with the goal of provoking the reigning principle of cultural decency in Argentina, such that works of his were banned, he was energetically condemned by sectors of the cultural press, and many bookstores refused to carry his titles (for example, the prestigious and ultraconservative Ateneo). The extreme circumstances of the dictatorships between...