Historia y taumaturgia intelectual. La prodigiosa invención de América en Última Tule de Alfonso Reyes

Alfonso Reyes’s Última Tule exhibits a mix of history, philosophy of history, blatant self-referential discourse, literature, and ideological proclamation that becomes disquieting, owing to the frequent feeling of unrest produced by everything hybrid; that is, by any product, entity, or process that defies established taxonomies. This fact is neither rare nor unconscious in Reyes’s oeuvre, especially with regard to his essays, that “centaur of genres” so dominant in his work. Curiously, his propensity to hybridity always goes hand-in-hand with a parallel and apparently contradictory aspiration to an Apollonian coherence. Última Tule provides a key to the understanding of this antinomy in Reyes. The monstrosity concerning genre that characterizes this particular text acquires a sense of unity through the combined strength of three axes of cohesion. First, Última Tule develops a pervasive idea according to which history, either in the sense of a chronicle of the past or of the very past itself, is always seen as a sort of verbal construction ruled by a poetics close to those used in literature, but without eschewing on that account an unwavering claim to truth. Second, it argues for a complementary conception of Latin America qua heterogeneous discursive field. Finally, and as a seemingly ineluctable consequence of those first two points, Última Tule defends a vision of the Latin American intellectual as taking the leading role in the task of deciphering, interpreting, and shaping the continent’s historical developments.