Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America

A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of Latin America

178 A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of Latin America Mario J. Valdés In his influential essay “Literary History as Challenge,” (1982) Hans Robert Jauss makes the following argument: “The task of literary history is . . . only completed when literary production is not only represented synchronically and diachronically in the succession of its systems, but also seen as ‘special history’ in its own unique relationship to ‘general history’” (39). My response to Jauss’s third point—regarding literary history’s own unique relationship to general history —will constitute the major part of this essay and in so doing I will outline my basic argument for a post-Foucault history of literary culture. In order to take up Jauss’s challenge we must first establish the social basis for literature and, consequently , literary history. A community in the sense of the Greek polis cannot be made by a housing development or a city planner or by a religious leader of a utopian settlement. A community, like a language, grows out of human interaction and an open public life that will eventually encourage group identity. The foundation of community life is dialogue, the willingness of people to talk and to listen to each other, the expression of mutual concerns, a debate on differences of opinion. Above all, it depends upon a sense of belonging and therefore having a vested interest in the life of the community. The question that immediately arises is: How do we situate communities in a literary history without reducing the diversity and unique features that distinguish them? The answer—in any case, my answer—was to enlist the participation of social scientists: cultural geographers, linguists, demographers, social historians and anthropologists to map the foundations of the rich diversity of Latin American literary cultures (see the website of the project at ). This mapping constitutes the first section of Volume 1 of our Comparative History of Latin A Historical Account of Difference 179 American Literary Cultures (see Vol. 1 at ). Some of the key questions that pertain to the viability of a community are covered by the issue of who has the right to speak. Throughout history there have always been some persons who live in the community but who are excluded from debate. They have been prevented from participating for many reasons including religion, caste, race, and gender. The sense of belonging to the community, which is so central to its development, paradoxically has also been the basis for excluding those who are different from those who set the rules. People in authority in communities around the world and in all periods of history, including our own, have established rules of eligibility or citizenship, which regulate rights and privilege and which also attempt to control communal dialogue, but to no avail. There is no law that can get people to talk to each other with mutual respect when they do not already have it, nor is there any law that has been successful for long in silencing those who would speak in spite of being excluded. There is a political dilemma here. In ideal terms universal freedom to speak is a desirable goal, but governments cannot legislate mutual respect when there is inherited distrust of those who are different. Or, to put the dilemma in terms of Hegel’s political philosophy, is it possible to have a community wherein everyday practice does justice to both particularity and universality? Northern Ireland has given us a prime example of the dilemma. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has come up with the most lucid response to Hegel’s paradox in his Philosophical Arguments (1995): “What seems to be emerging . . . is a hazy picture of history in which our understanding will be embedded. It rejects altogether the Hegelian single line of development , but it retains something like the notion of potentiality. . . . It does point us to a future of humanity in which the kind of undistorted understanding of the other aimed at by the comparativist enterprise will be increasingly valuable. . . . We can hope to advance in this direction, to the extent that the community of comparativists will increasingly include representatives of different cultures, will in effect start from different home languages” (164). We live in a time of distrust in all aspects of life. Just as Cuba has lost its revolutionary self-confidence, so has the United States lost its self-certainty of empire. Foucault’s recognition of the lust for power in all social organizations has...