Interartistic Approaches to Contemporary Latin American Literature

. . . the arts aspire, if not to take one another’s place, at least reciprocally to lend one another new powers.

Charles Baudelaire (“The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix,” 43)

Baudelaire’s observation will serve as poetic precursor to a more recent academic statement of this intuition. An advertisement for two issues of Poetics Today devoted entirely to the relations of art and literature reads as follows:

Perhaps the greatest advantage of the interartistic comparison . . . is the very richness and wit of its juxtapositions. Though it cannot organize the arts into a structured, coherent system, nevertheless it delivers a copiousness to aesthetic speculation that has long been missed in the restrictive matrix of academic disciplines. ¹

This statement announces (if somewhat hyperbolically) my own sense of the unnecessary disciplinary divisions that currently characterize the academic study of the arts. Not to place literary texts in relation to visual forms is indeed to diminish the “copiousness of aesthetic speculation” because such juxtapositions require that we consider how meaning is generated by verbal and visual structures, and how differently. The “sister arts” have long engaged in sibling rivalry, of course, and they often do aspire (as Baudelaire implies) to take each other’s place. Interartistic criticism necessarily deals with these overlapping aspirations. It raises questions about the relative nature of referentiality—about how literary and artistic content is constituted—in ways that other analytical models do not, even as it borrows methods from these other models. So, in interartistic courses and criticism, we begin to understand the reciprocal energies that Baudelaire describes.

Like his precursor Baudelaire, the poet Paul Valéry wrote brilliantly about painting: “One must always apologize for talking about painting. But there are important reasons for not keeping silent. All the arts live by words. Each work of art demands its response . . .” (“About Corot,” 134). Interartistic critics will surely hesitate to apologize, and will debate whether all arts live by words. But they will agree with Valéry’s final statement, for in the context of his discussion of Corot, Valéry clearly intends “response” to mean not just the reader’s or viewer’s interpretive response, but also the response of one art form to another.

I want to refer here not only to the interartistic critic’s task but also to the teacher’s, and suggest how interartistic approaches to Latin American literature may enhance our understanding of particular texts and traditions. In Latin America, the arts are not as separated as in Europe and the U.S., in part because visual and verbal modes of communication have played complementary roles since the earliest establishments of empire in the Spanish New World, and in part because print culture in many parts of Latin America is still radically affected by indigenous visual forms and modes of expression. My focus is American in a hemispheric sense: a comparative discussion of cultural attitudes toward the arts in the Americas will be useful, and sometimes invaluable, in interartistic analyses of Latin American literature.

I will begin by outlining four theoretical questions inherent in all interartistic response. These questions involve the referential capacities of the image, visual and verbal; they may be implicit or explicit in a given discussion, but they are obligatory to interartistic study.

1. 1. the ontological status of the image-as-such in a given culture;

2. 2. the relations among verbal and visual modes of signifying;

3. 3. the expressive capacity of the media in question, whether fiction, painting, poetry, photography, theatre, film, etc.;

4. 4. the semiotic mechanisms of these media in their cultural and historical contexts.

To approach these questions, we will have to combine methods from a variety of theoretical discourses: cultural criticism, philosophy, narratology, and most basically, semiotics. These methods will mix and merge as the interartistic argument unfolds, for a specific comparison will often dictate its own theoretical bases and analytical methods. My examples will show how theoretical considerations arise out of the comparative context itself.

But I need to raise one more question at the outset. Why, in l999, in the U.S., does interartistic analysis need to...