El cuerpo del delito: Un manual (review)

Josefina Ludmer. El cuerpo del delito: Un manual. Buenos Aires: Perfil. 1999. 509 pp.

El cuerpo del delito: Un manual does not resemble any other academic book in the field of Latin Americanism. Written in seemingly didactic prose, the book intentionally avoids any academic jargon. El cuerpo del delito, half analysis and half narration, comes off as a critical work written by a storyteller. Not in vain does Josefina Ludmer call herself the “Scheherazade of modern stories” toward the end of the book.

Academically speaking, El cuerpo del delito is a journey through one century of Argentine literature (roughly from 1880 to 1980) with “crime” as its vehicle. This description already advances the book's two methodological decisions: first, to consider “crime” not as a “theme” but as a critical instrument and, second, to traverse the formative years of modern Argentina. And yet, as Ludmer says, El cuerpo del delito is not a literary history.

Why “crime” as a critical instrument? Crimes, according to Ludmer, are foundational; they establish frontiers, delimit the proper and the Other. Crime does not necessarily refer to physical violence. There is murder in El cuerpo del delito (as in the chapter “Women Who Kill”) but also betrayal, cheating, and simply the avoidance of truth. Yet crime is not only a system of exclusions; it is also a point of articulation. It is an act that articulates one time with another, but also an act that, within a particular time, articulates the seemingly opposed realms of society, the forbidden, law, art, and the state. A culture tells itself stories of crime; these stories become foundational.

The fact that for many pages El cuerpo del delito is but a paraphrase of different books (as in the disorienting chapter 4, “History of a Best-Seller: From Anarchism to Peronism,” and the section “On Jewish Stories” in chapter 6) have already led some people to state that El cuerpo del delito is an antitheoretical book. It may then come as a surprise that I read El cuerpo del delito in relation to a classic (perhaps the properly classic) text of “literary theory,” Jacques Derrida's exegesis of Kafka's parable “Before the Law,” an essay that bears the same title and is included in Acts of Literature.

It is worth recalling that Kafka's parable starts with these words: “Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a countryman who prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment.” The countryman waits at the open door of the Law for years and years. Finally he dies without daring to go through the door that had been open the whole while. On the basis of this tale Derrida discusses the implications of law for any inquiry on literature and examines the basis of any judgment on the fictional or nonfictional character of a text. Ludmer echoes this very discussion in the opening lines of her book when she says that her problem is the difference between “literature,” “fiction,” and “reality”: “My subject is ‘crime' and this book is a manual about its body. A manual about ‘crime' in quotes (and about crime and quotation marks) [such is Ludmer's purely linguistic definition of fiction], because I do not use the word merely in its juridical sense, but in all its senses. And because fiction is my domain” (11).

In his essay, Derrida frames his discussion of fiction and law in reference to Freud's Totem and Taboo. In her introduction, Ludmer also refers to this Freudian text as a founding moment, but for her it is foundational in relation to crime instead of law. How then does Ludmer construct her difference with respect to the text whose movement her own text follows? The difference is narrative in character. Kafka's countryman stands at the open doors of the law without daring to trespass its limit. In stark contrast...