Resistance to Literature

Those who refer to literature plain and simple, without the quotation marks designed to suspend the habitual reference of the term, run the risk of losing sight of the present crisis of the paradigm, including the theoretical discourses and disciplinary practices that reveal and intensify that crisis. Among the latter, the practice known as Cultural Studies acquires its place of relevance in close connection with the problematization of the literary text's undecidable nature. Surely, in the expression "literary text," the former term still carries the heavier burden of disputability--and this should not surprise us.

Once the phenomenon called "literature" is placed in a secure, undivided, independent, and immune position, the result is a silencing or suspension of the relevant cultural conditions that have situated it as a contingent notion. The flip side to that silence is the exclusion of subaltern spaces, an exclusion generated by a canon founded on a concept of language that is marked in a specific aesthetic sense and contains the power to cover up its own historicity. The most immediate effect of a contingency that wraps itself in secrecy to hide its own dimensions is an elevation of the paradigm to the privileged position of universality. Although, as García Canclini pointed out in a slightly different context, there is no "reason to abandon the aspiration to the universality of knowledge" and to surrender to a "postmodern complacency that accepts a reduction of knowledge to multiple narratives," ¹ I still find it important to emphasize that such an aspiration has to be distinguished from those ideological constructions that, precisely in the name of the universal, bar the path to a possible universal knowledge. In sum, the ideological illusion of universality consists in passing off as phenomena things that are only conceptual products--like "literature," for instance. Having said this, and in order to avoid confusion, I wish to clarify that I do not refer to the notion of concept in a solely Platonic sense, since that would amount to re-establishing the category of the universal at the core of literature. To think of literature in terms of a concept means to posit it in the sense of an intentional correlate that does not guarantee the reproduction of an object of experience.

As a matter of fact, the question concerning the essence (quid) of literature acquires a renewed interest to the extent that it is displaced by an inquiry into the conditions of existence of that essence. This is why the emergence of subaltern voices acts as a destabilizing agent with respect to the presumed properties of "Belles Lettres." Minority discourses not only denounce the politics of exclusion, but, especially, the constructed nature of a concept that is insufficient when faced with a heterogeneous reality. The matter of taking into account the resolute appearance of Latin American testimonial literature, for example, cannot be resolved so much by broadening the canon as by criticizing the criteria upon which it is founded. Certainly, and although this is not my primary concern, at stake here is not the survival of the canon, but the tense dynamics of rejection and absorption that is played out when, in Noé Jitrik's words, "marginality bubbles and surfaces in the expression itself," ² as is the case of the Riverplate "gauchesco" genre, for example.

To speak about literature within the field of Cultural Studies, or worse, to delineate an object of study that would be literature as an aesthetic discourse (according to which there would still be a need to propose something like literary studies) have become activities that fall under suspicion of idealism. The present uncertainty has been produced by the demise of the aesthetic hegemonies previously charged with deciding where literature belonged--its place--which entailed a determination of its non-place. This uncertainty affects not only an already impossible dialogue with an essence of the literary (in any of its versions), but also the attempt to localize its existence on the basis of...