Literature and Subjection: The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America (review)

This is an ambitious and provocative book that explores the nature of the literary, its poetics and politics, powers and limitations, creative force and territorialized practice in Latin America. Even as the book in its seven chapters encompasses literary production from pre-conquest to contemporary times, it is far from constituting a comprehensive account of its literature. Posing Latin American literature as a theoretical problem, Legrás engages the aesthetic to explore the tension between the universal reach of the literary word, what he calls the inaugural moment of enunciation, and the singular, intractable areas of the Latin American experience that literature, as he says, not only symbolizes but also searches for, struggles with or ultimately abandons. He sets up the framework from a post-colonial perspective as he follows the historical project of the literati at the end of the nineteenth century. Led by a belief in the powers of literary representation, that is, the ability to capture the heterogeneous make up of Latin American societies, these writers, notwithstanding the differentiated worlds they inhabited in relationship to the popular masses, created symbolic worlds that inevitably also showed the limits of their reach, and even more so the ways the literary made evident the representation of power. This assimilative incorporation of the margins to literary discourse symbolically constituted the integration of "the others" into the discourse of the modernizing nation-states, that is, to the timetable of European modernity. The disjuncture between the modernizing logic of the writers and those marginalized opens a fissure that separates the work from the "real," and is still in search of resolve in both literature and reality, as is evident, states Legrás, in the terminology of cultural analysis brought forth by the renowned critics with whom he dialogues: transculturation (Rama), heterogeneity (Cornejo Polar), hybridity (García Canclini), colonial semiosis (Mignolo), third space (Moreiras), tropological mimesis (Gonzalez-Echeverría), auto-ethnography (Pratt) (6).

However, there are texts, continues Legrás, that either subvert the postulates of the domesticating historical project or test the limits of literary representation from within their own constitution. Demystifying the ungrounded claims of literature to truth/immanent value, are not sufficient to understand its on-going validity, suggests Legrás, defining the aesthetic not as ornament or judgment, but as act, as coinciding in part with poiesis. Legrás differentiates between literature as institution, as state project, as canonized by pedagogical aims, publishers, prizes, academia; and literature as an instituting power that creates social bonds through enunciation making those "others," subjected in the "historical project," being subjects that negate any hegemonic form of representation. Taking from Levinas, he differentiates between the said and the saying and through his analysis of texts by among others, but especially pertinent, Saer, Roa Bastos, and Arguedas studies, "the dynamic by which literature must look to its own arsenal for weapons that may allow it to negate its historical domestication" (2) rendering discerning and stirring revisionist readings of these canonical texts.

From the first introductory chapter and throughout the six chapters that follow, Legrás draws on a wide range of thinkers, theorists, and critics as he argues for the counter-hegemonic potential of the saying, the "how" rather than the "what" of literary texts. Chapter 2, focusing on The Witness by Saer and one of the most stimulating in the book, is as much a re-reading of Western philosophy as an analysis of the novel. In a challenging pairing of Descartes (real) and the protagonist (fictional), Legrás, drawing from Levinas's upsetting of ontology by ethics, studies the novel as imagining "another thinking" outside western metaphysics, as a refusing to reduce the "other" to the "same," and in turn, resisting the historical project of the lettered city. In Chapter 3 Legrás, in critical dialogue with colonialist critics and historiographers (Mignolo, Brotherston, León-Portilla, Rappaport, Lockhart) returns to Levinas's differentiation between the said and the...