On the Dark Side of the Archive: Nation and Literature in Spanish America and the Turn of the Century (review)

Drawing on the imaginative force brought to the study of Latin American letters by the grand-scale view of regional literary modernity as an archive— eminently represented in Roberto González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive and Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions—On the Dark Side of the Archive seeks both to extend and to reorient its critical purchase through the lens of what González Espitia calls the carnero, the titular dark side of the archive. The carnero, as the physical and mnemonic place where unwanted books are tossed, composes the constitutive outside of its visible counterpart, the “open archive” (16), simultaneously facilitating and betraying its purported self-sufficiency. Functioning like a Derridean supplement, the carnero forces us to appreciate the ways archives enact an endless self-reconstitution across their spectrum of visible and invisible spaces, where the latter appear spectrally in the gaps of the former and come (im)possibly to fill them, sending today’s open archive to the carnero so that the archival process is constantly begun anew.

The book’s six chapters challenge the archive of national romance popularized by Sommer through examination of its supplementary material, the a-foundational fictions of decadent literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Chapter six inverts the direction of investigation by studying the more current work of Fernando Vallejo, which is part of the open archive yet also a-foundational.) The inscription of these texts in the carnero is thematic, stylistic, and historic at once: not only do they undermine heteronormative national foundation through topics of incest, venereal disease, necrophilia, psychedelic hallucination, zoophilia, apocalyptic miscegenation, and vampirism; they also reflect the shuffling of texts in and out of the open archive according to the status of their authors, some of whom, like Colombian José María Vargas Vila or Peruvian Clemente Palma, had popular readerships yet have always been banished to the carnero, while others, like José Martí, Horacio Quiroga, and Vallejo, are refashioned for the open archive through a narrative of authorial maturation, separating the wheat of more acclaimed works from the chaff of their anomalous early production. The chapters are concerned to trace the appearance of the supplemental lack of these authors’ oeuvres—what “begs for completion” through prevalent contemporary literary modes but also makes silent claims about their inadequacies (20)—in the vicissitudes of their decadent mood, the set of tropes and discourses positioned against the grain of mainstream ideas about cultural nation-building.

Given the multilayered focus of the analytical apparatus laid out in the introductory chapter, the thematic chapters face the task of balancing contextualization of literary-cultural and geopolitical historic factors with close reading of decadent and a-foundational elements in each of the texts in question, and rejoining all of these threads to the main discussion of the archive’s supplemental lack. All the chapters actively illuminate some of these vectors of the archive’s morphology, but they manage less often to highlight them all equally as a cohesive whole. Chapter two, for example, probes the archival trajectory of Martí’s Amistad funesta/ Lucía Jerez for clues to the author’s changing ideas about the place of women in Spanish American nations. The novel, first published under a pseudonym in a New York periodical, officially joined Martí’s oeuvre under the title Lucía Jerez after critics discovered its true authorship: in the development of the title character, argues González Espitia, we can read the advancement of Martí’s ambivalence toward strong, sexually possessive feminine figures who counter the traditionally accepted role of women as decorative fodder for national progeny. In the original Amistad funesta, the paranoid murderess Lucía clearly personifies a threat of feminine power to the health of new national bodies, but in the subsequent archival inscription of the tale her character reveals a more positive energy...