Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse (review)

Many years ago, I published Cultural Diversity in Latin America (U of New Mexico P, 1994), in which I analyzed a series of Latin American verbal texts that were scarcely considered literature at the time (Latin American sociopolitical commentary, the ghosted autobiography of Eva Perón, child-oriented musical lyrics). Some colleagues complained that I was wasting my time with texts one would certainly not be teaching in the Latin American literature classroom. In general, the book did not much influence the debate just beginning to jell on criticism of Latin American literature, although some have been cited in subsequent criticism on the texts involved. In 1993, John Beverley published Against Literature with Minnesota. Since he has been better situated than I to influence cultural debates, his work has been notably influential, as befits the voice of someone who has been central to ideological controversies over Latin American writing. The one major difference between these two books is that I included Brazil; Beverley has rarely made reference to Brazil in his writing.

Shellhorse's interesting monograph, titled Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina, is immediately attractive, then, because it is firmly grounded in the postulates of Beverley and others, and it is additionally important because the author is, unlikely many of his mentors cited, well aware of the importance of including Brazil in any legitimate use of the adjective Latin American. And, by focusing on Argentina and Brazil (some will lament the absence of Mexico here), in highlighting texts from these two major centers of Latin American cultural production, Shellhorse is implying their viability for other continental cultural centers.

Anti-Literature, I would venture to say, is now squarely within the mainstream of the teaching of Latin American literature, at least as evinced by leading programs and the principal literary journals. That is, no one would seem to earn much grief anymore for teaching the écriture feminine of Clarice Lispector or sociopolitical and historical novels of David Viñas—or even, for that matter, of teaching Brazilian literature as an integral part of a Latin American Studies program, which was not true a couple of decades ago (which is why scholars like Beverley never felt like they had to pay much attention to Brazil). Indeed, the turn away from literature as an aesthetic phenomenon, seen in the declining enrollments in traditional literature-based courses, has sent my colleagues who used to decry my teaching popular culture scrambling for innovating ways to teach poetry, for example, alternatives to traditional lyric forms examples of which are abundantly represented in Shellhorse's collection of essays. Shellhorse understandably thumps the so-called Boom for its proposed monumentalization of the grand narrative, only to finally get right the representation of Latin American origins, history, and identity in ways in which the Romantic or Realist novel failed to do. The quest for the "purely literary" is a dicey one in Latin America, and the boom texts seemed to make it more reasonable: finally, we had full-throated literary creations that overcame the problem of why Facundo (a sociological treatise) is more intrinsic to Argentine literary than a "key" novel like José Mármol's Amalia. Modernism in poetry and the book in prose narrative established unquestionably literary parameters and standards that barely existed before. It has only been a questioning (beginning with their intransigent masculinist character) of the institutionalization of the two that began several decades ago that allows us now to see that alleged anti-literature is really where the excitement in Latin American writing really is. But, then, González Echeverría was saying that almost thirty years ago with the publication of Myth and Archive (Cambridge UP, 1990), where, precisely, he emphatically recommended teaching Facundo over any of the pale novels of the period (or Euclides da Cunha's journalistic report...