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  • La escritura errante: Ilegibilidad y políticas del estilo en Latinoamérica by Julio Prieto
  • Tavid Mulder
Prieto, Julio. La escritura errante: Ilegibilidad y políticas del estilo en Latinoamérica. Iberoamericana, 2016. 372 pp.

In the final lines of Trilce XXXVI, César Vallejo writes: "¡Ceded al nuevo impar / potente de orfandad!" This quote could be the slogan of Julio Prieto's thought-provoking La escritura errante. In a series of perceptive readings, Prieto traces a gesture in twentieth-century Latin America literature of bad writing, of writing premised on its incompleteness and abandonment of aesthetic conventions, and Prieto demonstrates the importance of this gesture for a reconsideration of Latin American literary criticism more generally. Bad writing, in Prieto's account, entails "una voluntad de llevar la escritura a sus límites, de recorrer los puntos de tensión por los que ésta se des-sutura y es puesta fuera de sí" (14). This gesture does not merely identify the limits of literature, emphasizing the strict separation of art and its outside; rather, it involves the attempt to "hacer productiva una falta" (14), yielding knowledge of literature's relation to its outside precisely on the basis of their mutual lack of closure. Prieto thereby articulates a historical and aesthetic framework around a socio-formal dynamic that resembles the avant-garde's self-critical attitude toward art. Although las vanguardias are not the explicit focus of his current book, Prieto's previous work on the avant-garde—and Macedonio Fernández, in particular—shines through in La escritura errante to the extent that he takes seriously, unlike most critics of Latin American literature, the questions raised by the avant-gardes. In so doing, Prieto also yields significant insights into the politics of literature.

La escritura errante constructs a literary tradition of what Prieto calls devenir-iletrado, highlighting its difference from Ángel Rama's concept of la ciudad letrada. If writing serves in the latter to give order to society, in the former writing stages its own lack and illegibility. [End Page 1027]

In the introduction, Prieto discusses Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" as an early paradigm of this tradition of "illegibility," especially the story's final words "Er lässt sich nicht lesen" (it does not permit itself to be read). For Prieto, the "illegibility" of the masses highlights the "constitutive dissociation" in modernity between the Enlightenment project of "hacer legible el mundo en términos seculares" and the illegible, chaotic social effects of instrumental reason, imperialism, capitalism, etc. (26–27). Because of the effects of colonialism, this "dissociation" intensifies in the periphery, raising the stakes for the gesture of bad writing. Prieto, for instance, traces this illegibility back to one of the primal scenes of Latin American history, the confrontation at Cajamarca, and he insists on its relevance to the various projects to construct a national identity, from the disagreements between Bello and Sarmiento on popular language to da Cunha's Os Sertões. Prieto thus suggests that el devenir-iletrado surfaces repeatedly throughout the longue durée of Latin American history, but the main focus of the book, in which Prieto is at his best, remains twentieth-century literature.

In subsequent chapters, Prieto clarifies the contours of el devenir-iletrado through readings of central figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature and cinema, but Prieto's interpretations could also stand on their own, not simply as illustrations of a theory. The first chapter provides an insightful reading of the "messianic realism" of Roberto Arlt's engagement with urban modernity and media. Arlt, who was often accused of "writing poorly," might seem like an obvious example. But Prieto provides a genuinely original reading, and, in the process, he demonstrates that el devenir-iletrado does not constitutes a momentary detour into the "low" in order to ultimately return to "high" art—that is, a way of renewing cultural energies—; rather, it involves "the strategy of conquering the high by means of a specific sublimation of the low" (65). In the second chapter, Prieto examines the poetic negativity of César Vallejo's Trilce, its agrammaticality, and what Prieto calls "la cadencia de caída...

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