Andrés Caicedo: ¡Que viva la música! Autobiographical Projection and the Anti-Bildungsroman

…lo principal en Caicedo es Caicedo mismo.

Alberto Fuguet

Caicedo: Blurring the Lines Between Self, Author, Characters and Text

In true rock star fashion, the legend surrounding countercultural Colombian author Andrés Caicedo (1951–1977) and his work has only grown since his suicide at age twenty-five on March 4, 1977—the very day he received the first copies of his novel, ¡Que viva la música! Indeed, Caicedo’s posthumous career seems to make evident key points set forth by Joli Jensen and Steve Jones throughout their work Afterlife as Afterimage: Understanding Posthumous Fame: that death is a “good career move” that inevitably boosts sales; that it creates an ongoing discussion of the young artist’s potential and promise; and boosts the symbolic capital instantly attained by the deceased in regards to defining an era and its ethos. The latter is particularly poignant when analyzing Caicedo from our temporal perch in the 21^st century and the influence he has had on authors for the last twenty-five years. While Jensen and Jones discuss how family, fans and critics engage in the mythmaking process and the reshaping of the image and legacy of musicians after death, Caicedo’s posthumous career trajectory is remarkable in how it follows so many of those same tenets. Both family and particularly critics have been instrumental in constructing Caicedo’s image drawing from the trove of unpublished personal writings that the young author left behind. His older sister Rosario states that he left everything behind so that it could be published, having perfectly premeditated his movements in life and death (“Las cartas silenciadas de Andrés Caicedo”). This process has been undertaken by a number of well known figures in late 20^th and early 21^st century Latin American literature such as Alberto Fuguet and Sandro Romero Rey, though there have been conflicts with the Caicedo estate along the way regarding which texts, mostly in the form of correspondence, should be published or suppressed.

Active in writing from the age of thirteen, the vast majority of Caicedo’s work has been published posthumously, gaining a strong cult following inside and out of literary circles, and in some cases, according to Juan Duchesne Winter, even entering mainstream college and non-college curriculums despite its countercultural nature and representations of sex and drug use. Evidence of Caicedo’s posthumous celebrity is further garnered from the fans from all over who now make pilgrimages to Cali to pay homage and the periodic attention he still receives in the Colombian underground and cultural press. It is an unlikely scenario for the young writer who felt he needed to make his own appointment with destiny. Currently, interest in his work continues and, after a number of years of internal family conflicts regarding publishing some of the letters and other personal texts, Grupo Planeta/Seix Barral was in the process of publishing his complete works as of this writing in the fall of 2019.

Nonetheless, the process of making these texts available began as the 40^th anniversary of Caicedo’s suicide approached and in the years that followed. Writer and critic Romero Rey, a member of the Cine Club and a key figure in the posthumous publication of Caicedo’s work, sorted through the trunks full of the papers he left behind and put them in their final order for their eventual publication. Caicedo was extremely prolific dabbling in many different genres, had numerous unfinished projects, worked on translations of varied material (including Rolling Stones songs and film reviews) and left a considerable amount of material from which to create a more complete portrait of him. A number of the letters had already been gathered along with other personal writings by Fuguet in constructing the montage of texts which is Mi cuerpo es una celda: Una autobiografía (2008). Like the previously published personal papers gathered in El cuento de mi vida (2007), this text reveals many of Caicedo’s most intimate feelings, his intensity, his disappointments, his struggles with alienation and loneliness, his disdain for growing...