Morrison Library Inaugural Address Lectures

This lecture was made possible thanks to the generous support of the
Class of 1941 World War II Memorial Chair of Spanish-American Literature.
We wish to thank the Center for Latin American Studies for supporting the publication of this issue.

The Multiple Voices of Latin American Literature

Antonio Cornejo-Polar

Dear friends:

I must apologize for my poor English, and for the impeccably incorrect pronunciation that you will soon notice. I am apologetic for many obvious reasons. At this moment I mainly regret not being expressive enough to convey my gratitude to the University of California at Berkeley and the Class of 1941 for having honored me with the Class of 1941 World War II Memorial Chair.

I will make use of a topos of classic rhetoric: intense feelings are to be expressed in simple words. Many thanks, then, to Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien and the University authorities, and thanks especially to the generous members of the Class of 1941. We all recognize that due to their courage the world was able to preserve its freedom. Thanks to The Center for Latin American Studies and The Library; and, of course, thanks to my friends from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, especially to its chairman, professor Charles Faulhaber.

I know well that I am undertaking very large and serious responsibilities, and I also know that I am not especially prepared to face them. My arrival in the United States occurred late in my career, and my basic experience took place in Peruvian universities, mainly at the University of San Marcos. Of course it is quite different from universities in the United States. Nevertheless having spent more than twenty years teaching in a Spanish American university will perhaps allow me to offer a more intense and committed vision of its literature.

To begin with, I do not believe that literature finds itself in an autonomous space, nor do I consider it to be a mere expression of the historic and social reality from which it emerges. In truth, the social reality is found within the literary discourse and it adds fullness and often drama to it. Even though the following paradox was proposed in a naïve fashion, it continues to be distressing: how is it that nations that have not yet been able to resolve their basic problems are at the same time creators of popular and elite cultures that are really admirable?

Today we do not have to revindicate the value of this literature. Let us just simply recall that Foucault began one of his best works, Les mots et les choses, with a long reference to Borges; that Borges's own shadow, just to mention one author, surrounds Umberto Eco's novels, and that the Theory of Reception can find some of its most refined arguments in "Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote", one of Borges's most noted short stories. After all, and now changing references, it is important to remember John Barth's words:

"Praise be to the Spanish language and imagination! As Cervantes stands as an exemplar of premodernism and a great precursor of much to come, and Jorge Luis Borges as an exemplar of dernier cri modernism and at the same time as a bridge between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth, so Gabriel García Márquez is in that enviable succession: an exemplary postmodernist and a master of the storyteller's art."

Of course, in Latin America we take all this as ironic because the rest of the world might have taken too long to "discover" us, and when they finally did, it was when post-modern thought discovered that marginality and subalternity, the borders and the fringes, were very exciting, excitement that at times risks irresponsible esthetizations of a people's poverty.

On the other hand, this tardy discovery also reduces our literature of more than five centuries to the production of the last few decades. Obviously, rather than merely celebrating the success of our contemporary writers, I am here interested in expressing some ideas about the profound nature of Spanish-American literature.

Moreover, if we do not want to distort -or worse yet: if we do not want to mutilate the Spanish American condition- it is necessary to embrace as ours not only the literature written in European languages, Spanish and Portuguese basically, but also those from the non-Hispanic Caribbean. Similarly, the oral literatures in those languages are ours but also ours are the oral literatures in Amerindian languages and in the narratives recreated from the African world in their early transplantation to Latin America by the tragic practice of slave trading.

In traditional literary studies, native literatures are usually considered as a long vanished prehistory, under the assumption that Amerindian literary production ceased with the Conquest. This is not the case. The present vitality of these literatures is amazing. Amazing because of the complexity, intensity, and wealth of their semiotic systems, and also because at the same time they represent an act of ethnic resistance and vindication that has lasted for five centuries.

But it so happens that these old and renewed discourses weave intercultural webs with a large part of other sectors of Latin American literature, establishing dialogs with it -dialogs that are sometimes polemic- and enriching it with an age-old background that continues to be current and dynamic. Without this venerable tradition it would have been impossible to have the works of Miguel Angel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, or Octavio Paz (all Nobel Prizes), but also the works of José María Arguedas, Juan Rulfo, Augusto Roa Bastos, Carlos Fuentes or Ernesto Cardenal, to mention just a few of the most notable examples. Roa Bastos says that to write is: "to read an unwritten text ahead of time, to listen and hear the sounds of an unformulated speech ahead of time but already present in the harmonious sounds of the memory."

In the last few years, there has been a difficult convergence between illiterate persons who tell their experiences to some intellectual who then puts them in the public eye in the form of a testimony, thus offering a public space to voices never heard before. The paradigmatic example in this field is Rigoberta Menchú. I mention it only to illustrate my first idea. Latin American literature is multilingual, multiethnic, and multicultural. Not only because within its own space one finds the interaction of various languages, multiple ethnic consciences, and diverse cultural values; but -especially- because its most profound nature is unimaginable without the presence of these complex intermixtures that constitute the very matter of which it is made. A literature of fluid and permeable boundaries, decentered by the heterogenous multiplicity of the systems that form it, Spanish American literature is really a challenge to critical conceptions and imagination.

From the point of view of literary history, the problem is still more complex. To the obvious chronological sequentiality of discourses it is necessary to consider what could be called the "verticalization" of time. The Chilean poet Enrique Lihn said in a memorable verse: "We are contemporaries of different histories;" and, in fact, this is so. There are discourses from diverse historical planes, sometimes incompatible discourses, that coexist in a common space and time. More importantly yet, within one and the same text different voices can be heard. Sometimes multiple voices, voices that come from those "different histories" but that are coetaneous, and that at the same time can articulate a common consciousness in one enunciation that chronologically might be perceived as separated by the barrier of the centuries.

In Peru for example, the most boldly experimental and rigorously modern novel of the last two or three decades is El Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo by José María Arguedas. In this work, the most precise contemporariness along with its own values and languages is inextricably linked to indigenous myths and stories that were set down in the sixteenth century but that without a doubt sprang from much older times.

At this point it might be appropriate to invoke an emblematic figure: the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The son of a noble Spanish captain and a ñusta (Inca princess), he belonged to the first generation of American mestizos. He lived in Cuzco, the imperial city of the Incas, until his adolescence. Speaking the languages of both his parents, he listens to the narration of the conquistadors' deeds as well as to the glorious stories of an Empire that they could still not believe had been defeated, stories that he is never able to forget.

Later, he travels to Spain, where he assimilates Renaissance culture, and at the same time learns to produce one of the finest and most intense prose styles of the Hispanic Golden Age. Only then does he decide to write about that which touches him most deeply: the history of the Inca Empire, its conquest by the Spaniards, and the first years of the colonial era.

The late José Durand, the unforgettable professor of Berkeley, used to say that upon reading the Inca Garcilaso one could rapidly discern that his discourse mixes history and autobiography. And this observation does not only refer to the fact that he was an eyewitness to some of the events that he narrates; or that he listened to the testimonies of those who participated directly in this history. It deals with something that is more significant: The Comentarios reales tell us -passionately- about the experience of a man of two worlds, two worlds that fiercely confront each other by the act of conquest, two worlds to which he, however, owes loyalty because both are part of his double ancestry.

From this perspective, Inca Garcilaso's works can be read as a prolonged, tenacious, and subtle effort to make these worlds compatible or even harmonious; for which he resorted to the principles of providencialist historiography as well as those of Neoplatonic philosophy in his attempt to create harmony between opposites. However, it becomes obvious that this effort ends in failure, a beautiful failure. There is no discourse capable of healing the deep wounds caused by the destruction of the Inca Empire, that for Garcilaso meant the beloved maternal world, a world that in less than one generation he saw change from a position of power and splendor to an unjust and humiliating servitude.

The historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea used to say that the Inca Garcilaso is a tragic character because he is "a Spaniard in America, and an Indian in Spain." He was a victim of his own desire for an impossible harmony, a harmony that he builds in each page, only to destroy it in the next with the fire and the blood of conquest. A conquest that on one side instills pride in him because of the heroism of his father, and on the other saddens him because of the harsh destiny of his mother's heritage. It is a tragic destiny, but paradoxically it is also the foundation of a new cultural dynamic. In spite of positioning itself between the fractures of two cultures, this discourse functions also as a difficult and enriching intercommunication between its great codes of interpretation of the world via a complex transcultural process that always results in the unexpected.

In any case, no matter how contradictory he is, the Inca Garcilaso supports one of Hispanic America's greatest utopias: "mestizaje," understood as the true cohesion of the many cultures that history accumulated in its territory. It is a conciliatory and comforting utopia that seems to gather into one unique torrent the many rivers that converged in this physical and spiritual geography we call Latin America. This idea at one point reached mythical proportions. I am referring to the thought of José Vasconcelos, who, from the context of the Mexican Revolution joyously announced the arrival of a "cosmic race."

However, the overpowering plurality of cultural experiences that make up the history of Hispanoamerica points to the fact that this utopia, in affirming the unification of what is essentially diverse, is not precisely the best suited for a world made of many worlds, and a history made of many histories. Perhaps, then, it might become necessary to imagine a polymorphous and changing identity, ready to accept heterodoxies and contradictions.

I am thinking of the famous chapter in Alejo Carpentier's El Reino de este Mundo, when the execution of Mackandal the leader of the slave rebellion in Haiti, is celebrated as a triumph by the French colonizers who have in fact witnessed his death, but it is also celebrated by his followers, who have seen something totally different in exactly the same occurrence: the metamorphosis of the leader into a powerful bird, an act of magic reaffirming the final triumph of their rebellion.

I am thinking as well of the double axis of verisimilitude that runs through Cien Años de Soledad. In this splendid novel there is a conflict of different notions of reality that can hardly be articulated as a synthesis of a superior unity. Those who accept, as something perfectly natural, events such as the ascendance to Heaven in body and soul of Remedios "the beautiful," or that yellow butterflies always surround Mauricio Babilonia's erotic encounters, can only accept as a satanic wonder some modest technological progress. On the other hand, of course, those who believe without doubt in the latter circumstances dismiss the former to the realm of incredible miracles. It may be that the magnificence of Gabriel García Márquez's novel rests upon the fact that in it both versions of the world are legitimate, and that they coexist as existential options that as a whole offer an intense experience of plenitude.

Summing up, I want to say that rather than to imagine a synthesis that makes homogeneous what in reality is notably heterogeneous, it would be better to attempt an understanding of a dialogic culture, a culture that in this sense is profoundly democratic, as in fact is seen in the great texts of Spanish-American literature. It might be better to imagine this culture as an open space where diverse languages, ethnicities, cultures, and histories enrich each other by means of that multiple dialogue without losing their idiosyncratic character. A culture, where identity and alterity, where what is one's own or another's, live together and interact in a productive manner.

José María Arguedas would say that in any Spanish American country, "any man free of chains and free of the vileness caused by egotism can live, happily, as a native of all countries." Of course this is another utopia, and it will be one as long as the reality of misery and injustice in which our peoples live make it impossible for this dialogic relationship to be one of symmetry and equality. A reality where each and everyone in daily life can resolve his or her own differences and can define the manner, the limits, and the reasons for his or her communication with the different social and ethnic groups that surround and form part of their being.

In that case the beautiful fullness stemming from the convergence of "all our nations" will be more than just images or words; it will be a true and exemplary history. Many of us around the world continue to hope.

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