Diacritics@50: An Interview with Alicia Borinsky
“Literature is not a generator of symptoms, a potential patient of theory”: An Interview with Alicia Borinsky
Alicia Borinsky is a U.S.-based Argentine novelist, poet, and literary critic. She is also Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and Director of the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University.
Excerpt:
MBO: As I was reading your articles, and I am going to refresh your memory a little bit here—your first one is entitled “What Do We Read When We Read,” it is on Mario Vargas Llosa’s book García Márquez. Historia de un deicidio, and there is a passage that called my attention:
“Spanish American literature has matured considerably during the last decades and it has given us texts as those of Borges, Macedonio Fernández, Cortázar, Carpentier, Sarduy, Lezama Lima, Bioy Casares, García Márquez, Donoso and many others. These have a complex self-reflexive character calling for the initiation of a criticism capable of exploiting the possibilities of reading modern literature without recourse to transcendentalist fallacies. But the existence of such a literature has not yet created a criticism of commensurable quality, a criticism freed from tradition in the same way in which those texts have freed themselves from naïve realism and naturalism. The absence of a critical space, noticed by so many Spanish American writers, is beginning to be resolved.”
I found this to be very interesting because it speaks to a specific moment in Spanish American literature and its criticism, and I wanted to ask you how you would evaluate this in hindsight?
AB: Literature is not a generator of symptoms, a potential patient of theory. It has an analytical energy capable of producing a discourse with the lucidity of both an explanation and an aporia—opening up the kinds of questions that are worth thinking about. I still think that those writers gave us that kind of possibility.
At the time when I wrote this in Diacritics, some of them were marginal, like Macedonio Fernández or Severy Sarduy. Sarduy was someone I knew, and people around him knew he was a big deal—in his own eyes and in our eyes, too—but he was not major. So, one of the tasks was to build a different canon and to give to the canon a different kind of meaning, to have a canon made of questions. I continued working in that direction. But what I don’t maintain anymore is this business of the “transcendentalist fallacies,” because at that time I was really convinced that there was a kind of new materialism that could dismantle metaphysics. It had a polemical force to deconstruct truth as a fictional construct. I changed my mind rather quickly. My book Theoretical Fables outlines the post-theoretical shift in my thought. It talks about how certain writers, Macedonio, Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Manuel Puig, Gabriel García Márquez, point to an “outside” of the text to produce effects of truth. The subtitle, The Pedagogical Dream in Latin American Literature is an indication of an opening to a literature “beyond.”
I thought that it was possible to avoid metaphysics, but as I started writing that book, I realized that there were different forms of metaphysical imaginations that had to do with teaching, with being a militant, with the politicization of writing and meaning, or the desperation of non-meaning. There is a funny turn. This book comes out, I am very happy that I found the right cover (a faceless man holding a mask with a human face), that the publishers accepted it and I said, well, this is really what I believe—that the contemporary metaphor is a metaphor that points outside itself, but there is nothing behind it. It is that kind of frustrated transcendence . . . and then I say to myself, so who was the artist behind the cover? Did I find out about the working conditions of the artist? I became very upset because this was an artist who had been working during the Nazi era in Europe, and if this was one of the first anti-humanists, was he a Nazi? Or a proto-Nazi? Luckily, he wasn’t. The collage pointed me in the direction of a man who had photographed not only Anne Frank but had also produced fake documents to allow people to flee Nazi-occupied territories during the war. Authorship, that most criticized notion, became relevant!
At the time I wrote that book, I was not truly aware of the impact of history on my analysis, but I knew that the moment had an impact. I think that “Rewritings and Writings,” the other article I wrote for Diacritics, inscribes some of the consequences as an interest in Fray Servando and Reinaldo Arenas. So for me Diacritics, and the clash between one article and the other, to a certain extent adds meaning to the beginnings of a preoccupation with the density of language as it echoes contexts.
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Click here to check out the full interview:
https://www.diacriticsjournal.com/diacritics50-an-interview-with-alicia-borinsky/