EMIR RODRIGUEZ MONEGAL
41
on, it seems evident that the main current can be located in what has been
called the novel about language.
One needn 't go further than avant-garde narrative, with Joyce's
Ulysses
as the fundamental piece, to recognize that this book (published in
early 1922) initiates a new style for the novel.
Ulysses
obviously expands
the external structure of the narrative, creating a linear narration which is
both a parody of the
Odyssey
and an allegorical voyage in which the
protagonist experiences a double descent into the inferno of a city (sym–
bolized in the visit of the brothel) and into the mystery of sex (Molly
Bloom's monologue), to find his lost identity as a son in the recognition of
his father and the embrace of his mother. Not only does
Ulysses
create this
narrative structure which duplicates the model in its mythical significa–
tion, but it also creates a linguistic structure in which the model appears
transposed into the code of a narrative language which also brings about
the double descent and achieves the double recognition . This second level
is not of the Homeric model but of certain literary monuments of the
English language . Joyce's achievement was
to
be imitated in many lan–
guages. Slowly, and through many successful works (Borges achieved in
his short stories a scale reduction of that double process) and through some
literally monstrous attempts (Leopoldo Marechal's
Adan Buenosayres),
Ulysses
became the invisible but central model of the new Latin American
narrative . From this point of view, Cortazar's
Hopscotch ,
Lezama Lima's
Paradiso,
Fuentes's
Change
0/
Skin ,
and Cabrera Infante's
Three Trapped
Tigers,
are ]oycean books. Whether or not they are obviously ]oycean,
they do share the same secret code. That is, they all agree in conceiving of
the novel as both a parody and a myth, a structure which in its
topoi,
as
much as in its private symbols , reveals the unity of a complete system of
signification .
Narrative language, then, comes
to
the foreground to define the
system of each book. We are no longer dealing here, as was believed in the
modernist era, with the preeminence of language as decoration, language
as a means to an end that was (finally) alien to it. Here decoration is
inseparable ftom the object decorated, here there is only adornment. The
customary distinctions between the surface and the depth of a given text,
the discussion of meaning as something alien to the narrative structure
itself, and the whole polemic over committed literature acquire a different
sense. There is no profundity other than that of the surface of the text, no
meanings but rather signification, nothing that is not the commitment of
the text to itself.
Which doesn't mean that each book is not inserted into a certain
historical circumstance or cannot be read within a certain political con-
