Norte y sur: La narrativa rioplatense desde Mexico (original) (raw)

Hispanic Review, 2003

Abstract

Norte y sur: La narrativa rioplatense desde Mexico. Ed. Rose Corral. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 2000. 279 pages.The twenty-four essays collected in this volume were first presented at a conference on the literature of the River Plate region, at the Colegio de Mexico, in 1999. The purpose of the conference was to reestablish a cultural dialogue between Mexico and the River Plate region which, according to the editor, does not presently enjoy the vitality it once did: "Concluida la euforia de los anos sesenta y setenta que permitio la circulacion continental de la literatura hispanoamericana, hoy no es dificil observar la compartimentacion, casi podria decirse el confinamiento, en que viven nuestras literaturas nationales" (9). The editor does not explore the possible reasons for the present situation, but an opening essay by Ana Maria Barrenechea, which shows the kinds of cultural exchanges that were possible for an intellectual like Alfonso Reyes to undertake-Reyes also published a book titled Norte y Sur in 1944 and created important and enduring bridges between Argentina and Mexico-, demonstrate the volume's desire to begin to recreate the types of intellectual projects (in publishing, literary magazines, seminars, and conferences) that were common between these two regions well into the second half of the twentieth century.Interestingly, many of the essays included here explore the displacements that literary texts make possible, the errancy that neither North nor South can contain. The "place" of literary texts is thus a prime concern throughout this volume-whether that place is considered in geographical terms or in literature's relations with those discourses, spheres of knowledge, and ideologies which are said to mark the literary text's exteriority.This problematic is the focus of the text by Juan Jose Saer, "La narracion-objeto," now published in his own collection of essays with the same title (Seix Barral, 1999). Saer shows that the singularity of a literary text must be read in its "autonomous" linguistic construction and not in its merely representational characteristics: "Negandose al comercio con-y de-lo general, emancipandose, gracias a una logica propia, de imperativos exteriores supuestamente ineluctables, obligaciones ideologicas, morales, religiosas que son extranas a su esencia, separandose en lo posible de topicos y de moldes asfixiantes impuestos por la rutina repetitiva de los generos, estas narraciones, adentrandose en las aguas pantanosas y turbias de lo particular adquieren el sabor de lo irrepetible y lo unico" (46). …

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