El sur

Juan Dahlman, the main character of Jorge Luis Borges’ El sur, is a character that lives within fantasy; within the fantasy of literature in general but particularly Argentine literature. (I will come back to the Argentine literature.) He lives surrounded by books. He works as a secretary in a municipal library and, not very surprisingly, reads a lot. Literature is his life, and also his death. But how is it his death? Does he die? The story as a whole plays with the reader’s (Juan’s, the nations, etc.) perception of reality and dream/fantasy/fiction. Is it clear that Juan Dahlman left the hospital after a supposed recovery? Is his thinking clear? Does he live a fantasy? Does it matter? These are questions that arise due to the play with perception: reality and fiction. The play although is to realize that there is no difference. The reality one lives is really a fiction; a constructed reality. They are one and the same; and they are equally as dangerous. It is dangerous if one forgets this; in regards to this Borges writes, “Though blind to guilt, fate can be merciless with the slightest distraction.” The study of language has shown us that meanings, signs, history are a construction and the human community has done the constructing. Lacan told us that we become subjects of language (which is makes up the human community) the minute we are named. In Dahlman’s case, what is he a subject of? He is the subject of the fiction of Argentina. Moreover, he is a subject of Argentine literature.

His Argentinity is produced by the story of his maternal grandfather. The events in his story in turn are the events that helped win and ‘civilize’ the Argentine nation. It marks the suffering and sacrifice that it took to build it. It takes the place of a void that exists in Argentina’s nationness. This void is shown in the first line of the story: “The man that stepped off the boat.” Argentina has no origin. Then we have the presence Martin Fierro. This is a poem sung by a ‘gaucho’. In the process of civilizing the country, along with the natives, this ‘gaucho’ is a figure, mestizo in many cases, which was wiped out, killed, or otherwise made to assimilate to the de new nation. Undoubtedly, this figure is also a part of that void, and it is a part of the new origin. The South, la pampa is a place that is disjointed with the city, which is really the nation. It is this disjoining that the national literature helped create. The ending tells us that the danger in the South is still there, or that it is a creation of Dahlman’s delirium at the hospital or romanticized fiction of his death.

What is an Author?

In his essay What is an Author? Michele Foucault makes a direct reference to, although this is probably more than a reference but rather a reading of, Roland Barthes famous essay Death of the Author. It seems to me that what Foucault undertakes in this text is essentially a deconstruction of the ‘death of the author’. He is in principle not questioning or saying the proposition by Barthes or other critics and philosopher as he says are wrong or inadequate, but rather saying that reality proves that we are far from a real death or disappearance of the author; at least theoretically one cannot subtract him from the study of the text because the author has leaves traces in it that are inescapable at the time of critique. Perhaps the author is dead or has died, and our trying to find THE meaning of the text within him can stop, but not his specter, at least this is how I understood this. This specter is what Foucault calls the author function. Before his death, the author needs to be defined and from that perhaps a horizon for the real death can be seen or hypothesized. This ‘author function’ basically transcends the ideas ‘the death of the author’ and the notions by witch this was signified.

As I read this I thought again of what it is to leave out who the author of a particular text is and thought that when we look at the form of a text, we are looking at the arrangement that someone made. The ‘montage’ that they are making with, yes, as Foucault and the other philosophers think, words and discourses that they did not invent. For instance, the paratextual signs that are included in a novel or a book; for instance the tittle makes reference to someone’s choosing, that, at least as I see it, was the authors, cold be the editors, doing. If an editor changes a tittle we will criticize him for ‘altering’ the original text. This questions his authority and places it into the real author. Another point I thought of was that a narrative will have a ‘narrator’ or a poem a ‘poetic voice’. This device has an author function. Perhaps the author is not one which holds the meaning of a text of literature but just one that arranged the language in a way that we find interesting to study. (Lazarillo de Tormes: why have researchers and critics tried so hard to find out who its author is?)

Orientalism

Edward Said’s book Orientalism is an interesting study of knowledge as power. He situates the knowledge the West has about the Orient as that which intrinsically expresses a hierarchy; a division. The division itself, of the naming, west/east, occident/orient, is allowing the possibility of difference, hence hierarchy; and hegemony as Said demonstrates. The parts of these binaries are charged, or packed, with different connotations or meanings that will be interpreted as us vs. them. The interesting part as Said points out, is that all of these connotations are a mere construction, even that of the west itself. Itself… This concept is of importance. In the history of the relations between west and east nothing stands as a symbol of equality. These two geographical areas are not on equal terms; one stands higher than the other. Said traces the instances of colonization of the Orient by the West and says that in the later there is also a correlative undertaking in culture. He gets to the position that acknowledges a reciprocal feeding of interpretations of the Orient, between the political discourse and the cultural discourse. Itself… or rather just ‘self’. Who’s self? The West’s self. At the heart of the practice of Orientalism there is a construction more of this self than that of the other. According to Said Orientalism tells us very little about the Orient, it rather tells us about occident. So what is known about the other is constructed, it is fictionalized, to legitimize the construction of ourselves, the West, and legitimize our superiority, our legitimate and godly power over the East. So knowledge about someone can give you power over them; knowing them better than they know themselves is the key to maintaining hegemony over a region or a certain people.

Cultural hegemony is basically how Said is pointing out the overall project of western culture and its creation of Orientalism. He says that the Orient is not just a simple fantasy but rather a reality in western culture. That is to say, the fiction, or fantasy as Said calls it, is not experienced as unreal but as reality; perceived as the reality of the Orient. Said points this out very precisely with his example of the French journalist that references his knowledge of the Orient to Chateaubriand and Nerval as the real Orient instead of what he was seeing and living himself.   So, when cultural hegemony has been consolidated, political domination will be an easy task.

What is good? Does it exist?

At first, I thought that Flannery O’Conner’s short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find was about decadence; decadence of a region of the United States, of the whole country, of a society, of a religion. I had thought the grandmother was a noble being, and that she was hated, that she was treated like a pest, by the new generations, the young, her own son and grandchildren. I saw the young as leaving behind, as disposing of the values, as destroying the heritage that was what made a good society, family, and individual people of them. The tittle of the story resonated very much with most of the male characters that in some way or another can be considered as ‘not good’; this bringing questions of gender critique into discussion. The son is not good because he doesn’t treat his mother with respect and neither does the grandson; there are the two individuals that con the gasman, and, of course, there is The Misfit and his gang. The gasman is interesting because he thinks that by saying that a good man is hard to find, that he is a good man; that because he got conned he is a good man; because he is a veteran he is a good man; because he is aligned with the grandmother and her time, her generation, her values, maybe even her class, he is a good man. So, a ‘good man’ is hard to find in these decadent days; these decadent days where there is no longer any pride for your land, for your state, or for your country. Even the language of the story is ordinary; it is decadent.

But then I read the story again. The discussion about Jesus, the ending, and the definition for the Misfit’s name made me rethink if there actually was a critique of new society, a love for The South, and discourse of decadence. The Misfit throws everything in this southern United States cosmos, and national cosmos overall, off balance. He says of his name, “I call myself The Misfit because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.” This here alone proposes that there never has been any justification for the amount of punishment that he has gone through given the ‘crimes’ he had committed, if he had committed any crimes at all. He creates his name so he can have a signature, so he can have ‘his papers’, which are his proof. (Note: he does not create his name to describe himself as a Misfit of society.) He had been accused of killing his father but he says he doesn’t remember doing it; implying that he originally was innocent. But ‘they’ had the papers; and they never showed them to him. This leads to another one of his explanations. He says that if Jesus raised the dead then there would be nothing but to follow him. This brings the holy scripture (or holy papers for the purpose of this story), the bible, into reference for good subsequent behavior by man. Then he says that if he did not raise the dead then then one should go on killing and committing other aggressions. This moment now is crucial, when the grandmother says that maybe Jesus didn’t raise the dead. (We should note that authorship and truth are put into question here. The Misfit says he wasn’t there to see if Jesus did raise the dead, that he cannot trust a paper to be telling the truth, just as the papers they had on him were not telling the truth. He has his signature that he will leave at the scene of the crimes he committed; so that he is not over punished if he gets caught.) This moment was the turning point in the unraveling of my initial reading. This raises some questions: How can you find a good man if good never existed? How can a society be in decadence if it never was in an ascent? Where are you going to find good where only evil has existed? How can you define ‘good’ in this atmosphere? Truth is separated from non-truth. The grandmother’s subsequent change in attitude towards the Misfit, when she says that he is one of her children, illustrates her realization that her imagination of the past, her religiously preconceived notions of ‘good’ and what society is, are shattered. She sees the truth of life, of her country, of her state. The fiction clashes with the reality. There is a breaking of the simulacrum, the hyper-real that is trying to be lived. The old are no different than the new.

The grandma portrays a character that is trying to maintaining a benevolent imaginary of the past, of the past that maintained certain relations of property, a conservative fiction (the expression ‘the gold old times’ could be remembered here), but that conflict with the new situation, the new times. The old relations of property in this context (let’s remember her dream of the plantation which in itself is reference to slavery and ownership of Africans) denote many situations which were beneficial to that imaginary, that upheld certain values that indeed were, at the very least, questionable.

It turns out that the grandma is not a very good person; that her values are not very good or they were wrong. Let’s remember her obsession with being a lady (even if they were to have a terrible car accident) and her pressing The Misfit that ‘he wouldn’t shoot a lady’; she has ‘connections’ and not friends; she thinks the world is the United States or maybe just the Southern states; Europe is to blame for the loss of better times; she said she wouldn’t take her children anywhere dangerous and then she was the one that wanted to go see the house (she lied to the kids about the house so they would convince their father to go) and ultimately she did not say that they should turn back when she realized that it was the wrong place. The accident was no accident as the kids were yelling out in capital letters. Let’s remember although that she’s not the only bad one. The new are bad too. They are also wrong. They also live inconsistent lives (we should remember the granddaughter’s remark about painting the little black kids life that didn’t have what they did). Their irrationality is shown by the uppercase letters of the word THEY when the kids are trying to convince their father of going to see the house. The lady became good when she was about to die; when she was on her death bed she realized her mistakes. What then can be considered a good man? The one that tells and acts the truth? Or, does a good man need to be found? What about a woman? How hard is it to find a good woman? Does she have to be faced with death every minute of her life? But that’s no real pleasure in life.

Judith Butler

I understand in Butler’s essay Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion how ‘gender is burning’ (through her look into the film Paris is Burning). This means to me that gender over all, is a construction; or a ‘fiction’ as is sustained towards the end of the essay. Furthermore, this means that there is no ‘true’ gender. The widely accepted notion that heterosexuality, and the gender identities, binary, it implies, is shattered, it is invalidated. Here then Butler presents the notion of hegemony to the category of gender. Here, there are all sort different divisions that become problematic. There is the masculine and there is the feminine; there is the white and there is the colored; there is the poor and there is the rich. This is very complex and it can certainly lead to, as Butler asserts, “constructions that belong to larger hegemonies of oppression,” in dismissal of the simplistic critique of ‘black male misogyny’ as was written in a critique made of the film. The problems presented in the film are indeed much bigger than just the problem of it portraying black male misogyny; or maybe not even reducible to that. This is where I have some doubts on Butler’s position on the ‘subversive’ aspect of the identity representations in the film. Perhaps I don’t have a problem with the notion of being rebellious, but I do with the explicit use of the notion of being subversive.

The represented identity may be subversion of a social norm, or more precisely a gender norm, but it loses all subversive intensity when it has been appropriated by the market, capitalist, system. Then it is normalized, but it has not affected the social conditions that are more pressing than gender identity (or at least the conditions that affect even the existence of such cultural formations represented in the film), the conditions that the capitalist system (society) is not willing, not able, to change, due to its nature of existence, which are that of poverty, domination, repression, exploitation, and others.  Then it follows this appropriation/democratic subversion->Appropriation (Normalizing/defeated subversive). This is very explicit in the film: everyone’s desire to be a star. But there also is explicit in the film, which Butler (or the Hooks, whom she criticizes) something of the real problem: there is a character in the film that states that the real dominating condition is their economic situation; he/she says that if they had millions of dollars they would share with everyone they know to alleviate their poverty hardship (At least remember having heard it at some point in the film in that way). I’m not saying that if this happened, all the social problems would be solved; that is not true either. What I think is that the film exposes, yes gender matters, but much more pressing issues that correspond to a universal situation and not just the particular instance of black/latino gay men.

bell hooks

The tittle to bell hooks’ essay Is Paris Burning? says a lot about the character of the essay. It is obviously making reference to the tittle of Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning, which is the focus and object of a very strong critique. Turning the documentaries tittle into a question has many effects. One effect is to question the overall project of the documentary. This documentary shows (exposes) the underground (is it redundant to say underground in this context?) drag culture of homosexual men in New York; more specifically of black and latino men. The life of these homosexual, outcasts most of them, is centered on the important events known as balls. These are competitions where the competitors try to be the best imitators of a certain fashion or social identity; most notably of women. Now there is glamour in this event and a remaking, or again imitating, of fashion presentation walk ways. The competitors walk and model their clothing, their appearance, their style, their makeup, and the work they put into their overall look. It basically is an imitation of high fashion, high culture trend and identity setting; hence the reference to the French city of Paris. But in this tittle, an affirmation, why is Paris burning? Because there is a satire of the fashion and glamour activity that takes place in Paris. The activities of these homosexuals, which is very much counter to the high class culture of Paris, makes a mockery of said high class culture and maybe even of the conditions that allow that high class cultural practice to take place. These obscure and low culture activity will make Paris burn with rage for the mockery that is made, by these racially subaltern homosexual men, of their highly cherished fashion and identity. So hooks questions this project. Has the documentary effectively made a critique (which is what a satire is) to that highly structured and exclusive world Parisian fashion and by extension to high class culture as well? Hooks thinks not. Hooks on the contrary, feels that film is in fact a mockery of black gay men, black identity overall, and even, most important to a feminist hooks, a mockery and further repression of the black woman. Even though hooks’ critique of the film is lacking in some areas, there are others that touch on very important points. The tittle in hooks’ essay is the first sign of a heavy critique to the film, but also a misreading of ‘why’ Paris would be burning.