On Location: The Question of Reading Crossculturally By Mark I Millington The University of Nottingham Published in: Siglo XX/20TH Century. Critique and Cultural Discourse, 13:1-2 (1995), pp. 13-39. ... let us not make the immediate occasion transparent. "What are we doing here, now?" – Spivak 1 Introduction I am going to take the short story "Sinfonía concluida" by Augusto Monterroso as the starting point, as a sort of pre-text, for a discussion of some of the problems and possibilities involved in reading the literatures of other cultures. More particularly, the points that I wish to make are primarily concerned with a quite specific activity: that of academic critics in First World cultures and their work with Latin American literatures. I want to consider in what senses that work is possible, and what its limits are. In other words, I seek to pinpoint what enables and also disables First World criticism. But first the story itself. "Sinfonía concluida" – Yo podría contar – terció el gordo atropelladamente – que hace tres años en Guatemala un viejito organista de una iglesia de barrio me refirió que por 1929 cuando le encargaron clasificar los papeles de música de La Merced se encontró de pronto unas hojas raras que intrigado se puso a estudiar con el cariño de siempre y que como las acotaciones estuvieran escritas en alemán le costó bastante darse cuenta de que se trataba de los dos movimientos finales de la Sinfonía inconclusa así que ya podía yo imaginar su emoción al ver bien clara la firma de Schubert y que cuando muy agitado salió corriendo a la calle a comunicar a los demás su descubrimiento todos dijeron riéndose que se había vuelto loco y que si quería tomarles el pelo pero que como él dominaba su arte y sabía con certeza que los dos movimientos eran tan excelentes como los primeros no se arredró y antes bien juró consagrar el resto de su vida a obligarlos a confesar la validez del hallazgo por lo que de ahí en adelante se dedicó a ver metódicamente a cuanto músico existía en Guatemala con tan mal resultado que después de pelearse con la mayoría de ellos sin decir nada a nadie y mucho menos a su mujer vendió su casa para trasladarse a Europa y que una vez en Viena pues peor porque no iba a ir decían un Leiermann* guatemalteco a enseñarles a localizar obras perdidas y mucho menos de Schubert cuyos especialistas llenaban la ciudad y que qué tenían que haber ido a hacer esos papeles tan lejos hasta que estando ya casi desesperado y sólo con el dinero del pasaje de regreso conoció a una familia de viejitos judíos que habían vivido en Buenos Aires y hablaban español los que lo atendieron muy bien y se pusieron nerviosísimos cuando tocaron como Dios les dio a entender en su piano en su viola y en su violín los dos movimientos y quienes finalmente cansados de examinar los papeles por todos lados y de olerlos y de mirarlos al trasluz por una ventana se vieron obligados a admitir primero en voz baja y después a gritos ¡son de Schubert son de Schubert! y se echaron a llorar con desconsuelo cada uno sobre el hombro del otro como si en lugar de haberlos recuperado los papeles se hubieran perdido en ese momento y que yo me asombrara de que todavía llorando si bien ya más calmados y luego de hablar aparte entre sí y en su idioma trataron de convencerlo frotándose las manos de que los movimientos a pesar de ser tan buenos no añadían nada al mérito de la sinfonía tal como ésta se hallaba y por el contrario podía decirse que se lo quitaban pues la gente se había acostumbrado a la leyenda de que Schubert los rompió o no los intentó siquiera seguro de que jamás lograría superar o igualar la calidad de los dos primeros y que la gracia consistía en pensar si así son el allegro y el andante cómo serán el Scherzo y el allegro ma non tropo y que si él respetaba y amaba de veras la memoria de Schubert lo más inteligente era que les permitiera guardar aquella música porque además de que se iba a entablar una polémica interminable el único que saldría perdiendo sería Schubert y que entonces convencido de que nunca conseguiría nada entre los filisteos ni menos aún con los admiradores de Schubert que eran peores se embarcó de vuelta a Guatemala y que durante la travesía una noche en tanto la luz de la luna daba de lleno sobre el espumoso costado del barco con la más profunda melancolía y harto de luchar con los malos y con los buenos tomó los manuscritos y los desgarró uno a uno y tiró los pedazos por la borda hasta no estar bien cierto de que ya nunca nadie los encontraría de nuevo al mismo tiempo – finalizó el gordo con cierto tono de afectada tristeza – que gruesas lágrimas quemaban sus mejillas y mientras pensaba con amargura que ni él ni su patria podrían reclamar la gloria de haber devuelto al mundo unas páginas que el mundo hubiera recibido con tanta alegría pero que el mundo con tanto sentido común rechazaba. * Organillero * 2 Cultural Relations and Reading My proposal is to read this story as a fable of certain aspects of crosscultural exchange (a reading which is therefore partial). In this way I will move into a theorization of the question of reading crossculturally. From the story it is clear that crossing the Atlantic culturally is no easy matter (at least for a Guatemalan going to Vienna). But the sheer presence of the two movements of Schubert's symphony in Guatemala does make a strong point: this cultural artifact has travelled and is appreciated by the viejito at least. But the culture of production (Vienna) refuses the contribution from Guatemala and renders the viejito an outsider, for reasons which have little to do with the authenticity of the manuscript (after all it does bear the composer's autograph), since the Viennese do not even bother to look at it. In the story's terms, the viejito's contribution is clearly valid in principle, but is not acceptable given the prevailing attitudes in the Vienna of the mid-twentieth century, when the Unfinished Symphony has become a cultural monument. Their creation of such a monument and the protection of their "property rights" over it are both signs of the Viennese desire to control and to maintain hierarchy. Here one begins to see the political dimension of cultural relations. What is striking in "Sinfonía concluida" is the strong polarization imposed by the Viennese. In fact, one thing that the story does is to map in basic terms the major locations in cultural exchange: inside, outside and a more complex, unsettled "between" (the location of the viejito for much of the story and of the Jewish family, who know Buenos Aires and Spanish1). The locations – inside, outside and between – are clearly aligned with power differentially. The point of the possessiveness regarding the cultural object is that much cultural capital is invested in objects like Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and they cannot be "given away". Hence the European power seeks to preserve the self and its current identity by rejecting the Latin American Other. These three locations are also useful in looking at the First World reading of Latin American texts in a so-called postcolonial world, even though in this story the movement is apparently in the opposite direction: from Latin America to Europe. In considering critical practice, questions of power and asymmetry are just as much involved as they are in the story. International cultural and political issues cannot be bracketed out, and more particularly, academic politics and debates over theory and the nature of critical practice are centrally implicated in shaping reading. In saying this, I want to stress that I am making a symptomatic analysis of critical practice, in other words, I am not talking about its manifest content (which usually tries to conceal the politics of location), but about the elided, underlying attitudes and stances. First World critical practices tend to assume that they are able to read and to speak – an assumption based on knowledge of their power to analyze and assimilate. I too am doing this, though differently: where the Viennese reject the viejito's manuscript, I am assimilating "Sinfonía concluida" to my argument in a very particular way. * 3 Critical Practice and the Location of Knowledge It is a useful first step for this enquiry to locate Latin American literatures explicitly in the Third World (however problematic that term), since that forces me to focus on the fact that Western academic practice is a product of the First World (however disparate the reality of that may be). My unease about the limitations of the First World/Third World binary is tempered by resignation that there are no viable alternatives, but always too by the conviction that the term Third World can be used to articulate a positive difference from or unaccountability by the First World. This binary is especially important insofar as academic criticism has a strong propensity to elaborate an idealist posture whereby the literary object is restricted to the aesthetic. What concerns me is not something inherent in the literary object but what conditions the First World critic's relation with it. And here I do not just refer to British or North American or French or Spanish critics, but to all those working in the Western academy, some of whom are Latin American. That relation needs to be seen in terms of its conditions of possibility – how the Western academy is regulated and behaves and why. In an international perspective those conditions have much to do with economics and a sort of division of labour – the Western academy can simply provide the luxury of ample research time and resources – , though the fault-lines separating areas of that academy and the degrees of luxury and space need to be underlined. There is no seamless or homogeneous whole across the West, any more than there is a cultural or literary whole in Latin America (as I shall show later). Stressing these differences is a prelude to resisting the common critical practice of assimilation. Despite the fact that the Viennese reject the viejito in "Sinfonía concluida", the First World has a long history of acquiring and exhibiting (in the broadest sense) objects from other cultures, and that goes far beyond displaying tiger skins, as Lord Elgin may have been aware. These objects are absorbed as part of a process, which in one vein is simply the culture of the museum. In this respect, critical practice risks becoming another branch of colonial discourse, tending to take plural cultural objects and "simply comprehend them within totalizing schemas" (Young 11). It is important, therefore, to question the comforting illusion that distance produces disinterestedness: Edward Said has written a book, Orientalism, disproving that. It is not incidental to signal the need for a similar project called "Hispanism" or "Latin Americanism" of which this essay might form part2. The point is to focus on the interests of the critical practice adopted, that is, what is at stake in the choice of topic and method. For example, why choose Cuban literature?, and why opt for deconstruction, say? Here national and professional pressures are relevant, and pretended neutrality can be seen as an attempt to do away with history, structure and the positioning of the subject. In its practice the Western academy perpetuates itself and in so doing is responding to the conditions of its national environments, which go far beyond the academic: criticism is an economic and political practice in various senses. There is no simple or direct encounter between critic and text: their relation is highly mediated. Critical practice is contingent on the economic health of the institution, and so the general conditions of its environment are deeply significant. In relation to such conditions, criticism has to justify itself, although it also devotes energy to not doing as much overtly, seeking to naturalize what it does, to make it seem inevitable. In that sense, what I want to do is to read against criticism3. The political and economic conditions of criticism – in their national and international dimensions – are highlighted by Gayatri Spivak in her essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?": "... to buy a self-contained version of the West is to ignore its production by the imperial project" (Spivak 1988a, 291). She insists on the interlocking nature of cultures, the dependency and exploitation that have made current conditions what they are, and on the relation of what happens now, in the academy, to what has happened and is happening in the international political and economic arenas. She sees this as particularly acute when the First World directly studies the Third World. Whatever its degrees of conditioning by international realities, critical practice is also tied by the dynamics of professional discourses. It is important not to lose sight of criticism's close links to the dynamics of professionalism and all that that requires for work to be accepted as "serious". Here the question is, in part, who has the qualifications to speak, to engage in "scholarly debate", and also, in part, how and in what terms that "debate" can be carried out. In that regard, the use (explicit or not) of critical theory has recently turned out to be a sort of "litmus test" of the "acceptable", particularly in the dismally positivist environment of the United Kingdom. As far as professional acceptability is concerned, criticism of Third World literatures cannot be dissociated from criticism of First World literatures: within the academy there is an assumed comparability of disciplines even if enforced from outside them. That comparability helps to underline the fact that criticism of Third World literatures is not only addressing those literatures but also an academic community, and the relations between those types of address are complex. The critic's address of the academic community, or the peer group, or the discipline, is aimed in (large) part at the construction of an academic self, the projection of an Imaginary identity, a sovereign subjectivity, and also at the performing and garnering of intellectual capital, but always within the range of the accepted (though gradually changing) parameters of the discipline. In the light of this, the critic is spoken by the academy probably more than being able to speak to the literary object. And so the conditions of critical practice may produce profound contradictions, which the academy has no interest in seeing, indeed, which it is committed to neutralizing or obscuring. In short, the First World critic of Third World literatures cannot pretend to be neutral or disinterested, to be writing something that is valid for any reader: all writing is audience specific. It may be difficult to specify who Carlos Fuentes is now writing for, but it is much easier to specify who I am writing for. Even my (mild) questioning is reproducing academic practice: it is recuperable within the liberal paradigm of the profession. Not that such self-reflexivity allows everything to be explained. Even though an illusory discursive transparency (the fear of metadiscourse) is part of the common currency of much academic criticism, I do not think that it should be assumed that any critic can achieve full understanding of his or her own condition within the institution. But it is therapeutic to see that there is an issue here: the question of appreciating one's location. The basic point that I have been making thus far might be summarized as follows: for all the comfort and space available within the Western academy (indeed largely because of the global conditions which produce them), it may not be the best location from/in which to read Latin American literatures. It is only one location from/in which it can be done. But that insight may already represent the beginning of a decentring, a rendering contingent. A further questioning of the Western academy is facilitated by concentrating on its lack of internal homogeneity. In other words, it is not so much an academy as a set of critical practices, some accepted (hegemonic), others marginalized and disputed, with variations between (the same trio of cultural locations that was present in "Sinfonía concluida"). Here I am talking about the politics of changing (or especially, not changing) critical paradigms. It seems to me that an exemplary defining fault-line in this respect is found in the assimilation or rejection of critical theory in academic work, especially post-structuralist theories. In respect of such theory there has been a debate within the Western academy and between it and the Third World. That academy has witnessed heated disagreement over the purpose of theorizing critical practice and of using theory explicitly in criticism, and there has been much ingenuousness in the attempt to assume unmediated contact with the literary object. The anti-theory argument has too readily relied on naive empiricism, especially recently with attempts to identify anti-theory with "post-theory", as if the "problem" of theory were "going away". Whatever the fault-lines, it should not be overlooked that there is here a fundamental issue of discursive definition: the commitment to theory is as much a ploy within the game of the academy as is its denial. It is a question, therefore, not so much of the best way to read literature as about where intellectual capital is to be recognized and so accumulated. In an extension of that internal debate, there has been some castigation of theory as a Western imposition on Third World cultures, as collusive with the West as a hegemonic power bloc. This issue is usefully discussed by Homi Bhabha. He seeks to problematize such an equation and asks sceptically: "Are the interests of 'Western' theory necessarily collusive with the hegemonic role of the West as a power bloc? Is the specialized, 'textualized', often academic language of theory merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western élite to produce a discourse of the Other that sutures its own power-knowledge equation?" (Bhabha 6-7). Too automatic an identification of method and political interest is naive, but complicated by the unevenness of the international division of labour, and the disproportionate influence of the West as a cultural forum (Bahbha 7) due to the size of its academic and culture industries. Theory, in this debate between the First and Third Worlds, merely crystallizes a broader debate over the protocols and ethics involved in their encounters. That point brings me close to the kind of questions posed by Spivak (1988b) and Mohanty concerning Western feminism and its theories, and how these relate to Third World women. The question is whether method needs to be altered or modified in any way in working with Third World material, or whether method is unproblematically and smoothly transferable. These are very real and troubling issues, and I am reminded of Fredric Jameson's image of the critic/analyst unknowingly viewing his or her own eyeball in the lens of the microscope (Jameson 206-07). This problem of unconscious self-reflection in the object of analysis is all the more complex in that there is no easy unlearning of privilege, no achievable innocence, even by trying to refuse self-awareness: this is utopian (Young 170). What one might attempt is to tread the tightrope of working within the Western academy while being open to the Other. And clearly the spur to treading this tightrope is the desire to avoid neo-colonialism and Eurocentrism (though that is an excessively homogeneous term). The presumption to know and the ease of speech might usefully be made less automatic: a certain disabling of critical practice is in order. And it is worth noting that that presumption and that ease are not simply attributable to negative or critical viewpoints on Third World literatures. One position within the available academic paradigms, which is particularly in need of critique because of the use that it makes of Third World literary texts, is the apparently sympathetic or celebratory practice of producing "good objects". By this I refer to the use made by First World critics of Third World texts as a vehicle for pious political attitudinizing, reading them as expressions or examples of "victim cultures" within global economic, political or cultural realities. In this vein, First World critics construct and invest in the Other as a way of criticizing their own governments and of delineating their own political positions within the First World. This apparently committed posture allows for a certain idealizing of the literary object and its assimilation to a debate within the First World, displacing and alleviating frustrated political radicalism in the process. Such covert production and assimilation of the "good object" does not constitute the sort of respect for the Other that I have in mind. It is precisely the use of critical theory which has made such covert assimilation more difficult by destabilizing the consensus about critical practice and the forms of knowledge that it creates. Such destabilizing and the question of the relation of method with its object are part of the current postmodern condition of fragmenting knowledge, of divergent histories, of decentred cultures: Perhaps... postmodernism, in which the old imperial maps have been lost, is the condition not just of late capitalism, but also of the loss of Eurocentrism, the loss of 'History' as such. In Jameson's terms, postmodernism would then be orientalism's dialectical reversal: a state of dis-orientation. Which would mean that history can no longer be a single story, even though Western history continues to conspire with its 'vast unfinished plot' of exploitation... (Young 117) If history can no longer pretend to be a controlled single story, criticism will need to grapple afresh with newly visible and audible Others. The very fact of my writing this essay and posing these questions exemplifies this change of circumstance and the loss of previous, misplaced confidence. That awareness may in itself help to pass beyond the old centre/margin metaphors into a multiplicity of different dialogic engagements. To paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, "cultural doubt" may be part of critical risk-taking (Clifford 1990, 162), and doubt may also be one way of disabling the self-affirmation of the critical act, with its propensity to deny the alterity of the Other. It is precisely the difference in dialogic engagements and the alterity of the Other which are crucial in the formation of knowledge. Such a view will help to undermine any relativist despair about who can know what about whom. Awareness of difference and alterity are crucial in any relation between the First and Third Worlds that does not equate with seeing them as discrete monads. Said describes the sort of exclusivism that can also be seen operating to foreclose knowledge in crosscultural contact: A double kind of possessive exclusivism could set in: the sense of being an excluding outsider by virtue of experience (only women can write for and about women, and only literature that treats women or Orientals well is good literature), and second, being an excluding insider by virtue of method (only Marxists, anti-Orientalists, feminists can write about economics, Orientalism, women's literature). (Said 106) Such a point about exclusivism is relevant, for example, to the viejito in "Sinfonía concluida": it is not that his is not real knowledge, but that it is not acceptable within Vienna. Hence his different perspective is brutally "othered", utterly discounted, by the Viennese. Spivak reiterates Said's argument about who is to be allowed to produce knowledge, and then goes on to trace the vital lineaments of the relation of knowledge with its object, which crucially avoids a falling back into an empiricist equation of distance with disinterestedness: (The position that only the subaltern can know the subaltern, only women can know women and so on, cannot be held as a theoretical presupposition either, for it predicates the possibility of knowledge on identity. Whatever the political necessity for holding the position, and whatever the advisability of attempting to "identify" (with) the other as subject in order to know her, knowledge is made possible and is sustained by irreducible difference, not identity. What is known is always in excess of knowledge. Knowledge is never adequate to its object. The theoretical model of the ideal knower in the embattled position we are discussing is that of the person identical with her predicament. This is actually the figure of the impossibility and non-necessity of knowledge...) (Spivak 1988b, 253-54) This vital definition holds to the necessity of difference in all knowledge and thereby allows for a complementarity or divergence of knowledges about the same object. * 4 Hermeneutics and Culture This question of ways of knowing and the irreducible difference between knowledge and its object recalls certain aspects of the long established debate in hermeneutics. While hermeneutics focuses on temporal distance in particular (reflecting no doubt its roots in the theorizing of reading ancient texts), there seems to be more than an analogy between that distance and cultural distance. The phrase "The past is another country" is clearly resonant in this context. In hermeneutics the key question is how to be open to the Other and negotiate a relationship with it in the present, a negotiation bearing on cultural, temporal and even epistemic relations. How to know alterity – what is beyond the Self or the Same – without reducing it by assimilation. In all these relations, hermeneutics suggests that scepticism about location (in various senses) is required. What hermeneutics is trying to theorize (as indeed am I) is how to establish a dialogue with a text, while preserving its difference. In some sense, a dialogue is impossible with a text: "Texts cannot, of course, prima facie be a partner in dialogue in the same sense that people can. The notion of interpretation as dialogue with texts may therefore have the relativistic consequence that the interpreter's dialogue with the text is merely a dialogue with himself, reducing dialogue to an inner monologue with no external checks on its validity" (Hoy 65). But it is the otherness, the newness of the text which can destabilize monologue: As part of our own tradition, for instance, the text is constitutive of our situation in such a way that we cannot remain indifferent to it. At the same time it also holds interest for us because it is an address from a perspective other than our own. If we did not experience the text as other, if we experienced it as merely something of our own invention or something completely familiar..., we would not be caught up by and interested in the text. It would have nothing new to say to us. Furthermore, if the "text" were really nothing more than a monologue with ourselves, it would not grasp our attention. (Hoy 67) There is in hermeneutics a useful insistence on the notion of continually renegotiated relationships, which contains an element of flexibility and an insistence on the (re-)production of knowledge: "Understanding is not a matter of acquiring eternally true knowledge about a previously given reality. On the contrary, it is itself a concrete happening, a form of doing and creating that has consequences in and of itself" (Hoy 92-93). This notion of the construction of knowledges coincides with my earlier point about the changing nature of the way the academy (re-)constructs its objects and so its system of knowledge: objects are not simply given. The flexibility of knowledge is underlined if one bears in mind how, in the academy, fields of knowledge are defined, consolidated, reconceived and then canonized or neglected. New objects are created as critical discourses change and as exhaustion sets in – witness how gender studies and post-structuralism have reinvigorated study of apparently familiar and heavily studied texts, or how some have leapt at the idea that theoretical work has now exhausted itself: the "end of theory" theory. But it is important to remember that these shifts and debates about fields of knowledge also serve to reproduce the profession (to mint new academic currency) as much as to produce knowledge. However, the mutability of method underlines how difference is crucial; interpreting Gadamer, Hoy says: "... the present understands the past, not better than the past understood itself, only differently" (Hoy 109-10). * 5 Others, Othering, Difference Of fundamental interest is how an understanding of the Other can occur without violence being done to it. Put another way, how is it possible to limit the more damaging aspects of assimilation, given the difficulty that understanding involves to some degree the bringing of the Other towards and into the Same. As a result, in considering the Other, the Self or the Same are not to be overlooked. Self and Other are interdependent in reading and interpretation: without both in play there is no understanding. The interplay of the given and alterity is crucial. This shuttling relation applies to concrete acts of understanding texts, and is only different in degree when the alterity is that of another culture. The importance of otherness in understanding other cultures is clearly delineated by Bakhtin: There is an enduring image, that is partial, and therefore false, according to which to better understand a foreign culture one should live in it, and, forgetting one's own, look at the world through the eyes of this culture. As I have said, such an image is partial. To be sure, to enter in some measure into an alien culture and look at the world through its eyes, is a necessary moment in the process of its understanding; but if understanding were exhausted in this moment, it would have been no more than a single duplication, and would have brought nothing new or enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce its self, its place in time, its culture; it does not forget anything. The chief matter of understanding is the exotopy of the one who does the understanding – in time, space, and culture – in relation to that which he wants to understand creatively. Even his own, external aspect is not really accessible to man, and he cannot interpret it as a whole; mirrors and photographs prove of no help; a man's real external aspect can be seen and understood only by other persons, thanks to their spatial exotopy, and thanks to the fact that they are other. In the realm of culture, exotopy is the most powerful lever of understanding. It is only to the eyes of an other culture that the alien culture reveals itself more completely and more deeply (but never exhaustively, because there will come other cultures, that will see and understand even more). (Todorov 109-10) A key element in this analysis is the notion of duplication – whereby the Same's self-understanding is no more than self-reproduction. By contrast, "creative understanding", as he puts it, would rely on a difference that allowed of analytical divergence. Now I would not seek to deny that a culture can arrive at some self-understanding (which Bakhtin seems to be suggesting), but I would not wish to claim that it could be exhaustive – psychoanalysis and deconstruction should make one suspicious of such self-reflexivity. But the degree of divergence or alterity in that analysis (the undermining of mere duplication) may well be distinct from what another culture would introduce. Hence, I would disagree with Bakhtin's quantifying final point that other cultures will understand "even more". In accordance with this idea, Bakhtin also talks above of enrichment, something which reemerges in his thinking when he discusses the struggle involved in understanding and the need for change: Only when the position is dogmatically inert is there nothing new revealed in the work (the dogmatist gains nothing; he cannot be enriched). The person who understands must not reject the possibility of changing or even abandoning his already prepared viewpoints and positions. In the act of understanding, a struggle occurs that results in mutual change and enrichment. (White 217) What is valuable here is the notion of the struggle in redefining the limits of the Same, and in adapting to the discomfort caused by the encounter with alterity when recognizing it as such. Spivak pinpoints this tense relation between explanation, Other and Self in rather less humanistic terms: ... the will to explain [is] a symptom of the desire to have a self and a world. In other words, on the general level, the possibility of explanation carries the presupposition of an explainable (even if not fully) universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject. These presuppositions assure our being. Explaining, we exclude the possibility of the radically hetergeneous. (Spivak 1988b, 105) The Other is not absolute alterity – by definition that would be outside or beyond conscious knowledge – , but there is a necessary relation with it for any judgement of the Same. There can be no dialogue with the Same. Monologue and identity seek to eliminate the structure of difference and the risk that accompanies it. Now this search of identity for duplication cannot be simply dismissed – the re-confirmation of the Self in the Same is a (perhaps the) crucial cultural activity, as James Clifford explains: "Some sort of 'gathering' around the self and the group – the assemblage of a material "world", the marking-off of a subjective domain that is not the "other" – is probably universal. All such collections embody hierarchies of value, exclusions, rule-governed territories of the self" (Clifford 1990, 143). The creation of cultural locations and the policing of their boundaries is a constant human activity, one attested to in (often excessively acrimonious) academic "debates". In that activity there occurs what I would call a process of "othering" or aggressive marginalization, the dismissal, rejection or belittling of the Other in an attempt to build the Self as sovereign subject or culture. In such discussions, the "othering" can take place both in the First World academy's use of Third World literatures, and in the rejection by Third World critics of all pretension by the First World to analyze and write about those literatures. The enactment of this latter scene of rejection is one that is played out from time to time on the floor of academic conferences; in this context, the rebuttal often reduces to the naive and untheorizable claim that the First World critic does not possess the requisite experience to understand and therefore that s/he is in essence "not one of us". This type of policing of the frontiers of cultures is exemplified in reverse in "Sinfonía concluida" by the Vienneses' utter rejection and patronizing of the viejito. Such attempts by both First and Third Worlds to draw essential boundaries seem to me to be arid, though symptomatic of how much is at stake and how real the political tensions. Such attempts should not, however, preclude the effort to minimize barriers. On the other hand, minimizing barriers should not be confused with smoothing away or sweeping aside rejections and hostilities, since frictions are expressive of important aspects of cultural relations. The point is to examine those obstacles, because the consequence of maintaining barriers is fragmentation and relativism. Now at first sight relativism might be taken positively as at least the recognition and non-judgemental acceptance of the Other. But, on close inspection, it can be seen to be a paralysis of judgement and a fundamental refusal to engage and negotiate with the Other. In any case, at this stage, the interpenetration of most First and Third World cultures is such that they cannot be neatly divided into "ours" and "theirs". As Clifford points out: "The world's societies are too systematically interconnected to permit any easy isolation of separate or independently functioning systems" (Clifford 1990, 152). It is far more interesting and rewarding (perhaps, as Bakhtin is fond of saying, enriching) to explore the complexities and assymetries of cultural relations. In this respect, Allon White warns against becoming stuck in relativism: Though our current fashion is to prioritize difference, and rightly, in the struggle against the false universalism and essentialism which has so oppressed all those who do not conform to the European, white, male, heterosexual shape which "Man" is evidently supposed to have, nevertheless, an ultimate political perspective of humanity as a unity-in-difference, a complex of co-existing and mutually understanding cultures, is just as important to any radical politics. A politics of pure difference which refuses to theorise the unity-in-difference of humanity ends by replicating the individualism of the self-sufficient bourgeois ego – a dangerous fiction if ever there was one. Identity for 'Bakhtin' is dialogic, relative, structured always in relation to the Other(s); it would be a fatal half-way politics which stopped at the point of asserting independent difference and did not go on to consider the structural interdependencies and the network of otherness within which that difference is made. (White 233) In this statement the complex interrelations between Self and Other are precisely what need to be held on to. In order to do that, it is important to consider something of the range of differences so that the relativizing of cultures can become less automatic or apparently simple. What I would stress initially is the difference both between cultures and within them, that process of difference making the attempt to draw lines between insides and outsides highly debatable and open to deconstruction. Something of the range of difference is already apparent in "Sinfonía concluida". In my initial analysis (and for the purposes of opening discussion in a provocative way), I concentrated on difference between the viejito and the Viennese. This tactic enabled a simplifying polarization of Europe and Latin America, but there are other cultural differences in the story which deserve attention. Firstly, there is difference within Guatemala: the general public there reacts to the viejito's claims with laughter, thinking him mad. Furthermore, even Guatemala's musicians reject him, showing that there is no simple homogeneity in its urban culture and suggesting an alignment with the European view. In addition, there is another facet of cultural difference embodied in the Jewish family in Vienna. They are constituted through various sorts of difference: they are in Vienna and are fond of its music but they do not belong there; they have lived in Buenos Aires and learnt Spanish but have returned to Europe; they share New World experience with the viejito but they live in Vienna; they accept the viejito's discovery but they want it for themselves not for the glory of Schubert as the viejito does. The complexity of their cultural location is compounded by elements of racial caricature: at the moment of truth, they huddle in a corner and talk in their own language, suggesting the stereotype of a secretive and devious race; they rub their hands together covetously like the cruellest stereotype of the acquisitive Jew; and, confirming that, they try to persuade the viejito to leave the music with them. So, as well as exploring the cultural complexity of the encounter, "Sinfonía concluida" also slips into its own sort of dismissive "othering", which divides the viejito from the Jews (despite certain analogies in their marginalities), so that at the end he can be left as isolated and misunderstood. The textual effect here relies on a process of creating identities that precisely demonstrates the Same's desire to belittle the Other. If attention is switched from the relations between Europe and Latin America to concentrate on relations within Latin America, the material in Vargas Llosa's El hablador becomes particularly revealing. The underlying cultural complexities glimpsed in "Sinfonía concluida" are also in evidence in Vargas Llosa, where they are useful to me in helping to dismiss any notion of a single homogeneous Latin American culture. El hablador charts a partial cultural map of Peru, in which conflict, contradiction and provisionality are germane both within cultures and in their relations. That condition is embodied graphically by a figure held in common with "Sinfonía concluida": the Jew. The novel's central character, Saúl Zuratas, belongs to a Jewish family from Lima, and, although not a believer, his Jewishness is mobilized as part of his heavily marked status as an outsider to the society in which he lives (somewhat of an S/Z figure?). His feeling of marginality in Catholic Lima shows the novel drawing on the well-known paradigm of the wandering Jew, and to that extent there is a certain continuity between Zuratas and a whole tradition of experience in Europe, an experience of division and not belonging. It is that which "Sinfonía concluida" also draws on. In addition to Zuratas, there is another major cultural focus in the El hablador in the nomadic Amazonian Indian group, the Machiguenga, some of whom are in the process of assimilation to national Peruvian life. Through contact with US Protestant missionaries and expanding capitalist activity, the Machiguenga begin to form settlements, to learn Spanish and to participate in the economic life of the nation. In other words, their own culture is diluted and they move into a subaltern position within mainstream national life. The ethics of this transformation are discussed by the narrator (who views it as inevitable and desirable that the Machiguenga be assimilated into the Western way of life), and by Zuratas (who vehemently denounces what is happening). Zuratas sees the missionaries as actively trying to destroy the Machiguenga language and culture as living forms, to reduce their otherness. The narrator argues for assimilation, Zuratas for absolute autonomy. The complex experiences of marginality and assimilation, and of division and clashing between cultures are seemingly bridged by Zuratas' crossover into the Machiguenga culture. He appears at the end as a Machiguenga hablador, a sort of wiseman and cultural mouthpiece. But, despite the novel's dependence on it, this crossover is unconvincing for more than one reason. Firstly, the Machiguenga have previously expressed hostility to outsiders (even other Indian groups), which makes their acceptance of a university educated, middle-class, white limeño seem unlikely. Secondly, Zuratas himself speaks out against acculturation and calls culture destiny: "Antes de nacer [that is, before he joined the Machiguenga], pensaba: 'Un pueblo debe cambiar. Hacer suyas las costumbres, las prohibiciones, las magias, de los pueblos fuertes. Adueñarse de los dioses y diosecillos, de los diablos y diablillos de los pueblos sabios. Así todos se volverán más puros', pensaba. Más felices, también. No era cierto. Ahora sé que no. Lo aprendí de ustedes, sí. ¿Quién es más puro y más feliz renunciando a su destino, pues? Nadie. Seremos lo que somos, mejor." (Vargas Llosa 211-12) Despite learning the hablador role and acquiring detailed knowledge of Machiguenga culture, Zuratas remains trapped in the position of the sovereign Western subject in search of a stable, non-marginalized identity. Hence, there is no convincing continuity even between the nomadic, marginal cultures within Peru. Likewise there is no smooth continuity between the narrator and Western culture. The narrator writes his account (which takes the form of a familiar Western narrative, complete with enigmas and suspense) in Florence where he tells the reader that he has gone in order to forget about Peru and the Peruvians, and to immerse himself in European visual and literary culture. But despite this familiar attempt by a member of the Latin American elite at assimilation to European culture, he experiences what can best be described as a return of the repressed, of the Other. The narrator is confronted unexpectedly in Florence by an exhibition of photographs of the Machiguenga which unleashes an irrepressible stream of associations and memories. He is caught unwittingly between his desire for a location within Western culture and the inevitability of his location within a Latin American cultural nexus. In Florence he is part of the Third World in the First World as earlier in the Amazonian jungle he was part of the First World in the Third World. That cultural heterogeneity in him matches the heterogeneity of Peru, in part embodied by the extremes and differences of Zuratas and the Machiguenga. Just as there is cultural difference between the narrator and Europe, so there is cultural difference within the narrator and within Peru, between Lima and the Amazon. No amount of trying to collapse differences reduces elements of otherness in all these figures and in all these relations5. The range of cultural differences in El hablador and "Sinfonía concluida" exposes particularly clearly how fault-lines within are as considerable as those between, and that to concentrate exclusively on international clashes or disjunctions or contradictions is misleading. For what emerges is that the very condition of a culture is difference: because of the nature of language, there can be no essence or absolute identity, as Bhabha asserts so incisively: The reason a cultural text or system of meaning cannot be sufficient unto itself is that the act of cultural enunciation – the place of utterance – is crossed by the différance of writing or écriture. This has less to do with what anthropologists might describe as varying attitudes to symbolic systems within different cultures than with the structure of symbolic representation – not the content of the symbol or its 'social function', but the structure of symbolization. It is this 'difference' in language that is crucial to the production of meaning and ensures, at the same time, that meaning is never simply mimetic and transparent. (Bhabha 20) * 6 Dialogics To render thought or the thinking subject transparent or invisible seems... to hide the relentless recognition of the Other by assimilation. – Spivak It remains to be considered how to represent the Other beyond the Same within the Same. The question is how alterity can be respected, and proximity and a degree of reciprocity achieved. This is the core issue since it is clear that the self and, more broadly, cultures constitute and reconstitute themselves through a form of negative grasp of the Other. In this context, to be classified as outsider or alien, the Other has already been absorbed (however partially) and categorized inside another system. In ideal terms, one might posit a dialogic relation as a way to avoid the impasse: the creation of a structure of more or less equal interlocutors in an open-ended dialogue of cultures and peoples, without a drive to subsume into preconceived programmes. This would not be an oppositional relation but one that respected the Other's alterity and was prepared to allow the Other to be listened to. But that would require that the Other be allowed to speak in the first place, and that is not always the case6. However, the ideal view conveniently brackets out the constraints of economics and political history which are fundamental in all cultural relations. Despite these constraints, however, the objective should be to find a critical and theoretical position which, though admitting as perhaps inevitable certain processes of assimilation and/or polarization of cultures, nonetheless allows for an alternative to monological mastery. In order to find dialogical potential in a crosscultural encounter, to break out of self/other polarizations (of which the First World/Latin America dichotomy is clearly one), a first step is to look for resistance to the critical discourse employed. This would be a way of uncovering not only the reserve or defence of the culture or text but also some of the unspoken logic of the method itself. In this way one might be able to render both the text and the method in part opaque and so point to their interdependence in broad structures of power that preclude simple dichotomies or comfortable assumptions of smooth access. It is important therefore to see that sheer geography is no aid to critical legitimation, but that racial, class and gender differences may play a more decisive role. Does an Argentinian have easier access to the reading of a Guatemalan or Mexican text than an Anglo-saxon? Or does a Spanish-speaking Latin American have more problems of access in reading the Guayanese Wilson Harris than an English-speaking critic? These questions proliferate and can reach absurd levels of intricacy about what is legitimate. The basic point is surely that no reader is ideally placed – there is no such location. So-called "insiders" to a culture will always have multiple potential locations within it, and while they may have a certain privilege, they are also necessarily restricted in their scope and capacity for knowledge7. What one might emphasize is the need for explicit self-reflexivity about location, interest and method. In particular, for critics working within a First World culture, an understanding of their location within structures of political power must be understood for the way they condition the potential for cultural exchange. Ultimately what I am arguing for is different sorts of knowledge. To know things differently is not necessarily to misunderstand them. And to know things differently does not imply the incompatibility of different understandings. Indeed, the discrepancies may be productive in that different critical practices may not replace but could creatively displace one another. Hence it is counterproductive to become focused on the pretence of "getting it right", which is a product of positivism and the insecurity which it promotes. What is at issue here is not transparent meaning, but focal angles and refraction in the process of negotiating with the Other. This is not to argue that just anything can be said. But it is important to remember that publication of a text means loss of control, an opening up to diverse attention. Bakhtin makes the point very concisely when he says in "Discourse in the Novel": "The word in language is half someone else's" (Bakhtin 1981, 293). A key question that arises here is whether one can consciously speak dialogically, whether one can write from a position other than that of apparent mastery. The absence of dialogue is part of the context out of which my essay arises, and, while trying to disable the unthinking bid for mastery, I hope to supplement that absence and so to enable dialogue as a process of mutual displacement. That sort of conceptualization of the critical process may help to bring out its character as an event or series of events, as an ongoing process of transactions with texts and other critical practices, but not as the laying down of definitive statements8. Despite the difficulty of seeing one's own location fully or even adequately, critical practice must be involved in constant review and retheorization, without theory's being hardened into a positive, totalitarian essence9. In the end, I am not convinced that any one voice can consciously speak dialogically - the specificity of cultural identity may be too burdensome for that. But if dialogism is possible within and between cultures it is because each voice is open (at least in theory) to deflection by a different voice, and by reflexivity on the difference within itself10. Not that self-reflexivity is without problems, not only of self-congratulation and complacency, but also of narcissism. Now it may be that elements of narcissism are inherent in any critical activity. So paradoxically, the appearance of striving for honesty by trying to remove the self-serving veils of legitimation might also (and perhaps better) be understood as a sort of striptease11, with all the implications of attracting attention not so much to cultural relations as to the Western critic's "dilemma", and so aiming for self-vindication. As Marjorie Garber succinctly puts it in another context: "What is disclosed is what is concealed – that is, the fact of concealment" (Garber 339). And the above reflexivity on self-reflexivity cannot escape the same danger, though it can at least suggest two important points: self-reflexivity is never innocent and never sufficient. Whatever the route chosen for it, self-reflexivity does not ground critical activity absolutely. To change the metaphor, when the final veil is removed there is no solid body underneath, no location beyond from which to totalize knowledge12. And that is true of "first-hand" experience as much as of any other supposed non-discursive ground. * 7 Conflicts of Interest I end with another text of Monterroso's, which I shall frame for an unashamedly allegorical reading in order to suggest what might be at stake in crosscultural relations. In "El eclipse", two readings take place: the Spanish priest's and that of the indígenas. Both parties "read" the same heavenly bodies and reach the same interpretation: there will be an eclipse of the sun at a particular time. But that common interpretation does not create mutual understanding because it fits into very different contexts of knowledge and power. The interests of both parties preclude any sharing of the common interpretation. Much more is at stake than merely reading the heavenly text. The priest cannot see beyond his cultural arrogance, which leads him to assume the Other's ignorance and inferiority. The indígenas, so well versed in the movements of the sun and moon that they have become sacred knowledge, have their minds on more cosmological activities so that the priest is no more than a convenient means to an end. But if, in my context, the heavenly bodies were allegorized as literary texts, the European critic would need to beware the consequences. El eclipse Cuando fray Bartolomé Arrazola se sintió perdido aceptó que ya nada podría salvarlo. La selva poderosa de Guatemala lo había apresado, implacable y definitiva. Ante su ignorancia topográfica se sentó con tranquilidad a esperar la muerte. Quiso morir allí, sin ninguna esperanza, aislado, con el pensamiento fijo en la éspaña distante, particularmente en el convento de Los Abrojos, donde Carlos Quinto condescendiera una vez a bajar de su eminencia para decirle que confiaba en el celo religioso de su labor redentora. Al despertar se encontró rodeado por un grupo de indígenas de rostro impasible que se disponían a sacrificarlo ante un altar, un altar que a Bartolomé le pareció como el lecho en que descansaría, al fin, de sus temores, de su destino, de sí mismo. Tres años en el país le habían conferido un mediano dominio de las lenguas nativas. Intentó algo. Dijo algunas palabras que fueron comprendidas. Entonces floreció en él una idea que tuvo por digna de su talento y de su cultura universal y de su arduo conocimiento de Aristóteles. Recordó que para ese día se esperaba un eclipse total de sol. Y dispuso, en lo más íntimo, valerse de aquel conocimiento para engañar a sus opresores y salvar la vida. – Si me matáis – les dijo – puedo hacer que el sol se oscurezca en su altura. Los indígenas lo miraron fijamente y Bartolome sorprendió la incredulidad en sus ojos. Vio que se produjo un pequeño consejo, y esperó confiado, no sin cierto desdén. Dos horas después el corazón de fray Bartolomé Arrazola chorreaba su sangre vehemente sobre la piedra de los sacrificios (brillante bajo la opaca luz de un sol eclipsado), mientras uno de los indígenas recitaba sin ninguna inflexión de voz, sin prisa, una por una, las infinitas fechas en que se producirían eclipses solares y lunares, que los astrónomos de la comunidad maya habían previsto y anotado en sus códices sin la valiosa ayuda de Aristóteles. Notes 1. See Memmi who traces these varied positions in some detail. 2. See Jordan for another contribution to such a project centred on the albeit restricted area of British Hispanism. 3. See Beverley on the parallel notion of reading against literature. 4. See also Bhabha 16. 5. See Millington for a thorough analysis of El hablador from this perspective. 6. See Spivak 1988a and Millington for a discussion of the ways in which subalterns can be rendered mute. 7. See Clifford 1984, 9. 8. See Spivak 1988b, 198. 9. See Spivak 1988a, 296. 10. For an incisive view of the need for reflexivity in method within anthropology, where problems similar to those in literary and cultural studies obtain, see Strathern 7-9. 11. The notion of striptease was suggested to me by a comment of Sonia Mattalía's after an earler version of this essay was presented in Poitiers. Her comment nicely foregrounds Bakhtin's suggestion that the word half belongs to someone else in that while she attempted to catch and tease me with her description, she was simultaneously caught in an act of voyeurism by the fact of conceiving of my paper as striptease. The teasing was mutual. 12. See Young 14-15. WORKS CONSULTED Beverley, John. "Humanism, Colonialism and the Formation of the Ideology of the Literary: Garcilaso's Sonnet 23, 'En tanto que de rosa y azucena'." New Hispanisms: Literature, Culture, Theory. Eds Mark I. Millington and Paul Julian Smith. Ottawa: Dovehouse Press, forthcoming. Bakhtin, M. "Discourse in the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 259-422. Bhabha, Homi. "The Commitment to Theory." New Formations 5 (1988): 5-23. Clifford, James C. "On Collecting Art and Culture." Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Ed. Russell Ferguson et al. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. 141-69. –––––. "Introduction." Writing and Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Eds. James C. Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: California UP, 1984. 1-26. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Hoy, David C. The Critical Circle: Literature, History and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: California UP, 1978. Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language. A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. Jordan, Barry. British Hispanism and the Challenge of Literary Theory. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1990. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Trans. Howard Greenfield. New York: The Orion Press, 1965. First French edition 1957. Millington, Mark I. "Can the Machiguenga Speak? Ventriloquizing the Other in Vargas Llosa's El hablador." Inequality/Theory/Hispanisms. Eds. B.J. McGuirk and M.I. Millington. Lewiston/Kingston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, forthcoming. Mohanty, C. T. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse." boundary 2 XII:3 and XIII:1 (1984): 333-58. Monterroso, Augusto. "Sinfonía concluida" and "El eclipse." Obras completas (y otros cuentos). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981. 31-33 and 55-56. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. ––––– . "Orientalism Reconsidered." Cultural Critique 1(1985):89-107. Spivak, G. C. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. London: MacMillan, 1998a. 271-313. ––––– . In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics. New York and London: Routledge, 1988b. Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift. Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: California UP, 1988. Todorov, T. Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Principle. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Vargas Llosa, M. El hablador. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987. White, Allon. "The Struggle Over Bakhtin: Fraternal Reply to Robert Young." Cultural Critique 8 (1987-88): 217-41. Young, Robert. White Mythologies. Writing History and the West. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. The author Mark I Millington is a Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, U.K.. His research and publications are in the field of contemporary Latin American fiction, with particular interest in applications of critical theory. He is the author of Reading Onetti: Language, Narrative and the Subject (1985), and of Fictions of Desire: The Short Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti. In addition, he has published articles on García Márquez, Borges, Monterroso, Donoso, Vargas Llosa and Rigoberta Menchú.