Latinx Literature Unbound

Undoing Ethnic Expectation

Ralph E. Rodriguez

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823279258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. Extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question "What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?" From this question others emerge: What does Latinx allow or predispose us to see, and what does it preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature?In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound frees Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Privileging the act of reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, Ralph E. Rodriguez argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature and suggests new ways we might proceed with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as Latinx.

CHAPTER 1

Brown Like Me? The Author-Function, Proper Names, and the Rise of Fictional Nobodies

It is said that when Linnaeus “found an insect that resisted classification he crushed it immediately” (Behar, “Juban América” 163). This chapter takes up the case of three writers whom Linnaeus, given his purported propensity to eradicate all matter of complexity, might indeed wish to crush. The first is the author of a novel that was heralded, upon its publication in 1983, as an authentic tale of life in a Chicano barrio, The Catcher in the Rye for the Chicano canon. It received the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, given to one painter and one American work of fiction, which, “though not a commercial success, is a considerable literary achievement.” The publishers also wished to nominate the book for the Pulitzer Prize. This new Chicano voice turned out to be that of a seventy-three-year-old, blacklisted, Anglo playwright. The second is a writer with an American Indian surname who, raised by five stepfathers, did not know for years that he was Mexican.¹ He has written a powerful first novel about Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles’s Echo Park. The novel received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The third is a writer who was born in Guatemala City and raised in the United States. He writes in Spanish (his books are published in Spain) on topics not recognizably Latinx, including the novel I will focus on, which is, among other things, the tale of the author’s Polish grandfather and his imprisonment in Auschwitz. The author also happens to be an award-winning Latin American novelist. All three of these writers indisputably illustrate the complexities of literary classification. The novels and their authors raise important questions about the definitional limits of Latinx literature, limits that might be understood as “Who speaks?” and “What is spoken?” Such questions wrap us in a web of authenticity, appropriateness, and cultural expectations. If you can’t crush the insects, how do you classify them? What does their disruption of the system tell you about the system’s shortcomings and blind spots?

The Rise of the Novel and Fictional Nobodies

Let me begin with an inquiry into authority, fictionality, and mimesis in the modern and contemporary novel, for it will abet us in tackling the pressing definitional matters raised by the three authors I examine in this chapter. In an insightful essay that claims historians and theorists of the novel have left the term fictionality “unexamined,” Catherine Gallagher rectifies that neglect by moving us through a compelling history of the rise of the novel and the concept of fictionality. Gallagher maintains that the “novel is not just one kind of fictional narrative among others,” but rather the two terms are “mutually constitutive” (“Rise of Fictionality” 337). It is the modern novel, as opposed to earlier forms such as fables, fairy tales, romances, and allegories, in which the special relationship between a plausible story and purely imaginary individuals takes hold (338–341). Working within this nexus of the plausible and the imaginary, the mid–eighteenth-century novel takes proper names as its “key mode of nonreferentiality.” The mid–eighteenth-century novel established this special relationship of the plausible story full of “fictional nobodies” (341, 353). If we are thinking in terms of contemporary literature as, for instance, with the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, there is no referent outside of the pages of the novel for Oscar Wao. He is a fictional nobody with a proper name inside a plausible story about Dominicans and Dominican Americans. Gallagher’s argument, however, is more complex than the truism not to confuse characters with people, and as such it undertakes an analysis of the relationship between belief, disbelief, volition, and readers’ expectations.

Although the proper names in novels “do not take specific individuals as their referents, and hence none of the specific assertions made about them can be verified or falsified” (341), we still must think through the various paradoxes this generates about referentiality, nonreferentiality, and belief. Indeed, “the founding claim of the form … was a nonreferentiality that could be seen as a greater referentiality” (342). These eighteenth-century novelists were distinguishing their work from the chroniques scandelouses and the charges of fraud, libel, and scandal they generated by creating a world of fictional nobodies, but unlike fables and fairy tales, they were creating fictions we might recognize, if not verify or falsify, in the everyday world.

Aristotle’s Poetics legitimized and lent them the formula they needed to square the probable and the fictive. “The difference between the historian and the poet,” writes Aristotle, “is this: the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen” (qtd. in Gallagher 343). But Aristotle’s work had long been available, so why this recent squaring of the probable and the fictive? The rise of modernity, argues Gallagher, made early eighteenth-century England an auspicious location for the birth of the novel: “Modernity is fiction-friendly because it encourages disbelief, speculation, and credit” (345). These attitudes of disbelief and speculation put the reader in a position to sympathize with certain characters while also feeling superior to the characters’ innocence and using the “reality of the story” as a means to speculate on how the reader might behave, act, react, and so on. “Novels,” writes Gallagher, “promoted a disposition of ironic credulity enabled by optimistic incredulity; one is dissuaded from believing the literal truth of a representation so that one can instead admire its likelihood and extend enough credit to buy into the game” (346).

Gallagher, then, persuasively illustrates how the connection between belief and disbelief in the rise of fictionality is tied to the modern epoch. Unlike other forms of speculation that attended the rise of modernity—the economy and marriage—the novel allowed readers “to indulge in imaginative play,” in which they were protected from any dire consequences (346–348). The individual’s willing suspension of disbelief, which Coleridge made famous, “set novel reading apart from those mandatory suppositional acts that required the constant maintenance of active skepticism” (347). The reader could immerse herself and enjoy fiction’s illusion because voluntary disbelief protects you from delusion (349). Gallagher brings us back again to the paradox of the novel form: It both discovers and obscures fiction. “The novel,” she reiterates, “gives us explicit fiction and simultaneously seems to occlude it; the novel reader opens what she knows is a fiction because it is a fiction and soon finds that enabling knowledge to be the subtlest of the experience’s elements. Just as it declares itself, it becomes that which goes without saying” (349). It is this paradox of discovering and obscuring fiction, I contend, that underwrites the agonistic relationship many readers and critics have had with novels that push Latinx literature outside of its comfort zone and that trouble our maintenance of the category Latinx literature, particularly the poles of authenticity and ethnicity around which it oscillates.

As with any other fiction, readers of Latinx fiction (perhaps especially Latinx readers), need to believe that the fictional world presented is plausible, but we readers of Latinx fiction (or at least a group of vocal critics) often forget the catalyst that drives the history of the novel, namely, a universe of fictional nobodies. We take the novels’ proper names and read them, not as nobodies, but as somebodies. We read them, that is, not as the novel form demands we do, but as the romance does. Characters in the romance were considered exemplary individuals. As Gallagher observes, “Cervantes … introduces the difference between the novel, with its fictional nobodies, and the romance, with its exemplary individuals, as, first of all, a matter of names” (353). We overlook these fictional nobodies’ non-referentiality and insist on their referent. When a novel fails to conform to a knowable universe or, better put, fails to conform to what readers believe are acceptable political, racial, social, gender, sexual, and other practices, we often deem it fraudulent and inauthentic; we consider it a sell-out.

FAMOUS ALL OVER TOWN

What makes Danny Santiago’s Famous All Over Town (1983) especially interesting is not that its representations failed the callow test of authenticity. In every way, the novel conformed to a knowable Latinx universe.² In brief, the novel tells the story of Rodolfo “Chato” Medina, Jr., growing up in a barrio in East Los Angeles. Medina, now an adult, recalls his youth and the various obstacles he and his family faced. By novel’s end his parents have split up, and his barrio has been razed. It is a coming-of-age story that follows Medina through tough times, with all the expected tests of his masculinity and male prowess. Things go too far when Medina is caught throwing up graffiti on a bank building and is subsequently arrested. This arrest will, however, see Medina’s life turned around as he is put on his path to becoming a successful writer. Critics at the time praised it as a masterpiece. Lauro Flores, for instance, called it a “remarkable achievement,” and added that it “joins the ranks of the foremost contemporary Chicano prose fiction works. Many more valuable contributions can be expected from this very talented artist” (“Response to Chaos” 147).³

What set the novel apart, and what makes it particularly interesting for my study of Latinx literature, was the discovery that Danny Santiago was not Danny Santiago. He was not, as had been supposed, a twenty-something Chicano author publishing his first novel. He was, rather, Daniel James, “a septuagenarian ex-Stalinist aristocrat from Kansas City” (Dunne, “Secret”). Danny Santiago—as if a character in a modern novel—was indeed a fictional nobody, rather than a unique individual. Or perhaps to make this complex case more interesting, we should give the screw another turn and say that we had a romance character (i.e., not a specific individual, but an exemplary one) writing a modern novel. That is, many readers and critics turned the person they believed to be writing the novel—Danny Santiago—into a representative for the group, a Chicano exemplar. It is a move often made in regards to Latinx fiction. Authors are often read as ambassadors for their culture. To add a layer of complexity, we had in the case of Danny Santiago, not just the readers’ typical move of making the author a romance character—an exemplar—but we had a double fiction. Daniel James had not only invented the story known as Famous All Over Town, he had also invented a “character,” a persona, to be the author. That invention seems, for many readers and critics, to have gone beyond the pale, to have pushed the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to read a novel onto the figure of the author as well, where readers have displayed a recalcitrance to suspend disbelief. To create an authorial fiction—even if that author is writing novels, not nonfiction⁴—is somehow going too far. We expect novels to be fictions, but not author’s names.

Yet the pages of literary history are filled with such fictions. Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens. George Eliot is Mary Ann Evans. Jane Somers is Doris Lessing. Mary Westmacott is Agatha Christie. Robert Galbraith was revealed to be J. K. Rowling. Benjamin Black is John Banville. María Amparo Ruíz de Burton published her 1885 novel The Squatter and the Don as C. Loyal, a play on Ciudadano Leal (Loyal Citizen), a conventional way to close official letters in nineteenth-century Mexico. Fernandes, Rae Jolene Smith, Rosamond Smith, and Lauren Kelly are all Joyce Carol Oates. The names of some very famous authors even appear on the covers of the books they publish pseudonymously—Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman. There are hundreds, if not thousands, more that could be listed.

After an author’s identity is disclosed, many want to know the motivations for the pseudonym. Some, like Mary Ann Evans, use a pen name to avoid gender discrimination. Some, like María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, use one to avoid gender and racial discrimination. Some, like Lessing, are testing the integrity of the publishing industry. In a July 2013 article for the Guardian, Rowling said that writing under a male pseudonym was intended to “take my writing persona as far away as possible from me” and that she was “yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career in this new genre, to work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback. It was a fantastic experience” (Bury, “J. K. Rowling Tells Story,” par. 6, 12). The possible motivations are many and sundry, and I’m not certain we can (or need to) arrive at a generalizable rule for their use.

Let us consider, however, two pressing factors in assessing Daniel James’s writing as Danny Santiago: (1) the distinction between a pseudonym and a heteronym, and (2) what Foucault has called the “author-function.” While there may not be bright line distinctions between a pseudonym and a heteronym, there is a difference, and in the case of Danny Santiago, it merits our attention. A pseudonym, as we well know, is a pen name—a name other than the writer’s own under which she publishes and may have adopted, as noted earlier, for a variety of reasons. A heteronym, on the other hand, though also a name other than the writer’s own, carries with it the distinction of being not just a “false name,” but a persona, an alter ego. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) “referred to the many names under which he wrote prose and poetry as ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not merely false names but belonged to invented others, to fictional writers with points of view and literary styles that were different from Pessoa’s” (Zenith 505). He endowed these heteronyms “with their own biographies, physiques, personalities, political views, religious attitudes and literary pursuits” (Zenith viii).

Given what we know of Daniel James’s relation to Danny Santiago, of which I will have more to say in a moment, we are speaking of a heteronym—the persona—not a pseudonym. James, for instance, would write his agent, his editor, and his close friends John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion in the voice of Danny Santiago, with all of its bravado, machismo, and interlingual (Spanish/English) language usage (Dunne, “Secret”). Daniel James inhabited Danny Santiago, and it freed his writerly voice. As he told William McPherson in a Washington Post interview on July 24, 1984, “The book. The book. That’s the important thing. Not the skin color or the ancestry of the author. I had to become Danny Santiago to write. I couldn’t explain it to my friends or wife. Perhaps a psychiatrist in two or three years might find the root causes of my need to be someone else. But the fact is I have that need” (A15).⁵ To reduce this complex case of Danny Santiago and Daniel James to a mere case of ethnic fraud is to miss what makes this tale interesting for the history and definition of Latinx literature.

Before we undertake an investigation of the Danny Santiago persona and the controversy it stirred, we need to keep in mind one more crucial factor, namely, the author-function. In 1969, Michel Foucault published “What Is an Author?,” an essay that interests itself, not in who an author is (not, say, at what point a writer becomes an author), but what an author is and how her name functions. The name of the author “is more than a gesture, a finger pointed at someone; it is, to a certain extent, the equivalent of a description,” writes Foucault. “When we say ‘Aristotle,’ ” he continues, “we are using a word that means one or a series of definite descriptions of the type: ‘the author of the Analytics,’ or ‘the founder of ontology’ and so forth” (121). In contemporary parlance, the author-function is much like what we call the brand. This author-function, this branding, creates expectations. Even before you open the cover of a Stephen King novel, you have expectations about its content...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Half Title
• Introduction: What We Talk about When We Talk about Latinx Literature
• 1. Brown Like Me? The Author-Function, Proper Names, and the Rise of Fictional Nobodies
• 2. Confounding the Mimetic: The Metafictional Challenge to Representation
• 3. From Where I Stand: The Intimacy and Distance of We and You in the Short Story
• 4. The Lyric, or, a Radical Singularity in Latinx Verse
• Conclusion: Thinking beyond Limits
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index