There was a time—either happier or more miserable, depending on whom you ask—when the written word reflected the same hierarchies that once organized social life. As in the day-to-day existence of ancien régime societies, back then there were superior genres that depicted the actions of characters who were ostensibly more important, wiser, or more powerful than the vast majority, as well as inferior genres focused on the lives and affairs of the lower classes, vulgar as you like, which might be amusing, but could never aspire to a place among the grander concerns of the former sort. These hierarchies, Jacques Rancière says in “The Politics of Literature,” were nullified by the emergence of literature in the early nineteenth century, when the line that once divided genres and subjects began to blur and protagonists became men and women with no greater attribute than their simple existence in the world. “Literature is the new regime of writing in which the writer is anybody and the reader anybody,” he declares. In other words, the appearance of literature called into question the logic that had dictated—and sometimes still dictates—that certain individuals are gifted with superior qualities that allow them to appreciate (or create) a work of art, while other individuals, lacking this sensibility, can only aspire to live a life centered around labor and survival. Rancière, of course, is thinking here of French literature, but his observations can likewise shed light on happenings in other lands (Latin America, for instance). In this essay, I would like to make use of them, and of other interlocutores, in order to consider how certain recent controversies have revealed that the tensions brought about by literature, which does politics regardless of who creates it and where it comes from, as Rancière would say, are still present today.
On the face of it, to claim that a writer and a reader could be anybody is problematic. It has been so since time immemorial. Rancière recalls how even Voltaire lamented that the readers of his day were no longer the wig-wearing, bejeweled gentlemen who applauded the work of Corneille, that icon of French classicism, but rather just “a few young gentlemen and ladies.” With his lamentations, nonetheless, he raised an essential point: literature is a form of creation that, without any guidance, follows its own path and heads toward whomever might read it—or listen to it, we might say today—without pausing to wonder if it should speak to a literature Ph.D. rather than a city street-sweeper. Perhaps for this reason, those who have been partisans of hierarchy in the written word, of considering genres either superior or inferior and subjects either important or insignificant, and who have no qualms about opining on who should and should not write, much less write quality literature, have often lamented that literature is not what it used to be.
Cristina Rivera Garza touches on this in her “Brief Missives from Pompeii” (translated into English by Robin Myers), an essay in which she reflects on how technology—and the 140-character texts of Twitter (X) in particular—have affected, and enriched, the “cultural significance” of writing itself. A tweet, she says, can resemble an aphorism or a haiku, but as writing “in the construct of real time” it runs “counter to the empty, homogenous time of the dominant ideology,” which, by definition, determines what is and is not literary. She cites as examples the flash fiction works of Alberto Chimal, which were born as tweets and ended up becoming a book (see La saga del viajero del tiempo), and the creations of writer and visual artist Graciela Romero, who has given us gems like, “And God made time, and He saw that it was good. Then he made us. And we were late. Too bad,” “I didn’t lose the idea, I gained a ton of distractions,” and “I’ve had too much of not enough of you.” What matters in these lines, Rivera Garza says, is not so much whether they can be counted as literary or not, but that they are symptoms of a change: no longer does one write “to be extraordinary, or because one was already extraordinary,” but rather to “write down […] life.” And also to recall that language is not “carved in stone” but rather “playful.” And, being language, political.
The “tweetwriters,” as Rivera Garza calls them, are an extreme case—and, for this reason, very useful. These figures, with the ambition to write for whomever it may be, despite their lacking any sort of license to do so, arouse “anxiety and suspicion” from the guardians of literary values. But they are not alone. Following John Guillory (Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation), Rivera Garza reflects at the end of her essay on the problem of literary quality. Does it make sense to judge a series of tweets by the same criteria used to analyze other forms of literature? Not really. But the thing is, in and of itself, literature is not equivalent to “good writing,” nor to literary quality, she says. Literature is simply the name that was given, at some point in the nineteenth century, to a form of writing published in printed characters on paper that, little by little, became the hegemonic criterion behind the formation of a canon. And that’s not all: “Quality […] isn’t intrinsic to a text.” The text only exists when someone reads it and, in that moment, ascribes to it a certain value. “Only an essentialist view, and therefore an ahistorical one, would make ‘literary’ synonymous with ‘quality.’ Only a conservative vision—that is, strongly tethered to the status quo and the hierarchies it entails—would seek the incessant repetition of a single means of producing textuality,” she concludes.
But, to be fair, there is nothing wrong with wanting things to continue as they are, social hierarchies included, as long as this is not denied—or, in the worst case scenario, denied because it is not consciously recognized. This is the problem that Terry Eagleton presented some years ago in his famous Literary Theory: An Introduction. Literary theory, and literary criticism in turn, is less a way of analyzing certain texts than a perspective from which to observe the reality—and history—of our societies, he writes in this book, which is didactic and ludic all at once. It is not reprehensible to make explicit whatever political stances one has, but rather to present as “scientific,” “critical,” and impartial a series of ideas that, in essence, favor “the particular interests of particular groups of people.” As sad as it may be, Eagleton says, the truth is that “the great majority of […] literary theories […] have strengthened rather than challenged the assumptions of the power-system.” To be sure, many of the guardians of literary values might take offense at the injustices of present-day societies, which concentrate wealth in a select few “while the human services of education, health, culture, and recreation for the great majority are torn to shreds,” but they do not recognize, Eagleton observes, that literature has anything to do with these problems. The more or less sacred nature that each of us attributes to literature safeguards it from having any link to them. What’s more, they are never our problems—until they are.
Every individual at least moderately satisfied with their profession tends to view it as especially important. And it is no secret that those who dedicate their time to cultural activities—especially when they are able to make a living from them, but even when (God forbid!) this is not so—tend to view them as even more important. A college history professor has every reason to think his research—much more than his teaching, of course—has contributed to a better understanding of our societies, just as those who write poetry, and comment on the poetry of others, might well think these practices are fundamental to humanity. They surely are. If someone asked me, I would say without the least hesitation that editing and translating are indispensable activities that keep the world turning. Aren’t they? But Eagleton, who tends to rain on all parades the humanities throw in their own honor, says every chance he gets that history and poetry are certainly important, “but not that important” (see “What’s Your Story?” in the London Review of Books). In the end, “poems don’t stop missiles,” as was the title of a recent series of documentaries on the war in Ukraine.
On the suggestion of thinking of literature as an activity more contingent than it is necessary, this claim from Rancière comes to mind: “Literature is the art of writing that specifically addresses those who should not read” (his italics). When these individuals read, something bad is bound to happen. Bad for whom? Not for those who read, of course, but rather for those who are affected by the consequences of this revolutionary act. In recent months, the second edition of Dahlia de la Cerda’s book Perras de reserva (Sexto Piso, 2022) has reminded us of this. Some comments on the thirteen stories that make up this collection, all narrated by women who have suffered (and inflicted) some sort of violence, have criticized their permanent use of the first person or the regional, popular language these women use; one is tempted to think that Eraclio Zepeda’s Benzulul or Antonio Estrada’s Rescoldo would likewise not escape the harsh glare of today’s critics. And, after congratulating themselves for pointing out all the book’s faults, the critics have carried on with their lives. But among readers, and women readers in particular, a paranormal phenomenon has been awakened. The book has made its way to readerships that literature, I believe, rarely reaches—women in prison, girls in secondary school, book clubs in relatively remote towns—and has spurred on those who should not read not only to read, but also to think they might also write. It might be said, again recalling Eagleton, that neither social criticism nor dissidence are guarantees of anything. Perhaps they are not. But here, I care less about the literary quality that anyone is free to find (or not) in a book like Perras de reserva and more about the way the reactions it has garnered exemplify how literature does politics, in Rancière’s terms, when it questions—or reverses—the normal order of things.
Neige Sinno observes something like this in a comment published in Les Inrockuptibles (March 2024). In it, she includes Perras de reserva as part of a Latin American phenomenon that also includes Mariana Enriquez, Mónica Ojeda, Samanta Schweblin, and Yuri Herrera—though we could just as easily mention Fernanda Melchor or Brenda Navarro—who have made violence, horror, discrimination, classism, and ecological destruction the subject matter of their works. Referring to the book’s protagonists, Sinno writes that these women have suffered workplace and domestic violence in a country where 98% of femicides go unpunished, “but far from being relegated to supporting roles, they become heroines who act, rebel, and get revenge.” Above all, they act. And she concludes: “You get the feeling that, finally, working class women can have access to a little glamour trash and recognition. If this isn’t yet the case in real life, it might as well be in literature.” But even if this were not the case, the book has succeeded in calling into question society’s supposed division into inferior and superior sensibilities and, in turn, the hierarchies in which, very much to its disadvantage, literature takes part. Pure politics in action.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
