“Latin American academics devotedly quote the most obscure of European and North American professors, turning a blind eye to their Latin American colleagues, not to mention mere writers.”
Books and articles published in New York (or Paris) quote, first and foremost, books and articles published in New York (or Paris). There is something natural in the provincialism of the metropolis: at the center of a creative conversation’s development, the animating force that gives it life, lies a local discussion. On the other hand, one clear sign of underdevelopment is publications that do not cite local authors, so as not to appear provincial. They share the haughtiness of Groucho Marx: “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.” In the underdeveloped world, the important discussions are the ones that are followed from afar, like a show. To be on the periphery means, in fact, to not be in oneself, to believe true life is taking place in some distant center.
Julio Ramón Ribeyro complained in his Prosas apátridas: “A Latin American author quotes forty-five authors in an eight-page article. Here are a few of them: Homer, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Pascal, Voltaire, William Blake, John Donne, Shakespeare, Bach, Shestov, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Marx, Engels, Freud, Jung, Husserl, Einstein, Nietzsche, Hegel, Cervantes, Malraux, Camus, etc.” Wilfrido Howard Corral, in “El desmenuzamiento de la autoridad de la cita y lo citado,” takes Ribeyro’s claim as his epigraph; however, he mitigates it, saying this obsession is seen in all literatures, and he observes something important: “It is only recently that Latin Americans have quoted Latin Americans.”
It must also be said that the quotable canon varies from time to time and from place to place. Ribeyro’s list is dated; it is from around 1960, before Foucault, Althusser, and academic marxism. And, to Corral’s observation, it must be added that this recent phenomenon has come about only after the boom: the Latin American novels published in Barcelona, Paris, and New York around 1970. Although, already in the first boom (of poetry, in the early twentieth century), Latin Americans were quoting one another.
On the other hand, Latin American academics (who have had no such boom) devotedly quote the most obscure of European and North American professors, turning a blind eye to their Latin American colleagues, not to mention mere writers. Referring to works produced in the foreign institutions where they earned their doctorates is a way for them to remember where they were and to dress up in the garb of their authority. They quote, translate, and invite their foreign professors, they apply their methods, they dream of being designated their representatives and put in charge of a branch. Their loftiest ambition is to publish where they publish. All of which is respectable, but different from striking up a local conversation. The creative miracle of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle came about another way: by raising the standards of local discussion.
It must nonetheless be recognized how difficult—even impossible—it can be to raise the standard of conversation in a community stupefied by the strains of survival or by obsession with abundance. Even in powerful societies (we must not forget that Sparta had just as much power as Athens), unfavorable conditions for creative freedom can exist. Would it have been better for Rubén Darío to have stayed in Metapa, Joseph Conrad in Berdychiv, Ezra Pound in Hailey, T.S. Eliot in St. Louis? Pound went so far as to say it was impossible to produce important poetry in the United States: one had to leave the country. Eliot reached the extreme of becoming a British subject. Conrad went further still: he abandoned his mother tongue.
“Jorge Luis Borges also plays the game, going so far as to publish not only fake exotic quotations, but also fake exotic quotations interspersed within genuine quotations that seem fake.”
An early version of The Waste Land included, as an epigraph, Kurtz’s final judgment of his “civilizing” life in the Belgian Congo: “The horror! The horror!” (Heart of Darkness, 1902). On the subject of this epigraph, Pound wrote to Eliot: “I doubt if Conrad is weighty enough to stand the citation” (The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound). In the final version, there is a full-weight epigraph: “I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.’” The dialogue is cited in Greek, the rest in Latin. That is not all: though The Waste Land was published with scholarly notes (a rare occurrence for a poem), its epigraph gives neither author’s credit nor textual reference. Eliot elegantly presumes he belongs to a club in which everyone knows Latin and Greek, and immediately recognizes the Cena Trimalchionis: passage forty-eight of book fifteen of the Satyricon by Petronius, which describes the sumptuous, ridiculous dinner laid on by a new millionaire. Thus, prophetically, Eliot compares the “civilizing” London of the British Empire to the Rome of Nero, satirizing himself and Pound as metics. Nothing more can be asked of an exotic quotation, laid on sumptuously by a new Englishman.
The exotic quotations of the peripheral (be they provincials or metics) must be distinguished from the exotic quotations of the metropolitan. When Michel Foucault cites Jorge Luis Borges, or when Jürgen Habermas cites Octavio Paz, they are not flaunting their familiarity with the classics. They are flaunting their own status as admirable Marco Polos who have traveled to the ends of the earth and returned laden with treasures. Quoting the classics is nothing compared to quoting books or documents unknown even to specialists: exotic authors, from distant cultures, in abstruse tongues. Miguel de Unamuno tells, somewhere or another, how he was fascinated by the great illustrated tomes of Mexico over the centuries, brought back by his father from Tepic (where he was a baker), and that he even dreamed of learning Nahuatl: “Now that would put them to shame. Anyone knows Greek. But Nahuatl?” (I quote from memory).
Alfonso Reyes published his Burlas literarias 1919-1922, written with Enrique Díez-Canedo, to mock the snobbery of exotic quotations. For example: the supposed discovery of a medieval “Debate between wine and beer,” whose one hundred nineteenth verse includes a note to explain the word “piebolista,” with reference to Gilbert Murray, Greek Sport in the Vth Century and After: Football, etc., Oxford, 1923.
Jorge Luis Borges also plays the game, going so far as to publish not only fake exotic quotations, but also fake exotic quotations interspersed within genuine quotations that seem fake; for example, in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (Other Inquisitions: 1937–1952, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms), an author who really existed and really published, in 1688, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, whose “600 pages in quarto” propose a global language based on a classification of all that exists in the universe. Over the course of a series of clarifications, with which he demonstrates that “there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural,” Borges abruptly quotes (without quotation marks, page numbers, or bibliographic receipts) a classification so exotic it could only be his own. According to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,” “animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.”
To quote this long-winded literary game from an obscure writer of the antipodes in Paris was truly exotic. It was even more exotic to write, in the incipit of Les mots et les choses (1966): “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage…” (translated by Alan Sheridan). Luckily for the many readers who discovered Borges this way, Foucault’s book became a worldwide academic bestseller. Quoting Borges ceased to be exotic. It became part of the local conversation in the metropolis. For this reason, daring Latin Americans now feel entitled to quote him as a classic, in any article with fewer than eight pages and more than forty-five authors quoted, like this one.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Gabriel Zaid, “Citas exóticas”, in Fama y dinero, in Obras de Gabriel Zaid Vol. 5, 1st ed.
(Mexico: El Colegio Nacional, 2017), 23-26.
Published with the author’s permission.
