Formidable talent, in the original sense of this tired adjective; unsettling analytical ability, universal informedness, solid taste, quick-moving sight with which to capture the predominant quality of books and authors, subtlety in perception of detail and skill at placing himself at the most propitious vantage point from which to encompass the scale of a character and embrace historical perspectives…

Baldomero Sanín Cano,
“Sobre Sainte-Beuve,” in Ocaso de la crítica

 

Malicious subtlety, intentioned critique—in the end, all higher tastes esteem it, for it hurts.

Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio

 

1

It must have been around 1650 when the refined and exuberant Bogotan poet Hernando Domínguez Camargo (1606-1659), in homage to his admired Paravicino, used in his Invectiva apologética the expression sobreescribiendo, or “overwriting.” We might accept that, in doing so, the author meant only to carry out a form of imitatio or to play with the effect of one writing on another, or to identify with an example, retracing Paravicino’s verses with his own.

But the invective, thanks to his method, has become perhaps the earliest and most complete model of criticism we now know from this America. This is also true because, in it, the author explicitly addresses his singular and multifarious accomplice: the “nameless” reader, the friendly reader, the candid, benign, flattering reader, the reader who reads with eyes or hands, the discreet reader, the Christian reader, the urbane reader, the reader who speaks another language, the reader plain and simple, the damned reader, the ambiguous reader, the learned reader, or the brotherly reader.

Perhaps it is not so curious that he, our vigorous primordial critic, should bear a three-word name, as is the case of Christopher Domínguez Michael—and that their first surname should be common to both. While today’s critic may travel, fall in love, experience politics as an immediate interest, etc., there can be no doubt that, in dedicating endless hours to the mysteries of reading and meditation, he cuts a monkly figure. The critic of four centuries past, while confined to the cloister, secretly experienced luxury, pleasures, business, rebellion, writing.

 

 

2

Domínguez Michael was born in Mexico City in 1962. Interviews, articles, and a few paragraphs that stand out from the many pages he has penned help us outline a rough profile. The son of a psychiatrist, he grew familiar with mental hospitals while waiting for his father in their gardens. (“There is little difference between a psychiatrist and a critic: both do clinical practice, write prescriptions, and make threats, and in the end every lunatic carries on just the same.”) 

Although he is considered a precocious reader and author, he admits he learned to read “a little late, at around eight or nine years old.” But, at the age of 21, he set about a task that, while growing more succinct over the years, he has not abandoned since: reviewing books. (“I no longer read all the new releases, nor do I write a review every week. Those who do become idiots out of necessity. I prefer, every year, to write three or four notes on books worthy of praise or loathing.”)

He studied sociology for a year, then left the university world behind. He loves live opera. His intense contact with books led him, seemingly without his being entirely aware, into the space of literary criticism. And there, in a state of mysterious satisfaction, he has remained, although from there he has turned toward the “history of ideas.”

As an adolescent, he noted down (but did not yet write) the images that, when he was 18, would turn into the story of William Pescador; only in 1997 would he publish this, his first and only novel to date. Although Christopher has not taken to writing fiction per se since then, all his essayistic work serves as a lively setting.

In 1993, the critic brought together three dozen of his reviews and essays in his first book, distinctively his: La utopía de la hospitalidad. This trend would continue in his unique way of doing criticism, and the book was a sturdy step up in his thought’s ascent.

A reader reads, gets distracted along the way, and forgets, or remembers what he has read for a time, with gratitude or annoyance. Indifference does not read. But what might be the first impulse of an analytical, critical reader? To take control of the text he has consumed? To repeat it within himself? To adapt its sound or content to his own feelings? To know he will remember it again? In any of these cases, the impulse brings with it approach, repetitions. And the original text has not changed in its dispersion. 

The natural reader incorporates the scenes of a novel, the images of a poem, or certain ideas from an essay into his own life, like his daily bread and coffee. This nourishment is sometimes healthy and sometimes disturbing, but the reader sees it as part of his philosophy. Not all readers are critical; to be critical, the reader must know he is that way.

The critic starts out as a natural reader (what’s more, he must be one for an extended period of time, or intermittently throughout his life). Thus, the writing of others becomes part of his metabolism. The critic cannot exist without a vast literary past. But a second powerful desire can lead him to look further: what does the page seem to tell us, besides what is written? What interrupts its secret fluency at a certain point? Whom—besides myself, its reader—does it resemble or imitate? What comparison does it force me to draw, consciously or not? How could it have emerged from its author, from its time and its geography? And so the ambiguous, learned reader carries out a sudden action, goes toward, seems to situate himself over the text: it is changing him. Because, when such a man starts to know he is reading (comparing, penetrating, choosing) and, above all, when he needs intellectual supports to explain this knowledge, another soul is born within him: one that grows out of his literary nourishments, transforming them into tempting triggers of analysis. At this instant, his physical past is diminished (as opposed to what happens in the natural reader) and his whole personal history becomes the history of what he has read (or compared, penetrated, chosen). 

The critic reads a text as if it were his last action in the world. What came before and after is erased. The absolute invades him. But then, his life (biological, social, literary) reduces that immensity found in the text to a small point on his private scale. He finds that the anecdote reflects another he already knows, that the images awaken previously-noted associations, that the subjects at hand… etc., etc. The work, irreductible in spirit, now resides within itself and in the critic’s experience. 

It is here where the transformation of the text that has been read will begin. Because its overwriting is underway: it is being addressed from a higher perception, placed on top of the text itself. And yet—as eluded Domínguez Camargo, the author who transmits this word to us—this higher action is likewise a way of placing oneself (reflecting, following) underneath the work one is reviewing.

 

 

3

To my mind, a writer’s perfection comes when he becomes his books—especially today and in our countries, where the author’s presence is considered of value. This is no mean feat: circumstances familiar to us all hamper the distribution of journals, supplements, and books. I have only read those of Christopher Domínguez that he and fate have seen fit to place in my hands.

At the age of 27, the author published his monumental Antología de la narrativa mexicana del siglo XX. Daring and revealing, it rests on two strata: the link between prose and civilization (“The ensemble of passions and humors, inhabited cities and barren lands that make up the territories of prose. Civilization associated with barbarism, its progenitor, its double and its foreseeable culmination”) and his personal conception of narrative: “The narrative is the style of our age. Narrative appears to be not a genre but an area, a channel through which all prosistic and prosaic threads pass and tauten.”

1997 saw Tiros en el concierto (“This is the story of an intellectual education,” the author informs us). It was written over the course of a decade, and its title, adopted from a line by Stendhal in The Charterhouse of Parma, would become a basso, emerging at several moments and in various texts by the essayist. Stendhal says, “Politics in a work of literature are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.”

The subtitle is characteristic of the critic’s imagination: Literatura mexicana del siglo V (“As this is the fifth century of the Spanish language in Mexico”). And its makeup evinces an obsessive “conversation” with the dead, following the most ancient of traditions, as Gracián established in his way: the journey of life, for he who is discreet, is divided into three phases: “The first day’s journey of a noble life should be passed in conversing with the dead […] The second day should be spent with the living […] The third  day is entirely for oneself. The last felicity is to be a philosopher.”¹

1998 saw Servidumbre y grandeza de la vida literaria: sixty essays published between 1986 and 1997 with the Mexican literature of the twentieth century as their focal point.

The rough outline I am sketching here is neither biographical nor anecdotal, though it may sometimes follow such lines. My interest is his “appropriation” of criticism. Christopher’s prose and knowledge are irreplaceable; I have not enough life left in me to review the latter. I admire certain great poets, essayists, and novelists; I love the vital risk that critics have taken on since Plato; I reread their interventions at any given time. But I never before had the chance to witness, to recognize, to debate within myself, to argue against, or to tremble before the work of an absolute critic. I have held this privilege, given shape in my language and in America, close to me for years. It came thanks to Domínguez Michael’s books, which have become a rebirth of literary thought. 

 

 

4

As in the cases of some of the great critics of the United States and Europe whom Domínguez Michael would discover and interpret in the future, his analytical focus did not develop within the confines of the university. Readings, the press, curiosity, and an unending interest in authors, their geography, and their history, as well as the powerful presence of friends who were authors and writers themselves, spurred on his intellectual development. The two aforementioned books of essays contain texts written when he was between the ages of 22 and 35. The broad range of authors reflected upon within them, along with the vibrant panorama of Mexican literature that surrounded him, may have made up the substance that nourished his early growth.

In Curtius, he would discover the significant problem of how criticism is to address “the hierarchy of attributes and the alterations it undergoes,” forcing us to attend not only to the emotivity produced by literary works but also to what time tells us about them, thereby glimpsing that which literature awakens within its own time as well as its work “outside of literary chronology.”

By that time, the author could decisively observe: “Some consciously prefer the pleasures of the critical text to those of fiction and poetry. These readers are readers because they travel between books like happy old men, recalling or imagining their roots. The traveler of the essay loves bibliographic references and historical routes, he crosses analogical bridges, and when he grows tired he sleeps like a log under the shadow of a footnote.” Thus, his “personal method” is laid bare.

Returning to his method, and in complement to it, in tribute to Albert Béguin, he describes the two ways a critic can appear as a writer. The first was established by Longino, who accepts criticism as one of the fine arts and activates the classical rules of analysis, as Edmund Wilson demonstrated. The other way, derived from Aristophanes, sees critics living “like happy vermin in the literary jungle”—lucid, daring, free. Christopher seems to align himself with the second path, but his ability to draw connections and give order to the fragmentary nature of his own expression pulls him closer to the first.

Read from a present-day perspective, these volumes from the 1990s, as well as his later work, give me the sense that Christopher’s critical vision erects a strangely visual and conceptual mise-en-scène. As he would tell one journalist, there is a novelesque or theatrical factor to his expository process. But Servidumbre y grandeza de la vida literaria, which brings together much of the author’s critical work in a single volume, not only displays this character but also synthesizes a spiritual model that, although indicative of his perceptive style, was apparently not repeated so intensely since.

Servidumbre y grandeza de la vida literaria opens with two indications, consciously chosen by the author, which would become constant elements of his future. The first appear in the epigraph by Cervantes (“I speak of human letters, the end of which is to establish distributive justice”) and the conception of the intellectual as cleric, according to the medieval understanding of the enlightened man (“The venerable task of the writer as a cleric who upholds the universal values of the Enlightenment—Voltairian, Goethian, or Catholic—against political barbarism”).

His essay on Octavio Paz, considered the creator of a politics of the Spirit, fits naturally within the previous schema; and, without a doubt, this conception of the critic would guide Domínguez Michael’s own work.

The beat to which Christopher marches, in arriving at his own assessments, is a modern one. He does not resort to Platonic ire (“The immitative poet is not naturally related to the better part of the soul […], he produces inferior things with regard to truth […], he implants in each man’s particular soul a bad government […], we must not allow him into a well-legislated State”)—nor to the Aristotelian syntheses or systematizations of Cicero and Quintilian: theoretical plots through which, over the centuries, the criticism of the future would be formalized. Nor does he turn to the hints and poetic laws of Horace or Boileau. His earliest bookends are Dr. Johnson and Sainte-Beuve, and thus his ideas are afforded a pleasant agility. The author is interested not in putting traditions on display, but rather in showing off to the spectator his own associations, imaginings, or notions. That is to say, a formulation of critical action as a sign of life, in the present.

Nevertheless, one may triumph in almost all aspects of intellectual life (as a professor, as a journalist), but almost never as a critic. Even still, according to the author, the critic’s sovereignty must be demanded; he must be placed on equal footing with other authors. While he does not ask for the critic to be preserved like some endangered species, he insists that “critical passion is consubstantial with the state of civilization.” This bolsters his admiration for Russia, which, whether under the tsarist empire or the Communist Party, trusted “in the critic’s miraculous powers to the point of superstition.”

Faced with the solid critical tradition of the English, French, and Germans, he recognizes the insufficiency of the Englightenment in “Spain, where not only was the critic prosecuted” but also his functions in the pursuit of intelligence were rejected. This took its toll on Hispanic America as well. “I find only one great, unscathed critic in the Spanish language: Leopoldo Alas Clarín.” And our peoples would have to wait for Modernismo and the avant-garde movements for this panorama to change. “The honor of our literary criticism has been saved by poets: Luis Cernuda, Jorge Cuesta, Octavio Paz, Guillermo Sucre, certain philosophers and a select few novelists. Nothing is more noxious to criticism than its falsification in the republic of professors.”

He concludes these passages by recognizing how the critic lives between the servitude and the grandeur of literary life, since “he is marked by a Grace or a difference, his pride before the fate of art, his obsessive drive to remember, to predict, and to curse.” This does not prevent him from saying of himself—or, indeed, it authorizes him to recognize—that “I have attacked ideas and novels and, at times, people. I regret my rudeness and am willing to make amends for it, but why is a poet allowed a bad verse, a crime more resounding than the critic’s most awful pronouncement?”

To remember, to predict, and to curse: swipes and arguments that the lynx inexorably delivers: broadened and visible effects of writing incarnated in one of its manifestations: criticism. Reciprocal actions in the amphitheatre. Behind them, in the critic and the spectator, the subterranean movement of the mole, also a maker of civilization.

 

 

5

Finall, I shall confess to some of the impressions that reading Christopher’s books has left on me. One of them is the danger, in my own case, of constantly returning to and rereading his paragraphs, the accuracy with which he chooses stirring quotes and the scale of his conviction. This is the product of a fluent and surprising prose, of the attraction generated as much by his attention to the everyday side of an author’s fate as by the signs of the abyss that the critic draws from such insignificant matters, and that lay bare the depth of his studied thought. In other words, his work awakens the temptation to forget about the text at hand and satisfy ourselves, in this age of fragile time, with the critic’s own eloquent vision.

Another of his effects on me is the desire to compare how such an irreverent, refreshing, and personal author might so inexorably lead me to glimpse echoes—which he himself likely does not sense—in pages hidden by the centuries. For example, Longino suggests that all that deserves to be intellectualy addressed is “that which provides material for new reflections and renders difficult, if not impossible, all opposition, and whose memory is long-lasting and indelible.” Since, upon communicating with the work, “our soul” takes possession of it “as if it were the author of what it had heard.” This situation is not alien to certain faults of literature, including, as Longino says, “the search for new thoughts, which is why our generation has gone mad.” The obverse and reverse of critical passion.

In turn, in his study of style, Demetrio recognizes: “In mockery there is a certain comparison, as the antithesis is clever.” A similar undertaking is not uncommon in the harsh treatment Domínguez Michael applies to that which he rejects.

Domínguez Camargo’s dream has come true, but has also been surpassed. Poets and novelists attain the overwriting he proposed. Thus we can enter into works and observe them, suffer them, or enjoy them. Texts can draw us in today due to their aesthetic challenge (or its negation), due to their call to distraction, to diversion; or as an imposition of popularity or fashion, publicity and commerce, or because they celebrate or condemn a political situation. In short: because they address an ethical landscape.

Criticism also emerges and disappears to offer us its breath. When its interpretative or classificatory intentions are exaggerated, it might well be considered metaliterature. But, in the case of Christopher Domínguez Michael, we come up against a different phenomenon. He does not merely content himself, as we have seen, with activating the traditional mechanisms of criticism by following after works and authors.

This is Christopher’s challenge, one of going beyond, and it is unique. He has singularly focused—and, I believe, he will continue to do so with ever greater breadth and profundity—on applying criticism to Criticism. He has concocted a new potency (which is staggering, still, when Boileau was already translating and singing the praises of Longino in 1674) for critical thinking. And, with it, he unites the primordial nature of works, their tacit or explicit internal reflection, and the study of said works in a social and historical context, in order to envelope—in the uncommon mesh of his own writing—this current that resembles a diaspora, and that he seeks to ride or embody like a world or a mirror. This is a new form, unforeseen in millenarian rhetoric or in current conceptions. Something that bites into philosophy, but that also disbelieves in it; that practices rewriting, be it wild or scientific. It is something for which I have no name.

 

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
This essay by José Balza was previously published in Crítica (Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, No. 151, October-November 2012) and in José Balza, Ensayos de humo, Equinoccio/Universidad Simón Bolívar (Caracas, 2013, pp. 53–96).
The version published in LALT was edited from the original by Micaela Paredes Barraza.
¹ Translated by Joseph Jacobs.

 

Image: Galina Nelyubova, Unsplash.