Autopolaroids

188.  COLOMBIAN KARMA

por © Alfredo Villanueva-Collado/Enkidu

I have been working for ten years on the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva and his only novel De sobremesa, finished in 1895 but not published until 1925.  In 1993, the manuscript of my essays on the novel wins the North Eastern Modern Language prize for best monograph in Romance Languages.  The prize consists of $1000 and publication by Peter Lang press, a European concern.  I get the paperwork from the publisher.  I so happens that I am entirely responsible for handing a camera-ready version of the manuscript.  Lang offers to format it for $1800, so I not only have to fork my prize money over to them, but add from my own pocket.  I know its editions are not distributed to the public in general because of their cost, are not known in Latin America, and usually end up in libraries where no one reads them.  I decide to spend the money on my glass collection and find another editor. 

My Colombian friend Eduardo Jaramillo Zuloaga, who shares my passion for Silva, recommends sending the manuscript to Bogotá and takes it to Mario Jurisch Durán, editor of Tercer Mundo Press.  After a few months, I get his answer:

“I will be  brief;  I liked your analysis of Silva very much, but I disliked the angry tone of your discourse just as intensely. I notice an excessive penchant for condemning, for showing how wrong previous critics were, for rejecting a mediocre reading tradition.  Don’t think it is a conceptual difference; I often felt myself agreeing with your words and  being surprised by your unusual reflections on Silva.  However, the literary criticism I admire (and try to publish) concentrates more on texts and less on polemics between critics.

Thus, we will not publish your book.  However, I repeat (and not as if coating the pill)  that I liked your book very much (not its tone).”

The first thing that pops into my mind is that this individual does not have the balls to publish the chapters where I make a systematic and demolishing analysis of what I call “the biographical fiction” and the “critical fiction” surrounding Silva., and I examine the mediocre, pompous criticism emanating from some of Colombia’s literary sacred cows.  Even worse,  I have fully tackled the question of Silva’s ambiguous and dubious sexuality.  But he is being named Colombia’s national poet. Therefore, he must be heterosexualized at all costs.  And I answer:

“I am sorry to have ascertained the profound gap in the very concept of literary criticism  between North and South America.  To reject a book for its tone, not content, points to an ideological posture I do not share but I understand, since it is the very same I try to fight through criticism of critical discourse, with all its flaws. To point out these flaws is to make criticism, not to criticize.  Thus it has been judged by other editors who, in the United States, Europe and Colombia refer to my articles. 

Your letter prepares me for the kind of controversy my work may raise in Colombia. . . . I must then thank you for your admonitory note which, I repeat, I understand beyond what is merely written.”

And I am right.  The hostility generated by my working premises about Silva, with their open homoerotic context, hounds me to this very day.  I only manage to publish one article in Colombia.  Eduardo deposits the manuscript in the casa de Poesía Silva.  Gustavo Cobo Borda takes what is perhaps the most offensive chapter, “The Critical Fiction,” and in 1997 publishes it in his massive critical anthology, Leyendo a Silva.  I decide not to try to impress those who do not impress me.  I continue moving through the novel’s structural labyrinth till I may decipher its palimpsest.