Josefina Ludmer

He aquí una obra ejemplar de crítica literaria. Se trata de una lectura astuta y penetrante de La vida breve, la 1952 novela de Juan Carlos Onetti donde el protagonista, Juan María Brausen, crea el personaje, doctor Díaz Grey, que después narrará muchos de los relatos del ciclo santamariano del autor uruguayo. Leí el texto de Ludmer al mismo tiempo que releía La vida breve, y fue una experiencia grata y elucidante. Al final de su lectura, Ludmer señala la función pedagógica del texto y, por mi parte, puedo afirmar que sí, que cumple con esa intención: me ha dado nuevas pistas no sólo para leer el corpus onettiano, sino para leer libros de ficción en general, prestando más atención a cómo se construyen los relatos, y los mundos ficticios, de los autores a cuyos libros recurro, como con Onetti.

Ahora, a releer Dejemos hablar al viento. Se publicó dos años después de Onetti, y me interesa saber: a) si el libro confirma algunas de sus observaciones sobre la literatura de Onetti, y b) si no, hasta qué punto se puede imaginar un Onetti, autor y ahora también lector del libro de Ludmer, quien supo comprender y comunicar tan bien los procesos de construcción de sus relatos.… (mer)

This study of the poetry of the 19th century gaucho genre analyzes the implications of the appropriation of the gaucho voice by non-gaucho poets in Argentina. The genre opens with early texts by Bartolomé Hidalogo and other lettered men in the early 19th century, and closes with the second part of Martín Fierro (commonly referred to as La vuelta, with the first part known as La ida) in 1879. In between, the gaucho is used in poetry by these educated writers, he's used in the military and in the countryside by those who have authority and need bodies to fight or do work, and he's incorporated into the newly-born Argentine legal and political state. The use of the voice of the gaucho in literature affects his physical usage, and vice versa: the texts of the genre function as part of various "civilizing" projects, and the failures of different aspects of the civilizing projects affect the representation of the gaucho in poetry. When Martín Fierro has shared his wisdom and affirmed that hard work and honest living are the way to go, and he and his sons part ways and change their names at the end of La vuelta, it represents the closing of the first cycle of the gaucho genre. There will be, of course, future gaucho literature, and Ludmer repeatedly links her analysis of works from within the genre to future Argentine literature inspired by the initial gaucho cycle.

Her book is no easy, straightforward read. While I sometimes felt completely lost as she provided different chains of usage of the gaucho voice and defined the limits and margins of the genre, I was extremely impressed by her original reading of different texts from both inside and outside the genre, and as I'm re-reading Martín Fierro I feel like I'm able to see it through her eyes and understand it in ways that I would not have before. From her initial breakdown of the uses of the gaucho voice and her concurrent delimitation of the spaces inside and outside of the genre (Sarmiento's Facundo, for example, is outside the genre and is its negative: the voice is Sarmiento's, and he describes the gaucho who remains silent), she moves to some close textual analysis. She looks at a poem by Hidalgo where two gauchos converse, showing how the voices excluded from their conversation correspond with the characters given voice in Martín Fierro. She shows how Ascasubi's gory poem "La refalosa," where a member of Rosas' paramilitary forces describes his preferred methods of torture with perverse pleasure, serves as an inspiration for later texts that depict twisted celebrations of violence, such as Borges and Bioy Cásares' "La fiesta del monstruo" and Lamborghini's El fiord (which is the sickest book I have ever read). It was around this point that i was absolutely hooked. I started to follow her alternation between lamentations and defiant challenges, two of the main common grounds of the genre, and she started throwing in more and more connections to texts I know and loved. She closes the second part of her book with an explanation of how Borges, in his first major work of literary criticism, Evaristo Carriego, identifies the two main tendencies in Carriego's poetry that Ludmer herself has found in the genre (the lamentation and the challenge), isolating the one he values the most: the challenge and the oral transmission on a neighborhood level of the violent events that shock life out of its patterns of normalcy. He then fuses these moments of whispered retelling of duels and knife fights with inspiration from the other half of his literary world, the Brownings and the Robert Lewis Stevensons of his family's English library.

I suppose that this is more of a special interest sort of book, best for those who are really into Argentina and its literature. I don't know that the intricate scaffolding that Ludmer builds around the genre would be very appealing to people who weren't familiar with some of the core texts of the genre (especially Martín Fierro). For me, though, it was great: it tied together a bunch of books I love, it associated them with gaucho poems that helped explain their place in Argentine literature, and it showed how the gaucho was given voice and then silenced in texts running through about the middle half of the 19th century. I plan to keep this book handy so that when I re-read Borges and come across stories inspired by the gaucho genre, I can refer back to her documentation of the genre and incorporate her theoretical viewpoint into what I'm reading.… (mer)