Alvaro Mutis and the Ends of History

Part of the confusion of the current literary and critical moment, in Latin America and elsewhere, involves a debate as to whether the most characteristic forms of contemporary writing are the more apparently transparent (in contrast to current critical practice) or the more impenetrable and indecipherable of literary texts. This debate is of particular relevance to Latin American discussions about the so-called "Post-Boom," and the work of the Colombian Alvaro Mutis, a writer who came late to narrative fiction and to critical attention, offers several insights into the links between writing, criticism and idology at this moment close to the end of the century and even, so some thinkers have said, to the end of history. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol19/iss1/9 Alvaro Mutis and the Ends of History Gerald Martin University of Pittsburgh I must have been 20, or 22, when I first came across Maqroll. From that time to this my peculiar esteem for him has grown. He almost never tells me what I want or expect, which may be why I understand and esteem him more. Franciso Cervantes, 1988' He died in exile; like all men, he was born at the wrong time. Jorge Luis Borges (on Juan CrisOstomo Lafinur, in "New Refutation of Time," 1946) One of Jorge Luis Borges's shortest pieces is "The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths." It tells how the king of Babylon built a labyrinth, which he used to perplex and humiliate other monarchs, including a king of the Arabs. ("The labyrinth was a scandal, because confusions and marvels are operations proper to God and not to men"). With Allah's help the king escaped from the labyrinth and immediately began a war against the king of Babylon, which ended in his defeat and capture. The Arab king then told his unhappy prisoner that he would now show him his own labyrinth, one without stairs, doors or walls. He tied the Babylonian to a camel, took him out into the desert and left him to die of hunger and thirst-and also, we might say today, of "exposure" (to reality, perhaps). Borges's allegory is especially apposite in thinking about Alvaro Mutis, a writer whose most frequently used terms would include the words "intricate" and "labyrinth," yet whose fiction is among the most 1 Martin: Alvaro Mutis and the Ends of History Published by New Prairie Press 118 STCL, Volume 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1995) accessible and apparently transparent in contemporary Latin American narrative. Mutis is a particularly fascinating phenomenon, because he is at once a fairly characteristic "Post-Boom" novelist as this concept is commonly understood-direct, accessible, monolinear, "readerfriendly," "narrative" and "classical" rather than "structural" or "baroque"yet he is a writer whose values and vision of the world stretch back beyond the beginnings of modernity and into the medieval, feudal and chivalresque period. In that sense he may prove particularly instructive as to the possible meaning of the Post-Boom's narrative, stylistic and intellectual turn in this disconcerting postmodern era. I like to think about Borges's brief allegory more generally when I am pondering the great unsolved-and perhaps unsolvable-questions of the past three decades confronting those of us interested in contemporary Latin American narrative. It suggests a contrast between artifice and simplicity, between theory and reality. The message seems to be that life is already sufficiently complex and anxiety-ridden without men adding their own theories and structures for no reason other than personal vanity or self-aggrandisement. My reading of the work of Alvaro Mutis would lead to the conclusion that beneath the surface multiplicity and relativity of Postmodernity, this writer, like many others, perceives a nothingness, an absence of meaning more baleful than any of the anguished speculations undertaken by variably romantic (that is, "humanist") philosophers and writers since the Enlightenment. Given that the Latin American Post-Boom is the thematic frame of this essay and Alvaro Mutis its central focus, and that Mutis is notable for his incisive and elemental view of the world and therefore confronts us with the very largest questions, it would seem appropriate to follow Borges's indication and to seek clarity here rather than complication. Space precludes a detailed analysis of the issues involved, but I would like to mention in outline the grand overarching questions that must form the conceptual frame for any discussion of literature and culture these days, even if our treatment of them must remain partly implicit. When was Modernity and what is the relation between Modernity and Postmodernity? What is literary Modernism and what is its relation to Postmodernism? What is the relation between Latin American narrative and world narrative as a whole since World War I? What was Structuralism and what is its relation to Poststructuralism? And, finally, the composite question that draws on all the others: what is the relation between Post-Boom, Poststructuralism and Postmodernism (a 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 19, Iss. 1 [1995], Art. 9 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol19/iss1/9 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1365