Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks & Strategies of Post-Structuralist Criticism.

Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks & Strategies of Post-Structuralist Criticism. By BERNARD MCGUIRK. London: Routledge, 1997. xiv + 265 pp. [pounds sterling]72.50.

The only excuse for a review which--even bearing in mind the slowness of the referral process and of publication--is so desperately overdue, is the merit of potentially alerting a new readership and possibly encouraging re-editions. If these objectives are even partially met, the procrastination will after all have had its uses.

I shall begin this review with two quotations: Strindberg who with habitual irascibility snarled, 'I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who don't have the guts to bite people themselves', and Washington Irving: 'A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use'.

The author of this volume doesn't keep dogs. What do we talk about when we talk about love (of literature)? McGuirk quotes Derrida--as well as inhabiting him--when he says that 'we must begin wherever we are'. I will begin, with conspicuous unoriginality, with this volume's foreword, a display of tart intellectual temper and an angry, witty, powerful willingness to bite people. The introduction instigates two salient lines of argument, one offensive and one defensive: first, an attack on the double whammy of an Anglo-Saxon academic posture of atheoretical fear/indifference, together with its USA counterpoint of arguably opportunistic domestication and farming of French winds of change; and second, a rejection of the by now standard accusations levelled at deconstruction, whether as theory or practice (isn't it always only the latter?) as an apolitical, disengaged, and ultimately aclimactic manifestation of self-indulgent (fore) play with no follow-up.

In McGuirk's mode of argument, attack habitually becomes a variant of defence, and he takes on critical methologies such as new historicism and gender studies, not with hostility but with the purpose of arguing that deconstruction inhabits and purposefully infects socio-historically grounded critical methodologies whose messages 'however loudly blared, cannot be allowed to conceal the ideological and the theoretical infrastructure that they exploit'. Deconstruction, then, seen through this lens, is not 'the passing ripple' which temporarily disturbs the calm surface of methodologies busy in their yearning for and pursuit of truth, but the engine which ought to fire a dialectical move against institutionality in critical practice.

McGuirk partly pre-empts retaliatory snaps regarding the dangers of deconstruction's own institutionalization by recognizing this phenomenon as one of the dangers of a transatlantic theoretical crossing of the water (which, as the historians of slavery now recognize, symbolized metaphorical as well as concrete death for the black cargo involved). Even if we accept the implication that the intellectual sins from across the pond have not learned to swim, he does not fully address the question of whether in the final (but closure-free) instance, the logical end-game of some of the problems he raises, both over there and over here, is a buffet-style, help-yourself smorgasbord of theory leading to practice, a critical aesthetics of indifference, characterized by intellectual/political commitment-phobia, or, in somewhat more benign phrasing, what Leo Steinberg called 'the historical pre-condition for the rediscovery of the subject'; in other words, the felicitous but undeniably detached aptness of a determinate brand of theory to be applied to a given text.

Regarding his own practice, McGuirk draws upon the metaphor of the 'island books' of Renaissance cartographers and explains, in uncharacteristic quasi-apologetic mode, albeit still with the punning wit that characterizes subsequent readings of, for example, Susana Thenon:

If the chapters which follow seem to offer but alternative readings, my
own fragmented textualities, it may be as a result of the wish to avoid,
in my own engagement with locating inequalities, the isolations of
labelling practice. Whether, at moments, I shall have inhabited
translation, criticism, psychoanalysis, literature or a range of
theories, it ought not to have been to leave, successively, one isolated
praxis for another; to have missed the structure of the floating islands
which constitutes, without unifying, the cartography.

Whatever. Passing over eccentricities such as the author's propensity for framework references which jumble together uncircumventable or merely distinguished names in theory and critical practice with a few of rather more dubious merit, this volume is a treat. Each chapter, in a different way, is a source of toe-curling pleasure, not least in the moments when the author goes off his own rails. It is not the purpose of this review to give a precis of them. Read them. Read the wonderful chapters on Cortazar and on Borges's purloined detective. Read the punning (sometimes puny), both profound and light-hearted (because, as the author seems to understand all too well, if it hurts, it doesn't work) playfulness on Susana Thenon's poetry. And the glorious essay on Borges's 'Emma Zunz', whose in-your-face erudition roller-coasters towards an end so clever it is almost horrible.

Ultimately, McGuirk practices what I think he preaches only sufficiently to ensure that he gives us never a dull moment. Absolute consistency, surely, would be altogether inappropriate. Bring your own popcorn.

MARIA MANUEL LISBOA

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE