A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of Lat- in America

Abstract: In his article "A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary
Cultures of Latin America," Mario J. Valdés addresses the well-recognized limitations of literary
history as historical research. Valdés outlines the theoretical thinking that has guided the editors
of The Oxford Comparative History of Latin American Literary Cultures to plan, organize, and com-
plete the first history of literary culture of Latin America. The project is comparative, recognizing
the radical diversity of the continent while at the same time it is an open-ended history that in-
forms but does not attempt to provide a totalizing account of more than five hundred years of cul-
tural development among the heterogeneous entities that make up Latin America. Valdés begins
by considering the paradox of literary history, he then suggests ways that literary history can be
shaped by the work of Michel Foucault, and he proposes a framework for a hermeneutics of literary
history. Valdés also considers the challenges that face the literary historian whose work now in-
cludes cultural history. All of these considerations are then placed within the context of an effort to
create a literary and cultural history of Latin America.

The Paradox of Literary History
In his influential essay "Literary History as Challenge," (1982) Hans Robert Jauss makes the fol-
lowing argument: "The task of literary history is ... only completed when literary production is not
only represented synchronically and diachronically in the succession of its systems, but also seen
as 'special history' in its own unique relationship to 'general history'" (39). My response to Jauss's
third point -- regarding literary history's own unique relationship to general history -- will consti-
tute the major part of this paper and in so doing I will outline my basic argument for a post-
Foucault history of literary culture. In order to take up Jauss's challenge we must first establish the
social basis for literature and, consequently, literary history. A community in the sense of the
Greek polis cannot be made by a housing development or a city planner nor by a religious leader
of a utopian settlement. A community, like a language, grows out of human interaction and an
open public life that will eventually encourage group identity. The foundation of community life is
dialogue, the willingness of persons to talk and to listen to each other, the expression of mutual
concerns, a debate on differences of opinion. Above all, it depends upon a sense of belonging and
therefore having a vested interest in the life of the community. The question that immediately
arises is: How do we situate communities in a literary history without reducing the diversity and
unique features that distinguish them? The answer -- in any case, my answer -- was to enlist the
participation of social scientists: cultural geographers, linguists, demographers, social historians
and anthropologists to map the foundations of the rich diversity of Latin American literary cultures
(see the website of the project at <http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/lithist/latin.html>). This map-
ping constitutes the first section of volume one of our Comparative History of Latin American Liter-
ary Cultures (see volume one at <http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/lithist/1engdetail.html>).
Some of the key questions that pertain to the viability of a community are covered by the issue
of who has a right to speak. Throughout history there have always been some persons who live in
the community but who are excluded from the debate. They have been prevented from participat-
ing for many reasons including religion, caste, race and gender. The sense of belonging to the
community, which is so central to its development, paradoxically has also been the basis for ex-
cluding those who are different from those who set the rules. Persons in authority in communities
around the world and in all periods of history, including our own, have established rules of eligibil-
ity or citizenship, which regulate rights and privilege and which also attempt to control communal
dialogue, but to no avail. There is no law that can get people to talk to each other with mutual re-
spect when they do not already have it, nor is there any law that for long has been successful in
silencing those who would speak in spite of being excluded. There is a political dilemma here. In
ideal terms universal freedom to speak is a desirable goal, but governments cannot legislate mu-
tual respect when there is inherited distrust of those who are different. Or, to put the dilemma in
terms of Hegel's political philosophy, is it possible to have a community wherein everyday practice
does justice to both particularity and universality? Northern Ireland has given us a prime example
of the dilemma. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has come up with the most lucid re-
sponse to Hegel's paradox in his Philosophical Arguments (1995): "What seems to be emerging ...
is a hazy picture of history in which our understanding will be embedded. It rejects altogether the
Hegelian single line of development, but it retains something like the notion of potentiality.... It
does point us to a future of humanity in which the kind of undistorted understanding of the other
aimed at by the comparativist enterprise will be increasingly valuable ... We can hope to advance
in this direction, to the extent that the community of comparativists will inceasingly include repre-
sentatives of different cultures, will in effect start from different home languages" (164).
We live in a time of distrust in all aspects of life. Just as Cuba has lost its revolutionary self-
confidence, so has the United States lost its self-certainty of empire. Foucault's recognition of the
lust for power in all social organizations has become a fact of life at the end of the twentieth centu-
ry. There is one universal truth today: a loss of faith in the human capacity to respect differences.

If we turn to Jauss's thesis that literary history must be related to general history, we must deal
with this central issue in historical terms -- the inclusions and exclusions which literary history has
itself practiced throughout its existence. General history does not select the participants and the
events that have been designated significant within the tradition although individual historians
may choose to revise the estimations of some. It is only in literary history that the process of se-
lection is either openly ideologically determined or, in most cases, uses the notion of aesthetic
quality and formal achievement to disguise what is ultimately inclusion on the basis of ethnic polit-
ical conservatism. Is this not the crux of the matter? If literary history is to be given the same re-
ception as general history, the process of exclusion must be examined closely.
Literary History After Foucault
Our response to this challenge was to establish two groups who examined literary histories in Latin
America. One group addressed the exclusions on the basis of socioeconomic, racial and ethnic fac-
tors and while another focused on perceptions of gender and sexual orientation (see Vol. I, Section
2 at <http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/lithist/1engdetail.html>). In The Order of Things (1994) Fou-
cault argues that between the codes of perception and the reflexive knowledge by which we organ-
ize reality there is a middle region of the experience of order itself (355-66). I interpret Foucault's
designation of experience as our quotidian practices of living in the Polis which revolve around
agreement and disagreement, concord and conflict. We have words like 'argument' that cover all
disputes, but others, like 'dialogue' and 'debate', are specific social practices of presenting if not
resolving differences. Other words, like 'contradiction,' 'contrary,' and 'contradistinction' are more
individual designations of difference, either attributed to the other person or to the arguments pre-
sented by the other. In all these words and their semantic derivations we are dealing with differ-
ences, with struggle, opposition, and tension, with or without resolution.
Let me review what I have taken from Foucault before going on to my hermeneutics. The codes
through which we function in our social life should not be confused with rules of comportment or
laws of civil regulation. These codes of perception and engagement govern the way we relate to
each other within the community ranging from everyday greetings to sexual relations. These codes
constitute the ways through which we explain our action, our intentions and ourselves. These
codes are embedded in our language use and in the social status implicit in language use. These
codes put into practice the multiple preformed values of our social group. At the other end of the
spectrum there emerge the various paradigms of order; these are the logical, rational means soci-
ety and, especially, history have developed in the last four hundred years to control diversity. All
forms of historical writing are paradigms of the creation of order out of diversity and, by the same
generalizing token, all literature (in its basic function of mimesis) makes manifest the diversity of
human perception; therefore, literary history is an attempt to organize the self-representation of
life writers have given us. And in between the codes and the sense of order lies the irreducible re-
ality of difference. In summary, writers start from within the shared codes of the community, but
they are also under the constraints of modes of organization operative in the community, be they
modes of religious, political or class distinctions. The tension between the writers' experience in
the observance of life under social codes and the modes of order subscribed to by the cultural au-
thorities leads to rebellion, opposition at all levels and, ideologically, contradiction. This dynamic
view of literary culture is not easily described in a historical narrative. Our proposal for a herme-
neutic approach to literary history begins by taking the historical perspective of difference as the
problem to be addressed.
A few additional remarks are necessary on what I have been calling the social codes through
which we live in communities. First, it must be recognized that these codes all relate to interper-
sonal behavior that has been given or assigned meaning. Second, the transmission of these codes
is accomplished by literature, cinema, television and, today, by electronic communication. Actions
expressing both love and esteem are the most frequent in the behavioral repertoire of interper-
sonal relations (since we must recognize that the well-being of the individual takes precedence
over goods and services) and they are also the primary topics of literature. But love that is unre-
quited and esteem that turns into envy are always implied. Amongst the multiple social symbolic
codes that operate in our communities we can designate four general categories that encompass.

multiple codes expressed consistently and, primarily, through literature. They are: 1) all forms of
love including self-esteem, regard for the other(s) and love of community which becomes a form
of primary identification, as in nationalism, and the negation of any or all of these; 2) status which
includes standing in the community and related issues of ethnicity, class and gender and the un-
derlying manifestation of authority; 3) questioning or the need to know, a category that includes
education and self-learning as well as the drive for control over information; and 4) participation in
exchange systems, which includes all forms of work and services provided and received in ex-
change for value. These codes have both a history of concrete realization and of symbolic expres-
sion; the former is the domain of anthropology; the latter is that of literature. Among the modes of
order aimed at controlling the writers' use of social codes are all forms of direct and indirect cen-
sorship and, of course, school curricula (with the legitimizing status it gives) as well as the various
forms of canonical domination. What interests us here is finding a model of literary history that will
explain the tensional relation between the codes of symbolic action within a society and the organ-
izing modes of order which always and without exception select and, also, exclude and marginalize
those elements of the symbolic codes that do not subscribe to the ideological pre-formation of cul-
ture they support.
The relationship between the codes and the organizational modes of order is best characterized
as a struggle that can be as destructive as it can be constructive of a literary culture. There are
only two basic issues: what are the modes of order that have been imposed on the symbolic dis-
course of the community in question and how is it possible to avoid the necessary distortion of the
exercise of power gained by the control of knowledge or, better yet, the knowledge-construct. Im-
plicit in this inquiry is the question of responsibility. In his final works before his death in 1984
Michel Foucault revealed what, to most of his readers, even some of his most careful readers, was
a consistent yet hidden line of thought on ethical responsibility. A retrospective reading of his ma-
jor works brings to light an overriding will to unmask the very activity of philosophy in terms of
moral responsibility. He was not interested in a code of conduct for philosophic writers and, much
less, in setting up ethical models of conduct. But with increasing intensity, he questioned the ethi-
cal responsibility of intellectual inquiry itself. In this sense his ethical concern was shared by his
contemporaries, Levinas and Ricoeur. The question of the ethical consequences for intellectual in-
quiry is never far away from the opening pages of Foucault's later works. But what, perhaps, dis-
tinguishes Foucault among his contemporaries was his oblique approach to the issues of responsi-
bility. For example, instead of addressing the problem of how and by whom knowledge is consti-
tuted, he asked what does it do? Knowledge in functional terms becomes that which one group has
that gives them an advantage over those who do not possess it. Or, to give another example, in-
stead of examining how the holders of power represent reality, Foucault moves ever so slightly to
an oblique angle and asks us to look at what power constructs and purports to be reality. In terms
of the history of philosophy he leaves behind the epistemological inquiry that had dominated
Western philosophy since Kant and suggests that human institutions and the means of how we
know the world are invented by the center of power in any social group. His concern was with the
use of knowledge and the strategies to take advantage of information as power. If knowledge is
reconfigured as power and power is a means of domination then the disclosure of these power re-
lationships becomes an ethical necessity. Foucault realized that there was never to be an escape
from the configuration of the knowledge-power relationship and thus, like a modern-day Don
Quixote, he was unyielding in his declaration that there was no social relationship which was either
necessary or unchangeable. The overwhelming nature of Foucault's challenge was to construct a
literary history that effectively addressed the plurality of cultural discourse in Latin America. Our
response was to organize this section on the basis of five related but clearly distinct units: 1) reli-
gious, scientific, and political discourse; 2) orality; 3) the diversity of discourses in theater and
public theatricality; 4) popular culture, and 5) cinema (see Vol. I, Section 3:

A History of Literary Culture: Texts, Poets, and Events
What if we were to change the historical focus from the traditional paradigm of the author and/or
his works, to a concerted examination of the context in which they were written and received?

How would we organize our inquiry? How could we cope with the multiplicity of the social codes on
the one hand and the reductionist tendencies of the institutions of literature on the other? Obvi-
ously, we could lose the disciplinary unity of a biographical dictionary of poets and of the corpus of
their work, but what we could gain would be a historical narrative of the poet's appropriation of
his/her own culture and other cultures which he/she encountered and, on a deeper level, the role
as a nodal figure in the development of literary culture. Even a cursory glance at this kind of mate-
rial would reveal a series of tensional opposites, sometimes irresolvable contradictions and, at oth-
er times, points of conflict and encounter that would lead to historical ruptures. As comparative
literary historians, let us begin by recognizing that the designation of Latin America is a completely
artificial construct. Yet, by the same token, we must also recognize that there are areas of social
and cultural dynamics throughout the continent that have become cultural zones of interaction. In
undertaking the historical consideration of both the production and the reception of the cultural
imaginary in Latin America, we are exploring an essential aspect of historical life -- the way peo-
ples imagine themselves and others -- and we are also cutting across national borders, geographic
regions, time periods, linguistic systems, and cultural traditions. Establishing the broader context,
political, religious and social, in which literary culture flows is a challenge of some consequence to
the comparative literary historian. But, above all, we must come to grips with syncretic cultural
expression and mestizo cultural identity. Clearly, there can be no attempt to gain a comprehensive
historical examination over such a vast and complex area with hundreds of years of conflictive his-
tory.
Latin America is too diverse and multifaceted to permit such synthesis. Nevertheless a compar-
ative cultural history can, by focusing on connections, inform discussions of the historical
problematics by insisting on foregrounding all aspects of inclusion and exclusion to legitimation,
and by maintaining a reflexive self-questioning, one that is central to a hermeneutic approach. In
order to anchor such vast cultural diversity and social variability, we have undertaken the transcul-
tural examination of the centers of cultural production and of the institutions with control over this
production. The texts and events of production thus enter the historical commentary, unfolding a
richer contextualization that is open ended. Thus, the vast scope of the undertaking -- an entire
continent, living in numerous distinct languages both European and Amerindian over the last five
hundred years -- put enormous pressure on us not to loose sight of the narrative requirements of
writing history. We had to tell the story of Latin American culture, but we were committed to not
impose closure. Our solution was a second volume that brought together institutional modes and
cultural modalities. This volume has three parts: 1) cultural institutions; 2) textual mode