The Opaque Experience

Florencia Garramuño

The Opaque Experience:
Literature and
Disenchantment

Peter Lang

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Florencia Garramuño, author.

Title: The Opaque Experience: Literature and Disenchantment

Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2018] | Series: Iberian and Latin American Studies : the Arts, Literature and Identity ; Volume 8 |

Cover image: Paisaje (2010), ink on paper, 145 cm x 145 cm,
by Juan Pablo Fernández Bravo

ISSN 1662-1794

ISBN 978-1-78707-366-1 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-668-7 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78874-669-4 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-670-0 (mobi)

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2018

Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland

info@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author

Florencia Garramuño is Director of the Humanities Department at Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina. She holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University, and degrees in Literature from Universidad de Buenos Aires. She received a John Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998.

About the book

The Opaque Experience is a thorough investigation of the changes in aesthetics that occurred in Argentina and Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. It analyses a slow transformation of the status of the literary, which has become increasingly manifest in writing practices against the backdrop of a wider aesthetic transformation that strongly questioned traditional conventions. Through readings of works by Silviano Santiago, Juan José Saer, Clarice Lispector, Néstor Perlongher and Ana Cristina Cesar –among others – in relation to the works of artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, the book seeks to understand the evolution of the notion of art. Its central argument is that artistic works of the period traverse an experiential drive that transcends artistic form. Special importance is given to historical context: when the frontiers between public and private are demolished by the authoritarian state; when “bare life” becomes the political category par excellence; and when art positions itself in an “expanded field”. Exposed to the face of the world, these art forms combine different and destabilizing logics that reveal a vulnerability of the subject, and of experience, that is not in harmony with the notion of autonomous subjects or work. It is not just a matter of a transformation of sensibilities, but rather a transformation of the meaning of art in contemporary society.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1

The Remains of the Real

Chapter 2

A Context: The Disenchantment of the Modern

Chapter 3

Culture as Margin

Chapter 4

The Narrative of Experience

Chapter 5

Poetry, Life and History

Chapter 6

Departures from Autonomy

Bibliography

Index←v | vi→ ←vi | vii→

Preface

“As for writing, a live puppy is worth more”: this stark sentence by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector illustrates a transformation in the status of literature and art that became increasingly manifest in Brazil and Argentina during the 1970s and 1980s. The violent authoritarian dictatorships that stormed the two countries during those decades voided modernization of all liberating and progressive illusions, leading artistic and cultural producers to contest modernist notions of art, transgressing limits and questioning aesthetics conventions.

The book reconstructs artists’ and writers’ positions against the backdrop of the disenchantment with conventional forms of art and critique through art. The transgression of boundaries, the demand for bodily participation, the transformation of the spectator into a participant, were all strategies that dissolved the separation between audience and artist, transforming the relationship between culture and politics.

In particular, I examine a select corpus of texts from the 1970s and 1980s that offer invaluable insights on a new concept of experience. Artistic works of the period are traversed by an experiential drive that exceeds artistic form. Insisting obsessively on coming close to experience, experience never assumes the form of knowledge; rather, it is conceived as the space of ignorance and fantasy. By analyzing works by Silviano Santiago, Juan José Saer, Clarice Lispector, Ana Cristina César, and Nestor Perlongher, among others, the book analyzes the blossoming of subjectivity, the emergence of marginal poetry, the abundance of hybrid forms and of amphibious texts –within the gray area between reality and fiction.

When the frontiers between the public and private are demolished by the authoritarian state, when bare life becomes the political category par excellence, art seems to assume the indifferentiation of social space by positing itself in an ‘expanded field’. In their openness and in their vulnerability in the face of the world, this type of art and writing combines different and destabilizing logics that expose a vulnerability of the subject←vii | viii→ and of experience that could never be matched to the notion of an autonomous subject or work. A strong challenge to the category of the work as an autonomous form distanced from the real can be read in all these practices. Replaced by an idea of the work as an archive of the exterior whose remains do not cast light but are the tenuous emanations of an equivocal luminosity, a new notion of art emerges out of all these challenges. Art, deprived of its aura of redemption and transformation, entered into a conflict with politics.

Through readings of works by Silviano Santiago, Juan José Saer, Clarice Lispector, Néstor Perlongher, Ana Cristina Cesar, among others, in relation to the works of artists, such as Hélio Oiticica or Lygia Clark, and different cultural changes, the book seeks to understand the larger transformation in the notion of art and its strategies of resistance. More than just a transformation in sensibilities, it is my contention that these works point to a transformation in the meaning of art in contemporary society.←viii | 1→