INTRODUCTION

In Chapter III above on "The Politics of Nation-making in Central America," James Riley raises two questions which suggest a way of reflecting upon the relation of the literary experience of Central America to the region's social and political events. The questions are: how does one go about constructing or forging a nation; and how can one regain one's own country?

On one level are the global historic events and their effects in shaping the tradition from which Central America emerges; on another level the critic is submerged by the plurality of social and political patterns in terms of which Central Americans perceive, interpret and react.

As literary critic, I will choose as a basis for interpretation literary works which have the following characteristics.

- First, they relate most effectively the world of imagery to the social context, thereby reflecting the homologies between the formal properties established among the elements within the text and the social patterns found in social structures.

- Second, they invoke particular, dramatic and pressing actions through which the reader can evaluate both the quality of the poem and the complexity of the situation it presents.

- Third, they have as their aim not to offer conclusions about experience, but to unveil the processes of the mind's emotional and intellectual reactions to the social situation.

- Fourth, they interpret the reality they depict in a manner which produces a liberating effect in their readers. Such interpretations provide readers with a new vision of themselves within their society by generating original mental models. These arise through a dialectical approach to tradition which simultaneously is anchored in the past and conforms to expectations for the future which affect the present. "The content of this anticipation [related to tradition] is not some objective, fixed, content to which we come; it is rather what we produce as we participate in the horizon of the tradition and thereby further determine ourselves."¹

- Fifth, they affect us esthetically in a way that is at once immediate and distant. That is, works which both retain the stirring and alluring effects of the texture of real events and provide us with a reflective distance or focus for considering the imaginative context evoked by actions.

- Finally, Octavio Paz has described the relationships between the analysis of social facts and literary texts as "the exercise of criticism as an exploration of language and the exercise of language as an exploration of reality."² Their analytic difference and its interpretation depend less upon their "essential nature" than upon the way both disciplines contrive and carry out their specific work of structuring reality. What matters is to emphasize the dynamic processes introduced by the literary texts in their imaginative embodiment of the social scene, while keeping in view the overall interaction within which immediate social facts have their meaning.

Given the emphases upon linking literary analysis with potential social criticism due to the repressive and violent socio-political history that has characterized the genesis of Central-American institutions, I will structure this presentation in response to two general questions: (1) what are the cultural models in terms of which literary texts have reflected upon the urgent problems affecting their society; and (2) what do these literary cultural models express or create that is specific or original to the society from which they arise?

The former question (1) relates to the author's producing new visions with which to reflect upon the problems endured by his or her community under the disturbing pressure of several levels of events. The latter question (2) concerns the process by which those models enable the esthetic experiences provided by literary patterns to become dramatic and existential as the author and the reader gradually deepen the psychological and sociological implications of the overall situation.

The former stresses the spatial structures of the text, since it calls for original patterns of thought permitting an overall understanding of the global dilemmas endured by society. Simultaneously this provides a vantage point from and towards which literary reasoning flows. The latter emphasizes one temporal and existential structure since what matters here is the progressive understanding of human actions as they unfold the text and are embodied in acts of awareness on the part of the reader. Here, the vantage point corresponds to literary, rather than to sociological experience because literature, as Roland Barthes writes, is one of the few cultural activities whose sole constant aim is to liberate from enslaving forces or ideologies by opening more widely the scope of one's apprehension of human reality.³

FROM LITERATURE TO SOCIETY

Regarding literature's critique of society and reality by the exercise of language, the issue becomes: how can one identify, reflect upon, and transform through literature the unconscious pattern of values which undergirds the dynamics of life which is specific to Central-America?

Rubén Darío (Nicaraguan poet: 1867-1916)

Rubén Darío laid the basis of modernism as a systematic foundation for an as yet inexistent Hispanic-American intellectual system. Beyond its formal and stylistic pattern this included the following.

1. Literature was conceived as a conscious cultural production for a cultural market sustained and nourished by modern bourgeois industrial, commercial, liberal and democratic society. The new literature was intended to contribute to the creation of such a society within the Hispano-American tradition.⁴ This meant moving from the 19th to the 20th century as technical progress partially suppressed the geographic distance between America and Europe. This broad theme will be considered in the works of Rubén Darío, Ernesto Cardenal and Miguel Asturias. As Octavio stated: "To go to Paris or London was not merely to visit another continent, but to jump to another century."⁵

However, progress, industry and capital were not praised as factors of productivity, labor and savings as in Walt Whitman; the focus was rather upon consumption, waste and pleasure. "The gold as it is wasted and spent becomes the real economic base of Darío's lyric and of modernism from a socio-historic perspective."⁶ The symbols of notorious consumption marked his work and characterized its ideological contradiction and underdevelopment.

2. Writers were conceived as self-reflective creators of their own intellectual activity. Their personal style became their trademark as well as the foundation of their writing and future professional competence. Literary authors became professionals paid for their work, just as industrial society makes us pay for its merchandise.⁷ Artists were seen as reflecting upon their intellectual activity, supporting themselves through the publication of their texts in periodicals, and thereby shaping public opinion. This contrasted with the earlier romantic Spanish-American artists, whose support and protection had depended upon and reflected the patronage of the ruling classes, to whom in most cases they also were related by bonds of family.

Further, whereas the romantics drew upon the internal resources of the artist in reflecting upon classical models, modernism was rather "in favor of presenting scenes which exhibit the mind in the process of seeking an adequate stance by which to foreground the very process of interpreting the particular experience the mind is engaged in."⁸ Modernist artists did not choose the tragic defeat of the romantic hero as a model of artistic life--they did not envisage the loss of their life to be their destiny as artists. Instead they were opportunistic in seeking recognition wherever it might be found.

This attitude could explain Darío's ambivalent position regarding United States, as it appears in "To Roosevelt" (1903) and in "Greeting the Aigle" (1906). In the first poem Darío contrasts the Hispanic way of life, with its spirituality, christianity, charitableness and ethnic integration, to the American characteristics of pragmatism, egoism, ethnic exclusion and the imperialist and colonialist drive. In the latter poem he praises what was criticized in the former: pragmatism and egoism become components of progress, while ethnic exclusion and the imperialist spirit become courageous virtues at the expense of creole inertia. Concha provides two clues: Darío's travel to the Panamerican Conference in Rio de Janeiro and his encounter with Mr. Root "who, between whiskies, gained the appearance of a `great and gentle' protector. The values of the elite, in full imperialist offensive, did not take any account of the Central American spirit."⁹ In fact, Darío sought to develop a new cultural model according to which the bourgeois and the poet could recognize each other.

3. Literary content, as with most 19th century authors, was articulated according to a Christological vision which, in Darío's case, assumed pagan resonances which he oriented toward a cosmic aesthetic naturalism. If the origin of his liricism is Christ, its culmination is Ovid.¹⁰

Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaraguan poet: 1925- )

For Darío the fundamental problems had been "how to create culture in and from a wasteland" and "how to produce a cultural system where there had been mistrust and denial of one's own cultural roots"? A half-century later, in the face of the violent repression of the Somoza period, Ernesto Cardenal confronted a related problem: how to produce a cultural discourse where the language of the community has been repressed and perverted?

Cardenal responds that the way to unblock the repression and restore the perverted language is to assume the purgative experience of Christian suffering.¹¹ This breaks through the interior atomization resulting from repression and permits the beginning of the reconstitution of oneself as a perceiving and feeling being. To feel sorrow is to regain a lost sensibility and to trangress the limits imposed by official censorship upon our emotions and, consequently, upon those of others. This literary model would be centered on the figure of the "suffering Christ." In view of the indissociability of humanity and language, the phenomenon of the "desaparecidos" has its parallel in linguistic perversion which renders a community incapable of articulating the repression it suffers or the hope that could give it life. In this light Cardenal's poems of love and ordeal appear truly significant.

By destroying the language of community, repression isolates its members and leads to the interior desert of egoism. This social perversion can be rectified by psychological suffering, as conceived by the psychoanalyst of culture, J.B. Pontalis.¹²

Let us note some of his most essential insights on the nature of "psychic pain or suffering."

From the point of view of the process in question, its first essential characteristic . . . is the phenomenon of a breaking down of barriers, occurring when `excessively large quantities of energy break through the protective devices', and then a discharge, within the body, of the cathexis thus accumulated.¹³ Pain is an effraction, it supposes the existence of limits: limits of the body, limits of the ego, it brings about an internal discharge, which could be called an implosive effect."¹⁴

The poet breaks through social repression and censorship by enduring and performing in his poems the suffering of the lacerated social body. Literally: "the social subject opens censorship with his pain."¹⁵ If terror was intended to arrest the meaning of words once and for all, the poem reestablishes their circulation through this pain. I agree with this interpretation and read Cardenal's poems as following this path.

But, how does this psychic process take place; what are the mechanisms through which "implosive" psychic pain accomplishes its social, explosive and liberating effects in its readers? What is engaged, repressed or suppressed in its dynamism?

Pontalis goes on:

What occurs with the experience of satisfaction (the gulf between Befriedigung and Wunschphantasie) is not to be found in the case of pain: there is no metaphor here, that is to say, no creation of meaning, but only analogy, the direct transfer from one register to another: . . . the body transforms itself into psyche and the psyche into body, . . . (that is the) `body-ego, or this psychic body.'¹⁶

Pain "reveals an unknown land" to the sufferer, i.e., "we receive spatial and other representations of parts of the body which are ordinarily not represented in conscious ideation. I have anxiety, I am pain, it could be said in obviously abrupt terms: . . . The subject cannot communicate his pain; . . . pain belongs only to oneself."¹⁷

In a very synthetic manner, this defines "psychic pain." Let us infer the related cathartic operations performed by the poet in his/her poems:

First, he or she has to create metaphors, meanings, representations which socially mediate the coalescence of the body-ego with the psychic body, and enable the subject to communicate both with the real objects (which cause the pain) and with the pain itself.

Second, the poet has to reassure the community, introducing lines of division between physical pain (that, e.g., of the "desaparecidos" or tortured), and psychic breakdown (the paranoid effect of censorship).

Third, in order to accomplish the above and overcome the "state of mental helplessness" caused by a "pain belonging only to oneself," the poet must regain full contemporariness with his or her present. This is defined as an intrinsic unity of temporal and spatial relationships fused together to form one concrete whole.

Otherwise the social subject will experience the good object as lost at the present time (i.e., civil rights as being irretrievable though they are truly one's due) and the bad object (i.e., repression of rights) as actual and permanent. If this happens--and this is precisely what happens under dictatorship--the subject will endure his or her present life as if it were an anticipation of an alluring utopia which never takes place, that is, the subject begins to experience his life and expectations as an anterior future. This entails the radical incertitude of projecting all that one is or does into a future which is already subordinate to another future--which may or may not take place. "No doubt psychic pain depends, in the final analysis, on object-loss, whether real or fantasmatic. . . . In the case of pain, the object ceases to function as a possible surety; he is, at best, a substitute, and behind this substitute, there is always another one in infinite `transference'."¹⁸

Fourth, Brian Johnstone's reflection in Chapter X below about the immediacy of suffering because of its closeness to bodily experience and its ability thereby to bear "a clear message across cultures"¹⁹ receives new light from Pontalis' insight.

(a) The true immediacy of suffering lies in the fact that it reveals to the sufferer "an unknown land" which is not only physical but also psychic, metaphorical and meaningful. This unknown land breaks open the opposition and sweeps away the separation traditionally recognized between the signified (which alone thusfar had been considered to have meaning) and the signifier (which thusfar had been considered meaningless). From now on the body becomes a sign which signifies less by the "pretended" conscious awareness of the ego (signified) than by the concrete symbols conveyed by its flesh (signifier). Therefore, a suffering body-ego or psychic body can reveal the truth because of the unfolding of the "unknown lands."

The unconscious is that chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere, namely, in the monuments: this is my body. That is to say, the hysterical nucleus of the neurosis in which the hysterical symptom reveals the structure of a language . . . . In semantic evolution: this corresponds to the stock of words and acceptations of my own vocabulary, as it does to my style of life and to my character.²⁰

This is the way the "implosive" effect of suffering discloses unknown lands. These will reveal the truth to us as long as we learn to recognize the significant bodily signs which depend upon the organization of the signifier.

(b) A "clear message" is sent out "across cultures"²¹ by the suffering body provided pain makes us aware of, and fully contemporary with, the latent social implications concealed in our present. In fact, what suffering sends `across cultures' is more a procedure than a message since psychic pain is one of the primary means both for materializing present time in space and for spatially unfolding meaningless events in all their temporal meaningfulness. Under the pressure of suffering, what happens is similar to what Bakhtin defines as the representational importance of chronotope in narrative.

Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. . . . Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins.²²

This means both breaking through the alienated mechanism of the anterior future (expectation enchained to another expectation) and recognizing that the suffering body expresses itself as a language. If suffering is immediate and global from the point of view of its psychic process ("the very property of pain being to blur the frontiers between physic and psychic"²³), the body which conveys it, however, is structured as a language. The signs sent out (or expelled) by a suffering body are always codified within one's specific culture in spite of their apparent bodily immediacy. I underline "apparent" because the body, as psycho-analysis has taught us, is also organized and written by one's specific culture.

From this brief analysis of how "implosive" psychic pain accomplishes its "explosive" and liberating effects, it can be seen that, just as the dictator personifies the perverted language of the community, the poet breaks the repression with verses that take up the amorphous, censored feelings and discourses of the community. Literally, the poet breaks through the censorship with his poems:

Haven't you read, my love, in the News:

SENTINEL OF PEACE, GENIUS OF WORK

PALADIN OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

DEFENDER OF CATHOLICISM IN AMERICA

THE PROTECTOR OF THE PEOPLE

THE BENEFACTOR . . . ?

They plunder the people's language.

And they falsify the people's words.

(Just like the people's money.)

That's why we poets do so much polishing on a poem.

And that's why my love poems are important.

(Epigrams, 1961)²⁴

In this sense, the exercise of language as an exploration of reality is social and political through and through.

The experience of psychological suffering, as depicted at its strongest in Canto Nacional (1973) and Oráculo sobre Managua (1975), is rendered incarnate in the imagination through the depiction of the actions endured by the poor and the wretched. The suffering is not so much declared as it is inevitably assumed by the reader as he or she goes through poems which render present apocalyptic scenes caused by the political anomy of the "fascized institutions." This is Ezequiel Martinez Estrada's dialectical phrase to say that the most pernicious effect of the dictator on civil institutions is that these institutions, finally, begin to act as does the dictator.²⁵ In fact, the suffering is less represented than suggested through the impressions the poems summon up and establish in the reader's mind. In agreement with the modernist approach, what Cardenal seeks to establish in the mind are not objects or their images, but their impressions in the reader's mind.

For example, concerning the reality of torture:

Don't beat me...Don't beat me...My God!

My God! You are killing me! His face was one single lump.

Nosecheekbonesforehead one single lump. His left eye

was almost falling out. The Superior said: Give him more...Give him more...

Kill him. He was beating him with the butt of his carbine and he was shouting:

Beat him!...Beat him!...Give him more!...Kill this son

of-a-bitch... Kill him!...Don't leave him alive. The soldiers kept on beating him

with bunches of electric wires. He was naked

in the water trough. Beat him...Give him more...Beat him. Kill him...

Kill him...The same person was beating him with

bunches of wires.

And stomping on him. He stomped on his heart. I'm going to kill you, you son-of-a-bitch.²⁶

Or when he describes an apocalyptical scene:

The sewers end there.

On the shore of the lake the children are playing at making small holes

with little sticks to see who can get more flies out of his digging In the water with cotton fibers, toilet paper, some

condoms.

The slaughter-house is close. Above their wastes, buzzards.

A stream of milky sewer-water flows toward the lake

to the right the poisoned soft-green lagoon of Acahualinca...

huts on the plain where the trucks from the capital dump

(or used to dump) Managua's garbage

a plain of tin-cans, papers, plastic, glass, automobile skeletons

buzzards in withered trees waiting for more trucks

Other sewers empty there

without reaching the lake (the moon glimmers

above the shit)

There children with small twisted eyes,

sickly, extenuated, with bodies badly disproportioned, beetle-like

with stomachs protruding and legs like toothpicks

and when afternoon begins to end he moves along seeking the fever

he eats dirt which is a pleasure

Old women bent over the entrails which the

slaughter-house cast off

scaring the buzzards.²⁷

In this sense, what Cardenal calls "exteriorism"²⁸ turns out to be an efficient poetic tool as long as it summons up and conveys to the reader's mind the restrained voice of the oppressed, mainly the poor and the wretched. The objectivism praised by "exteriorism," namely, "elements of real life and concrete things, with proper names and precise details," constitute only an initial step. From this the reader interprets the particular experiences in which his/her mind is engaged. From the point of view of its poetic effect, "exteriorism" is exterior only in name!

This type of experience was anticipated in his Epigrams (1961) and Psalms (1965). Both texts diffuse a mystic feeling of joy before the divine value of creation, but are interwoven with a socio-political awareness of human suffering (Holocaust, dictatorships, totalitarian regimes). In Canto Nacional and Oráculo sobre Managua he deepens and projects the particular suffering of the Nicaraguan community under Somoza's dictatorship. In sum, through his poems, from Epigrams to Oráculo sobre Managua, Cardenal moves from the Epiphany of a divine love of Creation to becoming progressively anchored in the Calvary endured by the Latin-American communities under their dictatorships. Both sets of texts provide a cultural path to reestablish a national consensus based upon the Christian humanist postulates of right to life, love and solidarity with those who suffer.

Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemalan writer: 1899-1974; Nobel Prize, 1967).

Among Asturias' many important literary productions, one aspect has had especially important consequences, both literary and sociological, for Central-American culture and history. He is the first writer to undertake one of the most tearing topics in Spanish-American narrative: the dictatorship novel. This was inaugurated with great success by his Señor Presidente (1946) and become an important narrative trend in latter Spanish-American novels: Conversacion en la catedral by Mario Vargas Llosa (1969), Yo el Supremo by Augusto Roa Bastos (1974), El recurso del método by Alejo Carpentier (1974), and El otoño del Patriarca by García Márquez (1975) are among the best known.

According to Angel Rama, the enormous public reception of these novels and their literary interest is based upon the fact that they dare to present and "recognize a Spanish-American archetype rooted, not in the exterior historical manifestations of society, but in its modeling forms, in its images reflecting psycho-social unconscious drives."²⁹ Further, the dictator figures ("Caudillo," "Benefactor" or "Protector of the Civil Rights by God's grace," as they insisted upon being called) could be the result of the governments' betrayal of the will of the people, as Jose Marti observed in his essay "Our America."

The government must originate in the country. The spirit of the government must be that of the country. Its structure must conform to rules appropriate to the country. Good government is nothing more than the balance of the country's natural elements. . . . It is by conforming with these disdained native elements [the natural man's wounded pride, humility or threatened interests] that the tyrants of America have climbed to power, and have fallen as soon as they betrayed them. Republics have paid with oppression for their inability to recognize the true elements of their countries, to derive from them the right kind of government, and to govern accordingly. In a new nation a governor means a creator.³⁰

^From his psycho-anthropological approach to culture Freud can tell us much about the figure of the dictator.³¹ The dictator, first, subjugates the collective subjectivity of the nation by imposing on it his own overinflated will, that is, the dictator forces the community to substitute his own Ego-Ideal for that of its own. Second, the dictator "devours" the social time of the community by suppressing all associative links other than those which are not related to himself. He thus suppresses the social space of the community and prevents it from building its own psychic and juridic space. Third, the dictator holds on to power by means of the cause-effect mechanism of terror. Terror is an effect of absolute subjection to his arbitrary will, for the individual becomes juridically and politically unprotected due to the lack of other mediating levels between the dictator's power and the vulnerability of the socially isolated person. Terror is also a cause because it is one of the most important variables which chain together the "fascized institutions."

Let us compare this interpretation³² with what Asturias himself and one of his best known critics have observed about this topic. First, the dictator is "the myth-man, the superior being, who fulfills the functions of the tribal chief in primitive societies, annointed by sacred powers, invisible as God. . . . The fascination he causes in everyone occurs outside of the boundaries of the chronological time."³³ From this remark of the author regarding his novel, I underline "the a-chronological aspect of his fascination and of his characters." This social a-chronism (or socially paralyzed time) is due to the fact that the tyrant has blocked out historical temporality (he "devours" it, as Freud writes figuratively) because he has thwarted the equalitarian contract among the members of the community regarding the socio-political generation of civil power. As long as there is no social consensus, there will be no social time or human temporality, but only mythical time. As this is cyclic, the dictator's a-chronism will last.

Second, the only hope of participation by becoming part of the mechanism of social power would require alienation of the self in the other, that is, in the self of the dictator ("The only possibility left is to think with Mr. President's head."³⁴) But not even this would succeed, as can be seen by the case of Mr. President's actuary who was executed for spilling an inkwell over some of the dictator's documents. The old employee winds up feeling guilty and fairly punished.

Third, "Fear has become an everyday habit in the world controlled by the dictator."³⁵ As I described it elsewhere, the origin of fear (or terror) in the dictatorship novel is twofold: on the one hand, it arises due to the renunciation by the subject of his own Ego-Ideal when he has to substitute it by that of the dictator; on the other hand, it arises also when the person's self disappears, becoming lost "in the many souls of the mob." "This double structural alienation of the Ego explains his terror and also his thirst of human servitude,"³⁶ for a sense of security is achieved only by placing our anxieties in the hands of another. Ezequiel Martinez Estrada called it "the fundamental psychological invariant of the socio-political institutions in La-tin America."³⁷

FROM SOCIETY TO LITERATURE

Moving now in a reverse manner no longer from literature to society but rather from society to literature, what do these literary models reveal about society when they are questioned about their social responsibility? More concretely, can these "subjective," ficticious models teach us anything "objective" about society; can these literary models show how they are themselves fed-back from society? Can these models be something more than mere reflections of the society which underlies them; in other words, can these models--beyond merely reflecting society as a mirror--produce an original understanding about the society? What do they say to us when we approach them from society?

Ruben Darío

I would propose the following hypotheses as a basis for further reflection. Darío's model, grosso modo, seems to imply that discourse is constructed consciously from two simultaneous verbal axes: (1) from one axis which affirms or states objectively, and (2) from another axis, superimposed on the first, which examines and analyses what the first states: "eyes within the eye to see how it sees" according to the description of Argos by Gracian. In a word, Darío inaugurates in hispanic discourse awareness of the reflexivity of language which is simultaneous with the self. To write literature becomes a strategy against the indissolubility of the self.³⁸ It is the same experience that Joyce achieved in English literature and Mallarmé in French.

The sociological effect of this literary strategy is ideological dis-alienation. One of the most effective instruments of ideological dis-alienation may be that of making evident to people, through and in the language in which they write or express themselves, the at times abysmal discrepancies between their concrete and real conditions of existence and what they believe those conditions to be. That is, they are revealed to themselves by the very discourse which writes or speaks through them. This is the experience which Darío expressed as being either "the artifice of his own language" or "his fight against the banality in literary language."

I understand this as affirming, on the one hand, the possibility of performing one's own dis-alienation through becoming aware of one's "cliches"; and, on the other, the socio-ideological role taken over today by contemporary literature and men of letters as "évéilleurs de conscience." That is, to write becomes at once a private and a public affair, a reflexive and a self-reflexive activity. Like M. Jourdan, the modernist writer realizes that he is performing at the same time at least three functions: (a) incarnating a new vision or "mimesis" for his time or, perhaps better, "for the future of his community", (b) performing a kind of "catharsis" of what has been repressed in his community, and (c) fixing the boundaries of what can be thought within his community. This fulfills the role of the "Maudit", i.e., of being at the intersection of all fires, simultaneously praised and detested not only by the public--which affects one's "pride"--but also by the ruling class or dictators--which can affect one's survival. What do these three functions have in common from the vantage point of writing itself?

The contemporary Latin American writer who has internalized the modernist lesson breaks down in his writing the stereotype which speaks (or writes) through his own writing. In sum, he writes with originality, varying the common phraseology or the ossified language of the community, which is the first that comes to his mouth or pen. This stereotypical language is that of Common Sense, i.e., it makes sense instantly and rejects the time required (the "durée" in Bergson's sense) for reflection. The fight against what is stereotypical within one's self requires a social (and learning) experience, because the problem brought into the open is, in fact, that of society's different levels or interests as carried by the respective illocutionary forces of our speech.

Ernesto Cardenal

In what way then can Cardenal's literary model, centered in the suffering Christ, provide in return an objective experience of Nicaraguan society? If the model of psychological suffering breaks through the inner subjective as well as the inter-subjective barriers established by social repression, this happens by overcoming the process of censorship and self-censorship which isolates the member of the community. The anti-censorship poems of Cardenal teach the way in which socio-political censorship functions, not only in Nicaragua, but also in the rest of the afflicted Spanish American countries. This has four dimensions.

First, the ambiguous functioning of censorship with respect to the censored material. In fact, you never know exactly what has been censored; this is the difference between "censorship" and the juridical "interdiction" which explicitly prohibits particular material. Because of this ambiguity of censorship its effects overflow its strictly linguistic borders, so that it affects or "seizes" the entire socio-pragmatic environment of man, as well as the root being of every subject.

Secondly, censorship induces an element of paranoia in those who suffer under it. People react by constructing protective speeches projected toward the future in order to anticipate the unexpected which might come either from the others or from their own unexpected but possible reactions. This mental "rumination" takes people away from their concrete present and projects them into nowhere, because a constant defensive reaction in the present nullifies the future itself. Could this be one of the psycho-social causes of our endemic procrastination?

Thirdly, censorship also enriches us with a second original sin: it makes us ontologically guilty in relation to the agencies of State. People are socially guilty and debitors in relation to the law, for which the individual is no more than a "blind spot": the one who deserves and endures all the duties, obligations and coercions of the law, but without any of its civil or human rights. This produces a schism between man and society, man and others, and man and himself.

Fourthly and resulting from the previous, people internalize censorship to such a point that it begins to be less they who act under its effects than internalized censorship itself which now acts as repudiation through the people who act it out. Censorship transfers itself from the censored object to the complete process through which it functions. Here lies the fundamental point: the individual disappears under the pressure which flattens him. Henceforth, censorship itself becomes the objective agent, the only valid interlocutor which interacts socially through the subjects which are its incarnations. Censorship ensconces itself in society, turning people into vertriloquests who act it out, for it decides beforehand what will or will not be said within the social body. This deviation of man within the socio-linguistic labyrinth reminds one of "the double game of the licit and the illicit" which Martinez Estrada called "fraudulent energies" and which occurs when "the licit way of acting is cast aside not only as the most uncomfortable and difficult, but also as the most irrational and unjust."³⁹

Miguel Angel Asturias

The model of the dictator created by Asturias attests to a well known social phenomenon in contemporary society: the multiplication and dissemination of repressive mechanisms at all levels of society and active in the different powers of speech. The all embracing power previously centered in the dictator has become miniaturized, distributing itself throughout the whole social body; it has been embodied in the finest mechanism and most subtle forces of social interaction. The repressive power--like the devil--becomes legion and his emblem, today, is that of arrogant speech.

We can hear it--and sometimes we hear ourselves reproducing it--in politics where it rules as the power to restrain by force. Along with the juridical, it is the only discourse which can perform what it says. Perhaps what one resents the most in its coercive behavior is its pretension of ruling sub specie aeternitatis, when in fact it is always choosing one particular entity or subject to the detriment of another, or, when it is disregarding universal concreteness in the name of universal impartialness. It is also heard at the university, where it rules as "discours du savoir," that is, speech which attempts to dominate the other, e.g., either by erudite references which show that the speaker knows more of the tradition, or by categorizing and then dismissing one's interlocutor. The speaker supposedly knows more and denies the interlocutor's claim to knowledge by interpreting (that is "bringing into subjection") their conceptual system in the light of a supposedly more comprehensive rational theory. Here the attitude is not that of unveiling what truly is (Heidegger's Aletheia), but of sophistical self-affirmation by the speaker. Sometimes it even reigns in the bosom of the family as the "master's speech," that is, speech that expresses fidelity to another person from whom we expect self-recognition.

How can all these types of arrogant speeches be defined? Roland Barthes provided a provisional answer: "that which engenders deficiency in the recipient and, thereby, guilt in the one who receives."⁴⁰

The struggle against these miniaturized powers calls for a complete analysis which should look into all aspects of our social existence and inter-subjective relationships. That is, we should not merely remember, but practice the lesson of Darío: to be able to put the arrogance of our speech at a distance to be able to hear our own speech, no longer merely in terms of our own self-esteem, but from the viewpoint from which we are heard; in short, to move from the production of arrogant speech to its recognition so as to produce the distance which permits knowledge. This means that we must become the other through distancing ourselves from the self that we were.

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

1. George F. McLean, "Cultural Heritage, Social Critique and Future Construction," chap. I, p. 9 above.

2. The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, trans. by L. Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1972), p. 77.

3. Roland Barthes, Lec, on (Paris: Seuil, 1978), pp. 17-18.

4. Angel Rama, "Prólogo," in Rubén Darío, Poesía (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977), pp. xlvii-xlix.

5. Octavio Paz, Cuadrivio, Darío, Lopez Velarde, Pessoa, Cernuda (Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz, 1965), p. 19.

6. Jaime Concha, Rubén Darío (Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1975), pp. 60-61.

7. Noé Jitrik, Las contradiciones del modernismo. Productividad poética y situacion sociológica (México: Colegio de México, 1978), pp. 7-8; and Rama, x-xi.

8. Charles Altieri, "The Poem as Act: A Way to Reconcile Presentational and Mimetic Theories," The Iowa Review, 6 (1975), 104.

9. Concha, p. 50.

10. Ibid., p. 114.

11. Canovas' excellent analysis of Raul Zurita's lyric establishes a crucial link between Christian suffering and "psychic pain." This latter has been worked out by J.-B. Pontalis. This theoretical, and indeed concrete, link can also be extended profitably to better understand Ernesto Cardenal's poetry, written not under the Pinochet, but under the Somoza dictatorship. Rodrigo Cánovas, "Literatura chilena de la década 1973-1983: cuatro respuestas a la experiencia autoritaria: Enrique Lihn, Raúl Zurita, ICTUS y Juan Radrigán" (Austin: Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Texas, 1985), pp. 111-113.

12. J.-B. Pontalis, "On Psychic Pain" in Frontiers in Psychoanalysis. Between the Dream and Psychic Pain, trans. C. & P. Cullen (London: Hogarth, 1981), pp. 194-211.

13. Pontalis here refers to Freud's 1895 Project.

14. Op. cit., p. 196.

15. Cánovas, p. 112.

16. Pontalis, pp. 198-99.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 200.

19. See Chapter X by Brian Johnstone in this volume.

20. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits. A Selection, trans. by A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 50.

21. See Johnstone, Chapter X.

22. M. M. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, M. Holquist, ed. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 250.

23. Pontalis, pp. 199-200.

24. Ernesto Cardenal, Apocalypse and Other Poems, trans. by Thomas Merton et al. (New York: New Directions Books, 1977).

25. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Los invariantes historicos en el Facundo (Buenos Aires: Casa Pardo, 1974), p. 23.

26. Ernesto Cardenal "Canto Nacional al FSLN," Poesía de Uso (Antología, 1949-1978), introduccion de Joaquín Marta Sosa (Buenos Aires: El Cid, 1979), p. 308-309. Eng. transl. by Robert Hammond.

27. "Oráculo sobre Managua," Ibid., p. 323. Transl. by Robert Hammond.

28. Cardenal, Poesía nueva en Nicaragua, selec. y prólogo de E. Cardenal (Buenos Aires: Carlos Lohlé, 1974), pp. 9-11.

29. Angel Rama, Los dictadores latinoamericanos (México: Fondo de Cultura Economica, Colec., 1976), p. 9.

30. In José Marti, Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, trans. E. Randall; ed. P. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), p. 87.

31. See mainly his Totem and Taboo (chapter IV, sub. chapters v-vii) and Psychology of the Crowds (chapters X-XII), from which I have derived the mechanism of the "structure of the herd" to study the processes underlying dictatorships.

32. See my study of El otoño del Patriarca by Gabriel García Marquez, "El otoño . . . , la horda y sus patriarcas," Cuadernos Americanos, XLIV (1985), 225-240.

33. Miguel Angel Asturias, "El Señor Presidente," (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. Bocconi, 1964-1965), cited by Guiseppe Bellini, La narrativa de Miguel Angel Asturias (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1969), p. 38, n. 5.

34. G. Bellini, p. 40.

35. Ibid., p. 47.

36. Hozven, p. 236.

37. Martínez Estrada, p. 29.

38. Luiz Costa Lima, O contrôle do imaginário. Razao e imaginacao no Occidente (Sao Paulo: Editoria brasiliense, 1984), p. 178.

39. E. Martínez Estrada, op. cit., p. 68.

40. Barthes, p. 11.