SOURCE: "Literature and Exile: Carpentier's 'Right of Sanctuary'," in The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature, University of Texas Press, 1985, pp. 125-36.

[In the following essay, Echevarría examines the many facets of exile present in Carpentier's story, asserting "The critical element of the story sets forth a founding literary myth in Latin America—that of exile—and shows how this myth engenders literature through a process of contradiction and self-denial. "]

and without making a sad tango out of being awash in the tide of remembrance, in the suitcase full of thousands upon thousands of chicks belonging to the sage of Alexandria, in the magician's briefcase that opens for the public, ladies and gentlemen, because the show begins every time you reach one of the stories, and will continue, I say, beyond the very limits of memory.

—Gabriel García Márquez

1

Not too many years ago a pessimistic and short-sighted critic proclaimed that Latin America was a novel without novelists. His gloomy assessment has been discredited by the work of a splendid group of contemporary novelists and the discovery of a rich narrative tradition going back to colonial times. Today the most frequent lament is that Latin America's is a literature with little criticism to speak of.¹

I would say instead that, although there may be little independent critical thought in Latin America, there is no literature that enjoys a higher degree of reflection than Latin America's; that, in fact, literature is Latin America's mode of criticism. Such critical reflection encompasses not only literature and criticism, but philosophy, sociology, and politics as well. What I mean by critical reflection here is not merely an examination of literature, criticism, sociological reality, or political evolution, but a meditation on the why and the how of such criticism, on the prolegomena of such analytical activity. At Yale One Hundred Years of Solitude has been taught not only by professors of Latin American literature, but also (to our increasing alarm) by historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Borges is taught in courses on literary theory, and Carpentier and Fernando Ortiz can be found on the reading lists of professors of Afro-American studies. Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude is taught by historians and sociologists, and Puig and Cortázar are known experts on film and on popular culture. Latin American literature may lack a body of original, independent critical reflection, but Latin American literature is in itself a rich source of criticism at the highest levels. It would be difficult to find a more penetrating analysis of the transition between the Enlightenment and romanticism, or a more systematic search for the origins of Latin American modernity than Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral. Carpentier himself was not a great critic or theoretician, yet his novels and stories are exceptional critical reflections, which display an intellectual daring often missing from his expository prose. Literature is the criticism and the philosophy of Latin America and, I suspect, of much of the postcolonial world.

In a curious way literature thus becomes again, like storytelling and the epic, a society's mode of reflection about the timeless questions facing it, a retreat from the facile answers officiously tendered by the mass media and the contingent and strategic solutions of politics. Latin America's major modern writers—Carpentier, Borges, Guimarães Rosa, Lezama, Vallejo, Guillén, Neruda, Paz, Roa Bastos, and García Márquez—are all agents of a ruthless, dizzying critical reassessment of tradition. The first and most sobering lesson one learns from reading Carpentier is that he gambled always for the highest possible stakes. The Kingdom of This World, The Lost Steps, and Explosion in a Cathedral were conceived with the most demanding issues of modernity at their foundation.

The most poignant question raised by modernity in Latin America was that of national or cultural identity, as well as of the link between such identity and literary production. The major literary figures of the nineteenth century (the founders of Latin American literature), Bello, Sarmiento, and Martí, conceived the issue in a rich metaphoric system linking humanity and culture to the land, to geography. Metaphors, drawn from nineteenth-century natural science, were mostly botanical or geological. From the times of the cronistas de Indias, American nature appeared to be the key to American differences, but most early historians were so imbued with scholastic thought that they could hardly conceive such a notion. Only Fernández de Oviedo came close to positing that the American natural world was a system apart from those known then. The romantics and their followers saw a different nature as a source for a different being, a distinct consciousness. Bello sang to agriculture in the torrid zone; Sarmiento spoke of the vast, barbaric pampas; Marti longed for the emergence of what he called a "natural man" in Latin America, and spoke of "grafting European tradition onto the trunk of Latin American culture" (instead of the other way around).² There were significant discrepancies between these writers, but for them culture was grounded (if I may be allowed the pleonasm) in the land, in local values and beliefs as different from Europe as nature, whose image literature would be.

But modern literature is not a set of platitudes; it is instead a relentless questioning of all pieties. Nineteenth-century truisms about the continuity of humanity and nature on the American continent are subjected by contemporary literature to a severe critique in the broadest possible sense of the term. This literature, which we could call postmodern, likes to parody and satirize such received notions, to show that, contrary to the assumption of a natural link between Americans and nature, the relationship is quite artificial, dependent on political and literary conventions. From a strictly political perspective, the importance of such a criticism—rendering visible the metaphoric nature of the definition of culture—lies in its ability to elucidate the ideological origin of the relationship between people and the American landscape. An all-encompassing concept of culture based on nature for its metaphoric cogency is a mechanism whereby the liberal imagination blurred class distinctions. From a literary point of view the critical gesture allows Latin American literature to declare its independence from a crude referentiality that hinders its ability for self-analysis. One of the topics most commonly used to engage in such an analysis of the modern tradition is exile, for it contains both a longing for a lost motherland as source and a sense of its irrevocable loss. If the land endows people with a special knowledge, exile would be a heightening of that knowledge through the ordeal of separation and return.

Given the pervasive, and even spectacular, character of exile in Latin American history and the notion that being American is in itself a form of exile, a correlation between Latin American writing and exile can all too quickly be established. An absurd reduction of this would run as follows: being Latin American is to be in exile from the metropolitan culture, not to mention that most important Latin American writers have, at one time or another, been exiles; therefore banishment and deracination are essential qualities of all Latin American writing. Moreover, since writing itself could be seen as a form of exile, Latin America's is the truest or most natural writing. Corroboration for this crude essentialist argument could be found by turning to the literature of the United States, where the names of Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others would be invoked to show that indeed exile is a continental malaise, but one for which we must be grateful, because it is an important source of American writing.

The persuasiveness of such a self-serving argument is lessened once we turn to the broader context of modernity, for the topic of exile can be easily subsumed within the general theme of alienation that runs across all postromantic literature—the feeling of not belonging to one's place and time, of having been torn away from a better world and epoch. Because modern literature is permeated by this sense of loss and distance, because writing appears to be a secondary activity that can record only what is no longer there, the tendency would be instead to make an overall formulation equating writing and exile that would invalidate all claims Latin America could make for its uniqueness. On a less abstract, but more general, level Harry Levin has written in a seminal essay on the subject that "exile has been regarded as an occupational hazard for poets in particular ever since Plato denied them rights of citizenship in his republic."³

If to these already compelling overdeterminations one adds the evidence of contemporary linguistic and psychoanalytic theories, the bond between writing and exile seems inevitable. The signifier's flight away from the signified would be the primal voyage, of which all fictions are but mere reflections. Psychoanalytic lore would make us all exiles from our mothers, prey to the anxieties of an impossible return that we continually rehearse in awkward, yet repeated, sexual encounters, encounters whose pleasure can never match the oneness felt within the mother's womb.

But all of these generalizations are of little use and, unless qualified and refined, may easily lead to distortions, because, in historical terms, exiles are quite different from each other, despite their apparent similarity, for they are exiled in substantially dissimilar circumstances and from quite different regimes. Nicaraguan and Chilean exiles in the United States differ in many respects, first and foremost in political ideology; it would, therefore, be somewhat rash to declare that there is a link between Latin American literature and exile, or even between literature and the historical phenomenon of exiles. What can be safely said instead, it seems, is that exile is one of those founding tropes that literature invokes constantly as a part of its own constitution, a trope already present in the work of the great Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, who, from Spain, his father's country, wrote about the lost kingdom of his mother's people. It is against the background of this argument that I wish to read a short story by Carpentier, "Right of Sanctuary." It is in this story that Carpentier, in the midst of the agitation of the sixties, considers the issue of exile as a founding literary trope and in relation to political power in Latin America. "Right of Sanctuary" is one of the most political of his fictions, yet one of the most critical. The issue seems to be, in the end, whether the two are compatible. The story, which was published separately as a slim volume in 1972, has been added to recent editions of War of Time. It is in many ways also a critical synthesis of Carpentier's works.⁴

2

Exile is one of the more pervasive themes in Carpentier's work, in both his fiction and his expository writing. A list of exiles in Carpentier's novels and stories would be very long, so I shall mention only Ti Noel and all the slaves in The Kingdom of This World, who dream of a return to Africa, a Lost Paradise inhabited by gods and strong men, and the narrator-protagonist in The Lost Steps, a Latin American who has been living in the United States for many years. The fact that Carpentier spent a good part of his life in France, where his family originated, makes the topic particularly poignant and suggestive when dealing with his works. Were Carpentier's own exiles journeys back to the source or away from it? Were his trips to Havana returns of the prodigal son or flights from home?

Carpentier was aware of the irony implicit in his situation as cultural attaché of the Cuban government in France, a country where he was obviously also at home and where no one would take him for a foreigner. A year before his death he told me that whenever he had to attend a formal official function he would go to the same Parisian establishment to rent a tuxedo. There, the old French tailor, after fitting him carefully, would stand back to admire his work and proclaim, "Vous allez bien représenter la France!" This dilemma is very visible in a set of articles Carpentier wrote in 1939, upon his return to Cuba after eleven years in France. The articles are suggestively entitled "La Habana vista por un turista cubano." In these articles, which I have studied at some length in The Pilgrim at Home, Carpentier figuratively strolls through his native city, discovering remarkable things that had passed unnoticed before he left but that he is capable of detecting now from the double perspective of a tourist in his own home.

What Carpentier is practicing is a "reading" of his city, the sign of which reading is the double temporal dimension and his own detachment; reading can take place only through the creation of this spacing, which is not so much the reflection of the space we occupy as an internal need of the process itself. Things merge into significant systems, but only by focusing on them through the isolation of detachment, of not being a part of them, of being an insider who is also an outsider—a voyeur of oneself. Carpentier's mature fiction is marked by this double vision, this need and fear of being at once the one and the other. There is throughout his recent works the apprehension that characters will merge, will collapse into one, or that they will all turn out to have been projections of one who needs to be different (foreign) in order to be himself or herself, and who must project another who resembles him or her, yet is not the same. In terms of everyday experience, the issue of distance and exile is related to the question that all of us ask when traveling to a faraway or exotic place: Are we still ourselves? Are we the same, or has the trip changed us completely, and how can language signify that difference? How can one be the same in two different places? Should my name not reflect this difference? Should I be called Roberto here in New Haven and something else elsewhere? This is, as Sharon Magnarelli demonstrated in a brilliant essay, a key issue in "The High Road of Saint James."⁵ In that story Juan is always named for what he was, not for what he is. He is successively pilgrim, indiano, student, musician, but he is never what the adjective that describes him says he is in the present.⁶

All of Carpentier's exiles live in a timeless state—a sort of suspended animation—and seek to return home by means of two intimately related activities: love and reading. The role of the erotic is clear, particularly if we think of a story such as "Journey Back to the Source," where the old Marquis dies while making love to a young woman. The story, told backward, takes him back to his mother's womb. Through the various women they encounter, Carpentier's characters seek to return to the mother and to a sort of rebirth. In The Lost Steps there is a regression from Ruth to Mouche, to Rosario, leading back to a prenatal bliss that the narrator-protagonist cannot find. This regression runs parallel to his voyage from the modern world back to the jungle.

The role of reading is more complex. Away from home, from language, Carpentier's exiles reify their mother tongue, petrify it. The mother tongue dies the moment the exile leaves and ceases to hear it. To preserve it the exile reads, caressing language as if it were a dead body that could be brought back to life through a sort of ritual incantation. By means of this practice the exile hopes to recover his or her original self and shed the new, alien self, which has become a silent code that does not "belong" to him or her, a petrified body devoid of meaning, like the statue of Pauline Bonaparte that Solimán caresses in The Kingdom of This World.

In Carpentier's work exile has three elements. The first is timelessness. Exile as a temporal gap has no duration except within itself, and, as a result, events, things, and people, not subject to the dynamism of becoming, appear as scaled-down models of themselves. Although distance makes reading possible, it also distorts dimensions by reducing them. Carpentier's characters seek to remedy this situation through love and reading. Love mimics a return, a rebirth, a starting anew. Reading is an attempt to recover language, but instead makes language ever more artificial, more self-contained, less able to designate distinctions between the various elements in reality.

"Right of Sanctuary," though probably conceived around 1928 when the Pan-American Conference mentioned in the text took place in Havana, is a late work and as such a reassessment of the larger, earlier fictions that make up the core of Carpentier's works.⁷ As with other fundamental topics in his own fiction, exile is, in a manner of speaking, deconstructed in this story. As suggested before, what "Right of Sanctuary" demystifies is the notion that there is a natural link between writing and exile. Exile itself, so the story seems to tell us, is a convention, a literary artifice that does not afford the kind of radical change with which fictions invest it. It does not furnish, in other words, a truly distinct perspective, nor can it be taken as a transcendental state that offers a special, privileged vision. Ultimately, every place and every moment is the same, except in writing, where signs set off one indistinguishable moment from the next, one place from another. In order to achieve this demystification, the story puts forth the topic of exile with all of the related elements seen before, exaggerating and distorting each.

Like Reasons of State, "Right of Sanctuary" is set in an archetypal Latin American country, a country that resembles Venezuela but that could also be Chile or Peru. With all of its symbols—shield, flag, uniforms—expressing cooperation, prosperity, and democratic ideals, the country appears like the invention of a Committee on Icons of the Organization of American States. The protagonist is the Secretary to the President and the Council of Ministers, a typical functionary of a corrupt government. His main occupation seems to be the procurement of whores for the pleasure of his superiors. When the President is deposed in a coup, the Secretary manages to gain sanctuary in the embassy of the neighboring country, with which there is a border dispute (a Galtieri avant la lettre, the dictator provokes the neighboring country to whip up nationalistic pride in his own and to deflect attention from internal repression). The Secretary remains in that other country for so long that he can eventually claim citizenship, the embassy being, technically, the territory of the foreign state. In addition, since to kill time the Secretary—now the Refugee—has been performing most of the duties of the ambassador, including making love to the ambassador's wife, he takes the citizenship of the embassy's country and is named ambassador to his original country. The story has the neat functioning of a baroque rhetorical figure: it is a retruécano, an inversion. The story ends as the former secretary presents his credentials to General Mabillán, the dictator, and they exchange some banter sotto voce.

These reversals of reversals—an exile, he returns from a place he never visited to a place he never left—all occur within a rather heavy-handed meditation on the passage of time and its relation to the signs that denote it. Each chapter is preceded by a brief indication of the day of the week in which the action takes place: the first says "Sunday," the second "Monday," but the third, once the protagonist is ensconced in the embassy, reads "Another Monday (it doesn't matter which)." The time of exile is a timeless gap, a kind of death. The story begins on a Sunday and ends on a Tuesday—exile, fiction, is lodged in that Monday that does not exist but that expands into countless days and years, as if a mad calculus took over in the designation of time. The days in the story are shuffled and expanded until the secretary becomes again a functionary. Once he presents his credentials, the week resumes a normal course.

Within the brackets of that fictional Monday, the Refugee begins to "read" the neighborhood around the embassy, much like Carpentier read Havana after his return from Paris. A tourist and a recluse in his own city, the Refugee reifies the capital, turns it into a system of signs that he reads and interprets; the city becomes an iconography. From a church behind the embassy he can hear and hence follow the liturgical activities—liturgy endows time with meaning, reducing it to a revolving system of fixed signs. In front of the embassy—perhaps the location of the church and these institutions is meaningful—the Refugee sees two stores. One, a hardware store, appears to him like a museum, an archeological, linear display of the history of mankind as seen through its instruments of labor: "I look across at the ironmongery and hardware store of the Brothers Gómez (founded in 1912, so one reads on the façade), and become absorbed in the dateless antiquity of the things sold in it. For the history of man's industry, from protohistoric times up to the electric light bulb, is illustrated by the objects and implements offered for sale by the Brothers Gómez." To the Refugee the store represents history, or better yet, it is the conventional, linear representation of history. To him as a reader, objects and time appear set off, differentiated, put in systematic order. The ironmongery has become writing, as conventional as the Latin he hears from the church.

From yet another window the Refugee can see

the toy department of the great American store. And there, immovable and always himself, through all the responses, lessons and liturgies that poured from the church, in spite of the archaism of the modern utensils in the Brothers Gómez ironmongery and hardware store, was Donald Duck. There he was, brought to life in pasteboard, with his orange feet, in a corner of the shopwindow, dominating a whole world of little railway trains on the move, of dressers with dishes of wax fruit, cowboy pistols, quivers full of arrows, and gocarts with colored beads on a rod. There he was, although he was sold and sold again a dozen times a day. Whenever a child asked for "that one," the one in the window, a woman's hand would seize him by his orange feet and soon afterward put another similar Donald Duck in his place. This perpetual substitution of one object by another identical to it, standing motionless on the same pedestal, made me think of Eternity. Perhaps God was relieved of his duties from time to time like this, by some superior power (the Mother of God? The mothers of the gods? Didn't Goethe say something on the subject?), who was custodian of his perennially. At the moment of change, when the Lord's Throne was empty, there would be railway disasters, airplanes would crash, transatlantic liners would sink, wars begin, and epidemics break out. (pp. 76-77)⁸

The time of exile is the time of Donald Duck and of the electric train going around and around—it is the time of scaled-down models, of artificial, mimetic systems, of endless and mindless substitutions and repetitions. What the Refugee longs for is the child's ability to fix upon an object and deem it sufficiently different and unique to be able to say, "That one." This wish he seeks to satisfy in his maniacal reading of everything—from books to labels to calendars—and through the seduction of the Ambassador's wife. But all this activity yields only repetition, not differentiation and uniqueness. Nothing appears to be singular enough to say, "That one."

Carpentier has skillfully woven together reading and love by ironically alluding to the canonical seduction-through-reading scene in Western literature. The Refugee seduces the "Ambassadress" by reading her lewd scenes from Tirant lo Blanc: "'The Ambassadress' was amused by the sly humor of some passages in the book. She laughed even more over the chapter describing the dream of My Life's Delight, in which the princess said: 'Let me alone, Tirant, let me alone.' And, at the risk of seeming pedantic, it is true to say 'that day we read no more'" (p. 88). The line is from Inferno V, 138: "Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante."

The suggestions of this allusion to the story of Paolo and Francesca are too many to exhaust here, but let me mention those directly concerned with the theme of exile.⁹ On the one hand, there has been a change in the book the lovers read. Instead of Lancelot, we have here Tirant lo Blanc, a book of bawdy lovemaking and raucous humor. There is a clear demystification in this transformation—the love of Carpentier's couple is not the sublime love of Paolo and Francesca, but the more physical one of Tirant. Yet, what is most pertinent is that Paolo and Francesca, confined to Hell, suffer a fate quite like that of the Refugee and the Ambassador's wife. The two couples are sentenced to repetition within a timeless void. Paolo and Francesca, like two mechanical dolls, reenact once and again the seduction scene. The Refugee and the Ambassador's wife, caught in the artificial and ahistorical time of the embassy, also repeat the same gestures over and over. Like the condemned in Dante's Inferno, who can remember the past and foretell the future but are blind to the present, the Refugee and the Ambassador's wife live in an empty moment—the fictional present of toys, of writing, of lovemaking.

The irony in "Right of Sanctuary" is that the Secretary does manage a return, does come back to be "reborn" in another who is himself, yet not quite himself. Once he accomplishes this, however, he is gripped by the realization that, on the other side, things are not substantially different; hence the banter he exchanges at the end with the dictator. Whether he is Secretary or Ambassador is a matter of custom, of uniform, and home is an arbitrary distinction of places, a convention determined by Pan-American conferences and other such political rituals. What "Right of Sanctuary" seeks to demonstrate is that, on the level of writing, exile is a figure of speech, not a shortcut to vision: it is a figure much like the inversion that constitutes the plot of the story.

It is not without a great deal of irony that "Right of Sanctuary" should open with a quotation from the agreement drawn up by the Pan-American Conference that met in Havana in 1928, which set forth the rules for accepting political refugees in foreign embassies (that irony has been increased in recent times by historical events such as the flight of ten thousand refugees into the Peruvian Embassy in Havana). The irony points to the meaninglessness of such conferences, and more specifically, to the peculiar sham of Pan-Americanism as fostered by U.S. policy in Latin America as a means of concealing the purposes of interventionism in the twenties and thirties.¹⁰ But more important, the irony is most devastating because in "Right of Sanctuary" Carpentier is demystifying the Americanist ideology that supported the work of a great many Latin American writers from the twenties on. Latin American culture appears in the story as the irrevocable mixture of heterogeneous codes typical of the modern city (advertisement, mass media, the myriad messages on city walls obeying no peculiar language and offering no special knowledge), together with an official iconography supporting the ideology of the state.

Much of the writing demystified in the story, writing that depended on a more primitivistic notion of culture, was, of course, done by Carpentier himself, and it should be quite clear that "Right of Sanctuary" is also a parody of some of Carpentier's own work, particularly of Manhunt This self-parody, however, requires no previous knowledge of Carpentier's work, because its most immediate object is "Right of Sanctuary"; a text's critical reassessment of the tradition usually spirals back onto itself. We have seen how one of the main characteristics of exile as presented in the story and in Carpentier's works in general is a sense of timelessness and, within the atemporal gap, the creation of scaled-down models. Exile provokes a heightened desire to recapture the past, a desire that makes of that past—be it in the body of the mother or its substitutes, be it in writing—a model whose main activity is repetition. The electric train goes around and around the same track: it is a scaled-down representation of a train that presumably goes somewhere. The ironmongery becomes a museum in which the whole history of humankind is reduced to a special representation enclosure. Love in the timeless gap is reduced to its most basic, yet most perverse, form as the mindless repetition of movements and gestures—Paolo and Francesca are doomed to repeat their every gesture in the depths of the fifth circle of Dante's Inferno. Sanctuary as exile is time in a temple of toys, self-sufficient reproductions, minute hermeneutic machines, such as the erector set mentioned in the story, that allow one to construct discrete models.

But is this not the same process as the one through which "Right of Sanctuary" is written? The story not only depicts a scaled-down Latin American country, a reduced iconographic model of a banana republic, but even reduces time to the basic model for its demarcation: the days of the week. All of Latin America's space and time are compressed in "Right of Sanctuary." The whole of the history of the "Frontier Country," for instance, is a capsule history of an archetypal Latin American country, which reads like a project for One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Once the Frontier Country was discovered, the first batch of citizens began to arrive: governors, encomenderos, ruined noblemen, blackguardly Sevillian tuna merchants, all of them great manipulators of loaded dice, drinkers of old and new wine, and fornicators with the Indian women. Then came the second batch of arrivals: magistrates, shady lawyers, tax collectors, and auditors, who spent more than two centuries transforming the colony into a vast ranch, with cattle and corn plantations as far as the eye could see, except for a few plots growing Spanish vegetables. But one day—who can say how?—there appeared in the country a copy of the Contrat social by Rousseau, a citizen of Geneva (federis aequo, dictamus leges). And next was the Emile. The schoolboys, taught by a disciple of Rousseau, stopped studying books and took to carpentry and nature study, which consisted in dissecting coleoptera and lizards that had been thrown into the burrows of tarantulas. The more influential among the parents were furious; simpler souls asked when and on what ship the Savoyard would arrive. And then, as a last straw, came the French Encyclopédie. A Voltairian priest made his first, unexpected appearance in America. There followed the foundation of the Patriotic Council of the Friends of the Nation, based on liberal ideas. And one day the cry of "Liberty or Death!" was heard.

And so, under the aegis of the Heroes, a century was given over to military revolts, coups d'état, insurrections, marches on the capital, individual and collective rivalry, barbarous dictators and enlightened dictators. (pp. 81-82)

The characters in the story, like Sergeant Mouse, appear to be drawn from comic strips or from games like toy soldiers. Is writing not itself, then, a model of exile? Yes, but not so much as a result of a peculiar Latin American condition as of a peculiar Latin American stance. Exile is a founding literary myth, as it is a founding Latin American cultural construct, a strategic form of self-definition.

A significant element in this radical critique of the notion of exile and its relation to literature is the protagonist of "Right of Sanctuary." The story is not only an inversion in terms of its plot, it is also an inversion in terms of the tradition. "Right of Sanctuary" is a microdictator-novel in which the Secretary has become the protagonist, replacing the tyrant. In Asturias's El señor presidente (1946), the secretary is slain by the dictator. The dictator is the voice of authority, the telluric force that deflects writing, the latter threatening to undercut his authority. In the postmodern dictator novels, particularly in Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo el Supremo, the secretary has gained power, but that power, as opposed to the dictator's, is hampered by its own contradictions. Patiño, a little Oedipus, has swollen feet and is burdened by having memorized every scrap of paper in the Republic. His is the power of cutting, spacing, writing, a power incapable of erecting itself as authority. The Secretary in "Right of Sanctuary," whose instruments are "several dossiers that were able to be dealt with quickly" and "an inkpot surmounted by a Napoleonic eagle" (p. 64), and who is an obsessive reader, is caught up in a world of writing, a world of repetition, of differences set up with apparent arbitrariness, of gaps and frontiers. As a protagonist he cannot claim any kinship to nature, nor declare himself to be the product of tradition. He is a product of convention on the level of fiction, and of political expediency on the level of history. He rules over an unnatural world of comic-book characters, a fictional world much like that of Donald Duck.

With respect to the dictator-novel, the inversion present in "Right of Sanctuary" is analogous to the one that occurred in the French theater from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, in which the servant eventually became the protagonist (the best example is the work of Beaumarchais). In the novel something similar happens as we move from the chivalric romance to the picaresque. The transition in all cases is toward humor. The world of the Secretary is humorous because the central figure stands not for authority but for the abdication of authority, not for an absolute knowledge but for fragmentation and criticism.¹¹

Nineteenth-century ideology connecting humankind to nature is shown in Carpentier's mature fiction to be, instead, a set of conventions; it is, among other things, an attempt to bypass all mediations, all codes erected by social and political humankind to process and interpret its world. Postmodern literature, most prominently Carpentier's, demonstrates the artificiality of those codes, their conventionality.

One of those codes is, of course, literature. The theme of exile promises to offer a privileged vision containing the proximity and distance from the source, a kind of double exposure whose perfect analogy is literature. But "Right of Sanctuary" shows that literature and exile possess their own mediations: a persistent tendency to construct models whose finality appears to be to lay bare their own gyrations, to provide pleasure and solace in the absence of recuperable past, to suggest, perhaps, that all life is lived within a gap in which we can only understand models, never whatever it is they represent.

The analogy between literature and toys is all but inevitable and one that I am sure Carpentier would not have disavowed. There is a knowledge to be gained from literature, as there is from toys, a knowledge that has to do with people's creation of palpable models as access both to beauty and to wisdom. Some may outgrow toys, but literature, art, replace these as forms of representation that give substance to our ideas and desires. Literature's own peculiar game, however, is constantly to remind us of its conventionality, to afford once and again the pleasure of its own form of self-denial. Despite the political criticism present on a primary level in "Right of Sanctuary," beyond the preoccupation with the existence of a Latin American culture, the world that Carpentier's story opens up is not too dissimilar from that in Roland Barthes's Le plaisir du texte: a maternal refuge (sanctuary) filled with toys and texts.

The process by which "Right of Sanctuary" undercuts the claims of both politics and literature leads us to conclusions that are at odds with Carpentier's avowed commitment to political ideology in the sixties and seventies. His critique of Pan-Americanism—and also of the Alliance for Progress—as fabrications to mask American imperialism is so radical that the story leads inevitably to the conclusion that all political activity consists of the generation of sign systems whose aim is to deceive rather than to enlighten, and much less to guide; to deflect attention rather than to focus it. There seems to be no real world, no original, no truth against which to measure the validity of these signs, and although literature seems to be capable of demystifying them, it too seems to be caught up in the same process of distortion and deflection. There seems to be no way out of this circle, and, like the toy train in the store, we go around and around. In this sense, literature is a sanctuary, an elaborate form of exile.

Although it may seem that the sort of demystification that "Right of Sanctuary" performs denies any specificity to Latin American literature, it seems to me to do the opposite. The critical element of the story sets forth a founding literary myth in Latin America—that of exile—and shows how this myth engenders literature through a process of contradiction and self-denial. Criticism of this sort is not only part of modern literature, it is modern literature itself.

Notes

The epigraph to this chapter is from García Márquez's prologue to ¡Exilio! by Lisandro Chávez Alfaro et al. (Mexico City: Tinta Libre, 1977), p. 10.

¹ Octavio Paz, "Palabras al simposio," in El artista latinoamericano y su identidad, ed. Damián Bayón (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1977), p. 23.

² José Martí, "Nuestra América," in Páginas escogidas, ed. Alfonso M. Escudero (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1953; reprint, 1971), pp. 117-124.

³ Harry Levin, "Literature and Exile," in Essays in Comparative Literature, ed. Herbert Dieckmann (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1961), p. 5. The bibliography of exile in relation to Spanish-language literature is immense, beginning with the classic study by Vicente Llorens, Liberales y románticos: una emigración española en Inglaterra, 1823-1834, 2d ed. (Madrid: Castalia, 1968). Paul Ilie's Literature and Inner Exile: Authoritarian Spain, 1939-1975 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), is a valuable thematic study, but limited by its exclusion of Latin American writers, more a quirk of American Hispanism than a reflection on the work of Spanish-language writers. A recent issue of Review (Center for Inter-American Relations), no. 30 (1981), contains provocative essays by Angel Rama, Julio Cortázar, Augusto Roa Bastos, and Fernando Alegría on the questions raised by exile. The organizers of the issue, however, left out Cuban exile writers, which resulted in an acrimonious controversy.

⁴ For the original I am using the first edition, El derecho de asilo (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1972). Quotations in the text are from "Right of Sanctuary," in War of Time, tr. Frances Partridge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), pp. 59-101. I have profited from S. Jiménez Fajardo's astute reading of "Right of Sanctuary" in his "Carpentier's El derecho de asilo: A Game Theory," Journal of Spanish Studies—Twentieth Century 6 (1978): 193-206, and above all by Eduardo G. González's Alejo Carpentier: el tiempo del hombre (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1978).

⁵ Sharon Magnarelli, "'El camino de Santiago' de Alejo Carpentier y la picaresca," Revista Iberoamericana 40 (1974):65-86.

⁶Indiano is what Spaniards who returned from Latin America were called. They became a literary type.

⁷ Carpentier went into exile in 1928, fleeing from Gerardo Machado's dictatorship in Cuba. It is, of course, ironic that the first Pan-American Conference should have taken place in a Havana torn by the repression of Machado and the struggles against him organized mostly by the students. When the 1948 conference took place in Bogotá, Carpentier was in Caracas. During this conference the bogotazo took place. The 1954 conference was held in Caracas while Carpentier was living there. By the time he published "Right of Sanctuary," Cuba had been expelled from the Organization of American States at the Punta del Este Conference.

⁸ A landmark study of American influence in Latin America through popular culture, particularly comics, was published in 1971 (Para leer al Pato Donald, Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso), by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (How to Read Donald Duck. Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, tr. David Kunkle [New York: International General, 1975]). The most interesting part of the study, in my view, is the analysis of kinship structures in Donald Duck's world, which turn out to be unnatural in the sense that there is no clear genealogy. Carpentier's critique is broader and at the same time less virulent. He seems to be saying, on one level, that Latin American traditional institutions are being replaced by American ones, and that these banalize life by turning it into a sort of toy kingdom. Yet at the same time he is showing that the elements of these institutions contain the same sort of codification as the old one and that they can be used to think about the world and criticize it in the same way. The analysis by Dorfman and Mattelart would seem to confirm this.

⁹ I am indebted in my reading of the Paolo and Francesca episode to Renato Poggioli, "Paolo and Francesca," in Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 61-77.

¹⁰ There are allusions in the story not only to Pan-Americanism but also to the Alliance for Progress (1928, incidentally, was the year of the first international flight by the fledgling Pan American Airways. It took place between Key West and Havana, and the airplane, a Ford Trimotor, was named the "General Machado").

¹¹ I am indebted in my analysis of the secretary to Jacques Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61-172.