[In the following excerpt, Mac Adam examines various levels of meaning in De donde son los cantantes and discusses the "distance" between author and reader and text and reader.]

Severo Sarduy's De donde son los cantantes (1965) may be said to constitute an allegory of language, or more specifically, of the language of Cuba. We should understand allegory in this context not so much as a kind of literature but as a way of reading literature. In the ancient world, in Quintilian for example, allegory is a situation in which a meaning exactly opposite to the meaning of the words is intended or one in which words say one thing and mean another. For Sarduy, as for Derrida, words are arbitrarily chosen signs, and printed words doubly arbitrary, doubly metaphoric signs, marks that stand for linguistic signs which stand in turn for something else. Any conjugation of these written signs therefore constitutes a case of allegorical activity, since we know that we are at least twice removed from anything like reality when we deal with the written word. We know, further, that the context in which these written signs appear, a literary text, is one in which nothing is communicated directly. What Sarduy's rhetoric aims at is a literal reading of the text—but this of course is a pun.

Theologians have for centuries been accustomed to see the Bible as a text in which more than one level of meaning is present. These levels, in Aquinas and, ultimately, in Dante, were codified into four levels: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical. The literal has two or three separate modes of existence: the words are composed of letters and must therefore have an individual meaning, out of any context. But most important for the exegete was the idea that the literal level of meaning was that which told "what happened." In the case of Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt, the literal level is history, a recorded event from the past. An event's being history enabled the interpreter to distinguish between it and parables, exemplary tales not possessing a literal or historical meaning. Beyond history is the spiritual significance of an event, itself divisible into three levels, the first of which is the allegorical, in which the historical event is seen as a prefiguration or type for another event (Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt is a prefiguration of Jesus leading mankind out of perdition). As Robert Hollander says of this process, "The letters of Scripture, when reporting events, have the peculiar quality of being able to signify words which simultaneously signify facts, which facts also simultaneously are figures, types, or shadows (umbrae) of other facts" [Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante's "Commedia," 1969]. The moral level of interpretation is somewhat vaguer, usually relating to the faith; the Moses story might be an admonition to keep faith in extreme adversity. The fourth level, the anagogical or mystical, relates the event to God's plan for the flow of cosmic history, teleology; its message might be that the faithful shall be saved. Thus we have history, morality, and metaphysics bound up in a single text.

Sarduy's text puts literature on the same level as Scripture, that is, Sarduy puts all texts on the same level, the sacred being a contribution by the reader. The method of fourfold allegorical interpretation may therefore grant the reader access to the work, with some alterations. First, the literal level of meaning (always remembering that the use of the word level is merely a convenient figure, that all levels of meaning occur at the surface of the text): the literal or historical level here is the history of language, the chronicle of how words change identity over time. This is taken up in the Ensor-inspired chapter "The Entry of Christ into Havana," which follows the section devoted to the development of Spanish on the Iberian Peninsula. This section is marked by a number of quotations from Hispano-Arabic poetry and references to Saint John of the Cross, quotations which constitute a synecdoche. We then follow the migration of Spanish to Cuba, where it undergoes further transformations. In order to define the process of Sarduy's text, we might rephrase Hollander's remark in this way: "The letters of Sarduy's text, when reporting events, have the peculiar quality of being able to signify words which simultaneously signify other words, which words also simultaneously are figures, types, or shadows (umbrae)—that is, metaphors—for other words." The moral level is not absent in Sarduy, but instead of referring to Christian metaphysics, it refers to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, "the little stud from the Black Forest" [From Cuba with a Song]. The anagogical or mystical level is likewise present, although in modified form: it refers us back again to the nature of language as a system of signs devoid of meaning, of interpretation as the individual's act of creating a meaning, a meaning found in or derived from himself, as in Heidegger's "hermeneutic circle."

Before pursuing the Heideggerian ramifications of Sarduy's text, we should recall its setting, Cuba. Not Cuba as it is (a geographical or political site), but a particular, peculiar Cuba, of which his language is a metaphor, in the same way that Cabrera Infante's language, in Tres tristes tigres, aspires to be a metaphor for another Cuba. In his ironic (in the way Eliot's notes to The Wasteland are ironic) note to the book, Sarduy states: "Three cultures have superposed themselves one on another to constitute Cuban culture—the Spanish, the African, and the Chinese; three fictions that allude to each of them make up this book." Cuba is a trinitarian (at first) reality, but there is also the mysterious fourth element, referred to as "The Unnamable Bald Female." This is, of course, Death, the death alluded to in Tocqueville's comparison of New England and the tropics, the death lurking just below the glittering surface of Carribean nature. The history of language has also (wrongly) been seen as a history of decay: Latin "decays" into the modern Romance languages. Sarduy plays with this fictitious history of decay in his history of Spanish and its cubanization in order to incorporate political history into linguistic history. The advent of the Spaniards was an act of violence, just as the history of Cuba is a movement of violence from east to west across the island. This would include Fidel Castro, whose entrance into Havana is alluded to in the chapter called "The Entry of Christ into Havana." Violence, decay, and death are all involved with the tropics, are all aspects of language (from various points of view), and are some of the motifs that give unity to the text.

Four is a number to which we must return as we again consider the first chapter of the book, "Curriculum Cubense," a Cuban course of study (and also the idea of a race). First we have a rather taut exchange between two characters (and we should always keep in mind the idea of character as letter, or the Spanish word for character, personaje, as persona or mask), Auxilio and Socorro. These names are synonyms as well as being two of the many names of the Virgin, as is the Dolores who appears later. These ladies are versions (deconsecrated to be sure) of the Virgin as vessel, seen here as lacking content. They are the signs of language, the signifiers chasing after or searching in vain for meaning. Auxilio is undergoing an "identity crisis" (understandably) because she has none, except as a searcher-for-identity, a role which links her to Heidegger's Dasein (his term for that aspect of humanity involved in inquiries into and investigations of its own mode of being). Socorro responds to Auxilio's outburst by telling her to drop dead, to cease to exist either as a thing (Heidegger's ontic mode) or as being, the ontological mode. Auxilio retorts with a modified quotation from the sonnet "Love Constant beyond Death" by the Spanish baroque poet Francisco de Quevedo: she makes the subject of the clause "I" where the original was "my soul": "Seré ceniza, mas tendré sentido" (I shall be ash, but I shall have awareness). It should be recalled also that the expression "tendré sentido" may also mean "I shall have meaning," an idea that converts the verse into a restatement of Saint Augustine's idea that language is born out of desire: what keeps Auxilio alive is her hope (hence the future tense of the verb), her will-to-meaning, seen in the text as the longing of the mystics for union with God. This God (meaning) is referred to in a duet the two females sing as

      Always absent, always absent,
      He does evil gratuitously.

The evil he does is merely to exist, to remind the signs of their emptiness: "For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence" [Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, in French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, Yale French Studies, No. 48, 1972].

In this introductory phase of the text, Sarduy dramatizes the plight of the signs: they long for (mystic) union with meaning, referred to as a God or other masculine figure. This introduces the erotic element implicit in the relationship between masculine and feminine, the same erotic relationship expressed in sacred terms in mystic poetry, particularly that of Saint John of the Cross. A twist is given to this eroticism, one already suggested by Saint John's relationship with God: the names of the signs, Auxilio and Socorro, while seeming to refer to female characters, are masculine in gender. This hetero-homosexual play reinforces the ludic aspect of the whole text; it is a carnival of language, literally a "farewell to the flesh" in which the reader is led to see that words are only surfaces, that whatever meaning desire imputes to the signs, they will forever be mere shells tricked out in whatever costumes fit the occasion (the context). The baroque concept of desengaño is the metaphor that best explains the situation: the drama of the signs, their being doomed to a permanent state of emptiness, their being condemned to exist as surfaces, points out to the reader that what is at stake in the text is language itself, that there is nothing hidden here, that the surface, or a palimpsestlike series of surfaces, is all.

It is precisely because of this rhetorical consistency that De donde son los cantantes is so outwardly baffling. Instead of being introduced to an allegorical or metaphorical situation by stages, as he is, say, in Morel or,… in Cortázar's Rayuela, the reader here is plunged directly into the middle of things. Depending on one's position, this is either to disregard the reader completely or to treat him with unaccustomed respect. What is demanded of the reader, and again we might bear Dante in mind, is that he share the writer's culture, in this case that he know something about linguistics and twentieth century philosophy, just as Dante could demand of his readers that they share his familiarity with theology. Unlike Dante or Bioy, Sarduy does not mask his allegory with a plot. De donde son los cantantes, whose radical of presentation is metaphoric recurrence, transmits its ideas by repeating its various metaphorical dramas again and again, by agglomerating those dramas. To read the text is, necessarily, to reread it, in the same way that a "reading" of myths is a reading of all available permutations of myths.

Sarduy has been termed a neobaroque writer, and there can be no doubt that because of his reiteration of elements of Spanish baroque culture—the poetry of Góngora, Quevedo, and Saint John or his (ironic) utilization of the idea of "passion" and other religious-erotic concepts—he is. But it might be more fruitful to associate him with a "Spanish" writer of an earlier period, Prudentius (348–415?), since De donde son los cantantes resembles the Psychomachia in so many ways. Prudentius's allegorical poem on the struggle between virtues and vices cannot be subjected to the fourfold exegetical technique because it patently lacks a literal level, and yet because of its majestic stylization, its wealth of significant detail, and its ritualized accumulation of scenes, it reminds one of Sarduy's text. It is the utter strangeness of the drama enacted in both texts that links them, a strangeness which repels psychological identification on the part of the reader.

This depersonalization of character, the association of characters and ideas, and the absolute disregard of anything even resembling a plot or any other form of temporal organization that would make the text "lifelike" connects Sarduy's work with satire. When we realize that the narrative represents, talks about, and is a metaphor only for its own processes and that these elements are a part of language taken as a totality, we see just how futile a reading of the text as any other sort of literary phenomenon would be. To be sure, Sarduy includes references to Cuba, which is only natural since the language he is concerned with is his own Cuban Spanish, and it is here perhaps that we see a contamination of the kind of purity to which Sarduy's text aspires by historical circumstance. Similarly, when he alludes to figures from the "real world," such as Jacques Lacan or Martin Heidegger, he is including the nonliterary world in his text even if he might not want those allusions to constitute a link between the text and an extratextual reality. Within the text, the allusions act as reinforcements of narrative coherence, but their presence does point out a possible gap between the culture of the reader and that of the writer (or his text).

It is the reader's knowledge that connects any text to a cultural context, not the text itself: it is no doubt unfortunate that most readers lack the intimate knowledge of Ireland necessary to follow Joyce's references, the knowledge of Southern history to make an annotated Faulkner unnecessary, or a familiarity with French culture equivalent to Proust's. The same is true for those matters most important to Sarduy's text, but this gap between reader and writer does not mean that the text can only be read within the confines of a cultural framework. It is not only these so-called modern works which challenge the reader; a cursory reading of Dickens or George Eliot reveals a culture, often presented in terms of biblical and liturgical references, to which most modern readers have only the most limited access. Ignorance gives us easy entry to no literature, and it is perhaps the realization on the part of the authors considered in this essay that they must educate their readers that constitutes what is truly modern in them. They demand what the nineteenth century obscured and what earlier centuries took for granted: a common culture shared by all educated people.

It is this intellectual distance between author and reader and text and reader which has gained the new Latin American narrative the reputation as an elitist literature. What has been forgotten is that all literature is elitist. The written word in Western culture has never been the property of all, although it has always been public property. It belongs to those who are willing to work at it, regardless of social or economic class. But there is, along with the need to make allusions to extratextual matters, a tacit confession that the reader may not know who or what is being alluded to, together with a tacit hope that the reader will find out; and this puts the concept of the literary text as a hermetically sealed system into some doubt.