Josefina Ludmer is Professor of Latin American Literature at Yale University.

Molly Weigel is a freelance writer, translator, and assessment specialist with the Educational Testing Service.

The Gaucho Genre-CL

By Josefina Ludmer

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2002 Josefina Ludmer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822328308

Chapter One

On the Side of Use

In this first moment only two categories are of interest, that of use and that of emergence. The first is that which perhaps defines and allows us to think about the gaucho genre: a learned use of popular culture. It concerns the use of the voice, of a voice (and with it an accumulation of meanings: a world) that’s not the voice of the one who writes. The category of use derives above all from the instrumental condition of the gauchos: it’s the category of meaning for those who lack something that the one who writes and uses their meanings has.

The second category has precise meanings: emergence is a coming into being and also an urgent need of use. The moment of the emergence of the genre is the moment before the repetition, variation, and convention that precisely constitute a literary genre; it’s the illusion of the first time, when the ideas of the genre are not yet received ideas. Hence the written is entirely transparent; it seems to say everything and allow everything to be read simultaneously. Verbal categories form an irreducible link among referentiation, action, and formalization. The use of the genre scatters and autonomizes this link. The reading of the genre changes according to the way the categories of use and emergence are set up.

But the moment of transparency is doubly paradoxical. First, because what is not yet genre is read here as genre. Second, because that transparency (which is, in part, a product of the theft of the past and of the convergence of multiple forces on one point) is also an effect of perspective: it can only be read from within the already constituted genre, from the perspective of the future and its convention. It can only be read from the completed deployment of the meaning of the genre. These are the two characteristic paradoxes of the use of meaning that arise when we attempt to read the meaning of the category of use.

Use and emergence and their paradoxes are defined here within temporal mobility and the diversity of literary objects. Mobility: each moment, stage, length, border is read from the perspective of others (Hidalgo from Castaneda, from Hernandez; La vuelta [The return] from La ida [The departure], from Borges, from Hidalgo; La ida from Luis Perez’s Biografia de Rosas and Perez’s work from de Angelis’s biography; the entire genre from the perspective of Fausto and Fausto from current Argentine literature). Diversity: we move among tones, voices, enunciations, actions, narratives, names, places, words as we postulate the founding character of the literary differentiation of objects and fields.

The Two Chains

Two interlaced chains of use may delimit the gaucho genre.

Laws

The first border of the genre is popular lawlessness. On one hand the so-called rural delinquency (the “vagrant” gaucho, unlanded and without fixed work or domicile; the well-known equation dispossessed = delinquent), and on the other, by correlation, the existence of a double system of justice that distinguishes city from country: the law of vagrants and its corollary, the law of conscription, reign above all in the countryside. This duality is in turn linked to the existence of a central, written law that in the country is confronted by the oral, traditional code of custom: the juridical regulating of rules and prescriptions that forms the basis of the rural community. The “delinquency” of the gaucho is nothing more than the effect of difference between the two juridical regulating systems and between the differential applications of one of them, and it matches the necessity of use: of field hands for the ranchers and of soldiers for the army.

Wars

The second border of the genre is the revolution and the war of independence, which begin the practice of the military use of the gaucho and his demarginalization. With laws and wars the first chain of use may be established, articulating the totality of the genre and giving it meaning:

a) use of the “delinquent” gaucho by the patriotic army;

b) use of his oral register (his voice) by the learned culture: the gaucho genre. And thenceforth:

c) use of the genre to integrate the gauchos into the “civilized” (liberal and civic) law.

The chain, almost circular (the logic of uses seems to take that form), begins with the texts of Hidalgo and concludes with The Return of Martin Fierro. Voice and law are modulated from within the army and the war to the national state: this passage and this modulation are the history of the forms of the genre.

The chain not only marks the time of the genre and gives it a meaning; it also narrates the passage from “delinquency” to “civilization” and situates the genre as one of the producers of this passage. Moreover it postulates in the center a parallelism between the use of the gaucho’s body by the army and the use of his voice by the learned culture, which defines the genre. Through this use of the body, which separates the gauchos from one field in order to carry them to another, that of the battle, the voice arises: the first fictitious locutor of gaucho literature is the gaucho as singer and patriot. The voice, the register, appears written, hypercodified and subject to a series of formal, metrical, and rhythmic conventions; it also passes through a disciplinary institution-written poetry-like the gaucho who passes through the army and is transformed into a literary sign. The two institutions, army and poetry, embrace and complement each other. The gaucho can “sing” or “speak” for all, in verse, because he fights in the armies of the motherland: his right to the voice settles and remains in weapons. Because he has weapons he must have a voice or because he has weapons he takes another voice. That which defines the gaucho genre from the beginning thus arises: language as weapon. Voice law and voice weapon interlace in the chains of the genre.

Sarmiento and the Words of Exterior Space The Heart of the Historic Space of the Genre

Facundo afterward reappears in Buenos Aires, where in 1810 he was enrolled as a recruit in the Arribenos regiment, which was commanded by General Ocampo, a native of Facundo’s own province, and afterward president of Charcas. With the first rays of the May sun, the glorious career of arms opened before him; and doubtless Facundo, with the temple of the soul with which he was gifted, and with his instincts for destruction and carnage, could he have been moralized by discipline to submit to civil authority and ennobled by the sublimity of the purpose of the struggle, might some day have returned from Peru, Chile, or Bolivia as a general of the Argentine Republic, like so many other brave gauchos who began their careers in the humble position of a private soldier. But Quiroga’s rebel soul could not endure the yoke of discipline, the order of the barracks, or the time required to rise within the ranks. He felt called to command, to rise at a single leap, to create for himself, alone, in spite of civilized society and in emnity with it, a career in his own style, combining bravery and crime, government and disorganization. He was later recruited into the army of the Andes, and enrolled in the Mounted Grenadiers. A lieutenant Garcia took him for an assistant, and very soon desertion left a vacancy in those glorious ranks. Afterward Quiroga, like Rosas, like all the vipers that have prospered in the shade of the motherland’s laurels, became notorious for his hatred of the soldiers of Independence, among whom both of the above-named men caused horrible slaughter. (Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo, chap. 5, “Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga: Infancy and Youth”)

This is the exact reverse of the genre and marks the border of its external space. Sarmiento defines the outside of the genre by making a leap in that which defines it: the voice (in this case Facundo’s voice: this is a biography and not an autobiography). In the chain of uses, Sarmiento passes from a to c: the army partially substitutes for the law in the definition of the “gaucho”; to serve in the army is to accept discipline and “the glorious career of arms”: it is to be “moralized” and “ennobled.” To subtract oneself from use is to fall back into illegality and also into the definition of the law: to direct one’s “instincts for destruction and carnage” elsewhere. The gaucho genre situates itself in choice itself, and that is its point of contact with the exterior space, its border. It constructs the ennobled voice of the patriot gaucho in order to produce patriotism (in order to give meaning, with the voice, to the struggle) and in order to ward off the subtraction of bodies. The written construction of the voice of the gaucho has a multiple meaning: it refers to the patriotic body of the soldier, the subtracted body of the deserter, and the body of the “delinquent.” Or to his “soul” or “instincts,” as Sarmiento writes from the other side of the genre, from the learned, written word.

Sarmiento speaks of the genre in a way in which the genre couldn’t speak as it was emerging because it would have to have been written precisely with the voice of Facundo and not through the word of Sarmiento. Or with Facundo’s soul, which for Sarmiento is a terrifying shade. Twice Sarmiento uses the word “soul”: “with the temple of the soul with which he was gifted, with his instincts for destruction and carnage,” and “but Facundo’s rebel soul could not endure the yoke of discipline.” The word “soul” belongs precisely to the external space of the genre; within, it would be “spirit” = voice. When Sarmiento’s word “soul” becomes central and occupies the heart of a text of the genre, in Fausto, it will be possible to make a cut in its history-in the history of the genre. It may also be said that that word marks the first turn of the genre, another, internal border. In any case, in Fausto, the word “soul” will create a play with the word “wool,” and with the sale of wool, in order to occupy a space that until then was exterior to the genre: the Colon Theater. When the Colon Theater enters the genre, Sarmiento’s word “soul” enters with it. But the one to sell his soul won’t be the gaucho but rather Doctor Faust.

For Sarmiento, Facundo’s “soul” is a terrifying shade, an enigma, because he has taken its voice away. It is not like the shade of Hamlet’s father, whose death came through his ears, who is all voice. The enigma that interrogates Sarmiento is none other than the spoken language, the exact rhythm and tone of the voice, its intensity, its modulations and registers: the way in which a voice becomes volume and in that volume becomes a world. It is not that Sarmiento had never heard that voice. Because he was hearing it constantly, because it was the voice of his madness, of his dream, because it was inside him, and because it was the voice of the motherland when he wrote Facundo-he wrote Facundo. Sarmiento’s role is to try to seize the emergence of the genre, because he writes during Rosas’s regime, when the entire space of the motherland is almost coterminous with the genre. The motherland and the genre touch, and Sarmiento writes in exile from Chile, which extends the length of the motherland and travels along it in its entirety. He is separated by the Andes from San Martin’s grenadiers, from whom Facundo deserted. And thus he occupies the exact reverse of the genre and is in complete contact with it, except at the precise point at which they could become the same, could become only genre: in the voice of the gaucho.

Sarmiento introduces one of the fundamental theoretical problems of this Essay. Is Sarmiento summoned to the genre so that it may be read in its emergence, or is it the genre that allows the reading of what Sarmiento writes in exile, and afterward, with the other, written word, the learned word, that of the nonvoice of the gaucho? The question is, What is it that allows the reading of that which wants to be read? Sarmiento is on one side of the frontier of the motherland, the genre is on the other side, and they are the same except in the voice of the gaucho. Sarmiento is the fiction of the genre in its moment of emergence because he says what the genre, with the voice of the gaucho, cannot say as it constitutes itself against another exterior space in order to constitute the motherland. (He says that there are desertions, that being delinquent or not depends on the army, that the gauchos are brave but rebellious, that they associate bravery with crime, that they are hostile to civilization.) And he says it afterward-a moment afterward, when the genre occupies the entire space of the motherland. And he has lost the motherland and therefore raises his literary writing against the voice that is the monument to Facundo, the first cathedral of Argentine culture.

In other words, the historical space differs from one side of the genre to the other, at its border. There is an afterward that says the before without the voice of the gaucho, and there is a before that may be read in the afterward or in another space and register. Interior and exterior spaces, before and after, frontiers, borders, heard voices, written words, written voices. These are the words that can transport us along this first stretch of the treatise on the motherland.

Sarmiento will return at the very center of the treatise, at its heart, when the penultimate moment of the turn and return of the genre appears with La ida of Martin Fierro, when the moment arrives in which the gaucho tells his life with his voice: when the singer sings. Once again, there will be a problem with the exterior and interior borders and again Sarmiento will allow this moment to be read by his gaucho singer without a voice. And this moment may be read with Sarmiento’s words from Facundo: he names the gauchos of the army “brave gauchos” and not “patriotic gauchos,” which the genre names them when it emerges. Or rather, Sarmiento names the gauchos as they name themselves in La ida, when Fierro and Cruz unite against the army and the judge and leave for another exile and another language. Each time Sarmiento’s words enter a text of the genre, a turn of the genre in its historical space is produced. But in La ida there is another word of Sarmiento’s, of his present and La ida’s: the name of his minister of war: “a ministry or something like that … / they called Don Gander” (11. 953-954), the gaucho Fierro says before deserting. La ida is the text of the gaucho who has lost everything, written when Sarmiento was the father of the motherland, its president, and Facundo is written when Sarmiento was the one who had lost everything.

Facundo‘s words, “moralized” and “ennobled,” will appear again at the end of this treatise with the final return of Martin Fierro, when the genre is in such complete contact with the exterior space that they are again only differentiated by the voice. But now Sarmiento’s Other will be there, his enemy and true interlocutor, the only one who really read him: Juan Bautista Alberdi. A poster of the founding fathers separates them. And another kind of exile, of voices and of writings (in between Sarmiento and Alberdi are the sea, the other language, and the posthumous writings). In the circle of La vuelta the two enemies, both founding fathers, one the father of law and the other of education, come together: in the voice of the gaucho, education and law are the same. La vuelta‘s perfect sphere united them forever.

Sarmiento, Facundo, is the historical guide to the genre through his written words and through the space from which they are written. Each time Sarmiento’s words-the exact reverse of the genre and their maximum point of contact-enter a text of the genre there is a turn, and Sarmiento becomes present at its heart, to such an extent that it might be said that he is the genre; he marks its frontiers and traces its history. He traces the form of its history: at its heart, a white and sky blue ribbon with three turns.

Continues…
Excerpted from The Gaucho Genre-CLby Josefina Ludmer Copyright © 2002 by Josefina Ludmer. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.