Leyenda. Literatura argentina: cuatro cortes. Daniel Link, Ed. Entropía, 2006
Daniel Link is something of a starlet in the world of literary academia, as chair of 20th Century Literature at UBA, former editor of Radarlibros (Página/12's book supplement) and an essay writer, together with a writing career which has received as much praise as condemnation at the hands of reviewers (nonetheless, he bagged one of the coveted Guggenheim Grants in 2004). Leyenda, his latest book, is a collection of texts on Argentine literature, an area which Link claims is not his field of expertise. Yet, the texts gathered in this collection of essays were written on different occasions on which Link was invited as a gun for hire (histories of Argentine literature, catalogs of art exhibits, the supplement he ran, other periodicals). Organized in four “cross-sections” (cortes), the book intends to progress chronologically and build a panorama of Argentine literature in the second half of the 20th century and the first few years of the 21st. It is obvious while reading that this work was never conceived as a whole, since the styles of each cross-section responds to their original intents rather than to a unified writing pattern, and the topics seem to be determined by accident rather than by a structural need. Still, a unified criterion and a singular reading perspective (more evident in the last, most personal half of the collection) manages to counterbalance what would otherwise have been loosely tied miscelanea.
The first section of the book is a review of crime fiction written during the Perón years, a topic which Link himself says he wouldn’t have covered if he hadn’t been asked to write on it for a History of Argentine Literature (the chapter, nonetheless, was not included in the book). It is clear that Link here was paying his dues to the “publish or perish” principle, as the text feels more like an academic tour of duty than a head-on, willful literary exploration.
The second section pays tribute to another timeless tradition of literary criticism: musing on itself. Link takes on a favorite topic for local literary critics, the buildup to the golden days of the movement that would give birth to the way of looking at literature which is still at the core of university courses in the country today. The 1955-1966 period is seen here as a transitional period which, through the seminal Contorno magazine, led to a more political, socially-aware reading of Argentine literature exemplified here by the works of David Viñas and Oscar Masotta. The subject, the style of writing and the overall perspective definitely feel more comfortable to the writer than those in the first section, even if the topic is narrow-focused and academy-centric.
The last two cross-sections work as a unit, and present the strongest thesis of the book, perhaps the quintessence of Link's reading of Argentine literature. In the third section, the writer presents the seventies as a “long literary decade” dominated by Manuel Puig, Rodolfo Walsh and Osvaldo Lamborghini, spanning between 1968 and 1982: post-1982 writers (post-Pichiciegos, Rodolfo Fogwill's Malvinas novel, in fact) are doomed to revising the past. The three writers chosen by Link transgress the principles of bourgeois culture (by their subject matter, their style and the genres they bring in their writing), and represent the seventies as the decade in which literature tried to go against the principles of mass media and mass culture, exploring its outer edges, subverting it and presenting dissident voices.
The fourth section is made up of reviews, interviews and dialogues mostly republished from literary supplements. The texts keep their original publication sources, but have been rewritten and expanded, which creates some weird effects (a text anticipating the death of the interviewee several years after its publication, for instance). The choice of subjects for these texts is a reading program for the new millennium, and represents what the dominant strand in academia (at the influential classrooms of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, at least) has dictated constitutes Argentine literature today: Aira, Fogwill, Laiseca, Piglia, Saer, Arturo Carrera; with side orders of Juan Filloy, Matilde Sánchez and María Moreno as secondary players. “The future” is conjured in the last two texts in the figures of the youngest writers mentioned, Alejandro López and Gabriela Bejerman, consistent with some of the previous choices (Lamborghini for the 70s; Aira, Fogwill and Laiseca for the 80s-90s) and the interspersed references to the esthetics of Belleza y felicidad in some of the last pieces.
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