The Epistolary Genre and Television

I am rereading Choderlos de Laclos' beautiful epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons. I'm sure evrybody has seen the film version with the amazing John Malkovich and the profoundly gifted Glenn Close. I watch the movie every few years just to remind myself that there are a couple of American actors who actually know how to act.

As good as the film version is, the novel is, of course, unmeasurably better. It's the XVIIIth century and words matter a lot. Beauty of expression which helps to reveal an incredible depth of meaning is valued above anything else.

I appreciate this novel not only because I'm fascinated with the Enlightenment, but also (paradoxically, it might seem at a first glance) because I really like television. In my opinion, the epistolary genre, so popular in the XVIIIth century, is more of a precursor for the television than any other artistic form.

One of the most engaging things about the epistolary novel is its skill in manipulating different stories at the same time. The epistolary creates suspense by abandoning one story and switching to another when a letter from one of the characters is followed by a letter from somebody else narrating a different tale. In a similar way, a television show abandons a storyline for a while by switching to a different scene.

A XVIIIth century novel always has a moral lesson, simply because it has no choice. So does a TV show. It is very easy, however, to find textual evidence in both that subverts the official morality. It is impossible to resist Madame de Merteuil's charm. Whatever might be said of her at the end of the novel, her letters make her undisputably the most engaging character of the book. A similar thing happens with TV shows. In spite of all efforts on the part off the creators of the show, the protagonist of 24 ends up looking like a sociopathic monster.

Hispanic Neo-Baroque

This post is inspired by the sessions on Hispanic Neo-Baroque I am participating in today.

Main principles:

• There is a common Neo-Baroque space (which is cultural, artistic, and ideological) shared by Spain and Latin America.
• It represents a peculiarly Hispanic approximation to modernity.
• It is an improvement on the Enlightened worldview since it manages to bring together the modern and the pre-modern, the mythic and the scientific, etc.
• Neo-Baroque inspires a culture of questioning and resisting neo-liberalism.
• It also poses a challenge to the English-speaking Protestant imperialist and hegemonic ideology of the US.
• The Baroque has been historically marginalized in its capacity of an Occidental discourse, so now it is capable of giving a voice to subaltern groups.

My critique:

• There is nothing more Baroque than neo-liberalism and nothing more neo-liberal than the Baroque.
• Instead of giving a voice to the marginalized groups, it makes the representation of these groups more palatable to the affluent consumer of the 1st world. Novels by Garcia Marquez, Almodovar's recent films, Brazilian City of God cutesify painful realities of the Hispanic world in order to make them less threatening to a US consumer. The inhabitants of the favelas, the horribly abused Latin American women, etc. are prettified and voraciously consumed by the jaded Western readers and viewers. I have yet to see ANY liberating potential in these cultural products. If anybody can provide me with examples of how this art and/or ideology can be liberating, I would be very grateful

Reasons for my critique:

• As I wrote before, I completely disagree with the male-chauvinistic belief in the failure of the Enlightened project. Offering any alternative to it, especially one as politically toothless as Neo-Baroque, bothers me.
• I specialize in Peninsular literature and I simply do not believe that today Neo-Baroque art is either prevalent or mainstream in Spain. There are some feeble attempts to work with the Neo-Baroque but they belong, for the most part, to those who want to transplant peculiarly US cultural phenomena into Spain (Rosa Montero's Temblor is one example.) By theorizing Hispanic Transatlantic Neo-Baroque we, in my view, theorize something that does not exist. And this is profoundly unscientific.
• In spite of the liberating agenda we might attempt to ascribe to the Neo-Baroque, the only kind of cultural products it has created so far are the products that mark an extreme degree of conformism. The Neo-Baroque art's greatest originality lies in how inventive and creative it is in coming up with more and more ways to conform to the system of world domination that has been and remains especially oppressive towards the Hispanic people.

A Finer World

"If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world" (Terry Eagleton).

It doesn't bother me when Terry Eagleton gets into this tired anti-Enlightenment rant. As a group, privileged middle-aged white men have been steadily losing in power and prestige. When Eagleton says that progress is a myth, he talks as a representative of a particular collective identity, one that has suffered a significant decline. If things continue developing in the same direction, being male, white, and rich will entail no advantages whatsoever. As much as I respect Eagleton (and believe me, I really do), observing him in real life made it clear to me that he has been making full use of these advantages and will not give them up easily. Hence the "progress-is-a-myth" agenda. Eagleton and Co must believe that if they repeat this mantra often enough, there is a chance that the pesky consequences of said unexisting progress will disappear.

Now, what really bothers me is when people saying such things don't stop to think that the only reason they can say anything - that is, engage in the production of a public discourse - is the very progress they are so happy to berate.

I will never forget the sad spectacle of a Latina scholar, speaking at an extremely conservative Ivy League school about the evils of Enlightened thought. You'd think that a Hispanic woman might have a different perspective on these things than people who historically kept women like her in the role of perennially abused, disenfranchised and despised servants. Not so. She seemed happy enough repeating the age-old anti-progress lamentations of old white men without stopping to think about the ideological and political considerations behind this rhetoric.

The argument I have heard most often from the eminently self-righteous Enlightenment-bashers is: "Progress is bad because it has put humanity on the verge of extinction." Oooh, verge of extinction, scary. As a woman, I have to say, however, that I don't believe the world where I'm not considered a valid human being is worth preserving. If the downside of the historical processes that gave the downtrodden a voice and a presence is "the verge of extinction," then so be it.

Eagleton is right when he says that we ALL are not en route to a finer world. For me, the world gets better with every passing day. For Eagleton and the like, it evidently isn't.


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