Mayra Santos Febres has published an essay in the Madrid newspaper El País discussing the principle of universality in great fiction. In a slightly ironic vein, she tackles the possibilities of writers from the periphery (such as those from the Caribbean) attaining such a transcendence of “the particular, the immediate.”
She writes:
For us, who live in this side of the Atlantic, to be universal implies having read and even know by heart all classical literature (which is not a bad thing), Dante and Boccaccio, Cervantes and Goethe, Thomas Mann, Sándor Márai, and the Generation of 27, plus all of Latin American literature. And if, to top it off, you happen to be black or a woman like me, universality becomes very complicated. Alternative canons of indispensable literature emerge: a feminist one headed by Virginia Woolf and Beauvoir; an Afro-diasporic one with Wole Soyinka, Ben Oki, Toni Morrison and Tzitsi Dangarema, not to mention Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer. The labyrinth, the library of Babel, becomes infinite. One begins to suspect that one is not being “universal” at all, that universality was another thing. That one is beginning to be “global.”
As Borges wrote in 1932, in El escritor argentino y la tradición, we Latin American writers, being marginal, remix tradition. We do it tensely, insecurely, with another perspective. . . . For many Latin American writers in these past centuries, to accede to this culture implies waiting for a point of entry from other social coordinates and amidst discussions of the collapse of the universal and the canon. It is true what Carlos Fuentes affirms, that metanarratives have collapsed; they have been replaced by “multinaratives.” We are living a beautiful and Babel-like moment of cultural transition. Chaos, yes, stridencies, of course, but also openings and hope. We will see how we manage to bring into harmony our present and very global diversities.
Perhaps we are closer to the universal than ever before in history.
The essay (in Spanish) can be found at http://www.elpais.com/articulo/semana/universal/elpepuculbab/20090328elpbabese_1/Tes
The photo of Mayra is form her blog, lugarmanigua, and can be found at http://mayrasantosfebres.blogspot.com/2007/05/fotos-de-escritora-4-meses-de-preada.html?showComment=1181089860000
