Does the Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro think of the act of writing as inherently a political act? The debate between Cortázar (arguably the boom’s misfit, at least certainly for several critics) and Collazos in 1969-70 frames the inquiry I just posed. Cortázar’s closing words in the heated exchange capture the crux of the matter: “Usted, amigo y compañero Collazos, piensa que ‘la trascendencia de la novelística latinoamericana es un hecho de identificación, de expresión, de estrecha correspondencia con la realidad latinoamericana.” Amistosamente, fraternalmente, yo le digo que esa trascendencia, sobre la que no deberíamos exagerar ni hacernos demasiadas ilusiones, es un hecho de identificación, de expresión, de estrecha correspondencia con la realidad total del hombre que, como se lo dijo Hamlet a Horacio, tiene más cosas en el cielo y en la tierra de lo que imagina su filosofía” (1971: 76-77). Simply put, Cortázar claims that the context of (his or any) artistic work does not have to be mapped around the nation or continent. In opposition, Collazos claims that any worthwhile work must be engendered by a local context, in that there must be a recognizable relation to an immediate geopolitics. Conversely, Cortázar believes that art, and writing in this case, must be … At the heart of the debate lies the seemingly unbridgeable rift between aesthetic innovation and political engagement. The artistic vanguard philosophy, to which Cortázar yielded, embodied the rift. Ribeyro did not write with a defined political intention or ideological agenda in mind. Even though numerous personal journal entries as well as letters to his brother contain ruminations on politics, political philosophy and history, it would be futile to impose his thoughts (from the private space of the journal and correspondence) on what happens in his fictional territory. I propose that Ribeyro’s writing, un-programmatically, grapples with the philosophies and functions of correspondence. His fiction constructs a realism, which, by privileging gestures and suspended moment of objectivity rather than subjectivity, can be described as gestural and indexical realism. His disposition as a writer remained antithetical to the political and social entrenchment professed by other writes such as Fuentes, Vargas-Llosa, Collazos, and, in some ways, even Cortázar himself. Even though Ribeyro insisted that his short stories carried or implied no ideology or nostalgia, I place his short stories in a space that is neither the boom’s nor exactly the one he claims.
For Ribeyro writing short stories results in much less the class of tragedy alluded by Cortázar than in comedy. For instance, in contrast to Cortázar’s reference to Hamlet, what happens to Mercedes in Ribeyro’s story relates hardly in any way to a possible philosophy of heaven than to a mediated realism on and of earth. His fictions center on drawing a collectivity of many nameless yet distinct individuals who configure, insistently, a cartography of many. On the other hand, Cortázar’s fiction and that of the other boom writers construct epic or tragic tales around a singular hero. There are affiliations summoned but they are not predicated on regional or national bonds, but rather on a common experience of the banal and mundane. In the previous chapter and this one, I have shown how the stylistic mechanism privileged by Ribeyro throughout are repetition and indexical (or photographic) realism, which is not the boom’s anti-realism, but certainly neither is it the classical one.
Standing apart from Cortázar’s position and certainly from Collazos’s, Ribeyro shows or declares no commitment to a particular literary ideology or ideological literature. Though he does not necessarily deem such a commitment as trivial or wrong, his works stave off being traversed by such a principle. If we speak of any form of commitment in his case, it must be in relation to the practice of literature per se, and even then, less to an epistemic notion of literature than to the mundane and precarious practice of it.
Realism 