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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Critical South
- Sprache: Englisch
Plebeian Prose is a key work by the pioneering Argentine Brazilian anthropologist, sociologist and poet Néstor Perlongher. Perlongher, whose work has been highly influential in the development of Latin American cultural theory and literature, represents an original critical ‘queer’ voice in Latin American thought.
This book is an exploration of the politics of desire, questions of identity, Latin American neo-baroque aesthetics, sexual dissidence, violence and jouissance. Prompted by his reading of Gilles Deleuze, the link between politics and desire remains central to all Perlongher’s reflections and gives his writings a lasting topicality. A thinker of the streets with a keen interest in those on the margins of society, the ideas that are developed in this book offer a lucid critique of capitalism and institutional power. Perlongher’s approach also reflects a particular Latin American neo-baroque style, a mode of critique whose value endures today.
Providing insight into Latin American culture and politics of the late twentieth century, Plebeian Prose will be of particular interest to anyone working on critical theory, literary theory, anthropology, sociology and gender studies.
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Seitenzahl: 502
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Contents
Series Title
Title page
Copyright page
Introduction –
Cecilia Palmeiro
Note
Prologue: Prosaic Perlongher –
Christian Ferrer and Osvaldo Baigorria
Sixty-nine Questions for Néstor Perlongher
Note
Desire and Politics
Cover Up, Girl
Notes
Loca
Sex
Notes
Don’t Lift the Lid, We’re on Shaky Ground
Note
Brazil: The Transvestite Invasion
The clients
A
Marica
Is Murdered
Note
Lust and Violence in the World of the Night
Corporal Order
Avatars of the Boys of the Night
Adrift
Escape and capture
Plotting bodies
Passions and codes
Postscript
Notes
The Force of Carnivalism
Living-Room Deficiency Syndrome
Note
Minoritary Becoming
Conditions for a cartography of desire
A cartography of ‘minor’ Brazil
Becoming and identity
The marginal personality
Mute passion
Subjectification in crisis
Notes
History of the Argentine Gay Liberation Front
The context
The formation of groups
The tasks at hand
Peronism and disenchantment
Somos
journal
Feminism and sexual politics
Repression and dissolution
Epilogue
The Disappearance of Homosexuality
Muddy Baroque
Sandy Beaches to Muddy Delta
An introduction to Cuban and Argentine neo-baroque poetry
Neobarroco/neobarroso
Carving/tattooing
Notes
Foot Fetish
Notes
Baroquification
Anti-western
Demented language
Newly muddied
Corporality
Kitsch, camp, gay
Notes
Cuba, Sex, and a Bridge to Buenos Aires
Note
Dress Straps for Puig
Flows in the Fjord. Baroque and the Body in Osvaldo Lamborghini
‘We will never be Vandorists’
Climax
On
Alambres
Anthropology of Ecstasy
Urban Poetics
Notes
Poetry and Ecstasy
Note
The Religion of Ayahuasca
Force and form
Notes
The Argentine Falklands
All Power to Lady Di
Island Illusions
Note
Island Desires
Notes
Eva Perón
Evita Lives
1
2
3
The Corpse
Macabre Gems
The Corpse of the Nation
1 Zombie
2
3
4
Notes
Miscellaneous
Acronyms
Credit for Tancredo
Lake Nahuel
Blue
Corpses
Appendix
The Gay Struggle in Argentina
Biographic Timeline
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
Sixty-nine Questions for Néstor Perlongher
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Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series was made possible with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Plebeian Prose
Néstor Perlongher
Selection and Prologue by Christian Ferrer and Osvaldo Baigorria
Translated by Frances Riddle
polity
Copyright page
First published in Spanish as Prosa plebeya. Ensayos 1980–1992 © Néstor Perlongher, 2000. All rights reserved.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3453-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3454-8 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 10 on 12 Sabon
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Prologue: Prosaic Perlongher1Christian Ferrer and Osvaldo Baigorria
Why would a poet’s prose interest anyone? Writers are assigned a specific genre and their incursions into other areas are usually considered minor or occasional unfoldings. While it’s true that Néstor Perlongher is remembered for innovating Argentine poetry, it’s also true that he tapped other veins in his quarry of skills. For those who followed the intellectual debates of the 1980s or gleaned nourishment from the untrustworthy grapevine of the newspaper stand, where cultural supplements ripened and fell, Néstor Perlongher’s name was a guarantee of risqué ideas, irreverent humour, partisan politics, linguistic sonority, ridicule for trite notions of democratic progressiveness, and insolent provocation. From the beginning to the end of his writing career, Perlongher displayed his talents as an essayist, and not only as a retreat or escape from his poetic work. ‘Truncated paths’ is how he classified his prose in an interview.
The nonfiction genre in Argentina is a duelling pistol in whose butt Perlongher managed to make a significant notch. In truth, the most enduring essays were written under the shadow of threat. Over five decades, academic trends, institutional structures and the deterioration of the reader’s taste increasingly restricted the space allotted to nonfiction. Various movements aggravated the process, starting with the social sciences crisis in the 1960s, followed by the political urgencies of the 1970s and rounded out in the 1990s by the demands of academic theory and journalistic commentary, often one and the same. Taken as a given that each published essay had the last word, nonfiction in Argentina gradually became the precarious encampment of atypical thinking. And in this unusual style, Perlongher forged the works we’re interested in recovering.
Perlongher’s ‘prosaic’ work centres around his political leanings, his sociological studies, his formation in urban anthropology; the curious groping that leads authors to express themselves using ‘the centaur of genres’ – the essay. He does not deal with a huge variety of themes, but each reflects a passion, and daring, disquieting opinions: neo-baroque writing and its origins and offshoots, sexual politics, gay identity, Eva Perón (a leitmotif), a political stance on the Falklands War and the ecstatic rituals of the Santo Daime religion. Of the abundant essays Perlongher published between 1980 and 1992, we’ve selected some of the most significant, but also the ones in which his style transforms arguments into poetry. In each of the thematic sections, the reader will find not only facets of Perlongher’s thinking, but also the evolution of his perspectives. In the section ‘Miscellaneous’ we have included some of the poems in which Argentine history or politics play a central role. Among them you will find ‘Corpses’, today considered one of the most important poems in Argentine literature.
The prehistory of Perlongher’s best-known and most extensive essay, ‘La prostitución masculina’ [Male prostitution], taken from his doctoral thesis published in Brazil (‘O negocio do michê: Prostitução viril em São Paulo’ [Male prostitution in São Paulo]), begins on Lavalle Street, in the ‘movie house’ section of Buenos Aires’s city centre. In the early 1970s, Néstor strolls, trots, swaggers, cruises and drifts down this de facto pedestrian street, among taxi boys, pimps and gay men in various degrees of overtness. The opportunity to present an exhibition in the Centre for Art and Communication allows him to dust off an old idea: a photographic exposé complete with recorded testimonies from the young men who offer themselves up as live bait on street corners and risk butchery in nearby interiors. Néstor enlists his friends and members of Política Sexual [Sexual Politics] and the Frente de Liberación Homosexual [FLH: Gay Liberation Front]. They go out, cameras in hand, timidly trying to pass unnoticed as they aim a lens at their targets. Néstor strolls, chats with various taxi boys, approaches a man he’s interested in, sets aside his amateur investigation for the possibility of sexual encounter, gets lost in the city centre: it’s no longer clear if anyone is taking photos, the exhibition never occurs. But this dress rehearsal, this mise-en-scène of bodies on street corners, inspires Perlongher’s interest in gay prostitution as part of his array of intellectual interests.
After cruising Lavalle in Buenos Aires, Perlongher followed the trail to the Brazilian hub for the sex trade, a place called Marquis de Itú. The former militant Trotskyist, former sociologist, Master of social anthropology, fixed his gaze on the streets. The street was where he practised his leftist political activism, his pioneering participation in Argentina’s first gay rights group (the FLH, active between 1971 and 1976). On the streets, he surveyed the gay districts of every city he visited and undertook explorations into the ritual experiences of an emerging Brazilian religion. Down these winding paths we search in vain for a fissure between the beginnings of the gay liberation movement and Perlongher’s later solemn criticism of ‘gay identity’. Desire – and not ‘gayness’ – was the anchor of his political perspective, in a period in which it was openly proclaimed that ‘everything personal is political’ but in which gays ‘didn’t exist’. Once, in the middle of a meeting of leftist activists, someone made a sarcastic comment about a young man with an ambiguous appearance: ‘Is that a man, a woman, or what?’ To which Perlongher was said to have responded: ‘It’s a what.’ This ‘who knows what’ invokes the amorphous and mutant silhouette of the black beast, target of moralizing campaigns that rained down on the population by the Argentine state, of which the reader will find here a costumbrista and conceptual portrait. Argentina, Néstor often said, is a paradise for police in which the only possible sexuality is sad or simulated, or else sordid.
Identity, that ancient philosophical and governmental concern, has seen fissures form in its colonnade of unity, certainty, ego, sexualization, monotheism and hierarchy. The cracks, in the last hundred years, have begun to form around Nietzsche and Foucault and around anarchy and surrealism. But perhaps these days, the crusade against identity – or its analysis – is seen as suspicious, something ‘too serious’, even if liberationist or self-deprecating nuances are accepted. Academic and organizational agendas have managed to transform a political nuisance into a ‘cultural’ study, a flexible mould to fill with differences and tensions. It’s true that identity was a main concern during Perlongher’s lifetime. But the gay rights movement and its demand for social recognition seemed to him too comfortable and, in the end, suspicious. Like in a supermarket: every minority gets their own aisle. Perhaps Néstor was not immune to a belief, widespread in the 1970s, that there would be no individual salvation and no corporate immunity. The lease of an institutional space or ghetto was but a meagre consolation; the right to same-sex marriage, petitioned before the authorities, a whiny claudication. Néstor was acutely aware that the sexual politics brought to the forefront by the revolutionary pulsations were being hemmed in as an issue of human rights: one more instance of victimization, another plaque on the wall. He was of the belief that desire, whether hetero or homosexual, was not a tangible object but a force that could be used to break down the classificatory system of the reigning law – family-oriented and capitalist – used as the basis for social control: to Perlongher, desire was a crusade that aimed to penetrate the borders of conjugality, of sedentariness, of consanguinity.
His guide was not Freud, or Lacan, but Gilles Deleuze, whose concepts he spun into gold. It’s through this appropriation – not simulation – that his investigation into male prostitution stands out as his personal nocturne. Perlongher read Deleuze – Anti-Oedipus – in a study group around 1975, a time in which he was gathering political knowledge. Non-academic reading; free from self-referential jargon, from expiry date. Deleuze and Guattari constituted an ideogram which conjured Eros in his death throes. But these books were not recipes: Perlongher read them with care and then he picked and chose items to carry with him as he explored the caverns of desire and the back alleys of the urban landscape. Beyond the polemics of methodology and theoretical ebbs and flows, we want to emphasize that Perlongher had a naturally radical temperament and that he was a keen observer of customs. In the end, the best polisher of a perspective is the sandpaper of experience and not the printed page.
Perlongher had no first-hand knowledge, however, of Eva Perón, about whom he wrote a few poems and a blasphemous story that still today inflames the emotional and political membranes of Argentine mythology. The compilers of this book are aware that Argentina is not a place where one can poke around in erogenous zones and open wounds without suffering the consequences. While the figure of Eva Perón has already elicited quiet laughter in certain works of literature and film, some of them – such as Copi’s – vaguely disrespectful, in the case of the story ‘Evita vive’ [Evita Lives], Perlongher has positioned himself beyond the twelve nautical miles of territorial exclusion. And although a writer may moonlight as grave robber, the halo surrounding this particular Argentine legend does not permit unauthorized exhumations. Because it wasn’t Perón’s Evita, of course. Perlongher’s Evita Duarte was a plebeian princess who descended from heaven to hand out, in place of blankets, packages of marihuana: Saint Mary Jane of Buenos Aires. His Eva was an unforgettable goddess, neighbourhood sweetheart, Peronist Amazon resisting with tooth and nail – tipped with Revlon – the ‘traitors’ who would grope her, an Eva come down from on high to suck a wart on the police chief’s shoulder and content to crash in any cheap hotel. Could Perlongher’s Evita be translated to film? A violent Eros would immortalize the montonera Evita, double disappointment of the ladies of the oligarchy, the Eva of the ‘counterculture branch’ of the Generation of ’73: the national Corpse, corpse set adrift, mortified immortal. Evita’s adoring public, in this story written in 1975 and unpublished until 1987, is the lower-class proletariat, the people Perlongher studied in the gay ghetto of São Paulo. This is not based purely on empirical observation: it is also a kind of political philosophy. The lower-class hero is always immoral and only revered at difficult moments in history or in popular legends. Néstor recognized, in the mass idolatry of the Peronist goddess, a politics of desire in its purest state: moral evaluations are set aside. He detected the same problem of libidinal politics – an issue so delicate it is still avoided to this day – in the popular fervour for the Falklands War, the platform on which General Galtieri held court. With a battering ram draped in witticism and insolence, the Falklands War is pummelled in the essays included here. It bears emphasizing that opposition to the Falklands War had not been widely expressed, making these essays even rarer. Perlongher’s stories and poems about Evita Perón and his texts on the Falklands show an open desire for blasphemy. And like any good blasphemer, Perlongher was aware he was insulting Argentine heroes, some of whom – such as Evita – he himself adored.
What mark has Néstor left on those of us who considered him a friend? Poets, taxi-boys, university professors, gays, journalists, transvestites and feminists all gravitated to him and interacted with each other thanks to his presence, as many others would connect later thanks to his absence. Nevertheless, it always seemed that no one could keep up with him. Although he was always surrounded by lovers, friends, former friends or future enemies, he gave the impression of being as singular as an activist as he was as a poet, humorist or agent provocateur. One of the characters in the second part of the story ‘Evita Lives’ could be a portrait of him in his years as a sociology student: a leftist intellectual on the fringes of the gay scene, a spectator of the circuslike Buenos Aires hippie culture in a cheap hotel where they ‘weren’t campaigning, just trying to secure a peaceful place to trip’. The appearance of Eva Perón, and then the police, constitutes a disruption of this peace. Sex, drugs, politics, repression and rock’n’roll: the Molotov cocktail of a generation.
We perceive Perlongher as a critical thinker, although we wouldn’t dare to simply plop him in the category of ‘intellectual’, not only because this label would be insufficient to describe him, but because there was something in him that bucked the notion. He didn’t want to abandon a radical political image even as he was immersed in a scene preoccupied with the ‘collapse of the grand narrative of Modernity’, the buzz of the Buenos Aires intellectual circles of the 1980s, forerunner, in academia, to ‘cultural studies’ and, in the public sphere, affirmative minority politics. But Néstor railed against ghettos, against the discrepancies between life experiences. Or against the fact that the world was one huge ghetto for anyone who had been exiled from their families, the church, from commonly held notions and customs. It is perhaps because of this that the deconstruction of identity became, within his work, an obsession. Did Perlongher perhaps ‘resolve’ the problem of identity in his final dive into mysticism? Did he make his foray into the religion of ayahuasca because he glimpsed in it an undulating freedom, a more powerful mode of corporal sensory reorganization? In mystic asceticism, the personal fuses with the divine; identity is no longer ‘political’ but transcendental, dissolved in an oceanic totality. He first tried to resolve the issue of identity through the orgy – in the times of ‘sexual liberation’ – flesh fusing with flesh. Then, through the religion of Santo Daime, identity gleamed, it became a flow of light. Flesh and spirit. The darkness of the orgy and the lightness of the sacred vision.
In the end, obscurity is the ultimate fear of all Argentine essayists: the genre suffers, in general, from the regular (cyclical) obsolescence of cultural magazines. The majority of the writings that you will read in this book were published in journals and cultural supplements of newspapers where Perlongher practised his unique mode of intellectual intervention, introducing into the public debate issues that, in the early 1980s, were considered ‘novel’: marginal territories, nomadism, gay subjectivity, the strong link between desire and politics. All this is now a distant memory in the fragile intellectual history of Argentina. The other major theme for Néstor was the neo-baroque, a literary movement where he felt at home. Perhaps foremost promoter of the movement, he chiselled its contours in minute detail, as can be appreciated in the essays collected herein. Perlongher always rejected the communicational use of language; he preferred instead to glide along its sonorities and distortions, like a kayak pulled by the current. The sensual sonority of the text, the exuberance of the lexicon, the unshakable betrothal of argument and poetic effusion: these all allow us to take a large portion of his writings as a performance of linguistic operation in a trancelike state. Once concepts and theories sink their teeth into the flesh, they become style, and style is not a decorative element but life itself, and all of Néstor’s life was a long essay on desire.
We would like to express our gratitude for the help, in preparation of this book, provided by Sarita Torres, Afranio Mendes Catani, Horacio González, Adrián Cangi, Paula Siganevich, Carlos Dala Stella, Cristóvao Tezza, Tamara Kamenszain, Paula Sibilia, Jorge Schwartz, Margareth Rago, Roberto Echavarren – Néstor’s literary executor – Paulo Martínez, Ricardo Antunes, Samuel León, Reginaldo Moraes, Daniela Chiaretti, Víctor Redondo, Vera Land, Martín Caparrós, María Moreno and Aurelio Narvaja, editor of this book, all of them friends and readers of Néstor Perlongher.
This text appeared as the prologue to the original Spanish edition.
Sixty-nine Questions for Néstor Perlongher
1 What was the first thing you ever wrote?
A ridiculous little poem about the Province of Buenos Aires, at seven or eight years old. Later, in high school, I won a contest with something loosely inspired by an album of Arab music.
2 Do you remember what your motivation for writing was?
A certain mania for introspection. A lack of a lair of my own to hideout in, not being able to put up with the world.
3 Who was your first reader?
Some (few) classmates from school. I was a little eccentric, I hung out with the girls, I didn’t get along with the boys. Writing, at that age, has something feminine about it. But my seduction was forced and implacable, I harassed my aloof readers.
4 What were the first comments you received on your texts?
There were some teachers who encouraged me. My classmates at Avellaneda Commercial turned up their noses: poetry was for fags. At around fifteen or sixteen years old I started looking for more favourable circles. The Secretary of Culture in Avellaneda called my attention to the abundance of ‘eyelids’, ‘shadows’ and ‘pillows’ in my opening verses (a somewhat hypnotic effect). A poet, Héctor Berra, owner of a local bookshop, told me that my poetry wasn’t good or bad, just regular. And he let me participate in an adolescent poetry reading where I went onstage, like an anachronistic existentialist, dressed all in black.
5 Do you still have any of that early work?
It must be around somewhere, things always get lost when you move.
6 What were you reading when you started writing?
When I was younger, the adventures of Bomba, a sensual Tarzan of the Amazon. Later, anything I could get my hands on (which wasn’t much; I grew up in a house with practically no books – a book was just something that took up space); large collections of selected works, random novels by Somerset Maugham or D. H. Lawrence, huge yellowed novels published by Tor. In Jules Verne I’d skip the descriptions and read only the dialogues. Also, books chosen for their fascinatingly cruel images. Later, in high school, Güiraldes, Alfonsina Storni, Neruda (I remember I shocked the principal when I asked for General Song); Góngora was eye-opening.
7 How did you get your first books?
Like I’ve already said, there was a certain aversion to books in my home. I found a way to get them through school, recommendations from teachers, on loan from an aunt who studied law.
8 What languages do you read?
Spanish, Portuguese, French. Grudgingly, English. For poetry, almost always in Spanish, because it’s about working with the intimacies of the language.
9 Which authors were most important for your formation?
Multiple intersections: we are a pastiche of echoes and voices, ‘collective agencements of enunciation’, as Deleuze would say, ‘an infinitely populated solitude’. But the ones who nourished me most – poetry is an elixir – were the surrealists (like Enrique Molina), Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ passing through Góngora and Lezama Lima (a true narcotic intoxication), Sarduy and, among the Argentines, my encounter with Osvaldo Lamborghini was decisive.
10 Who is your favourite poet?
Góngora, Lezama Lima. But also Artaud.
11 When and where do you see other writers?
Very seldom, when I travel to Buenos Aires, once a year. But I take advantage of the trip to see everyone at once. Happily, São Paulo is a fairly cosmopolitan city and from time to time someone comes to visit. However, I’m pretty isolated, I haven’t got involved in the local poetry circles – because, among other reasons, I write in unintelligible Spanish. This creates a problem, the lack of an immediate auditor, but it obliges me to polish and chisel away to the point of exhaustion or ecstasy.
12 Do you have friends who are writers? Who are they?
Some, not many. When I go to Buenos Aires I always see Arturo Carrera, Tamara Kamenszain, Hugo Savino, Víctor Redondo, and the people at Último Reino, and other younger writers, who would make the list too long. I miss the social gatherings; you could say, conversation isn’t the most Brazilian institution, the bars don’t have tables, just a bar where you sit facing the barman to talk, surrounded by a horrible racket of radios. There’s not that same Argentine passion for polemics. In compensation, they also don’t police you with savage confessions or interpretations, there’s a certain distant courtesy. I correspond with some writers, or used to. I feel saudade for certain (disperse) encounters with Roberto Echavarren, Uruguayan poet who lives in New York. I talk regularly with another Uruguayan, Carlos Pellegrino, who travels often to Brazil.
13 Do you have any writer rivals? Who are they?
I prefer not to know.
14 Do you belong to any group?
In a fixed way, no. But I’ll drift through any group that might be alternative, anti-establishment (the ruins of the underground scene), nomad. Lately, less. My social ties have loosened a little in Brazil, where I feel the weight of my foreignness.
15 Who are your favourite fictitious characters?
