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Archive and Origins in Los perros del paraiso

Brian Chandler

Like so many contemporary Latin American

novels, Los perrosdel paraiso,published in 1983 by the
Argentinean Abel Posse, is a narrative of origins.
However, contrasted with more famous, earlier
novels such as Cienanosdesoledad(1967)by Garcia
Marquez or Los pasosperdidos(1953)by Alejo
Carpentier, in Los perrosdelparaisothe reader is
engaged by a flagrantly ludic distortion of the events
surrounding the foundational fiction of Spanish
America. The novel begins by explaining that a
suffocating Europe of the fifteenth century is
"gasping for breath, long[ing] for its dead sun, its lost
pulse, the buried fiesta" (7). The erotic breath of life
that gives birth to the Renaissance comes from the
Americas where the Aztecs (described as religious

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fanatics) and the Incas (American socialists) meet to
contemplate exploring the lands of the pale ones. On
the other side of the Atlantic, Christopher Columbus,
since a young age, has been called by a voice to go
and find the Earthly Paradise across the sea. As we
have read in our history books, the Catholic
monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, fund Columbus'
journey. However, in Losperrosdelparaiso,the illicitly
married cousins fall for Columbus' ruse about new
commercial routes to the Orient. All the while,
Columbus prepares for the true meaning of his
voyage-to find the Earthly Paradise, the site of the
garden of Eden. In order to return to the singular,
live origin that is the Earthly Paradise, the Admiral
must overcome Time, History, and the Archive, a task
made impossible by its very undertaking.
Two recurring leitmotifs in Losperrosdelparaiso
are archival knowledge and temporality. To . inspection of the Archive highlights'the complicity
understand how these themes offer the reader a
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deeper textual meaning, we must return to the roots
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Archive Fever,Jacques Derrida explores how the
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information is collected and stored. . "'Archive' is only
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a notion,an impression associated with a word and
for which [. . .] we do not have a concept" (29).
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Exploring the abstract nature of the Archive leads
Derrida to examine the roots of the Archive as a
primary source of the power to control the production
and interpretation of law:
Arkhe, we recall, names at once the
commencementand the commandment. This .
name apparently coordinates two principles
in one: the principle according to nature or
history, therewhere things commence-
physical, historical, or ontological
principle-but also the principle according
to the law, therewhere men and gods .
command, therewhere authority, social order
are exercised, in thisplacefrom which orderis
given-nomological principle. (1)
As the locus of both the storage of historical
knowledge and a seat of power, Derrida's closer
between knowledge, memory, history, and power in
Western societies. Therefore, the Archive has a
dichotomous nature: metaphorically, it is both the
storehouse of knowledge that reaches back towards a
beginning and the site in which power is exercised.
In his well-known study Myth and Archive,
Roberto Gonzcilez Echevarria shows how the Latin
American Narrative grew out of and evolved
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Chandler
analogously with the Archive. Gonzalez Echevarria
notes that canonical novels like Cienaiiosdesoledad
and Lospasosperdidoscenter on characters that found
urban spaces from which a new Archive, a new
repository of knowledge and power, is constructed
(18). However, in contrast to the totalizing narratives
of many of the Boom period novels that textually
reproduce the foundational Archive, in Los perrosdel
paraiso,Posse engages and demythicizes archival
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knowledge through the use of parody and humor.
In LosperrosdelparaisoColumbus learns at an
early age that in order to fulfill his destiny he must be
able to manipulate the tools of inscription of the " event with true meaning for Columbus was finding
Archive when he steals the box containing the
sacristan's letters (26). Using these "forbidden grapes
from the Tree of Knowledge," Columbus deciphers
the priest's precept and begins to acquire the skills he
will later use to manipulate the Archive to further his
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search for the Earthly Paradise (26).
At times, the novel imitates established
historiography, as when the narrator explains that
"[s]urely he had constructed that vision of Paradise
from the illustrations in those depraved books-
alleged travel chronicles-already being published in
Venice, with a new apparatus called the printing
press" (23). These descriptions of Paradise found in
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the Archive give Columbus encouragement during
his long voyage as he compares the texts with the
reality that surrounds him.
Our history books indicate that nearly six years
pass between Columbus' first landfall in America and
the third voyage in which he passes the mouth of
what we know as the Orinoco River. However, the
narrator of Losperrosdelparaisoobserves that "[i]n the
real life of the admiral, the day that follows October
12,1492 is-curiously-August 4, 1498" (221). By
joining Columbus' four historic voyages into one
narrated journey, the narrator suggests that the only
the Earthly Paradise. Using archival knowledge in
the same way one would follow a treasure map, the
Admiral "was looking for confirmation, signs, not
vulgar gain" (253). Along the way, the expedition
sees"a wondrous black-and-yellow anaconda; they
knew by its size and splendor that it was indisputably
the one that had spoken to Eve" (253). Finally,
Columbus sees a large ceiba tree, declares that it is the
Tree of Knowledge, and hangs his hammock from one
of its long branches. The Admiral explains to the
others, "Here the original waters are blended in a
single continuum. We are at the brink of the
Beginning" (254). Columbus believes that he has
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found the mythical Beginning, the locus of
conu,nencement for the Judeo-Christian Archive.
Columbus' search for the Earthly Paradise evokes
the phenomenon that Derrida names" Archive
Fever." For Derrida, the modem Archive has
expanded to the internal psychological substrate,
r reflecting how Freudian psychoanalysis has changed
the way we think about memory and suppression.
The attempt to accumulate, condense, and capitalize
memory is realized through the Archive, where
I memory is separated from its very origin and
commencement (Derrida 91-3). The result is a
sickness, an Archive Fever that, inVQkingthe same
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processes as the Freudian death drive, eventually
destroys what it most seeks: the beginnings Qf
knowledge, memory, and power. The result is that
"[t]he archive always works, and a priori, against
itself" (Derrida 12).
However, as Columbus rests in a hammock
under what he believes to be the Tree of Knowledge
~~ of Good and Evil, the reader gets a sense that the
Admiral has been able to overcome Archive Fever.
Believing he has returned to the Beginning,
Columbus, between his long respites, passes two
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ordinances for all to follow: the Ordinance of Nudity
and the Ordinance of Being, in which "[p Jure and
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simple, the admiral was condemning work" (257).
However, the ordinances are not received well by the
men who had accompanied Columbus. "What
followed was a witches' Sabbath among the exfelons
and prostitutes. A merry dance. The hellhounds of .
repressed desire swept along the coast" (254). The
more conservative citizens reply, "We are not fucking
savages!" (255). After the first commotion against the
ordinances, the reality of nudity and no work
provoke boredom and emptiness. "After two weeks
everyone began to feel that without evil nothing had
meaning" (259). Shortly thereafter, the people begin
to revolt (261). Roldan, a strongman, begins
preaching of "nation" and "dignity" as violence and
rape spread through Paradise (261-5). Columbus,
oblivious to reality, "rested from the age-old fatigue
of the Occident" (265).
The Admiral, by dictating what seem to be
logical social ordinances for life within the Earthly
Paradise, destroys the very Archive that speaks to its
own mythological beginning. Life without the
Archive, the site of commencement and
commandment, is impossible to imagine. The
. mythological origin, the metaphoric foundation of the
Archive, is unattainable. In the Archive, original
memory (mnesis) is replaced with hypomnesis, a
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supplemental representation of a "live origin"
(Denjda 92-3). Columbus' Earthly Paradise is based
on "hypomnetic" inscriptions within the Archive that,
through the acts of translation and consignation, are
irrevocably separated from any true origin.
In a similar manner, Columbus' voyage in itself
creates a new space in the Archive. As the Admiral
sails to the New World
[t]he spatiohistorical horizon was
shattered once and for all by the bow of the
Santa Maria. It was like ripping open one of
those grab bags sold at the Ferragostofairs.
The Pandora's Box of reality.
People, ships, began to slip through the
rent in the spatiotemporal veil, human
scenes that the admiral-as a visionary-had
to accept without trying to seek explanations
that would exceed the modest possibilities of
. the age. (204)
In the wake of the Santa Maria the reader finds that
time collapses. Ships" of terrifying size, as tall as the
Cathedral of Seville[,]" (202) are "transporting
quantities of passengers and goods. Some have
enormous metal chimneys, and leave a trail of curious
smoke that seems too uniform to come from a fire"
(206). These ships tell of a future Columbus helps to
Chandler 135
create, but cannot understand. The breezes of the
ocean carry the voices of African slaves, European
immigrants, Ashkenazi Jews, "words the admiral
cannot understand: fox-trot, Andes, Immigrant Hotel,
Rio de la Plata, milonga, 'There's gold in them thar
hills, Jim!'" (207). The spatiotemporal region in which
Columbus finds himself is that of the future American
Archive.
Every movement and decision that Columbus
makes creates a new space in the Archive. Although
Columbus is in search of a mythological origin, his
quest is doomed to fail. The events of the future have
already been determined by his very presence in
America. Referring to the ships from the future:
He has observed that he never sees them
directly ahead of the Santa Maria's bowsprit.
It is as if they depended on her battered
wooden prow to cut the veil of time. At
moments when the Santa Maria is becalmed,
or on a long tack - whenever the normal
course is interrupted or delayed-the ships
from the future circle aimlessly. (207)
In this way, Columbus' voyage is similar to the classic
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I part in a later hurricane halfway across the world.
~ The Admiral's quest for an origin creates endless new
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, '. beginnings; new spaces that modify the Archive he so
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much wants to possess.
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Columbus seeks a mythological origin of a stable
Archive, not realizing his every action has morphed
the Archive beyond his control. Considering his
mission to be a messianic conquest of the Archive, the
narrator tells that, "[a]s a descendant of Isaiah, the
admiral knew that he was the bearer of an awesome
responsibility: to return to the place where that trap of
consciousness, that net woven with the threads of
Space and Time, no longer ruled" (150). However, as
the ships from the future attest, Columbus escapes
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neither Space nor Time. Rather, the Admiral is an
unaware architect of new inscriptions within the
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.:a' Archive that will forever change the history of the
world.
As Columbus lives tranquilly under the Tree of
Life, time continues, flows, and percolates as the New
World is constructed just steps away from Columbus'
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Earthly Paradise. The Admiral's rebellion and
insolence cause him to be arrested by agents of
Ferdinand and Isabella (296). Shackled and clothed,
he is marched through the princip~l street, "which in
time would be called Colon Boulevard" (297), that
"led to the plaza and the cathedral, still mainly of
fI logs, but beginning to be sheathed with carved stones
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taken from the native pyramids and temples" (297).
As Columbus walks the streets, he observes "that in
addition to the cathedral many other buildings were
being constructed of masonry or adobe" (298). The
paradise that the Admiral dreamed of was being
destroyed. "He marveled at the profusion of signs:
Santangel Bank & Hawkins Ltd., Bologna Beauty
Salon, Palace of the Inquisition (Semper Veritas),
Cook Travel Agency, United Fruit Company, Castile
Hotel, Sagardua Buffet" (298). In the place of the
mythical Beginning, a new Archive is already being
.
constructed, incorporating older Archives, in an
endless chain of origins. In his native Italian, the final
words of the Admiral, and of the novel, utilize the
imperfect form of the verb "to be" in order to express
his acknowledgement that the present and the future
have already been constructed. Columbus states:
"Purtroppo c'era il Paradise" (301). Recognizing that
"unfortunately, it was Paradise," Columbus realizes
what the reader already knows: the Earthly Paradise
was but a hallucination caused by Archive Fever.
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Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Trans Eric Prenowitz.

. Chicago: U of Chicago p, 1996.
Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. Myth and Archive. A Theory of Latin American
Narrative. 2,nded. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998.
Posse, Abel. The Dogs of Paradise [Los perros del paraisoJ. 1983. Trans Margaret
Sayers Peden. New York: Antheneum, 1989.

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