Ghosts of knowledge:

What remains of reading

Dr. Maximiliano Crespi

CTCL/IdIHCS (UNLP-CONICET) / ANPCyT

All reading leaves within the reader a remnant upon which a

knowledge, an image, or a print mark is projected. The erosion of time in

turn produces a sort of sedimentation of that residual charge that is activated

with a delay, inopportunely, usually triggered by events of a diverse nature.

For this reason, even wild, eagerly absorbed readings that are as common in

the vertigo of training as in the respite of the moments of distraction (and

which sometimes seem to go by without leaving much at all), live on in the

reader like “ghosts of knowledge” and work surreptitiously over the course

of their life and through subsequent readings.

In his recent “reader biography,” published by Ampersand in the

extraordinary collection “Lectores” (directed by Graciela Batticuore), Noé

Jitrik seems to confirm this conjecture. The first book that the prestigious

Argentine critic attributes with a decisive influence in his development as a

reader is The Work of Fire, Maurice Blanchot’s text which he bought on the
advice of his friend León Rozitchner, and which “changed his thinking,” to

the point where, after the effort represented by his reading, the young critic

had “the blinding impression” that it had changed his way of understanding

the “literary act.” His Horacio Quiroga, una obra de experiencia y riesgo

[Horacio Quiroga, a work of experience and risk] is without a doubt a

tangible symptom of that dazzling encounter. Not so much because of the

rhetoric of the literary model, but more due to the loyalty of its ethical

foundation: just like the Blanchot that was a reader of Char and Kafka, the

Jitrik of this quite singular book writes from a place of conviction that

literature will awaken in the reader “the desire to come close to that which is

behind what ‘is said,’ to the secret of the literature.”

It’s worth remembering: in the Argentina of 1959, when the publication

of this book occurred, “that which is behind what ‘is said’” was not exactly

the same for everyone. Not even within that circle which quickly and

simplifying called itself “the Contorno group,” that—upon examination—

was rather more of a space where literary perspectives in the making

converged (sometimes in open tension), incarnated by young authors who

shared more weariness for the official literary models than explicit

theoretical affinities. The fact that this strange and delicate book by Jitrik

appeared almost at the same time as Martinez Estrada, A Futile Rebellion by

Juan José Sebreli, and against the backdrop of agitation and bewilderment
produced by the Cuban Revolution, is already irrefutable proof that the

fellowship of Contorno was stimulating, precisely because it still existed in

a state of tension between the desire for literature and the will for political

transformation.

In Fantasmas del saber [Ghosts of knowledge], and unlike what it may

have represented for other names of that generation (like the Viñas brothers

or even the young Masotta), the name Jean-Paul Sartre appears, marking a

somewhat willful parenthesis, where “commitment” and “taking a side”

drive the critic to “leave behind what he had felt before,” in the moment of

his initiation: “that if the reading does not change the reader, reinventing

him, it isn’t reading but affirmation, perhaps a document, put to the test,

usually poorly.” But it also appears praising a literary model: the still

unformalized Sartrean “progressive-regressive method,” which diverged

from the literary work “to find in the person who produced the source, the

existential nucleus that gave way to the imaginary action,” which in Jitrik,

fed, not the illusion, but rather the “sensation” that the critical reading would

acquire the bodily density of a political action and at the same time provided

the opportunity to give an effective answer to the “challenge of writing

something that wasn’t a simple bibliographical commentary or academic

exposition.”
 But if there is something that this new Jitrik book adds and sustains as

an indeclinable principle, it is that reading is not a labor that a subject

(reader) carries out over an object (text), rather an ascetic experience and

transformation of the self, mediated by the encounter with the text of the

other. Jitrik has been insisting on this point for some time now. It’s no

coincidence that, throughout this entire book, he underlines with special

emphasis the defining nature of his encounter with the work of Augusto Roa

Bastos: in his illuminating essay I, the Supreme written in 1990, he

categorically affirmed that “there truly is no reading if the relationship with

the text does not provoke a suspension of disbelief.” This phrase pinpoints

an ethical principle that Fantasmas del saber arrives simply to confirm when

it states, “if reading does not confound, with the share of strangeness and

discomfort that it at times entails, it isn’t truly reading, [because] all reading

proposes, suggests, or imposes some kind of change.”

The fact that these readings have been the cause for labor demands or

institutional rationale does not prevent them from producing a silent

transformation in their readers. The ad hoc readings of Rubén Darío, and the

Diaries of Columbus, Roa Bastos, and García Márquez continue immersing

Jitrik in the dimension of Latin America, while paradoxically, his personal

itinerary sent him from Argentina to France, and from France to Mexico. The

readings and now more systematized rereadings of texts by Neruda, José

Emiliano Pacheco, Carpentier, Onetti, Arlt, Cortázar, Arguedas, Marechal,

Donoso, Bioy Casares, and Di Benedetto caused him to suspect that the idea

of “national literature”, rather than strengthening it, instead constrained the

political horizon of reading and left out a series of relationships and linkages

between literature and life that generally tend to be undervalued. Jitrik

demonstrates his acknowledgement when he affirms that Latin America

opened up before his eyes in Mexico, “because of its people, its landscapes,

and for the purpose of this book, [because of] its literature,” to the extent that

it forever marked his destiny. From there he read and reread Rulfo, Alfonso

Reyes, Nicanor Parra, Augusto Monterroso, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz,

Lezama Lima, and José Vasconcelos as if they were projected over the map

of Latin American experience; but above all it was there that he struck up a

relationship with the voice, the texts, and the contagious readings of Margo

Glantz, which in turn brought him to books by Manuel Payno, Julieta

Campos, José Luis González, Vicente Riva Palacio, and Justo Sierra

O’Reilly, among others.

Without a doubt restlessness predominated in these strong Latin

American readings, not only because they called into question the order of

knowledge that was thought to be established, but because they forced him

to take on a new disposition. Jitrik read and taught (himself) to read amidst

the tension in which he pens his readings to this day: “moved by an intention
for critique and distancing,” but without discounting the emotive dimension

of reading. Reading that corpus, which contains advances and retreats, heroic

feats and base trickery, upheavals and abdications, has turned into his way

of experiencing a concrete world by way of a literature. Latin America was

already his territory: the space, at once intellectual and poetic, political and

affective, in which reading exerts its enchantment and its power of

transformation.