Ríos, latinoamericanos

Abstract

In Latin America, modern fiction knew how to combine a universal exposure with a local repertoire, that made it encyclopedic and “montonera”, according to Borges, a way of defining itself, alternatively, as "western" but, at the same time, "local" or “national”, although such an equation failed to disguise the paradox that makes encyclopedic desire to be, nevertheless, a symptom of marginality. Exposure or encyclopedia is, indeed, an imperial procedure that highlights regional, social or international margins. It defines provincial or simply backward cultures in relation to other, metropolitan cultures, whose legitimacy rests exclusively on the display, clearly transgressive, on its own excess, of bookish heritage and consequent dominance of the Western tradition. Displaying power and dizzying competition in the cultural and linguistic domain is a paradoxical strategy, not of the centers, but of the cultural margins. Since its first manifestations, insofar history has been lost and we only retain its fragments, Ríos composes a meticulous natural history with his texts, a Naturgeschichte, of which what we understand by history is just one of those fragments, a "palimpsest of insects", a micrological protohistory, marked by metamorphoses, beginning with that of worms.