Lisa Block de Behar. “the City - Between Utopia and Common‐Place

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Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

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The city: Between Utopia and common‐place toRichard Morse, to his “Cities as People”

Lisa Block de Behar

To cite this article: Lisa Block de Behar (2002) The city: Between Utopia and common‐place

to Richard Morse, to his “Cities as People”, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 35:65,55-62, DOI: 10.1080/08905760208594713

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Published online: 10 May 2012.

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E C ITY : B E TWE E N U TOP IA A N D C O MM ON P LA C E

to Richard Morse, to his Cities as People

Lisa Block de Behar born in M ontevideo, is the author of A Rhetoric of

Silence and Other Selected Writings, Dos medios entre dos medios,

Una palabra propiamente dicha, Borges: La pasión de una cita sin fin , and

Obra selecta de Emir Rodríguez Monegal Editorial

Ayacucho,

forthcoming ,

among other works of l iterary

criticism.

Block de Behar was director of

Communication

Sciences

and now

serves

as the Chair of Comm unication

Analysis

at the

Universidad

de la República, Montevideo.

55 Lisa Block de Beh ar


3/9

Troy's down, Tall Troy's on fire

To think of cities today is to think of New York.

Grief

shock, crime, the towers collapsing, the myriad dead:

These images are f ixed. They can't be inserted into a narrative, because that would rend er them dynamic

and changing. Their fixity presents the implausible as permanent. They seem to illustrate a strange ballad

from th e dep th of time : "0 Troy Town 0 Troy Town "

Since antiquity, cities have projected two images, two archetypes, the city and the

destroyed city. The circu mstanc es chang e, but the inevitability of these alternating modalities doe sn't. Is

there no way to avoid these arche types? Are there so few? Mu rderers copy and mock the Scriptures; they

imitate the Homeric poems even though they abominate them as idolatrous and pagan.

Years ago, linguistics, along with oth er theoretical disciplines, showed th at language

organizes its signs in two clear and contradictory directions. The two basic functions of languag e, as

Roman Jakobson envisioned them, are the consecutive combination of signs and the alternative selection

between similar, possible terms. Opposed and united, the acts of selection (metaphor) and combination

(metonyme) not only ordered language but also polarized the forms in metaphoric selection or substitution

or in metonymic co mbination or contiguity to lay the foundations of a rhetoric of the imagination .

Rhetoric of the Imagination

Those same directions determine the nature and orientation of the literary works that

lay at the foundation of the narra tive imagination. On one side, we have the Iliad a narrative that empha-

sizes space a nd devotes itself to events that occur in one place: Ilium. The parad igm of epic discourse

resides in Troy, and a poet—or several poets—tells abo ut the siege of the city, the dram atic episodes tha t

destroyed it, the brutality of war, the shields and swords, the blood and agony. On the other side, we

have the Odyssey, where the narrative emphasizes adventures that take place in many settings. It traces a

dangerous itinerary on a sea as tumultuous as battle

itself

describing the adventures the journey involves

and the cleverness of a character who calls himself "No Man." These fictions administer space and

time in different ways. Is it possible to separate them? That is, narratological taxonomies turn them into

oppositions, but they are inseparable and reciprocal since there is no selection without continuity nor

succession without options.

How to resolve these differences? We might conjecture th at in a city of mo dera te dimen -

sions,

in Montevideo, in this capital of wh at's be en called "a land of nea rnes ses," in plural, proximity

would lend itself to the assimilation and conciliation of these opposites. The m eanin g of these contiguities

implies, aside from the physical nearness they define or the social nearness they assume, what Carlos Real

de Azúa calls the "cordial nearness of a community that beneath an apparent and rigorous partisan cleav-

age has a com mon, a nd virtually una nim ous, h istorical tradition in a figure like Artigas, so clearly sup erior

to the type that in other countries in the Americas fosters polemics and interminable schism."

In one century, Montevideo suffered the tribulations of sieges (by more than one power)

and the misadventures of travel. In an emigration that years later history would baptize with the biblical

nam e "The Exodus of the Pueblo Oriental" (we deliberately use "Oriental," the original designation

of the land on the eas tern b ank of the Rio Uruguay), a large pa rt of the po pulation a ban don s the city. The

designation evokes Exodus and re states the ideals of loyalty and freedom of a people that prefers to

accompany the person it venerates into exile rather than give in and submit to oppression from Buenos

Aires and a Spanish viceroy. The people did not hesitate to abandon their homes to follow José Artigas.



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place in 1 81 1, bec aus e of the first siege of Mo ntevideo, whe n m ultitude s left the city to partici-

de-feat into

ayan pea sants still practice. The nobility of their cause, even if it

Ju an Zorilla de S an Ma rtín, the "Poet of the Nation," in his Epic of Artigas, the culmina-

ef and hope of a people w ho, like the Jews with M oses, follow th e Leader of the Orientales guided by

th in the ideals tha t will become the foundation of the natio n's m yths. They heard—it w as said—

that pas sed saying "Let's go," and a sea of 16,000 people crossed the frontier of the country an d

And the heroes were women, and children, and old people, some very old.

And they were soldiers, a nd families, Artigas's own family, his aged parents, his elder sister

Doña Martina.

And they were semisavage Indians, and they were founders of the fatherland,

Suárez, Barreiro, Bauza. Monterroso. And they were parish priests, and the

Franciscan s expelled from Mo ntevideo for being friends of the bandits. . . . And it was

Artigas himself.

of Uruguay wa s reduce d to a third its size, to less than a fifth part of its inhabita nts,

A short time later, the Second Siege of Montevideo begins. It's curious that Francisco

The Twenty-Two Month

and its grand and happy resolution, with the glorious triumph of the sons of Liberty over the cham-

Spain." In verse, "everything is sung," beginning with the city:

Montevideo, alone, unique.

As if a proud peak set in the middle of the sea,

With no resources, with only its energy, :

Opposes that torrent with its heroism.

Historical Diary of the Siege of Mon tevideo from

At the end, he includes an acrostic as a signature:

F elicitous indeed he, who in the protective motherland

I n the bosom of the objects he most loves

G

ladly greets her new dawn

U niting he r praise to their fame. ¡

E cstatic but for now holding back,

R epressing the shout that bursts my bosom;

0 thers should enjoy my bliss I who in her memory

Am he who reveals her history to foreign climes

In 184 3, just 13 years after the República Oriental del Uruguay wa s constituted, the

der siege and will be until 185 1. Once again, the literary im agination links itself to war,

this time, like Don Quixote, it is Alexand re D umas wh o writes a "curious discourse on arm s an d let-

His memorable title is

Mon tevideo, ou la nouvelle Trole

(1850), dedicated "Aux héroiqu es défenseurs



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de Montevideo." The text was an attempt to persuade the French government and the French people

to favor Montevideo over Buenos Aires, that is the República Oriental over Juan Manuel de Rosas—justice

over Rosas's sec ret police, the M azorca (ear of corn), called by one and all "Más ho rca" (more gallows),

which Dumas translates as "Encore des potences," an improbable etymology that reflects the homonymic

tendencies of French and the bloody crimes of the tyrant.

More at home in a legendary past and more than merely tempted by the attractions of

pure fiction over history, the prestigious novelist here succum bs to the precise details of history and,

with excessive or dub ious facility, gives a minute accounting of them , des cribing the actors as well as the

dramatic events. Because of its surprising erudition and the liveliness of its anecdotes, the novel has

been attributed to Melchor Pacheco y Obes, who traveled to F rance w ith the express intention of not only

winning Dumas's literary support but to stir up as much hostility as possible against Buenos Aires

and the abuses of the upstart "phoney gaucho" Rosas:

II y avait, c omm e on voit, dans tout ce que nous venons de dire, des causes

suffisantes de rupture entre Artigas et Alvear, entre les homm es de Mon tevideo et

ceux de Buenos-A yres. \

Cefut done non seulement une separation, mais une haine; non seulement

une haine, mais une guerre.

A symbol of the city, a coin was put into circulation with just these wo rds on it: Siege of Montevideo. The

memory of the defeat of Troy marks the horizon before which the narrator projects the glorious portrait

of those who defend the city against the acts of "odious barbarism" perpetrated by the forces of Rosas and

his Uruguayan allies. Dumas w arns his read ers abou t the threats menacing the world—which desires

to be a u niversal repu blic of bro ther nations—if M ontevideo, "le dernier b oulevard de la civilisation," falls

to the vandals:

Mon tevideo n'est pas seulement une ville, e'est un symbole; ce n'est pas seulement un

peuple, c'est une esperance; c'est le symbole d e l'ordre, c'est ¡'esperance de la civilisation.

If during the y ears of the siege, the most violent battles in Uruguay took place in print,

if writers jeopardiz ed their credibility in agg ressive pa rty politics, if even historical investigations,

juridical procedures, and diplomatic correspondence all become exacerbated p ropagand a instruments,

if the cam paign extends to P aris and its light, the m itigation of fiction in history becom es equally militant.

Between more or less authoritarian politicians and more or less literary authors, the debate about

authority continue s. ;

Coincidences of Them e an d Place

Now to explain the few theo retical digressions mention ed at the beg inning. If the city

and sailing episodes accommodate themselves to that pair of poetic coordinates, the Iliad and the Odyssey,

they could also overlap. If they did, two of the foundational myths of Western imagination would cross

paths.

What event do the Jewis h people celebrate with g reate r fervor tha n its liberation from

the Pharaoh 's oppression? What greater celebration than freedom? For the Exodus, the Jews abandone d

everything—dwellings, customs, misery, their "limits," which is what the Hebrew word Mitzraim (Egypt)

means. Thanks to the evocation of the biblical story, in the space without place and the time without

time of ritual, the promise of Jerusalem becomes annual, precise, and present. The holy place, halfway

between the common-place and the no-place of utopia, or the desired dwelling place. What city is

more legendary than Troy? What tr ick more atrocious than the h orse? The burning, the m assacre, and the

enslavement configure the Trojan topos, its theme and place. Cycles are not exclusively the privilege

of nature, return also ennobles the city, in the same way the temple or its ceremonies sacralizes time. As

ítalo Calvino puts it, "Memory is red und ant: it rep eats signs so the city may begin to exist."

58 Lisa Block de Behar


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Iterative, analogous, coincidences tur n continuity into illusion and m ake history into e ter-

y. If, indeed, the n am es a re different and th e dates va riable, beyond those details and rep etitions,

he wrote, in his unpaginated novel The City Without a Name, th at in Montevideo or "in any city . . .

y. Because he lives in a city without a n am e. He crossed a hum an limit, and n ow ca nnot re turn from

station," things that exist everywhere . In addition to affirming universality, the city participates

oolhaas says, "that condition according to which each city offers nu me rous possibilities to its

Except for a single reference at the end of his novel

The City,

Mario Levrero omits the

s etymology is doubtful, ob scure," an d, bec ause of that doubt, the origin of the word become s

ike it wa s sha ped by a hat to which w e gave the nam e Monte vidi (the corruption of which they now

Santo vidio)." As Arturo Rodríguez Peixoto kindly pointed out to me: in letters and docum ents, Bruno

ip of Montevideo," in hagiograp hic m emo ry d edicated to Philip V of Spain.

More or less by accident, a few poets also contribute to a species of poetics of absence

e. Jules Supervielle de dicates a poem titled "M ontevideo" to the city, but even thou gh it 's

the City

We find a different tone and frequency whe n we listen to Bioy Casa res's cha racters as

the observations of Alan Pryce- Jone s, an English trav eler wh o visited the Río de la Plata during

/

have sometimes played with the idea of an essay upon the theory that

modern poetry owes half its shape and texture to the city of Mo ntevideo. Mod ern

French poetry in any case. Lautréamo nt (1846-1870) comes from Mon tevideo,

Laforgue (1860-1887) comes from Mon tevideo; so does Jules Supervielle, the fine

poet of G ravitations. And out of the first two come in turn the lemonish force, and

the rambling nostalgia, which modern poets of all countries have borrowed from

the French.

There is no tidy exp lanation for the existence of poets in Mo ntevideo. If the

landscape mattered, they should be born farther north, in Brazil, or inland upon

the Pampas. Montevideo has not even much charm.

. . . The rectangular street-blocks, and the clerks in flannelette pajamas



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do not inspire; although to the credit side mu st b e set really e xcellent wine and a

great variety of bars: sanded plain, crazy, geometrical, or murdero us.

Montevideo seems to have no roots in the country of which it is the capital.

The traveler's perplexity is justified. In the sam e se nse, but m any ye ars earlier,

Rubén Darío had ventured a precariously poetic and even less realistic hypothesis to resolve this astonish-

ment. As he understood things, Lautréamont and Laforgue said they were "montevideanos," not

because they were born in that city but simply to give the impression they were eccentrics. When Darío

speaks of Lautréam ont in his book of literary portraits

Los raros,

he says, "His real name is not

known. The Comte de Lautréamont is a pseudonym. He calls himself 'montevideano.'" The truth is that

"le montévidéen" really was from Montevideo and wrote it. Although Isidore Ducasse disappears

in his work, the alterity, or otherness, of his nature does not: L'autre a Montevideo), his apocryphal nam e

emp hasizes the m ountain that gives his city its nam e. The m ask reve als his civil identity: in his Chants de

Maldoror, "Montevideo, la coquette" contrasts w ith "Buenos A ires, the Queen of the Plata."

When Julio Cortázar writes "The Other Heaven," he has the fiction wander between

Pasaje Güem es, a gallery in Buenos Aires and th e covered galleries of Paris, the sam e passages that fasci-

nated Walter Benjamin, intrigued by the ambiguities of that space, neither exterior nor interior,

neither public nor private, neither covered nor exposed, neither house nor street, but both. A reader of

Laforgue—the other Julio—but obsessed with the dualities of "Le 'fantóme' de Lautréamont," as Rodríguez

Monegal writes in Narradores de esta América, Cortázar identifies himself with the protagonist, who

represents a man from the Río de la Plata living in Paris, between two hemispheres, vacillating between

a doub le identity and a single, divided identity. The coincidences betw een Paul Laurent, Cortáza r's

protagonist, and Lautréamont are significant. In the shadows, it 's hard to make them out: They walk the

same sordid neighborhoods during a period of barricades, they glide through the same lugubrious, pitiful

bordellos, they denounce any doctrine with similar blasphemies, they go from the 19th to the 20th

century, back an d forth, from Buenos Aires to Paris, they pass from biog raphy to story, from one nam e to

the other with the easy naturalness with which the narrator shifts pronouns in mid-dialogue.

The Dreams of Imagination

Before any n ation's jurisdictions becam e global, fiction w as introducing one world into

another, places where conscious life fuses with illusion to the point that one cannot be told from

another. If the dreams of imagination, like those of reason, produce monsters—where beings and species

mix, men and machines, men and animals, men and gods—then hybrids have that plural origin science

confirms. From Buenos Aires, Adolfo Bioy Casares's ch aracte rs usually try to cross the river (the Uruguay

River or the Río de la Plata) to the "othe r Bank," a s Argentines te nd to call the eas tern territory of the

Uruguay River, which wa s the E astern Bank (Banda Oriental), convinced they will find an invention that

will make them happier, the formula that will make them immortal, the immortality of a nearby

"BEYOND," a domestic, familiar he re-and -now right at ha nd. As Bioy Casares pu ts it in his 19 86 tale

"Plans for an Escape to Carmelo:"

Shortly thereafter, the Urugua yans discovered the technique for suppressing

death. . .. Inventions, like the person the gentleman has on the other Bank?. . .

u

forget that the government has forbidden trips to Uruguay . Perhaps we could

go to El Tigre islands and talk w ith one of the boatmen there, the ones that ferry

over emigres, or with a smuggler.

In Bioy's stories and novels, where there are so many biological experiments and

hybrids, we are not surprised either by the use of Montevideo as a setting or by the hybrid nature of his

tale "Ad Porcos," in Love Stories (1982). Because of political restrictions, the story's narra tor cannot retu rn

to Buenos Aires as he'd foreseen. He passes time in Montevideo visiting all of our comm onplaces, w hich



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e alm ost dom estic legends: Plaza Indepen dencia, Soli's Theater, the El Águila res taura nt, Avenida

in the Latin title, which recalls the vulgarity of pigs even if it doesn 't declare w ar on th em , as

Diary of the War of the Pig (1969).

Before biology dedicated its attention to genetic mixtures, fiction h ad already experime nt-

aginary places , utopias erected only in the no-place of writing. Or it transforme d ordinary

The u rba n sagas of Ju an Carlos Onetti linked the two cities of the Río de la Plata in

is introduction to Onetti 's Complete Works-.

Like Florencio Sánchez and Horac io Quiroga, Juan Carlos Onetti is one of those

Urugua yan writers whose work, from the beginning, encompasses both banks

of the Río de la Plata. And not only because Onetti lived for 15 or so years in

Buenos Aires (the years of his literary maturity) and not only because he

published five of his best novels there, but for the extremely important reason.that

the world he creates in his fictions is that of the River Plate city in the 20th

century. Whether it's called Montevideo (as it is in

The Pity

or Buenos Aires (as in

No Man's LandA

or Santa Maria (as in almost all his other novels), the city

Onetti describes, the city where his characters live and die, the city he dreamed to

the point that he made his readers dream it as well, is a city located on the

banks of the vast, muddy , false Río de la Plata. And it is also a city of today.

City of Today

More than the austere facts contained in history, it was the excesses of that vernacular

aur a of illustrious poets, that contributed to inflate Montevideo's limited intellectual environ-

genii loci of the city had scattered or disappeared, with imagination and

Even so, young people are beginning to shake the monotony of the cultural landscape.

will not manage to assimilate them to its own precarious state.

In a well-known dialogue in H opscotch, Ossip Gregorovius interrogates la Maga, who is

montevideana, ironically referrin g to figures of outsize, mythica l prestig e that belong to a city that

"And do people know Lautréamont well in Montevideo?"

"Lautréam ont?" asked la Mag a. . . . "Oh, Lautréamo nt," said [la Ma ga]

suddenly remem bering. "Sure, I think they know him very well."



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"He was Uruguayan, though he doesn 't seem like one."

"No, he doesn't," said la Maga, getting back into form.

Now Cortázar sh ows Horacio Oliveira, the ironic witness to this dialogue:

(He) stayed where h e was, moving his lips in silence, speaking to himself with la Mag a

from within the smoke and the jazz, laughing inside himself at all that Lautréam ont and

all that Montevideo.

All that Montevideo? "The Indian village called Sillyvideo," the poet Herrera y Reissig

said in a very different situation, though h e too was horrified by the unb earab le hypocrisy of Montevideo

society at the outset of the 20th century, horrified by its indifferent complacency, the same things he

would fight today.

Although he was a contem porary of He rrera y Reissig, and fought similar vices, José

Enrique Rodó has a different, d istant, and discrete tone. Perha ps be cause h e didn't give in to the

contemplation of the pettiness of the city and because he was an advocate for the idea that the city was

a crossroads of an empire and since he recognized the universality in which the city participates:

Because a "city" is a spiritual value, a collective physiognom y, a persistent and creative

character. The city may be large or small, rich or poor, active or static;

but what w ill be recognized is that it has a spirit, that it realizes an idea, and that

the idea and the spirit harm oniously link everything done in the city, from the

form in which its stones are arranged to the tone in which its people speak.

("Cities with Soul," in Cam ino de Paros.)

Paying attention to a city mea ns p reserving the trace s of its foundational my ths. It is

a will to preserve the past and an urgent need for continuity, a right that writing with its

droit de citer

vin-

dicates as a

droit de cité.

62 Lisa Block de Behar

Lisa Block de Behar. “the City - Between Utopia and Common‐Place

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