for clarification I take my example from Mexican Luis Zapata's second novel, En jirones (In Shreds), the journal of a much-vexed love affair. At one point in the novel, the (male) narrator explicitly describes his authorial stance in relation to his work. A severely edited version of this authorial positioning reads 'like a man,' that is, it flows along the traditional pathways of an archetypally conceived, heterosexually oriented male discourse: 'Independently of the solicitudes, of the specifications, of the position-taking, and the detailing of desires and preferences, whose author or designated audience could be anyone, I discover a sentence in the Institute's bathroom that seems to address me specifically….' In Zapata's novel, however, this commonplace sentence is interrupted at each point by parenthetical remarks that prevent that kind of active misreading. When the parenthetical remarks are returned to the text, the authorial positioning becomes strikingly, shockingly unconventional, and still, in the Latin American context, largely unacceptable: 'Independientemente de las solicitudes (busco verga), de las precisiones (19 años, la tengo grande y cabezona), o de las tomas de posición (soy puto) y la especificación de deseos y preferencias (me gusta mamar, soy pasivo), cuyo autor o destinatario puede ser cualquiera, descubro una frase en el baño del Instituto que parece concernirme directamente: 'Dame tiempo, papacito: llegará el momento en que me la retaques hasta el fondo'' ['Independently of the solicitudes (I'm looking for a prick), of the specifications (19 years old, I have a big one with a large head), of the position-taking (I'm a hustler), and the detailing of desires and preferences (I like to suck, I'm passive), whose author or designated audience could be anyone, I discover a sentence in the Institute's bathroom that seems to address me specifically: 'Just give me a little time, daddy-boy: the time will come when you'll really give it to me'']. The reader, shaken from the comfortable pathologies of a 'neuter' readerrelationship, is insistently gendered and redefined by sexual preference. Resistance too is subsumed in the prophetic phrase on the bath-630- room wall, a narration still framed, but now out of the closet, the seductive promise of a deferred penetration between men, between a forthright author and a coyly (self) deceptive reader, without the place-holding, face-saving symbolic exchange of women to mediate the act. Zapata's insistently marginalized discourse also intuits the potency of the fragmented fac-simile, the 'transa' that is both otherdirected and profoundly self-critical, and the charge of his hormonal injection is disruptive of the pathologies of least resistance.
Already during the same period in which literary studies were dominated by references to the Boom novelists, the literature of social 'transa' was inventing its place and its form. In Mexico, the literature of disaffected middle-class youth strung out on too much rock, too much sex, and too many drugs was called, at the end of the 1960s, 'literatura de onda' (new-wave literature). The work of writers like José Agustin — De perfil (1966; Profile), Se está haciendo tarde (1973; It's Getting Late), Ciudades desiertas (1982; Deserted Cities); Gustavo Sainz — Gazapo (1965; Rabbitkin), Obsesivos días circulates (1969; Obsessive Circular Days), or the edited volume Corazón de palabras (1981; Heart of Words); Salvador Elizondo — Farabeuf; o, la crónica de un instante (1965; Farbeuf; or, The Chronicle of an Instant), and others has a hyper real quality that is very conscious of its interconnectedness with modern media and modern means of communication. Cars, telephones, televisions, tape recorders, and stereo systems are very much in evidence. Many of these fictions involve preposterously contorted multilingual plots and dashes of provocative metatelephonic analysis with the reader/ auditor, all written to a rhythm falling between the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan — set to mariachi music, of course. In José Agustín's story 'Cuál es la onda' (What's Shaking/What Is the Wave), the group of disaffected youths speak to each other in lines from their favorite rock songs and television shows, and adopt/adapt Americanisms like the exclamations 'Oh, Goshito,' 'buen grief,' or 'en la móder,' call each other 'darlita,' and suggest meeting 'a tu chez.' The rebel-without-a- cause quality of the 'onda' writers now seems a bit dated, but their lingering influence can be discerned in the vexed bilingualism of other writers who sprinkle their works with street slang that includes Anglicisms and loan blends like 'gufeándose jevi' or 'friquiao' or 'fóquin,' as well as in such overwhelmingly popular -631- confections as Guadalupe Loaeza's series of 'chronicles' of high life in the capital. Clearly, we are meant to laugh at the foibles of Loaeza's society women, their concern for being comme il faut, their penchant for shopping (a word Loaeza always uses in English) in New York, their exclusive preoccupation with class (having it, and belonging to the right one), their interpretation of Mexican folklore: huitlacoche crepes, huipiles over Calvin Kleins. Loaeza represents, as she captures, the smug chic of those who find a certain cachet in the practice of épater le bourgeois.
Argentina's Enrique Medina's eloquent Strip-Tease (1976) exemplifies the counterpart and the reverse of such works as those of Agustín and Loaeza. It too enacts a social 'transa,' but his point of view is not that of the rich kid slumming with lower-class companions out of either boredom or political conviction; rather Medina takes as his charge that of defining those characters most traditionally associated with the underworld side of these negotiations. He is well positioned to do so. Medina, who has since the easing of censorship been Argentina's best-selling writer, is one of the few well- known Latin American writers from a lower-class background. His father was a boxer; Medina's first work, Las tumbas (197 2; The Tombs) is a 'testimonio' of his life in a prison for adolescents; Strip-Tease is at least partially based on his own experience as a striptease show director and as a doorman in a house of prostitution. In this work, as in all his later works, Medina insists on what is alternately called 'writing without concessions' or 'contestatorial writing' as he writes in the violent street slang of his marginalized characters and deliberately refuses to prettify the gratuitous violence of their surroundings.
In Strip-Tease, Medina creates a fictional representation of the social pressures obtaining in Buenos Aires's underworld, and the premature adolescence of its youth, their disillusionment and boredom and hatred and impotence that leads them to second-rate striptease shows, dirty massage parlors, and rerun movie parlors. His characters move in a world where violence is the norm; it is his aggressive portrayal of those assaults and rapes, without concessions to dominant morality, that caused his long-term problems with Argentina's censors. This novel, like most of his other books, was banned in Argentina for many years. Like the more privileged characters of -632- Agustín et al., Medina's throwaway people are deeply imbued with Western mass-culture clichés; in their mouths, however, such clichés take on a frighteningly literal twist:
Quién más quién menos, todos iríamos al fondo. La muerte es la muerte and dats ol.
¿Cómo caí en la trampa?…Lo único que sabía era que la inundación seguía subiendo and que no pararía jamás. Nadie se salvaría. Era el fin de todo. Mañana sería un magnífico día.
One more or less, we'll all go down. Death is death and that's all, folks.
How did I fall in the trap? All I know was that the flood kept rising and would never stop. No one would be saved. It was the end of everything. Tomorrow would be a wonderful day.
Strip-Tease is exceptionally powerful in depicting this world of hoodlums and hookers and minor-league criminals who draw from popular culture but deform/subvert it to their own ends.
Other 'transas' with/of literary history have become increasingly common, if understudied: rewriting popular art forms, appropriating high art for alternative contexts, proposing new aesthetics of reading.
Rosario Castellanos, herself the author of two novels generally misread as indigenista, Balún Canán (1957; The Nine Guardians, 1959), and Oficio de Tinieblas (1962; Service at Dusk), recognizes and takes into account a tradition that marks women readers as superficial and morally deficient, but she realigns the
