I am putting Arguedas and Vallejo in my book.
The book will be a series of overlapping essays. I can publish some of them ahead and then put revised versions of them in the said book.
One of them, a finished one, is arguably the best thing I ever wrote but is not publishable on its own; it and some of the other pieces will make the book new even if parts of it have been published before.
The book will not propose a definitive or overarching theory.
Neither will it focus narrowly on only a few texts.
It will include discussion of some late 20th century texts, after all.
This is feasible because I am not looking to trace a single trajectory or propose that a single key opens all the doors.
I am saying these things now and this plan will help move things along, but watch the actual book turn out to be much more cohesive than I am now saying it will be.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Vallejo is one of those figures you have to keep going back to. And I mean you personally as well as “you” everybody. Since you wrote dissertation on Vallejo (right?) then it’s doubly good to return. I find the critical problems I was working in my dissertation are still with me. I am still working them out as though it were 1985.
Yes, one always gets all one’s ideas very early on, it seems to me.
Vallejo, I do not know that he will really fit into this book, I am just saying so so I do not have to put off thinking about him. I am going to put in Arguedas for sure.
But, to speak without notes, what are some currents in book?
– more fundamental in LA society and discourse thereof is racial hierarchy, not racial mixture, and this is the situation in which all literary expressions, constructions, refractions, etc. of modernity, the nation, etc. struggle
– that is forbidden knowledge, unspeakable, and this makes the whole discussion all the more contorted
– and it is why all this discussion around transculturation, hybridity, and so on gets so circular
And it occurs to me that this situation has conditioned a lot of the discusson on, precisely, Vallejo. It is not simply that people fall into the biographical fallacy (note in fact that I would favor the creation of an actually good, truly well researched biography and intellectual biography of him) … it is that people, not limited to that extremist Larrea, depend so on the mestizo hypothesis and the imperative to “authentic” “original” “expression” of a Volk when not of humanity.
Hmmmm.
I guess it took a Spaniard like Larrea to construct of Volkisch ideology around Vallejo.
I am trying to think of some other writer who has been called a prophet like that and have not come up with one.
Here’s a piece in _Zurgai_ I had not seen before, that gives a pretty good rundown on this matter. 061995 larrea-vallejo.indd – zurgai
The thing is that it is not even Volkisch, it is worse — Spenglerian or something and amazingly self-serving, not to say parasitical. It is as though JL had to fight so desperately because he had so painted himself into a corner, his existence appears to depend upon a certain view of C.V.