I have now become more rational with this project, and it is a big achievement. Here is how it is done. Any time I work on this topic I feel crushed by it, like it is a mountain or a slag heap, or a dead body I cannot move out of my way. When you just keep working in this situation you go in circles, and I find myself writing endless prologues or alternate beginnings, and cannot move out beyond these breakers.
In very vulgar psychoanalytic terms you have to quell that mountainous superego and enhance ego. There may well not be a yo de conjunto, as Borges would put it, but an excess of ego shattering is not a good idea.
Even Vallejo, that fractured subject, had a great deal of ego in real life. This is why I like Stephen Hart’s biographical investigations, which insist that Vallejo, no matter what the situation, was never a complete pobrecito, was never like that Pelele character in El señor Presidente, for instance.
Someone needs to do something psychoanalytic on Vallejo, by the way, something serious, and I will note that my first intuitions on him came from listening to Leo Bersani–although I never followed these out fully. (A Future for Astyanax, I wonder, perhaps Astyanax, c’est moi.)
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 