A itself as love, First impressions are what count. Perhaps this intuition helps pascalian vague reminiscences to recall the tremendous impression that I caused the final scene of "The vultures without feathers," that tale of Julio Ramón Ribeyro who was immersed in the pages of the New School manuals in late the now-distant 1980's. The picture that Ephraim and Harry get rid of her abusive grandfather, who left at the mercy of pig Pascual in the pigsty of his house, is so touching to eleven or twelve years old, a remarkable force, comparable only with the stark scene of Fellini's La Strada, and even now, rereading the story, is projected city's image as a ruthless beast, undaunted human suffering. Not in vain Ribeyro write this story during the heyday of Italian neorealism, but that I knew many years later.
The following texts were "Logo" and "Dubbing", which read, if memory is unfaithful, in an edition of Populibros, that of newspaper and huge block letters, with titles in capitals. At that time, I delighted in Foucault's Pendulum, perhaps the lowest novel in the literature of Umberto Eco, but captivating by its many allusions to the Templars, the Western Hermetic tradition and all the paraphernalia of the secret societies. It was inevitable the hook to "badge" on the life of a nondescript man from one moment to another, for the mere possession of a badge apparently inane, is disrupted his life, without knowing fully the real meaning of change, hands a guild which used the emblem as a means of recognition of its members. With an overtly parodic, surely Ribeyro was mocking our modern rituals, so used to provide content to almost anything.
"Dubbing" was also a disturbing experience. It is the reason for the double, so repetitive (I found it again in "Lina's eyes" by Clemente Palma, and brought to full expression by Cortázar in "Axolotl" and "The night face up"), yet so fruitful for any storyteller. This story is for fantastic stage Ribeyro, which also owns "On the roof, and one of the most successful of all his production of short stories. If you do a survey now on the best stage in the narrative of Ribeyro, without hesitation I'd choose these years of writing, because they are the freshest, most polished and less ornamental, where a black sense of humor flows sum spontaneity.
is true that university education is left temporarily put aside the mere reason of reading to discover a greater sense leakage concentration, interactions, proliferation and theoretical categories in the texts. First-person narrator, third, narratee, focused, diegesis ... all these terms were expensive to the second cycle of Letters. So was "Alienation", one of the most valuable texts that my fellow university I read in the kind of practice literature course in General Studies. The "story followed by a brief uplifting climax" exemplary condensed narrative Ribeyro talents and I returned it again and again, by the intense rumination that occurs and because over the years and reading the look is refined, in order that the timid and unwary reader can become a skilled smith of some assumptions (all entirely debatable). The issue here is to define, in the case of Bob Lee and Queca, some traits that make them memorable and archetypal characters.
I do not intend to operate in the manner of some sociological readings that have become the story, concluding with the familiar refrain of a hierarchical Peruvian society, and so on. That is not, in my opinion, a valid conclusion, because a tautology repeats present in the story: the notorious division breeds, which is evident in the look of contempt he devotes to sambo mixed Queca Roberto Lopez.
To try to clarify my point of view, we must first make some preliminary caveats. Ribeyro was a passionate reader of Stendhal, Flaubert and Maupassant. In 1956, the narrator writes the article "Gustav Flaubert and bovarysme" (first appeared in the newspaper El Comercio and included in subtle Hunting), term coined by the Frenchman Jules de Galtier to explain the volatile moods of Emma Bovary, caused by such uncontrollable addiction to reading romantic books that were all the rage in the mid-nineteenth century and the completely divorced from a proper sense of the reality. Emma Bovary did not have the feet on the ground because of bovarysme, a hopelessly modern disease.
Another contemporary French critic, René Girard, the author of lie and truth romantic novel, argues that the notion of Galtier, although sufficient, explains only a stage of development of the novel. Girard argues that, "Madame Bovary" looks so much like Don Quixote : both Alonso Quijano as the Norman peasant imitate the desires of characters outside the fictional action: for the Quixote, Amadis of Gaul ; in the case of Emma, romantic heroines who were traveling to exotic countries to realize their ideal love. The closer to the protagonist find a mediator, suffered the first major distortions.
Indeed, with the abolition of nobility and religious privileges forged in the heat of modern revolutions, the distance between people is growing short. Stendhal feelings appear, so far ahead of his time, described as modern, "the envy, jealousy, hatred, impotent. " Now imagine that the mediator is within the action novel that is a character in the plot and who possesses the object that the protagonist longs, thus completing the three angles of desire. The psychological feeling of suffocation increases. The heroes are distant stirrings of a happy ending. Hence the hidden consciousness, almost underground, resentful, that permeates a Raskónikov, a tragicomic Kirilov or Proustian characters. The literature of the absurd would be the next step in the revelation of triangular desire.
This sequence is repeated novelists c ontemporáneos not a matter of tradition, but is close to the surface in the upper layers and lower our contemporary societies. It happens every day, irrevocably. On the street, in ads and even products the so-called popular culture (as in Mexican telenovelas, Brazilian or Venezuelan) we can see this scheme. Are the signs that define our times.
Bobby Lopezhave a strong attack bovarysme compulsive. After copying the Queca gringo boyfriend (or Mulligan or nothing ") and then to Alan Ladd, both outside the scope of Lopez-that wants most desperately, almost metaphysically, is the skin of his opponents. Thus, ironing hair, face, and his English talqueada chewed, traveling from Lima, the "colonial city, to the United States, a WASP society (1) the coastal Creole where to his amazement with the other Bobby Lee in the world. As at present, as is happening to many African Americans and Latino immigrants to the invasion of Iraq, is recruited by the marines to serve as cannon fodder in the Korean front. The end of this whole journey is obvious.
One of the most successful features of the story is that after his fatal encounter, Queca and Bob go through the same vicious circle. Each seeks to rise against all odds in the social scale: Bob, in your neighborhood theaters in the metropolitan New York neurotic, Queca, Plaza Bolognesi to the fields of Kentucky. Of course, progression is gradual. For Queca, it happens as changes from love, each with more symbolic capital, as Bourdieu would say. At the end marries a guy who belongs to the most reactionary stratum of American society, who reminds him of his true origins while intoxicated with whiskey hits.
"Alienation" is nothing but the story of how two people become subjects through the mad pursuit in search of his elusive objects of desire. Conditioned by a society doomed to contempt of the other-and that is the point that aims to strike Ribeyro, our total lack of social solidarity is the basis of ignorance, much as Bob Lee Queca so perfectly constructed images of themselves that they end up losing sense of reality, the direction of their lives.
The mechanics of desire is so compelling that leads precisely the romantic lie, convinced that one extracts the wishes of himself, when in fact the opposite is true (the desire is the desire to Another or, in other words, the cheap, sentimental that detects both the narrator and other characters ), and the story is there to show it. The paradox is that both could not be reached without this lie, which reminds me of Nietzsche's statement: "How many doses of truth is capable of supporting a human being." I think in the case of Bob Queca and not many, since his illness, belonging more to the spiritual realm that the somatic-is incurable.
The other case that merits consideration is that of Santos Diego de Molina, the central character in "The Marquis and the hawks" and who turns the whole plot of this story. Santos de Molina, an old descendant of the old breed aristocratic families in Lima, is constantly fueled by Fernando Hawk and Aliaga, representative of that burgeoning middle class who made a fortune during the boom exporter in the early 1950 and held several progressive political projects that took shape in the next decade, which moved to the alliance between the oligarchy and the military power.
Well, Santos de Molina is completely obsessed with the Hawk and Aliaga. The text is a metaphor for the loss of spaces traditionally assigned to the oligarchy, as the hotel Maury, the properties of downtown Lima and even the possibility of seeking refuge abroad. The desire to Santos de Molina, a nostalgic colonial order, constantly collides with its rival. This conflict describes what Girard calls the double mediation, the most extreme stage of triangular desire.
Here, both the subject and the mediator are in a horizontal position, no longer vertical, as in the case of bovarysme. The obsession with the other is complete. Distortions, as were referring above, definitely are as catastrophic as in the case of Bob, for Santos de Molina, they lead him to a claustrophobic psychosis.
Occasionally I like to expand further details-mately these points, but for now, in the ongoing wildlife that crosses their stories, described Ribeyro us human types burdened by unstable modernity, which in the Peruvian case has generated a great social mobility but also a widening gap between wealthy and impoverished, with consequent disruptions to further separate the castes into which Peruvian society. However, Ribeyro, unlike some of his readers, not try to sociological explanations. He just happened to be the privileged witness of a time when the fast changing face of Peru.
So I seem pretentious interpretations that put Ribeyro as a character in his stories, as they scavenge in the biographical key to understanding their attachment to the stateless skepticism, irony and sarcasm with which he treats his characters. As has occurred with the publication of his diaries, which has opened a vein to such unexpected easy reading. In an interview says
The diary is a genre in which one tells true facts and real. There can be an imaginary diary because that would be a fiction. In my other work if there is fiction, I take my experience, I listen and watch to recreate situations, develop stories, short stories and plays. Literature is necessary to differentiate intimate, the personal diary, and the fictional, present in my other books (2) .
That would be enough to clarify this point. In another interview, in which you want to charge biased racist, ends quietly, but decisively: "I have no aristocrat." These readers should be bothered to check more to the nineteenth century Peruvian writer, who abused until the cows of racial stereotypes. On the contrary, Ribeyro frees his characters from nineteenth-curious ties he had as models the French writers of the time-and circulated, their miseries and grandeur, a sort of "human comedy" of the twentieth century Peru . Hence the special touch subversive acre, a vast black humor that characterizes all his work.
Thus, I laugh along with the passages Ribeyro eccentric "The Marquis and the hawks" or after the great masquerade of "Dust of knowledge", but I have recorded the phrase "The skin of an Indian does is expensive" when the news comes the sneaky ways that the disregard and the ninguneo adopted in Peru through the ominous funnel law that affects us, but not whether we see it, everyone.
In the last years of his life, his return Europe, the writer was the subject of attention of much of the press. When I reviewed the notes for this article, I noticed that the media give him so much coverage, perhaps due to the publication of Temptation of failure or Letters to Juan Antonio (the interviews were accepted by the commitments to their editors, because deep reluctance felt to them.) The truth is that the readership of Ribeyro basically university began to expand with the writer's stay in Peru. Still bear the memory of their presence during the presentation of the fourth volume of the dumb The word, in 1992, the Municipality of Miraflores, where he was cheered. However, to be awarded the Juan Rulfo in that year, this has not happened in other Latin American countries. As Jose Miguel Oviedo wrote in the newspaper El Comercio , a few days the death of the author of Chronicle of San Gabriel :
is unfortunate that the work has been systematically evaded Ribeyro in the American literary scene, for his contribution to the art of the story is endless, not only is one of the most prolific storytellers of this century (he has written more than a hundred stories), but has insisted on the highest artistic category of gender in no way inferior the novel, theater criticism, also known cultivar forms. There is a moral rigorous aesthetic Ribeyro, whose models are not of this time: Stendhal, Maupassant, Flaubert, subtly air Chejov.El retrospective of his work, his indifference to the ways of this and its nostalgic charm so inexorably away, are an ironic (perhaps skeptical) commentary on the world, real and literary, where he lives. After 40 years of continuous production, is still an author that many readers have not discovered. (3)
Why should this concealment, this lack of communication with readers not only Hispanic, but Peruvians? Although foreign literary critics have devoted entire pages, which holds Oviedo is true: ten years after his physical disappearance, the work of Ribeyro still have not caught the rest of Latin America. More likely is that own no interest Ribeyro not be the center of attention, as in the case of some Latin American writers, old and young, who live more than marketing strategies of literary quality. A consistent approach, then, marks the footsteps of his quiet yet abundant and successful-sometimes tedious work in her own words work writer.
About the book tribute to Julio Ramón Sieges Ribeyro (1996), one of the first efforts of the Peruvian literary criticism to outline a systematic reading of our greatest short story writer, journalist Carlos Battle wrote:
ever said it was the Peruvian writer Ribeyro most cited but less read. It may be true. Efforts like this book is greatly reduce the gap that exists between "recognizing" a writer and truly "know", ie, approaching him with reason and feeling alert, being able to assimilate the most subtle and perishable of his art: the right word, the wide and varied knowledge of the language, and, indeed, a fictional universe itself (4) .
Qualities Ribeyro enough to make not only an extraordinary storyteller, which is essential to enjoy the pleasure of a good prose, but in an example of writing, whose teaching is projected onto a radically individual project in a conviction that the literary understood as central to the formation of clear thinking, with all the consequences this attitude towards the opinions that govern modern life. Our task as readers must not stand in reverence or useless repetition of the usual cliches, as they reported their stories. We dare you to discover the secrets and truths of a literary work that awaits us behind the shadows. 
© Giancarlo Stagnaro, 2004 
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(1) WASP : English Acronyms White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant), which corresponds to the values \u200b\u200bof the American Puritans, generally intolerant of foreign elements. Not all inhabitants of Caucasians in the United States fall into this category as it referred to a wealthy circle, exclusive and close to power.
(2) Valentine Ahonen. "Ribeyro: natural disposition for the story." In Trade, section C, May 14, 1993.
(3) José Miguel Oviedo. "Narrative Art of Julio Ramón Ribeyro." In El Comercio, Section A, December 11, 1994.
(4) Carlos Batalla. "Studies on Ribeyro. " In El Peruano, Cultural Section, 24 September 1996.
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