Of the many
problems in constructing an anthology, the one related to determine possible
readers, the audience, is fundamental. An academic anthology will use different
criteria from an anthology created for a general public. In some way, an anthology
will always be a collection of our “sympathies and differences” as the
Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges used to say. When we catalog our library,
we are practicing the arts of the anthologists –but, when we put some of our
books in a separate shelf, out of the general alphabetical order, we are
creating our own personal anthology. The criteria for this personal anthology
could be utilitarian, the books that I will need to prepare or pass a class, or
metaphysical, the books that help me to sort out the works and the days.
National
literature is a concept as desultory as world literature is –both are political
categorizations and academic constructions to accommodate curricula. Literature
is primarily a language experience –the translation of the human experience
into the written language. If I were asked to put together those twentieth
century American literary texts I consider the best, I would be in serious
trouble since that corpus is as massive and consistent as Moby Dick. I would
feel myself as a new Ishmael with the difference that I would not survive, at
least in a literary sense. However, an anthology should be edited and I will
assume the risks of selecting my “sympathies” -those literary texts that I have
read in translation the first time and in its original version, the second.
(And if my potential editor allows me to, I would write brief and pertinent
annotations on my experience as a reader of those works).
Two of the
remarkable aspects of the American literature are the initial, and
foundational, amazement with a paradise-like landscape and a sense of solitude,
of human solitude, in front of that landscape. There are other constitutive
elements in the American literature such as the bloody westward expansion and
the experience of the individuality; both are part of the American literary
tradition. These aspects and elements are driving forces that can be found in a
literature that has been at the same time classical and experimental,
historical and metaphysical, with identical fervor.
I read as a
form of ascetic practice; the aesthetical experience of reading as a form of
facing the most diverse and controversial scenarios; a Barthean’s pleasure of
text, a playful semiotic where you read “text” for “sex” and “textuality” for
“sexuality”.
