The Counter-Fiction of Antonia Alaresi

The work of Antonia Alaresi is marked by a necessity of breaking out from the narrative standards of her time. Being the only woman in her generation of writers made her traverse a path that was outside the status quo of a Río de la Plata Literature that was looking to earn a spot at the world stage.

Not much from her work has reached us. Her rejection to be published in anthologies or literary magazines limits her know work to an essay and a collection of poems — the latter thanks to the generosity of Cristina Ludič who donated her collection of five years of love letters between her and Alaresi. The Society Friends of Alaresi was endowed with the task of preserving this material.

Let’s take a look at the literary manifest “Counter-fiction: for a literary production without shackles”, written by someone that defined herself as a writer from the periphery in a constant fight against the centrifuge forces of capitalism.

The main idea posed by Alaresi is that every work of literature, even the most radical of them, follows the function of perpetuating the status quo, allowing that those in power, stay in power, dictating the cultural norms that tell us what’s accepted, what can be said, and ultimately, what can be thought. Her thesis is based in a set of principles that we will see now.

First, Alaresi presents the idea of Encyclopedia vs encyclopedia. The first one refers to the whole of human knowledge, something that no human being possess. The second one, in lowercase, refers to the knowledge that each of us has, a knowledge that’s based in everything that we learnt not only from educational institutions, but also across our whole life, from the relationships with our peers, and of course, from the institutions that govern us. The word democracy has a very different meaning for a twenty century Uruguayan woman than for her peer from the nineteenth century. The first one has the right to vote in presidential elections, while the latter lived in a democracy that limited her voting rights, says Alaresi.

Without the encyclopedia, literature wouldn’t be possible. “George got into his car and drove to the hospital” works as part of a fictional piece because our encyclopedia has the idea of cars, of driving, streets, and hospitals. An author uses our encyclopedic knowledge so they don’t have to explain what each and every element of their work means. Literary works live out of the surplus value generated by its readers, writes Alaresi. Until here, she presents theories that have appeared in different form or shape across the twentieth century. The difference is that Alaresi claims that the encyclopedia is the shackles from which literature will never escape. The encyclopedia dictates what we can write about if we want to be understood by our readers, which has the effect that literary productions aren’t but a perpetuation of the status quo.

In relation with her idea of encyclopedia, we find her position about fictional worlds. They have a parasitic character with regards to our reality, because they feed from our own world’s rules and laws. Whenever the rules in fictional worlds aren’t spelled out, we draw them from our own. George’s car probably requires fuel to run, and does it over streets, all information that’s never explicit in the example from above.

Alaresi uses the following text to get her point across:

Literary works function because they are built in such a way that whenever there’s lack of information about how their world works, the reader is able to find them in their own world, extrapolating those rules back into the world of fiction. There’s a tension at the beginning of A Hundred years of Solitude because we believe the bullet could injure the anatomy of Aureliano Buendía. We apply the logic of our reality into a world that clearly doesn’t work by those rules, as we can see from the deeds of Melquíades the gypsy.

The problem for Alaresi stems from this anchoring of fiction into our own reality, which has no other function than bringing the dominant culture of our society into the fictional landscape of literature. In the end this has the effect that the possible worlds that a society is able to think about, are limited to those allowed by the dominant culture.

Detective fiction is the genre which has the biggest rejection in Alaresi’s manifest, because it’s a genre that in order to work it requires an established social order and a set of stereotypes. There’s a mystery that breaks into reality and which detective seeks to solve, to bring back reality back to normal. Normal according to whom?Asks Alaresi and continues: Normal in a genre that’s plagued with caricaturesque characters trying to fool the reader into thinking that the immigrant is the main suspect, so we find with shock that the honorable store owner was the actual murder; or a doctor that raises suspicion because it has Arab physiognomy, or has a bald head; or a woman that likes to go out at night so she “deserves” to be the victim of a murder. All these stereotypes are in play so the masses that consume this kind of literature don’t question the reality that’s been put forward by the police state that governs them.

Despite all her loath for detective novels, she offered the following commentary about who’s the real murderer when it comes to all kinds of works in this genre: if we assume that the reader decides which rules apply to a fictional world, then it’s the reader who decides that the bullet or the knife have the power of ending the life of its victims. This makes every reader a criminal that walks scot free from every murder that he reads. A conclusion that’s no less interesting.

It’s easy to understand why Alaresi didn’t produce any works of fiction, finding her creative outlet in poetry, because poetry doesn’t need to signify anything, it’s just a game that seeks to break with the biggest and oldest of hegemonies, that of grammar.

In a letter sent to Ludič, Alaresi declares that poetry is the ultimate goal for any writer, because poetry frees the human being from its role of meaning-producing-machine, it breaks with the semiotic function, and avoids to re-present the social hierarchies into the mind of its readers.

Let’s finish this commentary on the work of Alaresi with one of her poems, dated on the 27th of April, 1937.

Nights without neighboring beads
Adorn my whispering
Evil birds of power
Destroys without knowledge
Prison that writes my letters