Literature in
the margins: a new canon for the XXI century? (1)
Ana Maria
Amar Sanchez
The second half of the XX
century has
been a time noted for the appropriation of images and conventions
specific to mass
culture. Indeed, it has proven to be the completion of a process of
expansion
of popular forms initiated more than two hundred years ago. Culture can
no
longer be thought of as a totalizing system but rather a series of
discourses
in conflict, battling to attain legitimacy as privileged forms of
representation. Among them, mass culture has been one of the most
evident
agents of crisis and destabilization for the categories used to think
about
art; it has effected fundamental changes in the very notion of art by
exposing
a multiplicity of aesthetic possibilities. In addition, the fall of
avant-garde
utopias coincided with the break of the opposition between consumerism
and
experimentation; in other words, the distinction between popular
genres, taken
as “pleasing and unproblematic,” and art. After the experimental
neo-vanguardist texts of the sixties one of the possible options became
the
reworking of a tradition that struggles to gain space in Latin American
culture
and has produced a continuous game of contact with and distance from
those
vanguards usually taken as the tradition's antithesis. In fact, the
presence
and development of popular forms in
This antagonistic play with
tradition
brings to mind the debate surrounding yet another dichotomy that sets
the
avant-garde against mass culture: these two terms, used as keys to many
studies
about camp and pop, constitute an exemplary summary of one of the
classic
methods used to read the differences between “high” and “low.”
It may be precisely here where the present historical axis is evinced,
when it
is no longer possible to confront the codes of mass culture with the
avant-garde. We must remember that Vattimo, in “The Death or Decline of
Art,” indicates how historical avant-gardes are taken as point of
departure to verify “a wider phenomenon of the ‘explosion’ of
aesthetics beyond the institutional limits which are assigned to
[them].”(2)
A decisive factor herein is the impact of technology as spelled out by
Walter
Benjamin in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.”(3) In other words, the media of
technology enacted
a radical modification of artistic practices which became more
pronounced
during the sixties, when certain expressions, such as pop art,
underscored the
weakening of the oppositional force and seized the revulsive capability
and
political intent inherent in the avant-garde. We are dealing then with
a
cultural phenomenon wherein the vanguardist gesture may be read through a process of mediative assimilation.
If critics agree that the
avant-garde is
no longer possible today, the aesthetics which since the sixties have
turned to
technological media and popular forms seem most able to bridge the gap
between
“high, experimental and politicized art” and “mass,
consumerist and alienated” forms. And at the end of the XX century,
when
the contact between artistic forms and mass culture begins to be
considered as
part of a tradition, one may think of their interface as a space of
dissolution
for certain dichotomies, or of fusion, confrontation and debate of
certain
others; that is to say, a political space par
excellance.
In every case, the contact
with popular
forms always implies a transformation, a distortion of the codes used;
elements
are subverted while genres, discursive and aesthetic practices, and
levels of
language merge. Texts engage in a contradictory movement: they approach
mass
culture and include it, but at the same time, establish a guarded
distance from
it. This link with “low” forms is sustained in the ambiguity of a
relationship I have defined as simultaneous “seduction and
betrayal:” there is a tendency to erase
hierarchies and appropriate from the “low” only to reinstitute
differences that distinguish the texts from those “margins.”
Indeed, accepting that one is dealing with a literature that explores
those
“lesser” forms presupposes in some way the tacit recognition of a
“center”, a “higher” culture from which all contact is
performed.
This movement of appropriation
produces a
mobility of frontiers which are yet never erased; in every case we are
dealing
with a narrative that belongs to the literary system, out of which it
is
written—and read. As such, it enters into a permanent relationship with
the canon in a search to replace it and occupy its space. “Low” or
“lesser” forms constitute those practices that have not yet been
incorporated into literature or are situated at its limits. They imply
a
changeable relationship, charged with tension, in which various modes
of
convergence can coexist. If a process of disqualification and exclusion
has
predominated, rejecting and omitting popular and mass forms from
canonized
culture, the literature considered here has also opened up a much more
fluctuating space: The use of these forms always implies, in spite of
restored
distances, an acknowledgment and entrance into the system, functioning
as a key
space for the negotiation between
cultures.
The literature
that has searched its margins for new alternatives reproduces and
quotes texts
and genres belonging to mass culture, known for its “redundancy”;
however, in its new emplacement, this redundancy generates something
quite
distinct from the simple comforting, alienating, and repetitive
pleasure
attributed to popular forms. The aesthetics of modernity have been very
severe
with those products of mass culture that provoke an alienation derived
from
their serial form. For instance, a police novel or a cowboy movie are
both
considered examples of preestablished models and, therefore, cannot
even be
judged as art. Far from “artistic creation,” they maintain a
preordained schema and are, in Adorno’s words, the products of a
“cultural industry.” Mass forms, formulas and repetition are
associated with pleasure, and their escapism leads fatally into
depolitization.
If good literature is commonly defined by its capacity to break the
codes to
which it is subjected, then popular genres may never be able to share
its
space. Postmodern aesthetics propose, in turn, a reworking of the idea
of
repetition through the transformation of formulas and genres. The use
of
seriality in these stories generates other contracts with the reader
which are
in play between a recognition—“the regressive pleasure in the
return of the expected”(4) with its consequent
solution reduced to
clichés—and a difference, the variation which deviates,
transforms
and distances itself from the formula.
This distance which operates,
for
example, between Luis Rafael Sánchez’s narratives and the same
mass forms on which they draw, opens other alternatives of reading.
Umberto Eco
reminds us that both repetition and pleasure have been condemned by
avant-garde
aesthetics, especially by the neo-vanguardist movements of the sixties,
which
associate difficulty with the break from alienation, and entertainment
with
alienating comfort. However, with the beginning of pop art, when the
differences between experimental art and mass art dissolve, the
aesthetics of
modernity make room for postmodernity, and a new perspective rises from
which
to consider enjoyment and consolation: consumerism and provocation are
no
longer irreducible oppositions. In Postcript
to The Name of the Rose Eco revalues the concept of entertainment
and
recovers popular forms, adopting a “postmodern attitude” for the
use of mass culture as “quotation”: “[...] quotation could be
less escapist than the plot
quoted.”(5) This is the point of inflexion from
which one may
think of a literature that appeals to consoling formulas while
exercising on
them a certain kind of conversion. A new contract with the reader is
instituted
which challenges him to simultaneously acknowledge the familiar and the
innovations where difference lies.
The calculated
use of quotes reflects a work of approximation and distancing, a
contact which
always involves a transformation; it is therefore a metalinguistic game
in
which quoting always recognizes an affinity while at the same time
institutes a
difference. The ironic distance implies a calculated metareflexive
gaze, such
as the gaze of Almodóvar's viewer who revels in the boleros and
the camp
in his movies with the knowledge that they respond to a quotation of
codes; he
or she neither “takes them seriously” nor disqualifies them. The
link these texts propose is no longer resolved or explained by the
notion of “consoling
pleasure;” an appeal is made to the attraction of formulas, but other
uses are elaborated: The self-conscious quote becomes a system of
remittances
to codes that do not assume any value judgment. Distant then from “high
culture’s” scandalized disavowal but without the seriousness or
innocence of mediated forms, a new alternative is designed to confront
the
mechanisms governing these narratives: they all appeal to the charm of
formulas
and seduce with the promise of a known pleasure, but postpone and
deceive that
promise by always transforming their codes at a key juncture. The space
that
engenders the reader's frustrated expectation is the site of difference
between
the texts and the mediated forms. A story like Kiss of the
Spider Woman by Manuel Puig demonstrates that one may
exploit the potential charm of formulas without complying with them,
establishing a simultaneous “amorous and unfaithful” relationship
with popular forms: these are integrated but only to mark their
difference,
which is the difference of the other
culture. And it is in that space, which constructs a difference
between
expectation and deception, where a political reading becomes possible.
The narratives which
particularly
interest me belong to a period of time strongly dominated by mass
media, when
authors such as Manuel Puig or Luis Rafael Sánchez, and their
use of
mediated culture, were already becoming canonical. They initiated the
development in
I think of this production as
a universe
in which—beyond the most obvious differences—nets have been cast
and true constellations have been formed which connect Caribbean
narratives
with others in the Southern Cone or in
Perhaps one of the most
notable networks
in Latin American literature in the last thirty years is organized
around the
exploitation of camp and pop aesthetics. The stories by authors such as
Luis
Zapata or Ana Lydia Vega have become almost canonical and as such
exercise an
“authority” which invalidates any notion of marginality; the margin,
the “low”, now inhabits the center. It could be said that these
aesthetics provide the axis for the articulation of the texts: they
turn to
camp to construct a narrative that inverts its signs and questions all
accusations of frivolity and depoliticization. It is thus a narrative
which
becomes political precisely through its use of “depoliticized”
forms. This gesture of inclusion of vulgarity can most clearly
represent the
constant challenge proposed to “high literature” as well as the
permanent contest to occupy its space. (6)
We are therefore witnessing
the formation
of a new canon; camp and pop have been particularly exemplary in this
process
because, while operating from a space “high” culture has greatly
resisted (as it resists any manifestation considered in “bad
taste”), they came to be dominating forms. Mass culture or consumerist
formulas are quoted in these texts as metaphors for an aesthetic whose
margins
are always in dispute within an already exclusionary system. This
self-representative
exercise is also a sign of the new space conquered by this narrative.
Self-reflection, where a quote refers to its own code, is only possible
when
the code can already be recognized as canonical and when a broad
collection of
texts can be read taking it as their point of departure.
The process of consolidation
of this
“new canon” achieves its completion in the narrative collected
under the controversial and polemical but highly effective name of McOndo group. The stories of Alberto Fuguet (Mala
onda; Por favor, rebobinar), (7) Sergio
Gómez (Adiós Carlos Marx, nos vemos en el
cielo), Edmundo Paz Soldán (Sueños
digitales), or their anthologies (McOndo;
Cuentos con walkman) offer aesthetics that best consolidate mass
culture
into the literary system. These narratives seem to bring
to a close a long
tradition of struggle, appropriation and resistance and can be seen as
the
product of a time when the presence of mass media has been effectively
“institutionalized:” They are the culmination, at the turn of the
century, of that long history of links with mass culture. Indeed, their
wager
on mediation serves as an attack strategy intended to open margins in
order to
gain ground and position themselves as canonical, to the extent that
they have
been accused of a total fusion with mass media that threatens to render
them
“unliterary.” However, I believe that they revisit and use numerous
literary lines: they are the indisputable heirs of an imaginary which
belongs
to Puig, not in its precise contents, but certainly in the gesture that
seeks,
in a fin de siècle equivalent, the material with which to form
new
representations of the world. US films from the 1940’s, serials, radio
theater, and middle class cultural clichés form the system upon
which
Puig’s narratives are assembled. Pop culture, rock, movies from the
1980’s and other audiovisual forms, and bourgeois rituals of the
1990’s perform the same function as the cultural imaginary of the
“McOndo” texts.
A short story by Fuguet,
“Más estrellas que en el cielo”(8)
included in the
anthology Se habla español,(9)
indicates to what extent this process has been developed and
accentuated.
Subtitled “cortometraje,”(10) its opening
scene at the bar
of an American cafeteria remits us to many movies, but, most
significantly, to
Edward Hopper's oeuvre and his painting “Nighthawks,” a title that
seems highly pertinent to the short story. With its artificial light
and
characters that evoke the film noir of the forties, the painting in
turn seems
to reproduce the scene of a movie. And in fact, the text stages this
relationship with “an encounter” between Edward Hopper, Tim Burton
and David Hockney: (11) film, painting, and
painting which remits to
film reproduce an “image” of literature.
“Cortometraje” reminds us of
those texts which Puig subtitled “serials” or “police
novels” and which are invaded by
Scenes that reproduce other
scenes; we
are at the heart of a literature that presents itself as artifice and
quote but
whose procedures specifically remit not only to the mediative, but to
“erudite” forms such as the nouveau roman. The narrator’s
indications: “Beyond, out of focus,
I see the disco shop” or “beyond
the frame” (“Veo más allá, fuera de foco,
la disquería;” “fuera de cuadro”) (13)
echo
the game in the narratives of Pacheco, Leñero or Elizondo of the
seventies where the planes of “truth” and “fiction” are
blurred. A phrase like “Jennifer López picks up our plates”
(Jennifer López nos recoge los platos”),(14)
remits us both
to now canonical modes of description and definition which, in Ana
Lydia Vega
or Luis Zapata, appeal to comparisons with mass culture, and to the
games of mise en abîme characteristic of
experimental novels. Couldn't it effectually be Jennifer López
acting
the script we are “reading?;” might it be: “Scene six, take
one. Extreme close-up inside Denny’s at night” (“escena seis,
toma uno. Cafetería Denny’s Interior/Noche. Primerísimo
Puig’s novels raised the
problem of
how to write literature incorporating cinematographic dialogues and
myths;
Fuguet’s story proposes a writing to translate images or constitute
itself from images that are themselves already a translation and
intersection
of various mass and literary codes. We do recognize in Fuguet the same
gesture
of his predecessors: the quote of the mediative form constructs the
narration.
However, this gesture seems so canonized that the narrative displaces
its focus
to those artistic forms that have already assimilated and incorporated
the
products of that imaginary as in Hopper’s or Hockney’s painting or
Burton’s film. This is how the text transforms into disenchantment the
fascination Puig’s or Zapata’s protagonists had for the aura of
film stars. Fuguet’s characters, failures of the system, reinstate
“from
within” the script, the scene, or the movie, the impossibility of
mediative illusion, the desolation of defeat: as a result, the narrator
discovers that the wager on Hollywood and American mediative culture
has been
futile because “there are no more stars in heaven” (“no hay
más estrellas en el cielo”) as is proven before the words
“The End” (“Fin”).
Unlike their predecessors,
“McOndo” texts seem absolutely assembled through media
culture; the “excess” in the challenging
gesture to construe narratives with
mediation is the only apparent point of cultural reference. The texts
are a
display of codes and signs from that culture and they themselves become
a code,
a sign—“McOndo”—that defies other literary forms
already considered canonical (especially magic realism).(16)
However,
the narratives are also a compendium of erudite quotes and remittances
to
“high literature:” Sueños
digitales,(17) by Paz Soldán, is a
science fiction narrative
with echoes of Philip K. Dick but also a postmodern electronic version”
of The Invention of Morel (18)
by Adolfo Bioy Casares, that in turn remits us to a short story
apparently as
distant as “The Vampire”(19) by Horacio
Quiroga, published
in the collection Más allá
in 1935.
Sueños
digitales
explores every possibility of image reproduction; all of reality is, or
is
confused with, photography, television screens, computers, electronic
games.
The characters are involved with images in one way or another. This is
when
ambiguity and the confusion between the real and the artificial become
exasperating; everything turns out to be simulacrum, montage, digital
life and
“magenta.” The expression “to digitalize reality”(20)
could summarize the narrative and, in its turn, connect it to The Invention of Morel. The protagonist
of Sueños digitales works by
inserting and erasing the story of characters and scenes, accomplishing
for
others what the narrator of The Invention
of Morel attains himself towards the end of his story: to form
part of
history and create a montage equivalent to the one that incites his
admiration
in films. Morel’s machine, an archive of images and producer of
artificial phantoms in Bioy Casares’s narrative, finds its postmodern
version in Sueños
digitales’s computer, and Morel’s phrase, “My companions
and I are illusions; we are a new kind of photograph,”(21)
becomes
the point of intersection for the three narratives, is valid for all
three and
reminds us of the phantom in “The Vampire,” a “hallucination
in motion.” New types of photographs, forms “derived” from
film, new modes of manipulation; these three stories revolve around
three
unattainable women: Nikki, with the nomenclature of a photographic
camera and
within whom everything is “possibly false,” is a replica in Sueños
digitales of the character
of Faustine in The Invention of Morel,
a pale and unattainable shadow, double of the ghostly actress in “The
Vampire.” The feminine shadow sets in motion the narrative and the
always
suicidal actions of the protagonists.
In each case, there is a quest
to entrap
the real, modify it, produce it or reproduce it from a machine, and the
artificial is selected as the most perfect form of life. We are again
at the
heart of the debate about the media. Those machines that kill as they
offer
immortality (at least a certain kind of immortality), extensions of
film or
computers coded as science fiction, are the forms of a mediative
culture that
vampirize the real. It is not by chance that the title of Quiroga’s
story
is reiterated with Lestat,(22) the name of the
computer in Sueños digitales. Vampirism,
furthermore, enters into a reflexive relationship; the manipulator or
inventor
will always end up swallowed, erased by his machine. Therefore, life is
the
price one must pay for the illusion of immortality. To reproduce,
manipulate,
falsify, preserve: it is interesting how these texts, especially Paz
Soldán’s novel, where it is most explicit, dramatize the central
polemic of mass media. In Sueños
digitales, these forms of transience par
excellance, responsible for the loss of historic memory, state
their
essence as they exhibit their reverse: the possibility of erasing, by
digitalizing images, the sinister past of a dictator easily
identifiable.
However, they are also the only possibility (as archive of negatives)
to
reconstruct the past in a future without hope, where, as in Bioy
Casares and
Quiroga, real life has been killed and replaced by images.
As The
Invention of Morel before it, Sueños
digitales summons in one space, in the reproduction of images, a
utopian
project which is also a totalitarian distopia (let us remember another
novel by
Bioy Casares, A Plan for Escape, with
its island-prisons, one of which has a castle, an obvious Kafkaesque
quote
reiterated in the citadel where the protagonist works). Digital beings,
dreams
or chimeras, become nightmares and follow the same course of the
“artificial phantoms” in the previous texts. Death is always the
only exit awaiting the protagonists trapped by the images. If in Bioy
Casares
entering the ghostly story conjures a form of immortality, in Sueños digitales suicide (which
inverts the end of The Invention of Morel
by erasing images before people) moves one step further into a distopic
resolution. No illusion survives, and if there is any possibility for
memory to
endure, it can only be found in the archive of negatives. It is
interesting to
observe the distance that mediates between the protagonist, who during
childhood “used to cut magazine photographs” (“[se] pasaba
recortando fotos de revistas”), making collages he labeled “sad
photomontage” (“tristes fotomontajes”)(23) and
Toto,
the character of Manuel Puig’s Betrayed
by Rita Hayworth, for whom the same activity represents the
entrance into
the imaginary and, consequently, into cinematographic illusion.
Sueños
digitales,
therefore, builds on an “erudite” tradition that questions from
early on the presence (and effect) of the media, is disturbed by its
“fatal results,” and attributes few alternatives for
“salvation” to its capacity for historic memory. Crossed by lines
which intersect cyberpunk literature and an impeccably “high and
erudite” science fiction, it thus seems to contradict the
“anti-literary” accusation which befalls the McOndo group.
McOndo’s stories have been
seen as
exemplary “postmodern” representations of mass culture and, as
such, as depoliticized narratives whose only interest lies in their
consumerism. However, the texts implicitly define the historic
crossroads in
which they take place: those hostile spaces of Por favor,
rebobinar or Sueños
digitales, the solitary individualism of subjects with their gaze
fixed on
the screen or listening to music isolated in their walkmans, design the
landscape that lies beyond catastrophe. In the era following Latin
American
military dictatorships nothing is left to find or hope for. All utopian
possibilities have been abolished: we are dealing with a world where
individuals are powerless spectators. It is here where the stories
advance
another reading; the representations of these “empty” spaces,
replaced by a mediated culture in the formation of experience,
construct a
figure which may be read as the political evaluation of an era.
Isolation and
refuge in virtual culture provide an escape from a dangerous world
where it is
no longer possible for anyone to see his or her reflection in the gaze
of
others. (24) In these narratives, the
television screen or computer
games (such as the images manipulated by the protagonist in Sueños
digitales) allow us to
“digitalize” reality and forget history but they also cancel all
alternatives for escape.
McOndo stories may be read
then as a
hopeless and highly politicized representation of life in a space
demolished by
dictatorship. Through these texts, the media reproduce the
contradictory role
that has been assigned to them in debates: they are havens which secure
the
evasion of thought while simultaneously eliciting—and justly so—a
reading of alienation. We may then consider this narrative as the
result of a
double strategy: on the one hand, it inherits the tradition that thinks
of the
link to mass culture as tension, appropriation and difference. At the
same
time, at the end of the century these texts can no longer confirm any
distance
from a culture that has invaded everything and is the access road to
experience; this rapprochement has
eliminated all possible hopes in mass culture. At this juncture, the
world is a
solitary space, undifferentiated and dangerous, where the only possible
speakers are virtual and where mediative signs have become the last
refuge to
which one may retreat. Read from an Adornian perspective, these
stories, which
engage in apparent and deceitful depoliticization, are assimilated into
the
production of mass culture; however, they also conceal another reading
whereby,
with different strategies, they place themselves within that literary
tradition
that has politicized the stories through
mass culture.
In the “McOndo” narrative,
therefore, we witness the culmination at the end of the millennium of a
network
of affiliations, a textual chain reiterated throughout the century with
gestures and strategies, appropriations and differences from mass and
popular
forms: an unsteady equilibrium underwritten by the attraction and
desire to
exploit their possibilities, but also by the need to secure distances.
This
game of complex ambiguities constantly restores the distinctions
between
“high” and “low” cultures; it exposes the impossibility
of absolute fusion, the dismissal of hierarchies, and reminds us that
all
readings of cultural difference—including this reading—imply a gaze
from another space. But at the same time, and this is where its
fascination and
political signification lie, the game can only be articulated with and through these unprestigious
forms, incorporated in order to change
and destabilize the frontiers of the cultural map. As the new century
begins,
these narratives propose themselves as a new canon whose greatest
seduction is
its constant questioning of every attempt at becoming fixed, of being
confined
within already defined spaces. With the unending pleasure of unstable
equilibrium with which they enter the XXI Century, they occupy a
dominant space
and remind us that literature always defies what has already been
consolidated
and accepted as sacred and indisputable.
Notes
(1). Translated from
Spanish by professor
María de Lourdes Dávila. This essay may be taken as an
addendum
to my book Juegos
de seducción y
traición. Literatura y cultura de masas (Games of Seduction and
Betrayal. Literature and Mass Culture) [
(2). G.
Vattimo, The end of Modernity. Nihilism and Hermeneutics
in Postmodern Culture,
translated by Jon R. Snyder,
(3). W.
Benjamin, Illuminations,
(4). U.
Eco, “Le Lacrime del
Corsaro Nero,” Il Superuomo di
Massa,
(5). U.
Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose,
(6). This
tension is very evident in Luis
Zapata's novels. El vampiro de la Colonia
Roma (The Vampire of the Roma Colony), for example, postulates
itself as a
“border” narrative; its genre margins—in its dual
meaning—install the narrative in a constant game of remittances between
the center/canon and margin/countercanon.
(7). Alberto
Fuguet, Bad Vibes, Please, Rewind;
Sergio Gómez, Good-bye Carl Marx,
We'll See Each Other in Heaven; Edmundo Paz Soldán, Digital Dreams. Anthologies: McOndo; Stories
with Walkman.
(8). “More Stars than in Heaven.”
(9). Alberto
Fuguet and Edmundo Paz
Soldán (comp.), Se habla
español [Spanish Spoken Here]
(11). “We are in a Denny’s with
aesthetic pretensions. Edward Hopper meets David Hockney with a twist
of Tim
Burton to add some flavor” (“Estamos en un Denny’s con pretensiones
estéticas. Edward Hopper meets David Hockney con un twist de Tim
Burton
para darle sabor”), 113.
(12). “Más
estrellas,” op. cit., 113.
(13). “Más
estrellas,” op. cit., 115-116. Italics added.
(14). “Más estrellas,” op.
cit., 119.
(15). “Más estrellas,” op.
cit., 119.
(16). In
the prologue to McOndo, which may be taken as the
group’s manifesto, the authors specifically situate themselves against
and beyond magic realism, an aesthetic already accepted as canonical
for Latin
American literature, especially in the U.S.
(17). Edmundo
Paz Soldán, Sueños
digitales [Digital Dreams], La
Paz: Alfaguara, 2000.
(18). Adolfo
Bioy Casares, La invención de
Morel, Madrid: Alianza, 1991. Translated into English
in The Invention of Morel and Other Stories (From La trama
celeste),
(19). Horacio
Quiroga, Más allá [Beyond]
in Cuentos completos [Complete
Short Stories], Volume II, Ed. Carlos Dámaso
Martínez, Buenos
Aires: Seix Barral, 1997.
(20). The
image is defined as the
“digital impact in the stagnant waters of truth” (el impacto
digital en las aguas estancadas de la realidad;” 68) and the
manipulation
of images is a constant at “the hour of digital dreams” (“la
hora de los sueños digitales;”238).
(21). Bioy
Casares, A., The Invention of Morel, op. cit., 65.
(22). Character
of Anne Rice’s
vampire novels. It first appears in Interview
with the Vampire and becomes the protagonist narrator of The Vampire Lestat.
(23). “I used to spend all my time
cutting photographs from magazines, I loved making collages [...] A sad
photomontage. It doesn't compare [to digital images]” (Me la pasaba
recortando fotos de revistas y me encantaba hacer collages
[...] Un triste fotomontaje. Ni para comparar [con las imágenes
digitales]”), 18-19.
(24). ‘[...] both looked at Pixel crouched over a forest of deeply saturated colors on the computer screen. They came closer; Pixel gabbled in a foreign tongue [...] Sebastian tried to get closer and lose himself in an embrace. However, motionless, he could not move one step, while his eyes wandered toward the lifeless computer screen.” (“Ambos observaron a Pixel agazapado sobre un bosque de colores supersaturados en la pantalla del computador. Se acercaron; Pixel farfullaba en una lengua extraña [...] Sebastián quiso acercarse y perderse en un abrazo. Sin embargo, no pudo mover un paso, y se quedó inmóvil, desviando los ojos hacia la pantalla apagada del computador.”) Sueños digitales, 225-228.
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