Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

218 reframing latin america
moral ambiguity by fi at. When Santos forces the issue, the authority in town
settles the question of property with a legal-speech act: “the laws must be
fulfi lled just because, otherwise they wouldn’t be laws, that is, orders from
the Government” (107; 177–178). Thanks to this kind of tautological voluntarism,
Santos accepts that his entitlement is merely legal fi ction; yet he
accepts it all the same as constitutive of a modern order. And he is willing
to consider the fi ction foundational because, in this self-serving tautology,
it promises to found something. If law is merely simulacrum for the right to
possess, it nevertheless can stabilize the irrational dissemination that Bárbara
puts into motion (her androgynous eroticism, her scattered cattle and
boundless borders). The simulacrum can become a horizon for future representations;
it can domesticate the llano’s mirages by fencing in the land, by
writing clearly. Truth, in other words, need not be the immutable given that
Barquero demanded; it can be a procreative assumption. Although Santos
may have no real genealogical claims, the legal fi ction allows him to make
generative claims, like the ones made in romantic founding novels. And
like the language of love and politics in those dialectical romances, Santos’s
legal language has no a priori grounding; instead it lays the ground for productive
relationships.
The analogy is hardly fortuitous. Marriage, after all, is a fi ction, a contract
that can be read as an allegory of the Law of the Llano. It makes no
genealogical claims to legitimacy, since marriage partners need hardly be
blood relatives; but it does make a promise of productivity. And Santos’s
projected marriage to Marisela both repeats and makes possible, in a familiarly
dialectical way, the legal fi ction aimed at populating the desert [. . .].
But this is to dwell on the difficulty of establishing historical legitimacy,
the very problem the future-looking contract can displace. Legitimation
here is not retrospective but proleptic, through the resourceful management
and the procreative marriage the legal fi ctions project. By contrast, Bárbara’s
equally fi ctional claim on the land promises to found very little. Maternity
for her was an infuriating victory of men who reproduce themselves
on women; and management was left to traditional terror (28; 40). Santos
plans to populate the llano with legitimate children; Bárbara doesn’t. This
practical difference allows us to sense a shift from the moral to the legal
questions this novel raises, from personal claims to patriotic duty, from genealogical
rights to the generative responsibility of fathering the fatherland.
It is a responsibility that Gallegos and Santos can translate imperfectly but
pragmatically into the transparently constructed but nonetheless effective
difference between better or worse for civilization, for or against the necessary
fi ctions that will ground productivity and prosperity.