In search of our critique: On Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Ernesto Sábato, and Ángel Rama

Abstract

This article studies, from the ubiquitous and problematic presence of the search for an identity in Latin-American literary criticism, the schemes, concepts and questions that three theoretical inquiries produce. It takes as its starting point a reading of Pedro Henríquez Ureña‘s Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión; it then explores the continuities and ruptures with respect to Henríquez Ureña‘s essay traced by Ángel Rama in Transculturación narrativa en América Latina; and ends by proposing a «return to the path»: the essays of Ernesto Sábato, in particular El escritor y sus fantasmas. With Jorge Luis Borges as an emblematic example of convergence between literary criticism and literature, this article takes Sábato‘s ideas as a point of inflexion between the tradition established by Henríquez Ureña, and Rama‘s particular proposal of continuity and rupture. It also analyzes the articulations of a frontier oeuvre that, launched by Sábato as a writer, problematizes –from itself and from its translation to fiction– the schemes, binary oppositions, and utopias that each text, on the center or the margin of its own pursuit, delineates and configures.