Gabriel García Márquez's presence, although altogether benign, has cast a lengthy shadow upon contemporary Colombian literature, obscuring much of its recent fiction; Andrés Caicedo's work, as a part of Colombia's late literary production, is a case in question. Fairly known within the subcontinent's borders, Caicedo is a primary example of the aesthetic influence of modern popular culture in present Latin American literature.
An icon of the seventies, his novels and short stories exhibit a morbid
fascination for the visual, depict frenzied, chaotic environments, and
include a wide assortment of unlikely characters: blood-sucking anthropophagous
teenagers, wandering transvestites, sex-starved couples, film-loving assassins,
and detectivesque scholars. Extraordinarily, amid such bizarre collage,
the author's passion for the visual reigns uncontested.
In the following paragraphs, I intend to argue for a befitting reading
of his work, suitable to a narrative that has borne the overwhelming effect
of the culture industry of the industrialized world. Like his characters,
who seem to profess a marked affinity for cannibalism, fetishism, and voyeurism,
Caicedo ransacks, appropriates, and politicizes cinematic language, employing
it as a façade to question and subvert social and moral conventions.
In his texts, he rewrites the city, denounces the political manipulation
of his generation, and proposes a surrogate version of urban reality. As
a vehicle for social critique, Caicedo portrays Santiago de Cali, the now
widely-known abode of the cocaine cartel, as an alternate version of the
city, where the politics of pleasure and desire find a complacent ambiance.
Andrés Caicedo was born on September 29, 1951, an offspring of the
growing Colombian bourgeoisie. His childhood, marked by an education in
a private religious institution, does not pave his intellectual restlessness.
Since his early years he shows interest in film and consumes massive doses
of cinema. From an early age, he prepares scripts and participates in theatrical
presentations, experiences that will motivate him to become a film critic,
a circumstance that will, in turn, influence his literature in a tangible
way. Parallel to his film related activities, Caicedo pursues writing.
His first stories appear in 1966, and up to 1968 an initial stage is discernible,
where the pursuit of a personal style is apparent; still, only until 1969
will he be able to coalesce his personal theory of identity, his caleñidad.
That year, thanks to the discipline attained, he receives a prize in the
literary contest of a Venezuelan magazine for his short story "The
Teeth of Little Red Riding Hood"; true to his method, he produces
seven different versions of the story. In 1972, with director Carlos Mayolo's
assistance, he makes his first attempt to film. He publishes articles in
various newspapers and produces Ojo al Cine, a publication that
will become, from 1974 on, Colombia's main film journal. In the same year,
he travels to the U. S., hoping to offer a script to Roger Corman, the
renowned director. He unsuccessfully tries to interview Hitchcock but manages
instead to see a vast quantity of pictures, interview Sergio Leone, begin
writing his novel ¡Que viva la música!, and start a
diary titled Pronto: memorias de una cinesífilis. In 1975,
sponsored by his mother, he publishes El atravesado. Shortly after,
in conformity with his theory of life's uselessness beyond twenty five
years of age, he attempts suicide twice. Barely recuperated, he concludes
¡Que viva la música!, which he manages to see published,
and the final issue of Ojo al Cine. On March 4, 1977, at the age
of twenty five, he commits suicide.
My reading proposes Andrés Caicedo, judging his representation of Cali in a short lived literary career, as a source of distinct relations between an experience of class and consumerism, between capitalism and social inequality. His style synthesizes the gist of a damned poet, integrating the rebelliousness, the desire to experiment, and the psychedelic outburst of the sixties. As a mixture of pop hero and literary junkie, the young author incorporates the zeitgeist of Aquarius to Colombia's current literary tradition. Caicedo is, keeping matters in perspective, a fleeting incarnation of Morrison or Lennon, in a film-adoring, literary, and Latin American edition. With his long and curly hair, thick eyeglasses, and the face of an eternal adolescent, he manages to occupy a niche in the minds of new generations, delighting them with morbid tales and extravagant storylines. At present time, despite his incompatibility with official culture, he remains widely popular.
The main trait of the Caicedian universe, beyond any literary debt, is its embracement of the city as a sort of metaphor for the author's existence. Despite the festive tone occasionally adopted to refer to Cali, his literary spirit, lively and sarcastic, reflects the youthful disenchantment of his times. By imagining the city as part of the community that defines him, by imagining his identity within the layout of the streets of Cali, Caicedo recognizes a coincidence between his teenage role and that of a growing city. That is, between a place that grows by spurts and an adolescent that matures haphazardly, in many instances, there is not a vast difference. The city and the adolescent fuse, and from such a relationship, rises the Caicedian civitas; in other words, such cognition of a juvenile macrocosm growing at the pace of a developing capital signals his understanding of social and economic change.
Caicedo is, to a certain extent, the unavoidable result of his time. Towards the end of the sixties, Cali experiments a sudden, unrestricted growth, with the generous support of national moneys and foreign investment. American multinationals choose this peaceful, provincial city to set up enormous manufacturing complexes and the state invests heavily with the excuse of the coming Pan-American games. Cali ceases being a spot on the banks of the Cauca river; instead, it becomes, together with Medellín and Bogotá, part of Colombian economy's "golden triangle". New highways are built, the public services network is expanded, skyscrapers and buildings rise; in short, a new infrastructure redraws the size of the metro area. Suddenly, before the astonished caleños, their once dormant abode gains the profile of a burgeoning sprawl, becoming the third largest city in the nation, and asserting its title as boomtown of the seventies. Such is the place where Andrés Caicedo is raised, a town of great civic spirit, the malignant influence of drug trafficking yet unknown. The impact resulting from this accelerated growth is echoed in the opportunistic mentality of its youth. The cultural frenzy, evidenced in salsa music's growing popularity and a reputation as nest of playwrights, next to the sudden prosperity, render likely an improvised configuration of urban identity; Cali is, to its inhabitants, a synonym of development, possibility, and future. Its people enjoy a superior standard of living and can only think of betterment. In Cali, people relish the future and breathe the promises of modernity. Their new status is distinguished by an acritical stance, a wishful acceptance of things to come, and a disproportionate faith in growth. Towards the beginning of the first presidential period of the seventies, the place has consolidated itself as a collective fallacy; its falsity is an undertaking experienced by two million individuals.
The reason behind the appropriation of the city image in Caicedo's work is simple: the dilemma is chiefly generational. As I have mentioned, the city's unrestrained growth becomes fused with his own. The borderline between the city's expansion and that of the individuals which render it city evaporates; as a result, the sprawl appropriates human features and the humans attain urban traits. The city's dimensions, for instance, are employed in hyperbolic descriptions of growth.
For Caicedo's generation, born under the conventional agenda of the major political parties, the demand for the implementation of a sensible order leads to their fervent embracement of modern culture: art cinema, new music, the literary boom of the sixties; in other words, a certain predisposition enhances the recognition of the emerging cultural scene. Desperate to end the political violence of the previous era, the traditional parties sign a treaty in Benidorm, the Spanish Mediterranean resort, agreeing to share power during the next two decades in a way such that an entire generation grows within a political void. Liberals and Conservatives are the same; both represent the interests of the upper class. With the arrival of modernity, new communicative spaces appear within the media: cartoons, television, new journalism, and most importantly for Caicedo, cinema. The city's most dynamic segment is, quite obviously, its youth. Caicedo's proposal is simple: in their hands, mass culture replaces traditional politics as a space of ideological dispute. Given the lack of a befitting political alternative, since anti-regime practices have been--at least in a official fashion--anesthetized, pop culture becomes the great political arena for the young. Making use of a pop façade, the young author decides to validate his own version of hegemony.
Once the political gap is evident, Cali becomes the great Caicedian character. The city becomes the springboard for a hegemonical proposal, relying on the expressive potential of teen culture. In the latter edition of his short stories, this condition, that of the city as the protagonist of his work, is postulated as a backdoor, as a provocation. Still, even if life within its limits may have been unbearable, it remains true that Caicedo describes Cali as a place "exclusively for adolescents" (13); his urban formula takes some of its best images from the worlds of cinema, noir, and horror, familiar to most teenagers. Given the fact that the only troublesome presence, once the differences in traditional politics have been eradicated, is the American one, youngsters choose to favor it; in other words, Caicedo makes use of American cultural capital to redetermine and posit his own theory of identity. His characters, mixtures of loneliness and schizophrenia, wander aimlessly through the streets, uprooted and miserable, covered with a layer of psychedelic pop.
As few others, Caicedo exemplifies the contemporary Latin American short story; his work adopts two distinct categories to sketch a personal, sui generis rendition of the city. In a first instance, Caicedo refers to the Calicalaboose, where the city insinuates itself as a sour, claustrophobic environ, tempered by the behavior of those who subvert the dictates of the bourgeois majority. In the other, he refers to a place named Caliwood, where he depicts a rosier, glorified variant of the urban sprawl, a mythical dimension, where things optical are privileged and where visual aesthetics rule unbound, with characters that emerge from the collective imaginary of America's film industry.
For the author, American pop culture, aside from being a troublesome presence, signifies a vestige of modernity. For him, the main thing is the interpretation of American culture as an attendant, overpowering entity, whose hegemony appears incarnated in economic development. Aside from positing an unfamiliar persona, Americana contains worthy aspects which the writer repeatedly usurps throughout his career. Film--the great Caicedian constant--, tales of horror, noir literature, rock music, all will feed his particular vision of a chaotic and vital world; through them, the young writer reveals an aesthetics of power in such a way that, unwillingly, his texts appear laden with authority. Through this approach, in essence a practice of transcultural nature, Caicedo substantiates his version of the Latin American urban sprawl. In other words, by adopting the format of alien cultural manifestations, he procures, aside from the immediately apparent, their prepotency. Hence, in search of an approximate image, Caicedo seizes foreign cultural capital and redigests it, issuing a new way of being.
In order to conquer it as narrative, Caicedo conceives urban space as a machine of desires; his two main strategies result from this premise. In the Calicalaboose, the city dwellers live in order to desire and be desired; in Caliwood, space becomes the object of desire per se. In "Street Kisser," one of the accounts of his earlier stage, the goal, beyond the transgression of the social order, is that of seduction. The main character is a transvestite who, by means of his activities in the streets of the city, inverts the norm and transforms sex into an explicit occurrence, thus infringing the boundaries of the public sphere. In "Street Kisser", aside from referring to the city as a sexual arena, Caicedo adopts the homosexual as embodiment of marginality. In a manner similar to many of his stories, Caicedo is specially interested in a distinctive feature: the fact that the transvestite, in his quest for lovers, must patrol the streets of Cali.
The character's name, Street Kisser, signals a direct association: the conjunction of public space--the street--and sex, a practice, in essence, of private nature; in order to find lovers, the transvestite must conquer the streets. Through his search for love, the roaming homosexual becomes the executioner of puritan morality; thus, his presence is necessary to suggest the subversion of traditional urban order. Once again, the goal will be to invert bourgeois values, deeply questioning the ambivalent morals of adults, mostly, the city's hypocritical upper classes. As the quintessential streetwalker, the figure of the transvestite is suitable to legitimate a especial version of the environs. For the young author, it is quite clear that, in order to conquer narrative space, one must contain it. As a pedestrian, the urban being savors the pleasure of crossing the city and it is through this means that a definite occupation comes to be. Street walking, which Caicedo equates with prostitution, insinuates how the author, as a literary pimp, will take advantage of urban space.
In other cases, Caicedo depicts couples desperately roaming the city. Rambling aimlessly, couples stroll through Cali in search of locations to make love. Under these circumstances, Caicedo's indifference to the traditional borders of the private and public spheres becomes clear. Having privileged the public domain, the city abolishes any possibility of open physical intimacy; the absence of intimate contact, which keeps the couple walking throughout the entire city, is largely due to the extreme nature of the public sphere. Only by contravening rules of social character, ignoring them, is it possible to reformat the social makeup of space. Thus, physical desire serves as a medium for social change, for it fosters the attitude of couples such as Miriam and Mauricio, who carelessly defy conventions as they frolic by the banks of the river. While Mauricio seduces Miriam with city anecdotes, Caicedo employs them to subjugate the reader. Playfully, his narrative transforms into a thinly veiled image of its own literary schemes.
As a primary motivation, desire contributes to the transgression of all boundaries and determines the relationship with the environment; by identifying sentiment with the encircling medium, the writer secures the environ. The river, which bisects the entire city and whose grounds serve as an exemplary location for sex, is just one of its embodiments; its surroundings barely insinuate the narrative manipulation taking place. For Caicedo, the river conveys a sexual connotation; its flow serves as thread of life, inseminating all which stands in its path. The river's vicinity, impregnated with humidity, is a sort of sensual expanse, where the transvestite, as well as the desperate couples, rest at ease. With its vital demeanor, that of teeming nature, the river assists as sexual incentive for the Caicedian polis.
"The Teeth of Little Red Riding Hood" is perhaps, stylewise, his most elaborate account. Its argument is reasonably straightforward: Eduardo, a common lad, is fascinated by Jimena, the ex-girlfriend of Nicolás, who, in turn, serves as a mute, hypothetical audience for the story's monologue. Unfortunately, aside from being physically appealing, the girl exhibits evidence of a most disturbing condition; the protagonist's dilemma is evident from the first kiss. Beyond the usual flirtations and endless agonies, used to legitimate the image of a traditional teenage romance, events take an unexpected turn: once the girl is sexually aroused, she exhibits signs of lycanthropy and bears in mind one single object, to chew off her suitor's sex. A superficially Freudian reading could speak of fear of castration but Caicedo is too playful in his ways to venture such a narrow understanding; the account's fabric reflects the pleasure obtained from the gruesome plot. The allusion to the childhood story reveals the fact that, like most of Caicedo's narrative, the story is but a practical joke. For him, the character's truculent voracity is, above all, source of delight. With such a twist, Caicedo is blatantly inverting the traditional gender roles; whereas women traditionally portrayed acquiescent roles in romantic relationships, the author prefers, by means rather unconventional, to award his female characters a prominent piece of the action. Shying away from Latin American folklore, most of the anomalies of Caicedo's characters have a strictly prosaic origin. In his work, instead of arrogating popular superstitions, which would grant him a more autochthonous quality, horror exhibits one exclusive origin: Hollywood.
Caliwood, the second thematic block of his work, groups most of his cinematographic stories, where the movies becomes the preferred substance of narrative and where the city itself, as object of affection, becomes the matter to be coveted. Caicedo speaks through characters who adore film and creates a utopian version of the place he would have liked to live in; film begins to signify a cultural practice that marks and distinguishes. Some of its characters are avid film enthusiasts who, as a result of their fanatical attitude, are prey to discrimination. Ricardo, one of these characters, suffers from a very particular condition: he is unable to distinguish between the realm of fiction and the surrounding reality. At a specific instant, when he approaches someone to share his excitement for cinema, he is mistaken for a homosexual, giving way to the bystanders' homophobia. Under these circumstances, the cinéaste, as incarnation of marginality, is equated with homosexuals and used to criticize the hypocrite moral standards of the ruling classes. Some other narrations within this segment are minute tributes to Chandler, Hammett, and Cain, loosely drawn versions extracted from the dark realms of pulp; their underworlds, instead of being inhabited by hoodlums, are the domains of the written word.
In Caliwood, cannibals, flesh-eaters, and echoes of Vincent Price and Poe abound, rejoicing in the goriest of details. Still, it includes one of the few instances in which Caicedo refers to the period's socio-historic context. In "Patricialinda," the narrator is a teenager considering his alternatives as the end of the academic year comes to a close. Although the story is sketched as an account of seduction--Patricialinda is, after all, the name of his muse--the real dilemma lies elsewhere. Were he to fail, his parents threaten him with the military draft and a trip to the eastern plains, where the guerrillas have hidden as a result of military repression; his sole alternative seems to be a trip overseas. His options seem restricted to a fulfilled modernity, representative of the foreign agenda, and the plains, with their connotation of armed upheaval; between the two stands Cali, a Latin jungle of concrete, asphalt, and underdevelopment.
In another instance, adopting a female identity, that of the fictional diva, Caicedo outlines a film mecca. Cali appears as the distant archetype of modernity, a sort of alter ego of backwardness. Amid a vision drenched in nostalgia, the romanticized space attains greater colorfulness and the narrator's voice turns apocalyptic. The city even boasts a parade of imaginary celebrities; witness a place of dreams with delusions of grandeur, strictly megalomaniac. In a hyperbolic display, Caicedo transforms a street of the city, the most mundane of venues, into one of the world's seven wonders. The idealized city, or modernity itself, inspires such longing, such fervor, that the young author consents to fabricate it.
Sadly, by merely recognizing the city as a symptom of modernity, Caicedo appears naïve. His celebratory narrative exemplifies, in some occasions, a schematized and simplistic perception of the urban medley, of recurrent appearance in Latin American letters. The author never realizes his near-sightedness for, since he conceives it as a modern space, he fails to consider its excluding nature. Perhaps it is a matter of interest; with Cali, as he aims to see it, he deems it enough. Still, by celebrating it, he disregards the shanty towns and the social and economic decay of the land.
The literature of Andrés Caicedo is distinguished by its marked proximity to the urban experience, disguised in the multiple forms of desire for fellow human beings and for modernity itself. Its stories reflect wide aspects of life in the city and celebrate it repeatedly. The techniques adopted to bring such effect about result, in great part, from a transcultural practice; Caicedo decides to adopt the semblance of American culture and manipulates it to create an alternative for critique based on the displacement of desire. The modern city, aside from serving as object of desire, is the cause of his condition of life and the origin of his theory of identity. Caicedo is, above all, caleño; his caleñidad legitimates and defends his work, making it a special case in the representation of Latin American modernity.