Colombia
El presente artículo indaga sobre cómo las obras canónicas de la literatura colombiana, que se leen como “gran literatura”, han ayudado a exotizar y a banalizar las problemáticas culturales y políticas del país y el continente. Tomando como referencia principal la novela Pesadilla editorial (2017), del escritor marginal Marco Cala, se argumenta que el canon oficial impone y promueve un tipo de escritura aceptado por las élites como “altacultura”; un tipo de literatura acartonada y distanciada de la calle, de la cotidianidad, que excluye a quienes no se adaptan a las formas y a los contenidos esperados por aquellos que dominan el poder cultural. A partir de una metodología que aprehende la visión teórica de Jaques Derrida (1930-2004) y se desplaza hacia una lectura detallada de la novela, se explica la importancia teórica y práctica que tiene, para cualquier escritor, publicar una obra que se ha escrito justamente para que sea leída, para decir, para contarle a los otros, y se concluye que hay tipos de escrituras, como la del mismo Cala, que son invisibilizadas por no ajustarse a las identidades fijas y a las formas estéticas que se esperan desde las élites, encargadas de distribuir y de jerarquizar las manifestaciones culturales
Based on a detailed analysis of the novel Pesadilla editorial (2017), by the marginal (peripheral) writer Marco Cala, and the concept of “saying from the intimate” by the French philosopher Jaques Derrida (1930-2004), this article shows that the canonical works in Colombia, which are read in the world as “great literatu-re”, have helped to exoticise and trivialise the cultural and politi-cal problems of the country and the continent, and have imposed a type of writing accepted by “high culture”; a type of writing, stiff and distant from “the Street”, of “the everyday”, that marginali-ses those who do not adapt to the forms and content imposed by the elites who have stayed in power; those few for whom it is convenient to govern or create wealth in an exoticised, static, weak, and dominable world. This phenomenon has therefore generated a disinterest in (and deliberately made invisible) lite-rature that shows a dynamic, urban, complex Colombia, without fixed identities, unexoticized, away from that magical realism where all injustices are permissible because “we are in Macon-do”. In turn, this same phenomenon operates in formal terms: the non-learned, unstylized, “unpretentious” use of words. Na-mely, the use of popular everyday speech is rejected by cultural elites because it dismantles the myth of the magical, the unreal, the hallucinated, the static, the rural idyllic Colombian identity (non-existent) that suits it, for that false identity is understood, at a distance by those who write about the popular from the pers-pective of the cultured