Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Dorfman, Ariel

  It was a magnificent vision and I kept it inside me all during the Chilean revolution, it was so intense that even now, more than twenty-five years later, I am able to commune with it. Even though, as soon as the crowd dissolved and we began to celebrate the new age that was dawning, each in his own way, as soon as I was back in my middle-class house with my books and my records and my manuscripts and my obsessions and memories of a pampered existence, as soon as I returned to who I was, an intellectual educated in traditions and tastes and codes that most of the people in that plaza did not have access to, as soon as all the breaches and disparities that divided us came roaring back into my elite existence, I realized that I had given myself an impossible, utopian goal.

  And yet pursue it I did, with an energy that amazed me then and that amazes me even more now. If I could not immediately fuse with the people, if their story and my story were still on separate tracks, I could, at least, help create the space that would allow their stories to emerge, work as a citizen and a militant so that the resources and education available to someone like me could become available to them. And, of course, I wasn’t going to wait for that breakthrough: liberated from the foreign, English-language realm in which I had secluded myself for so long, I started to make up for the time I had wasted by letting Spanish flow out of me as if I were a river.

  Everything was new and crying out to be written and I shared a glorious language with the people who were writing the text of reality itself and I wanted to put every last word of it down on paper.

  I wrote essays and screenplays and poems and magazine articles and television programs and pamphlets and newspaper ads and radio jingles and political slogans and propaganda tracts and an experimental novel and cultural policy reports and political diatribes and songs and plays, all of them juxtaposed, all of them given equal attention in my life. A typical day might see me rise at dawn and frenetically type a surrealistic short story, take Rodrigo to school, teach a class at the university, burst into my office to scribble part of an essay at noon, then lunch with the producer of a quiz show for adolescents I was hosting on TV, rush off to a powdered-milk factory whose workers had called for volunteers to help load and unload trucks, run back all sweaty to the center of town to collaborate with some writers who were issuing a cultural manifesto, talk over the phone with a colleague at the university about the possibility of our Spanish Department joining forces with a trade union to launch a poetry festival, and then, as the afternoon began to wane, meet with a Party committee that was deciding what political slogan we would issue, to be painted by the brigades, and then that night, after a quick dinner with Angelica, who had been through an equally hectic schedule, and after a good-night story to my son, my wife and I would join our group of comrades to splash the walls of the city with the very message I myself had conjured up a few hours before. And then, if there was time and energy—and there was, there always was—off we’d go to somebody’s house to dance and drink and celebrate the fact that we were alive.

  They were the best years of my life.

  Ever since I could remember, perhaps since that hospital in Manhattan, perhaps before, a vague heartache of guilt had been gnawing away at me, dripping into me like a deformed twin who whispered that I was to blame, always to blame for whatever was wrong, that I could never do enough to make things right. Those years were like a balm: day by day the revolution cleansed the slow cesspool of my shame and taught me to forgive myself. And if it had allowed me to drain my remorse, there was nothing that I thought the revolution could not do. Just as it taught us to tolerate those with whom we disagreed, it would teach me to tolerate my own dissonant voices inside. Just as it would resolve the contradictions of our misdevelo-ped society and modernize Chile without using force and establish social harmony without hurting anyone and purge the country of its past, so it would allow me painlessly to change into someone new, liberate me from all the quandaries that had plagued me.

  If this identification of my own person with the revolution, my belief that what I imagined was real or could become so, might in retrospect be judged as a sign that I had gone slightly mad and was unable to distinguish between what was and was not possible, it was out of that same madness, my incapacity to detach my imagination from reality, my insistence that everything was simultaneously social and aesthetic, it was out of enthusiasm for a society that could be prefigured as if it were a work of art, that I wrote a book which was to transcend its moment of creation and withstand the test of time and is still read around the world, a book which, significantly, was both an extremely personal form of self-expression and, at the same time, was conceived as a very practical means of contributing to the possibility that millions of other Chileans could defeat silence.

  The book in which I confused my own journey with the epic journey of discovery of the people of Chile came as an answer to a question about culture that had been vexing me for several years before Allende won the Presidency.

  Our left-wing strategy to attain economic independence and achieve self-sufficiency did not take into account, I felt, that there was another sort of wealth that was dominated from abroad, equally as one-sided as the copper-mining operations that were in gringo hands. Just as we imported most of our advanced technology from abroad, just as we had never developed our own cars or our own detergents or our own electronics, we also were massively subservient to foreign films, TV series, soap operas, comics, songs, advertisements, cultural products that originated for the most part in the United States or, when they were produced nationally, were based on American models. These mass-media messages explained Chile’s powerlessness as much as our lack of command over the foreign-owned telephone companies did. It was in those imported stories that our citizens learned to dream their lives in ways that eliminated confrontation, penalized rebellion, ridiculed solidarity, caricatured critical thought, and reduced all social conflicts to easily resolved psychological dilemmas.

  Before 1970, my worries about this form of cultural domination had been primarily theoretical, developed in a couple of university seminars that analyzed comics and TV serials through methods borrowed from literary criticism. There was not much that could be done, beyond this critical examination, to modify those messages, which were owned and distributed by large corporations tailoring their productions to profit-making.

  With Allende’s victory, the situation changed drastically: what had been my speculative university elaborations were transformed into urgent questions of policy and strategy. For the first time in the history of Chile, the rebellious forces of the left had at their disposal massive-media outlets, radio, TV channels, recording studios, film companies, publishing enterprises which had previously been in private hands, churning out messages that predisposed the Chilean public to see the explosive changes besetting their lives as threatening rather than liberating.

  Who was going to tell the story of Chile? Who was going to narrate us?

  Those questions were going to be decided not only in the battle for information (the CIA was pouring millions into the right-wing media) but in the battle for the entertainment of Chile. We needed to create forms of massive popular art to accompany the marginal, alternative stories people were beginning to tell themselves and each other about their lives.

  The problem was that hardly anybody in the government (or anywhere else, for that matter) knew how to go about making those major changes. Previous socialist experiences with the media were useless: all those violent revolutions had simply expropriated the organs of communication and turned them into humorless, boring, gray propaganda machines. A monopolistic solution that, given our commitment to freedom of expression, was impossible but also, we thought, counterproductive. Pluralism was not, for us, a mere tactic but a strategic option: the liberty of our adversaries to produce their own stories was something not merely to be tolerated but to be welcomed. The presence of messages from our enemies in the marketplace would force us to be creative rather than repressive, to compete agai
nst them with better ideas, more participatory forms of popular amusement, riskier and more transgressive stories. It was a chance to bring into the media a flood of people who worked in culture and had spent most of their lives writing and painting and singing and thinking for a reduced circle of select spirits.

  Because I happened to be one of the few intellectuals in the country to have studied a wide variety of popular artistic media genres, I was asked in early 1971 to work as a consultant in a number of different enterprises which had begun to produce alternative TV dramas and comics and youth magazines and a panoply of other diversions. As soon as I started, I realized that it is easier to challenge cultural domination in university essays than to alter it in the day-to-day reality of the media. I had already written a piece on neocolonialism as reflected in Babar the elephant, analyzing the inner workings of children’s literature, but it was an entirely different matter to create a magazine for kids—or for adolescents, for that matter. Our audience had been bred on superheroes and sob stories and intrigue, but we had no clear idea why these forms of entertainment were so appealing. In fact, there were thousands of studies about the manner in which an empire controls economic resources or influences political or military decisions, but there were hardly any which probed how stories from abroad subliminally and covertly indoctrinate millions of consumers without anyone realizing what is being done.

  It was the innocence with which these products presented themselves that seemed to be the key. If I could examine the hidden political agenda inscribed in one exemplary and apparently innocuous case, I might be able to denounce that cultural penetration and also take a significant step toward understanding, and therefore perhaps changing, the media messages we were importing from abroad. The victim of my attention had to be both exceedingly popular and obviously apolitical. I soon stumbled upon one of the most beloved fictional characters of the twentieth century. He inhabited a comic book made in America that sold more copies in Chile in one month than all the stories we had produced locally in our 160 years as an independent nation. He was an old friend of mine, whom I may have met in the hospital in Manhattan at two and a half or who may even have been introduced to me before that, in my native Argentina. He had delighted me and countless other children and adults with his irate, squawking, unfortunate, and ultimately benign existence: I ended up investigating Donald Duck.

  For this project, I teamed up with an expert on mass communications, a Belgian sociologist named Armand Mattelart, who had settled in Chile and was an ardent supporter of the Allende experiment. Together, during a feverish ten days at the beach in mid-1971, we produced what was to be for many years my most notorious book, How to Read Donald Duck, a close reading of hundreds of Disney comics from a Third World perspective.

  Unexpectedly, the book became an instant best-seller in Chile, denounced bitterly by the right and hailed ecstatically by many on the left (though not by the Communists, who were extremely suspicious of any book that emphasized cultural struggle as essential to the success of the revolution). The fact that it would later sell millions of copies around the world and be translated into over a dozen languages indicates that our “manual of decolonization,” as John Berger later called it,1 touched a raw nerve in inummerable readers. But the enduring popularity of the book cannot be solely traced, I believe, to its having been the first text to address the issue of how to confront America’s culture industry as it expanded prodigiously across the globe. Its impact must also be attributed to the style of the book: wildly playful and original, lyrical and defiant, it broke out of the dry academic language, the abstruse sociological terms in which these sort of treatises were supposed to be couched. Just like Chile itself, it was full of life, and, in fact, behind its insolent style, you could hear, you can still hear if you lis-ten closely, the Chile of the revolution marching fearlessly on the Gates of Heaven (or of Hell), you can hear Chile inspiring us to go ever further, egging us on to bite the mental and emotional hand that feeds us. How to Read Donald Duck can be interpreted, therefore, as one of the ways in which the nation of Chile declared its national independence of foreign influence, its desire to think for itself. But that book, and a series of other essays that I wrote by myself at that time, which were eventually to become The Empire’s Old Clothes, can also be read as a declaration of another sort of independence.

  It cannot be an accident that the first book written about U.S. cultural imperialism should have been created by a man who had himself been seduced by that country as a child, who had spent his adolescence yearning for that land and dancing to its sweet melodies, who had struggled as a young adult to make sense of the American part of his life and the English in which it was embedded. Or that I should have sought a foreigner as a partner in this venture, someone who, like me, had been so fascinated by Chile as to end up making it his home. Both of us from abroad, trying to inoculate our adopted land against the perils of what we had once adored.

  As a child of seven, when I had preferred my parents to my flag, I had been able to live with the ensuing crisis of who I was by separating American politics and the transitory U.S. governments from what I understood to be the true and eternal America expressed in its popular culture, I could fear one while enjoying the other, I could be as American as apple pie (and Mickey Mouse) and yet remain a member of a family persecuted by other Americans. This insulation of U.S. popular culture from criticism had persisted in me all through the fifties and the sixties, but now, after having cut loose in Berkeley from the language in which I had, all through my life, communed with that American identity, I was ready for one more step in the process, a final one, I thought at the time: an intellectual assault on the cultural core of the boy I used to be by the political consciousness of the man I had become.

  Trying to reverse completely and radically the decision I had made as a toddler in that Manhattan hospital.

  Trying to do to America what America had done to my Latino origins.

  So, if the book on Donald Duck can and should be seen as an answer by two left-wing intellectuals to the very concrete and collective historical dilemmas posed by a revolution, it can also be understood as the culimination of my own very personal journey into Latin America, the ritual and public purging of my last links to the United States. That is the secret origin, I believe, of the book’s vitality, of the sense of danger and excitement that jumps out at the reader: I am there, seated in a chair in a Chilean beach house, banging away at the typewriter, while Armand paces up and down, and I know that with each word I am breaching a boundary, I am committing a transgression, I am breaking a taboo, I am killing the country that fathered me, I am finally daring to confront the America inside me and bring it into the light of day and burn it at the public stake. Engaging, in fact, in that most North American of ceremonies, dreaming of burying the past and starting over with a clean slate.

  I am, undoubtedly, like Chile, like Latin America at the time, going too far.

  In my pursuit of purity and national autonomy, in my desire for a rebellious Chile that would totally expel the American part of me with the same fury with which it was trying to eradicate American influence from the country’s economy, I have exaggerated the villainy of the United States and the nobleness of Chile, I have not been true to the complexity of cultural interchange, the fact that not all mass-media products absorbed from abroad are negative and not everything we produce at home is inspiring. And I have projected my own childhood experience with America onto Chile and the Third World, assuming that because I had been so easily seduced, so willingly ravished and impregnated, millions of people in faraway lands are empty, innocent, vessels into which the Empire passively pours its song, instead of tangled, hybrid, wily creatures ready to appropriate and despoil the messages that come their way, relocate their meaning, reclaim them as their own by changing their significance.

  But these are forms of resistance that I was only to learn in the years ahead. At that point I was not engaged in a dialogue with the Uni
ted States, as I am now, not searching for a space inside the system from which to perturb that system. I was looking for a divorce, trying to settle accounts with an old lover.

  Throughout the sixties, I had been ashamed of my previous infatuation with America, I had tried to hide it, make believe it had never existed. And now, all of a sudden, that liaison had become valuable, indispensable to free the patria in its hour of need. It had a meaning, it all fit into place: that is why I had gone to the States, that is why I had fallen in love with America. So that many years later I could discern and dissect the risks of that love affair, warn my new compatriots not to follow my path. So that they could reject now what I had been unable to reject back then as a child.

  It is paradoxical that it should have been my penetrating and intimate knowledge of the United States that would finally allow most of my compatriots and many other people around the world to identify me as a Chilean writer, that I should have become a spokesperson for the poor of Latin America because I had spent so many years in the rich North. And what may be even more paradoxical is that the book that would moor me so successfully to the country would be one of the chief causes of my exile. My attack on Disney turned me into an object of hatred for thousands of indignant Chilean fans. Portly grandmothers frothing at the mouth tried on several occasions to run me over with their cars, and one night our bungalow in Santiago was stoned by irate mobs of children and their parents holding up placards and shouting at the top of their lungs, “Viva el Pato Donald!” What those defenders of the honor of Donald Duck were unable to do to me while Allende was President became more than possible as soon as the coup turned the tables and thousands of copies of the latest edition of our book on Disney were thrown into the harbor of Valparaiso. That Duck of ours couldn’t breathe underwater and I wouldn’t be able to either if they caught me and decided to submerge my head in shit. I could see a sarcastic captain grabbing me by the hair, lifting my head up and telling me that he had a little boy who loved Goofy and would I care to explain now, man to man, what I found so objectionable about that Disney character?