Point of Contact:
30 Years
A presentation on behalf of the Point of Contact Board of Directors,
for the faculty,
students, and administration of Syracuse University,
for the friends of the university, and for the Syracuse
arts and literary community...
by Douglas Unger
Point of Contact's 30-year anthology, co-published by Point of Contact and Syracuse University Press, is not merely a retrospective publication but also a living project, still awaiting its bilingual companion; combined, they are testament of a significant and subversive “other” of intercultural contact for the past three decades. The fact that we are all standing here in this new gallery space—a physical site center devoted to the concept of “contact”, with each of us a point—is significant; so is the presence of founder and visionary, Pedro Cuperman, from whose labors of love, intellect, and transcendent playfulness “Punto de Contacto” continues to publish, and to grow. Thanks on behalf of the Board to the College of Arts and Sciences, and Dean Cathryn Newman; to the Editors of Syracuse University Press; and most especially to Chancellor Nancy Cantor—thanks to all of you for your continuing advocacy and support.
What’s been on my mind lately, thinking about this talk, is that the contact we intend here is an “other” that inserts itself into the language of a dominant ideology. With regard to this notion, please let me tell a little story of my personal contact with the late philosopher, Jacques Derrida—gone barely two years ago. Derrida is a thinker whose writings I had long resisted until I had the chance to meet him, and talk with him, on two occasions. On the last one, at the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, we engaged in a public exchange about translation. The setting for our repartee was a controversial and framing talk given by Kenyan novelist, N’gugi Wa’ Thiongo, and his contention that native African languages—many of them endangered languages—including his own Gikuyu, should bypass English altogether, that literary translation should seek to preserve endangered languages as much as to pave them over with the juggernaut of English. I asked Derrida about this—about English’s capacity as linguistic sponge, it seems, to absorb elements of other languages so easily into its stocky, Anglo Saxon embrace. I cited to the Grande Jacques a sentence created by a friend of “Point of Contact”, Christopher Towne Leland, that I thought best illustrated the point of this homogenous capacity of English.
Leland’s sentence is in the voice of an apartment dweller in New York—think Brooklyn, or Stuyvesant Town—complaining about the couple in the apartment next door: “She’s a diva and he’s a macho poseur—all that kvetching over a pair of khaki mukluks on the futon!”
Derrida immediately got this very clever look on his face—I hate the cliché, “narrowed his eyes” but that’s just what he did; his nose sniffed as if taking a whiff of some very pleasant vintage cognac: “Ah, there it is,” he said. “The other is subverting the English language.”
What I’ll always treasure about this exchange, and our lively conversation later, is the tremendous sense of fun, and of pure play, with which Derrida approached the world. So it is, too, with “Punto de Contacto”—and with this contact. At the same time—not to engage this evening in too much of the kind of politics that Jorge Luis Borges often called, “the great lead weight of the world,” still, given the dark echoes of our current global crisis (when has the world not been in a crisis?), I can’t help but put strong focus while reading this new anthology on how astonishingly political it truly is. What strikes me about this project of contact in the first place is how it started with adventures into the literary and plastic arts, in English and Spanish, based on an interchange of Latin American and North American cultures. Then it soon diversified to embrace so many other cultural objects: fabric symbols, cinema, interviews with performing artists and movie directors, explorations into the language of sports, and of the new baroque, drawing upon all kinds of other languages than English and Spanish, all finally interfacing also with a common language of the spirit.
All art and critical discourse about it is inherently political, of course, and inevitably engages with broader, deeper beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies, the problems of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions of the present and hopes for the future. I’ll just venture through a list of selections from this new book that leap out from a first reading, in the mode of cut-ups, or high-lights, of what this “contact” continues to be after 30 years:
From Jacqueline Simon and Terry Karten’s seminal interview with Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther revolutionary, author of Soul On Ice, that piece that, in effect, scooped The New York Times: Cleaver critiques communist systems after a decade of embracing them because he has experienced first-hand, “the trading of freedom for security under those systems,” and the sacrifice of individual rights “for bread.” Listen to how Eldridge Cleaver defines conservatism, even way back when: “A lot of people in the U.S. use the term conservative… as a disguise to hide their reactionary political postures and identify with certain anti-democratic practices as conservative measures.”
This political statement is placed into contact with a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein: “What is the criterion for the sameness of two images?
From Nicolas Calas’ essay on Jasper Johns and his critique of painting, also about Robert Rauschenberg, who says bluntly: “Art is a means to function thoroughly in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.” This question of the kind of art of palimpsests by Johns as hovering somewhere between the dominant aesthetics of Warhol and Rauschenberg—as if forming a third critical position—finds itself slamming into direct contact by juxtaposition in editing with Dina and Joel Sherzer’s treatment of the hand-sewn mola, the decorative fabric panels of the Cuna Indians of Columbia, “semiotic subsystems are not independent and to treat them as such would be a theoretical error.”
Political, indeed, is the arrangement of these essays in their juxtaposition—other against other—as if for their intentional qualities as both metaphor and metonymy at the same time. Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, is described by Floyd Merrell, in his essay on C.S. Pierce and Fuentes: “…as Fuentes tells us, the only way to portray contradictory (paradoxical) situations is by the internal use of ambiguous (revolutionary) language.” In direct contact with this piece is Carlos Fuentes himself, in his now famous essay, “The Writer in an Alien Culture”, when he writes that the founding utopia of the capitalist state, “denies the past as barbarous, and irrational… it denies the variety of civilizations and the respect due to them… it then parades as the sole depository of human nature and human rights… then transforms art into the innocuous.” Then his following statement, which remains as true now as for his cold war era, if one only renames the nationalities: “A Chilean or Czechoslovak writer is driven into exile. An American or French writer is driven to a talk show.” He goes on: “We are living through… the crisis of the dream of progress, turned into the nightmare of legal injustice, mass deportations, and mass deprivations of the majority of mankind. As the material resources of progress peter out, we are left with a new alternative. Since we cannot have more, we must try to be more.”
The genius of selection and editorial arrangement by Pedro Cuperman will not let any such statement—not even by the estimable Fuentes—stand alone in its leaden grimness. In the hopscotch fashion of a Cortázar, turning a page soon offers Pozzo, from “Waiting for Godot”: “I don’t remember exactly what it was I said but you may be sure that there wasn’t a word of truth in it.” And consider the contact of this with a reference by the recently deceased, and very much missed, Argentine intellectual, Hector Libertella, in his essay on Mexican poet-philosopher, Octavio Paz: “…considerations about the market acquire new meaning and the criteria of what is untranslatable, antisocial (abnormal communication) is what gives them validity.”
This is then in direct contact with the possibility of surprise drawn from oblique experience by the late great Severo Sarduy writing about the work of Cuban writer, José Lezama Lima: “It’s as if a man, suspecting nothing, of course, by flipping the light switch in this room switched on a waterfall in Ontario. …When St. George plunges his lance into the dragon’s flank, his horse falls dead.”
By means of this brief sampling of citations, I’m sure the larger concept of contact in the editing of this anniversary anthology registers—supportive in inter-allusions, corrupting, too, also erotic in their proximity. Contacto is subversive in a meta-sense, since “Point of Contact” finally subverts even its own project, as it surely must, with high seriousness combined with the joy of pure intellectual play, and with its boldly unapologetic physical eroticism, as in contact sports. Peter Wollen writes in his essay on the Baroque and Neo-Baroque in the age of the spectacle: “The crisis of Western Modernity, which we are now living through, takes place, particularly here in the United States, in circumstances strangely reminiscent of 17th century Spain: a highly centralized and spectacularized politics, combined with a negative redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, a declining level of productivity, a declining standard of living, as well as a debtor state, increasingly involved in trying to maintain a disintegrating global empire. At the same time, the culture moves steadily in the direction of ever greater media obsession and consumption of kitsch.”The society of spectacle provides images of conflict where there is always an underlying unity, as there invariably is in sports; or deceives with illusions of unity where there is underlying conflict, as in mass produced images (advertising, sit-coms) of the living conditions of the differing social classes.
The conversation about sports—by Pedro Cuperman, Bruce Smith, and Mary Karr—allows the free play of minds to distill sport down into something of what it is: a male lubricant, and a substitute language for emotions, as in the “bring ‘em on” rhetoric Bruce Smith quotes from George W. President Bush as he is cheer-leading the public to take the United States into a war. Sport is revealed as an integral part of the history of colonialism, and perhaps its most positive influence. At the same time, this mode of articulating sport then makes contact in a selection that soon follows about Argentine soccer star, Diego Maradona, distinguished by his sleight-of-hand triumph in making a World Cup goal—by means of thorough corruption of the rules of play—hailed ever since as the “mano de Dios”, literally, the “hand of God.”
By now, such contact has completely overturned, or turned inside out, the traditional literary journal with an ever-expanding embrace of subject and form: Owen Shapiro and Andrew Waggoner interview Philip Glass on the music of film, and it is just as Philip Glass states: “This society, for whatever its values… will be measured by its culture, and nothing else.”
There are many other interfaces of our Point of Contact project now with cinema, including a public festival held in April each year, hosted by Syracuse University. The proposal for initial, mainly bilingual contact and cultural exchange has become diversified over the years. Corporate market forces and institutional ideologies would seem to line themselves up against literary journals these days, and art for art’s sake, as any viable contemporary enterprize. As Marshall McCluhan advised, long ago, the solution—indeed, our future depends—on a broadening of our focus, and on a diversification of the media we engage in and into which the message of contact seeks out and amplifies its dissemination.
Thirty years ago, Punto de Contacto-Point of Contact started up as a curiously off-beat, countercultural journal of arts, founded by an exiled Argentine intellectual, theorist, artist, and scholar, Pedro Cuperman, with the intention to explore literature, art, aesthetics, theory, and other ideas for which there are no structural categories. Thirty years later, the project has diversified to the point where, within its many ventures, this anthology’s publication is perhaps an event of the least significance in the course of what the project will one day embrace as it diversifies into the future. In the final analysis, Point of Contact-Punto de Contacto is still, basically, a story—all art becomes narrative, in a sense, for, after all, what else can we do we when not making art but tell each other stories about the arts? Point of Contact-Punto de Contacto remains a juxtaposition mainly of Latin American and North American cultural presences, bilingual points that echo and rebound off of one another. And the essential “otherness” of Latin America is underscored by the thoughtful—even prophetic—statements by the late dear friend of the journal, Julio Cortázar’s executor, also an essential poet soon to have an issue of Punto de Contacto devoted to his work, Saúl Yurkievitch: “Latin American art and literature is a place of multiple crossroads, assumes the free circulation and the crossing of all kinds of texts. An expert in graft, injections, and contaminations, it enjoys a kind of synchronic omnipotence that likes timelessness and spacelessness, which jumps over any distance to actualize and generate extraordinary mergings.”
Ladies and gentleman, this is the journal, selected from thirty years, filled with such extraordinary mergings. So it has been, still is, and hopefully will continue to be, when it is carried on by a new generation of scholars and writers, many of whom are in the gallery here tonight. And, finally, let’s not forget how Pedro Cuperman has been and remains the essential point around which this contact happens. I thank him, and hope we all can now thank him with a round of applause, for his energy and his spirit, for this journal, and for this evening, and, as he says, for having given it his all, “body and soul.”
Table of Contents
Contributors' Bios
30th anniversary reception at Syracuse University
ORDER THIS ISSUE FROM SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Professor Douglas Unger, of University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is a former guest editor of Point of Contact (Writing Across Cultures, Fall 1995), currently a member of the Point of Contact Board of Directors, and a former director of Syracuse University’s Creative Writing Program in the English Department.
Professor Unger, has published four novels to unanimous acclaim, including Leaving the Land, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and recipient of various prestigious literary awards, among them, the Society of Medland Authors award for fiction and a Special Citation from the P.E.N. Ernest Hemingway award. From his short stories collection, Looking for War (Ontario Review Press, 2004), “Leslie and Sam," was distinguished among the Best Short Stories of 2002 anthology editors. The Washington Post described his last book, Voices from Silence, as an "emotionally complicated story that is a grisly sequel to El Yanqui." It narrates the story of a journalist and a former foreign exchange student who takes his wife to Argentina to introduce her to his former host family and becomes deeply involved with the family's tragic circumstances after military dictatorship takes over the country. The story is based on the author’s own experience as an exchange student in Argentina. Unger has been the Managing Editor of The Chicago Review, Assistant Editor at The Iowa Review and an essayist for the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. He has also worked as a screenwriter for New Horizons, Andes Films and Universal Studios. Currently Unger is the Director and co-founder of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing International program at University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
The presentation of this Point of Contact publication took place at the Point of Contact Gallery, 914 East Genesee Street, Syracuse, on Friday, December 1st, 2006, at 6:00 p.m.