The regional novel from the first decades of the twentieth century marks a turning point in Latin American narrative. In the 1960s, Latin American writers became world leaders in combining technical innovation with commercial success and critical acclaim. However, what came to be known as the Boom novel would not have been possible without advances made in the preceding decades. Beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century, Latin America experienced economic expansion and relative political stability. These changes were accompanied by the consolidation of liberal political institutions that eliminated many vestiges of Colonial society. The regionalist writers of the early twentieth century came to grips with these changes by drawing on international influences and local cultures to generate new narrative forms. The eminent Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama’s outline of this phenomenon remains the most important social periodization of Latin American narrative in the early twentieth century, and his work usefully suggests that the regional novel can be defined in part through its engagement with the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that structure models of citizenship and cultural belonging.

The corpus of texts to be addressed under “regionalism” is not obvious. The most apparent inclusion would be the novelas de la tierra, or telluric novels, that describe local realities through nature, rural life, and cultural traits understood as peculiar to Latin America. In the 1930s, Concha Meléndez had already identified this body of works, now established in the literary canon. As Carlos Alonso has argued, even if these novels rely on problematic concepts of representation, they played a crucial role in defining Latin America’s cultural modernity, particularly as a response to US Pan-Americanism and as an expression of revitalization one hundred years after independence.

Applied to translation, the phrase “X said” is more remarkable than appears at first glance. It certainly is useful, as just now to quote St. Jerome's exasperated depiction of the translator's work. Even so, to use it is to ignore a half-truth, for the phrase cannot mean what it says. The patron saint of translators composed his one-liner in Latin, while the English words on which I must rely to read it belong to the translator. So “X said” is no more than a shorthand. And as a shorthand, moreover, “X said” obscures what it abbreviates. Two statements of disparate origin, not one, inhabit every translation: what X said and what X has been made to say. Those two statements are forever distinct and variously related. As the first translator, in 1915, of Durkheim's 1912 masterpiece, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (hereafter Elementary Forms), Joseph Ward Swain invented many statements of the second, made-to-say kind. Re-translating Elementary Forms in 1995, so did I. My own statements, like Swain's, bear different kinds and qualities of relationship to the original. I propose to explore some of the relationships that matter when English is the language in which Elementary Forms is to be read.

In 1950 Vladimir Nabokov, then an aspiring American author, wrote in chapter 14 of Conclusive Evidence, a Memoir, about his Russian literary career of the 1920s and 1930s as if he and Sirin (Nabokov's Russian pen name) were two different persons:

Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits, 1982) tells the tale of the political struggle between the Left and the Right in twentieth century Chile which led to Augusto Pinochet’s coup d'état on September 11, 1973, and the imposition thereafter of a repressive, right-wing military dictatorship. Its novelty is that it does so from the vantage point of the lives of three generations of women - Clara (grandmother), Blanca (mother), and Alba (granddaughter) - though Clara’s husband, Esteban Trueba, fulfills an important mediating function within the novel, as we shall see. Like Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), the structural impetus of Allende’s novel is provided by genealogy rather than plot, though the family line traced is male-centered in the former but feminocentric in the latter. Indeed, the “house” in the title of La casa de los espíritus functions paradigmatically as an image of the intrinsically feminine.

The obvious similarities between the two novels, indeed, have led some to question the originality of Allende’s novel. In a revealing interview Allende made the following self-deprecatory comment: “Me siento como un pirata que se hubiera lanzado al abordaje de las letras” (“I feel like a pirate who has boarded the ship of letters”). There are a number of ways of interpreting this statement. One - the more cynical - is to take it as an admission of plagiarism of Gabriel García Márquez’s fiction, with which her work has so often been compared.

By the middle of the 1930s, Nabokov, writing since 1920 under the pen name “V. Sirin,” had achieved an enviable reputation as the leading Russian émigré writer of prose fiction. Publication of Dar (The Gift, written 1933-1938) and Priglashenie na kazn (Invitation to a Beheading, 1935-1936) was to put this beyond question. However, by late 1939, the Nabokovs were preparing for an imminent new life in the English-speaking world. In May 1940, as famously described at the close of Speak, Memory, they left Europe for New York, on what was to be the penultimate voyage of the liner Champlain - just before the fall of Paris. One meteoric career, that of the exiled Russian writer Sirin, was effectively over. A second and, in world terms, rather more explosive career, that of the American-English writer “Vladimir Nabokov,” was about to be launched.

Few of our contemporaries remember, and fewer still deserve to be rebuked if they do not, that when it first appeared in the vocabulary of incipient and inchoate sociology the word “society” was but a metaphor, and a metaphor of the most common, “here-like-there” kind, a kind usually deployed with the intention to domesticate something strange and make intelligible something heretofore unfamiliar and baffling. After all, two centuries or so have passed since that word had been deployed in metaphorical capacity. The mark of well-chosen and persuasive metaphors is that their metaphorical - interpretative - nature tends to be quickly forgotten and is no more noted. True to its metaphorical status, the word “society” was originally meant to focus attention on some otherwise blurry facets of the thing of which it claimed to be (newly) referent, thereby playing down the significance of that thing's confusing (and for that reason alarming) idiosyncrasy.

The facet of human experience which it was hoped would be laid bare or insinuated by the choice of “society” as the metaphor for the setting of human life-pursuits, was that of “being in company.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “fellowship,” “companionship,” “association with one's fellow men, esp. in a friendly or intimate manner” were the oldest meanings of the word “society.” There were other meanings too, all preceding the adoption of the word for metaphorical purposes - like “a number of persons associated together by some common interest and purpose” (first recorded in 1548); “the state or condition of living in association, company or intercourse with others of the same species”; “adopted by a body of individuals for the purpose of harmonious co-existence or for mutual benefit, defence, etc.” (1553); “a corporate body of persons having a definite place of residence” (1588); or the “aggregate of persons living together with a more or less ordered community” (1639).

I should like to steal up on Nabokov's late fiction with a quiet query about the term. It is in one sense synonymous with “last fictions,” as we now speak of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, although he didn't call them that. Lateness of this kind is a matter of chronological time, and may imply an achieved maturity, a sense of autumn. The Oxford English Dictionary gives “flowering or ripening at an advanced season of the year” among its meanings. But with Nabokov no matter of time is only a matter of time, and lateness in the work of distinguished artists often has another, qualitative meaning, far from negative but indicating, nonetheless, a certain quirkiness, hinting not merely at maturity but also at something beyond maturity. Since all of Nabokov's work is quirky, we shall have to show, if we wish to pursue this thought, that the quirkiness itself changes its color or its tone or its intensity in the late novels, and that is what I shall try to do in this essay.

Of the nine novels that Nabokov wrote in Russian, the last three - Despair (Otchaianie), Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kazn), and The Gift (Dar) - are arguably his finest. In them Nabokov explores the nature of the creative spirit and the relationship between artists and the subjects that inspire them. Despair offers a cautionary tale of creative solipsism with its depiction of a self-proclaimed artistic genius who shows little regard for the autonomy of the people whose lives he subsumes into his creative fantasy. Invitation to a Beheading presents the contrary position as Nabokov focuses on an imaginative individual who must work up the courage to trust his own creative vision and end his fealty to the conformist pressures of the surrounding society. The Gift provides the most sweeping portrait of the artistic personality, and it discloses in exquisite detail the transformative powers of a finely honed creative consciousness. What is more, each of these novels tackles its subject in a unique way. The resulting triptych testifies to the extraordinary range of Vladimir Nabokov's own imagination.

Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life ([1912] 1991) (hereafter Elementary Forms) is considered by many the conclusive statement on religion of the Durkheimian school. In fact, this is rather a simplification of a more complicated intellectual history. A more careful evaluation of the examinations of religious phenomena by the members of the Durkheimian team demonstrates some intriguing theoretical distinctions that give rise to broader differences in intellectual position-taking and helps explain serious differences in the trajectory of influence of the Durkheimian school on subsequent generations of intellectuals. These differences stem largely from the description of the nature of the sacred in the Durkheimian tradition.

The sacred is of course the key to the Durkheimian definition of religion. In Elementary Forms, Durkheim proceeds in typical fashion toward a working definition of this difficult category by eliminating competing definitions, only offering his own after all others examined have been effectively annihilated. Religion, he argues, can only adequately and inclusively be characterized as ideas and rites oriented toward the setting aside and protection of sacred things. But in what manner can we as social scientists classify sacred things and distinguish them from things non-sacred? One might suggest that sacred things can be defined merely as those things set aside and protected in any given society. But this is clearly a circular definition. In any society, Durkheim asserts, there are things sacred and things profane. The profane he is content to leave with a negative definition: that which is not sacred. But it will not do to take the same route with respect to the definition of the sacred (i.e. the non-profane), as this is the substantive category upon which his entire theory of religion is based. The sacred inspires respect, but why? What is it about sacred things that so inspire us and that allow us to distinguish them from profane things? And is this awe-inspiring capacity monolithic and identical in all sacred things?

Although this chapter will begin with Émile Durkheim's ([1912] 1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Elementary Forms), I will focus on the place of ritual in the Durkheimian tradition, rather than add to the already enormous amount of explication of that book and the place of ritual in it. Even so, because of the vast influence of Durkheim on several disciplines, my treatment will be highly selective. I will focus on the ways in which ritual continues to be central for the understanding not only of religion, but of society.

There is probably no better place to begin a discussion of the place of ritual in the thought of Émile Durkheim than with a famous passage in his Elementary Forms:

Origins: Lucilius

Near the beginning of the tenth book of his Institutes, midway through a list of readings recommended for the orator in training, Quintilian, Rome’s most prolific theorist of rhetoric after Cicero, takes a tendentious step towards satire’s terrain by claiming that this particular genre can be accounted “totally ours.” The claim is tendentious because extreme, and true only in a highly qualified sense. For ancient critics had long since sought to establish the genre’s Greek pedigree by tracing its development past its most obvious early practitioners in Republican Rome (Ennius and Lucilius, both of whom wrote in the second century bce) all the way to fifth-century Athens. Claims of satire’s Greek provenience, although they could easily be stretched to an opposite extreme, are defensible and seem to have at least some narrow basis in fact.

Horace, writing more than one hundred years before Quintilian, was aware of both extremes. Perhaps to goad those in his audience who adamantly defended the idea that satire sprouted entirely from Roman soil, but perhaps also to mimic those who wanted to believe that any good thing in Roman literature just had to come from the Greeks, Horace went so far as to assert that Lucilius did not a whit more to invent satire than to rework the meters of Greek Old Comedy (“having changed only their meters and rhythms,” mutatis tantum pedibus numerisque, Sermones 1.4.7).

It is a commonplace to say that satire is the most difficult genre to define, and always has been. “Metamorphic” and “Protean” are terms commonly applied to it, the latter perhaps suggesting that it not only has no stable form but will also continue to elude attempts to tie it down. The task of exploring what constitutes the “presence” of Roman satire in the present and recent past is thus a rather delicate one, for how can we recognize it to be “there” if we are not sure what we are looking for? If one looks hard enough, one can find James Joyce referring to Ulysses as “farraginous.” The satiric associations of this term (nostri farrago libelli, Juvenal 1.86) will certainly not have been lost on Joyce, but most readers could be forgiven for failing to spot the writer of Latin hexameter verse in this novel shape. Formal verse satire is still practiced, but not in a way that seems central to the oeuvre of any major author or to cultural practice more generally, as it could be argued it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Martin Winkler in his anthology Juvenal in English detects some significant echoes in T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, twentieth-century engagement with Horace and Juvenal has largely come in the form of translations, but nothing has emerged that could begin to match the response of Dryden and Johnson to Juvenal. Instances of the invocation of Roman satirical texts as clear as Fellini’s Satyricon are very few and far between.

What makes for a good companion? What makes for a good companion to satire? The present volume offers a variety of versions of companionship, of course. I expect to be a sort of short-term companion, a companion met briefly and fortuitously, a companion who whispers a dirty little secret in your ear and then walks off leaving you to decide what to do with this information. The image is not, of course, casually chosen, for I am here to talk about the production, reproduction, and public dissemination in and by satire of a dangerous dirty little Roman secret. Better still, there is a crisis: bad sex has gone public. Satire upbraids. But I want to talk about the desire to talk about desire, and the perverted pleasures of reproaching perverts.

I plan to neglect the question of the persona of the narrator of the satire. There are a variety of accounts of this character. But I do hope that an investigation of the structure of the satirical narrative of desire will be complete in and of itself. And I hope as well that readers will themselves take these conclusions and apply them to the broader question of the “masks of satire.” I am not after a biography such as Highet (1954). Nor do I even offer a reading that aims for the man behind the mask as frequently found in Winkler (1983). Furthermore, I am not even looking to decide whether or not the satirist “is serious” or if he “means what he says” even though an essay like Gold (1994) makes it clear that it is hard to claim that Juvenal offers a mere parody of moralism that self-destructs amidst its own vitriol.

Histories of English literature tell us that the defining terms of Restoration (1660) poetry were established by John Dryden (1631-1700). Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), in his not entirely uncritical Life, makes Dryden’s transformation of English poetry analogous to Augustus' Rome: “he found it brick, and he left it marble.” He is the seminal poet of his age. So too the masterworks of Restoration satire are Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, and his later Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire set out the ways in which the Roman satirists were to be read and adapted right through the eighteenth century. Pope’s (1688-1744) and Johnson’s conceptions of Horace and Juvenal derive directly from a typology that Dryden popularizes, if not invents. This should, then, be an essay on Dryden. But it is not; for the brilliance of Dryden’s work has tended to leave us a distorted picture of what satire, or indeed Horace and Juvenal, might have meant to a Restoration reader; we look back at the Restoration and see Dryden; a contemporary reader of satire would have seen Dryden and others experimenting with classical satire’s legacy, sorting out its manners and place in the hotly contested literary and social politics of the Restoration. That said, I cannot offer a significantly less inflected version of Restoration satire here; merely another view from its slightly seamier underside, and here too Dryden plays a role …