Rodrigo Fresán's Jardines de Kensington: Literature as Home

ABSTRACT

Reading contemporary arguments either in favor of or against cosmopolitanism, one cannot help but notice that it is almost exclusively debated as part of a sociopolitical discourse. Literary space per se, as a potentially cosmopolitan landscape and a plausible alternative to the political order, remains unexplored. In this article, I propose to redirect cosmopolitan discourse toward literature and explore how literature destabilizes and reimagines it. My touchstone will be Rodrigo Fresán, particularly his novel Jardines de Kensington, a text that theorizes writing literature and views it as an inclusive physical and geographical territory. In a world where national and cultural boundaries are blurred, where migration is a norm, and where the ideal of the nation-state seems to be incapable of articulating one's belonging, Fresán proposes to consider literature as a space that could be called home, challenging the tradition of authorial rights and property and suggesting that literature be viewed as a territory constructed entirely through collaboration.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitanism
• Rodrigo Fresán
• hospitality in literature
• world literature

Notes

1. Toulmin traces the evolution of cosmopolitan discourse, claiming that it is a Western, European, and North American agenda of creating one all-encompassing world community based on the Newtonian idea of organizing and managing society rationally. Toulmin argues that the “agenda” of modernity is to view in Cosmopolis a possibility of unifying the orders of nature and society. Cosmopolis gave a “comprehensive account of the world,” and it was based on two guiding principles as parts of the “Divine Plan”: stability and hierarchy (128). Toulmin dates the origins of modernity to the 1630s, with the commitment to rationality as well as the rise of the nation-state and its status as a central political unity.

2. In a recent study, Mariano Siskind (2014) points out the important role that Latin American authors have played in the development of past and present cosmopolitan worldviews. Although there is no doubt that Latin American writers, as Siskind rightfully argues through scrupulous examination of many authors' works, have made considerable contributions to world literature and have frequently engaged with global literary, cultural, and sociopolitical discourses, the fact remains they have also been frequently dismissed or ignored by the cosmopolitan literary landscape precisely due to the perceived politically and economically peripheral status of their respective countries of origin.

3. Goethe spoke of Weltliteratur on several occasions in his essays. His opinions about world literature can be found in his disciple's collection of conversations with Goethe. See J. W. von Goethe.

4. The phrase “at home in the world” is taken from Timothy Brennan's book with the same title.

5. Fresán repeats this phrase on various occasions in several of his texts. One of them is La velocidad de las cosas (462). The same phrase appears in Fresán's Mantra (39).

6. Here, once again, one should acknowledge Mariano Siskind's work (2014), in which the author considers the “hero” of his study to be “a Latin American cosmopolitan intellectual (a distinctively male writer) who derives his specific cultural subjectivity from his marginal position of enunciation and from the certainty that this position has excluded him from the global unfolding of a modernity articulated outside a Latin American cultural field” (9). Although Fresán still feels like an outsider who dwells in the very center of modernity (London, in this case), he certainly distances himself from and refuses to be seen as the Latin American intellectual who is marginalized due to his peripheral status to which Siskind refers.

7. Fresán notes here that this catchphrase is taken from Robyn Hitchcock's album “Moss Elixir (1996)” and then reappears in his own novel Mantra as a title of Baltazar Mantra's “pequeño libro universo” (La velocidad de las cosas 488).

8. This phrase also alludes to Jorge Luis Borges's “eternity of the instant” in his short story “The South,” which refers to the space of literature that can provide us with a life where time has no meaning or function.

9. Fresán's unquestionable interest and perhaps debt to mass culture is quite obvious in Jardines de Kensington, where the life of the Victorian-era British playwright, James Mathew Barrie, is told from the perspective of Jim Yang, a fictional pop culture icon, and is intertwined with the narrator's digressions reflecting upon the swinging 1960s, The Beatles, and Hollywood.

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Ketevan Kupatadze

Ketevan Kupatadze received her PhD in Spanish and Spanish-American literature from Emory University and joined the Elon University faculty in 2007. Her teaching and research interests include contemporary, post-Boom Spanish-American narrative and the intersections of literature, identity, and sociopolitical discourses. Her recent research examines the possibilities of rethinking cosmopolitan tradition through its relationship with the practice of hospitality from a Spanish-American perspective, particularly in the works of Manuel Puig, Rodrigo Fresán, and Ignacio Padilla.