Ángel Rama and the rare. The rise and fall of a category

Abstract

The historical emergence, the trajectories of meaning and subsequent fading of the ‘rare’ category are examined, which Ángel Rama used in 1966 to designate a line that he understood to be a minority and permanent part of Uruguayan literature. Regardless of the national use that he imprinted on the notion of Rubén Darío –from Verlainean mauditisme–, under the subsequent inflection of the avant-garde and neo-avant-gardes, he identified a set of dissident narratives, distanced from the hegemonic realisms and the fantastic of the Sur group, a kind of countercanon and dark side of the nation. Rama constructed the category as if it resulted, immanently, from a history of the hidden and repressed literary character of Uruguayan literature, an immanence that part of the later criticism did not question too much as long as the label was embraced. More recent perspectives questioned the category more decisively, although without arriving at major consequences. We approach, following a line of thought shared by Rama the concept of realism (Della Volpe, Garaudy), through a tour of the problem, in times of globalization of capital and flattening of exceptionality, to arrive at a concept of fading of the negative power of “rare” and dissolution of the category as such.