• Still AnonymousJicotencal and the Authority of Labor
• Rodrigo Lazo (bio)

author, literary history, Félix Varela, labor, anonymity

And if a text should be discovered in a state of anonymity—whether as a consequence of an accident or the author's explicit wish—the game becomes one of rediscovering the author.

Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?"

In one of the greatest hits of poststructuralism, the essay "What Is an Author?," Michel Foucault writes, "If we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions" (210). Authorial names are different from proper names, Foucault goes on, because they are created in part by the texts attributed to them; in turn, the name of an author can grant a text importance and lead to modes of classification even as it can delimit interpretive possibilities. Foucault writes that an author's name "permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts" (210). Foucault's essay lobs a bomb into the long-held veneration of great authors, questioning the very authority of authorship even as he unpacks the problems of privileging authors in an interpretive process. His references are mostly to male authors in a European literary and intellectual tradition—Homer, Bacon, Becket, and Freud, among others—and yet his line of questioning, which is driven by skepticism about the importance of the author, is relevant for one of the most important books in Latino/a/x literary history: Jicotencal (1826).

The identification of an authorial figure has been an important factor in the mistaken attribution of Jicotencal to the philosopher-priest Félix Varela, which supported the literary historical situating of the novel within a US [End Page 703] "Hispanic literary heritage."¹ Varela, a prominent intellectual, granted the novel gravitas even as the novel's place of publication (Philadelphia) emphasized his place in the orbit of US Spanish-language print culture. How does the disattribution to Varela and the introduction of a new author of Jicotencal change how we situate this book in relation to critical questions, or affect the types of relationships among texts we emphasize? As Kirsten Silva Gruesz shows in her contribution to this symposium, a new writer/publisher of Jicotencal opens a path to considering "sibling works" from Spanish-language publishing in the early United States. Furthermore, what does the veritable musical chairs of authorship, and what each of the proposed authors implies, tell us about the history of literary history? That last question takes us to a period in the twentieth century when the author-nation nexus was paramount and came to influence the critical framing of Jicotencal.

María Barrera-Agarwal's convincing case in this issue that Jicotencal was written by Cayetano Lanuza, a name that some will associate with Spanish-language publishing in the northeastern United States during the early nineteenth century, will inspire new critical directions. But this latest, and perhaps final, salvo in what has been an ongoing debate about an anonymous novel's birthright should also prompt us to step back and reconsider the effects—Foucault's "author function"—of having claimed a figure such as Varela without the type of documentary evidence offered by Barrera-Agarwal. What were the results of framing the novel not only in relation to a particular (erroneous) author but also as part of national literary heritages of Mexico, Cuba, or the United States? To varying degrees the mistaken attributions dislodged the book from three important contexts: (1) the complicated status of an individual author in a transamerican and transatlantic print culture in which intellectuals were more intent on circulating ideas and texts on political theory than positioning themselves as novelists; (2) the importance of anonymous publication to the book's anticolonial politics; and (3) the labor of unnamed figures of Hispanic descent in US history. With Lanuza as a new writer/editor, we can now see that Jicotencal is a novel without a nation, a book without an author, and a product...

• 仍然匿名的Jicotencal和劳工权威
• 罗德里戈·拉佐（简介）

作家、文学史、费利克斯·巴雷拉、劳工、匿名

如果一篇文本在匿名状态下被发现——无论是由于意外还是作者的明确愿望——游戏就变成了重新发现作者的游戏。

米歇尔·福柯，《什么是作家？》

米歇尔·福柯在后结构主义最伟大的作品之一《什么是作家？》一文中写道，“如果我们证明莎士比亚并没有写下那些被认为是他的十四行诗，那将构成一个重大的变化，并影响莎士比亚的创作方式。作者名字的作用”（210）。福柯继续说道，作者姓名与专有名称不同，因为它们部分是由归属于他们的文本创建的。反过来，作者的名字可以赋予文本重要性并导致分类模式，即使它可以界定解释的可能性。福柯写道，作者的名字“允许人们将一定数量的文本组合在一起，定义它们，将它们与其他文本区分开来并与其他文本进行对比。此外，它还建立了文本之间的关系”（210）。福柯的文章向长期以来对伟大作家的崇拜投下了一枚炸弹，质疑作者身份的权威，尽管他在解释过程中解开了赋予作者特权的问题。他的参考文献主要是欧洲文学和知识传统中的男性作家——荷马、培根、贝克特和弗洛伊德等——然而，他的质疑路线是由对作者重要性的怀疑所驱动的，与一个人相关拉丁裔/a/x 文学史上最重要的书籍之一：《Jicotencal》（1826 年）。

作者身份的认定是《Jicotencal》被错误归属于哲学家兼牧师菲利克斯·巴雷拉的一个重要因素，这支持了这部小说在美国[第 703 页] “西班牙文学遗产”的文学历史定位。¹瓦雷拉是一位著名的知识分子，尽管小说的出版地（费城）强调了他在美国西班牙语印刷文化轨道上的地位，但他还是赋予了这部小说庄严的地位。瓦雷拉的分配和《Jicotencal》新作者的引入如何改变我们对这本书与关键问题的关系的定位，或者影响我们强调的文本之间的关系类型？正如克尔斯滕·席尔瓦·格鲁兹 (Kirsten Silva Gruesz) 在本次研讨会的贡献中所表明的那样， Jicotencal的一位新作家/出版商开辟了一条考虑美国早期西班牙语出版的“兄弟作品”的道路。此外，名副其实的作者身份的抢椅子游戏，以及每位拟议作者的暗示，告诉我们什么是文学史的历史？最后一个问题将我们带到了二十世纪的一个时期，当时作者与民族的关系至关重要，并开始影响《吉科坦卡尔》的批判框架。

玛丽亚·巴雷拉-阿加瓦尔（María Barrera-Agarwal）在本期中令人信服地证明《Jicotencal》是由卡耶塔诺·拉努扎（Cayetano Lanuza）撰写的，这个名字有些人会与十九世纪初美国东北部的西班牙语出版业联系起来，这将激发新的批评方向。但是，关于匿名小说与生俱来的权利的争论中，最新的、也许是最后的一次齐射也应该促使我们退后一步，重新考虑在没有类型的情况下声称拥有像瓦雷拉这样的人物的影响——福柯的“作者功能”。 Barrera-Agarwal 提供的书面证据。将这部小说不仅与某个特定的（错误的）作者联系起来，而且将其视为墨西哥、古巴或美国国家文学遗产的一部分，会产生什么结果？这些错误的归因在不同程度上使该书脱离了三个重要背景：（1）在跨美洲和跨大西洋的印刷文化中，个人作者的复杂地位，在这种文化中，知识分子更专注于传播政治理论的思想和文本，而不是把自己定位为小说家。 ; (2) 匿名出版对于本书反殖民政治的重要性；(3) 美国历史上无名西班牙裔人物的劳动。随着拉努扎成为新的作家/编辑，我们现在可以看到《Jicotencal》是一本没有国家的小说，一本没有作者的书，一个产品……