To Begin Writing: Bellatin, Reunited

Abstract

This article reads the works of Mario Bellatin, a writer and artist working in Mexico City, as paradigmatic of new artistic and social forms. It examines a number of spheres of production (performance, pedagogy, novels, the plastic arts) but maintains the centrality of the operation of writing. Bellatin's writing, the article suggests–in a way that is notably distinct from many of contemporaries' resentful attachment to the Spanish American narrative boom–toys with but cannot ultimately be made legible through the modes of national-political allegory that so often determine readings of Latin American texts. History's virtual ‘failure’ to appear legibly in Bellatin's work suggests a new way of understanding allegory—of indeed reading Latin American writing—under what the paper calls interregna1 times. That is, the paper argues that today there is no order or sovereign condition—no social formation, no future project or shared history—that would guarantee the legibility of history's inscription in these texts and this illegibility is precisely the trace of the historicity of the present.