El último juego (1977) is a pastiche of modernism by Panamanian writer Gloria Guardia. The plot, set in media res over the course of a single day, follows Tito Garrido, banker by profession and son of a prominent family of the Panamanian elite. In the diegetic present, the protagonist is preparing to meet with the military president to ratify a treaty that agrees to the continued presence of American military bases around the Canal Zone, despite popular calls for their abolition in the name of national sovereignty. The concession had spurred a student guerrilla group to break into Tito’s house over the weekend, while he was hosting a party for the treaty negotiating team. They were kept under hostage for three days, making the diegetic present, a Tuesday, Tito’s first day of “freedom” since Friday. Notably, he spends it mostly inside his car or at one of his two offices in Panama City, forced to torturously wait while the military head delays the meeting, a convenient technique for narrative progression. As readers, we learn about what happened through flashbacks rendered in a stream of consciousness that is reminiscent of the style of Virginia Woolf, where exterior events lose narrative hegemony in favor of the inner thoughts of the protagonist. The prose is also inflected with montage and crosscuttings techniques that pay a nod to Boom writers.1

The overall result, on one hand, is a blank parody pastiche where anything goes, but on the other, the plot gradually reveals an orientation and direction to Panamian society at a moment of radical transformation of both American empire and the global financial order. In fact, the plot about the hostage and its aftermath is expanded through the technique of the prose, in the accumulation of connections forged between the protagonist’s reaction to the loss of his lover, the toggle between narrative and descriptive modes, and the external social issues internalized by the composition. In other words, the literary form parodies a structure of disavowal that drives the narrative forward by way of Tito’s mental acrobatics, making visible a social process in motion through the “small, imperceptible capillary movements of individual life.”2

Dominant interpretations read the novel as a national allegory in terms of race and gender.3 However, missing from these analyses is a more thorough interpretation of the novelistic attempt to unravel a specific class dimension to the nation. My analysis will focus on how the literary form evokes a major economic transition in patterns of capital accumulation in Panama, theorizing the role of national elites within it. The novel theorizes this transition by “discovering” a kind of pattern to the affects, habits, and dispositions that secured the neocolonial financialization of the country, what I call an abject comportment of mournful hedonism. This analysis does not come at the expense of gender and race, but rather allows us to return to these terms with deeper scrutiny.

The representation of the protagonist’s deceased lover Mariana tends to be the focal point of most criticism on the novel. Literary scholar Ileana Rodriguez sees the character as an “unfolding of metonymy” that constitutes the nation into a “feminized fiction,” where the only subject position available is impotence.4 At stake with this interpretation are the historical trajectories of Central American, anti-imperialist revolutions throughout the second half of the twentieth century, which compelled the need to advocate for a close relation between literature and politics. Therefore, this commentary on the novel is also a critique of social polarization as revolutionary aspirations became foreclosed. Although the conclusions on impotence are generative, the methodological orientation treats the novel as an interpellating apparatus, thereby losing sight of the specificity of the literary form.5 In short, the tendency to focus on Mariana as representation has constrained more thorough interpretations of the novel as a whole.6

Consider her introduction in the opening lines, where seemingly banal descriptions gain meaningful symbolism retrospectively, when we pay close attention to the alternation of the temporal levels: the memory of Mariana talking with the guests happens right before the hostage takeover, while the “last time” Tito references at the beginning is the paramedics taking the corpse out of his house, which is also the final scene of the novel. One way or another, he spends his first day of freedom fixated on the hostage:

Yesterday I saw you, Mariana, for the last time, I should have stared at you deeply and attentively, you had a visage to be stared at, I mean, to be stared at without qualms, without shame and with quite some malice in the recording pupil: full lips, tall forehead, brown cheekbones, I came close to you, Good evening, Mariana, with a quick gesture…and you walked across the living room in the direction of a group of guests talking…7

The spiral structure suggests itself as a peculiar origin story where her loss is not only implied from the beginning, but thematized as an absent corpse in the sexualized description of body parts, which in turn suggests itself as a refracted memory of death turned into fixation on an idealized past. For the French feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the corpse is the symbol of abjection par excellence, a process she further depicts as the subjective experience of the dissolution of temporal boundaries, an “archaic memory” that impels carnivalesque parody and repulsive horror.8 I’m interested in how Kristeva’s idea of abjection foregrounds a temporal dissolution that results in the alternation of polarities; etymologically, abject also means something that is both present and cast off.9 Both meanings seem apt for approaching the qualities of the character of Mariana as part of a larger literary form, which repeatedly sets in motion a play of presence and absence that looks like an alternation of Tito’s reactions to the diegetic present, paradoxically revealing in the process the contours of a social reality in transformation. Notice how even as Tito sexualizes the corpse, a new and ornamental qualityof abstract labor comes across, “you were doing your thing, telling guests how boring you found that job of yours…the whole day in front of an electric machine, serve the café…the five latino economists at your service, pisco sours with the board at five, write down the memo...”10 In mourning Mariana while stressing modern feelings associated with the workforce, the form expands what at first glance seem like menial details, enlisting the digressive prose for a narrative progression of some kind of allegory.

What exactly is the allegorical content of this literary construction? Except for Tito and his family, every other character, including Mariana, expresses nationalist sentiments that exacerbate his sense of isolation. As this social pressure and his recalcitrant refusal are gradually fleshed out, a structural dimension emerges, contextualizing Tito’s mental acrobatics while performing a kind of toggle that suddenly turns the narration of loss into something else. Take, for example, the moment Tito is out for lunch at one of the most exclusive clubs in Panama City. After ordering a lobster bisque, he runs into Paco Alvarez, a government colleague who participated in the 1959 anti-American riots. Paco is curious to know what happened during the hostage takeover, but Tito finds the question irritating and dismisses him by attacking his nationalist convictions, a “heroism of the I-would-die-for-my-nation type.”11 Paco responds: “man, things have been changing, and you know it…we want to be a free nation, we want the Canal to be ours, fuck, let’s stop playing along with the world powers.”12 The conflict between the two is neutralized from the very beginning, since the stream of consciousness mediates the plot from Tito’s point of view. In this scene, the outrage at what he considers Paco’s “ingenuity” deflates his mournful obsession over Mariana as the other side of a hedonistic class project. From this double affective stance, Paco’s nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiments appear out of place while surrounded by martinis and lobster bisques. Tito reacts to an unpleasant past that refuses to die by turning its symbols into objects of grotesque obsession (Mariana) or absurd repulsion (Paco). The mental acrobatics conveyed by the digressive prose gradually reveal the contours of a social world, in principle excluded by the technique of the prose. In short, the bursting asunder of the present is intimately linked to a past moment of nationalism and its lingering pretensions or attractions. The pastiche emphasizes the perverse pleasure Tito finds in mourning the national past viz-a-viz his obsession with Mariana and his hedonistic repulsion of others, damaging the legitimacy of nationalism in the process, but without fully dismissing its validity.13 To put it bluntly, by grafting a dead Mariana onto an ideal past that is more comforting than the present, the impossibility of the lingering attractions of the developmentalist project are brought to the fore.

It is also worth noting that the composition of the pastiche is also rendered through the repetition of bank advertisements, a feature rarely remarked upon by critics.14 Consider this radio broadcast a few lines after the opening scene:

this is WCA transmitting from Panama City, historical town where the two Oceans meet, welcomes you any time of the year...Ladies and Gentlemen…leave your money in Panama, a paradise where your money is safe, the Switzerland of the Americas. Panama offers you security and good service, deposit your money today and bury your concerns at the high mountains of Chagres Club, the biggest and most modern private social club in Central America …15

The pastiche unfolds the country’s transformation into an offshore enclave as a cartoonish object of desire, comparing it to one of the most successful tax havens in Europe. The indulgent pitch appeals to and makes fun of its intended audience — a transnational and financial elite: “courtesy of the Bank of Transylvania, a bank with over one hundred years of experience…when you think of your children, think of the Children’s Bank”16 Even as it parodies peddling global prestige, the novel remains committed to a national legacy. In fact, a longue durée of violence is alluded in the reference to Chagres, a trade town from the colonial era that was flooded in 1904 to expand the Canal.17 The image that emerges suggests a city teeming with banks as a lucrative reminder of failure, a humiliating but attractive transgression of sovereignty that sustains Tito’s world of luxury. The pastiche of the bank advertisement contributes to the narrative insofar as the social world that impelled Tito’s convictions is revealed. These scenes exemplify how the combinatory play of the form activates registers of mourning and hedonism in function of a specific class dimension to the nation, more specifically a project that seeks to render the nation abject, both present and cast off in new financial forms. In short, the accumulation of alternations may give insights into a practical comportment that turns weaknesses into strengths and strengths into weaknesses — a repeated motion conditioned by the compulsory turn to an offshore financial enclave.

To anticipate my larger argument, on the levels of content and form El último juego reveals how the class recomposition of the contemporary, Panamanian elite conditioned the fetishistic strategies of self-delusion most adequate for this ruling class from a merchant colonial background to transform itself into bankers. By further grafting the loss of Mariana over a newly constituted moment of financialization, the novel obliquely visualizes an economic transition by theorizing in the literary composition a plausible comportment for the successful reordering of Panamanian dependency according to its new role as an offshore enclave, a turn that took place after the developmentalist pretensions of the elite fractured along conflicting class interests.

A Volatile Class

The traces of the social world outlined so far suggest a distinct orientation of the literary form, which may be better characterized by briefly considering the historical composition of the Panamanian ruling class.18 Panama’s incorporation into a capitalist world market has historically been conditioned by its advantageous geographical position, which significantly increases productivity by lowering circulation costs worldwide. This “natural resource” has been under the monopoly of a merchant bourgeoisie since the colonial era, which benefitted from it through the generic form of enclave concessions. Tito belongs to this specific faction of the ruling class, with ties to liberal ideologues of the state who founded the Republic of Panama in 1903 as an imperial venture.19 Restricted insertion in the sphere of circulation strengthens one of the main contradictions of the social formation: the inequality between the urban transit zone of Colon and Panama City (in the center of the country) and what the sociological literature calls the “rural interior,” which refers to the eastern and westerns ends of the country. Each version of the capitalist world-market has had a main concession through which the merchant faction made its profits. Starting with the California Gold rush of 1848, the nexus of dependency was the railroad. The Panama Canal took over the role between 1904 and 1914, until the offshore enclave replaced it, beginning in 1969.20

The generic structure of the concessionary enclave is symptomatic of the systematic weakness of the Panamanian ruling class. By profiting essentially from the lowering of circulation costs worldwide, there was never a strong foundation to foment sovereign authority. Furthermore, the ability to profit from concessions failed to incentivize robust internal markets, which in turn preserved languishing circuits of subsistence in the interior by intermittently expelling surplus labor to circuits of transnational accumulation in mono-export industries.21 The material basis in the sphere of circulation left the merchant faction very vulnerable to the volatility of the world market, so to guarantee its reproduction as a political leader, it was forced early on to strategically “absorb” other classes through compromises in the control of the state apparatus and “prestigious” marriages, resulting in one oligarchic alliance between urban and rural landowners, agrarian industrialists, and a nationalist petite bourgeoisie.22 The alliance between the merchant faction and the military government of Omar Torrijos, the former’s response to oligarchic in-fighting, was forged in 1969, precisely with the reorientation of the national economy to new financial markets.

This is the historical composition of the oligarchic ruling class in Panama, today around 20 families. If we locate the standpoint for the literary form with this hegemonic faction, we are forced to revisit the canonical readings of the novel. Ileana Rodriguez ultimately interprets El último juego as an anti-imperialist romance, along the lines of Doris Sommer’s canonical reading of nineteenth-century Latin American novels, where the plotting of heterosexual love is used to negotiate national histories. However, Sommer’s argument presumes the project of romance to be democratic and conciliatory, which Rodriguez leaves intact by mobilizing her interpretation solely as a negative critique: the anti-imperialist romance in Guardia’s novel, its failure of reconciliation, posits both nation and gender as discursive play of legitimizations and transgressions of sovereignty. At first, the interpretation may seem plausible, insofar as the main antagonism consists of anti-imperialist revolutionary politics and an “administrative non-bourgeoisie.” The problem is that this characterization does not convincingly account for the literary form as we have seen it so far. Interpreting the novel as an anti-imperialist romance fails to consider how the representation of nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiments has an ornamental disposition that reinforces the main antagonism withinan oligarchic class that shares a modern and liberal self-image, between a faction in favor of transnational financialization and another one fixated on national developmentalism as a sign of modernity.

In other words, the novel crystalizes habits and dispositions that come together as a disavowing comportment, a defense mechanism that makes an economic transition alternately visible and invisible. It is as if the literary form stylistically ventriloquizes the comportment needed to realize the history it illustrates, namely the transition from shipping enclave with developmentalist pretensions to neocolonial offshore enclave. I call this gesture mournful hedonism, an abject comportment that is not empirically verifiable but remains plausible insofar as the interpretation of the novel succeeds as a compelling reading. Consider for example the sequence soon after the opening scenes, when Tito arrives to his office at the bank. He quickly becomes uncomfortable the moment he is left alone, with abrupt shifts in the narrative that convey a sense of spiraling horror: from memories of family gatherings with Mariana to scenes of lovemaking (unclear at times whether with his lover or his wife) to brief flashes of the guerrilla group shoving the guests against the walls. The spiral reaches a climax when the focalization returns to Mariana: “you seemed oblivious to everything, as if time had stopped around you and this was the only thing you aspired to, and even the hostage was necessary, the motor force to situate you…on a summit or a stadium from where to change your skin…for a more sensitive one, capable of perceiving beyond your own reality.”23 By grafting the Romantic sublime onto a fantasy of sexual possession, it is as if the entire section was suddenly reconfigured in a new key. The protagonist gazes out the window, asserting the privilege of experiencing the foreclosure of contradictory possibilities as a kind of beauty, precisely because the horizon remains the Panamanian social formation. An allegorical movement from sexualized object to social landscape suddenly emerges in the confrontation with an unbearable new reality. Mournful hedonism, as figure for a literary form and a social process, attunes us to how the composition internalizes the external to make visible a historical structure: an abstract but real coercion in the middle of social transformation.24 In other words, the novel theorizes in its form a point of affinity between literature and reality, a real but abstract nexus of contemporary social relations.

Agency in Restriction

This concept of mournful hedonism, not just as an abject comportment that is the expression of the compulsory turn to the offshore enclave, but also as the rule for the literary composition, allows us to appreciate how the novel plays with the residual genres of realism in unique ways. The use of Bildungsroman is particularly noteworthy; it mediates how the merchant faction preserved itself in a new financial form, thanks to a traditional strategy of elite survival, family prestige.25 Mariana was Tito’s lover since young adulthood, even after he married Maria Enriqueta, or Queta, at age 30. Her family is of a similar pedigree as the Garridos, but she’s “tackier.” Among other things, he dislikes her taste for American magazines, which he sees as a gaudy manifestation of provincial origins. In contrast, Tito admires how Mariana reads Federico Garcia Lorca. She is portrayed as the rebel, modern woman par excellence. On the other hand, the decision to marry Queta was imposed by his father, Ricardo A. Garrido II, or RAG, who also pushed Tito to become treaty negotiator, to ensure low trade tariffs as part of the canal treaty, which benefit the import-export business he established with Queta’s family wealth. Tito’s love triangle therefore performs a clash between modern ideals and class interests that double as family duties. Their weight distorts the norms of family life without damaging their validity, registering the inability of the class to participate in the world market outside the concessionary enclave. In this way, a negative relation to the family form motivates the continued adherence to an unachievable norm: “Queta is a Garrido now, very much a Garrido…no one dares even doubt it…my old man gets mad…he appreciates what she’s worth…with her money he organized that enterprise, yes, the International Importing and Exporting Business…he even kisses and hugs her tenderly, something he has never done with me.”26 Not only is Mariana out of reach, so is his own status as a Garrido. It is Queta who received the paternal approval, precisely because she acted as an investor. Tito’s sense of belonging is denied at the same time it is distorted in practice, evoking a coerced transformation that diminished without annihilating their former source of wealth in shipping. The accommodation of transgressed family norms attests not just to who this class was before turning financial, but also to the comportments it developed over time to support its transformation.

The novel therefore achieves a very concrete standpoint from where everything else is constructed: the national “defect” of the Panamanian elite, which is consciousness of their fundamental role as an imperial lackey. This neocolonial raison d’être is an inevitably humiliating position, even more so after the foreclosure of national developmentalism. As imperial lackey, achieving hegemony is conditioned by the faction’s ability to successfully adapt to imperial interests. This need to adapt to the rules of the “game” is thematized in the parody of the Bildungsroman, where the process of maturation implies a betrayal of any principle that goes against larger class interests. On this plane, the betrayal is transformed into an unfulfilled desire for paternal approval. Furthermore, in this parody of growing up, the ruling class resents the new, making it valorize the old. Take the following moment, one of the few times Tito walks outside:

the colonial style mansions that the gringos, the French, the Swiss and the Germans have been buying and turning into banks, restaurants or commercial stores, I want to return, rewind, go back in time…8-year-old me…visiting that couple of older Nicaraguans, old exiles…they had just built for themselves this, or was it that?, house of two floors that now harbors one of the seventy something banks we have…27

Tito mourns the years after 1938 as the bygone time of his youth, a period which coincided with a boom in internal accumulation tumultuously sustained by oligarchic cleavages until the 1960s. Throughout this period, urban landowners, agrarian industrialists and the petit-bourgeois factions of the oligarchic ruling class used economic and political crises to realign against the merchant faction, which benefits the most from transnational circuits of accumulation. By recurring to canal treaties under the auspices of sovereignty, the merchant faction sought to manage the oligarchic cleavages.28 At the same time, the “death” of internal accumulation under the hegemony of finance capital, gestured at in the description of foreign banks destroying the childhood neighborhood, is in part a result of the foreclosure of global, developmentalist possibilities of the immediate post-war period. As Bret Benjamin argues, the developmentalist aspirations of global decolonization were foreclosed by the early 1970s as a crisis in the valorization of capital asserted itself. Briefly put, this crisis in the value-form results from the imperative to compete by increasing productivity, which leads to a decline in profitability by displacing living labor from production.29 The tendential displacement of living labor across the totality undermines the global ability for capital accumulation by removing the basis for new value creation through consumption, resulting in a relative surplus population.30

In addition, increasing productivity in Panama, as in the rest of Central America, meant modernizing with restricted technological means a somewhat autonomous agrarian structure by continuing the practice of enclave concessions. With the mid-1950s discovery of the Euromarkets, a regulatory vacuum that resulted from the decolonization of the British empire and further incentivized the proliferation of the first offshore financial markets, modernization became intertwined with the promotion of various forms of offshore activities, putting it at odds with its prior conception as investment in productive activities.31 The parody of Bildungsroman evokes this perverse present that is as traumatic as the foreclosed past, a catch-22 that results in an alienating modernity that is not disqualified in its allure. What we have is Tito yearning for a moment when he could be rich without becoming a banker, which in Panama would have been when the ruling class could carry out its infighting as a reformist developmentalist struggle. In short, the novel parodies a time the ruling class could pass for a progressive force before its fundamentally counterrevolutionary tendency asserted itself.

In this way, the abject comportment of an older elite class reacting to unpleasant change is formalized. In the coordination of content and form, mournful hedonism mobilizes dispositions and habits compelled by the history illustrated. Unable to hide the truth of their defective trait as imperial lackey, but still entitled to empire’s prerogatives, mournful hedonism is a kind of agency in restriction. Symbols associated with modern life are always employed to alienating ends; take, for example, Tito’s reaction to Panama City, “a Third World city, or developing or underdeveloped to say it without poetry.”32 As a reaction from the privileged old to the new form of offshore enclave financialization, mournful hedonism turns banks, the city, and electronic devices into targets of petty resentment. As a concept, it allows us to appreciate not simply that the Panamanian elites are an imperial lackey, but what’s most interesting, the peculiar comportments developed to reproduce their humiliating position.

Near the end of the novel, we find out how Tito got the job of treaty negotiator: by rewriting national mining laws to encourage transnational extractivism, which impressed the military president, who also wanted to use his prestigious last name to give legitimacy to the negotiations. In 1970, the same year Tito secured his new job, the Torrijos government in real life passed a new set of banking laws that coincided with the amendment by the US Congress to the Bank Holding Act, allowing American banks to expand abroad and operate in Panama. The amendment was an attempt by US banks to take advantage of the lucrative Euromarkets. In Panama, the move was part of the transition away from the period of internal accumulation driven by oligarchic cleavages. The new set of banking laws realized the successful alliance between a hegemonic merchant faction suddenly embracing financialization, the military faction clustered around the figure of Omar Torrijos and the US, at the expense of the factions in favor of national developmentalism.33 In short, the neocolonial relation between the US and Panama eased the latter’s financialization and the transfer of the Canal, which was unprofitable for Americans since the end of WWII.34 Tito’s character evokes, as part of the literary whole, how through its subjugation in a structure of dependency, Panama was assigned a new role in a transformed global financial order that overlapped with the hegemony of American empire, while conditioned by a crisis in the value form of capital.

Imperial Lackey Patriarch

The phenomenon of finance as conditioned by crisis gets dramatized in the parody of gendering codes. Mournful hedonism allows us to appreciate how the novel constantly subjects Tito to juxtapositions that bring into focus a hollowed-out masculinity. The form functions as a kind of meta dissecting mechanism, achieved in part through the influence of 1970s feminist thought. By using modern objects to interrupt Tito’s memories and bring the prose back to the present, the montage is constantly dissecting his defense mechanisms, developing the narrative on a different plane as an exposition of patriarchal impotence.35 For example, we first find out about the hostage in an implicit manner, during the opening scene of his car ride to the office: “the day changed course and I had to pronounce that goodbye which remained fixed, printed and sealed…National Guard Communications, Panamanian terrorists arrived to Libya…they kept under hostage some thirty something personalities inside a luxurious residence for over seventy hours…I turn down the volume...”36 The prose surrounding the military memo doubles as Freudian slip: the final goodbye to Mariana is figured as a signed treaty; lowering down the news hints at discomfort. The associative modality of the metaleptic prose transforms disparate memories and sudden reactions into one virtual reenactment of his disavowal of responsibility and its rationale. Mournful hedonism, as rule of the composition, ventriloquizes Tito by showing how his hollowed-out masculinity resembles, on the one hand, the reproduction of a hollowed-out sovereignty in a structure of neocolonial dependency, and on the other, the economic impossibility of sustained accumulation, a state of affairs that “does not show itself by the ‘cessation’ of capitalism…but by actions that force upon the capitalist class the awareness that [it is] on its way.”37

The entire composition aims at exaggerating patriarchal impotence, revealing through its humiliating qualities an antagonistic impasse.38 When Tito remembers the first time he slept with Mariana, at a party she organized with their childhood friends Teresa and Antonia, he digresses to comment on Antonia’s husband Juan Almillategui, a cousin of Mariana: “and the photographer…focusing on Wilson…and Juan Almillategui, so short, chubby and plump…Don Juan, please, look this way, toward the camera…and a grimace came out, so out of tune with the splendid gestures…with which Teresa and you, Mariana, had decorated.”39 With the pretense of mourning, he indulges in a violent inscription of inferiority, simultaneously insinuating the act as a thrilling privilege in the references to mass photography. Although at this moment RAG’s character has not been introduced, the description of Juan anticipates Tito’s relation to his father, “an appendage of his father, that chubby Spaniard with black suspenders.”40 His contempt is a clear recoil to their resemblance, a reminder he is similarly a daddy’s boy. Importantly, the Almillategui family’s economic basis in domestic production is used to justify both malice and resignation:

[the father] was starting a business selling foodstuff, and their house, I blush thinking about it, a lifeless house, without light or hope, I mean a mausoleum bought by my own efforts and decorated with a pale woman, of opaque eyes, blue-eyed and purple lips, where we used to have lunch, some immense tortillas, every Sunday.41

The anamorphic imagery stages the prerogative of a subject that perceives internal accumulation as both prey and emblem of belonging. The boastful description of the house as a feminized mausoleum turns the Almillateguis into a metonymy for an ideal relation to the nation: a compulsion to profit off transnational circuits of accumulation that stagnate national productivity, while inflating consumption in the country’s transit zone at the expense of the laboring population’s consumption capacities.42 As scholars have pointed out, Panama’s twentieth-century agrarian reforms were minimal at best and deeply intertwined with the ambitions of different factions of the ruling class.43 The oligarchic alliance is sustained by the prerogative to be an imperial lackey, too weak to overcome dependency, but strong enough to secure its reproduction in the sphere of circulation. Unlike elsewhere in Central America, like in Guatemala or El Salvador, Panamanian landowners and agrarian industrialists never achieved hegemony over the state. The dizzying oscillation of gendered luxury and impoverished consumption reinforces Tito’s impotent masculinity as the compromised hegemony of a neocolonial bourgeoisie unable to address the systematic but uneven rendering of the national laboring population as doubly redundant to the valorization process of finance-driven accumulation, in other words, relatively superfluous to national production and consumption. This memory of Almillategui, in other words, captures in its parody the impersonal coercion to produce “monetary subjects without cash.”44

By giving insights into a comportment constituted by the history the novel illustrates, the literary form repeatedly performs the concrete strategies that negotiate humiliation with self-preservation. Halfway through the book, we learn Tito once proposed to Mariana, but she rejected him: “You Mariana, talking to me about that simple man, your ideal…someone who will see me for what I am, you were saying, for what I am: a lowercase woman.”45 Parodying his romantic obsession to the point of narcissism, Mariana’s reason for her rejection deflates his mournful fantasy into an idealized compensation. The revelation of dismissal relativizes Tito’s nostalgia, suggesting it is in fact for an era when the oligarchy could be rich and claim to embody the nation through developmentalist pretensions. A new reality, more unbearable and humiliating, reveals the perversity of both past and present without disqualifying either.

Surreal Conflicts

The perversity of both past and present reinforces mournful hedonism as an abject comportment of the Panamanian bourgeoisie, the most adequate form of practice and consciousness to embrace financial circuits mediated by the national, defective trait of being an imperial lackey of the United States. The moment of striking the bargain produces the strategy of class delusion as a practical necessity that justifies the preservation of neocolonial prerogatives by lamenting the betrayal to nationalist developmentalist aspirations. However, this does not mean it can dismiss humiliation or fix the decomposition of class relations. Instead, new weaknesses must be confronted and appropriated, but the strategy of class delusion can only go so far. Registering a wider decomposition as immanent to financialization, the form parodies at times the action-packed qualities of the thriller, using racial codes to compose a kind of surrealist suspense.

Take for example another moment when Tito looks out a window and sees the statue of President Jose Antonio “Chichi” Remon, murdered in 1955 and located right next to the presidential palace in real life. In the novel’s sequel, Lobos al Anochecer (2006), Chichi’s murder takes center stage, where he is portrayed as a peculiar national hero: a petit bourgeois turned drug dealer and military leader, but still committed to agrarian reform and investment in productive activities. These associations are negatively present in Tito’s digressive remembrance of the murder:

there he was… shots fired, rat-tat-tat-tat, a burst, another one, then another, the murderers jumping from all sides, smiling, dancing, singing…fighting for the prerogative to take part in slaughter, to revel in the blood gushing out…leaving the poor man, thrown aside, impotent…no one, really, no one remembers that anymore, now what matters is my children, awake and playing with a pair of cholitas that take care of them…let the rest sink down the Earth…for the status-quo, I even let the Earth swallow me.46

The assailants are figured as bloodlust revelers, suggesting an anamorphic fantasy of a guilt-ridden conscience, where racialization and social reproduction (“mis hijos…jugando con el par de cholitas que los cuidan”) come across as emblems for new social priorities that have replaced what Chichi stood for, namely, national developmentalism, no matter how limited or at what expense. Openly admitting his predilection for the status quo, Tito turns his children into an alibi for the enjoyment of violence, relying on racial codes to amplify the urban spectacle of the offshore enclave while securing a defense from his consciousness as imperial lackey.

At the same time, the position of financialized imperial lackey also suggests a transformation in the hegemony of American empire, conditioned by the impossibility of continued accumulation at the level of the totality. The inevitable abjection of the neocolonial offshore in a situation where the impossibility of continued accumulation looms over is expressed in the elastic codes of racial resentment. For example, the moment when Tito runs into the Japanese banker Tanaka, a power struggle where the status of subordinate to a new kind of financial empire led by the US is rehearsed. Like everyone else, Tanaka wants to know about the concession to military bases, “he asks with petulance, with airs of I-am-superior-you-runaway-Indian.”47 Throughout the novel, racial identifications are inconsistent at the level of Tito’s character, but they always exacerbate humiliation. Brief interruptions of the guerrilla leader Cero calling him “rabiblanco” (“white-ass”) recur, along with his mother’s warnings of looking too “Indian.” His projection of racial resentment in fact speaks to a shared but coerced association. Both Panama and Japan were strategically important allies to the postwar project of a global capitalism under the auspices of US hegemony, which was predicated on reviving capitalist economies around the world and their national bourgeoisies. Between the immediate postwar years until the 1990s, Japanese banking was the second most prevalent in Panama after American banks. The racially charged interaction of competitive inferiority intentionally mobilizes this history, which is further thematized when Tanaka shares that he is moving to the new Bank of Tokyo skyscraper: “I notice how purple his lips are, quivering, probably, in anger, pure anger, and he opens his mouth to tell me with pride.”48 Tito’s speculation comes across as a compensatory projection, palpable in the tentative language in which it is delivered. The prerogative to inscribe social differentiation, seen earlier with the Almillategui family, is repeated here to evoke a regime of financial expansion that is fundamentally about conceding to a transformation of American empire, now in charge of upholding a new global financial order that hinges on the dollar.

The specific ways since the 1970s in which the contemporary infrastructure of finance capital keeps sustaining a totality in tendential crisis are opaque.49 At the very minimum, we can say the structure of dependency of the concessionary enclave makes the national turn to financial markets an expression of the needs of the global hegemon and its potential “autumn.” As pointed out above, the 1970s represent a fundamental transformation of the international financial order and the role of the US within it. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin have shown how the American decision in 1971 to effectively dismantle the Bretton Woods system “decreased one set of perceived restrictions on the US” while at the same time it “expanded not only international status but the responsibilities of the Federal Reserve and US Treasury.”50 The literary form internalizes a national transition that presupposes a larger transition in the global financial order, where the US is no longer responsible solely for its own social formation but also for securing and validating confidence in the dollar. Confidence in the dollar as a new necessity for competition in the world market makes the transformed playing field a humiliating one for neocolonial capitalist classes after a period where national developmentalist sovereignty seemed possible. The racial resentment of the scene alternates between mourning for the transgressed national sovereignty represented by finance and enjoying its privileges as a hedonistic inscription of interlocked racial and gendered stigma.51

Therefore, the comportment, even as it preserves neocolonial prerogatives, also denounces exclusion from privileges that have disappeared. Right after the encounter with Tanaka, Tito steps outside one last time. He often complains about the heat. Even the sun’s reflection in the rearview mirror of his car bothers him:

outside the heat is asphyxiating, the sun, Mariana, it blinds me, to protect myself I hurry to put on my sunglasses and…I feel safe to walk through these streets…the ones our generation has witnessed changing…thousands of people, of traders…who come and go from skyscrapers like this one…the First National City Bank, the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Banco do Brazil, the Bank of Boston and London’s…Little or nothing do they know that when you and I were children…we used to play in those same spots… used to be empty lots or giant, fancy houses …from one day to the next, they were sold, demolished or renovated, like that of Banco Comercial Antioqueño.52

By incorporating references to changes in the urban landscape as part of the literary construction of a dependent elite’s perspective, the novel proleptically gestures at a technique that Honduran-Salvadorean writer Horacio Castellanos Moya developed further a few decades later.53 The denunciatory quality of testimonio suddenly appears as a parody of ruling class delusions. The new is resented through a valorization of the old, by way of a projection of exclusion viz-a-viz changes in the built environment. The parody of speaking from a position of exclusion while enjoying hermetic privileges emphasizes Tito’s mental acrobatics as futile, as if they resembled the impossibility of continued accumulation within a totality in tendential crisis, registering a repressed consciousness of its reality.

But the generality of catastrophe implied in the looming over of impossible accumulation is at its most palpable as the novel comes to an end, when the use of montage to generate suspense takes over the narrative mode. Its accelerated repetition insinuates Tito’s arrival to the perimeter of the Presidential Palace to ratify the treaty, where several slums are located, evoking it as a virtual form of social disintegration. As the novel comes to an end, it exacerbates action-packed, surrealist suspense.54 After he tells his driver Elias to take him to the palace, he remembers the guerrilla leader Cero commanding him into a bus to go to the airport, fragmenting the memory of their preparations, “packing up weapons…putting away the large quantities of ammunition, hand grenades, dynamite candles ,” with a list of the luxury brand names he sees along the ride in the diegetic present, “LUCES, Christian Dior/ Pierre Cardin/ Givenchi/ John Kloss/ Ives St. Laurent.”55 Mournful hedonism is operating at full speed, rapidly collapsing memories of the ride to the airport to escape to Libya with snippets of rescue negotiations. The scene becomes a parody of a car chase, turning the city into a virtual encounter with death, “Cero screaming, either stop or I kill you, Mariana, the racket of the motor…Elias, take the Justo Arosemena avenue…the guerrilla approaches the driver, if you stop the car I blow you up…aiming the gun at his thick and sweaty neck.”56 The foreground is lit with action; the vivid settings of brutality intermingle with erotic memories of Mariana until, “lowering his head…he is certain it is not worth remembering…but he is stuck in a morbid game and he knows it.”57 The sequence reaches a peak with this moment of ambivalent empathy, amplifying the stigma of decomposition while simultaneously asserting it as part of the social whole.58 As Tito readies himself to assert his class prerogatives, the novel relativizes an appearance of absoluteness with the distance of an unequivocal judgment. The stream of consciousness turns on its protagonist, showing how he cries his way to the bank, by way of a canal treaty that ensures the smooth reordering of a shifting structure of dependency, “a morbid game.” The composition of this “morbid game” is the concrete means by which the literary form labors to make visible an abstract historical structure: mournful hedonism attunes us to the formalization of overlapping transitions in a complex ensemble of social totalities that generate new forms of real but abstract coercions.59

Thrilling Decompositions

As literary form, mournful hedonism can only go so far. The suspenseful unraveling of the Bildungsroman is a sign of its breakdown. After the parody of the car chase, a switch to the perspective of Elias reinforces the relativization of absolute reflexes, one of the few times the prose focalizes a perspective other than Tito’s: “Elias, for his part, is bored. This patron is extremely laconic, a tomb, nothing like the Jiménez, who left to the United States; he wipes the sweat off his forehead, he doubts he’ll last much longer with this weird family.”60 Tito’s centrality is diminished in his portrayal as interchangeable patron. The driver can dismiss the damaged validity of abstract values like nation and family, knowing full well that the only binding force is the restricted means of earning a wage. Both oligarchic nostalgia and nationalist aspirations are turned into empty ideals. The sudden importance and audacity of the secondary character relativizes the normative reflexes of Tito’s milieu, exalting the comedy of the situation and reaching a peak when the narrative switches back to Tito’s claim of liking Elias for being a stereotypically submissive worker. The racialized description was undermined before it was even delivered, turning the judgement of “submission’’ into a clownish projection of domination: “like a good Indian, always quiet…tamed, lets someone else do, say, decide, and he only knows how to follow, to abide, to begrudgingly please…that is how he gets to feel just how he likes to, I mean, how he feels in his puddle: upset, tired, oppressed, irritated.”61 The relativization of Tito’s inner world collapses his defense mechanisms, parodying his projection as a conviction for his ownneocolonial subjugation.

This scene also pays a nod to Panamanian writer Rogelio Sinan’s short story “Todo un conflicto de sangre” (1946), where a Nazi German trader is convinced her driver from the interior is gradually turning her into a Black woman, until she seduces him at the end instead. The intertextual relation suggests the diminished stature of the oligarchic ruling class in the world-system. Whereas postwar fantasies sustained by internal accumulation could criticize the ruling class by amplifying the absurdity of the racial and gendered hierarchies they created (Sinan), the fantasy performed by Guardia’s novel, building on previous achievements in the literary sphere, can only work through the national past by acknowledging the humiliating reality of being an imperial lackey, a reality that cannot be easily racialized or sexualized away.62

A culminating trajectory of surrealist suspense further evokes stagnant national productivity, most perceptible when we contrast the depictions of the slum neighborhoods of El Marañon, Calidonia, and El Chorrillo at the beginning and at the end of the novel. Tito first describes their sight as “ants’” coming down the “hills,” a familiar gesture of the hedonistic prerogative to treat others with disdain. Although treated indifferently, super-exploitation is one of the possible ways the Panamanian structure of dependency reproduces an economic periphery.63 It “comes back” as a kind of exaggerated immiseration, a reminder of the compromised hegemony of the neocolonial ruling class, where the relative surplus population stands for an impasse between the private wealth of the elite and the social wealth of the nation. After he orders his driver to take the quickest road to the palace, “strewn with puddles and mud, reeking of fish,”64 physical discomfort foreshadows the recognition of Mariana’s death, amplified by the cross-cutting of “I swear! It was an accident” with memories of love making, “you and I in Las Cumbres, breathlessly climbing up and down the path with the exotic plants, our bodies recorded in the pupils of the shadows.”65 The dissonant sequence emphasizes generalized catastrophe as Tito covers his nose to no avail, while informal markets erupt into the scene: “lotto vendors sitting in the middle of the street, try your luck!, a scream, another, a traffic jam, cars running into wheelbarrows, trucks, bikes, drunken motorcyclists…”66 Chaos and chance give way to a miniature model of the country’s social polarization. The distinct trajectory of entropy evokes the unnerving consequences of adhering, then betraying, the ideals of national developmentalism. The market is taken over by descriptions of surrounding luxury hotels and private yachts, montaged with anti-imperialist slogans, “NO BASES! GRINGOS GO!...WE ARE NO LONGER MEAT FOR IMPERIALISM,” followed by memories of Tito in his living room while held hostage, catching the announcement of Mariana’s death over the radio, since men and women were separated 24 hours into the hostage takeover. The patterns give the montage a naturalist-surrealist quality.67 His memory of physical deterioration as Elias is about to pull up to the palace, “a diffuse pain, with the urge to puke,”68 reinforces his journey across the city as a spiraling progression of social deterioration. The result is a crystallization of doubt about the hegemony of a diminished peripheral bourgeoisie, figured as a “desperate fear of slipping down the slope of class domination” and experiencing the misery they condemn onto others.69

As he remembers seeing from the living room window the paramedics taking her corpse out of his house, the “shuddering symptoms of the unconscious and deep impersonal volcanic forces” characteristic of the classed perspective of naturalism become evident in his reaction:70 He clings desperately to her, “they were saying your name, repeating it over the radio…what right do they have, Mariana,” confirming his own decadence in a final moment of stunned comprehension, “you extending over the hard stretcher? Your smooth body? Your long and warm thighs? I close my eyes…a grey wind blows across the bay.”71 Tito behaves according to the new needs of his class, as if it were a binding, subconscious force. In doing so, the obstinate preservation of his class interests also registers a diminution of their position in the capitalist world-system, a self-interested critique that keeps the elite on its toe. At the same time, the form shows obliquely how the reordering of dependency into an offshore enclave doubles as national productive stagnation and class disintegration across the totality under the auspices of a new financial empire.

In conclusion, El último juego relies on temporal concentration and montage in a pastiche of modernism to unfold a history of class compulsions. As literary form and social process, mournful hedonism formalizes the strategies of an intra-competitive, financialized ruling class to make sense of its alienating self-preservation. The new critical knowledge may illuminate, but it is not guaranteed, the historical reluctance of Central American elites to deal with the disproportionate weight the concessionary structure of dependency exerts in the social organization of the territory. The critical mapping of the form figures social disintegration as part of a shared, contemporary plane of historical transformations, determined in the Panamanian social formation by the reordering to the offshore enclave of a historical structure of dependency, the concessionary enclave. The concept attunes us to how the literary composition evokes in the alternation of narrative and descriptive modes larger social relations, where the mobilization of gendering and racializing codes doubles as a parody of defense mechanisms. The arrangement makes visible stagnant national productivity and a qualitative transformation of American empire, but in the transgression of generic conventions. The abject comportment of mournful hedonism is, in this way, a point of affinity between part and whole that reveals connections between literary and social features that were previously unavailable for scrutiny, or in other words, a “social ontology” that unfolds in itself by compelling interpretation.

1. Particularly The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) by Carlos Fuentes, a comparison scholar Ileana Rodriguez briefly pursues in Women, Guerrillas and Love (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 27. Guardia also credits Mario Vargas Llosa as an important influence. See Roy C. Boland-Osegueda, “Entrevista a Gloria Guardia: una escritora de profesion y vocacion,” Antípodas23 (2012) 11-28.
2. György Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1989)144.
3. See, Arturo Arias, Taking their Word (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) 62; Rodriguez, Women, Guerrillas and Love 20-23.
4. Rodriguez, Women, Guerrillas and Love 20-23.
5. The argument rehearses the isomorphism of culture and literary text, collapsing their specificities. In contrast, my essay attempts to straddle two diametric positions: taking seriously material conditions, but also elaborating how aesthetic form achieves a modicum of autonomy. The aim is to balance an almost total separation between the spheres of literature and reality. See Roberto Schwarz, “Objective Form,” Two Girls (London: Verso, 2012)10-32.
6. For examples of representational analyses of Mariana, see Maida Watson, “Casa, mujer y nación en la trilogía Maramargo,” Antípodas 23 (2012): 73-84; Elena Grau-Lleveria, “Relaciones de poder como juegos estratégicos,” Confluencia 21.1 (Fall 2005): 158-167; Barbara Dröscher, “Huerfanas y otras sin madres,” Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana (2004) 267-296.
7. Gloria Guardia, El Último Juego (San Jose: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1986 [1977]) 9, all translations of the novel are my own. This quote is a translation adapted from Rodriguez, Women, Guerrillas and Love.
8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)11-13.
9. My use of “abject” is loosely inspired by Endnotes Collective’s “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection” (2014).
10. Guardia 9.
11. Guardia 104
12. Guardia 105
13. Even her name reinforces a close affinity betwen the character and the failure of Panamanian nationalism, by recalling Mariano Arosemena, the “grandfather” of the nation.
14. For the only account that comes close to scrutinizing this formal element, see Elena Grau-Lleveria, “Desencuentros en un proyecto nacional,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 82.2 (2005): 195.
15. Guardia 11. The original text is in both English and Spanish.
16. Guardia 11
17. Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019) 52.
18. To characterize the class composition of the elite, I draw from Julio Manduley, “Panama: Dependent Capitalism and Beyond,” Latin American Perspectives 7.2/3 (1980): 57-74; Ricauter Soler, “Panamá: Nación y Oligarquía” (1976), Antología del pensamiento Crítico Panameño Contemporáneo (Buenos Aires: CLASCO, 2018) 25-52; Humberto Ricord, “Los clanes de la oligarquía panameña y el golpe militar de 1968” (1983), Antología del pensamiento Crítico Panameño Contemporáneo (Buenos Aires: CLASCO, 2018) 83-101.
19. On the ideologies of Panamanian liberalism, see Ricaurte Soler, Formas ideológicas de la nación panameña (Habana: Casa de las Americas,1963). It is also worth noting that Gloria Guardia belonged to this merchant faction of the oligarchic ruling class, which makes her novel, in a way, a laudable act of class betrayal.
20. The Canal was not reordered toward internal accumulation until the year 2000, when the ownership transfer to Panama turned official, as agreed upon by the Torrijos-Carter treaty of 1977. This is the same treaty the novel references in its plot.
21. For an account of the relatively autonomous agrarian structure of the isthmus, see Edelberto Torres Rivas, History and Society in Central America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999) 22-36.
22. See Soler, “Panamá: Nación y Oligarquía” 30.
23. Guardia 78.
24. For more on the artistic dialectic of the abstract and the concrete, see Emilio Sauri, “The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Labor of the Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51:2 (2018).
25. Diana Balmori, Stuart F. Voss, and Miles L. Wortman, Notable Family Networks in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 52-78.
26. Guardia 168-169
27. Guardia 154
28. Soler, “Panamá: Nación y Oligarquía,” 36-46; Manduley, “Panama: Dependent Capitalism and Beyond,” 61.
29. “Developmental Aspirations at the End of Accumulation,” Mediations 31.1 (2018).
30. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]) 789-790.
31. Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism” American Historical Review 122.5 (2017) 1451; Ronen Palan, “The second British Empire and the re-emergence of Global Finance,” Legacies of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 54-56.
32. Guardia 31
33. Crucial to Panama’s pivot to global financial markets was the influence of Arnold Harberger, the “father” of the Chicago Boys and recurrent advisor to the Torrijos administration. See Memorandum on fiscal incentives (Panamá: Dirección General de Planificación y Administración, 1969). For another Chicago Boy economist writing about Panama’s financialization at the time, see Harry G. Johnson, “Panama as a Regional Financial Center,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 24.2 (Jan. 1976): 261-286.
34. See Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu, The Big Ditch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) 8, 212-222.
35. In this regard, the form is influenced by feminist thinkers of the time, including Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Maria Esther Harding and Maria Zambrano. See Roy C. Boland Osegueda, “A Challenging Game,” Antípodas 23 (2012) 35.
36. Guardia 10.
37. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971) 182.
38. It is worthwhile to note that across the “foundational fictions” of Latin American literature, the national patriarch, be it intentionally or not, always comes across as pathetic and humiliating, even more so when novels like Doña Barbaraare explicitly trying to compose a redeeming allegory. In this regard, El último juegorepresents a step forward after the fall of the lettered city; the tradition achieves a self-conscious grasp of itself, but at a moment when it no longer holds the sway it used to in the construction of a national community.
39. Guardia 15.
40. Guardia 20.
41. Guardia 20
42. I follow the insights of Ruy Mauro Marini’s version of dependency theory. See The Dialectics of Dependency (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022) 113-153.
43. Gandasegui, “Sociedad y Nación: Dinámica electoral el Panamá de la pos-invasión (1990-2015),” Tareas 157 (2017) 5-25.
44. On “monetary subjects without cash,” see Roberto Schwarz, “An Audacious Book,” Mediations 27.1-2 (2013-2014).
45. Guardia 113.
46. Guardia 28-29.
47. Guardia 84.
48. Guardia 84.
49. My insights in this regard draw heavily from the work of dependency theorist Ruy Mauro Marini and its readings by Central American scholars, in addition to the German body of work known as value criticism or Wertkritik. It is important to note these traditions have points of friction that go beyond the scope of this work. My interpretation of the novel tries to hold to the insights of both as much as is pertinent to the novel, while also drawing from the work in world systems theory of Giovanni Arrighi and the scholarship on monetary theory of Prabhat Patnaik (see The Value of Money) and Costas Lapavitsas (see Profiting without Producing).
50. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2013) 144.
51. The scene clearly mobilizes Asian stereotypes of a “dangerous productivity” that have a long history in American literature. See Colleen Lye, America’s Asia(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) 3-11. Guardia was educated mostly in the US. She did her BA at Vassar College and her MA/PhD at Columbia University.
52. Guardia 85-86.
53. Here I am thinking of La Diabla en el Espejo (2000) / She-Devil in the Mirror (2009).
54. My use of surrealist as descriptor has the work of Luis Buñuel in mind. The literary affinities with surrealist cinema are thematized by the prominence of montage in the composition, especially in the final scenes, and the constant reference to the image of “recording” pupils as seen in the opening line.
55. Guardia 187.
56. Guardia 188-189.
57. Guardia 190.
58. My exploration of the connection between thriller and class decomposition is heavily inspired by Roberto Schwarz, “City of God,” Two Girls 223-234.
59. See Sauri, “The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Labor of the Novel.”
60. Guardia 191.
61. Guardia 195.
62. Although outside the scope of this essay, an important sediment in the novel is the socialist realist work of Joaquin Beleño.
63. Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency 113-153.
64. Guardia 195.
65. Guardia 195.
66. Guardia 195.
67. On naturalism, surrealism and cinema, See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 123-133.
68. Guardia 197.
69. Fredric Jameson, “A Note on Literary Realism in Conclusion,” Adventures in Realism (Malden: Blackwell, 2007)266
70. “A Note on Literary Realism in Conclusion” 265.
71. Guardia 197.