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During the latter part of the 19th century, the Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones peruanas, and the Cuban writer Julian del Casal's literary criticism, were widely read by many Latin Americans. Yet, some one hundred years later, Palma's work would be generally ignored by literary critics, though it would continue to be read and enjoyed by the general public. Del Casal's literary criticism would be completely forgotten, and the author himself would come to be viewed as an apolitical, anti-Cuban, escapist who accepted his country's colonial status without protesting. The present work constitutes a reevaluation of Palma's work and of del Casal's literary criticism, as well as of the latter's political involvement. A reading of Palma's Tradiciones peruanas based on the reading of Francois Rabelais' work carried out by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His World, demonstrates that literary critics have been unjust with Palma by judging his work according to the canons and esthetics of refined, written literature, when in fact that work was meant to be popular, oral literature, with totally different literary characteristics and a totally different esthetic. Thus, the "defects" perceived by literary critics in Palma's work are really qualities and characteristics of popular, orally-oriented literature. Likewise, a reading of del Casal's "lost" critical prose, finally reedited in 1963 by the Cuban National Culture Council, demonstrates that he was very proud of being Cuban, much more political than is generally thought, and a patriot who risked his welfare by protesting his country's colonial condition. It also shows the excellence of his incisive and prophetic, modernist, literary criticism which called attention to the works of many new Latin American authors and made known to Latin Americans some of the most important European writers of his day.

The current study is a proposal that heads towards the vision of a polyphonic accompaniment of the evolution of allegory, journeying from a cavern, to the soul and out into the spheres of knowledge and representation. It examines the evolution of allegory from antiquity and goes deep into the study proposed by Walter Benjamin in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, allowing for the analysis that allegory falls into two fields of interpretation: first that of representation, and second that of the articulation. With its articulatory power of expression of a convention, allegory transgresses limits and spaces, becoming a tool of expression and verification of the past through the process of investigation and of research. So being, allegory, a discursive material for the laying out of the past, redirects the reader’s view towards a forgotten, ruined and decadent past that awaits its redemption and incorporation within the historicist discourse. With this in mind, I would argue that allegory in the works of Carpentier and Saramago, far from being a stylistic device seen by critics as a way of escaping censorship, is a poetics resulting from repositioning history through the displacement of what is already signified, bringing forth, as a crucial component of History the decadent, the displaced, the ruins and the marginalized. Allegory is a way of disrupting, transforming and subverting—through the very archival work carried out by both authors—, the temporal and territorial vocality of definitive histories and official languages, mythologies and the politics of inherited Manichean allegories that typify the rhetoric of nationhood and nationalism. Works such as El arpa y la sombra, Los pasos perdidos and “Viaje a la semilla” of Alejo Carpentier and Memorial do Convento, A Jangada de Pedra and A Caverna of José Saramago examine a circular vision of life and history and its discontinuities, the decadent phases of history that beg to be exposed in the decadent ruins of its reality. Allegory, in my analysis, is the means through which man and history are only saved by exposing the past, failures, and decadence from the time of the lost Paradise.

Drawing on the critical social theories of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jurgen Habermas, I take a close look at the "oppositional criticism" of Said and Lentricchia and attempt to illuminate the unlit places there, which I refer to as "situational tensions." My discussion of Said's and Lentricchia's situational tensions is made in terms of their self-image, theoretical affiliation, and their strategy of totalizing about their life-world. I argue that Said's and Lentricchia's adoption of the "intellectual" as their self-image is their way of recognizing a certain type of subject as the precondition for basic change. Based on this recognition, their affiliating with Marxism or Foucault results in an emphasis on producing a cultural counterdiscourse of intellect emancipation. However, literary critics must come to an understanding of the systemic impediments to their emancipatory projects. Said and Lentricchia, constrained by the pressure to avoid conceptions of social totality and human totality, have failed to give full articulation to a much needed moral philosophy, even though they both show a keen interest in the ethical. Their theoretical hesitance has blunted the humanist edge of the "intellectual," which is the central figure in their "oppositional criticism." The demise of the intellectual-critic reflects the fundamental antinomy of today's intellectual work itself: it cannot be done if it is isolated from praxis, from involvement in political movement or political action; but neither can it be done well if it is isolated from the pressures of competing intellectual ideas in the current stream of intellectual debate which is located in the university. To recognize this intellectual antinomy, however, is not just to ratify what has been and must be. What begins with Said's and Lentricchia's need for a changed concept of the "intellectual" and for literary politics may lead finally to the intellectual's need for a changed world, and a search for proper strategies in order to play a more active part in the process of change.