Lima under the pen Ribeyro Julio Ramón Ribeyro met in the early nineties. With few college friends went to see him in his apartment in Barranco. He received us very politely and chatted with us about two hours. At the end I confirmed several things that did not smoke, who loved to drink shoulder to shoulder with the parishioners of Flowerpot, still did not understand What Vargas Llosa had removed the word, and, above all, I confirmed that it was one of the heaviest feather Peruvian literature: the world of her world was silent. Here goes my opinion on some of the issues we discussed that evening on the balcony of his house under the leaden sky of Lima. Here goes another dumb word.
This essay attempts to explain how urban and social transformations that occurred in the city of Lima in the fifties were processed in the narrative of Julio Ramón Ribeyro. We will focus on The elves Sunday, early novel that had several editions. The first dates from 1963 and was edited for novel prize Expreso daily. This edition has several errors and mutilation of the text, to the extent that some critics such as Antonio Cornejo Polar, disqualify any perusal of this work. A second dates from 1973, and was edited, revised and expanded by the Editorial Milla Batres. And the most recent being 2001, and was produced by Peisa editorial. This edition is used in our analysis and quotes.
I. CRITICAL RECEPTION
From the range of interpretations that has had the novel since its publication, we would highlight two: Antonio Cornejo Polar and Peter Elmore. The first, entitled The elves Sunday: his fortunes and adversities, as part of his volume The Peruvian novel. Highlights of his performance the way addresses the theme of the city of Lima. Cornejo Polar says:
By
very brief and dimensions, always sufficient, the narrator defines the social character of each area: Miraflores caters to the upper classes, Santa Beatriz to the petty bourgeoisie, as La Victoria or appear Surquillo popular areas as well as hosting a lumpen population in its bars and brothels. Although this stratification is constantly highlighted by the narrator, sometimes used to symbolically as announcing the change of address of Ludo, Miraflores Santa Beatriz, which expresses the social decline of the protagonist and his family, the fact is that he and his friends move through all areas and in front of each contour acquire an exceptional ability mimetic. They walk with ease by Miraflores bazaars or enter without hesitation in the worst bars Groove (Cornejo Polar, 1989: 121).
Cornejo Polar emphasizes two aspects: first, the classes are marked geographically, and secondly, the characters have the property to blend in all areas and social classes. The former is interesting as it reveals the way in which "embodies" the perception of social classes in the novel. Indeed, throughout the narrative it becomes clear that simply moving from Miraflores Santa Beatriz to Surquillo or Victory for the whole system of valuation changes. The central image of the Miraflores area is linked to family, tradition, people "Whitey." In turn, in outlying areas such as La Victoria is the dominant image of the brothels, bars, prostitutes and criminal. Social ascent and decline, civilization and barbarism are the symbols through which to establish hierarchies of these areas. On the other hand, characters, especially the core, as Ludo Pirulo Totem and have the ability, says Cornejo Polar, to move around all areas. In fact, this capability would be understood as a structural necessity in the novel. It is necessary that the characters can develop in different areas to account for them, but that does not alter social hierarchies linked to the geographical demarcation. Although Ludo Totem to frequent the brothels of La Victoria, this area does not lose its status as forbidden place.
For his part, Peter Elmore in his book The invisible walls, which performs a very interesting study reveals how the Peruvian narrative and participates in projects modern nation, tied to the geography of the city of Lima, as follows addresses the issue of Lima in Sunday's elves:
urban space in the novel [The elves Sunday ] of Ribeyro is much more than a decoration, a scenario in which the characters run. The Lima of The Sunday elves is a dynamic area in which they cross and confront the nostalgic memory and the present deteriorated, the pressures of overcrowding and the drive to preserve the individuality, the privileged classes and the petty and marginal sectors. Semantically loaded area, contradictory city offers subjects a destructive dialectic in which the adventure and routine are the two poles of life experience, hence, acts that advance the argument Sunday The elves are, symptomatically, in the form of transgression . The Totem Ludo journey becomes, in this line, ie the law student will end up becoming delinquent. Their incursions across Lima, the area of \u200b\u200bthe forbidden and clandestine, marking end the stigma of illegality "(Elmore, 1993: 151).
The thesis highlighted in the meeting, which runs along the Ribeyro chapter is that the fate of Ludo Totem, his misfortunes, is linked to the city of Lima. If Cornejo Polar established that social classes are marked on the novel geographically Ribeyro, Elmore argues that crossing the "forbidden zone"-step of Miraflores to La Victoria, Ludo Totem would assume all the content, social degradation, marginalization , crime-which has been attributed to these areas. As Ludo Totem is introduced in the labyrinthine intricacies of downtown Lima, carrying court papers filed by the Azángaro shred or seduced by the drunkenness and nights of bar and brothel in La Victoria, Surquillo and Callao, is losing its Young condition law student, son of good family, and resident of the wealthy Miraflores district.
II. THE COLONIAL ARCADIA
These two theses: the social classes are demarcated geographically and subjects are transformed by contact with certain geographical areas, need some clarification. First of demarcation in the novel is from a place of enunciation. This place is the colonial arcade. I understand the arcade as an ideological construct that is central feature of a reference idealization, which may be nonexistent, as the earthly paradise or Gold, or remotely, as the pre-Hispanic or colonial world.
In our case corresponds to an idealization of the colonial past, articulated by figures such as tradition, the reputation, family and the dynasty. In the novel, the colonial arcadia is represented by the district of Miraflores, basically. It is from this ideological construct that is processed features of the areas marginal to the arcade. As in the mythical stories related to training colonial ideologies like arcadia, where border areas are presented as enchanted forests, deserts full of wild, and mountains inhabited by gargoyles, the city of Lima in the fifties is presented as an amorphous body, rambling, strange, full of grotesques. Some examples: "[...] people walking by his side is ugly, there are lots of bars with crackling and smell the ads, lying in the narrow streets from balcony to balcony, become the center of Lima in Shadowing an Asian city (Ribeyro, 2002: 3); "And a horrible people, the Lima, the Peruvian in short, because there were people from all provinces. Vainly sought an arrogant expression, intelligent or beautiful: cholos, baboons, graft, panels, mulattoes, quinterones, albino, red hair, [...] were the faces that had seen at the National Stadium in the processions. In short, a race that had not yet found its features, a mixture adrift. Noses had been wrong target and ended up on mouths that do not correspond. And hair that covered skulls for which were not acclimated. It was the disorder "(Ribeyro, 2002: 102).
The notion of Lima as a body becomes important for two reasons. On the one hand, it allows us to focus on the novel in the context of a relationship of otherness: the self, which would be the discourse of colonial arcadia, and the other, the sensory Contents related Lima fifties. And second, because if we see the way in which otherness structure in the novel, we find that reproduces the way the discourse of modernity have otherness process. These speeches tend to incorporate the other as a subject officer, emptying it contains opposed to the self. For example, the way in the course of Christopher Columbus is inserted under the heading of wild, the native American aboard his famous diary. Or the Indian dumb, lazy and lost in the time of Jose Santos Chocano and Ventura García Calderón.
This process of rationalization of the other, we are immediately reminded of the thesis of Peter Elmore: subjects are transformed by contact with certain geographical areas. In the novel, as is Totem Ludo inserted in the neighborhoods most areas "prohibited" is becoming, at least at the level of actions, one of them. The reading given to this process is sociological. That is, to become delinquent, Ludo Totem has deteriorated socially. Is lost. Without invalidating this reading, shared by the bulk of the criticism, I think it's possible another. Lies at the level of relations between changes that occur in the novel, Ludo Totem is the agent that streamlines the body of otherness. It does so from a place of enunciation. The place of self, structured under the framework of the ideological formation of the colonial arcade. Articulates the ideology of otherness modern discourse. That is, the other makes sense, is rationalized as a denial of self. Thus, the image of Lima as a chaos, a formless and grotesque body is only possible if the contrast in the image of the colonial arcade. Legitimized in contrast both the traditional values \u200b\u200bof the Lima mansion. Thus, as the hero who crosses the borders of the kingdom to conquer new territories, Ludo Totem is an attempt to rationalize this body amorphous, rambling, strange, full of grotesque beings, which is the Lima-fifties. If the plane of the fictional plot, linked to social-court interpretations of the character fails, another plane, which is presented as a subject that rationalizes a space alien and elusive, it is successful. At the end of history, thanks to the inroads of Totem Ludo group in prohibited areas, we have a picture of her. Image linked to measures such as degradation, crime, poverty, filth, immorality and other values \u200b\u200bopposed to those attributed to colonial arcade.
III. PROJECT GENERATION
Two aspects can be learned from this reading. In principle, the issue of urban and social transformations of Lima in the fifties, central to The Sunday genies, was not a particular novelistic project July Ramon Ribeyro, revealed in his article "Lima, a city without novel" (Ribeyro, 1975). As Peter Elmore admits:
In the first half of the fifties the town requesting the attention of the narrators in the making. The ironic condescension of the writer [meaning Ribeyro and his article "Lima, a city without novelist], protects the entire program solemnity, but not hidden at all its intentions and assumptions. Lima does not appear as mere raw material, as a spatial reference to which the fiction had to give way. By contrast, the quick summary of Ribeyro becomes clear that the capital-or, to be precise, its reality contemporary-is already in power structure of a text is, in short, a versatile multi-theater, peopled by characters in search of the author (s). It is the invention of the past that fed the Peruvian Traditions by Ricardo Palma, which Ribeyro proposes, but to build realistic versions of the urban experience. This project is precisely to inform the elves Sunday (1965), the very Ribeyro, Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), by Mario Vargas Llosa, and A World for Julius (1970), Alfredo Bryce (Elmore, 1993: 146).
could also include Enrique Congrains, Oswaldo Reynoso and Carlos Eduardo Zavaleta. In that sense of was a generational project. While it might be a more detailed analysis at this time could postulate the thesis that, in general, in terms of alterity relations, these writers participated in the process of modernizing rationalization of that otherness, which was the fifties Lima . Thus we find in his texts the emphasis on constructing images that are based on elements opposed to the ideological formations of colonial arcadia, marginalized as "rock'n'roll" of the Innocents, Oswaldo Reynoso, or the slums of mats Congrains tales. In all of them, Lima is weak, decadent, marginal.
A second and final appearance is related to the effects of ideological formations highlighted in the literature. One of the book's central thesis Orientalism, Edward Said, is that East West is a discursive construction. The speeches made modern western colonizers work purposes since the sixteenth century, embedded in literary production, "worked" the image we have of the East: strange, pagan, demonic, exuberant. Thus, the literature is presented as a speech at all innocent, but part of the mechanisms of the discourse of power. Especially the novel, is an ideological element par excellence. The political and social consequences with respect to India Said that extracts of this thesis are irrelevant at this time. I am interested in your thesis relate to our theme. I think that the images were made on the Lima emerging in the fifties, new neighborhoods, new social subjects, are marked by the way was "worked" by the narrators of those decades. Such "ideological work", running for these narrators as colonized subjects in the fifties and sixties began to develop images of Lima in opposition to the ideological formulations of the colonial Arcadia. I can even postulate that in the last two decades have seen a stage where these images acquired in the narrative Lima Peruvian nature of a discourse genre, in the sense that Mikhail Bakhtin gives to this notion, in such a way that is impossible to represent Lima and its suburbs outside the topics and images prepared by the narrators of the fifties.
Bibliography.
Cornejo Polar, Antonio. The Peruvian novel. Lima, Horizonte, 1989.
Elmore, Peter. The invisible walls. Lima and modernity in the twentieth century novel. Lima, Mosca Azul Editores, 1993.
Ribeyro, Julio Ramón. The elves Sunday. Lima, Populibros, 1965.
- The elves Sunday. Lima, Ed Milla Batres [Bib Peruvian Authors], 1973.
- Hunting subtle essays and articles of literary criticism. Lima, Editorial Milla Batres, 1975.
- The elves Sunday. Lima, Peisa, 2001.
Photos: [1], Julio Ramón Ribery in photographic tableau, [2] Julio Ramón Ribeyro, [3] Peter Elmore, [4] Ciro Alegria. José María Arguedas and Antonio Cornejo Polar, [5] Oswaldo Reynoso.
"Although in the early years of the republic," says Antonio Cornejo Polar 
