Declared or not, the prejudice, sweetened by different vocabularies and adopted by successive dialectics, is the prejudice of realism. Everything about it, about its vast grammar upheld by culture, the guarantee of its ideology, assumes a reality outside the text, outside the literalness of writing. Everything about it, about its vast grammar upheld by culture, the guarantee of its ideology, assumes a reality outside the text, outside the literalness of writing. That reality, which the author must limit himself to expressing, translating, directs the movement of the page, its body, its languages, the substance of writing. The most naïve readers assume this is the reality of the “world around us,” the reality of events; more astute readers displace that deceit in order to propose an imaginary entity, something fictitious, a “fantastic world.” But it is all the same: pure realists—socialists or not— and “magical” realists promulgate and refer to the same myth. A myth rooted in logocentric, Aristotelian knowledge, in the knowledge of an original, or something primitive and true that the author supposedly brings to the blank page.
[…]
The text’s apparent exteriority, its surface, its mask deceives us, “for if there is a mask there is nothing behind it; a surface that hides nothing more than itself; a surface that prevents us from considering it surface because it leads us to assume there is nothing behind it. The mask leads us to believe there is depth, but what the mask masks is itself: the mask simulates dissimulation in order to dissimulate that it is only simulation.”
[…]
Those planes of intersexuality are analogous to the planes of intertextuality that make up the literary object. They are planes conversing in the same exterior, answering and completing, exalting and defining each other: that interaction of linguistic textures, of discourses, that dance, that parody, is writing.
—Severo Sarduy, Escrito sobre el cuerpo [Written on a body], translated by Carol Maier
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