manoeuvre based on a series of negations and self-negations through which the West reconstrues its identity as 'a play of projections, doublings, idealisations, and rejections of a complex, shifting otherness',24 and occurs in the academies at a time when usable knowledge is gathered and processed with growing certainty and control through technologies of information retrieval from the rest of the world.25 The history of the West and the non-West is by now irrevocably different and irrevocably shared. Both have shaped and been shaped by each other in specific ways. The linear time of the West did not simply mummify or overlay the indigenous times of colonised countries, but was itself opened to alteration and /^-entered into specifiable cultural combinations. The history of Latin America is also the history of the West and informs its psychic and economic itinerary. The cultural products of both the West and the non-West are implicated in a larger history. If the crisis of meaning in the West is seen as the product of an historical conjuncture, then perhaps the refusal to either export it or import it may be a meaningful gesture, at least until we can replace the stifling monologues of self and other with a genuinely dialogic and dialectical history which can account for the formation of different selves and the construction of different epistemologies. 1. Irlemar Chiampi Cortez, 'In Search of a Latin American Writing', Diacritics, 8, No. 4, Winter, 1978, p. 7. 2. Trans., Ann Wright. London : Verso. 1982, p. 31. 3. The Autumn of the Patriarch, trans.. Gregory Rebassa. London : Picador, 1978, p. 162. Further citations are in the text. 4. Octavio Paz, Alternating Current, trans.. Helen R. Lane, New York : Viking Press, 1967, p. 21. Geoffrey Hartmann describes the 'culture supermarket: 'a liberation, not of men and women, but of images, has created a fheatrum mundi in which the distance between past and present, culture and culture, truth and superstition is suspended by a quasi-divine synchronism'. See The Fate of Reading. Chicago : University of Chicago Press. 1975, p. 104. 5. One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans.. Gregory ^Rebassa. MJu^dlesex : Penguin. 1970, pp. 52-3. Further citations are in the text. 6. In an interview with Gene Bell-Villada, .Marquez discusses the strike sequence in One Hundred Years: That sequence sticks closely to the facts of the United Fruit strike of 1928, which dates from my childhood.... The only exaggeration is in the number of dead, though it does fit the proportions of the novel. So instead of hundreds dead, I upped it to thousands. But its strange, a Columbian journalist the other day alluded in passing to "the thousands who dies in the 1928 strike". As my Patriarch says^It does't matter if something isn't true, because eventually it will be r ' South, Jan. 1983, p. 22. •7. It is important to see how Marquez is read in Latin America. When he decided he would not publish another book until Pinochet quit as Chile's president, political prisoners at a detention camp near Valparaiso decided to give him a gift: They would recreate One Hundred Years of Solitude in popular verse—the traditional form of verses often lines each. The book would be illustrated with woodcuts, a technique used by Chilean popular engravers since the nineteenth century. The wood came from used teachests. The only tool was a small knife made from an old metal saw. The inking roll was an empty shampoo bottle filled with sand\ One woodcut, done by historian Leonardo Leon. shows Innocent Erendira's wicked grandmother being carried by Journal of Arts and Ideas 57