The shadowless intellectuals

Oscar Amalfitano’s account of “the shadowless intellectuals” is an allegory of writers’ dependence on the state and the loss of perspective that dependence entails. In a conversation with Manuel Espinoza and Liz Norton, he imagines intellectuals on a theater stage, facing an audience while an obscured mine opens behind them. They hear its sounds but cannot see its source, and their language cannot adequately render what they hear. The image joins political critique to a meditation on interpretation: the intellectual’s public performance continues, even as the conditions for understanding reality disappear.

The state and the intellectual

Amalfitano begins with what he calls an old story: the relationship between Mexican intellectuals and power. He does not claim that all writers are alike, or that those who accept state support necessarily act in bad faith. His point is structural. In Mexico, and perhaps much of Latin America—with Argentina offered as an exception—intellectuals work for the state. In his comparison, European intellectuals may depend on publishers, newspapers, spouses, parents, or other occupations; Mexican writers, by contrast, often receive their livelihood through state employment.

The political party in office does not, in Amalfitano’s telling, alter that underlying arrangement. He names both the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the National Action Party, arguing that the state can sustain intellectuals whether they defend it or criticize it. The state feeds and watches over them, while putting their work to use: writers may be expected to exorcise demons or influence the national climate. The support is therefore neither presented as simple patronage nor reduced to a conscious bargain. It is a system in which intellectual production remains entangled with the power that provides its material conditions.

Amalfitano acknowledges that writers can work at universities, including American universities, but treats that alternative as no guarantee of independence. A late-night call from someone speaking for the state might offer a better job and better pay, appealing to intellectuals’ sense that they deserve more. He says the mechanism “crops the ears off Mexican writers” and drives some toward forms of displacement: translating Japanese poetry without knowing Japanese, or spending their time drinking. The example of Almendro combines both tendencies, as far as Amalfitano knows. The diagnosis is not simply that writers produce poor work; it is that their institutional setting distorts what they can hear and say.

The lost shadow and the stage

The allegory takes shape through the disappearance of a shadow. Amalfitano pictures Mexican literary life as a nursery school, kindergarten, playground, or club: pleasant, sunny, and seemingly harmless. Writers can sit in a park with a book by Valéry, whom he calls perhaps the writer most read by Mexican writers, and visit friends to talk. Yet at some point, without noticing—or while pretending not to notice—their shadows have slipped away. Amalfitano lists possible explanations, including the angle of the sun, alcohol, oblivion, pain, fear, illness, wounded vanity, and the desire to be on time. The list does not settle the cause; it makes the loss difficult to isolate and easy to rationalize.

Without their shadows, the intellectuals arrive on a stage and begin to translate, reinterpret, or recreate reality. Behind the proscenium is an enormous opening, like a mine shaft or cave. Unintelligible sounds rise from it: syllables, murmurs, and cries that may suggest rage or seduction. But stage machinery, light, shadow, and time conceal the opening’s real shape. Only spectators close to the orchestra pit can glimpse something behind the camouflage—and even they cannot see it plainly. Most of the audience sees nothing beyond the proscenium, and, Amalfitano suggests, would rather keep it that way.

The intellectuals themselves face the audience, so they cannot look behind them. They hear what comes from the mine and try to render it, but their rhetoric falls short of the force they sense. Where they perceive a hurricane, they use rhetoric; where they hear fury, they strive for eloquence; where there is silence, they impose meter. The absurd animal noises they produce stand in for their inability to imagine either a creature of immense scale or the possibility that no such creature exists. Their failure is thus more than a lack of technical skill: it is a breakdown between sound, perception, and representation.

Shrinking institutions, growing audiences

The stage on which the intellectuals speak is attractive and carefully designed, but it grows smaller over time, as does the hall around it. Fewer people watch. Amalfitano sets this declining literary venue beside other stages that have emerged: painting, film, and television. The painting stage is enormous but has a tiny, elegant audience; film and television accommodate far larger crowds, and their prosceniums continue to expand. The contrast describes a change in scale and public reach, not a simple transfer of authority. The literary stage contracts while mass-media platforms grow.

Intellectuals sometimes move onto television, where the mine’s opening remains the same even as the perspective changes. Its camouflage may grow denser and acquire an appearance of humor, but the source remains troubling. The public is offered two interpretations of that camouflage, simplified for the convenience of its collective eye. Some intellectuals settle permanently on television, yet the roars continue and remain misread. Even those theoretically trained in language cannot enrich it on their own; their best words are borrowings from spectators in the front row, whom Amalfitano calls flagellants. He associates these spectators with sickness, the invention of hideous words, and a rise in mortality. The image makes public language feel both borrowed and exposed to pressures the intellectuals cannot master.

Night, return, and uncertainty

When the workday ends, the theaters close and steel sheets cover the mines. The intellectuals leave the stage and go out into the night. Some hear songs from bars and enter to drink mezcal. Amalfitano describes one who might begin to consider what would happen if something occurred, but then refuses the thought: the intellectual drinks and sings instead. Sometimes he believes he has seen a legendary German writer. What he has actually seen, Amalfitano says, is a shadow—perhaps his own. That shadow returns home each night, preserving the intellectual from bursting or hanging himself from the lintel, while the belief in the German writer sustains happiness, order, bustle, and revelry.

The next morning, the sequence resets. The sun shines without burning; a person can go out with a shadow following at his heels, stop in a park, and read a few pages of Valéry. Amalfitano ends with the prospect of repetition: “And so on until the end.” The shadow’s return offers relief, but not a solution to the institutional problem that preceded it. The writer moves again through the same bright landscape, with the mine hidden and the conditions of interpretation unchanged.

Form and narrative significance

The speech moves from a social claim about state employment into an unstable, layered allegory, then back to an ordinary daily routine. Its stage, audience, mine, television, and returning shadow do not resolve into a single explanatory code. The mine remains partly unseen; its noises pass through interpreters whose language is inadequate, while spectators may prefer not to see what lies beyond the performance. In this way the speech makes the problem of intellectual responsibility formal: the writer must represent what cannot be plainly observed, but the available institutions and vocabularies shape—and limit—that representation.

Amalfitano’s final exchange preserves the uncertainty. Liz Norton says she does not understand what he has said, and Amalfitano answers that he has really just been talking nonsense. That dismissal follows a sustained argument with concrete political and literary particulars, but it does not certify the allegory as a transparent explanation. Instead, the speech leaves its audience between diagnosis and evasion: the intellectuals keep performing, the mine stays obscured, and the shadow may return without restoring what was lost.