We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
Roberto González Echevarría's recent article in LARR, “The Dictatorship of Rhetoric/The Rhetoric of Dictatorship: Carpentier, García Márquez and Roa Bastos,” though elegantly written and full of ideas, seems to me to have confused almost every issue it raises and to have evaded other equally important issues rather than confront them. The persistent, largely unspoken promise of his text is that it will illuminate both history and literature by separating and contrasting them, whereas in fact it surrenders completely to the latest version of the literary critic's traditional means of escape. Where previously it used to be said that history was the realm of mundane reality and literature the realm of the imagination, critics now tell us that the twentieth century has proved that all reality is fictive and that the borders between reality and what used to be called fiction are impossible to draw, all men's actions and reactions forming and being formed from a seamless web of invisibly structured discourse. This is evidently RGE's view, and the influence of French structuralism is apparent in his text.
1. LARR 15, no. 3 (1980):205–28.
2. Any writer on this topic must be clear on the different periodizations and definitions of European and Latin American history and literature, and, with regard to the latter, on the differences between “Modernismo” in Latin America and the later movements of “Modernism” in European and North American literature; between the “New Criticism,” arising out of Modernism in the U.S. and U.K., and the much later “Nouvelle Critique” in France and elsewhere; and between the French “Nouveau Roman” after World War II and the so-called Latin American “Nueva Novela” normally thought to have originated in the 1960s. These are all literary or critical movements with the same names, but which mean quite different things. As a general perspective, the most lucid article I have seen on recent Latin American writing is Jean Franco, “From Modernization to Resistance: Latin American Literature 1959–1976,” Latin American Perspectives, no. 16 (Winter 1978):77–97.
3. “El señor Presidente: una lectura contextual,” in El señor Presidente, Edición Crítica de las Obras Completas de Miguel Angel Asturias, Vol. 3 (Paris and México: Klincksieck and FCE, 1978), pp. lxxxiii–cxxxix.
4. “Yo el Supremo: The Dictator and his Script,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 15, no. 2 (1979):169–83. Reprinted in S. Bacarisse (ed.), Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1980), pp. 73–87.
5. Roa Bastos' work attempts to encompass all the various points of view on his chosen personage (which, to take up the present analogy, would mean including Cortés' own Cartas de relación as well as the evidence of chroniclers and historians), whilst rigorously outlining his own political standpoint as he does so.
6. RGE eventually alludes to this problem on the last page of his analysis, only to dismiss it without discussion: “the novel has not replaced the myth of the self with that of a collective unconscious, nor of a class consciousness, a proletarian ideology that would replace the fallen self of the bourgeois author” (p. 221). But this is misleading: the works of the early Carpentier and Asturias, to which RGE attributes the “myth of authority,” are in fact examples of Modernism in the Anglo-American sense, and yet, many years before the boom, included both the idea of a collective unconscious (myth) and of a proletarian ideology (history). As in other cases, the problem arises because RGE has not made up his mind about the historical parallels and relations between European, North American and Latin American literature.
7. Let us be clear. Roa Bastos fully recognized the “ambiguity” of the world—his novel is almost “Althusserian” in its epistemological intentionality—but he insists that the difficulty of interpreting the nature-society dialectic of human reality in no way justifies ambiguities between the writer and the people or between the writer and the reader. These are quite separate problems.
8. On p. 207 RGE places a great deal of weight upon a passage which appears almost to deify Rosas as writer, failing to point out that the whole intention of the passage is to set up subtly ironic contradictions, and that only a few lines earlier Sarmiento had referred to this “portento” as “un hombre bien indigno.”
9. I would not like readers to imagine that I find Goldmann's view of this trajectory the last word on the matter. I am merely providing what seems to me a logical corrective to RGE's presentation of such a view. Goldmann himself was eventually forced, like so many other theorists, to try to explain why no important proletarian literature had developed in the nonsocialist world in the face of Modernist alienation, and fell back upon explanations of “reification” and “false consciousness.” The more convincing explanation, it seems to me, lies in the very ambiguous relations between the exploited working classes of advanced capitalist states and the superexploited workers and peasants of the Third World.
10. We should perhaps remind ourselves that French structuralism was itself a “recourse” of “rationalism,” the product of an advanced European colonial power at a certain stage of its historical development, and that the movement belatedly paralleled and refined the so-called “New Criticism” of the U.S. in earlier decades, giving formalism a more rigorous, apparently scientific basis, and actually reinventing the same name.
11. One might make the same kind of point about RGE's inclusion of Valle-Inclán's Tirano Banderas among “Latin American” masterpieces. Tirano Banderas is a novel of Latin America seen through Spanish Eyes (“novela de tierra caliente”), a fact which it is surely essential to bring out in any analysis.
12. Asturias was another writer tarred with the brush of “magical realism,” and eventually ended up accepting and making the best of it, due to his attempt to deny that he was a “surrealist” in favor of some more American label. His works themselves, however, provide a critique of European ethnocentrism which is both subtle and radical.
13. There have been innumerable statements on this question, but see especially “Entretiens avec A. Roa Bastos,” Les Langues Modernes 71 (1977):57–62, which leaves no room for doubt as to the Paraguayan novelist's sincere admiration for Francia, however qualified it may be in the last analysis.
14. RGE makes a critique of Cabrera Infante's recent Vista del amanecer en el trópico, in order to differentiate it from El recurso and El otoño. In view of the constraints of time and space, I cannot take this up here, but merely record that it seems to me that his approach takes minor differences between Cabrera Infante's authorial position and those of the two novelists in question, and turns them into major ones; whereas a far more radical antagonism exists, I believe, between all three novels mentioned and Yo el Supremo.
15. It was precisely Sarmiento's genius that in his text, even though—or perhaps because—it was written in the (politically and literarily) anarchic 1840s, almost all the contradictions are semiconscious, perfectly legible.
You have
Access
