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Critical Approaches to Latin American Fiction
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CONCIENCIA Y LENGUAJE EN EL QUIJOTE Y EL OBSCENO PAJARO DE LA NOCHE. By CaldernHector. (Madrid: Pliegos, 1987. Pp. 234.)
MYTHOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE FUTURE: JOSE MARIA ARGUED AS. By ColumbusClaudette Kemper. (New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Pp. 191. $33.70.)
STUDIES ON THE WORKS OF JOSE DONOSO: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CRITICAL ESSAYS. Edited by AdelsteinMiriam. (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1990. Pp. 208. $59.95.)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
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- Copyright 1994 by the University of Texas Press
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1. Fredric Jameson believes that literature has perpetuated a single voice in a class-dialogue and that peasant cultures cannot be assigned a place in the dialogical system without restoration or artificial reconstruction. El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo and El obsceno pjaro de la noche could easily be placed in the reconstructed category. In these novels, the framework of their reconstruction takes place in what are essentially peasant cultures, in their folk songs, fairy tales, popular festivals, and occult and oppositional systems (magic and witchcraft). See Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981).
2. The term logos is generally associated with truth or absolute meaning. Umberto Eco indicates that logos often manifests itself as a governed code of political, ideological, and cultural power that imposes its preordained interpretation by functioning as a form of social control. He defines epos as the realm where languages speak to themselves. It is the extrasubjective and extratextual realm of mystical thought that produces and denotes visions endowed with vague images and meanings that cannot be anchored to any pre-established code. Epos hence is the poetic side of human nature that remains open to interpretative keys. Its meaning lies outside the boundaries of preexisting social, political, or ideological frameworks incorporating language, myth, oral tradition, mysticism, symbolism, and metaphor. See Eco, Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 163. In El obsceno pjaro de la noche, the written logos was separated from memory and from the formulaic style of the oral tradition in this way: the old women of the casa represent repressed memory, or epos, while the psychotic writer Humberto Peazola represents writing, or logos.
3. To clarify this point, see Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato, Psyche or the Separation of the Knower from the Known (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1963).
4. Huarte dwelled on the psychological aspects of human nature, while Pinciano dedicated himself to studying aesthetics (Conciencia y Lenguaje, p. 17). Huarte defined ingenio as a mental power associated with reason and discourse whose by-product was poetic language. Cervantes also used Huarte's concept of anima, the spiritual side of human nature that could differentiate between good and evil.
5. Humberto-Mudito assumes many personalities: Jernimo; a witch; the seventh woman in the circle of old women in the casa; a slave when he assumes the identity of Iris Mateluna's dog; a virile and powerful papier-mach giant; the miraculous child (the awaited Messiah to the women of the casa); and finally, disappearing into the mummy-like folds of hemp, el imbunche, a human child who, according to Chilean oral tradition, was sacrificed by witches in order to serve as an oracle.
6. For more information on this subject, see the introductory note to Inframundo: el Mxico mexicano de Juan Rulfo (Mexico City: Ediciones del Norte, 1983), 1415.
7. Umberto Eco states that the modern novel presents reality as contingent and meaningless in reaction to conventional habits of perception. In this way, the modern novel releases reality from the illusion-making structure of memory so that the reader's imagination can be manipulated and even reoriented. See Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 25, 140, 142, 144, 145.
8. Most critical approaches have given preference to social or cognitive approaches. For one example, see V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). In contrast, Benedetto Croce considers language a purely aesthetic phenomenon. See Croce, The Essence of the Aesthetic, translated by Douglas Ainslie (n.p.: Folcraft Library Editions, 1974). For an approach that encompasses the cultural and cognitive aspects of language, see Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 87112, 13663.
9. For more on language and primitive societies, see Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 16465.
10. Quechua and Aymara are languages whose identities have been preserved by the constant altering of their forms. On this subject, see Metaphor and Thought, edited by Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 267.
11. Claude Lvi-Strauss has pointed out that when a symbolic animal appears, we confront not the clan and the animal but a reference to real society. See Lvi-Strauss, Le Totmisme aujourd'hui: Mythes et religions (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); and The Savage Mind (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
12. Arguedas's foxes are hybrid creatures because, as Mikhail Bakhtin indicated, hybridization is the mixing of different linguistic consciousnesses. But the foxes are also polyglossic in that they express the simultaneous presence of two or more national languages interacting within a single cultural system. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 42829.
13. Ernst Cassirer indicated that symbols enable readers to perceive a given world because symbols do not embody any of the qualities or properties of the existing reality. For more on this topic, see Cassirer, Language and Myth, translated by Susan Langer (New York: Dover, 1946); and Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953).
14. On dialogics, see Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, translated by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Michael Holquist, The Politics of Representation, in Allegory and Representation, edited by R. Baily, preface by Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). On collective we-experience, see V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 88; and Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination.
15. Columbus warns her readers not to rely on Norman Holland's psychoanalytic approach. See Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford, 1968). On bridging, see Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
16. Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seouil, 1973), 2526. It was published in English as The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).
17. See Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, 17071.
18. In the languages that Eco considers intuitive (in this case, Aymara and Quechua), metaphors and symbols are more easily created and understood, producing narrative images that embody emotional, social, and cultural states. See Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 142.
19. The endnotes are extremely hard to follow. A number of authors are mentioned without specific references, and some of the Spanish citations are incorrect and riddled with typographical errors. Most annoying is the repeated use of what looks like an inverted letter c instead of Spanish accent marks.
20. See Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 7, 1627.
21. Ibid., p. x.
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