The Southern Quarterly
A Journal of the Arts in the South
Index to Volumes 27 to 41
            Click Here for Index to Volumes 17 to 26�� Click Here for Index Volumes 27 to 41
History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction. By Deborah N. Cohn. Nashville and London, Vanderbilt University press, 1999. 248 pp. $ 39.95, $ 19.95 paper.
Suely Cavendish
Reviewer
Among the many and fertile unfoldings of Deborah Cohn?s effort to establish significant parallels between Southern American and Spanish American novelists of the twentieth century is the re-actualization of the question "What is history"? For her purposes, she pairs William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, and Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda's Stories and Juan Rulfo's Pedro P�ramo.
But the author's first goal is to impose a radical twist to the prevailing current in the field of inter-American critical studies, which has been marked by a de-emphasis on the strong southern orientation of William Faulkner, the writer whose work stands as a lighthouse to the literature produced in Spanish America between 1950 and the 1980's, and by the trend towards forcing the author to take his place as an American writer rather than as a southerner. But America, unlike the South, operates culturally out of myths of innocence, victory and confidence. What the canonic criticism loses by Americanizing Faulkner is Loss itself, the very core of Faulkner's fiction, the hallmark of the South's identity, and the kind of experience "military defeat, occupation, reconstruction, poverty" -- that southerners share with other countries but not with their own.
Cohn reasserts the centrality of Loss, then reinstates it as the proper ground over which to spread her comparisons; and the equally shattered identities of southerners, North Americans and Spanish Americans, are scrutinized on this common territory of lived and fictionalized defeat. There are risks of oversimplification in her construct, Cohn admits, and she proceeds, as an analytical safeguard, to an enumeration of the remarkable differences between these ?regions? ? cultural, political, economic, geographical.
The US South and Spanish America can, nevertheless, be envisioned as ?neighboring? spaces, with similar ?personalities?deriving from shared histories?(2), since, like southerners, Spanish Americans have lived through a history of dispossession, during which they have watched their local resources fleeing North. These assumptions clear the way for Cohn to open up, with this study, a whole new branch in the inter-American critical field. The terrain thus cleared is leveled off by discussions that highlight convergences, an overview of the present status of inter-American literary criticism and incursions into structural socioeconomic issues: dependency, neocolonialism, the plantation system and its components, patriarchalism and slavery as the nucleus around which both societies were constituted. Cohn establishes a basis for comparing the works named above by describing the literary periods during which the works appeared, the influences of Euro-American modernism on Spanish American authors vis-�-vis their struggle to encounter their own voice and identity, and last, but not least, how William Faulkner?s work came to represent, to these writers, a turning point and the end of a long search.
In manipulating the concrete materials the author exposes the ?correspondences in the works? revisions,� retellings and rewritings of regional history, and on the similar perceptions of the past that underlie them; of the relationship between the consciousness of regional history and the approaches taken to narrate it? (3). Cohn presumes a continuity between reality and fiction, but what uncoils from her comparison is a denial of its own methodologies. For the textual analyses run unleashed from the constraints the methodologies create, bringing to the fore, most productively, the intricacies tying up the concepts of history and fiction, the problematics of narrative and referentiality, the interweaving of the boundaries between storytelling and fact. Moreover, a performative mode exposes the laborings and workings of history. And a phenomenological approach to the joint venture of both narrators and readers, which captures them in the active task of providing articulations where they lack, of filling up the lacunae inherent in individual perspective?s short-sightedness, fully unravels the plasticity of history ?and of fiction. History can thus be seen in the act of springing out of the massa confuse where it hides, dormant, as the raw material gaining shape while manipulated through the telling and retelling of it, through the collective effort of narrators and narratees, of writers and interpreters. History and story fuse then as historia, when the full awareness of the always already mediated nature of the past is gained and the domain of language becomes the only possible platform to be shared. On it, the truth-seeking endeavor gives up into the power of a far more ludic game, the free interplay of the imaginary ?of all human faculties the most subject to repression and control ? and of reason.
The author?s disclosure of the dynamics at work in the novels she studies rises to its peak in the analysis of William Faulkner?s Absalom, Absalom! and Mario Vargas Llosa?s The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. They are treated, among other things, as a ?case of fabricated facts?, i.e., the fictional facts engendered by the dialectics� of concealment ? the withdrawing of information ? and the invention which ensues. Fictions which, in Quentin Compson?s words, would ?probably be true enough,? as long as they reflect the setting in motion of the partnership of reason and the imagination. In Absalom, Absalom! it is not only the return of the repressed that this marriage renders, the knowledge of Charles Bon?s black blood, but rather its reconstruction, its rescue from the depths where it lay buried under thick layers of obscure collective forces pushing it downward, forces which can also bear the name of ?history.? It is worth noting at this point how sharply Cohn points out, in Llosa?s work, a rather diverse, although surprising, outcome. The enigma to be solved in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is the failure of a 1958 Peruvian rebellion, a historical, extra-literary incident which the narrator, a novelist who shares Llosa?s political views, identifies as the source of Spanish American?s social and political disruptions of the present. In order to reconstruct facts, this narrator will take depositions of those directly involved in the event, but the multiple utterances of the polyphonic spectrum are hushed one by one, as he finds them distorted by either personal or ideological conditionings. Cohn classifies this reconstruction as knowledge-destroying, rather than truth-finding.� Facts lose substance under the narrator?s judgment of the unredeemable inaccessibility of the past; his procedures lead to the absolute negation of the truth-seeking process� -- of its constructive and eminently creative potential ? once truth is unattainable as an absolute. It is only then that the true essence of what has been missing in the detective story ca be revealed: ?Whereas the creation of ?facts? is the final step in Quentin and Shreve?s collaboration, as is simultaneous with their revelation to the reader, the narrator of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta starts his project by fabricating data that he does not divulge as invented until the end of the frame tale?(71). The withheld information is that the narrator has been lying from the beginning. As it is rendered only textual, history is not re-lived, but dissolved into words.
Such an authorial strategy, breaking the rules of the mutual contract binding both parts of the speech act, is an overthrow of the readers, who thus find out that their potential to participate has been precluded from its very roots. The narrator summons up upon himself the sole authority, a superior view deepened and sustained through the enacting of a paradox which, while undermining the credibility of all levels of narration, endows him with the possession of a truth-value after all: the final truth is that there is no final truth. Cohn further explores the functions and the epistemological status of this narrator who discards and destroys all partnerships in the course of narration and who warns the reader to beware of texts. There are, in fact, compensations for so many losses: first, the partnership maintained between narrator and the author himself, whom the narrator directly doubles, whose ideology he gives voice to, as his persona, gives the reader vicarious access to Llosa; second, this access is made even more significant when one considers that, implied in Llosa?s own ?aesthetics of lie??literary fictions are non-mimetic works that deny their own truth-value, and as such are able not only to reveal basic truths but also to counteract the so-called ideological fictions ?is the pledge that he may be in possession of truth, after all, as a writer of fiction. So the reader, expelled from the book by way of a magician?s trickery, is offered the author?s political beliefs and exemplary biography as a last resort.
The arrangement of the narrator?s discourse, the juxtaposition of scenes between past and present, is one of the instances where Llosa?s ideological use of his fiction, no matter his claims of neutrality, is highlighted, especially when contrasted with Faulkner?s treatment of the same devices: Whereas in Absalom the manipulation of conventions of time and identity complements the weakening of the omniscient narrator?s authority and the transfer of authorial power to the narratees, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta?s subversions of boundaries reinforce both the author?s and the narrator?s power and their agenda(78).
Cohn observes that with his staging of the Peruvian rebellion at Jajua, whose date he moves back from 1962 to 1958, Vargas Llosa intends to demonstrate the chain effect it provoked over Spanish America, and to mark it as the first spark that precipitated the Cuban Revolution and the subsequent terrorist activity in the Spanish-speaking continent. The contended cause-effect relationship between past events and present violence is reinforced in the novel through interwoven narrations and condensation of time. But for all the smoke he is able to throw over the reader?s eye, Vargas Llosa, a politician himself, is still caught, through Cohn?s analysis, in the very practice of the politics of the ostrich.
?To See or Not to See: Invisibility,�� Clairvoyance, and Re-visions of History in ?Invisible Man? and ?The House of the Spirits?? is the suggestive title to the analysis of Ralph Ellison?s and Isabel Allende?s novels, addressing the marginalized condition shared by blacks and women in their respective milieus, the condition of seeing but not being seen, rearing but not speaking, and the estrangement it creates in discourse once their voices finally break up into it. In the Miranda Stories and Pedro P�ramo, what is mainly at stake is the survival of patriarchal traits in the midst of radical structural socioeconomic changes, much in the fashion of the words proffered by the protagonist of Giuseppe�� Tomasi di Lampedusa?s magnificent Il Gatopardo, when facing the imminent appropriation of Sicily by Garibaldi: things must change so that they can remain the same.
Through Deborah Cohn?s lenses, the creativity of the historian?s task shines in the convolutions of the narrative modes undertaken by the authors under examination ? the refusal of the realistic approach as a breaking of the bones of old joints and articulations, as an undoing of the warps and woofs of things past, in order to reconstruct them anew. But is the question ?What is History? at all answered? Fortunately not. The re-actualization of the question in the process of its own posing, its ever renewed and fresh re-birth, is afforded by her study, since history, like fiction and art, is a system whose fundamental thrust is the continuous negotiation of its own boundaries. Fiction, by its turn, is certainly not the place for any kind of crystallizations, since what it mainly enacts is the constitutive oscillation of the human mind, its irreducible blindness, its eternal attempt and ever renewed failure to grasp either the surrounding world or the human internal difference from itself, which marks the impossibility of cognition in terms of any reconciling totality. But what it gives access to is the continuous flux of the object, its constant metamorphosis, its endless doubling in difference and sameness. Considering its radical fundamental vocation to conflict and to transgression, fiction would rather be the place for the blockage and for the bursting of the concept.
Sueli Cavendish, a PhD from The State University of Rio de Janeiro, is a professor of Literatures in the English Languages of the University of Pernambuco, UPE.
�
Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1