Arguedas's De-Auto-Rized Biography: A Failed? Trickster's Tale
[In the following essay, Columbus likens Arguedas and his narrator in El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo to a trickster who inhabits “compound characters who, like him, straddle several language worlds.”]
Individuality can no longer be contained within the terms of manifest personality traits. In a world of transition and revolution individuality has become a problem of historical and social relations, such as cannot be revealed by the mere characterizations of an already established social stereotype. Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.
(John Berger, The Look of Things, 41)
Autobiography, in focusing on the life of an individual, even a culture hero or heroine, has generally been, as a genre, the province of the exceptional: the rich, the famous, the crippled, the exemplary case. Its highlighting of a particular life emphasizes the individual and marginalizes the lives of others. In a context in which masses suffer gross inequities of opportunity, such as those suffered by the native populations of Peru, autobiography seems a particularly egoistic genre. Even Rigoberta Menchú draws on the lives of others in Guatemala, almost exclusively, in vignette form.
To deem autobiography as inherently egoistic is a rather harsh view, but it does raise an issue: has José María Arguedas (1911-1969), anthropologist, poet, and novelist, written a novel autobiography in his unfinished last novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (hereinafter referred to as The Foxes) an autobiography that gives others equal space? equal voice?1
In part reared by Quechua Indians, Arguedas spoke Quechua and could look on the world with non-Western eyes. He suffered the tensions of a country so stratified economically that the concept of upward mobility for its shrunken middle class has long been replaced by the hope of just getting by. Peru's worsening social tensions erupted during the writing of this novel, significantly set amidst the metropolitan forces2 of a “horrible” port city: multi-ethnic and industrial Chimbote, Peru, its agonistic turbulence resonant in Arguedas's multimodal book. In the sixties, guerrilla activity begins to increase, its strategy to set countryside against city, and globally, the U.S. intervention in Vietnam is coming to an end, not before the slaughter of millions in the third world with which Arguedas symbiotically allied himself.3
The many layered historical and social situations of the novel's inhabitants are matched by its temporal dimensions. Several time periods are introduced in the “First Diary” and pervade the chapters of the novel as well. One time period is terminally short—the drawing to an end of Arguedas's life, his plans for the future the imminent suicide planned in the diaries that are intercalated with the chapters. Another time period is the inclusion of the most daily of events; another, memories of his personal past. He also identifies with two, pre-Colombian myths: the Andean, shaman deity Huatyacuri who overhears the foxes and the shaman deity Tutaykire, waylaid by lust. The perdurable arches of these shaping myths of an archaic epoch of living affect rise above the flux of transient and therefore “terminal” times. For it is mythic time that is memorable and essential, in contrast to the indeterminate present, the vast past, the shadowed future. The forms of personal life that transcend death, such as Arguedas's growing renown, do so because they acquire a mythic dimension not to be confused with glorification of the individual. Rather, his voice is subsumed by the polyphony of voices heard.
As in the diaries, the scenes of the novel present perforated collages of time. The present moment as each character experiences it in its transit is represented perforated by different personal memories of times past, and by the ongoing time of the myths. Like Arguedas, the major characters speak of incidents past as well as on-going crises in personal and public history. And like Arguedas, the characters inhabit identifiable and polyglot mythic horizons.
Arguedas oscillates between the first person singular in the diary form and, in the chapters of the novel, depicts characters closely modelled on living persons and sometimes even with their actual names: the crazed, black, street preacher Moncada and the dying miner Esteban de la Cruz among those whose names are unchanged. This admixture of lives and letters exemplifies Arguedas's emphatic assertion that in his work there is no separation between art and life.4 He speaks of how dependent his life and art are on the lives and arts of others. He makes clear that the concept of an individual life apart from the lives of others is delusory.
Even though Arguedas shaped the “facts” of his life for the diaries, alteration is itself a reflection of experience. The act of selection from the field of what happens is a part of the truth of one's life. The shaped account is in many ways more revealing of the shaper than what happens. Even outright lies and misleading distortions do not alter the referentiality of a biography to its author. However high one's standards of accountability to a data base may be in biography, an author's presentation is at least as expressive of the truth as its accuracy in sequencing.
But what is autobiography when the lives of prostitutes and brute fishermen comprise as significant a part of one's life as one's wife and one's friends? Or when the poignancy of a blind musician, a defiant whore, and a pre-historic or mythic shaman help comprise one's own life and art in a reciprocal, chameleon poesis? For when crazed black Moncada preaches sacrifice and nails himself symbolically to the cross as an act of resistance and of freedom, he signifies Arguedas's own suffering as well.5 The scripts for a number of characters indicates to Arguedas that resistance against massive exploitation and environmental degradation6 may have to entail self-sacrifice.
While writing The Foxes, Arguedas prowled the streets of Chimbote, listening for the operational logic for this last of his novels. The unmistakably individual people Arguedas found in the streets, in the markets, on the docks, in the fishmeal factories become deeply Arguedean characters. Their lives became his life, and their deaths, his also. No corner constitutes a private enclave vis-a-vis the city in which he weighed his life while gathering materials. He suffered the city's tentacles; they reached into such privacies as his sexuality and his death.7
The word “Boilers” for the chapters indicates the novel itself is being “produced” by the forces it resists: the demonic energies of the fishmeal factories of Chimbote and other deranged and corrupting urban forces such as those city fathers and industrialists motivated by material considerations and those agents of an international mafia.
The following passage from the “Second Diary” shows Arguedas's sense of the inseparability of the private and the public spheres. The ecological, the sociological, the historical, the mythic perforate this “individual” life:
Andean demons in the mountains and the abysses of Peru as they try to follow their destinies eviscerate one another; battle of God, excrement, light. When I thought that war won by the river of blood, the yawar mayu in my previous novel, it is as if I won. But I cannot quite get chapter III of this new novel in hand, because … I fundamentally do not understand what is going on in Chimbote and in the world.
In half a second—in the margins—I will transcribe the pages I wrote in Chimbote, when, just like today, after several sleepless nights besieged by the odious, the impotent, the empty, I decided yet once again to commit suicide. Word for word, I copy into the margin what did not then seem so fallacious … I believe myself to have, like all mountain people, a portion of frog, a bit of lark, some snake, and a trace of the little falcon we so much loved as children. But at this instant, I remember, utterly desire to be the Andean flamingo.
(79-80)8
Not only are other human beings and historical struggles past and present part of Arguedas, other creatures are. And not only other creatures, but river and mountain landscapes. The blood in his veins is the river of blood of the Andes that falls from the summits to the sea. The natural world is indivisible from the cultural and social worlds he seems not so much to write as to overhear; it is a world overheard that scrawls over his life, de-auto-rizing it, or, to draw on Derrida's pun, creating an otobiography attentive to the ears of the others.
Arguedas represents his personal agony as intricately interfused with those exploited by the industrialized and international megalopolis. In Certeau's terms, Arguedas explores in his own life and in the lives of others the “microphysics” of power, looked at through—given the constraints of this essay—three, interrelated characters, the Arguedas of the diaries, Esteban de la Cruz, the Quechua former miner dying of black lung disease, and his preacher friend, Moncada.
“I am trying to hear,” Certeau writes, “these fragile ways in which the body makes itself heard in the language, the multiple voices.” (1984,131) The “triumphal conquista” of a capitalist economy has a history of thrusting these voices aside and thrusting aside also “the provincial soul of the world,”9 and thrusting aside its creatures.
Still very frightened at having been taken to a hospital, even after his release, Esteban picks a fight with his brother, who has adapted to city life and to the Spanish language. His brother gazes down at his own super-shiny shoes as Esteban protests:
I weigh the carbon I spit out; I do it to get better, you fuck-off. Even a fuck-off can do magic, you fuck-off product of a fuck-off police state. Damn it, at least I spit out this filth!
(160)
Because his wife objects to Esteban's profanity, Moncada carries him home, tears a page from the day's newspaper, and spreads it on a small table for Esteban to spit on. The page has a photograph of a space station or possibly a rocket.
“Would you look at that!” Moncada exclaims. “They say that weird looking wheel will fly to the moon! Spit there! Spit, my friend! Get on your knees before Moncada. Moncada knows how insect lives and plant lives are organized, how Peruvian rangers are organized—ha-ha-ha!—hey yankees! you on your moon shot! up yours with invisible sausages. Spit!”
Don Esteban gets to his knees and without trying hard, spits dry the first, the third, the tenth time. Then he shoots out a stream, he launches a shot of stuff that could stick to a door, or to a face, or to the wall of a church, giving color and shape. Finally, Don Esteban coughs up a clot wrapped in carbon. (161)
As a good luck charm against Esteban's dying, Moncada takes a scissors to Esteban's “powerfully” shiny eyelashes and blows one lash to the winds. “Black light, friend. Black light.” (162)
The explicit and dramatic connection between the dying and impoverished Indian and the space station funded in the billions is an economic connection that subsumes whole populations, including Arguedas, and hence Esteban becomes, paradoxically, an independent component of Arguedas's autobiography.10 Both appeal to higher orders of reality perceivable through the poesis of creative language, the deep rhythms of conversations with friends and spirits.
Esteban speaks of a cemetery named Field of Lilies near his hometown. Moncada asks him about the lilies. “¿Había lirios?” (152) and hearing there are none, Moncada says:
My friend grows a lily in his lung. Though it is a black lily, it is a flower and for nobodies will he kneel. He will not prepare his death, not confess, not sing an unopen, peevish, dead song. He will not say a prayer. Not salt, not pepper. … Black vomit? a messenger butterfly that … arrives all tired out to rest on the dead man who has nobodies. You no evangelist. You, brother, you want to bury death. Ain't that the way it is?
(153)
A year before when he had awakened knowing how ill he was, Esteban had beaten the walls, kicked his wife, spoken filth, and then, his hands in fists, recited verses from Isaiah. He appreciates this prophet fated not to be heard because Isaiah was never wishy-washy (qaima in Quechua, 153); nor is Esteban wishy-washy. The bold voice of Isaiah, the voice of Esteban, the voice of Arguedas together amplify diversity.11
After little little time, death squeezes me like a serpent or its blows make my nose bleed. When I turn the light on, his head remains up. … He looks at my blood as if it were a pig thinking things over. He says he hears the frog that competes with the tiny music of the mosquito and the “cricket” [cicada]. But Esteban respects the frog. … When I lights candle, though blood is in my mouth, I hear the fat frog speak in the ditch. Isaiah, … Isaiah Frog. Crickets. We the little people. Cursed drunkards born to blows. From black mud the frog speaks bravely against the dark. … For him, there is no darkness. On the contrary. It is this humanity that will disappear, another will be born in the throat of Isaiah. We will push mountains aside; we will build aqueducts and bring water to the midlands; we will push stronger than Caterpillar.
(157)
Even speaking roughly the same language (Spanish) as we do, Esteban does not speak the same dialect or echo an orthodox version of the Bible. In Jameson's marvelous phrase, Esteban speaks a “nonimperial, non cosmopolitan language,” (1993 33) a composite language that incorporates (but does not colonize) the croaks of frogs12 and ducks,13 a death-defiant, a systems-defiant, anti-disciplinary ideolect of freedom.”
Arguedas reproduces the rhythms of his characters' speech habits.14 He does not speak for but, having listened to, he speaks with Esteban. Nor does the book of Isaiah assimilate Esteban. Beyond synchretism, Esteban's own voice reconstitutes fragments of the Western tradition not as it contributes to a conflicted consciousness, but as absorbed in spirit, if in fractured form. It is as if Esteban, oysterlike, has absorbed foreign matter, so much foreign matter that the oyster will die. But he has not been consumed by ‘walrus’ Western perspectives nor by ‘carpenter’ Western professionalism. By transmuting Isaiah, Esteban side steps the us/them binary distinction that maintains a colonializing system. Instead, Esteban expresses a self that, like Arguedas's, is not authorized by a single tradition, but, like Arguedas, is a bricoleur choosing from what is on hand when he has choice; choosing not to assimilate when he can resist. Esteban, for instance, resists bedding an urban, “white,” and relatively well-off Limeña, who attempts to seduce him for the sole purpose of having sex.
With Arguedas, these characters are the record keepers of death who defy the death of meaningless social roles, who refuse to confess or sing unopen, peevish songs, who revivify the so-called “minor,” non-standardized languages.15 Like Arguedas, the character-people of the novel are compound characters who, like him, straddle several language worlds. These character-people engage in the “microphysics” of resistance in part through ideolectic speech acts, through “the delicate layering and plasticity of ordinary language, with its almost orchestral combinations of logical elements (temporalization, modalization, injunction, predicates of action, etc.),” (Certeau xvi). “Poets of their own acts,” “discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality,” each major character works out “signifying practices” something like “the ‘wandering lines’ … drawn by the autistic children.” (Certeau 1984 xviii) They sustain resistance by alternative values, whether they be superstitious beliefs or sustaining myths. These, like fiction, have life-shaping power.
These worlds of consciousness and constantly changing voice incorporate singular and plural. The ill that befalls the abused and abusive Esteban filters into Arguedas's life. In this work the identity theme for Esteban, however singular he may be, is merely another expression of one organism among others, sharing a heterogenous environment. Each character's concerns are reflected within the others. There is almost no character not sketched in terms of pig, louse, and worm, for instance, terms Arguedas uses to sketch himself as well. So, while communicating singularity, he withdraws boundaries. For it is Arguedas who scratches a pig into ecstatic snoring, releasing the absolute joy of the libido in the “First Diary” (8-9); it is Esteban who exclaims, in a paean to pig earth: “The pig is majesty in its … why, buddy, majesty in its talk!” “Pigs have taught me so much!” (151) Native music, cricket and frog and libidinous pig rhythms of the “peasant” countryside, “trickster” profanity also help him, both of them, many in the cast, to support resistance to a decreaturing system.
When not regulated by principles of social welfare and the common good, capitalism or any other system of governance settles into fixed forms that favor an elite. Against the triumphal but deadly socioeconomic system (represented in Chapter III by Braschi, head honcho of the fishmeal factory), against a social world organized by “discipline” (and punishment) rather than by communication, rather than by shared beliefs and human values, Arguedas sets such “helpless” characters as Esteban and Moncada:
… the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline.” Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses … compose the network of an antidiscipline which is the subject of this book.
(Certeau 1984 xiv-xv)
Antidiscipline, the subject of Arguedas's de-auto-rized biography, offers a transition from Esteban and Moncada as component parts of Arguedas's (and the reader's) life, to Arguedas's as a failed? tricker's tale and the relationship of Arguedas to the foxes of myth, diary, and novel.
The agon trickster Arguedas draws the second diary to a close the way he draws the first to a close: by invoking these mythic trickster figures, the foxes. First, Arguedas addresses the black Gastiaburú who used to call Arguedas a woolen man (a highlander and hence a fox from above). Arguedas asks, “Why did I ever include these difficult foxes in my novel? However much we highland foxes sniff over city folk from the lowlands, we cannot understand them.”
The semantically saturate and polyvalent fox is a borderline creature who escapes taxonomy in being so widely associated: with nighttime, with the moon, with music, with the spring, as well as with people in commerce, with thieves, with artists and tricksters. The rapscallion fox is also tricked; a hunter, he is hunted; a truthful soothsayer, he is also a liar and an ominous bearer of bad news. And the pharmakon fox, representing the cure as well as the kill, is a creature superbly “qualified” mythologically to bring out “multiple connotations.”16 A binarily shape-shifting, he is the body of the world as a whole and also the breakup of wholeness into parts.
Cross-hatching his voice with the voices of highland Indians (foxes from above) attempting to withstand city life, and also cross-hatching his voice with the voices of the mythic foxes, creative tricksters holding liminal positions, Arguedas subsumes himself as “we foxes” to seek “thresholds of larger meaning, ways of turning ordure into order, … feces into treasure.”17 Like Carmen Taripha,18 the trickster speaks not only in human languages but the languages of nature.19 As we have seen, Arguedas hopes to expand biography into sociography and zoography and ecography. “Not without reason is it said that Trickster speaks the language of all living things; for in Trickster's universe, everything is already a sign of something. Trickster's universe is essentially linguistic and infinitely interpretable. Trickster is thus not a sacred being, but the way the whole universe may become meaningful, sacred, and filled with ‘power,’” (Doueihi 1984 309). Sacred power is not, of course, synonymous to the sanitary, obedient, and asexual.
But, unlike Carmen Taripha, neither fox speaks complete fables nor does either represent the arts of the folk tale. Rather, in catching wind of discursive fragments, innuendo, gossip, whatever's in the air, in fragmentary conversations and narrative bits, they enjoy scraps of life essences, whether criminal or creative. Theirs is very much like Arguedas's own art in The Foxes.20
Watching and listening, the prehistoric Andean foxes, figurative embodiments of thought processes even larger than those embodied by historical forces,21 roam the margins of human life. Inhabitants of a realm that mocks the present moment, they do not feel with or for the human beings/characters either in this 20th century novel on in their ancient folk context in which they report anti-social forms of sexual life. Then and now, they represent creative but not necessarily curative alternatives through metafiction and wordplay.
At the end of the “Second Diary,” Arguedas “plays” metasocially, linguistically, acoustically, and discursively with blackness. The letter “z” begins a term for colored, zambo. “Do you have it right, black man?” [¿Tendrás razón, negro?] he says to the black physician, Gastiaburú. [“Negro” is also a term of endearment.] Arguedas asks, “Are we zambos criollos? We blacks and a-blacks, we de-colored ones. [“zambos y azambados”] we in that category of blacks in white-face [en esa categoría de azambados], you include Indians and highlanders, suckled by [amamarrachados] city life, don't you? The foxes (zorros), the Indians, we, I azambado.” (83)
The foxes contribute to the erasure of boundaries among “diaries” and the chapters of his novel. The foxes help erase the demarcations of skin color. They slip the bondage of ethnic tagging and tongue gagging. The novel named for them includes rough and crude scenes, deploying offensiveness to trangress the “finer sensibilities” of a reader. For it is those very sensibilities that encase the reader in a discourse of domination exerted by an apparatus: church, class, state,22 and that allow the reader to escape awareness of inequity. An invocation of supposedly “normal” behavior and response evinces another site where an inequitable socioeconomic system has exerted its power. As a trickster, known for his foul habits, Arguedas [and Esteban, and Moncada] is both character and narrator; or rather, he is the discourse that cannot decide between the two, that erases their boundaries, makes an opening in their boundaries, linking them and at the same time allowing them to be distinguished and juxtaposed. (Doueihi 1984, 306)
But however potentially transformative, Arguedas finds working with the foxes ultimately too difficult. Although they offer a plural poetics of self; although they leap barriers of space and time, of text and context, although they move between the discursive and the narrative, and present themselves as human and superhuman personages, characters in the Boilers seemingly cannot go beyond scenes of instruction into scenes of action. Although the tricksters' hint of another story unfolding behind the surfaces and although they transform the text whenever they appear, the relentless weight of irresponsible greed and racial hatred shifts too little. The tricksters' story deconstructs into a semiotic activity, a free play. It invites the reader to recognize in this play of signi-fiers a “seeming as if” they signified a particular story, a clear and univocal meaning. (Doueihi 1984 303).
But few English speakers have accepted the invitation; the novel remains untranslated into English.
Patently “fictive” and mythic, Arguedas's foxes are also “operative” in what seems [and for Arguedas is] real life. Their genital gossip adds a discursive dimension that goes so far beyond mundane explanation of the prostituted city that cause and effect is made to appear what it is: simplistic. Their discourse opens up each narrative moment to speculation by opening up multiple perspectives and durations.23 But in shattering familiar taxonomies, the foxes may be too difficult for human powers of adaptive “play.”
The shape-shifter fox from below prowls the borders of machinic systems for exit signs. His name is the indigenous name for fox, Diego, after St. James. In appearance looking like an Inca hippy, he acts as a commercial man, a representative of mafia business interests and as a magician. In itself, his Inca hippy appearance suggests a complex boundary situation if there ever was one. Diego is also on the boundary between a most mundane tour of a fishmeal factory and the dance of deity.
As the linguist of the gods, the trickster can sometimes transform the most obdurate predicament, can turn “ordure to order,” can link “these bits of social dirt into the forms of communal life,” can reveal “how it is precisely on the plane of the daily and the specific that time is cooled down, social order enlarged, and all experience opened to transformation,” (Pelton 1993 130).
In the “Last Diary?”—and I paraphrase—the foxes could not tell such tales as were boiling up in Chimbote; they could not intervene. They were to have commented on Moncada's sermon in which he judged the earth and the sea. But only the black man sees the totality of the connections between nature and destiny; the foxes could not dance leaping, the light flashing from them, not to those last words. I will not be able to relate (for Arguedas as agon trickster changes from third to first person, showing again how the trickster “is both character and narrator; or rather, the discourse that cannot decide between the two” (Doueihi 1984 306). Arguedas and the fox leave apocalypse to the black preacher to narrate, for Arguedas will interrupt this novel about his death and the deaths of others with his death and with the deaths of several main characters. His suicide notwithstanding:
The trickster shows us a way to see the world by opening our minds to the spontaneous transformations of a reality that is always open and creative. It is only to the closed, ordinary mind that trickster stories seem absurd or profane.
(Doueihi 1993 200)
In the “Last Diary?” Arguedas takes his leave of the mythic narrative and of his life, leaves what options are left for changing the destiny of a pueblo through myth and art to those who survive by transformative acts directed not towards primarily individual good but towards the social good, a criteria by which Arguedas survives.
Notes
-
Pratt asks us to imagine “linguistics that decentered community, that placed at its center the operation of language across lines of social differentiation, a linguistics that focused on modes and zones of contact between dominant and dominated groups, between persons of different and multiple identities, speakers of different languages, that focused on how such speakers constitute each other relationally and in difference, how they enact differences in languages. Let us call this enterprise a linguistics of contact, a term linked to Jakobson's notion of contact as a component of speech events, and to the phenomenon of contact languages, one of the best recognised challenges to the systematising linguistics of code,” 60.
-
“Metropolitan forces” is a phrase owed to Coronil.
-
“You, my own other, my Vietnamese brother,” comes from a speech delivered by Arguedas in August of 1969 to Quechua who feared they were also the intended targets of U.S. forces; “Vietnamita, runa-masiy,” “Vietnamita, semejante mío,” translated into Spanish by Alfredo Torero and Arguedas (1983, 266-7).
-
Arguedas argued this point emphatically (1965 passim).
-
Moncada nails an image of himself to the cross, but the action is a leitmotif: Arguedas nails himself to the cross of a cause he believes all but lost; the poor drag the crosses of their dead from the cemetery of the rich to their “very own” cemetery; the mythic Tutaykire hangs upon a cross of bone in the “Last Diary?”
-
So depleted of sardines was the Pacific ocean near Chimbote in the late 60's that pelicans would in flight fall dead of starvation. Only on November 27, 1987 did El Comercio report that the “national catch” was coming back.
-
Possibly, living in a third world country contributes to the sense of permeability among people. Wilson Harris takes note of redefinition of character in a mode similar to the Arguedean: “The consolidation of character is, to a major extent, the preoccupation of most novelists who work in the twentieth century within the frame-work of the nineteenth century novel. Indeed, the nineteenth century novel has exercised a very powerful influence on reader and writer alike in the contemporary world. And this is not surprising after all since the rise of the novel in its conventional and historical mould coincides in Europe with states of society which were involved in consolidating their class and other vested interests. As a result ‘character’ in the novel rests more or less on the self-sufficient individual—on elements of ‘persuasion’ (a refined or liberal persuasion at best in the spirit of the philosopher Whitehead) rather than ‘dialogue’ or ‘dialectic’ in the profound and unpredictable sense of person which Martin Buber, for example, evokes,” (28-9); also “What in my view is remarkable about the West Indian in depth is a sense of subtle links, the series of subtle and nebulous links which are latent within him, the latent ground of old and new realities.” (28)
-
I presume that the armed resurrection Arguedas represented in All the Races had begun to show that such violence and rage was not only not efficacious, but destroyed human values. During that very period that Arguedas had begun to urge, “Que no haya rabia,” his second wife, Sybila Arredondo, was becoming more closely involved with Sendero Luminoso, a simultaneously puritanical and a terrorist movement. A February, 1969 letter to John Murra makes explicit their political difference; his wife disdains his dedication to writing when he could be an activist (Fell 285). In 1985, she was jailed for a time, a move prompted because, allegedly, she was caught transporting dynamite with known Senderistas.
-
Arguedas's own phrase.
-
That Arguedas is political is obvious, but the issue is not one of being representative of a particular political party or conscious ideology. Arguedas supported the insurrectionist, Hugo Blanco. But the Peruvian government was oppressive. He was barred as a Communist from entering the States for a P.E.N. convention. However, communal life as Andean Indian groups experience it has little in common with such collectivities as a Soviet farm. In Peru, Communism is conspicuously communisms. The matter of Arguedas's politics is more fairly phrased by itemizing. Arguedas was against fascism, against violation of civil rights, against an ethic that shamed the native populations. He was in favor of preserving their right to develop as independently as possible. He was in favor of Castro's revolution in Cuba. And so on.
-
“El mundo de El zorro se articula sobre todo desde el sónico,” writes Rowe (1990, 333).
-
Cornejo Polar claims allegory in the frog, claims a philosophy of life very like Conrad's character's advice to Lord Jim: “In the destructive element, immerse,” (1973, 294).
-
Maxine Hong Kingston refers to herself as “quacking” like a duck.
-
Mróz demonstrates how good an ear Arguedas had for street speech (1981, 133-160).
-
As Deleuze and Guattari show also (1986).
-
See, for instance, Lévi-Strauss 467; fox myths on 94-97.
-
Pelton (1993, 127). Taking a cue from Victor Turner, Pelton defines limina as threshold.
-
In the “First Diary,” Carmen Taripha's tale-telling talent is remembered; it expresses Arguedas's own love for the folk tale. Carmen “told endless tales about zorros [a polysemous word that may be translated as foxes, harlots, “beaver,” Indians, persons engaged in commercial adventures], tales about the condemned [ghost stories], about bears, snakes, lizards. She imitated those animals with her voice and her body. She imitated them so well that the living room of the curate became caves, mountains, table-lands, gorges through which you could hear the snake dragging itself as it moved slowly through the grasses and brushwood. You could hear the fox's talk, between comic and cruel; the speech of the bear that seems to have dough in its mouth, and the speech of the rat that even cuts off its own shadow. Doña Carmen went about like a fox and like a bear, and she moved her arms like a snake or like a puma, even waving her tail, and she bellowed as loudly as the damned” (1990, 14). By bringing creatures to vivid life, Carmen's tales bridge the gap between culture and nature in such a way that nature seems to narrate, and in nature's narration, culture acquires body. Arguedas is indicting the poverty of written narratives that embody comparatively little, that function in the absence of an audience and of nature. His praise of Carmen is a paean to oral literature that brings characters both animal and human fully to ideolectic and physical life. The artist is a composite “surplus” other wise than singleness of being.
-
Of animal mimicry, Taussig writes, “Foolhardy as it is to speculate what it might be about the absence of chiefs and property, the State and the market, that would enhance the mimetic faculty—the terms are as generous as they are suggestive—I cannot resist suggesting that it must have to do with a protean or plastic sense of self in an animated nature where objects, in some sense, have souls and nature speaks back, the material world being like an envelope to an underlying spiritual reality such that every material entity is paired with an only occasionally visible spirit-double—a mimetic double!—of itself,” from ms. version of Mimesis and Alterity: A Contribution to the History of the Senses, 1990.
-
Some—but only some—aspects of post-modernism illuminate this last work of Arguedas. For instance, the following passage applies, except for its dismissal of reality:
But what exactly might this loss of reality, this genuine erosion of the principle of reality, mean for emancipation and liberation? Emancipation, here, consists in disorientation, which is at the same time also the liberation of differences, of local elements, of what could generally be called dialect. With the demise of the idea of a central rationality of history, the world of generalized communication explodes like a multiplicity of “local” rationalities—ethnic, sexual, religious, cultural or aesthetic minorities—that finally speak up for themselves.
(Vattimo, 8-9)
-
Carr attaches historical processes of thought to a “we,” going further he says than Dilthey and Collingwood who think of history as “the actions of individuals,” (1986, 178).
-
The limits of discourse analyses in colonial contexts such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's and Homi Bhabha's are brilliantly summarized in Parry's cogent essay of 1987.
-
Good criticism on the relationship between Arguedas's use of discourse in narrative in the Foxes and comparable Latin American authors may be found in Rowe (1984).
The page numbers cited come from Fell's critical edition; all translations into English are mine. Julio Ortega was attempting to have the novel translated into English.
Works Cited
Arguedas, José María. Primer encuentro de narradores peruanos. Arequipa, Peru, 1965; Lima, Peru: Casa de la Cultura del Peru, 1969.
———. “Vietnamita, runamasiy.” Obras Completas, Vol. V. Ed. Sybila A. de Arguedas. Lima, Peru: Editorial Horizonte, 1983: 266-7.
———. El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Coordinated by Eve-Marie Fell. CEP de la Biblioteca Nacional Madrid: Coleccion Archivos, 14, 1990.
Berger, John. The Look of Things. N.Y.: The Viking Press, 1971.
Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, LA, London: University of California Press, 1984.
Cornejo Polar, Antonio. Los universos narrativos de José María Arguedas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, S. A., 1973.
Coronil, Fernando. “Can Postcoloniality be Decolonized? Imperial Banality and Postcolonial Power.” Public Culture Vol. 5 #1: Fall 1992: 89-108.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. The University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Doueihi, Anne. “Trickster: On Inhabiting the Space between Discourse and Story.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 67/3. 1984: 283-311.
———. “Inhabiting the Space between Discourse and Story in Trickster Narratives.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticism. Eds. William J. Hynes & William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa & London: University of Alabama Press, 1993.
Dumont, Jean-Paul. Under the Rainbow: Nature and Supernature among the Panare Indians. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.
Harris, Wilson. Tradition, The Writer and Society: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon Books, 1967.
Jameson, Fredric. “Cultural Studies.” SOCIALTEXT, 34 1993: 17-52.
———. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Vol. 2: Trans. by John and Doreen Weightman. N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1973,
Mróz, Marcín. “José María Arguedas como representante de la cultura Quechua. Análisis de la novela El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo.” Allpanchis, Vol XV, #17-18. Cusco, 1981: 133-160.
Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” OLR, Vol. 9, Nos.1-2, 1987: 27-58.
Pelton, Robert D. “West African Tricksters: Web of Purpose, Dance of Delight.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticism. Eds. William J. Hynes & William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa & London: University of Alabama Press, 1993: 122-139.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Linguistic Utopias.” The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature. Eds. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen Inc. 1987: 39-66.
Rowe, William. “Deseo, escritura y fuerzas productivas.” El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Edición Critica. Ed. Eve-Marie Fell. CEP de la Biblioteca Nacional Madrid: Coleccion Archivos, 14: 1990: 333-340.
———. “Ethnocentric Orthodoxies Vs. Text as Cultural Action: Some Issues in Latin-American Literature.” Romance Studies, Vol. 5. 1984:75-87.
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Contribution to the History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Vattimo, Gianni. The Transparent Society. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.