José María Arguedas

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Reading Arguedas's Foxes

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SOURCE: Rowe, William. “Reading Arguedas's Foxes.” In The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, edited by Julio Ortega and Christian Fernandez, translated by Fred Fornoff, pp. 283-89. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Rowe describes “diaries” in The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below as “an erratic form of writing … that function as a threshold or multiple bridge between the fictional world, the sociocultural circumstance, the weave or Peruvian culture through many centuries, and the life of the author.”]

The initial reception of El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo was marked by the concern of the critics over the apparently inconclusive character of the text; they also stressed its supposedly testimonial nature (Arguedas himself uses the word testimonio in his “Diaries”), with regard to both the life of the author and the social world of the characters. With the years, however, it came to be recognized that this was a work of exceptional importance, not only within the Arguedian corpus but also for Peruvian and Latin American literature. The axis of this change of attitude on the part of the critics consists of what Martín Lienhard has called “a kind of Copernican revolution in the literary production of Arguedas and Peru” (Lienhard 1990: 322). This is because the text engages the Peruvian western-coastal world from Andean perspectives and patterns of discourse; thence, the formal techniques of the urban vanguardist novel are used and reformulated. As a result, “for the first time, since 1532, one perceives the possibility of unifying Peru, through narrative fiction, from an Andean perspective” (Lienhard 1990: 322), although the colonial mestizo chronicles, such as those of Guamán Poma, should be regarded as precursors, as should Arguedas's great epic-lyric poem itself, A Nuestro Padre Creador Túpac Amaru. This new literary process finds its historical base in the massive immigration of the Andean population to the cities of the coast, a demographic and cultural transformation unleashed by the rapid capitalist transformation of the 1960s.

As a result of all this, the reading of the text requires a certain degree of knowledge of the Andean culture, and to a certain extent, projects or anticipates a new bicultural reader. The sociohistorical context of the narration is the city of Chimbote, at the time (1967-69) the largest fishing port in the world, which had attracted an intense immigration from the mountains. There followed a rapid and fecund appropriation of the Western world by the mountain people, with a notable decrease in the shackles used to perpetuate Western-criollo privilege in the capital city. In a kind of counterinvasion, the Indian population was breaking through the barrier that had kept it marginalized since colonial times. In a letter, Arguedas writes: “The Hispano-Indian culture forged to the point of having attained a kind of incredible stability of contrast during the colonial period … is disintegrating in the most extraordinarily dramatic manner” (Arguedas 1990: 287). This disintegration is inextricably accompanied by a new potentialization, a process that is prolonged in the paradoxical struggle between life and death suffered by the author himself.

In this text, the narration does not progress toward a conclusion that promises to tie up the loose ends, as the classic novel usually does. On the contrary, there is a proliferation of voices and characters. These can be classified, according to geographical origin, as those from the mountains, those from the coast, and North Americans. The first group comprises, in an approximately ascending order of linguistic-cultural “occidentalization,” the following: Hilario Caullama, Paula Melchora, Esteban de la Cruz, Asto, Cecilio Ramírez, and Gregorio Bazalar. The most important of those from the coast are Angel Rincón, Chaucato, and Moncada, and there are three North Americans: Cardozo, Hutchinson, and Maxwell. We can also perceive differences in social strata, as for example between Angel Rincón, owner of a fish-meal factory, and Moncada, who lives on the margins of the economy. We have, as a result, an extraordinary variety of “sociolects” (see Escobar 1984: 188), and not only of voices, which makes this novel much more complex than many other Latin American novels that critics have called polyphonic. Traversing the different voices, we can grasp a wide variety of discourses, among them that of traditional Andean cosmology (Hilario Caullama), the corporal-mercantile discourse of the brothel (distinctly coastal), another corporal-expressive (Bazalar), and without exhausting the variations, another discourse of utopian convergence featuring the currents of Cuban socialism, Andean messianism, and liberation theology. If the boundaries between one sociolect and another and one discourse and another are not always clear, and if there is a high degree of interpenetration among them, this is due to the transformational power to which the novel subjects them. In the most intense moments, this produces a veritable swarm of discourses, characterized by disintegrations and extraordinarily fertile interconnections.

We are not speaking of a homogenizing integration—a program of forced and hierarchizing modernization—but of mutual transformations in which the differences are maintained and respected: a model, clearly, of a future society. The transformations take place under a specific tutelage (in the West, we would say muse): that of the character Diego, the Fox from Up Above, who interrogates and allows the people to speak and dance in ways that they alone would not be capable of doing. Diego incarnates the power of Quechua culture, especially its creative capacities. He channels into Arguedas's novel the presence of an extremely important Quechua text from the early seventeenth century, Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí [Gods and Men of Huarochirí], which Arguedas himself had translated shortly before beginning to write The Foxes. A text that collects the oral traditions of the popular social strata, Dioses y hombres has a cosmogonic and at the same time metamorphic character: it traces a series of swift transitions between different worlds. The main opposition of worlds consists of that between the world above and the world below, a traditional cosmological opposition and principle of spatial and social organization of the Andean zone; this is articulated in two characters/foxes, avatars of those of Arguedas, whose dialogue prolongs and renews an ancient dialogue. It can be said that among the many intertextualities of Arguedas's novel, the one articulated by the two foxes introduces into the text a time-space of long duration and vast spaces.

If the novel, from the perspective of Quechua culture, offers a new vision of Peru, not like the divisive and ethnocidal visions that have prevailed since the sixteenth century but rather one capable of embracing it as a totality, it is necessary to inquire more concretely what exactly we mean by Quechua culture. In the culturally hybrid world of Chimbote, as Arguedas perceives it, the coherence of a corpus of myths is no longer available. In this sense, for example, the fragments of Quechuan cosmogony are mixed with others of a coastal cosmogony (the Bay of Chimbote as the feminine sex penetrated by Braschi). Neither do we have a translation, in its “pure” state, of the Quechua notion of the sacred. The huaca, the predominant expression of the Andean sacred, has been reformulated: the pink smoke from the steel foundry is converted into a kind of industrial huaca, as a magical intensification of space.

We can utilize magic as the key word for clarifying the power of Quechua culture; this comes through in Arguedas's affirmation, when referring to the importance to him of socialism as an organizing principle, that nonetheless it [socialism] “did not kill the magic in me” (Arguedas 1990: 258). To sum it up briefly, magic, as the power of Quechua culture operating in the novel, would include the following elements: a time-space that is not homogeneous (Cartesian) but is capable of swift expansions and contractions and of affective twists; a semiotic fluidity (“the magical juice of nature,” as Arguedas would call it) capable of transpiercing everything, of confronting the most remote realities; a cosmos elaborated from specifically Andean modes of looking, hearing, and touching, which serves as the base for sustaining the semiotic flow; and the metamorphic inventiveness of popular Andean culture, capable of converting men into animals and vice versa and of making all beings change appearance.

At the level of expression and form, there is a key site in which the manifestation of Quechua culture can be observed as a structuring force. The long dialogue between Diego and Don Angel (chapter III) is developed much like the dance of the scissor dancers, a traditional dance of the southern Andean region in which two dancers engage in a competition of prowess for hours and days at a time (see Lienhard 1981, chap. 3). At a more general level, even in the “Diaries,” the written word is theatricalized by oral discourses, although these are not only Andean. The basic linguistic substance of the novel consists of popular coastal speech re-elaborated in different manners.

The collision of cultural and linguistic worlds occurs in the appropriation of Western technology and language by the immigrants from the mountains. Part of this same transculturating process are the hervores, or “boilings,” a word Arguedas used to refer to the coagulations of lives and words woven together and unwoven throughout the text, which gradually form the weave of times and spaces controlled by the Foxes, who are to some extent responsible for the narration. The hervores imply a freer and less linear method of composition than the division into chapters. They correspond to the incidence of the fragmentary and mobile reality of the modern city in the vanguardist novel and allow for the intersection in a single space of two polyphonies, that of precapitalist culture and that of modernity. In this way, it can be said that one of Arguedas's goals is the creation of an alternative modernity.

Given that there is no privileging of one form of expression over another, the different worlds collide under an equality of conditions, with no trace of archaism, folklorism, or traditionalism, words that emanate from supposedly advanced cultures. Within the hybridism of the speech, new possibilities of enunciation—of sociality—are woven, as for example in the dialogue between the “crazy” Moncada and Esteban de la Cruz. The forms of expression of the latter, a miner from the mountains who is dying of black lung disease, penetrate the speech of the former, a black man from the coast, and they attain a lovely synthesis whose dimensions of metamorphosis and resurrection are entirely devoid of patheticism. This can be regarded as a classic moment in Latin American literature, in which tenderness exorcizes the violence of the inherited language that is saturated with ethnocide.

The incompleteness of this text, which indicates scenes that were meant to be included but that will never be written, should be considered in its relation to the suicide of the author, mentioned as a possibility from the beginning. In the first place, it must be emphasized that this incompleteness has nothing to do with failure. The idea of a textual lack is inappropriate. On the contrary, the reader has before him a fully finished text, a text that converts its incompletion into a positive factor, primarily in two ways: (1) it is a text that demands completion within sociopolitical reality (in a multicultural modernity), and for this reason the textual material mentioned but not written is part and parcel of a lack pertaining to historical reality; (2) the open, nonconcluded character of the text consists of a multiple aperture to forces on a macro and micro scale that include the struggle of the people of Vietnam, the political situation in Peru, the disturbances provoked in the author by a new love, his friendships, his relationship with Latin American literature, and his death. The “Diaries” enter into this as an erratic form of writing, far more complex than what is normally understood by testimonial literature: they function as a threshold or multiple bridge between the fictional world, the sociocultural circumstance, the weave of Peruvian culture through many centuries, and the life of the author. Death, in all of this, asks to be acknowledged as a risk inherent in metamorphosis.

The book has aroused at this juncture a rather widespread critical debate. We should mention in this context, as a minimal summary, the problem of rationality versus magic or myth (Columbus 1986; Cornejo Polar 1990; Rowe 1990), the sociopolitical vision (Cornejo Polar 1990; Forgues 1986), language and the discourses and relationships between ethnoliterature and written literature (Escobar 1984; Lienhard 1981, 1990), Andean culture and vanguard literature (Lienhard 1981, 1990), and spirituality (Gutiérrez 1990). But the critical arguments have not exhausted the possibilities for further investigation. There are a number of topics that still need deep critical analysis, among them the linguistic-discursive richness of the text and its relation to the history of languages in Peru, and the vision of an alternative modernity.

Bibliography

Arguedas, José María. 1990. El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Edición Crítica, coord. Eve-Marie Fell. Colección Archivos, 14. Madrid: CSIC.

Columbus, Claudette. 1986. Mythological Consciousness and the Future: José María Arguedas. New York: Peter Lang.

Cornejo Polar, Antonio. 1990. “Un ensayo sobre ‘Los zorros’ de Arguedas.” In José María Arguedas, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Edición Crítica, coord. Eve-Marie Fell, 297-306. Madrid: CSIC.

Escobar, Alberto. 1984. Arguedas, o, La utopía de la lengua. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Forgues, Roland. 1986. De la pensée dialectique a la pensée tragique. Toulouse: France-Iberie Récherche.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. 1990. Entre las calandrias: Un ensayo sobre José María Arguedas. Lima: Instituto Bartolomé de Las Casas y Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones.

Lienhard, Martín. 1990. “La ‘andinización’ del vanguardismo urbano.” In José María Arguedas, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Edición Crítica, coord. Eve-Marie Fell, 321-332. Madrid: CSIC.

———. 1981. Cultura popular andina y forma novelesca: Zorros y danzantes en la última novela de Arguedas. Lima: Latinoamericana y Tarea.

Rowe, William. 1990. “Deseo, escritura y fuerzas productivas.” In José María Arguedas, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Edición Crítica, coord. Eve-Marie Fell, 333-340. Madrid: CSIC.

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