What Matters in Reading

Proceed With Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas. By Doris Sommer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. x + 365 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper).

"There's something wrong with scholars who say the facts don't matter."

--Daniel H. Levine, The Chronicle of Higher Education ¹

IN LAST YEAR'S CONTROVERSY AROUND RIGOBERTA MENCHU AND THE ACADEMIC left, the overwrought media furor persisted in spite of its strange lack of attention to the already controversial nature of the book in question, I, Rigoberta Menchú. So accusations like the one above were hurled in the face of a large body of existing commentary about Menchú, her memoir, the book's ambiguous collaborative genesis, and its circulation through university classrooms and activist reading lists. ² The political investments that generate such oversights and blindspots--particularly about the rules of evidence that govern the "facts" of cross-cultural comparison and communication--constitute one of the main concerns in Doris Sommer's exciting and often groundbreaking new book. What's more, Sommer generates her paradigm shift against the tyranny of "facts" and the rules of engagement for scholars through a sustained interrogation of reading practices and not the various politics of particular regions or identities that at times constitute discussions of "minority writing." This oblique angle in Sommer's approach throughout Proceed with Caution is ultimately one of the book's greatest strengths, though one that might be said to generate its own set of difficulties.

By concentrating on a wide range of texts and philosophical arguments, Sommer highlights the hermeneutics of reading as an institutional and cultural practice. Although these philosophical arguments are largely twentieth-century and European (Levinas, Wittgenstein, and Lyotard figure prominently), they are inflected by the Latin American philosophy of Enrique Dussel and other traditions of dissident voices in the Americas. The texts themselves span five centuries and can be read as an idiosyncratic map of the history of literature in "the New World." Sommer's immense erudition and scholarly rigor emerge clearly in these disparate readings of (in order of their appearance): Walt Whitman, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, Rigoberta Menchú, Elena Poniatowska, Toni Morrison, Cirilo Villaverde, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa. She groups these nine short essays according to the learning curve that she constructs for her readers: a trajectory that moves from avoiding "The Traps of Translation" to the complexities of "Taking a Life" (where she reads Menchú, Poniatowska, and Morrison), and finally to a complex interrogation of "White Writing on Dark Subjects."

As the titles of both the book and these sections indicate, Proceed with Caution has a heavily pedagogical intent, one that is most explicitly aimed at communicating the "dos and don'ts" of reading the texts of "Others" when one is located in academe. Sommer begins with an "Advertencia/Warning" that flaunts her affiliation with those scholars with whom something is "wrong" but with a decidedly chastising voice that is addressed to exactly such conservative assumptions about the facts, the truth, and the "Other." She declares that "we miss opportunities for genuine dialogue with texts and with citizens in public arenas because presumptuous habits of reading cannot prepare us to listen" (x). Sommer traces these habits through a matrix of genealogies that includes modernism and discourses of democracy, such as those inscribed in Whitman's poetry: "we have typically wanted to share so much ground and so many games with the author that we can pretend to assume whatever he or she assumes" (xi).

This call to "resist the heat" of American idealizations of democratic union and mutual identification between reader and text drives Sommer's arguments through the vast array of texts and the historical and geographical locations from which they emerge. The lessons of Proceed with Caution are clearly explicated in the prologue and the first, most theoretically minded chapter where Sommer delineates her idea of "A Rhetoric of Particularism." As the...