Amnesia in a Republican County (review)

294 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies The fruitfulness of Gonzalez's method is most persuasively exemplified in his final three chapters—on Borges, Carpentier and Cortázar. All three chapters are a tour de force of careful analyses and brilliant deconstructive maneuvers. In his analysis of Borges's "The Garden of the Forking Paths," the critic centers his study of Borges's graphophobia not only on this story's dissemination of labyrinrhine meanings (the "forking parhs," which González equates with a kind of nuclear fissioning), but, even more intriguingly, on a seemingly innocuous ironic detail that, in the context of this argument, becomes all-important when revealed. It is no small matter, after all, to observe that Tsui Pen's Utopian novel in the story ( The Garden of the Forking Paths)—a pacifist text so intent on avoiding conflict that it refuses all judgments or conclusions—leads to the ultimate violence of murder. The observation, along with Gonzalez's insistence that Borges's graphophobia is not only as an aesthetic choice, but an ethical principle , will make it more difficult for future readers of Borges to read this authot as a disengaged and morally dubious metaphysician. The chapter on Cortázar's "Press Clippings" is undoubtedly the most forceful illustration of Gonzalez's argument about the ramifications of writing about violence as well as of the consequences of violent writing on supposedly non-violent readers. But Gonzalez's chapter on Carpentier's The Harp and the Shadow is the most accomplished example of how a deconstructive ethics, or an ethical deconstruction, can illuminate a text's meaning in novel and unexpected ways. González bases much of his argument for the author's misgivings about writing in this text's farcical performativity, a farce and a performativity that bring to center stage the unruliness and the potential treachery of all representation . Gonzalez's brief but utterly convincing chapter on Teresa de la Parras Ifigenia is most interesting for its speculative conclusion: it is not the silence of die sacrificial heroine that die novel ultimately affirms, says this critic, but the power of the woman writer as "an active and powerful generator of fictions" (82). The first two chapters in the book are less persuasive, not in their overarching argument about the ambivalent attitude of the writers studied (Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and Manuel Zeno GandÃ-a), towards the violent acts represented in their fictions, but in the critic's insistence on locating the source of this graphophobia in the representation of these authors' abused, young female characters, characters whom Gonzalez reads as an allegory of writing, via their parentage with Goethe's Mignon. The allegorical bent of both chapters struck me as forced. More importandy , the critic's efforts to highlight this particular allegorical connection draws attention away from an important undercurrent in both chapters : the recognition by both authors that their characters—as radically Other—elude their ethical grasp of the narrative process in which they are engaged. But these are small quibbles, ones that in no way detract from the forcefulness and the potential explosiveness of Gonzalez's seemingly modest argument. They are seemingly modest because the critic leaves open most of the ethical dilemmas about the relationship between writing and violence, limiting himself primarily to unpacking those textual moments in which graphophobia is evident. They are potentially explosive because the ideas considered have considerable consequences for the practice of literary analysis. If it is indeed the case, as González seeks to demonstrate , that postcolonial, social, and cultural critics have based many of their arguments against the "moral" legitimacy or authenticity of canonical fictional narratives by ignoring the ethical complexities hidden within the narratorial voices in those texts, then this critic's brand of ethical deconstruction poses an urgent challenge not only to current trends in Latin American criticism, but also to current trends in academic curricula and, by extension, the world of literary publishing as well. Dianna Niebylski University of Kentucky Amnesia in a Republican County University of New Mexico Press, 2003 By Gary Soto Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 295 This novel begins with the latest misadventure of Silver Méndez...