Latin American Novels of the Conquest: Reinventing the New World (review)

298 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Latin American Noveh of the Conquest: Reinventing the New World University of Missouri Press By Kimberle S. López The conquest of the New World has sparked much controversy in recent years. Some view Columbus's voyage as one of the greatest achievements in human history; others see it as the beginning of horrific atrocities that decimated millions of Amerindians, and diere are those who are somewhere in between and can see many sides of diese events. In this fascinating new book, Latin American Noveh of the Conquest, Kimberle S. López is interested in how Latin American novelists deal with the conquest. López starts out this study with a well-researched introduction diat provides a general overview of historical novels from the twentierh century that revisit and reinvent the conquest. She notes that the years surrounding the quincentenary of Columbus's first voyage spurred many Latin American authors to revisit this controversial time of their ancestors. It appears that die general trend of these novelists is to take the perspective of the Spaniard, instead of the indigenous peoples. López believes that in some ways the novelists are afraid of identifying too much with the colonized Amerindian because they fear losing their own identity. She coins the new term "anxiety of identification" to help clarify her new theory. She explains that it is used: to refer to a specific dynamic that occurs in literary representations of intercultural contact: the fear of losing the self in the Other, that is, the fear of becoming so closely identified widi another individual or group so as to lose one's own ego boundaries. (18) Although these novelists seem reluctant to include Amerindian protagonists in their writings, many of them do look for a marginalized voice, such as that of the converso, within the colonizer. López has chosen five novels for her study, each of which was written after 1970 and spurred by the 1492-1992 quincentenary. The first chapter is called "Loving Cannibalism " and is dedicated to Juan José Saer's El entenado (1983). The title of this novel, translated as The Witness, describes a fictionalized story based on a cabin boy of Juan DÃ-az de SolÃ-s's expedition to the Rio de la Plata in 1516. The third person narrator describes the protagonist's travels as a cabin boy sodomized by his shipmates and later as the lone survivor of rhe journey. He is subsequently adopted by an Amerindian tribe and becomes a witness to their yearly ritual of cannibalism . Throughout his life he is plagued by an anxiety of identification because he finds himself both repulsed and attracted to these marginal aas within Western society. Chapter two, "Violence and the Sacred" continues the theme of marginal acts, but instead of sodomy and cannibalism it focuses on idolatry and human sacrifice. López analyzes the second novel in a two part series called Memorias del Nuevo Mundo (1988) by Homero Aridjis. She saves the first novel, 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilb ( 1985), for chapter five. The main character oÃ- Memorias del Nuevo Mundo is a ruthless Spaniard named Gonzalo Dávila. He participated in the conquest with Hernán Cortés and took great pleasure in killing and torturing Amerindians. On the one hand Gonzalo is repulsed by the Amerindian culture, especially their rituals of sacrifice, but on the other he is extremely attracted to native sorcery and sees himself as die reincarnation ofTezcatlipoca. The novel ends with the sacrifice of Dávila/ Tezcadipoca, a necessity within Aztec cosmology. The following chapter examines another novel that deals with one of Hernán Cortés's brutal conquistadors. This chapter entitled, "Eros and Colonization," is based on Diario mablito de Ñuño de Guzmán (1990) by Herminio MartÃ-nez. The novel is written in a first person narrative and retells the story of one of the crudest conquistadors of Mexico, Ñuño Bertrán de Guzmán. This fictional depiction of Beltrán de Guzmán illustrates a man both attracted and repulsed by sodomy amongst Spaniards and Amerindians. López elucidates her portrayal of...