Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (review)

160 the minnesota review Gene H. Bell-Villada, 7"A? Carlos Chadwick Mystery: A Novel of College Life and Political Terror. Albuquerque, NM (P.O. Box 12335, zip 87195): Amador Publishers, 1990. 255 pp, $9. This remarkable novel, little noticed upon its release, works interestingly in two or three separate dimensions. Bell-Villada, best known for his books on Borges and García Márquez, wants to show us the terrific tensions under which a middle-class Latino student lives his life in the U.S., a U.S. utterly different from his rosy anticipations back at home. Bell-Villada also sets out to satirize the academic claims to "balance" by cleverly creating a popular authorial voice for today—the centrist open to neo-conservalism claims and demands. There is also a third dimension which Bell-Villada may not have intended to evoke, but which is vivid to this reader: the enormous odds against the radical who wants to do something beyond academic discourse. Bell-Villada accomplishes some of these aims better than others. The hilarious pseudo "Forward to the British Edition," (by "George O.R. Newell") reflects "Strange place, America. There's no industrialized country with such a tiny left, and yet no place on earth with such seamless and intense anti-leftism." He is paternalistic toward the members of the vanished New Left, this dignified commentator, although he would be the first to call the cops if students dare to picket his class by calling attention to the university's role in the war machine, and indeed he played a little footsie with the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom in his younger days. We have heard his voice in the New Republic (in earlier decades, the New Leader) often enough, and Bell-Villada captures him perfectly. I'm not sure that he captures the principal author, "Fred Jennings," quite so well. The problem is to maintain the voice for about 180 pages, and here and there it seems a bit tinny, especially in the dialogue department. Or perhaps the posture of this protagonist wears on me. Anyway, generally speaking, Bell-Villada gets inside the head of the Jennings type, a selfconscious academic neo-liberal on the make. His portrayal of Carlos Chadwick, who wants so to fall in love with American life but cannot do so, rings deeply empathetic, as if the real author has known (or perhaps lived) the experience to one degree or another. The scenes of Venezuela as U.S. cultural colony, and the times that Chadwick finds himself trapped between cultures, are especially striking and poignant. Whether the intimate scenes of life at a private college, and the teetering of Chadwick ultimately toward attempted terrorism, will have the same resonance to those who observed such life close at hand, I don't know. I find them less compelling, but then again I'm a stranger to the small and claustrophobic elite school. All in all, this is a novel to be enjoyed and appreciated as a part of generally muffled dialogue between different parts of the Americas. Anyone knowledgeable about modem West Indian literature, for instance, will recognize many similar systems of alienation and unreality, mixed anti-imperialism and self-rejection, among the Caribbean diaspora college elite. This is a discussion we need badly to have opened up, and Bell-Villada has succeeded in political as much as literary terms. PAULBUHLE Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture by Stephen Greenblatt. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. pp. 188. $25.00 (cloth). With the publication of his latest collection of essays, Stephen Greenblatt continues to practice and promote a critical method that first gained him widespread attention (and something like a cult following) a decade ago with the appearance of Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Anyone who is as yet unfamiliar with the new historicism would do well to turn to that inaugural work, reviews 161 along with Greenblatt's next book, Shakespearean Negotiations.' The earlier collections, however, are not prerequisites to the present essays, which span a period of fifteen years and thus give a good sense of Greenblatt's trajectory. Readers for whom the new historicism is by now not so new...