Bakhtinian Approaches to the Indigenous World of Manuel Scorza

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY BAKHTINIAN APPROACHES TO THE INDIGENOUS WORLD OF MANUEL SCORZA OSWALDO ESTRADA RELYING on the novel as the optimum medium to represent the dialogic encounter of various social languages, the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin recreated in the first part of the twentieth century a hybrid world of intertwining ideological systems. He conceived the novelistic whole as a puzzle of compositional-stylistic unities, made up of unique dialects, authorial literary-artistic narration, different forms of oral or semiliterate discourse, and the personalized speech of characters. As literary critics of today, we can still draw on his theorizations regarding the ambiguous nature of the novel, a heterogeneous genre that allows individual voices to have some degree of autonomy while they remain subordinated to a leading language that controls the course of the narrative. By virtue of this novelistic conflict between multiple discourses, also known as heteroglossia, the reader can observe how opposing languages – centrifugal and centripetal, official and unofficial – encounter each other dialogically to reflect “the interaction among different attitudes and opinions of a society” (Booker 479). This sort of societal representation is achieved in Manuel Scorza’s Redoble por Rancas,1 a neoindigenist novel that confronts various social languages.2 Divided in two intermingling parts, one that delineates the 1 Although I cite from the Penguin edition of 1997, the novel was originally published in 1970. 2 I apply the term “neoindigenist” to Scorza’s text taking into account Antonio Cornejo Polar’s study of this subgenre within the context of the Indigenist literary movement. In short, the Peruvian critic differentiates a “neoindigenist” novel from an “indigenist” text because the first one portrays: a) a perspective under the influence of magical realism that reveals the mythical dimensions of the indigenous universe; b) the intensification of YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 153 conflict between the comuneros of Yanacocha and the town of Yanahuanca , and another one that portrays the silent battle between the village of Rancas and the International Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation, the novel takes us to the center of a heteroglossic world. Scorza’s “account of the transition from a semifeudal system of land tenure (‘gamonalismo ’) to more ‘modern’ forms of imperialist and capitalist exploitation” (Larsen 137) embraces the orality of the Peruvian Central Andes and delineates its social dialects. Loaded with autochthonous sounds from the highlands, the language of the extremely poor and unprotected peasants , the authorial voices of the gamonales, and the standard Spanish dialect of those individuals from the Peruvian capital who reside in the Andes, the text highlights the language of the Indian, one that relies on “traditional oral stories, proverbs, prayers, formulaic expressions, or other oral productions” to perpetuate its existence (Ong 11).3 From its opening sentences, Redoble por Rancas confirms the validity of Bakhtin’s postulates in regards to the “living words in a novel,” since every utterance of the indigenous or mestizo individual is “charged with value . . . entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents” (276). This is obvious throughout the novel, but particularly when the leader of the Indian peasants, Héctor Chacón, reassures the people of his village that they will lose all their pastures and communal lands, due to their failure to combat the semifeudal landowner of Junín. As this revolutionary confirms what seems to be a perennial state of Indian servitude, Héctor tells them, full of rage and irony, that they will have access to a better world “cuando vuelen los chanchos” (45). The presence of this deterministic proverb explicitly engraves in the text not only the agonistic situation of the subaltern but also the seemingly impossibility of his survival in the pres154 ROMANCE NOTES the lyric quality of the text; c) the enlargement, complexity and mastery of technical devices, through a process of novelistic experimentation; and d) the expansion of the proper space for a narrative representation of the indigenous, with the real transformations of his world (“Neoindigenismo” 549). I analyze Scorza’s novel under these parameters and other postulates regarding neoindigenism in my article “Diglosia neoindigenista .” 3 In defense of orality, Raúl Dorra reminds us that, although our contemporary world is reducing the survival of oral production, “la identidad...