In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • A Recipe for Discourse: Perspectives on Like Water for Chocolate
  • Jason Meyler
Skipper, Eric. A Recipe for Discourse: Perspectives on Like Water for Chocolate. New York: Rodopi, 2010. Pp. 211. ISBN 978-90-420-3192-0.

A dozen years after its publication in 1989 and almost a decade after its filmic release in 1992, Like Water for Chocolate still stokes academic debates. Eric Skipper’s collection of eleven essays in A Recipe for Discourse: Perspectives on Like Water for Chocolate testifies not only to the sustained interest in Laura Esquivel’s popular novel and film, but, more importantly, to [End Page 359] the variety of perspectives that configures the dozens of scholarly articles on Esquivel’s work. In fact, the most salient feature of Skipper’s volume as a whole is the thematic grouping of the eleven essays in a way that highlights how multi-positional interpretations of Esquivel’s first novel create discourse. The structure of the book is as follows: Section 1: Like Water for Chocolate and Gender Issues; Section 2: Like Water for Chocolate, Magical Realism and the Critical Response to Its Use; Section 3: Like Water for Chocolate and the Cinderella Myth; Section 4: Rabelaisian Appetites and Gastronomy in Like Water for Chocolate; and Section 5: Like Water for Chocolate and the Mexican Revolution. Skipper admits that the essays inevitably overlap thematically and “serve as stepping stones to much fuller and wide-ranging interpretations” (xii). This eleventh volume in Rodopi’s Dialogue series accompanies editions that focus on single authors such as Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and Sandra Cisneros, among others.

Each section in A Recipe for Discourse contains two or three essays addressing themes from different and often opposing perspectives. One outcome of this editorial strategy would be iterations of academic discourse and dialogue, but this is not always the case. For example, in Section 1, Tina Escaja’s and Jorge J. Barrueto’s essays debate the cultural representation of women in Like Water for Chocolate, while Jerry Hoeg’s article addresses human nature in Esquivel’s novel from a mostly scientific perspective. Escaja’s and Barrueto’s sociocultural approaches that confront issues of alterity, patriarchy, and tradition contrast with Hoeg’s research which attempts to locate reasons for character conflict through recent developments in behavioral genetics, cognitive science, neuropsychology, and biology. Hoeg’s analysis concerns gender, but it avoids cultural interpretation as much as Escaja’s and Barrueto’s work avoids scientific approaches to human nature. The second section of Skipper’s collection also provides variation in academic viewpoints regarding the role of magical realism in Like Water for Chocolate, but the essays again lack a common focus. Jay Corwin’s essay unfortunately analyzes other critics of the novel and what he would deem their inordinate amount of favorable criticism more carefully than he considers Esquivel’s writing. On the other hand, Mónica Zapata’s accompanying article is well-conceived as it synthesizes differing interpretations of magical realism in Like Water for Chocolate.

The dialogue in the third and fourth sections is more fruitful than in the first two. Section 3 hosts a successful pairing of essays by Cherie Meacham and Victoria Martínez. Meacham reads Like Water for Chocolate as a mostly positive and revolutionary version of the Cinderella myth. Contrarily, Martínez contends that Esquivel presents a “stagnant” representation of Mexican society that fails to present readers with truly progressive or feminist characters. The fourth section on Rabelaisian appetites and gastronomy should pique the interest of those seeking interpretations of the memorable recipes and food-related episodes in Esquivel’s work. The two articles in this section are well-researched, but their arguments address largely different concerns. Amelia Chaverri adeptly evokes Mikhail Bakhtin and the Russian’s meditations on Carnival as a key phenomenon in the works of François Rabelais, but more elaboration on the Rabelaisian characteristics of Like Water for Chocolate would make her work outstanding. On a different note, Ellyn Lem studies the impact that Esquivel writings have had on perceptions of Mexican food in the United States. Her thorough argument is an important contribution to literary analysis and to cultural studies, but there...

pdf

Share