Monólogo desde las tinieblas: Oral Tradition and Ideological Silence

Monólogo desde las tinieblas: Oral Tradition and Ideological Silence Dick Gerdes University of New Mexico I Antonio Gálvez Ronceros's second prose work, Monólogo desde las tinieblas (1975), has been called a book of short stories.1 More accurately the seventeen selections contained in the work, which are accompanied by some handsome drawings, consist of many kinds of different narratives. Some of the narratives in this book do suggest a short-story format, but many others seem closer to narratives from folklore: proverbs, tales, and jokes. Since in many cases none of the standard genre types seems adequate to describe much of contemporary literature, Gálvez Ronceros's use of a variety of narrative forms within one text is not surprising. Despite the diversity of the pieces, Monólogo desde las tinieblas is unified by other literary elements — that is, many of the narratives use a curious but exact reproduction of the language spoken by agriculturally-based rural blacks and mulattoes in the Chincha Valley area of Southern Peru. Gálvez Ronceros has literally transcribed the oral nature of the language to the written page, and he reproduces nonstandard phonetic and syntactic features of the Spanish spoken by the inhabitants of that area to give the reader an overview of the daily situations of a marginalized sector of Peruvian society. Thus, again and again the reader receives an idea of a world view, a set of feelings and attitudes which have a seeming coherence. Superficially it might seem as if. allowing the characters to tell their tales in their own dialect allowed them to vent the frustration, alienation, silence, and death of their social milieu. In other words, it might seem as if this oral transcription were particularly conducive to the creation of critical awareness. Instead, all of the talking in their own words serves to show us that they have not evolved a world view that is really their own. What they do reveal is that even though they are the oppressed, they either imitate the thinking of their oppressors or have nothing to say. Gálvez Ronceros's book belongs in the line of literature that uses a putatively naturalistic oral language. When one reads a book in this line, one expects to encounter individualized characters from social levels other than¡. Elena Alvarado, review oí Monólogo desde las tinieblas, in Revista de critica literaria latinoamericana, 1, ii (1975), 146-47. Gálvez Ronceros's first prose work, Los ermitaños, was published in 1962. 272ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW the dominant social level. It is as if by letting characters use nonstandard language, their thinking and personalities will not fit the standard. But we see Gálvez Ronceros's characters use their energetic , colorful local dialect only to show us that they are defeated by the same prejudices, nihilism, and alienation of all the modern world. Given a chance to express themselves, they actually have nothing to say. Insofar as the ideological silence to which we refer is concerned — an apparent contradiction to the orality of the narratives — we are able to discern that the formal structure of the text reflects a social structure beyond it. To put it another way, it represents a certain ideology of the social world that encompasses the text. Ideology in the Marxian sense is taken to mean the way men live out their roles in class society, the values, ideals, and images that tie them to their social functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole.2 Hence, ideological silence refers to the idea that despite the fact that Gálvez Ronceros's characters use a natural oral language, they are unable to organize their world in a conscious way. II Antonio Gálvez Ronceros has said that several of the narratives were collected by transcribing them directly from the people of the region in question. For example, the following passage sounds like an authentic oral diatribe: DiIe quel no sabe agadá lampa, que su cintura se quierba como carizo pordrido y se le ariscan la mano como la jeta del buró. Que nunca se viun hombe que le recule al deyerbe. DiIe que...