Corporeality in Early Twentieth-century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations by Bruce Dean Willis (review)

The purpose of Bruce Dean Willis’s most recent book is “to construct a comparative anatomy of body articulations among Latin American works” (1) from the 1920s and 1930s. Following naturally from his previous Aesthetics of Equilibrium: The Vanguard Poetics of Vicente Huidobro and Mario de Andrade (2011), Willis once again draws equally from authors from both Spanish America (Miguel Ángel Asturias, Óscar Cerruto, Oliverio Girondo, Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Icaza, and Teresa de la Parra) and Brazil (Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Patrícia Galvão, and Solano Trindade). The result is certainly an ambitious work that is just as expansive as it is analytical and writerly.

The word “writerly” is an apt descriptor for Corporeality in Early Twentieth-century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations, a critical work that also asserts the power and value of the writer’s style and craft. Willis’s unique literary vision and his clever use of language together carry the reader through what would seem to be so many disparate elements in the hands of another. In effect, this approach implicitly acknowledges why literature has the power to compel us so. The truth, Willis would have us realize, is that literary criticism need not be dry and sterile but may instead embody a style, a language of its own. Language itself is crucial to the content and form of Corporeality—as can be seen in the book’s subtitle, Body Articulations. “The verb to articulate,” writes Willis, “can mean both to connect and to cohere; articulations can be cohesions as well as connections” (2; original emphasis). This is the doubled insight that is persistently expressed throughout the book. Bodies together comprise a social language, and moreover, there can be no language without bodies. Appropriate attention is paid both to the literary text as itself an embodied act of linguistic expression and also to the textual representation of language(s), dialects, speech in general, and bodies/body parts, specifically.

This premise allows for a number of striking phrasings that are not unrelated to Willis’s analytical goals, such as in the section of chapter 1 titled “Bed, Bath and the Great Beyond: Remodeling Desire with Manuel Bandeira” (53–66) or the conclusion’s “The Cannibal at Work: What’s on the Menu at Churrascaria Oswald” (166–76). But the author is also attentive to the way bodily concerns manifest themselves in more common language (e.g., metaphorical expressions such as ‘the body politic’ in chapter 3 [129–64] and the synecdoche involved in the equivalency between [spoken] language itself and the tongue in chapter 2 [81–127]). Throughout, attention placed on “verbal wizardry” of Huidobro (33), the “musicality” of the poetic language of Bandeira (53), or the “literarily affirmed Afro-Brazilian body” of Trinidade (68) builds toward asserting the value of criticism as itself also a creative act.

Although Corporeality deals both with a wide selection of texts and an equally impressive range of themes pertaining to the intersection of language and the body—desire in Bandeira’s poetry, gender in Asturias’s Leyendas de Guatemala, class and politics in Galvão’s Parque Industrial, and Cerruto’s Aluvión de fuego, indigenous collectivities in Icaza’s Huasipungo, and race and ethnicity in Trinidade’s poetic corpus, centered around the Poemas Negros—the strength of the work lies in the way these themes intersect and overlap with each other. Less engaged readers or those preferring discussion of a single theme, for example, may find the transitions between such varied themes and topics to be unsettling. There is a clear preference for heterogeneity over monolithic truths, but of course here the medium is the message. Willis’s purposely eclectic approach does justice to the “connections and cohesions” suggested by the work’s subtitle, suggesting that the body and language cannot be studied as research specialties of their own in isolation from other topics.

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