Contra la alegoría: Hegemonía y decadence en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XIX by Gustavo Faverón Patriau (review)

A century after José Enrique Rodó argued that the novel should be considered the epic of his era, Faverón Patriau’s Contra la alegoría: Hegemonía y decadence en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XIX shows just how central a role narrative continues to play in our understanding of the Spanish American nineteenth century. While Faverón Patriau does not confine his analysis exclusively to the novel, he writes in the tradition of scholarly attempts to piece together a literary nineteenth century defined by narrative, following in the footsteps of works such as Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991) and Carlos Alonso’s Modernity and Autochtony: The Spanish American Regional Novel (1990). With a deliberate eye toward textual fissures that subvert allegorical interpretations, Faverón Patriau offers his own close readings of Jorge Isaac’s María and Gertrudis Gómez de Avallaneda’s Sab—two novels that figure prominently in Foundational Fictions—as well as the Memorias of Juan Buatista Túpac Amaru (whose better-known brother was the leader of the 1780–81 uprising) and Juan Bautista Alberdi’s Peregrinación de Luz del Día, o Viaje y aventuras de la Verdad en el Nuevo Mundo. The book’s opening and closing chapters reimagine the legacy of the Baroque and the hermetic concept of the lettered city, in each case seeking a more deeply contextualized and historicized approach to allegorical rhetoric and its reception. While he stops short of rejecting allegory as an interpretive framework, Faverón Patriau makes a compelling argument that nineteenth-century Spanish American authors had multiple motives for creating works that would both attract and complicate allegorical readings. The end result is less an outright rejection of the sort of reading advanced by Sommer’s Foundational Fictions than an reorientation designed to make allegory a more nuanced and historicized interpretive tool.

Faverón Patriau’s greatest debt is to Sommer, something the book’s first chapter acknowledges. Here he presents contragoría as a revision of Sommer’s allegorical readings of nineteenth-century novels. Arguing that the period’s narrative structures responded to a region-wide crisis of language and representation, he posits the contragoría-centered reading as one that explores the contradictions and fissures baked into the allegory.

This approach seems highly appropriate for Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru’s Memorias, a deeply problematic and contradictory text. Noting that Juan Bautista’s reconstruction of the rebellion was published just before his death in 1827, and that, given its author’s professed illiteracy, it was the result of some sort of collaboration with pro-independence priest Marcos Durand Martel, Faverón Patriau focuses on the inherent problem of narrating these events from the remove of three decades and across the conceptual gulf of independence. On the one hand, Juan Bautista finds it impossible not to conceive of his brother’s rebellion as a precursor of the Creole independence movement, while on the other hand, Faverón Patriau detects signs of the movement’s original indigenous nationalism concerned more with the restoration of a lost aristocracy than with the establishment of republican forms of government. What this reading yields is a text that produces anything but a seamless link between the Túpac Amaru II rebellion and the republics to come and rather reveals, as Faverón Patriau puts it, just how precarious the rhetorical project of nation building remained, both before and after independence.

The chapters on Sab and María focus on the discordant forces lurking within the unity Sommer identifies with erotic attachment. In the case of Sab, where Sommer concentrates on the tension between Creole and African racial identity, Faverón Patriau emphasizes a third term, the indigenous, present as a racial marker in at least one important character and surfacing rhetorically in the narrator’s reliance on oral...