The Eve/Hagar Paradigm in the Fiction of Quince Duncan (review)

Since the late 1970s, there has been a growing interest in Central American affairs by scholars based outside the region, as evidenced by the stream of books on its well-known political and economic crises. In the cultural realm, there have also been efforts to undo the parochialism that, until recently, tended to make Rubén Darío's the only Central American name recognizable to most specialists in Latin American literature.

Dellita Martin-Ogunsola's pathbreaking study, The Eve/Hagar Paradigm in the Fiction of Quince Duncan, carries on the investigation of Central American literature by offering the first book-length analysis in English of the work of one of Costa Rica's most significant contemporary writers. The book is divided into five chapters, framed by an introduction and a short conclusion. In the brief preface and the introduction, the author defines the properties of the matriarchal and androgynous dichotomy, Eve/Hagar, on which her analysis of Duncan's female characters rests. She traces the founding models of woman as emblematic other from various readings of the Bible through contemporary examples in North American and Spanish America literature, and explains her reasons for invoking them in her study: "The twinned figure Eve/Hagar paradigm is a vehicle for measuring the degree of wholeness and equilibrium the female personae seek as they endeavor to shatter the pigeonholed images imposed on them by a national discourse that embraces European values" (10).

The first two chapters deal with the portrayal of women in two of Duncan's four short story collections: Una canción en la madrugada (1970) and La rebelión pocomía y otros relatos (1976). The characters selected from the twelve stories are primarily West Indian immigrants and/or their descendants, who, in the first book, are located in the Limón province of Costa Rica prior to 1949, the year when West Indian blacks were granted the rights of citizenship in Costa Rica, and, in the second book, reside mostly in San José between the 1950s and the 1970s. All are considered to bear the markers of a fallen status through their lives of "unprofitable labor" (32), "oppression" (41), "penury" (49), "suffering" (71), "invisibility" (73), "great physical deprivation, and overwhelming responsibilities" (50), and in one instance, "self-abasement by resorting to the kind of lifestyle that makes outcasts of females in all societies—prostitution" (65). However, Martin-Ogunsola argues that "Duncan's constant juggling of multiple and sometimes contradictory images is a technique that rescues his work from sentimentality and male chauvinism" (53).

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 address gender issues in three of Duncan's five novels: Los cuatro espejos (1973), La paz del pueblo (1978), and Final de calle (1979). In the third chapter, "A Tale of Two Wives in The Four Mirrors," Martin-Ogunsola reads the male protagonist's two marriages as alternate signs of his quest "for a place, identity, and language that make him feel at home in Costa Rica" (99). She extends this notion to the writer's situation: "The Four Mirrors is also a dialectic of ambivalence concerning Duncan's place, language, and identity as a writer. On the one side is the West Indian oral tradition of Anancy tales, musical forms (such as calypso), attitudes, religious beliefs, healing practices, customs, and values in all their richly performative aspects that he inherited during his upbringing in Limón Province. On the other is the weight and attraction of a chirographic (written) Western tradition made dominant by conquest and imposition. The challenge lies in reconciling these mutually exclusive spheres or having them come to terms with each other tangentially" (107).

In the fourth chapter, "The House of Moody in For the Sake of Peace," the author examines elements of that desire for reconciliation in the novel's interweaving of events on a sugar plantation in post-Emancipation Jamaica during the 1830s and a banana plantation in Depression-era Costa Rica during the...