Writing across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America by Ángel Rama (review)

At long last, the English-reading world can lay its hands on the series of essays in which the influential Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama developed his idea of "narrative transculturation." Carefully transported to the realm of literary criticism, Rama's idea of transculturation, borrowed from Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz, still largely frames debates around regionalist and indigenista literature as well as broader cultural practices. English readers will be well served by David Frye's fluid translation, one that retains the rhythm and deep erudition that govern Rama's linguistic universe, and by an introduction to the thinker that specialists will want to revisit and newcomers will find necessary. Having previously translated Guaman Poma's The First New Chronicle and Good Government (1615) and Fernández de Lizardi's The Mangy Parrot (1816), Frye, who teaches anthropology at the University of Michigan, is particularly equipped to negotiate Rama's unique literary-historical and anthropological panning of "the continent."

Divided into three parts, Writing across Cultures begins with Rama's elaboration of Ortíz's anthropological paradigm. Ortiz's understanding of "transculturation" identified three movements that constituted the process: "partial decultu ration," or the loss of the most bygone cultural elements indigenous to a region; the incorporation of foreign cultural elements into that region's culture; and, finally, the attempt to stitch together these two cultural fabrics. Rama's appropriation of the concept for literary studies, however, does not come without his own theoretical twist. "This schema," Rama argues, "pays insufficient attention to the criteria of selection and inventiveness that must always be part of the mix in any case of cultural plasticity, for such a state testifies to the energy and creativity of a cultural community" (22). Here as elsewhere, the Uruguayan critic stresses the agency of writers working in transculturated zones: it is not the case that writers select from only what is ostensibly on offer from both the regional and foreign (or imperial) cultures, but rather mine both for traditions that, when combined, might "stand up to the damaging impact of transculturation" (23). Transculturation, then, appears less as another catchy label for the harmonious synthesis of two cultures in an asymmetrical power relation than as a name for the theoretical operations in which writers engage precisely to combat the leveling thrust of modernity.

In literature, these transcultural operations of losses, selections, rediscoveries, and incorporations occur in three dimensions: language, literary structure, and worldview. Language, for Rama, allowed writers to collapse hierarchies previously present in a regionalist literature that distinguished between and alternated learned modernist prose with colloquial, regional language. Writers who represent modes of transculturation, like the Mexican Juan Rulfo, crucially closed this linguistic gap, opting for narrating stories entirely from the perspective of his or her characters or, like Augusto Roa Bastos, finding Spanish equivalents for indigenous American languages. At the level of literary structure, Rama argues that the authors of transculturation did not assimilate the latest trends of European modernism (Joycean "stream-of-consciousness" comes to mind), but instead looked toward their own cultures in an attempt to reclaim oral and popular narrative structures. Exemplary of this style is the Brazilian Guimarães Rosa, in whose works one cannot help but notice the thorough and lengthy research that went into recreating the popular narrative structure, language, and society of the sertão from Northeastern Brazil. Lastly, Rama traces the influence of the European irrationalist movement as it influenced narrative practitioners in Latin America through transatlantic exchanges with Spanish Americans living in Europe and the circle around José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente. This worldview, he argues, gave many Latin American writers the confidence to explore their own cultural archives for popular myths, dormant and nearly lost to the long oppression of nineteenth-century positivist thought, which, in turn, had heavily influenced the regionalist novel until then.

The second part of the book shifts from tracing theoretical developments in Latin American...