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  • The Cult of Bolívar in Latin American Literature
  • Marixa Lasso
The Cult of Bolívar in Latin American Literature. By Christopher B. Conway. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Pp. xii, 192. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth.

Christopher B. Conway's book brings new theoretical insights to the cult of Bolívar, a field of study inaugurated in 1969 by foremost Venezuelan historian, Germán Carrera Damas who asked how and why the cult of Bolívar developed in Venezuela. Building on recent theories of nationalism, Conway presents Bolívar as an icon for debating the nation's purpose and identity and for representing the dreams, aspirations, and failures of Latin American modernity. He starts by examining the religious and monumental character of the cult of Bolívar, a narrative of power, according to Conway, that portrays a particular version of national values as eternal and inviolable. Conway classifies the monumental discourse in three "poses": the pose of progress, which promises a future of democracy, modernity and national glory that that never quite arrives; the patriarchal pose, which presents Bolívar as a heroic, [End Page 484] masculine, and sacrificing father; and the metatextual pose, which endows Bolívar's words with clear, immutable, religious, and self-evident meaning.

The second part of Conways' work starts with the question of why Latin American literature persists in wounding Bolívar's symbolic body. This leads him to the most engaging and original section of his work: the analysis of Bolívar as a space for denouncing the failures of Latin American modernity. He begins by examining the growth of an iconoclastic Bolivarian discourse—exemplified in Idolos Rotos—that condemned the emptiness of the authoritarian heroic ideals amidst a reality of corruption and poverty. In addition, he examines the literary challenges to monumental patriarchal narrative. In the chapter "A Whore in the Palace," Conway analyzes Denzil Romero's depiction of Manuela as a self-identified whore who follows her sexual inclinations without attention to moral conventions; a Manuela who is the seducer not the seduced questions a narrative that links manliness and martial prowess with promiscuity and seductive powers. He also notes the impossibility of confining her within the monumental narrative, even by those who sought to do so. The romantic narrative was confronted with the impossibility of marriage and domesticity, while the epic narrative portrayal of Manuela as a manly woman challenged the monumental gender script. Manuela was and remains illicit.

In the last section of the book, Conway examines how Gabriel García Márquez challenges the metatextual narrative by questioning the possibility of transparent and stable meaning. García Márquez links power with solitude and detachment from reality, filling his tale of Bolívar with humorous stories that challenge the authority of Bolívar's words and representation. The authority of Bolívar's words is dismissed by an absentminded Bolívar who cannot remember himself whether a certain phrase belongs to him or to General Sucre. His authority is further questioned by a public who confuses his well-dressed valet for him. In this way, García Márquez disconnects Bolívar from his mythical image, liking his empty heroic representation to the empty promises of Latin American leaders and Bolívar's human, sick, wounded, yet endearing body, with the real wounded Latin American body.

As Conway rightly points out, representations of Bolivar reveal a conflict over the meaning of Latin America modernity. However, Conways' monolithic notion of modernity—and in this he is not alone—is somewhat problematic. Is it modernity per se, or a certain version of modernity—authoritarian, elitist, patriarchal—that is challenged? What followed the Wars of Independence was not a single vision of modernity but various, and often conflictive, versions of what progress and modernity meant. For example, Carrera Damas's historical analysis of the cult of Bolivar sees its emergence as a response to blacks' and mulattos' radical and egalitarian vision of progress. Indeed, until we recover those early multiple voices of modernity, we will continue to be trapped by the single monolithic version of modernity enshrined in the monumental cult of Bolívar.

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