The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (review)

At the end of The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze gestures at what has come to be called the Neobaroque: “Something has changed in the situation of monads, between the former model, the closed chapel with imperceptible openings, and the new model invoked by Tony Smith, the sealed car speeding down the dark highway” (136–37¹). In the late twentieth century, that is, monadology became “nomadology” and the Baroque was free, albeit with new tensions and complications, to reinvent itself in new places, times, and forms. Part of the brilliance of The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction consists in locating this shift in geographic, historical, and cultural places that Deleuze ignores. Latin America’s rich genealogy of the Baroque, as Parkinson Zamora masterfully shows, spans centuries and ultimately defies any attempt to equate the Neobaroque and New World Baroque with the relativism typically associated with postmodernity.

Often lavish (not only because of the many illustrations) and always acute, The Inordinate Eye balances the claims of formalism and historicism as it navigates the interactions and analogies between verbal and visual arts in the Baroque(s). Reading, and I mean this in the broadest sense of the term, the art of the Aztecs, Rivera, Kahlo, Carpentier, Garro, Galeano, García Márquez, and Borges, the book shuttles between cultural theory and intellectual history to chart “transcultural energies in relation to New World Baroque aesthetics and ideology” (xv). Relying throughout on the conceptual lens of the “inordinate,” it furnishes a cornucopia of insights about the objective forms, subjective motivations, and expressive limits found in the Baroque’s various incarnations.

This is an exemplary comparatist work—accessible to the general reader yet keenly engaged in the on-going task of mapping how the Baroque creates and decreates meaning and aesthetic feelings. Like recent books by Christopher Braider, Rebecca Zorach, and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, The Inordinate Eye rethinks received hermeneutics of the Baroque(s) with marvelous results. Blurring disciplinary boundaries between art history and literary criticism, it shows how cardinal “inordinate” qualities of the Baroque follow a curious logic of translation, whereby elements of indigenous culture, colonial and European painting and architecture, as well as aspects of Mexican mural and oil painting re-circulate in Latin American fiction. In part this result is due to the fact that historical phenomena maintain a certain “spiritual” efficacy, such that in the wake of the seventeenth-century European and colonial Baroque, the twentieth-century Neo-Baroque and New World Baroque emerge almost with a sense of inevitability. Such inevitability comes, though, in myriad forms; thus “to encompass this variety, it is important to allow for play among terms, techniques, and intentions” (286). Allied with admirable rigor, such “play” shapes, for instance, a reading of Mesoamerican codices alongside contemporary Latin American fiction such that Parkinson Zamora discovers how time is given “inordinate spatial relation” in both forms; it likewise helps her rethink Carpentier’s originary vision of the New World Baroque in the chiaroscuro light of his debts to the visual and musical arts, Spenglerian theories of history, and insistence on the unique nature of Latin American totalidad. Exemplary also is the chapter entitled “Baroque Self: Kahlo and García Márquez,” which locates “continuities” and “discontinuities” between “European Baroque modes of rendering subjectivity . . . and Latin American modes of self-representation” (168).

Simply put, this book remaps a field. I wonder, though, if it doesn’t give excessive weight to a visual hermeneutic of literature at moments when the topic at hand is, admittedly, the ineffable, the sublime, or simply a text whose rhetoric (its energeia) tends to outstrip visualization (its enargeia). The conceptual folds of the Baroque conceit, the vertiginous narrative devices in Borges’s prose, or the material copia and hyperbolic repetitions in García Márquez’s novels may be more resistant to a “visual” reading than Parkinson Zamora sometimes allows. Another quibble is that, notwithstanding the attention given...