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

The sumptuously produced, clothbound volume The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction offers a fusion of literary criticism, art and architectural history, and interdisciplinary cultural criticism. Lois Parkinson Zamora does not just allude to visual expression, but analyzes specific examples in as much detail as the literary texts she discusses. The book includes twenty-three meticulously reproduced color plates and eighty-five halftones of images ranging from codices containing indigenous writing, sculptures of Quetzalcoatl and the oft-reproduced image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, through colonial religious art and baroque churches, to the painting of Diego Rivera and other muralists and of Frida Kahlo. Analyses of these visual productions are coordinated with studies of Spanish American narrative and essays. The literary examples are principally from the twentieth century, though there are comparative references to earlier writers, Sor Juana in particular.

With such a wide-ranging collection of exemplary texts, The Inordinate Eye requires a strong central thesis to give it unity, and it possesses one. Throughout her study, Zamora follows the evolution of the baroque in Spanish America. While the baroque style was, of course, brought to the New World as part of the imposition of European culture and religion, it became transformed over time, as interaction with Amerindian and African cultural currents resulted in original hybrid forms. The New World Baroque resulting from this lengthy process of transculturation is reclaimed as a force for cultural resistance by Latin American writers of the twentieth century. In Zamora's summary, "the New World Baroque has become a self-conscious postcolonial ideology aimed at disrupting entrenched power structures and and perceptual categories" (xvi). This project of recovery is not only manifested in essays, such as those of Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy, that openly discuss the relation of the Baroque to Latin American realities. In Zamora's view, it is also present, at a more implicit level, in creative writing and the visual arts.

The first chapter treats the initial coming together of Amerindian and European cultural forms. Zamora discusses a wealth of examples, but focuses most closely on two narratives, that of Quetzalcoatl's encounter with a mirror and that of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The author examines the aspects of ancient Amerindian signifying media that current-day Westerners find most difficult to grasp. Zamora's analysis of the Virgin of Guadalupe brings to the fore the dynamic and productive nature of the interaction between Amerindian cultures and the Spanish-Catholic one just then in the process of becoming dominant.

In the second chapter, Zamora explores links between the indigenous codices and twentieth-century cultural productions, specifically, the literary narratives of Elena Garro and Eduardo Galeano and the murals of Rivera. The author reminds readers that, in the cosmology of Mesoamerican peoples, space and time were a unitary entity, and reading and writing included public performance (70). It is this integrated outlook that Zamora identifies in the work of the modern-day creators, calling Rivera a tlacuilo, which she translates as "diviner/painter/priest/performer" (70). Only a specialist in ancient Mesoamerican writing and cosmology could evaluate the solidity of Zamora's information and her tracing of these pre-Hispanic concepts in modern Spanish American productions. However, the resulting analysis certainly makes for fascinating reading, and this chapter is outstandingly original.

Chapter 3 directly explores the twentieth-century reconceptualization of the Baroque, and the discussion is especially helpful to readers seeking to grasp the central concepts uniting the vast range of topics in this study. Summarizing the ideas of Carpentier, Lezama Lima, and Sarduy, Zamora observes that while all were perfectly aware of the colonial imposition of the Baroque, "they came increasingly to understand the Baroque as a postcolonial strategy . . . by means of which Latin American artists...