The Ghost of John Wayne and Other Stories (review)

308 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies cómoda y rápida guÃ-a de referencia para el lector. La obra se cierra con una muy completa bibliograf Ã-a sobre las comedias estudiadas y la base teórica utilizada. Galoppe consigue en su obra un análisis original de las comedias tirsianas donde va más allá de los mensajes conscientes del dramaturgo y se adentra en las estructuras mÃ-ticas y psicológicas subyacentes en el texto. Acepta el reto de acercar las complejas teorÃ-as lacanianas al lector para comentar la importancia del disfraz y la confusión de género como desestabilizadoras del orden «adicional existente. Uno de sus mayores logros, curiosamente , es abrir interrogantes en lugar de cerrarlos . Nos invita a cuestionar, desde otra perspectiva, las ambigüedades existentes en las comedias de Tirso y a la vez nos da pie para aplicar las teorÃ-as de confusión de género a diferentes obras, tiempos y sociedades. Antonia Petro Loyola Marymount University The Ghost of John Wayne and Other Stories The University of Arizona Press, 2001 By Ray Gonzales Writing well in more than one genre is no easy accomplishmenr. William Faulkner claimed that fiction writeis were failed poets, and stacks of weak attempts at fiction by poets have proved rhat the reverse can also be true. Only relatively few writers—Borges, Hardy, Carver—have been able to pull it off. In his first book of fiction, The Ghost of John Wayne and Other Stories, poet Ray Gonzalez adds his name handsomely to that list. In one sense, Gonzalez is a kind of translator of various modernist and post-modern traditions into the vernacular of his home turf, the borderland. Just one of die stories in the volume, "Fishing," might in facr be considered conventional , epiphanic fiction. In it, Gonzalez writes movingly of an afternoon's fishing expedition during which a father takes his son to the spot along the Rio Grande where rhe father's uncle drowned years before. In a symbolic moment of rebitth the fathei involves the son in coming to terms with a dark family history connected with that drowning, a momenr that will make the boy both "love and hate his father for the years to come," (77)—and proves that when Gonzalez wants, he's quite capable of writing strong realistic , charaaer-based stories. The remainder of the pieces, howevei, aim for other kinds of effects. They take place in a world tinged with mystery, and occasionally madness , or one in which individual character revelation is less important than understanding rhe relationship between cultural and personal identity. The first of the collection's three sections comes closest to what is sometimes known as "poet's fiction," short, elusive, evocative pieces that ate near cousins to prose poems. In these, Gonzalez at times seems to be writing "after" certain predecessors , and in homage to them—though doing so by no means reduces the force of his own stories. An imagined moment in a conquistador's life, for example ("Cabeza de Vaca"), has a whiff of Galleano to it. "The Legend" is a either a real local ghost legend retold, or, a la Borges, simply a fiction . In the various vignettes there are touches of Sartre, of Calvino, of Hawthorne, of Cortázar, of Rulfo—of magical realism, of surrealism, of just plain realism thrown off kilter by an injection of borderlands noir. The three stories in the second section are more substantial, and all ate told primarily from the points of view of children. Heie the story of the visit to the Rio Grande appears, along with that of a young boy's discovery in an abandoned adobe house of a miniature carved barrel covered with symbols which, though undecipherable to the boy, aie apparendy Native American. Equally puzzling to the boy is the old Pueblo man he finds playing a flute in die weeds beside the house and looking, the reader discovers, for parts of his past. As house, barrel, and perhaps old man are all consumed in an apocalyptic fire at the story's end, the boy begins to understand that some ritual unknown to him is taking...