Voices from the fuente viva: The Effect of Orality in Twentieth-Century Spanish American Narrative (review)

230  Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.2 (2007) understanding and analysis of how contemporary Hispanism has come to be, with incisive and exciting proposals on how to shift the terrain of study and register the discursive formation of Spanish identity in our work and in our classrooms. Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity is an important book. Not only does it brilliantly question the discursive pillars that anchor the foundational fictions of Spanish literary history, it also provides lucid and alternative ways of redefining our object of study. In the wake of the imperative spirit of this volume, I would recommend that it be required reading for Peninsularists on both sides of the Atlantic. ALDA BLANCO, University of Wisconsin nauss millay, amy. Voices from the fuente viva: The Effect of Orality in TwentiethCentury Spanish American Narrative. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005. 222 pages. The complicity of writing in the historical trauma of conquest and domination has made it a guilty activity that yearns for the purity and innocence of language before writing, the language of those who have been silenced by that traumatic history. The fascination of Latin American writers with the ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘barbaric ’’ voice of the Other has of course a long history, beginning in colonial times and continuing through post-Independence to the present day. Millay’s study explores how the twentieth-century Spanish American ‘‘anthropologistwriters ’’ Lydia Cabrera, José Marı́a Arguedas, Miguel Barnet, Elisabeth Burgos and Augusto Roa Bastos inscribe orality as Other in their literary and ethnographic texts. Each of these writers, Millay suggests, invents an ethnopoetics in order to evoke the presence of the Other’s voice and create the effect of orality in their works. In order to create this effect, the writers take on the role of mediators, in Rama’s transcultural sense, establishing their authority to speak as the Other by invoking their uniquely intimate knowledge of both worlds. This rhetorical strategy, according to Millay, requires them to maintain the binary opposition between oral and literate cultures, an opposition that is ideologically constructed so that the writer becomes a necessary conduit for the disempowered voice to be heard, salvaged, and ultimately, contained. In the first chapter, Millay outlines how critics have treated the oral/literate divide since Ángel Rama wrote of the ciudad letrada in opposition to the oral culture of Latin America’s unlettered masses, and transcultural writers as mediators between these polarized worlds. Post-Rama critics she invokes who have thoughtfully examined Latin American writers’ inscription of orality in their texts include Antonio Cornejo Polar, Martin Lienhard, William Rowe, Carlos J. Alonso, Josefina Ludmer, Anı́bal González, Jorge Marcone, and Carlos Pacheco. Disappointingly missing from this distinguished list is Neil Larsen’s brilliant early reading in Modernism and Hegemony of Juan Rulfo’s use of oral language, a reading that would particularly enrich and support her notion that the textualization of oral language conceals an ideological agenda that involves subjugating the oral while creating the illusion of letting it speak for itself. Millay’s theoretical Reviews  231 discussion and readings are particularly indebted to Pacheco’s ideas about the ‘‘fictionalization of oral discourse,’’ which involves appropriating the discursive strategies of oral language to create textually ‘‘an aesthetic effect of orality.’’ In critiquing writers in her study, Millay argues for ‘‘a fluid approach that does not consider orality and literacy in purely oppositional terms’’ (18). Here she cites Marcone’s ‘‘theory of orality as a category that functions within writing’’ rather than outside it. Orality as an object of desire in this sense is an invention of literate culture that the writer deploys in order, paradoxically, to subvert the authority of writing. In Chapter Two, Millay discusses Lydia Cabrera who, like Carpentier, was inspired to explore Afro-Cuban culture during her years in Paris in the 1920s and 30s when ethnographers and surrealists became fascinated by non-European cultures . Cabrera’s ethnopoetics developed as a means to create the effect of the oral presence of the Afro-Cuban informants in her collections of folklore. Millay emphasizes the key role that poetry, seemingly closer to an oral aesthetics than prose, played in Cabrera’s artistic development. Of...