Dependency Theory and Literary History: The Case of Latin America

FRANCO 65 JEAN FRANCO DEPENDENCY THEORY AND LITERARY HISTORY: THE CASE OF LATIN AMERICA I The Anglo-Saxon critic of Latin American literature is not only caught between the twin dangers of paternalism and exoticism but, far more seriously, the critic as university teacher must face the fact that the university is a voracious yet highly selective consumer of Latin American literature. This consumption , whether through departments of Spanish or through translated works taught as part of world culture concentrates preferably on certain privileged "masterpieces" which foreign students approach without the famUiar signposts of a native language or famUiarity with history or social customs . No doubt the literary work speaks for itself but its voiee is apt to be thinner, less charged with polemical or ideological overtones when separated from biography and history. It becomes, in other words, assimUable even into those cultures to which it was originaUy alien and antagonistic. Neruda's politics can be dropped and even justified on the grounds (which are never theoreticaUy clarified) that his political poetry is not his best. It is smaU wonder that New Criticism which did such an effective job of extirpating the "heresies" of paraphrase and the "faUacies" of intention seems in retrospect to have fulfilled the ideological requirements of the affluent cold war years. For many students, the way out of the hothouse proved to be through the myth criticism of Northrop Frye whose Anatomy of Criticism offered an account of change without resorting to extrinsic criteria. Yet, in one sense, the reductionism and the categorization which derive from myth criticism have proved as damaging to Latin American literature as New Criticism . Thus, for instance, it is easy to see Juan Rulfo's novel, Pedro Páramo, as a quest novel which corresponds to the "low mimetic mode" but once the classification has been made, the critic has successfuUy assimilated the work into a recognizable system and glossed over its differences. For this novel represents not only a development within the literary form itself but reveals the dissolution of relationships when money mediates social structures. Northrop Frye himself has spoken eloquently of the uses of criticism and the need for a coordinating theory. Yet for anyone approaching literature from outside the European or North American context, the very "ideal order" (to use T.S. Eliot's word) which Western literature constitutes is also an ide- 66 MINNESOTA REVIEW ological order which conceals the real relations between the culture of the metropoUs and that of the dependent countries. In the end the very selection process by which a Borges may become part of that order while Lezama Lima's Paradiso is rejected as "not the master-piece that many people take it to be" but rather, "a weird and gleaming literary freak, a collapsed monument , a grand, failed landmark sunk in the sands of its author's colossal selfindulgence " reveals the ideological categories which reject "difference" as abnormality. ' And even Borges, despite his acceptable political views, is liable to be damned by association as when the English critic Colin Wilson writes that he is lucky to have been born "in a country with almost no literature —at least, none that has ever been heard of in Europe."2 This process of assimilation and rejection which lurks behind apparently authoritative evaluation is a particularly potent weapon within the structures of colonialism and imperialism. From the discovery of America onwards the difference between the colonizer and colonized was established as a qualitative one, so that the native inhabitants could not possibly inhabit the same universe. Caliban, the noble savage, Morgan's "barbarians" and savages are examples of taxonomies which concealed the ideological justification which has put native Americans into the work-camp and the reservation. It is significant that when the indigenous peoples became the objects of study, they came within the purview of anthropology rather than history, of folklore rather than Uterature. Further, the creation of a colon and mestizo population whose culture was radically different, simply added to the variety of these marginalized peoples whose very remoteness from the centers of power diminished them. In Black Skins White Masks, Franz Fanon described eloquently enough that hankering for assimilation which makes...