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Alternate Voices in the Contemporary Latin American Narrative by David William Foster (review)
- Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature
- Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
- Volume 41, Number 1-2, 1987
- pp. 95-96
- 10.1353/rmr.1987.0054
- Review
- Additional Information
Book Reviews95 using five well known literary works featuring adolescent girls. She starts with twelveyear -old Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and proceeds chronologically according to the ages of the protagonists: the early adolescent girls in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Anne Frank in The Diary ofAnne Frank, Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and finally the late adolescence recalled by Anne Elliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion. Dalsimer cites numerous passages in these texts that indeed illustrate familiar aspects of female experience. She sees these aspects as developmental processes, psychological processes, stages. This is where the problem of her interpretation begins. As she herself notes in a different context, "description inevitably shades into prescription" (10). While she notes that the five works are from different periods and cultures, she basically ignores class, race, culture, historical circumstances, and individual reactions and pro-actions in her schema of the stages and passages of girlhood. Common patterns of development are not so easily applied to individuals. Even more disturbing is the psychoanalytic premise Dalsimer uses as her framework. She states as one purpose of the book "to make more accessible to those outside the profession what has been learned through psychoanalytic observation about development during adolescence" (2). I am appalled at this indication of "what has been learned." Freud gets twelve citations in the bibliography, far more than any other source and far more than he deserves, especially since the references to his theories are presented as unquestioned givens. Dalsimer makes no mention of feminist re-evaluations of Freudian psychology, instead cheerfully citing Freud as an authority whose pronouncements are validated by literary examples. Thus in Persuasion Lady Russell is, must be, a replacement for Anne Elliot's dead mother; Anne Frank's changes over the years are "the painful process of disengagement from the original objects" (75), revealing "the resurgence of the oedipus complex and the beginning of its resolution" (52). The schoolgirls' interest in Miss Jean Brodie's sex life reveals displacement, for "in early adolescence, the emergent sexuality of the girl makes that of her parents at once undeniable and unthinkable" (39), though surely this is not inevitable for girls of all classes, for example those with large families crowded together in a single room or two as is still common in parts of the world. Perhaps this book will be of more interest to psychoanalysts than to those who study literature, but I hope they too would be skeptical of the Freudian framework. It's not so much that Freud was sometimes wrong, but that even when he was right, he was not right enough. LOIS MARCHINO University of Texas at El Paso DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER. Alternate Voices in the Contemporary Latin American Narrative. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. 163 p. In The Wretched oftheEarth, Franz Fanon defines as "National culture" all efforts made by a nation in the realm of thinking. Concurring with Fanon's position, Foster's valuable text, Alternate Voices in the Contemporary Latin American Narrative, offers a revalorization of Latin American contemporary narrative that breaks with the obsolete dichotomy of "high literature" and "popular literature." 96Rocky Mountain Review The first chapter, "Latin American Documentary Narrative," is bound to become the classic study on the subject. With a clear sense of purpose and an excellent expositive method, Foster presents the textual strategies that guide the composition of five key Latin American works: Operación massacre, by Rodolfo Walsh; La noche de Tlatelolco, by Elena Poniatowska; Tejas verdes, diario de un campo de concentraci ón en Chile, by Hernán Valdes; Relato de un naufrago, by Gabriel García Márquez; and Biografía de un cimarrón, by Miguel Barnet. An appendix included in this chapter states that there is, unfortunately, no clear example of documentary narrative in Brazil. However, there is a text, according to Foster, that could be considered "semi-documentary" and is worthy of critical attention. He refers to Aracelli meu amor: urn anjo espera a justicia dos homens, by José Louzeiro. The second chapter, focusing on La razón de mi vida by Eva Perón, starts, as does the...