Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures by Worley, Paul (review)

Twenty-five years after Spivak’s watershed essay, libraries are now full of scholars’ attempts to identify the subaltern voices veiled by dominant discourses, and Paul Worley adds another title to the shelves. Despite joining this already abundant tradition, however, the book is not a redundancy. Focused on the specific historical setting of the Yucatán peninsula, it proffers a well-documented analysis with implications for future research. It makes an important contribution not only to the study of “Maya literature,” a field that though growing, still suffers from a dearth of critical scholarship, but also to indigenous studies in general.

From the outset, Telling and Being Told impels readers to reconceptualize the term “Maya literature.” Worley opens it to incorporate any creative expression, written or spoken in any language, that “originates from a Maya locus of enunciation” (16). He asserts that the accepted binary between orality and literacy has crippled previous studies because “it imposes Western literary norms on Maya culture and fails to recognize this culture’s existence in and for itself according to its own internal norms” (26). Therefore, he argues, critics should treat oral performances, often classified as “folklore,” alongside more apparently literary works. In the following chapters, he utilizes this approach to demonstrate how the storytelling framework entails a power negotiation and provides opportunities for subaltern voices to exercise discursive agency. The act of articulation creates a space in which ancient oral traditions are reinscribed to provide an episteme through which contemporary storytellers interpret their present reality.

Nevertheless, such displays of subaltern agency rarely reach audiences directly. In his second chapter, Worley explores the intricate interplay occasioned by the multi-layer authorial structure of ethnographic records. Though bogged down by his use of literary jargon, his meticulous deconstruction of the “multifaceted relationship between cultural broker and storyteller” provides the theoretical background for a productive juxtaposition of four versions of the common Yucatec tale “The Dwarf of Uxmal” (31). A close reading of versions published in the mid-nineteenth century by J.L.B. Stephens and Estanislao Carrillo highlights the mechanisms through which a dominant cultural broker manipulates written records in order to “blunt” the agency of the original storyteller and foment the “discourse of the Indio,” a rhetoric that appropriates indigenous culture at the same time that it distances indigenous realities (31). Even in the most extensively mediated texts, however, “the cultural brokers’ negation of this agency is never complete” (60). Worley’s subsequent comparison of Stephens’s and Carillo’s texts with two contemporary recordings exposes how storytellers take advantage of the anthropological encounter to “reframe the story on their own terms” (59).

At this point, Telling and Being Told turns to fiction. This shift initially leads to a less productive moment in which the author rehearses previous arguments about indigenismo and mestizaje. This critic’s subsequent return to his comparative methodology, however, enables valuable insights. Read against the “folktales” collected by ethnologists Manuel Andrade (later published by Hilaria Máas Collí) and Allan Burns, the indigenista novels and short stories he has analyzed display two disconcerting trends. Their repetition of a limited number of narratives points toward the creation of a “canon” of Maya folklore, which serves to bolster authorial claims to authenticity. Furthermore, the bias of this “canon” toward pre-Columbian events indicates a selective process aimed at silencing actual indigenous voices. In the face of such literary cooptation, Worley argues, oral tradition represents a promising point of intervention. Through spoken performances, the Maya can assert distinct, yet coeval, voices.

The final two chapters explore this process. At the heart of their arguments is the claim that stories within the indigenous context do not merely reveal other modes of thought, but are themselves interpretive acts of knowledge production. The penultimate chapter demonstrates this assertion through the comparison of two narratives, one a fable about the trickster rabbit Juan, the other a “true” account of a waiter...