America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea (review)

In an era of multitasking and short attention spans, Antonio Barrenechea's critical analysis of the encyclopedic novel in the Americas is an outstanding model of the benefits of deeply studying long books. In America Unbound, Barrenechea examines four works of fiction that he calls "summa Americana," or great American novels of continental proportions (xi): Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Mexican Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra (1975), French Canadian Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues (1984), and Native American Leslie Maron Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). Several thematic and formal threads tie these works together: each novel explores the era before the American continent was separated by the imperial languages of Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese and divided into nations; each novel also features contemporary protagonists who critique the results of those divisions. Moreover, the works all have a "masterful performance inscribed within them" that self-consciously takes the entire American continent as its muse (10). The aim of Barrenechea's elegant and jargon-free book is to demonstrate how reading encyclopedic novels from different traditions reveals their shared American roots.

Barrenechea takes as his theoretical point of departure the work of Herbert Eugene Bolton, an American historian whose 1932 "The Epic of Greater America" advocated for a continental rather than a national approach to American history. Bolton was undoubtedly a pioneer who wrote against the dominant paradigm of approaching US history without considering its inter-American aspects. Yet Bolton's ideas also had some fatal flaws: the Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman criticized him for practicing intellectual hegemony, and Barrenechea points out that Bolton was deeply Eurocentric and rarely considered the Amerindian or African experiences in the Americas. Barrenechea proposes to update Bolton's approach and enters into dialogue with more recent scholars who have spearheaded comparative American literary studies beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, including Vera Kutzinski, Earl Fitz, Lois Parkinson Zamora, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat. What makes Barrenechea's work new is his attention to the encyclopedic American novel, whose roots can be traced to colonial writings about the New World that attempted to enumerate and contain the marvelous abundance of the continent. His selected authors participate in this drive to create a compendium of the interrelated histories of peoples of the Americas, yet they do so in a critical postmodern fashion, demonstrating a "skepticism of totalizing projects" (32).

The first work under consideration is Moby-Dick, a staple of the US literary canon that Barrenechea places in a broad continental setting. The rewards of this approach are immediately evident in his contextualization of the doubloon, a unit of Ecuadorian currency that circulated throughout the Americas in the nineteenth century. Melville, who could read Spanish and Portuguese, critiques US imperial ambitions by comparing the gold rush in California and its concomitant philosophy of manifest destiny to the Spanish legend of El Dorado. Ultimately, Barrenechea goes beyond canonical readings of Moby-Dick to show that the tale of the great white whale flourishes "as an encyclopedic novel that recalls, and disrupts, imperial hemispheric legacies" (24). In Boltonian fashion, this first chapter reveals the deep connections between the United States and the Spanish Empire in the New World.

In erudite discussions of the three twentieth-century novels, which make up the bulk of his study, Barrenechea delves deeply into the ways in which the authors depict the violent mestizaje that lies at the root of continental American history. They do so by inserting colonial texts directly into their encyclopedic novels. For example, the author shows how Fuentes mingles the content and form of imperial documents by Columbus and Cortés with contemporary characters in Terra Nostra to "deconstruct the temporal and spatial coordinates of established histories, languages, and nations" (60). While Fuentes is a canonical Spanish American writer, the other two authors discussed in Barrenechea's study occupy the traditionally marginalized intellectual spaces of Québécois and Native American literatures. In the Francophone Poulin's...