Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature by Gustavo Pérez-Firmat (review)

138 The Latin Americanist Spring 2005 presents a brief discussion of how recent movies and plays have reclaimed the Pachuco image as a positive icon for the Mexican American community. Finally, the author reviews overlooked evidence from the scene of the murder of JosC Diaz and offers his own solution to the mystery of the Sleepy Lagoon. Roger I? Davis University o f Nebraska at Kearney Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature. By GustavoP6rez-Firmat.New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2003, p. 193,$26.95. This book is, as the reader probably already guessed from the title, about language and its ties to aspects of life that go beyond the merely linguistic and intertwine with questions of nationality, ethnicity, politics, hate, and love-particularly hate and love. As a matter of fact, the lovehate relationship with language is so important in this book that Gustavo PCrez Firmat puts aside the social and the political because, as he declares in his introduction, he is “interested in something more elusive, in the emotional bonds or ‘tongue ties’ of selected Hispanic writers” (p. 4). Elusive indeed is a word that can also be used to describe this book because even though it is written with style, for moments it resembles an exercise on rhetoric more than a work of academic rigor-which may have very well been the intention of the author. However, this gives the impression of a calculated artificiality that contradicts the book’s original premise of talking about the emotional bonds with language. Such artificiality is reinforced by the constant use of “smart” phrases, so persistent that they become distracting: e.g. “You say ‘tomato’ and I say tu mudre” (p. 2); “When we go for the jocular, we go for the jugular” (p. 6);“Ocio was their negocio” (p. 54); “Kicked in the ingledinglks” (p. 99); “A lover of Latin, if not a Latin Lover” (p. 101). Fortunately when talking about specific writers in the seven chapters that, along with an introduction and an epilogue, constitute this book, PCrez Firmat, for the most part, focuses on the writers’ struggle with language-or more precisely with bilingualism . This is important because if the selection of Hispanic authors (another elusive category) seems at first difficult tojustify, it really makes sense once we realize that what unifies them is how PCrez Firmat reads their work. Yet for some it might still be a Book Reviews 139 problem to gather in the same book Spanish poets like Pedro Salinas or Luis Cernuda, philosophers like George Santayana, Latin American novelists like Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Maria Luisa Bombal, as well as Latino writers like Richard Rodriguez or Sandra Cisneros. However when we consider that the focus of this book is not the authors’ works but their relationship with language, particularly their struggle with English and Spanish, the selection seems more coherent. Among the authors selected, Santayana is perhaps the best example of this struggle since he is the one that most painfully felt the divide of who he was and who he wanted to be, linguistically speaking. “Just as he wanted to forget himself, he wanted to forget his language” (p. 43), according to P&rezFirmt. Very different is the case of the Spanish poets Pedro Salinas and Luis Cernuda. Cernuda, for example, always felt at home in his language to the point that he could not remain in the United States and had to move to MCxico in search of linguistic air, we are reminded very poignantly: there, in Mexico, the poet infuses his poetry with air; finds “pulmonary freedom” (p. 75). Salinas, on the contrary, had a less problematic relationship with the Anglophone world, even though he maintained a more ambivalent opinion of English and disliked American vernacular, which he associated with advertisement , business, and what he saw as empty phrases like “the bigger, the better” or “time is money.” Still, for him “Literary English held no terrors” (p. 53). The case is a little different when we deal with narrators who try to move from one language to another, particularly Cuban writers Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Calvert Casey and Chilean novelist Maria Luisa Bombal. Casey represents the split writer; a writer...