Corporality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature by Bruce Dean Willis (review)

The Latin Americanist, Septemeber 2013 CORPORALITY IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE. By Bruce Dean Willis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 234 pp. ISBN 978-1137 -26879-2 In addition to the quality and depth of the various segments that analyze specific works, Bruce Dean Willis’s Corporality in Early TwentiethCentury Latin American Literature has two major framing virtues. In the first place, it deals with early twentieth-century Latin American literature. Critics have tend to slight narratives from the first half of the twentieth century. The so-called boom of the nueva narrativa really left so many of us intently focused on fiction writing of the last half of the century, and the emergence of a major market in English translations enhanced the available audience for writing about the period after 1960 (Borges was, of course, the exception). Indeed, there is almost the implied assertion in the imbalance of the critical record that we can now mostly skip over the early twentieth century fiction, as we might well do so, with few exceptions , the fictional writing of the nineteenth century. Luis González Echevarrı́a’s brilliant and, at least for me, quite persuasive proposals in Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (1990) that we would do well to substitute texts like Sarmiento’s Facundo or Cunha’s Os sertões for the highly derivative narrative fiction of the period the curriculum usually includes may not have been globally adopted, but González Echevarrı́a’s lengthy demonstration of the imitative quality of Latin American fiction prior to the nueva narrativa hardly makes one want to go back and read the earlier texts, much less teach them or attempt to writing original criticism on them. Willis’s book is a welcome fresh perspective on this material. The second important framing of Corporality consisits of the effective attempt to bring together both Spanish American and Brazilian writing in a way that legitimates the use of Latin American in the title; Latin American is often used as a synonym for Spanish American in such a way that Brazil is excluded, as those its history and culture had nothing to do with Latin America. Of course, there are major discontinuities between the cultural production of the two countries if, beyond language differences, one focuses on Spanish American modernismo, which has no viable equivalent in Brazil, or the Semana de Arte Moderna (São Paulo, 1922), which is a watershed for cultural modernity in Brazil, with no real equivalent event of such magnitude in Spanish America, or the Spanish America nueva narrativa , which has no conveniently identifiable equivalent in Brazil (and much less the so-called Boom). But if one considers cultural productions in ways that do no require the matching up of movements or schools, inaugural events or major literary figures (who is the Spanish American Machado; who is the Brazilian Borges?), other forms of continuity emerge. After all, when one speaks of Spanish American modernismo, one is not speaking of a uniformly Pan American movement, and the same is true of the nueva 114 Book Reviews narrativa: Puerto Rico may feel as excluded from such alignments as Brazil has been. Since Willis’s approach is to examine discrete works is separate units (there are thirteen of them), the problem of correlating them in comparative ways is not an issue. Indeed, such an approach means that there is not much in the way of global theorizing about the body, and specific bodily issues arise from the identification of a work first and the subsequent analytical treatment of a text and the bodily issues arriving from that text. There is a basic organizing group of these individual studies: “Body, Language , and the Limits of Ontology”; “Language Immersion: Return to the Original Tongue”; “The Body Politic: Immediate Breakdown, Renewed Deferral”; and “Conclusion: “Anthropophagy, Legacy of a Body Aesthetics .” These categories are sufficiently vaguely cast, from a conceptual point of view, to permit considerable variety within then as regards to the issues associated with the individual texts. Clearly, this is a very different organization than one that would have been driven by some over-arching theorizations about the body, especially with reference to...