Gothic Imagination in Latin American Fiction and Film by Carmen A. Serrano (review)

Gothic Imagination in Latin American Fiction and Film is an impressive contribution to the emergence of a contemporary subfield of criticism—the Gothic in Latin American cultural production. Serrano's adeptly researched study follows in the wake of recent interventions that seek to locate, recover, or assess the Gothic in a region in which the aesthetic initially was disdained and considered inferior by most 'serious' critics and authors. Serrano's analysis, which focuses primarily on literature, upholds her claim that "Latin American texts did not necessarily follow European models but transported [the] Gothic imagination to articulate the social and political realities of their times" (2). The tension between cultural/artistic autonomy and a model highlights one of the text's primary axes and strengths by showing the pliability of the Gothic in the hands of a swath of authors writing at distinct historical moments and who would wield the Gothic for different ends.

Gothic Imagination starts by pointing to the hegemonic nature of the categories of magical realism and the fantastic and how those rubrics largely have obscured any critical appreciation of the Gothic. Serrano does well to situate Latin American manifestations of the Gothic within larger bodies of criticism on the Gothic and movements, such as the avant-garde. For Serrano, the Gothic in Latin America is different by being inextricably bound up with questions of colonialism and modernity, a general critical tendency which accommodates an approach in which the Gothic is either hybridized with indigenous folktales or becomes a mode that expresses fears and anxieties over political and cultural transformations.

The book consists of five chapters with each one centering upon a Gothic motif: vampires; the relationship between Gothic and cinema; live burials; "metaphoric vampires"; and the doppelgänger. Serrano charts out suggestive new territory in her analysis in Chapter 1 by locating the image of the bat-man in pre-colonial Latin America. The later appearance of the bat-man in nineteenth-century European Gothic literature evidences a transatlantic exchange in which writers, such as Bram Stoker, would use the figure in their own works. Serrano's subsequent turn to the distinct forms that the vampire would take in Latin American literature during the nineteenth and twentieth literature makes for a supple and expansive analysis that touches on topics, such as the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, how the Gothic embodied masculine anxieties about female advancement, and the permutations of the vampire in short stories by the likes of Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, Clemente Palma, Delmira Augustini, and Julio Cortázar. In Chapter 2, Serrano does well to mine the variegated relationships between the Gothic in Latin America and cinema in its various forms. The author alludes to the force of early cinema from elsewhere in Latin America and how authors-cum-film critics (i.e., Horacio Quiroga, Vicente Huidobro, María Luisa Bombal) would rework Gothic cinematic tropes in their particular short stories. Serrano's analysis of Huidobro's Cagliostro is outstanding, and her remarks on Quiroga's El espectro are incisive.

Chapters 3 and 4 foreground the relationship between the Gothic and Latin American sociopolitical contexts. Serrano examines how the trope of the live burial can allegorize an oppressive patriarchy as in Bombal's La amortajada, while also accounting for how a burial can be pleasant as in Alejo Carpentier's El reino de este mundo, or even erotic, as in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo. Serrano returns to the figure of the vampire in Chapter 4 and hones in on its metaphoric capacity to weigh in on contemporary dynamics, such as dictatorships, neoliberalism, and drug trafficking. More particularly, Serrano points out the Gothic characteristics in Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo el supremo, such as anachronisms, torture, and the undead. The author's turn to Carlos Fuentes's novella Vlad signals the palimpsests of past and present that converge within the frame of the Gothic and provide a...