Foundational Fiction and Representations of Jewish Identity in Jorge Isaacs' María

Doris Sommer's landmark study of Latin American literature, Foundational Fictions, claims Jorge Isaacs' novel María as a foundational fiction because of its tremendous popularity and its allegorization of the divisions plaguing nineteenth-century Colombia. Sommer's approach to nineteenth-century Latin American literature has been widely received and generally well accepted. A recent study, "Judaísmo y desarraigo en María de Jorge Isaacs" by Gustavo Faverón Patriau, calls Sommer's interpretation into question by proposing that Isaacs's novel does not propose unification through mestizaje but rather is a novel of exile and Diaspora (341). Like his Jewish forefathers, Efraín, the protagonist, continues the search for a homeland at the conclusion of the novel. Given that almost twenty years have passed since the publication of Foundational Fictions, perhaps we should be inspired by Faverón Patriau's example to reexamine Sommer's analyses in order to determine which aspects of her methodology are still useful for us and where further work may be called for. In this article, I propose to evaluate Faverón Patriau's critique of Sommer's approach to the nation-building novels of the nineteenth-century and analysis of María in light of recent developments in a growing but still very much underrepresented area, Latin American Jewish Studies. Rather than discount Sommer's enormous contribution to the study of nineteenth-century Latin American literature as over determined, we can take this opportunity to further examine the concepts of foundational fiction and mestizaje with respect to representations of Jewishness in Latin American literature. I will demonstrate that Efraín's nostalgic look at the past offers a critique of the high cost of assimilation to those groups that do not fit in with the nineteenth-century elite's vision of a homogeneous, whitened national identity.

I would like to begin by briefly reviewing Doris Sommer's approach to the Latin American literary works that she calls "foundational fictions." Sommer's impact on the study of novels from the nineteenth century has been enormous; in my opinion, this is because her approach is effective and useful. A re-examination of her work can nonetheless benefit literary criticism and our understanding of nineteenth-century literature. One overarching theory unites the chapters of Sommer's book: her concern, she states, is "to locate an erotics of politics, to show how a variety of novel national ideals are all ostensibly grounded in 'natural' heterosexual love and in the marriages that provided a figure for apparently nonviolent consolidation during internecine conflicts at midcentury. Romantic passion, on my reading, gave a rhetoric for the hegemonic projects in Gramsci's sense of conquering the antagonist through mutual interest, or 'love,' rather than through coercion" (Sommer 6). Sommer arrives at her interpretation by means of her unique definition of allegory. As Sommer herself claims, people were already reading these novels as allegories: "By assuming a certain kind of translatability between romantic and republican desires, writers and readers of Latin America's canon of national novels have in fact been assuming what amounts to an allegorical relationship between personal and political narratives" (41). Rather than rely on the traditional definition of allegory as an extended metaphor or "a narrative with two parallel levels of signification" (42), Sommer defines allegory as "a narrative structure in which one line is a trace of the other, in which each helps to write the other" (42). Developing this concept even further, Sommer describes "the allegory in Latin American national novels as an interlocking, not parallel, relationship between erotics and politics" (43). As she reads, Sommer "shuttle[s] back and forth from reading romantic intrigues to considering political designs" (41). Her understanding of the love story informs her interpretation of the political commentary and vice versa.

A curious aspect of Sommer's approach that must be dealt with is the fact that many of the love stories that she analyzes as political allegories proposing national unification and consolidation are in fact failed unions. In Mármol's Amalia, the lovers, Eduardo and Amalia, are killed near the...