Sarduy’s Colibrí and the search for discursive foundations in the regional novel

ABSTRACT

This essay will examine Sarduy’s novel Colibrí as an attempt at reinterpreting classics of the Latin American regional novel such as José Eustasio Rivera’s La Vorágine and Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara. Sarduy radically reexamines those earlier novels and finds that they already contain generic, racial, and sexual tensions that link them more directly to Boom narrative. He recognizes that these archetypes of the autochthonous modality already contain themes similar to those that will be foregrounded later in contemporary Latin American literature and, therefore, vindicates the regional novel’s significance despite its traditional role as the Boom’s imperfect, abandoned ancestor within the Latin American canon. Sarduy uncovers the mediated discourses of which the novela de la tierra is composed by exploding its superficial binaries, its supposed logic of purity, and revealing a veiled mestizaje.

RESUMEN

Este ensayo analiza la novela Colibrí de Severo Sarduy como un intento por reinterpretar los clásicos de la novela de la tierra (novela regional), como La Vorágine de José Eustasio Rivera y Doña Bárbara de Rómulo Gallegos. Sarduy reconoce que estos arquetipos de la modalidad autóctona ya contenían temas que eran semejantes a los que se verán luego en la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea y, por consiguiente, reivindica el valor de la novela regional a pesar de su papel tradicional como el ancestro imperfecto del Boom en el canon literario latinoamericano. Sarduy destapa los discursos mediados de los que está compuesta la novela de la tierra al explotar sus binarios superficiales, su lógica de supuesta pureza, revelando un mestizaje velado.

KEYWORDS:

• Sarduy
• Colibrí
• regional novel
• novela de la tierra
• Rómulo Gallegos
• José Eustasio Rivera

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. We use the terms regional novel, autochthonous novel, telluric novel, modalidad autóctona, jungle novel, novela de la selva, and novela de la tierra interchangeably in this essay.

2. See Philip Swanson’s The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture after the Boom (1995) for a broad discussion of the “new novel” that arose in the 1940s (especially the writing of the Boom and “postboom”). Swanson locates the principal division among scholars of Latin American narrative between followers of Donald Shaw and those of Gerald Martin.

3. El Dorado refers to the mythical chieftain as well as the legendary city of gold, the search for which motivated a disastrous Spanish expedition in the sixteenth century. It also refers to the flaxen youth who performs on stage.

4. Her name is an obvious parodical correction of the hypercorrection already present in Spanish novelist Clarín’s La Regenta (2006 [1884]) as well. Sarduy, significantly, points to a Spanish classic. While Clarín’s novel of nineteenth-century realism is indeed traditionally far afield from either the telluric novel or the colonization of the Americas, this is yet another echo of a Peninsular referent (along with those of the dictator novel – Tirano Banderas is a well-known Spanish dictator novel – and the Spanish origins of Latin America, as we will see later).

5. Roberto Echevarren asserts: “Colibrí es una novela de dictadura […] comparable a Tirano Banderas, al Patriarca del Otoño [sic], a Yo el supremo” (Echevarren 1992, 132).

6. Although the tradition of the dictator novel stretches as far back as the nineteenth century – as a reflection of the real caudillo figures that filled the power vacuums created by independence from Spain (in Sarmiento’s Facundo Quiroga figure (1989 [1845]), for example) – and although Gónzalez Echevarría even goes as far as to assert that the dictator novel is “the most clearly indigenous thematic tradition in Latin American literature” and traces the origins of this subgenre to “as far back as Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s and Francisco López de Gómara’s accounts of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico” (González Echevarría 1985, 65), the dictator novel on the whole is associated with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s. For literary critic Gerald Martin, this subgenre marks the end of the Boom and even “the end of an entire era in Latin American history” (Martin 1989, 237). According to Sharon Keefe Ugalde, the dictator novel became popular again in the 1970s, towards the end of the Boom, when, according to Raymond L. Williams (2003), enough Latin American authors had published novels dealing with military governments that “dictator novel” became a generally accepted term.

7. David W. Bird uses the notion of “plasticity” as the central theme of his essay “Naming, Dominations and Plasticity in Sarduy’s Colibrí” to mean “the bending or ignoring of ‘rules,’ for some characters within the context of an enabling space, La Casona, while for other characters […] there is a struggle to fragment figuratively and literally that space and to reinscribe it to their liking” (Bird 2006, 1–2). Bird does not equate plasticity with discursive mestizaje.

8. Sarduy’s depiction of Colibrí here is similar to how Rubén Gallo describes Sarduy’s view of Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors: “it is a painting that frustrates the viewer’s desire for unity with its multiplicity of perspectives and meanings” (Gallo 2007, 51).

9. Roberto González Echevarría (1990) in particular has found the archive to be the source of origins to which Boom novels point.

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Notes on contributors

Carlos Riobó

Carlos Riobó is associate professor of Latin American literature and cultures at both the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.