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Abstract
Many read The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, by José María Arguedas, as a tragic expression of the breaking-point of Andean myth. Others, while recognizing a tragic dimension to the novel, also see a joyous one that they associate with the hope that myth and modernity could come together to form a harmonious new society. This article argues for a reading of the novel as joyful as well as tragic, taking distance from most understandings of the novel's ‘hopeful’ dimension in arguing that both joy and suffering, together, are expressions of the novel's profoundly modern intervention in and opening up of history. I examine the passage in which the fox-human Diego joyously ‘dances the machines’ in don Ángel's factory in order to discuss how the modernity of the novel is related to this affect where joy and suffering are one, showing that it is at the level of joy-suffering that the novel is able to open up a space of indistinctness that has the potential to generate a radically new community no longer based upon the logic of identity and difference.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful for William Rowe's inspiring comments and questions, which greatly enriched my research.
Notes
1 Some of the ideas of the present article were shared at the conference ‘Arguedas: la dinámica de los encuentros culturales’ held at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú from the 20th to the 24th of June 2011, and will appear in the conference proceedings (Hibbett Citation2012, forthcoming). The present article is a development of an initial exploration of the notion of joy in The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below which will be published by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (Lima) in an edited volume of work by young researchers on Arguedas (details of the publication have not yet been advised).
2 From here on The Foxes.
3 In Peru, notions of social improvement, or progress, are racially coded. For an enlightening ethnographical discussion of this, see De la Cadena Citation2001.
4 Achichar, to become chicha, that is, to interpret and develop an element of Occidental culture from an Andean (migrant) perspective.
5 This translation, and all others, are my own.
6 Many critics identify Diego with one of the foxes of the title, and therefore as representing a mythic fixed identity taken from the Huarochirí manuscript. However, as Beasley-Murray has discussed (2008: 115), there is no agreement as to which fox he is: some see him as the fox from down below (for example, Rouillón (Citation1990: 348) and Lienhard (Citation1981: 115)); others, as the fox from up above (for instance, Rowe (Citation2000: 285) and Lienhard in a different piece (1990: 328)). The discrepancy amongst critics should be taken as a sign that to simplistically equate him to either fox – to ‘Andean identity’ – is reductive; rather, in being man and fox, from above and from below, even living being and machine, he ‘escapes… categorizations’ (Beasley-Murray Citation2008: 115); that is, he subverts fixed mythic identity.
7 The image of transparency is key, and comes up several times in the novel. See pages 80, 97, 104 and 176 for examples, and Rowe (Citation1990: 338) for an analysis of the image of transparency.
8 Rowe uses the expression ‘passage through death’ to signify a kind of radical change in which something (here, the Andean) experiences the death of its symbolic identity. Such a death implies not complete annihilation, but an obliteration of the symbolic network which gave it said identity, and thus has the effect of re-articulating the entire symbolic field. The notion of symbolic death as opposed to biological death is Lacanian; see Žižek Citation1989: 131–6, and Citation1999: 262.