History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction

Deborah Cohn's book outlines a new geography in Inter-American literature, one which transcends linguistic boundaries between the English and Spanish languages to link the modern literature of the South of the United States with the writers of the Latin-American contemporary renaissance. The unwitting conquistador of this new territory, Cohn claims, was William Faulkner. To major Hispanic American writers he introduced a South that shared with Latin America a plantation system whose decline led to rural backwardness; a condition that brought about a sense of defeat and dispossession and a trail of political and cultural strife.

Cohn, who teaches Hispanic studies at McGill University, begins her study by discussing Faulkner's legacy to the new, post-WWII narrative in Latin America. But beyond Faulkner her aim is to "examine convergences, similar features and strategies that have developed as responses to analogous social and political circumstances" in writers from both language communities. In the middle-twentieth-century South, as in Hispanic America one generation later, literature has retained its importance in contributing to the construction of national identity. By comparing AngloAmerican and Spanish-American novelists, Cohn defines the features of Southern strategies of literature: the redefinition of history, the role and stylistic treatment of memory, the attitude to realism and magic realism. She also identifies a set of common subjects of interest-political and social unrest, the double consciousness of belonging in a dominant tradition as well as one's own culture, the foregrounding of the process of telling through dialogue. Like Faulkner, a modernist, but also a regionalist who reached universal status, the authors Cohn studies find ways to replace chronological order with alternative modes of representing time.

The core of Cohn's book is a careful and provocative comparison of three pairs of classic books: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Mario Vargas Llosa's Real Life of Alejandro Mayta; Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits; Katherine Ann Porter's Miranda stories and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. In Faulkner and Vargas Llosa, Cohn explores "a curious dialectic between the concealment of information and the imaginative creation of "facts" to compensate for a gap in verifiable knowledge." The narrative strategies of both authors in Absalom, Absalom!-- with its connection to the Caribbean South-and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta are thoughtfully analyzed, their effects compared and contrasted, with complementary comments on other works by these authors, to show how both novelists reterritorialize historiography and story-telling through the foregrounding of the act of enunciation. In both examples, Cohn explains, the frame narratives question the relevance of historical narrative, though not its exemplary value. The characters' calculations to come to terms with their land's social structures fail tragically, and they pass on to their heirs the evils they sought to uproot. Faulkner and Vargas Llosa get to the heart of the Southern predicament and contradictions, rooted in the Southern reliance on idealism.

Cohn considers Katherine Ann Porter's Miranda stories and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo as two examples of Southern feudal societies with common features, in which the veils of honor and paternalistic protection mask alienating economic interests. In Porter and Rulfo, as in Faulkner, Cohn's study is deeply sensitive to the stylistic rendering of a present haunted and sometimes overwhelmed by the past.

What Cohn defines as Southern strategies might be equally referred to as modernist strategies, so that the demonstration ends up encompassing too much to be completely convincing. She asks, what if the "Second Coming" foreseen by Yeats was the rise of these literatures far away from a center that could not hold YA the white patriarchal hegemonic center, that is. Ellison (but does Invisible Man really belong to Southern literature?) and Allende are examined as witnesses of the idea that the burden of Southern history has fallen more heavily on certain groups. Accordingly, both authors represent the double-consciousness of post-colonial communities and of gender or race groups that have to use the oppressor's language; moreover, both resort to magic realism. This section on Ellison and Allende touches upon well-trodden ground-the familiar parallelism between female and African American narrative modes, as designed to speak on behalf of muted voices, bringing other-ing realities out of invisibility and revealing what central, male, or white history had repressed.

This study is enriched by insights from the writings of such authors as Jose Marti, Carlos Fuentes,Alejo Carpentier, Nicolas Guillen, Toni Morrison, or Rosario Ferre.The list of works cited is indeed impressive, although given the amount of criticism on the six authors with which Cohn principally deals, gaps are inevitable. Faulkner scholars may wonder why a recent special issue of "The Faulkner Journal" devoted to "Faulkner and Latin America," edited by Beatriz Vegh, which addressed the same issues, was all but overlooked (it is only briefly saluted in an endnote), but it must have been published as this book was all but completed.