America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies [1 ed.] 9780826357595, 9780826357588

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colonial values in their narratives. His close attention to written documents, visual representations, and oral traditions in these encyclopedic novels sheds light on their comparative cultural relations and the New World from pole to pole. This study amplifies the scope of “America” across cultures and languages, time and tradition.

Antonio Barrenechea holds a PhD in comparative literature from Yale and is an associate professor in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication at the University of Mary Washington. His research focuses on the literatures and cultures of the Americas. He lives in Washington, DC.

Literary Criticism

“

America Unbound is a fresh contribution to literary studies in a hemis­pheric American frame. A passionate and effective plea to recover the truly comparative spirit of hemispheric studies at its founding moment in the ’80s and ’90s, America Unbound practices what it preaches in nuanced comparative readings of New World encyclopedic fiction by North American authors from three nations and fiction in three languages.” —Monika Kaup, author of Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film

“

In America Unbound Antonio Barrenechea offers an insightful, rich, and nuanced interpretation of three modern ‘encyclopedic’ novels written originally in Spanish, French, and English in a hemispheric American context. This book will be a milestone in a growing body of comparative inter-American and hemispheric American scholarship.” —Ralph Bauer, author of The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity

“

America Unbound makes a strong case for a comparativist approach to hemispheric American literary studies. Through insightful chapters framed around four important novels, this study’s generous attention to interpretative, methodological, and pedagogical issues makes it a valuable resource for scholars from a range of disciplines who are teaching or conducting research on inter-American topics.”

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University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com | 800-249-7737

9 780826 357588

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Barrenechea

—Claire F. Fox, author of Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War

America Unbound

continued from front flap

Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies

America Unbound Antonio Barrenechea

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his original contribution to hemispheric American literary studies comprises readings of three important novels from Mexico, Canada, and the United States: Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Quebecois writer Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. The author argues for the importance of a hemispheric perspective and engages these encyclopedic novels as a means of examining the interconnectedness of the Americas. Beginning with a new reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Barrenechea examines the ways in which Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko incorporate early American print and visual archives, as well as oral traditions, into their own hemispheric fields of vision. Their novels imagine American history prior to the development of nationstates and thus dislodge assumptions about the uniqueness of nations and cultures in favor of a transcultural, decentralized “New World.” Fuentes’s Terra Nostra is an encyclopedic vision of Hispanic America, Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues includes all Franco-Americans, and Silko’s Almanac of the Dead resuscitates a telluric map of indigenous American communities. The historicism of these works is impelled by their authors’ conviction that American histories and cultures exist in complex and fluid relation to a hemispheric whole. The encyclopedic novel has particular generic characteristics that serve these writers as a vehicle for the reincorporation of hemispheric histories. Barrenechea shows how this narrative genre allows them to reflect the interconnected world of today, as well as to dramatize indigenous and continued on back flap

America Unbound

America Unbound Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies

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A n ton io Ba r r en ech e a

University of New Mexico Press | Albuquerque

© 2016 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2016 Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16     1 2 3 4 5 6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barrenechea, Antonio author. Title: America unbound : encyclopedic literature and hemispheric studies / Antonio Barrenechea. Description: Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016006707 (print) | LCCN 2016029120 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826357588 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780826357595 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: America—In literature. | American fiction—History and criticism. | Mexican fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | French-Canadian fiction— 20th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN56.3.A45 B38 2016 (print) | LCC PN56.3.A45 (ebook) | DDC 809.3/997—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016006707 Cover illustration adapted from art by Timothy Krause, licensed under cc by 2.0. Map courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Mary Washington Designed by Lila Sanchez Composed in Minion Pro 10.25/13.5

For Christina, soul mate and fellow traveler And for Little Rickey, a special part of our journey

Contents

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Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 The Great(er) American Paradigm: Moby-Dick and the Summa Americana 1

Chapter 2 From Terra Incognita to Terra Nostra: Carlos Fuentes’s Reinvention of America 38

Chapter 3 Jacques Poulin’s Archival Pathways: Volkswagen Blues as Discovery Chronicle 72

Chapter 4 Leslie Marmon Silko’s Council Book: Hemispheric Forces in Almanac of the Dead 104

Chapter 5 Greater America in the Classroom: Comparative Literature, Theory, and Praxis 139

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contents Notes 175 Bibliography 193 Index 217

Preface and Acknowledgments

Big novels have always fascinated me. Some of my best memories as a student at Fordham University, and then at Yale University, are of plunging into—and often getting lost inside—the prodigious books of Miguel de Cervantes, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, and several other “encyclopedic” authors. These volumes seemed to contain entire worlds, histories, cultures, and epistemologies; their range and erudition rewarded a comparative literature student’s immersion in the humanities. As the book before you took shape, my interest in encyclopedic literature of the Americas was considered unorthodox at Yale. Despite having made strides toward a world literature curriculum by the turn of the century, Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature continued to privilege the European traditions that had defined comparatism since René Wellek founded the program in 1946. The European slant persisted through the 1950s rise of New Criticism, the 1960s arrival of structuralism, and the 1970s shift to poststructuralism and deconstruction. The challenge to canonicity during the 1980s, as well as that from the postcolonial non-West during the 1990s, posed another test. For these reasons, I did not suspect at the time that my Americas-centered work at Yale was part of a larger wave of interest that was then emerging during the first decade of the new millennium. In fact, my project was. As indicated by the spike in transamerican- and hemispheric-themed publications right around this period, the Americas were fast becoming a hot topic, albeit not so much in comparative literature as in English and American studies. This development would culminate in Hemispheric American Studies, a 2008 critical anthology edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine that sought to define the field, and facilitate work within it. A number of supporting organizations and journals joined the effort. For instance, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University has been staging scholarly ix

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and artistic encuentros (encounters) in different New World locations since its establishment in 1998. The International American Studies Association (IASA) was founded in 2000 as a complement to the US-focused American Studies Association (ASA). The International Association of Inter-American Studies / Asociación Internacional de Estudios Interamericanos (IAS), a sister organization to the IASA, was established in 2009 to address NorthSouth interrelations. While the flagship Americanist journals American Literature and American Literary History both devoted special issues to hemispheric topics, Comparative American Studies: An International Journal has provided the liveliest venue for inter-Americanists to debate the scope of the field since 2003, as have the online journals Review of International American Studies (RIAS) and Forum for Inter-American Research (FIAR). Book series by University of Virginia Press (New World Studies), Oxford University Press (Imagining the Americas), and Bilingual Review Press (Inter-American Studies / Estudios Interamericanos) furnished an additional platform. Digital initiatives, most notably the Our Americas Archive Partnership between Rice University, the University of Maryland, and the Instituto Mora in Mexico City, offered open access to researchers looking for primary texts, historical documents, and pedagogical materials. The recent hemispheric turn also brought with it new academic positions in the “literature of the Americas.” I was fortunate to gain employment in this field during and after my graduate training. First, I worked as an instructor at Barnard College, where I taught the survey The Americas (I–II), part of a first-year seminar track in Reinventing Literary History, a program directed by Margaret Vandenburg and designed as an alternative to the literature-humanities core curriculum at Columbia University. I now teach at the University of Mary Washington, where I was hired in 2005 as a “Literature of the Americas” specialist in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication. In this position, I have developed an undergraduate curriculum that informs the scholarly and pedagogical aims of this book. Given the developing state of the inter-American field, I treat these as inseparable. In the context of a liberal arts institute, I have returned time and again to fundamental questions about the actual and conceptual terrain of America and American literature within the classroom. These concerns run throughout America Unbound. My book is indebted to hemispheric American studies scholarship from the early twenty-first century. At the same time, I seek to contribute beyond the critiques of US borderlands and/or hemispheric relations that have

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mostly defined its academic purview. My aim is to reposition America as a global, comparative, and plurilingual entity. In this book, I focus less on US ethnic, border, race, gender, and cultural studies subfields, and more on major literary traditions of the Western Hemisphere. This amplification of “America” was first proposed by the UC Berkeley historian Herbert E. Bolton in his 1932 speech “The Epic of Greater America.” Bolton is a guiding figure for America Unbound, as are the first wave of scholars who pioneered the study of comparative American literature in the 1980s and 1990s. For these scholars, American literature is a de facto comparative literature that need not begin nor end with the United States as its main unit of analysis. In this regard, America Unbound is a recuperation of a North-South understanding of America, the continuation of a scholarly enterprise, and an effort to bring what is currently a US-led hemispherism into a productive and friendly conversation with comparative literature. America Unbound is concerned with the contemporary encyclopedic novel as it narrates a return to a time before the partitioning of America into Hispanophone, Lusophone, Francophone, and Anglophone nation-states. This restoration of an early America, and of a single quarta orbis pars (fourth part of the globe) dislodges assumptions about the centrality and independence of nations, regions, and cultures; it favors instead a decentralized, interdependent, and international America as first depicted in novelized form in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). The concern for origins (especially as reflected in colonial documents of European-Amerindian encounters) is common to fiction by Carlos Fuentes, Jacques Poulin, and Leslie Marmon Silko in relation to a “Great American Novel” tradition that characterizes one strand of the encyclopedic genre. Shared foundations make the novels less nation-bound, in recognition of what Bolton argued all along: that the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English can be seen as branches of a Western Hemispheric tree. We might identify each literary work as a “summa Americana.” Fuentes is an encyclopedic novelist not only of Mexico, but of Hispanic America; Poulin creates a compendium of all Franco-Americans; Silko recovers a telluric map of pan-indigenous communities. Although this study does not treat novels from South America, British Canada, and the Caribbean, examples exist there as well. Each of these self-professed literary monuments is guided by a shared sense that American parts live in complex relation to a hemispheric whole. Given their mature historicism, the ways in which transgressive imaginations find expression at a high point in these authors’ careers, and the sense of

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masterful performance within the works themselves, I characterize them as hemispheric “masterworks.” The encyclopedic genre is a vehicle for the reincorporation of hemispheric histories that reflect the interconnected world of today. They also reflect an age-old process of indigenous and colonial record keeping contained in what González Echevarría calls, in exclusive relation to Latin American literary origins, the “Archive.” Yet, these fictions affirm the existence of a repository of documents that is inter-American and interartistic. This print and visual archive both records and impels American history, and drives the hemispheric sensibility of the authors whom I treat in this study. As even the most cursory glance at the early American holdings at the John Carter Brown Library reveals, colonial foundations have always been interrelational, multinational, multilingual, and multimedia. In short, they are New World–wide in scope. As a comparatist, I admit to feeling a degree of exhilaration at the thought of exploring American literature with its full hemispheric dimensions in mind, and in ways mostly untried by scholars with backgrounds in national literatures. Yet the vastness of the New World archive strikes me with an equal measure of anxiety that comparists can relate to (and that most of us trace back to Wellek’s “The Crisis of Comparative Literature,” a 1963 essay that is widely regarded as the manifesto of the “American School” of comparative literature). As continues to be the case today, comparative literature provides scholars with a way of seeing differently, and also at times a way of not seeing deeply enough (let us hope that the former outweighs the latter in this book). Thus, nourished by an equal dose of boldness and anxiety, my hope is that America Unbound contributes to the unfolding scholarship of inter-Americanists, but equally to that of specialists within Latin American, Canadian, and US literary studies, including Mexican, Quebecois, Native American, border, and ethnic studies, and particularly within the context of transnationalism, indigeneity, and identity. In order to produce meaningful scholarship about those cultures, and about New World literature as a whole, I have made every effort to learn these subfields from the ground up, and to engage both pertinent hemispheric studies criticism and scholarship within individual areas. Most of all, I am interested in placing New World cultural crossings and conflicts in historical perspective within a grand scale. My interest in large and small analytical frameworks for American studies guides my macroscopic and philological approach within chapters. It also brings together my two arguments regarding the American

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in general and the encyclopedic in particular. While these encyclopedic novels lend themselves to the hemispheric repositioning of America, they incarnate local histories and languages to which I remain attuned. I provide ample historical and cultural contexts within each chapter in order to guide the reader through what may be unfamiliar terrain. I trust that this makes for more self-contained and teachable chapters, and that these lead effectively into my discussion of an Americas pedagogy with sample course syllabi at the conclusion of the book. America Unbound is the fulfillment of a most rewarding collaboration. Foremost among those who continue to inspire me is Lois Parkinson Zamora, whose intelligence and generosity is unparalleled. She, along with Earl E. Fitz, a founder of inter-American literary studies, has read parts of the manuscript in its entirety and offered the type of honest criticism and advice that attests to a deep intellectual kinship. Vera Kutzinski was my guiding light as this project first got underway, while Roberto González Echevarría provided me with the example of his own formidable work in print and in the classroom. Rolena Adorno offered sage words of advice and instilled in a young scholar a desire to excise theoretical jargon from his writing and start developing the elegant style of which she is a master. Over the years, I have had illuminating conversations with brilliant inter-Americanist scholars whose work I strive to emulate, among them Ralph Bauer, Anna Brickhouse, Silvia Spitta, George Handley, Monika Kaup, Christopher Winks, Claire Fox, and Linn Cary Mehta (with whom I organized and chaired several ACLA and IASA conference panels that shaped this project). I benefited greatly from the astute chapter readings provided by Maarten Van Delden, Scott Manning Stevens, and Claudia Sadowski-Smith. I am also grateful to individuals and organizations that extended me an opportunity to develop and rehearse some of my ideas in their early incarnations. In 2005, I participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute seminar “British and Indigenous Cultural Encounters in Native North America: 1580–1785,” directed by Scott Manning Stevens at the John Carter Brown Library. I also took part in the NEH Seminar “Toward a Hemispheric American Literature,” codirected by Rachel Adams and Caroline Levander in 2007 at Columbia University, and “The Globalization of American Literary Studies,” directed by Peter Mallios in 2008 at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. At the University of Mary Washington, I received a Jepson Fellowship, two faculty development grants, and subvention funds in support of this project.

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I am beholden to Carla Bailey, head of Interlibrary Loans at UMW, for whom no book is too difficult to secure in just a few days. Her attention over the years has helped my research in more ways than she knows. I wish to acknowledge Carolyn Parsons and Suzanne Chase for their help accessing maps from the Rare Books collection of Simpson Library. A special thanks goes to Elise McHugh, senior acquisitions editor at the University of New Mexico Press, for believing in this project and helping me get it in print in a timely fashion. Several of the ideas in this book were tested as articles in Comparative American Studies, Comparative Literature, and Revista Iberoamericana; in the volume America’s Worlds and the World’s Americas (edited by Chanady, Handley, and Imbert); and in the 2014–2015 American Comparative Literature Association Report on the State of the Discipline of Comparative Literature (edited by Eric Hayot and Barbara Harlow). Finally, I wish to thank my students. In ways that I did not anticipate, the classroom has been a laboratory for ideas, and my students have taught me the full scope of what it means to profess literature. All translations from Spanish, French, Latin, and Portuguese in America Unbound are my own and were produced in consultation with published translations whenever available.

Ch a p t er 1

The Great(er) American Paradigm Moby-Dick and the Summa Americana

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In “The Epic of Greater America,” his 1932 presidential address

to the American Historical Association, Herbert Eugene Bolton, a historian from UC Berkeley, proposed that scholars approach American history not as a national narrative, but as a story of hemispheric proportions. Bolton’s speech was a response to The Epic of America, a best-selling historical monograph published by James Truslow Adams in 1931. Adams was himself a leading historian of the period and had received a Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for his work on settlement, revolution, and nation-building in New England. Although in The Epic of America, the study in which he coined the phrase “The American Dream,” Adams had extended his investigations beyond the Puritan tradition, his new study nonetheless remained focused on the United States. By contrast, Bolton’s “The Epic of Greater America” transcended the teleology of a single nation to include the interregional and international development of the entire Western Hemisphere. The basic presupposition of “The Epic of Greater America” was that historians mistake the nation for the hemisphere when they equate America with the United States. According to Bolton, “a broader treatment of American history . . . to supplement the purely nationalistic presentation to which we are accustomed” is not just ethical and politically advantageous, but “desirable from the standpoint of correct historiography” (“Epic” 448). Without this inter-American lens, scholars can only form a fractured and 1

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distorted picture of “Greater America,” for “each local [national] story will have much clearer meaning when studied in the light of the others” (449). Bolton stresses the chaos and confluences of the colonial period in order to reveal how official US narratives depended on the erasure of the multi­ ethnic underpinnings of—and in particular the Spanish contributions to— what historians called “America.” Believing that “much of what has been written of each national history is but a thread out of a larger strand,” Bolton underlines common New World patterns of exploration, colonial experience, wars of independence, and nation-building (“Epic” 449). With respect to westward expansion, for instance, Bolton extends his argument to the United States after first discussing the sixteenth-century Spanish exploration of lands that would only later become part of the nation: “Most of our American explorer heroes of the Far West, from Smith to Frémont, were in reality belated explorers of a foreign country. For a quarter century after 1820 these trespassers roamed the western wilds, profiting by the [French] fur trade, and ‘discovering’ the mountain passes—which Spaniards had discovered long before” (“Epic” 465). Unfortunately, the quotation marks around discovering do not indicate that Bolton recognized his Eurocentric view of exploration (his biggest failing, in my view), nor do they signal US efforts to overtake Native American communities that had already “discovered” their own lands. They do indicate, however, the belated arrival of the English. Bolton establishes Spanish colonization as a basic fact of an American history that starts not with British separatists in the Northeast, but with exploration that spreads northward from New Spain and southward from New France. Bolton highlights comparable national and regional narratives by observing multiple points of origin. Referencing US independence, he claims that the Spanish founding of the viceroyalty of La Plata, with Buenos Aires as its capital city, was also (and equally) “one of the significant American events of 1776,” and “did much to determine the destiny of the southern continent” (“Epic” 454). He reminds historians that “[a] few days before the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in Philadelphia, San Francisco was founded [by Spain] on the Pacific Coast” and that this “was another of the significant events of 1776” (“Epic” 457). Far from recounting the history of Anglo-American exceptionalism, “The Epic of Greater America” features multiple European empires caught up in parallel and intertwining projects. Instead of interpreting British American independence as an event that begins one national story line, Bolton sees it as the first successful revolution among many in the Americas—as a catalyst, in short, for a bloody chain of

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events that “did not end in Yorktown” (458). He conceives of revolution as a hemispheric matter, as an articulated movement that, however precariously, ousts Europe from America and brings the colonial period to a close. In “Defensive Spanish Expansion and the Significance of the Borderlands,” an address delivered three years earlier in 1929, Bolton made the same point by connecting historical figures from the United States to several Latin American ones, and erasing the privileged status of the former: “Washington and his associates merely started the American Revolution; Miranda, Bolívar, San Martín, Hidalgo, Morelos, and Iturbide carried it through” (Wider Horizons 67). “The Epic of Greater America” is the culmination of Bolton’s pioneering work on the Spanish presence along the southern and western fringes of the United States. The historian’s 1921 book The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest had amplified the famous “frontier thesis” pronounced by Frederick Jackson Turner, one of Bolton’s professors at the University of Wisconsin. In his 1893 address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner asserted that the experience of expanding from Europe to the Pacific was a rite of passage for the United States that bolstered the development of a distinct national character. Bolton revised Turner’s argument to include a pantheon of Spanish trailblazers—Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Juan Ponce de Léon among them—thus anticipating (and in some sense founding) the fields of Chicano and border studies. His “Spanish borderlands” research questioned the notion that the United States had ingrained within it a pioneering spirit lacking in other nations: “Everywhere contact with frontier environment and native peoples tended to modify the Europeans and their institutions. This was quite as true in the Latin as in the Saxon colonies” (“Epic” 453). For Bolton, America develops as a disputed hemisphere rather than a set of fixed and isolated entities. He treats contested lands without imposing nationalist paradigms retroactively, and he recognizes parallels that appear even more radical for having been neglected for so long: “In Saxon America the story of the ‘struggle for the continent’ has usually been told as though it all happened north of the Gulf of Mexico. But this is just another provincialism of ours. The southern continent was the scene of international conflicts quite as colorful and fully as significant as those in the north” (“Epic” 453). While conducting archival research in Mexico and the United States, Bolton realized that Anglophone historians were still perpetuating a “black legend” of Iberian backwardness and Catholic fanaticism from the colonial

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period. In it, the Spanish figured as gold-seeking caricatures who lacked the temperament necessary to form viable societies in the New World. According to Bolton, these accounts attested to a nationalist myopia, and were “the inevitable result of writing United States history in isolation, apart from its setting in the history of the entire Western Hemisphere, of which the United States are but a part. It was the logical corollary of restricting the study of American history to the region between the forty-ninth parallel and the Gulf of Mexico, as though that area were an inclusive and exclusive entity, and were synonymous with America” (Wider Horizons 56). Assuming a broader perspective, Bolton argued that the Spanish used the presidio and the mission to establish a stronghold in North America. While the former created a military front against Native Americans and Europeans, the latter was a colonial apparatus that—beyond proselytizing—helped to administer an overseas empire. Representing what Bolton calls “a conspicuous feature of Spain’s frontiering genius,” the missions and monasteries created by Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, and other Catholic orders served to regulate Amerindian societies and chronicle expeditions into uncharted lands (Wider Horizons 148). Yet, Bolton—most of all his pioneering work on the hemispheric dimensions of America—did not escape criticism. “The Epic of Greater America” was at times charged with being overambitious, geographically deterministic, and inattentive to local details. The most pointed of these critiques was launched by the Mexican historian and philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman. What ensued in inter-American intellectual history reveals fundamental divides, while also underscoring the shortcomings of both points of view in what was a controversial climate of US-led hemispheric diplomacy. In 1937, the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (which counted among its members the prominent Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea) published a Spanish translation of “The Epic of Greater America” as “La epopeya de la máxima América.” This text would introduce Latin American intellectuals to Bolton’s hemispheric model. In 1964, Lewis Hanke, a US Bolton supporter, published the collection Do the Americas Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton Thesis, the only book to date to provide an in-depth analysis of Bolton’s grand design. It reintroduced “The Epic of Greater America” alongside numerous assessments and rebuttals, including a condensed English translation of O’Gorman’s “Hegel y el moderno panamericanismo” (Hegel and Modern Pan-Americanism, first published in 1939). This expanded the debate into the Cold War era.

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In the article, O’Gorman denounces Bolton’s Hegelian emphasis on material development as a marker of historical fulfillment, as well as his failure to recognize cultural and religious differences between Latin America and the United States. The Bolton thesis, O’Gorman charges, is “una illusion bella y falaz” (“Hegel” 70; a beautiful and fallacious illusion) that is misguided by “una alucinación geográfica” (“Hegel” 72; a geographical hallucination). Its developmental aspect thus causes Bolton to misconstrue Latin America and, furthermore, exemplifies US hemispheric policy as articulated by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Verdaderamente el profesor Bolton con su bien intencionada visión niveladora, con mucho de eso que por llamar la política del ‘Buen Vecino,’ nos presenta una historia inhumana, una amplia crónica de un enorme organismo, indiferente a su salvación o perdición” (“Hegel” 68; Truly, Professor Bolton with his well-intentioned, leveling vision, with much of that which calls itself the “Good Neighbor” policy, presents us with an inhuman history, an ample chronicle of an enormous organism, indifferent to its salvation or to its perdition). For O’Gorman, “The Epic of Greater America” is intellectual hegemony parading as hemispheric cooperation. Because Bolton undervalues the role of Latin American culture, and its human agents, he fails to establish a meaningful connection based on “ese conjunto espiritual que es lo que da cuerpo a una individualidad histórica” (105; that spiritual complex that gives body to a historical entity). In short, O’Gorman—rightly, I think—finds in Bolton’s work a combination of Hegelian progressivism and New World exceptionalism that reifies the hemisphere by imbuing it with a unified geographic ontology, and a historical destiny that separates it from the rest of the world. O’Gorman exposes Bolton’s missed opportunities: (1) the failure to consider the cultural and religious specificities of mestizo Latin America, and (2) the lack of a rigorous critique of US Pan-American diplomacy, which tended to conflate basic Anglo-Hispanic differences.1 Yet, despite the critique, O’Gorman’s response to Bolton appears to be generated as much by his own opposition to US foreign policy as by the Bolton thesis. In a retroactive attempt to counter an academic analogue of the “Good Neighbor” policy (the pronouncement of which “The Epic of Greater America” preceded by just three months), O’Gorman embraces a Hispanic essentialism that presumably will prevent Latin American history from being subject to a Hegelian measure of progress that he treats as an extension of US imperialism. In what is at least in part a territorial critique, O’Gorman throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater and dismisses a new site of research that would go on to fund the

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types of projects that, according to Earl Fitz (“Theory”) and Deborah Cohn (The Latin American) were instrumental to the Latin American Boom.2 Ironically, O’Gorman’s The Invention of America: An Enquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History, published in 1957 and revised in 1961—a book that will serve as a touchstone for colonial fantasy throughout America Unbound—legitimates the very comparability between the United States and Latin America that the Mexican historian renounced in his response to Bolton. In his most influential work, O’Gorman argues that, in the process of initiating modernity in the Americas, Europeans invented, rather than discovered, the Western Hemisphere: “the fault that lies at the root of the entire history of the idea of the discovery of America consists in assuming that the lump of cosmic matter which we now know as the American continent has always been that, when actually it only became that when such a meaning was given to it” (Invention 42). Instead of attributing to America an ontological essence beyond the history of its cultural construction, O’Gorman considers the Anglo/Hispanic imagining of the New World as a complementary point of origin for inter-American history: “It was the Spanish part of the invention of America that liberated Western man from the fetters of a prison-like conception of his physical world, and it was the English part that liberated him from subordination to a Europe-centered conception of his historical world. In these two great liberations lies the hidden and true significance of American history” (Invention 145). Still, this awareness calls for a comparative method that can trace this three-hundred-year-old line from 1492 to US independence. Without recognizing this continuity and the consequences of the invention across national borders, scholars can merely form an incomplete picture of Bolton’s “Greater America.” In a recent article titled “The Invention of America Again: On the Impossibility of an Archive” (2013), Rodrigo Lazo offers further insight into the Bolton-O’Gorman debate by arguing that inter-Americanists should concern themselves with the history of the idea of America rather than presuming that the hemisphere has an ontology from which a ready-made literature somehow naturally emerged. Like O’Gorman, Lazo takes issue with the Bolton thesis, in his case by looking at its lingering spirit within hemispheric studies (which he charges with inventing America yet again). His cautionary argument is quite useful, yet there is something disagreeable in it as an endpoint when one considers the heavy US slant of contemporary hemispheric studies. Lazo’s essay (which was published in the prestigious

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US journal, American Literary History) may even wind up perpetuating the Anglo and nation-centered status quo of the field rather than amplifying its outlook. Furthermore, anxiety over a fraught object of study has become such a critical commonplace today that—in the case of hemispheric studies, at least—it allows scholars to circumvent the same hemispheric literary traditions that once formed a bedrock for an earlier incarnation of the field in which American literature was a de facto comparative literature.3 Paradoxically, O’Gorman’s ire may be redirected at Lazo’s own call for selfawareness for reinscribing an Anglo-Hispanic epistemological divide in the name of a US-centered academic approach. In the end, no amount of critical suspicion can substitute for exploring a hemispheric field over a lifetime. Because breadth is a requirement of Boltonian hemispherism, and rigor something to strive for, Bolton’s optimism can help establish a larger knowledge base beyond a limiting self-­ critique. This is not to say that Bolton writing in 1931 will not reveal his shortcomings and overreach in the eyes of the skeptical twenty-first century scholar. Still, I contend that, in the case of US-led hemispheric studies today, more (texts, nations, traditions, histories, languages, literatures) is better. Yet this begs the question: is an intellectual broadening unto the hemisphere a desideratum of the renewed Americas field? America Unbound forges a response to what I see as a movement away from literature and from the literatures of the Western Hemisphere. In my own work, I interpret a broader construct as more useful for understanding the Americas, and I do so in direct consultation with masterful literary texts that grapple with the culture and history of real places on a hemispheric map. For me, this means less a concern for US multiculturalist (including Latino) theory, critique, and other scholarly frameworks, and more a devoted attention to literature canons that can be said (for better and/or worse) to form veritable pillars for the hemisphere—including five-hundred-year-old ones from Latin America with direct links to pre-European foundations. I find present American studies too suspicious in its adoption of a critical metadiscourse for hemispheric studies, a problem that was already acknowledged in the title (and surpassed in the subtitle) of Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Latin America (1986), the first collection of published inter-American essays, edited by Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia. Most hemispherists, of course, would concur with Lazo’s greater concern for “investigat[ing] how the archive offers texts and contexts that complicate or even destabilize the field” (“The

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Invention” 769). In America Unbound, I combine approaches by taking on the hemispheric vision of Bolton while heeding the Latin Americanist critique of O’Gorman. However, O’Gorman’s model of invention will apply less to my own construction of my object of study (something with political consequences for all scholars, whether they study “America” as nation or hemisphere) than to what literary imaginings have to teach us about shared aspirations, differing views, and parallel histories. Moreover, my academic “reinvention” is personal. Like the main authors I discuss in this study (half of which hail from outside the United States), I am drawn to the histories, languages, and traditions relating to my own inter-American ontology. With this scholarly ethic in mind, I begin America Unbound by invoking Bolton’s hemispheric paradigm in order to define the parameters of this book and, more importantly, to propose a new trajectory for American studies. In the final analysis, the Bolton-O’Gorman debate lays bare a paradox at the heart of inter-American intellectual history: part of what has united the Western Hemisphere even before the original publication in 1900 of Ariel, an essay by the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó that outlines the differences between US utilitarianism and Latin American spirituality, has been a hard line of political distrust and a tendency toward nationalist/ regionalist formulations that deny any affinity. As José David Saldívar proclaimed in the essay (and later pioneering book) “The Dialectics of Our America” (1990), “Only when we begin to look at the history of the Americas as a hemisphere, and when we begin to analyze the real and rhetorical, often hostile, battles between the United States and what Martí called ‘Nuestra América’—‘Our America’—can we begin to perceive what the literatures of the Americas have in common” (64). To try to overcome this rift in the academy, one of the aims of America Unbound will be to bring a non-Eurocentric and more self-aware form of the Bolton thesis to bear on four of the most important novels from the Americas, and also to uncover the legacies of contact, conquest, and colonization that structure that trilingual literary corpus.4 Following a neo-Boltonian model that is attuned to the micro- and macro-narratives of Amerindian and African American communities (Bolton’s greatest and most consequential omission, in my view), this book envisions an American literature that is, first and foremost, geographically intact (i.e., one comprised of works from Latin America, Canada, and the Caribbean, as well as the United States). This multinational and multilingual field should ideally allow for multiple points of entry between and among New World traditions. It should also support comparative analysis both of

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the United States and its ethnic and border cultures, and, as importantly, of other hemispheric literatures within transatlantic and transpacific contexts (a type of research more characteristic of Latin Americanist scholarship, which generally spans Hispanic and Lusophone cultures). My approach is thus more in keeping with the foundational wave of scholarship spearheaded by Vera Kutzinski, Earl Fitz, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Doris Sommer, José David Saldívar, and others who brought comparative perspectives to American literature in the 1980s and 1990s. These scholars engineered an inter-American field by staging rich—and even disorienting—dialogues between poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The juxtaposition of literatures allowed for a multilateral and interdisciplinary inquiry into New World expression as a whole. In practice, most of this work privileged US–Latin American comparisons (to the exclusion of Native American and Canadian cultures). Nevertheless, the title of Pérez Firmat’s 1990 anthology Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (itself named after Hanke’s 1964 critical anthology Do the Americas Have a Common History?) speaks to a capacious—indeed, Boltonian—spirit that guides my own labors in America Unbound. Over the last two decades, scholars have called for an American studies that is “new” (Pease), “postnationalist” (Rowe), and “hemispheric” (Levander and Levine), yet no model thus far has engaged American literature as a fundamentally international phenomenon. These recent approaches have mostly reinvigorated the reading of Anglophone fiction and nonfiction set in and around, or in relation to, US-neighboring nations. While this revelation of a US hemispheric imaginary has challenged nationalist paradigms, scholars have not yet fully debunked the fiction of America as a single nation in practice. With the exception of early Americanists, US scholars have not engaged much with the literary traditions that date to the Spanish arrival and to the indigenous nations situated in present-day Latin America.5 More akin to US multicultural paradigms advanced by English departments since the 1980s, efforts at minority representation in “hemispheric” literary history have routinely privileged the writings of US Latino and border authors over those of established figures that Latin Americans have been reading for centuries, and who have provided a foundation for those same writers. While this new scholarship has broadened the US field considerably, it is difficult to image how it may undertake a Boltonian-type analysis of French and English colonial writings, nineteenth-century literary nationalism in Brazil and Argentina, or,

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as it does in this study, New World historical imaginings in encyclopedic novels from Hispanic, Anglophone, and Francophone America. At the core of America Unbound are three modern encyclopedic masterworks that are neo-Boltonian in scope: Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. By blending colonial histories and contemporary poetics, these texts— written in Spanish, French, and English, respectively—reveal the broader national and linguistic foundations of American literature. I am well aware of debates regarding “great books” and contingencies of value in the humanities. I do not mean here to forward a defense of the “masterpiece,” but rather to study novels that have a masterful performance inscribed within them. I intend to show how each of these works self-consciously aspires to be a summa Americana, i.e., a Great American Novel about what Bolton calls “Greater America.” Their deft interweaving of the hemispheric and historical (undertaken at high points within the authors’ careers) show a shared imagination that regards America itself as the inspiration, a hemispheric muse of sorts. We might regard them as New World magna opera that encompass, and rebut, colonial legacies in encyclopedic forms. In order to provide a foundation for the peculiar interconnection between America as a hemisphere and as a muse for the encyclopedic author, I turn now to a novel that has become a veritable sounding board for American literary studies—Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). I read the work as a Great American Novel, but do so in recognition of a new type of nineteenth-century encyclopedism that is “all American” in scope. As Nick Selby notes, the criticism of Moby-Dick “has gone hand-in-hand with such attempts to define what American literature might be” (8). By reinterpreting a classic usually associated with the New England–based American Renaissance, I provide a literary and conceptual framework for America Unbound, which itself offers a remapping of American literature as a larger argument linking its chapters. In what follows, I place Moby-Dick within a “New World” context, by which I signal: (1) Melville’s reimagining of a new hemisphere as depicted by imperial documents from the early modern period incorporated into the novel for a fuller transatlantic and global vision, and (2) a nineteenth-century arena of newness in which, not without some anxiety of influence, writers from the Americas advocated for separation from Old World literary traditions.6 In Moby-Dick, Melville fills the US cultural vacuum with American content that predates the United States and British America. As Ishmael proclaims in Moby-Dick, Melville needs to write

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“a mighty book” (541).7 Its pages figuratively expand to “imperial folio” so as to match the scale and grandeur of the sperm whale itself (540). Melville, in other words, must craft a titanic masterwork. “Leviathan is the text” in this case.8 But what, in turn, is leviathan to hemispheric studies?

Moby-Dick in a New World Context In 1970, Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford published Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts, 1851–1970, a critical anthology with a name meant to indicate “the tormenting fascination that Moby-Dick has exercised upon its readers” (14). The main title references a famous episode in which eight characters take turns reading the doubloon that Captain Ahab has nailed to the mast of the Pequod, and that he will give as a reward to the first sailor who spots Moby Dick. For Parker and Hayford, the analogy between the novel and the gold coin conveys the efforts of critics, within and beyond the text, to profit from a true interpretation. By association, Ahab’s maniacal struggle to capture and unlock the mysteries of the White Whale parallels the scholarly ambition to decode a novel that had, by Parker and Hayford’s time, become a national treasure. The title suggests that the combination of semantic indeterminacy and magnetic lure makes the doubloon, and Melville’s novel, a tabula rasa for competing projections of value and, by extension, a barometer for American studies. Starting with the “Melville Revival” in the 1920s, critics have read Moby-Dick as a modernist text (Mumford), as part of a national literary flowering (Matthiessen), as an incarnation of US cultural symbols (Lewis), as a formal masterpiece (Bezanson), as a product of the antebellum period (D. Reynolds), as a deployment of US imperialist discourses (Dimock), and, more recently, as a continuation of anticolonial perspectives on non-Western Native cultures (Sanborn). Melville even seems to predict Moby-Dick’s centrality to this critical history when, toward the end of the lineup, the third mate Flask observes, “There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see” (434). Parker and Hayford discover a sound analogy, but they overlook the material relevance of the doubloon, a unit of Ecuadorian currency that is engraved with “the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock . . . the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics” (431).9 They also take for granted its presence aboard a New England whaling vessel. Unlike the editors, the second mate Stubb

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places the coin within the site of its production: “I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili [sic], your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan” (432). Understood within a panatlantic history, the doubloon connects Moby-Dick, and the United States, to the Spanish Empire in the New World. It also links Melville to Ecuador and the Spanish American republics founded twenty-five years prior to the publication of his novel. Beginning in 1536, Spain minted gold and silver coins in New Spain, Peru, and Nueva Granada in order to feed transatlantic commerce, and to finance the viceroyalties it had established after conquering Mexico and Peru. The British used the same coins as currency in North America, particularly since Parliament had prohibited the exportation of gold and silver into the colonies in the belief that precious metals should flow solely to England. Well after the US founding, domestic currency was used interchangeably with legal tender from Europe and Spanish America. This international circuit continued unabated until the US Congress passed the first National Banking Act to standardize legal tender in 1863.10 Melville, who could read Spanish and Portuguese, had a particular interest in Latin America.11 As a whaling hand aboard the whalers Acushnet (1841–1842), Lucy Ann (1842), Charles and Henry (1842–1843), and the frigate United States (1843–1844), he had many an impressionable encounter along the Pacific coast of South America and even spent ten weeks in the Peruvian coastal city of Callao. The story of Yillah and the Peruvian sailor in Mardi (1849), the Golden Inn of Lima in Moby-Dick, the Galapagos Islands in The Encantadas (1855), and the Spanish merchant vessel in Benito Cereno (1856) are just a few examples that signal the irruption of Latin America into Anglophone US literature.12 Melville and Moby-Dick have been taken to represent this tradition, as solidified by the publication of American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), in which F. O. Matthiessen canonizes the novel—among other works—in line with national democratic aspirations. Yet Melville was not alone in his transhemispheric interests. Many writers sought distinctive New World elements with which to forge national identities separate from European monarchies. Across the Americas, a literature arose reflecting intercultural contact and tending toward incorporation and hybridity, a feature that scholars have long associated with the Latin American redeployment of the European baroque.13 Several of these literatures connected New World cultures through their shared Amerindian

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histories and their shared histories of colonization, as well as their struggles for independence. Writers generally continued to regard Europe as the world’s cultural capital, even as many of them argued against European influence in the hemisphere. To project an elastic model of literary nationalism, authors ranging from James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, and Susanna Moodie in Anglo-America to José María Heredia, José Martí, and José de Alencar in Latin America showcased vast American landscapes as uncorrupted by the cultural over-refinement and industrialization of Europe. As if corroborating Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s claim that “dans le nouveau [monde], l’homme et ses productions disparoissent, pour ainsi dire, au milieu d’une nature sauvage et gigantesque” (Voyage 1:53; in the New (World), man and his productions almost disappear amid a wild and gigantic nature), images of a telluric sublime—from Niagara Falls in North America to the Patagonia in South America—celebrated majestic nature even as they betrayed cultural anxieties over territories, and peoples, beyond national borders.14 Most of all in the United States and Argentina, this cultural ownership of the land relied on the removal of the same indigenous populations that national agents saw as the root of its authenticity. In what follows, I argue that, in the wake of the US-Mexican War, the latest saga of Anglo-American expansion by the mid-nineteenth century, print and visual documents that traced the “discovery” and pillage of the New World were Melville’s cultural templates for contributing to an emerging US literature. Rather than regarding Melville as a US author, however, I read him as a New World writer who extends, in transgressive ways, the colonial legacy of the entire Americas. In Moby-Dick, Melville redeploys fantastical images of conquistadors and of ancient American landscapes resuscitated in nineteenth-century books that connected the colonial and precolonial cultures of the Western Hemisphere. Of greater consequence to the tradition of American studies that Moby-Dick criticism has always helped to define, I examine how Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonial records reconfigure the national meaning of “America” within a whale-sized book that many continue to regard as the Great American Novel.15 In the article, “Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon” (1976), Edward Mendelson outlined a new genre that may help us to grasp this fuller hemispheric dimension of Moby-Dick. Extended references to politics, science, technology, language, history, and art (as well as tropes of monstrosity and gigantism that reflect on the megaform itself) are among the many particulars contained by encyclopedic works. Mendelson characterizes Melville as an

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encyclopedic author who, along with Dante, Cervantes, and other luminaries, “attends to the whole social and linguistic range of his nation, who makes use of all the literary styles and conventions known to his countrymen, whose dialect often becomes established as the national language, who takes his place as national poet or national classic, and who becomes the focus of a large and persistent exegetic and textual industry comparable to the industry founded upon the Bible” (1268). Mendelson sees their prodigious writings as tied to the spirit of nation-building, for “[e]ncyclopedic narratives all attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge” (1269). Although the critic aptly describes the omnivorous aesthetic of MobyDick, and the encyclopedic tradition more generally, his emphasis on the national character of the genre neglects the incorporation of elements that are inimical to nation-building and/or that unravel the idea of a self-­sufficient national culture with one representative author at the helm. While the formal dimensions that Mendelson identifies are crucial, the abundance of Latin American examples published in the last half century renders his typology too focused on Europe and the United States. I choose, therefore, to put Mendelson’s definition in productive conversation with Latin Americanist scholarship. I place Moby-Dick beside an encyclopedic collection of writings that comprise what Roberto González Echevarría calls the “Archive,” “a repository for the legal documents wherein the origins of Latin American history are contained, as well as a specifically Hispanic institution created at the same time as the New World was being settled” (“Myth” 29). Expanding on González Echevarría’s Hispanist argument, I see a shared New World encyclopedism beginning with the official documents that sought to contain hemispheric realities during, and as part and parcel of La Conquista (the Spanish Conquest). In the Americas (and most of all Latin America), a connection exists between the encyclopedic novel and a Greater American archive that is central to understanding its origins and significance as a New World variant of the genre. For González Echevarría, the Archive reflects a Spanish state bureaucracy that called for the documentation of everything from flora and fauna to the social and political life of the new Hispanic societies. It consists of legal, naturalist, anthropological, historical, and scientific summations, as well as the many documents of relación (a deposition bearing witness to something) written by conquistadors, missionaries, chroniclers, and

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letrados (lawyers). Besides helping to shape a transatlantic discourse of the New World, these writings (many of which were translated into all the major European languages) provided Spain with a legal basis for dividing and conquering America, and for viceregal governance. The Archive begins with the 1493 letter of Christopher Columbus, which details the first voyage to the Indies for the Spanish royals and was published in eighteen editions by 1497. It also includes documents such as Hernán Cortés’s Cartas de relación (1519– 1526; Letters of Relation), which recount the Spanish conquest of the Aztec capital in Mexico-Tenochtitlan for Charles V, but also polemical tracts such as the Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias (1552; Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies), in which Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas denounces the Spanish slaughter of indigenous populations carried out under evangelical pretense. Disseminated widely through the printing press in Europe and the Americas, these instruments of empire formed a giant repository of records that Charles III consolidated into Seville’s Archivo General de Indias in 1785. In the United States, these writings, and Hispanic and pre-Hispanic history more generally, became widely known after books redefined the newly independent region as an object of study. Most notable among these are William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), the first of which brought to national consciousness an archive “consist[ing] of instructions of the Court, military and private journals, correspondence of the great actors in the scenes, legal instruments, contemporary chronicles, and the like, drawn from all the principal places in the extensive colonial empire of Spain, as well as from the public archives in the Peninsula” (4). Through best-selling epic histories that, in the case of Mexico, were as “adventurous and romantic as any legend devised by Norman or Italian bard of chivalry,” Prescott granted the United States access to the published and unpublished records of its hemispheric neighbors (9). He endowed US readers with a New World historical imaginary by working to “surround him with the spirit of the times, and, in a word, to make him . . . a contemporary of the sixteenth century” (6). As Prescott propagated a black legend of Spanish despotism and greed, he simultaneously solidified an exceptionalist belief—despite its conquest of Amerindian lands and its goal of hemispheric supremacy on the eve of war, the United States held nothing in common with imperial Spain. In Moby-Dick, Melville incorporates Hispanic chronicles, as well as famous accounts of British travel included in compendia such as Richard

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Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (first published in 1589) and in Samuel Purchas’s Purchas, His Pilgrimage (first published in 1613). Together, these texts ground a global vision of exploration and conquest, and, particular to the circumstances of early US national culture, a post-independence imaginary that is hemispheric. Melville, however, uses this Greater American archive to rebut the exceptionalism and romantic racialist history of Prescott’s paradigm. Starting with the “Etymology” and the “Extracts,” a litany of quotes selected from sources pertaining to whales and whaling, Moby-Dick establishes an archival repository. This embedded bibliography introduces Moby-Dick as a book about other books, an encyclopedic novel that exists within a long tradition of whaling, but also of merchant ships and of maritime culture more generally. The textual genealogy includes, but is not limited to, the Book of Jonah, modern scientific treatises on whales, and European sources from the Age of Exploration (many of them reissued and/or popularized during Melville’s time). Melville was also inspired by contemporary travel relations, including two reconnaissance reports ordained by the US Congress to facilitate expansion into the Pacific: Charles Stewart’s A Visit to the South Seas, in the U.S. Ship Vincennes, during the Year 1829 and 1830; with Scenes in Brazil, Peru, Manilla, the Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena (1831) and Charles Wilkes’s 1845 publication Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition during the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842. A major influence was Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex (1821), a sensationalistic, but nontriumphal, tale of whale combat, cannibalism, and survival in the South Seas that gained a wide readership in the United States. Throughout Moby-Dick, Melville intersects whaling, the first international industry dominated by the United States, with voyages of discovery as described in many of these books. Numbering among the multinational crew of the Pequod are Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans, the three main racial groups that intersected during the Conquest. In addition, the whaler contains sailors from all of the maritime powers that competed for empire in the New World, including England, France, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. When asked by a ship-owning Quaker his reason for wanting to join the whaling expedition, Ishmael responds matter-of-factly: “I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world” (71). For Ishmael, whaling and the circumnavigation of the earth are one and the same. To the extent that it requires the crisscrossing of dangerous oceans for successful

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enterprise, whaling affords the protagonist, who attests earlier that he “love[s] to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts,” the opportunity to travel as an explorer (7). As a symbolic ship of state, the Pequod, whose name foreshadows the vessel’s demise by referring to the Pequot Indians slaughtered by Puritans, embodies the prosperity of US commerce, but also claims a longer and more illustrious history: “For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the earth” (110). The whaler has proudly served as both industrial vessel and ship of discovery, and has “explored seas and archipelagoes which no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed” (110). Regarding the European settlement of the Pacific Islands, Ishmael even claims that the whaler “cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations” (110). In Moby-Dick, modern New England whaling overlaps with European navigation from a bygone era; for better or worse, it is the inheritor of a transoceanic legacy that originates in the Age of Exploration. If the nineteenth-century whaling vessel has defined the new routes of discovery, then it follows that its captain is a modern extension of Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and other famous navigators. Ishmael contends that, while the general public “may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns . . . I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater” (99). Ahab is a Nantucket whaling captain and a captain of industry who stimulates the national economy. Some critics have read him as a tragic character cast in a Shakespearean mold (Geist; Matthiessen; Sewell), while others have noted that Ahab resembles public figures that Melville may have deemed politically extremist, including Daniel Webster (Foster), Lloyd Garrison (Weathers), John C. Calhoun (Heimert), and James K. Polk (Lawson). Scholars have suggested single points of reference within the nineteenth century, but I would expand the range of sources to include Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, two men whose exploits Prescott had popularized and placed within a romantic tradition in Melville’s own time. In History of the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott describes Cortés as possessing a “bold, aspiring spirit” that showed the “wildest cravings of avarice” (135). As a soldier-of-fortune-turned-knight-errant, he was a “young adventurer, whose magic lance was to dissolve the spell which had so long hung over these mysterious regions” (136). His capture of the Aztec Empire inspired Pizarro, whose imagination was “fired with the idea of, one day, attempting

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the conquest of the mysterious regions beyond the mountains” (History of the Conquest of Peru 836). Pizarro, who would go on to overtake the Inca Empire in Cuzco, likewise hungered for “a land teeming with gold . . . an El Dorado” (History of the Conquest of Peru 843). While following a course of personal revenge in Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab mirrors these rapacious conquistadors from the Spanish black legend. He is responsible to wealthy New England patrons, but seeks personal gain at all costs. Led by his charts, logbooks, and compasses, he intends to pursue the White Whale “round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames . . . on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out” (163). In a hemispheric context, Ahab’s revenge for the loss of his leg takes on a ghostly aspect—the plot is the fulfillment of a transhistorical death drive passed on from a castrated Spanish Empire (which collapsed in Melville’s nineteenth century) to a fully engorged US empire. Although Ahab ultimately fails in his pursuit, the journey is Melville’s updating of the mad quest for El Dorado to suit the march of “manifest destiny” during the 1850s, a period that saw the largest and swiftest geographical aggrandizement of the nation since the Louisiana Purchase. Through monomaniacal Ahab, the author implies that, just as Cortés and Pizarro had inaugurated a conquistador gold rush in Spanish America, the prospect of land, California gold, and other resources now incited the US conquest of hemispheric terrains.16 In a tongue-in-cheek passage proclaiming Nantucket ownership of the oceans, Ishmael even predicts the US annexation of all of North America: “Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s” (64). Here, Melville parodies the rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine, which turned Latin America and Canada into US protectorates in 1823. By hyperbolizing diplomatic terms that, according to Gretchen Murphy, “both unified the United States with Latin America and aligned it with Europe as that continent’s imperial successor in the Western Hemisphere,” Melville lampoons the hemispheric desideratum of Jacksonian democracy (Hemispheric 145). Through Ahab’s quest for the fantastical, Melville invokes the misguided course of a new US empire that, under the cover of peaceful consolidation, had signed into law the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and had conquered half of Mexico through the US-Mexican War. Ahab allegorizes this US imperial ascendency in an aggressive, albeit poetic, pronouncement: “The path to my

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fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!” (168). Ahab’s inherited ship of discovery has transformed into a steam engine, a modern instrument that will stop at nothing to penetrate nature and consolidate the nation from sea to shining sea. Here, Ahab is a sea-­ captain-turned-train-conductor; US conquest via the railway continues the course of transoceanic pillage inaugurated centuries earlier by Columbus and the Spanish Empire. As “supreme lord and dictator” of the Pequod, Ahab is an archetypal tyrant with biblical links to King Ahab of Israel, but within an international whaling context that also makes him an heir to New World colonial enterprising (122).17 To ponder conquest in Melville’s America is to trace a violent thread that ties together a hemispheric history, and that connects 1492 to US industrial expansion in 1851. Melville counters the rapid rise to power in the United States by emphasizing the intellectual lineages of ancient civilizations, particularly in Egypt and Latin America. Specifically, Eric Wertheimer argues that Melville was one of several Anglo-American authors who “found the very condition of post-coloniality a spur to theorizing American classical origins” (2). In the early national period, accounts of Latin American exploration provided the best sources for ancient artifacts that evoked the sublime, an aesthetic category that also guides Melville’s representation of awesome sperm whales in Moby-Dick.18 By highlighting what Humboldt calls “ces sites majestueux, qui ne peuvent être compares à ceux de l’Ancien Continent” (Vues 4; those majestic scenes, which cannot be compared to those of the Old Continent), many of these narratives suggested that pre-Columbian monuments could compete in scale and grandeur with Greco-Roman and Egyptian architecture. Most notable were Humboldt’s illustrated accounts of travel (published in thirty volumes from 1805 to 1834), which pioneered the scientific study of Latin American nature and antiquities. From 1799 to 1804, Humboldt analyzed several natural and engineering marvels from America, ranging from the Andean volcano of Cotopaxi to the Mexican pyramid of Cholula, as well as Maya relief carvings and Aztec codices. In particular, Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (1810) (translated into English in 1814 as Researches, Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America, with Descriptions and Views of Some of the Most Striking Scenes in the Cordilleras!) was “destiné à la fois à faire connoître quelques—unes des grandes scènes que

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présente la nature dans les hautes chaînes des Andes; et à jeter du jour sur l’ancienne civilisation des Américains, par l’étude de leurs monumens d’architecture, de leurs hiéroglyphes, de leur culte religieux et de leurs rêveries astrologiques” (Voyage 1:37–38; destined to represent a few of the grand scenes that nature presents in the high chains of the Andes, and to shed light on the ancient civilization of the Americans, through the study of their architectural monuments, their hieroglyphics, their religious rites, and their astrological reveries). Following upon Humboldt through his own popular books of travel, the US explorer John L. Stephens documented the ruins of Mayan civilization after visiting forty-four archeological sites from Copán to Palenque in 1839 and 1840. In Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841), a volume that revolutionized Mesoamerican studies and popularized Amerindian hieroglyphics, Stephens compiled descriptions of the encrypted statues and buildings of the Maya alongside illustrations by the British artist Frederick Catherwood.19 Regarding the hieroglyphic monuments in Copán, Stephens claims that they “beyond doubt record some event in the history of the mysterious people who once inhabited the city,” but also laments that, unlike the Rosetta Stone (which was deciphered during Melville’s youth), “[n]o Champollion has yet brought to them the energies of his inquiring mind. Who shall read them?” (1:140, 159–60). In Moby-Dick, Ishmael recalls one sperm whale that was “obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array  . . . engraved upon the body itself,” which reminds him of the enigmatic markings he once saw in a book illustration: “By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiseled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable” (306). According to Parker and Hayford, Ishmael is likely referencing a pre-­ Columbian petroglyph carved on the high bluffs along the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois (Moby-Dick 245 n2). The image, which Melville may have seen in 1840 before it was destroyed by quarrying, was of a phoenix-like monster that the Illinois Confederation called Piasa (“the bird that devours men”). As its name suggests, the mythical beast ate humans and terrorized the inhabitants of the area. In 1673, French Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette described the petroglyph in his journal en route to becoming, along with explorer Louis Jolliet, part of the first European team to map the Upper Mississippi.20

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Etched on the huge tablet-like back of the sperm whale, the Piasa multiplies the daunting aspect of the leviathan and underscores its resistance to both conquerors wishing to claim it and readers wanting to decipher it; in other words, imperialist and interpretive projects align here vis-à-vis impenetrable landscapes. The physical incarnation of a New World palisade, and a symbol of the illimitable terrains sought first by European explorers and, later, by US expansionists, the sperm whale is awesome and unconquerable. The enigmatic language scratched into its surface facilitates no profitable medium, for no master reader elucidates its ancient secrets, nor, by implication, those of Melville’s own whale of a book. Instead, Melville presents readers with a tantalizing challenge that is typical of the questioning philosophical mode of Moby-Dick in general, and that resonates with Stephens’s description of the well-guarded mysteries at Copán quoted above: “there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face . . . how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can” (347). In 1850, Melville wrote a letter to his English publisher that conveyed an additional interest in fantastical sources for his whale. According to Melville, Moby-Dick was to be “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries” (Correspondence 163). Published in the New York Knickerbocker in 1839, J. N. Reynolds’s “Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific,” a tall tale about an albino sperm whale named after the Chilean island of Mocha, provided Melville with an ideal source. Mocha Dick is a “ferocious fiend of the deep” who has become legendary after surviving countless attacks by whalers and for the sinking of these same vessels (Reynolds 384). Yet Mocha Dick, unlike Moby Dick at the conclusion of Melville’s novel, loses its epic struggle with mortals. Although the whale “thrashed the waters on either side of him with quick and powerful blows; the sound of the concussions resembling that of the rapid discharge of artillery,” the whaling heroes turn it into “a dead mass upon the sea through which he had so long ranged a conqueror” (Reynolds 389). The men then celebrate their conquest with a sexualized gusto that underscores the telluric attributes of the South American whale: “I leaped upon the quarter deck of Dick’s back, planted my wafe-pole in the midst, and saw the little canvass flag, that tells so important and satisfactory a tale to the whaleman, fluttering above my hard-earned prize” (Reynolds 389).

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In Moby-Dick, Ishmael contends that whaling men “are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them” (180). In addition to Mocha Dick, Melville incorporates a collection of monsters and marvels present in documents of travel and discovery, including the items that he catalogues in “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales”: “those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman” (260, chapter 55). The “Squid,” the titular object of chapter 59, is one such creature that numbers among “the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind” (276). With its “innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach,” the monster is a relative of the fabled kraken of the North Sea but, as Melville implies, with an integral link to the South American anaconda snake (276). Like the giant squid, Melville’s leviathan also has classical and medieval antecedents, including sea monsters from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (c. ad 77; Natural History) and images from bestiaries, a collection of real and imaginary animals drawn and arranged in accordance with a Christian cosmology. In the “Harley Bestiary” (c. ad 1230–1240, folio 69), for instance, an island-whale about to capsize sailors who have mistakenly anchored their ship upon its back creates an allegory for the devil’s deceit. It reworks an episode from Navigatio Sancti Brendani (c. ninth century; Voyage of St. Brendan) in which an Irish saint unwittingly lands on a sleeping whale.21 The monsters resurface in early modern maps after Olaus Magnus establishes a core vocabulary of fabulous North Sea creatures in his Carta Marina (1539; Map of the Sea).22 As sixteenth-century writers and artists struggled to represent the novelty of America for an Old World audience, monsters and marvels became coextensive with terra incognita. For instance, a number of sea creatures, including double-spouting whales, appear in full view in Americae Sive Quartae Orbis Partis Nova et Exactissima Descriptio (America or an Accurate Description of the Fourth Part of the Globe), a map of South America drawn by the Spanish cartographer Diego Gutiérrez in 1562.23 Here, the giant monsters from the Carta Marina, along with tritons, hippocampuses, and other mythological beings, threaten nearby vessels. John Smith’s famous map of Virginia from 1612 features angry whales coasting through the Chesapeake Bay and off the Atlantic

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coast.24 Samuel de Champlain’s Carte geographique de la Nouvelle France (1612; Map of New France), a foundational record of French possessions in North America, exemplifies the cartographic penchant for picturing exotic creatures as coterminous with indigenous places, peoples, and plants.25 In the two-panel map “Americae Nova Tabula” (New Map of America), from the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, sive, Atlas Novus (1634; Theater of the World, or, New Atlas) by Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu, giant whales swim near European vessels approaching the Western Hemisphere. Along the top margin, Blaeu includes nine labeled vignettes showing views of St. Domingo, Cartagena, Cuzco, La Mocha, and other key colonial sites. Ten additional vignettes distributed evenly along the right and left margins display indigenous Americans, including those from Brazil, Florida, Virginia, and Greenland. To complete his ethnographic index, Blaeu regales the men, women, and children in the typical clothing and headdress (and even the weaponry) of their respective homelands.26 Considered collectibles during the early modern period, many such maps were reprinted in the nineteenth century along with travel accounts originally compiled by Hackluyt and Purchas. Although Melville devotes three chapters to describing visual artifacts—“Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” “Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes,” and “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars” (chapters 55–57)—scholars have overlooked map sources as a key to interpretation. Yet the author certainly borrowed from monstrous cartographic images to characterize his larger-than-life whale.27 Invoking this cartographic and teratological tradition, Ahab covets a giant whale that Melville relates to the geographic typology of America. In a chapter on fishing protocols, for instance, Ishmael defines a “Loose-Fish” as “fair game for anybody who would soonest catch it” (396). He then proceeds to ask rhetorically, “What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish” (398). Melville’s “America” is the Western Hemisphere, its European lineage beginning with Spanish expansion into the Caribbean rather than with the founding of New England or of the United States. The passage invites associations between Ahab and Columbus: both men are commissioned, one in an industrial capacity and the other in an imperial one, to claim island-whales. Beside the Turkish capture of Constantinople

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and the British founding of the East India Company, Ishmael imagines Columbus harpooning America, and predicts that the United States will annex the rest of Mexico in violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Spanish conquest of the New World continues with the United States as the latest hegemon, a sequence that Melville highlights by linking territorial claims made in 1492 to the US capture of northern Mexico in 1848. While Melville associates the White Whale with pre-European America, scholars have mostly interpreted the beast as a metaphysical agent (Mumford; Matthiessen; Buell “Moby-Dick”) or as part of a prescient allegory for the US Civil War (Foster; Weathers; Heimert; Rogin). Within a New World context, however, the leviathan is a hemispheric American icon. It is a single continent, the quarta orbis pars, as it came to be known after the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map, Universalis Cosmografia, made the first name of Amerigo Vespucci (who had just returned from exploring the South American coast) synonymous with America.28 By returning to its New World origins as an emblem sought by European galleons, the White Whale assumes a radically new shape beyond canonical interpretations of Melville’s Great American Novel. Moby Dick is nothing less than a monster from the Age of Exploration that is alive and well in the age of industrialization, a fantastical insignia that continues to haunt enterprise in the Americas. By envisioning US nation-building as continuous with La Conquista, Melville allows Moby-Dick to flourish as an encyclopedic novel that recalls, and disrupts, imperial hemispheric legacies. European maps formed part of the archival documentation of New World settlement, but Melville subverts triumphal narratives by recuperating the deadly obstacles that confronted European seafarers. Melville reawakens the sense of awe before the radical difference of America, an epistemological state of suspension that, as Stephen Greenblatt argues, explorers supplanted with an idiom of wonder through which they enacted legal rituals of dispossession. In Moby-Dick, however, the White Whale is a hieroglyphic landscape that resists domestication, a terra incognita that leads imperial agents to their deaths.29 Melville reverses the function of colonial maps by summoning a telluric American monster to destroy a vessel with Ahab at the helm. Evoking the cruelty and bravado of a New World conquistador, Ahab offers bitter words of vengeance at the end of the novel: “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!

Figure 1.1. Cartographic marvels from the Age of Discovery, Joan Blaeu, Le theatre du monde, vol. 2, plate Americae Nova Tabula, 1643. Image courtesy of Simpson Library’s Special Collections and University Archives, University of Mary Washington.

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and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!” (571–72). Ahab lives out a frontier myth that initiates him into a masculine order of rugged individualism. This is a commonplace of American studies criticism inspired by the Turner Thesis, but within a transnational domain that calls into question the national unity usually ascribed to the novel.30 Ahab is a doomed seeker after the sublime; the whaling scene becomes an arena of proud and misguided warfare wherein the captain does not give up the “ghost,” but the phallic “spear.”31 Reconfiguring conquest, Melville turns the Pequod into a US ship of state that seeks to rape and pillage an America hemisphere and, in doing so, topples the maritime commercial enterprise. Melville warns against the inevitable destruction awaiting US expansion by imagining it as the unilateral death drive of a would-be nineteenth-century conquistador who crosses headlong into the unmapped body of the sperm whale. Ahab’s dramatic claim that “Ahab is forever Ahab” and that “[t]his whole act’s immutably decreed” confirms a tautology of violence that Melville overturns through an apocalyptic eruption (561).32 In Moby-Dick, conquest begins with Columbus during the Age of Exploration and continues with Ahab during the Age of Jackson. It also ends there in shipwreck, a return of the repressed that connects US democratic statecraft to European despotism. At the end of the narrative, only Ishmael survives (as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, William Strachey, Owen Chase, and other shipwrecked sailors had throughout the history of the Americas) to render a textual relación of a misguided and unfortunate voyage.33 Because Melville inaugurates the New World novelistic compendium in connection with maritime disaster, an added function of language in Moby-Dick is to forestall the end of the story through a symbolic buffer. The bigger Melville’s word count, the longer Ishmael is able to fill in the horror vacui summoned by the “Whiteness of the Whale” (chapter 42); and, in turn, the longer the Pequod can stay above water before its certain collapse. While my approach is one of several for finding meaning in the polysemous doubloon that Moby-Dick has always been for American studies, the genealogy I propose here remains unexplored; after all, the absence of the hemisphere was much in keeping with the novel’s postwar canonization within the nation. Despite Parker and Hayford’s suggestion that Moby-Dick is an analogue for currency from another New World republic (an Ecuadorian novel, as it were), Melville’s book has become the ever-fluctuating mirror of a

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US-focused American Studies. For instance, New Americanists (Pease, “MobyDick”; Dimock; Spanos; Rowe) have uncovered the global circuits of MobyDick, but they have been largely concerned with the Cold War as a nationalistic context for US reception. As a consequence of critiquing the nation-state from within, these scholars have not turned a comparative eye to the other Americas. More recently, Rodrigo Lazo (“‘So Spanishly’”) and Christopher Taylor have accounted for Moby-Dick and nineteenth-century US imperialism in Latin America.34 Still, by identifying, and reimagining, the déjà vu of a hemispheric history that begins centuries earlier, Melville lends a Boltonian platform for rethinking the foundations of America and its literature.

New World Encyclopedism Encyclopedism has been at the core of American writing since La Conquista. As evidenced by Melville, the New World compendium differs from the epic genre in its non-teleological and multinational orientation, and stems from colonial accounts of exploration that submitted America to mental tabulation. For instance, in the first of five letters to King Charles V, Hernán Cortés compensates for his struggle to describe Mexican reality by including an itemized list of the booty he plans to smuggle back to Spain. Here, Cortés catalogues an inventory of, among other things, the “oro y joyas y piedras y plumajes que se han habido en estas partes nuevamente descubiertas” (24; gold, jewels, stones, and featherwork that have been acquired in these newly discovered parts). Indebted to rational ordering, and to gigantic taxonomies that followed an inclusive, and overwhelming, sense of “etcetera” (“y . . . y . . . y”), encyclopedic authors from the Americas extend, and disrupt, the literary patrimony of Cortés and other chroniclers that first described the real and imagined abundance of the New World for Europeans. The colonial archive emerged alongside the Renaissance encyclopedia, which sought to retreat from the myth-based epistemology of the medieval compendium and toward a more scientific understanding of the world. During the Enlightenment, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert extended this totalizing trajectory in their twenty-eight-volume Encyclopédie (1751–1772; Encyclopedia), even as its authors recognized the need for an evolving system of accommodation. Archival narratives treat America through a controlling view to legitimate colonialism; almost all, however, also register the shock of the new by

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including elements that disturb cosmographical, epistemological, and ethno­g raphic foundations for knowing the world. The sixteenth-century compendium—of which the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (General History of the Things of New Spain; known as the Florentine Codex) (c. 1578) is the crowning achievement—operates along such a nexus of power and knowledge. The first encyclopedia of and about America, the Florentine Codex is a Christian evangelical manual that also discourses on, among other topics, the indigenous gods, human sacrifice, and the smallpox epidemic that was fast consuming Native populations. Because he sought to preserve the Aztec language, Sahagún wrote in Spanish and Nahuatl, and he included a dictionary and a section on grammar. The book contains over 1,850 images in its twelve volumes, thus establishing a link between visual culture and literary encyclopedism as I explore it in America Unbound. Having consulted Native informers, the friar also transcribes, somewhat unwittingly, an Aztec version of the Conquest that registers voices of resistance. As we have seen, Melville revives encyclopedism in the nineteenth century even as historical romances dominated the hemispheric literary scene in the service of nationhood (Murphy, “Hemispheric”). In the twentieth century, two key examples—one literary and the other visual—propel encyclopedism into the period of key importance for America Unbound. Most notable among literary works is US Latino poet William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925). An experimental collage that borrows verbatim from the New World archive, the book criticizes the Puritan legacy and, by extension, the isolationist rhetoric of manifest destiny. In the American Grain expands the traditional meaning of “American” in its title through a series of vignettes featuring characters and events inside a hemispheric panorama. Williams finds coherence in an America whose grain runs north to south and chronologically from Eric the Red to Abraham Lincoln. His chapter juxtapositions even preempt Bolton’s historiography. For instance, “The Discovery of the Indies,” “Voyage of the Mayflower,” and “The Discovery of Kentucky” take up the theme of exploration. “De Soto and the New World” and “Sir Walter Raleigh” treat prominent conquerors from Spain and England, respectively. In addition, chapters such as “Père Sebastian Rasles” (a French Jesuit missionary who worked among the Abenaki in present-day Canada), and “Jacataqua” (a fictional métisse sachem) challenge the Puritan-based American vision of the 1920s by highlighting a New World identity based on the union of races and cultures.

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Vera Kutzinski acknowledges the modernist work’s revolutionary place in inter-American letters when she writes, “In the American Grain is not, strictly speaking, the property of the Anglo-North American literary canon or even some of its more recent variations, but belongs instead to a tradition of New World writing that deliberately crosses canons and blurs the distinctions between them” (Against 35). In art history, Mexican muralism, which Octavio Paz calls “the first American answer to the long monologue of European art,” also revived New World intercultural themes and grand poetics through the murals of, most notably, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexico 34). After studying in Paris and Madrid between 1907 and 1921, Rivera created epic murals that synthesized, and mythologized, Mexico. His Historia de México (1929–1935; History of Mexico), for instance, occupies three adjoining walls and 275 square meters of the Mexican National Palace. In a dazzling panorama, it re-creates the pre-Hispanic past, paints the brutality of the Spanish Conquest, celebrates freedom-fighting leftists, exposes neocolonial dependency, and points toward a socialist revolution. Rivera was commissioned to produce the work in the immediate aftermath of the 1929 formation of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), which had then shifted its attention away from the immediate concerns of revolution and toward the exigencies of modern nationhood. The left tableau of Historia de México renders a kaleidoscopic portrait of pre-Cortesian Mesoamerica. Titled “El antiguo Mundo Indígena” (The Ancient Indigenous World), it foregrounds Quetzalcóatl, the divine creator of culture and civilization. His human subjects provide him with tribute in a central scene. He appears twice more: once as a plumed serpent emerging from a volcanic eruption, and again as captain of a snake vessel that, according to a Toltec legend of exile and return, banishes him from Teotihuacán. Intertribal warfare destabilizes the civic organization of the Aztec metrop­ olis. Rivera juxtaposes images of Native kinship with those of homegrown despotism; hand-to-hand combat in the bottom-left section of the fresco shatters the harmonious composition of weavers, sculptors, artisans, and musicians on the other side. Rivera also includes slaves, the synchronized arrangement of their dorsal humps echoing the line of the pyramidal structures they have built under compulsion. Upon one of these structures stands an Aztec high priest holding an obsidian knife indicating religious sacrifice. Despite the violence and class inequalities, Rivera displays a complex and sophisticated Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors.

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The largest of the three panels, “De la conquista a 1930” (From the Conquest to 1930), dramatizes four hundred years of Mexican history. Rivera portrays the Conquest through an asymmetrical palette. The glitter of Spanish armors opposes the earth tones of Amerindians in animal skins. The main battle in Mexico-Tenochtitlan takes place in the foreground between Cortés and the last Aztec ruler Cuauhtémoc, thus showing Indian resistance to the invaders. A staggering concentration of Mexican characters, centered above the Aztec symbol of an eagle devouring a serpent, echoes the disarray of battle. Inserted directly beneath the central wall arch (not part of the painting) is the Indian socialist governor of Yucatán, Carillo Puerto; next to him stand agrarian reformists Pancho Villa and Luis Cabrera; following thereafter are revolutionary leaders Miguel Hidalgo, José Morelos, Alvaro Obregón, and Plutarco Elias Calles. Mexico’s first Indian president, Benito Juárez, represents the national period of La Reforma below an adjacent tier; conversely, the looming figure of Porfirio Díaz epitomizes dictatorship. An inquisitorial scene appears in the left foreground. Burning “heretics” and horrible priests contrast with a crowd of politicos who seem to crane their necks under another physical arch. Set alongside portraits of Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, José Vasconcelos, and other revolutionary heroes and nation-builders, the images suggest that Mexico is in the midst of an unfinished struggle to eradicate internal colonialism. Other images invoke external oppression via scenes from the US-Mexican War and, through a rendering of the Emperor Maximilian, the period of French occupation. The right canvas, “El mundo de hoy y de mañana” (The World of Today and Tomorrow), reinterprets biblical prophecy as industrial revolution. An image of Karl Marx, who grips the Communist Manifesto with one hand and indicates a marching parade of soviet flags with the other, dominates the composition. Rivera associates his messianic stature with Moses in possession of juridical tablets from heaven. The communist hammer and sickle in the background echoes, and contests, the brutality of military policemen executing leftist agrarians and intellectuals. In addition, Rivera paints the dehumanizing hardware of modernity: a skeletal network of pipelines scarcely protects the rich from industrial collapse on the one hand, and from overthrow at the hands of the people on the other. While the north wall captures an ambivalent kinship with the Aztecs, and the west mural transmits the sheer frenzy of the Conquest, the south painting conveys Mexico’s international plight through a violent catharsis: a galvanizing vision of emancipation coexists with an

Figure 1.2. Encyclopedism on display in Mexican muralism. Diego Rivera, Historia de México (detail), 1929–1935. Mexico City. © 2015 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Khalo Museums Trust, Mexico, DF / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: Schalkwijk / Art Resource, NY.

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apocalyptic procession of armed peasants. Historia de México thus conflates the forces of creation and destruction that resonate across the three panels. Although Rivera’s ostensible purpose is to celebrate the nation in a big way here, Historia de México conveys an impression of spatial and temporal chaos that undermines the mural’s cohesion as official state pageantry.35 Not surprisingly, the literary compendiums that follow upon Mexican muralism hail mostly from Latin America, a region of the hemisphere linked by a deep awareness of the past. While the literature does not always try to encompass all of the Americas (choosing instead to focus on a particular broad region), Hispanic encyclopedic novels from the Boom, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World), and the post-Boom, among them Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó, el gran putas (1984; Chango, the Great Son of a Bitch), and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004) are plentiful. An encyclopedic tradition also flourishes in the postwar United States. Here, the postmodernist novels of, among others, Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973), David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest in 1996), and Don DeLillo (Underworld in 1997)—all of whom were inspired by the micro-serializing fictions and tropes of Jorge Luis Borges—lead the way. Examples produced in major regions I do not treat in this study include Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière . . . noire de Salem (1986; I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem), Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993), and Ana Maria Gonçalves’s Um defeito de cor (2006; A Color Defect), three novels that use encyclopedism to forge a greater view of the French Caribbean, British Canada, and Brazil, respectively. Because there has been no agreed-upon definition, encyclopedic novels go by many names.36 Studies of the genre fall along three general lines: (1) theory and global variants (Moretti Modern; Ercolino); (2) Latin American variants (Menton; Aínsa); and (3) US variants (Karl, LeClair Art and “Prodigious”). Discussions of the inter-American scope of encyclopedic novels are thus far missing. In all cases, contemporary versions disrupt the epic triumphalism of Mexican muralism, and tend instead toward a deeper skepticism of totalizing projects. Despite the authority suggested by its formidable name, “encyclopedic” fiction embraces inclusivity and openness, not academic closure. The novels I discuss in America Unbound incorporate, and redeploy, written and visual sources on narrative scales that reflect hemispheric breadth and complexity. Moby-Dick, the most seminal of American encyclopedic fictions, prefigures a tradition of archival borrowings that is central to

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Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues, and Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Following Melville, these authors write self-professed literary milestones by including, and challenging, documents that trace the conquest of America, North and South. These New World novels recover the imperial trading networks established in 1492, while also tracing their influence on national and transnational histories from the nineteenth century to the present. The historical archive even has metafictional analogues in the encyclopedias, scrolls, museums, and manuscripts that the characters read, visit, and inhabit within the novels. This tendency marks the authors’ recurring interest in visual culture, and in the ways that discourses and aesthetics cross media. I remain attuned to images throughout America Unbound, for they are central to an expanded view of literary craft, and form an exegetical and ekphrastic tool of interpretation. Literature matters here in ways that are so obvious as to be counterintuitive. Despite Mendelson’s anatomizing of the genre, no one has commented on how the physical scale of most encyclopedic fiction transforms the art of the novel into one of building big in three dimensions. As if to assume a hemispheric gigantism, these books undertake a self-conscious expansion through words. When Melville implies that Moby-Dick is a whale of a book, we recognize a clever conceit. Still, as is suggested by embedded visual tropes that cue readers to experience text beyond words, size does matter. Encyclopedic books are big; their linguistic bodies are not reducible to transferable type on a digital tablet or computer screen. Encyclopedic authors create objects with literal degrees of gravity. Readers enter a long-term relationship with them; their scale is what results when authors make words matter by producing more matter. Terra Nostra imagines what happens when Europe meets America, thereby transforming itself into an archive that can be consulted for wisdom, myths, facts, and figures about New World identity. Volkswagen Blues creates a scrapbook of a transamerican journey that the reader uses to retrace the steps of the Quebecois protagonists. Almanac of the Dead forges strong ties to the Mesoamerican codices, so much so that it seeks to materialize in the reader’s hands in order to issue a prophecy about the fate of the Americas. These books are monuments that attest to the value and endurance of literature today. For decades now, standard operating procedure in the humanities has been to regard literature as part of the deluge of culture, its story told from a safe critical distance. By aligning the art of the novel with crafting in three-dimensions, however, encyclopedic authors confront

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us with the power of artistic revelation. These books compel us to dialogue with New World cultures across space and time by jumping into the deep end of languages. We are overwhelmed by their towering intellect and amazed by their erudition. Rendering an opinion that seems anathema to literary criticism today, Rita Felski contends that “[t]he literary text is not a museum piece immured behind glass but a spirited and energetic participant in an exchange—one that may know as much as, or a great deal more than, the critic” (The Limits 182). In short, the encyclopedic novel may provide a more comparative pathway to an American hemisphere that speaks in multiple tongues and looks from different vantage points as expressed through its different literatures. With a capacious historical vision to match its maximalist form, the genre has the potential to mobilize a hemispheric gathering of voices within and beyond its fictional worlds. Written in the three official European languages of North America, the novels of Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko project different sociopolitical visions according to differences in region, nation, and culture. Nevertheless, they are all concerned with colonial foundations for connecting the hemisphere. These archival works privilege history, and underscore the importance of contemporary recuperations inside their own formidable dimensions; for, unlike artificial reconstructions of the past in historical fictions ranging from Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (United States, 1826) to John Richardson’s Wacousta (Canada, 1832) to Alencar’s Iracema (Brazil, 1865), the novels I analyze overlap multiple time frames in order to dramatize and problematize their own temporal and transhemispheric migrations from contemporary to colonial worlds. This chronotopic entanglement reveals that, although the archive once invented America in line with a pattern described by O’Gorman in The Invention of America: An Enquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History, it now forms the common inheritance of New World authors.37 Although one may safely assume that Melville is a common source, I have found no indication in my research that the three authors in my study read each other’s work. Yet parallels in the absence of a direct link strengthen the case for what Kutzinski calls an academic “New World writing” paradigm that privileges a “comparative” and “cross-cultural perspective” (Against 11). To this end, America Unbound extends González Echevarría’s seminal thesis to a hemispheric level, further complicating the notion that the Archive is (1) Hispanocentric (thus excluding British and French traditions of colonial recordkeeping, and its modern redeployment by authors from those cultures), and (2) based

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solely on alphabetic writing (which neglects what Walter Mignolo calls “colonial semiosis,” an alternate literacy for reading Amerindian visual artifacts). Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko connect three major waves of monetary and multicultural expansionism in the Americas: the sixteenth-century colonial era (which created an Atlantic commercial circuit through the mines and plantations of the New World), the nineteenth-century age of industrialization (which was an engine of parallel national developments), and twentiethcentury globalization (in which the United States became the hemispheric superpower). This return to the colonial world and to a single continent disrupts fundamental assumptions about the centrality and independence of nations, regions, and cultures and favors instead a polycentric, interdependent, and global America. No doubt, this literary salvaging of a more malleable geography and geopolitical terrain (wherein explorers worked under different flags and wrote documents in several languages) is largely a reflection of the cultural logic of present-day migrations under globalization. Yet, in framing contemporary concerns that span national borders from the pre-Columbian era to the present, the masterful novels of Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko also revive a long-standing hemispheric history that is more than a symptom of present conditions.38 Thus, a primary aim of this book is to explore the resuscitation of colonial currents within contemporary cultures by treating the new—but, as I see it, more profound and historically conscious—definitions of “America” posited by insightful literary artifacts. Of course, one must be wary of overstating transnationalism at the expense of the lived realities of nations, as well as local resistance to imperialism (both foreign and domestic) within the hemisphere. During the postwar era in question, the Americas stood divided. In its rise to a global superpower, the United States sought to “contain” communism in Latin America by helping to install right-wing dictatorships amenable to US business interests. It did this through training programs, most notoriously as executed by the US Army School of the Americas, now the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The Army School’s “scholarly” practices were nowhere more egregious than in the remaking of Central America into US-dependent “banana republics.” The US venture into the war in Vietnam was likewise a lone affair, as Canada and Latin America remained neutral. I thus concur with Winfried Siemerling’s suggestion that “[w]hile North American perspectives can bring national

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cultures in relational view where otherwise they may not be seen or heard, they offer genuine differentiation mostly where they work ‘through’ particular and distinct contexts . . . includ[ing] national ones” (2). In this first chapter, we have seen how Melville inaugurates an encyclopedic novel tradition shaped by New World paradigms of encounters, and especially by representations of monsters and marvelous geographies in colonial documents. In the second chapter, I argue that Fuentes’s Terra Nostra reactivates a violent and fantastical archive in order to contextualize the 1970s rise of dictatorships in Latin America. My title, “From Terra Incognita to Terra Nostra: Carlos Fuentes’s Reinvention of America” signals a transformative neobaroque process through which the hemisphere first invented by European imperialists yields to an ampler, but also increasingly unmoored, New World identity. The third chapter, “Jacques Poulin’s Archival Pathways: Volkswagen Blues as Discovery Chronicle” examines how travel and border crossing in the novel reflects the cultural broadening of French Canadian fiction in the wake of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Within intersecting vignettes that highlight a long continuum of hemispheric traversals, Poulin links sixteenth-century French explorers to nineteenth-century US frontiersmen, as well as to the 1980s Francophone road novel. My fourth chapter, “Leslie Marmon Silko’s Council Book: Hemispheric Forces in Almanac of the Dead” examines how, on the eve of 1992, the Laguna Pueblo author forges a bulwark to global capitalism by linking Pueblo prophecy to the Popol Vuh, and to Maya pictographic and hieroglyphic traditions more generally. In ways that expand Bolton’s historiography to include hemispheric indigenous perspectives, Silko forges a vision of land solidarity to upset the Columbian legacy of cartographic divisions. By synthesizing writings and visual documents usually read within separate national contexts, and by identifying a multifaceted poetics based on the colonial inheritance of New World writers, this study advances a comparative and multilingual approach to American literatures. My aim is not to provide a comprehensive survey of big hemispheric novels, but rather to interpret a constellation of major works by major writers that, in imitation of the New World discourses they incorporate, assume encyclopedic shapes that reform our cultural, linguistic, and geographic understanding of America. I am especially interested in how a renewed comparative American studies can emerge from the insights of imaginative, but historically aware, encyclopedic fiction. In this way, I seek to avoid an academic version of US hemispheric interventionism as it began with the Monroe Doctrine and

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returned, most recently, in the guise of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). To this end, my fifth chapter, “Greater America in the Classroom: Comparative Literature, Theory, and Praxis” returns to Bolton’s pedagogical contributions through a practical discussion of how I have integrated an inter-American platform at the University of Mary Washington, where I was hired to establish, and teach in, a literature of the Americas curriculum a decade ago. I discuss textual selections, pairings, and strategies for an undergraduate literature survey ranging from the pre-Columbian period to the present, and highlight the challenges of teaching the Americas comparatively. At a moment when the humanities are striving to justify their place within higher education, I define a newly coherent American object of study in relation to recent debates on the role of comparative literature in the context of the global. Since there are few such courses in existence, it is my hope that the chapters that follow will incite interest in a neo-Boltonian paradigm, and in the scholarship and teaching facilitated when America goes unbound.

Ch a p t er 2

From Terra Incognita to Terra Nostra Carlos Fuentes’s Reinvention of America

}

In a 2004 lectur e at Yale U niversity titled “Globalization:

Pros and Cons,” Mexican author Carlos Fuentes identified three paradigms of capitalism that had a modernizing effect on nation-state economies. A “first globalization,” he argued, arose with the European Renaissance. At this time, maritime explorers facilitated an imperial trading network that led to an economic imbalance. This access route established a “reality without a legality” that set in motion the plundering of the New World. A “second globalization,” he claimed, found its fullest expression through the Industrial Revolution. Bolstered by technological efficiency to control material production, it nevertheless created conditions whereby hunger and sickness “plagued the emerging industrial working class.” According to Fuentes, our own modernity constitutes a “third globalization.” This one features a network of information technologies and threatens to “leave behind forever the countries unable to keep up” (qtd. in Levine-Gronningsater 3). In order to heighten awareness of a lopsided world economy, Fuentes traces the poverty rift to independent modules that, while they follow the same dictates of capital accumulation, are not bound spatially or temporally. Rather than observing a developmental or incremental model where one stage flows into the next, Fuentes identifies three socioeconomic forces that surface at different times but continue to overlap one another. Read alongside his fiction, which most notably explores the ruptures and continuities 38

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between ancient and modern Mexico, his three paradigms of expansionism are part of a flexible design that allows Fuentes to connect the impact of market-driven modernizations to the psychological effects of the European conquest. He voices concern for this enduring New World pattern in the prologue to Todos los gatos son pardos (1970; All Cats are Gray), his play about the Spanish toppling of the Aztec Empire: “Mientras México no liquide el colonialismo, tanto el extranjero como el que algunos mexicanos ejercen sobre y contra millones de mexicanos, la conquista seguirá siendo nuestro trauma y pesadilla históricos: la seña de una fatalidad insuperable y de una voluntad frustrada” (9; So long as Mexico does not liquidate colonialism, foreign as well as that which some Mexicans exercise over and against millions of Mexicans, the Conquest will continue to be our trauma and historical nightmare: the sign of an insurmountable fatality and of a frustrated will). During Fuentes’s lifetime, the historical continuum of colonialism, and the need for decolonization, structured a literary and critical output that reflects, and contests, repeating waves of economic and spiritual conquest in the Americas, from the pre-Columbian age to the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I explore how Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975) dramatizes a tripartite globalism with colonial violence as a constant, a connection that exemplifies the subversive coupling of the encyclopedic novel with the New World archive. A literary triptych, the novel inquires into the Mediterranean and indigenous legacies of the Western Hemisphere through a series of flashbacks and multi-authored narratives that interweave “El Viejo Mundo” (The Old World) of sixteenth-century Spain (Part I), “El Nuevo Mundo” (The New World) of pre-Hispanic America (Part II), and “El Otro Mundo” (The Other World) of transatlantic hybridity (Part III). Fuentes explores Spain’s transformation from a medieval state of Christians, Jews, and Muslims to an insular empire that captured hemispheric terrains even as it rejected many of the social and political benefits of Renaissance globalism. He lays bare the cultural origins of Hispanic America by tracing the impact of the Counter-Reformation, which, according to Fuentes, “destruyó la oportunidad moderna, no sólo para España, sino para sus colonias” (La nueva novela 31; destroyed the modern opportunity, not only for Spain, but for its colonies). Terra Nostra incorporates fundamental texts of Latin American history and culture. Fuentes’s characters inhabit the Spanish Golden Age literary myths of La Celestina, Don Quijote, and Don Juan. These stories brush shoulders with the exploration accounts of the Indies, the chronicles of the

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conquest of Mexico, and the Aztec codices. Fuentes, who finished writing Terra Nostra while living in Washington, DC, on the eve of the US bicentennial (1974–1975), also inserts Anglophone sources into this medley. Among these is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which the author called “la más extraordinaria obra creada por la literatura norteamericana del siglo XIX” (Casa 34; the most extraordinary work of nineteenth-century North American literature). Through Melville, Terra Nostra intertwines the era of colonial monsters with that of US industrial expansion, thus unearthing a long line of hemispheric conquests that impact “third globalization.” The New World archive transforms radically a celebrated novel that was still being read in exclusive US canonical terms in the 1970s. Terra Nostra conjoins the fates of the Roman Empire, Renaissance Spain, pre-Columbian America, the industrial United States, and modern Latin America and Europe. Fuentes paints an encyclopedic canvas of cultural, linguistic, textual, and historical interactions across global contexts, thereby challenging modern Mexico’s nationalist and racialist creeds as celebrated by state proponents of mestizaje. Through a counterintuitive measure, the author revives colonial fantasies of monsters (European and indigenous) as the platform for an ampler neomestizaje. Seeking an alternative to the legacy of Spanish totalitarianism, and to Western modernity more generally, Fuentes returns to a seventeenth-century tradition of cultural amalgamation. Yet, even as he embraces cross-pollination through a New World baroque, Fuentes wrestles with a parallel ontological rupture that stretches across the three ages of globalization. In Terra Nostra, Fuentes complicates identity politics by linking history and fiction across the Atlantic and up and down the hemisphere. As such, the author replaces Mexican rootedness with a more cosmopolitan, and more fragmented, Latin American self.

The Boom and Baroque Recuperation In Historia personal del «boom» (1972; Personal History of the “Boom”), Chilean writer José Donoso chronicles the Latin American literary movement that saw the first major works by Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The author notes that the Latin American Boom marked the rise of an international consciousness among authors who had previously worked within traditions that they saw as separate from, and even in rivalry with, foreign literatures (including those from neighboring

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Hispanic countries). Turning away from regionalism, these pioneers were able to “inventar un idioma más amplia y más internacional” (Donoso 47; invent a more ample and international language). Their articulation of a shared Latin American reality through new forms of expression was aided by a transnational publishing industry. The works-in-progress of Boom authors appeared in venues such as the Spanish-language literary magazine Mundo Nuevo, which was founded by the Uruguayan intellectual Emir Rodríguez Monegal in 1966, published in Paris, and sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The Boom was a period of intense cultural exchange that made the Latin American movement more hemispheric. As Deborah Cohn notes, although the Boom held the spirit of the Cuban Revolution in common, its publication and translation circuits, and its use of inter-American funding sources, was often at odds with US Cold War policies of containment (The Latin American). At the same time, the Boom revived the cultural politics of the baroque to contest local oligarchies, many of which were backed by the US military industrial complex even as Gregory Rabassa completed his most celebrated translations of Latin American literature into English. On a more global scale, it was shaped by French theorists of postmodernism and poststructuralism while Fuentes and other exiled and expatriated writers resided abroad, particularly in Paris during the 1960s. The Boom’s formal experimentation was influenced by James Joyce, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, and other modernist authors, but also the first modern novel, Don Quijote (1605–1615). Donoso contends that Fuentes was “el primer agente activo y consciente de la internacionalización de la novela hispanoamericana de la década de los años sesenta” (49; the first active and conscious agent of the internationalization of the Hispanic American novel of the 1960s), thus serving as the prime catalyst for Latin America’s intellectual awakening to more hemispheric and global currents. Born in Panama City to a Mexican diplomat family, Fuentes grew up in South America and the United States before attending college in Mexico City. His international background shaped his worldview, and he divided his time between Europe and the Americas until his death in 2012. While a cosmopolitan polyglot, Fuentes remained profoundly concerned with Latin America’s indigenous history, the legacy of the European conquest, and the intellectual’s struggle for social justice. In 1955, he cofounded the journal Revista Mexicana de Literatura in an effort to foster a universal platform for Mexican literature beyond the bucolic images created by the previous

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generation of writers, muralists, and filmmakers. From his short-story collection Los dias enmascarados (1954; The Masked Days) and his first novel La región más transparente (1958; Where the Air is Clear), which spearheaded a shift from rural to urban themes in Mexican literature, Fuentes approaches history and ideology in ways that reflect an unstable and multilayered reality, not a world in which politics dictate the role of the author. Fuentes opposed the utilitarian rigidity of littérature engagée (committed writing) as pronounced in Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” (1948; What is Literature?), and embraced by many Latin American intellectuals committed to the aims of the Cuban Revolution. Beginning with La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969; The New Hispanic American Novel), his literary criticism dismisses the documentary and anthropological bent of the novela de la tierra (novel of the land) which, from the Colombian llano to the Argentine pampas, advanced regionalist and ethnocentric visions of progress. Fuentes also denounced indigenista themes as primitivist. Rather than romanticize pre-Hispanic Mexico, he aligned himself with Juan Rulfo, Luis Buñuel, José Luis Cuevas, and other vanguard artists who provided multifaceted perspectives on modernity. In 1968, Fuentes joined Octavio Paz, Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Monsiváis, and other Mexican authors in denouncing the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; formerly the PNR) for its massacre of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City. The killings occurred just days before Mexico was set to host the Summer Olympics. In a letter to Donoso from later that year, Fuentes places the event into a Mesoamerican cycle of government tyranny. He invokes the Aztec god of war and characterizes the atrocity as a testament to “the resurrected kingdom of Huitzilipochtli” (qtd. in Van Delden 225). Taking a long view of the Conquest, within a particular chapter in Terra Nostra (“Día de la fuga” [Day of Flight]), Fuentes positions the 1968 carnage alongside the massacres led by Hernán Cortés at the central plaza in Cholula in 1519 and by Pedro de Alvarado at the Templo Mayor in 1520, as well as the final defeat of the Aztecs in Tlatelolco in 1521. The dazzling and intersecting images translate the visual breadth of a Diego Rivera mural. Furthermore, Fuentes’s play Todos los gatos son pardos features a scene in which Mexican soldiers gun down a student who had appeared earlier as a sacrificial victim of the Aztecs. The Tlatelolco debacle exposed the increased corruption of the PRI, which had enjoyed the support of intellectuals since the rise of Mexican

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muralism. More profoundly, it cast doubts on the so-called milagro mexicano (Mexican miracle) as a model of economic growth for the developing nations of Latin America. In retrospect, the worldwide student and worker protests of 1968 (the Mexico City affair being the bloodiest) were a testament to a global economic crisis that would characterize much of the 1970s. Across the Americas, geopolitics brought nations together through conflict rather than cooperation. The turbulent times saw the rise of dictatorships in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, and Peru. As part of its fight against communism, the United States trained counterinsurgent armies to topple populist uprisings that threatened free-market capitalism, thus helping to install, and later to preserve, Central and South America’s authoritarian regimes. Within Mexico, US hemispheric bullying exacerbated lingering ill feelings over the US-Mexican War—to this day referred to as the “Intervención Estadounidense” (US Intervention). The tension even recalled President Lázaro Cárdenas’s testing of the US “Good Neighbor” policy through the nationalization of Mexican oil in 1938. During this time, Fuentes resisted absolutism by combining experimental and politically conscious writing. For his 1967 road novel, Cambio de piel (A Change of Skin), Fuentes sought a collective and personal expression that struggled with “un conflicto mío no resuelto, una adhesión intelectual esquizoide” (qtd. in Miguel Ullán 12; an unresolved conflict of mine, a schizoid intellectual adherence), which struggles between “la visión marxista” (the Marxist vision) and “la visión nietzscheana” (the Nietzschean vision). The “Bibliografía Conjunta” (Joint Bibliography) that concludes his critical treatise Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura (1976; Cervantes or the Critique of Reading) conveys this predilection for aperture over closure, and for interrelating fiction and nonfiction. A “bibliografía gemela de ambas obras” (twin bibliography of both works), the list reveals the extent of his engagement with Don Quijote (which Cervantes wrote during “first globalization”), while also linking the Spanish compendium to Terra Nostra (which Fuentes penned during “third globalization”) (Cervantes 113ff.). The bibliography merges different historical time frames, and offers a key to both Spanishlanguage novels. It includes books by Hispanic and Anglophone intellectuals (such as Ángel María Garibay and Harry Levin, respectively), Western canonical authors (Erasmus, Dostoevsky, and Joyce), chroniclers of New Spain, (Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and Bernardino de Sahagún), and French theorists (Georges Bataille, Hélène Cixous, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida).

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Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura serves as a companion piece. It, and Terra Nostra, “nacen de impulses paralelos y obedecen a preocupaciones comunes” (Cervantes 113ff; are born of parallel impulses and obey common preoccupations). In the essay, Fuentes analyzes how Cervantes’s self-­ reflexivity overturns a medieval worldview. As is the case with Terra Nostra— in which Don Quijote figures as a character and Cervantes appears as “El Cronista” (The Chronicler, a surrogate for Fuentes himself)—Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura displays a sensibility inherited from Renaissance perspectivalism, but also from modern theorists and writers, many of whom are indebted to the autoreflexive, densely allusive, and micro-encyclopedic fictions of Borges.1 Like Cervantes, Borges, and others, Fuentes sought to revise skewed epistemologies, in his case those originating with the Spanish chroniclers and missionaries who imposed doctrines of church and state on the Americas during La Conquista. The integration of Don Quijote, which mixed and revitalized the Spanish language and the literary genres of early modern Spain (pastoral, epic, chivalric romance, picaresque, Moorish novel), suggests a parallel ambition to make Terra Nostra (“Our Land” in Latin) into an encyclopedic masterwork to critique Iberian history, and to redefine a New World identity. In retrospect, we might say that Terra Nostra is the magnum opus of Felipe Montero, the young protagonist-historian of Fuentes’s novella Aura (1962). Montero was then planning a “gran obra de conjunto sobre los descubrimientos y conquistas espanõlas en América. Una obra que resuma todas las crónicas dispersas, las haga inteligibles, encuentre las correspondencias entre todas las empresas y aventuras del siglo de oro, entre los prototipos humanos y el hecho mayor del Renacimiento” (33; great conjoining work on the Spanish discoveries and conquests in America. A work that synthesizes all of the dispersed chronicles, makes them intelligible, finds the correspondences between all the enterprises and adventures of the Golden Age, between the human archetypes and the major deeds of the Renaissance). In Terra Nostra, which once bore the title “Renacimiento” (qtd. in Peden 11; Renaissance), the longing for personal redemption that steered La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz), Fuentes’s archetypal novel about the Mexican Revolution, would yield to a 783-page “novela total”—a Hispanist version of the encyclopedic novel—to highlight centuries of panatlantic and inter-American interactions. J. Ann Duncan claims that the genre “expresses the exuberance, savagery, and hyperbole of Latin America, the diversity of its cultures, [and] the immensity of its landscapes” (14). The

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total novel forms “a patchwork quilt of cultural and political invasions over the centuries, each transforming but not abolishing the previous society, so that reality is everchanging and multifaceted” (Duncan 15). While several scholars (Oviedo; Anderson; Juan-Navarro) have read Terra Nostra as an encyclopedic masterwork, none of them has linked encyclopedism to the Spanish baroque.2 In a New World context, however, Fuentes heeds the imperatives of the “novela total” by bringing a global sensibility to aid his revivification of the baroque, and to pollute the legacy of La Conquista in Terra Nostra. In the Spanish and Portuguese dominions of the New World, the baroque served as an instrument of legislative power that Jesuits used to convert Native populations. The latter, however, redirected and even subverted its purpose, as Christian baptism (sometimes done en masse by the thousands) did not guarantee spiritual submission. Most conspicuously, the iconography on church facades and altarpieces that were designed by Andean master José Kondori and the Brazilian mulatto architect Antônio Francisco Lisboa (known as “Aleijadinho”) also served pre-Iberian deities. Because the baroque relied on the religious syncretism of European, Amerindian, and African elements, it imbued the art and architecture of Latin America with a unique transcultural character. With respect to Mexico, Serge Gruzinski claims that “si les Indiens de la Nouvelle-Espagne cherchèrent à se conformer à des modèles imposés, ce fut toujours en inventant des accommodements, des ‘combinaisons’ (dans tous les sens du terme) qui prirent les forms les plus diverses” (367–68; if the Indians of New Spain were looking to conform to imposed models, it was always through the invention of accommodations, of “combinations” [in every sense of the term] which took the most diverse of forms). Perhaps the multiracial portraits of the New World Virgin—including Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe, Cuba’s Virgin of Charity, and Venezuela’s Virgin of Coromoto—constitutes the apotheosis of this cultural mestizaje as a mode of survival that fuses (and, in equal measure, confuses) Latin America. Terra Nostra relies on a baroque combination of texts that have become part of the register of Latin American identity. To compensate for a sense of failure in history, the novel is infused with a linguistic passion that Fuentes (La gran novela, 56) calls “el barroco doloroso del Nuevo Mundo” (the painful baroque of the New World). In El espejo enterrado (1992; The Buried Mirror), a cultural history of Latin America released to coincide with the Columbian quincentenary, Fuentes praises the baroque’s “carácter

Figure 2.1. New World baroque, Iglesia de San Lucas, Tzicatlán (mid-eighteenthcentury facade), Puebla, Mexico.

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circular . . . que exige puntos de vista determinados por el desplazamiento y rehúsa darle a nada ni a nadie un punto de vista privilegiado” (291; circular character . . . that demands points of view determined by displacement and refuses to give anything or anyone a privileged point of view). He cele­ brates the baroque’s “afirmación del cambio perpetuo; su conflicto entre el mundo ordenado de los pocos y el mundo desordenado de los muchos” (El espejo 291; affirmation of perpetual change; its conflict between the ordered world of the few and the disordered world of the many). More specifically, Fuentes follows Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy in updating the seventeenth-century baroque into a self-conscious, and contestatory, neobaroque (or New World baroque).3 In La nueva novela hispanoamericana, the author embraces a polysemous discourse to deconstruct the claims of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, and particularly its “larga historia de mentiras, silencios, retóricas y complicidades académicas” (30; long history of lies, silences, academic rhetoric and complicities). According to Fuentes, Latin American writers in the 1970s were in need of “un nuevo lenguaje” (La nueva 30; a new language) committed to the “[p]rofanación y contaminación de una retórica sagrada” (profanation and contamination of a sacred rhetoric). Only through cultural heresy could authors reclaim valuable texts and perspectives outlawed by Spain, and by the neocolonial and dictatorial regimes that followed suit in the Hispanic republics. In Terra Nostra, Fuentes combines sacred and profane into a neobaroque “nuevo lenguaje,” an anticolonial poetics of the New World.

The Perils of “El Nuevo Mundo” King Felipe II (called “El Señor) is the most complex character in Terra Nostra; yet he epitomizes the ignorance, fear, and prejudice that Fuentes struggles against as a neobaroque writer. Through such a characterization, Fuentes would seem to adopt some of the less savory aspects of the black legend; still, he surpasses such a heavy-handed account by imbuing Felipe with the same intelligence and tragic humanity found in his archetypal Mexican patriarch, Artemio Cruz. The escalating woes of Felipe’s life dominate part 1 of the novel, but he accrues flawed historical personages throughout the course of the narrative, including the Roman emperor Tiberius and the Spanish Kings Philip II and Charles V (the latter of which ruled the first, and the biggest, of modern empires). According to Fuentes, Felipe also

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embodies a range of Hispanic despots that are the basis for Latin America’s biographical “dictator novel” (qtd. in Faris, Carlos 152). Since the Mexican author explores the tradition’s roots within the Iberian Peninsula, a likely target of his is—aside from Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Jorge Rafael Videla (Argentina), Artur da Costa e Silva (Brazil), and perhaps even Richard Nixon (United States)—the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who died the same year that Terra Nostra was published. In Fuentes’s reinvention, the king is at the center of a perverse family drama that unravels the iron fist of Spanish machismo and despotism. Felipe abides by principles of Christian chastity and is unwilling, or unable, to produce an heir with Queen Isabela (“La Señora,” a composite of his real-life brides Mary of England, Maria Manuela of Portugal, Elisabeth of France, and Anne of Austria). In accordance with his faith-based fanaticism, the king also suffers from cosmographical anxieties. In a long soliloquy that disavows all thought of “El Nuevo Mundo,” he misapplies medieval allegory to a flourishing Renaissance world: nononono, España cabe en España, ni una pulgada más de tierra, todo aqui, todo dentro de mi palacio, alíviame, Señor Mío, Dios y Hombre Verdadero, mírame postrado de vuelta ante tu altar de misterios, óyeme esta vez, contéstame esta vez, asegúrame que cuanto existe en la materia y el alma del mundo ya está contenido en este mi palacio, la razon de mi vida, la duplicación de cuanto existe, encerrado aquí, conmigo, para siempre, yo el último, yo sin descendencia, aquí en este reducido espacío, aquí a mi mano, todo, todo, todo, no en una extensión sin límite, inalcanzable, multiplicada, el mundo se me escapa de las manos, vida breve, gloria eterna, mundo inmóvil, aquí, no me cabe una idea más, un terror más, una alegría más, un desafío más, todo, aquí, todo cercado por los muros de mi mausoleo, aquí el lujo, aquí el duelo, aquí la guerra del alma, el arte, fray Julián, la ciencia, fray Toribio, el poder, Guzmán, el honor, Madre mía, la perversión, el juego y el placer, Señora mía, el amor, Inés, tu propio proyecto de salud eterna y redención humana, Cristo Salvador, aquí, ubicado, fijado, contenido, comprensible, destilado en sus esencias finales, aquí el bien, y el mal, y el juicio final de cuanto es . . .

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nonononono, Spain fits within Spain, not one additional inch of land, everything here, everything within my palace, alleviate me, my Lord, God, and True Man, see me once again prostrate before your altar of mysteries, hear me this time, answer me this time, assure me that everything that exists in the material and spiritual world is already contained here within my palace, my reason for living, the duplication of everything that exists enclosed here with me forever, I, the last I, with no descendants, here in this reduced space with everything within reach of my hand, everything, everything, everything, not in a limitless extension, unreachable, multiplied, the world escapes my hands, brief life, eternal glory, unchanging world, here, I cannot fit another terror, another joy, another challenge, everything here, everything enclosed within the walls of my mausoleum, here luxury, pain, here the war of the soul, art, Brother Julián, science, Brother Toribio, power, Guzmán, honor, my mother, perversion, game, and pleasure, my Señora, love, Inés, and your own plan of eternal health and human redemption, Christ Savior, here located, fixed, contained, comprehensible, distilled in its final essences, here good, evil, and the final judgment of everything that is . . . (501) Equal parts Augustinian supplication and schizoid rambling, Felipe’s prayer is obsessed with containment (“todo”), and with arresting the course of time. Unlike his right-hand man Gúzman, an Iago-like villain who dreams of regicide and later becomes a conquistador, the king foreshadows the seventeenth-century decline of the Spanish Habsburgs. Through a single run-on sentence, Fuentes paints a monarch unable to adapt to a bourgeoning “first globalization.” Felipe laments his inability to treat the world through all-encompassing categories; his cognitive bearings under duress, he embraces familiar substitutes for a reality too vast for mental accommodation. Another continent amounts to an excess of difference, a daunting terra incognita beyond Spain’s geographical and epistemological boundaries. Its peoples and territories form an inexhaustible otherness (“una extensión sin límite, inalcanzable, multiplicada”) that threatens sanity, the divine right of kings, and, ultimately, the purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) that fueled Spain’s post-Reconquista campaign to distinguish, and discriminate among, old Christians (cristianos viejos) and the new Muslim and Jewish converts (conversos). Haunted by the weight of the past and intolerant of the

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racial and cultural mestizaje that he rightly foresees in the future, Felipe reaffirms a medieval religious and political order (Fuentes’s aforementioned “world of the few”) that denies the disorder of the Renaissance (the“world of the many”). During the early modern period, America shattered the tripartite model of the universe that medieval cosmographers had based on Old Testament doctrine. Felipe considers the metaphysical impact of a fourth continent when he laments before Guzmán: “Si el mundo nuevo descrito por ese muchacho y el nuevo universo por ti descrito son reales, entonces son inmensos y fatalmente empequeñecen a los hombres y al Dios que los creó” (502; If the new world described by that youth and the new universe described by you are real, then they are immense and fatally diminish men and the God who created them). Along with the revolutionizing of the cosmos, the enterprise of the Indies transformed Europe from a feudalist economy into one centered on mercantile exchange. This shift to modernity, and to an incipient mode of global capitalism, was based on converting Amerindian and African labor into gold and silver for European enrichment, but it also meant that the Old World would absorb the New, thus creating hybridized versions of itself (Nueva España, Nouvelle France, New England). This adjustment of Eurocentric paradigms in light of an expanding globe—and a requisite degree of racial and cultural mixture—is the unwitting consequence of colonial encounters across the Americas. Given his intellectual timidity, however, Felipe cannot face America with an open or even legislative mind. Instead, he hides in his moribund castle and rejects the planetary scheme, concluding that “si el mundo nuevo existe, debe ser destruido” (505; if the new world exists, then it must be destroyed). El Escorial palace is the foil to America’s uncontainable vitality, as it evokes funereal containment and is, in the estimation of the court’s artist-priest Fray Julián, “una semblanza perfecta de la muerte” (308; a perfect semblance of death). In El espejo enterrado, Fuentes calls the historical El Escorial “el primero y el mayor monumento arquitectónico de la contrarreforma” (231; the first and the biggest architectural monument of the Counter-Reformation). Aesthetically, it is an unadorned neoclassical structure that was based primarily on the medieval monastery. Philip II hired Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera as its two principal architects, and oversaw its construction himself from 1563 to 1584. The king financed it with funds gathered from the Indies (hence, in Terra Nostra, the fortress is an anachronistic symbol of Felipe’s devotion to a cult of death). Although

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Phillip II erected El Escorial to commemorate the Spanish victory over the French in Saint Quentin in 1557, it served as a holy sepulcher for Charles V and the rest of the Habsburg deceased, and as a steadfast symbol of Catholic orthodoxy during the spread of the Protestant Reformation.4 In Terra Nostra, Fuentes shows Spain losing the religious war by having the exiled Isabela (in the guise of Elizabeth Tudor) instruct England on how to better colonize the Americas. For Fuentes, the royal palace is a necropolis that stifles the healthy growth of Spain; it is Felipe’s perverse substitute for a legitimate heir. A totalitarian giant, El Escorial foreshadows dictatorships in Latin America and is, somewhat ironically, the antithesis of the giant novel that contains it.5 Felipe nevertheless relies on the divine logos of writing to sustain his decaying empire. In a passage that lampoons the fetishism of documentation in early modern Spain, the king claims that “nada existe realmente si no es consignado al papel, las piedras mismas de este palacio humo son mientras no se escriba su historia” (111; nothing really exists if it is not consigned to paper, the very stones of this palace are but smoke while its story is not written). A deranged neo-Platonist, the king sees the material world as the a priori manifestation of a transcendental grammar. Writing does not bring to mind an object or idea through a signifying chain. Rather, it is a supreme form beyond the “humo” (smoke) of appearances, a baroque trope of ephemerality. The incomplete El Escorial bothers the monarch, as he fears that its apertures will thwart scriptural containment itself. Unless his workers weld each one of its bricks firmly into place, writing is not fit to reproduce, solidify, or salvage the structure from its material lifespan. Yet the new Gutenberg press (which, historically, was more than a hundred years old at the time of Philip II) distresses Felipe to no end: “¿de qué servían estos triunfos . . . si la singularidad misma de las cosas y su permanencia, eterna en la página escrita, volvíanse propiedad de todos?” (611; what purpose would these triumphs serve . . . if the very singularity of things and their permanence, eternal on the written page, became the property of everyone?). Felipe realizes that the new technology plants the seed of insurrection by granting unofficial access to archival documents. To alleviate his anxiety, he concludes nonsensically that “[l]a legitimidad única es reflejo de la posesión del texto único” (611; the only legitimacy is the reflection of the possession of the unique text). Like the New World itself, the printing press undermines Habsburg rule by disseminating information that challenges the old system. This is the ultimate paradox of the archive: its regulatory mechanisms tend to preserve rather than purge; in its gathering of more and more texts to justify empire,

Figure 2.2. Old World fortress, Real Sitio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, sixteenth century, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain. © 2015 Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY.

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it builds a warehouse of writings open to reinterpretation by colonial subjects. This democratizing of monolithic order, and particularly of the colonial maps and manuscripts of the Conquest, mirrors Fuentes’s own decolonizing project in Terra Nostra. Part II of Terra Nostra comprises the oral testimony of Peregrino (Pilgrim), a shipwrecked youth modeled on the wandering protagonist of Luis de Góngora’s archetypal Spanish baroque poem Soledades (1623; Solitudes). The boy, one of triplet siblings, meets supernatural elements and overcomes a series of trials in America before washing onto the Iberian shore. Rendered in sixteenth-century Spanish prose, his narrative combines real and imagined events within threads that correspond to Mexico’s three principal cultures: the pre-Hispanic (through the fall of the deity Quetzalcoatl), the Spanish (through the invasion of Mexico-Tenochtitlan), and the Mexican (through the creation of a new mestizo race). The narrator of “El Nuevo Mundo,” the pilgrim figures as America’s first transatlantic author, one who combines European accounts of exploration with oral indigenous legends, as well as with chronicles of resistance borrowed from sixteenth-century manu­ scripts.6 His description of “la suprema unión de la fábula y la realidad” (466; the supreme union of fiction and reality) makes him an anachronous precursor to Fuentes, and to the magical realist and neobaroque authors of the Latin American Boom. Yet, like Christopher Columbus, the youth follows imperial protocols: Fuentes’s printed text of “El Nuevo Mundo” is the equivalent of Peregrino’s relación to King Felipe II—a piece of the New World archive, as it were, is in the reader’s hands. Primary sources for “El Nuevo Mundo” include the first two manuscripts in the archive: Columbus’s Diario (Diary) and his 1493 letter of “discovery.” Together, these texts established archetypal patterns in the literature of encounter: the perilous Atlantic crossing, the discovery of paradise in the distance, the first glimpse of bashful Amerindians, the vast flora and fauna of the New World, the claiming of territory for Europe and Christendom, the inhabitant’s belief that the visitors are descended from heaven, the trading of trifles for Indian gold, and the ethnographic detailing of life among the Natives. Fuentes reproduces such descriptions found in the letters, histories, and relaciónes of adventurers, clergymen, and chroniclers, while foregrounding sources for Spanish-Aztec contact: Cortés’s Cartas de relación (as a model for Gúzman’s epistle of conquest), Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (for Peregrino’s description of the marketplace at Tlatelolco), and Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva

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España (for the Aztec account of the meeting between Cortés as Peregrino and Moctezuma as the deity Tezcatlipoca).7 By preserving the content and form of these texts —including Columbus’s repetitive use of the word maravilla (marvel)—Fuentes traces the conquest of America to documents that circulated through a modern imperial bureaucracy. Antonio de Nebrija famously underscores the efficacy of this paper empire in the preface to his Gramatica de la lengua castellana (1492; Grammar of the Castilian Language), where, in the same year of Columbus’s landfall, the author reminds Queen Isabela that “siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio” (5; language has always been the handmaiden of empire). To depict the transatlantic voyage, Fuentes also integrates Anglophone seafaring and adventure stories, including William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (c. 1611; to describe a Caribbean storm), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1791; as a template for the shipwreck narrative), Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841; to depict a capsizing whirlpool), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899; to characterize a type of journey back in time). Tumbling dangerously upon the Sargasso Sea, the sailors survive an episode that also recalls Moby-Dick as belated literature of exploration.8 Here, the men are startled by the tail of a “fiera bestia que . . . agitaba las aguas tranquilas” (fierce beast that . . . agitated the tranquil waters). They soon behold the “fauces de irisadas carnes” (jaws of iridescent flesh) and how the monster was “revolcándose, hundiéndose, disparándose otra vez fuera del mar” (365; thrashing about, diving, and reemerging violently from the sea). The spasms turn the ship into an “almadía sin gobierno, azotada por el oleaje cada vez más alto, agitado y sin concierto que engendraba el leviatán” (ungovernable raft, whipped by the agitated, unceasing, and ever-higher waves that the leviathan engendered). Fearing that “al pegarnos un zurriagón con la cola, nos hundiésemos, quebrados” (receiving one blow from the tail, we would sink, broken), they are relieved that “la nave estaba probando su buena hechura . . . y no se dejaba anegar” (366; the ship was proving its good construction . . . and did not allow itself to sink). The sailors soon realize that this buoyancy is owing to the “terrible combate que contra la ballena libraba un enorme peje vihuela . . . pugnando por herir el lomo espeso de la ballena y mostrando el hocico lleno de dientes muy fieros” (terrible combat that an enormous swordwish had unleashed against the whale . . . fighting to injure the whale’s thick hump and showing its snout full of fierce teeth). This clash of titans, which reinvents Melville’s legendary tale of shipwreck, presents a struggle in which “el pez jugaba su

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estoque de costado . . . arañando, rebanando la mejor defensa del leviatán . . . y buscando occasion de clavar la espada en el ojo arredrado del enemigo” (the fish played the side . . . of his rapier, scratching, cutting the leviathan’s best defense . . . and seeking the opportunity to plunge his sword into the frightened eye of the enemy). In the end, rather than assail the Spanish boat, the swordfish and the whale consummate their embrace through an eroticized deathblow: “contra la ballena ensañase el peje su espada, y no contra nuestra barca, pues habría traspasado la banda y entrado dentro un palmo, como ahora, con un movimiento imprevisto . . . el peje vihuela hería a fondo el ojo de la ballena y en él se clavaba con el gusto y la medida natural de macho clavado en hembra” (366; the fish was directing his sword against the whale and not against our ship, for he could have pierced our bulwarks and entered a handsbreadth deep, as now, with an unforeseen movement . . . the swordfish wounded the whale’s eye to a great depth and penetrated it with the same gusto and to the same natural length that the male penetrates the female). A sexualized American savagery threatens to capsize the ship of discovery and the colonial enterprise for which it stands. Yet, by referencing and then redirecting the sinking of the would-be Pequod, Peregrino bypasses the death and destruction found at the conclusion of Melville’s novel; in this version, the whale struggles against a parasitic and predatory swordfish that is the more terrifying killer. Placed into a panatlantic seafaring context, the doomed ship, Melville’s symbol of US industrial enterprise, survives within the pages of Terra Nostra. US and Latin American scholars have overlooked this hemispheric intertextuality, but Fuentes’s boat here fulfills a “manifest destiny” with a greater “American” significance. It merges Spanish and British American trajectories; for, through a striking anachronism, Fuentes suggests that the whaler’s nineteenth-century journey in Moby-Dick led to its contact with the New World three hundred years earlier. Ishmael’s sea narrative develops into Peregrino’s Age of Discovery relación within a contemporary novel that encompasses hemispheric maritime history. The neobaroque confluence of (neo)colonial times, literatures, and geographies implies that, from its embarkation at a New England seaport, the Pequod had always sought the American hemisphere symbolized by Melville’s leviathan. Fuentes’s three eras of modernity intersect here: “first globalization” (1492 reimagined as a sixteenth-century expedition), “second globalization” (the 1851 industrial context of Moby-Dick), and “third globalization” (the contemporary 1975 of Terra Nostra).

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Fuentes resuscitates a bestiary of the Indies in order to place his characters directly onto the pages of exaggerated colonial maps and reports. Rereading Moby-Dick through Fuentes’s doubly retrospective lens, one notes that such fantastical sea creatures recall European projections of monsters to account for America’s biological diversity. I am referring here to the aquatic monsters, bipeds, and boiling oceans that were a product of medieval cartographies printed and reprinted in compendia of voyages throughout the early modern period; these, in turn, reach back to sensationalistic travel narratives (real and apocryphal), such as Marco Polo’s Travels (thirteenth century) and Sir John Mandeville’s Travels (c. 1357), both of which Columbus possibly carried with him on his first voyage to the New World (Greenblatt 26). While European explorers used an Atlantic imaginary to inscribe America with a familiar outline, the images betray a fear of the unknown. Peregrino conveys this apprehension as he and his shipmate Pedro are tossed about by the Shakespearean tempest: “Veía la muerte en los azogues del mar e imaginaba un hirviente fin al derrumbarse sus aguas en la frontera misma del mundo” (375; I saw death in the quicksilver sea and I imagined a boiling death where the waters cascaded over the very frontier of the world). Although he longs to see what lies beyond, the youth fears unlimited expansion. In this passage, the dread of the sea inherited from the Middle Ages counteracts the plus ultra motto that Charles V invented in 1516 to encourage Spanish navigation beyond the Straits of Gibraltar (Rosenthal 204). In the course of his adventures ashore, Peregrino has a sexual encounter with La Señora de las Mariposas (The Lady of the Butterflies), which likewise references, and disrupts, the patriarchal foundations of the Conquest. The indigenous princess recalls allegorical depictions of a gendered fourth continent on maps and drawings, such as Giovanni Stradano’s America (ca. 1575), which depicts Amerigo Vespucci bringing the tidings of civilization to a nude, and sexually available, female.9 Yet La Señora de las Mariposas also shares attributes with Fuentes’s Celestina, and with Mesoamerican goddesses that incarnate a continual process of cosmic mutation. Early in the narrative, she recalls the goddess of beauty and fertility Xochiquetzal (Flower Feather), who has an avatar in Mayahuel (a goddess associated with the maguey plant). Later, she assumes the form of Tlazolteotl, the goddess of sin and sexual misdeeds. Still later, she takes the traditional guise of Celestina as an old Spanish sorceress. Bewitched, the pilgrim describes the butterfly princess as an “aparición de deslumbrante belleza y deslumbrante horror” (apparition of dazzling beauty and dazzling horror), and in possession of a

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“cuerpo bello y terrible” (412; beautiful and terrible body). Her simultaneous embodiment of creative and destructive properties also connects her to Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess who gave birth to the moon and the stars to guide humanity, but also spawned the god of the sun and war, Huitzilopochtli. Although Peregrino “goes native” with the indigenous sorceress before a burning temple (and she provides him with a map of “El Nuevo Mundo”), the Lady of the Butterflies also plays a central role in his banishment from that domain. Fuentes underscores the ambivalent sexual union of Europe and America, and establishes the foundation for the pair’s resurgence as the Adam and Eve of the “Next World” in part 3 of Terra Nostra. Following Edmundo O’Gorman’s argument in The Invention of America, we might say that Europeans invented America by imposing mental categories to overcome the danger embodied by the likes of La Señora de las Mariposas. As part of their efforts at usurpation, writers and artists represented both a prelapsarian utopia and a postlapsarian dystopia. As we have seen in chapter 1, colonial maps in particular depict the Western Hemisphere as exotic, alluring, and dangerous, and fill in America with recycled images of peoples, animals, and places drawn from classical mythology and chivalric romance. From the terrestrial paradise and the fountain of youth, to the New Jerusalem and El Dorado, explorers, missionaries, and cosmographers envisioned mythical places within the same spatial radius as giants, mermaids, and amazons. Many maps and globes situate the likes of Atlantis, the island of California, and the golden cities of Quivira and Cíbola alongside images of cannibals and sea monsters toppling ships laden with booty from the New World. As suggested by a painting such as Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1503–1504), which makes an appearance in Terra Nostra, America teased Europe with the promise of Edenic renewal. Yet it is equally clear that Europe saw the hemisphere as its degenerate opposite, an uncivilized hell better suited for Shakespeare’s Caliban, whose name is an anagram of the Spanish word canibal (cannibal).10 Such subhumans seethed with lust and a desire to thwart the Christian apostolic mission. Taking Satan’s sovereignty over the New World as a given, many Spanish chronicles channeled the spirit of the Reconquista and re­enacted the feats of knights slaying dragons. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra contends, in the wake of Spain’s victory over the Moors in 1492, the discovery of new “infidels”—particularly ones who worshiped monstrous deities calling for human sacrifice—cried out for the remaking of a pagan America. Interpreted as metaphysical allegories of good versus evil, the “just” wars to

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come would transform the likes of Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and John Smith into Christian martyrs. Fuentes further challenges such imperial constructs by injecting Nahua poetry (in Spanish translation) into the pilgrim’s narration. Most notably, in the chapter “La leyenda del anciano” (The Legend of the Elder), the youth serves as the mouthpiece for El Señor de la Gran Voz (The Lord of the Great Voice), the antithesis of the writing-obsessed “El Señor” of El Escorial. The elder foregrounds the oral tradition by transmitting a myth of origins that incorporates legends pertaining to the departure and return of Quetzalcoatl, as well as to the Fifth Sun, which the Aztecs believed required warfare and human sacrifice to prolong life on earth. Fuentes introduces this creation story by reproducing the short blocks of declarative sentences that characterize published renditions of sacred indigenous texts, such as the Quiché-Maya Popol Vuh. An archive of Native wisdom, the elder expounds on the role of memory, apocalypse, and cyclical regeneration in defiance of the linear chronology of Western industrial society. While El Señor de la Gran Voz initiates Peregrino into the Native community, the youth kills him accidentally by reflecting his image in a mirror given as tribute. Suggesting both communion and invasion, this exchange reinvents the mythic discord between the Aztec deities Tezcatlipoca (a god of war) and Quetzalcoatl (the principal god of culture and creation). At the end of his labors, Peregrino, who later recalls that “mis identidades se desparramaban y multiplicaban más allá de todo contacto con mi mínima razón humana” (my identities were spilling over and multiplying beyond all contact with the least bit of human reason), counteracts his role as destroyer by creating a mestizo race of children from bones found within a volcanic underworld (478). Soon, however, he enters Mexico-Tenochtitlan, where, in the guise of the conquering Cortés, he receives a warm reception from Tezcatlipoca as the Lord of the Smoking Mirror (a surrogate for the Aztec emperor Moctezuma, who, by most accounts, makes the fatal mistake of thinking Cortés is the returning Quetzalcoatl). Within an episode that fuses and reinvents indigenous myths of the drunken Quetzalcoatl fornicating with his sister and being banished to the East, Tezcatlipoca then tricks Peregrino by disguising himself as the Lady of the Butterflies. The youth’s hallucinatory adventure ends as he leaves for Europe on a serpent boat, a direction that prognosticates his return to Mexico as Cortés-Quetzalcoatl within a historical loop. Through the juxtaposition of languages, cultures, and literacies, Fuentes makes the figure of Peregrino the mediator between Europe and America;

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he is the protagonist of the Spanish chronicles of the Conquest while also living out a destiny that hybridizes at least four versions of the Quetzalcoatl myth.11 This plurality attests to a cultural amalgamation that precedes the New World arrival of the Spanish, a culture largely in denial about its Muslim and Jewish roots. Here and throughout Terra Nostra, Fuentes employs intertextuality as a literary neomestizaje that propels a neobaroque proliferation of selves. As suggested by his dual role as conqueror and cultivator, Peregrino embodies an internal rupture that is the hallmark of Latin American identity, and that results from what Peregrino calls the “terrible encuentro” (494; terrible encounter) between two worlds. This coexistence of multiple and contrapuntal parts within single characters, along with the promiscuous commingling of written and oral documents, creates a schism that serves as the precarious foundation for New World identity. For Fuentes, the collective, expansive, and asynchronous forms of the neobaroque makes it an ideal vehicle for exploring “nuestras dudas y nuestras ambigüedades” (El Espejo 280; our doubts and our ambiguities), and for grappling with “nuestra identidad mutante” (281; our mutating identity).

The Neobaroque Self: Hybrid Monsters / Monstrous Hybrids In Terra Nostra, Fuentes reconfigures the archive and expands characters across elastic and intersecting globalizations using a neobaroque technique that we might call “composite characterization.” It stems from a syncretizing of several traditions that nurture Fuentes’s writings: poststructuralist conceptions of selfhood, Faulkner’s sense of tragic repetition, a Latin American poetics of counterconquest, and Amerindian pantheons in which deities have multiple avatars in keeping with cyclical time.12 As Fuentes confirms in a fugue-like refrain within the novel, “Una vida no basta. Se necesitan múltiples existencias para integrar una personalidad. Toda identidad se nutre de otras” (619; One life does not suffice. Multiple existences are needed in order to integrate one personality. All identities feed upon others). The passage refers to a process, rather than to self-fulfillment (we never find out how many identities “se necesitan”). Fuentes’s most original contribution to literature is on full display in Terra Nostra: the creation of loaded characters that never stand alone. All personages carry the baggage of history and possess one or more alter egos that, in neobaroque fashion, merge story lines. Furthermore, because these “composite characters” live in physical, mental,

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and spiritual in-between orbits, their identities fluctuate between a salubrious plenitude and what Kimberle S. López calls an “anxiety of identification,” a process that “occurs in literary representations of intercultural contact: the fear of losing the self in the Other . . . the fear of becoming so closely identified with another individual or group so as to lose one’s own ego boundaries” (18). Fuentes has pioneered an art of imprecision in which the reader is unsure whether stories occur in the present, in the past, or in a third hypothetical space that resonates with the first two. The author created “composite characters” as early as Aura (where Aura/Consuelo bewitches Felipe). He reused the technique in Zona sagrada (1967; Holy Place), where the narrator Guillermo transforms into a dog. In Cambio de piel, two couples on a road trip switch sexual partners, and fuse physically and metaphorically. The identitarian displacement continues in Cumpleaños (1969; Birthday), where Georgie (a young boy), George (an old man), and Siger de Brabante (a thirteenth-century theologian) overlap within a fractured and dreamlike narrative. While Catherine Swietlicki has provided a detailed analysis of Fuentes’s mixed-up characters, no scholar I know of has explored how this neobaroque strategy challenges, and amplifies, the parameters of Mexican mestizaje. Terra Nostra exhibits the racial, cultural, and linguistic permutation of eighty or so overlapping characters, thus underscoring the unstable ontology of proliferating selves. In the dramatis personae that begins the book, Fuentes places them into the following categories: “los reyes” (the kings), “la corte” (the court), “los bastardos” (the bastards), “los soñadores” (the dreamers), “los mediterráneos” (the Mediterraneans), “los flamencos” (the Flemish), “los indios” (the Indians), and “los parisianos” (the Parisians). In the novel, the author expands this field of reference by disrupting one-to-one correspondences. By interweaving historical and literary personages that embody multitudes and/or repeatedly change skins, Fuentes uncovers the breeding ground for a Greater Americanism. Yet, because he also deconstructs the temporal and spatial coordinates of established histories, languages, and nations, this neomestizaje is equally a schizoid byproduct of the Conquest, as perilous as it is promising. Fuentes chronicles a legacy of mixing that ties characters to each other across worlds, but this also involves registering the shock waves of a colonial clash that engenders monstrous men of an indecipherable character. In particular, several personages in Terra Nostra fuse beauty (an aesthetic category of harmony) with monstrosity (an anti-aesthetic alterity that

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shatters traditional form). In “El Viejo Mundo,” for instance, the lonely Isabela decides to possess Peregrino sexually by copulating with Don Juan, one of the many characters with whom the youth combines. Afterward, she sees her body transformed into Peregrino’s, but fitted with the head of a mouse she once had intimate contact with on the floor of her bedroom. Isabela looks in a mirror (a baroque trope) and sees a “monstruosa belleza” (290; monstrous beauty). While the word belleza denotes aesthetic integrity, the word monstruosa, whose linguistic inflections reappear throughout the novel, stems from the Latin word monstrum and from its root monere (to warn). The word designates something as radically different and potentially harmful, for the monstruo commands attention because it is literally worthy of demostración (demonstration; a Spanish derivation). Its copious use throughout Terra Nostra, a novel upon which Fuentes once bestowed the Yeats-inspired working title “Una terrible belleza” (A Terrible Beauty), allows the author to deconstruct essentialist notions of a heterogeneous Latin American identity (qtd. in Peden 13). In this moment of grotesque gender and species interpenetration, the conjoining of beauty and monstrosity create proliferation, tension, and fluctuation. It is one of several metamorphoses that foreshadow the hermaphroditic monster born at the end of the novel, a neobaroque image of the indeterminate self, par excellence. Regina Janes aptly describes the neobaroque flowering at the end of Terra Nostra as the fruit of an “apocalyptic fornication” in which “[a] single character, who is at least five characters, makes love to another, who is at least two, and as they make love, they begin to merge and they keep merging” (265–66). The millennial coupling of Celestina and Polo Febo (a Parisian youth who becomes Peregrino after falling into the Seine) implies gestation and parturition and, by extension, New World mestizaje. Ironically, Celestina, the barren witch and procuress from Spanish literature is the catalyst for this regeneration. Fuentes recuperates the bawd as the first modern literary heroine by depicting her as a campesina (peasant) who turns to sorcery only after being raped on her wedding night by King Felipe I. This backstory accounts for why the author later fuses her with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, America’s first baroque poet and, according to Ilan Stavans, “an archetype of the collective Mexican soul” (xxiii). In her original literary incarnation in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (1499; Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea), Celestina is an outcast who transgresses Christian codes of sexual regulation by selling off “virgins” after repairing their hymens. The brainchild of Fernando de Rojas, a likely Jewish converso, she represents a

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heretical element that Spain sought to eradicate in the early modern period, a monster that returns to produce change in Terra Nostra.13 As Celestina and Polo copulate in a Parisian hotel room, the latter forestalls his orgasm by reciting lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321): “el Infierno, te repites en silencio los versos, para no venirte todavía, nondum, aún no, la mitad del camino de nuestras vidas, una selva oscura, perdimos el camino, selva salvaje, áspera y dura, el recuerdo del terror, no, no es eso lo que quisieras recorder, mas adelante, aún no, un canto, nondum, el canto, el canto veinticinco, eso es, ed eran due in uno, ed uno in due . . .” (782; the Inferno, you repeat the verses in silence, in order not to come yet, nondum, not yet, midway along the journey of our lives, a dark forest, we lose the way, savage forest, arid and harsh, the memory of terror, no, that isn’t what you want to remember, further ahead, not yet, a canto, nondum, the canto, the twenty-fifth canto, that’s it, ed eran due in uno, ed uno in due . . .). Polo recalls canto I of the Inferno, which begins by describing the poet’s physical and spiritual perdition: “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, / I found myself within a shadowed forest, / for I had lost the path that does not stray” (canto I: 1–3). As suggested by Polo’s skipping ahead in the poem, canto I would place his sexual encounter in the realm of metaphysical despair. His subsequent reference to canto XXV, however, creates further confusion by evoking a dreadful episode in which the poet details the punishment of thieves in the eighth circle of hell. However, the fragment “ed eran due in uno, ed uno in due” (and two were two in one and one in two) is actually line 125 from canto XXVIII, and refers to Bertran de Born, a twelfth-century French troubadour who led the rebellion that severed ties between Henry “The Young King” and his father Henry II and brother Richard. As the propagator of a familial schism, he carries his own severed head in place of a lantern. This same line serves as the epigraph to Ezra Pound’s lyric poem “Near Périgord” (1915), which inquires into Bertran de Born’s life as a poet, warrior, and political strategist. And yet Fuentes’s miscitation is meaningful in Terra Nostra. In canto XXV, Dante reworks the story of the hermaphroditic Tiresias from book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. ad 8). In the Inferno, he has mutant snakes transform tormented souls into grotesque hybrids: As I kept my eyes fixed upon those sinners, a serpent with six feet springs out against one of the three, and clutches him completely. It gripped his belly with its middle feet,

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Figure 2.3. The subject in monstrous transition. William Blake (1757–1827), Agnello and Cianfa merging into a single body, Dante’s Inferno, XXV. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

and with its forefeet grappled his two arms; and then it sank its teeth in both his cheeks; it stretched its rear feet out along his thighs and ran its tail along between the two, then straightened it again behind his loins. No ivy ever gripped a tree so fast as when that horrifying monster clasped and intertwined the other’s limbs with its. Then just as if their substance were warm wax, they stuck together and they mixed their colors, so neither seemed what he had been before; just as, when paper’s kindled, where it still has not caught flame in full, its color’s dark though not yet black, while white is dying off. The other two souls stared, and each one cried: “Ah me, Agnello, how you change! Just see, you are already neither two nor one! (canto XXV: 49–69)

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Reading the end of Terra Nostra in relation to this episode, we note that Fuentes places metamorphosis within both the regenerative cycles of Mesoamerica and the Christian landscape of eternal damnation. Polo’s invocation of union from canto XXV does not signal, as one might expect, the symbolic merging of body and spirit, or of male and female, but rather a physical change that accompanies a cycle of unremitting punishment. Dante demonstrates how a single and finite identity is replaced with a malleable one that occupies a horrific state of indeterminacy. Without the promise of redemption offered in Dante’s Paradiso, this process in the Inferno only breeds more mixed-up monsters that perpetuate the pattern of suffering.14 Like Dante’s hellish composites, Polo and Celestina merge monstrously. As they make love, the couple is suspended somewhere between jouissance and alienation: aúllas como un animal, no te puedes separar, no te quieres separar, te hundes en la carne de la mujer, la mujer se pierde en la carne del hombre, dos en uno, uno en dos, tu brazo, tu brazo retoña, tu mano, tu mano crece, tus uñas, tu palma abierta, tomar, recibir, otra vez, reaparece la mitad perdida de tu fortuna, tu amor, tu inteligencia, tu vida y tu muerte: levantas el brazo que no tenías, no es el tuyo, el que apenas recuerdas, el que perdiste en una cacería de hombres contra hombres, Lepanto, Veracruz, el Cabo de los Desastres, Dios mío, tu brazo es el de la muchacha, tu cuerpo es el de la muchacha, el cuerpo de ella es el tuyo . . . you howl like an animal, you cannot separate yourself, you do not want to separate yourself, you sink into the woman’s flesh, the woman loses herself in the man’s flesh, two in one, one in two, your arm, your arm regenerates itself, your hand, your hand grows, your fingernails, your open palm, take, receive, again, the lost half of your fortune reappears, your love, your intelligence, your life and death, you raise up the arm that you did not have, it is not yours, the one you barely remember, the one you lost in a manhunt, Lepanto, Veracruz, the Cabo de los Desastres, my God, your arm is the girl’s, your body is the girl’s, her body is yours . . . (782) The three place-names here intertwine Polo’s former identities by recalling the Battle of Lepanto (where Cervantes lost a hand fighting Ottoman

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Turks), Veracruz as the site of Cortés’s first landing in Mexico, and the Cabo de los Desastres as the fictional shore where Peregrino washes onto the shore of Spain. Fuentes makes literal a metaphorical connection by recalling the allegory of desire invented by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium (c. 380 bce). According to the Greek dramatist, man and woman were joined as a single hermaphrodite before Zeus severed them as punishment for their godlike aspirations. This traumatic separation instilled in them the desire to regain their lost half. Yet, even as Polo and Celestina struggle to combine into an emblem of love, the fusion threatens to extinguish them. As he does throughout the novel, Fuentes incorporates other characters and their histories not just as an auspicious broadening of identity, but also as an incorporation of incompatible parts. Polo (a composite) absorbs Celestina and all that she represents—from the indigenous Señora de las Mariposas, to the satanic procuress from the Spanish Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, to the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The creature galvanized into being by this Frankenstein-like union of parts somewhat foreshadows the Víctor-André “angel,” which is made up of conjoined twins that float dead in a pool at the conclusion of Una familia lejana (1980; A Distant Family), Fuentes’s novel about French-Mexican relations. The fate of the Polo-Celestina monster, however, is more uncertain: buscas, enloquecido, instantáneamente, otro cuerpo en la cama, esto no lo has soñado, has amado a una mujer en tu lecho del cuarto del Hotel du Pont Royal, la muchacha ya no está, sí está, no está, hay un solo cuerpo, lo miras, te miras, tocas con tus dos manos tus senos reventones, tus pezones levantados, tus extrañas caderas, juveniles, estrechas, tu cintura quebradiza, tus nalgas altaneras, tus manos buscan, buscan con el terror de haber perdido el emblema de tu hombría, rozas la mata de vello, llegas, no, tocas tu verga dura todavía, mojada, babeante, tus testículos exhaustos, temblorosos aún, sigues buscando, detrás de tus bolas, entre tus piernas, lo encuentras, tu hoyo, tu vagina, metes el dedo, es la misma que acabas de poseer, es la misma que volverás a poseer, hablas, te amo, me amo, tu voz y la de la muchacha se escuchan al mismo tiempo, son una sola voz, déjame amarte otra vez, quiero otra vez, introduces tu propia verga larga, nueva, contráctil, sinuosa como una serpiente, dentro de tu propia vagina abierta, gozosa, palpitante, húmeda . . .

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maddened, you search instantly for another body in the bed, you have not dreamed this, you have made love to a woman in your bed in the room of the Hôtel Pont Royal, the girl is no longer here, is here, is not here, there is a single body, you look at it, you look at yourself, your two hands touch your plump breasts, your raised nipples, your strange hips, young, firm, your slender waist, your swelling buttocks, your hands, search, search with the terror of having lost the emblem of your manhood, you graze the mat of hair, you’re getting there, no, you touch your still-hard cock, wet, slippery, your exhausted testicles, still trembling, you keep searching, behind your balls, between your legs, you find it, your hole, your vagina, you insert your finger, it’s the same you have just possessed, it’s the same that you will possess again, you speak, I love you, I love myself, your voice and the girl’s are heard at the same time, they are a single voice, let me make love to you again, I want to again, you introduce your own new, long, and pliant cock, sinuous like a serpent, inside your own vagina, open, joyful, palpitating, and moist . . . (782–83) The characters combine into a neobaroque perpetuum mobile of dread and fulfillment. Polo realizes that he is ensnared in a mutation that renders him unrecognizable; he continues to lose himself in the female flesh, the contours of his body becoming less and less discernible. As he is devoured, he experiences castration anxiety and searches maddeningly for his erect organ in order to reassert his sexual identity. Yet it is impossible to tell, at this transitory juncture, whether Polo and Celestina are separate beings, whether one character has subsumed the other, or whether a third entity has superseded them both (a point of confusion that Fuentes heightens by using pronominal and verbal conjugations that shift between first and second person). The process creates a hermaphrodite that literally fucks itself; one that, in the Mexican vernacular, is both “chingon/a” (he/she who fucks another) and “chingada/o” (he/she who is fucked by another). The act suggests several interpretations, including (1) the aforementioned murder-rape of the whale by the giant swordfish; (2) a return to a mythical androgyny through the sexual consummation of a singular will; (3) self-mutilation that recalls Francis Bacon’s paintings of nude bodies caught between lovemaking and physical assailment; and (4) the Ouroboros, an archetypal image of a serpent swallowing its own tail in a vicious circle.15 Adding to the ambiguity, the creature’s serpentine erection recalls both Christian and Amerindian snakes:

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Dante’s infernal snakes from canto XXV along with the Aztec snake deity Quetzalcoatl and the goddess Coatlicue (“the one with the skirt of serpents” in Nahuatl). Nevertheless, Fuentes (782–83) suggests that this act will breed new life: te amas, me amo, te fecundo, me fecundas, me fecundo a mi mismo, misma, tendremos un hijo, después una hija, se amarán, se fecundarán, tendrán hijos, y esos hijos los suyos, y los nietos bis­ nietos, hueso de mis huesos, carne de mi carne, y vendrán a ser los dos una sola carne . . . you make love to yourself, I make love to myself, I fertilize you, you fertilize me, I fertilize my (masculine) self, my (feminine) self, we shall have a son, then a daughter, they will make love with each other, they will fertilize each other, they will have sons (and daughters), and those sons (and daughters) their own sons (and daughters), and the grandsons (and granddaughters) great-grandsons (and great-granddaughters), bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, and the two will become one single flesh . . . (782–83) In a reinvention of God’s dictate in Genesis 1:28 that Adam and Eve be fruitful and multiply, Polo and Celestina give birth to an incestuous brood that will perpetuate itself ad infinitum. Even though the act of self-love recalls the solipsism of the Habsburg monarch, the conclusion retains visionary overtones that suggest a reconciliation between Latin America and its ruptured past. Yet the creature combines regeneration and decay; without entirely dismissing desire, it disrupts its own stability and complicates any prelapsarian ideal. This apotheosis signals an energetic attempt to abolish difference and is Fuentes’s premier example of a monstruosa belleza, in which beauty is inseparable from monstrosity and monstrosity is inseparable from beauty. Because it reflects a deep-rooted “anxiety of identification,” this neobaroque coincidentia oppositorum is at once an enriched hybrid and a deranged patchwork; in short, it is a fitting symbol of Latin American identity. Despite the internal contradictions of the Polo-Celestina hermaphrodite, several critics have read this moment in the novel as utopian fulfillment, or as Fuentes’s somewhat naïve attempt to forge such a union. In a critique that identifies a deep rift between Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura and Fuentes’s application of its theoretical postulates, Roberto González Echevarría writes,

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Terra Nostra is, then, an effort to reach back to those original words found in a prediscursive logos that retains the keys to a homogeneous Hispanic culture, a reserve that is a common ground whence those keys have emanated throughout time and history. In spite of the “criticism of reading” that the essay [Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura] appears to promote, Terra Nostra attempts to abolish all possible criticism through a return to the origins of language, a golden age where there is no mine or yours, a moment before dispersion that is an apotheosis of the legible. (The Voice 91) In González Echevarría’s view, Fuentes succumbs to a premodern myth of language in order to reconcile a history that he treats as irreconcilable in his study of Don Quijote. González Echevarría concedes that Fuentes outlines a radical project in theory, but faults him for having reverted to a transcendental fantasy at the conclusion of his novel. He reads Terra Nostra as an ill response to the theory of Mexican biracial angst outlined in Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (1950; The Labyrinth of Solitude). Here, the Mexican poet and philosopher identifies a fundamental, and still unresolved, conflict between Cortés as rapacious Spanish father and La Malinche / Doña Marina as raped, yet whorish, indigenous mother. Giving historical resonance to the contemporary Mexican expression “hijos de la chingada” (sons of the fucked female), La Malinche served as Cortés’s translator during the Conquest and gave birth to their son, the honorary “first” mestizo of the New World.16 Yet, whereas Paz stresses an existential schism bred by the trauma of the past, Fuentes, according to González Echevarría, turns himself into a modern Aristophanes who can heal the wounds of history by recycling a myth of desire.17 No doubt, the desire to escape the nightmare of history is a Fuentes trademark.18 Even the incorrigible El Señor, like the Mexican patriarch Artemio Cruz, lives to regret (but not escape) the decisions that led to his downfall. Given Fuentes’s stated mission to corrupt the Spanish imperial legacy (rather than to transcend history itself), González Echevarría’s reading, in my view, turns the Mexican author into a utopian writer much too readily. As we have seen throughout this chapter, Fuentes envisions ideal states that he knows are ungraspable, and that continue to dissolve under “third globalization.” Instead of synthesizing opposites in order to regain perfection, Fuentes harnesses a neobaroque tension that disturbs reunification and displays what Carl Gutiérrez calls “the projection of a highly ambivalent future” (260). The palace theologian Ludovico supports this conclusion

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when he reports that Fray Julián (in the guise of Bartolomé de Las Casas) has developed an art known as “barroco” (743; baroque). While the New World aesthetic represents “una floración inmediata” (an instantaneous flowering), Ludovico concedes that “[a]ún no sabemos si de esta muerte y nacimiento conjuntos, puedan nacer más cosas muertas o más cosas vivas” (743; we still do not know whether from this combined death and birth can be born further dead things or further living things). In Terra Nostra, indecipherability is as liberating as it is constraining, for Fuentes reveals the need to reconcile cultural and historical elements from the Hispanic past, but also underscores the difficulty of this same effort. The ending supports Lois Parkinson Zamora’s observation that, although “[t]he androgynous union of Pollo [sic] and Celestina, with its resonances of mythic finality, would seem to link Terra Nostra to the timeless paradisal visions Fuentes criticizes . . . the final fusion must be understood in terms of diffusion” (Writing 161). In Terra Nostra, utopias shatter and dreamers are left to dream again, a point that Fuentes makes in the last line of the novel through a combination of warmth and chill that leaves all final judgments in suspension: “No sonaron doce campanadas en las iglesias de París; pero dejó de nevar, y al día siguiente brilló un frío sol” (783; twelve-o’clock did not toll in the churches of Paris; but it stopped snowing, and the next day a cold sun shone).

Toward a Neomestizaje of the Americas In the critical anthology Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues (2002), Monika Kaup and Debra Rosenthal look beyond transatlantic models of identity and embrace formations along a Boltonian axis. The editors contend, “To trace American cultures back to their trans­ oceanic sources is to ignore their new beginnings, their mestizo, mulatto, or métis rebirths in the American hemisphere” (xiii). I embrace this thesis throughout America Unbound, for identity is a central concern within all of the New World literatures I examine. Fuentes reminds us, however, that before terra incognita can become terra nostra, any privileging of the hemisphere as the site of rebirth must contend with the requisite culture shock. As such, his mega-novel offers several correctives to hybridity when seen exclusively as a liberation from the past or a no-strings-attached enrichment. Most notably, Fuentes contests the notion of a celebratory identity (i.e., the “best of both/all worlds”), which many Mexican intellectuals supported

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in response to the legacy of the Spanish caste system. The main proponent of a normative mestizaje was José Vasconcelos, who served as Secretary of Public Education under President Álvaro Obregón from 1921 to 1924. His foundational essay “La raza cósmica” (1925; The Cosmic Race) proudly opposes the (presumed) racial purity of Europe by treating miscegenation in Hispanic America (especially Mexico) as the culmination of an identitarian teleology. Influenced by Vasconcelos’s vision of utopian fulfillment, the state soon commissioned muralists to produce narratives that highlighted Mexican mestizaje on public walls. Several scholars (most recently, Coffey) have criticized this identity construct, for they see it not as an anticolonial remedy, but as a perpetuation of the caste system’s promotion of blood mixture with Euro­ peans to erase Indian and African traces. Fuentes’s neobaroque novel would regard any such purification as a remnant of colonialism. Secondly, Fuentes disrupts the idea that the cultures that blended in the New World were once monolithic. As is evidenced by the Toltec-Mayan society at Chichén Itzá and the Aztecs’ incorporation of previous Mesoamerican deities in their architectural designs (the types of varied cultures that abound in Terra Nostra), American hybridity dates from pre-Hispanic times, and is only further complicated by bodies migrating to and from the Western Hemisphere after 1492. Spain itself was already mixed with the Jewish and Muslim populations that were part and parcel of its medieval social organization. The Age of Exploration, then, brought together two worlds that were plural, thus challenging nostalgic narratives of the Conquest that privilege one race over another. Hybridity is a reality in the Americas, whether it is embraced as a happy coexistence of parts, or, following Paz, as a conflict of paternity resulting in a multiple existence. As Fuentes’s technique of “composite characterization” suggests, neomestizaje is a neobaroque corrective to official state mestizaje. Third, Fuentes moves mestizaje from a category of blood and biology to one of neobaroque intersections wherein race is not the sole marker of selfhood. In the same volume by Kaup and Rosenthal, Earl Fitz defines a more comprehensive sense of mixed identity as a common denominator for American cultures: “Although in the Americas we have long tended to interpret it narrowly, as an issue of biology alone, miscegenation may well be more germane to our collective New World experience if considered in its larger cultural context, a perspective that allows us to view it as being profoundly and inextricably linked to the diverse social, economic, and political structures that guide and align our various American cultures” (“From Blood”

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243). Fitz could very well have been writing about Terra Nostra, in which identities are the fluid byproduct of a planetary confluence of literatures, races, and cultures. Fuentes’s model of neomestizaje is not exclusively a genetic category, but a culturally specific condition that exists along diverse (neo)colonial frontiers within a long line of globalizations. It is a more mobile category, for, as Silvia Spitta points out: “Since the different processes of transculturation have been at work since the Conquest, the Latin American subject is always ‘in process’ and situated along . . . a ‘continuum of mestizaje’” (Between Two Waters, 23). This model may seem to dilute mestizaje as a stable component, but, for Fuentes, Latin America is the sum of the contradictory forces that give it shape. The interplay of colonial and contemporary histories in Terra Nostra reveals a globalizing process that, for better and for worse, continues to make and unmake identity. As one of the most capacious expressions of, and about, New World consciousness, Fuentes’s summa Americana broadens the boundaries of hemispheric thought.

Ch a p t er 3

Jacques Poulin’s Archival Pathways Volkswagen Blues as Discovery Chronicle

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In the introduction to a 2005 special issue of Compar ative

American Studies, Rachel Adams and Sarah Phillips Casteel write, “Canada has long been overlooked in scholarship about the Americas as a hemisphere, which has more typically focused on relationships between the USA and Latin America” (6). This academic omission, I would add, is most apparent with respect to Francophone Canada, whose literary traditions exhibit what E. D. Blodgett calls “self-awareness as minority literatures” (49). Now that English has become a planetary lingua franca, Quebec fiction presents an even greater challenge to Anglo-Canadians, and to a US academic readership that is currently leading the charge of hemispheric studies. A deeper complication is that, while inter-Americanists may recognize that Canada shares New World patterns of European-indigenous contact, colonial settlement, African slavery, racial miscegenation, nation-building, and globalization, Quebec has traditionally deemed itself a separate political entity. Ever since the British conquest of New France in 1763 (over one hundred years before national confederation would unite the Anglophone and Francophone provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, respectively), François Xavier Garneau, Aubert de Gaspé, Louis-Honoré Fréchette, and other authors created a separatist literary-historical tradition that exalted the Catholic pioneers of New France in connection with the French motherland. Even as late as 1943, a Canadian luminary argued that Quebec’s contributions 72

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to a national literature were sorely lacking due to “the presence among us [Anglo-Canadians] of a large minority which is prevailingly indifferent to the currents of culture that run among the majority” (Brown 8).1 The tension between English and French would contribute to the radical reshaping of Quebec after World War II, most of all during the 1960s. As part of the political and cultural movement known as “La Révolution tranquille” (The Quiet Revolution), Franco-Canadians projected a nationalist image of québécité that celebrated their French ancestry, but also what they saw as their unique place in the Americas. Ushering in Quebec’s greatest intellectual flowering, poets Roland Giguère and Yves Préfontaine, abstract expressionist painters Paul-Émile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle, and prose writers Hubert Aquin and Pierre Vallières rejected the past by denouncing Anglo-Protestant rule, but also the French-Catholic education that had come to suppress modernist experimentation at the time. A newly styled “Quebecois” minority was galvanized into action by Borduas’s manifesto Refus global (1948; Total Refusal), and led a “total” opposition to the two-hundredyear-old stifling of its self-determination and creativity.2 More recently, Quebec has undergone a second revolution in response to globalization and, in particular, the defeat of the 1980 referendum on sovereignty, the prevailing issue for the previous generation.3 Most of all, globalization has facilitated a vast cultural exchange in Montreal, where Quebecois, Haitian, Algerian, Senegalese, and non-Francophone intellectuals now come into regular contact. As part of this realignment, the contemporary Quebecois novel is more committed to the combinatory and conflicting forms of postmodernism than to purist politics. In the 1994 article “The Quebec Novel Today: Multiple Perspectives,” Mary Jean Green writes, “A monolithic view of Quebec literature in terms of easily characterized trends and movements is no longer possible, and the society represented in the novel itself appears multiform, multicultural, and, even, multilingual” (922). These writings begin with Régine Robin’s emigrant novel La Québécoite (1983; translated as “The Wanderer”), and seek to establish, and validate, a “pluralistic, decentered cultural space” (Green 922). Pure laine (pure wool) ethnocentrism as a way of tracing one’s roots back to the original French settlers has now receded before an identitarian métissage that reflects global integration. In short, the (post)modernizing forces of free-market capitalism, and the rise of immigration in Quebec, have led the Quebecois to newly rethink, and rearticulate, their place as Franco-Americans. This identity, writes Anne Marie Miraglia, is one in

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which “[l’]a ‘québécité’ d’aujourd’hui semble fondée sur la coexistence de la francité et de l’américanité du Québécois” (“Le récit 30; the “québécité” of today seems founded on the coexistence of the Frenchness and Americanness of Quebeckers). One of the major writers from this new era is Jacques Poulin, a Montrealer who began his career as an English translator, but whose first novel, Mon cheval pour un royaume (1967; My Horse for a Kingdom), follows the style of Aquin’s separatist novel Prochain épisode (1965; Next Episode). Poulin emerged with this generation of nationalists, but he also forms a bridge to a more contemporary postnationalism that recovers a more expansive américanité. As he himself has observed, “Je ne me vois pas comme un auteur québécois au sens des années 60. . . . Je suis un écrivain de l’Amérique qui écrit en langue française” (qtd. in Soulié, B-3; I do not see myself as a Quebec author in the sense of the 1960s. . . . I am a writer from America who writes in the French language). Poulin’s work is inspired by several modern and postmodern US authors, including Ernest Hemingway, J. D. Salinger, and Kurt Vonnegut. His inter-American affiliations have brought French Canadian fiction closer to Anglophone letters. Yet Volkswagen Blues (1984)—his best-known novel worldwide—has a longer historical vision that places Quebec alongside its indigenous and Hispanic neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. In this chapter, I argue that Poulin expands the national basis of Quebec literature by accentuating physical and spiritual border crossing from the Age of Discovery to the age of globalization. Volkswagen Blues restores a concern for New World identity that has always been at the heart of the Americas, but that, in Quebec, suffered a centuries-long suppression in the midst of the struggle for independence. Poulin’s strategy is both conservative and radical: he revisits primary Canadian sources, but shows how these same works prove uncontainable once placed into fuller historical contexts. Exploring, and ultimately rejecting, the “American Dream” as the basis for progress, the author highlights the intertwined histories of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans in a narrative that overlaps maritime “discovery,” US westward expansion, and 1980s capitalism. Most of all, Poulin disturbs our ideological complacency by disclosing the link between travel and conquest in the Americas. I believe that, because it recovers archival materials that predate and/or undermine American national borders, Volkswagen Blues can serve as a blueprint for the hemispheric study of Canadian literatures.

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The Archive and the “Grand Rêve de l’Amérique” Like the other novels central to this book, Volkswagen Blues reworks the literature of encounter that begins with Christopher Columbus. Poulin incorporates the archive into a new version of the road novel to create what Adam Paul Weisman calls “a postmodern historical mystery” (486). Volkswagen Blues contains thirty-three chapters within its episodic structure. While much less challenging formally, its labyrinthine style recalls the mini-­ encyclopedism of Borges’s short fiction and of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), both of which use protagonist-detectives. Poulin is a selfproclaimed minimalist, but his hemispheric archival preoccupations also tie him to Carlos Fuentes and, in turn, to a strand of Great American encyclopedism that began with Moby-Dick. Like his New World brethren, Poulin creates a fictional universe that represents “the very antithesis of reductionism and rigidity—[for] it portrays variety, flexibility, uncertainty, and flux, and even sustains contradictions” (Socken 112). Even at 321 pages, Volkswagen Blues is the most ambitious example of Canadian literature written hemispherically. And here it is worth noting that, at five hundred manuscript pages, Volkswagen Blues was once as voluminous as more traditional encyclopedic novels (Côté 79). As of 2016, it remains the longest of Poulin’s novels by about one hundred pages. In Poulin’s 1978 novel Les grandes marées (Spring Tides), an archetypal character named “l’Auteur” (The Author) references prevailing notions of québécité and américanité, and forecasts a masterful apotheosis in Volkswagen Blues: En deux mots, voici: le roman français s’intéresse plutôt aux idées, tandis que le roman américain s’intéresse davantage à l’action. Or, nous sommes des Français d’Amérique, ou des Américains d’origine française, si vous aimez mieux. Nous avons donc la possibilité, au Québec, d’écrire un roman qui sera le produit de la tendance française et de la tendance américaine. C’est ça que j’appelle le grand roman de l’Amérique. In two words, here it is: the French novel is interested more in ideas, while the American novel is interested more in action. Now, we are the French of America, or Americans of French origin, if you prefer. We therefore have the opportunity, in Quebec, of writing a novel

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that will be the product of the French tendency and the American tendency. It is that which I call the great novel of America. (177) The Quebecois novelist is an intercultural agent primed to produce a summa Americana. This “grand roman de l’Amérique” will be transatlantic in character and pertain both to the head and to the heart—equal parts phi­ l­osophy (Old World “idées”) and adventure (New World “action”). Just six years later, Poulin would create a “grande roman de l’Amérique,” emphasizing North America as the nucleus of French involvement. According to Poulin, his self-appointed task in Volkswagen Blues was to “retrouvent les traces de l’ancienne présence française en Amérique” (“Voyage” 50; recover the traces of the ancient French presence in America). This resuscitation, and intertwining of past and present, would allow him to “agrandir, énlargir la conscience américaine des Québécois” (amplify, enlarge the American conscience of Quebeckers). Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx note that Poulin disrupts Quebec’s telluric novel tradition by uprooting the ideology of the French farming habitants: “Represented as sedentary in the roman de la terre, the Québécois are historically reenvisioned by Poulin as a people of movement and perpetual migration who are not circumscribed by the territory of Quebec itself” (17).4 Volkswagen Blues is part of a quartet of Quebecois road novels that includes Pierre Turgeon’s La première personne (1980; The First Person), Gilles Archambault’s Le voyageur distraite (1981; The Distracted Voyager), and Jacques Godbout’s Une histoire américaine (1986; An American History), all of which reflect a new transnational sensibility.5 These fictions feature Quebec protagonists who escape stifling home environments by journeying to California, where they soon find themselves entrenched in espionage and mystery, much of it derived from Hollywood film noir. The theme of travel allows these 1980s road novels to examine the migration that, while suppressed by the habitant ideal, has been central to all of the Americas since the sixteenth century. For these authors, unsolved mysteries facilitate self-­ discovery; the object of the quest is largely a ruse that leads characters to a greater, though hardly joyful, wisdom.6 Particularly in Volkswagen Blues, the conventions of the road novel genre take on a more expanded meaning as a search for Quebec identity within, and not just in distinct national relation to, a Greater American paradigm. Volkswagen Blues depicts the journey of Jack Waterman, the anglicized nom de plume of a mediocre Quebecois writer (and the actual “pen name”

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of the French fountain pen Waterman). As an antidote to a bout of depression and to his writer’s block, Jack decides to seek out his estranged older brother Théo after more than fifteen years. From Jack’s correspondence with him, we know that Théo has traveled across North America—as far as James Bay to the north and Key West to the south. His last message was a postcard mailed from Gaspé that bore a strange handwriting. Jack remembers his brother as being part rugged frontiersman and part bohemian intellectual, his wanderlust making him the heir to the legendary French explorer Étienne Brûlé, but also to Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation as a band of latterday US adventurers. Waterman sets out in his pre-owned 1971 Volkswagen (blue?) minibus with a young métisse hitchhiker who calls herself “La Grande Sauterelle” (the big grasshopper), but whose indigenous name is Pitsémine. Jack and Pitsémine set out on a quest that brings them face-toface with a long history of frontier violence. In a revised version of the Western—one of education rather than of the appropriation of indigenous and Mexican land—the protagonists become disillusioned as they investigate documents pertaining to America’s origins. The hunt for Théo steers the main characters across the Canadian border, through the Oregon Trail, and into San Francisco. While searching for clues, they undertake a whirlwind tour of historical sites, libraries, and museums that trace the course of American exploration, a subject that includes, and parallels, the journeys of Poulin’s historical and fictional personages inhabiting colonial and contemporary worlds, respectively. In an anticlimax that reflects the failure of leftist reforms under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Jack finds Théo badly aged and wheelchair-bound outside a San Francisco train station. Realizing that his brother is now mentally disabled and no longer recognizes him, a disillusioned, but presumably wiser Jack separates from Pitsémine and returns to his writing career in Quebec City. Given the author’s own extensive transamerican travels before writing Volkswagen Blues, the novel is partly the autobiographical story of how Poulin/Waterman conducted historical research and gathered the materials necessary to compose a breakthrough novel about the French in the Americas.7 The title of Volkswagen Blues is especially significant. It combines German and English words whose foreignness the Francophone reader might ignore as a result of common usage. Both signifiers, however, are multiply nuanced. The Volkswagen (literally “people’s car”) implies transatlantic commerce and the postwar cult of the automobile in Canada and the United States. The blues, on the other hand, references the form and genre pioneered

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by African American musicians from the Deep South. The title thus links the road genre to a lyrical melancholy based on a blue color palette. It announces Poulin’s search for an aesthetic that is interartistic, nonlinear, rhythmic, and in keeping with the musical tastes cultivated by hipster beatniks. The title also presents Volkswagen Blues as a timely work infused with an all-­pervading internationalism. The absence of French words is rather fitting, for it positions the text into a global network beyond Quebec: Europe, America, and Africa, are all implicated in terms of culture and commodity, both the spirituality of music and the materiality of cars. The first chapter of Volkswagen Blues, titled “Jacques Cartier,” invokes literary origins through the first French explorer of Canada. In the hopes of replicating the success of the Habsburg Empire under Charles V, King Francis I commissioned Cartier to find gold and the Northwest Passage to Asia in 1534. Although it was Samuel de Champlain who established the permanent settlement of Quebec City in 1608 and is commonly known as the “Father of New France,” Cartier was the first to name Canada from Iroquois speech (Kanata, meaning “village,” “settlement,” “land,” or “cluster of dwellings”), the first to produce Francophone writing about the New World, and, through his depiction of the First Nations, Canada’s first ethnologist. He was also among the first to conduct trade with Native Americans for pelts and furs, which would become a Canadian staple enterprise into the nineteenth century by producing luxury goods for the European market. As the historical forebear of Quebecois writing, Cartier’s Relation originale du voyage (1534; First Relation) is the impetus for Poulin’s literary journey to rediscover Franco-américanité.8 In an episode that conjures French Canadian beginnings, the protagonists visit a museum at Gaspé containing a treasure-trove of “outils, vêtements, armes, véhicules de transport, instruments de navigation, cartes et affiches . . . tout cela disposé selon un ordre chronologique allant des origines de l’Amérique à l’époque contemporaine” (17; tools, clothing, weapons, transport vehicles, navigational instruments, cards and posters, all arranged in chronological order from the origins of America to the contemporary epoch).9 Among the exhibits, they find a placard matching the archaic French on Théo’s postcard. The text turns out to be a replica of Cartier’s 1534 claim to Gaspé as pronounced before an assembly of St. Lawrence Iroquoians: Le XXIIIIe jour dudict moys nous fismes faire vne croix de trente piedz de hault, qui fut fete deuant pluseurs d’eulx, sur la poincte de

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l’entrée dudit hable, soubz le croysillon de laquelle mismes vng escusson en bosse à troyes fleurs de lys, et dessus vng escripteau en boys en grant, en grosse lettre de forme, où il y auoit «Vive le Roy de France»; Et icelle croix plantasmes sur la dicte poincte deuant eulx, lesquelz la regardèrent faire et planter; Et après qu’elle fut esleuée en l’air, nous mismes tous à genoulz, les mains joinctes, en adorant incelle deuant eulx et leurs fismes signe, regardant et leur monstrant le ciel, que par icelle estoit nostre Redemption, de quoy ilz firent plusieurs admyradtions, en tournant et regardant icelle croix. On the 24th day of said month, we had a cross made of thirty feet in height, which was made before a number of them (the Indians), at the entrance to this harbor, under the cross-bar of which we fixed a shield with three fleur-de-lys in relief, and above it an engraving on a wooden board, in large characters, where was written “Long live the King of France.” This cross we planted on said point before them, who watched it being made and planted. And after it had been raised in the air, we knelt down, our hands joined, worshipping it before them and made signs to them looking and pointing out the heavens to them, (to show) that by means of this we had our Redemption, at which they showed much admiration, as they turned and looked at this cross. (18) This seminal recording of the French claim to the New World signals the first of many irruptions of early America into Poulin’s novel. As Columbus and the Spanish explorers had done before him, Cartier performs a ritual of dispossession in the name of church and state, and at the expense of an indigenous community. Rather than subverting the official record through a fictional reimagining, a common strategy of historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon), Poulin places the archive directly before pseudodetectives—and surrogate reader-researchers—who must confront and make sense of the writing in order to fulfill the ends of the main plot. Like the French pioneers, the couple “discovers” America here, but within a narrative frame that comments on and extends colonial history into the 1980s. Poulin also reworks the racial and cultural dynamics of the quest by making the pure laine Jack and the part-Montagnaise Pitsémine the joint agents of an inquiry that will entail the reexamination of French-indigenous contact.

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Poulin’s incorporation of the first Canadian document underscores the importance of the archive for New World writers. As in Spanish America, Catholic missionaries worked as proselytizers and as architects of a new social order in which Amerindian converts enjoyed limited participation. The French likewise introduced the baroque and produced writings—such as the seventy-three-volume Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France (1611–1768; The Jesuit Relations)—that, while intended for European readers, were later incorporated into national literary histories. Like its hemispheric counterparts, the archive of New France focused on evangelism and settlement, and produced a discourse that fueled the myth of America as utopia.10 Early in Volkswagen Blues, Jack ponders this colonial fantasy in relation to his own “American Dream”: L’Amérique! Chaque fois qu’il entendait prononcer ce mot, Jack sentait bouger quelque chose au milieu des brumes qui obscurcissaient son cerveau. (Un bateau larguait ses amarres et quittait lentement la terre ferme.) C’était une idée envelopée de souvenirs très anciens— une idée qu’il appelait le «Grand Rêve de l’Amérique». Il pensait que, dans l’histoire de l’humanité, la découverte de l’Amérique avait été la réalisation d’un vieux rêve. Les historiens disaient que les découvreurs cherchaient des épices, de l’or, un passage vers la Chine, mais Jack n’en croyait rien. Il prétendait que, depuis le commencement du monde, les gens étaient malheureux parce qu’ils n’arrivaient pas à retrouver le paradis terrestre. Ils avaient gardé dans leur tête l’image d’un pays idéal et ils le cherchaient partout. Et lorsqu’ils avaient trouvé l’Amérique, pour eux c’était le vieux rêve qui se réalisait et ils allaient être libres et heureux. Ils allaient éviter les erreurs du passé. Ils allaient tout recommencer à neuf. America! Every time he heard this word pronounced, Jack felt something stir in the middle of the fog that muddled his brain. (A boat casting off its ropes and pulling slowly away from terra firma.) It was an idea wrapped in very ancient memories—an idea that he called the “Great Dream of America.” He thought that, in human history, the discovery of America had been the realization of an old dream. Historians said that the discoverers were looking for spices, gold, a passage to China, but Jack didn’t believe any of it. He claimed that, since the beginning of the world, people were unhappy because they

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could not recover the terrestrial paradise. They had retained in their head the image of an ideal land and they searched for it everywhere. And when they found America, for them it was the old dream come true and they would be free and happy. They were going to avoid the errors of the past. They were all going to start anew. (109) The image of a boat departing simultaneously toward the Western Hemisphere and past a mental frontier suggests the retroactive transformation of Jack’s Volkswagen into a vessel of discovery. The minibus will traverse North America toward a physical (Théo) and intellectual discovery (new material that can break through Jack’s writer’s block). Succumbing to a pattern described—and critiqued—in Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America, Jack considers utopia to be the basis for American civilization. Jack’s fantastical ascription begins with an implicit reference to Columbus’s mismapping of the earthly paradise in his Diario, and continues with the latter’s depiction of the Taíno Indians as Edenic in his 1493 letter. America appeals to Jack on a visceral level and clarifies his muddled thoughts, but it also seduces him into misunderstanding history. Because he sees America as a tabula rasa for postlapsarian regeneration, a biblical myth of universal redemption supplants colonial violence. For this belated discoverer with a penchant for fantasy, there is no mature awareness yet of how Columbus, Cartier, and other explorers smuggled captives into Europe, introduced diseases that wiped out up to 90 percent of indigenous populations, and established a transatlantic commerce in precious metals that depended on slavery. Eurocentric presuppositions are important to the pedagogical mission of Volkswagen Blues—the characters routinely fail to perceive the full scope of history before a gradual recognition makes them wiser. Poulin fills in the missing pieces through a tale of recognition and disenchantment that redeploys the New World archive.11 The title and subject of the second chapter, “La légende de l’«Eldorado»” (The Legend of “El Dorado”) announces a hemispheric vision in connection with an Iberian “Great Dream of America.” Poulin introduces a colonial legend from Spanish America as recounted in Walker Chapman’s The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado (1967), a book that Jack references by name. By juxtaposing “Jacques Cartier” (chapter 1) and this second chapter on an Amerindian kingdom ruled by a monarch covered in gold dust, Poulin reveals how New World identities combine European and indigenous agents, interlace fantasy and history, and impact both North and South America.

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At the beginning of the chapter, Jack describes his childhood spent with Théo near the US border. At home, the boys played cowboys and Indians and idolized French fur traders and explorers, among them Champlain, Brûlé, Jean Nicolet, Pierre-Esprit Radisson, Louis Jolliet, Jacques Marquette, and Rene-Robert Cavalier de La Salle. Pitsémine responds by disclosing her métisse origins (her father is white, while her mother is Montagnaise from Quebec). By introducing an existential malaise that is a key feature of her character, she provides the first corrective to Jack’s wide-eyed view of colonial history: “Quand vous parlez des découvreurs et des explorateurs de l’Amérique . . . Moi je n’ai rien en commun avec les gens qui sont venus chercher de l’or et des épices et un passage vers l’Orient. Je suis du coté de ceux qui se sont fait voler leurs terres et leur façon de vivre” (29; When you speak about of the discoverers and explorers of America . . . I have nothing in common with the people who came to find gold and spices and a passage to the Orient. I am on the side of those who had their lands and way of life stolen). Seeing that Pitsémine identifies with her indigenous half, Jack tells her the myth of El Dorado as he has learned it from Chapman’s book. As if imagining a transhemispheric spiritual bond between the North American woman and pre-European Muisca Indians from Colombia, he conveys to her the wonders of a “contrée mystérieuse et riche qui était le rouyaume de l’or” (32; land mysterious and rich that was the kingdom of gold). Poulin later extends this myth to the multinational corporation. Standing before the Royal Bank Plaza building in Toronto’s financial district, the protagonists are dazzled by the enormous glass panels dusted in twentyfour-karat gold and by the two pyramidal towers soaring into the sky. A capitalist incarnation of the American Dream, the skyscraper “était vive et chaleureuse comme du miel et ils ne pouvent pas s’empêcher de penser à l’Or des Incas et à la legend de l’Eldorado” (85; was alive and warm as honey and they could not stop themselves from thinking about the gold of the Incas and the legend of El Dorado). Jack and Pitsémine are awestruck by this image of a New World sublime that combines the inner glow of the grand cathedrals of Europe with the engineering marvels of ancient American pyramids. Through a hemispheric remapping, Poulin imagines America as a succession of kingdoms layered south to north from Cuzco to Toronto. At this time, the characters fail to question the dream of Canadian wealth creation that stems from Cartier’s land theft, just as they earlier failed to question the human cost of the conquistador pursuit of El Dorado. As they get closer to the “promised land” of San Francisco, however, Poulin will use landscapes as

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alternatives to this image of the corporation as transnational ideal. By studying the archive and other evidence, the protagonists will embrace the sobering realization that, as Jack attests at a later stage of his education, “toute l’Amérique a été construite sur la violence” (141; all of America has been built upon violence).

Intertextuality and Métissage Through a literal rendition of a practice common to the authors I engage in America Unbound—the redeployment of the New World colonial archive— Poulin’s characters plunder a wealth of records and use them in their search and research. Jack and Pitsémine inhabit information corridors in equal proportion to other places in the novel. Besides the Gaspé museum, public institutes include the Toronto Reference Library (where Pitsémine “borrows” her first book), the Natchez steamboat replica in the Mississippi, and the Museum of Westward Expansion, which is located beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and was “le plus passionnant et le plus étonnant qu’ils eussent jamais vu” (134; the most fascinating and most amazing that they had ever seen). In one episode, the characters stop at the Detroit Institute of Art to marvel at Detroit Industry, a stunning mural painted by Diego Rivera between 1932 and 1933 and considered by the artist to be his most successful commission. Poulin intertwines North American cultures by depicting French Canadian travelers viewing and discussing a Mexican mural about US automobile manufacture in Detroit, a city established as a French fort and missionary outpost in 1701, but depicted as a post–“white flight” African American slum in Volkswagen Blues. The tourist attractions provide educational pit stops for discussion and disagreement and, ultimately, for a more complex understanding of America and Franco-American identity. These points of culture and geography connect along a new transcontinental highway that, like the novel itself, retains strong traces of former times and explores their relationship to the present. Books are central to Poulin’s project of literary renewal. Jack’s pursuit of family as something “à quoi [se] raccrocher” (12; to grab on to) is likewise a trek through the cultural lineage of Quebec. In this capacity, the protagonists’ search for Théo and their field research are one and the same. The Canadian expedition is, as Miraglia observes, “à la fois un voyage touristique, historique et littéraire” (“Lecture” 55; at the same time a voyage that is

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touristic, historical, and literary). The Volkswagen gets increasingly flooded with books relating to an American past that Théo recalls through his own road exploits. Soon, the vehicle becomes an archive in itself; as El Escorial in Terra Nostra, it creates a mise en abîme within the novel: Il y avait des livres dans tous les recoins du Volkswagen. À ceux que l’homme avait mis dans ses bagages en partant de Québec s’étaient ajoutés les livres qu’il avait achetés ou que la fille avait «emprunté» en cours de route. Il y en avait dans le compartiment aménagé derrière le siège du conducteur ; dans le coffre à gants où dormait le chat; derrière et sous le siège du passager; sur la deuxième tablette de l’armoire à pharmacie ; dans le compartiment des casseroles et autres ustensiles de cuisine ; au fond du petit suspendus et sur la tablette surplombant la banquette arrière. Quel que fût l’endroit où l’on se trouvait dans le minibus, on avait toujours un livre à portée de la main. There were books in all the corners of the Volkswagen. To those that the man had packed into his bags on leaving Quebec had been added the books that he had bought or that the girl had “borrowed” along the way. They were in the compartment behind the driver’s seat; in the glove compartment where the cat slept; behind and under the passenger seat; on the second shelf in the medicine cabinet; in the compartment for saucepans and other kitchen utensils; at the back of the little cupboard where the rain gear was hung and on the shelf overhanging the back seat. No matter where you found yourself in the minibus, you always had a book within reach. (172) As indicated by the six prepositional phrases forming one long sentence, Jack and Pitsémine are literally surrounded. In this winding repository of knowledge, the characters live and breathe texts and language. Poulin creates a mobile and evolving library that contains the tools for remapping the course of Quebec literature. We know from the narrative that, like a New World explorer, Jack’s Volkswagen originated in Europe (Germany), and then crossed the Atlantic and traveled along the East Coast from the Maritime Provinces to southern Florida. According to Pierre Nepveu (217), the Volks­ wagen is “une métaphore même de la nouvelle culture québécoise: indéterminée, voyageuse, en derive” (217; a metaphor for the new Quebec culture:

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undetermined, voyaging, drifting). Indeed, not only is Jack an author looking for material, but Pitsémine is a book thief who mails back purloined library volumes after she has read them. By combining characters who are bibliophiles and “des maniaques des musées” (134; crazy about museums), the author foregrounds the research, discovery, and mental digestion required for his own writing. Volkswagen Blues is largely about Poulin’s conception of Volkswagen Blues; the investigative background comes to the fore as the author places books and other sources before us, and engages them through internal readers. These reading materials create an internal bibliography: Volkswagen Blues houses a vast collection of maps, brochures, photographs, dictionaries, magazines, and a number of fiction and nonfiction volumes. The most mentioned monographs are Percy James Robinson’s Toronto during the French Regime (1933), Joseph-Camille Pouliot’s La grande aventure de Jacques Cartier (1934; The Great Adventure of Jacques Cartier), Benoît Brouillette’s La pénétration du continent américain par les Canadiens français (1939; The Penetration of the American Continent by the French Canadians), Timothy Severin’s Explorers of the Mississippi (1967), Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout L’histoire du Far-West (1967; History of the Far-West), Gregory M. Franzwa’s The Oregon Trail Revisited (1972), Sabine Hargous’s Les indiens du Canada (1980; The Indians of Canada), and Arthur and Kit Knight’s Beat Angels (1982). Most of these texts retrace voyages of one kind or another, and recount the exploration and settlement of North America. They introduce travelers from Europe and the Americas into Poulin’s novel and, quite literally, into Jack’s Volkswagen. While Poulin is partial to history books, he is characteristically postmodernist in his equal regard for truth-bearing fiction. He incorporates literature from the Lost Generation (Hemingway) and the Beat Generation (Kerouac), and references to Salinger, Mark Twain, Jack London, Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Tom Wolfe, Gabrielle Roy, Réjean Ducharme, Boris Vian, and Richard Brautigan; to the painters Rivera, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Leonardo da Vinci; and to the Hollywood filmmaker Sam Peckinpah (a master of the ultraviolent Western).12 Poulin also integrates a number of pictures that turn his road novel into a mixed-media collage, a tradition that he began with icons and comic strips in Les grandes mareés.13 In Volkswagen Blues the reader must process language alongside an archive of images that extends beyond the colonial period proper: the back of Théo’s postcard (chapter 1), a photograph of Jesse James (chapter 15), a sketch of a gravestone along the Oregon Trail (chapter 19), a

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photograph of Chimney Rock (chapter 20), a rearview depiction of a covered wagon (chapter 21), a photograph of beatniks gathered in a café (chapter 30), and a final map drawing of North America that identifies the Oregon Trail and several of the places visited in Volkswagen Blues.14 In almost every case, Poulin inserts subtitled captions for sources. The pictures serve as clues in a mystery novel, but also create a physical, and personal, scrapbook. More generally, they underscore the importance of visual literacy in colonial and contemporary recordkeeping in the Americas. Like Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Volkswagen Blues juxtaposes literacy and orality by embracing Native American traditions of storytelling. While Poulin employed this technique in connection with the Iroquois creation myth in his 1974 novel Faites de beaux rêves (Sweet Dreams), he first used it to link exploration and cars in Jimmy (1969).15 In Volkswagen Blues, the stories create breaks in the narrative in order to revive an indigenous system of cultural transmission. From time to time, all eyes turn to the speaker as he or she reads from books or recites from memory using a stylized delivery. The most notable of these orations, and corrections to the official record, occurs as Pitsémine summarizes the “Indian Wars.” After visiting the site of Fort Laramie and lashing out at a Gatling gun on display, Pitsémine tells Jack about the killing of more than 125 Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children at Sand Creek in 1864. She follows by detailing the 1868 Battle of Washita River that involved General George Custer and resulted in more than one hundred casualties, among them Chief Black Kettle and his wife (two Cheyenne Sand Creek survivors). Pitsémine concludes by recounting the massacre of over 180 Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1890. From an impromptu reenactment of Brûlé among the First Nations told in a flashback, to a rendition of the “Sioux Prayer for the Return of the Buffalo,” the tales illustrate points, elaborate themes, and teach through a gift of language. As several critics have noted, Volkswagen Blues is about the compulsive need to read and interpret texts (Miraglia “Lecture” and Lécriture; Lapointe). For Poulin, intertextuality—through the incorporation of books by other writers and by the author himself—is at the heart of a new Quebec literature incomplete unto itself.16 Pitsémine conveys this vision of an evolving intercultural collaboration among readers and writers: —Il ne faut pas juger les livres un par un. Je veux dire : il ne faut pas les voir comme des choses indépendantes. Un livre n’est jamais complet en lui-même ; si on veut le comprendre, il faut le mettre en

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rapport avec d’autres livres, non seulement avec les livres du même auteur, mais aussi avec des livres écrits par d’autres personnes. Ce que l’on croit être un livre n’est la plupart du temps qu’une partie d’un autre livre plus vaste auquel plusieurs auteurs ont collaboré sans le savoir. —It is not necessary to judge books one by one. I mean, it is not necessary to see them as independent objects. A book is never complete in itself; if one wants to understand it, it is necessary to put it in relation to other books, not only books by the same author, but also books written by other people. That which one thinks is a book most of the time is only part of another vaster book that many authors have collaborated on without knowing it. (186) Books circulate in a planetary network across space and time, and beyond the control of single authors and perspectives. Pitsémine’s inter­ textual and dialogic reading allows her to temper the authority of books by challenging their claim to mastery. Although Jack is the author-surrogate in Volkswagen Blues, Poulin attributes the previous statement about the function of literature to his female protagonist. Pitsémine is born without Indian status because her mother married a white man and was expelled from her reservation at La Romaine in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec. The métisse seeks to “se connaître elle-même” (88; know herself) and is haunted by the sense that she “n’était ni une Indienne ni une Blanche, qu’elle était quelque chose entre les deux et que, finalement, elle n’était rien du tout” (246; was neither an Indian nor a White, that she was something in between the two and that, in the end, she was nothing at all). Pitsémine’s biracial identification would thus seem to have a ready-made analogue in the “tragic mulatta” figure introduced into the literature of the Americas by Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons” (1842).17 Yet Pitsémine’s mixed identity (which is complicated further by her playful cross-dressing) does not lead to an impasse consistent with racialist overdetermination based on blood contamination. On the contrary, the young woman is, according to Jack, “quelque chose de neuf, quelque chose qui commence” (247; something new, something that is beginning). While Poulin handles race mixing more critically than the official purveyors of Mexican mestizaje, Pitsémine’s métissage is nevertheless central to a novel about the full meaning of America. Paula Ann Roberts arrives at

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a similar interpretation, while seeing Poulin as a postmodernist author: “Ni Blanche, ni Indienne, la Grande Sauterelle se voit comme exile . . . elle est le lieu parfait pour la pratique postmoderne, c’est-à-dire l’installation et la subversion des métarécits” (“Un voyage” 11; Neither white nor Indian, la Grande Sauterelle sees herself as an exile . . . she is the perfect locus for postmodern practice, that is to say, the installation and subversion of meta­ narratives). According to Roger Hyman, Pitsémine is “the guide, the wisdom figure, advising, repairing, reminding us of and retrieving for us the other way of seeing in North America, the aboriginal perspective, matriarchal, tribal and founded on a decidedly non-Eurocentric view of history” (126). As a Sacagawea-like heroine, the métisse forms a corrective to a romantic view of America because she upsets the accounts contained in the books and museum displays that she and Jack (a fan of frontier stereotypes) encounter along the journey. At the same time, Pitsémine is not a mouthpiece for Poulin’s liberal romanticizing of pre-European history. As pieces of the story, she also points to unequal gender relations within the Six Nations confederacy and to intertribal warfare in Starved Rock. Pitsémine is the incarnation of the literary métissage that Poulin embraces in the novel. This is not to say that all texts coexist harmoniously in Volkswagen Blues. By analogy, a rift remains between Jack and Pitsémine, who form a dialectical point-counterpoint technique in the story. Consistent with a more cross-cultural Quebec, Poulin’s New World intertextuality allows the author to display, analyze, and challenge the minefields of American history from colonization to globalization.

Rugged Individualism and the Theme of the Voyageur In Volkswagen Blues, Poulin resuscitates colonial timelines through libraries, museums, books, and historical sites that tie Canada to patterns of travel, ones that began with the indigenous crossing of the Bering Strait from the West and continued with the French explorers who crossed the Atlantic from the East. For Jack, efforts to recover early America are driven by a spiritual longing that finds expression through the nineteenth-century myth of US nation-building: Avec le temps, le «Grand Rêve de l’Amérique» s’était brisé en miettes comme tous les rêves, mais il renaissait de temps à autre comme un

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feu qui couvait sous la cendre. Cela s’était produit au XIXe siècle lorsque les gens étaient allés dans l’Ouest. Et parfois, en traversant l’Amérique, les voyageurs retrouvarent des parcelles du vieux rêve qui avaient été éparpillées ici et là, dans les musées, dans les grottes et les canyons, dans les parcs nationaux comme ceux de Yellowstone et de Yosemite, dans les deserts et sur les plages comme celles de la Californie et de l’Oregon. With time, the “Great Dream of America” had been broken like all other dreams, but it was reborn from time to time as a fire that was smoldering under the ashes. This had happened in the nineteenth century when people went to the West. And perhaps, in traversing America, voyagers found fragments of the old dream that had been dispersed here and there, in museums, in grottoes and canyons, in the national parks like those at Yellowstone and Yosemite, in the deserts and on the beaches like those in California and Oregon. (110) If America’s cornerstone is the pilgrimage, then Poulin’s books, buildings, and sites form an archive containing its spiritual shards. The Age of Discovery is gone, but the promise of renewal persists within the ashes of history. The author establishes US migration to the West as a second moment of exploration. As Poulin rethinks Quebec literary nationalism in the mid1980s, his protagonists are “voyageurs” and part of a migratory third wave. Their voyage of education, however, will illuminate a troubled past and offset the romance of border crossing. Despite his mixed optimism about recapturing the “Great Dream of America,” Jack does not consider the cost of manifest destiny as a Jacksonian incarnation of this ideal. Nevertheless, Poulin’s interest in history brings to light a cultural domain that oversaw the establishment of museums and national parks—such as the Smithsonian Institution in 1846 and Yellowstone National Park in 1872, respectively—for affirming the intellectual life of the US republic. While disagreements persisted over the course of national economic development, an ideology of exceptionalism came to reflect a collective spirit of political and racial superiority during this time. Particularly in the wake of the War of 1812, the United States celebrated its illustrious revolutionary past and believed that its pioneering ways in the New World opposed the political corruption of British and other European societies. A brief illustration is in order here.

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Just sixteen years after the signing of the Constitution, the Louisiana Purchase had marked the passage of the United States from a free republic to an emerging empire. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson from 1803, Andrew Jackson, then a colonel in the Tennessee militia, celebrated the acquisition while implying US ownership of a grander empire: “all the western Hemisphere rejoices at the Joyfull [sic] news of the Cession of Louisiana—an event which places the peace happiness and liberty of our country on a parmanant [sic] basis, an event which generations yet unborn in each revolving year will hail the day and with it the causes that gave it birth” (354). By merging the agency of the European colonies, Amerindians, and African Americans into a single exultation, Jackson performs an audacious act of political ventriloquism. He conceals US nationalism within the garb of Pan-American solidarity by turning effortlessly from an international spokesperson (“all the western Hemisphere”) into an opportunist who praises the aggrandizement of a single nation (“our country”). He invokes universal principles of self-rule from the Declaration of Independence (“happiness and liberty”), but in support of a reason of state that eclipses adjacent European claims and the sovereignty of all indigenous peoples. After spearheading a successful military campaign that resulted in the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814 and the annexation of Florida in 1819, Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Along with the hemispheric security measure of the Monroe Doctrine, and a massive increase of US settlements west of the Mississippi, this law would help pave the way for the US capture of northern Mexico by midcentury. Like John L. O’Sullivan, that most influential proponent of what he termed manifest destiny, Jackson believed that the United States would only solve its Indian problem by expanding westward and southward to oust all European meddlers from North America. O’Sullivan’s editorials for the Democratic Review bolstered Jacksonian populism in general, and supported the annexation of Texas and Oregon in particular. In “The Great Nation of Futurity” (1839), O’Sullivan proclaimed the fate of the United States in terms more metaphysical, but no less geographically ambitious, than Jackson’s: The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High—the Sacred and the True. Its

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floor shall be a hemisphere—its roof the firmament of the starstudded heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God’s natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood—of “peace and good will amongst men.” (17–18) The nation’s “boundless future” connotes expansion without geographical or temporal limits. Expulsion, war, and annexation become events marking a cosmic movement, not political acts perpetrated by historical agents. O’Sullivan renders the visionary span of American empire through the architecture of the sacred “temple.” Erected for the secular worship of human prosperity, its roof reaches unto a cosmic zenith. The base occupies the foreign and domestic soil of the Western Hemisphere. Like Jackson before him, O’Sullivan figures US settlement of all of the Americas as a natural stage in the course of democracy. He evokes international diplomacy in his image of a league of nations (“an Union of many Republics”), but ensures that the coalition remains intact through the ultrasovereignty of that one “nation of many nations.” Besides Jack’s fascination with grandiose rhetoric used by the likes of Jackson and O’Sullivan, Poulin places the US commemoration of a mythologized past front and center as Jack and Pitsémine’s travel on the historic Oregon Trail. The couple retraces the “manifest destiny” of US pioneers past the Platte River, Ash Hollow, Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff, Fort Laramie, the Rocky Mountains and Sweetwater River, South Pass and the Continental Divide, and Fort Hall. Guided by Franzwa’s The Oregon Trail Revisited (a copy of which was once owned by Théo), Jack and Pitsémine make every effort to identify the remnants of the trail, even when natural and manmade markers have long been displaced by the transcontinental railroad, buried under buildings, or become part of the interstate highway. In a parody of a gold rush to find the lost brother, they undertake a detour onto the California Trail, at the end of which an anticlimax typical of the “blues” and characteristic of Poulin’s existentialist fiction awaits them. While this and other sites in Volkswagen Blues were once designed to project US national pride, they also provide a real chance for education through materials that, when studied thoroughly, challenge the violence concealed by dreams of transcendence. Frederick Merk writes that the Oregon Trail was largely responsible for building the “‘paths of empire’ in the nation’s formative years, opening the provinces of the Pacific West to occupation by American pioneers and to

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acquisition by the United States” (264). He also credits the trail with “serv[ing] as arteries between the Pacific coast and the Mississippi Valley, through which the life currents of travel and trade flowed until the advent of the railroads” (264). The Oregon Trail was originally carved out by traders and fur trappers and operated from the early 1840s until the completion of the Pacific Railroad in 1869. The shortest and most direct route to the West Coast, it traced a two-thousand-mile wagon ride for emigrants departing from Independence, Missouri (the trail’s starting point). Between 250,000 and 400,000 settlers, ranchers, farmers, businessmen, former soldiers, and adventurers undertook the journey, sometimes veering off to follow different trails along the way. Three offshoots were most notable: the California Trail and the Bozeman Trail both developed in response to the discovery of new gold rush territories, while the Mormon Trail led Brigham Young and his followers to a spiritual “promised land” in Utah. The emigrants took an average of six months to traverse the prairies, plains, mountains, and deserts. They lived under constant threat of death through disease, accident, and frontier attacks.18 Poulin counts the dangers as the characters stand before the grave of one unlucky traveler in Nebraska: victimes du choléra ou de la dysenterie ; noyés en traversant une rivière en crue ; frappés par la foudre ; tués par les Indiens ; blessés mortellement en maniant une arme à feu  ; morts de fatigue, d’épuisement, des suites d’une insolation ; dévorés par un ours grizzly  ; jeunes enfants, ils étaient tombés du chariot et avaient été broyés sous les roues. victims of cholera or dysentery; drowned crossing a river in spate; struck by lightning; killed by the Indians; mortally wounded when handling a firearm; dead of fatigue, of exhaustion, of sunstroke; devoured by a grizzly bear; young children fallen from a wagon and crushed to death under the wheels. (205) Nevertheless, the Oregon Trail is an American locus classicus that became synonymous with the US settlement of the West in celebratory landscape paintings such as Emanuel Luetz’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1860), John Gast’s American Progress (1862), and Albert Bierstadt’s The Oregon Trail (1869), and in the work of the North American historian Francis Parkman (who is referenced in Volkswagen Blues).19 For Poulin, the Oregon

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Trail is a place in which peoples and epochs coexist within the grand concourse of history. It is an eternal landscape that is multicultural and multi­ national, “plus ancienne que toute l’histoire de la conquête de l’Ouest, plus ancienne que les coureurs de bois et les pionniers, plus ancienne que tous les émigrants avec leurs chariots tirés par des bœufs . . . aussi vieille que les Indiens et probablement aussi vieille que l’Amérique” (253; older than the entire history of the conquest of the West, older than the coureurs de bois and the pioneers, older than all the emigrants with their ox-drawn wagons . . . as old as the Indians and probably as old as America). The Oregon Trail attests to humanity’s failed roadways, but it also records a pioneering spirit that Poulin seeks to recover in order to create a palimpsest of travel in the Americas. Ships, wagons, pedestrians, and cars all intersect in Volkswagen Blues. Pitsémine aptly mixes up traversal by land and sea while recounting from The Oregon Trail Revisited: “lorsque la caravane a quitté Independence, il y avait des collines et, avec l’herbe qui ondulait dans la prairie, on avait un peu l’impression d’être en bateau” (183; when the caravan left Independence, there were hills and, with the grass waving on the prairie, one had the slight impression of being on a ship). As we have seen, Poulin’s novel revives a history of frontier-crossing that is traditionally understood, and celebrated, as leading to nationhood. For Poulin, however, the Oregon Trail bespeaks a broader and longer interAmerican narrative that includes French claims to land that would only later become US territory. To retrace the Oregon Trail is likewise to retrace the steps of the French pioneers and, by extension, to see the transamerican span of Franco-American identity. While traversing the Rockies, the protagonists even find Théo’s accented name spray-painted on a giant boulder. This is hardly a joyful revelation, however, for Jack already suspects that “mon frère Théo, comme les pionniers, était absolument convaincu qu’il était capable de faire tout ce qu’il voulait” (149; my brother Théo, like the pioneers, was absolutely convinced that he could do whatever he wanted). Jack’s brother may have become more of a villain than a hero through an overindulgence of his freewill. At the Jackson County Historical Society in Missouri, the characters learn from a police report that Théo was implicated in an attempted robbery of a nineteenth-century map of Westport. Not by coincidence, it was drawn by the French Jesuit priest Nicolas Point, who had performed missionary work in what is today the Northwest and Midwest of the United States. Later, Poulin links Théo to the Western outlaw Jesse James. This leads Jack to speculate that his brother may have been a terrorist for the Front de libération du Québec (Quebec Liberation Front; FLQ).20

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Figure 3.1. An American locus classicus. Albert Bierstadt, The Oregon Trail, 1869. Collection, the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

At the Toronto Reference Library, the couple finds microfilm detailing Théo’s arrest for possession of an unlicensed firearm. When interrogated by the police, Théo claimed “voyageur” as his occupation, a term that Poulin uses frequently throughout Volkswagen Blues, and one that appears to have a pedestrian meaning as “voyager” (79). Yet the word has a precise connotation in Canadian French that is untranslatable into English; for, in the course of establishing and operating the fur trade in New France, the voyageurs were also the European “discoverers” of large portions of North America.21 By forging French-Amerindian business relations, they prepared the way for settlements and defined the routes for the Jesuit pursuit of “unsaved” souls. Samuel de Champlain’s 1603 travel narrative Des sauvages (Of Savages) established the theme of the voyageur in Canadian letters. In Volkswagen Blues, they are the most iconic of American forebears who allow Poulin to look forward and backward—ahead to the future of Quebec literature and back to a Canadian past that has always been transnational and mobile. Historically, fishermen and independent traders were among the earliest members involved in the fur business, as were coureurs de bois (unlicensed dealers operating in the Canadian wilderness and the precursors to the

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voyageurs). By navigating rivers with Indian canoes, voyageurs transported furs and other goods between the trade hub in Montreal and trading posts installed in the far western and northern reaches of North America. They were indentured servants who worked for companies that employed up to three thousand men at the height of industrial production during the eighteenth century. The largest of these corporations were the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) established in 1670 and the North West Company (NWC); established in 1783. Seeking to exploit French-Amerindian connections, the companies used the old trade routes and recruited voyageurs to serve as ambassadors. The lucrative interchange incited a fierce rivalry across the continent. New Englanders, for instance, seized French forts at Detroit and Michilimackinac to use as trading posts shortly after the French and Indian War. Then, in an effort to gain a monopoly beyond the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes regions, the New York entrepreneur John Jacob Astor established the Pacific Fur Company on the West Coast in 1811.22 While several of them settled in the pays d’en haut (the “upper country” west and north of Montreal), the voyageurs were part of a mobile workforce that forsook home for months and even years at a time. Business interactions inside lodges and hunting camps routinely brought the men together with their First Nation counterparts. The Frenchmen adjusted to the indigenous diet, mode of dress, language, social customs, and technology (most notably the bark canoe). The voyageurs sought to remain French Catholics, but their labor led them to forge a new and unexpected identity as the first cultural hybrids of Canada. Many voyageurs even came to show pride in their wedlock with Native women, whom they regarded as sexual prizes bestowed upon them by their “savage” rivals in the field. These intermarriages produced the Métis, the first generation of mixed-race Canadians who served as intermediaries for business conducted between French and Indian fur traders.23 Pitsémine, the troubled offspring of French and indigenous contact in the New World—and one of Poulin’s most learned and articulate characters—occupies this position of middle broker in Volkswagen Blues. Her métissage attests to a split past that must be negotiated in order to chart a new course for Quebecois literature. Although the voyageur facilitated a transnational blending of cultures, he has been embraced as a long-standing archetype of Canadian national mythology in history books such as Fur Hunters of the Far West (1855), which was written by Pacific Fur Company trader Alexander Ross, and Grace Lee Nute’s classic The Voyageur (1931). Like Natty Bumppo, the legendary frontiersman,

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protagonist, and friend to the Indians in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823–1841), voyageurs came to symbolize self-reliance, endurance, and strength as a national foundation.24 Alexander Podruchny describes the myth of the voyageur as one in which, “[l]ike comic-book heroes, voyageurs have a highly visible reputation, building the Canadian nation with their Herculean strength, while singing, laughing, leaping over waterfalls, and paddling faster than speeding arrows” (2). The original voyageurs left songs behind, but virtually no writings. This dearth of sources has only fueled the tradition of tall tales. As the gaucho in Argentina and the cowboy in the United States, the voyageur emblem circulates in popular memory as one of a largerthan-life folk hero whose working-class charm is at the roots of Canadian manhood and, by extension, a national identity separate from Old World refinement. In Volkswagen Blues, Poulin utilizes voyageur tropes in order to reshape the oldest European genre in the Americas—the expedition narrative— within a contemporary road context. He transforms the early modern archive of French “discovery” into a novel of rediscovery for a new global age. Using colonial travel themes as a template, Poulin juxtaposes a hemispheric panorama of journeymen from the precolonial era to the present. The voyageur archetype positions all characters into a saga of early French exploration that overlaps narratives of Oregon trailblazing and of Canadian postwar travel. In chapter 4, Pitsémine even compares the treatment of Native Americans by coureurs de bois, voyageurs, and (less favorably) the pioneers of the western United States. Théo in particular, according to Miraglia, “se distingue par son nomadisme, par son esprit d’aventures et même par sa capacité de violence. Bref, par son américanité” (“L’Ámerique” 39; distinguishes himself by his nomadism, by his adventurous spirit and equally by his capacity for violence. In short, by his Americanness). Rather than reprising the voyageur national ideal, Théo is a peregrinator of pathways that are older and more expansive. Poulin gradually turns the missing brother, whom Jack admits to being “à moitié vrai et à moitié inventé” (149; half-real and half-invented), into a museum composite of athletes, writers, artists, politicians, folk heroes, and frontiersmen from all sides of the border: “peu à peu la silhouette de son frère grandissait et prenait place dans une galerie imaginaire où se trouvait une étrange collection de personnages, parmi lesquels on pouvait reconnaître Maurice Richard, Ernest Hemingway, Jim Clark, Louis Riel, Burt Lancaster, Kit Carson, La Vérendrye, Vincent Van Gogh, Davy Crockett . . .” (240; little by little the silhouette of his brother broadened and

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Figure 3.2. Canadian hybridity at work. Frances Anne Hopkins, Shooting the Rapids, 1879. Frances Anne Hopkins, Library and Archives Canada, acc. no. 1989-401-2, c002774.

took its place inside an imaginary gallery where were found a strange collection of personages, among which one could recognize Maurice Richard, Ernest Hemingway, Jim Clark, Louis Riel, Burt Lancaster, Kit Carson, La Vérendrye, Vincent Van Gogh, Davy Crockett . . .). Poulin’s concluding ellipsis here suggests an unfolding, and uncertain, Quebecois identity that situates the past within the present, and vice versa. Most importantly, the voyageur theme allows Poulin to account for cross-cultural traversals in early Canada as the basis for a grand amplification within a quintessentially New World novel. Adam Paul Weisman claims that, in seeking “a single myth that explains the development of North America,” Poulin found a “philosopher’s stone in the myth of the voyageur” (488). While the theme of the voyageur is a key, Simon Harel finds a more difficult negotiation of Quebec identity that fits the disillusionment of the protagonist at journey’s end: “L’intérêt du roman de Poulin, malgré la nostalgie de cette présence française, ne résidant pas dans la recherche d’une quelconque archè fondatrice . . . mais plutôt dans la sédimentation plurielle des parcours entremêlés” (166; the interest of Poulin’s novel, despite the nostalgia for this French presence, does not reside in the search for some

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foundational arche . . . but rather in the plural sedimentation of interwoven routes). Indeed, the journey from Gaspé to San Francisco proves emotionally disheartening on the one hand, but intellectually inspiring on the other. From a Toronto police file, we know that Jack’s brother traveled with a copy of Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), which suggests that he admired the Beats and perhaps even sought to become a disciple of the movement, a connection explored by Miraglia (L’écriture) in line with what Rachel Adams calls the “Quebecoization of Kerouac” (168).25 Théo later turns up as an unidentified man along with Allen Ginsberg in a photograph taken at the Caffé Trieste around 1977. The picture resembles Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1498), with Théo assuming the role of Judas Iscariot. At the City Lights Bookstore, Jack questions Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the cofounder of the legendary bookstore that published works by the Beats. Further investigations lead Jack to San Francisco’s red-light district, where he learns that his brother has been living among vagrants and junkies. His condition reflects the failings of the 1960s hippie counterculture, which, according to the author, had “essayé de mettre en pratique dans ce secteur une nouvelle conception de la vie et des rapports entre les gens” (306; attempted to put into practice in this region a new conception of life and of relations between people). In a Canadian context, he also represents Quebec nationalism at the end of its rope. Jack finally spots Théo in front of the Powell Street station in a condition that perverts the kinetic ideals of the road genre. Confined to a wheelchair and incapacitated by a terminal illness described as “creeping paralysis” (315), Théo fails to recognize his brother and addresses him in English with a terse declarative sentence that recalls Peter’s denial of Jesus: “I don’t know you” (314).26 If Poulin uses the voyageur trope to foreground symbols of mobility that have connected the Americas (the canoe, the steamship, the railroad, the automobile), then Théo’s wheelchair represents inertia as the deterioration and death of the American Dream. Adams sees Théo (a stand-in for Kerouac, in her view) as “a presence to contend with, but also to overcome” (176). In my view, Volkswagen Blues exceeds allegorical one-to-one correspondences between characters and historical counterparts. Rather, Poulin broadens the field of reference and espouses intertextuality, cultural métissage, and open dialogue in order to update the American travel genre and amplify Quebec literature. Théo’s condition marks the end of the road for all emigrant-­travelers; it is Poulin’s final blow to the myth of America as land of physical and spiritual freedom. The road to San Francisco ends not in gold, but in California’s skid row, the type of place where, to paraphrase Los Angeles author Nathanael

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West, many a hopeful Quebecker has gone to die. At the beginning of Volkswagen Blues, travel was the source of a childlike fascination for Jack, who aspired to be a writer-adventurer in accordance with a long line of journeymen, his brother among them. As the tale winds down, he realizes that Théo is a fallen hero and that, in the longue durée of recorded hemispheric history, “la violence éclatait à chaque page” (136; violence clamored out in each page). Paradoxically, the journey proves successful because it simultaneously affords a more complex understanding of border crossing within a new kind of Quebecois novel. The completed trip establishes a crucial link between the Americas as source material and Poulin/Waterman as author of Volkswagen Blues. The journey transforms the individual and collective identities of all transcontinental passengers on board. While Jack remains dejected, Pitsémine stays in San Francisco in an ongoing effort to reconcile her warring halves in the multicultural metropole. Before they part ways, however, a long embrace unites the couple in an uncharacteristically quiet moment in the text: “ils se serrènt l’un contre l’autre, assis au bord de leur siège, les genoux mêlés, et its restèrent un long moment immobiles, étroitement enlaces comme s’ils n’étaient plus qu’une seule personne” (320; they hugged each other tightly, sitting on the edge of their seat, knees tangled, and they stayed immobile for a long time, embracing tightly as if they were no more than a single person). While much less vexed, the passage invites comparisons with the ending of Terra Nostra; here too a couple comes together not by eliminating differences, but as if they (“comme s’ils”) were capable of doing so through a transcendent fusion. Nevertheless, this merging tempers Pitsémine’s earlier divisiveness: “On est arrivés par l’Ouest et vous êtes arrivés par l’Est. Il y a 7 000 kilomètres qui nous séparent! (29; We (Native Americans) came from the West and you (Europeans) came from the East. There are 7,000 kilometers that separate us!).27 By utilizing his newfound understanding to “en parler dans un livre” (319; talk about it in a book), Jack will create Volkswagen Blues as a likeminded prudent mixture of cultural understanding and irreconcilable differences as negotiated along the well-traversed pathways of America.

Remapping American Borderlands In Volkswagen Blues, Poulin describes the US-Canadian border in and around Thousand Islands through a statement that highlights his interAmericanism: “Quelque part au milieu du fleuve, une frontière imaginaire

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séparait le Canada et les États-Unis” (57; Somewhere in the middle of the river, an imaginary frontier separated Canada and the United States). The inexactness of the Canadian border destabilizes a sense of “place” by undercutting the foundations of national definition. The parts of the St. Lawrence River “belonging” to one or the other neighboring states must meet in a back and forth that violates the logic of official boundaries and exact coordinates. The waterway is an indivisible entity, and thus impervious to the cartographic imaginary of nations. Poulin’s borders remain porous and create overlaps rather than separations. The cartographic “rift” does not signal discrete political entities created through legislation, nor is it imbued with the proud national significance that the frontier has historically held for humans from both sides of the line arguing with each other.28 Whether working to cordon off the nearly one million Quebecois who sought work in New England manufacturing towns between 1830 and 1930, the African American slaves who dreamed of escaping northward in the nineteenth century, or the US draft evaders who sought refuge from the Vietnam War, the “border” established at the forty-ninth parallel is quixotic because it purports to tame an ecosystem that remains unbound, that is prenational, and even prehistoric. This undoing of traditional boundaries is behind Poulin’s depiction of two antique maps of North America exhibited at the Gaspé museum. The displays reveal a continent plagued by a successive wave of conquests that predate the political consolidation of nation-states. On the first of these maps “on pouvait voir l’immense territoire qui appartenait à la France au milieu du XVIIIe siècle, un territoire qui s’étendait des régions arctiques au golfe du Mexique et qui, vers l’ouest, atteignait même les montagnes Rocheuses” (19; one could see the immense territory that belonged to France in the middle of the eighteenth century, a territory that extended from arctic regions to the Gulf of Mexico and that, toward the west, also reached the Rocky Mountains). By showing the French Empire at its height, the map lays bare the geopolitical malleability of so-called “early” America. The British had yet to conquer New France and Jefferson had yet to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon Bonaparte, which would more than double the span of the United States. The map estranges perception by establishing the French contribution to a history that is not confined to current “American” borders. Yet to stop the process of discovery here would risk promoting a narrative of Franco-exceptionalism. Thus, a second map disrupts the first by revealing an earlier and more remote image of the continent. It is dotted with

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de noms de tribus indiennes, des noms que l’homme connaissait : les Cris, les Montagnais, les Iroquois, les Sioux, les Cheyennes, les Comanches, les Apaches, mais également une grande quantité de noms dont il n’avait jamais entendu parler de toute sa vie  : les Chastacostas, les Shumans, les Miluks, les Wacos, les Karankawans, les Timucuas, les Potanos, les Yuchis, les Coahuitlecans, les Pascagoulas, les Tillamooks, les Maidus, les Possepatucks, les Alseas, les Chawashas, les Susquehannas, les Calusas. .

the names of Indian tribes, names that the man knew—Cree, Montagnais, Iroquois, Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, Apache—but equally a large quantity of names that he had never heard in all his life: Chastacosta, Shuman, Miluk, Waco, Karankawan, Timucua, Potano, Yuchi, Coahuitlecan, Pascagoula, Tillamook, Maidu, Possepatuck, Alsea, Chawasha, Susquehanna, Calusa. (19) The display revives a large network of communities that form the first layer of multicultural America. Here and elsewhere, Poulin’s remapping of Quebec relies on a full understanding that embraces suppressed and/or forgotten cartographies. The catalogue of familiar and unfamiliar names is an incantation that calls the First Nations back into being. In Poulin’s mosaic, the inhabitants of Canadian villages in the St. Lawrence valley, southern Ontario, and coastal British Columbia form part of a constellation of peoples strewn across an entire continent. Both maps defamiliarize America by redrawing, and reclaiming, colonial and pre-Columbian boundaries, and by reconfiguring place-names in defiance of an inherited sense of nationhood. They compress past and current histories and emphasize inter-American contact zones. Poulin disrupts the centrality of nations, regions, and cultures, and rediscovers an interdependent and transnational continent. By reawakening connections that were forged centuries earlier, he presents the transamerican paradigm as normative. Poulin simply assumes the role of geographer here, for it is the evolving map of America itself that disturbs our sense of permanence by revealing the intertwined “alien” presences behind current national formations. Additionally, Poulin creates alternative geographies across nations and regions through hemispheric American nature that invokes the sublime. For instance, the Mississippi River “séparait l’Amérique en deux et . . . reliait le Nord et le Sud” (129; separated America in two and . . . linked the North and

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the South). At about 3,730 kilometers in length, it is the largest river system in North America and establishes natural boundaries along ten different states stretching from its starting point in Minnesota to its final spill into the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi cuts North America into two halves and, in spite of their cultural and political differences, links the US territories of the North and the South through an arterial flow of life. Poulin’s envisioning of elemental physical boundaries beyond the imagined space of the nation suggests the awesome power of nature to influence the course of human events and not the other way around. This remapping of borders undermines what, in the vein of ecocriticism, Lawrence Buell identifies as an environmental imaginary that trades in “distinctive myths of landscape that then inscribe themselves on the physical environment, partly to underscore and partly to produce what passes as distinctively national environmental forms” (“Ecoglobalist” 229). While Scotts Bluff, Mitchell Pass, and Chimney Rock all invoke Western iconography, the Continental Divide best conveys Poulin’s own trans­ hemispheric vision. This hydrological boundary is a natural wonder that courses through America from the North Pole to the Tierra del Fuego. It carries river drainage to the Atlantic and the Pacific at 7,550 feet of elevation and across mountain terrain ranging from the Rockies to the Andes. In Volkswagen Blues, Jack and Pitsémine decide to commemorate their arrival at the site in Wyoming by making love right on the line. They fail to consummate after Jack succumbs to premature ejaculation, a mishap that reminds Pitsémine of her incompatible racial selves. Poulin stages the episode upon a majestic American peak, but keeps the characters from meeting halfway through sexual union. The couple’s anticlimax underscores the rift between the protagonists and, by extension, their French and Amerindian worldviews. The episode also separates man and the environment: nature offers neither a pastoral innocence, nor a material repository of use-value. An alternative to the transnational corporation, gigantic nature insists on human limits by placing respect before aggrandizement.29 Accordingly, Volkswagen Blues ends with an image of a New World cosmos that exists outside contemporary maps. In this undisclosed location, an assembly of gods protects Jack and illuminates a trail for Quebec literature. Poulin’s hybrid path even suggest life beyond Fuentes’s mestizo monster: “il y avait, quelque part dans l’immensité de l’Amérique, un lieu secret où les dieux des Indiens et les autres dieux étaient rassemblés et tenaient conseil dans le but de veiller sur lui et d’éclairer sa route” (320; there was, somewhere in the immensity of America, a secret

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place where the gods of the Indians and the other gods were assembled together and holding council with the goal of watching over him and lighting his way). While they begin by traveling southward, Poulin’s personages reach the endpoint of a North American continent defined historically by its west­ward crossings—from the original European traversal of the Atlantic, to nineteenth-­century US migration along the Oregon Trail, to the retracing of such voyages by the Beat writers and, more recently, 1980s Quebecois authors. What is new in Volkswagen Blues is also what is old; for, unlike much of contemporary literature, the novel dramatizes the current emigrant experience as part of the global traffic depicted in Hispanic, Francophone, Anglophone, and indigenous archives of the Americas. Paradoxically, Poulin achieves literary originality by creating a story line that is simply coextensive with its own troubled past. In retracing New World travel since 1492, the novel combines the excitement of the road with the prudence necessary to continue the quest(ioning). A newly declared Canadian “masterpiece,” Volkswagen Blues introduces a Greater American perspective that can broaden the historical, cultural, and linguistic parameters of Quebecois and hemispheric studies.30 In Genèse des nations et cultures du Nouveau Monde (2000; The Genesis of Nations and the Cultures of the New World), the acclaimed Quebecois intellectual Gérard Bouchard expands the terrain by urging scholars to “considérer la genèse du Québec non seulement comme l’histoire d’une culture minoritaire en Amérique mais aussi comme l’un de épisodes de la création du Nouveau Monde” (173; consider the genesis of Quebec not only as the history of a cultural minority, but also as one of the episodes in the creation of the New World). In heeding this Boltonian call for a new Canadian paradigm, we might first turn to Poulin and to the bittersweet wisdom of his “grand roman de l’Amérique.”

Ch a p t er 4

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Council Book Hemispheric Forces in Almanac of the Dead

}

I n 1981, L agu na Pu eblo I n di a n au thor Leslie M a r mon Silko

became one of forty-one recipients of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Nicknamed the “genius grant,” the prize recognized the mixed-media collections Laguna Woman (1974) and Storyteller (1981), and most importantly, her 1977 novel Ceremony, which had made Silko a leading Native American writer overnight. She formed a triad with N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa-­Cherokee) and James Welch (Blackfeet-Gros Ventre), writers who also explore alienation and healing in their respective debut novels, House Made of Dawn (1968) and Winter in the Blood (1974). The decision to award the 1969 Pulitzer Prize to Momaday’s House Made of Dawn had signaled the official arrival of a new Native American literature, and the works that followed by Welch and Silko amplified the signal. In fact, these three works became paradigmatic of what, in his classic 1983 study by the same name, Kenneth Lincoln would dub the “Native American Renaissance.”1 Silko’s subsequent novel, the 763-page Almanac of the Dead (1991), is quite a different story. It was notorious even before its publication in 1991 because of the decade it took to write. Silko had left a teaching job at the University of New Mexico in order to complete the novel during the five-year funding period of her McArthur fellowship, and added to the financial and creative stress generated by the overdue project was the loss of the legal custody of her twelve-year-old son. When it finally did appear, Almanac of the 104

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Dead stirred controversy for its radical departure from her previous work.2 Whereas Ceremony has been described as a “manual of healing,” Almanac of the Dead called into question the healing formula deemed by Lincoln as fundamental to the Native American Renaissance (St. Clair, “Uneasy” 85). Almanac of the Dead never received the type of praise that had made Ceremony required reading in Native American literature courses. While this undoubtedly had to do with its length, graphic subject matter, and formal demands on the reader, Almanac of the Dead departed from what had become by then expected representations of Native American cultures.3 Its publication coincided with the culture wars in the 1990s, during which English departments embraced “minority” literatures as part of multicultural studies initiatives within the US academy. Because the position of quintessential Native American novel already belonged to Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead—Silko’s most misunderstood work, in my view—seemed doubly distanced from accepted canonical criteria. Clearly, this difficult novel requires a critical assessment that goes beyond the thematic emphases current at the time of its publication. Most importantly, it requires the foregrounding of Silko’s use of Latin American indigenous expressive forms. Placing Almanac of the Dead into standard US ethnic studies categories obscures its hemispheric reach, for the novel exceeds the nation-state in its engagement of pan-indigenous traditions and media, among them stone carving, muralism, and the Mesoamerican codices. In Almanac of the Dead, Silko puts aside existentialist concerns with tribal alienation, a topic that drives Ceremony and much of the literature of the Native American Renaissance, in order to explore a broader sense of Indianness.4 Responding to this critical imperative, I propose to place Almanac of the Dead into its proper hemispheric and historical context as an indigenous summa Americana. In this chapter, I focus on three intertwined dimensions of the novel: (1) the inter-American range of its Native and non-Native sources, which stem from traditions that are outside, and even inimical to, the physical, conceptual, and linguistic boundaries of the United States; (2) its interartistic elements, and in particular the ways in which the novel’s alphabetic writing intersects with pre-Columbian visual forms; and (3) the hemispheric expanse of Silko’s storytelling, which, in an effort to disrupt repeating epochs of colonial plunder and environmental ruin, conjoins the physical and cultural geographies of Native peoples into a five-hundred-year struggle for telluric reclamation.

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A particular episode in the long gestation of Almanac of the Dead is telling. As Silko recounts it in a handful of interviews, one afternoon in 1988, as she struggled with prolonged writer’s block, her efforts took an unexpected turn. After wrestling with the manuscript all morning, she exited her rented studio at 930 Stone Avenue in Tucson and spray-painted one of the building’s brick walls. A colorful mural (which no longer stands) began to emerge that eventually measured twelve by forty feet. It featured a profile view of a thirtyfoot blue rattlesnake with thirty-three human skulls lining its intestinal tract. The snake was depicted as a prodigious predator with exposed fangs, a darting tongue, and an upturned eyeball. Silko placed it among southwestern motifs: a blue mountain peak (possibly Mount Taylor), spiky desert plants, and a slithering salamander. Celestial bodies highlighted two overlapping planes, daytime and nighttime. On extreme ends of the foreground panel, rain and thunder clouds coexisted with a Zia Pueblo sun symbol (a red circle with rays pointing in the four directions). Stars and a crescent moon floated on a midnight-blue background that provided a matting effect for the central images. The overall impression was of a snake emerging from nocturnal slumber into full consciousness. At the center, Silko spelled out its intentions in Spanish: La gente tiene el frío. La gente tiene el hambre. Los ricos han robado la tierra. Los ricos han robado la libertad. La gente grita. The people are hungry. The people are cold. The rich have stolen the land. The rich have stolen freedom. The people cry out. Here, Silko channeled the anger of Tucson’s poor and powerless during the Reagan presidency of the 1980s. Abandoning any legalese that she might have learned as a law student at the University of New Mexico, her message was clear: the snake is on the warpath in defense of the have-nots; it will punish the rich, and also the corrupt politicians who serve their interests. Silko’s graffiti spoke to disenfranchised Spanish speakers, and condemned the area’s

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Figure 4.1. Leslie Marmon Silko, “Stone Avenue Mural.” Original version, 1988. Image courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © 1991 by Leslie Marmon Silko; © 1988 by Leslie Marmon Silko, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

racist, and often monolingual, authority figures, among them then governor of Arizona, Evan Mecham.5 At the time, she was also fighting an anti-­ Hispanic mandate passed in the state legislature that sought to erase the Spanish heritage of the Southwest by making English the official language of Arizona. Silko “edited” her Stone Avenue mural in 1993, painting the snake red and adding other details, including another skull for the snake’s eyeball, a hummingbird, and a spider in its web.6 The property owner of 930 Stone Avenue erased all remnants of the mural in 1994. Although Silko claims the mural was a serendipitous creation (“a message came and it was in Spanish”), a clear inspiration for it was the thirtyfoot biomorphic sandstone snake that is said to have appeared at an open uranium mine near Paguate, New Mexico, in the spring of 1980 (qtd. in

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Arnold, Conversations 155). Known as “Ma ah shra tru ee,” this same snake was believed to have once inhabited Lake Kawaik, from which Laguna Pueblo (“Lagoon Village” in Spanish) gets its Keresan name. Consistent with Laguna Pueblo cosmology, the snake came from the Fourth World with a message from the Mother Creator. It appeared to protest the pit mining carried out near the sipapu (“the place of emergence”), the sacred site from which humans and animals transitioned into the present Fifth World. In Laguna Pueblo, Kerr-McGee Oil Industries and Anaconda Jackpile conducted open-pit mining between 1953 and 1982, much of it to build atomic bombs and nuclear reactors. Silko visited this site while scouting locations for her film Estoyehmuut and the Gunnadeyah (1980; Arrowboy and the Witches). Her activism on and off the reservation ties her to her protagonist Sterling in Almanac of the Dead, and evidences her local and global concerns; while rooted in her tribal homeland, the author is not confined to it as an artist. Silko’s wall snake reappears as the Laguna Pueblo stone snake in Almanac of the Dead. As Silko multiplies its meanings in the novel, the snake accrues antecedents in the ancient religious traditions of Mesoamerica (particularly through the serpent-deity Quetzalcoatl) and West Africa (through the voodoo snake-god Damballah), and becomes a key to an authorial prophecy.7 Silko’s mural was a catalyst for the final stages of Almanac of the Dead. Working from wall to page, she soon wrote the “Mexico” section (part 2), which paved the way for the Mayan-led uprising as described in the last twothirds of her novel. After speaking with her Laguna Pueblo community, Silko became convinced that her mural was revelatory and would assume its full significance in the form of a completed masterwork: “When I finished that drawing I was told that the snake was . . . a messenger to the Pueblo people . . .  and that he came to help me finish the novel” (qtd. in Arnold, Conversations 155). According to the author, she had planned for Almanac of the Dead to be “a very short, simple, commercial novel” about Tucson’s “cops-and-robbers” underworld, but the wall snake demanded a bigger and more daring panorama (qtd. in Arnold, Conversations 154). By highlighting a pattern of exile and return, the stone snake provides a frame for the novel. At the beginning, the reader learns that Laguna Pueblo elders have banished Sterling from the reservation after he allowed a Hollywood crew to desecrate the snake by filming it. In the final chapter, Sterling returns to the foot of Mount Taylor and visits the holy icon in a moment of tribal reintegration. Connected to “the disappearance of all things European” (a slogan that gains momentum as the

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novel approaches its ending), the stone snake points to an indigenous revolution that stretches well beyond the New Mexico reservation. Aesthetically, the Stone Avenue mural reflects several interrelated traditions, all of which amplify the prophetic range of the novel and justify Silko’s characterization of Laguna Pueblo as an “all-inclusive” culture (qtd. in Perry 317). Mary Ellen Snodgrass calls the snake “an urban petroglyph,” thus placing Silko in an ancestral Puebloan tradition of rock carving that may have begun as early as 7,000 bce (30). The petroglyphs found in Mesa Verde, Horseshoe Canyon, Grand Gulch, and other locations often depict largescale animals (such as the bighorn sheep indigenous to the Southwest) hover­ing alongside hunters, kachina spirits, ancestral beings, and other pictograms and celestial symbols. Although scholars have yet to decipher the entire pictorial lexicon of the Four Corners region, the character and consistency of the markings that artists left behind trace a civilization with a sophisticated cosmology and an equally complex social organization. Today, the most spectacular of the markings, once carved alongside multistory cliff dwellings and ceremonial kiva chambers, are contained within US national parks. For Laguna and the twenty other tribes that trace their heredity to the ancestral Puebloans, the sites remain mystical places of communion. But Silko’s Stone Avenue mural was a painting, not sculpted stone. Even as she engaged this age-old Pueblo tradition, her mural also had aesthetic affinities with the Mexican muralist movement, which began with Diego Rivera’s return from Europe in 1921, and flourished for more than three decades. As we saw in chapter 1, Rivera’s murals blend indigenous and Spanish imagery on public walls. His frescoes, which represent an antibourgeois disavowal of easel painting, celebrate Mexico’s indigenous cultures and their art forms (including ancient mural painting), as well as contemporary cultural practices and beliefs that remain rooted in indigenous traditions (such as the Day of the Dead, communal festivals, dances, and the ceremonial use of masks and costumes). Rivera sought to educate his viewers through politically and culturally charged imagery that reinterpreted history and illustrated the promises and perils of modernity. While supporting mestizaje, he also defended Mexico’s indigenous past against a racist colonial legacy that had persisted into the twentieth century. His murals and those of other contemporary muralists, notably José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, were sponsored by the Mexican state, but they would have a grassroots revival during the US Chicano movement that began in the late 1960s.

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Chicano muralism had a powerful precedent in Mexico’s state-­ sponsored art, but its practitioners traded the authority of the state for funding that came directly from working-class communities, local businesses, and unions.8 The new images appeared not on the walls of civic buildings as they had in Mexico, but along the barrio streets of decaying inner cities. Murals such as Corazón/Aztlán (1975) helped to advance Chicano political aims. Painted by Tomas Castaneda for San Diego’s Chicano Park, the mural created a symbol for the struggle by picturing a giant sacred heart (a blending of Catholic and Aztec religious imagery) before a Mexican pyramid. Linking blood to bloodline, multigenerational portraits of Latino families look proudly at the heart (which appears to beat in real time), and back at the viewer. Another remarkable example is The History of California (1976–1983; known as “The Great Wall of Los Angeles”), which measures half a mile’s length. Directed by Chicana muralist Judy Baca and executed by over a dozen artists, its original subject was California’s development from prehistory through the 1950s. Early phases of the work consisted of nine panels that stressed Amerindian and Hispanic contact during the era of exploration and in the period of Mexican nationhood. Yet, as Eva Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sánchez indicate, “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” combines a preoccupation for projecting a distinct Chicano heritage alongside a multicultural approach inclusive of all oppressed minorities (13–14). Panels painted at subsequent stages relate Japanese internment, Jewish Holocaust refugees, McCarthyism, the gay rights movement, and other testaments to human struggle.9 Silko’s Stone Avenue mural, in combination with the novel it helped to complete, is part of this indigenous Hispanic artistic tradition. Just as Chicano street artists reinvented Mexican muralism north of the border, so too Silko, in the guise of her Laguna Pueblo snake, reworks a hemispheric and artistic lineage into a pronouncement of collective hope. 10

Silko’s Indigenismo: Cosmic Revision and the Codices With the 1991 publication of Almanac of the Dead by Simon & Schuster (reissued as a paperback by Penguin in 1992), Silko joined several Native American authors and artists who timed major works to contest the Columbian quincentenary.11 Among their collective achievements is Without Discovery: A Native Response to Columbus (1992), an anthology of verse, fiction,

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and essays edited by the Chicano poet Ray Gonzalez. Unlike projects that stress survivorship from a single tribal perspective, Without Discovery establishes a pan-tribal platform for resistance. Gonzalez expands the range of the term “Native” by combining mixed-blood artists who are normally considered Native American (such as the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor) with those who are not (Chicano and Puerto Rican authors). The back cover features a full-page blurb credited to “Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Almanac of the Dead.” Here, Silko begins by quoting a speech made by the Chicano activist Reyes Lopez Tijerina sometime during the 1970s: “Yo soy indio-­ hispanico. No soy ‘hispanico,’ ni ‘latino,’ ni ‘espanol,’ ni mexicano. Yo soy indio-hispanico” (I am Indian-Hispanic. I am not “Hispanic,” nor “Latino,” nor “Spanish,” nor Mexican. I am Indian-Hispanic). Hearing this redefinition of indigeneity, Silko claims to have thought, “Yes! If all the indio-­ hispanicos ever decide to stand up and be counted, we indio-americanos will number in the millions, and then we’ll retake the land.” This revelation is followed by a description of the anthology, which, according to Silko, answers these questions: “Who are we native Americans? Who are we half-breeds and mestizos? Who are we Chicanas?” Silko then quotes Chicano poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz and Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior, confirming that her interest in Without Discovery is not only in its debunking of the Columbus myth but also in its reconfiguration of identity. She finds here a powerful restoration of common origins, akin to her own project in Almanac of the Dead. Both quincentenary works seek to make the “indio” prefix connecting “hispanicos” and “americanos” newly visible.12 In Almanac of the Dead, Silko also draws on indigenous textual traditions to disrupt “the worldwide network of Destroyers” responsible for the “Blood Madness” of the Americas as dramatized in the novel (336). She finds a primary precursor in the Quiché Maya Popol Vuh (Council Book).13 Following the lead of the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, a Nobel Prize winner and a translator of the Popol Vuh into Spanish, Silko reinvents the Maya holy book in order to forward a spiritual and anticapitalist vision of America. Unlike Asturias, however, Silko redefines all of the Americas through the common bond of indigeneity, negotiating competing and complementary aspects of European and indigenous histories. This hemispheric realignment turns Almanac of the Dead into “an encyclopedia of Native American cultures,” according to Adam Sol (25).14 As Herman Melville, Carlos Fuentes, and Jacques Poulin do before her, Silko incorporates and updates a New World archive comprised of words and visual images. Besides

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the Popol Vuh, she engages Toltec narratives of Quetzalcoatl’s return, legends of the Aztec homeland in Aztlán, and the Mesoamerican codices. Myths, their expressive media, and the interweaving of hemispheric story lines from Alaska to Argentina, combine to provide the metaphysical and symbolic foundations for Silko’s response to the Columbian quincentenary. Contrary to the US modernists who sought to “make it new,” to borrow Ezra Pound’s oft-quoted dictum, Silko’s originality here consists in recovering an indigenous archive that can make American literature “old” again. Critics have connected Silko’s literary encyclopedism to her repeated depictions of greed, murder, suicide, genocide, drug abuse, sex abuse, bestiality, and other modes of debauchery. This marriage of form and content turns Almanac of the Dead into what even admiring interpreters have called “a compendium of contemporary evil” (Perreault 173) and an “enormous tapestry of moral depravity” (Powers 268). While the darkness of Almanac of the Dead overshadows the redemptive tone of Ceremony, both works confront the problem of evil, which the author equates with “injustice” and attributes to “an imbalance and unwellness” in the universe (qtd. in Arnold, Conversations 105). This view of iniquity as cosmic disturbance is common to indigenous cultures, and disrupts a Western binary sense of good and evil with one side winning. For instance, in an episode from the Florentine Codex, one of Bernardino de Sahagún’s Indian informers registers the aftershocks of the Cholula massacre by the invading Spanish army: “Por su parte, la gente humilde no más está llena de espanto. No hace más que sentirse azorada. Es como si la tierra temblara, como si la tierra girara en torno de los ojos. Tal como si le diera vueltas a uno cuando hace ruedos. Todo era una admiración” (748; On their behalf, the humble people are full of fright. They do nothing but feel terror. It is as if the earth trembled, as if the world were spinning before their eyes. Just as it spins one around during vertigo. Everything was a wonder). The violence at Cholula has unleashed an apocalyptic earthquake (“como si la tierra temblara”), and the inhabitants of Mexico-Tenochtitlan are terrified because the Spaniards have knocked the world off its hinges. This whirling of the senses before a universal malaise is handled on a monumental scale in Almanac of the Dead, whose “core,” according to Silko “is the Indian Holocaust in the Americas” (“Indian Hater” 97). In this novel, the violence is a reflection of cyclical periods that necessarily ended in destruction as defined by the Aztec calendar. Yoeme, the grandmother of the Yaqui mestiza twins Lecha and Zeta Cazador, characterizes it as “the epoch Death-Eye Dog,” during which “human beings, especially the alien

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invaders, would become obsessed with hungers and impulses commonly seen in wild dogs” (251). Silko’s unflinching depiction of this dog-eat-dog world bolsters Jane Olmstead’s claim that “[i]f there is one thing that links all the competing efforts within the novel, it is blood—bloodiness, bloodshed, bloodlust” (465). And, as Silko makes clear, the blood is not only on the hands of the “alien invaders,” but also on Native peoples: “Cortés and Montezuma had hit it off together when they met; both had been members of the same secret clan” (760). Referring to an intertribal schism that had “caused the old-time people to flee to Pueblo country in Arizona and New Mexico,” Silko charges that “Montezuma had been the biggest sorcerer of all” and that, unlike their southwestern brethren, the Aztecs “had lapped up the first rich spurts of hot blood” because they “had been excited by the sacrifice victim’s feeble struggle” (760). Silko’s jeremiad acknowledges the violence of the indigenous past here and throughout the novel, but critics have largely ignored her cultural sources— the blood rituals of Mesoamerica—and preferred to focus on the carnage in the novel without relation to its full historical implications. They have found conventional critiques of European colonialism despite the novel’s engagement of the Mayan “almanac” form as a key to unraveling its meaning.15 Silko traces the title and aesthetics of Almanac of the Dead to the Maya codices. As she notes in the introduction to her collection Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (1996), these images reflect an aesthetic sensibility that connects ancient Pueblo to preHispanic Mesoamerica. Referring to the Mesoamerican books that existed alongside oral traditions, she explains, “The rich visual languages of the Aztec and Maya codices, or folding books, are closely related to the great frescoes, or mural paintings, of the Maya and Aztec pyramids. Similar massive frescoes are found on the walls of kivas in ancient Pueblo towns” (Yellow Woman, 21). The codices (called “painted books” by the Spanish invaders) were created in the Mixtec, Aztec, and Mayan regions of Mesoamerica. Accordion-like screenfolds comprised of painted panels (pliegos), when fully extended, they can measure over twenty feet. Together, the panels conjoin to trace cosmic movements, and thus to address the larger mythic whole. They were painted in red, black, and blue on bark paper (amate) or animal skin. Only twentytwo out of the seventy-six codices in existence today are pre-Hispanic.16 Although the Spanish destroyed most of them during the Conquest, four Maya codices survive, three of which—the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, and the Paris Codex—now bear the names of the cities in which they reside. The fourth, the Grolier Codex, is currently in a Mexico City vault, but

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it was first displayed in the Grolier Club in New York City. (The authenticity of this codex remains a controversial issue.) In these sacred texts from the Maya Postclassic period (ad 900–1520), elite scribes painted colorful profile views of gods performing rituals of life, death, and renewal. Rows of hieroglyphic captions, and bars and dots representing position numerals, partition the divinities into vertical and horizontal grids in two-dimensional space. The gods typically wear masks and elaborate headdresses. Their costumes are replete with extravagant jewels, feathers, animal skins, and human trophy heads in accordance with their rank and position within the cosmic design. Scenes of interaction among deities, animals, sacrificial victims, and natural phenomena employ repetitive or slightly varied iconography on one or several pages. The implied locomotion suggests that the divinities are the cogs and wheels of the Maya universe, the entrails of which are on display for the interpreter of the codex. In observance of the 260-day calendar of Mesoamerican cultures, the codices account for the deeds done by the gods on different days (each of these “days” having a propitious or unpropitious character and predisposition). These first American books contain astronomical tables and divinatory almanacs that allowed the tlacuilos (priests/ painters, “keepers of days”) to create planting schedules, time sacred rituals, track planetary movements, and derive prophecies.17 In “Notes on Almanac of the Dead” (1996), an essay in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, Silko describes her novel in relation to the structure of the “ancient Maya codices”: By 1982, I was writing the novel in sections, much as a movie is filmed for later editing; the sections also resembled the fragments that remained of the ancient Maya codices. I wrote the novel in these sections because I could not think of the story of the Almanac as a single line moving from point A to point B to point C. I knew that I wanted to shape time inside my Almanac. I wanted to use narrative to shift the reader’s experience of time and the meaning of history as stories that mark certain points in time (when time is a long string of markers or points on the pages of a calendar). I had to figure out how to do this and still tell stories people could understand. Myths alter our experience of time and reality without disappointing our desire for a story. I knew Almanac of the Dead must be made of . . . all sorts of myths from the Americas, including the modern myths. (140)

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Figure 4.2. Codex Cospi, Mixteca-Puebla (Borgia group of Mesoamerican codices), central Mexico. University Library of Bologna.

Both the codices and Silko’s novel are structured in fragments that function as a montage of interacting images, rather than as a linear narrative. A codex, when opened, reveals its contents in ways that require association and interpretation ranging over its extended pages. The full span of a codex gives it a frieze or mural-like quality, the overall impression of which is an invocation of gods and natural forces dancing in profile. Octavio Paz characterizes this divine procession as a “ballet de dioses enmascarados que danzan la pantomima terrible de la creación y destrucción de los mundos y los hombres” (“El arte” 48; ballet of masked gods who dance the terrible pantomime of the creation and destruction of worlds and men), a dance that itself was effectively destroyed. Spanish missionaries, most notoriously the bishop of Yucatán, Diego de Landa Calderón, deemed the codices idolatrous, and destroyed hundreds over the course of the sixteenth century, a crime paralleled by the Council of Lima’s burning of Inca quipu records in the 1580s. As Silko writes in “Books: Notes on Mixtec and Maya Screenfolds” (1993), another essay in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, the Christian conquerors “burned the great libraries because they wished to foster the notion that the New World was populated by savages” (157).

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In Almanac of the Dead, Silko adds to the Mayan archive by inventing a fifth codex. Consistent with the history of these rare documents, “[o]nly fragments of the original pages remained” and “substantial portions of the original manuscript had been lost or condensed” (569). The surviving copy incorporates clippings, scribbles, and marginalia that feature strange orthography, as well as “red and black painted glyphs” and an “outline of the giant plumed serpent” (569). The miraculous preservation of this “great legacy,” as Silko defines it, connects the Yaqui to the ancient Maya, the Southwest to the Yucatán (569). Starting in the sixteenth century, the Yaqui established a reputation as fierce warriors who fought encroachment onto their lands by Spain and Mexico. While the Yaqui remained intact under colonial New Spain, Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 led to extreme persecution, and they began to flee from their homeland in Sonora, Mexico, into present-day Arizona. Through a policy that set the stage for Yaqui-Mayan contact, during the first decade of the twentieth century the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz displaced thousands of Yaqui to work on plantations in Oaxaca and the Yucatán. Altogether, these “Yaqui Wars” began with the arrival of the conquistador Diego de Guzmán in 1533, and they lasted until well after Díaz was deposed by the Mexican Revolution in 1911. Silko invokes the Yaqui as an example typical of the legacy of resistance in the Southwest (epitomized by the Pueblo Revolt of 1680), and as an instance of shared purpose among peoples living in the same desert ecosystem but on opposite sides of an international border.18 In the chapter “Journey of the Ancient Almanac,” the grandmother Yoeme engages this history, telling of Yaqui child-fugitives who carried a codex “North” as they fled from Diego de Guzmán, “the Butcher [who] had starved and slaughtered their people” (250). Consistent with Silko’s statement quoted earlier that “Myths alter our experience of time and reality without disappointing our desire for a story,” Guzmán is a sixteenth-century historical figure who enforces a fictional deportation in the twentieth century. The Yaqui elders entrust “the ‘book’ of days of their people” to the next generation, implying shared ownership of the codex across a deep-time continuum (247). The Maya-Yaqui text accrues meaning on its way to Yoeme (whose name is a synonym for “Yaqui,” meaning “the people”), increasingly becoming a trans­ indigenous palimpsest. Yoeme makes her own entries in Yaqui, Latin, Spanish, and English, including an autobiographical story of surviving influenza and a relation of the exploits of the Apache resistance fighter Geronimo. She then bequeaths the codex to her granddaughters for a final deciphering consistent with Silko’s hemispheric agenda, for “the almanac had living power

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within it . . . that would bring all the tribal people of the Americas together to retake the land” (569). The codex is “a mosaic of memory and imagination,” and a beacon of communal hope and anti-colonial resistance (574). The almanac within Silko’s Almanac of the Dead reflects the work that contains it and reiterates its mythic aspirations, thus tying the metahistorical commentary within the novel to that of other hemispheric works, most notably Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.19 Furthermore, the mise en abîme structure in Almanac of the Dead—a recurring self-reflexive feature in encyclopedic fiction—suggests that Silko’s novel is the codex, the custodian of indigenous history in the Americas. By extension, Silko—a Melquíadeslike scribe—is the Laguna Pueblo storyteller and the Maya daykeeper. Lecha, a character who seeks to penetrate the secrets of an almanac that will “tell you about the days to come—drought or flood, plague, civil war or invasion,” presents a corresponding challenge to Silko’s readers (136). Quite fittingly, a central theme of Almanac of the Dead is divination; whether interpreting words, pictures, or auguries, characters are preoccupied with understanding texts and deducing the fate of the Americas. Most significantly, as the personages head toward a cataclysmic showdown—the narrative propulsion echoing the anticipated moment of truth between Ahab and the White Whale—several of them dream and/or interpret dreams, over thirty-five of which are related in the novel. Silko’s dreams are not the manifestations of personal unconscious desire but rather harbingers of a galactic struggle between “Destroyers” (Euro-American capitalists and their enablers) and Maya-led resistance fighters (including non-Natives aligned with their interests). Of the latter, Silko writes that “many claimed they had been summoned in dreams” (709). This mobilization combines a literal dreaming with a figurative sense of envisioning a brighter future. In keeping with the cosmic forces at work in the novel, the looming revolution also presumes a mystical nocturnal alignment in tune with the power of a shared land mass: “one night the people would all dream the same dream, a dream sent by the spirits of the continent” (712). These collective dreams of indigenous justice contrast radically with the haunted dreams of European destroyers, who, according to Yoeme, “had not been able to sleep soundly on the American continents” because they “suffered from nightmares and frequently claimed to see devils and ghosts” (718). Almanac of the Dead contains more than sixty-five characters, several of whom possess names and nicknames that recall the composite and shape-shifting nature of the Mesoamerican pantheon. Named by his mother to keep

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women at bay, El Feo (“The Ugly One”) is one of two handsome Mayan twins leading the grassroots Army of Resistance and Retribution. His brother, Tacho, has an alter ego as the prophet Wacah, the sound made by the parrots who advise him on his leadership. Roy (“Rambo”) is a Vietnam War veteran who plans to include the Army of the Homeless in an anticapitalist and antigovernment uprising. His nickname comes from the larger-than-life character portrayed by Sylvester Stallone in the Hollywood blockbuster First Blood (1982). Calabazas (also known as Pumpkins) is a Yaqui drug smuggler and Mexican border-crossing trickster who encourages an employee to “[i]nvent yourself a name” (216). Calabazas also works with his hyperactive partner in crime Carlos, whom he calls Mosca (Fly). The architect Alegría’s name means “joy” in Spanish. Angelita La Escapía is a Mayan rebel army leader who fuses the name Little Angel with the nickname “The Meat Hook.” On a lower scale of meaningful monikers is Peaches, an employee at Bio-Materials, Inc., and Cherie, a dancer at the tawdry Stage Coach nightclub. In turn, this establishment is owned by a fat hustler with the comic nickname Tiny. In what appears to be an expression of Silko’s personal experience of losing child custody, Seese is a mother searching desperately for Monte, a son she named after Moc(n)tezuma. The charismatic demagogues Barefoot Hopi and Wilson Weasel Tail adopt traditional Indian names. Silko deploys these “flat” characters against a universal backdrop, re-creating the two-dimensional perspective of the codices. As if painted on multiple contiguous panels, her figures exist within a Greater American panorama of theft and restitution across time and space. Silko’s personages are extreme examples of their disposition, apparently living out the destinies assigned to their avatars and in keeping with their corresponding “days” in the novel. Fickle, incomprehensible, and quite often cruel, the characters nevertheless effect changes in the universe through their frenetic comings and goings. My argument here is the following: while issues of indigenous justice are at the core of Silko’s political aims, her dramatis personae represent cyclical and archetypal forces carved in an indigenous mold. This treatment contrasts sharply with the Western notion of individual liberty and self-realization (tragic or otherwise) that is a cornerstone of the bourgeois novel.20 In an interview with Linda Niemann, the author remarked, “What I wanted in Almanac of the Dead was for those narratives to be like glyphs in a visual sense—that’s why characterization isn’t that important, because I was working with these other notions of how things can be codes and glyphs and intertwinings of the visual and the narrative” (qtd. in Niemann 109). Her characters thus operate in a vast calendrical drama; they are actors

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in a cosmic theater of cruelty and creation whether they work to replenish the earth through an antigovernment coalition of smugglers, computer hackers, ecoterrorists, and the homeless, or to counter these groups with an evil network of investors (Menardo, Alegría, Leah, Trigg, Beaufrey, Serlo), corrupt state officials (Judge Arne, Mr. B, De Guzman, General J), and mafiosi (the Blue crime family). For Silko, these characters are greater than the sum of their parts. In a 1993 interview with Donna Perry, Silko offers an explanation for the excesses of Almanac of the Dead through a recurring diction: “The Mayan almanacs had really strong images that are often repeated. And since a lot of the remnants covered war, destruction, politics, war, destruction, politics, I thought that my almanac is going to be crammed full of narratives” (qtd. in Perry 326, italics added). Admittedly, Silko treats blood sacrifice as an artistic vehicle that ignores many of the ethnohistorical dimensions of the codices and their impact on the trained reader who saw more than gore and conflict.21 This is surprising given her normally rigorous attention to anthropological scholarship as shown in several essays in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit. Nevertheless, the recurring themes and motifs that connect the profusion of narratives in Almanac of the Dead—the novel’s “circulatory system,” according to Olmstead—is blood (466). In Silko’s updating of practices adopted by both Amerindians and Spanish Catholics, characters kill, mutilate, and even cannibalize their victims at the sacrificial altar of capitalism. In Mesoamerica, death rituals were instituted by the Toltecs during the eleventh century, but bloodletting (autosacrifice) is present as a motif in the visual representations of the much earlier Olmecs (1500–400 bce), the first major civilization in Mexico (Stuart 221). The Aztecs, who admired the Toltecs as great artists and architects, escalated ritual sacrifice as they grafted their empire onto the Mesoamerican template. As related by Cristobal de Castillo—admittedly a sixteenth-century convert to Christianity—the Aztecs were fanatical in their devotion to the war god Huitzilopochtli, who demanded, “when you take captives you will cut open their chests with a Flint on the sacrificial stone and you will offer their hearts to the brilliant Movement in the sky” (qtd. in Brotherston, Image 201). For the Aztecs, the precious gift of human blood appeased capricious deities who, in turn, kept the universe in motion. The Aztecs timed human offerings to coincide with termination periods in calendrical cycles. The rites also consecrated major state functions, including the inauguration of new buildings or a change in the balance of power. The awesome spectacles blended religion and politics and were part of flower-laden

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festivals that featured music and dancing before a grand pyramid. At its summit, high priests (often dressed as the gods they sought to honor) would hold down a victim and cut out his heart with a flint or obsidian knife known as a técpatl. They would then place the still-beating heart on a ceremonial cuauhxicalli (“eagle gourd bowl”) or on a tray held by a chac-mool sculpture. The men extracted the organ in front of a statue of the deity they were honoring, who would be regaled with the spilled blood. They then dropped the lifeless body down the temple steps, where the blood flowed more freely with each additional victim. After the corpses were decapitated, the heads were displayed in celebration on skull racks known as tzompantli. Because the Aztecs believed that the bodies had been sanctified in death, they sometimes (and particularly in connection with the worship of the underworld god Mictlantecuhtli) concluded the festivities with a ritual banquet in which priests and conquering warriors imitated the gruesome feasting of the gods.22 While Silko condemns the Aztec practice and separates it from the Laguna Pueblo, the Maya civilization she favors also practiced blood sacrifice.23 Besides killing animals such as turkeys, dogs, deer, eagles, and jaguars, Maya men and women used bloodletting to bring about religious ecstasy. Priests and nobles would collect blood from their own cheeks, lips, tongues, penises, or earlobes in compliance with ritual duty, and sometimes in honor of revered ancestors. The bloodlettings paid homage to immortals who had previously given their own blood to create and preserve humanity, and ensured the fertility of the earth and the continuation of the cycle of life. Skulland-bones iconography is present across the art and artifacts of the Mayan world, including the Great Ballcourt relief carvings at Chichén Itzá (a site that includes a tzompantli whose scale surpasses the one at the foot of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City). Offering further proof are the frescoes of war captives in the Bonampak temple in Chiapas, as well as the painted ceramic sculptures, drinking vessels, and jade figures that reflect the Maya creation myth. The Maya codices are not steeped in quite as much blood as the Aztec Codex Tudela or Codex Magliabechiano (both dating from the mid-sixteenth century), but they too include images of human sacrifice. The Madrid Codex, for instance, features mostly death by decapitation, but also via heart extraction, spearing, eye plucking, drowning, hanging, and disemboweling.24 The sixth page of the Grolier Codex (which traces the inauspicious cycles of Venus) shows the grinning death god, Mictlantecuhtli, caught in suspended animation as he decapitates a kneeling captive bound in rope. The severed neck spurts copious amounts of brightly colored blood for all to behold.

Figure 4.3. Sixth page of the Grolier Codex. The Grolier Club, New York. Donated to and housed at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. Photograph © Justin Kerr.

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Such images impel the blood-drenched pages of Almanac of the Dead. During a psychic vision, for instance, Lecha sees a shopping bag that contains the partial remains of the US ambassador to Mexico and his chief aid, “two human heads, their blue eyes open wide, staring at the sky” (164). As famished Yaqui youngsters carry the codex northward, they encounter a crippled old witch who cooks them a stew, its contents resembling “the severed arms and heads the children had seen in a lake near their home in the South” (248). Foreshadowing Monte’s death by dismemberment is a scene of cannibalism in which the evil necromancer sacrifices a Yaqui girl in a “dim ceremonial chamber,” and has perhaps already “feasted on the liver or heart, known to be preferred delicacies” (252). Silko traces the New World sacrificial practices to this and other Amerindian sorcerers, who “called for their white brethren to join them” because they “craved more death and more dead bodies to open and consume” (760). In the chapter “Vampire Capitalists,” Silko links bloodsucking to the exploitation of Latin America’s working class. For Angelita, a stroll through Mexico City brings to mind a macabre passage from Karl Marx’s Capital (1867): “a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where thousands passed yearly through the fire as offerings to the Moloch of avarice” (313). Rambo refers to the corporate profiteers of the Vietnam War as “fat cats glutted with blood” (393). Perhaps the most prodigious vampire capitalist of them all is the wheelchair-bound Eddie Trigg, who uses his Blood Plasma International center as a front for the illegal harvesting of lungs, hearts, skin tissue, and corneas. An organ thief, he profits from civil war casualties south of the border because “Mexican hearts are lean and strong” (404). In one episode, Trigg recounts how his homeless victims, which he refers to as “human debris,” are “slowly bled to death pint by pint” (444). Even worse, he drains the sexual life of his male donors by fellating them while he collects their blood, such that “the victim relaxed in the chair with his eyes closed, unaware that he was being murdered” (444). The incidents surrounding a suicide and a fatal riding accident shine a spotlight on the ghoulish Beaufrey. A rich Argentine pornographer and producer of torture, abortion, snuff, and autopsy videos, Beaufrey kidnaps and murders Monte in connection with the black market. After he successfully manipulates his lover Eric into shooting himself, Beaufrey persuades David (Monte’s father and another one of his lovers) to take artistic pictures of the dead body, “nearly buried in blossoms of bright reds and purples . . . the blood, thick, tar pooled and spattered across the bright white of the chenille

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bedspread” (106–7). When he later finds the photographer dead beneath his horse, Beaufrey sends for a camera because “pictures of David’s corpse would bring good prices” (565). From an early age, he is obsessed with Albert Fish, the real-life child rapist and serial killer who committed acts of vampirism, cannibalism, and self-mutilation. (In an unsigned letter from 1934, the historical—but no less diabolical—Fish even detailed for the mother of one of his victims how he killed and ate her ten-year-old daughter.) In Beaufrey’s estimation, he and the “Long Island cannibal” are “kindred spirits because they shared not only social rank, but complete indifference about the life or death of other human beings” (534). Menardo, a Mexican mestizo, is a key member of this coalition that profits from blood money. Blood leads to bloodlines, and through Menardo, Silko offers a Latin American version of the archetypal half-breed narrative to expand Native American identity. Although Menardo tries to pass “for one of sangre limpia,” he acquires two childhood nicknames that seal his fate: “Pansón” (Big Belly) fuels his physical insecurities, while “Flat Nose” (a slang term for Mexican Indians) triggers a psychological return of the repressed (259). The latter appellation, which “[f]or the rest of his life Menardo could hardly think of . . . let alone whisper,” reveals an unwanted racial lineage and triggers a breakdown (258). This dimension of Latin American identity at war with itself places Menardo’s story into the context of the Spanish peninsular casta (caste) system, which developed out of a nationalist preoccupation with limpieza de sangre (purity of blood, i.e., bloodline) after the Counter-­ Reformation. Post-Reconquista, the expulsion and/or forced conversion of Jews and Muslims was central to a policy of “purity” in matters both physical and spiritual. Officials conducted legal procedures for judging purity of lineage, which meant proving that one had neither Jewish nor Muslim ancestry and thus affirming one’s Christian allegiance. In the Americas, particularly during the eighteenth century—a time when the power of the Catholic Church had actually been curbed by the Bourbon monarchy—purist notions of sangre limpia (clean blood) dominated the colonial administration of New Spain. The Crown sought to regulate the new mixed-race peoples of the New World in line with white privilege. The four main categories were, in order of rank, Peninsulares (native Spaniards), Criollos (full-blooded Spaniards native to America), Indios (Native Americans), and Negros (persons of African ancestry). The system discriminated against those with less European blood, while allowing for people of color (ostensibly, at least) to regain purity through intermarriage with the higher born. The permutations of New

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World interbreeding are on maniacal display in eighteenth-century Mexican casta paintings, which show families fitting higher and lower within a racially defined scheme (and their reflected character stereotypes).25 Menardo’s disavowal of his indigenous heritage reflects the psychological damage caused by the Counter-Reformation, which created an anti-Indian legacy that persists until today in Latin America. A victim of mental colonialism, Menardo chooses to perpetuate racial schisms by becoming a vampire capitalist. He abandons the teachings of his Indian grandfather, an “old man [who] recognized evil, whatever name you called it,” because he wishes to forget his indigenous heritage (259). His obsession with sangre limpia connects him to several purebred characters who despise what they see as Indian backwardness standing in the way of their social privilege. One example is Serlo, a Nazi-like Colombian who hopes to use a biological weapon to cleanse the world of the “swarms of brown and yellow human larvae called natives” (545). Equally abhorrent are his plantation-owning uncles, who “had raped six or seven young Indian women . . . because they believed it was their Godgiven duty to ‘upgrade’ mestizo and Indian bloodstock” (541). Menardo is also a foil to other mestizos in the novel, most notably the Mexican Indians Lecha and Zeta. Despite being raised by their parents not to acknowledge their Indianness, the twins learn to embrace Yoeme’s corrective revelation: “You are Indians!” (114). On the other hand, Menardo confirms Sterling’s sour view of Mexican mestizaje: “‘Mexicans’ were really remnants of different kinds of Indians. But what had remained of what was Indian was in appearance only—the skin and the hair and the eyes. The cheekbones and nose like eagles and hawks. They had lost contact with their tribes and their ancestors’ worlds” (88). Menardo creates the Universal Insurance Company, which deploys corrupt security forces to protect wealthy investors against all eventualities. His successful entrepreneurship earns him the status necessary to marry Iliana, a white woman from an upper-class family from Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Espousing an ideology of the self-made man, Menardo hates Mexican natives and unassimilated mestizos who threaten to run him out of business by retaking the land that his US and Mexican clients use for profit. In this sense, Menardo resembles the title character of Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz, an archetypal Latin American patriarch of mixed blood whose pursuit of power and wealth betrays the revolutionary ideals of modern Mexico. Like Menardo, Fuentes’s character exploits US neocolonial business operations in his own country by interfering in union labor disputes and aiding “dirty

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wars” against the leftist opposition. Both characters seek class advancement and racial atonement as overcompensation for their vexed origins. In a move more typical of a Latin American author, Silko represents Menardo’s demise by revising an episode from the Popol Vuh. Because the events and characters in this novel cannot be appreciated without a knowledge of their indigenous subtexts, let us first consider the details of a one-of-a-kind book that Carlos Fuentes calls “the Mayan Bible” (Tedlock). As we have seen in previous chapters, the incorporation of at least one canonical book is typical of New World encyclopedic fictions, and is a measure of their aspirations to becoming literary monuments themselves. In Almanac of the Dead, Silko follows suit. In pre-Columbian times, the Popol Vuh existed in hieroglyphic form, and possibly as a folded codex stored in the Mayan lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula. Seeking to preserve their privilege with the new Christian overlords, anomynous Quiché nobles secretly transcribed some version of the text into Roman characters during the early sixteenth century. As attested by these transcribers inside the Popol Vuh, the original text was lost already as they completed their work of cultural survival on behalf of the Quiché Maya civilization. Around 1701, the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez found this version and recopied it as a single monograph with parallel columns in Quiché and Spanish. This bilingual version is the only surviving copy of the book as it is now preserved at the Newberry Library in Chicago.26 The Popol Vuh contains the most comprehensive version of the Maya creation myth, along with an account of the origins and development of the Quiché people. In this vein, the book recounts the exploits of Mesoamerica’s superhero ballplayer twins, whose victories in the Mayan underworld (Xibalba) established the preconditions for human life.27 The mythical twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, are divine tricksters who defeat the Lords of Death in the Mesoamerican ballgame, a blood sport akin to cosmic warfare that involved decapitation for the losers. The boys also kill the arrogant false god Seven Macaw (who tries to pass for the sun and the moon) and his sons, Zipacna and Cabrakan (who claim to be the creator and destroyer of mountains, respectively). In the Popol Vuh, the twins’ mastery, when confronted with a series of trials, leads to the universal triumph of life over death. After staging their own deaths by jumping into ovens, the brothers acquire a reputation as anonymous magicians with a talent for resurrection. Dressed as vagabond performers, they revisit the death gods of Xibalba, whose behavior recalls Silko’s Destroyers in Almanac of the Dead, “thrilled by the spectacle of death” and “excited by . . . the sight of blood and

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suffering” (475). Promised a reward for a grisly show, the brothers comply by sacrificing a dog and bringing him back to life. Overjoyed, the lords increase their challenge: “You have to kill a person! Make a sacrifice without death!” (Tedlock 135).28 In response, the twins dazzle by plucking and holding “a human heart on high” before bringing the body back to life. The deities continue to escalate their demands: “Sacrifice yet again, even do it to yourselves!” (Tedlock 136). After astonishing the crowd with a reversible fratricide, the twins get the request they have been waiting for: “Do it to us! Sacrifice us!” (Tedlock 137). Predictably, the boys outwit the Lords of Death by skipping the last part of this fourth act. The victorious twins then locate, and venerate, the dismembered corpse of their father (a former victim of Xibalba) and restore him by re-membering him (Tedlock 141; “their father is put back together by them”). In turn, they sacrifice themselves to aid the creation: they ascend into the heavens, where one becomes the sun and the other the moon. Like the codices, the Popol Vuh dramatizes the pairing of creation and destruction in keeping with the Maya calendar and the cycles of celestial bodies. The non-Western role of death here, and in Almanac of the Dead, is to make a requisite place for everything, and to put everything in its place. In Almanac of the Dead, Menardo’s death scene recalls aspects of this mythic narrative, as do Silko’s handsome pair, the Mayan brothers from Guatemala, Tacho and El Feo. Menardo, eager to prove his machismo to his business cohorts, undertakes a death-defying stunt in which Tacho is to shoot him in the chest while he wears a bulletproof vest. An insurance agent seeking the ultimate security of immortality (an attribute of the gods), “Menardo wanted to feel it, to experience it and to know the thrill, to see the moment of death and not have to pay” (338). He plans to star as sacrificial victim and resurrecting hero in his own multipart drama: “Menardo’s heart was pounding with excitement. He could hardly believe what fun he was having with the bulletproof vest. Later . . . Menardo would ask one of the waiters for a carving knife, and they would witness still another amazing escape from death” (501). But Menardo does not get beyond the first act. In the end, his protective armor—which is worn “bright white against his skin”—mocks his desire for racial passing (497). His humiliation suggests a return to an insecure childhood. As he lies dying, Menardo “felt a warm puddle under himself ” (504). Menardo’s autosacrifice is offered in ironic opposition to the sacrificial practices of the Mayas; the tension between sacrifice as a means of cosmic regeneration and Menardo’s death is palpable. And yet it seems that Menardo’s days are “numbered” in the Mayan calendrical sense because his

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death comes to have meaning, eventually helping to strengthen the movement to reclaim America’s indigenous heritage; for, as one character sees it, “[t]he Americas were full of furious, bitter spirits; five hundred years of slaughter had left the continents swarming with millions of spirits that never rested and would never stop until justice had been done” (424).29

A “Mosaic of Memory and Imagination” Silko exemplifies a New World penchant for mixing media that is also present in the novels of Melville, Fuentes, and Poulin.30 In Almanac of the Dead, this tendency conjures pan-indigenous traditions of writing, painting, and carving that mediate between literature and the oral tradition. The Stone Avenue mural was not the first time that Silko had fused images and words in inspired and inspiring ways. Her father, Leland Howard Marmon, was a professional photographer who developed his prints at home when Silko was a young girl. As such, he provided his daughter, a self-described “frustrated visual artist,” with the groundwork for experimenting with pictures (qtd. in Arnold, Conversations 155). She does this most conspicuously in Storyteller, a rectangular book collage of poetry, short stories, and family photographs (many from her father’s private collection). Earlier, Silko had juxtaposed poems and drawings in Laguna Woman, and she had included an image of the night sky alongside patterned arrangements of verse in Ceremony. Later, she created graphics and a photo-essay for Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit. More recently, she has designed plant and animal icons for her novel Gardens in the Dunes (1999) and for her memoir The Turquoise Ledge (2010), where she discusses her paintings of “Star Beings” at length. In addition, Silko founded the Laguna Film Project and produced the short film Estoyehmuut and the Gunnadeyah (Arrow Boy and the Witches), as well as the documentary Running on the Edge of the Rainbow: Laguna Stories and Poems (1982), two works that emphasize visual aspects absent from written renditions of oral narratives. Silko, as we have already seen, engages several media and modes of discourse in Almanac of the Dead. Besides the writers who contribute to the ancient notebooks, the novel includes a number of visual artist figures, among them the unnamed Hollywood cinematographer who films the Laguna Pueblo stone snake, Beaufrey as producer of illicit videos, the death photographer David, and even his hapless male model, who “had made his

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suicide a sort of visual event or installation” (537). In addition, Lecha combines the theme of divination with media aesthetics when she appears on a Denver television show as a psychic who can locate the dead. Meanwhile, the Madrid-trained architect Alegría rhapsodizes about “the interplay of structure as sculptural form with light,” but builds Mexico in the image of the rich (267). The monomaniacal Beaufrey, who “loved the theater,” regards Eric, David, and Seese as pawns in a play in which he is “director and author,” as well as “producer” (537). Phony photographs of Geronimo and a grainy video of ecoterrorists blowing themselves up at Glen Canyon Dam add to this motley cast of characters, most of whom trade in death and taboo subjects. Varied typographical formats bolster the novel’s interartistic aims. For example, Trigg’s backstory comes out of a filthy notebook rendered in block indentations beneath the subtitle “From Trigg’s Diaries.” In the indented and italicized sections under “From Clinton’s Notebook,” a militant black studies graduate gives history lessons on the African Indian peoples of the New World. He also delivers public addresses below the headings “Clinton’s Slavery Broadcast” and “Clinton’s Radio Broadcast #2.” Here, Silko animates voiceover and musical choices through numbering, centering, indentation, and transcription. The novel also incorporates two revisionist catalogues of tribal histories that occupy several pages and unfold chronologically and hemispherically, recalling Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire) trilogy, which Silko read while writing Almanac of the Dead.31 The first of these litanies (Angelita’s) showcases indigenous revolts starting with the Taíno chief Hatuey in 1510; the second (Clinton’s) highlights African slave rebellions. In addition, there is the idiosyncratic typographical arrangement of a speech in which the poet-lawyer Wilson Weasel Tail reads his own verse, quotes the Ottawa chief Pontiac and the Paiute prophet Wovoka, and blasts US anti-Indian legislation. These devices are intended to heighten the reader’s visual experience of the printed text, and they do. Silko even formats several chapters to imply that she is presenting the reader with a hardcopy of a Mesoamerican codex. In “Yoeme’s Old Notebooks,” for instance, she arranges numbers, indentations, and italicized blocks of text to suggest a real manuscript. Because “the notebook of the snakes was the key to understanding all the rest of the old almanac,” Silko places the “Pages from the Snakes’ Notebook” and the “Spirit Snake’s Message” into this important early chapter (134). The snake prophecy, which culminates with the lines, “What I have to tell you is that / this world is about to end,” requires a reaction from all who set eyes on this page—“you” referring

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both to the fictional interpreters of the notebook and the readers of Silko’s novel (135). In addition, Silko includes a dictionary entry for the word “almanac,” its definition and cross-referencing ranging from its Arabic etymology to its Mayan form in the codices. The concrete poetry under “Transcriptions from the Old Notebooks” also suggests that an actual manuscript has been placed in the hands of the reader. Finally, beneath “Fragments from the Ancient Notebooks,” Silko uses Maya and Christian calendar years to date sections of text that are hard to read as a result of missing or damaged pages. Bracketed entries such as “[Numbers nine and ten are illegible]” and “[Manuscript incomplete]” cue readers to experience the text beyond words (573). Such layout and typesetting strategies create an uncanny sense that parchment and amate have fused with the pages of the novel. What I am suggesting here is that we approach Silko’s novel as both literature and artifact in order to recognize how it engages indigenous mixedmedia traditions. A feature that contributes to this materialization is Silko’s self-designed graphic art, which is used to separate the novel into books, parts, and chapters. Attempting to reproduce the aura of the Mayan codices, Silko intersperses several black-and-white hand drawings that lend Almanac of the Dead a “broader visual, experiential, and spiritual focus” (Arnold, “The Word” 26).32 A small spider enclosed in a circle and centered on a title page introduces each of six “part” divisions. The author begins each “book” (nineteen altogether) with a title beneath which appears a large rectangle resembling a Zuni Pueblo pottery design, and perhaps even the Maya glyph for codex (“huun”—a side view of a closed screenfold book). Finally, a rounded and symmetrically inscribed glyph similar to a Pima basket design accompanies each chapter title, and follows every entry under “Fragments from the Ancient Notebooks.” Beyond decoration, Silko’s iconography requires an alternative form of literacy that, as Walter Mignolo and others have argued, presented Europe with the challenge of reading America not through the model of transference critiqued by Edmundo O’Gorman (The Invention), but on its own terms. Conceptually, at least, these glyphic motifs transform Almanac of the Dead from a repository of words transferable in mass printings into a oneof-a-kind handmade book. In fact, Silko took this path to produce limited first editions of Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures (1993), her mixedmedia work that followed the publication of Almanac of the Dead. Using her own publishing imprint, Flood Plain Press, the author fashioned a textual collage that alternates between poetic fragments and photographs of nature.

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The book’s cover was designed in two editions by the Albuquerque artist Stephen Watson, using either blue corn or white volcanic ash gathered from New Mexico. In the author’s note to the second edition, Silko justifies her antiquated form of bookmaking: “I want a book which is unmistakably my book, a book which only I could make” (Sacred Water 80). In imitation of a tlacuilo painting a panel of a codex, Silko supplements word reading with the visual and tactile dimensions of a finely crafted object: “I wanted to have complete control over the book, from the design of the book to the actual sewing, and gluing of the book. The appearance of the book itself forms part of the reader’s experience of the text” (80). Although Silko provided her own graphics for the textual markers in Almanac of the Dead, the cover art was painted by the prolific illustrator Wendell Minor (in consultation with the author). The dust jacket resonates with some of the themes of the Stone Avenue mural. Southwestern motifs provide a rectangular frame and add local color. In a visual equivalent of a narrative journey, an empty desert highway vanishes into a mountain horizon, above which the novel’s title appears in a furious scribble. Cacti flank the roadway as architectural columns, as if welcoming the reader into the theatrical production inside the cover. Several figures float along the margins in an interpenetration of time, space, and myth. A skull beneath a rainy cloud unleashes a thunderbolt to suggest prophecy, toxicity, and death. A Navajo Yei spirit and a colorful tipi provide Native cultural emblems. Amid the flora and fauna are a raven, a salamander, and a yellow rattlesnake that spouts lightning from its mouth and is itself shaped like a bolt of lightning. The cover combines European and indigenous spatial ordering to introduce a Native American novel: the depth of field of the disappearing highway coexists with a flat wallpaper-like array of images that defy Renaissance perspective.33 Inside the book, Silko includes an out-of-scale “Five Hundred Year Map” frontispiece that depicts both sides of the southern border. The label “MEXICO” dominates the composition and reflects that nation’s importance in redefining indigeneity. Dotted lines reminiscent of footprint symbols on indigenous maps lead into Tucson, the site of convergence for her perambulatory characters. Neatly stacked piles of character names suggest that the literary text will unfold spatially rather than chronologically. An inset box identifies Tucson’s “assortment of speculators, confidence men, embezzlers, lawyers, judges, police and other criminals, as well as addicts and pushers.” While sprinkled with indigenous and Spanish place-names, state terrains

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Figure 4.4. Wendell Minor, Almanac of the Dead. Jacket design and art © 1991.

remain unmarked on both sides of the frontier. Silko conceives of land as elemental earth rather than as divisible cartographic entity; the United States of America and “los Estados Unidos Mexicanos” (the United States of Mexico) are truly “united”/“unidos” now. Arrows point to an unseen hemispheric expanse: “North to Alaska” and “South to Cartagena and Buenos Aires.” As Arnold Krupat explains, this north–south emphasis “seeks to displace the privileged east-west directionality of the hegemonic American master narrative” (175). Because the map excludes the East Coast, it also displaces the cultural dominance of Ellis Island, which hosted European immigrants only

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Figure 4.5. Leslie Marmon Silko, “Five Hundred Year Map.” Image courtesy of Simpson Library’s Special Collections and University Archives, University of Mary Washington. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Inc. from Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko. © 1991 Leslie Marmon Silko.

centuries after Native and Hispanic interactions were taking place in America. Silko’s sole figural drawing is of Ma ah shra tru ee, with the subtitle “Giant stone snake,” and a smaller label that reads “ancient spirit messenger.” In a prominent box, Silko writes, “Through the decipherment of ancient tribal texts of the Americas the Almanac of the Dead foretells the future of all the Americas.” Meanwhile, the cartouche on the bottom left connects the past with the future: “The ancient prophecies foretold the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. The ancient prophesies also foretell the disappearance of all things European.” A final box erases boundaries altogether: “Native Americans acknowledge no borders; they seek nothing less than the return of all tribal lands.” In an interview with Laura Coltelli, Silko explains, “I drew that

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map in Almanac of the Dead as a ‘glyphic’ representation of the narrative. This ‘glyph’ shows how the Americas are ‘one,’ not separated by artificial, imaginary, ‘borders’” (qtd. in Arnold, Conversations 119). While scholars have commented on Silko’s “Five Hundred Year Map,” none of them has discussed its physical dimensions. The frontispiece has an uncommon publication history. The 1992 Penguin paperback edition includes the map as the sixteenth and seventeenth pages of the prefatory matter, though the original Simon & Schuster hardback printed it across the inside of the front cover and the first page, and again at the end of the book, this time with the images reversed as the final page and the inside of the back cover. The reflecting maps underscore the overlapping and repeating patterns of the codices as they trace the Amerindian cosmos, and also the back and forth movement of Silko’s novelized history. The original edition even assumes a provocative aspect when stood upright with its pages opened, its front and back covers creating the impression of a codex with glyphs framing the accordionlike pleats of its open pages. Inside and out, Silko’s masterwork seeks to harness the spirit of the first literatures of the Americas.

Hemispheric Aztlán With respect to indigenous land reclamation, the essential subtext of Almanac of the Dead is the myth of Aztlán. As elaborated by Aztec codex painters, colonial historians, and Chicano writers and muralists, the story involves the southward migration of the Nahua people to establish Mexico-Tenochtitlan on the edge of Lake Texcoco in 1325. Although depicted on the first page of the sixteenth-century Boturini Codex and imagined as a paradise in the Durán Codex (c. 1581), Aztlán assumed its fullest significance in the Chicano movement. During its political height, US Hispanic intellectuals and activists sought to locate the Aztec ancestral homeland in the Southwest. At a seminal 1969 conference in Denver, MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán; Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) adopted the ideological construct and created a manifesto for the Chicano movement, “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán). As it happens, Silko’s New Mexico homeland is a privileged site for the retaking of this Aztlán, and for building a bridge to Hispanic indigeneity. Laguna Pueblo was named and claimed by Spanish explorers as they passed through the area in 1539. In particular, the conquistador Francisco

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Vásquez de Coronado made Pueblo territory synonymous with mythical wealth as he searched, unsuccessfully, for the Seven Cities of Gold said to be nearby. There were nine Catholic missions erected in Pueblo country by 1616; the Mission San José de la Laguna, established in 1699, was the most prominent of these strongholds and was built by Laguna Pueblo converts under Spanish rule. Under a 1689 land grant from the King of Spain, Laguna Pueblo developed along the syncretic cultural and political lines typical of Latin America. In her writings, Silko celebrates Laguna Pueblo border crossings as they commenced south from the ancestral Pueblo homeland and proceeded across Spanish, then Mexican, and then US territory. Moving back and forth between Aztlán and Mesoamerica, Laguna Pueblo was successful in establishing trade networks that allowed for survival in the desert climate. As discussed in two of Silko’s most polemical essays, “Fences against Freedom” and “The Border Patrol State” (both published in 1994 and included in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit), this movement continues today despite US efforts to suppress it.34 In Almanac of the Dead, the best representative of Aztlán border crossings is the ring smuggler Calabazas, who proclaims Yaqui rights to cross ancient footpaths: We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the first whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely. North-south. East-west. We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines. Imaginary minutes and hours. Written law. We recognize none of that. And we carry a great many things back and forth. We don’t see any border. We have been here and this has continued thousands of years. We don’t stop. No one stops us. (216) The dozen appearances of the plural possessive pronoun makes mobility synonymous with the endurance of a people across millennia. Thumbing his nose at the government through his trafficking operation, Calabazas extends the ancestral tradition of free movement across lands otherwise limited by cultural and political borders. Silko expands this conception of mobility by putting nature first. In an interview from 1998, she connects people to all living things, calling for an ecological reorganization of borderlands: “Regionalism is the hope. Regionalism—what human beings did with plants

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and animals and rivers and one another before you had the nation-state tramping in—that’s where the hope is. Getting rid of all national boundaries. Getting rid of all borders” (qtd. in Arnold, Conversations 186). Following Calabazas’s argument for unimpeded flow (and Poulin’s authorial insights regarding the porous US-Canada border in Volkswagen Blues), Silko sees America as a cluster of bio-, rather than geopolitical, terrains. Silko’s emphasis on interdependent ecosystems turns the retaking of Aztlán into a spiritual liberation in which people will reestablish a primary and reciprocal relation with nature.35 Through a pan-indigenous syncretism, Silko turns a tribal phenomenon based in the US Southwest into a full-fledged reclamation. Her Aztlán myth combines waves of Yaqui, Pueblo, and Aztec migrations rendered as a Maya prophecy (itself a summation of indigenous apocalyptic thought that includes Southwestern beliefs and predictions from the Yucatecan Books of Chilam Balam). Miriam Schacht aptly describes the novel’s place within and across tribal and hemispheric contact zones: “Almanac of the Dead describes an Indigeneity that is at once both firmly rooted in the local land and also mobile, moving internationally and across both new and traditional boundaries” (54). Silko’s character Alegría imagines hemispheric revolt as “a map of the world suspended in darkness until suddenly a tiny flame blazed up, followed by others, to form a burning necklace of revolution across two American continents” (507). The prophet Tacho looks into a divinatory opal stone and sees “glittering sapphire blues and emerald greens of the Pacific Ocean, and the long coastline . . . all the way from Chile to Alaska” (480). As the clouds “darken and thicken,” however, “great cities burn” before his eyes (480). The Barefoot Hopi, who “could feel the earth grinding and groaning from Alaska to the South Pole,” also presages a new cycle when he registers the primal grumblings beneath his feet (618). Consistent with her agenda to hemispherically reclaim indigeneity, Silko’s Aztlán is a vehicle for rethinking Latinidad within and beyond the US academy. She does not foreground Latino presence in the United States in order to lobby for equal protection under one nation. Far from arguing for an empowered indigenous presence solely within the United States, she works at the intersection of Latino, Latin American, Native American, ethnic, and border identities to represent the Southwest as a hemispheric nucleus.36 She refrains from celebrating hybrid identity because she recognizes the risk of reinstating a US melting pot ideology. She is also wary of drawing on problematic notions of indigeneity as enshrined in the Chicano

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movement’s Aztlán, as well as in celebratory Mexican versions of mestizaje.37 Instead, she rewrites the myth for Amerindian, rather than US citizenship. The vast majority of US Hispanics have some indigenous blood, whether or not they acknowledge it, or even know it. For Silko, indigeneity is at the core of mestizo identity, which is why Latinos are unlike any other “immigrant” group in the United States. The fact that the Spanish populated much of the New World, mixed with indigenous peoples, and, in addition to that, lived in the Southwest three-hundred years prior to US national consolidation makes the “indio-hispanico” population the basis for hemispheric unity. Silko’s America is Indian country from pole to pole, but Hispanics must be primary agents in the reconquista of Aztlán.38 In order to help this reconquista, Silko fills Almanac of the Dead with mixed-race revolutionaries marching to take back the land in keeping with the forces of correction. In the struggle between two unruly networks—the aforementioned “worldwide network of Destroyers” and “a network of tribal coalitions” (737)—Almanac of the Dead reflects the metaphysics of the Maya cosmos. The momentum of the freedom fighters conveys the just anger of the earth, and revolutionary tactics vary from the spirituality of the twins, the militant approach of Angelita, Lecha’s armed subterfuge, ecoterroristic suicide bombings, and Awa Gee’s hacking of government computer systems. As the cast of characters gathers in hemispheric solidarity at the International Holistic Healers Conference in Tucson, Silko presents an anticlimactic scene with a purpose that is as life affirming as the one in the Popol Vuh. Once guided by Maya literature, the membership must now act beyond the pages of this Native American novel, in keeping with the prophecy of its creative and spiritual center: “The Snake was looking south, in the direction from which the twin brothers and the people would come” (763). Silko looks forward, and southward, to the end of the Death-Eye Dog epoch and the start of the new pan-indigenous age.39

Pan-Indianism in the Fifth World In Almanac of the Dead, Silko advances a hemispheric tribalism to overcome the conceptual shortcomings of nation-based indigenous advocacy groups in the United States, most notably the American Indian Movement (AIM). Founded in Minneapolis in 1968, AIM came into prominence as the voice of “Red Power” during the 1970s. In the midst of the civil rights era,

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the organization battled issues of inadequate housing, poverty, discrimination, treaty violations, and other indignities endured by Native peoples. Following upon the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz island by the “Indians of All Tribes” coalition—a political act that Pitsémine proudly points out to Jack Waterman in Volkswagen Blues—AIM led a protest march to Washington, DC, along a “Trail of Broken Treaties,” which included a weeklong take-over of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972. After its 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee and the “Longest Walk” back to Washington, DC, in 1978, AIM would cement its presence in the public consciousness. Almanac of the Dead reflects the infighting and political upheaval of the American Indian Movement, but Silko suggests greater hemispheric membership to encompass her philosophy of “One World, Many Tribes,” the title of book 5. Admittedly, the hemispheric indigeneity she proposes is pronounced in an Anglophone novel where even the Mexican characters “speak” in English. Yet justice in Almanac of the Dead requires a cultural and political solution to problems that affect tribes beyond national and linguistic borders. Most of all, the Spanish language was crucial to her artistic epiphany. Although Indian nations have historically thought of themselves as self-sufficient, Silko finds inter-American affinities to broaden their identities and strengthen their case. As such, she exemplifies a contemporary condition in which Native Americans forefront both their local and global selves. In the introduction to Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World, Claire Smith and Graeme K. Ward refer to this recent development as “the emergence of a global sense of Indigeneity that coexists with a strong sense of Indigeneity at a local level” (7). For Silko, tribalism and pan-Indianism both live at the intersection of globalism and traditional ways of being in, and across, the American hemisphere.40 This newly expanded indigeneity requires a commensurate broadening of the current academic paradigm. While Herbert Bolton proves to be an inadequate advocate for the indigenous field, Almanac of the Dead champions the notion that historical lines of contact are lost in scholarship when the Americas are partitioned according to European patterns of colonization. A remapping is necessary to grasp shared histories of colonialism, as well as the full scope of pre-European indigenous cultural interactions. Silko succeeds where the historian fails, reinvigorating a tradition of borderless interchange by redeploying peculiarly American mixed-media traditions in Almanac of the Dead. In the spirit of open borders and artistic practices, indigenous cultural studies must remain multidisciplinary and translinguistic. Gordon

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Brotherston exemplifies this interdisciplinary approach in two visionary monographs, Image of the New World: The American Continent Portrayed in Native Texts (1979) and Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through Their Literature (1992). Believing that “the literatures of the Fourth World ask to be perceived as chapters of a single book,” Brotherston recognizes a pre-European archive that encompasses cultural productions ranging from Haida totem poles and Sioux winter counts to Navajo sandpaintings and Andean poetry (Book 341). Silko’s ambitious novel is a timely addition to this archive and to a hemispheric studies attuned to foundations.41 A literary monument to five hundred years of Amerindian survival, Almanac of the Dead persists, big and heavy, like the land itself.

Ch a p t er 5

Greater America in the Classroom Comparative Literature, Theory, and Praxis

}

In this concluding chapter, I return to Herbert Bolton, whose

1932 American Historical Association address, “The Epic of Greater America,” has provided this book with a foundation for reading American literatures comparatively. More specifically, it has allowed me to trace the imagination of history within four encyclopedic novels. These fictions, in turn, allow scholars to redraw the contours of hemispheric studies. A neoBoltonian organization and understanding of the Americas has bolstered interpretations of literatures that position national concerns within interAmerican cultural frameworks. We have delved into national and regional New World archives by exploring self-defined masterworks by Herman Melville, Carlos Fuentes, Jacques Poulin, and Leslie Marmon Silko. These authors heed a hemispheric muse. Their literature rewrites the exclusionary tenets of imperial documents, and responds to key historical events that form part of the legacy of 1492: the US-Mexican War, the Tlatelolco massacre, Quebec globalization, and the Columbine quincentenary. At the same time, a macroscopic approach underlies my placement of the selected case studies within a Greater American map that brings the literatures of the United States, Mexico, Quebec, and Native America into clearer relational focus. America Unbound has offered original hemispheric interpretations of novels that have been studied extensively through the lens of national traditions. These books—each of them what I have called a 139

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summa Americana—blend past and present. In my account, Moby-Dick becomes a Great(er) American Novel. The White Whale is the assailed Western Hemisphere, while Ahab leads the conquering march of manifest destiny in line with earlier New World conquests. Terra Nostra then crosses paths with Moby-Dick in ways that make us rethink the original scope of Melville’s novel. In Fuentes’s neobaroque triptych, Europe and the Americas intersect lovingly and violently. Resulting from this transatlantic and interAmerican clash is a New World consciousness that remains in a perpetual in-between state to complicate identity. Volkswagen Blues showcases the Francophone course of history and travel in the Americas. By using the voyage as a keynote, Poulin redraws traditional maps of Quebecois culture and estranges any sense of “American” nation, language, and identity. Almanac of the Dead channels indigenous archives of wisdom into a multimedia council book. Like the Popol Vuh, its very existence attests to the survival of the Amerindian heritage in the face of colonialism. A new type of codex, it also tells of things to come in the broad struggle for postcolonial recognition. It seeks to be the trunk of a hemispheric tree. In the interest of a hemispheric studies committed to both immersion and cross-cultural interdisciplinarity, we have traced the confluence of colonial contexts and contemporary texts within and across national boundaries, a method that unsettles any straightforward account of American literature. Rather than treating literature as one of several cultural discourses, I have privileged linguistic expression and close reading over predesigned political frameworks. Melville, Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko all recognize a multinational and plurilingual America, and inscribe hemispheric interconnections. I have attuned myself to literary insights in accordance with the methodologies of comparative scholarship on the literature of the Americas. Rather than submitting texts to symptomatic reading that, according to Rita Felski, “assigns all value to the act of reading and none to the object read,” I have dialogued with novels that have a lot to teach scholars (Uses 3). With summa Americana in hand—and with an equal helping of boldness, apprehension, and openness to literary insight—we have jumped into the deep end of languages and approached a hemispheric world of differences across time and space. My readings have provided a way of grounding a hemispheric argument for an American literature that is invested in focalized, yet intertwined, national histories. At no point have I meant to suggest that the literature of the margins, particularly as written by ethnic minorities (which would traditionally include Silko), does not matter in its disruption of the status quo,

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literary or otherwise. That said, I am troubled by the tendency of scholars to treat discussions of “great works” (and the issue of quality that usually goes by the wayside) as a mere power grab. Must contingencies of value, to follow upon Felski’s work, stifle literature’s power to amaze, repulse, and (ultimately) teach? To paraphrase Bruno Latour’s seminal 2004 essay “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” has a poststructuralist outlook left us helpless in the humanistic affirmation of what matters to us? As if in response, Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (2004) offers a compelling new view in which literature functions not as a passive object to demystify for predetermined purposes, but as an active agent that resists critical rigidity and appropriation. Texts are irreducible artifacts that change each time they are newly encountered. Treating each act of reading as a novel experience, Attridge embraces “an openness that allows for a range of possible outcomes” (8). Such a restorative approach to texts—and (in Attridge’s case) to original responses constituting literary traditions—has opened up ways for acknowledging the power of literature to impact the reader across the ages. Texts are unique. They possess an unruly agency worth engaging not from some safe critical distance and with the aim of coercing truth out of them. Rather, texts command attention to linguistic expression, strangeness, and nuance best approached through close readings that measure the effects of language on the page. Because texts are the embodiment of difference, a responsible reading of literature requires a willingness to meet otherness head on, registering its effects both on the brain and on the body. It is in this configuration—with literature as an active disciplinary object—that I believe immersion can strengthen the multidirectional “inter-” prefix in inter-­ American studies. In general accord with Attridge and Felski, I see a renewed attention to the aesthetic not as a reactionary measure to regurgitate a canon of “dead white males,” but rather as an effort to recapture the uniqueness of literature and language for the humanities. This reclamation calls for the active assertion of value rather than a more passive-aggressive critique carried out in perpetuity. Long before my present effort to recuperate Bolton for American literature, the historian advanced three interrelated fields of study: Latin American history, US-Hispanic border studies, and (less successfully) interAmerican studies. Unlike Bolton’s legacies in the first two fields, his model for a hemispheric history remains mostly unknown and largely unassimilated into his life’s work. This omission is indicated by the title of Albert L.

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Hurtado’s magisterial 2012 biography Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands. As Samuel Truett claims, historians “usually saw Bolton as two distinct people, Bolton of the Borderlands, and Bolton of the Americas” (215).1 While his Spanish borderlands work is Bolton’s most recognized contribution to date, the historian’s greater ambition was to bequeath an academic legacy that would achieve a synthesis from the Arctic Pole to the Tierra del Fuego. To this end, he concludes “The Epic of Greater America” with a list of suggested research topics meant as a carpe diem for inter-Americanists. His litany even recalls the spirited capaciousness of the encyclopedic genre as we have encountered it in America Unbound: Who has written the history of the introduction of European plants and animals into the Western Hemisphere as a whole, or the spread of cattle and horse raising from Patagonia to Labrador? Who has written on a Western Hemisphere scale the history of shipbuilding and commerce, mining, Christian missions, Indian policies, slavery and emancipation, constitutional development, arbitration, the effects of the Indian on European culture, the rise of the common man, art, architecture, literature, or science? Who has tried to state the significance of the frontier in terms of the Americas? (474) In a call for hemispheric research that includes “literature,” Bolton sketches a network of cultural, political, and biological filiations that scholars have been exploring in the eight decades since his address, although hardly ever as professed (neo-)Boltonians. Bolton was nonetheless the most prescient forebear of comparative American studies in print and in the classroom. At the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1919 until his retirement in 1944, Bolton directed more than one hundred PhD dissertations, thus advancing his Greater American perspective through his own graduate students, many of whom would go on to conduct the type of work called for in his address. Although a prolific researcher, Bolton was what we may rightly call a “teacher-scholar.” Believing that “[i]n my own country the study of thirteen English colonies and the United States in isolation has obscured many of the larger factors in their development, and helped to raise up a nation of chauvinists,” he led a pedagogical mission to broaden the intellectual horizon by instructing the next generation of scholars (“The Epic” 448).

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Figure 5.1. Herbert E. Bolton, founder of comparative American studies. Image courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Banc Pic 1959.089 Pic Box 1.

Bolton’s biggest contribution as a teacher came in the yearlong course History of the Americas. Listed in the UC Berkeley course catalogue as History 8 (A–B), Bolton advertised it as “a general survey of the history of the Western Hemisphere from the discovery to the present time” (History iv). Bolton called the first semester Colonial America. After two introductory lectures, “The Scope and Significance of American History” and “The Discovery of America,” the course followed with a unit on Spanish and Portuguese conquests during the sixteenth century. Here, Bolton covered conquistadors (Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro), and also the intellectual and religious life of the Spanish colonies, whose colonial universities

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were founded before Harvard and Yale. Bolton continued chronologically through French, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish colonial ventures as a second unit. The English colonies of North America (and the Caribbean) occupied a third unit. In a fourth and final unit, Bolton turned to colonial governance, expansion, and inter-European rivalries across the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bolton’s greatest strength was as a colonial historian. We find in this New Worldist design a new cognitive map that would help inspire the hemispheric turn in early American studies as documented by Ralph Bauer (“Early American” and “Notes”). The second semester, “The American Nations,” began with the transition from colonies to republics starting in 1776. Of particular importance here is the Revolutionary War, the founding of the United States, and the acquisition of Louisiana and Florida. A subsequent unit elaborated British Canadian foundations as established by loyalists during the Anglo war of independence. Bolton also discussed the British fur trade, and the competition therein, in terms of its nation-building attributes. A third unit covered the independence movements that unfolded throughout most of Spanish America from 1810 to 1826. Emphasizing revolutionary heroes (Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar) and highlighting battles within different regions, it established an adequate point of comparison with the AngloAmerican revolution. A discussion of the new Hispanic republics included some consideration of the Monroe Doctrine, as well as the Congress of Panama organized in 1826. This unit also offered a lecture on Brazilian independence, as well as one on South American dictatorships, among them that of Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina. The semester continued with a fourth unit on US expansion under manifest destiny as well as post–Civil War consolidation in the Far West. It tackled US industrialization and big business as empire-forming. Next was a fifth unit on the international growth of Canada and Latin America. Bolton discussed the Mexican Revolution and the rise of the ABC Powers (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), as well as hemispheric diplomacy leading into the Great War. Because “[m]ost present-day political boundary lines in America are of recent origin; [and] culture and commerce quite generally ignore them,” Bolton synchronized nearly one hundred maps with sixty course lectures to disrupt his students’ inherited cartographical norms (History iii). Reasoning that “European history cannot be learned from books dealing alone with England or France or Germany, nor can American history be adequately taught if confined to the United States or Brazil or Canada or Mexico,” he

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designed the two-semester survey as the macroscopic component of a multi­ layered approach meant to coexist with his colleagues’ offerings in national histories (History iii). This provided—not unlike in a European history curriculum—a fuller reflection of the interplay of local constituencies within a distinct world civilization. Even before publishing “The Epic of Greater America” in 1933, Bolton had used his lectures from History 8 for the 1928 monograph History of the Americas: A Syllabus with Maps, a distillation of “The Epic of Greater America” and the first classroom or program manual of the Americas.2 This genre continues to be a central concern for interAmericanist scholars in their attempt to remap the terrain. It has seen a revival recently as indicated by the title of the edited collection by Anthony B. Pinn, Caroline F. Levander, and Michael O. Emerson, Teaching and Studying the Americas: Cultural Influences from Colonialism to the Present (2010). It is in the community-building spirit of Bolton’s teaching volume that I approach the question of theory and praxis in this chapter. In line with the neo-Boltonian scope of America Unbound, and as a practical synthesis of its animating ideas, I invite scholars working in all fields of American studies to embrace a more comparative framework in the classroom. I contend that American literature is ideally understood as a branch of comparative literature. I am mostly interested, however, in promoting comparative literature as a useful practice rather than as a strict discipline. In what follows, I track—and critique—recent trends in American studies that have been at the forefront of the field and have achieved significant strides in thinking beyond US national boundaries. Meanwhile, in comparative literature the Americas have been mostly eclipsed by a world literature paradigm that presently dominates debates over the field’s definition and methodology.3 In line with the forthcoming print version of the 2014–2015 “state of the discipline” report commissioned every ten years by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), I conclude this chapter by offering an outline for a three-semester survey course designed in conversation with interAmericanist criticism, past and present. These syllabi represent my effort to bring New World literatures from the pre-Columbian era to the present into relational focus, and to organize certain texts into productive blocks for reading, discussion, and comparison. They are an Americas pedagogy in action, one possible map of the temporal and geographic terrain of a stillevolving field. Most of all, the syllabi are meant as a practical aid for anyone seeking to adapt a more comparative perspective to their institutional realities.

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Chapter 5 Hemisphere, Globe, and Comparative Literature

For over a quarter century now, scholars have been globalizing English departments, part of which has led Americanists to realign literary history in consort with US multicultural and identity politics paradigms. Just prior to this shift, “inter-American literature,” a discipline that was pioneered by Earl Fitz at Penn State University, found a home in comparative literature.4 Having created the first six courses in the field in the spring of 1979, Fitz made the following forecast in July of 1980: “It is our contention that interAmerican literary studies, naturally of a comparative nature, will prove themselves to be a major trend of the near future, one which will eventually establish itself as a permanent and vital part of every comparative literature department and program in the country” (“Old World” 10). This “literature of the Americas” was the first response to Bolton’s call for a hemispheric field beyond a few scattered examples.5 It entered the academic mainstream with the tenth congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), hosted by New York University in August 1982. There are at least four reasons why the ICLA conference, which featured a major unit titled “Inter-American Literary Relations,” is significant for the discipline in the early years. First, it regarded American literature as the fiction and nonfiction of the Western Hemisphere (i.e., the United States, Spanish America, Brazil, and Anglo-French Canada). As such, the object of study of the emerging hemispheric discipline was a multinational and multilingual field of literature. Second, papers were delivered in multiple languages (English, Spanish, and French) by scholars hailing from universities throughout North and South America. Third, critiques of methodology (the largest contribution of hemispheric studies since 2000) did not substitute for the close reading of the literatures of the Americas. As catalogued in the third volume of the conference proceedings (published in 1985), juxtapositions were integral. These ranged from place and selfhood (“The Metropolis and the Nation in American Literatures,” “Regional and National Identity in American Literatures”), aesthetics and traditions (“Crosscurrents in the Development of Narrative Form in American Literatures,” “Literary Movements in American Literatures”), genres (“Crosscurrents in the Development of Poetry in American Literatures,” “The Fantastic in American Literatures”), NorthSouth artistic flows (“Toward a History of Cultural Relations,” “Canadian and Latin American Literatures and their Interdependence”), and intellectual history (“Crosscurrents in the Development of Comparative Literature in Latin

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America,” “History of Genre Criticism in American Literatures”). Fourth, the conference featured the work of several young scholars who later produced important work on the Americas (among them Lois Parkinson Zamora, Wendy Faris, Jorge Schwartz, Cynthia Steele, Earl E. Fitz, Alfred Owen Aldridge, Mary Louise Pratt, and Elizabeth Lowe). As evidenced by the conference proceedings volume, this early work was carried out with an in-depth care for traditions placed in two- and three-way dialogues. The dialogues themselves took the form of literary analysis that marked continuities and differences within plural contexts. Furthermore, a keynote address by the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes confirmed the centrality of Latin America to “inter-American literary relations.” At the time, comparative literature saw its principal concern as European national literatures (with French, German, and English forming a holy trinity of sorts). The ICLA conference signaled a shift wherein comparative literature’s attention to languages and literatures would be refocused onto the Americas. Since its inception at the turn of the nineteenth century, comparative literature had not dialogued much with Latin America (Spanish and Portuguese) and, even less so, with Francophone literatures outside of France. Fitz recalls the event in a personal communication: “Everyone seemed fired up and inspired by the idea of freeing our dear old discipline of Comparative Literature from its old, but truly venerable, European moorings and (without forgetting those) creating something new, exciting, and comparative in all the best ways. There was a palpable sense of excitement, of getting into something really new and really comparative, in meaningful and productive ways. And that it (the inter-American project) could be done and done well.” As Fitz suggests here, the disciplinary critique encouraged a constructive balancing act. The inter-Americanists at NYU sought to reject Eurocentrism while remaining aligned with the multilingual internationalism that remains the raison d’être of comparative literature. Yet, as it turned out, Fitz’s pronouncement from 1980 was only half-right. While inter-Americanism has acquired a more central place after the hemispheric turn of the 2000s, the majority of teaching posts, fellowships, and seminars designated as “literature of the Americas” and “transnational” and “hemispheric” American literature are housed within English departments. Anglophone literature comes first there, and programs are more likely to be monolingual and to adopt an anachronous approach that places the United States (including US Latinos) before Hispanic antecedents. While this approach has helped to uncover a hemispheric imaginary within US literature, its

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decentering of the national fixture remains a work in progress. As a result, the equal-parts inter-Americanism that Fitz envisioned thirty-five years ago remains unfulfilled.6 Institutionally, it has led to an imbalance of power in terms of money, resources, and cultural capital that replicates the troubled US–Latin American relations that have historically plagued the hemisphere. Ricardo D. Salvatore argues that these have gone mostly unexplored in hemispheric studies, which does not sufficiently “include the critical examination of knowledge-accumulation and knowledge-location as part of the agenda” (368). As indicated by its very title, Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine’s 2008 collection Hemispheric American Studies announces the existence of a coherent field. The volume is thus more properly a torchbearer for the resurgence of academic inter-Americanism. In an introduction titled “Essays Beyond the Nation,” the editors write that Hemispheric American Studies is meant “to serve as a sort of handbook (or guidebook) to a burgeoning field” (3). They endeavor to “chart the interdependencies between nations and communities throughout the Americas,” as well as “to enlarge the critical frame of Americanist debate by moving beyond traditional area studies paradigms through analyses of the multiple geopolitical terrains encompassed by the hemisphere” (6). Most notably, they affirm their commitment to “doing literary and cultural history from the perspective of a polycentric American hemisphere with no dominant center” (7). The essays in the collection explore the promises and perils of hemispheric approaches to, among others, early American, African American, Asian American, Islamic American, US Latino, and Southern literatures and cultures. The volume includes excellent contributions by leading US academics, although its outlook beyond the colonial period remains limited by linguistic, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries that turn hemispheric into little more than an expanded national terrain, or a scholarly terra incognita that lends itself to projections of cultural marginality. This approach privileges a self-reflexive national perspective over a more disorienting—and significant, I feel—engagement with major cultures from the other Americas. These are less preoccupied with the operations of their neighbor to the North than US scholars would sometimes have us believe. The volume’s tendency to highlight the cultural politics of the borderlands and of “hyphenated” US minorities as “hemispheric” grounds a more global sensibility, but the predilection itself leaves out major traditions—from Cuzco to Quebec—every bit, if not more, sophisticated than those that developed in the United States. As presently constituted,

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then, hemispheric American studies is not a call to immersing oneself in the language and literature of fields that one later traverses for added insight, but a US-centered theorizing of uneven hemispheric relations. The literatures of the Americas, the reading of which could greatly impact our understanding of the hemisphere, go mostly unexplored here. Somewhat reinstating a paradigm that the editors want to get “beyond,” most of the contributors to Hemispheric American Studies challenge the centrality of the United States while paradoxically placing the nation at the center of the discussion. While the national meaning of “America” is always under question, Levander and Levine mostly facilitate the study of US literature vis-à-vis its hemispheric neighbors. Dialogue with scholars who established inter-American studies in the 1980s and 1990s may have carried the volume’s own “polycentric” pursuits into the new millennium.7 Almost none of their works is cited in Hemispheric American Studies, thus accounting for the editors’ characterization of “a bourgeoning field,” rather than one that has now been rediscovered by US Americanists. The disjunction here can also be attributed to a key methodological difference. Whereas comparative literature has pursued an agenda that is international, multilingual, and philological in relation to the foundational text in the field—Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953)—English and American studies have been concerned, at least since the publication of Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease’s 1991 anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism, with race and gender in consort with US global hegemony.8 This stress on state geopolitics explains the Americanist mission to always expose “United States imperialism.” What this amounts to, in short, is that, whereas comparative literature has traditionally regarded American literature as a hemispheric object with several moving parts, American studies has tended to account for hemispheric relations with the aim of disturbing US nationhood.9 In addition, the former has embraced literature as a privileged mode of expression, rather than as a subset of culture. In Hemispheric American Studies, Levander and Levine preempt what many skeptics are sure to wonder: “What is ‘Hemispheric American Studies’ and how does one assay to move ‘beyond’ the nation? How can one de-center the United States in American Studies, and how can American Studies become transnational without bringing about what George Handley has called ‘a neoimperial expansion into the field of Latin American studies’?” (9). Although this series of questions is largely rhetorical, my would-be response— to reactivate the approach of comparative literature—is in keeping with the

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spirit of the hemispheric field as Bolton called for it in “The Epic of Greater America.” Like the Bolton thesis that underpins it, however, this position faces legitimate challenges. For instance, in All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (2007), Natalie Melas characterizes comparative literature as a discipline pioneered in connection with the positivist teleology of comparative anthropology. By analyzing the work of nineteenth-century pioneers, she argues that comparative literature positioned Europe at the evolutionary forefront of world literature. Melas notes that, in the work of one such US scholar, “comparison along the civilizational scale allowed all differences in kind to be measured as differences of degree in development or growth” (15).10 Like Melas, I am wary of standards of aesthetic equivalency that use comparison as a measure of national superiority, and favor instead incommensurability to establish “a ground of comparison that is in common but not unified” (43). Melas’s critique notwithstanding, methodology has been a central concern of comparative literature since its founding, and the focus grew ever more vigilant as theory became a privileged domain of the field starting in the 1970s. The spread of theory to English departments today attests to the success of this self-critical dimension. Djelal Kadir applauds this “disciplinary self-awareness and reflective critique” when he calls comparative literature “a perennial site of transformative theoretical inquiry” (“Concentric” 31). For Kadir, this space of constant introspection helps to keep the field’s internal operations in check. In my view, the blending of this self-critique with a capacious sense of exploring literary worlds beyond the familiar is what signals the promise of comparative literature for hemispheric studies. More to the point, in “Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America,” the introduction to a 2002 special edition of the journal CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture, Sophia A. McClennen and Earl E. Fitz advance a similar viewpoint as a warning to inter-Americanists: “it is imperative that the discipline of comparative literature (and that of comparative cultural studies) be understood, essentially, as an issue of methodology, as a way of studying literature from an international perspective and as a rationale for framing its studies, rather than as a hierarchy in which some literatures, texts, and authors are always perceived to be at the top while others are automatically relegated to a secondary status.” Mutatis mutandis, I envision a more inclusive field that abides by “the principle of polyglottism” forwarded in 1877 by Hungarian scholar Hugo Meltzl, editor in chief of the first journal of comparative literature (44). This linguistic focus, which has been a sine

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qua non of the discipline, was strengthened after World War II by Auerbach, René Wellek, and other European philologists who left home and became the founders of comparative literature in the United States. As scholars have shown, the “American School” of comparative literature emerged as an embattled site of political conflict and exile, and, for that very reason, differed significantly from the American studies programs (particularly area studies) that were sponsored by the US State Department in the interest of Cold War surveillance.11 Despite their European biases, these multilingual pioneers considered reading and writing within, and across, national literatures a logical consequence of being comparatists. Most of all, in Mimesis, an extraordinary book penned during his exile in Istanbul, Auerbach treated a range of literary texts and traditions that spanned from ancient Greece (Homer) to modern England (Virginia Woolf), and engaged German, Italian, Spanish, French, and other languages. Channeling this spirit of a global (if still Europe-centered) approach, Vera Kutzinski argues that at least “a modicum of linguistic competency in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, which by no means exhaust the possibilities even for the Americas, is an indispensable prerequisite for any scholar in any discipline who wants to approach the hemispheric dimensions of America meaningfully” (The Worlds 230). My aim in this chapter is not to treat comparative literature as the culmination of a triumphal teleology, nor is it to proclaim its control over all other disciplines. Rather, I seek a comparative method for studying the Americas and I see its logical basis in the field in which I received training. To my mind, comparative literature (though never mentioned by name) is promoted in several cautionary arguments about the recent hemispheric turn. Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Claire F. Fox deliver such a warning in the 2004 article “Theorizing the Hemisphere: Inter-Americas Work at the Intersection of America, Canadian, and Latin American Studies”: “If Americanists are to internationalize their field . . . they need to travel abroad, engage in scholarly dialogue in languages other than English, and interest themselves in scholarship produced outside the United States and outside their own fields. Until they do so, we fear that an Americanist-led hemispherism will only promote a vision of the Americas in which all academic disciplinary configurations are subordinate to those of the United States and in which every region outside of the United States is collapsed into a monolithic order” (23). Despite its shortcomings in practice, comparative literature possesses the cosmopolitan ethos outlined above. Because comparatists

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typically acquire much of their expertise abroad and/or within national literature departments, the discipline is well suited to instill the study of languages and the development of interdisciplinary perspectives gained from learning multiple fields from the ground up. My attempt here is not to fall back on an unreasonable mastery of languages (we cannot all be Auerbach or Wellek), nor to envelop the discipline in a rarified shroud of elitism. In my experience, language learning at any level is guided primarily by an ethic that measures our level of commitment to the literatures we choose to study and write about. As a discipline, comparative literature facilitates this approach not just as a practical matter, but because it is central to its mission, whether this takes the international form launched in Europe, or the planetary shape elaborated in Gayatri Spivak’s 2003 book Death of a Discipline. Here, Spivak seeks to correct comparative literature’s chronic blindness to the non-Western world (and also the more recent tendency by world literature scholars to approach non-European works in English translation). Desirous of a field that is broader yet no less rigorous, she calls for a necessary “joining of forces between Comparative Literature and Area Studies” (20). From this union, she envisions “a new Comparative Literature, whose hallmark remains a care for language and idiom” (5). While Spivak’s domain is global, it is specifically geared toward a linguistically attuned study of the Global South. Her methodology, however, echoes Bolton’s macroscopic and microscopic approaches to teaching and studying America. Both compara­ tists seek collaboration between scholars who work with units of analyses, big and small. Unfortunately, comparative literature and hemispheric studies have yet to engage in the type of dialogue that Spivak conducts on behalf of the Global South, a category that, as used by postcolonial theorists, denotes the Third World. This umbrella term, in my view, remains imprecise for the Americas; for, unlike Africa and South Asia, the majority of “postcolonial” Latin America absorbed the colonizer during La Conquista through the racial and cultural mestizaje of its people. In this study, I have opted instead for a North–South trajectory that is in keeping with the single America conceived, and fought over, by Europeans during the early modern period; and, more specifically, one consistent with the emergence of Spanish America within a hemispheric whole. This being the case, I find it disappointing that one of the most significant critical contributions to world literature by American studies scholars, Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell’s Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007), disregards the international

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scope of America expressed by its own subtitle. As such, the volume takes for granted that America can be said to already possess an international literature pertaining to one half of the planet, a hemisphere to be exact. While the terms “America” and “American” are routinely misused by academics and nonacademics alike, its misapplication in an anthology set to rethink “American literature” globally retains a glaring nationalist moniker. The introduction to Shades of the Planet calls upon scholars to read American literature with the type of transnational awareness called for in Janice Radway’s 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association (ASA), which is also an important point of reference for Levander and Levine’s volume. In the provocatively titled article “Inter-American Studies or Imperial American Studies?” (2005), Sophia McClennen offers the most insightful assessment of Radway’s address and traces its negative implications for hemispheric studies. She critiques the ASA speech for forwarding lines of thinking in American studies that “represent themselves as postnational, but which ultimately have no cultural referents beyond the borders of the United States, and consequently are not post-national in any meaningful way” (McClennen 401). According to the introduction by Dimock, Shades of the Planet aims to transform “the United States from a discrete entity into a porous network, with no tangible edges, its circumference being continually negotiated, its criss-crossing pathways continually modified by local input, local inflections” (3). To this end, the contributors to the anthology “rethink the adequacy of a nation-based paradigm” by placing US literary texts and authors into sets of global constellations that allow disciplinary objects to ebb and flow rather than to calcify into a national category (2). Like Levander and Levine, Dimock and Buell seek to transcend the nation, but do so only within the contours of a “global” inquiry that refers back to the US “American” that is their object of study. While theorizing to the contrary, such an approach restricts the perspectival amplitude that seems to me a prerequisite for a global Americanism. Despite assuming the lead in theorizing hemisphere and globe, American studies currently treats the literature of the United States as if it were somehow beyond compare. A multidirectional engagement is only possible, it seems to me, through comparative readings that are invested in the literatures and cultures of the globe. As Kadir notes, it should also observe a measure of “worldling” committed to asking who carries out this work, and in what ways, in order to avoid appropriating its objects of study (“To World”).

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Within comparative literature, world literature proponents have tended to see their work as enhancing a discipline rooted in Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur (Damrosch, Melas, and Buthelezi 17–25). Despite the need for more global correctives in the academy, however, world literature risks having the reverse effect on comparative literature, particularly once coupled with translation studies understood not as a genre of reception and transformation, but as a stand-in for the study of literature as it circulates around the world.12 In What is World Literature? (2003), David Damrosch answers his titular question as such: “a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (4). In an act of rewriting the literary history that guided Auerbach’s Mimesis, Damrosch pursues case studies ranging from the “Epic of Gilgamesh” to the autobiography of Rigoberta Menchú. His capacious inquiry, however, privileges mostly circulation (and translation), as well as a literary history of global interactions. This sociological orientation effectively displaces Auerbach’s attention to close reading, a staple of comparative literature that has been challenged most radically by the “distant reading” framework proposed by Franco Moretti.13 The definition of Weltliteratur in What is World Literature? even flirts with the notion that non-Anglophone letters do not truly exist unless they have entered into circulation outside of their disadvantaged origins. Although translation into a global lingua franca may be a mark of publishing success for writers from abroad (and in particular those from the Third World or from the former Soviet Union), Damrosch’s method implies that scholars should follow the money in the interest of tracing what are currently Anglophone-led fields of production. Following his definition, one might argue that a currently outof-print English translation of a major work by Carlos Fuentes (A Change of Skin), or of José Eustacio Rivera’s genre-defining novela de la selva (novel of the jungle) La vorágine (1924; The Vortex), and also untranslated works by the Mexican authors Fernando Vallejo and Juan Villorio (who received the Spanish-language Premio Herralde de Novela prize in 2004), are currently not world literature proper. Conversely, Paulo Coelho’s O alchimista (1988; The Alchemist) would be more worthy of our attention than the baroque poetry of Gregório de Matos. The greatest of Brazil’s colonial poets has not enjoyed the commercial success of a modern orientalist novel that has now been translated into more than fifty languages. As if led by Pascale Casanova’s description of competing and semiautonomous literary spheres in Le république mondiale des lettres (1999; The World Republic of Letters), world

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literature currently allows the realpolitik of the global marketplace to dictate the terms and scope of engagement rather than the other way around. World literature professes worldliness, yet it currently substitutes close encounters with literatures from around the world with quantitative mappings of its networks. In an unapologetic critique titled “The Trouble with World Literature” (2011), Graham Huggan characterizes the discipline as “too much of a symptom of the often profoundly antidemocratic and neoimperialist tendencies within globalization that an appropriately ‘global’ Comparative Literature should make it its business to contest” (491). More optimistically, I believe that comparative literature needs to provide a corrective to world literature by paying close attention to the cultural particularities subsumed under the “global,” a domain so unmanageable that Huggan places the term under scare quotes. If we are to access any of these fields successfully, there must be an effort to do so via original languages of production, without which scholars can really only engage in meta-discussions about literatures. Following the thrust of Spivak’s call for a reborn discipline with an emphasis on the Global South, I see world literature as synonymous with comparative literature, but only if delimited to manageable, and intensely comparative, subdisciplines, the Americas being one of these. Critics may contend that such an Americas-first approach (perhaps unlike that of world literature) may construct a New World essentialism. Yet, this need not be the case so long as the hemispheric paradigm is continually mediated through local and global circuits and, in addition, provided that the practice retains the critical edge called for in Emily Apter’s critique of world literature, which envisions “an approach to literary comparatism that recognizes the importance of nontranslation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability” (Against 4). If world literature becomes tantamount to the study of textual circulation within an empirical world system, however, there may be less incentive for extending ourselves, and our students, beyond the political supremacy of English speakers. Without struggling to learn the peculiar ways in which other civilizations interpret, order, and construct their own realities through language, comparative literature risks losing its identity as a practice grounded in philology, the prime vehicle for bringing us face-to-face with the literatures of the hemisphere and the globe. Devoid of such a comparative and multilingual methodology, it is doubtful that the academy will ever establish literature of the Americas programs that address, and ideally mitigate, the ideological divide between the

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United States and its hemispheric neighbors—or, for that matter, between any other New World nations invested in their own isolated histories. This huge body of work calls for collaborative energies from scholars working in different literary traditions and periods of specialization. Yet this challenge should not keep us from pursuing the course; for, just as inter-American study is best seen as a collaborative enterprise, so too is an Americanist, by definition at least, a comparatist. Robert McKee Irwin emphasizes this point by stressing Spanish language-acquisition in two recent articles, “¿Qué Hacen Los Nuevos Americanistas? Collaborative Strategies for a Postnationalist American Studies” (2004) and “The New American Studies: A Lesson from the Borderlands” (2005). In the first, he writes, “if they [Americanists] do not have at least some level of proficiency in Spanish, to my mind, they are not competent Americanists, but merely narrow specialists in their chosen subfields” (306–7) Irwin’s sharp point is a constructive one, as his demotion of US literature to a subset of a larger American field corrects approaches that subsume the hemisphere within the United States rather than the United States within the hemisphere. What is at stake in the twenty-first century is not just the preservation of Hispanic voices within the US academy, or a more progressive view of diversity that reflects globalization and US multiculturalism, but, as Bolton indicates in “The Epic of Greater America,” the accuracy, integrity, and preservation of a Greater American story. Furthermore, as encyclopedic literature continues to proliferate throughout the Americas—such as Marcus Accioly’s Latinoamérica (Brazil, 2001), Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (Chile, 2004), and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (United States, 2006)—bridging the divide can lead to a better grasp of the developing implications of what is perhaps the most remarkable literary genre from the New World.14 One hopes that we can read across hemispheric lines without retreating to an isolationist deadlock that obfuscates the wider latitudes of America, or succumbs to disciplinary partisanship where more study is needed. Ideally, this work extends into the classroom, where it can have a practical, but profound, impact.

Teaching the Literatures of the Americas: A Three-Semester Survey from the Codex Borgia to the Codex Espangliensis At the University of Mary Washington, a public liberal arts institute where I was hired in 2005 as a literature of the Americas specialist, I have designed a

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three-semester survey that follows a neo-Boltonian track. I have implemented these courses as an “Americanist” within the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication (my position was not defined by period, but by orientation). Most of my students hail from the Washington, DC, corridor. Although many face language barriers, they enter my classroom with a degree of interdisciplinary training, as signaled by our departmental name. Because I believe that attention to the particularities of translation is essential to fostering an ethical comparatism, I challenge my students by working with at least one original line of text from each work they read in translation (signaling transformations in content, poetic cadence, etc.). Bilingual editions are a blessing. On the other hand, reading lists are often compromised by editions that are either out of print or unavailable in a good English translation. (Brazilian poetry is doubly marginalized given the broader appeal of Spanish verse within Latin American literature.) Oxford’s Library of Latin America series remains an essential resource for Spanish and Portuguese books in Anglophone editions. The Arte Público Press series, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, provides titles that make for a broader national literature. For lesser-known primary texts and supporting documents, I make frequent use of digital archives projects—such as the Americas Archive at Rice University (http:// oaap.rice.edu/) and the Early Americas Digital Archive at the University of Maryland (http://mith.umd. edu//eada/). Through strategic pairings and combinations of texts and themes, the long survey—consisting of “New World Writing in the Colonial Period,” “Literature and Nation-Building in the Americas,” and “Hemispheric Fiction of the Global Age”—reflects the voices that have distinguished New World traditions from before the Conquest and continue to challenge and define American identities in the twenty-first century. By placing the literatures of the Americas side by side, my syllabi present students with a wide variety of texts and ask them to examine established materials in new ways: the shock of the American unfamiliar competes with a more familiar America in ways that position Amerindian, Hispanic, Lusophone, Francophone, and African American literatures as pillars. The courses redraw the English curriculum by highlighting diversity, a commonplace of US university policy, but in a longer historical framework that serves as a tool for defining a global Literature of the Americas pedagogy. The courses highlight three modes of engagement and interconnection. I adapt these from the categories of the generic, genetic, appositional, and

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meditative as discussed by Gustavo Pérez Firmat in the introduction to the 1990 collection Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (which we may regard as comparative literature’s version of the Levander/Levine volume Hemispheric American Studies). The first is parallelism: writings influenced by common historical events, such as the sixteenth-century relations of “discovery” by Amerigo Vespucci and Samuel de Champlain, or two or more literatures that reflect on issues ranging from miscegenation to independence. The second is intertextuality: writings whose influence (in terms of content and/or form) carries across hemispheric borders, such as the impact of Walt Whitman’s poetry on José Martí and Spanish American modernismo, and the effect of Jack Kerouac’s travel ethos on Quebecois and Latin American road novelists. Finally, inter-Americanism refers to writings whose embedded themes and cultural positioning traverse the Americas, such as Latino poet William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), or the bilingual play Fronteras Americanas / American Borders (1993) by the Argentine-born Canadian playwright Guillermo Verdecchia. For the three courses, I place literature within a historical frame that includes parallel and overlapping experiences of contact, conquest, colonization, revolution, nation-building, industrialization, cultural resistance, and globalization. To avoid both a US-led hemispherism and a hemispheric isolationism, the courses address, within transatlantic and transpacific contexts, the sociopolitical specificities that make New World identities plural and often contradictory. I seek to expose my undergraduates to the best and brightest authors from the Americas, yet try to strike a balance between acknowledged masterpieces, works that offer insight into hemispheric cultural relations, and noncanonical writings. Most of all, I aim to turn my students into historically grounded readers of America through its multiple literary traditions. Although academic period histories have been challenged recently as being unimaginative and/or proto-canonical, I have found that timelines provide the best tools for impacting the undergraduates enrolled in these surveys.15 As Kadir notes with respect to comparative periodizing in particular, “the comparative persistently troubles the structural coherence of . . .  historiographical master plots and their self-validating systematicity” (“What” 644). In kind, these courses provide a conceptual map of a large field that remains incomplete, but that, of necessity, must rely on particular examples to illustrate broader tendencies. A comparative periodization thus remains for me the most compelling form of ordering literary texts and for

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staging rich—and ideally disorienting—encounters, the US part of which my students usually regard as more familiar. The surveys explore literature across a longue durée that covers roughly the colonial period in the first course, the era of nation-building in the second, and the age of globalization in the third. While I use the history of the Americas as a tertium comparationis to structure pedagogical units, I refrain from treating literature as the ready-made byproduct of master narrative of US political and cultural dominance. The surveys tell a thick tale through two- and three-way literary dialogues; these provide students with navigational tools while also estranging an English major’s understanding of “America” and of “American literature.” My selections vary from year to year to prevent monolithic incarnation of texts, authors, and movements, yet I believe that charting a long tradition is crucial to understanding New World literary expression. Rather than stressing breaks that place scholars into separate camps of early Americanist, nineteenth-century, and modernist subspecialties, my syllabi follow a generalist track for exploring American literatures across a deep space-time continuum.16 The first course, New World Writing in the Colonial Period, traces authorial strategies used to register the radical difference of America and to negotiate distinctive New World identities. Selections range from fifteenthcentury travel relations to nineteenth-century narratives of independence. Topics include pre-Columbian oral and textual traditions, the literature of the encounter, the psychology of the Conquest, race and transculturation, the circum-Atlantic slave trade, and the impact of the European Enlightenment on American revolutions. In this course, I avoid proto-nationalist accounts in which colonial literatures foreshadow fully formed republics. Because defamiliarizing the nation-state is crucial here, I make every effort to disrupt any inherited sense of a continental geography and, by extension, any privileged sense of place within the hemisphere. The sixteenth century, which can drop out of such a course when focused mostly on New England, is a key to accessing the larger picture of competing European and indigenous geographies.17 While Bolton set the table for hemispheric historians, such as Elliot (Empires) and Fernández-Armesto, Alfred Owen Aldridge established a literary platform in Early American Literature: A Comparatist Approach (1982). Among others, Ralph Bauer and Lisa Voigt are strong representatives of this shift, while Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer provide a valuable New World archive of primary texts in The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology (2001).

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Chapter 5 Syllabus #1 New World Writing in the Colonial Period Unit I: The Indigenous Cosmos Week 1

Central Mexico, The Codex Borgia (Dover, 1993) Iroquois, “Iroquois, or the Confederacy of the Five Nations” (in Early American Writings; Penguin, 1994) Alternate: Inca, Apu Ollantay (trans. Markham; Project Gutenberg)

Week 2 Quiché-Maya, Popol Vuh (trans. Tedlock; Touchstone, 1996) Alternate: Maya, Rabinal Achi (trans. Tedlock; Oxford UP, 2003)

Unit II: The European “Discovery” Week 3 Christopher Columbus, Carta a Luis de Santángel (1493; Letter on the First Voyage) (trans. Cohen; in The Four Voyages, Penguin, 1969) Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus (1502) (trans. Markham; Early Americas Digital Archive) Alternate: Pêdro Vaz de Caminha, “Carta” (1500; Letter) (trans. Tarrow; excerpt in The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology, Blackwell, 2001)

Week 4 Jacques Cartier, Relation originale du voyage (1534; First Relation) (trans. Biggar; in The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, U of Toronto P, 1993) Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590) (Dover; illustrated Theodor de Bry edition, 1972) Alternate: Handsome Lake, Seneca, “How America was Discovered” (in Early American Writings; Oxford UP, 2002)

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Unit III: Polemics of Conquest Week 5 Hernán Cortés, “Segunda carta-relación” (1520; Second Letter to Charles V) (trans. Pagden; in Letters from Mexico, Yale UP, 2001) Aztec, Cantos tristes de la Conquista (Elegies on the Fall of the City) (trans. León Portilla; in The Broken Spears, 2006) Alternate: Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1632; The True History of the Conquest of New Spain), excerpts (trans. Cohen; Penguin, 1963)

Week 6 Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias (1552; A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) (trans. Griffin; Penguin, 1992) Alternate: Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucana (1569; The Araucaniad), Book I (trans. Lancaster and Manchester; Vanderbilt UP, 2014)

Unit IV: Colonial Transculturation Week 7 Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Naufragios (1542; Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition) (trans. Bandelier; Penguin, 2008) Mary Rowlandson, The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) (in Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives; Penguin, 1998) Alternate: Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) (excerpts in Early Americas Digital Archive)

Week 8 Garcilaso de la Vega, “El Inca,” Comentarios reales de los incas (1609; The Royal Commentaries of the Incas), Part I (trans. Livermore; Hackett abridged edition, 2006) Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Loa al divino Narciso (1692; Loa to The Divine Narcissus) (trans. Peden; in Poems, Protests, and a Dream: Selected Writings; Penguin, 1997) Alternate: Aztec, “The Miraculous Apparition of the Beloved Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, at Tepeyacac, Near Mexico City” (in The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology; Blackwell, 2001)

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Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) (Norton Critical Edition, 2001) Alternate: Phillis Wheatley, “To His Excellency George Washington” (1775) (in Early American Writings; Oxford UP, 2002)

Week 10 Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) (in Complete Writings; Penguin, 2001) Philip Freneu, “Account of the Island of Santa Cruz, Containing an Original Poem on the Beauties of that Island” (1779) (in Early American Writings; Oxford UP, 2002) Alternate: J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Letter X: “Description of Charles Town; Thoughts on Slavery; on Physical Evil; a Melancholy Scene” (Oxford, 1999)

Unit VI: Enlightenment and Revolution Week 11 Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776) (Dover, 2000) Toussaint L’Ouverture, Constitution de Saint-Domingue (1801; The Constitution of Haiti, The L’Ouverture Project) Alternate: Cornplanter, “Speech in Council at Philadelphia” (1790) (in Early American Writings; Oxford UP, 2002)

Week 12 J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Letter III: “What is an American?” (Oxford, 1999) Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1791) (Norton Critical Edition, 2012) Alternate: J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Letter XII: “Distresses of a Frontier Man” (Oxford, 1999)

Week 13 William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy (1789) (Penguin, 1996) José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, El periquillo sarniento (1816; The Mangy Parrot), (trans. Fry; Hackett abridged edition, 2005)

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Alternate: Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) (Dover, 2008)

Week 14 Simón Bolívar, “Carta de Jamaica” (1815; Jamaica Letter: Reply of a South American to a Gentleman of this Island) (trans. Fornoff; in El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar; Oxford UP, 2003) Andrés Bello, “Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida” (1826; Ode to Tropical Agriculture) (trans. López-Morillas; in Selected Writings of Andrés Bello; Oxford UP, 1997) Alternate: Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus (1787), Book I (Kessinger, 2006)

The opening unit, “The Indigenous Cosmos,” introduces students to oral, pictographic, and hieroglyphic records of civilizations that preceded the European arrival. Students read the Quiché-Maya Popol Vuh, the most foundational Amerindian book in existence, yet one that comes to us in written form after the Conquest. The second unit, “The European ‘Discovery,’” expands on O’Gorman’s notion of the invention of America. The misrepresentation of the Native “other” bolstered a tradition of documentation that served as a capstone to European voyages of exploration, and that provided the legal basis for Amerindian dispossession, and for the establishment of colonies. The next unit, “Polemics of Conquest,” introduces the triumphal rhetoric of Hernán Cortés, but also the voices of moral restraint that spawned a vigorous debate across Europe regarding the rights of indigenous peoples. As Rolena Adorno demonstrates in The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (2007), the documents pertaining to this controversy later provided a foundation for Hispanic New World literature. A unit on “Colonial Transculturation” (following Mary Louise Pratt’s key concept) introduces students to the racial, spiritual, and cultural hybridity that resulted from European-indigenous interactions. Here, I include both Mary Rowlandson’s classic captivity narrative and works by seminal authors from Mexico and Peru. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican nun whose baroque metrics reflect the cultural syncretism of New Spain as it was emerging from inside the former Aztec capital, is one of them. Then, “The African Panatlantic” highlights the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a slave, and one of the most prolific travelers of the eighteenth century. This unit conveys a hemispheric scope of African American cultural expression

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that is missing from Paul Gilroy’s classic account The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), but that has found a place in the recent work of Laird Bergad and Henry Louis Gates Jr. The final topic, “Enlightenment and Revolution,” traces the impact of European political philosophy on ideas of freedom in North and South American creole societies, as well as through the black Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture. I juxtapose foundational US documents (the Declaration of Independence among them) with the writings of other non-Anglophone “founding fathers.” I also trace the development of the novel through the first two examples of the genre produced in the hemisphere: Brown’s sentimental fiction, The Power of Sympathy (1789), and Lizardi’s picaresque tale, The Mangy Parrot (written 1816). The second course, Literature and Nation-Building in the Americas, examines the cultural span of nationhood, as it considers uneven modernities across newly established borders. Topics include romanticism and the sublime, literary nationalism and pan-nationalism, expansionism and Indian removal, race and miscegenation, democracy and dictatorship, New World plantation economies, industrialization, and the emergence of modern literary forms. This course follows upon the first through its comparative focus, but a particular challenge here is to resist the isolationist rhetoric that bolsters partitioning. In actuality, even as they projected nationalism, several writers from the Americas used an expansive New World identity to offset European influence in the hemisphere. Furthermore, just as the colonial era featured a volatile map that lends itself to a comparative approach, so too did the early national geography of America remain unstable. It was transformed through war, border conflicts, and/or territorial acquisitions, among these the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the US-­ Mexican War (1846–1848), the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), and the Spanish-American War (1898). While stressing enmity between neighbors, such events brought the nations of the Americas into closer contact and made the nineteenth century a hemispheric matter. Anna Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz are among the scholars who have contributed to our understanding of this Greater American Renaissance.

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Syllabus #2 Literature and Nation-Building in the Americas Unit I: Cultural Independence Week 1 José María Heredia, “Niágara” (1825; Ode to Niagara) (trans. Bryant; Early Americas Digital Archive) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837) (in Emerson’s Prose and Poetry; Norton Critical Edition, 2001) Alternate: William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies” (1829) (in The Norton Anthology of American Literature; Shorter Eight Edition, Volume 1, 2013)

Week 2 Thomas D’Arcy McGee, “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion” (1867) (Montreal Gazette, 1867) José Martí, “Nuestra América” (1891; Our America) (trans. Allen; in Selected Writings, Penguin, 2002) Alternate: Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850) (in MobyDick; Norton Critical Edition, 2001)

Unit II: Romancing the Nation Week 3 Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (1852), excerpts (Norton Critical Edition, 2007) Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), excerpts (Norton Critical Edition, 2002) Alternate: José Hernández, Martín Fierro (1872), cantos I–III (trans. Ward; SUNY P, 1974)

Week 4 James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826) (Penguin, 1994) Alternate: Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (1827) (Rutgers UP, 1994)

Week 5 José de Alencar, Iracema (1865) (trans. Landers; Oxford, 2002)

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William Apess, “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836) (in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot; U of Massachusetts P, 1992) Alternate: Clorinda Matto de Turner, Aves sin nido (1889; Torn from the Nest) (trans. Polt; Oxford UP, 1999)

Unit III: New World Slavery Week 6 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831) (Penguin, 2001) Juan Francisco Manzano, Autobiografía de un esclavo (1837; The Autobiography of a Slave) (trans. Scott; Wayne State UP, bilingual edition, 1996) Alternate: Gertrudis Gómes de Avellaneda, Sab (1841) (trans. Garfield; U of Texas P, 1993)

Week 7 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) (Dover, 1995) Alternate: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), excerpts (Norton Critical Edition, 1993)

Unit IV: Modernity and Its Discontents Week 8 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845; Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism), chapters 1–5 (trans. Ross; U of California P, 2004) Esteban Echeverría, “El matadero” (written 1838; The Slaughterhouse) (trans. Ross; in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, 1997) Alternate: Sousândrade, “O inferno de Wall Street” (1871; The Wall Street Inferno) (trans. Brown; excerpt in Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3, U of California P, 2009)

Week 9 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851), excerpts (Norton Critical Edition, 2001) Alternate: Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) (Oxford, 2008)

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Week 10 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852) (Bedford Cultural Edition, 1996) Alternate: Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1856) (in Melville’s Short Novels; Norton Critical Edition, 2002)

Week 11 María Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) (Arte Público, 1995) Alternate: Frank Norris, McTeague (1899) (Signet, 2011)

Unit V: The Birth of Modernism Week 12 Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Memorias posthumas de Braz Cubas (1881; The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas) (trans. Rabassa; Oxford UP, 1998) Alternate: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (1899) (trans. Gledson; Oxford UP, 1997)

Week 13 Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899) (Dover, 1993) Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) (Dover, 1993) Alternate: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898) (Norton Critical Edition, 1999)

Week 14 Emily Dickinson, selected poetry (in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; Back Bay Books, 1976) Rubén Darío, Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905; Songs of Life and Hope) (trans. Derusha and Acereda; Duke UP, bilingual edition, 2004) Alternate: José Martí, selected poetry (in Selected Writings; Penguin, 2002)

The first unit, “Cultural Independence,” registers the urgency felt by authors who sought intellectual freedoms that were commensurate with new political liberties. José María Heredia strikes a fitting opening note in a quintessential inter-American scene: a Cuban poet writing in exile in New York about Niagara Falls, a northern borderlands icon of New World romanticism. José

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Martí also figures largely here as a pan-nationalist (but also something of a separatist), as explored by several scholars (Saldívar, “The Dialectics”; Belnap and Fernandez; Lazo, Writing). The second unit, “Romancing the Nation,” pursues racial and cultural miscegenation as a key, as well as an obstacle, to civic formation. As Doris Sommer has argued with respect to Latin America, the nineteenth-century novel provided a partly ambivalent, and even contradictory, picture of how the body politic envisioned national consolidation. Seen as a romantic extension of vanishing Amerindians, nature in works by James Fenimore Cooper and other writers provides adventure but is, in the end, an inhospitable terrain that must yield to progress. A unit on “New World Slavery” then presents a fuller sense of bondage and emancipation, as illustrated by slave narratives from the African diaspora. Placed alongside Caribbean authors, Frederick Douglass assumes a different guise as one of several progenitors of African American letters. The next section, “Modernity and Its Discontents,” highlights pessimistic literary responses to the thwarting of the nationalist ideals promoted by earlier writers. With Argentina and the United States being among the most industrialized nations, the fictions of Esteban Echeverría and Herman Melville express disenchantment with violence and the course of civilization there. Finally, “The Birth of Modernism” highlights turn-of-the-century texts that signal a shift to modernism. This section centers around two of the most refined novelists from the Americas. While seemingly of one mind in their psychological realism, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and Henry James never read each other’s work. Given the sheer quantity of excellent twentieth-century literature, “Hemispheric Fiction of the Global Age” is in many ways the most difficult syllabus to design. This course examines literature within thematic sections that highlight global conceptions of art, identity, history, and culture. Topics include modernist aesthetic experimentation, cosmopolitanism and regionalism, the construction of a usable past, black cultural and political consciousness in Harlem and the Caribbean, the influence of the US South on the Latin American Boom, the Cold War, counterculture, immigration and globalization, and the rise of postmodernist epistemologies. Rather than trying to include all of the major writers of the period, I create constellations of authors and texts that have impacted modern literary developments. Useful criticism for this period includes works by Vera Kutzinski, Lois Parkinson Zamora, George B. Handley, and Justin Read. This third installment of the Americas survey calls clearly for adopting a pedagogy of continual revision.

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As we move further into the twenty-first century, it may require division into two parts.

Syllabus #3 Hemispheric Fiction of the Global Age Unit 1: Modernist Manifestoes Week 1 Vicente Huidobro, “Ars Poetica” (1916) (instructor’s translation) T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) (in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism; Dodo Press, 2009) Alternate: Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1923), excerpts (Penguin, 1999)

Week 2 Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto antropófago” (1928; Cannibal Manifesto) (trans. Bary; Latin American Literary Review 19.38 [1991]) Paul-Émile Borduas, Refus global (1948; Total Refusal) (trans. Ellenwood; Exile Editions, 2009) Alternate: William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1825) (New Directions, 2009)

Unit II: The New World Metropolis Week 3 Mário de Andrade, Paulicéia desvairada (1922; Hallucinated City) (trans. Tomlins; Vanderbilt UP, 1968) Hart Crane, The Bridge (1930) (Liveright, 1992) Alternate: T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922) (Norton Critical Edition, 2000)

Week 4 Pablo Neruda, Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1944; The Heights of Macchu Picchu) (trans. Tarn; FSG, bilingual edition, 1967) Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (1955) (City Lights, 2001) Alternate: E. J. Pratt, The Titanic (1935) (in Selected Poems; U of Toronto P, 2000)

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Jean Toomer, Cane (1923) (Norton Critical Edition, 2011) Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) (in The Black Aesthetic; Doubleday, 1971) Alternate: Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) (Applewood Books, 2015)

Week 6 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939; Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) (trans. Arnold and Eshleman; Wesleyan, bilingual edition, 2013) Alternate: Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la créolité (1989; In Praise of Creoleness) (trans. Taleb-Khyar; Gallimard, bilingual edition, 1990)

Unit IV: The Cold War and the Boom Week 7 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) (Vintage, 1990) Alternate: William Faulkner, “The Bear” (1942) (in Go Down, Moses; Vintage, 1970)

Week 8 Carlos Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz) (trans. MacAdam; FSG, 2009) Alternate: Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude) (trans. Rabassa; Harper, 2006)

Week 9 Julio Cortázar, selected short fiction (trans. Blackburn; in Blow Up and Other Stories, Pantheon, 1985) Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star) (trans. Moser; New Directions, 2011) Alternate: Hubert Aquin, Prochain épisode (1965; Next Episode) (trans. Fischman; New Canadian Library, 2011)

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Unit V: Border Crossing and Globalization Week 10 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) (Penguin, 1999) Alternate: Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Diarios de motocicleta (1993; Motorcycle Diaries) (trans. Keeble; Ocean Press, 2003)

Week 11 Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues (1984) (trans. Fischman; Cormorant, 2004) Leslie Marmon Silko, “Fences against Freedom” (1994) (in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today; Touchstone, 1996) Alternate: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) (Aunt Lute Books, 2012)

Unit VI: Postmodern Hyperrealities Week 12 Jorge Luis Borges, selected short fiction (trans. Hurley; in Collected Fictions, Penguin, 1999) Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) (Perennial Fiction Library, 2006) Alternate: Gerald Vizenor, The Heirs of Columbus (Wesleyan, 1991)

Week 13 Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest (Coffee House Press, 1990) Alternate: Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (Vintage, 1991)

Week 14 Alberto Fuguet, Las películas de mi vida (2003; The Movies of My Life) (trans. Fitz; Rayo, 2003) Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (2001) (City Lights, 2001) Alternate: Guillermo Verdecchia, Fronteras Americanas / American Borders (1993) (Talonbooks, 1997)

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The first unit, “Modernist Manifestoes,” stages a four-way dialogue between cultures seeking a new literature for the modern age. Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) is arguably the richest novel about the development of the artist in the Americas. While the novel’s embrace of Amerindian culture falls along primitivist lines, Cather illustrates a concern of several New World authors—how to create a homegrown cosmopolitan art from hemispheric materials. In the next section, “The New World Metropolis,” Pablo Neruda provides an example of how to wield this usable past in a Whitmanesque long poem that, read alongside the work of his hemispheric brethren, treats Macchu Picchu as an ancient version of a modern technological wonder like the Brooklyn Bridge. The section “The Black Arts and Négritude” links the voices of the Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer and the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, whose concept of négritude facilitated the development of an Africanist discourse in the Caribbean. Both writers feature a medley of poetic and musical forms that are central to African American consciousness and modes of expression. The unit “The Cold War and the Boom” presents William Faulkner as a master figure for Spanish American authors. As explored most notably by Deborah Cohn in History and Memory in the Two Souths, Faulkner’s interest in intergenerational tragedy, the demise of the slave-owning aristocracy, and multiperspectival storytelling influenced the Boom. A subsequent unit called “Border Crossing and Globalization” turns to the Native American Renaissance through Leslie Marmon Silko and Gloria Anzaldúa, and brings the course back to pre-Columbian travel. The authors challenge traditional maps of culture by connecting border crossing to global identity formations. The concluding unit, “Post­modern Hyperrealities,” begins with Jorge Luis Borges, whose short stories seem almost to predict postmodernism, the post-Boom, and new media poetics. His oeuvre pairs well with that of Thomas Pynchon, one of the greatest living writers from the Americas and a master of encyclopedic form. Pynchon’s vision has inspired Bret Easton Ellis and Karen Tei Yamashita, two novelists whose works show the cost of capitalist consumption on the psyche and on the environment, respectively. The course ends with the Codex Espangliensis, which blends pop art, comic books, and Amerindian codices in a multi­ media book. It brings the class back to the pre-Columbian Codex Borgia that began the three-semester sequence. If the three courses are taught on a semester basis, that leaves every other year for a seminar on a special topic. These could allow for cross-temporal literary constellations through analysis of, among other syllabus topics, the encyclopedic novel (Barrenechea), Poe

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and Argentina (Esplin), US Latino borderlands (Raab), social movements (Messmer), or personal narrative (McClennen).18 If comparative literature is to be the vehicle for a new hemispheric pedagogy, then it is up to scholars and institutions of higher learning to engage a worldlier paradigm not just in theory, but in classroom practice. As I hope my discussion of inter-Americanism in this chapter has shown, it is especially critical that the discipline retain the agonistic basis of its existence. In the words of Franco Moretti, comparative literature must be “a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures—especially the local literature. If comparative literature is not this, it’s nothing” (“Conjectures” 68). In this monograph, I have tried to heed this comparatist credo through my hemispheric approach to encyclopedic novels; and, more broadly, through an underlying argument for a new American literature that lives up to its name. A task of semiplanetary proportions, the first step is to cross the line and proclaim America unbound.

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1. The sense of being out of touch with Latin American reality haunted the reception of Bolton’s work. The Mexican playwright Rodolfo Usigli may have used Bolton as a model for a character from El gesticulador (1938; The Gesticulator). Usigli’s Oliver Bolton is a young and somewhat naïve Harvard professor who mistakes the play’s protagonist for a hero of the Mexican Revolution. I am indebted to John Ochoa for making me aware of this possible connection. These same basic Anglo-Hispanic divisions are also pronounced in Octavio Paz’s classic 1979 essay “México y Estados Unidos: Posiciones y contraposiciones, pobreza y civilización” (Mexico and the United States: Positions and Counter-Positions, Poverty and Civilization), which developed out of the 1978 conference “Mexico Today” in Washington, DC. 2. By contrast, Fitz considers the US-sponsored “Pan-Americanism” of the FDR years as “a movement that can be taken as the conceptual progenitor of interAmerican literary studies” (“Theory” 159). 3. Elsewhere, Lazo argues for delimiting hemispheric American literature through “a hemispheric approach rather than a presumptuous designation of a new field that would include all novels published in the Americas” (“Hemispheric” 1086). 4. A literary updating of Boltonian history is Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria del fuego trilogy, which begins with vignettes on Amerindian creation myths and concludes with the Uruguayan author writing his own panoramic work in 1986. This inter-American dimension in the work of a Latin American author implies that (1) a new mode of hemispheric study might emerge right out of fiction, and that (2) Latin America can serve as its anchor. 5. For the hemispheric turn in colonial literature, see Bauer (“Early American”); for an intellectual history of the inter-American field, see Bauer’s 2009 PMLA Changing Profession piece “Hemispheric Studies.” I address the state of hemispheric studies today in chapter 5.

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6. Manifestoes calling for cultural independence to accompany political freedom included Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (US, 1837), Herman Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (United States,1850), Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion” (Canada, 1867), Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s “Notícia da atual literatura brasileira: instinto de nacionalidade” (Reflections on Brazilian Literature at the Present Moment: The National Instinct; Brazil, 1873), and José Martí’s “Nuestra América” (Our America; Cuba, 1891). 7. All references to Moby-Dick are to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of the novel. 8. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne dated 29 June 1851, Melville refers to The Whale (the main title of the British edition) as a synonym for its subject: “Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked—though the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this” (Correspondence 196). 9. Interpretations of the doubloon have foregrounded its hermeneutic inscrutability (Sedgewick), cabalistic symbology (Seelye), or relation to epic insignia (Garrison). Critics have mostly overlooked the coin’s cultural and economic implications. Vogel engages the nineteenth-century debate over currency and the gold standard, but does not mention the Hispanic origins of the doubloon. In turn, Lazo (“‘So Spanishly’”) explores Melville’s use of the coin to destabilize US imperialism in Latin America through the creation of an epistemological impasse. 10. On the history of currency from colonialism to the nineteenth century, see Hepburn. 11. Melville’s edition of Three Dramas of Calderón includes marked passages in both English and Spanish; his edition of Poems, from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens (sic) contains marked sections in both English and Portuguese. See respective entries in Sealts. 12. An inter-American tale about New World slavery, Benito Cereno has been the privileged text for hemispheric approaches to Melville. For a critical summation, see Emery, as well as Sundquist. 13. I am not claiming that an official baroque entered the United States through Latin America. Rather, it would seem that, despite Anglo-Latin differences, the experience of contact and hybridity in the New World engendered a parallel— and largely unexplored—phenomenon. 14. In a parallel artistic medium, the Hudson River School of US painters created an aesthetic of the New World sublime through images of the Hudson River Valley, as well as the Catskill Mountains, the Adirondack Mountains, and the Cotopaxi Volcano of the Andes. On the US artistic interest in South American landscapes in the nineteenth century, see Manthorpe.

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15. Curiously, Moby-Dick was not appreciated in this capacity until the “Melville Revival.” For a discussion of Moby-Dick as a Great American Novel, see Buell (“The Unkillable”). 16. Melville wrote Moby-Dick as the California Gold Rush began in 1848. In a history that connected whalers and gold hunters, the latter voyaged besides whaling-men-turned-“forty-niners” on the more than forty-two Nantucket whalers that were converted into passenger ships. For a brief summation, see Downey. For a reading that sees the Asian Pacific as the desideratum of the expansionist goal expressed through Ahab in the novel, see Takaki. 17. My view of Ahab as consummate dictator differs from C. L. R. James’s reading in Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in (1953). While James sees Melville as a visionary who identifies the origins of modern totalitarianism in the nineteenth century, I see Melville as returning to models of conquest from the colonial era. For a reading of this book as a foundation for New American Studies, see Pease (“C. L. R. James”). 18. In his Critique of Judgement (1790), Immanuel Kant defines the sublime as the contradictory feelings engendered by an object that, by virtue of its size (mathematically sublime) and/or quasi-divine quality (dynamically sublime), dwarfs the subject into an initial state of imaginative impotence: “the sublime . . . is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought” (82). 19. The most important work on hieroglyphics and US literature is still John T. Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (1980). Irwin, however, does not discuss the platform offered by Amerindian hieroglyphics. In Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature (2012), Birgit Brander Rasmussen has examined the presence of pre-European hieroglyphic and pictographic languages within hemispheric literary texts. Her book includes a chapter on Moby-Dick that centers on the tattooed Polynesian harpooner Queequeg and his engraved coffin. 20. For more on the French discovery of the Piasa petroglyph, see O’Connor (33–34). 21. Information on the Harley Bestiary is available through the British Library website: http://prodigi.bl.uk/illcat/record.asp?MSID=8797&. 22. For a detailed study of sea monsters from the Carta Marina, see Nigg. For a more general study of sea monsters present on medieval and Renaissance maps, see Van Duzer. A digital copy of the Carta Marina is available via the website of the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, https:// lib.umn.edu/apps/bell/map/OLAUS/MAP/indexm.html. 23. An illustration of Gutiérrez’s map is available on the Library of Congress website: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gutierrz.html.

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Notes to pages 23–27

24. I consulted this map in the French edition of Blaeu’s atlas, Le theatre du monde (vol. 2, plate Mare Virginicum, 1643), which excludes the sea monsters. An original image is available through the Virtual Jamestown Archive: http:// virtualjamestown.org/jsmap1.html. 25. A copy of Champlain’s map is available online through McGill University Library: http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/champlain/fullrecord.php. 26. I consulted this map in Blaeu’s French edition Le theatre du monde (vol. 2, plate Americae Nova Tabula, 1643). A digital copy of the map from the Atlas Maior (Greater Atlas), a later edition of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, is available through the John Carter Brown Library: http://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/ servlet/detail/JCB~1~1~554~230075:Americae-nova-Tabula. 27. These artifacts from seafaring life may reveal a conceptual blind spot with respect to the bibliographic arrangement of books owned and borrowed by Melville as listed in Melton M. Sealts Jr.’s Melville’s Reading (1966) and Mary K. Bercaw’s Melville’s Sources (1987). For one notable exception that includes map sources, see Frank. 28. A copy of Martin Waldseemüller’s map is available on the Library of Congress website: http://loc.gov/rr/geogmap/waldexh.html. 29. Rasmussen reads the end of the novel as conveying Melville’s liberal view of cross-cultural affinities figured as the coexistence of alphabetic and non-­ alphabetic languages: “As a text which survives the wreckage of the Pequod along with the narrator, Queequeg’s coffin represents indigenous writing and its presence at the center of American literature” (138). I see a darker ending here that is concerned less with indigeneity, and more so with the US collapse. 30. Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) inaugurated the myth and symbol school of American studies. 31. For a different reading of Moby-Dick as furthering US imperial interests through the aesthetic domestication of the sublime, see Wolf. 32. For an opposite reading of this decree that aligns Ahab with the irreversible course of Native American extinction, see Dimock. 33. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a sixteenth-century Spanish explorer and a survivor of the Narváez expedition shipwrecked in Florida. William Strachey survived the 1609 shipwreck of the Sea Venture, a British ship that was caught in a hurricane in Bermuda on the way to Virginia. Chase is the aforementioned survivor of the Essex whaler, which was sunk by a sperm whale. 34. Such critics follow the lead of the first study of Melville published in Latin America—José de Onís’s Melville y el mundo hispánico (1974; Melville and the Hispanic World)—which reads the beleaguered Leviathan as a symbol for Latin America under the pursuit of US empire. Yet Onís does not trace the White Whale back to hemispheric America in the Age of Exploration.

Notes to pages 32–47

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35. Rochford (83–93) provides a critical summation of Rivera’s Historia de México. For Mexican state involvement in muralism, see Coffey; Anreus; Greeley; and Folgarait. For discussions of Rivera’s San Francisco mural Pan-American Unity (1940) as a touchstone for hemispheric studies, see Zamora and Spitta (189–92); and Park (221–32). 36. Alternate scholarly designations for the “encyclopedic” include the following: “total novels” (Rodríguez Monegal; Corral), “mega-novels” (Karl, American Fictions: 1940–1980; American Fictions: 1980–2000), “new historical novels” (Menton), “systems novels” (Le Clair, Art), “prodigious fictions” (LeClair, “Prodigious”), “modern epics” (Moretti, Modern), “maximalist novels” (Ercolino), and, less favorably, “hysterical realism” (Wood). 37. For Europe’s mental accommodation of America, see Honour; Elliott (The Old); and Rabasa. 38. John Muthyala’s Reworlding America: Myth, History, and Narrative (2006) also takes a long conceptual view from a multinational hemisphere to the redefinitions of “America” under globalization. Although the book privileges theory at the expense of literature, it stands somewhere between the first wave of comparative scholarship and newer postcolonial approaches to ethnic, minority, and border cultures derived from English and American studies.

Chapter 2 1. In Terra Nostra, Valerio Camillo’s “Teatro de la Memoria” (Theater of Memory), whose performances “integran todas la posibilidades del pasado, pero también representan todas las oportunidades del futuro” (567; integrate all the possibilities of the past, but also represent all of the opportunities of the future), best illustrates Fuentes’s debt to Borges, particularly to the short story “El Aleph” (1989; The Aleph). All references to Terra Nostra are to the Joaquín Mortiz edition. 2. Some of the most canonical readings of Terra Nostra (Helmuth; Kerr) overlook the baroque, and Hispanic cultural history, in favor of poststructuralist tropes. Most recently, scholars (Dupont; Abeyta) have begun tracking its neobaroque strategies. 3. Along with the Spanish poets known as the Generation of ’27, Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, Catalonian art critic Eugenio d’Ors, and Argentine architect Ángel Guido led the recovery of the baroque in the twentieth century. Countering neoclassical aesthetic and ideological norms, these figures influenced Alejo Carpentier, Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy to look beyond the colonial origins of the aesthetic, and to establish a neobaroque platform for a modern New World identity (see Zamora and Kaup 1–35). For the

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Notes to pages 51–57

incompatibility between neobaroque cultural politics and critiques of Latin American modernity, see Beverly (Against Literature; Essays). By contrast, Echeverría champions an anticapitalist “baroque ethos.” 4. For more on El Escorial, see Kamen. 5. Juan-Navarro describes this paradox in Terra Nostra as a “difficult synthesis between dispersion and monumentality” (75). As I see it, all encyclopedic novelists wield formal gigantism—and the multiplicities therein—as a dissolving agent to fight closed systems. For an opposite reading that sees El Escorial as mirroring the grand design of Terra Nostra in keeping with the multiculturalism of medieval Spain, see Williams (53–59). 6. Fuentes had access to the chronicles through Miguel León-Portilla’s Visión de los vencidos (1959; Vision of the Conquered, translated into English as Broken Spears), an anthology of Amerindian voices of resistance gathered from Sahagún, Toribio de Benavente, Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc, and others. Fuentes includes León Portilla’s book in the “joint bibliography” of Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura. 7. For side-by-side comparisons of the novel and these source texts, see Ibsen. For a discussion of the intertextual function of colonial chronicles in Terra Nostra, see Echegoyen. 8. In Casa con dos puertas (1970; House with Two Doors), Fuentes embraces MobyDick as an epic of industrialization critical of the US ideology of imperial aggrandizement. Furthermore, Terra Nostra contains a chapter titled “Miradas” (Gazes), in which Fuentes renders the thoughts of characters who stand before a large Italian painting. The episode reenacts the Renaissance perspectivalism of Diego Velázquez’s painting Las meninas (1656; The Maids), but also echoes the exegetical lineup in chapter 99 (“The Doubloon”) of Moby Dick. 9. An image of Stradano’s drawing is available through the Metropolitan Museum of Art website: http://metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/ search/343845. 10. The Tempest was likely inspired by William Strachey’s 1610 letter relating the Bermuda shipwreck of the Sea Venture, the flagship of the Virginia Company, which was established in 1606 to promote British settlement in North America. In the twentieth century, the play became a touchstone for postulating the meaning of New World identity. In Ariel, José Enrique Rodó associates Latin America’s youth with the transcendent spirituality of Ariel, and the United States with the materialism of Caliban. Different, but equally insistent on the Anglo-Hispanic divide, is Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay “Calibán” (1971), which celebrates Caliban’s critique of imperialism by aligning him with the Cuban Revolution. This work follows upon Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête (1969; A Tempest), a play in which Caliban rejects both the imperialist Prospero and the conciliatory mulatto slave Ariel.

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11. For a discussion of the Quetzalcoatl myth in Terra Nostra, see Juan-Navarro. 12. Faulkner is one of the greatest influences on Latin American writers of the Boom. Fuentes praises his baroque sensibility in “La novela como tragedia: William Faulkner” (1970; The Novel as Tragedy: William Faulkner), published in Casa con dos puertas. For connections between the US South and Spanish American literature, see Cohn (History and Memory) as well as Smith and Cohn (Look Away!). An example of multifaceted divinities is Tezcatlipoca, a jaguar god who sees into men’s souls as Lord of the Smoking Mirror (black Tezcatlipoca), but can change into Quetzalcoatl (white Tezcatlipoca), Xipe Totec (red Tezcatlipoca), and even into his opposite, Huitzilopochtli (blue Tezcatlipoca). 13. Fuentes also uses Celestina as a model for the old woman in Aura. In Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literatures (1993), González Echevarría argues for the literary modernity of the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, and examines the book’s absence from the Western canon, as well as its return in contemporary Latin American fiction. 14. All but a few critics have ignored Fuentes’s miscitation of the Inferno. For two notable exceptions, see Josephs and Zamora (Writing). Although Allen Josephs recognizes Fuentes’s “error,” he dismisses canto XXV in order to privilege Pound’s “Near Perigord” as a key to a harmonious ending. Zamora, in turn, notes that “[i]n this and in the multitude of other mis-citations and invented facts, Terra Nostra can be compared to the texts of Borges’s character, Pierre Menard, which, we are told have enriched the art of reading by a new technique, that of ‘deliberate anachronism and erroneous attribution’” (Writing 221). Following Zamora, I believe that the layering of erroneous source places the sexual encounter of Polo and Celestina within an open-ended interpretative field that underscores the apertures of Latin American culture itself. 15. Another source is surely the painter José Luis Cuevas, who found inspiration in Bacon’s expressionist style and was the subject of Fuentes’s critical study El mundo de José Luis Cuevas (1969; The World of José Luis Cuevas). Cuevas formed part of La Ruptura (The Rupture), the first movement to challenge Mexican muralism in the 1950s. He remained obsessed with monsters and disfiguration throughout his career, and even drew Hollywood-inspired monsters. 16. Fuentes explores Mexico’s conflict of paternity most directly in Todos los gatos son pardos, where the sexual encounter between Cortés and La Malinche anticipates the ending of Terra Nostra. 17. González Echevarría repeats this argument in Celestina’s Brood: “Their [Polo and Celestina’s] combination into an androgynous figure at the end rekindles a utopian myth that [Fernando de] Rojas would have never accepted and that is a restatement of the one told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium to explain the origin of desire. This longed-for monism of Fuentes, an abolition of difference, hence of desire for and of the other, with the attendant eros and

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Notes to pages 68–76

violence, is really a longing for a seamless society, an autarchy that ultimately denies the existence of the other and that abolishes writing altogether by denying difference” (38). 18. In Terra Nostra, Fuentes conveys this concern for utopia best in an episode in which several characters—a disguised young Felipe among them—hold a symposium by the sea where they take turns sharing ideas for building a perfect society. None of the theories comes to fruition.

Chapter 3









1. For the challenges to studying Canadian literature within a hemispheric context, see Adams and Casteel; Siemerling and Casteel; Sadowski-Smith and Fox (14–20); Sadowski-Smith (“The Centrality,” and Border Fictions 136–38); and Green (“Accenting”). 2. Along with the changes wrought by postwar modernization, a string of events led to the Quiet Revolution, including the Maurice Richard riot of 1945, the Asbestos strike of 1949, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) strike of 1958. Besides the publicizing of these events in Le Devoir, Cité Libre, and other Quebecois newspapers, the movement benefited from the publication of, among other texts, Refus global and Jean-Paul Desbiens’s Les insolences du Frère Untel (1960; The Impertinences of Brother Somebody), which criticized clerical control of the educational system. For a discussion of the overall rejection of traditional values under the liberal reforms of Jean Lesage (nineteenth premier of Quebec and an architect of the Quiet Revolution), see Bothwell (79–137); and Cuccioletta and Lubin. 3. In addition, two events hosted by Montreal at the highpoint of nationalism provided a transnational platform for Quebecois identity. The first was Expo 1967, a World’s Fair held during Canada’s centennial year that attracted more than fifty million visitors and is widely considered one of the most successful international events of all time. The second was the 1976 Summer Olympics, which made use of eighteen sports venues in and around the city. 4. The roman de la terre (or roman du terroir) dominated Quebec literature from the 1840s to the 1940s. The paradigmatic example of the genre is Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine (1913), whose titular protagonist epitomizes French ideals of steadfastness and hereditary pride. 5. For the traditional images and themes deployed by the road-novel genre, see Ireland. 6. In La première personne, Turgeon’s protagonist leaves his family and job in order to experience adventure in California. Yet the novel resorts to Hollywood film noir in its depiction of the seedy underbelly of urban life and the femme fatale characters that threaten to destroy unwary travelers. In Le voyageur

Notes to pages 7 7–86













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distraite, a Quebecois author follows the trail of Jack Kerouac and the Beats in order to escape personal and professional tedium, but returns to Quebec after sensing the failure of the “American Dream.” Jacques Godbout’s Une histoire américaine (1986; An American History) is a political thriller about a Quebec nationalist who leaves his home after the defeat of the 1980 referendum but finds more disillusionment in San Francisco. For a discussion of these works in connection with the pattern of failed journeys in Canadian road novels, see Miraglia (“Canadian” 171–80). 7. Poulin uses author figures in all of his novels. In Volkswagen Blues, we learn that “l’écriture était pour lui (Jack) non pas un moyen d’expression ou de communication, mais plutôt une forme d’exploration. Chacun de ses romans avait été écrit de la façon suivante: dans un certain décor, il avait mis deux personnages en présence l’un de l’autre et il les avait regardés vivre en entervenant le moins possible” (99; writing was for him (Jack) not a means of expression or communication, but rather a form of exploration. Each of his novels had been written in the following manner: within a certain setting, he had placed two characters one in the presence of the other and he had watched them live, intervening as little as possible). 8. For more on Jacques Cartier and the first voyage, see Cook (ix–34). 9. All reference to Volkswagen Blues are to the Leméac edition. 10. The kingdom of Seguenay, said to be full of blond inhabitants rich in gold and furs, provides a fantastical Canadian example. During his second voyage, Cartier postulated its existence beyond the rapids of Montreal after speaking with two indigenous captives from Gaspé. See King. 11. Socken (61–74) examines the theme of the lost paradise in Volkswagen Blues, but only in existentialist terms. He thus overlooks its importance for the colonial Americas and, as a result, for Poulin’s reexamination of Quebec’s cultural origins within a long historical context. 12. Poulin’s most salient use of Hemingway occurs in chapter 25, where a hitchhiker’s autobiography mirrors that of the US author. In chapter 4, Jack describes his fantasy of composing a masterpiece that begins with inspiration at a bar, proceeds through automatic writing, and ends with the author’s recovery in a hospital. Here, Poulin plays with popular conceptions of Kerouac’s lightningspeed composition of On the Road on a scroll of tracing paper. He proclaims the US writer a precursor with whom he and Waterman share a first name (Jacques/Jack), and yet distances both from Kerouac’s genius through his lessthan-stellar protagonist. 13. Recently, Poulin used visual images to recall the Lewis and Clark expedition in L’anglais n’est pas une langue magique (2009; English is Not a Magical Language). 14. This map is missing from Sheila Fischman’s English translation of the novel.

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Notes to pages 86–95

15. At one point in the story, Jimmy describes how his father, a car aficionado, sits around a fire and tells his family about automobiles. From these tales, Jimmy gets “l’impression que tu avais . . . d’écouter une histoire du Far West, la lutte contre les Indiens, la Conquête de l’Ouest avec Buffalo Bill, Davy Crocket et les autres, ou bien une histoire plus ancienne comme la découverte de l’Amérique et tout” (Jimmy 25; the impression that you were. . . . listening to a story of the Far West, the fight against the Indians, the Conquest of the West with Buffalo Bill, Davey Crockett and the others, or some even older story like the discovery of America and everything). 16. Socken identifies the unfolding of a Balzacian universe as a Poulin trademark: “By reprising characters, situations, structures, and themes . . . Poulin has created, not only a series of books, but a work-in-progress that is taking shape” (75). Before Volkswagen Blues, Théo appeared in Faites de beaux rêves. Jack Waterman reappears in Poulin’s La traduction est une histoire d’amour (2006; Translation is a Love Affair), L’anglais n’est pas une langue magique, and most recently Un jukebox dans la tête (2015; A Jukebox in the Head). Pitsémine resurfaces alongside Waterman in L’homme de la Saskatchewan (2011; The Man from Saskatchewan). 17. Fitz (Rediscovering 70–94 and “From Blood”) examines miscegenation as a central New World literary theme. 18. For more on the Oregon Trail, see Merk; and Dary. 19. With histories such as The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and RockyMountain Life (1849), The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867), and The Old Régime in Canada (1874), Parkman was the greatest popularizer of the Canadian archive in the United States. For his book Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), Parkman gained access to “the unpublished records of the colonies . . . many documents of important bearing . . . found scattered in public and private libraries, chiefly in France and Canada” (15). 20. The FLQ was active from 1963 to 1970 and is infamous for its role in the October Crisis of 1970. The incident involved the kidnappings of the British Trade Commissioner James Cross and the Quebec Minister of Labor Pierre Laporte (whose corpse was later found in the trunk of a car). The FLQ’s manifesto incited unrest after being broadcast by CBC / Radio Canada. In a controversial countermeasure, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau resorted to the War Measures Act. 21. Fischman translates voyageur as “traveller.” In The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature, Norah Story translates voyageurs as “canoemen” and notes that the word “was adopted into English after the conquest to refer to the men who paddled the large canoes in the western fur trade” (816). 22. For more on the history of fur trading in early North America, see Podruchny. 23. For the relation between French husbands, Indian wives, and the fur trade, see Sleeper-Smith.

Notes to pages 96–104

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24. This US-French connection equally underscores a major difference between French and British Canada. In Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Margaret Atwood finds the Anglo-Canadian conservative embrace of law to be in opposition to the US celebration of frontier individualism and lawlessness. As substitutes for the “wild” West, the latter embraced the national, federal, provincial, and municipal authority of the mounted police. See also Lipset. 25. It is worth remembering that Kerouac was born to French Canadian parents who christened him Jean-Louis Lebrid de Kérouac. He spoke the Joual dialect as his first language and penned at least two manuscripts in French. Adams (149–88) provides a fascinating account of Kerouac’s significance for Greater North American literary and intellectual history. 26. This crucial line is inexplicably absent from Fischman’s translation. 27. Pitsémine supports the widely accepted view that Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait from Asia into the Western Hemisphere around twelve thousand years ago. For a rejection of the conventional science from a Native American scholar and activist, see Deloria Jr. 28. The treatment of land as wilderness in need of domestication and commodification has been a staple of American history since the Puritans. Furthermore, it is not by coincidence that the American Geographical Society (AGS) was established in 1851, a time when the Mexican cession had shifted US boundaries considerably. In the age of “manifest destiny,” its mission to advance geographical learning among the public also served the interests of policymakers. 29. In the disagreement between conservationists and environmentalists, Poulin would be closer to the latter, for he seems to regard the earth as sacred and man’s influence on it as either misguided or deleterious. For this debate within contemporary environmental studies, see Minteer. 30. Volkswagen Blues was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in 1984, but the establishment’s full embrace came as a result of its 2005 victory in the “Canada Reads” battle-of-the-books competition. Operated by the CBC, the program features leading cultural figures who advocate for five different novels that they feel all Canadians should read. Volkswagen Blues was championed by Francophone author and former National Librarian of Canada Roch Carrier.

Chapter 4 1. In Native American Renaissance, Lincoln was the first to define the movement with which most scholars now associate Silko and some of her literary peers. Lincoln’s addition of the qualifier “Native” to the mainstream literary his­ torical designation “American Renaissance” responds to F. O. Matthiessen’s

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Notes to pages 105–110

The American Renaissance (1941), a study that established (as implied by the definite article in its title) a singular canon of Anglo-American writers (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman). For Lincoln’s reading of Ceremony, see Native American Renaissance (233–50). 2. Early reception of Almanac of the Dead ranged from vituperation (Skow) to backhanded praise for its failed efforts (Birkerts). For a rare exception, see the review by Niemann. 3. Lundquist claims that the Native American Renaissance operated on three levels: “confidence on the part of contemporary Native authors in reclaiming their heritage in their own literary expressions; concern with finding and reevaluating early literary works by Native authors; and renewed interest in anthologies of translations of traditional artistic expressions” (38). 4. While Silko is inclusive of Africa, I concur with Gardner, who suggests that her primary concern is with Haitian sources in connection with the first “Black Indians.” In addition, “Africa” (Part Three) is the only section of the novel not set in the location of its title. 5. In an interview with Ellen Arnold, Silko discusses writing anti-Mecham graffiti on the wall of 930 Stone Avenue right after he was elected governor of Arizona in 1986 (Conversations 174). Her writing remained there until the politician was impeached and removed from office in 1988, after which the giant snake painting took over the same space. No doubt, Mecham, among others, is a local model for the corrupt authority figures that abound in Almanac of the Dead. 6. Besides inverting the words frío and hambre, Silko rewrote the last line as “La gente exige justicia. De otra manera, Revolución” (The people demand justice. Otherwise, Revolution). A photograph of the 1988 original is preserved at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. A black-and-white photograph of the 1993 version appeared in Silko’s “Stone Avenue Mural,” published by City Lights Press in a 1994 special issue commemorating the Zapatista uprising (republished in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today, 1996). 7. For a study of the snake motif in Almanac of the Dead, see Roppolo. 8. This would change with the 1970s recession, during which the Carter administration expanded the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) to do what FDR’s New Deal program had done a generation earlier for the public arts (including murals) through the WPA (Works Progress Administration). CETA funded the creation of community arts programs and oversaw the hiring of muralists as agents for the revitalization of urban neighborhoods. 9. For the hemispheric circulation of art in the age of Cold War policy, see Fox (Making Art).

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10. It is worth noting that Silko also used a profile drawing of a snake suspended above rain clouds and a mesa landscape—perhaps as an authorial insignia—on the back covers of her Flood Plain Press books, Laguna Woman (1994) and Sacred Water (1993). 11. Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus (1991) and Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991) number among Anglophone literary works. In the former, a Dartmouth professor works to finish a critical study of a newly discovered Columbus manuscript in time for 1992. In the latter, Columbus figures as a character with Maya ancestry (!) and is a figurehead for modern heirs seeking to establish a tribal nation. In Latin America, Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato (1987; Christopher Unborn) is the most direct response to the quincentenary, with its satiric narrative of a fetus narrator who is to be born on 12 October 1992, as part of a contest sponsored by the Mexican government. The Ojibwe artist Carl Beam provides one of the most powerful visual responses to the Columbus legacy in The Columbus Project (1989–1992). A mixed-media series influenced by the layered and ghostly canvases of Robert Rauschenberg, it nonetheless retains a First Nations consciousness that is anticolonial. 12. In this vein, Jamake Highwater (a.k.a. J. Marks) deserves a mention. In the introduction to his 1984 anthology Words in the Blood: Contemporary Indian Writers of North and South America, he writes, “One of my major motives for including mestizo writers [Vallejo, Neruda, Asturias, Paz, and Rulfo] . . . is to deny the numerous barriers of race, language, and Indianness that are founded upon the erroneous notion that Indians are only found in the United States and Canada” (15). 13. All references to Almanac of the Dead are to the 1991 Simon & Schuster edition. 14. See Sol for a comparison of Almanac of the Dead with Edward Mendelson’s encyclopedic criteria. 15. For example, Powers’s “Mapping the Prophetic Landscape in Almanac of the Dead” rightly claims that “the journeys recorded on Silko’s map are allegorical, forcing readers to confront the evil in a world born of dual colonization, first by the Spanish and later by the Anglos,” but his argument follows a Eurocentric line by making Dante the model (262). For a reading that sees Christian-based apocalyptic allegory alongside indigenous modes of storytelling, see Sugg (67–100). 16. For basic information on the codices, see Zamora (The Inordinate Eye 61–113). All of the codex images discussed in this chapter can be found on the FAMSI: Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. website: http://famsi.org/index.html. 17. Silko would have seen images of the codices as the fine-line drawings published in J. Antonio Villacorta and Carlos A. Villacorta’s Códices Mayas (1930; Maya

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Notes to pages 116–125

Codices), an annotated Guatemalan text that established a template for scholarly reproduction. For more information on editions and reproductions, see “Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: The Ancient Maya Codices” on the FAMSI website: http://famsi.org/mayawriting/codices/summary.html. 18. For discussions of Yaqui history in Almanac of the Dead, see Muthyala (“Almanac”); and Sadowski-Smith (Border Fictions 74–84). 19. Carlos Fuentes (La nueva novela 58–67) provides a fascinating account of García Márquez’s novel as a reworking of European fantasy (particularly utopia) within the colonial archive. 20. I agree with Powers and Snodgrass, two scholars who separate heroes from villains within Silko’s metaphysical drama. Here again, however, I would emphasize the role of the Mesoamerican codices rather than the European novel or Christian allegory. Silko’s characters likewise defy the stereotype of the “ecological Indian” as defined by Krech, that being “the Indian in nature who understands the systemic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living forms, and takes steps to conserve so that earth’s harmonies are never imbalanced and resources never in doubt” (21). Moreover, it is through these cosmic indigenous frameworks that Silko sketches her homosexual villains in Almanac of the Dead, which have created problems for gender- and sexuality-based readings; see St. Clair (“Cannibal Queers”). 21. For an excellent ethnohistorical account of Aztec sacrifice, see Carrasco. 22. For a discussion of the Mesoamerican rites, see Stuart; Tiesler and Cucina; and Carrasco. Debates over human sacrifice in ancient America are heated. While contemporary scholars disagree on the numbers within Mesoamerica (with estimates ranging from 300 to 250,000 per year for the Aztecs), their occurrence is indisputable. Notable images of Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism are found in the Codex Magliabechiano (folios 70 and 73, respectively). This emphasis on spectacular bloodshed made the region amenable to the stress on sacrificial blood in Catholicism. For a reading of Almanac of the Dead that invokes the metaphor of blood sacrifice as witnessing atrocity, but does not engage primary sources from Mesoamerica, see Moore. 23. See, for instance, folios 82 and 95 of the Madrid Codex. Scholars once believed the Maya to be more “enlightened” than the Aztecs on the question of human sacrifice, but opinions have changed since the 1970s. See Tiesler and Cucina. 24. See Vail and Hernández for detailed lists of all forms of ritual killing. 25. See Katzew on Mexican casta paintings. 26. According to Gordon Brotherston, “the Popol Vuh fuses the indigenous Maya tradition with that brought in by the Nahua speakers who drove on south from highland Mexico through Mixtec territory to Guatemala long before the Spaniards arrived” (Image 165). Brotherston also considers the Popol Vuh “the synthesis of several ways of American knowledge” (Image 292). For theories

Notes to pages 125–136

189

on the transcriptions of the Popol Vuh, see Tedlock (21–60); and Christenson (26–56). 27. These Mesoamerican twins have analogues throughout the Americas, and especially in the Southwest. Among them are the Navajo twins Nayenezgani and Tobadzistsini (who are monster slayers), the Hopi twins Pöqánghoya and Palögawhoya (said to reside in the North and South Poles, respectively) and the Zuni warrior twins, known collectively as Ahayuta. 28. I am using Denis Tedlock’s English translation of the Popol Vuh, as this is likely the one that Silko consulted for her own fictional “translation” of the text while writing Almanac of the Dead. However, the reader may choose to consult Allen J. Christenson’s more precise rendering of the Quiché text in his multivolume English translation published in 2003. I am indebted to Scott Manning Stevens, former director of the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, for facilitating my examination of the Popol Vuh. 29. This prognosis of justice reverses the role of prophecy as a rhetoric of conquest used by Columbus and the New World explorers who followed suit. See Kadir (Columbus). For prophecy and apocalypse in the literature of the Americas, see Zamora (Writing); and Beebee. 30. It is as if Silko were extending a multimedia tradition noted by Tedlock in the introduction to his translation of the Popol Vuh. Here he writes, “In Mayan languages, the terms for writing and painting were and are the same” and “the same artisans practiced both skills” (27). 31. Galeano’s triptych shares the encyclopedic impulse with Almanac of the Dead. Silko corresponded with the Uruguayan author and read his work in galley form while writing her novel. For a comparative reading of Silko’s novel and Memoria del fuego, see Bell. 32. To my knowledge, only Arnold has paid sustained attention to Silko’s drawings. 33. I am indebted to Wendell Minor for a personal communication with me regarding this cover. 34. For a history of the Pueblo Indians, see Dozier. 35. For ecological approaches to Almanac of the Dead, see Reed; and Kang. 36. For interpretations of Almanac of the Dead from the perspective of border studies, see Sadowski-Smith (Border Fictions 74–84); and Muthyala (“Almanac”). 37. There is a copious critical bibliography on the Aztlán legend in connection with Chicano nationalism. For differing indigenous studies views, see Hernández-Ávila and Varese; and Cook-Lynn (142–49). For critiques of Aztlán’s exclusivity, see Alarcón; and Sadowski-Smith (Border Fictions 21–45). For a recent view of Chicano indigeneity as disruptive of North American nation-states, see Hartley.

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38. Silko also connected Aztlán and current Hispanic immigration in the question and answer session of the “Poetics and Politics” lecture she delivered at the University of Arizona in 2011: http://youtube.com/watch?v=vsWRGeqShTA. 39. It is tempting to see the next chapter of the story as the declaration of war against the Mexican government made by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation on 1 January 1994 (the day when NAFTA went into effect). Silko’s pan-indigenous collective gained a real-life correlative (a fulfillment of the snake prophecy, it would seem) through this group of Maya revolutionaries who seized towns and cities in their home state of Chiapas. As if to heighten the mystical connection between Almanac of the Dead and the Zapatista movement, Silko published her piece “Stone Avenue Mural” in a 1994 special issue by City Lights Press that celebrated the insurrection. For a discussion of the Zapatista uprising in relation to Almanac of the Dead, see Romero. 40. Silko envisions a broader Native Americanism based on hemispheric goals of survivorship, a position that she shares with other pan-Indian coalitions. Among these is the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), which was formed in 1975 and was the first international human rights organization to lobby for indigeneity at the United Nations. The UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP), which first met in Geneva in 1982, also raised global awareness of the plight of Native peoples within a transnational venue. Most immediate for Silko, however, was the “Declaration of Quito,” which took place in July of 1990 in direct response to the impending quincentenary. Attended by several Indian commissions, the conference in which the hemispheric manifesto was forged included delegates from twenty different countries, as well as representatives from international and popular grassroots movements, among them the South and Mesoamerican Indian Information Center (SAIIC), the Confederation of Indian Nations of Ecuador (CONAIE), the Organization of Indian Nations of Colombia (ONIC), the Awakening of Indian and Campesino People of Ecuador (ECUARUNARI), and the Confederation of Indian Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE). For a history of modern pan-Indian movements, see Hertzberg. For an indigenous critique of Almanac of the Dead as forwarding an ineffective pan-tribal nationalism, see Cook-Lynn (89–96). 41. On the absence of Indianness within postnationalist American studies, see Huhndorf. For a recent discussions of hemispheric indigeneity (with a particular emphasis on Mesoamerica), see Castellanos, Gutiérrez Nájera, and Aldama. For the promises and perils of inter-American Native frameworks in the academy, see the introduction to the 2013 special issue of Comparative American Studies by Barrenechea and Moertl (109–23).

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Chapter 5 1. For a brief summation of Bolton’s influence on intellectual history, see Barrenechea (234–38). For other assessments of Bolton’s legacy, see Truett (236– 41); Hurtado (65–69); Bannon (255–58); and Magnaghi (137–54). See also Hanke (30–44) on the “History of America Program,” which was inspired by Bolton and sponsored by the Pan American Institute of Geography and History. 2. For a sustained discussion of History 8 and of Bolton’s teaching career, see Truett (223–30). 3. One key exception is “The Americas, Otherwise,” a 2009 special issue of the ACLA flagship journal Comparative Literature, guest-edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Silvia Spitta. 4. The inter-American approach was one way in which the Western Hemisphere remained relevant within a discipline largely focused on Europe. On the absence of Latin American literature from comparative literature, see González Echevarría (“Latin American”). On the absence of US literature from comparative literature, see Damrosch (“How American”). 5. The first inter-American literary treatment is, to my knowledge, George W. Umphrey’s “Spanish American Literature Compared with That of the United States” (1943). For a summation of inter-American literary scholarship before 1982, see Shouldice. 6. Fitz, currently a professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and comparative literature at Vanderbilt University, is the most systematic of inter-Americanists (at one time compiling a 143-page online annotated bibliography of inter-American literature and scholarship for the University of Iowa Press). With an encyclopedic knowledge of New World literature in four languages, Fitz has contributed to the discipline while focusing on course and program design. His successor at Penn State was Djelal Kadir, a staunch defender of comparative literature and the founding president of the International American Studies Association (IASA). For scholarship by Fitz, see Rediscovering (1991), which maps the Americas through themes/motifs, genres/forms, periods/movements, and influence/reception; see also “Old World” (1991), “Wither” (1991), “Theory and Practice” (2000), “In Quest” (2004), and “Inter-American” (2004). 7. Beside the scholarship by Fitz, I am thinking here of Kutzinski (Against the American Grain); Zamora (Writing and The Usable); and Saldívar (The Dialectics); the collections edited by Chevigny and Laguardia; and Pérez Firmat. 8. Bauer also makes this distinction in the PMLA article, “Hemispheric Studies” (2008, 235). 9. For a comparatist critique of American Studies, see Kadir’s “Concentric”; and his introduction to the 2003 PMLA guest-edited issue “America: The Idea, the

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Literature.” For other defenses of comparatism, see Tötösy de Zepetnek; Kadir (“Comparative”); and Xie. 10. For other critiques of comparative literature and its methodology, see Bassnett (12–30); and Seigel, respectively. A collection of essays that illustrate (and often confront) Eurocentrism has been compiled by Damrosch, Melas, and Buthelezi in The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present (see especially 3–161). 11. On the differences between comparative literature and area studies, see Spivak (Death). In The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), Emily Apter positions the global in relation to the philological and humanist concerns of Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, two pioneers who worked across and between cultures at a time of geopolitical crisis. She thus constructs a scenario in which Edward Said, and postcolonial scholars more generally, have inherited the mantle of the European comparatists. On Auerbach and the founding of comparative literature, see Kadir (Memos 204–20). See also Apter (Against World Literature, especially 193–227). 12. On translation in the Americas, see Lowe and Fitz. 13. See “Conjectures” and Graphs. In the vein of 1960s structuralism (but without an interest in the architecture of a work of art beyond its material ontology in the marketplace), Moretti’s theory of “distant reading” looks to reveal the semi­ autonomous development of particular forms, tropes, and genres within a world system. It takes the human actor out of the equation of reading and writing well beyond poststructuralist critiques of humanism, and ecocritiques of anthropocentrism. For disavowals of “distant reading,” see Arac; and Kadir (“Comparative”). 14. See the recent focus on “Big Novels” in American Book Review 37.2 (2016). 15. For recent discussions of periodization, see “Theories and Methodologies” in PMLA 127.2 (2012): 301–56. 16. The survey platform also provides ample opportunity for stressing the types of thematic and genre/period/movement approaches called for in Fitz’s Rediscovering. Here, Fitz identifies solitude, identity, and the conflict between civilization and barbarism as enduring American themes. Among genres/ movements, he includes the New World epic, the novel, regionalism, and modernism. 17. Annette Kolodny argues for the additional inclusion of the Icelandic sagas in the early American literature classroom in In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo American Anxiety of Discovery (2012). 18. The International Association for Inter-American Studies / Asociación Internacional de Estudios Interamericanos (IAS) maintains an archive of these and other documents on the “Course Syllabi” page of their website: http://inter­ americanstudies.net/?page_id=40.

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Index

Page numbers in italic indicate illustrations.

Abbreviations AOTD Almanac of the Dead MD Moby-Dick TN Terra Nostra VB Volkswagen Blues Adams, James Truslow, 1 Adorno, Rolena, 163 Africa and Africans: AOTD, 108, 186n4; Damballah, 108; MD, 16; in survey course, 163–64, 172 African Americans in survey course, 159, 163–64, 168 Agnello and Cianfa merging into a single body (Blake), 63 Ahab, 17–19, 23–26, 177n17 Ahayuta, 189n27 Aldridge, Alfred Owen, 159 Alighieri, Dante, 62–64, 67, 181n14 Almanac of the Dead (Silko), 104–38; Archive, 33, 34–35, 111–12; Aztlán, 112, 132–36; borders, 130–32, 134–35; capitalism, 124–25; characterization, 117– 19, 186n5, 188n20; codices, 105, 112,

114, 116–17, 128–29, 132, 188n20; colonialism, 34–35, 105, 137–38, 187n15; controversy, 104–5, 186n2; cover, 130, 131; divination, 108, 117, 128–29, 132, 135; encyclopedism, xi, 33, 111–12; globalization, 35, 137; industrialization, 35; layout, 128–29; maps, 130–32, 133; mestizaje, 123, 135–36; mixed media, 105, 127–30; overview, 32–37, 105; pan-Indianism, 105, 136–38, 186n4, 190n40; Popol Vuh, 111, 125, 126–27; purity of blood, 123–24; as quincentenary work, 110, 111, 112; as summa Americana, xi–xii, 10, 105, 140; violence and sacrifice, 112–13, 119, 122–23, 126–27; writing of, 104, 106, 108, 114 America/American terms, xi, 153, 179n38

217

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“Americae Nova Tabula” (map), 23, 25 American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), 145 American Dream, 74, 80–81, 88–89, 98–99, 182–83n6 American Geographical Society (AGS), 185n28 American Indian Movement (AIM), 136–37 American Literary History, x American Literature, x American Revolution. See revolutions American studies: vs. comparative literature, 149, 151, 192n11; languages, 156; methodology, 149; myths and symbols, 178n30; world literature trend, 145. See also hemispheric studies; inter-American literature American Studies Association (ASA), x, 153 androgyny, 66, 68, 181–82n17. See also hermaphroditism Anglophone bias: black legend, 3–4; comparative literature, 154–55; hemispheric studies, 6–7, 147–48, 154–55. See also United States primacy Anzaldúa, Gloria, 172 Apter, Emily, 155, 192n11 Archambault, Gilles, 76, 182–83n6 architecture, 46, 50–51, 89 Archive: AOTD, 33, 34–35, 111–12; colonial function, 14–15, 27–28, 53–54; El Escorial, 50–51; encyclopedism, xii, 14–15, 27–28; Fuentes’ on, 43–44, 188n19; MD, 10, 15–16, 32–33; paradox of, 51–53; Parkman, 184n19; preColumbian, 105, 138; in survey course, 157, 163; TN, 32–33, 34–35, 39–40, 43–44, 50–54; VB, 33, 34–35, 78–81, 84–85 Ariel (Rodó), 8, 180n10

Asociación Internacional de Estudios Interamericanos (IAS), x, 174 Attridge, Derek, 141 Atwood, Margaret, 185n24 Auerbach, Erich, 149, 151, 192n11 Aura (Fuentes), 60, 181n13 autosacrifice, 119, 126 Aztecs: AOTD, 112–13, 118–19, 129; migrations, 135; in Rivera, 29; sacrifice, 112, 119–20; TN, 42, 58–59; Todos los gatos son pardos (Fuentes), 42. See also codices; deities, Mesoamerican; Native Americans Aztlán, 112, 132–36, 189n21 Baca, Judy, 110 Bacon, Francis, 66, 181n15 baroque: architecture, 46; capitalism, 179–80n3; colonialism, 45, 80; encyclopedism, 45; Fuentes on, 45–47; Latin American Boom, 41; neo­ baroque, 47, 55, 59–68, 179–80nn2–3; nineteenth-century literature, 12, 176n13; TN, 40, 45, 47, 55, 59–69, 179n2 Bauer, Ralph, 159 Beam, Carl, 187n11 Beat Generation, 77, 85, 98 beauty, monstrous, 60–67 Benito Cereno (Melville), 12 Bergad, Laird, 164 bestiaries, 22, 56 Blaeu, Joan, 23, 25 Blake, William, 63 blood, purity of, 49–50, 123–24 blood money, 123, 124–25 blood sacrifice. See sacrifice blood sports, 125–26 Bolaño, Roberto, 32 Bolton, Herbert E., 143; concept of hemispheric studies, 2–7, 139–45;

index critiques, 4–7, 8, 175n1; influence, xi, 1–7, 8, 141–42; as teacher, 142–45 Bonampak temple, 120 “Books” (Silko), 115 Books of Chilam Balam, 135 “The Border Patrol State” (Silko), 134 borders: AOTD, 130–32, 134–35; Bolton, 3, 142; ecology, 134–35; in survey course, 164, 172, 173; VB, 74, 99–103 Borduas, Paul-Émile, 73 Borges, Jorge Luis, 32, 44, 172, 179n1, 181n14 Bosch, Hieronymus, 57 Boturini Codex, 132–33. See also codices Bouchard, Gérard, 103 boundaries. See borders Brickhouse, Anna, 164 Brotherston, Gordon, 137–38 Brown, William Hill, 164 Buell, Lawrence, 152–53 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, 26, 178n33 Cabrakan, 125 calendars, 112–13, 114, 118–20, 129 Caliban, 57, 180n10 Cambio de piel (Fuentes), 43, 60 Canada: Archive, 184n19; border, 99–100; lawlessness, 185n24; neglect in hemispheric studies, 72. See also Quebec; Volkswagen Blues (Poulin); voyageurs cannibalism, 119, 120, 122, 123, 188n22 capitalism: AOTD, 124–25; Fuentes on, 38–39, 40, 49, 55, 68, 124–25; and neobaroque, 179–80n3; Quebecois identity, 73; as sacrifice, 119, 122; shift to, 50 Cartier, Jacques, 78–80, 183n10 Casa con dos puertas (Fuentes), 180n8 Castaneda, Tomas, 110

219

caste and class: AOTD, 123, 125; celebration of mestizaje, 70; paintings, 124 Castillo, Susan, 159 Cather, Willa, 172 Celestina, 56, 61–67, 181n13 Ceremony (Silko), 127 Cervantes, Miguel de, 43, 44 Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura (Fuentes), 43–44, 180n6 Césaire, Aimé, 172, 180n10 Champlain, Samuel de, 94 characterization: AOTD, 117–19, 186n5, 188n20; TN, 59–67, 70 Chase, Owen, 16, 26, 178n33 Chevigny, Bell Gale, 7 Chicano movement, 109–10, 133, 135–36, 189n21 Chicano studies, 3 Chichén Itzá, 70, 120 civil rights, 136–37, 168 class. See caste and class close reading, 140, 141, 146, 154 Coatlicue, 57, 67 Codex Borgia, 115, 160 Codex Cospi, Mixteca-Puebla, 115 Codex Espangliensis, 172 Codex Magliabechiano, 188n22 codices: AOTD, 105, 112, 114, 116–17, 128– 29, 132, 188n20; Aztlán, 132–33; form and structure, 113, 114, 115; image, 115; sacrifices, 120, 121; in survey course, 160, 172 Cohn, Deborah N., 172 coin in Moby-Dick, 11–12, 176n9 Cold War, 27, 151, 168, 172 collage. See mixed media colonialism: anxiety over, 47–53; AOTD, 34–35, 105, 137–38, 187n15; Archive, 14–15, 27–28, 53–54; and baroque, 45, 80; Bolton, 2–4, 143–44; coins, 11–12; as common theme, xii, 12–13, 34–35;

220

index

colonialism (continued) encyclopedism, 27–28; hybridity of, 50; MD, 13, 21, 23–24; missionaries, 4, 45, 80; Oregon Trail, 93; purity of blood, 123–24; in Rivera, 29–30; sacrifice, 112, 119; in survey course, 158, 159–64; TN, 34–35, 39, 40, 47–53; VB, 34–35, 77, 78–83, 96–97, 100–101. See also conquest and conquistadors; discovery Columbus, Christopher, 15, 23–24, 53–54, 81 communism, 30, 35, 43 Comparative American Studies, x comparative literature: vs. American studies, 149, 151, 192n11; Bolton’s influence, xi, 1–7, 139–45; development, xi, xii–xiii, 9–10, 146–51; Eurocentrism, ix, 147, 151, 152, 192n11; methodology, 149; US primacy, xi, 1, 147–49, 151–53, 155–56; world literature focus, 145, 154–55. See also hemispheric studies Comparative Literature, 191n3 composite characterization, 59–67, 70 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), 186n8 Condé, Maryse, 32 conflict of paternity, 68, 181n16 conquest and conquistadors: MD, 13, 17–19, 23–24, 26, 177n17; prophecy, 189n29; in Rivera, 29–30; in survey course, 158, 159, 163; TN, 42, 44, 58; travel writing, 16; VB, 74, 100–101. See also colonialism; Cortés, Hernán Conrad, Joseph, 54 conservationism, 185n29. See also environmentalism Continental Divide, 102 conversions, 45, 49–50, 123 Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 133–34

Cortés, Hernán: Ahab as, 17–18; Archive, 15, 27–28, 53; Paz on, 68; in survey course, 163; in TN, 58; in Todos los gatos son pardos (Fuentes), 181n16 Counter-Reformation, 39, 47, 123–24 courses. See survey course covers, book, 130, 131, 187n10 creation myths, 120, 125–26 criminals, 93–94, 185n24 Criollos, 123 “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” (Wellek), xii Cristóbal Nonato (Fuentes), 187n11 Cuban Revolution, 41, 42, 180n10 Cuevas, José Luis, 181n15 Cultures of United States Imperialism (Kaplan and Pease), 149 Cumpleaños (Fuentes), 60 Damballah, 108 Damrosch, David, 154 Death of a Discipline (Spivak), 152 The Death of Artemio Cruz (Fuentes), 124–25 “Declaration of Quito,” 190n40 “Defensive Spanish Expansion and the Significance of the Borderlands” (Bolton), 3 Defoe, Daniel, 54 deities, Mesoamerican: AOTD, 108; in codices, 114; hybridity, 70; multi­ faceted, 59, 181n12; sacrifice, 119–20; TN, 56–57, 58–59, 67; twins, 125–26, 189n27 DeLillo, Don, 32 desire, allegory of, 65 destruction cycles, 112–13, 126 Detroit Industry (Rivera), 83 Díaz, Porfirio, 116 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 53 dictator novel, 47

index dictatorship, 47–48, 51, 164, 177n17 Dimock, Wai Chee, 152–53 discovery: Bolton on, 2–4; capitalism, 38; encyclopedism, 27–28; good and evil, 57–58; of Laguna Pueblo, 133– 34; MD, 16–19, 21, 23–24, 26, 177n17; Oregon Trail, 93; TN, 44, 53; VB, 74, 77, 78–79, 81–82, 84–85, 89, 93–97, 183n7; writing as, 183n7. See also colonialism distant reading, 154, 192n13 divination, 108, 114, 117, 128–29, 132, 135 Divine Comedy, 62–64, 63, 67, 181n14 domestication of wilderness, 185n28 Donoso, José, 40–41 Don Quijote (Cervantes), 43, 44 Dorris, Michael, 187n11 Do the Americas Have a Common History? (Hanke), 4 Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (Pérez Firmat), 9, 157–58 doubloon in Moby-Dick, 11–12, 176n9 Douglass, Frederick, 168 drawings. See visual forms and images Dresden Codex, 113. See also codices Durán Codex, 133. See also codices dystopia, New World as, 57–58 Early American Literature (Aldridge), 159 Early Americas Digital Archive, 157 Echeverría, Esteban, 164 “El Aleph” (Borges), 179n1 El Dorado, 81–82, 98–99 El Escorial, 50–51, 52 El espejo enterrado (Fuentes), 45–47 El laberinto de la soledad (Paz), 68 Ellis, Bret Easton, 172 El mundo de José Luis Cuevas (Fuentes), 181n15 The Encantadas (Melville), 12 encounter literature, xi, 53–54, 75, 159

221

encyclopedic novels: AOTD, xi, 33, 111– 12; characteristics, ix, xii, 13–14; as dialogue, 33–34; formal gigantism, 180n5; Latin American Boom, 32, 44–45; MD as, xi, 11, 13–14, 16, 24, 28, 32–33, 36; Memoria del fuego (Galeano), 189n31; modern, 32, 156, 172; nation-building, 14; scale, 33; as shared foundation, xi–xii; in survey course, 172; terms, 32, 279n36; TN as, xi, 33, 40, 44–45, 180n5; VB as, xi, 33, 75. See also encyclopedism encyclopedism: Archive, xii, 14–15, 27–29; and baroque, 45; muralism, 29–32; and New World, 27–37. See also encyclopedic novels Enlightenment in survey course, 159, 164, 167 environmentalism: AOTD, 105; Aztlán, 135; borders and boundaries, 134–35; ecological Indian, 188n20; Poulin, 185n29; in survey course, 168; VB, 101–2 The Epic of America (Adams), 1 “The Epic of Greater America” (Bolton), xi, 1–7, 139, 142 Equiano, Olaudah, 163 Erdrich, Louise, 187n11 Estoyehmuut and the Gunnadeyah (1980), 108, 127 Eurocentrism: avoiding, 8, 147, 164; in Bolton, 2; in comparative literature, ix, 147, 151, 152, 192n11 evil, 57–58, 112–13, 187n15 exploration. See discovery Expo 1967, 182n3 Faites de beaux rêves (Poulin), 86, 184n16 Faulkner, William, 59, 172, 181n12 Felski, Rita, 34, 140, 141 “Fences against Freedom” (Silko), 134

222

index

Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 180n10 film noir, 76, 182–83n6 films by Silko, 127 Fish, Albert, 123 Fitz, Earl E.: inter-American literature, 146, 147, 148, 191n6; Latin American Boom, 6; mixed identity, 70–71; PanAmericanism, 175n2; themes and movements, 192n16 Florentine Codex, 28, 112 Forum for Inter-American Research (FIAR), x Fox, Claire E., 151 Franco, Francisco, 47 Franzwa, Gregory M., 85, 91, 93 Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), 93, 184n20 frontier myth, 26 frontier thesis, 3 Fuentes, Carlos: Aura, 60, 181n13; on baroque, 45–47; biography, 41–42; Cambio de piel, 43, 60; on capitalism, 38–39, 40, 48, 55, 68; Casa con dos puertas, 180n8; Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura, 43–44, 180n6; Cristóbal Nonato, 187n11; Cumpleaños, 60; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 124–25; El espejo enterrado, 45–47; El mundo de José Luis Cuevas, 181n15; on Faulkner, 181n12; on García Márquez, 188n19; ICLA address, 147; La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 42, 46, 47; La región más transparente, 42; Los dias enmascarados, 42; political activity, 42; poststructuralism, 59; Todos los gatos son pardos, 39, 42, 181n16; Una familiale jana, 65; Zona sagrada, 60. See also Terra Nostra (Fuentes) fur trade, 95 Galeano, Eduardo, 128, 175n4, 189n31 García Márquez, Gabriel, 32, 116, 188n19

Gardens in the Dunes (Silko), 127 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 164 gender relations, 88, 149 geography: AOTD, 105, 130–36; in survey course, 159; VB, 100–102. See also maps ghosts, 24, 26, 117 gigantism, formal, 180n5 Gilroy, Paul, 164 globalization: America term, 179n38; AOTD, 35, 137; as common theme, 35; comparative literature, 153, 155, 156; Fuentes’ on, 38, 40, 49, 55, 68; Quebecois literature, 73; in survey course, 158, 159, 168–73; TN, 35, 38–40, 49, 55, 68, 71; VB, 35, 74, 103 Global South, 152 Godbout, Jacques, 76, 182–83n6 gold, 11–12, 81–82, 92, 98–99, 134, 177n16 Gonçalves, Ana Maria, 32 Góngora, Luis de, 53 Gonzalez, Ray, 111 González Echevarría, Roberto, 14–15, 67–68, 181–82n17 graffiti, 186n5 Great American Novel. See summa Americana Grolier Codex, 113–14, 120, 121. See also codices Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 164 Guzmán, Diego de, 116 Haiti, 164, 186n4 Handley, George B., 168 Hanke, Lewis, 4 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 176n8 Hayford, Harrison, 11 “Hegel y el modern panamericanismo” (O’Gorman), 4–6 Hemingway, Ernest, 85, 183n12 Hemispheric American Studies (Levander and Levine), ix, 148–50

index Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, ix–x hemispheric studies: aesthetics, 141; Anglophone bias, 6–7, 147–48, 154– 55; Canada in, 72; challenges, 156; current scholarship and events, ix–x; development, xii–xiii, 1–7, 9–10, 148– 51, 175nn2–3; digital initiatives, x, 157; influence of Bolton, 1–7, 139–45; Latino literature, 9; publications, x; syllabi, 145, 160–63, 165–67, 169–71. See also survey course Heredia, José María, 167 hermaphroditism, 61, 62–67 hieroglyphics, 20–21, 24, 125, 177n19 Highwater, Jamake, 187n12 Historia de México (Rivera), 29–32, 31 Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Sahagún), 28, 53–54 History of the Americas (Bolton), 145 History of the Conquest of Mexico (Prescott), 15, 17–18 History of the Conquest of Peru (Prescott), 15, 17–18 homosexuality, 122–23, 188n20 Hopkins, Frances Anne, 97 House Made of Dawn (Momaday), 104 Hudson River School, 176n14 Huggan, Graham, 155 Huitzilopochtli, 57, 119, 181n12 human sacrifice. See sacrifice Humboldt, Alexander von, 19–20 Hunahpu, 125–26 Hurtado, Albert L., 142 hybridity: colonialism, 50; as common theme, 70; monsters, 59–67, 63; murals, 109, 110; pre-Columbian cultures, 70; Quebecois identity, 73–74; Silko on, 135; Spain, 59, 70; in survey course, 163, 164; TN, 40, 59–67, 69–71; VB, 87–88, 102–3;

223

voyageurs, 95–96. See also mestizaje; métissage hysterical realism, 179n36. See also encyclopedic novels Icelandic sagas, 192n17 identity: AOTD, 123; celebratory, 69–70; Inferno, 64; lawlessness, 185n24; Quebecois, 73–74, 76, 96–98, 103, 182n3; TN, 59–67, 69–71; VB, 81, 87–88, 93–95, 99, 103; voyageurs, 95–96 Iglesia de San Lucas (Puebla, Mexico), 46 immigration and migration: AOTD, 135; Aztlán, 135, 189n21; Quebecois identity and literature, 73, 76; in survey course, 168; VB, 89, 98–99 imperialism: Caliban, 180n10; critique of Bolton, 5; in Latin America, 35; MD, 11, 16–19, 21, 23–24, 26, 27, 176n9, 178n29, 178n34; scholarship focus, 149, 153; TN, 39, 40, 54; VB, 100–101 Indians. See Native Americans; preColumbian cultures Indian Wars, 86 Indios, 123 individualism, rugged, 24–26, 88, 96, 185n24 industrialization: AOTD, 35; Fuentes’ on capitalism, 38; MD, 17, 19, 24, 180n8; in Rivera, 30–32; in survey course, 158, 164; TN, 35, 40; VB, 35 Inferno (Dante), 62–64, 63, 67, 181n14 inter-American literature, 146–48, 158, 191nn4–6. See also American studies; comparative literature; hemispheric studies International American Studies Association (IASA), x, 191n6 International Association for InterAmerican Studies (IAS), x, 174

224

index

International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), 146–47 intertextuality, 83–88, 158, 184n16 In the American Grain (Williams), 28–29 The Invention of America (O’Gorman), 6 “The Invention of America Again” (Lazo), 6–7 Irwin, John T., 177n19 Irwin, Robert McKee, 156 Jackson, Andrew, 90–91 James, Henry, 168 Jewish converts, 49–50, 123 Jimmy (Poulin), 86 Josephs, Allen, 181n14 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 163 Kadir, Djelal, 158, 191n6 Kant, Immanuel, 177n18 Kaplan, Amy, 149 Kerouac, Jack, 77, 85, 98, 183n12, 185n25 King, Thomas, 32 King Felipe II (Terra Nostra), 47–53 Kolodny, Annette, 192n17 Kutzinski, Vera M., 151, 168 Laguardia, Gari, 7 Laguna Film Project, 127 Laguna Pueblo, 107–8, 133–34 Laguna Woman (Silko), 127, 187n10 land: landscape in VB, 101–2; novels, 42, 76, 182n4; reclamation in AOTD, 132–36. See also borders; geography L’anglais n’est pas une langue magique (Poulin), 183n13, 184n16 language skills, 150–52, 155, 156, 191n6 La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Fuentes), 42, 46, 47 La première personne (Turgeon), 76, 182–83n6 “La raza cósmica” (Vasconcelos), 70

La región más transparente (Fuentes), 42 La Ruptura, 181n15 Latin America: Bolton on, 2–7; MD, 11–12; nineteenth-century interest, 12–13, 15, 176n11; US imperialism, 35 Latin American Boom, 6, 32, 40–41, 44–45, 168, 172, 181n12 Latino literature emphasis, 9–10 La traduction est une histoire d’amour (Poulin), 184n16 Lazo, Rodrigo J., 6–7, 27, 175n3 León-Portilla, Miguel, 180n6 Les grandes marées (Poulin), 75–76 Le theatre du monde (Blaeu), 23, 25 Levander, Caroline F., ix, 148–50 Levine, Robert S., ix, 148–50 Le voyageur distraite (Archambault), 76, 182–83n6 Lewis and Clark, 183n13 L’homme de la Saskatchewan (Poulin), 184n16 libraries, 83, 84, 115 Library of Latin America, 157 Lincoln, Kenneth, 185–86n1 The Literatures of Colonial America (Castillo and Schweitzer), 159 littérature engagée, 42 Lizardi, José Joaquín Fernández de, 164 Lord of the Smoking Mirror, 181n12 Los dias enmascarados (Fuentes), 42 Lost Generation, 85 Louisiana Purchase, 90, 164 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 164 “Ma ah shra tru ee,” 107–8, 132 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 168 Madrid Codex, 113, 120. See also codices La Malinche, 68, 181n16 manifest destiny, 18, 28–29, 55, 89–93, 185n28 maps: AOTD, 130–32, 133; Bolton’s teaching, 143–44; MD, 22–23;

index monsters on, 22–23, 25, 56; quarta orbis pars term, 24; VB, 100–101. See also geography Mardi (Melville), 12 Marks, J. See Highwater, Jamake Marmon, Leland Howard, 127 Marquette, Jacques, 20 Martí, José, 167–68 Matthiessen, F. O., 12, 185–86n1 maximalist novels, 179n36. See also encyclopedic novels Mayahuel, 56 Mayans: almanac form, 113, 129; creation myth, 120, 125–26; sacrifice, 120, 188n23. See also codices; deities, Mesoamerican; Popol Vuh McClennen, Sophia, 153 MEChA, 133 Mecham, Evan, 107, 186n5 mega-novels, 179n36. See also encyclopedic novels Melville, Herman: Benito Cereno, 12; books owned, 12, 176n11, 178n27; The Encantadas, 12; Latin America, 12, 176n11; Mardi, 12; revival, 11, 177n15; in survey course, 164. See also MobyDick (Melville) Memoria del fuego (Galeano), 128, 175n4, 189n31 Mendelson, Edward, 13–14 Merk, Frederick, 91 Mesoamerican codices. See codices mestizaje: AOTD, 123, 135–36; Aztlán, 135–36; baroque, 45; Bolton, 5; celebration, 69–70; Highwater on, 187n12; purity of blood, 123–24; in survey course, 164; TN, 40, 49, 50, 59–60, 69–71; voyageurs, 95. See also hybridity; métissage Metamorphoses (Ovid), 62 metamorphosis in Terra Nostra, 61, 64

225

métissage, 73, 82, 87–88, 95, 98. See also hybridity Mexico: map, 130–32, 133; muralism, 29–32, 70, 109; political activity, 42–43 Mictlantecuhtli, 120, 121 migration. See immigration and migration Mimesis (Auerbach), 149, 151 Minor, Wendell, 130, 131 missionaries, 4, 45, 80, 134 Mississippi River, 101–2 mixed media: AOTD, 105, 127–30; Beam, 187n11; Popol Vuh, 189n30; Sacred Water (Silko), 129–30; VB, 85–86 Moby-Dick (Melville), 10–27; Archive, 10, 15–16, 32–33; conquest and colonialism, 13, 17–19, 21, 23–24, 26, 177n17; correspondence, 21, 176n8; critical debate, 11, 26–27, 178n34; doubloon, 11–12, 176n9; encyclopedism, xi, 11, 13–14, 16, 24, 28, 32–33, 36; exploration and expansion, 16–19, 21, 23–24, 26, 177nn16–17; imperialism, 11, 16–19, 21, 23–24, 26, 27, 176n9, 178n29, 178n34; industrialization, 17, 19, 24, 180n8; influences, 15–16, 19–20, 21, 22–23, 26, 178n33; overview, 10–11; rugged individualism, 24–26; as summa Americana, xi–xii, 10, 13, 140; in TN, 40, 54–56, 180n8 “Mocha Dick” (Reynolds), 21 modern epics, 179n36. See also encyclopedic novels modernism: Latin American Boom, 41; in survey course, 164, 168, 172 modernity: Fuentes, 38, 42, 44, 55; of New World, 6; in Rivera, 30; shift to, 50; in survey course, 164, 168, 172; TN, 55 modes of engagement, 157–58

226

index

Momaday, N. Scott, 104 Mon cheval pour un royaume (Poulin), 74 Monegal, Rodríguez, 41 Monroe Doctrine, 18, 90 monsters: Cuevas, 181n15; hybridity, 59–67, 63; on maps, 22–23, 25, 56; MD, 21–22, 24; TN, 40, 54, 56, 59–67 Moretti, Franco, 154, 173, 192n13 Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 133 multimedia. See mixed media Mundo Nuevo, 41 murals: celebration of mestizaje, 70; Chicano movement, 109–10; encyclopedism, 29–32; by Silko, 105, 106– 8, 107, 109–10, 186n6, 190n39; sponsorship, 109, 110, 186n8; VB, 83 museums, 83, 89 Muslim converts, 49–50, 123 Muthyala, John, 179n38 myths: American studies, 178n30; AOTD, 112, 114, 116–17; Aztlán, 132– 36; creation myths, 120, 125–26; frontier myth, 26; of landscape, 102; TN, 56–57, 58–59, 67; twins, 125–26, 189n27 Nahua, 58, 188–89n26 names in Almanac of the Dead, 117–18 Narváez expedition, 26, 178n33 nationalism: borders, 99–100; Chicano, 189n21; comparative literature, 148; MD, 12; Quebec, 73, 74, 98, 182n3; in survey course, 159, 164, 167–68; US expansion, 90–93 nation-building: encyclopedism, 14; manifest destiny, 18, 28–29, 55, 89–93, 185n28; MD, 24, 26; in survey course, 158, 159, 164; VB, 88–93 Native American Renaissance, 104, 105, 172, 185–86n1, 186n3

Native Americans: arrival in North America, 99, 185n27; ecological Indian, 188n20; gender relations, 88; literature, 104, 105, 128, 172, 185– 86n1, 186n3; MD, 16, 17, 178n34; in murals, 109; purity of blood, 123; in survey course, 164; TN, 53, 58, 180n6; twins, 189n27; VB, 86, 96, 101, 184n15; violence, 112–13; and voyageurs, 95–96. See also Almanac of the Dead (Silko); métissage; panIndianism; Silko, Leslie Marmon Nayenezgani, 189n27 “Near Perigord” (Pound), 62, 181n14 Nebrija, Antonio de, 54 Negros, 123 neobaroque, 47, 55, 59–68, 179–80nn2–3 neomestizaje, 40, 59, 69–71 Neruda, Pablo, 172 new historical novels, 179n36. See also encyclopedic novels New World: anxiety in TN, 47–53; arrival of Native Americans, 99, 185n27; effect on medieval cosmology, 50; encyclopedism, 27–37; as evil, 57–58, 112; as general theme, 12–13, 176n6; in MD, 10, 23–24; sublime, 13, 19, 82, 101–2, 176n14; as utopia, 57–58, 80–81, 183nn10–11 New York University, ix–x novels, land, 42, 76, 182n4 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 4–6, 7, 8 Old World: as corrupt, 13; separating from, 10, 176n6 Olmec blood sacrifice, 119 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez), 116, 188n19 Onís, José de, 178n34 oral traditions, 58, 86, 105, 106, 184n15 Oregon Trail, 85, 91–93, 94 O’Sullivan, John L., 90–91

index otherness: fear of losing self, 60; of New World, 49; in survey course, 163 Our Americas Archive, x, 157 Ouroboros, 66 Ovid, 62 painted books. See codices paintings. See visual forms and images Palögawhoya, 189n27 Pan-Americanism, 175n2 pan-Indianism: AOTD, 105, 136–38, 186n4, 190n40; codices, 113; organizations, 190n40; quincentenary works, 110–11, 187n12 Paris Codex, 113. See also codices Parker, Hershel, 11 Parkman, Francis, 92, 184n19 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 42–43 paternity, conflict of, 68, 181n16 Paz, Octavio, 68, 115, 175n1 Pease, Donald E., 149 Peninsulares, 123 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 9, 157–58 periodization, 158–59 perspectivalism, 180n8 petroglyphs, 20–21, 109 Pitsémine (Volkswagen Blues): in L’homme de la Saskatchewan (Poulin), 184n16; métissage, 73, 82, 87–88, 95, 98; storytelling, 86 Pizarro, Francisco, 17–18 Plato, 65, 181–82n17 Poe, Edgar Allan, 54, 172 “Poetics and Politics” (Silko), 189n21 political activity: American Indian Movement, 136–37; Mexico, 42–43; Quebec, 73, 93, 184n20; Silko, 106, 134, 186n5, 190n39 Popol Vuh, 111, 125–27, 163, 188–89n26, 189n28, 189n30 Pöqánghoya, 189n27

227

postmodernism, 32, 41, 73, 168, 172 postnationalist studies. See hemispheric studies poststructuralism, 41, 59 Poulin, Jacques: author figures, 77, 183n7; awards, 185n30; career, 74; environmentalism, 185n29; Faites de beaux rêves, 86, 184n16; intertextuality, 83–88, 184n16; Jimmy, 86; L’anglais n’est pas une langue magique, 183n13, 184n16; La traduction est une histoire d’amour, 184n16; Les grandes marées, 75–76; L’homme de la Saskatchewan, 184n16; Mon cheval pour un royaume, 74; sources and influences, 74; Un jukebox dans la tête, 184n16. See also Volkswagen Blues (Poulin) Pound, Ezra, 62, 181n14 pre-Columbian cultures: AOTD, 105; archive, 105, 138; borders, 101; hybridity, 70; in MD, 13, 19; petroglyphs, 20; in Rivera, 29; sacrifice, 112, 119–20, 188nn22–23; in survey course, 159, 163 Prescott, William H., 15, 17–18 prodigious fictions, 279n36. See also encyclopedic novels prophecy. See divination Pueblo people, 107–8, 109, 133–34, 135 purity of blood, 49–50, 123–24 Pynchon, Thomas, 32, 172 Quebec: bus as, 84–85; colonialism, 78–81; identity, 73–74, 76, 96–98, 103, 182n3; postnationalism, 74; Quiet Revolution, 73, 182n2; sovereignty, 72–73, 93, 184n20 Quebec Liberation Front, 93, 184n20 Quebecois literature: intertextuality, 86–87; postmodernism, 73; road novels, 76, 182–83n6; separatism, 72–73;

228

index

Quebecois literature (continued) voyageurs as theme, 94, 95–96. See also Volkswagen Blues (Poulin) Quetzalcóatl: AOTD, 108, 112; as multifaceted, 59, 181n12; in Rivera, 29–30; as snake, 67, 108; TN, 58–59, 67 Quiché Maya. See Mayans; Popol Vuh The Quiet Revolution, 73, 182n2 quincentenary works, 45, 110–12, 187n11 race: MD, 16; scholarly emphasis, 149; in survey course, 159, 164, 168 Radway, Janice A., 153 Rasmussen, Birgit Brander, 177n19, 178n29 Read, Justin, 168 reading: close, 140, 141, 146, 154; distant, 154, 192n13; as novel experience, 141 Reconquista, 49–50 records. See Archive Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, 157 Reinventing the Americas (Chevigny and Laguardia), 7 Review of International American Studies (RIAS), x Revista Mexicana de Literatura, 41–42 revolutions: chain of, 2–3; Cuba, 41, 42, 180n10; in survey course, 158, 159, 164 Reynolds, J. N., 21 Rivera, Diego, 29–32, 31, 83, 109 road novels, 75, 76, 97–99, 182–83n6 rock carvings, 105, 109, 120, 127 Rodó, José Enrique, 8, 180n10 roman de la terre, 76, 182n4 Rowlandson, Mary, 163 rugged individualism, 24–26, 88, 96, 185n24 Running on the Edge of the Rainbow (1982), 127 Sacred Water (Silko), 129–30, 187n10

sacrifice, 112, 119–20, 122, 126–27, 188nn22–23 Sadowski-Smith, Claudia, 151 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 28, 53–54 Said, Edward, 192n11 Schweitzer, Ivy, 159 Seguenay, 183n10 Seven Macaw, 125 sexuality: AOTD, 122–23, 188n20; TN, 55, 56–57, 61, 65–67, 181n14; Todos los gatos son pardos (Fuentes), 181n16; VB, 102 Shades of the Planet (Dimock and Buell), 152–53 Shakespeare, William, 54, 180n10 shipwrecks, 16, 26, 178n33, 180n10 Shooting the Rapids (Hopkins), 97 Silko, Leslie Marmon: awards, 104; blurb, 111; on codices, 114; essays, 115, 134, 189n21; films, 108, 127; Gardens in the Dunes, 127; graffiti, 186n5; Laguna Woman, 127, 187n10; mixed media use, 105, 127–30; murals, 105, 106–8, 107, 109–10, 186n6, 190n39; political activity, 106, 134, 186n5, 190n39; Sacred Water, 129–30, 187n10; Storyteller, 127; in survey course, 172; The Turquoise Ledge, 127; Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, 113, 115, 119, 127. See also Almanac of the Dead (Silko) The Singularity of Literature (Attridge), 141 slavery, 159, 163–64, 168 Smith, Henry Nash, 178n30 snakes: AOTD, 108–9, 128–29, 132; Damballah, 108; Inferno (Dante), 67; “Ma ah shra tru ee,” 107–8, 132; MD, 22; Ouroboros, 66; Silko’s use, 106, 108–9, 128–29, 132, 187n10; TN, 66–67 Socken, Paul, 183n11, 184n16

index Soledades (Góngora), 53 The Song of the Lark (Cather), 172 The Spanish Borderlands (Bolton), 3 Spitzer, Leo, 192n11 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 152 Stephens, John L., 20 “Stone Avenue Mural” (Silko), 106–8, 107, 109–10, 186n6, 190n39 stone carvings, 105, 109, 120, 127 Storyteller (Silko), 127 storytelling, 58, 86, 105, 106, 184n15 Strachey, William, 26, 178n33, 180n10 structuralism, 41, 59, 192n13 sublime: defined, 177n18; Hudson River School, 176n14; MD, 19, 26; New World as, 13, 19, 82, 101–2, 176n14; in survey course, 164, 168; VB, 82, 101–2 summa Americana: concept, xi–xii, 10, 13, 105, 140; Poulin on, 75–76; teaching implications, 139–41 survey course, 156–73; engagement modes, 157–58, 192n16; first, 159–64; materials, 157, 158–59, 163, 168, 172; overview, 37, 156–59; second, 164–68; students, 157; syllabi, 160–63, 165–67, 169–71; third, 168–73 syllabi: Bolton, 145; IAS, 174; survey course, 160–63, 165–67, 169–71 syncretism and baroque, 45 systems novels, 179n36. See also encyclopedic novels teaching. See survey course The Tempest (Shakespeare), 54, 180n10 Terra Nostra (Fuentes), 38–71; anxiety over New World, 47–53; Archive in, 32–33, 34–35, 39–40, 43–44, 50–54; baroque, 40, 45, 47, 55, 59–69, 179n2; characterization, 59–67, 70; colonialism, 34–35, 39, 40, 47–53; conquest, 42, 44, 58; deities, 56–57, 58–59, 67; dictators, 47–48, 51; discovery, 44, 53;

229

encyclopedism, xi, 33, 40, 44–45, 180n5; globalization, 35, 38–40, 49, 55, 68, 71; hybridity, 40, 59–67, 69–71; identity, 59–67, 69–71; industrialization, 35, 40; MD in, 40, 54–56, 180n8; mestizaje, 40, 49, 50, 59–60, 69–71; monsters, 40, 54, 56, 59–67; Native Americans, 53, 58, 180n6; overview, 32–37, 38–40; sexuality, 55, 56–57, 61, 65–67, 181n14; sources and influences, 39–40, 44, 53–55, 62–65, 179n1, 180n6, 181nn14–15; as summa Americana, xi–xii, 10, 140; utopia, 67–69, 182n18; violence, 39, 66 Tezcatlipoca, 58–59, 181n12 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 23, 25 time: AOTD, 112–13, 118–19; multifaceted deities, 59; Popol Vuh, 126; sacrifice, 119–20; VB, 76 timelines, 158–59 Tlatelolco massacre, 42 Tlazolteotl, 56 Tobadzistsini, 189n27 Todos los gatos son pardos (Fuentes), 39, 42, 181n16 Toltec blood sacrifice, 119 Toomer, Jean, 172 total novels, 279n36. See also encyclopedic novels translations, limitations of, 155 translation studies, 154 transnational studies. See hemispheric studies travel writing, 15–16, 19–20, 23, 76, 85, 182–83n6 “The Trouble with World Literature” (Huggan), 155 Turgeon, Pierre, 76, 182–83n6 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 3 The Turquoise Ledge (Silko), 127 twins, 65, 124, 125–26, 189n27 typography in Almanac of the Dead, 128

230

index

Umphrey, George W., 191n5 Una familiale jana (Fuentes), 65 Une histoire américaine (Godbout), 76, 182–83n6 United Nations indigenous policy, 190n40 United States: foreign policy, 5, 35, 43; lawlessness, 185n24. See also imperialism; United States primacy United States primacy: avoiding in survey course, 158, 159, 164; Bolton on, 2–7; in comparative literature, xi, 1, 147–49, 151–53, 155–56; globalization, 153; in hemispheric studies, 6–7; Latino authors, 9–10. See also Anglophone bias University of California, 142–45 Un jukebox dans la tête (Poulin), 184n16 Usigli, Rodolfo, 175n1 utopia: Aztlán, 132–33; Columbus, 81; contradictions of, 67–68; New World as, 57–58, 80–81, 183nn10–11; in TN, 67–69, 182n18; union, 67–69, 181– 82n17; in VB, 81–82 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 32 Vasconcelos, José, 70 Velázquez, Diego, 180n8 violence: AOTD, 112–13, 122–23; TN, 39, 66; VB, 82. See also sacrifice Virgin, New World, 45 Visión de los vencidos (León-Portilla), 180n6 visual forms and images: AOTD, 105, 127–28, 129–30, 131; casta paintings, 124; codices, 113; Cuevas, 181n15; encyclopedism, 28, 33; Hudson River School, 176n14; Oregon Trail, 92, 94; Poulin on Lewis and Clark, 183n13; Quebecois, 73; VB, 85–86. See also murals visual literacy, 86, 129

Vizenor, Gerald, 187n11 Voigt, Lisa, 159 Volkswagen Blues (Poulin), 74–103; American Dream, 74, 80–81, 88–89, 98–99; Archive, 33, 34–35, 78–81, 84–85; awards, 185n30; borders, 74, 99–103; colonialism, 34–35, 77, 78–83, 96–97, 100–101; conquest, 74, 100– 101; discovery, 74, 77, 78–79, 81–82, 84–85, 89, 93–97, 183n7; encyclopedism, xi, 33, 75; globalization, 35, 74, 103; hybridity, 87–88, 102–3; identity, 81, 87–88, 93–95, 99, 103; industrialization, 35; intertextuality, 83–88, 184n16; métissage, 73, 82, 87–88, 95, 98; nation-building, 88–93; Native Americans in, 86, 96, 101, 184n15; overview, 32–37, 74, 76–77; as road novel, 75, 76, 97–99; sources and influences, 77, 85, 98, 183n12; as summa Americana, xi–xii, 10, 140; title, 77–78; voyageurs, 94–95 voyageurs, 89, 94–96, 97, 184n21 Wallace, David Foster, 32 Ward, Graeme K., 137 Watson, Stephen, 130 Welch, James, 104 Wellek, René, ix, xii Weltliteratur, 154 Westerns, 77 whales and whaling: MD, 16–17, 19, 20–24, 26, 178n34; TN, 54–55, 66 What is World Literature? (Damrosch), 154 wilderness, domesticating, 185n28 Williams, William Carlos, 28–29 Without Discovery (Gonzalez), 110–11 Words in the Blood (Highwater), 187n12 world literature trend, 145, 154–55 Xbalanque, 125–26

index Xibalba, 125 Xipe Totec, 181n12 Xochiquetzal, 56 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 172 Yaqui, 116, 135 Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (Silko), 113, 115, 119, 127

231

Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 69, 168, 181n14 Zapata Olivella, Manuel, 32 Zapatista movement, 190n39 Zipacna, 125 Zona sagrada (Fuentes), 60

colonial values in their narratives. His close attention to written documents, visual representations, and oral traditions in these encyclopedic novels sheds light on their comparative cultural relations and the New World from pole to pole. This study amplifies the scope of “America” across cultures and languages, time and tradition.

Antonio Barrenechea holds a PhD in comparative literature from Yale and is an associate professor in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication at the University of Mary Washington. His research focuses on the literatures and cultures of the Americas. He lives in Washington, DC.

Literary Criticism

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America Unbound is a fresh contribution to literary studies in a hemis­pheric American frame. A passionate and effective plea to recover the truly comparative spirit of hemispheric studies at its founding moment in the ’80s and ’90s, America Unbound practices what it preaches in nuanced comparative readings of New World encyclopedic fiction by North American authors from three nations and fiction in three languages.” —Monika Kaup, author of Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film

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In America Unbound Antonio Barrenechea offers an insightful, rich, and nuanced interpretation of three modern ‘encyclopedic’ novels written originally in Spanish, French, and English in a hemispheric American context. This book will be a milestone in a growing body of comparative inter-American and hemispheric American scholarship.” —Ralph Bauer, author of The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity

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America Unbound makes a strong case for a comparativist approach to hemispheric American literary studies. Through insightful chapters framed around four important novels, this study’s generous attention to interpretative, methodological, and pedagogical issues makes it a valuable resource for scholars from a range of disciplines who are teaching or conducting research on inter-American topics.”

isbn 978-0-8263-5758-8 90000

University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com | 800-249-7737

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Barrenechea

—Claire F. Fox, author of Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War

America Unbound

continued from front flap

Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies

America Unbound Antonio Barrenechea

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his original contribution to hemispheric American literary studies comprises readings of three important novels from Mexico, Canada, and the United States: Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Quebecois writer Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. The author argues for the importance of a hemispheric perspective and engages these encyclopedic novels as a means of examining the interconnectedness of the Americas. Beginning with a new reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Barrenechea examines the ways in which Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko incorporate early American print and visual archives, as well as oral traditions, into their own hemispheric fields of vision. Their novels imagine American history prior to the development of nationstates and thus dislodge assumptions about the uniqueness of nations and cultures in favor of a transcultural, decentralized “New World.” Fuentes’s Terra Nostra is an encyclopedic vision of Hispanic America, Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues includes all Franco-Americans, and Silko’s Almanac of the Dead resuscitates a telluric map of indigenous American communities. The historicism of these works is impelled by their authors’ conviction that American histories and cultures exist in complex and fluid relation to a hemispheric whole. The encyclopedic novel has particular generic characteristics that serve these writers as a vehicle for the reincorporation of hemispheric histories. Barrenechea shows how this narrative genre allows them to reflect the interconnected world of today, as well as to dramatize indigenous and continued on back flap