Writing Across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America by Rama Ángel; Frye David

Author:Rama, Ángel; Frye, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press

CHAPTER FOUR

The Saga of the Mestizo

José María Arguedas, Peruvian novelist, has overshadowed José María Arguedas, Peruvian ethnologist, almost to the point of making him disappear. Indeed, it will surprise many fans of his fiction to see his name on the cover of a collection of essays in cultural anthropology about the formation of a truly mestizo and original culture for all Peru.1

This is not because there was a huge gulf between his two activities, as is typical for Latin American intellectuals: on one side, a literary vocation, free, unremunerative, and sporadic; on the other, a profession that fulfills the social demand for paid work—what Mallarmé referred to when he complained, “What jobs our society inflicts on its Poets!”2 Rather, both activities developed as if on parallel paths, mutually complementary and interconnected, arising from a single creative impulse that adapted to the two disparate forms without losing their common root. Arguedas did not compartmentalize his fields of expertise; instead, he built a holistically meaningful corpus of intellectual work. Its meaning emerged from many channels, at least three of which we can distinguish: we may speak of José María Arguedas as writer, as folklorist, and as ethnologist. Facts from any one of these three identities alone, even that of fiction writer, would not suffice to understand the author's full intellectual adventure.

He dedicated his entire adult existence—from the 1930s, when as a youth of twenty he studied at the Universidad de San Marcos, to his death in 1969, when he had already served as professor and chair of Ethnology at the same university and had joined the faculty of the Universidad Agraria La Molina as head of its Department of Sociology—to literature, folklore, and anthropological research, all at one and the same time. For him, these three disciplines were interconnected, and through them he expressed a single will and a single intellectual project whose roots were necessarily political and social.

The unity of José María Arguedas's life derived from his early selection of one area of reality to study and one philosophy for interpreting it. The area of reality that he chose can be defined as follows: the situation of indigenous culture, heir to the culture of the Incas, in the heart of contemporary Peruvian society, and the indispensable means by which it should contribute to the formation of a vigorous, free, and modern national culture, alongside all of Peru's other cultural roots. This choice necessarily led the young intellectual to join the indigenista movement, which his elders had already founded, though it would later be up to him to rework it in accordance with the changes that were taking place in the country's social and cultural structure. As for his philosophy, it was a legacy of Mariátegui's thought. Arguedas took up its rebellious spirit, a spirit of protest and social activism, which should not be confused with his forerunner's Marxist philosophy, but he nevertheless confidently adopted much of Mariátegui's socioeconomic analysis of Peruvian reality, together with his ideological presuppositions. Above all, Arguedas adopted

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