Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture ed.

by
Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, and Inés Ordiz (review)

Juan Pablo Dabove

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Tomo 53, Número 2, Junio 2019, pp. 786-788
(Review)

Published by Washington University in St. Louis

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2019.0046

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/735063

Access provided at 25 Oct 2019 12:53 GMT from ProQuest Information & Learning
786 Sección Bibliográfica

junto con las rupturas causadas por el adulterio literario resultan en lo que Bouzaglo
titula como una “adulteración catastrófica para la ciudad letrada” donde la clasifica-
ción de la mujer fundamentalmente se desestabiliza (199). El libro asombroso de
Bouzaglo señala las muchas posibilidades constructivas en abrir estas representacio-
nes difamadas del adulterio para entender de forma renovadora las complejidades
nacionalistas del fin de siglo.

Andrew R. Reynolds West Texas A&M University

Casanova-Vizcaíno, Sandra, and Inés Ordiz, editors. Latin American Gothic in

Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2017. 269 pp.

This timely volume attests to the undeniable ascendancy of the Gothic

as an object of inquiry within Latin American Studies. This ascendancy is itself an
echo of the increasing prestige and dominance of the Gothic in Latin America and
the larger global cultural arena. Consider a telling example: two of the most vis-
ible—and talented—Latin American writers today, the Argentines Samanta Schwe-
blin and Mariana Enriquez, jumped to global fame on the strengths of two Gothic
books, the nouvelle Fever Dream (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and the
short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire (translated, so far, into more than
twenty languages).
In Latin America, as the editors of this volume correctly point out, the
label gótico coexists with others: horror, terror, fantástico (closer to the French fantas-
tique than to the English fantasy). This plurality poses in itself an interesting ques-
tion, that speaks to the traditionally dubious prestige of the Gothic, and to how lit-
erature, as an institution in Latin America, was conceived until quite recently. This
erasure poses a number of tasks for scholars: 1) to explain why the Gothic has not,
until recently, assumed its own name as such and why it does now; 2) to reconstruct
a lineage of the Gothic in Latin America; 3) to define Gothic’s preoccupations, top-
ics, and formal traits; and 4) to assess its specificity, both at the regional level (for
example, what does the Gothic have in common throughout Latin America, and
what differentiates it from metropolitan instances of the Gothic, or the more deter-
ritorialized global Gothic?) and within particular areas or nations (e.g. how is the
Argentine Gothic different from, let’s say, Mexican or Caribbean Gothic?). These
are not easy tasks: the object of inquiry is conceptually—and perhaps inherently—
ill-defined. Is the Gothic a genre defined by specific topics, themes, and narrative
twists, is it a mode, or is it just a constellation of tropes—such as the past that re-
turns, pollution, the creature in-between, and so forth—that inflects multiple dis-
cursive practices, both fictional and non-fictional? Since the object is arduous to
define, the corpus to be studied is therefore not easily isolated. Furthermore, the
problems that could define the Gothic in the Latin American context are only now
becoming visible.
Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture is one of the first books,
and probably the most comprehensive so far, to tackle these challenges. The seven-
teen contributors in this volume are particularly adept to the tasks at hand: this is
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not a hastily assembled group of academics, who jumped on the bandwagon of a

fashionable topic. For the most part, the contributors are scholars who have been
working and publishing on different aspects of the topic for years, and who have
been interacting with each other at conferences and publications. They, therefore,
bring a collective depth of knowledge to the volume in their respective geographi-
cal areas or topics. This, and the carefully balanced regional/national distribution of
the chapters, gives Latin American Gothic a coherence that is rare in these types of
enterprises, and for this, the editors should be congratulated.
After the well-thought-out introduction, in which the editors establish the
theoretical parameters of the volume, there are a few well-defined preoccupations
that permeate the book’s chapters. Several engage deliberately in the partial or com-
prehensive reconstruction of Gothic lineages, mostly (but not exclusively) at the na-
tional level, such as Inés Ordiz and Soledad Quereillac’s consideration of Argentina,
Olga Ries’s of Chile, Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez’s of Colombia, and Rosa María Díez
Cobo’s of Peru. Of course, to a certain degree, most of the articles engage in such a
task, even when focusing on specific authors or works. Some examples are Antonio
Alcalá Rodríguez’s work on Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Adriana Gordillo’s study of
Carlos Fuentes’s Aura, Sergio Fernández Martínez’s consideration of Edmundo Paz
Soldán’s Los vivos y los Muertos and Carmen Serrano’s chapter on Froylán Turcios’s
El vampiro, not to mention Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, whose analysis of Óscar Urrutia
Lazo’s Rito terminal taps into his vast knowledge of Mexican film and TV. In other
cases, the authors explore the previously unknown (or underappreciated) connec-
tions of a work or an author to the Gothic tradition: one excellent example is San-
dra Guardini Vasconcelos’s work on Machado de Assis.
In addition to dealing with a particular region, author, genre or time-span,
most authors anchor their contributions to a specific critical, theoretical or political
problem they want to explore. For example, Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno explores the
anti-imperialist uses of the Gothic in the context of the US occupation of Puerto
Rico. This approach is close to that of both Persephone Braham, who studies the
notion of Caribbean grotesque in the context of centuries’ old colonialism, and to
that of Kerstin Oloff, who explores the capitalistic commodification of nature and
the creation of the monstrous feminine in specific instances of Haitian literature.
Daniel Serravalle do Sá, for his part, explores the notion of “cultural cannibalism”
in Brazilian cinema, a notion crucial to understanding the relationship between
national and global Gothic. Inés Ordiz, on the other hand, explores the rearticu-
lation of some of the nineteenth-century national guiding metaphors in contem-
porary Argentine narrative, while Sergio Fernández Martínez explores the relevance
of the concept of post-Gothic in defining certain features of contemporary cultural
dynamics. Finally, Ilse Bussing presents the case of how the trope of the house-as-
prison informs both fiction and public discourses on security and the urban space
in Costa Rica.
As I mentioned before, one of the several virtues of this book (as a col-
lective project, different from the strengths of individual chapters) is its truly Latin
American scope, by virtue of its emphasis on Caribbean and Central American lit-
erature (Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica). Another is its consideration of the very
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significant, although usually neglected vein of Gothic humor, parody, and grotesque
(Braham, Serravalle do Sá, Casanova Vizcaíno, Ordiz), as well as the attention that
is drawn to works that were almost completely neglected in the Latin American
canon (for example, the aforementioned chapter by Serrano on Froylán Turcio’s
modernist novel El vampiro).
This collection is, at the same time, a great distillation of the state of the
art, and a seminal work that will inform projects and discussion for years. In that
spirit, I would like to mention two possible lines of discussion that were elicited
by my reading the volume, but perhaps not fully developed there. The first line of
discussion is that no work of this kind can be, by any means, exhaustive (for intel-
lectual as well as editorial reasons). One would wonder, however, why the volume is
mostly devoted to literature and film, when the title announces the Gothic in cul-
ture? If the Gothic is considered a mode (as the authors do), it is by definition mul-
timedial, and is certainly not confined to just one or two mediums, unless there is a
specific set of problems that are exclusive to the literary or cinematic Gothic (which
may very well be the case). If this remains undiscussed, examining the Gothic main-
ly as a literary and filmic phenomenon may seem to be an attempt to restore the
traditional prestige reserved for the major genres (which is, most likely, not what
the editors intended), thus transforming it into a well-behaved reflection on the big
issues (e.g. nationhood, imperialism, race, capitalism, and so forth). The Gothic is
serious stuff, and it speaks to the big issues, but it does so precisely because it refuses
to abide by the pieties of the hour (i.e. political correctness, cultural prestige, serious
tone). In any case, the dialogue that this volume brings forth would benefit from a
more determined counterpoint between the Gothic in literature and film and the
Gothic in, for example, comics, graphic novels, music, and radio. As an example,
the multimedial phenomenon of El siniestro Dr. Mortis in Chile, or Alberto Breccia’s
hugely influential adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories come to mind.
The second line of discussion is that perhaps it would be important to re-
member why we read or watch Gothic stories. It is not because of its ideological
content but rather because of its affective appeal: terror, horror, and the uncanny.
And why do we seek those emotions, why do we find them entertaining? Gothic is
political, indeed, and the authors of this volume show that very well. But it is also,
and above all, fun and addictive, and unsavory and offensive, and it has no fear of
bad taste or transgression. And perhaps, this, above all else, is another reason why
the Gothic is political: not only because of what it has to say about the nation or
capitalism or gender (and it has plenty to say about these topics), but because it
has no fear of tapping into the darker, unrecognized recesses of our own identities,
those from which we try to escape, but to which we are inevitably (and gleefully, it
seems) drawn.

Juan Pablo Dabove University of Colorado Boulder

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Further reproduction prohibited without permission.