The Chicano Translation of Troy: Epic Topoi in the Novels of Rudolfo A. Anaya

Abstract

fourth world, in the myths of North and Meso-America, set loose tribes in migratory waves, destined someday to rediscover one another and their ancestral home. Each of Rudolfo A. Anaya's novels in his trilogy, Bless Me, Ultima, Heart of Aztlan and Tortuga,2 mirrors this general pattern of displacement and migration, and each is intertextually linked to the European literary tradition which records it. The extent to which Anava reaches to European myth and legend in his reshaping of Native American myth has not been sufficiently scanned as a central topic of Anaya criticism, which has been focused almost exclusively on his representation of indigenous materials. Anaya not only refers occasionally to classical myth in his works, but he appropriates in large measure the topoi of classical story as a means of aligning distinctive features of early European and traditional MesoAmerican culture.3 What is at stake, ultimately, is finding a proper place for the Chicano story in a Eurocentric literary economy. The two branches of European cultural myth which are most prominent in the framework of Anaya's fiction are, first, the destruction and displacement story whose basic, but not exclusive, archetype is Homer's Odyssey, and, second, the founding myth whose archetype is Virgil's Aeneid.5 The two are complementary, since destruction of a nation and displacement of its inhabitants force the founding of a new home which will infuse into a new terrain what is salvaged of the older culture.