Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004-2012 by Katie Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004-2012 by Katie Brown Irina R. Troconis Brown, Katie. Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004-2012. Liverpool UP, 2019. 198 pp. Katie Brown's Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004-2012 is an illuminating and welcome addition to a growing corpus that examines cultural production during the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Focusing on contemporary Venezuelan fiction, Brown addresses and productively challenges its absence not only from English language scholarship, but also from debates and discussions—old and new—that have shaped and defined the scope and the study of Latin American literature. Brown's study focuses on eight novels published between 2004 and 2012: Juan Carlos Chirinos's El niño malo cuenta hasta cien y se retira (2004), Slavko Zupcic's Círculo croata (2006), Israel Centeno's Bajo las hojas (2010), Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez's Chulapos Mambo (2011), Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles's Transilvania unplugged (2011), Alberto Barrera Tyszka's Rating (2011), Gisela Kozak Rovero's Todas las lunas (2011), and Armando Luigi Castañeda's La fama, o es venérea, o no es fama (2012). The year 2004, as Brown points out, marks the start of major attention to culture in Bolivarian policy, while 2012 was the final full year of Hugo Chávez's life. Within this temporal framework, a question that dominated cultural and political debates in Venezuela and that figures prominently in the novels analyzed is: what is the role of literature? More specifically: who should have access to it? Who should be considered a writer? Whose stories should be told, and how? How should literature engage with national concerns and global demands? Brown's analysis explores not only how the writers of the aforementioned novels position themselves vis-à-vis these questions, but also how the cultural apparatus of the Bolivarian Revolution led by Minister for Culture Francisco Sesto established a strong link between the production of culture and the political project of re-founding the Venezuelan nation. Faced with the Bolivarian idea of culture "in which politics is the utmost priority" (15), the writers Brown engages with turn to metafiction, intertextuality, and autofiction to escape from the oppression of official grand narratives and to explore different forms of national belonging and different understandings of what it means to write literature in and about Venezuela. Brown's extensive introduction addresses several elements of the literary and political context framing the novels discussed in the book's six chapters, beginning with an overview of the various factors that contributed to the absence of Venezuelan writing from world literary spaces and from defining literary movements such as the Boom. This absence, Brown argues, problematizes recent theories of "global" or "post-national" Latin American literature "which are based on studies of a handful of countries" and which conceptualize it as not particularly exceptionalist or isolationist (2). Though contemporary Venezuelan literature shares many of the characteristics of "global" or "post-national" literature, it also draws attention to the insistence of the Bolivarian government that "the national is necessary and [End Page 467] sufficient" and that literature should not be influenced by the foreign (5). Brown traces the development of this understanding of literature by examining the different cultural policies that were introduced starting in 2004, and that promoted "nationalism, socialism, the democratisation of literature, and a focus on literature as a way of documenting and transferring information more than as a creative endeavor" (13). She then discusses how Venezuelan writers reacted to these changes in the cultural landscape, the challenges they faced in terms of publishing inside and outside of the state system, and the changes in the visibility and marketability of Venezuelan literature that have resulted from the ongoing wave of emigration caused by the Bolivarian Revolution. She concludes with an overview of each of the novels and authors examined in each chapter, and develops a conceptual framework to approach their shared interest in experimenting with metafiction, autofiction, and intertextuality. Brown's introduction not only provides readers with a thorough analysis of the state of the literary industry in Venezuela under the Bolivarian Revolution, but it also places it in a productive...