La Primavera Research Articles

Bed-Site Selection by Desert Mule Deer in Southern Arizona

Bed-Site Selection by Desert Mule Deer in Southern Arizona

Effects of Flooding on Recruitment of Roundtail Chub, Gila robusta, in a Southwestern River

Effects of Flooding on Recruitment of Roundtail Chub, Gila robusta, in a Southwestern River

Breeding Phenology of the Lowland Leopard Frog (Rana yavapaiensis): Implications for Conservation and Ecology

Breeding Phenology of the Lowland Leopard Frog (Rana yavapaiensis): Implications for Conservation and Ecology

Latin America's New Historical Novel

Reviewed by: Latin America’s New Historical Novel Gareth Williams Seymour Menton. Latin America’s New Historical Novel. Austin: U of Texas P, 1993. 228 pp. No price given. Latin America’s New Historical Novel could be considered to be a useful book for the undergraduate and master-level classroom since it provides an exceptional bibliographic chronology of the Latin American Historical Novel dating from 1949 to 1992 (including the subgenre that the author terms the “New Historical Novel”); it provides, as well, extensive character readings and plot summaries of a wide selection of narratives that could be helpful to a casual or initiate reader of Latin American narrative interested in familiarizing him/herself with the Historical Novel in Latin America. As an example of Latinamericanist critical practice, however, Latin America’s New Historical Novel is somewhat disappointing. The underlying impulse of Latin America’s New Historical Novel, it would appear, is twofold: on the one hand, the book marks an implicit lament for the loss of the Latin American boom aesthetic of the 1960’s and, on the other hand, an attempt to revalidate the lost object by arguing the case for the canonization of a contemporary boom of novelistic production that is presented as the inheritor of the 1960’s “tradition”: the “New Historical Novel”. Unfortunately, any reader interested in identifying the parameters of a possible post-boom boom in Latin American novelistic production will be disappointed by this book since it tends, rather, to reveal the problematic nature of a critical venture designed to delineate dominant [End Page 872] literary trends precisely at a time in which the singularity of dominant trends in Latin American literature, and in Latin American cultural production as a whole, has collapsed, and in particular in which the boom aesthetic and its ideas on the literary as a means and manifestation of Latin American knowledge production, are becoming increasingly derelict for the contemporary analysis, interpretation, and understanding of Latin American cultural formations. As a result of Latin America’s New Historical Novel’s overriding desire for canonization, apparently at all costs, the book tends to fall into the symptomatic revelation of its own self-imposed conceptual confinement. For Menton the “New Historical Novel” is the inheritor of the Latin American boom’s muralistic scope, exuberant eroticism and complex, neobaroque (albeit less hermetic) structural and linguistic experimentation, witnessed by a generalized emphasis on what he terms the novel’s “metafictionality,” “intertextuality” and “carnivalesque” characters. As a result of these properties, however, García-Márquez’s El general en su laberinto, to name just one example, is discarded as a “New Historical Novel” on the grounds that it is the re-creation of a specific period with relatively few characters, that tends to avoid exuberant experimentation. Thus, in spite of Menton’s characterization of the “New Historical Novel” as a narrative whose action takes place completely (and in some cases, predominantly) in the past—arbitrarily defined as a past not directly experienced by the author—the problematization of a single historical figure such as Bolivar does not serve for inclusion into the canonization of this subgenre. Indeed, the book’s stifling production of exclusionary criteria, systematically implemented in such a way as to homogenize what is ultimately a highly complex and heterogeneous corpus of narratives, leads to mass elimination on apparently arbitrary grounds. Thus, Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del metodo and La consagracion de la primavera are excluded from analysis, and presumably from any possibility of pertaining to a “dominant trend,” because they do not conform to the author’s definition of the historical novel since they present events concurrent with the author’s own life. Obviously, if the reader follows this logic, then we are confronted with a problematic critical practice in which lived experience cannot be an experience of the historical, nor of historicity, and novelistic production such as that of the Southern Cone post-dictatorship novel (Miguel Bonasso, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Diamela Eltit, to name just a few), or the production of testimonial [End Page 873] narratives over the last fifteen years or so in the Southern Cone and in Central America, are excluded from the contemporary...

Carpentier and Jolivet: Magic Music in Los pasos perdidos

ALEJO Carpentier's preoccupation with music is well-known and well-documented in his own work as well as in criticism about him. Three volumes of his music criticism, aptly titled Ese misico que Ulevo dentro, and the prominence of music as a narrative theme and structural device in works such as El acoso, Concierto barroco, La consagraci6n de la primavera and Los pasos perdidos attest to this lifelong enthusiasm.' A parallel may be drawn between Carpentier's musical interests and his search for a new narrative form appropriate to his depictions of the New World and to the recurring theme of a return to the source. This quest for primitive purity lies at the structural core of Los pasos perdidos, the narrator of which is a composer whose travels into the jungle take him backward in time, allowing him to discover what he believes to be the beginnings of music, and inspiring him to return to his artistic vocation. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria in The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, 1977) has demonstrated in detail the eclectic nature of Carpentier's literary style. In Los pasos perdidos, the novelist draws on early chronicles and the accounts of nineteenth-century explorers, as well as his own travels, in order to transform what began as simple reportage into a work of fiction. His use of music is also eclectic, drawing on specific sources for the musical substance of his narrator's fictional world. For example, in his Nota Carpentier gives us a source of the shaman's dirge in Episode xxiii, a recording

Seasonal Changes in the Numbers and Foraging Activities of Two Jamaican Exomalopsis Species (Hymenoptera, Anthophoridae)

Exomalopsis globosa (F) was more numerous during the winter, whereas E. similis Cresson was more so during the spring. These differences were explained from comparison of the bees' daily foraging activities and flight ranges with the seasonal and daily rainfall patterns. The types of pollen collected by the two species during the year did not account for the seasonal changes in the numbers of bees. Exomalopsis globosa (F) fue mas numerosa durante el invierno, mientras que E. similis Cresson lo fue tambien la primavera. Estes diferencas fueron explicadas por la comparacion de la actividad por las abejas en el forrajear diario y por sus radios de vuelo con los patrones diarios y estadonales de la lluvia. Los tipos de polen recojidos de las dos especies no explican los cambios estacionales en los numeros de abejas. Two MAJOR CONTRASTS exist between the flowering of tropical and temperate plants. Both regions are subject to seasonality, but the wetness and dryness of the seasons in the tropics do not generally have such drastic effects on the grow,th of plants as the warmth and coldness of the temperate seasons have (MacArthur 1972). The marked seasonality in temperate regions has maintained low diversities of plant species there and consequent high local densities of some of them. However, in the moist tropics, where the effect of seasonality is small, the diversity of plant species is very high and the densities of even the commonest species are low (Dobzhansky 1950). The second con,trast between the two regions is, like the first, maintained by the different effects of seasonality in them. The flowering of plants in temperate regions is largely restricted to the spring and summer, and the flowering periods of many species are only a few weeks in duration. However, in the moist tropics, many plants, especially the herbs, flower throughout the year (Adams 1972). These spatial and temporal concentrations of flowers in temperate regions have affected the activities of bees there. Such large numbers of flowers may be produced at the same time within foraging range that the bees can choose to feed at flowers of only a few of the available species. Species of bees in the same genus, for example in Bombus (Brian 1951), Andrena (Chambers 1968), and Osmia (Raw 1974), nesting at the same time of year and in the same locality have been found to collect pollen from largely different types of plants. In extreme situations bees have become oligolectic, in which each species of bee collects pollen from one or a few related taxa of plants (Linsley et al. 1963 and 1964, Cruden 1972). In contrast to the situation in temperate regions, the moist tropics have low densities of flowers of many species that are available to bees throughout the year and this led Michener (1954) to suggest that very few species were oligolectic there. However, so far, the food preferences of troipical bees have not been investigated quantitatively. The species within several Jamaican genera commonly feed at the same types of plants, so the interaction of two Exomalopsis species was investigated. E. globosa (F) and E. similis Cresson are probably the most common indigenous species of bees in Jamaica. Adults of both are active throughout the year and in many localities they have been seen to visit much the same types of flowers. Their nests are built in the ground, and in the study area the entrances of the nests of the two species were only a few metres apart. Adults of the two species are almost identical in size and were thought to have similar flight ranges and hence similar potential foraging areas in the locality studied (but see discussion). Up to 19 adult females of E. globosa co-operated in building and provisioning a nest as did up to 12 of E. similis. Most of the bees from a nest collected pollen, and many of these foragers had well-developed ovaries. Castes of egg-laying and non-egg-laying bees could not be distinguished by their size, age or ovarian development in either species (Raw, in press).

Villaurrutia and Baudelaire

to the complete works of Villaurrutia1 has pointed out (p. xxii) the importance of Proust, Cocteau, Supervielle, Giraudoux, the surrealists, the intellectual example of Gide, for the Mexican poet. Behind them all, however, stands the figure of Baudelaire, whose work forms the beginning of modern French poetic theory and attitudes. The present paper is an attempt to indicate some relationships between the author of the Fleurs du mal and the Mexican contempordneo, not so much in the way of direct imitation but more in the way of comparisons which seem significant. These relationships center about those themes of death, night, and dream, usually present in a discussion of Villaurrutia's poetry. The theme of death is an important one for both Baudelaire and Villaurrutia. The Fleurs du mal has a section of six poems entitled La Mort. In the first of these poems, La Mort des amants,2 we find a note of a certain exaltation, the angel who entre 'ouvrant les portes,/Viendra ranimer, fiddle et joyeux,/Les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortes. Thus life is associated, in Baudelaire, with memory, remembrance of things past. There is also an essential association with death and its necessary opposite, or complement, life. This parallel is basic in Villaurrutia. In the poem, Canto a la primavera, it is the poet who poses this question which is the beginning of all poetic activity, the origin of love and its end, or a repetition of the love-death motif which can be found in the Baudelaire poem. Inherent in the Baudelaire piece is the idea of regeneration or rebirth: there is in the figure of the Angel the possible announcer of the final judgment, which is to be the beginning of another life. In Villaurrutia there is a similar innate impulse towards regeneration, but with the modification that it counts less in a moral or intellectual decision on the poet's part and is more natural in origin, somewhat comparable to Bergson's elan vital. With this association of the quest for an answer the poem follows a series of possibilities. First, from the earth characterized as sumisa, dormida, fatigada, he'rida, and which includes the past (olvidado) and death, emerges the dream of rebirth, of renascence: