Bakhtinian approaches to the indigenous world of Manuel Scorza

Oswaldo Estrada

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Relying on the novel as the optimum medium to represent the dialogic encounter of various social languages, the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin recreated in the first part of the twentieth century a hybrid world of intertwining ideological systems. He conceived the novelistic whole as a puzzle of compositional-stylistic unities, made up of unique dialects, authorial literary-artistic narration, different forms of oral or semiliterate discourse, and the personalized speech of characters. As literary critics of today, we can still draw on his theorizations regarding the ambiguous nature of the novel, a heterogeneous genre that allows individual voices to have some degree of autonomy while they remain subordinated to a leading language that controls the course of the narrative. By virtue of this novelistic conflict between multiple discourses, also known as heteroglossia, the reader can observe how opposing languages -centrifugal and centripetal, official and unofficial- encounter each other dialogically to reflect «the interaction among different attitudes and opinions of a society» (Booker 479).

This sort of societal representation is achieved in Manuel Scorza's Redoble por Rancas¹, a neoindigenist novel that confronts various social languages². Divided in two intermingling parts, one that delineates the conflict between the comuneros of Yanacocha and the town of Yanahuanca, and another one that portrays the silent battle between the village of Rancas and the International Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation, the novel takes us to the center of a heteroglossic world. Scorza's «account of the transition from a semifeudal system of land tenure ("gamonalismo") to more "modern" forms of imperialist and capitalist exploitation» (Larsen 137) embraces the orality of the Peruvian Central Andes and delineates its social dialects. Loaded with autochthonous sounds from the highlands, the language of the extremely poor and unprotected peasants, the authorial voices of the gamonales, and the standard Spanish dialect of those individuals from the Peruvian capital who reside in the Andes, the text highlights the language of the Indian, one that relies on «traditional oral stories, proverbs, prayers, formulaic expressions, or other oral productions» to perpetuate its existence (Ong 11)³.

From its opening sentences, Redoble por Rancas confirms the validity of Bakhtin's postulates in regards to the «living words in a novel», since every utterance of the indigenous or mestizo individual is «charged with value... entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents» (276). This is obvious throughout the novel, but particularly when the leader of the Indian peasants, Héctor Chacón, reassures the people of his village that they will lose all their pastures and communal lands, due to their failure to combat the semifeudal landowner of Junín. As this revolutionary confirms what seems to be a perennial state of Indian servitude, Héctor tells them, full of rage and irony, that they will have access to a better world «cuando vuelen los chanchos» (45). The presence of this deterministic proverb explicitly engraves in the text not only the agonistic situation of the subaltern but also the seemingly impossibility of his survival in the presence of oppressing forces. Later on, the struggle between these two social groups is reinforced when mestizo Prefect Figuerola expresses his despotic attitude toward the Indians: «Hace años que soy autoridad. Yo he servido en casi todos los departamentos. Nunca he conocido un indio recto» (145). The inclusion of these words in the text reminds us, once again, of the Manichean construction of postcolonial Latin America, where whiteness and Spanish heritage are consistently placed in a higher category than the Indian and his native culture.

Far from being a system of abstract grammatical categories, the language employed by these characters is ideologically saturated and reflects an ongoing struggle. In Redoble por Rancas the voices of those who belong to the world of literacy diminish the Indian background by stating that the indigenous people are worthless, or «uncivilized». The conflict between orality and literacy in the novel, rooted in the same axis of civilización y barbarie that permeates a great deal of Latin American literature, represents the argument between two worlds separated by the nature of their beliefs, their traditions, their dialects, their culture and traditions⁴. Combined, these sets of variables make up a novelistic framework of heteroglossia. It is an aesthetic construction that Cornejo Polar would certainly see as appropriate to represent various bilingual and multilingual environments of the heterogeneous Peruvian Andes (Escribir 25).

Just as in everyday life we find differences between: «the language and the world of prayer, the language and world of song, the language and world of labor..., the specific language and world of local authorities, the new language and the world of the workers freshly immigrated to the city», the novel represents a similar and complex atmosphere (Bakhtin 296). This network of dialects entangles itself in Redoble por Rancas through a variety of speech cultures, such as that of the priests, who tell their indigenous parishioners to rebel against the local authorities; the insults of the semifeudal landowners, who call the Indians «el cáncer que está pudriendo al Perú» (145); the voices of the illiterate Indians, who have guarded their traditions by means of their oral memory; and, finally, the voice of the literate Indians, who can read and write but cannot let go of their traditional and cultural beliefs. One way of representing this state of heteroglossia in the novel is through «a hybrid construction, which contains within it the trace of two or more discourses, either those of the narrator and character(s), or of different characters» (Morris 249). Instead of a plain amalgamation of voices, what we have is an intentional debate between two languages that are forced to face each other.

Scorza depicts this dialogical engagement with allusions to several musical fragments that, besides contributing to the oral quality of the text, confront those who are obliged to stay away from the center of society with their immediate oppressors, in a heteroglot zone. Such process becomes palpable, for example, with the sudden intrusion of the Peruvian vals «El plebeyo» in the heat of an indigenous argument. At once, the lyrics of this popular song from Lima circumscribe the anguish of the Andean peasant who complains about his misery with the language of his oppressor. Thanks to this intertextual link, the attentive reader can take an «inferential walk»⁵ or an imaginary excursion to hear the silenced voice of the Indian who uses the words of his oppressors to assert: «Mi sangre, aunque plebeya, / también tiñe de rojo /... / no es distinta la sangre / ni es otro el corazón»⁶. Likewise, the Peruvian National Anthem, a patriotic song that pronounces the freedom of all Peruvians with the words «Somos libres, seámoslo siempre», is juxtaposed in the novel with the voice of the Indian, who almost automatically denounces his situation: «Mentira decimos que somos libres. Somos esclavos» (191). As a result of this novelistic encounter of two divergent dialects, the literary language of the novel breaks the socio-linguistic barriers of these songs that are usually associated with the circles of power, and the Indian dialect acquires a new tone. It is, in Bakhtinian terms, «deformed and in fact cease[s] to be that which had been simply as dialect» (Bakhtin 294). It is a language enriched by a diversity of voices.

The intentional contact of different linguistic dialects in the novel produces the hybridization of literary discourse. Even though Redoble por Rancas is a neoindigenist novel, the language of the narrator is not indigenous. Most of the narrative voices use a limeño speech that belongs to the world of literacy, yet Scorza manages to turn up the volume of the voices of illiterate or semiliterate Indian characters with Spanish rather than Quechua lyrics. While these songs emphasize the orality of the indigenous world, it is valid to consider that the characters of this novel are empowered by dialogism to pass, in Bakhtinian fashion, from one language to another. This linguistic confluence is also apparent towards the end of the narrative, when the peasants finally use the written language of the educated in a complicated procedure that allows them to win a temporary victory against their oppressors. Guided by their oral mentality, on that occasion the peasants of Rancas use hundreds of pigs as their only weapons to infect the sheep pastures that the Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation has taken away from them. Enveloped by a comic aura, the plan is sketched out on a black chalkboard by one of the village leaders, Cayetano, with a written language that draws on the Andean wisdom of the villagers to contaminate these fields.

Even though this victory against imperialism does not last for too long, at least the peasants corroborate that they have finally learned how to use the language of their opponents to fight against the capitalist forces based in the Peruvian capital and the United States. If an illiterate person can live in a multi-language world, where he prays to God in one language, sings songs in another, speaks to the members of his family in a third and, when he needs to attract the local authorities' attention, he uses a fourth language (Bakhtin 295), in Redoble por Rancas the peasants also exploit a language deep-rooted in the «world of the letter» (Mignolo 30). Cornejo Polar attributes this conversion of various languages within the Indian space to the growing intercommunication between different sectors of the Peruvian society. It is a phenomenon that mirrors the constant Andean migration to the coast, as well as the expansion of the cultural influence from the cities to the rural areas («Neoindigenismo» 550). This socio-linguistic encounter, a clear indicator of what Jean Franco calls the Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, where «indigenous languages and cultures enter into productive contact with lettered culture» (10), implies, nonetheless, the recognition of the Other as a unique representative discourse of an individual's consciousness.

Such process of dialogism is understood in the context of every utterance, where the most «serious» statement can become «comical» (Bakhtin 340). This happens in Redoble por Rancas when the ranqueños, stripped from their pastures, find themselves debating for six hours if it is morally right to let their sheep eat the flowers from the cemetery of Cerro de Pasco. With a blend of humor, denunciation, and irony, the narrator indicates that spending six hours debating this issue is not a waste of their time, especially if we consider that «al comenzar la conquista, los filósofos españoles debatieron no seis horas sino sesenta años si los indios pertenecían o no al género humano» (197). Although there is a clear confrontation between a) an authoritative discourse and b) an internal persuasive one, the semantic structure of the first one, representative of the official history of the conquest of the New World, is not malleable or divisible: it has a «single meaning, [and] the letter is fully sufficient to the sense and calcifies it» (Bakhtin 343). The novel's ideological discourse, on the other hand, is internally persuasive because it opens up a wide range of possible meanings.

Bakhtin suggests that the novel turns persuasive discourse into speaking characters, personalities that can be autonomous and, at the same time, inter-connected voices due to a creative and artistic imagination. Even when the task of establishing, transmitting, and interpreting the words of others seems to chain one speech to another in an incessant line of connections, «one's discourse and one's own voice... will sooner or later begin to liberate [itself] from the authority of the other's discourse» (Bakhtin 348). It would be a mistake, however, to interpret this concept of dialogism as the representation of total socio-linguistic freedom. Bakhtin perceives heteroglossia as «the constituting condition for the possibility of independent consciousness in that any attempt to impose one unitary monologic discourse as the "Truth" is relativized by its dialogic contact with another social discourse» (Morris 73). This assumption implies the presence of a central force, a dialogic device that, in order to keep the stability of verbal discourse, weaves diversified dialects into a linguistic whole. It is a force that plays an important role in the novel because it holds together many dialects that, by themselves, would get lost in the narration. The voices of the Andean peasants in Redoble por Rancas, for instance, would not be as effective if they were not linked to the voices of their oppressors.

What holds all the divergent pieces of the novel into an artistic representation of the Peruvian society is the implicit but controlling voice of the narrator as the ultimate «higher stylistic unity of the work» (Bakhtin 262). This commanding unity of style is different than the individual voices that constitute the polyphonic make-up of Redoble por Rancas. In the specific novelistic scenario that we are analyzing, the narrator lets us hear a variety of otherwise silenced voices. At the beginning of the novel, we are presented with the dialect of the Peruvian peasants in the midst of their fight against the gamonales who take advantage of their Andean idiosyncrasy. Later on, we hear the voice of the Indian who sings a patriotic song that acquires new connotations in the world of the subaltern. And, at the end of the novel, we can distinguish the speech of the Indian still anchored to his traditions and culture, who now realizes that his people are being exterminated by imperialism, concluding: «No es Jesucristo quien nos castiga, son los americanos» (234). The unity of this novelistic structure, however, is not maintained by an indigenous voice, nor by a language that truly represents the voices from the world of literacy. A fictional artifice manipulates the portrayal of the Andean culture. After all, «El movimiento indigenista no es la manifestación de un pensamiento indígena sino una reflexión criolla y mestiza sobre el indio» (Favre 11).

The higher stylistic unity of the novel is a phenomenon that occurs precisely because each individual discourse is autonomous. The novel brings them together to frame their peculiarities, to construct images of languages. All of these images represent a view of the world and specific social situations that braid incalculable connections with other languages and social dialects. The higher stylistic unity, therefore, is achieved by the artistry of the author who invents a language to represent the colonized⁷. It is a fictional creation that Mario Vargas Llosa recognizes as an «habla inventada» in the Indigenist texts of José María Arguedas (132). Although Scorza does not distort the grammatical construction of his Spanish narration with the inclusion of Quechua expressions⁸, he crafts a language with the texture of the Andean world. This commanding voice that controls the development of ideas in the text is not a transcription of any specific oral discourse but rather a «semantic fiction» (Vargas Llosa 132). By aligning the musicality of the Andes with oral proverbs and confronting peripheral and central discourses, the letter and the word, as well as the mentality of the Indians against the clasista culture of their oppressors, Scorza constructs a voice that carries with it the necessary variables to represent a group of colonized individuals. Only then can we digest, according to Edward Said, «the pressures of such transpersonal, transhuman, and transcultural forces as class, the unconscious, gender, race, and structure» (294). This is why the novel, as a genre, retains in this new century its subversive powers to explore various social conflicts in a hybrid and dialogic manner.

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