Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dialogic Aspects of the Cuban Novel of the 1990s . Ángela Dorado-Otero. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2014. Pp. vii+291.

2015; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 113; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/680964

1545-6951

Isabel Alvarez Borland,

Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewDialogic Aspects of the Cuban Novel of the 1990s. Ángela Dorado-Otero. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2014. Pp. vii+291.Isabel Alvarez BorlandIsabel Alvarez BorlandCollege of the Holy Cross Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs a result of the breakup of the Soviet bloc in 1989, Cuba lost Soviet subsidies and fell into a period of economic hardship known as the Periodo especial, also described by the Castro regime as a “special period in peacetime.” No longer able to support its artists, the Cuban government allowed them to travel abroad as well as to sell their works in foreign countries. Many of these writers decided not to return to Cuba and settled in cities such as Paris, Madrid, Mexico City, and in the United States. This exodus was referred to as the “Cuban diaspora” since many writers were not allowed to return to their native country, became exiled, and today publish their work from a variety of geographical settings. What these writers have in common is that their formative years occurred under the revolution, as a majority of them left Cuba as adults, and all had been recognized as writers while living in Cuba.Dialogic Aspects of the Cuban Novel of the 1990s focuses on six authors who, according to author Ángela Dorado-Otero, are representative of a 1990s boom of sorts. The critic selects specific novels by Reinaldo Arenas, Leonardo Padura, Abilio Estévez, Daína Chaviano, Yanitzia Canetti, and Zoé Valdés, paying attention to the dialogic aesthetics common to specific novels these writers published during the decade. According to Dorado-Otero, “these authors have increased their use of discursive techniques to create polyphonic novels and dialogism, in line with Bakhtinian theoretical postulates.” The critic’s thesis maintains that the carnivalesque or Bakhtinian aesthetic evident in all six novels creates “polyphonic texts that ridicule any hypothesis that would suggest that notions of country and nation coincide.…This process in turn creates a non-official history, a memory from the margins, which acts as a form of cultural resistance to monolithic representations of Cubanness” (2). According to Dorado-Otero, the aesthetics of Bakhtinian dialogism evident in these novels are a response to different realities that were the result of the post-1989 changes in the international socialist camp. This change in aesthetics reevaluates the concept of national identity and seeks to amplify what is understood by Cuban identity.Chapter 1 analyzes how, in El color del verano (1991), Arenas creates a carnivalesque, upside-down world motivated by a desire of a personal revenge against the state and as a way to bring attention to homosexual discourse. Chapter 2 is devoted to the 1997 novel Máscaras by Leonardo Padura, the only writer in this selected group who still writes and resides on the island. Here Dorado-Otero studies how Padura uses both intertextuality and the figure of the transvestite as dialogic narrative strategies in order to subvert monolithic notions of literature, culture, and identity. Chapter 3 concerns Abilio Estévez’s Tuyo es el reino (1997). This chapter studies the novel as an exploration of the process of creation itself that “challenges any kind of authoritative discourse” (13).The book changes focus in the last three chapters, which analyze the narratives of three well-known women writers who published during the 1990s and continue to publish today: Daína Chaviano, Yanitzia Canetti, and Zoé Valdés. For these women authors, sexual oppression signified political oppression as women were excluded from the patriarchal modes of discourse production in the island. Dorado-Otero analyzes these writers’ erotic discourse as a dialogic mechanism to present the female subject as one who rejects her “erotic objectivization and stresses her agency as a producer of discourse” (235). The subversion of the patriarchal order is demonstrated in Dorado-Otero’s analysis of Chaviano’s Casa de Juegos (1999) in chapter 4 and Canetti’s Al otro lado (1997) in chapter 5. Here the critic explores how the authors use the female body as both a feminine and feminist strategy with “which to undermine monologic discourse” (14). Valdés’s La nada cotidiana (1996) is the subject of the sixth and final chapter. Here the author concentrates on the linguistic humor used by Valdés in order to challenge traditional male erotic discourse. In the critic’s words: “I demonstrate how eroticism rather than silence is the trick of the weak” (18). The book includes a conclusion in which the author summarizes specific features of each of her chapters stressing how these Cuban writers have developed different narrative techniques in order to challenge and subvert fixed notions of identity. Her study celebrates how the aesthetics of heteroglossia and dialogism present themselves as subversive strategies against the discourse of power (234).The idea of studying these novels through the critical tools of Bakhtinian aesthetics proves to be a useful one. Moreover, Dorado-Otero is to be commended for the thoroughness of her analysis and above all for the quality of the documentation, as all these chapters offer a review of the extant literature on each of these novels and how Dorado-Otero’s approach differs from or expands upon available research. The book loses a bit of focus in the chapters about female authors since the feminist critical approach is not well integrated with the aesthetics of Bakhtinian dialogical analysis. The integration between the chapters needed to be solidified, and better links should have been established between the works of the individual writers so that the reading from one author to the next would have been more fluid and less isolated from chapter to chapter. In addition, both the introduction and the conclusion seem to want to cover additional aspects of these novels beyond dialogism, which made the reading of these crucial segments somewhat digressive. It would have been better to use this valuable space to concentrate on her main thesis, thus creating broader connections between the authors and their individual use of dialogical aesthetics. The book is also packed with jargon, and Dorado-Otero should have spent more time defining for the reader the intricacies of the terminology of Bakhtinian aesthetics. Still, the individual chapters in themselves are very worthwhile and constitute a valuable contribution to the ongoing study of an important and dispersed group of diasporic intellectuals who sought to fight literary censorship through the democratic aesthetics of dialogism. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 113, Number 1August 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/680964 Views: 153Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.