Bakhtinian Approaches to the Indigenous World of Manuel Scorza (Mikhail Bakhtin) (Critical Essay)

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 Rancas, (1) a neoindigenist novel that confronts various social languages. (2) 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)