The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction

by Lois Parkinson Zamora

The Inordinate Eye traces the relations of Latin American painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature—the stories they tell each other and the ways in which their creators saw the world and their place in it. Moving from pre-Columbian codices and sculpture through New World Baroque art and architecture to Neobaroque theory and contemporary Latin American fiction, Lois Parkinson Zamora argues for an integrated understanding of visual and verbal forms.
 
The New World Baroque combines indigenous, African, and European forms of expression, and, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Latin American writers began to recuperate its visual structures to construct an alternative account of modernity, using its hybrid forms for the purpose of creating a discourse of “counterconquest”—a postcolonial self-definition aimed at disrupting entrenched power structures, perceptual categories, and literary forms.    

Z amora engages this process, discussing a wide range of visual forms—Baroque façades and altarpieces, portraits of saints and martyrs (including the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo), murals from indigenous artisans to Diego Rivera—to elucidate works of fiction by Borges, Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Sarduy, Garro, García Márquez, and Galeano, and also to establish a critical perspective external to their work. Because visual media are “other” to the verbal economy of modern fiction, they serve these writers (and their readers) as oblique means by which to position their fiction culturally, politically, and aesthetically.
 
The first study of its kind in scope and ambition, The Inordinate Eye departs radically from most studies of literature by demonstrating how transcultural conceptions of the visual image have conditioned present ways of seeing and reading in Latin America.

424 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2006

Reviews

[J.I.]

This is a collection of pairing, of art (mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries) and literature (mostly from the 1940s and beyond) that works towards building a kind of understanding about what, really, makes up the Neobaroque. Dr. Zamora is largely successful in the ways that she uses close readings of the fiction as well as close considerations of the artworks, along with a number of art and literary historians and theorists, to put together her categorizations.

Where this fails, however, is largely in the way of approach. You see, Latin American Neobaroque is simply Latin American Postmodernism. This however, is a lable that Zamora despises and goes out of her way in order to refute. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the refutation is largely ignorant of much of postmodernism and focuses its beam too narrowly on the postmodernism of the 1960s United States (particularly that being composed by white men) and fails to realize the scope of the movement through both Western and Eastern Europe as well as other places such as India and Japan (to say the least) and how firmly her ideas of a non-white and mestizo culture rejecting "white" culture by incorporating it ironically falls withing these other art forms. Interestingly she also invents her own (mildly anemic) form of contrapuntal analyses, though she is ignorant of Said's book that speaks of the idea, which carries the book through.

Which is to say that this is an excellent book that is soft in a few areas and ignorant in others (which would be fine if it weren't striving against them), but can be forgiven its faults for the good it does and the quality of its analysis.