Book Reviews

Wylie, Lesley (2009) Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics inthe novela de la selva, Liverpool University Press (Liverpool), viii + 256 pp. £56.00 hbk.

At the conclusion of the third chapter of her new book on the novela de la selva(jungle novel), Lesley Wylie quotes Stanley Diamond, who defined anthropology in1974 as ‘the study of men in crisis by men in crisis’ (p. 91). Diamond’s descriptioncould well be used to define Wylie’s own aims in this study: how early twentieth-centuryLatin American writers, at a crossroads of (post-Independence) history, write theirnational Others – indigenous populations, and the landscapes they inhabit – while alsopondering the tradition of travel writing that has produced such enduring narrativesof the Americas as exotic spaces. In Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks, Wyliefocuses on four novels – Green Mansions (1904), by Anglo-Argentine author WilliamHenry Hudson, Colombian Jose Eustasio Rivera’s La voragine (1924), Canaima (1935)by Venezuelan Romulo Gallegos, and Los pasos perdidos (1953) by Cuban AlejoCarpentier – where the main characters are white men who envision the Latin Americanjungle as a landscape of spiritual and physical renewal, only to find their hopes thwartedby the very spaces and conditions they idealise.

In Chapter 1, Wylie builds the case for reading these four novelas de la selva in thelight of postcolonialist revisions of colonial literary models. These novels, according toWylie, revise, parody and debunk earlier travel writing through the use of ‘palpableanachro[nisms]’ (p. 21) in the case of Hudson’s novel, the ‘ludic propensities’ in Rivera’swork, and Carpentier’s active rewriting of such texts as Humboldt’s Personal Narrative.In Chapter 2, ‘Tropical Nature and Landscape Aesthetics’, Wylie discusses how theseauthors radically re-conceive the Kantian sublime, which relies on the constant ofstable subjects and landscapes. Instead of this Romantic notion of perceptual territorialcontrol, in the novelas de la selva we have a poetics of ugliness and the unknowable,replete with silences that haunt the novel’s characters – what Wylie persuasively callsa disconnection between ‘the imperial lexicon and non-European topography’ (p. 59).Chapter 3, ‘Salvaging the Savage’, focuses on the treatment of indigenous charactersand the inclusion of native languages in the composition of the novels in question.The latter is perhaps one of the most salient qualities of the wider genre of LatinAmerican novelas de la tierra, described by Carlos Alonso as part of the writers’ aimto produce distinctly national, autochthonous works. Wylie adds to this by noting thatthis multilingual quality of the novels ‘draws attention to the difference of indigenousculture and its refusal to be neatly translated into another cultural paradigm’ (p. 90).Chapter 4, ‘Paradise Lost: Wilderness and the Limits of Western Escapism’, describeshow the four novelists parody a host of European Romantic attitudes to naturallandscapes. Wylie notes the failure of any aspiration towards communing with thisLatin American wilderness in the narratives, describing the tropical forest ‘not as acommodity for urban self-actualisation, but as a menacing and potentially deadly,postcolonial space’ (p. 95). The final chapter is a discussion of the disintegration of thenovels’ central characters after their failures in the jungles. Much like Kurtz in Conrad’sHeart of Darkness (a text that Wylie often uses as a counterpoint in her discussions ofthe four novels central to her study), the protagonist in any given novela de la selvaspirals into degeneracy, a denouement that converses with a number of fin-de-siecletexts that worked to ‘map the tropics’ according to the diseases that could be contractedthere. According to Wylie, these paths to degeneracy and, ultimately, savagery, havewider, postcolonial implications: they produce the ‘mortal blow to the leitmotif ofOtherness’, as the colonialist gaze is violently ‘returned’, making the protagonists

© 2011 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2011 Society for Latin American StudiesBulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 4 543

Book Reviews

themselves ‘conspicuously exotic’ (p. 124). Following Homi Bhabha’s work on travelliterature, Wylie’s own discussion of degeneracy is compounded with Freud’s discourseon the uncanny (1925), as evidenced in episodes of the novelas in which the maincharacters’ perceptions of their cultural others reveal the horrors of familiarity.

Wylie’s monograph returns attention to texts that have had a tendency to slip outof critical currency. She makes a valid case to read these novels alongside, and as earlyexamples of, prevalent discussions of the subversive qualities of postcolonial texts. Inthis sense, Wylie points to the need to develop a more nuanced and historically expansivenotion of what we understand as the postcolonial period in literature – one that includesthe Latin American experience after 1820. Finally, Wylie’s careful readings of thesenovelas alongside their many literary precursors and intertexts – from Columbus’s Diar-ios to early twentieth-century tropical medicine treatises from Spanish America – forma rich historical guide with which to study how these four writers problematise notionsof reading and writing from within the postcolonial Latin American nation.

María del Pilar Blanco(UCL) University College London

© 2011 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2011 Society for Latin American Studies544 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 4