Refusing Masculinity

Introduction

The Curious Invisibility of Gender in the Critical Reception of Arguedas

This essay argues that a refusal of dominant masculinity is central to the literary project of the Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911–1969) and that this “failure to make the gesture of return” significantly distinguishes his work from the complicit and dividend-reaping ¹ masculinities that characterize many of his male literary contemporaries. ² I propose this thesis not with the intention of displacing the dominant paradigm of interpretation that reads Arguedas’s fiction in the context of issues of language and culture in Peru. Instead, I argue that our understanding of the explicit politics of language and culture in Arguedas is enhanced and enriched by a consideration to the more implicit (and quite likely unconscious) politics of masculinity in his writing. In making this argument, I hope to encourage and contribute to a reassessment of the significance of gender in Arguedas’s work. I suspect that such a reassessment will produce changes in how we read Arguedas’s work in the larger context of twentieth-century Latin American literary production. In that context, I believe his work stands out as a significant exemplary case of a “minor literature” written in the major language of Latin American literary masculinity. ³

To claim that a refusal of dominant masculinity is central to Arguedas’s literary project quite likely will seem strange to readers familiar with scholarship on, and criticism of, his work. But why? Why have issues of gender been nearly invisible in Arguedian commentary? This is especially puzzling because many of the male protagonists of Arguedas’s narratives embody masculinity in a way that quite clearly does not coincide with dominant forms of gender recognition. These are characters who feel deeply alienated from the surrounding racist and patriarchal social order, who are traumatized by its violence, and whose personality is oppositionally marked by the qualities of tenderness, empathy, mythological consciousness articulated in Quechua, and a heart-breaking longing for human connection. In other words, these characters very specifically negotiate their traumas, their solitude, and their desires as boys and men in a male-dominated world. And yet, ironically, the strange and estranged masculinity of these characters is almost universally resignified by critics as signs of something other than gender nonconformity. In the following several paragraphs, I summarize representative examples of five major tendencies in criticism on Arguedas, focusing in particular on the way Ernesto, the strange and lonely boy who serves as the main character in Los ríos profundos, is understood. These examples provide a critical context against which to set the gendered interpretation of Ernesto (as well as the gendered interpretation of Santiago in Amor mundo) that I advance in this essay.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the nobel-prize winning Peruvian author, has published several important and influential essays on Arguedas. Generally, he views Arguedas as an intuitive writer who, despite his fine lyrical efforts in Los ríos profundos, is not up to the literary snuff of contemporary writers such as himself, Carlos Fuentes, and others. Vargas Llosa views Ernesto as a figure of suffering who gives voice to a lyrical, but irrational and primitive, vision of social reality that he attributes in part to indigenous culture itself and, in part, to Arguedas's own naiveté. He writes:

In contrast to Vargas Llosa’s diminution of Arguedas’s literary achievement as lyrical, but marred by political ideology and technical deficiencies, most critics have read Arguedas’s work in more laudatory terms as an ambitious and complex effort to translate Quechua orality into Spanish literary forms, and to translate Andean experience and cosmovision for a non-Andean reader. Thus, Arguedas’s work is often framed by these critics in terms of concepts such as mestizaje or transculturation. From this perspective, a character like Ernesto appears as a mestizo who embodies the conflictive cultural and linguistic processes that characterize the Southern Peruvian Andes and, more importantly, who embodies Arguedas’s innovative attempts to imagine a Peruvian modernity informed by Quechua cosmovision. For example, Angel Rama in his influential book Transculturación narrativa characterizes Los ríos profundos as an “opera of the poor” that brings together languages, perspectives, and discourses in a kind of musical score. In a similar vein, William Rowe characterizes Arguedas’s perspective in Los ríos profundos in the following terms:

In an attempt to add nuance to the images of synthesis and harmony that are often evoked by the notions of mestizaje and transculturation, other scholars—most notably Antonio Cornejo Polar—have conceived of Arguedas’s project of literary translation in terms of notions such as migrancy and heterogeneity. This point of view puts more emphasis on the discordant and conflictive character of cultural translation so that a character like Ernesto appears as a stranger, an outsider, a character whose mobility both fragments his consciousness while at the same time giving him a privileged perspective (See Cornejo Polar 1995 and the essays collected in Franco 2006).

While the politics of language and culture constitute the primary focus of Arguedian commentary, a few critics have emphasized the political dimension of Arguedas’s novelized depictions of Andeans within Peruvian society. For example, Roland Forgues writes about Ernesto as a figure of political and cultural resistance, a character who hears the voices of the oppressed and who articulates, in his utopian, mythological language, a biting critique of Peruvian forms of capitalism and racism (See Forgues 1989; Rodriguez-Luis).

Several critics do focus on Ernesto as a gendered character. Their emphasis is on Ernesto as an autobiographical character whose drama reflects the psychological pain and neuroses of the Arguedas himself (Forgues 1989; Castro-Klaren 1983). I will have more to say about this psycho-biographical interpretation of Arguedas in the conclusion of this essay.

In sum, none of the major approaches to Arguedas’s work recognizes the strangeness and alienation of his male lead characters in terms of their unfamiliar (and defamiliarizing) embodiment of masculinity. The invisibility of masculinity in the critical reception of Arguedas is quite curious. It is due, I think, to what Sara Ahmed calls orientation (or what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus): that is, the habits of mind and body that emerge from history and that constitute our epistemological and ontological sureties (Ahmed 2006; Bourdieu 1977). Specifically, the ways of seeing that constitute our prevalent gender orientation have made it difficult if not impossible for critics to assess characters like Ernesto in Los ríos profundos, or Santiago in Amor mundo, in terms of how they embody masculinity. ⁵ Instead, the male-dominated world is presupposed as the inevitable or necessary context within which the more visible conflicts of language, culture, and class occur. In this context, the contrarian performance of masculinity by Arguedas’s protagonists is seen simply as a contrarian cultural performance, the pained response of sensitive male characters with Andean sensibilities to the authoritarian and racist world around them. In contrast, this essay is organized by the assumption that the representation of masculinity matters in Arguedas and that an intersectional approach that includes an analysis of gender will enhance our understanding of the issues of language, culture, and class that are foregrounded in his work. Specifically, the essay argues that the masculine otherness of Arguedas’s protagonists serves as a symbolic challenge to the “grids of gender intelligibility” (Butler 2004) of the Andean world and that this challenge is inseparable from the more visible cultural and economic dissent to which Arguedas’s fiction gives voice.

In the analysis that follows, I focus on the representation of masculinity in two specific short texts that are representative of the wider field of Arguedas’s fiction. These are the opening chapter of Arguedas’s most well-known and widely disseminated novel, Los ríos profundos (1959), and “Don Antonio,” the concluding short story of the four interwoven stories that comprise Amor Mundo (1967). Both of these texts feature a boy protagonist who confronts a world of “monsters and fire” in which Spanish and Quechua cultures collide, and in which cruelty and injustice predominate. At the same time, as I will argue, these protagonists confront the violent and alienating forms of dominant masculinity that characterize their world.

Los ríos profundos

Deep Rivers (Los ríos profundos) is considered by many to be Arguedas’s greatest literary achievement. The novel tells the story of Ernesto, a boy who accompanies his wandering father on foot through the Southern Peruvian highlands until they arrive in the small city of Abancay. In Abancay, the father abandons Ernesto to live and attend a boy’s school run by Catholic priests. The remainder of the novel follows the strange and lonely Ernesto who is traumatized by the violence and cruelty of the priests and boys at the school, and who feels deep empathy for those who suffer that violence. This is especially poignant in the case of the regular sexual abuse of the idiot woman Marcelina by the older boys in the school. In the larger social space of Abancay, the abuse of Marcelina is paralleled by the physical and psychological violence with which the priests, authorities, and landowners subjugate the chicheras—the mestiza women who own the chicha (corn beer) bars in town—and the colonos—the quechua speaking indentured servants of the landowners. Alone, Ernesto finds refuge in nature, in his magical top the zumballyu, and in his memories of the nurturing Quechua communities he has lived in as a boy. His identification and solidarity with the oppressed, and with Andean culture are most evident at the end of the novel when he stands with those who resist and defy the social order, namely the chicheras who riot over the withholding of the supply of salt by the authorities and landowners, and the typhoid-riddled colonos who collectively defy the quarantine the army tries to impose upon them.

The opening chapter of the novel depicts the entrance of Ernesto and his father into the ancient Inca capitol of Cuzco where they are to stay with a distant relative who they refer to as el Viejo—the Old Man—who is described as an avaricious landowner from whom Ernesto’s father hopes to receive a favor. Ernesto is enchanted by the enormous Incan walls of stone that line the streets. They seem to him to be alive, their undulating lines flow and move like rivers. He admires them, and feels a vibration emanating from them, as if—he says—they were speaking in Quechua. The walls inspire a flood of associations with, and memories of, the Quechua-speaking communities in which he has lived, and he speaks aloud to the walls as if answering their live speech, improvising as he speaks on refrains from huaynos. ⁶ Through his communion in Quechua with the Incan walls, Ernesto links himself to Andean collective memory and history. He intuits the violence of that history in the stark juxtaposition between the Inca walls and the Spanish colonial construction which sits atop them. When Ernesto asks his father who lives inside the mansions, his father tells him that other greedy landowners like el Viejo live in them. Surprised, Ernesto asks his father if the Inca allows them to live there. When his father responds that the Incas are dead, Ernesto defiantly claims

Ernesto’s perception of the power of the stones is a kind of moral judgment, of course, but it also seems to stand for an Andean world view in which the human and natural worlds are intimately intertwined. This world view lies in opposition to the disaggregating subject–object perspective of the conquerors that, in part, legitimizes their domination. As Julio Ortega (1982) has argued, Ernesto’s incantatory denunciation of the landowners in this chapter is an attempt to validate the capacity of an Andean mode of perception and communication to contest the ideology of domination, to talk back to power. Thus, Ernesto here becomes, like Arguedas himself, a kind of emblem of Andean consciousness, a figure who defies and denounces the oppressive social order of his world, and whose voice embodies the creative, constructive possibilities of Andean cosmovision.

These are important observations about Ernesto’s bilingual Andean identity and consciousness, and they are representative of the interpretive perspective used by most scholars and critics to understand the novel. Nonetheless, the opening chapter of the novel also tells a story of masculinity. This is, after all, the intimate story of a boy traveling with his father, a boy who longs desperately for tenderness and human connection. It is a story of a boy whose ways of thinking and feeling and being are at odds with everything that characterizes the world around him—including its models of masculinity. In the opening chapter, along with Ernesto there are three other characters, all men, to whom Ernesto relates. They are his father, el Viejo, and the pongo or servant who works for the Viejo. Ernesto’s interactions with these three tell a surprising story—the story of Ernesto’s refusal of dominant masculinity—that I argue enhances the more obvious story of cultural defiance and critique the opening chapter tells.

When Ernesto first meets his uncle, el Viejo, at his house in Cuzco, the old man addresses him with the familiar form of “you”, and asks: “¿Cómo te llamas?”—“What’s your name?” Ernesto answers him as follows:

Ernesto, emboldened by the images of Cuzco which accompany him is “prepared” for el Viejo and refuses to be subjugated by his familiar address. By denying him his name, he refuses his authority. This act of defiance constitutes a symbolic reversal of the violent subordination of quechua speakers by Spanish-speaking señores, a reversal that bears striking generic similarity to the stories of reversal that are so popular in Andean oral traditions. However, at the same time, it is important to see that it is also a symbolic refusal of el Viejo’s model of masculinity. Ernesto feels a visceral dislike for the old man and is appalled by the violence that underwrites his status, comfort, and confidence. He refuses to comply with the norms of communication with the old man because it would compromise what he knows: that the old man’s power and authority are based upon a way of relating to others that is violent and abusive, even if in this case he finds himself on the benevolent, familial side of that violence. He refuses, in other words, his insider status in a tradition of male privilege, and appeals in its place to an identity in another (perhaps imagined) line of male inheritance: I am named after my grandfather. Sarah Ahmed (2006), in her phenomenological account of gender, argues that one inherits normative gender as a kind of social gift which must be repaid in kind. That is, to say yes to the inheritance of the gender-normative family constitutes an obligation that is repaid in terms of a complicity that confirms what it has received. Clearly, Ernesto’s refusal of the old man’s familiar address constitutes a refusal of the familiar gift of masculinity and its obligations, a refusal that cannot be separated from his refusal of the old man’s economic power or his racism.

Ernesto’s refusal of inherited privilege and its masculinized forms of embodiment can be contrasted with the pathos of his attempts to make a connection with the pongo, the old man’s degraded and voiceless Indian servant. In what follows, Ernesto narrates his second meeting with the pongo (who remains nameless in the passage).

Here, Ernesto addresses the pongo with a combination of tenderness and respect as taita—father—and asks about his origins. But the pongo is a man whose sense of self is so degraded that he sees his origins in terms of the Viejo’s ownership of him. Ernesto asks him an identity question—if he is Cuzqueño—and his answer is “soy de la hacienda” which can mean either “I am from the hacienda” or, more appropriately in this case, “I belong to the hacienda.” The spectacle of the pongo’s psychic humiliation leaves Ernesto feeling terribly isolated and sad. Ernesto’s empathy for him, and desire to communicate with him in his native tongue, is not a strong enough antidote to the accumulated poison of class and race that he has suffered. Here, el Viejo’s imperious masculine authority articulated in Spanish has its counterpart in the pongo’s unlivable silence in Quechua. In sum, the available forms of masculine power and relationality embodied by el Viejo—and made legitimate through the familiar and familial lines of inheritance—are directly responsible for making impossible the imaged forms of masculine tenderness and connection that Ernesto longs for with the pongo, and that he associates with the word taita—father. Ernesto’s symbolic offering of kindness and respect to the pongo is tantalizing because, as a gift whose implied obligation is an exchange of kindness between equals, it raises the possibility of a form of masculinity that does something other than reproduce the inequalities and cruelties of the patriarchal, neocolonial social order represented by el Viejo. Here, in Los ríos profundos, that possibility is foreclosed to Ernesto, and condemns him to a terrible solitude. The rebellion of the chicheras, followed by that of the colonos at the end of the novel, raise in different register that same possibility.

Ernesto’s disturbing relationship with his real father in the chapter is quite complex and reinforces this story of contrasts between what Ernesto desires and what he refuses in terms of his connections to adult men. For example, when Ernesto tries to communicate to his father the surge of feelings and ideas the Inca walls are provoking in him, his father is unable to understand what Ernesto says, nor to accept the overture of intimacy that it constitutes.

At another similar moment, Ernesto’s father responds to Ernesto’s perceptions about the walls by saying “estás alterado, hijo”—a phrase that might be translated, “you’re seeing things, my son,” or, “you’re not yourself, my son.” What is heartbreaking about these exchanges is that Ernest’s longing for father–son connection—expressed in the language of memory, desire, and magic—the father cannot understand. He does not recognize the perception and knowledge contained in his son’s words, nor can he recognize the person his son is when he speaks this way. His son embodies a kind of masculinity—a kind of boyness—that he regards as illegitimate (you aren’t yourself, my son) and confused or delusional. For this reason, he cannot complete the communicative loop of father-and-son that Ernesto offers to him, and desires of him in this scene. In emotional terms, he abandons Ernesto at a moment at which the son needs his presence and shuts himself off to the intimacy that Ernesto offers him. He does this in large part because what Ernesto is asking of him he finds profoundly disorienting. It is not in his vocabulary as a man to stand in solidarity with the son, and to permit his son’s insights to open his eyes to the social history embedded in the walls, and to which his son gives voice in a mythological counter language. He rejects his son’s insights as delusions, and he rejects his son’s way of being a boy as illegitimate, as impossible. His father’s rejection, and the terrible loneliness that ensues, is representative of Ernesto’s gender experience throughout the novel. He navigates the social world in utter isolation, refusing absolutely the abusive and violent forms of male relationality that characterize Abancay. Alone, he depends on memory, nature, and Quechua cosmovision for his sources of sustenance precisely because he finds almost no models for his sense of self, nor for the kinds of intimacy he desires, in the world as it is. Without question, his story is a story of masculinity as much as it is a story of culture and language in the Peruvian Andes. Between the forms of masculinity that Ernesto refuses, and the impossible forms of relationality that he desires and imagines, Arguedas gives us the story of a boy who intuits a way of doing masculinity that, in Ahmed’s terms, is both disoriented and disorienting precisely because he refuses the social gift of masculinity.

Ernesto’s refusal of masculinity runs parallel to his refusal to acculturate to the dominant white world of Abancay. Interestingly, when Arguedas theorizes his own work, as he did repeatedly over the course of his career, he uses autobiographical narrative to legitimize his position as a privileged observer of the Andean world. In his speech in acceptance of the Inca Garcilasco Prize in 1968 Arguedasdeclares

In Arguedas’s formulation, the autobiographical voice of the unacculturated “I” represents a privileged and condensed expression of national consciousness. The translation of personal experience into language is also a translation of the cultural and linguistic conflicts of the nation. Importantly, the copresence of languages is not a simple sign of harmony, or of integration, but rather a measure of the continued incommensurability of the social and cultural worlds which exist side by side in Peru. In fact, to represent the Andean world, Arguedas argues, requires a kind of decolonized Spanish, syntactically and lexically distorted by Quechua.

One might say that Ernesto does as a boy what Arguedas says he does as a writer in subtly disordering Spanish, so that its form might correspond to the Andean identity of his characters. Heteroglossia here serves as a performance of self whose livability depends on the rejection of the already-oriented identities that are available in the culture. I have not acculturated. In a parallel way, Ernesto’s performance of self in Los ríos profundos depends on a subtle disordering of the language of masculinity in ways that leave him, as he says, “fuera del círculo … outside the circle.” This is a contrarian performance of masculinity that—like Arguedas’s quechuized Spanish—is disorienting in its unfamiliarity. To the extent that he disidentifies with the prevalent forms of masculinity that form his horizon of possibilities—the masculinity of his classmates, and of the landowners and priests of Abancay—Ernesto is abandoned to a heart-wrenching solitude. At the same time, as a boy who yearns desperately for alternative forms of relationality, he bears witness to the necessity of an unfamiliar, new form of masculinity in order to make the world liveable, just as Arguedas himself defiantly bears witness to the necessity of hybrid subjectivity as the sine quo non of national livability.

Don Antonio

Aside from his poetry in Quechua, the most ignored texts in Arguedas’s literary corpus are the four stories that comprise his 1967 collection entitled “Amor Mundo.” Probably, the reason for this is that the subject of male sexual degradation and abuse that comprises their content seems awkward or difficult and very hard to integrate into the rest of Arguedas’s oeuvre. However, if one assumes, as I do, that questions of gender and masculinity are central to understanding Arguedas’s literary work, then these texts become indispensable.

The four stories of Amor Mundo—“El horno Viejo,” “La Huerta,” “El Ayla,” and “Don Antonio”—are perhaps better considered sequences of vignettes rather than stories. Each is composed of scenes or moments in the life of Santiago, a young Andean boy who very much resembles Ernesto in Los ríos profundos. Although none of the stories has a conventional plot structure, nonetheless, as a whole, the four stories do end up telling a compelling and emotionally coherent tale about masculinity and sexuality. The protagonist, a boy named Santiago, is witness to horrific scenes of sexual abuse by an older man of the landowning class and is subsequently plagued by a conflict between a wide range of feelings around sexuality that oscillate between desire, guilt, disgust, longing for communion, fascination, and resistance. Like Ernesto, in the end, Santiago refuses the gift of dominant masculinity he inherits from the white world because he so loathes the brutality and sexual violence toward women that characterizes that masculinity. However, while Santiago’s refusal of masculinity is like Ernesto’s in that it mostly turns in on itself and is absorbed by him as anguish, alienation, and isolation, at the same time in the final story “don Antonio” something significant happens that does not happen in Los ríos profundos . In “Don Antonio,” Santiago’s refusal to return the gift of masculinity has consequences outside of his experience: it disturbs the apparent coherence and sense of dominant masculinity for one of its ardent spokesmen, don Antonio, and thereby undermines the viability of its forms. In the analysis that follows, I look carefully at the queer unfolding of this drama.

Don Antonio is a mestizo truck driver who is hauling cattle to an urban area on the coast from the Andean town of his origins. The adolescent boy Santiago has decided to go with him in order to escape a world he finds unbearably oppressive. As the reader knows from the first three stories of Amor mundo, Santiago has been traumatized by a landowner who has forced him to accompany him and watch him sexually abuse various women.He is deeply troubled by the contradictory feelings of desire and repulsion that he feels both in the scenes with the landowner and in his encounters with the demented girl Marcelina. In addition, he has witnessed the open and joyful sexuality of the surrounding indigenous community at the yearly ritual celebration of the cleaning of the aqueducts but, as a white boy, is harshly insulted by the participants when he reveals his presence. The pain of this exclusion, in tandem with his traumatic and confusing experiences with the landowner and with Marcelina, leaves Santiago feeling anguished and alone. It is in this context that he decides to leave the highlands. And it is with this context in mind that the reader overhears the extended conversation between Santiago and Don Antonio about masculinity and sexuality, as they make their way toward their destination. The drama of the story lies in Don Antonio’s psychological and emotional journey, as he tries to answer Santiago’s questions and finds himself deeply unsettled by Santiago’s refusal of the forms of masculinity he espouses.

The story begins with the contrast between the worldly womanizer don Antonio and still-innocent and romantic Santiago. As they are leaving the town, they pass by two men who are singing a love song outside a balcony. Don Antonio makes fun of the love song and exclaims that the girl is probably laughing at all those “maricondadas” (faggot stuff) whose only purpose is false: to trick the girl. On the contrary, the song—with its references to nature and its heartfelt declaration of love—seems to Santiago to be wonderful, “No escierto, don Antonio. Todo es verdad. It’s not that way, don Antonio. It’s all true” (p. 241). Later, after they have come down from the mountains, Santiago wants to ask don Antonio about women on the coast, given the fact that, as he puts, everything is different down here. He is hopeful that sex will be different as well. He begins to ask his question—“La mujer, tambien” “Women also … ” a question whose content don Antonio understands even though the boy does not finish his sentence. “La mujer, en donde quiera, está hecha para que el hombre goce, pues … Women everywhere are made for men’s pleasure, that’s all …” (p. 242) he tells Santiago. With confidence and authority, don Antonio answers Santiago’s question by giving voice to a familiar narrative of male sexual privilege and female subordination.

Curiously, however, it is at this point that a transformation begins to occur. After his initial response to Santiago’s query about women, don Antonio thinks for a while and then tells the boy that he wants to say something else. He explains that “queridas”—lovers or girlfriends—don’t quite fit into what he was saying about women. He can’t quite explain it except to say that he has been in love in the past and that the feelings of intimacy one has for a querida makes them something more than just sexual objects. Quite suddenly, the memory of past loves motivates don Antonio to confess to Santiago that he sometimes beats his wife. Indeed, he reveals that he feels confused by the contradiction between the abusive man he is with his wife, and the good man he remembers from the past who treats his queridas kindly and with good feelings. Curiously, Don Antonio’s admission of guilt and self-hatred is provoked somehow by Santiago. “Tu, no sé cómo, no sé por qué, me has hecho hablar.” “I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but you’ve made me talk” (p. 244) he says. In fact, as he talks to Santiago, don Antonio feels increasingly disoriented. He goes on to make a series of confused and confusing comments about sex that culminate in another surprising, and even more intimate, confession: his real father is the hacienda owner who employs the demented, sexually abused Marcelina, and who wields tremendous influence in town. He is, it turns out, just one of many of the bastard sons of this powerful philanderer. This is, he says, the first time he has ever revealed this secret. Ultimately, this is a secret about don Antonio’s feelings of abandonment and loss, and about the consequences of the selfish, brutal sexual behavior of men. In fact, at the bottom of don Antonio’s rambling monologue, there is a painful awareness of a contradiction between the heterosexist ideology that he confidently espouses, and his more intimate feelings and longings. He expresses a yearning for a different kind of intimacy with women (and for a different kind of intimacy with his own son) than his performance of heterosexist masculinity allows. “Men,” he exclaims with deep chagrin, “are not children of God when it comes to women, they’re more like animals. En eso de ajuntarse con la mujer, el hombre no es hijo de Dios, más hijo de Dios son los animalitos” (243).

Don Antonio’s emotional drama comes to a crisis when one of the calves they are hauling gets his head caught in the side-slats and dies. In a fit of rage at his misfortune, don Antonio gets out, grabs a branch of a tree, and uses it to violently poke out the eyes of the calf. Grotesquely, he then tries to jam the branch up the rear end of the calf, yelling in rage “Así como dicen que ese viejo le hizo a mi madre … Just as they say that old man did to my mother” (p. 245). Clearly, the rage about the calf is merged here with a deeper rage about his father and also about masculinity more broadly. After disposing of the calf, Santiago and don Antonio go down to a stream for water. As they are walking, both of them weep uncontrollably. This is a frightening moment for don Antonio. When he is finally able to stop crying, he attempts to overcome his shame with a compensatory gesture of masculinity. He tells Santiago that he is going to take him to a brothel, exclaiming enthusiastically, “Ya eres mi amigo, mi más amigo. ¡Tan muchacho, tan sufrido, tan pendejo! Now you’re my friend, my best friend! So much a boy, so tortured, such a piss ant!” (p. 245). Santiago responds by bringing him back to what has just occurred: he tells him that at least through their crying they have come to understand that there is hope. Don Antonio responds by returning ferociously to the familiar idiom of masculinity “Hope. Hope of screwing a whore after having cried like a faggot … esperanza de abrazarse a una puta después que uno ha llorado como un maricón …” (p. 245).The moment has passed, he has revealed himself to Santiago, has cried, and now his ego is in danger. His only recourse is to return to the familiar forms of masculinity, despite the fact that they make him so unhappy. But he needs Santiago’s confirmation, and therefore proceeds with his plan to take him to a brothel. In solidarity, Santiago agrees to go with him, but ends up feeling alienated and decides to wait for don Antonio on the sidewalk outside the brothel instead of going off with one of the women he meets inside. In this context, in the final scene of the story, don Antonio feels that he has demeaned himself by going to the brothel, and by taking Santiago there with him. He sums up his shame and self-loathing by making the sign of the cross and whispering a confession under his breath, “Lord, I’ve been with whores. He estado con putas, Dios” (p. 246). In response, Santiago lifts off his hat and waves to him, calling to him, “Adios, adios, don Antonio.” Don Antonio is moved by the gesture because Santiago has recognized him, has understood his deepest anxieties, and yet still respects him and likes him. The story ends with the line “Don Antonio también se quitó el sombrero delante del muchacho.” And don Antonio also raised his hat to the boy” (p. 247).

What has happened to don Antonio over the course of his trip with Santiago? When the trip began, Don Antonio was in the position of an adult man giving worldly masculinity instructions on love and sex to an innocent, inexperienced boy. He speaks to him in the familiar idiom of heterosexist masculinity and instructs him on the routines of sexuality and male power. But in the end, Santiago’s refusal of masculinity has the effect on don Antonio that Judith Butler hopes queer embodiment will have on gender norms.

Santiago’s questions about the suffering of women, his concerns about love and his desire for tenderness and connection with don Antonio, have quite literally disoriented don Antonio. His refusal to adopt any part of the familiar code jars don Antonio from his comfort zone and eventually leads him to reveal to Santiago his most intimate feelings of self-hatred, pain, and loneliness. Ironically, these emotions are the direct result of the heterosexism that he routinely espouses. This is particularly evident when Santiago rejects the gift of the brothel: don Antonio is overcome with guilt and self-loathing. Where can masculinity go if the boy will not accept it as a gift from the man? What will become of Santiago, of don Antonio? When Santiago lifts his hat to don Antonio, it is an act of empathy, respect, understanding, and forgiveness all in one. Something in don Antonio knows this and feels it deeply. He returns the gift: he lifts his hat to Santiago in gratitude, as if to a man of authority. He accepts Santiago’s sign of respect and friendship, but he does so in the shadow of a terrible melancholy that arises from what Judith Butler calls the ungrieved and ungrievable loss that lies at the heart of normative heterosexuality (1997, 132–50). To become a man, don Antonio had to repudiate the feelings that Santiago still struggles to express, and the yearnings he still struggles to realize. For this reason, Santiago’s refusal of masculinity disorients don Antonio, unnerves him, puts him at odds with himself. However briefly, he has glimpsed the loss and disavowal at the heart of his masculinity; he has felt the weight of heteronormative melancholy on his life.

Conclusion

Two important critics who focus on themes of gender and sexuality in Arguedas are SareCastro Klarén (1983) and Roland Forgues (1989). Both argue that the women in Arguedas’s narratives tend to be depicted as either virgins or whores, and on that basis interpret Arguedas’s work in Freudian terms as an expression of a highly conventional, and in Arguedas’s case highly neurotic, masculinist point of view on women. Forgues makes rather grandiose claims on this basis, arguing that Arguedas’s real-life loss of his mother at an early age is encoded in his novels not only in the bimodal depiction of women as whores or virgins, but more significantly as a displaced maternal longing projected onto Quechua language and culture itself, and onto nature insofar as nature is an extension of Quechua culture. My sense is this kind of Freudian approach to the representation of gender in Arguedas is wrong on three interrelated accounts. First, it overlooks the relational character of gender in the sense that it isolates the representation of women from the representation of men, feminity from masculinity. This is particularly poignant when one looks at characters like Ernesto and Santiago in term of how they relate to the forms of dominant masculinity around them. It also ignores the interesting fact that the male characters in Arguedas find sources of recognition and selfhood not only in the indigenous communities but also in strong female characters such as the chicheras in Los ríos profundos. Second, in Forgues’ case, it inaccurately and unfairly reduces the complexities of language, culture, and critique in Arguedas’s work to an effect of Arguedas’s psychosexual male neurosis. This leads to an utterly unconvincing interpretation of his work as politically naïve. Third, it conflates the literary truth effect of Arguedas’s autobiographical texts with the truth. This leads to an understanding of Arguedas’s literary project as a kind of intuitive, natural result of his troubled childhood as a Quechua speaker, an argument that ultimately serves to diminish the significance of Arguedas’s literary achievements.

While I agree that gender, language, culture, and autobiography are probably the basic materials from which an interpretation of Arguedas’s work might or should be made, I think the question of their intersectionality in his work is considerably more complex and interesting than the preliminary studies of Castro Klarén and Forgues allow. ⁸ For example, Ernesto’s story in Los ríos profundos is a story of a boy who, as he describes it himself, is left alone to receive “la corriente poderosa y triste que golpea a los niños cuando deben enfrentarse solos a un mundo cargado de monstrous y de fuego … the powerful and sad current that buffets children when they have to confront a world filled with monsters and fire …” (p. 39). In this sense, Ernesto’s articulation of Andean consciousness in the novel is not only a denunciation of a social order that oppresses Andeans, and an attempt to legitimate the capacity of response of an Andean world view to that oppressive social order, but is also a denunciation of violent masculinities, and an attempt to at least bear witness to the possibility of an alternative masculinity for which he has no model, and for which he gets no affirmation. This is one of the factors that makes his embodiment of masculinity so disorienting to his father, to many of the boys in the school, and to the priest in charge of the school. Antonio Cornejo Polar writes that there is a painful paradox at the heart of Ernesto’s attempts to make connections with nature, with other boys, with the chicheras and the colonos, and to overcome his own marginality and at the same time come up with an antidote to the violence of the world. The paradox is that

The question of masculinity is at the heart of this paradox. He has placed himself at such odds with the gender orientation of the world that he finds himself in a kind of unlivable, impossible solitude. That solitude has everything to do with his resistance to the dominant social order including, quite fundamentally, a refusal of the dominant forms of masculinity. In “Don Antonio” Santiago’s refusal of masculinity, with its palpable effect on don Antonio, augments the significance of that refusal. It turns his performance of masculinity into something much more than a sign of his naïvete or of authorial sexual neurosis. Indeed, insofar as it changes don Antonio’s awareness of himself and makes him question his beliefs and practices, Santiago’s refusal of masculinity gains the status of insight, and therefore becomes necessary. That is, his refusal to inherit the forms of masculinity is a refusal to acculturate, to use Arguedian terms, and this refusal points to the urgent necessity of finding another way of being Peruvian and another way of being a man.