No one can doubt the impact of immigration on Argentine thought and letters in the nineteenth century. A panacea for Sarmiento and Alberdi in the years before the flood of southern Europeans descended on the Argentine, immigration by the end of the century had reached such proportions that it strained the shaky foundations of the oligarchic state— which explains the emergence of a substantial literature on the subject. By concentrating on narrative, Evelyn Fishburn narrows the potential scope of her inquiry and foregoes the opportunity to explore larger questions of culture and social formation at this moment of intense demographic change. On the positive side, the limitation gives her the opportunity to explore a few novels in depth in order to monitor the changing stereotypes of the immigrant. She prefaces her study with an extensive discussion of the views of Sarmiento and Alberdi, which includes an analysis of the latter’s allegorical Peregrinación de Luz del Día, and concludes with an appendix on the historical background. The body of her argument relates to the change registered between the time novels like Germán García’s Inocentes o culpables, Eugenio Cambaceres’s En la sangre, and Julián Martel’s La bolsa were written, and in which the immigrant is portrayed as a biological degenerate, and 1894-1902, at the height of a period of immigration and of economic prosperity, when a series of novels attempted to show how the immigrant could be integrated into the new environment. These novels, which include Adolfo Saldías’s Bianchetto and La patria del trabajo, Francisco Grandmontaigne’s (himself an immigrant) Teodoro Foronda, and Francisco Sicardi’s Libro extraño, reflect the basic concern with race, with the need for a responsible national bourgeoisie, and with the reproduction of a productive labor force. Though it should come as no surprise to learn that these novels abound in stereotypes and reflect the economic and environmental determinism of the time, Fishburn seems to marvel at the fact that the narrative is uninventive and offers blatant authorial messages only lightly disguised. Yet we have to take into account the fact that literature in nineteenth-century Latin America (and this is also true of a vast body of formula literature produced in Europe) was regarded as a model for social behavior and etiquette, as well as being a symbolic response (as Angel Rama and Fredrick Jameson have pointed out) to social problems. In narrative, this leads to a strategic “managing” and deployment of these responses on the surface level of character and plot. A more dialectical approach might have permitted Fishburn to examine these novelistic strategies in a less judgmental way. As it is, she has chosen to restrict herself to a literal reading, which, though informative and well-done, does not allow her to confront the methodological and theoretical problems raised by any attempt to link culture to ideology during a period of state formation.
Book Review|
May 01 1983
The Portrayal of Immigration in Nineteenth Century Argentine Fiction (1845-1902)
The Portrayal of Immigration in Nineteenth Century Argentine Fiction (1845-1902)
. By Fishburn, Evelyn. Berlin
: Colloquium Verlag
, 1981
. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index
. Pp. 191
. Paper.Hispanic American Historical Review (1983) 63 (2): 414–415.
Citation
Jean Franco; The Portrayal of Immigration in Nineteenth Century Argentine Fiction (1845-1902). Hispanic American Historical Review 1 May 1983; 63 (2): 414–415. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-63.2.414
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