The Destructive Persistence of Myths and Stereotypes:
Civilization and Barbarism Redux in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto
Jane Marcus-Delgado, Ph.D.
Between December 1996 and April
1997 members of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) held over seventy
men captive, sequestering them in the
Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto is a fictionalized account of this hostage crisis. In her work, Patchett not only re-writes the horrific events of this lengthy conflict, but also complicates its dynamics by creating participants who represent a wide range of nationalities, ethnicities, classes, and linguistic groups. She also introduces female as well as male characters, creating a complex series of juxtapositions within the confines of the work’s cloistered setting. Although at first glance the novel appears sympathetic in portraying the relationships and love interests that develop among its diverse cast of characters, it ultimately reinforces the age-old stereotypes of the good, innocent European/Americans versus the bad, unwashed Primitives, saviors versus sinners, and the triumph of civilization over barbarism.
This essay focuses on the evolution
of the traditional binary of civilization versus barbarism in
U.S./European-Latin American relations and its political consequences. It
contains three sections: first, an overview of the historical “clash of
civilizations” articulated in writings about and from
Before turning to this analysis,
the following briefly describes Patchett’s retelling of the events. In the
novel, as in real life, a group of rebels invades a large gathering of
dignitaries at a party. They take the group hostage at gunpoint, allowing
nearly all of the women and elderly to leave within a few hours – except for
one. She is the central figure in the novel – a
Creating National Identity: The
Myth of Civilizing the
The French conceived of the notion of civilization in the
eighteenth century to distinguish themselves from those they deemed to be
“barbarians.” As Samuel Huntington
writes,
Civilized society differed from primitive society because it was settled, urban and literate. To be civilized was good, to be uncivilized was bad. The concept of civilization provided a standard by which to judge societies, and during the nineteenth century, Europeans devoted much intellectual, diplomatic, and political energy to elaborating the criteria by which non-European societies might be judged sufficiently ‘civilized’ to be accepted as members of the European-dominated international system. (40-41)
Throughout the nineteenth century, as the former colonies in
Si un destello de literatura nacional puede brillar momentáneamente en
las nuevas sociedades americanas, es el que resultará de la descripción de las
grandiosas escenas naturales, i sobre todo, de la lucha entre la civilización
europea i la barbarie indíjena, entre la intelijencia i la material….(47)[1]
At the same
time, Sarmiento exhorted his nation to open its doors to increased European
immigration, asking, “[D]espues de la
Europa, hai otro mundo cristiano civilizable i desierto que la América? (16).
If only the territory were populated with white Europeans – he would also
accept U.S. Americans – its problems would be solved. Having spent time as his
nation’s envoy to the
While white
females have often been depicted as symbolizing – or literally facilitating –
civilization in the new American nations, Latin American women have been
frequently associated with untamed nature, loose morals, and barbarism. Frederick Pike clearly delineates this
prostitute/schoolmarm distinction, categorizing among the former group Indians,
Asians, Blacks, and Mexicans. In fact,
The
“primitive” American woman – depicted repeatedly in
In a chapter called, “Los amansadores,” the novel simultaneously describes a ranch hand’s domestication of a wild horse named Catira and Luzardo’s “taming” of Marisela. The text juxtaposes the two females, debasing the latter to the level of a wild animal:
Laborioso fue el amansamiento, porque la Catira tenía un ‘corcoveo
jacheado’ que había de ser muy a caballo para mantenérsele encima…
—¿Cómo va la Catira, Carmelito?—solía preguntarle
Luzardo.
—
¡Ahí,
doctor! Ya está cogiendo el paso. ¿Y a usted, cómo le va en lo suyo?
Se refería a la tarea de la educación de Marisela, emprendida por
Santos.
También Marisela tenía un ‘corcoveo jacheado’. No porque le costase
trabajo aprender, sino porque de pronto se enfurruñaba con el maestro (622).
As Luzardo continued to train Marisela, she resists his
efforts and pleads repeatedly, “Déjeme ir
para mi monte otra vez” (622, 623, 625). But Luzardo is determined to mold
her vocabulary and behavior, “[E]n cuanto a modales y costumbres, los modelos
eran señoritas de Caracas” (623). Her sexual “looseness” is also
not-too-subtly implied, as she and the mare Catira shared the “...’[c]orcoveo
jacheado’ que había de ser muy a caballo para mantenérsele encima....” (622). Having moved into the ranch, Marisela clearly allowed her
education to extend into the bedroom. Luzardo corrected her vocabulary
throughout the day, but “Las lecciones propiamente, eran por las noches” (623). Marisela eventually submits to
him – with civilization once again triumphant – and his victory is proven when
she finally asks him to give her a lesson one night. The comparison to the resistant mare
resurfaces, with the narrator’s observation: “Lo mismo que la Catira, que
después de unos corcoveos cogía el paso por sí sola” (625).
Gallegos and Sarmiento shared the common political missions of nation-building – each became his country’s president – and sought to shape national identity by asserting their ideals of hegemonic authority in society. Each worked to subjugate, convert, or eliminate existing cultures by forcing upon them language, music, art, literature or other trappings of “high culture” while negating the value of their own traditions and experiences. And each victory, following Doris Sommer’s argument, involved the Gramscian concept of “conquering the antagonist through mutual interest, or ‘love’ rather than coercion” (Sommer 6).[2] In fact, the teaching of language, music, art, and “high culture” have long served the elite classes as instruments of domination – from the earliest missionaries who arrived in Latin America to today’s globalized versions of cultural and economic imperialism.[3] As Marianne Torgovnick writes, “[s]ooner or later those familiar tropes for primitives become the tropes conventionally used for women. Global politics, the dance of colonizer and colonized, becomes sexual politics, the dance of male and female” (17).
Patchett’s twenty-first century rendition of such a culture clash strays little from those written decades ago: it creates a scenario in which a white North American woman finds herself in a “barbaric” hostage situation in a poor country, and proceeds to teach, civilize and win the love of all who surround her. She does so by introducing them to highbrow art music, which makes them not only forget their political aims and motivations, but also convinces them to reject their own way of life and embrace Western ways. Her efforts are supported by Gen, the Japanese translator who serves as an intermediary between the rebels and the international hostages, and who also becomes a teacher of many and lover of one of the natives, Roxane Coss’ darker-skinned foil.
Civilization
and Barbarism in Bel Canto
The irony of Bel Canto is that music embodies both its most truly civilized and most barbaric elements. From the very beginning, the Latin American rebels are drawn to the opera singer because of the beauty of her song – not for its words, but for its sound. As they wait in air conditioning ducts for their moment to attack, they overhear Roxane’s singing:
When a girl in their village had a pretty voice, one of the old women would say she had swallowed a bird, and this is what they tried to say to themselves as they looked at the pile of hair pins resting on the pistachio chiffon of her gown:... but they know it wasn’t true. In all their ignorance, in all their unworldliness, they knew there had never been such a bird (24).
As the crisis unfolds, the hostages from every country, speaking a vast array of languages, fall in love with the sound of Roxane’s singing. They are bound together physically, but are also united by their primordial attraction to the music. And it is that music, as Nietzche reminds us, that gives birth to tragedy—an intensity of emotions and experiences that provides life with meaning:
For a brief moment we become, ourselves, the primal being, and we experience its insatiable hunger for existence. Now we see the struggle, the pain, the destruction of appearances, as necessary, because of the constant proliferation of forms pushing into life, because of the extravagant fecundity of the world will. We feel the furious prodding of this travail in the very moment in which we become one with the immense lust for life and are made aware of the eternity and indestructibility of that lust. Pity and terror notwithstanding, we realize our great good fortune in having life—not as individuals, but as part of the life force with whose procreative lust we have become one... Our study of the genesis of Greek tragedy has shown us clearly how that tragic art rose out of music... (Nietzche 102-103).[4]
Both the hostages and the rebels reach a higher understanding and appreciation of their existence while in captivity than ever before. The Japanese businessman, Katsumi Hosokawa, falls in love with Roxane and her music, “Her voice stays inside him, becomes him. She is singing her part to him, and to a thousand other people. He is anonymous, equal, loved” (50). His life is completely transformed:
Everything that Mr. Hosokawa has ever known or suspected about the way life worked had been proven to him to be incorrect these past months... Where there had been a respectable family that functioned in the highest order, there were now people he loved and could not speak to. Where there had been a few minutes of opera on a stereo at bedtime, there were now hours of music every day, the living warmth of voice in all its perfection and fallibility, a woman in possession of that voice who sat beside him laughing, holding his hand (228).
The priest, Father Arguedas, is similarly enraptured: “What a blessing he had received in his captivity. The mysteries of Christ’s love had never been closer to him, not when he said mass or received communion, not even on the day he took holy orders. He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow....(156). And the rebel, Carmen, expresses, “[T]his was the happiest time of her life and it was because of the music. When she was a child dreaming on her pallet at night, she never dreamed of pleasures like these” (156). The Russian hostage also declares his love for the opera singer, the gruff rebel leader General Benjamin lays down his weapon and begins to pass his days playing chess, and the uncultured “native” Cesar finds that love awakens his natural talent for opera: “He was only a boy who loved her by singing. Or was it singing he loved? He could no longer remember. He was too far inside...” (267). The music puts the characters in touch with the essence of their true being, reaching Nietzche’s Dionysian state of “primordial unity,” and grasping their “great good fortune in having life—not as individuals, but as part of the life force with whose procreative lust [we] have become one...” (Nietzche 103).[5]
Unfortunately, while the text
recites the mantra of music as the universal language, it simultaneously
asserts the superiority of Western art music over “lesser” forms of cultural
expression. Indigenous music – of which there was an abundant collection in the
vice president’s house, where the novel takes place – was held in low regard by
the hostages. In contrast, though, before they are “saved” by Roxane’s music
the Peruvians appreciated their native music. The vice president “seemed only
to have a taste for local music. All of his CDs were of bands playing
high-pitched pipes and crude drums. The music gave Mr. Hosokawa a headache. The
Generals, however, found it inspiring and would not grant requests of new CDs”
(133). The “high-pitched pipes and crude drums” disparagingly described
undoubtedly represent the centuries-old tradition of Andean music, its
existence rendered worthless without the recognition and appreciation of
Western ears. Just as there are women in the villages who sing as if they had
swallowed a bird, other voices are equally exceptional. When Roxane discovers,
to her astonishment, that the rebel Cesar has an outstanding voice, she begins
to teach him: “He sang every line, every scale, as if the singing would save
his life. He was settling into his own voice now and it was a voice that amazed
her. It would have lived and died in a jungle, this voice, if
she hadn’t come along to rescue it” (307-308). Thus, the voice not heard in civilization is
assumed to be at best, inferior, and at worst, silent.
In fact,
music has played a crucial role in the assertion of Western primacy for
centuries. In the 1800s, as
But opera also became the vehicle through which cultural hegemony could be conveyed, as its words delivered messages charged with political, ethnic, racial and gender-biased content. Indeed, for Nietzche opera signified a rupture with the purity of music’s aesthetic function; it destroyed the unity of human existence and became a means to express individual self-interest:
Opera is the product of the man of theory, the critical layman, not the artist... Since the demand, coming from essentially unmusical people, was for a clear understanding of the words, a renascence of music could come about only through the discovery of a type of music in which the words lorded it over counterpoint as a master over his servant (115-116).
As the novel purports a normative hierarchy within music,
privileging Western art, it goes further and glorifies opera as an even higher
form of expression. Thus it is not only the musical form that the civilized
must appreciate, but they necessarily must learn to understand the language in
which it is written, and to accept the values and norms it conveys. This is the crux of the
civilization and barbarism distinction: the dominant powers devalue, eliminate
and replace the pre-existing culture – language, traditions, values,
notions of beauty, religion, music, and art – and install one they deem
superior. It is an abhorrent practice when carried out militarily, but perhaps
even more insidious when conducted in the name of love. It is a tradition that
is repeated endlessly in dynamics between wealthier, more powerful societies
against their poorer counterparts, as this essay has explored. In
The
Anti-Heroine: Carmen
Conspicuously absent from Bel Canto is any mention of the Peruvian characters’ lives or the reason for their boldly political act of terror. In fact, the novel continuously devalues and belittles the nation and culture in which it is set, describing the rebels as if they were animals, screaming, mimicking and jumping up and down when seeing television for the first time (115); with Beatriz not knowing what a watch was for or how to tell time (169); Cesar climbing a tree to escape embarrassment (269); Ishmael following the vice president around “like a dog” (269); and Carmen rejecting her own beauty because it was “too coarse, too dark. At home some people had called her beautiful but now she had seen beauty and knew it was something she could never possess...” In contrast, she admires the ideal of Western beauty, “Yellow hair, blue eyes, skin like white roses brushed in pink. Who would not be in love with Roxane Coss?” (204). There are only mocking references to the rebels’ mission, which fails because of the absence of its primary target, the nation’s president. The latter is made to look ridiculous as well, as he has opted to watch a soap opera rather than attend to his official duties (10).
Indeed, there is no figure in the novel who more clearly represents the civilization and barbarism distinction than Carmen, the young rebel who “seduces” Gen. In the tradition of Gallegos’ Marisela, the Quechua-speaking native begs the translator to teach her Spanish, as well as English. They begin a secret, unequal love relationship that mirrors the more proper interactions of Roxane and Mr. Hosokawa. Carmen serves as the ignorant, primitive foil to the clean, saintly and well-educated opera singer, a contemporary replication of the age-old Latin American prostitute and white schoolmarm dichotomy.
Her role as the dark “barbarian” is further reinforced by the novel’s emphasis on opera and its seductive qualities. In fact, Father Arguedas cites Bizet’s opera Carmen as one of the works that tempts him to think carnal thoughts, “When he suffered from any feelings of questionable discomfort, he simply rectified the situation by not reading the libretti.... Sadly, there were times when the lust came through the music rather than the words. Having no understanding of French did not keep a priest safe from Carmen. Carmen gave him dreams... (53). And, of course, the title character of the opera is a Spanish gypsy who lures the virtuous Don José away from the pure, lighter-skinned Micaela into a life of crime.
In fact, Bizet’s Carmen can be considered a fairly
typical manifestation of the nineteenth century French definition of
civilization discussed earlier. Although the opera is based on a novel by
Prosper Merimée, its two librettists Halevy and Meilhac converted the original
story to fit the audiences’ preferences in 1875
Like its citizens, the country
itself is described as “ridiculous” (70) and a place that Mr. Hosokawa only
agreed to visit after being assured that Roxane Coss would be there to perform
for his birthday celebration. It is portrayed as a barbaric nation, where
people live in the jungle and even terrorists cannot remember what they are
fighting for. Disturbingly, the novel explicitly refers to its Peruvian
setting, mentioning local drinks (pisco
sours), the light rain or drizzle of the coastal areas (garúa), and regional expressions (requetebueno), as well as lampooning its
former Japanese-Peruvian president. Why,
then, does the text never name the country where it takes place? Even the
book’s back cover describes its location as “somewhere in
In the end, soldiers storm the
house, freeing the hostages and gunning down the rebels. The two characters
wielding the most power – Gen, for his ability to speak everyone’s language and
Roxane, for her music – survive the ordeal and move to
The Politics of “Civilized”
Discourse
As a
But naming Latin Americans (or other residents of so-called “developing” countries) as uncivilized or primitive is not merely farcical. It justifies any number of political actions – ranging from covert support of opposition parties to militarily overthrowing uncooperative regimes. As Marianna Torgovnick eloquently articulates, this labeling has repeatedly rationalized aberrant behavior in Western foreign policies:
[I]deas about primitive societies, and,
very important, the persistent Western tendency to process the third world as
‘primitive’ have made things happen in the political world. Many events in this
century would have been less possible without operative notions of how groups
or societies deemed primitive become available to ‘higher’ cultures for
conquest, exploitation, or extermination: the partition of Africa, the invasion
of Ethiopia, the Nazi ‘final solution’ for Gypsies and Jews, for example.
Events closer to us in time have similarly been influenced by shifting views of
what is or is not primitive:
That Bel Canto re-tells the story of the Peruvian hostage crisis of 1996 – 1997 falls squarely within the dynamics of the sort of “primitivist discourse” that Torgovnick describes. As long as the first world persists in portraying residents of the third world as faceless, dangerous and subhuman, it can continue to exploit, invade, and dominate at will. This discourse creates conditions of fear and distrust in the imperial population, rationalizing military, economic, political and cultural aggression. Whether based in reality or in fiction (or a blurring of the two), it is an effective tool of political propaganda, as J.M. Coetzee observes in Waiting for the Barbarians:
[S]tories began to reach us from the capital of unrest among the barbarians... The barbarian tribes were arming, the rumour went; the Empire should take precautionary measures, for there would certainly be war. Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. These dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Show me a barbarian army and I will believe (8).
In the case of
Bel Canto blurs the line between fact and fiction, and as such becomes one version of the truth. As it interprets reality, it shapes it, either creating new concepts and images of people and places, or reinforcing existing ones. When speaking in the voice of the hegemon, the Western novel must understand the power of its words and the consequences of its discourse. Not to do so would be nothing less than barbaric.
[1] According to González Echevarría (I), Sarmiento attempted to reform and simplify the Spanish language by eliminating the letter y, which represents the same sound as the i. Although his efforts failed, some subsequent editions of Facundo remain faithful to the author’s original orthography.
[2] Sommers’ Foundational Fictions refers specifically to the national romantic novels that emerged during the foundational period of Latin American nation-building. She discusses an “erotic of politics” in which patriotism and romantic love are inextricably intertwined, and heterosexual relationships served as catalysts for successful domestic governance and civil society.
[3]
Frederick Pike observes that in the post-WWII period, the
[4] In many ways Nietzche’s
complex intermingling of the Apollonian and Dionysian elements that combine to
create tragedy can in themselves be interpreted as
reflections of the civilization and barbarism distinctions. The notion of
barbarism was created to give life to that which was “civilized,” and one
cannot exist without the other – the Dionysian – unfettered, free, and natural
(and often viewed as feminine)– can be compared to the masculine order that is
Apollonian in a way that mirrors “primitive” cultures versus civilizations.
[5] For a discussion of differing views of the role of music in Nietzche’s Birth of Tragedy, see Heckman. It is unclear whether Nietzche viewed art as a vehicle of truth, or one that provides illusions rather than truth. Although his later writing altered somewhat his position on art, he clearly maintained a strong association between music and “the world will” (Heckman 357).
[6] Deborah Weisgall interviewed Ann Patchett about the notion that Bel Canto was about the “redemptive power of art,” asking, “[B]y the end of the book, you make the argument that art is the only possible redemption. But on the other hand, art can save nobody.” Patchett responded: “Heavens! Roxane did redeem them. She gave them all freedom, beauty, love. She gave them art, in many cases introduced them to art. Their lives were shorter than they should have been, but at least they had a little while to know brilliance. What does it mean to be saved? What if opera takes on the role of faith, what if it saves the soul?” In other words, not only does the text imply that exposure to high Western art “saves” or “redeems” the rebels, the author apparently believes it as well.
[7] On Western intellectuals’ complicity in furthering economic interests at the expense of subaltern groups, see Spivak’s brilliant essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
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Comisión
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