Narrative, Ideology, and the Reconstruction of American Literary History

Ramón Saldivar

Before I present a more detailed analysis of narrative forms, ideology, and American literary history, I should say something about the coordinates of this essay I think that we have reached a point in literary studies where it is no longer fruitful, nor even accurate, for us to assume that we can go directly to a text without first considering the critical presuppositions that we bring to our reading of a text. This is as true for noncanonic texts as for those of the established canon.

It is especially true, I believe, in the case of Chicano literature and its literary criticism as it produces texts that have been systematically excluded from the traditional framework of American literature. Works by Mexican-American authors are absent from the American literary histories, the anthologies of American literature, and from the syllabi of courses on American literature. Spanish departments in American universities have also participated in this strategy of exclusion. This exclusion is by no means innocent. Its effect has been very similar to that of the exclusion from the American canon of African-American art, where as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., describes it "logocentrism and ethnocentrism marched together in an attempt to deprive the black human being of even the potential to create art, to imagine a world and to figure it" (1984, 7).

I wish to suggest a method of interpretation that will provide a ground for the development of a way of reading Chicano literary texts as a group of works that intentionally exploit their peripheral status to and exclusion from the body of works that we might call majority literature. This method of reading obliges us to make connections between the findings of narrative analysis and traditional as well as modern approaches to ideology. Such critical dialectical awareness is crucial in the case of a developing literature like contemporary Chicano literature where literary historians are still involved primarily in the process of establishing the texts in the tradition and resolving questions concerning the issue of canon formation. This work is crucial as a reflection on the primary texts that constitute a tradition, for the dialectical analysis of which I speak both defines the tradition and helps to shape the direction of an art that is, to paraphrase Gates, in the process of "imagining" and "figuring" a world.

Narrative and Dialectics

I begin with the first of my three topics, narrative itself. The problem of narrative structure and of its relationship to the thematic aspects of texts is currently one of the most vital areas of analysis in literary theory. Much contemporary narrative analysis reveals the dialogical nature of meaning.

In Figural Language in the Novel (1984) I argued that with its care for authenticating detail and its passion for credibility and intelligibility, the novel especially among narrative forms expresses a continuing desire for types, for monological readings, for an anachronistic mythos of common understanding and a shared universe of meaning. And yet, in the same breath, the novel never ceases to express the conceptual maneuvering that we all must perform in order to conceive reality, indeed to shape reality, in ways that will make sense to the human mind. The novel allows us to seek, to absorb, and to understand new experiences by discovering new forms and rhythms, "grasping and reconstructing the stuff of social change in the living substance of perceptions and relationships" (Eagleton 1976, 34). This conflict between the contrary tendencies toward monological unifications, single voices on the one hand and polyphonic diversity, what Mikhail Bakhtin has called a choir of voices, on the other, all this makes the novel a particularly important Chicano literary genre.

As narrative productions, socially symbolic acts, and not mere reflections of the ideological formations within which they arise, Chicano novels put ideology to work, exposing the framing limits of what we take as self- evident truths, as common sense (Eagleton 1976, 155). These narrative fictions represent that what appears "natural" in the ways individuals live their lives in society is the result of identifiable cultural matrices. These cultural matrices, the truths that we hold to be self-evident, use the signifier to create truths and set them as norms, as coercive texts for meaning, that claim universality. Dialectical readings can point out the reification of these truths from the constructed domains of a specific history and a particular culture. They allow us to see the production of ideology not as a system of formalized ideas, but as ordinary ways of thinking, as common sense. E. P. Thompson puts it very sensibly in these terms. He says that:

Very rarely in history—and then only for short intervals—does any ruling class exercise authority by direct and unmediated military or even economic force. People are born into a society whose forms and relations seem as fixed and immutable as the overarching sky. The "common sense" of the time is saturated with the deafening propaganda of the status quo; but the strongest element in this propaganda is simply the fact that what exists exists. (1978, 254)

As narrative representations, these productive processes are necessarily figurative and cannot be abolished because they allow social formations to persist, but they can be articulated and analyzed. That articulation would have as its object what Jameson has called ideological analysis (1981, 12), namely a critical exposition of cultural texts that amounts to a rewriting of the text so that it is seen itself as a rewriting...