A Class Project

El Güegüence, Masaya-Carazo, and Nicaraguan National Identity

National Identity, National Literatures, and the Foreign Eye: Theoretical Tools and the Nicaraguan Case

This chapter's roving description of the interpretations of El Güegüence is shaped by three analytic positionings: the exegesis of national identity as a social construction; the link between national identities, national literatures, and literary discourses, as shaped by state systems of power; and the legitimization of intellectual discourses in subaltern countries, such as Nicaragua, by metropolitan authorities. Below, I discuss these positionings as they apply to the Nicaraguan case at hand.

Benedict Anderson's (1983) characterization of nation-states as social constructions, imagined into existence through nationalist ideologies, now pervades the anthropological literature concerned with national and local identities. Since the mid-1980s many anthropologists have grafted Anderson's insights to the analysis of class and ethnicity in nation-states, leaning heavily on:

the Gramscian concept of hegemony, which describes systems of class domination as reproduced and confirmed through incomplete, contested processes of socialization and enculturation that all individuals within a given society experience; and

Foucauldian linkage between systems of power and bodies of knowledge that further elaborates the naturalization and internalization of domination and subordination in individual and social bodies.

Brackette Williams (1989) describes nation-building projects as explicitly class projects, in which national identities, embedded in nationalist ideologies, are deployed by dominant classes. Utilizing the language of ethnicity to mark subordinate groups leaves elite domination ethnically unmarked and valorized by nationalist ideology: "ethnicity labels the visibility of that aspect of the identity formation process that is produced by and subordinated to nationalist programs and plans–plans intent on creating putative homogeneity out of heterogeneity through the appropriative process of a transformist hegemony" (439).

In recent years, the role of literature–plays, novels, poetry, and criticism–in the construction and representation of national culture and identities has been greatly emphasized, in some disciplines perhaps even more than in anthropology; my discussion in chapter 5 of the culture critics who have written about Nicaragua in the past fifteen or twenty years amply demonstrates this. Much of this interpretive discourse, notwithstanding substantive differences among authors, is imbued with a cultural nationalism that Aijaz Ahmad's (1992) succinct characterizations of post-World War II literary theory and its relationship to world-historical events critique. In doing so, his analysis distinguishes "progressive and retrograde forms of nationalism with reference to particular histories ... [and] the even more vexed question of how progressive and retrograde elements may be (and often are) combined within particular nationalist trajectories" (38). Ahmad's commentary helps to distinguish the role played by elite intellectuals in demarcating and enforcing hegemonic knowledge among Nicaraguan elites about class, ethnic, and national identities from the cultural politics of Sandinista Nicaragua, and how El Güegüence has been used in both discourses before, during, and since the revolutionary period. Doris Sommer (1991) has also underscored the construction of national identities through deployments of national literatures by Latin American states, working with feminist, Gramscian, and Foucauldian theories. Sommer links the romantic love between individuals of different classes and ethnic groups in important Latin American novels to state-led nation-building projects. Such novels, canonized as national literatures, establish "a metonymic association between romantic love that needs the state's blessing and a political legitimacy that needs to be founded on love" (41). Heterosexual romantic love thus becomes a cornerstone of the state and the nation, and intermarriage between social sectors weaves together a national identity sanctioned by the state.

Although I agree with Sommer's insights, it is then curious indeed that elite Nicaraguan intellectuals focused on El Güegüence, in which interethnic, interclass miscegenation between the governor's daughter Suche-Malinche and Güegüence's son Don Forsico is neither romantic nor necessarily (re)productive, but rather the result of chicanery and farce. Moreover, whereas Sommer understands the metonym between heterosexual romance, interclass and interethnic miscegenation, and the building of nation-states as allegorical, I understand El Güegüence as a parable. Yet Sommer's work constitutes a reminder to attend to the specifics of how novels and literary discourses become a part of national power structures. In the Nicaraguan case, although important elite literary intellectuals such as Pablo Antonio Cuadra and José Coronel Urtecho might have held only minor bureaucratic jobs under Somocismo, their published work performed enormously important roles in legitimizing the hegemony of Somocismo as a state and a social system, and thus the particular forms of knowledge about Nicaraguan culture and identity shaped by Somocismo.

This chapter consequently focuses on authors who best illustrate the way literature and its discourses, about El Güegüence in particular, build national culture and identity. I do not pretend to discuss all authors, Nicaraguan or foreign, who have written about El Güegüence; and I am hardly the first writer, by any means, to attempt a historiographical treatment of the El Güegüence literature. The principal contemporary historiographer of El Güegüence, Jorge Eduardo Arellano, a distinguished Nicaraguan man of letters through several decades of political and intellectual upheaval, has used his authority to elegantly and comprehensively reify the dominant interpretations of El Güegüence. I both use Arellano's work and turn around and analyze his work, for he offers a prime example of the relationship between an intellectual and the nation-building projects of successive states. By tracing the demarcation of Nicaraguan culture through the discourse about El Güegüence in a more or less chronological sequence of selected authors' treatments of the play, I show that the textual appearance of El Güegüence at the end of the...