José María Arguedas’s Poetics of the Novel

Abstract

This chapter studies José María Arguedas’s poetics of the novel focusing on Yawar Fiesta (1941), Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers, 1958), and El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, 1971). Antigenric coupling, a key characteristic of these works, is examined as Arguedas’s response to the challenge of narrating Peru’s historical transformation during the twentieth century, particularly the clash between indigeneity, traditional social relations, and capitalist modernization. Not a literary flaw but a deliberate formal decision, antigenric coupling refers to Arguedas’s use of multiple discursive genres (fiction, biography, history, ethnography, folklore, sociology, mythology, dance, music), avoiding fusing these genres into a single dominant narrative. This chapter maintains that Arguedas intentionally employs this formal manipulation to capture the multiple affective, epistemic, political, and cultural dimensions of a postcolonial country with a predominantly indigenous and rural population embroiled in an accelerating capitalist modernization.