Review: Luz Elena Ramirez British Representations of Latin America University of Florida Press, 2007 212pp.

Luz Elena Ramirez's British Representations of Latin America is a very uneven achievement. It is a relatively small book tackling a big subject or, to summarise the project in another way, it is a book with ambitious aims that doesn't always deliver the results hoped for – in this ironically emulating the earliest text with which it deals, Ralegh's 1596 Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. The ambitions are twofold: first to look at a number of British representations of Latin America (Ralegh's Discoverie and Schomburk's 1848 edition of it for the Hakluyt Society, Conrad's Nostromo (1904), Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947) and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory 1940 and his The Honorary Consul of 1973) and to extrapolate from them a distinctively "Americanist Archive", that is "some patterns and relationships ….. that confirm the idea of an actual discourse, rather than just a catalogue of narratives representing Latin America." (p. 28). By employing the distinctively Foucauldian term "discourse" we are led to expect some kind of linking between written texts, academic and scientific institutions and socio-economic and ideological practices such as we find spelt out in Said's Orientalism or Mary Louise Platt's Imperial Eyes or even in Roberto González Echevarría's Myth and Archive which offers an "archival archaeology" of the Latin American novel. Ramirez explicitly acknowledges her debt to the work of Said and Platt as well as to other such "New World" theorists as Greenblatt and Pagden but her own attempts to establish anything so rigorous as a distinctive archive tends to dissolve back into something not unlike an old resort to "influences" – "The Humboldt-Williams-Darwin-Schomburgk-Ralegh connection is just one of the many examples of how British writers, scientists, and explorers influenced one another and created a veritable tradition that I call Americanist." (p. 28) – or to the positing rather than the demonstration of shared "rhetorical strategies" that remain rather vague: "These strategies include equating the New World with paradise, endorsing the right of rule in the Americas, stressing the encounter with the other, using the rhetoric of discovery, energetically promoting science and commerce, expressing the fear of going native, and, by the twentieth century, searching for self in a fragmented, modernist, and postcolonial world. It is these features, among others, that make this body of literature unique, and, I shall argue, uniquely Americanist." (p. 29) There is nothing here of the telling tautness of, say, Platt's coupling of the establishment of the Linnaean System and the Condamine expedition in Imperial Eyes.
There is a reason for this that is connected to the author's second ambition which is to attempt to move beyond what she clearly thinks to be the shortcomings of much post-colonial and New World critical theory. Highly as she regards the work of New World critics like Pratt, Pagden and Greenblatt, Ramirez feels that they "tend to focus on one period or geography at a time, rather than a tradition of writing from the 'discovery' onward, hence the need for the broader perspective [her] book provides." (p. 30) Her main object of criticism, however, is "post-colonial (usually Marxist) interpretations" (p. 3). Towards the beginning of the book she announces: "Specifically, I discuss the degree to which postcolonial theory provides an adequate lens with which to examine the British literary, scientific, and economic attraction to countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela." (p. 12) and at the end she returns "ultimately to the hypothesis that these theories do not quite apply to the literature under consideration." (p. 175) Unfortunately this rejection of postcolonial theory (indeed, as far as I can make out, of all theory) leaves Ramirez seriously under-tooled for her own project and the anti-Marxist strain seems to make her curiously unaware of the bias in her own readings, a bias that can lead to catastrophic results.
To begin with, the haziness of her notion of what constitutes a "discourse" does not just result in vague notions of "influence" and "rhetorical strategies" but, rather, to what is more properly described as a kind of shared "attitude" or "orientation" and this is the strain of diffidence or ambivalence that characterises all the writers discussed in their approach to Latin America: "Central to this book's argument is the insight that, contrary to expectations set up by postcolonial theory and contrary to the example set by the British in the Near East, the British in Latin America, at least as depicted in the work under consideration, express a self-conscious ambivalence in the face of Latin America's exoticism, an exoticism portrayed at times as a paradise and at others as a purgatory or even as nightmare. Both consciously fascinated and repelled, confident and insecure, the British in the works I examine are portrayed less as arrogant imperialists and more as risk-sensitive participants in an uncertain, or sometimes failed, scientific, commercial, or expatriate experiment…… Rather than an unwavering British identity exclusively driving the understanding of the other, a crisis of British self-understanding arises as a result of encountering Latin Americans in all their diversity. … The result in such writing is often a paralyzing self-inventory that calls into question Britain's place in the world, demonstrating a subtler self-understanding than postcolonial critics might expect." (pp. 17-8, 19) Up to a point one can welcome this more sympathetic account of the imperialist abroad – that he (it is always a "he") was not all bad, he had his problems too – but it can too easily lead to a rather benign view of the effects of the colonial venture where the colonised should be jolly grateful that the colonisers came along: "One must keep in mind, however, that land and labor were the things that, traditionally, the countries of Latin America were best at producing….. Since the eighteenth century and the Industrial Revolution, Britain's best 'products' have been its capital (that is, its loans, shares, and insurance) and its technology. Thus, given British capital and Latin American raw resources and labor, one might argue that each side of a British-Latin American deal was optimizing its efficiency in what it could offer." (pp. 6-7) With only an occasional glimpse of the violence (it is to her credit that these glimpses are there) of the capitalist-imperial (informal or not) encroachment on Latin America Ramirez's account is on the whole one of a rather benign and philanthropic venture that caused more headaches for its proponents than for its victims.
In the end what must matter most in a study like this (apart from any theoretical or conceptual apparatus that it might bring into play – and we have seen that Ramirez is unsympathetic to such concerns) – is the quality of the readings of the texts subjected to analysis. Here the quality of the readings varies greatly.
In approaching her first and in many ways paradigmatic text, Ralegh's 1596 Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana and Schomburk's 1848 edition of it (and occasionally it is not clear whether Ramirez is speaking of the Discoverie or the Discovery – Schomburk's amended spelling of the original title) Ramirez is faced by the fact that there has been an inordinate amount of scholarship and commentary dedicated to Ralegh's text ranging from Hume's notorious dismissal of it as pack of lies through Harlow's well documented edition of 1928 that places the Discoverie in the whole context of Spanish exploration of the Orinoco and the search, by Antonio Berreo above all, for El Dorado; through Naipaul's brief but moving account, in The Loss of El Dorado, of Ralegh's disastrous two journeys and the changes that had taken between the first and the second – "The New World as medieval adventure had ended; it had become a cynical extension of the developing old world, its commercial underside." – to more recent studies such as that of Neil Whitehead whose 1997 edition of the Discoverie has done much to restore credibility to Ralegh's account and to make a convincing case for his ethnographic achievements. What this scholarship shows is that the Discoverie is a highly complex and diverse text – heteroglossic, polyphonic, dialogic, liminal – to be located in a whole network of discourses and traditions as mazy as the delta of the Orinoco itself – courtly, confessional, mercantile, political – and (like Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain which at many moments it shamelessly emulates) on the cusp of the break between the medieval and the modern world. The best moments of Ramirez's discussion is when she recognises that complexity: "Ralegh's venture of 1595 appears as a transitional one, occurring between the monarchical aristocratic mode of 'finance,' which relied heavily upon courtly influence, and private investments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which initiated free enterprise." (p. 66) "Ralegh was caught between interests and eras: between the defeat of the Armada and Britain's seventeenth century truce with Spain; between privateering and the developing systems of capitalist enterprise; between the love of storytelling and the demand for more accountability in travel writing." (p. 75) and one wishes she had explored the complex heterogeneity of the text more. Instead she insists on describing the Discoverie as a "travelogue" and one cannot but feel that this characterization "flattens" the whole thing. (As if that was not bad enough at one point Ramirez is close to suggesting that Shakespeare's The Tempest is "merely" a "recycled travelogue" p. 39.) Take Ramirez's discussion of Ralegh's notoriously provocative final metaphor: "To conclude, Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead…" (Schomburgk's edition p. 115) – all this elicits from Ramirez is "The image relayed here is one of untapped potential." (p. 71) whereas other commentators such as Louis Montrose have placed it at the very centre of the gender politics of the discourse that bring in not only the rather commonplace (it must be said) connotations of conquest and colonization with patriarchal "penetration", as well as the strange "mirror image" confrontation between the prospect of a tribe of Amazons and the painted effigy that Ralegh bears with him of the "Amazonian Queen", Elizabeth, herself, but also the highly complex political situation of Ralegh vis à vis the court back home whence Ralegh had been expelled due to his clandestine marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton. A similar provocative complexity is to be found in Ralegh's hard-to-credit account of the "chivalrous" conduct of his men towards the native women they encounter on the Orinoco: it might have been some form of compensation for Ralegh's incontinent behaviour back home or it might have been the result of observing native rituals of celibacy prior to prospecting for gold.
I am sure that the Schomburgk/Ralegh combination of 1848 is symptomatic and interesting, clearly bringing together the heroics of the Elizabethan period and the great period of imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. But once that has been said I can't help feeling that Ramirez has little more to say and has to fall back on labouring the obvious so that parallels are forced and the logic of events contorted. The parallels drawn are at times banal: "The parallel between these two world explorers was both an inspiration and an argument for Schomburgk's activities in the Amazon." (p. 60) – Schomburgk had already been to the Amazon when he was asked to edit the Discoverie. Or, again: "Simply put, Ralegh's grand ambition to promote colonization in Guiana becomes Schomburgk's as well." (p. 71) Or, again, finally: "In the same way that Schomburgk offers a corrective to earlier cartographies of Venezuela, so too did Ralegh relate the Spanish history of exploration in Guiana to situate the search for El Dorado." (p. 68). So concerned is Ramirez to identify Schomburgk with Ralegh's text that again and again she seems to imply that Schomburgk went to the Amazon in order to verify Ralegh's findings which is not the case at all, Schomburgk having already, as I have said, visited the Amazon. The confusion of propter hoc and post hoc, of a slippage between "to" and "before", is evident in the following: "In the same way he undertook extensive fieldwork to substantiate The History of 'Barbados, Schomburgk undertook a major riverine exploration before editing Ralegh's travelogue." (p. 60) By the end of the book this shifty logic has become established fact: "In the 1830s and 1840s, Schomburgk retraced the route of Ralegh to vindicate the Renaissance explorer from charges of being a complete fraud." (p. 170)
I think this pressure to make more of a case than perhaps the facts warrant leads to some rather clumsy writing where a number of really rather disparate points are wedged into a single paragraph:
Contemporaneous with the start of Schomburgk's own career as a civil servant in the 1830s, Britain sharpened its focus on Africa and Asia, while renewing efforts in Caribbean and South American territories, territories that would eventually be independent of Spanish and Portuguese rule. By this time, Robert Schomburgk had travelled in the Americas with his equally adventurous brother, Richard Schomburgk. The Royal Geographical Soviet (RGS), which sprang from the Raleigh Travellers' Club, gave credibility to Robert Schomburgk's career as a scientist and a writer. Thus Ralegh's German-born editor fit neatly into British imperial culture by furnishing material and quantifiable proof of his own excursions, excursions in the service of Queen Victoria. The contested border between Venezuela and British Guiana (now Guyana) bears the name of the energetic explorer: the Schomburgk Line. (p. 58)

Unfortunately, this rather ungainly ordering of material is characteristic of the chapter on Ralegh and Schomburgk as a whole where we begin with a brief introduction to Ralegh's text, then an account of the career of Schomburgk, then we have Schomburgk's biography of Ralegh before then going back to Ralegh's landing on Punto de Gallo in 1595 to end up with the problems of Ralegh at court.
Ramirez's tendency to force a point that is barely there can be found again when she quotes one of Schomburgk's celebrations of Britain's imperial success and comments on the language: "Schomburgk's phrasing, with his scientific vocabulary ("offspring," "cultivation") and economic language ("regular system," "articles of use and luxury," and "new fields of labour"), appealed to the Victorian entrepreneurial mind." (p. 63) I would hardly call this language, metaphorical certainly, either "scientific" or "economic" in any meaningful sense of the term and it is interesting to compare this with the passage from von Gentz that Schomburgk himself quotes at this juncture which is far more replete with "economic" language: "Thus the productions of new regions operate to increase the activity and to multiply the commercial relations of the old; this gives new life, extending even to the interior of more civilized countries, and multiplies the objects of traffic; industry produces riches, and riches reproduce industry; and thus commerce at length becomes the foundation and cement of the whole social edifice." (Schomburgk p. xxv). Indeed there are many other moments when one finds oneself questioning Ramirez's readings. At the very beginning of her discussion of Ralegh's text she makes the astonishing claim that "Despite its grand ambitions, the Discoverie of Guiana doesn't disguise the fact that there is little gold to retrieve…..": I would have thought that even the most casual reading would have revealed that it is almost the prime object of the Discoverie to disguise the fact that there is little or no gold to be retrieved.
By far the best chapter in the book is the discussion of Conrad's Nostromo and it is not difficult to find the reason for this: rather than in the line of a British "Americanist Archive", the ostensive project of her book, Ramirez places this text in a Latin Americanist archive and in that way provides a genuinely illuminating reading of the novel. She begins by criticising most standard criticisms of the novel, especially those that turn away from its Latin American specificity to produce allegorical, formalist or otherwise dehistoricised readings – she specifically mentions Said who has claimed that "Readings of Nostromo that overemphasise its political dimension detract from the novel's overall effect" (p. 78) and who has gone on to suggest that "Nostromo reveals itself to be no more than a record of novelistic self-reflection." Indeed the frequency with which "radical" critics of the novel have either ignored or patronised its political acumen is astonishing – Fredric Jameson turns it into a structuralist allegory of the passage from nature to culture; Jean Franco speaks of the limitations of Conrad's liberal ideology; Elaine Jordan rather rashly claims that "Conrad doesn't really know about Latin America"[!].Ramirez claims that her own reading is "deconstructive" and "materialist". This means, in the first place, that she sees the novel as "deconstructing" the "master narrative" of colonialism: "my interpretation of Nostromo centralizes the weak spots of British enterprises and in this way I widen the cracks in 'the master narrative'" (p. 79). This is at one with her impatience with post-colonial studies which she thinks too readily casts the colonisers as villains and the colonised as victims: "an Americanist reading makes problematic both the victim status of those living in a developing nation and the exploiter status of the capitalist power." (pp. 81-2). This leads her to a more sympathetic reading of the plight of the "liberal" and "progressive" elites in the text while not blanching from the fact that the colonised "victims" – the Montero insurgents – are just as much responsible for the debacle of independence as are their "oppressors". This is what, I think, Ramirez means by her "materialist" grounding of the text, going beyond the work of someone like Ian Watt to locate the text in the matrix of a Latin American history and its own historical/discursive archive that legitimises a number of the Conradian stereotypes (p. 85): "Conrad mixes and matches real and fictional Latin American figures to confound the reader. He uses details from the real careers of Carlos Antonio López, the president and caudillo of Paraguay (1840-62); the controversial reign of López's son, Francisco Solano López (1862-70); the dictatorship of Guzmán Blanco of Venezuela (1870-88); and the flight of the writer Santiago Pérez Traina from Colombia (1893)." What is interesting here is the mention of Paraguay for if anything threatens the equipoise of Ramirez's rather "benign" characterization of informal colonialism that pervades the text it is the genocidal War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1872) between Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, on the one hand, and Paraguay on the other – a war engineered, promoted and financed by British interests fearful of Paraguay's indigenous industries. Ramirez refers to Bradford Burns' account of this conflict and concludes on a judiciously sober note: "When read with this account of the War of the Triple Alliance in mind, [Nostromo] calls into question the sincere concern of the British for stability in Latin America." (p. 91)
In fact I think Nostromo offers more. Nowhere is Ramirez more illuminating than when she places Nostromo in the context of the debate between Sarmiento and Martí on the relative benefits of, on the one hand, encouraging Anglo-Saxon immigration, and, on the other, fomenting a hybrid mixture of indigenous and immigrant populations: "One way to read Nostromo is as a battle between the racial politics of Sarmiento and the progressiveness of Marti;……… It is a novel about the land-holding class guarding its privilege, and revolutionaries seizing national resources." (p. 95) On the whole, Ramirez maintains, it is Sarmiento who dominates: "On many levels, Sarmiento is one of the personalities and the purveyors of attitudes that Conrad seems to have had in mind in the writing of Nostromo" and his "Facundo predict[s] many elements of Nostromo's plot, including the Montero brothers, the miners' uprising against foreigners…." (pp. 97, 96) It is to Sarmiento, moreover, that Conrad is indebted for the figure of Nostromo himself whose "appearance and demeanor are reminiscent of the Argentine gaucho (cowboy)." (p. 97; see also p. 162: "Conrad's Nostromo is this kind of man.") It is at this point that one wants to demur: the whole appearance and demeanor of Nostromo – his silver-buttons, his red scarf, his silver-trimmed sombrero, his vanity, his shallowness – is nothing like the figure of the gaucho as depicted either by Sarmiento or that other classic of the Argentine pampa, Hernández's Martín Fierro. Indeed I cannot help feeling that the whole role of Nostromo in the text is one of displacement from the real revolutionary core which is that represented by the outlaw gaucho figure Hernández – his very name recalls the author of Martín Fierro and his whole career of escape from conscription, the death of his wife and the assembling of a small band of rebels beginning with those sent to capture him are a clear echo of the Argentine poem. The revolutionary force in the novel – glimpsed perhaps even in spite of himself (though to think Conrad didn't know what he was doing is simply to repeat the patronising charges as to his ignorance) – is not the Montero brothers, but the montonero guerrilla force headed by Hernández. Montero, Nostromo and the nasty little Marxist agitator (Conrad's racist stereotyping at its worst) are all displacements of a genuinely anomalous and historical "third force" lying in the wings – an anarchic force that would appeal to Conrad's own anarchic spirit. This montonero force, moreover, is in alliance with the irascible Padre Corbelán who is perhaps the one truly epic figure in the book and one with a principled historical consciousness: "'We have worked for them; we have made them, these material interests of the foreigners,' the last of the Corbeláns uttered in a deep, denunciatory tone….., -- 'Let them beware, then, lest the people, prevented from their aspirations, should rise and claim their share of the wealth and their share of the power,' the popular Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco declared, significantly, menacingly." (Nostromo p. 419) In Hernández and Padre Corbelán there is evidence that, far from "being unable to glimpse a possible Third World ideology" (Jean Franco), Conrad's vision has anticipated a future of armed guerrilla movements and Liberation Theology.
Ramirez tries hard to embed Conan Doyle's The Lost World in her "Americanist Archive" and to give it an intertextual richness: "Conan Doyle's lush, exotic location frames a fictional treatment of the dichotomies marking Americanist literature, namely the familiar and the strange, the fascinating and the threatening, the urge to conquer and the urge to assimilate, the intellectually valuable and the commercially valuable, and the found and the lost…. My notion of Americanist discourse unites threads from all of these tropes and narratives [from survival literature, travelogues, scientific treatises, and science fiction] and elaborates on themes that each individual approach misses." (pp. 102 and 123) but the sad truth is that The Lost World is far too light and escapist a work to bear the weight of any sort of "Americanist" thesis. The very trope of a "lost world" isolated in space and time means that any relation to a "real" world or a "real" history cannot but remain tangential. (The flimsiness of The Lost World's claims to a place in an "archive" becomes evident when it is compared to Carpentier's The Lost Steps which, while clearly indebted toConan Doyle's work, offers a virtually encyclopaedic survey of the Latin Americanist archive, as has been demonstrated by González Echeverría.) Ramirez's best hope is in the link she tries several times to establish between Lord Roxton's discovery of diamonds in Maple White Land and the development of diamond mining in Brazil and the parallels this has with Ralegh's search for gold and Nostromo's silver mine: "Conan Doyle's The Lost World suggests an inexorable link between British exploration and Brazilian raw resources awaiting development. The lost world's diamond reserves posit, then, another E1 Dorado, or source of fantastic wealth." (p. 103) This may well be true but the evidence for this in the text is of the slightest if it is there at all. When Roxton and Malone plan to return to the Lost World at the end of the novel it is more in the spirit of a jolly jaunt of a couple of bachelors than any serious proposal to engage in any kind of commercial enterprise. As Ian Duncan has pointed out Conan Doyle's "lost world" is much more of an "English" production than an "Americanist" one: not only can the lost acropolis be traced back to Milton's description of Paradise but the very flora and fauna on the plateau constantly recall Conan Doyle's own native Sussex. And when Ramirez does introduce other specifically "Americanist" links she manages to invert their valencies: that Roxton is modelled to some extent on Sir Roger Casement is acknowledged but the acknowledgement ends in something like bathos: "Roxton's character is more sensational than was Casement, whose actions and (political views about Ireland) got him into serious trouble." (p. 114) "Serious trouble" is a rather anodyne way to speak of Casement's execution for treason. On the other hand, we are asked to take seriously the motivations of the villainous Gomez, whose action isolates them on the plateau, as "authentic responses to British intervention" (p. 115) – a heavy, and barely warranted, political interpretation of the kind Ramirez condemns elsewhere as typical of a "Marxist" "post-colonialism."
Because the "Americanist" theme is quickly exhausted Ramirez turns to other issues: "I address in the remainder of this chapter Challenger's research, Conan Doyle's representation of evolution and competition, his treatment of the mestizo and the Apemen, and his use of craniology to connect Homo sapiens and primates." (p. 105) Not only are these topics not "Americanist" specific – they are the stock in trade of much imperialist fiction – Ramirez handles them with little sense of the humour and irony with which Conan Doyle endows them. Thus she takes seriously Challenger's comically self deluding conceit regarding the deference paid him by the Apemen: "Native passivity and acknowledgment of hierarchies are characteristics from which, the professor thinks, his country-men could benefit: 'their deportment in the presence of their superiors might be a lesson to some of our own more advanced Europeans. Strange how correct the instincts of natural man!'" (p. 110) Again, as with the insistence on the prospect of diamond mining, Ramirez seems to be impressing on the text, for the sake of her thesis, a seriousness of purpose that it hardly lays claim to.
If The Lost World is too slight a text to bear the weight that Ramirez seems to impose upon it, Lowry's Under the Volcano is altogether too big and I found this the most disappointing chapter in the whole book. Ramirez insists again and again on the importance of the "material conditions" of the Mexican context for a proper understand of the novel: "… it is surprising that much criticism of Under the Volcano ignores the novel's imperialist tensions and geographical framework. Lowry describes in detail not only the setting of the novel, but this area's specific characteristics, both geographical and socio-political….I argue that reading Lowry's novel in a context that emphasizes material conditions is imperative… Andrew Pottinger rightly notes that the 'emphases on symbolic and mythic interpretation has seriously dehumanized the novel'. I extend Pottinger's argument to say that much criticism dehistoricizes Volcano, thereby obscuring the material conditions informing the novel." (pp. 127-8, 129, 130) In fact I think that any endeavour to locate the novel literally in its local Mexican context -- even a study as well documented as Dale Edmund's reading of the "immediate level" which ties the consul into a seamy plot of fascist spying and counter-spying -- seriously risks constricting the novel's astonishing range of stylistic and symbolic possibilities. Even when broadening her perspective to situate the drama of deracination and the fragmentation and instability of the subject in the context of the break-up of the British Empire – "It is in this setting that Lowry develops the theme of deracination  that typifies not just the identity crisis of the modern self, but that of the British Empire in the twentieth century." (p. 26) – Ramirez's reading remains curiously limited (even though at one point she credits Lowry with anticipating the phenomenon of economic globalization), insensitive to the metaphysical resonances of the text. This is not to dehistoricize or decontextualise the novel. When Lowry himself protested against the accusation that he had "heaped on local colour…. in shovelfuls" (Selected Letters p. 61) he nevertheless went out of his way to insist on the novel's stylistic, structural, and overall thematic debt to the "churrigesque" architecture (see Selected Letters pp. 61 and 88) of the great churches in Tlaxcala and Oaxaca – "an overloaded and embellished style" (Volcano p. 301), to the palimpsest structure of the Great Pyramid at Cholula, as well as to the massive symbolic resources furnished by not only the Mexican Day of the Dead but also an indigenous hybrid culture rich in syncretic symbolism. Mexico offers Lowry what England, according to E. M. Forster, lacks – a vibrant and alive mythology. That this is Lowry's great, "Americanist" if you like, achievement – a kind of "magical realism" avant la lettre – is testified to in the debt to his work clearly owed by writers such as García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Compared to this achievement Ramirez reading cannot but appear not only limited but even crabbed – and again I think this follows from her ideological stance. It occurs in a small way when, like, Graham Greene, to whose work she turns in her last chapter, she too readily elides the reform programmes of Cárdenas with fascism – "Mexico was alienating its British investors who saw in the rise of fascism a climate hostile to business: the expropriation of British businesses and the harassment of expatriates." (p. 132) – but it is responsible also for what I can only assume is a terrible misreading, or at least a confusion, between Hugh's support for the Republican loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and his support for the Spanish royalists(sic) which then leads Ramirez to the elaboration of an extraordinary historical fantasy: "I believe that Hugh's commitment, and his comrades' devotion, to Spanish royalty functions both as a historical closure and as a cipher. The allegiance to Spanish royalty brings history full circle to the Anglo-Iberian union of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. The end of the rivalry also signals the end of Victorian and Edwardian imperialism and the emergence of a global order (one in which, after a close call with communism and socialism, capitalism will triumph)" (p. 142). This is a delirium that not even the consul is guilty of.
Graham Greene's many essays (The Lawless Roads, Getting to Know the General, Another Mexico) and novels (The Power and the Glory, The Honorary Consul, Our Man in Havana) that take Latin America either as their object or their setting must have made him seem a prime candidate for election into an "Americanist Archive." In the event, however, as far as the two "major" novels (The Power and the Glory, The Honorary Consul) discussed here are concerned such expectations prove to be illusory. For all their parade of a "Latin American" context, Mexico in The Power and the Glory, Argentina in The Honorary Consul, there is little evidence in either novel of any real grasp of a specific socio-political environment. Both novels are far too wrapped in their own theological and moral dilemmas to expend anything like enough energy on their "material conditions" (to employ a phrase much used by Ramirez). Ramirez herself acknowledges that Greene's plots too readily run towards allegory (p. 153) and to just as readily fall back on stereotypes. The Power and the Glory is the greater culprit: almost the only complexly realised characters in the text are expatriots (Tench, Fellows, the Lehrs) whereas all other "characters", apart from the fugitive priest and his nemesis, the lieutenant, are the worst kind of racist stereotypes: the shifty, treacherous mestizo "half-caste" with his yellow eyes and yellow protruding fangs, the fat senior police office, the "gringo" on the run. The priest and the lieutenant themselves are abstractions: to what extent they are so one has only to compare them with the accounts of Father Po and of the caudillo Cedillo given by Greene himself in his The Lawless Roads – his journal of his visit to Mexico that provides the "background" for the novel. In her discussion of the novel, in fact, Ramirez finds herself devoting an inordinate amount of time to discussing the expat figures which leads her to what one can only characterise as a rather banal conclusion: "In delivering this scene [the shooting of the priest] from Tench's perspective, Greene urges the reader to arrive at a characteristically Americanist conclusion: Britain's ambitions abroad are misplaced." (p. 157). This seems to me to both underestimate and overestimate the achievement, such as it is, of the novel.
The Honorary Consul, like The Power and the Glory, is basically an, at times moving, examination of what it means to be a "father" – both as the father of a child and as a priest – and the nature of love and redemption. But once again the Argentine setting is minimal – much, if not all, of it might have been picked up in the bar of the Hurlingham Club. Frequent mentions of machismo and the local whisky hardly constitute an archive.
And here we come once again, as in the discussion of Nostromo, to what is Ramirez's strength and, indeed, what might have made for a more original study: her knowledge of the Latin American archive and the role it has played in English representations of Latin America. This emerges in her discussion of Greene's portrayal of the rather sad figure of the frustrated Argentine minor novelist Dr. Saavedra whose works seem to consist of a curious mixture of Borgesian and gauchesque motifs. It is not that Saavedracannot keep up with the boom novelists, as Ramirez suggests, but that he in many ways embodies some of their problematic contradictions that makes him such a disturbing and anomalous figure. And, again, Ramirez and Greene himself seem to recognise this and, indeed, the importance of what Doris Somer's has described as "foundational fictions": "Greene suggests both the impotence and the value of the gaucho figure… [he] knows that such personas and the stories people tell help form a national identity." (p. 163). In fact I think Ramirez's anxiety to fit the texts she is discussing into the rather precarious "Americanist Archive" that emerges from her study hobbles any examination of the anomalous moments in these texts that refuse accommodation within any such archive.
Finally, it is evident at times that the writer, though on the whole fluent and intelligible, is not a native speaker. The text abounds in errors of language, largely matters of vocabulary but also the occasional idiomatic phrase (on p. 50 we have the expression that writers "hearkened to Queen Victoria's reign" when, clearly, it should be "harked back to…"). In this, and many other instances, I feel that the author has been badly let down by her proof-readers.