The thesis La heterogeneidad en las crónicas y en la narrativa andina contemporánea, is a study of the application of the term heterogeneity as defined by the Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar to some examples of transcultural literature from Perú. Cornejo Polar identifies literary heterogeneity in those literatures produced by the crossing of two different cultural traditions: the Hispanic European and the Andean. In his analysis, he concludes that heterogeneity does not create a product conformed in synthesis as the discourse of Peruvian nationality shows; rather, it is characterized by divergent and conflictive speeches that it produces. Cornejo Polar understands that heterogeneity is then, the most appropriate theoretical frame to explain Latin American societies as well as their social products like Literature.
In our investigation, we take examples of literary texts that belong to colonial and contemporary times (excluding the twenties and thirties which produced comparatively little heterogeneous literature). Los Comentarios Reales by Inca Garcilaso de La Vega, Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno by Guamán Poma de Ayala, and Suma y Narración de los Incas by Juan de Betanzos configure the three examples of Colonial Literature. The novels written by José María Arguedas in the fifties, sixties and seventies: Los ríos profundos, Todas las Sangres, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, occupy three different moments in relation to literary and cultural heterogeneity experienced by the author as part of his novelistic and personal trajectory.
Continuing with the previous indigenous literary tradition, La Guerra Silenciosa by Manuel Scorza is used as an object of study in a text, which incorporates new techniques procuring a new perspective of literary heterogeneity.
In the last novel original of Laura Riesco, Ximena de dos caminos written in 1994, fiction and reality, tradition and modernity, orality and writing intersect to offer a text that focuses on heterogeneity as the central topic of the narrative. In this case, the intersection of aspects from two different worldviews contributes to build the story in which the novel is developed.
The novels chosen are part of what is called transcultural Literature, a kind of Literature whose discourses come from the conflictive and contradictory discourses created by the the crossing of two different weltanschauung that confront tradition and modernity, orality and writing. At the same time, the authors live and experience their literature as a transcultural writers whose cultural background come from the tensions and encounters between these two different views of understanding the world. In our study we’ll identify the dissonances and divergent expositions according to Polar’s definition of heterogeneity.
We’ll also illustrate how the authors affected by cultural and intellectual mestizaje perceive the subaltern culture as a part of their own identity. This phenomenon constitutes the main topic of our dissertation, focused on Transcultural Literature.