Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

civilized folk marry the barbarians 217
gation over land with Doña Bárbara is not only an occasion for doubting
the very legitimacy of law, if, that is, legitimacy is grounded in natural,
genealogical rights. This is the vexed moral issue of Santo’s legal victory,
his lawyerly maneuvering through fi ne print. In order to win, he is forced
to contemplate all the guilt-provoking issues raised above, by contemplating
the judicial history of entitlement. It began with the indefensible conquest
of the land from the indigenous, natural masters, by his “centaur” of a
grandfather Evaristo Luzardo. If genealogical rights were the grounding legal
rights, then Santos has no more right to the land than does Bárbara, perhaps
less, since the mestiza can claim an immemorial genealogical grounding on
her mother’s side. But, as González Echevarría points out, the incommensurability
between Evaristo’s initial violence and the later law doesn’t stop
Santos from pressing his claim; this produces a moral and semantic undecidability
that makes this novel precociously modern. Too self-interested
to confess the contradiction between moral right and legal rights, Santos is
not the persona for Gallegos on this analysis. Instead it is Lorenzo Barquero,
the once-brilliant law student who dropped out of everything once he saw
through the fi ction of all language; one cannot use it without lying, and one
cannot be human without using it [. . .].
Sensitive to the semantic bleeding between words like right and wrong,
civilization and barbarism, national and foreign, male and female, Gallegos
insists (where Rivera desists) on damming up the leak system of
oppositions, because he is convinced that a system (of grammar, phonetics,
law) is superior to systematic anarchy. However fi ctitious and arbitrary,
rules are codifi able, generalizable, and therefore generally binding in a way
that produces a society. “Although the law does not provide for fi nes or
penalties or arrests,” Santos retorts to Bárbara’s refusal to comply, “it is
binding per se. It obliges everyone to fulfi ll it, purely and simply” (107–108;
176–177) [. . .].
Gallegos is surely reinscribing the excess and dissemination, putting his
fi nger on the wound of language from which meaning continues to ooze
every time he tries to stem the fl ow, every time he stages the binding and
suturing of meaning against the vagaries of roaming cattle, people, and popular
speech. But he nonetheless continues to act out/on his control, staging
it to some—perhaps—temporary effect. The lessons, the branding, and
the whole system of arbitrary proprietary oppositions so nervously repeated
throughout the novel all resonate, of course, with the scene of assigning
ultimate possessive meaning, the morally equivocal legal arbitration of the
land. And read in the context of the shock waves and insistent sutures this
confrontation sends through the book, the scene is the occasion for settling