SOURCE: Rowe, William. “Reading Arguedas's Foxes.” In The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, edited by Julio Ortega and Christian Fernandez, translated by Fred Fornoff, pp. 283-89. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Rowe describes “diaries” in The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below as “an erratic form of writing … that function as a threshold or multiple bridge between the fictional world, the sociocultural circumstance, the weave or Peruvian culture through many centuries, and the life of the author.”

The initial reception of El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo was marked by the concern of the critics over the apparently inconclusive character of the text; they also stressed its supposedly testimonial nature (Arguedas himself uses the word testimonio in his “Diaries”), with regard to both the life of the author and the social world...