SOURCE: Columbus, Claudette Kemper. “Arguedas's De-Auto-Rized Biography: A Failed? Trickster's Tale.” Latin American Literary Review 21, no. 42 (July-December 1993): 21-33.

In the following essay, Columbus likens Arguedas and his narrator in El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo to a trickster who inhabits “compound characters who, like him, straddle several language worlds.”

Individuality can no longer be contained within the terms of manifest personality traits. In a world of transition and revolution individuality has become a problem of historical and social relations, such as cannot be revealed by the mere characterizations of an already established social stereotype. Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.

(John Berger, The Look of Things, 41)

Autobiography, in focusing on the life of an individual, even a culture hero or heroine, has generally been, as a genre, the province of the exceptional: the rich, the famous, the crippled, the exemplary case...