April 17, 2024
This dissertation studies the narrative work of Manuel Scorza, the first Peruvian writer to be nominated to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979. He wrote a series of five novels that describes the lives and rebellions of Indigenous peoples who served as peasants, farmers, and miners in Peru in the Central region of the Andes in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that Manuel Scorza is not an “indigenist” writer like the literary studies say, but rather was both an Andean and Modern writer at the same time. Indigenist politicians and writers tried to incorporate Indigenous people into “civilization.” By “civilization” we can understand the life in society brought to the Americas by Europeans during the Conquest. This meant, indigenous people should give up their culture and join the Iberian way of life. But Scorza offers a sophisticated exploration of Andean ways of living, thinking, and knowing, something that Indigenism failed to consider. Some of the Andean cultural singularities that he elaborates are 1) the communal narration, in which first, second, and third person are combined to create the effect that the entire community narrates key scenes; 2) the idea that in Andean religiosity life does not end with death. Scorza's characters, after being murdered by the Army, come back to life to talk to the living; 3) the interpretation of Andean myths as repetition: events from the past will happen again because time is cyclical. Scorza also has a program and a doctrine to transform the structure of Peruvian society through what could be considered the Peruvian Revolution. In that plan, crafted with Marxist theories, he incorporated Andean philosophy: Peru was not an industrialized society, so the revolutionary force was in the indigenous communities and their forms of resisting coloniality without necessarily rejecting modernity. So, it is possible to understand that Scorza portrays a hybrid culture, just like José María Arguedas and Gamaliel Churata did. Thus, his work is significantly beyond indigenism. The thesis has five parts: Introduction, a conceptual map of modernity, a conceptual map of Andean thought, Andean elements in Scorza’s narrative, and conclusions.