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The Exhaustion of the Bilingual Tongue: The Failure to Recuperate Meaning in José María Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos

In Jose Maria Arguedas' novel Los rios profundos (1958), the protagonist, a young boy named Ernesto, embodies the friction and subsequent violence that arises from two opposing languages and cultures, that of the neo-colonial Peruvian and the indigenous Quechua peoples. As a bilingual and bicultural child in the process of conceptualizing his environment and forming a notion of self, he struggles to interpret meaning with language due to the harsh external and internal divisions between the frameworks that comprise the power in the society in which he lives. For some concepts Ernesto thinks in Quechua; while for others, he processes information in Spanish. In addition, when these attempts fail to provide a comprehensible meaning, he blurs the border between the linguistic codes and mixes them. To shed light upon the bilingual dilemma and the negotiation of identity that this character faces, I will address the role of the external neo-colonial social system in Peru and its relationship to the protagonist's internal cognitive-bilingual processing system. Based on the research of the cerebral functioning of the dual language mind as provided by Kecskes in Foreign Language and Mother Tongue (2000) and the theory of the exhaustion of the transcultured subject as developed in Alberto Moreiras' article, "The End of Magical Realism: Jose Maria Arguedas's Passionate Signifier" (2001), I conclude that Ernesto's inability to encounter a peaceful compromise between these two systems and languages--whether it be integration into the dominant neocolonial world, the Quechua reality or a mixture of the two--forces him into a place of self-exile where his subjectivity becomes erased. In Ernesto's case, words serve as the means in which he classifies and understands the environment in which he dwells (an inward view looking outward); and on the other hand, they also exist as a tool that groups use to define his person (a view that originates from the outside and is directed inward toward the protagonist). Regarding the latter, it remains evident that the dominant Spanish speaking class in the novel utilizes language to label, manage and organize the happenings of those that they consider inferior. Referring to the relationship between linguistic contact and power in society, Benjamin Bailey states the following: communication and efficiency [are] intertwined with living in capitalist, industrialized, bureaucratized widely literate societies, which privilege certain types of productivity and efficiency [...] This folk understanding [of language] is layered with hegemonic ideologies that privilege language varieties that are associated with powerful and privileged groups in society. (261) Here Bailey reminds us that certain classes use language to exercise control over others with their particular ideologies in order to achieve a goal. Consequently, for one language group to gain privileges and productivity, another linguistic system must be subordinated. In the case of Arguedas' work Los rios profundos, the linguistic power structure in the novel remains embedded in the roots of a deep and painful colonial and neo-colonial history. The entire notion of the colony resides in the dominant Spanish speaking group subordinating or "civilizing" the Quechua speaking natives of Peru. In order to carry out such an endeavor, the empowered class uses language to maintain control over the indigenous population and manage their activities. Naturally, when one community asserts power over another, the latter resists, and this creates friction between the two linguistic systems and cultures. As a result, this tension between the neo-colonial reality and the subsequent subordination of the native peoples affects the dynamics of language on a personal level. In the case of Ernesto, Quechua serves as his mother tongue. As defined by Istvan Kecskes, this is "the language that our mother first exposed us to, the language we try to maintain no matter how difficult it is when living in a country where that language is not valorized, and referring to the language that is closest to our heart no matter how many other languages we speak" (2). …