Biography and philological conversations in the novel “El cuervo blanco”

Abstract

The article proposes to examine the tension between the Spanish language and the grammar in the novel El cuervo blanco (The white raven), written by the controversial Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo, currently living in Mexico. The text is a hybrid one that explores the thought and the biography of the famous philologist Rufino José Cuervo. The book delves into his papers, letters and books; documents in which the book collects his philosophical-philological talks with European linguists regarding the modalities and idiomatic forms that the Spanish language acquires in Colombia and Latin America. The feature of this book is its narrative form, since more than giving primacy to the events it worries about tropes, drafts, quotes and grammatical effects that build the logic of the documents related to the State language. In a metaphorical level, Rufino José Cuervo is presented as a "black bird with a white soul that has the gift of the gab", that is to say a "white Raven", whose color is an index of its uniqueness, name by which he is identified in one of the letters of the German linguist August Friedrich Pott, but which the narrator changes into the title of this curious book