One Writer, Two Authors: Resolving the Polemic of Latin America's First Published Novel
Estelle Irizarry · Literary and Linguistic Computing · 1991
Computer analysis can bring objective evidence to a polemic regarding Latin America's first published novel, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez), written by the Mexican historian and mathematician Carlos de Siguenza Góngora in 1690. The learned Mexican writer clearly states that he transcribed the story that the illiterate Puerto Rican adventurer Ramírez told him, but many scholars have insisted that Ramírez was a fictional narrator invented by Siguenza's to lend credibility to the tale of naval adventures and pirates. The problem was to ascertain whether the personality of the Puerto Rican sailor was sufficiently strong and unique to leave its mark on the learned Siguenza's written version of his story to differentiate the novel from other narrative texts authored by Siguenza alone. Electronic texts of three narrative works written by the Mexican author within three years of Misfortunes provided examples of his stylistic habits for the sake of contrast with the novel. Some tests were carried out on the complete texts and others on equal samples of 40,000 words. Parameters examined included unlemmatized type-token ratios, lemmatized type-token ratios, sentence length and patterns of distribution, word length, initial words of sentences, and ’plus‘ and ’minus‘ words and constructions Computational evidence supports other documentary and textual research that points to the probability that Ramírez was a real person and co-author of the book.