Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction (Routledge Revivals)

Philip Swanson, Philip Swanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317620280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the 1960s, there occurred amongst Latin American writers a sudden explosion of literary activity known as the 'Boom'. It marked an increase in the production and availability of innovative and experimental novels. But the 'Boom' of the 1960s should not be taken as the only flowering of Latin American fiction, for such novels dubbed 'new novels' were being written in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as in the 1970s and 1980s. In this edited collection, first published in 1990, Philip Swanson charts the development of Latin American fiction throughout the twentieth century. He assesses the impact of the 'new novel' on Latin American literature, and follows its growth. Nine key texts are analysed by contributors, including works by the 'big four' of the 'Boom' – Fuentes, Cortázar, Garcia Márquez and Vargas Llosa.

This book will be of interest to critics and teachers of Latin American literature, and will be useful too as supplementary reading for students of Spanish and Hispanic Studies. It will also serve as a helpful introduction to those new to Latin American fiction.

1

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INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND TO THE BOOM

PHILIP SWANSON

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The two key terms in any discussion of modern Latin American fiction are those of the ‘Boom’ and the ‘new novel’. The terms are sometimes confused but really the distinction is quite a simple one. The Boom is basically the sudden explosion of literary activity which occurred amongst Latin American writers in the 1960s when there was a marked increase in the production and availability of dazzlingly innovative and experimental novels. However, the more general term, new novel, recognises the fact that this type of fiction was being produced well before the Boom and has continued to be produced well after it. Indeed, some of the most important examples of the new novel were published in the 1940s and 1950s (with their forerunners written earlier still), while many critics point to great ‘new novels’ of the 1970s and 1980s.

Defining the so-called new novel is another problem altogether. A rich variety of differing narratives has come to be encompassed by this umbrella label; nonetheless, a number of basic points can be made. Essentially, the new novel can be seen as a reaction against and rejection of the assumptions and forms of traditional realism. In Latin America realism was associated with social observation (usually of backward, rural areas). The traditional novel in the early twentieth century attempted to document reality authentically so as to expose a variety of social ills, such as harsh natural conditions or the brutality of certain social groups and the exploitation of others (like the Indians, for example). In practice, this often tended to result in a simplistic, black-and-white presentation of reality: on the one hand there were villainous landowners and corrupt opportunists, while on the other hand there were idealised peasants and innocent victims. This is, of course, a contradiction of realism: literature cannot claim to be an objective document while steering its readers towards a subjective interpretation of reality. But given that the readers of the time were happy to accept fiction as a mirror of reality, this meant that they accepted a novel’s distortions as truth. The generally omniscient, third-person narrator was seen as a kind of donor of truth or reality, with the reader acting as his acquiescent, passive recipient. The assumption of author and reader alike, then, was that reality was a readily comprehensible phenomenon which could be unproblematically captured and reflected in writing.

The new novel questions the suppositions of conventional realism and its Latin American equivalents, so that (local) social certainties give way to the (universal) metaphysical scepticism of the modern age. Modern man’s crisis of faith in the values and systems which have traditionally guaranteed order and meaning in life has led to a repudiation of the Western view, rooted in Christianity, of a coherent world based on clear principles of right and wrong. Whereas the ordered structures of the realist text reflect a faith in an ordered, meaningful reality, the modern novelist feels that reality is much more problematic, contradictory and ambiguous. It is not something which can be clearly understood and transferred to the written page: therefore fiction must abandon its pretensions to mimesis and/or adopt complex techniques to express a vision of a complex reality. Hence, the subjectivity of reality is put across via the withdrawal of the narrator, interior monologues, stream of consciousness, multiple viewpoints, inner time scales; similarly, its complexity is stressed through structural fragmentation, chronological inversion, fantastic distortion and multifaceted symbolism. This introduction of difficult techniques inevitably changes the role of the reader: no longer a passive receptor, he has to engage actively in the text and piece its parts together, sharing the confusion of the characters as they attempt to find order in their chaotic existence.

Having said all of this, the switch from traditional novel to ‘new’ novel in Latin America should not be seen as too abrupt a process. It is not simply a question of unsophisticated, unambiguous social fiction being ‘replaced’ by ingenious, polysemic universal fiction. For a start, the early-twentieth-century Latin American novel is not as traditional as is often supposed (and indeed the new novelists were really reacting against a notional realist novel which may never have really existed in any pure form). As an illustration, it is worth examining briefly a few of the major examples of the Regionalist novel, as Latin America’s rural social realist fiction was known. For example, the subcontinent’s most famous traditional novel, Doña Bárbara (1929), by the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969) demonstrates considerable ambiguity. Conventional wisdom has usually seen the novel as an illustration of the conflict of civilisation-versus-barbarism.¹ The cruel and corrupt rural landowner, doña Bárbara, represents (as her name implies) the barbarism of the interior, while the sophisticated city-dweller, Santos Luzardo, who attempts to clean up the region, represents (as his name implies) the enlightening forces of civilisation. Yet a closer analysis reveals that each character contains something of the other. Bárbara (whose badness can in any case be explained by her traumatic past) oscillates between ‘malos instintos’ and ‘sentimientos nuevos’, ultimately sacrificing her own interests for the sake of love when she spares her daughter’s life. Santos, meanwhile, is similarly prey to ‘dos sentimientos contrarios’ and flirts with the thrill of machismo and violence. So accommodation of the two traditions is made to seem more fruitful than the swamping of one by the other. The point is that, despite the novel’s tendencies towards simplification and schematism, there is some degree of psychological complexity in the characters and an appreciation of the social complexity of the problem under consideration. Even if the novel does aim to teach its readers, its underlying sense of confusion provides a hint – albeit small – of things to come.

This process is carried a stage further by the two other great Regionalist novels of this period. Firstly, Don Segundo Sombra, published in 1926 bv Argentina’s Ricardo Güiraldes (1886–1927), reverses the civilisation-versus-barbarism equation, idealising the gaucho of the Argentinian pampa and opposing his values to sterile, modern European importations. But, as Beardsell has expertly shown,² the eponymous gaucho hero is dangerously prone to violence and irresponsibility. Moreover, don Segundo’s young apprentice, Fabio, though remaining a gaucho at heart, becomes an educated member of a landowning elite. This is paralleled on a stylistic level too, where there is a similar blend of the rustic and the culto: for Güiraldes – himself a wealthy landowner with a European background – uses language inherited from French Symbolist and Latin American Modernist poetry to describe the rough, tough world of the outback. Thus the novel posits, not a simple opposition, but a complex – if vague – pattern of acculturation. In the same way, Mariano Azuela’s (1873–1952) 1915 novel of the Mexican Revolution, Los de abajo, presents its protagonist, Demetrio Marías, as a genuine peasant hero, but also as a man given to drunkenness, womanising and aggression. Even more interesting is the structure of the novel which strings together a series of only loosely related impressionistic scenes, suggesting the directionless bewilderment of characters grappling with a reality beyond their comprehension. The reality here, of course, is a social one rather than a metaphysical one, and there is no radical questioning of the nature of existence. The point is not that these novels were consciously experimental precursors of the new novel, but that they provide evidence of an unconscious sense of confusion before reality which, even at this early stage, was already threatening to subvert the novels’ realism without their authors being aware of it.³ Add to this the precedent of modernismo – a turn-of-the-century poetic movement which rejected naturalism and everyday reality⁴ – and the stimulus of social development in the form of European immigration, rapid modernisation and urban migration, and some kind of major change on the literary scene was inevitable.

The bridge linking Regionalism and social realism with fantasy and formal innovation is the phenomenon known as Magical Realism (and the related phenomenon of Neo-Indianism): for both these styles involved the assimilation of the technical accomplishments of European writing in order to explore better the nature of an essentially Latin American reality. The term magical realism is much abused and misused (particularly since journalism’s discovery of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa et al., which has led to its being availed of to define almost any piece of fiction that is modern and Latin American). Essentially, magical realism is based around the idea that Latin American reality is somehow unusual, fantastic or ‘marvellous’ because of its bizarre history and because of its varied ethnological make-up. In other words, reality in Latin America is more akin to fantasy given its prodigious historical background, its incredible range of communities and living conditions, its spectacularly heterogeneous geography, and – above all – the indigenous population’s view of life based on myth and legend. This was later to lead to a type of fiction (often associated with Garcia Márquez) where fantasy was incorporated into realistic narratives, with incredible events presented in a deadpan manner as if they were really happening. However, at this point the debate concerning magical realism begins to widen out: now it becomes difficult to decide if the fantastic is pointing to the sheer exuberance of Latin American reality or if it is going beyond this to question or subvert the notion of reality in general.

Perhaps the author whose name should be most closely linked with magical realism is Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier (1904–80). Though his story ‘Viaje a la semilla’ (1944) is plainly fantastic (most notably through its inversion of chronological time) and is therefore closer to the more typical elements of the nueva narrativa, his work is more often concerned with seeking out the magical or ‘marvellous’ in everyday reality. Indeed, he makes this clear himself in the famous prologue to his 1949 novel, El reino de este mundo, in which he coined the phrase ‘Io real maravilloso’. The discovery of the ‘marvellous real’ evidenced in the prologue owes itself to a fusion of European and Latin American influences. Throughout the 1930s Carpentier had been in Paris and, along with Asturias, had come into contact with the French Surrealists. Following his return home at the end of the decade and a highly formative trip to Haiti in 1943, Carpentier began to apply the lessons of Europe purely to Latin America, seeing the surreal as a daily feature of life in his own subcontinent. Hence now, just as his earlier Afro-Cuban novel Ecué-Yamba (1933) opposed black primitivism to white dominance, so the much more successful El reino de este mundo sees native values and voodoo as somehow superior to culture of European descent or influence.

But Carpentier’s two most famous novels are probably Los pasos perdidos (1953) and El siglo de las luces (1962). In fact, the unnamed narrator of Los pasos perdidos embodies the Carpenterian dilemma of a Europeanised Latin American reviewing his impressions of his homeland.⁵ He is of mixed parentage (Protestant Northern European and Catholic Latin American) and, though born in Latin America, has lived largely in Europe and the USA. Thus he is a perfect vehicle for an exploration of the decadence of the North in comparison to the elemental vitality of Latin America. Much influenced by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918),⁶ Carpentier characterises life in the USA and Europe as empty and alienating, the materialism and pretentiousness of New York society finding a more sinister echo in the references to war and concentration camps in Europe. However, when the narrator is given an opportunity to undertake a journey to a remote region of Latin America in order to unearth primitive musical instruments, he is brought face-to-face with a more authentic form of existence.

The contrast between inauthenticity and authenticity is underlined schematically by the opposition established between Mouche (the narrator’s lover in the North) and Rosario (his lover in the South). Rosario accepts misfortunes with equanimity, while Mouche complains of minor discomforts; Rosario reads simple folk tales, while Mouche reads thinly disguised pornography posing as art; Rosario offers native herbal remedies, while Mouche exploits superstition for commercial ends through astrology. Similarly, almost all of the characters in South America are natural and down-to-earth while almost all the characters in North America are shallow and superficial.

Given that the modern world of the North is presented as a kind of perversion of natural norms, it is not surprising that the narrator’s South American odyssey is portrayed as a journey back in time towards a more meaningful form of primitivism. His journey takes him ever further away from modern civilisation and, in particular, the river, which leads him deep into the jungle, is an obvious symbol of the backwards flow of history. For example, the narrator can say that: ‘los anos se restan, se diluyen, se esfuman, en vertiginoso retroceso del tiempo.’⁷ This is, of course, partly what marvellous realism is all about: the idea that communities of vastly differing stages of development can exist side by side in this huge subcontinent, that ‘(el) hombre prehistórico’ can be ‘contemporáneo nuestro’ (p.203). But it is also linked, as González Echevarría has pointed out,⁸ with the quest for some sort of Edenic origin or paradise of authenticity prior to the trauma and devastation of the European invasion. And so the narrator asserts that:

Si algo me estaba maravillando en este viaje era el descubrimiento de que aun quedaban inmensos territorios en el mundo cuyos habitantes vivían ajenos, a las fiebres del día, que aquí, si bien muchísimos individuos se contentaban con un techo de fibra, una alcarraza, un budare, una hamaca una g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Background to the Boom
• 2 Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
• 3 Miguel Ángel Asturias: El Señor Presidente
• 4 Juan Rulfo: Pedro Páramo
• 5 Carlos Fuentes: La Muerte de Artemio Cruz
• 6 Julio Cortázar: Rayuela
• 7 Gabriel García Márquez: Cien Años de Soledad
• 8 Mario Vargas Llosa: La Casa Verde
• 9 José Donoso: El Obsceno Pájaro de la Noche
• 10 Manuel Puig: Boquitas Pintadas
• 11 Conclusion: After the Boom
• Select bibliography
• Index