Many of the Latin American writers publishing before the 1920s were so deeply concerned about national culture debates and so intensely engaged in political dialogue that aesthetics were secondary. This was not the case for short story writer Horacio Quiroga or for many of the novelists of this second moment of desiring to be modern who were publishing in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of these novelists were more gifted in dealing with questions of aesthetics and creating viable experience for readers than most of their predecessors and many of their peers. A group of established novelists as well as beginners with modernist aesthetics published noteworthy fiction during this period. The desire to be modern took the Latin American writer in two general directions—toward a traditionalist’s reaction against modernity and toward an embracing of modernity in the mode of the vanguardia.
Among novelists interested in modernity were the writers interested in exploring the possibilities of New Worldism or
criollismo who were profoundly concerned with issues of national identity and cultural autonomy.
1 This and related cultural movements in Latin America promoted the idea of a “new” person of the Americas who represented a racial and cultural mix previously unknown in Europe. This idea of a new person was particularly promoted in Mexico and Brazil, but similar ideas circulated throughout Latin America. In the indigenous areas of Indo-Afro-Iberoamerica, the promulgation of the cultural ideals of
mestizaje also promoted the ideas of New Worldism and
criollismo. Out of this general context came the three now canonical novels of the period: the Colombian José Eustasio Rivera’s
La vorágine (1924), the Argentine Ricardo Guiraldes’s
Don Segundo Sombra (1926), and the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos’s
Doña Bárbara (1929). In addition, women writers such as Teresa de la Parra, author of
Las memorias de Mamá Blanca (1929), published novels meritorious of more recognition than they received at the time. The presence of de la Parra and other women writers offered an initial feminine response to what was still a predominantly masculinist aesthetic.
On the other hand, the second group of writers and intellectuals conceived of being modern as the appropriation of European avantgarde modernist aesthetics, particularly as they were practiced in France, Spain, and Italy. They were motivated by the surrealist writings of André Breton, the futurist writings of Marinetti, and the like. For some Latin American intellectuals and in some of their texts, these two basic concepts of being modern operated dialogically. Guiraldes, for example, has been associated with both groups, and his
Don Segundo Sombra (1926) contains stylistic registers of both types of fiction.
2 From this group came novelists who have been far less recognized than Guiraldes, Gallegos, and Rivera, such as the Peruvian Martín Adán, the Chileans María Luisa Bombal, Vicente Huidobro, and Juan Emar, the Cubans Enrique Labrador Ruiz and Dulce María Loynaz, the Mexicans Jaime Torres Bodet and Xavier Villaurrutia, the Argentine Adolfo Bioy Casares, and the Colombian José Felix Fuenmayor.
The cultural debate was most often articulated in Manichean terms as one between civilization and barbarism. Following a discursive mode and conceptualization of national culture from the nineteenth century, the civilization versus barbarism debate articulated issues of national identity in simplistic terms. The basic idea was that Latin America’s identity crisis and national crises were to be resolved only when the conflict between the (supposedly) barbaric rural society and (supposedly) civilized urban society would somehow elevate the former from its backwardness. In the 1920s, the
criollistas maintained that a key to establishing an authentic national identity was to be found and celebrated in local and regional values. Consequently,
criollista novels tended to exalt local and regional customs. Paradoxically, some aspects of rural culture that had been associated with barbarism became positive values in these novels. In contrast, novelists with more urban and cosmopolitan interests looked to the European model of the modern nation-state. Their novels tended to reflect this enthusiasm for modernity and the cultural innovations of modernism. Both the
criollistas and the
vanguardistas believed that their formulas would lead to the production of a literary culture of universal value.
The widespread effort to redefine national identity and cultural autonomy was led in Latin America by José Vasconcelos and Samuel Ramos in Mexico, Fernando Ortiz and Jorge Mañach in Cuba, and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada in Argentina. In Puerto Rico, Luis Lloréns Torres and the intellectuals of the Generation of 1930 worked along these lines, which included essayists, poets, and novelists. Consequently, the cultural criticism of Antonio S. Pedreira and the literary criticism of Margot Arce and Concha Meléndez, as well as the novel La llamarada (1935) by Enrique Laguerre, made important contributions to this dialogue on national identity. The poet Luis Palés Matos contributed by conceiving of the culture of the region as a mulatto one, thus working with ideas parallel to those promoting mestizaje in Mexico and the Andean region. Lloréns Torres brought the idea of national literature to Puerto Rico, as well as Puerto Rico’s participation in broader questions of national identity delineated in the island as a matter of lo puertorriqueño.
The
Revista de Occidente, founded in Spain by José Ortega y Gasset in 1923, was essential to an understanding of how the cultural dialogue in Latin America unfolded in the 1920s and 1930s. As González-Echevarría explained, it would be difficult to exaggerate the enormous impact that Ortega and his
Revista de Occidente had on Latin America.
3 By means of this magazine, Ortega’s thought permeated the continent, as did the many translations of German philosophers that the magazine’s publishing house disseminated. Most importantly, Ortega and his cohorts translated, discussed, and popularized the ideas of Spengler, whose book
The Decline of the West was much in vogue throughout Latin America. It appeared in Spanish translation in 1923 and was an immediate best-seller. Ortega y Gasset was also responsible for an ongoing dialogue on the European avantgarde in his book
La deshumanización del arte (1925).
Spengler’s ideas also served the purposes of both groups. He offered a view of universal history in which Europe was no longer the center; it was simply one more culture.
4 Thus, Spengler offered a strong argument for Latin America’s cultural autonomy, one with which both the nationalist
criollistas and the promoters of avant-garde modernism could agree and one they could appropriate. The Cuban Jorge Mañach, an advocate of a new
vanguardia in Cuba, read Spengler and spoke of the “physiognomy” of Cuban culture, the Cuban Fernando Ortiz was lecturing in 1924 on
la decadencia cubana, and Vasconcelos published his view of a future
mestizo culture under the title
La raza cósmica in 1925.
Most of the groups of
vanguardia were inspired by the aesthetic programs of the avant-garde in Europe, and the writers they mentioned most often were Joyce, Proust, and Benjamín Jarnés.
5 In their typically brief fictional experiments, they pursued innovative narrative forms, exploring the possibilities of interiorization of characters, for example through interior monologues, and the use of multiple points of view and striking imagery. Some, such as Torres Bodet and Arqueles Vela, were more effective in undermining the conventions of traditionalists than in constructing their own fully developed novels. Throughout the major urban centers of Latin America, there were groups of writers—often held together by a magazine or journal—who promoted modernist aesthetics. Among these groups were the “Florida” circle in Argentina, those associated with the magazine
Contemporáneos in Mexico, and those artists associated with the
Revista de Avance in Cuba. Similar, earlier organs were
Martín Fierro (founded in 1924) in Argentina, and
Horizontes and
Irradiador in Mexico.
With respect to modernism and the avant-garde of cultural aesthetics, in Brazil the aesthetics of European modernism were quite well received. The Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922 was a celebration of the new modernist aesthetics, with particular emphasis on the poetry and the arts. The event took place at São Paulo’s municipal theater, with iconoclastic exhibitions and proclamations by the avant-garde of Brazil’s artists, musicians, and writers.
Indeed, 1922, the year of the celebrations in Brazil, was a landmark year for avant-garde literature. That year, César Vallejo published his iconoclastic book of poetry
Trilce, Joyce published
Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot came forth with
The Wasteland. Joyce was of great interest to the writers of the
vanguardia, and the stylistic innovations of
Ulysses were evident in the fiction of Juan Filloy, Agustín Yáñez, and several of the major novels of the 1960s.
6In Cuba, the
Revista de Avance appeared in 1927 under the direction of Jorge Mañach and four others. Yet another outgrowth of the Spanish
Revista de Occidente, the
Revista de Avance featured avantgarde poets César Vallejo and Jaime Torres Bodet, as well as Miguel Angel Asturias and a host of Spanish writers considered by critics to have embraced universal interests: Américo Castro, Miguel de Unamuno, Eugenio D’Ors, and others. One of the key figures of the Cuban avant-garde, Mañach, had joined a group of equally irreverent young intellectuals to form the Grupo Minorista in 1923.
The cultural dialogue in Argentina took the form of a debate between the groups known as Florida and Boedo. They were not in direct opposition, however, for there was an evident crossover between the groups, and many personal friendships. In general terms, the Florida group promoted cosmopolitan attitudes toward literature and culture, and its adherents tended to equate sophistication with cultural trends in vogue in Europe. The Boedo group was generally less elitist in attitude and more associated with the general populace; novelist Roberto Arlt was the principal influence in this group.
Some of the essayists and thinkers of this period formulated ideas about nation, identity, and cultural autonomy that drew upon the ideas that were in vogue, but their contributions to the broader dialogue were relatively minor and highly derivative. In Argentina, Ricardo Rojas, obviously drawing from Vasconcelos, predicted in
Eurindia (1924) that the New World would find its emancipatory expression in a new race of people. As Masiello has observed, Rojas uses sexual metaphors to describe Latin America as the passive female, and thus his essays contributed to the masculinist aesthetic that was still powerful in Latin America during this period.
7The reviews
Horizontes and
Irradiador were organs of
estridentismo, which arose in 1921 with the affirmations and exaltation of the new technology and new urban lives as promoted in Mexico by Arqueles Vela, Manuel Maples Arce, and Germán Luis Arzubide in their magazine
Actual. For the most part, the
estridentistas were poets, but Arqueles Vela wrote the novel
El Café de Nadie (1926). From 1928 to 1931, the
vanguardia in Mexico coalesced around the journal
Contemporáneos and through it promoted the ideas of artistic renovation. The
Contemporáneos group attempted to open Mexican culture to the latest trends in European art. Its most active members were Jaime Torres Bodet, Gilberto Owen, Salvador Novo, Xavier Villarrutia, and Carlos Pellicer.
8In Central America, the most active movement of
vanguardia was in Nicaragua. The avant-garde manifesto of sorts in Nicaragua was José Coronel Urtecho’s sardonic poem “Oda a Rubén Darío.” Coronel Urtecho was joined by Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Joaquín Pasos, and Luis Alberto Cabrales in the publication of several avant-garde periodicals:
Critero (1929),
rincón de vanguardia (1931), and
vanguardia (1931–1932). By the end of the 1930s, the group was known as the
movimiento de vanguardia.9Puerto Rico produced numerous groups of
vanguardia, even though most of the writers themselves have remained relatively obscure outside of Puerto Rico. The poet Evaristo Rivera Chevremont brought
ultraísmo from Spain to Puerto Rico, thus serving in the intermediary role (between Europe and Latin America) for Puerto Rico that Borges served in Argentina and Huidobro in Chile. Nevertheless, the roots and reach of the avant-garde movement in Puerto Rico were more local than international.
10Awareness of the different magazines associated with these groups is important because, as Unruh has argued, Latin America’s
vanguardias are best understood not in terms of individual works or specific authors’ careers.
11 Rather, they need to be viewed as a multifaceted cultural activity, expressed in a variety of creative endeavors. Women played a key role in this as
salonnieres, directors of cultural magazines, and supporters of the arts. Norah Lange and Victoria Ocampo, for example, moved in elite lettered circles in Argentina, exercising a notable influence in the formation of national culture. Along with her companion Oliverio Girondo, Lange published the magazine
Martín Fierro; her prose and verse contributed alternative views of feminine participation in national culture. Ocampo directed the influential and prestigious magazine
Sur; she and Lange functioned as “bridge” figures of the avant-garde.
12Political movements in the 1920s and 1930s highlighted the urgent need for social and political change, and leftist and radical movements organized with the intention of realizing that change. There was widespread conflict among rising economic groups, new political movements, and the oligarchy that had generally exercised power throughout much of the previous century. In Mexico, power struggles and conflicts between the state and the church made it impossible to realize the programs of social, economic, and political change implied in the Constitution of 1917. Uruguay attempted to enact social and economic reforms similar to those of Mexico, promulgating a constitution in 1917 that provided for a commission-type government, but a lack of land reform and other problems limited the success of the Uruguayan experiment. In Argentina, an oligarch with alliances with Hipólito Irigoyen of the Radical Party, Marcelo T. Alvear, was elected president in 1922. The reign of the Radical Party was brief, however, for Alvear’s alliances with key elements of the Radical Party broke down within three years. The Communist Party of Chile arose in the 1920s, corresponding to the election of conservative Arturo Alessandri. Unable to carry forth a successful political program for either the left or the right in Chile, Alessandri was deposed by the military. Class conflicts and strikes led to devastating massacres of workers in several Latin American nations in the 1920s, two of the most controversial being the ones in Ecuador in 1922 and Colombia in 1928.
In the Caribbean region, widespread economic crises and poverty led to uprisings, new political organizations, and union organizing. In Puerto Rico, Albizú Campos headed a nationalist movement in the 1920s that led to the formation of the Partido Unión. This nationalism promoted political independence from the United States and the importance of the Spanish language. Populism, modernization, and political realism (i.e., negotiation with the United States) resulted in the rise of two elements in Puerto Rico: the Partido Popular Democrático and the concept of the Estado Libre Asociado, which was born in 1928. Rebellions took place in St. Kitts, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia in 1935 and in Barbados in 1937. In 1938, the Barbados Progressive League was formed and soon thereafter the Barbados Labour Party and Barbados Workers Union.
Following the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922, Brazil entered a period of cultural nationalism and intense creativity. With the rise of modernism, Brazilian novelists such as Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade transgressed the norms of traditional fiction with multiple kinds of formal and linguistic experimentation. Two of Oswald de Andrade’s most experimental works of this type were Memórias sentimentais de Joào Miramar (1924) and Serafim Ponte Grande (1933). Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928) was a valuable and exceptionally well-conceived contribution to avant-garde fiction.
With respect to the novelists of this period, there was a growing awareness of both their modernity and their immediate surroundings. The latter produced an increasing interest in regionalist novels. The masters of the traditional (realist-naturalist) forms were Ricardo Guiraldes, Teresa de la Parra, Rómulo Gallegos, and José Eustasio Rivera. These four novelists published their major works in the 1920s, and by the 1940s Guiraldes, Rivera, and Gallegos were recognized in their respective homelands not only as masters of the art of fiction but, more important, as the creators of national identity, authentic representatives of a national literary tradition, and leaders in the quest for cultural autonomy. In each case, there were significant cultural and political reasons—the momentum of nation building provided cultural and political justification for promoting their works as part of a national literary culture—that their works were much-needed cultural artifacts of what was promoted as authentically national literary culture. In this sense, Guiraldes’s
Don Segundo Sombra, Rivera’s
La vorágine, and Gallegos’s
Doña Bárbara were the foundational novels in Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela.
Noncanonical novelists such as the Colombians César Uribe Piedrahita and Bernardo Arias Trujillo as well as the Argentine Benito Lynch wrote fiction that was part of the criollista dialogue popularized in the novels by Guiraldes, Rivera, and Gallegos. These were writers who also thought of themselves as modern but were concerned with how cultural autonomy and national identity might be found in the growing tensions between rural and urban life, or in essence, tradition versus the modern. In their work, they had different responses to this question. Uribe Piedrahita’s Toá (1933) and Arias Trujillo’s Risaralda (1935) are also novels of social criticism.
Uribe Piedrahita’s project is similar to many of that period in Latin America in that the author contributes to the New World identity by focusing on a social group that is “less sophisticated, less cultivated [in the European sense] than the city-dwelling members of the ruling class.”
13 Sophisticated and cultivated in the European sense here refers to one’s knowledge of writing culture. In
Toá, the basic model is clearly set forth: the outsider Antonio (to whom the narrator refers even late in the novel as “visiting doctor”) experiences a series of lessons as part of his possible integration into this New World. Early in the novel the difference between this world and his previous cosmopolitan life is vividly delineated, as the narrator explains how the protagonist desires to experience the “strange landscapes of that new world.” The adjectives “strange” and “new” obviously promise the reader a New World encounter.
Despite Antonio’s fascination with this new world, his sympathy for its exploited people, and his love for Toá, his process of learning is, in fact, a failure. During the second half of the novel, when he is active in this new context, he does not fit comfortably with the locals nor is he physically strong enough to withstand the environment. Near the end of the work the narrator describes Antonio as “exhausted from the trip to the jungle.”
14 Toá follows a typical model of the New World protagonist who becomes so lost in nature that he ceases to function as a social human being.
15 This work is considerably closer than many Spanish American novels of the period to the
criollista novel.
16Arias Trujillo was more explicitly interested in being modern than was Uribe Piedrahita. In his Risaralda, Arias Trujillo promises in its subtitle to revolutionize the local obsession with classical humanism, announcing it as a “film written in Spanish and spoken in criollo." He only partially delivers on this promise of modernity combined with local culture. With respect to the potential film (and modernity) in this novel, the promise remains virtually unfulfilled. The only exception is chapter 30, which includes the subtitle “(Projected in slow motion)” and does change in narrative technique. Arias Trujillo, like Guiraldes, Rivera, and Uribe Piedrahita, was committed to defining a national identity by appealing to regional values.
Benito Lynch wrote several books of fiction during this period that were also part of the dialogue on national identity. The short novel
La evasión (1922) is a continuation of Lynch’s interest in portraying authentic Argentine society as
gaucho life on the estancia. Lynch characterizes protagonist Jaime Frasser as the ideal physical presence in an idealized rural setting. Lynch was a typical author of masculinist aesthetics, and Frasser is described early in the novel as projecting “perfect” and “harmonious” masculinity.
17 The novelette tells the story of this strong-willed protagonist and his young love, Mabel.
In his fiction, Lynch promotes traditional and rural values and, in turn, the importance of oral culture, just as do many of these
criollista writers.
18 In
El inglés de los guesos, Lynch portrays the life of a kind of tenant farmer
(puestero) named Juana Fuentes who works the land while the owners dedicate themselves to business in the city. A British student of anthropology appears on the
estancia to carry out research and excavations on a fossil bed. The foreign student has a love affair that ends in the suicide of his lover. Through this narrative Lynch is able to provide his idea of the intimate relationship between the
gaucho and this land, as well as regular digressions for the portrayal of local customs and folklore.
As the dialogue on identity and nationhood intensified into the 1930s, so did the relative sophistication of narrative technique and form. Two novels that joined in the cultural dialogue yet were also a step closer to the modernism of the Latin American novel of the 1940s were
Vidas secas (1934) by the Brazilian Graciliano Ramos and Demetrio Aguilera Malta’s
Don Goyo (1933). Both novelists demonstrate their technical mastery of structure.
Don Goyo is set on islands off the coast of Ecuador and deals primarily with two fishermen, Don Goyo and Cusumbo. Aguilera Malta uses a harmonious three-part structure that involves flashbacks to characterize the two characters fully. The author’s use of the strategies of both modernist fiction and oral tradition creates some effects that became associated with “magic realism” decades later, making Aguilera Malta yet another important forerunner to the rise of modernist fiction in the 1940s and the more recognized Boom of the 1960s.
19In addition to a growing interest in the immediate physical surroundings and nation building, there was also a growing awareness of the social and economic consequences of Latin America’s troubled modernity, an increased interest on the part of the writers in these social problems, and early attempts to portray class conflict in fiction. The fiction of Edwards Bello, such as the novel El roto (1920), exhibits some of these ongoing concerns. El roto tells the story of a young boy, Esmeraldo, and portrays his environment—urban slums in Chile. The center of the story is a bordello. Written with the documentary detail of the realist-naturalist tradition, El roto is one of numerous indicators that the realist-naturalist mode had reached its apogee in Latin America in the 1920s.
Leónidas Barletta, Martín Luis Guzmán, and José A. Osorio Lizarazo were also writers with social and political interests. In his novel Royal Circo, Barletta’s message is unclear and his narrative strategies simple, while his thematic interest is the suffering of common people. Guzmán regales his readers with an insider’s view of Mexican politics. His fictions El águila y la serpiente and La sombra del caudillo are more nuanced political novels than Barletta’s. In the former, he reveals the character of Mexican political leaders, and in the latter he fictionalizes the supposedly real happenings in the Mexican political scene after the Mexican Revolution. Its plot centers on the individual in conflict with the collectivity. Osorio Lizarazo published numerous novels of social protest; his main contribution in Colombia was the fact that he was an urban writer. In La casa de vecindad (1930), he focuses enough on the characterization of the protagonist to save his work from an overly simplistic presentation of class conflict. In this case, the individual is overwhelmed by the collectivity.
Some of the most classic novels of protest were of
indigenista themes, and two such texts are Jorge Icaza’s
Huasipungo (1934) and Gregorio López y Fuentes’s
El indio (1935). In
Huasipungo, the reader is made privy to the exploitation of the Indians in Ecuador, where they are driven off their parcels of land or
huasipungas. Fictionalizing the classic power structure triangle of the government, the church, and the local oligarchy, Icaza portrays the human dimension of individuals in the situation. The ugly and extreme violence of the novel shocks the reader into an understanding of the social circumstance. López y Fuentes takes a different approach in
El indio, characterizing the collectivity as an archetype rather than characterizing the individual. Set in postrevolutionary Mexico, this novel suggests the history of Indians since the time of the conquest.
20Huasipungo and El indio are stories of cultural resistance, as are Chicano narratives published during this period. An early predecessor to the first Chicano novels to be published decades later, Américo Paredes’s story “The Hammon and the Beans” (ca. 1939) is set in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, an area of intense border conflict. The story is about an individual’s experience in this conflict in the aftermath of an armed uprising by Mexican Americans seeking justice with pistols in hand.
Two masters of the traditional art of storytelling who were just as accomplished in their art as de la Parra, Guiraldes, or Gallegos—yet as concerned about society as Guzmán and Osorio Lizarazo—were Mariano Azuela and Arturo Uslar Pietri. These two, along with Aguilera Malta, published some of the most nuanced and successful fiction of the 1930s. Azuela shows a control of narrative techniques more associated with the new aesthetics of the avant-garde in La luciérnaga. In this story, a young man from the provinces attempts to survive in the city, where the changes in postrevolutionary Mexico created numerous social problems. By using a variety of techniques of interiorization (such as interior monologue), Azuela reveals the protagonist’s sense of confusion and helplessness in the new urban space. The reality of postrevolutionary Mexico is as ambiguous for this protagonist as it is for the two main characters of Las lanzas coloradas (1931), which is set in the period of the war of independence in Venezuela. The two main characters, however, are unclear and ambiguous about their reasons for fighting in the war.
Novelists of the
vanguardia, such as Dulce María Loynaz, Gilberto Owen, Macedonio Fernández, Jaime Torres Bodet, Xavier Villaurrutia, Vicente Huidobro, Juan Filloy, and Enrique Labrador Ruiz, published novels with an obvious awareness of modernism and the incipient modernity of Latin American, North American, and European societies. Beyond being strictly novelists, they were engaged in the broader activity of modernizing Spanish American fiction. María Luisa Bombal and Adolfo Bioy Casares wrote with an interest in storytelling and awareness of modernist technique that brought them closer to the
vanguardia than Aguilera Malta and Uslar Pietri. The main character in Loynaz’s
Jardín (1935, published in 1951) is a young woman, Bárbara, who lives with her black maid, Laura. The setting is an old home with a garden in Havana. In the second half of the novel, the story moves back to the nineteenth century and relates the relationship between another Bárbara (great-grandmother of the protagonist) and an adolescent. After the return to the twentieth century, the protagonist goes to Europe with a lover and suffers a tragic death with him at the end. Described by Sklodowska as a hidden jewel of avantgarde narrative,
Jardín is also an early feminist novel that questions the values of traditional patriarchal society.
21Loynaz, Owen, Fernández, and many others of these novelists of vanguardia often related the stories of the interior lives of their characters rather than dwelling on their immediate surroundings. Owen’s Novela como nube is the story of the protagonist’s search for the ideal woman. The author uses surrealist imagery to communicate the moods of this protagonist; in the end, the vague imagery blurs what is real about the women and blurs the novel’s meaning. Fernández’s Papeles de Recienvenido (1929) is even more radical in its irreverence toward everyday, empirical reality, for the narrator’s perspective is frequently incongruent with standard perceptions of reality. The special and particular feature of this book, however, is its tone, for Fernández found humor in the irrational and in paradox.
Enrique Labrador Ruiz and José Felix Fuenmayor also adopted playful and humorous stances toward reality in their novels of
vanguardia. In
Laberinto de sí mismo (1933), Labrador Ruiz portrays pencils in playful dialogue with each other. It is a surprisingly self-conscious and introspective novel for the period and one in which everything is in a constant process of disintegration. Fuenmayor’s
Cosme (1927) is equally playful in tone, although not as self-conscious and introspective. This novel is the entertaining and tragic story of the protagonist, Cosme, growing up in the new, modernizing Barranquilla (Colombia) of the 1920s.
Cosme is not a novel of elaborate characterizations or profound psychological development. In contrast to the excessive emotion in many of the
criollista novels of this period—such as
La vorágine—in Cosme the characters function as an element of the novel’s play, entering with little or no introduction on the narrator’s part. The modernity of
Cosme is not so much in its use of the narrative techniques of modernism as in its dialogue on the conflict between tradition and modernity.
Fuenmayor is not generally recognized as a writer central to the Latin American vanguardia. He, Roberto Arlt, and Norah Lange wrote on the margins of both the elite circles of the avant-garde and the mainstream of more popular fiction. In Lange’s novel 45 días y 30 marineros (1933), a ship removes passengers from their everyday lives. The exceptionality of this novel is the fictionalization of female eroticism, although it shares questions of national identity that are common themes of novels of this period. Arlt was also a special case with respect to the avant-garde movements: he shares some of their interests but is different enough from them to not be generally associated with the vanguardia. Arlt’s three novels, El juguete rabioso (1926), Los siete locos (1929), and Los lanzallamas (1931), are an urban trilogy that gained more of a readership than most fiction of the vanguardia. The narrator-protagonist, Silvio Astier, tells of his intellectual interests (which include the works of Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, and Baroja) and relates the process of growing up. His adolescent adventures involve petty crimes, working in a bookstore, attempting to become an airplane mechanic, and working as a stationery salesman. In all these anecdotes, his uncontrolled imagination seems to interfere with his ability to deal with everyday life. In Los siete locos, the protagonist, Erdosain, is an anguished individual whose cohorts are a group of unstable friends (the locos) who organize a secret society. Arlt continues Erdosain’s story in Los lanzallamas; both the protagonist’s anguish and his group’s insanity become more intense. The most outstanding element (something of an anomaly) of these three novels is Arlt’s style: his prose is not as refined and metaphorical as that of either the avant-garde writers (with whom he shares some interests) or the criollistas.
Torres Bodet’s first three novels—
Margarita de niebla (1927),
La educación sentimental (1929), and
Proserpina rescatada (1931)—were typical examples of
vanguardia fiction both in terms of theme and technique.
Margarita de niebla has little of a conventional plot and vague characters that are sometimes difficult to decipher. Torres Bodet wrote essays in favor of a new kind of novel, and among these works of the new novel, in addition to those already mentioned, were
Dama de corazones (1928) by Xavier Villaurrutia and
El joven (1928) by Salvador Novo.
Villaurrutia’s only novel,
Dama de corazones, is a short work of less than fifty pages. It is virtually plotless and, as Frank Dauster argues, contains a style in which a number of lyrical passages are similar to poetry arranged in prose form.
22 Dama de corazones is the story of Julio, a Mexican exchange student in the United States who returns to Mexico for a visit with his aunt and two cousins. He spends much of the novel with questions over the identity of these women, as well as offering numerous digressions on topics such as literature, travel, death, and the very concept of character. As D’Lugo has observed, Villaurrutia eschews conventional notions of plot and character development and invites the reader to consider the process of narration.
23 Like Fuenmayor, Juan Filloy was a marginal figure of the avantgarde, yet his novel
Op Oloop (1934) has had a small group of devoted readers. Filloy tells the story of a Finnish resident in Buenos Aires; the reader observes the protagonist’s disintegration over a period of twenty-four hours. Writing in the Joycean tradition, Filloy is devoted to language play in itself and often with humorous consequences. The novel’s outcome—the protagonist’s suicide—however, is not humorous and leaves the reader to continue the protagonist’s speculations about the rationality of the supposedly harmonious and rational order.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the writers’ desire to be modern—as it was played out in the cultural wars of the period—meant a predominance of a realist-naturalist type of fiction that has generally been categorized as traditional with respect to form. In a book published in 1939, the prominent critic Arturo Torres Rioseco wrote: “The purely psychological novel with no external movement, and the metapsychic novel oriented toward the realm of dreams, have had their cultivators in our countries (C. A. Leumann, Torres Bodet, etc.), but they are inappropriate forms of expression for peoples of such an intense objective life and of such limited literary culture.”
24 As Pérez Firmat has argued convincingly, vanguard fiction exists between parentheses.
25 From its inception, the novel of
vanguardia occupied a liminal space—a parenthetical placement—that has been amply documented in the hostile articles and reviews written at the time. The comment by Torres Rioseco is one telling example of this reaction. The questions that interested Torres Bodet, Macedonio Fernández, and these other writers of
vanguardia—such as characterization in fiction—were of relatively little interest to most readers and critics at the time. Alejo Carpentier and Demetrio Aguilera Malta, in
Ecué-Yamba-o (1933) and
Don Goyo, respectively, bridged the gap for many readers and critics who shared some of the interests of the modernists but were also deeply concerned with the debates on identity and cultural autonomy in the New World.
During this period, the mass marketing of novels became an increasingly important factor in the production of literature. For example, the Argentine Hugo Wast’s Lucía Miranda (1929) offered a plot of action and adventure directed to the new middle-class reading public. In the 1920s and 1930s, all three of the criollista classics—La vorágine, Don Segundo Sombra, and Doña Bárbara—were promoted as best-sellers in their respective nations. At the same time that these novels were being promoted for mass consumption, periodicals such as La novela semanal circulated brief fictions for middle-class readers.
The dominance of upper- and middle-class male writers prevailed, to a large extent, well into the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, the criollista classics served not only to build nations but also to reinforce the role of the old oligarchies as well as of those close to these oligarchies. Nevertheless, the presence of oppositional writing of cultural resistance as seen in Huasipungo and El indio was increasingly evident. Women novelists such as Teresa de la Parra, María Luisa Bombal, Dulce Loynaz, and Norah Lange were a significant response to what had been a predominantly masculinist aesthetic at the beginning of the century.
In the formation of national cultures, a variety of heterogeneous forces were in play by the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the most successful mainline writers of
criollismo, such as Guiraldes and Gallegos, were among the most competent in incorporating the oral tradition into fiction. They seemed to articulate the case for cultural autonomy most forcefully. The authors who wrote novels fundamentally in opposition to both mainstream fiction and early pulp fiction were the novelists of cultural resistance of
indigenismo, the innovative fictions of
vanguardia, and the alternative writings of women. Certainly there were other noteworthy writers of the avant-garde, among them the Mexicans Efrén Hernández, Salvador Novo, and Arqueles Vela, the Argentine Oliverio Girondo, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, the Ecuadorian Pablo Palacio, the Uruguayan Felisberto Hernández, and the Venezuelan Julio Garmendia.
26
In the next chapter of the Latin American novel—the 1940s—the modernist novel was finally an “appropriate” form for the culture. The writers’ desire to be modern, in effect, had become a more generalized desire in Latin American society in the process of urbanization and modernization of Indo-Afro-Iberoamerican culture. Given the need for a clearly identifiable national literature in each country of Latin America and given the schematic and seemingly incomplete appearance of many of the texts of vanguardia, the cultural scene of the 1920s appeared contradictory and occasionally confusing for much of the new middle-class readership. Nevertheless, a new heterogeneity was increasingly evident.