The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

The traditionalist writers pursued their search for the modern in the form of criollista novels. Canonical works written in the traditional (realist-naturalist) mode in Spanish America were La vorágine (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera, Don Segundo Sombra (1926) by Ricardo Guiraldes, Las memorias de Mamá Blanca (1929) by Teresa de la Parra, and Doña Bárbara (1929) by Rómulo Gallegos. These writers were seen as Latin American masters of the traditional craft of fiction, although their works were affected by the vanguardia, too.¹ Their desire to be modern varied; in all cases they held ambiguous and contradictory attitudes about what they understood as modern. These four novels were, nevertheless, important texts for nation building and the search for cultural autonomy, even though they and others like them were often closely associated with the old aristocracy and its patriarchal order.²

The critical bibliography of these novels is substantive, consisting of a lengthy list of studies published since the 1920s but primarily from the 1930s to the 1950s, when the criollista novel was still in vogue. Carlos Alonso has analyzed the discourse of cultural autochthony that has become virtually synonymous with the novelistic production of Rivera, Guiraldes, Gallegos, and many other Latin American writers of the 1920s and 1930s.³ Alonso argues that the search for an indigenous cultural identity should be understood as an attempt to empower the Latin American writer in the face of modernity’s threat to undermine the authority of his discourse.

The writers of the 1960s Boom were modernity’s latest and most devastating threat to the authority of the regionalist discourse, which prevailed well into the 1950s. In both their fiction and their critical essays, the writers of the Boom published essays that were devastating for the criollista masters. In his widely read Nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969), Carlos Fuentes claimed that these classic texts led to essentially the same outcome: the protagonists were devoured by nature (the jungle, the llano, and so forth). Vargas Llosa, morever, made numerous references to these novels as “primitive.”

For Doris Sommer, on the other hand, these criollista novels were an entire canon of “great novels” that the writers of the Boom dismissed all too easily.⁴ More importantly for Sommer, they were key texts in the history of nation building. Following the example of Benedict Anderson, Sommer stresses the continuities between this nation building and print communities formed around newspapers and novels. Sommer shows how national ideals are grounded in heterosexual relationships that provided a figure for national consolidation. She reminds readers that before the Boom, Latin American literature had the capacity to intervene in history, to help construct it.⁵

As realist-naturalist writers, as well as for their search for an indigenous identity, Guiraldes, Gallegos, and Rivera were the most recognized novelists of the period. Don Segundo Sombra chronicles a young boy’s rite de passage in the process of becoming a gaucho and an adult. Doña Bárbara is the tale of a conflict between civilization and barbarism. La vorágine is ostensibly the story of the protagonist’s adventure into the Colombian jungle. All three are novels of adventures—the protagonists travel from the city to a rural area. In Las memorias de Mamá Blanca, the protagonist eventually travels from her idyllic hacienda to the city, although the novel deals primarily with her experience as a child on the hacienda.

Don Segundo Sombra consists of twenty-seven chapters narrated by the protagonist, Fabio. The general setting is the pampa of Argentina. In the first part, which consists of nine chapters, the orphaned Fabio is fourteen years old and departs with the gaucho Don Segundo Sombra. During these apprenticeship years, Fabio learns the ways of the gaucho from Don Segundo. In the second part of nine chapters, five years have passed and the young boy has become an adult and a gaucho. In the third part, Fabio and Don Segundo are occasionally together, but this part also tells of Fabio inheriting land and learning how to read and write literature. Throughout the novel, Guiraldes describes the autochthonous elements of life on the pampa.

In this three-part structure, Guiraldes uses water imagery with a variety of functions. The novel opens as follows: “En las afueras del pueblo, a unas diez cuadras de la plaza céntrica, el puente viejo tiende su arco sobre el río, uniendo las quintas al campo tranquilo” (On the edge of town, some 10 blocks from the central plaza, the old bridge stretches its arch over the river, uniting the houses to the tranquil country).⁶ The young Fabio has come to his fishing spot, but on this occasion he experiences a different feeling: “Mi humor no era el de siempre” (I wasn’t feeling normal; Don Segundo Sombra, 11). He remembers his separation from his mother in his childhood and the vagabond ways that had led him to this river. In this opening of the novel, then, water imagery is associated with his reflections upon his past or, as one critic has identified this moment, his “taking stock” of his life and situation.⁷ At the beginning of chapter 10, five years later, his gaze falls over a river once again, causing him to reflect on his experiences. He reflects on his years of gaucho life.

Fabio explains that he has matured from a young boy to a gaucho. And at the beginning of the novel’s last chapter, Fabio approaches water once again—a laguna—and enters into more reflections on his life:

Está visto que en mi vida el agua es como un espejo en que desfilan las imágenes del pasado. A orillas de un arroyo resumí antaño mi niñez. Dando de beber a mi caballo en la picada de un río, revisé cinco años de andanzas gauchas. Por último, sentado sobre la pequeña barranca de una laguna, en mis posesiones, consultaba mentalmente mi diario de patrón. [It is evident that in my life, water is like a mirror in which images of the past parade by. At the edge of a river I synthesized my childhood. Giving my horse a drink of water in a river, I reconsidered five years of gaucho wanderings. Finally, seated on the small bank of a pond, in control of myself, I mentally consulted my diary as landowner.] (Don Segundo Sombra, 182)

In many ways, Don Segundo Sombra is the epitome of the well-crafted fiction in Latin America. The three-part structure constructed around water imagery gives the novel a sense of coherence and unity that is comparable to Azuela’s success with the spiral structure of Los de abajo; this coherence and unity is not as evident in Doña Bárbara. As perhaps the most accomplished piece of traditional fiction of the three classic criollista novels of the 1920s, Don Segundo Sombra arguably represents the apogee of the realist-naturalist mode that had continued to be written since the nineteenth century.⁸ Nevertheless, numerous critics have pointed to its flaws. For example, one prominent critic has observed that Fabio is not a real-life boy; he is a generalization of the urban adolescent with romanticized ideas about life in the country.⁹ For this reader, it requires a considerable stretch of the imagination to first accept Fabio’s adaptation to the gaucho life, then his equally difficult adaptation to urban life of high literary culture.

For Alonso, Don Segundo Sombra is, in reality, the narration of how a boy simultaneously becomes both a landowner and the writer of an autochthonous text.¹⁰ This critic argues that, as Fabio becomes more educated, he “earns” the right to his new status as landowner. He has also mastered the knowledge of the gaucho life, which is a discipline in itself. It could also be stated that it is not just becoming a gaucho that earns Fabio his ultimate success. Rather, it is the dual discipline of learning to write and learning gaucho ways that leads to his final success. In terms of nation building, Guiraldes points to literary education and literature as positive elements for the new nation.

Critical readings of Don Segundo Sombra have also emphasized the contradiction between Guiraldes the privileged landowner and Guiraldes the promoter of gaucho values. The privileged author, according to many of these critics, was too elitist in worldview and literary style to successfully tell the story of the gaucho and his values. For these critics, the expression of the national essence is not viable because of Guiraldes’s inevitable elitism.¹¹

Doña Bárbara is the longest (and perhaps the most unwieldy) of these four criollista novels; it consists of three parts and a total of forty-one chapters (432 pages in a Mexican edition of 1971).¹² Despite its title, it is really the story of Santos Luzardo’s “heroic” journey.¹³ In this journey, Luzardo leaves Caracas and goes to the llano, where he hopes to recoup the land of his estate Altamira and sell it. Having heard of the “barbarity” of doña Bárbara, he also intends to “civilize” her and rural Venezuela as part of his civilizing project for the nation.

Like Don Segundo Sombra, Doña Bárbara consists of three parts, but it lacks the harmonious and unified tripartite structure so evident in the Argentine classic. The lengthy (175-page) first part consists of thirteen chapters in which the author introduces the numerous characters and conflicts that inform the central conflict between civilización and barbarie. In the opening chapter, Santos Luzardo travels along the Arauca river through the llano. The narrator characterizes doña Bárbara as a person about whom terrible things are said, even though she does not appear in the chapter. Equally terrible and threatening is nature, which is omnipresent in this first chapter.

Proceeding in the systematic manner of the realist novelist, the second chapter provides more background to the conflicts over the land and the Altamira ranch: family disputes between the Luzardos and the Barqueros go back to the colonial period, and the “famous” doña Bárbara became involved in land disputes. Santos Luzardo’s mission in this barbarie is described as a dual task: to civilize the region and to civilize the impetuous doña Bárbara. The third chapter, titled “La devadora de hombres,” characterizes doña Bárbara in more detail, describing her “perturbadora belleza” (disturbing beauty) and her being raped in her youth. The narrator freely makes mention of the numerous legends that surround her, including her supposed pact with the devil and her reputation for being a witch. The third chapter concludes with a description of doña Bárbara’s character as cruel and superstitious. The remainder of the first part offers more detailed descriptions of the land and nature, the introduction of additional characters (Balbino Paiba, Marisela, El Pajarote, Mister Danger), and descriptions of rural customs and legal battles over the land. Lorenzo Barquero is portrayed as doña Bárbara’s pathetic victim, an ex-lover who fathered doña Bárbara’s daughter Marisela. Toward the end of Part I, Santos Luzardo falls in love with this distant relative, the now adolescent Marisela. Also introduced here is the infantile and “barbarous” North American, Mister Danger.

In the lengthy Part II (containing thirteen chapters), the conflict over property rights intensifies, and Gallegos further develops his criollista interests. Santos Luzardo becomes more committed to the legal technicalities of his right to the land held by doña Bárbara, who proves to be a cattle rustler in addition to engaging in other illegal activities. Luzardo continues his educating of Marisela, who is transformed into an attractive and civilized young woman. Luzardo also rediscovers his own national roots in local customs, being reminded of his former knowledge of cattle and cowboy culture when he observes a rodeo (Part II, chapter 4, “El Rodeo”). Doña Bárbara is also momentarily transformed by Santos Luzardo (chapter 5) and shows a romantic interest in him. A considerable portion of Part II consists of detailed descriptions of customs on the llano.

Part III (fifteen chapters) dramatizes the denouement of the conflict between Santos Luzardo and doña Bárbara, between feuding families, and, in a broader sense, between civilization and barbarism. In the end, some of the characters are consumed by nature, killed by natural forces; Luzardo marries Marisela; and doña Bárbara is a transformed person: she gives her land to Marisela and then disappears.

A paradoxical precedent to this novel was the support that the Venezuelan political figure Juan Vicente Gómez had received in 1909 from Gallegos and his peers, populists who favored the application of high-minded principles and an absolute respect for the law. But Gómez turned out to be a ruthless dictator who had alienated intellectuals and local elites alike by the time Gallegos began to write Doña Bárbara. At the time of its publication, this novel was read in Venezuela as an attack on Gomez’s dictatorship; as Mariano Picón Salas has pointed out: “se vio en la diabólica varona, vengativa, cruel y oscura, la imagen de la tiranía” (in the diabolical figure, vengeful, cruel, and dark, the image of tyranny is seen).¹⁴ In the 1930s and 1940s, Doña Bárbara was not only canonized as Venezuela’s national novel, but it also served as the opposition intellectuals’ narrative projection of a future victory and a future nation.¹⁵ Produced as a film in 1943, Doña Bárbara reached a public that elected Gallegos as a populist candidate representing the Acción Democrática.

Gallegos’s faith in constitutional principles and respect for the law is indeed evident in Doña Bárbara. Santos Luzardo is presented as the most positive and admirable character in the novel, above all because he has the most sophisticated understanding of property law and the most consistent adherence to its principles. Clearly, Gallegos’s idea for the new civilized nation is one in which the law is followed to the letter.

For Sommer, Doña Bárbara is Gallegos’s “fantasy of return and repair.”¹⁶ It envisions a liberation from an internal tyrant (Bárbara/the dictator Gómez) and her external ally (Mister Danger/the oil industry). This was a landmark novel for a modernizing program for Venezuela and more specifically for modernizing the nation’s ranches. The backward ranches and medieval political and judicial practices effected in the rural areas, in fact, threatened any idea of “progress.” Sommer concludes, referring to Marisela, that Santos Luzardo’s offer of legal and loving status to Marisela “shows Gallegos trying to patch up the problem of establishing a legitimate, centralized nation on a history of usurpation and civil war.”¹⁷

Doña Bárbara not only is a novel written clearly within the parameters of criollista ideals, but it also is the most closely and consistently dedicated to this project of the four novels discussed in this chapter. Like the other novelists, Gallegos invents a narrator who makes use of regionalisms to describe the flora and fauna of the New World.

Gallegos’s modernizing mission in Doña Bárbara is most evident. If only Venezuela’s uneducated could be educated (i.e., civilized) and if only the ranches on the llano could be modernized, national life in Venezuela supposedly would improve. Thus, Santos’s mission is to educate Marisela. Similarly, Santos’s struggle with Bárbara is another aspect of the conflict between the modernizing centralists and the violently independent regionalists in Venezuela.¹⁸

Guiraldes and Rivera had paradoxically mixed feelings about modernity, and Gallegos likewise exhibits these ambiguous desires to be modern. On the one hand, this Venezuelan author seems to favor modernizing the llano, in effect, populating rural Venezuela with people who would provide the accoutrements of modern life. On the other hand, Gallegos celebrates many of the traditional, folkloric aspects of Venezuelan culture that might well disappear upon modernization. Tradition may be a source of national pride, but it is also associated with economic and cultural backwardness.¹⁹

Interestingly, the implied author of Doña Bárbara seems to be in favor of modernity in some passages of the novel and against it in others. He consistently favors progress and the modernization of the haciendas. On the other hand, he exhibits negative attitudes toward the United States, presenting all aspects of modernity of U.S. origin in a negative light. Thus, Gallegos the cultural nationalist undermines his own ideas about progress and modernization.

Doña Bárbara is not only the longest and most unwieldy of these criollista classics—it is also the most ambitious. Indeed, unlike Don Segundo Sombra and La vorágine, this novel attempts to be that “total novel” that would interest the writers of the Boom several decades later.²⁰ If we examine Robin William Fiddian’s outline for the total novels of the 1960s, Doña Bárbara shares several of their characteristics.²¹ Like the total novel, Doña Bárbara aspires to represent an “inexhaustive” reality and cultivates a broad range of encyclopedic references. The encyclopedic effect in Doña Bárbara is particularly evident in the numerous passages of criollista content, as in the lengthy and detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Americas, as well as in the equally long descriptions of customs of the llanos.

Fiddian also proposes that the total novel is conceived as a system contained in itself, or as a microcosm of signification whose main element is ambiguity. In the case of Doña Bárbara, the llano does become a microcosm of sorts, and Gallegos’s efforts to create ambiguity are perhaps more evident than many modern readers—particularly those writers of the Boom themselves—have been willing to recognize. The author does mitigate the potentially extreme opposition between civilization and barbarism and its multiple parallels, such as man versus woman, by including elements of the opposites in the other. One of the most striking examples of this tendency—given the book’s date of publication—is the characterization of doña Bárbara as andrógina, an exceptional gender bending that breaks down the male-versus-female dichotomy of the period. Gallegos’s characterization of doña Bárbara and his development of a plot with numerous ambiguities would seem to imply his interest in creating the ambiguous and “total” novel. His failure as a creator of lasting ambiguity, as well as his failure to create a modern and total novel, however, is evident on the novel’s last page, where all the mysteries of the plot have been solved. One needs also to consider the last paragraph: “¡Llanura venezolana! ¡Propicia para el esfuerzo, como lo fue para la hazaña, tierra de horizontes abiertos, donde una raza buena, ama, sufre y espera!” (Venezuelan plains! Propitious for the effort, as it was for feats, land of open horizons, where a good race of people love, suffers, and waits!; Doña Bárbara, 423). With this final line, Gallegos unequivocally confirms his nation-building, criollista agenda, leaving no room for ambiguity.

Fiddian’s third characteristic of the total novel is the fusion of a historical and mythical vision with a transgression of the conventional norms of narrative economy. This characteristic is important because it suggests that total novels are lengthy and ambitious in framework, an element that Doña Bárbara shares with many total novels of the 1960s. Indeed, Gallegos does articulate interests in both Venezuelan history and a tendency to attempt to make Doña Bárbara a character of mythical proportions. Both she and nature, in fact, are depicted in the hyperbolic and legendary terms that are the material of myths. Beyond these three points, a comparison between Doña Bárbara and the novela total of the 1960s begins to break down. More specifically, Gallegos’s novel certainly is not a Joycean text with respect to language.²² It is, nevertheless, a noteworthy predecessor to the ambitious totalizing efforts of the writers of the Boom.

La vorágine is also an ambitious novel that has elicited ample critical response ever since its publication. Critical readings of La vorágine portray a flawed work with multiple sources: romanticism, realism/naturalism, or realism/criollismo. One critic has claimed that it is in turn “visionary, mystic, realist, modernist, and melodramatic.”²³ Many readers have pointed out the work’s defects, stressing problems with the plot. Tomás Carrasquilla, a contemporary of Rivera, described La vorágine as a shambles; others have found Cova, the protagonist, unbearable.²⁴ Later readings embody a similar range of reactions concerning the novel’s quality: Randolph Pope absolves Rivera’s text by judging Cova’s narrative one of a decadent intellectual; Sharon Magnarelli, on the other hand, describes the depiction of woman as a “malevolent being in collaboration with the evil forces of the universe.”²⁵ One assertion can be made on the basis of these three readings: Cova functions exclusively within a plane of writing noetics; he is a product of writing culture.

The narrator-protagonist Arturo Cova has been described as a romantic poet.²⁶ Certainly much of the text fully supports such a characterization, beginning with Cova’s initial portrayal as a free spirit who flees society in search of the ideal. The characterization as romantic poet, however, is only a partial portrayal of the total person. Pope contends that Cova shares many qualities of the decadent intellectual. For Magnarelli, Cova is “seriously demented”; she and others consider him an “unreliable narrator.”²⁷ In fact, Cova is neither demented nor unreliable, and the characterization as romantic poet/decadent intellectual is also too limiting. These characterizations project the image of a “writer.” The reader observes a patently literary character creating a self-conscious “literary” text.

The first matter to consider, then, is Cova’s supposedly demented character. Several readers have described him as unstable, irrational, or unreasonable.²⁸ Indeed, his relationships with women and reactions to his surroundings do indicate unorthodox behavior; his decision to flee from Bogota with Alicia, for instance, is not entirely reasonable, given the social context. What is unique about Cova’s supposed irrationality and instability, however, is its self-consciousness. Cova himself often qualifies his actions as irrational or his thoughts as malevolent.²⁹ Two questions arise when observing such commentary: How literally should it be interpreted? And what could possibly motivate a self-characterization as an insane person? The answer to both questions lies in Cova’s identity as writer. Interpreted literally, Cova must be dismissed as a ludicrous madman, as indeed many critics have considered him. He should be seen, rather, as a narrator who employs a series of strategies in order to effect his characterization as a writer. At the end of the primera parte, Cova watches Franco’s house burn and comments: “In the middle of the flames I began to laugh like Satan!” Magnarelli contends that his reporting this personal reaction highlights his instability.³⁰ When Cova makes this oft-quoted statement, however, Cova the narrator should not be seen as either diabolical or unstable but rather as attempting to characterize himself as a literary figure.

Cova’s irrationality not only corroborates his characterization as a writer but functions as a positive antidote to the excessively rational modern world developing in Colombia. An implied criticism of the rational arises, for example, when, after a caudillo’s greed-driven excesses are described, two characters end the section with the ironic comment “Logic triumphs! Long live logic!” (La vorágine, 134). Here the modern world of commerce and rationality is placed in opposition to a romantic world of the “irrational” writer. As such, the authentic Cova is not a demented individual who abuses women (as Magnarelli would have us believe), for this status would require the presence of a human being; lacking the ontological status of being, Cova is only the figure of a writer. Far from functioning as unreliable narrator, Cova is a paradigm of the model romantic-decadent writer: self-centered, horrified by a world both vital and decaying around him, constantly vacillating among multiple duplicities. The telltale indicator of Cova’s genuine stability, however, is his consistent insistence on his instability.

What, then, is the subject of this writer’s writing? Readings have stressed the portrayal of the New World as one of the three classic criollista texts: civilization versus barbarism, “the evil forces of the universe,” and social injustice. Such forces do indeed operate in the fictional world of La vorágine. The question, however, is whether these are the primary subject matter—the thematic core of this criollista text. The predominant subject of La vorágine is not a fictional representation of rural Colombia in 1924, but rather the self in the process of writing.

The multiple ambiguities with respect to author, writer, narrator, story, and text are a function of the ambiguous genre status of the novel in 1920s Latin America. Oddly enough, Rivera’s most significant predecessor and literary model was Jorge Isaacs’s romantic classic María, which contributes to an understanding of the romantic elements in La vorágine. Published some six decades after Isaacs’s María, La vorágine shares approximately the same temporal distance from María as does La vorágine from readers at the end of the twentieth century. Having been published in several successive editions and read throughout the Hispanic world, María was still an understandably viable presence in Colombia during the 1920s.³¹

Modernization, industrialization, and a growing middle class in Colombia during the 1920s fostered an expansion of the reading public. La vorágine, like Don Segundo Sombra and Doña Bárbara, did become a best-seller in its time.³² Any further statement about this novel’s status is more problematic. In La vorágine, a plethora of literary conventions and languages is also at work, including realism, costumbrismo, decadentism, modernismo, and criollismo. The text suggests that the empirical author Rivera was unsure or ambivalent about the basic elements of the novel: his own role as author, the narrator’s relationship to author and character, and La vorágines relationship to society. An ambiguous attitude toward rural orality is present in the colloquial language of the dictionary at the end.

The contradictions and ambiguities in La vorágine result from its complex dynamics of writer and narrator. It is evident that the function of these elements was not entirely clear to Rivera: he was patently insecure in his role as author. The role of the author, the novel, and the reading public was still in many ways undefined in Colombia and throughout Latin America. Thus, the first edition of La vorágine included a supposed photograph of the protagonist Arturo Cova!³³ The reader must recall, nevertheless, that, rather than simulacra of people, novels are universally composed of language.³⁴ La vorágine is a text about writing—the ambiguities, contradictions, and metaphors are all part of a text striving to attain the status of écriture. Despite Carlos Fuentes’s admonition that all these early-twentieth-century criollista classics were simply variations on the theme “they were devoured by the jungle,” La vorágine does not play out his pattern in a significant way. The meaningful drama is not the death of Cova or anyone else but rather the survival of the text.

Las memorias de Mamá Blanca has not been as widely recognized as one of the canonical texts of criollismo as has the work of Gallegos, Guiraldes, and Rivera. Nevertheless, de la Parra has been increasingly recognized as a major writer, and Las memorias de Mamá Blanca is a noteworthy contribution to the cultural dialogue of the 1920s. Described by a traditional scholar in the 1970s as “one of the few good women novelists in Spanish America,” de la Parra belonged to the aristocracy of Venezuela and took good literary advantage of contact with writers during a stay in Paris.³⁵

De la Parra was as unsure and ambivalent about her role as novelist and the genre of the novel as was Rivera. She uses Rivera’s ruse of the “found manuscript”; in this case, she explains in her preface that the manuscript, apparently a partial version of what the reader is to read, was found by the fictionalized author figure. Consequently, part of the drama of this work, as in La vorágine, is the adventure of seeing a manuscript becoming a novel. The basic story involves a description of life on the hacienda Piedra Azul and the narrator-protagonist’s maturation process on the hacienda. In many ways, Las memorias de Mamá Blanca is the classic criollista text, with its celebration of local and regional customs. This celebration includes a recognition of the value of oral culture; the oral tradition is exalted as much as writing culture. De la Parra also tends to portray Venezuelan reality in the same Manichean terms of her contemporaries—as civilización versus barbarie.

Even though her characters finally accept modernization, de la Parra is as ambiguous about traditional and modern values as Gallegos. In this context, the lengthy characterizations of Vicente Cochocho and cousin Juancho are revealing. Vicente Cochocho is portrayed as the idiosyncratic intellectual who dresses poorly because these clothes are “más interesantes” (more interesting).³⁶ Despite his sloppy physical appearance, he is courteous and, above all, well read. Thus, his character seems to be a synthesis of the rural character of criollista ideals yet also refined, inasmuch as most others are able to appreciate the refinement of her “rustic” ways (Las memorias, 97). Beyond this compromise of civilization versus barbarism, it is noteworthy that nostalgia is part of his characterization. He encarnates not only certain nineteenth-century rural ideals of Tomás Carrasquilla, but also those of a distant Spanish past.

This characterization of Vicente Cochocho reveals the implicit author’s fascination with the old ways that preceded modernization. In contrast, the cousin Juancho is portrayed as progressive liberal. Possessing the don de la palabra, he is described as an attractive man of words—a person of both eloquence and verbosity. In terms of modernity, Juancho initially seems to personify the liberal in favor of modern progress. For example, Juancho calls the conservatives “ineptos” (inept). But Juancho has little better to say about his cohorts, the liberals: “¡Son unos ladrones sin idea de conciencia!” (Las memorias, 70). He also seems to be a nationalist in favor of the anticipated unity of “los futuros Estados Unidos de Hispanoamérica” (the future United States of Spanish America).

De la Parra and Gallegos agree that moral vision, improved moral behavior, and respect for the law are all the signs of civilization that would lead Venezuela to modernity. Las memorias de Mamá Blanca and Doña Bárbara invite other comparisons. As Sommer has observed, both novels are about women who break gender stereotypes.³⁷ Doña Bárbara is the occasionally masculine, occasionally feminine, and sometimes androgynous figure. The masculine older sister of Mamá Blanca, Violeta, is as loved by everyone as Doña Bárbara is seemingly hated by virtually everyone around her.

Las memorias de Mamá Blanca and Doña Bárbara are also novels whose central focus is the human character viewed as an essence in the face of social, political, and economic modernization of the nation. In both novels, women who are central to the traditional, rural society come into conflict with men who represent many aspects of change, modernization, and urban society. Rivera seems to fear the rational, while Gallegos is committed to it, seemingly unaware of the multiple contradictions inherent in the vision of his implied author. On the other hand, de la Parra provides more space than either Rivera or Gallegos for both the rational and the irrational, in a fictional world seemingly “doomed” by positive and national change.³⁸ In her acceptance of the rational and the irrational, de la Parra offers a fictional counterweight to the writing of Rivera and Gallegos.

Like La vorágine, Las memorias de Mamá Blanca is an unstable fictional text with ambiguous roles for the author, the narrator, and the reader. The novel begins with a prologue in which a young woman explains that she is the de facto editor of Mamá Blanca’s posthumous memoirs. The editor-friend was twelve years old, and Mamá Blanca seventy when they were friends. The editor-friend explains her work:

The decade of the 1920s is a period of cultural transformation in Latin America, a period of change from oral to writing culture as the predominant mode of communication. As writers aware of the oral tradition, these novelists were important precursors for a more successful integration of oral culture in the fiction of, among others, Carpentier, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa.³⁹ Indeed, in accordance with Alonso, the four novels discussed above represent a search for indigenous cultural identity in the face of the threat of modernity. The extent to which this search is truly significant in these texts, however, does vary. This search is quite significant in Don Segundo Sombra and Doña Bárbara and far less so in La vorágine and Las memorias de Mamá Blanca.