The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

The avant-garde fiction writers of the 1920s and 1930s were a cultural minority who nevertheless pursued a modernist aesthetics inspired by the new European and North American modernist trends. For them, this new writing involved a multifaceted cultural activity. Vicente Huidobro, more recognized as a poet, in fact, wrote what he called a novela filmica and was involved with the film industry; Adolfo Bioy Casares was fascinated with the implications of technology and film in the context of literature, an interest evident in his novel La invención de Morel. Modernist works that were either ignored or rejected by the predominant criollista and traditionalist literary culture of the time and to be considered in this chapter are El Café de Nadie (1926) by Arqueles Vela, La casa de cartón (1928) by Martín Adán, Mío Cid Campeador (1929) by Vicente Huidobro, Proserpina rescatada (1931) Margarita de niebla (1927) by Jaime Torres Bodet, La última niebla (1927) by María Luisa Bombal, and La invención de Morel (1940) by Bioy Casares. Virtually forgotten works in Latin America, they were resuscitated by scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as by postmodern Latin American novelists of the 1970s and 1980s who felt an aesthetic alliance with these frequently marginalized writers.¹ They offer different degrees of innovation and experimentation with time, plot, and character, clearly distancing themselves, in the process, from the traditional (realist-naturalist) modes of Rivera, Gallegos, and the other criollistas.

Deemed “inappropriate” for Latin American readers by one of the most influential literary scholars of the time, Arturo Torres Rioseco, the writers of the vanguardia were, in reality, proposing a fundamental change in the cultural paradigm. According to Torres Rioseco, Latin American culture was still too “limited” for the production of psychological or innovative fiction. For David Daiches, the modernist novel in the United States and Europe meant a basic breakdown of the implied agreement between author and reader about what was significant in the human experience.² In Latin America, this breakdown began in the 1920s with the publication of the first novels of the vanguardia and the cultural debates promoted by Torres Bodet and Arqueles Vela in Mexico, by Huidobro in Chile, by Bioy Casares, Borges, and Victoria Ocampo in Argentina, and by numerous other intellectuals. Whatever the more contemporary assessments and revisions of this fiction may be, most of these works were viewed as failures as novels in their times, despite the aesthetic qualities they offered.

These novelists—Arqueles Vela, Torres Bodet, Adán, Huidobro, Bioy Casares, and Bombal—did not represent a unified cultural or ideological front, nor were they associated with the aristocracies of the patriarchal order. To the contrary, they were a heterogeneous group with limited communication among themselves, holding diverse literary and political agendas. They were all affected (or afflicted) by different degrees of a desire to be modern and held different levels of enthusiasm for the new modernist cultural agenda. They also varied in their acceptance of Macedonio Fernández’s assertion that the writer does not copy reality but makes it.

In addition to the magazines and groups that attempted to promote new aesthetics (i.e., Contemporáneos, Florida), the contributions of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, and Victoria Ocampo to the modernization of Argentine letters in particular and Latin American literature in general were remarkable. Ocampo founded her seminal cultural magazine Sur in 1931; this organ and the diverse writings of Bioy Casares and Borges in the 1930s were important forerunners to the rise of the modernist novel in Latin America in the 1940s. Cortázar has explained this as follows: “Sur nos ayudó a los estudiantes que en la década del 30 al 40 tentábamos un camino titubeando entre tantos errores, tantas abyectas facilidades y mentiras” (Sur helped us students who were looking for a path in the 1930s, living among so many errors, poor facilities, and lies).³

These writers were often more connected to their local settings than many of their critics claimed. Martín Adán and Torres Bodet, for example, made references to specific places in Lima and Mexico City in their fiction. They expanded the national geography in such a way that the urban spaces were now at the center, and this constituted a relatively new approach in Latin American fiction.

Jaime Torres Bodet and Vicente Huidobro are best known as poets; in their efforts as novelists, they wrote inventive works the reading of which requires a new tacit agreement between author and reader about what is significant in the experience of a narrative. Torres Bodet the fiction writer has been long ignored by the general reading public and scholars, although his lot improved in the latter part of the century: a two-volume set of his complete fiction appeared in Mexico in 1985, and his fiction is now generally well known by scholars of Latin American literature.⁴ His short novel Proserpina rescatada has been the focus of several recent readings.⁵ It is a fragmented work consisting of twenty-eight segments that appear in four parts, and they relate the story of the relationship between Delfino Castro Valdés and Proserpina Jiménez. Delfino is a doctor, and Proserpina (also called Dolores Jiménez) is a medical student who becomes his lover. After several years of separation, Proserpina calls him on the telephone, which in turn causes him to remember a variety of events associated with their relationship. The characterization of Proserpina underlines her duality, for she functions not only as a medical student but also as a medium or conduit for the dead. The narrator also suggests that Proserpina has numerous identities, as manifested in her being the voice for many souls. The text jumps from one time and space to another, culminating in Delfino finding her approaching a diabetic coma and, after her pleading, agreeing to inject Proserpina with a drug that will prompt her death.

The main structuring device in Proserpina rescatada is memory. Consequently, it is a fragmented novel that follows the illogical pattern of the associative process involved in memory.⁶ This basic fragmentation of the structure appears as a parallel fragmentation at other levels of reading. The most consistent and obvious of these levels is the characterization of Proserpina as a fragmented being. She is portrayed as a person with a split personality whose segmentation is communicated by means of temporal and spatial fragmentation. The narrator’s discourse is fragmented by pauses and a variety of stylistic devices.⁷ He even states directly: “No consigo ya unir todos los fragmentos, todas las páginas sueltas del libro desencuadernado, del almanaque en desorden que esparce sobre mi memoria los recuerdos de nuestra vida de Nueva York” (I no longer manage to unify all the fragments, all the loose pages of the unbound book, of the almanac in disorder that spreads the memories of our life in New York on my brain).⁸

Characterization in Proserpina rescatada differs radically from what was standard among Torres Bodet’s realist-naturalist contemporaries. Pérez Firmat has postulated that characterization in this novel, appropriately enough, is a process of decharacterization.⁹ He points to the fact that Delfino’s enterprise ends by dissolving his subject into a background of whiteness that cannot but remind one of the blank page. Proserpina is not only a character of multiple identities: she is also a slight and slender character who, in the end, disappears into death. This outcome is but one indicator of Torres Bodet’s relative disinterest in character development and his enthusiasm for other aspects of the creative process.

Torres Bodet’s desire to be modern is so overt that it could be described as an anxiety of the modern. The characterization of Proserpina features, in addition to her multiple identities, her modernity. This modernity consists of her interest in universal (as opposed to local or national) art and literature and the fact that she avidly consumes everything from the Upanishads and the writings of Rabindranath Tagore to the fiction of Paul Bourget and the art of Latin America. The important detail here is not that the art and literature that she admires are necessarily modern (which they obviously are not), but that it is not local or nationalist. The narrator’s characterization of Proserpina also involves frequent use of the new objects associated with modernity. For example, her movements have a “nerviosidad eléctrica” (electric restlessness), and her thin hands “derramaban un fluido magnético” (exuded a magnetic fluid; Proserpina rescatada, 190).

The text is a celebration of modernity that describes North Americans as “un pueblo de mecanógrafas, de ascensoristas, de médicos que han hecho su carrera por correspondencia y profesores de gimnasia que dan todos los días sus lecciones de tenis por radio” (A nation of typists, of elevator operators, of doctors who have done their studies through correspondence courses, and gym teachers who give their tennis lessons by radio every day; Proserpina rescatada, 202). In accordance with standard modernist procedures, Torres Bodet is particularly fascinated with the juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern.

The fragmentation and the focus on modernity have several implications with respect to the state of Latin American fiction and society in the late 1920s and early 1930s. María Bustos Fernández has set forth a reading of Proserpina rescatada arguing that the essence of the work is fragmentation as a way of being.¹⁰ For this critic, Delfino and Proserpina offer opposing versions of the “modern” condition, he being practical and scientific, she impractical and irrational. Indeed, Proserpina rescatada is a manifestation of a sense of an unstable and fragmented subject and an unstable and fragmented society. As a modernist text, nevertheless, this novel presents the reader with the task of finding harmony when confronted with an apparent chaos of fragmentation, as D’Lugo has observed: “Since Delfino cannot achieve a sense of unification, then readers are the ones to attempt such a task, by means of a more active participation in the narrative process.”¹¹ By the end, the reader does find something of the unity of the modernist text, for in the end, Proserpina rescatada is the minimally unified story of a protagonist’s search for a lover who escapes the possibility of any stable relationship until her final escape into death.

Proserpina rescatada is a modernist text and thus an evident forerunner of the rise of modernist fiction the 1940s and 1950s in Latin America. It is also a less obvious forerunner to postmodern fiction of the 1970s and 1980s.¹² Like much postmodern fiction, the main interests of Proserpina rescatada are more ontological than epistemological, for the ontological status of Proserpina is frequently ambiguous.¹³ Vague in its thematic focus, the main subject of the novel is actually language itself, and self-consciously so, as is the case of much postmodern metafiction published several decades later (see chapter 12).

Unlike Proserpina rescatada, Vicente Huidobro’s Mío Cid Campeador is one of the least-discussed novels of the vanguardia. Nevertheless, it is a noteworthy work—a curious cultural artifact already—that was made into a film and translated into English under the title Portrait of a Paladin. Like Proserpina rescatada and much postmodern fiction published much later in the century, it also places emphasis on language as a theme in itself. The use of a mythical literary figure as the protagonist is also typical of the vanguardist writer who desired to be modern by being universal.

The dichotomies observed by Goic are symptomatic of the numerous dualities that are the main structuring device of the text. Indeed, there are three basic dualities that function as aberrations from a simple anecdote about a hero named El Cid. The first is constructed around the contrast between the Cid as literary myth and the Cid as a real person. In the first two chapters, the anecdote accentuates the mythical and universal qualities of the Cid. For example, when his mother is about to give birth to him, the situation is described as follows: “La madre en su cama entre los linos blancos es el centro del universo en el centro mismo de España” (The mother in her bed between the white linens is the center of the universe in the very center of Spain).¹⁴ The young hero is characterized according to modern clichés, with references in English to “Yankees” and “cowboys” (Mío Cid Campeador, 29). The novel vacillates between these two visions: on the one hand, the invincible mythical hero and, on the other, the real person of our everyday world. Huidobro uses this duality to intercalate anachronistic allusions. The novel begins on a specific date (1040), but soon the athletic interests of the Cid appear in a contemporary framework: “El campeón estaba knock-out" (The champion was knocked out; Mío Cid Campeador, 37). Besides modifying the characterization of the Cid as the mythical character of the Poema del Cid, the anachronistic nature of this duality places into doubt the supposed “objectivity” of the realist-naturalist tradition.

A second duality, between actions and words, is set forth by Huidobro in the preface when he states: “no puedo negar mi preferencia por los hombres de acción y de aventura” (I cannot deny my preference for men of action and adventure; Mío Cid Campeador, unnumbered page). In addition to the futuristic tone that is also occasionally evident in the fiction of Torres Bodet, the reader notes the contrast between the tastes established by Huidobro and his creative act (a cerebral activity not exactly within the domain of acción y aventura). A letter that precedes the preface produces even more ambiguity. This missive is directed to Mr. Douglas Fairbanks for having inspired him to study the Cid: “Me pidió usted que le recopilara datos sobre él y se los enviara a los Estados Unidos, y me habló con tal entusiasmo que su entusiasmo se comunicó a mi espíritu, y entonces nació en mí la idea de escribir algo sobre el Cid” (You asked me to compile facts on him and to send them to the United States, and he spoke to me with such enthusiasm that his enthusiasm communicated itself to my spirit and then was born in my idea of writing something about El Cid; Mío Cid Campeador, unnumbered page). The contrast between the hombre de acción who knows Mr. Fairbanks and the other person, the writer, is evident in the preface that follows the letter. In this section, Huidobro minimizes the true influence of Fairbanks on his creation. (Mío Cid Campeador, unnumbered page). With respect to this second duality, Huidobro’s interests do not lie in the action of the traditional (realist-naturalist) novel but in the language that was not widely understood as the possible subject of a novel until the rise of postmodern fiction in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America.¹⁵ None of these four novels—Proserpina rescatada, La casa de cartón, Margarita de niebla, or Mío Cid Campeador—has the strength of plot found in Doña Bárbara or Don Segundo Sombra.

A third duality deals with the narrator. An omniscient narrator presents the actions, exercises complete omniscience over the characterization, and organizes the narrative. The duality is expressed in the difference between this traditional narrative position and its subsequent variations. At times, the narrator limits his omniscience as a rhetorical device, asking, for example, if the character really loves the Cid: “¿Ama al Cid doña Urraca?” In a playful manner, the narrator explains supposed difficulties that arise from attempting to follow the actions of the Cid: “Difícil es seguir ahora las andanzas del Cid.” (Mío Cid Campeador, 301.) He is supposedly unable to relate the details of a battle because one of the characters has disappeared from his view (Mío Cid Campeador, 368).

Proserpina rescatada and Mío Cid Campeador are the products of inventive, entertaining, and iconoclastic novelists who were, in effect, proposing a new idea of what was significant (to paraphrase Daiches) in the reader’s experience of reading fiction. They were also proposing a new cultural paradigm. Obviously, their modernist projects had neither the ambition nor the depth of the high modernist texts that the novelists of the Boom completed in the 1960s—the brief Proserpina rescatada will never compete with Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde for a place in the canon of the most accomplished modernist texts of the century.¹⁶ Arqueles Vela and Adán were perhaps less entertaining than Torres Bodet and Huidobro but equally committed to new ideas about what fiction might be. Arqueles Vela’s El Café de Nadie has a central character and a setting, and the latter predominates. There is virtually no plot. The setting is the Café Europa in Mexico City. The novel opens and closes with references to the café, whereas the supposed protagonist, a woman named Mabelina, is not introduced until the third of ten chapters. The novel’s fragments focus on Mabelina, seen both in an exterior and interior fashion. Given Arqueles Vela’s interest in being universal (i.e., modern), he provides no names for the city or its streets.

Mabelina is a character in ongoing crisis, whose fragmented identity, like that of Torres Bodet’s Proserpina, is one of being in itself. This problem of being and the generalized vagueness and anonymity of the other characters places this book, like much postmodern fiction, in the sphere of primarily ontological rather than epistemological interests. In El Café de Nadie, however, the author is fully and enthusiastically committed to exploring every possible avenue for subverting any conventional concept of “character.” Thus, the waiter is a hypothetical character, and the other characters are more beings in the process of collective and ongoing transformation than subjects of fixed and stable personalities.

Read as modernist novels, Margarita de niebla, Mío Cid Campeador, and El Café de Nadie were aesthetically inconsistent. All three, however, were celebrations of the surprising metaphor. Margarita de niebla is an experiment in modernist aesthetics that tells more of a story than does El Café de Nadie—it deals with a young professor in love with two women of opposite personalities. Margarita Millers is the daughter of a German family residing in Mexico; Paloma is the Mexican friend of Margarita to whom the narrator-protagonist, Carlos, feels an attraction. Carlos, however, is far more committed to the literary image than he is to either of the women. The novel’s twelve chapters are a study in ambiguity and contradiction, with constant jumps in time and space. Verani has suggested that an overflow of refined images, in fact, is excessive for the contemporary reader, and this critic is probably accurate in his assessment of even the modern reader’s likely response to a work that obviously was not attractive to many readers at the time of its publication.¹⁷

Margarita de niebla has only little more conventional plot than the novels of Huidobro or Arqueles Vela, and the depiction of the characters makes them difficult to decipher. Rather than depicting psychological states, Torres Bodet was interested in this novel in creating landscapes, moods, and thoughts.¹⁸ Now the landscapes, however, are not replicas of the jungle, the pampa, or the plains, but of modern urban scenes that appear as both exterior descriptions (of what the narrator-protagonist observes) and interior descriptions (of what the narrator-protagonist perceives, sees, or feels). For example, in a description of his memory of her, he uses images from modern science “tubes” to describe a “motor” inside him that seems to flow like a mechanical engine. He then evokes the image of the streets of asphalt, which the reader assumes he is observing as the “motor” that goes over these streets.¹⁹ In this manner, Torres Bodet moves from interior to exterior-type imagery, frequently using objects associated with modernity to describe the narrator’s emotional states and what he is observing.

As has been observed, Margarita de niebla should not be read as a novel of character, but as an inquiry into the question of characterization in fiction.²⁰ Thus, the question of the ontological status of the characters is a central matter and invites further comparisons with more recent postmodern fiction.²¹ Character in this novel is not portrayed as a human essence (as is assumed in Don Segundo Sombra and Don Goyo), nor as something always in transformation (as in Arqueles Vela’s work), but as either irrational or as a result of chance. As Forster has observed, the two characters are really a pretext for the study of opposites, and neither ever attains human dimensions.²²

Unquestionably, Margarita de niebla and Proserpina rescatada made Torres Bodet one of the most articulate spokespersons for the emergence of a “nueva novela que surge por sobre los escombros de la ‘novela de ayer’” (new novel that comes forth from the leftovers from “the novel of yesterday”).²³ Indeed, there is a sense of vitality and play in these two novels, as well as in Mío Cid Campeador, that places them among the early declarations of the death of the realist-naturalist novel.

The potentially excessive imagery of Margarita de niebla is even more cultivated in Martín Adán’s La casa de cartón. The other aspects of this work, however, are as little developed as they were in much Latin American avant-garde fiction, for La casa de cartón is, in fact, another brief novelette, in this case consisting of ninety pages and thirty-eight brief narrative segments. Adán’s technical adventure in this novel is a remarkable precursor to modernist novels of later decades that test the limits of technical innovation. Anticipating Agustín Yáñez’s innovative stylistic procedures in the opening chapter of Al filo del agua (“Acto preparatorio”) by two decades, Adán uses images virtually without employing conjugated verbs, thus creating a sense of timelessness and eternity in his description of the docks of Barranco.²⁴

The images in the opening of this chapter suggest a brightly lit child’s toy, and the sense of timelessness in this passage is indicative of how these fiction writers of vanguardia often presented specific and identifiable places. They were accused of ignoring local settings in favor of European themes, but Adán places this novel specifically in the Barranco neighborhood of Lima (then a municipality outside of Lima). The difference between the Barranco of Adán (as well as the Mexico City of Torres Bodet) and the spaces of the criollista novel is that these writers of vanguardia, rather than assuming that local places are to be celebrated as the site of local folklore and customs, assumed that their task was to somehow universalize their settings. In some cases, the space is neither urban nor rural. Adán attempts to universalize the setting by creating a sense of eternal time and space.

La casa de cartón deals with a young man’s experience growing up in Barranco. The narrator-protagonist describes going to high school and everyday life in a small town in the mountains above Lima which they visit, observing everyday life on the streets of Barranco, seeing images from a ride on a streetcar. The novel offers vignettes of his different adolescent loves, as well as a satirical description of Latin Americans in Paris; revelations of the narrator-protagonist’s impressions of male and female friends; and descriptions of a variety of other characters (emphasizing imagery and emotions). The narrator-protagonist comments about their readings of modernist writers, including Joyce.

A 1971 reprint of La casa de cartón includes a commentary written by Peruvian critic Luis Alberto Sánchez and a postscript by Adán’s contemporary José Carlos Mariátegui. Arguing in favor of this fragmented novel’s unity, Mariátegui observes that “su desorden está previamente ordenado” (its lack of order is ordered in advance).²⁵ Mariátegui is correct, for La casa de cartón is a modernist text that offers the reader an initial impression of fragmentation and chaos, yet in the process of reading, the modern reader finds continuities and unities in the narrator’s style, imagery, fluctuating relationship with the world around him, and attitude toward others, making it a more harmonious modernist text than Proserpina rescatada, Margarita de niebla, or Mío Cid Campeador.

There is little plot development in this novel, so the reader’s task is not the organizing of anecdotal material; the major event in La casa de cartón is the use of imagery. Adán’s consistent use of metaphors involves physical objects and conditions to describe emotional and psychic states. Unlike the anguished and lost souls of Margarita de niebla, the narrator-protagonist of La casa de cartón is less profoundly affected by his adolescent setbacks than engaged in a celebration of life as it relates to the word. This novel is, above all, an exceptionally joyful celebration of the act of creation and, more specifically, a celebration of the joy of discovering surprising, iconoclastic, and occasionally humorous juxtapositions of words. Much of the literature of vanguardia is an object of celebration; Adán, like Huidobro, believed in Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández’s assertion that the word is reality and this linguistic reality is a subject of celebration.

Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel and Bombal’s La última niebla were more viable as cultural products of Latin America in the 1930s and are more successful modernist texts than most of the works produced in the 1920s and 1930s. These two novels are increasingly recognized as well-wrought and significant works despite their avant-garde status. Bioy Casares collaborated with Borges in writing projects, using pseudonyms such as H. Bustos Domecq, B. Suárez Lynch, and B. Lynch Davis. Bioy Casares had already published a series of short fictions in the realm of the fantastic by the time that he wrote what Borges described as a “perfect” novel. Remarkably, in the preface to La invención de Morel, Borges concludes with this observation: “He discutido con su autor los pormenores de su trama, la he releído; no me parece una imprecisión o una hipérbole calificarla de perfecta” (I have discussed the details of its plot with its author; I have reread it; it doesn’t seem to me imprecise or hyperbolic to call it perfect).²⁶ In typical Borgesian fashion, this statement remains patently ambiguous: in the last line of this four-page preface Borges offers no explanation for exactly why this novel might be considered “perfect.” In fact, the reader is soon subjected to a fiction that few would have considered perfect by virtually any measure of aesthetic quality being used in Latin America in the 1940s. La invención de Morel reads as the fragmented, incoherent, and contradictory story of a narrator-protagonist (with a criminal record) on an island who falls in love with a woman identified as Faustine. Technically, the text is a supposed diary or memoir of the narrator-protagonist. If one were to identify a perfect modernist fiction of this period—using as the criteria the aesthetics of modernism—two likely candidates would be La invención de Morel and Agustín Yáñez’s 1947 novel, Al filo del agua (see chapter 7).

The opening lines of La invención de Morel offer a radical undermining of traditional concepts of linear time already suggested and elaborated in texts such as Borges’s short story “El milagro secreto,” the novels of Torres Bodet, and La casa de cartón. The novel’s first two lines read as follows: “Hoy, en esta isla, ha ocurrido un milagro. El verano se adelantó” (Today, a miracle has occurred on this island. Summer jumped ahead; La invención de Morel, 13). After this incredible statement concerning time, the narrator nonchalantly returns to the everyday: “Puse la cama cerca de la pileta de natación y estuve bañándome, hasta muy tarde” (I put the bed next to the swimming pool, and I was bathing myself, until very late; La invención de Morel, 13). The narrator explains the situation on the island: some white settlers had built a museum, a chapel, and a swimming pool in 1924 and then abandoned the island. A mysterious sickness, which disintegrates bodies and kills humans, afflicts people who might move there.

From early in the novel, the narrator-protagonist makes statements that invite the reader to question the ontological status of Faustine and himself. For example, early in the novel he refers to summer visitors to the museum as “verdaderos” (real) and then follows “por lo menos tan verdaderos como yo” (at least as real as I; La invención de Morel, 15). The ontological status of the text itself also becomes increasingly ambiguous. Early in the work, the narrator affirms that the island is called Villings and belongs to the archipelago Las Ellice. A footnote from a fictitious editor, however, says “Lo dudo” (I doubt it; La invención de Morel, 17) and then explains inconsistencies between this island and the islands of Ellice.

Bioy Casares and many of the other writers of the vanguardia were clearly misunderstood or misinterpreted by many of their contemporaries with respect to their use of space. The vanguardista fiction writers did indeed use their nations—both their urban centers and their rural areas—as settings. Their objective, however, was to be universal, and many of them viewed their cities as more similar to European novelistic spaces than to the pampa or the llano. (Clearly, they were not engaged in the same nation building project of Gallegos and Guiraldes.) María Luisa Bombal sets her works in casas de campo in Chile. She is yet another special case, for she is not frequently associated with the groups of vanguardia. Many of these fiction writers, nevertheless, were exceptions in one way or another, and Bombal actually did interact sporadically with the cosmopolitan Argentine writers of Victoria Ocampo’s magazine Sur during a lifetime that included several years of residence in Argentina. La última niebla is another relatively brief novel, yet it relates a compelling story. The narrator-protagonist suffers a crisis of truth that is a noteworthy precedent to Latin American postmodern fiction of the 1970s and 1980s.²⁷ She remembers an intense love affair, which compensates for an empty and disappointing relationship with her husband. Both the reader and the protagonist, however, have growing doubts about the veracity of the relationship with the lover; the text leaves this matter ambiguous.

Bombal employs water, mist, and dampness as consistent images of the protagonist’s unhappiness and alienation. More importantly, the mist contributes to a pervasive sense of uncertainty concerning what is real.²⁸ Along these lines, mist serves the function of creating a multiple reality in which dreams, the imagined, and the tangible are interwoven. The novel’s events flow back and forth between the subjective, interior reality of the narrator and the empirical reality of the exterior world. As Lucía Guerra-Cunningham has pointed out, the ambiguity of La última niebla has two sources: the lack of specificity with respect to external reality and objective time; and the elimination of exact and rational limits between the dreamed world and the objective world.²⁹ Given the protagonist’s ongoing crisis, it becomes the reader’s task to attempt to understand the enigmatic relationship between her and her supposed lover.

As a work that rejects the conventions of the realist-naturalist novel, La última niebla can be easily associated with all five of these novels of vanguardia. Like Arqueles Vela and Torres Bodet, Bombal constructs a fictional world that emphasizes interiorization and imagery rather than the imitation of empirical reality. Like Bioy Casares and Borges, Bombal finds the fantastic in everyday life, and clear connections can be made between La invención de Morel and La última niebla. The male narrator’s diary of his relationship with an invented woman has its parallel in La última niebla, in which a female narrator fictionalizes a relationship with an apparently invented man. As an avant-garde text, the specialness of La invención de Morel is the fact that the protagonist’s lover turns out to be an entirely fictionalized entity; the specialness of La última niebla is the ambiguity of the protagonist’s lover—textual evidence makes it impossible to ascertain whether he really exists.

In contrast with the tenuous world and ambiguous human relationships of the protagonist, her friend Regina lives in a concrete world with a real human relationship. Like the protagonist, Regina finds it difficult to endure the mediocre reality that surrounds her in her everyday life. Regina commits suicide, making her an important character in the novel. As Borinsky points out, the woman Regina controls the meaning of the relationships that the narrator has with those surrounding her. The protagonist strives for difference: “Her being a woman is rooted in wanting to be a different woman, or be punished with a constant doubt as to who she is.”³⁰

In La última niebla, Regina’s story offers a conventional plot, reminding the reader of this virtually missing element in the novel. Many of these novels of vanguardia, of course, offer a minimal plot and, consequently, the protagonist’s exceptional story of a potential relationship and the minor character’s more conventional story distinguish La última niebla from much fiction of vanguardia. Sharing the interests of both the innovators and the more conventional storytellers of the 1930s, Bombal is a key transitional figure between the most experimental avant-garde writers of the 1920s (i.e., Torres Bodet and Huidobro) and the modernist storytellers of the 1940s (i.e., Asturias and Yáñez).

These five novelists of the vanguardia shared a common interest in breaking the conventions of time, plot, and character in the novel. To the limited extent that their characters are recognizable and credible as human beings, these beings, such as Proserpina and the Cid, were identifiably “modern” with the obvious intention of also being “universal.” In fact, these writers of vanguardia were content to associate their characters with both Greco-Roman antiquity and modernity, with the goal of being universal. More often than creating truly universal human types, however, they simply subverted the very concept of character itself. This was the case of the characters in Mío Cid Campeador and El Café de Nadie.

The new cultural paradigm suggested by these writers involved a breakdown of the previously accepted tacit agreement between author and reader about what was important in human experience. Unfortunately, no new commonly accepted agreement was forged with respect to this new modernist fiction. Consequently, these new novels were frequently criticized, ignored, or openly rejected. The writers’ desire to be modern was momentarily frustrated. In general, the modernist project of the 1920s and 1930s went unrealized with respect to the novel.

As Unruh has pointed out in her discussion of the avant-garde, it could well be that Latin American literature’s time has come at the end of the century (rather than in the 1920s) precisely because it has been in tune with the cacophonous disclocation of our postmodern times. Careful rereading of these Latin American texts suggests that the experience of radical discontinuity is a story that the literature of Indo-Afro-Iberoamerica has been attempting to tell about itself for several decades.³¹

Successful as a type of underground promotion of the right of invention, the avant-garde fiction of the 1920s and 1930s began to explore Macedonio Fernández’s idea that the writer does not copy reality (as Gallegos and company had attempted), but makes it. If the criollista fiction was a celebration of regional customs, the fiction of vanguardia was a celebration of the word. The collaborative cultural work of Victoria Ocampo, Bioy Casares, and Borges, as well as the aesthetic achievements of Adán’s La casa de cartón, Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel, and Bombal’s La última niebla were exceptions to the generally unsuccessful modernist fictions published in the 1920s and 1930s.