The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

The avant-garde writers of the 1920s and 1930s had laid the groundwork for a modernist novel in Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s. Unfortunately, their work in fiction had little immediate impact on the Spanish American novel, and the more important forerunners for the rise of modernist fiction in Latin America were not writers like Torres Bodet and Huidobro, but rather Proust, Dos Passos, Kafka, and Faulkner, in addition to other foreign modernists. For novelists, wanting to be modern in this period tended to consist of the desire to be the Latin American Dos Passos or the Latin American Faulkner. The seminal Spanish American figure behind the rise of the modernist novel and the reaffirmation of the right of invention in Spanish America was the Argentine poet, essayist, and short fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the case of the Latin American novel, during the 1940s and 1950s, the desire to be modern was played out primarily by employing the strategies of modernist fiction. In this period numerous cultural tensions surfaced, and writers such as the Mexicans Carlos Fuentes and Rosario Castellanos fictionalized attendant issues of cultural conflict, cultural difference, and hybridity.

Borges’s promotion of avant-garde aesthetics in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, his innovative short fiction of the 1940s in the form of Ficciones, and his translations of Faulkner into Spanish, among other contributions, made him a central figure for the rise of the modernist novel in Latin America. Of these contributions, his book Ficciones represented not only innovation just in terms of form, but a reaffirmation of the right of invention.¹ Seemingly an obvious right for modernist novelists in Europe and the United States, pure invention had been under attack (and fallen into disrepute) from the traditionalists and criollistas. Given this background, Borges’s reaffirmation of the right of invention was a cultural revolution in itself. His volumes of short stories El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan (1941) and Ficciones (1944) suggested innovative, new paths for Latin American writers. The story “El milagro secreto” deals with time in ways that few Latin American writers other than those of vanguardia had dared to explore in fiction. These stories also contain metafictional qualities, a matter considered irrelevant by the traditionalists and nationalists. Subjective concepts of time and space are also common experiences for readers of Ficciones. The same had been the case for some of the avant-garde Latin American fiction writers of the 1920s, but now the culture and the society seemed ready for such approaches to fiction and to reality. Huidobro had admonished poets in his “Arte Poética” to invent, and the Latin American and Caribbean writers two decades later were freely fulfilling Huidobro’s desire to be modern. Writing in French, Caribbean writer Aimé Césaire stressed the importance of invention, advocating “the drive to invent our own way and to rid it of ready-made models.”²

Several of the major modernist writers of the 1940s and 1950s had direct contact with the European avant-garde. Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias and Cuban Alejo Carpentier had been well versed in European modernist literature since the 1920s. Asturias traveled to Europe in 1923, studying the Mayan collection at the British Museum and then Mayan mythology at the Sorbonne. During this stay in Europe, he also became acquainted with the most prominent French surrealists as well as with European avant-garde writing in general. The poet Robert Desnos had helped Carpentier escape political repression in Cuba and find exile in Paris. In Europe, Carpentier became deeply engaged in European and Latin American culture of the moment and participated in the literary circles of Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Eluard.

Some Latin American writers conceived of modernity as a challenge rather than a burden. In Brazil, the most prominent novelists of the 1940s and 1950s were social critics who also hewed to the aesthetics of modernism. Since the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922, Brazilian writers had been dedicated to the modernization of Brazilian fiction. One result of this process was the rise of four renowned novelists from the northeastern region of Brazil: Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado, Rachel de Queiroz, and José Lins do Rego. Independent of these regionalists were the two prominent figures of modernist fiction in Brazil, João Guimarães Rosa, and Clarice Lispector.

Throughout Latin America, the 1940s and 1950s were a period of intense cultural debate as new sectors of Latin American society contributed to the debates on national identity and cultural autonomy. Important foci of these debates were the multicultural Caribbean, indigenous cultures, and African cultures. Disparate cultural forces such as indigenismo, Caribbean negritude, and Marxism contributed to this dialogue, and all three of these forces were a response to what was viewed as the degeneration of Western modernity.³ The Caribbean region called for cultural independence. During this period, some of the most significant cultural texts of this Caribbean dialogue were Alejo Carpentier’s La música en Cuba (1946) and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953). Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) is a radical text that affirms the cultural independence of the Caribbean region. Nevertheless, Cahier is also indebted to European modernist models.⁴ Indeed, Césaire used the ecumenical language of high modernism to make his call for a rejection of colonialism. Gikandi explains as follows: “Whatever its limitations, what makes Césaire’s poem so remarkable in the discourse of decolonization is its initial conceptualization as a fragment that, nevertheless, exists as the preliminary toward a whole: the poet falls back on the discourse of deracination borrowed from European modernism to explode the colonizer’s claim of an integrated Caribbean culture (i.e., one integrated to the empire).”⁵ In Caribbean modernism, as throughout Latin America—from Césaire to Fuentes and Cabrera Infante—the master of form also deforms. Césaire was also a prominent spokesperson for international discussions of negritude.

In his book Caribbean Discourse, Edouard Glissant proposes that the long history of colonialism in the Caribbean and the construction of its culture under European domination have resulted in the region’s irruption into modernity as a violent departure from the colonial tradition. Glissant insists on the “real discontinuity beneath the apparent continuity of our history.”⁶ Despite the reaction against colonialism among Caribbean writers, they did not totally reject European modernism. As Simon Gikandi has observed, Aimé Césaire is agitated by any notion that he is an “enemy of Europe” or the mere thought that he ever urged colonized peoples to return to “the ante-European past.”⁷ Near the end of this period, the Cuban Revolution served as a model for the Caribbean intellectuals who had been calling for independence from neocolonial powers.

The Haitian Jacques Stephan Alexis entered into cultural dialogue with Alejo Carpentier and, at the same time, into dialogue with Latin America at large. In 1956, Alexis began theorizing new ideas about Caribbean time and space. For several years preceding Alexis’s writings, Carpentier had been articulating a Spenglerian view of history, with regular references to the idea of the decline of the West.⁸ Alexis appropriated this view of history from Carpentier along with the Cuban author’s concept of Caribbean identity as a New World Mediterranean.⁹ Consequently, the cultural autonomy and national identities of the Latin American nations seemed to be assured with the rise of this region and the decline of Europe.

Carpentier visited Haiti in 1943, and this experience had a profound impact on his vision of Caribbean culture. Haiti’s popular culture, with its strong African elements, was for Carpentier the authentic source of Latin American identity. As González-Echevarría has explained, “Carpentier searches for the marvelous buried beneath the surface of Latin American consciousness, where African drums beat and Indian amulets rule; in depths where Europe is only a vague memory of a future still to come.”¹⁰

In Puerto Rico, American influence was asserted during World War II as it never had been before. During the 1940s, the military presence on the island increased, and Puerto Rican nationalists were persecuted. With the support of the United States, Luis Muñoz Marín formed a new political party in Puerto Rico (the Popular Democratic Party or PPD), leading to Muñoz being elected the first governor of Puerto Rico. Given the growing anticolonial movements throughout the Caribbean, the government of the United States found a formula that allowed Puerto Rico some political autonomy under the name of the Estado Libre Asociado.

The new modernist fiction in Latin America was published by Asturias and Carpentier as well as by recognized writers such as Agustín Yáñez, Juan Rulfo, and Leopoldo Marechal. Among these modernist writers were Rosario Castellanos, David Viñas, Antonio de Benedetto, Yolanda Oreamuno, Salvador Garmendia, and Haitian Jacques Stephan Alexis. The Caribbean writers George Lamming, Edouard Glissant, Jacques Romain, and Samuel Selvon published modernist novels that questioned the authority and discourse of colonialism. The list of noteworthy modernist novelists could potentially be quite long but should also include, in the 1950s, Eduardo Caballero Calderón, Miguel Otero Silva, and Ramón Díaz Sánchez. In Puerto Rico, the writers to be associated with modernist aesthetics during this period were identified as the Desperate Generation and included José Luis González, René Marqués, Pedro Juan Soto, José Luis Vivas Maldonado, and Emilio Díaz Valcárcel.

The narrative strategies appropriated by these Latin American modernists could be easily associated with numerous European and American fiction writers. These stratagems included the use of interior monologues, stream of consciousness, fragmentation, varying narrative points of view, neologisms, innovative narrative strategies, and frequent lack of causality. Just as important as these narrative techniques, however, were some fundamental changes of attitude that came with modernism. One obvious change was the acceptance of new concepts of time, as well as the promotion of new concepts of space. The basic breakdown of the implied agreement between author and reader about what was significant in human experience (as postulated by David Daiches) was evident: in the 1920s, this rupture had begun to take place in Latin America, but the breakdown became significant, widespread, and successful as promoted, above all, by Borges.¹¹ In general, modernist fiction tended to present a chaotic and fragmented modern world in seemingly chaotic and fragmented texts. The reader’s task with the modernist text was to find a subtle, implicit, or implied harmony—a unity of some sort—in the novel.

The clearest indicator of the rise of the new modernist novel in Latin American—a major shift in the cultural paradigm—was the appearance in successive years of Miguel Angel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (1946), Graciliano Ramos’s Insonia (stories, 1947), Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (1947), Leopoldo Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres (1948), Clarice Lispector’s A Cidade Sitiada (1949), Arnoldo Palacios’s Las estrellas son negras (1949), and Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949). The parallel phenomenon in the English-speaking Caribbean was represented by Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun (1952, Trinidad) and George Lamming’s landmark novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953, Barbados). An engaging and challenging modernist text in Brazil during this period was Grande Sertáo: Veredas (1956) by João Guimarães Rosa. Chicano José Antonio Villareal also appeared on the scene during this period, publishing Pocho (1959), a novel many critics of the time considered the “first” Chicano novel. With these books, the right of invention is evident; the radical rupture of the implicit agreement about what is important in human experience had taken place.

During this period, Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and several other Latin American writers were intrigued by the possibilities Faulknerian narrative approaches could offer for telling the stories of their respective regions.¹² García Márquez, David Viñas, Di Benedetto, and Rulfo were immersed in the writings of Faulkner in the 1950s and produced modernist texts crafted in the Faulknerian mode: La hojarasca (1955) by García Márquez, Cayó sobre su rostro (1955) by Viñas, El pentágano (1955) by Di Benedetto, and Pedro Páramo by Rulfo exhibit clear affiliations with Faulkner. García Márquez had read As I Lay Dying with great interest and used three different narrators to relate the story of fictional Macondo—his Yoknapatawpha County—from 1903 to 1928 in La hojarasca. Viñas also was a deft technician in Cayó sobre su rostro, a novel in which the chapters alternate between the past and the present, but both types of chapters suggest ways in which the past affects the present. It is a historical novel that debunks some of the nineteenth-century military leaders who had been considered national heroes in Argentina. Di Benedetto’s El pentágano is a novel of a love relationship among five characters, and the author’s masterful use of narrative point of view is just as effective as García Márquez’s and Viñas’s. A master of language, Di Benedetto experiments with a variety of languages and tones that is more ambitious than the styles employed by García Márquez in the 1950s.

García Márquez, Viñas, Di Benedetto, and a host of other novelists of this period use a specific region to create a more universal human experience than had generally been the case for Latin American regionalists before the 1940s. This new type of regionalism, which one critic has identified as transcendent regionalism, is the type of fiction also cultivated by Juan Rulfo.¹³ Rulfo had published a volume of well-constructed Faulknerian stories set in rural Mexico, El llano en llamas (1953), before the appearance of one of the most accomplished and prestigious modernist novels of the century in Latin America, Pedro Páramo¹⁴ (see chapter 7 for further analysis).

José Donoso, Miguel Otero Silva, and Ramón Díaz Sánchez published modernist novels that were less flashy in narrative technique than Pedro Páramo. In his first novel, Coronación (1957), Donoso employed interior monologues to characterize a protagonist, an aging Chilean oligarch, who narrates a story of frustrated human relationships. The novel is both an engaging character study and critique of the Chilean oligarchy. Otero Silva also uses soft touches, such as special syntactical structures and certain stylistic devices, to characterize the people in a decadent town. His Casas muertas (1955) is constructed primarily on the basis of extended flashbacks, and the author avoids the potentially obvious symbolism of the decadence surrounding “dead houses.” Otero Silva was just as committed to social justice as he was to subtle narrative strategies, but neither interferes with him or the reader in Casas muertas. Díaz Sánchez’s Cumboto (1950) is also more nuanced than the typical Latin American novel of social protest written in the 1930s and 1940s. Its four-part structure and carefully controlled tone—opening with a tone of mystery—make it as engaging to read as Donoso and Otero Silva of the same period.

Galindo, Lispector, and Mallea changed the focus from the broad and external to the details of the characters’ interior lives. In Colombia, a similar and significant change took literature in the direction of modernist aesthetics.¹⁵ This change was signaled particularly in the work of six fiction writers in the 1940s: Tomás Vargas Osorio, Rafael Gómez Picón, Elisa Mújica, Ernesto Camargo Martínez, Jaime Ibáñez, and Jaime Ardila Casamitjana. Novels such as Ardila Casamitjana’s Babel (1943), Ibáñez’s Cada voz lleva su angustia (1944), and Mújica’s Los dos tiempos (1949) carry thematic overtones of reaction against Colombia’s process of modernization at the same time that the novelists exhibit interest in modernist fiction writing. De la vida de Iván el mayor (1942) by Camargo Martínez relates the protagonist’s psychological disintegration. Gómez Picón’s 45 relatos de un burócrata con cuatro paréntesis (1941) deals with the tedious and stultifying life of a small-time bureaucrat; the suffocation the protagonist feels—if seen as typical of the lower middle class—was unleashed in 1948 with the bogotazo, when a clash between liberals and conservatives led to civil war.¹⁶

Gómez Picón, Camargo Martínez, and the early Lispector focused on the individual, and these three authors shared some of the interests of European existentialists. Juan Carlos Onetti also fictionalized some of these existential interests in El pozo (1939), Tierra de nadie (1941), La vida breve (1950), and Los adioses (1954). They are novels about isolated, alienated, and anguished individuals. The fictional port city of Santa María (an amalgam of Buenos Aires and Montevideo) is the sordid setting of his work. Most readers have agreed that Onetti’s major novel was La vida breve, a story about the protagonist’s real and imaginary incursions into an apartment next to his own, a space occupied by a prostitute who is alcoholic and psychologically warped. The novels’ ambiguous conclusions suggest the general meaningless of life. Tierra de nadie deals with the human relationships among a small group of characters, creating a sense of chaos. Not an aggressive innovator in terms of narrative technique, Onetti did find ways to use the third-person narrator and conventional literary language in unexpected and effective ways.¹⁷

Many more novelists of this period used less ambitious strategies to create novels of interior dimensions, with incursions into the psychology of characters, along the lines of Onetti. Ernesto Sábato published El túnel (1948) and Yolanda Oreamuno La ruta de su evasión (1949); these are novels of interiorization, works of the modernist aesthetic concern over individual consciousness and, just as typical of the 1950s, novels of existential anguish. Sábato develops philosophical ideas and a psychological portrayal of love, jealousy, and murder in El túnel, a novel portraying a protagonist isolated from others. The protagonist in La ruta de su evasión is equally incapable of establishing relationships with others and also suffers from existential anguish.

The fiction of Elisa Mújica and Yolanda Oreamuno brings to the forefront the fact that by the 1940s and 1950s, women writers were increasingly present in elite Latin American culture. In addition to Mújica and Oreamuno, Antonia Palacios, author of several volumes of short fiction and poetry, published the novel Ana Isabel, una niña decente (1949), a bildungsroman that can be read as a metaphor for the decadence of a social class. It consists of a series of sketches in the life of a young upper-middle-class girl in Caracas. The style of Ana Isabel, una niña decente can be connected to the fiction of vanguardia.¹⁸

The tradition in Latin America of social literature had numerous manifestations in the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with Ciro Alegría’s El mundo es ancho y ajeno; three of the most successful novels of this type were Rosario Castellanos’s Balún Canán (1957), Eduardo Caballero Calderón’s El cristo de espaldas (1952), and Asturias’s Hombres de maíz (1949). Balún Canán was Castellanos’s first novel set in Chiapas, where she initiated her indigenista fiction. Despite being white, educated in Mexico City, and upper-class, Castellanos wrote convincingly of the Indian condition in Chiapas. As Franco has asserted, the novel is less successful when the author abandons the child narrator and adopts a third-person narration in order to show the increasing defiance of the Indians.¹⁹ The context for El cristo de espaldas is the civil war in Colombia in the 1950s, identified as La Violencia (1948–1956). It tells the story of a parricide in a small town: a son who belongs to one political party kills his father, who belongs to another. The town’s novice priest becomes a surrogate victim when he attempts to defend the son’s just cause. The plot is clearly a typical scenario of both La Violencia and many novels of this period; Caballero Calderón distinguishes himself from many of these Colombian novelists by creating overtones in this fiction of the venerable tradition of Hispanic literature that dates back to the Spanish Golden Age and Don Quixote.

Writing from a position in Peru comparable to that of Rosario Castellanos in Mexico, José María Arguedas wrote the indigenista novel Los ríos profundos (1958). Arguedas was bicultural, and his young protagonist in Los ríos profundos, Ernesto, is reared in indigenous culture even though he is white by birth. His worldview is typical of an oral-culture perception of the world around him. After his father leaves Ernesto in school in the town of Abancay, Los ríos profundos becomes the dual story of growing up and of a person from an oral culture learning to adapt to writing culture.

The Peruvian Ciro Alegría’s El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941) is the most canonical of these indigenista novels yet the least compelling and convincing for the modern reader. This disjointed text portrays the world of Rumi and his people. They suffer from the injustices of the landowners and local power brokers; the narrator offers editorial comments to the potential (traditional) reader who might need such clarifications.

The indigenista writer tended to deal with bicultural themes, and this is almost always an explicit or implicit topic of Chicano writing. The bicultural Américo Paredes continued laying the groundwork—with a variety of texts written in the 1940s—for what became the Chicano novel of the 1960s. His story “Over the Waves Is Out” (ca. 1948) deals with the experiences of a young boy who wishes to be a musician against his father’s will. The conflict is not between cultures, but between generations. In the end, father and son find reconciliation. Rereading Paredes in the 1990s, Saldívar has observed: “Paredes’s story shows how oppositional Chicano narratives attain hegemonic patriarchal force precisely by repressing the threat of its feminist consciousness.”²⁰

Regional awareness was strong in several areas of Latin America, but particularly in Brazil and Colombia. The 1940s in Colombia witnessed the conception of a fiction based on awareness of regional sociopolitical and cultural realities; the novels of Guillermo Edmundo Chaves, Diego Castrillón Arboleda, and Arnoldo Palacios represented this awareness of a new novelistic project. Chaves’s Chambú (1946) is a search for identity which recalls similar criollista projects of the 1920s, but la tierra is now the southern region of the Greater Cauca in Colombia. Chaves demonstrates not only an awareness of this region’s tri-ethnic oral and writing culture but also is fascinated with it as the material for establishing an identity.

Diego Castrillón Arboleda likewise pursued a fictional project closely related to the Greater Cauca region in Colombia and, more specifically, its indigenous, black, and mestizo cultures. Castrillón Arboleda wrote as an outsider to the culture, producing the novels José Tombé (1942) and Sol en Tambalimbú (1944). In both novels a strictly writing culture is the frame of reference for telling stories intimately related to the region’s tri-ethnic culture. José Tombé deals with the exploitation of the indigenous population by the local power structure in the hands of whites.

Castellanos and Castrillón Arboleda were novelist-anthropologists who studied culture in ways that allied them with scholars of the academic discipline of anthropology. González-Echevarría has argued for the importance of this discipline as “the mediating element in the modern Latin American narrative because of the place this discipline occupies in the articulation of founding myths in order to see itself as the other.”²¹ Asturias, Carpentier, and Jacques Romain are examples of the novelist-anthropologist; Romain founded the Bureau d’Ethnologie in Haiti in 1941 and later published anthropological studies. Asturias explores Native American folkloric traditions in Hombres de maíz, a text in which Asturias synthesizes modernist strategies and folklorist themes. It is an elusive and digressive modernist work in which Asturias himself has admitted he made no concessions to the reader.²² Hombres de maíz is divided into six parts and an epilogue, and the conflict revolves around the cultivation of corn: the outsiders desire to interfere with the Indians’ cultivation of corn, even though it is a sacred form of sustenance for them. Here, Asturias incorporates an oral-culture understanding of the world. The language of this novel is also a synthesis of modernist experimentation and oral tradition. As a modernist, Asturias exercises the right to experiment with the word and, by repeating syllables within words, he evokes effects of the oral tale.

The writing of Arnoldo Palacios and Adalberto Ortiz confirms a new social and political awareness of Afro-Latin Americans in the 1940s. Palacios’s novel Las estrellas son negras (1949) follows a day and a half in the life of Israel, a black boy in the region of Chocó in Colombia who suffers from poverty and the physical pain of hunger. Israel (usually referred to as “Irra”) is the first of five children in a family headed by the mother. The omniscient narrator is close to Irra: he follows Irra’s thoughts and actions closely during the novel’s short span of time. The thematic focus is on Irra’s suffering, but in certain key moments he attains the political awareness that his suffering is part of a general condition of class and race. Ortiz’s Juyungo (1943), like Las estrellas son negras, involves a synthesis of social protest and the protagonist’s search for individual identity. The novel begins when the protagonist is approximately twelve years old, making this a story of rite de passage. The main interest of the novel, however, arises from his position as a black man in a variety of social contexts.

The publication of novels such as Luis Carlos Flórez’s Llamarada, novela obrera anti-imperialista (1941) in Colombia was an indicator of the continued thrust of social protest fiction. The Colombian writer in Antioquia who most actively cultivated this type of fiction was Iván Cocherín, whose settings were western Antioquia (the present-day state of Caldas). The circumstance of mine workers in the town of Marmato in Caldas and similar scenarios are to be found in his novels Esclavos de la tierra (1945), El sol suda negro (1954), and Carapintada (1959). Already more sophisticated than Cocherín in the use of narrative technique in his first novel, Tierra mojada (1947), Manuel Zapata Olivella’s thematic interest was the experience of workers in plantations located in the northern Caribbean region of Colombia.

Latin American novelists shared a common bond in their questioning of the modernization, and, consequently, the burden of modernity was an issue.²³ Mariano Azuela questions Mexico’s modernization project in Nueva burguesía (1941). Here, modernization undermines traditional values, and the satirical tone reveals Azuela’s dismay over the postrevolutionary construction of capitalism in Mexico.

As mentioned, Carpentier had visited Haiti in the 1940s and believed that the African roots of Latin America were to be found in the popular culture of Haiti. In El reino de este mundo, Carpentier looks at the historical roots of Caribbean culture, here in Haiti. This novel relates the life and character of Ti Noel as they develop throughout the book’s four parts. The first part, which consists of seven brief chapters, narrates a rebellion under the leadership of a man named MacKandal. The second, which takes place twenty years later, also contains seven chapters and tells of the historic Bouckman massacre and of a yellow fever epidemic. The seven-chapter third part deals with the rule of Henri Christophe, and the fourth part relates the coming of the mulattos. El reino de este mundo does not offer the technical experimentation of Asturias or Yáñez; Carpentier’s idea of innovation did not involve the use of fragmented structures or multiple points of view. His method for reaching a layer beneath the surface of empirical reality was not the employment of modernist strategies, but of oral storytelling techniques. As Carpentier understood the right of invention in the 1940s, the Latin American writer’s task was to express “the marvelous real.”²⁴

Carpentier continued his discussion of Latin American culture in Los pasos perdidos (1953). In this novel, the characters regress in time as they travel into the jungle. This journey into the past ultimately leaves the protagonist lost—with ambiguous identity—for at the end he realizes that he is a misfit in the city and in primordial nature. It is a novel of failures: the protagonist fails to find any sort of transcendence, and Carpentier fails to fully exploit the ideas suggested in the novel.²⁵

In general, the Brazilian novelists Ramos, Amado, de Queiroz, and Lins do Rego were not as committed to experimenting with narrative technique as were many novelists writing in Spanish, such as Asturias, García Márquez, and Rulfo. Nevertheless, these northeastern Brazilian writers had read Faulkner and produced novels of transcendent regionalism comparable in many ways to the fiction of Faulkner, Rulfo, and the early García Márquez.

One of the most complex and ambitious modernist novels of the century in Latin America was João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertâo: Veredas, comparable in complexity to Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres. In addition to Grande Sertão: Veredas, several novels of the late 1950s that set the stage for the Latin American and the Latino novel of the 1960s and 1970s were Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente (1958), Salvador Garmendia’s Los pequeños seres (1959), and José Antonio Villareal’s Pocho (1959). These novels emerge as a response to the fragmentation of the traditional societies in which they were written. In the case of La región más transparente, the new urban society of the postrevolution “Mexican miracle” was in conflict with the traditional and rural values of the prerevolutionary agrarian and hierarchical society. More traditional in narrative technique, Pocho is a Chicano novel that emerges as an art form responding to the conflict between traditional social relations of Hispanic society in the United States and a modernizing cultural hegemony in the region.²⁶ Both novelists focus on individual identity within this context of cultural conflict firmly grounded in history. Like García Márquez and Viñas, Fuentes and Villareal are interested in exploring how the past affects the present.

Like Fuentes, Garmendia explored the possibilities of modernist fiction in an urban setting. Los pequeños seres (1959), widely recognized as a pioneer urban novel in Venezuela, is the story of Mateo Martán, told mostly through interior monologues, with multiple levels of time and varied levels of the perception of reality. The exploration of an individual’s psyche in this urban setting is something of an innovation in itself in Venezuela, although this type of fiction already had seen exponents throughout Latin America since the late 1940s. Los habitantes (1961) is Garmendia’s fictionalization of urban working-class life, with a focus on truck drivers. It is the story of an individual’s alienation, with subtle changes in time and perspective.

The heterogeneity of the Latin American novel was more evident than ever: the writing of women, Afro-Latin Americans, Native Americans, and Chicano writers during this period was evidence of this growing hybridity. The novelistic production of Rosario Castellanos, Antonia Palacios, Yolanda Oreamuno, and Elisa Mújica were testimony to the significant fictional contributions written by women. The masculinist aesthetic was challenged in a wide range of texts written by men and women who questioned authority and traditional discourses. Afro-American writers such as Arnoldo Palacios and Adalberto Ortiz contributed to the heterogeneity of discursive practices.²⁷

The desire to be modern is played out with modernist aesthetics and with a new focus on problems of identity and cultural conflict. Generally speaking, identity was sought in a universal context. Many of the novelists carried this out with the strategies of transcendent regionalism, while others pursued the effects of oral culture and, in turn, what was identified as magic realism.²⁸ In retrospect, it is evident that some of the major modernist texts of the century appeared during this period, one of the most remarkable being Nobel laureate Asturias’s El Señor Presidente. Another Nobel laureate, Gabriel García Márquez, published his first novel and stories in the 1950s, as did Fuentes. The Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1945. In a variety of ways and because of several unrelated circumstances, by 1961 the scene was set for the 1960s Boom of the Spanish American novel.