Seven

Rereading Spanish American Modernist Novels

In addition to the short fiction of Borges, the unequivocal indicator of a cultural shift in Latin America toward modernist writing was the publication in the 1940s of the landmark modernist novels of Miguel Angel Asturias, Agustín Yáñez, Leopoldo Marechal, and Alejo Carpentier.¹ Important and representative novels of the 1940s and 1950s to be analyzed in this chapter—all of which demonstrate an urgent desire to be modern—are Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (1946), Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (1947), Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres (1948), Juan Rulfo’s Pedio Páramo (1955), and Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente (1958). Among these writers, Marechal has been the least recognized. Nevertheless, they all were fully engaged in a new modernist aesthetic, and they were interested, to different degrees, in fictionalizing universal archetypes or myths, such as the quest. Three of these novelists were ostensibly political in their writing.

When the Latin American writer entered the decade of the 1940s, readers and critics were not readily prepared to set aside their conventional expectations for fiction and to embrace the modernist novelistic enterprise. The modernist novel as explored, written, and promoted by the different groups of vanguardia had not satisfied the cultural context. The situation seemed to confirm what García Canclini declared decades later: “Latin America: where traditions have not yet departed, and modernity has not yet arrived.”² The novelists of this period, like those of today, made García Canclini’s remark as questionable as was Torres Rioseco’s in 1929 with respect to the fiction of vanguardia.³ These novelists realized interests of the vanguardia writers of the 1920s and 1930s; indeed, there were several direct connections between these novelists and the vanguardia. Asturias was involved with the avant-garde in Europe in the 1920s, and Yáñez published in the avant-garde magazine Bandera de Provincia in Guadalajara. Fuentes’s connection to this vanguardia was through his mentor Alfonso Reyes.⁴

Borges’s claim that Bioy Casares’s novel of 1940, La invención de Morel, was the perfect novel is noteworthy within the context of the novels that appeared during the remainder of the 1940s. It is difficult to guess what Borges’s criteria might have been to reach this conclusion, which the reader is invited to assume must have been stated with tongue in cheek, perhaps because, by the conventional standards in place in Argentina at the time, the novel was a grossly imperfect aberration of known literary practices. But in the 1940s and 1950s, several novels, including El Señor Presidente, Al filo del agua, and Pedro Páramo, were in some ways perfect, at least as manifestations of modernist aesthetics in fiction.

Many modernist writers in Europe and the United States implicitly accepted a divorce between aesthetics and politics. Asturias, Fuentes, and most of the other Latin American modernists refused to recognize this supposed separation between art and ideology. Continuing in the path of their Latin American forerunners, they considered themselves political writers, and they were. El Señor Presidente is an explicitly political novel in which Asturias denounces a historical dictator in Guatemala as well as Latin American dictators in general. The politics of writing held different meanings for Marechal, Yáñez, and Fuentes. For Marechal, who was known as a Peronist writer in Argentina, literary politics meant marginalization from his lifetime friends of the Florida and Martín Fierro groups. In the influential organ Sur, for example, Adán Buenosayres was summarily dismissed as a poor copy of Ulysses. For Yáñez, politics meant participating in the political establishment (Mexico’s PRI) at the same time that he wrote novels critical of the status quo in the Mexico of earlier years. Carlos Fuentes, on the other hand, vigorously questioned the political and literary establishment in Mexico in the 1950s, and his early novels La región más transparente and La muerte de Artemio Cruz explicitly set forth his rebellious attitude and revolutionary politics of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The most ostensibly modernist and explicitly political of these novels are Asturias’s El Señor Presidente, Yáñez’s Al filo del agua, and Fuentes’s La región más transparente. Having been fully committed to the modernist enterprise since the 1920s, Asturias employed a broad range of modernist strategies of fiction in the creation of El Señor Presidente. He utilizes interior monologues and stream of consciousness, for example, with mastery. Asturias also uses techniques that associate this novel with expressionism, surrealism, and cubism. Asturias relies on expressionistic stratagems to suggest irrational mental states in moments of panic. Indeed, Asturias filters the thoughts of characters whose extreme fear distorts their vision of reality, producing expressionistic effects. The author’s exploration of dreams and use of dreamlike imagery (especially the image of a single eye that appears in one dream) connect the novel to surrealism, and the surrealist effects are constant in this work.

In all five of these novels, authority figures are under siege. The authority figure in El Señor Presidente is a fictionalized version of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the early-twentieth-century strongman in Guatemala, even though neither Estrada Cabrera nor Guatemala is ever specifically named in the novel. The time frame is approximately the first half of the century, and the novel begins with the assassination of a military officer, Colonel José Parrales Sonriente, when a deranged person kills him as an instinctual reaction on the street. The dictator, identified only as “the President,” uses this death to eliminate two men, the lawyer Carvajal and General Canales. Colonel Parrales Sonriente has Carvajal arrested, tried in court, and shot. He plans to have Miguel Cara de Angel persuade Canales to flee his home at night in order to have him shot. Cara de Angel, however, creates an escape scheme that allows the general to flee from his home and into the mountains. Back in the city, Canales’s daughter becomes ill, and Cara de Angel falls in love with her and marries her. In the end, he is imprisoned and eventually dies. Despite this outcome and the attendant setbacks for the small group of essentially well-intentioned individuals, this denunciation of the amoral dictator intimates that there is some hope for the citizens of this nation and for humanity. The dictator himself appears rarely—only six times—and usually briefly. Rather than operating as a visible character, he is a shadow presence that pervades virtually everything; Estrada Cabrera was a similarly invisible omnipresence in Guatemala.

This résumé of the plot does not provide a sense of Asturias’s strategies as a storyteller. Like García Márquez, Asturias maintains a rapid flow not only of language, but of plot, too, with chapters that function well as entities in themselves, as in Cien años de soledad. Lacking the hyperbole of García Márquez’s novel, Asturias overwhelms the reader with ugly scenes of grotesque human behavior. The reader is not a spectator to an incredible celebration of life (as in Cien años de soledad), but to the spectacle of horrific human behavior and the attendant moral dilemmas.

Readings of El Señor Presidente have tended to emphasize the universal qualities of one of Latin America’s most widely read and canonical novels. Many of these readings have focused on how Asturias achieves widely appreciated effects through the use of language. Indeed, the opening chapter invites the reader to join in a universally understood and primordial order of linguistic effects—as opposed to rational communication. The arresting first chapter offers an impressive linguistic texture in which sensory perceptions, especially the sense of smell, dominate. The novel begins with the narrator’s incantation “Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre!” (referring to lights and the devil) and the sound of church bells. The chapter’s initial setting involves a group of beggars on church stairs and a dark street at night; it culminates in the madman’s attack and murder of Colonel José Parrales Sonriente. The narrator evokes both Christian and Arabic religious traditions with his language, and after these words of invocation, he closes with a brief final sentence: “Estaba amaneciendo.” This understatement creates a striking contrast with the powerful language and lengthy sentences of the remainder of the chapter.

By creating a strong sense of closure to this first chapter, Asturias demonstrates his subtle handling of his craft as a traditionalist. In a similar use of a conventional device, Asturias creates a circular structure in the novel through the presence of a student and a sacristan at the beginning of chapter 2 and in the last chapter. The author employs other time-tested strategies in El Señor Presidente, such as the regular use of conventional images of darkness and light to suggest pessimistic and optimistic moments in the novel. Many aspects of Asturias’s novel can be associated with traditional cultures and writing and several others with modernity and modernism. With respect to the modern, Naomi Lindstrom considers El Señor Presidente the most cosmopolitan and urbane of Asturias’s novels and observes how many of the book’s features relate directly to the experimentation of the European avant-garde that had been so important for Asturias in the 1920s.⁵ She points out that the word “nightmare” appears frequently, and the novel generates an atmosphere of nightmarish fear and uncertainty. It replicates certain spatial and temporal distortions characteristic of uneasy dreams. El Señor Presidente can also be read as a cyclic struggle between fertility and destruction: the president embodies sterility and death, and Cara de Angel represents the generative forces of nature. Some of the novel’s scenes can be related to Mayan mythology; thus, Asturias juxtaposes Babylon, a symbol of corruption and cruelty since biblical times, with a modern city suffering a cruel dictatorship. Asturias’s mythic vision can be related to Rulfo’s desire to be modern and universal through the use of myths.

These simultaneously conventional and modern approaches to fiction and reality help define the specialness of El Señor Presidente. In many ways, this novel is a summa of traditionalist and modernist aesthetics and interests in Latin American fiction since early in the century. Paradoxically, this is a work that uses high modernist narrative strategies, yet contains a dictionary of vocabulary at the end that the reader associates with the criollista text. Similarly, El Señor Presidente contains, on the one hand, an incorporation of oral storytelling techniques of traditional cultures and the stream of consciousness of high modernism. The result of Asturias’s synthesis is exactly what Torres Bodet and Guiraldes attempted and failed: the universal text. To use Borges’s reference to Bioy Casares once again, this synthesis could be used as an argument for how El Señor Presidente indeed is the perfect novel.

Yáñez and his generation of writers in Mexico were equally interested in participating in what they called “universal” literature. For Joseph Sommers, Yáñez was fully successful, affirming that Al filo del agua is a work of “universal interest.”⁶ Like Asturias, Yáñez had an ear for oral culture as well as contact with the vanguardia. In Al filo del agua he evokes special effects with stylistic maneuvers with language and interior monologues. Rarely does one find a modernist novel with such a seemingly perfect harmony between form and content; it is a technical masterpiece of modernist fiction in Mexico and Latin America in general. If El Señor Presidente represents a synthesis of traditional and modernist aesthetics, Al filo del agua is its peer in modernist aesthetics and the novel for which Borges might have made the argument about perfection, at least within the context of modernist fiction. As a modernist with universal interests who used a specific regional setting, Yáñez was a pioneer in creating the transcendent regionalist text.

The setting for Al filo del agua is a small town in the provinces during a year-and-a-half period leading up to the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Early in the novel, it is apparent that the Catholic Church dominates all aspects of life in the town. In the second chapter, “Ejercicios de encierro,” for example, the reader is privy to seven characters’ digressive thoughts about the church and spiritual matters. The omniscient narrator describes the characters’ thoughts, which, in turn, are intercalated with interior monologues of the seven characters. As the novel progresses, however, it is also evident that the church is losing its influence among the townsfolk. Secret lives and relationships also develop in the town. Micaela and the northerner Damián have a secret affair. After Micaela experiences life in Mexico City, she cannot accept the strict social morés of the town. At the end of the novel, the young woman María rejects her upbringing and the town’s patriarchal values by fleeing with the revolutionaries who sweep through the region.

One reason that Al filo del agua produces the effect of moving from chaos to harmony is the structure. The novel contains sixteen chapters that unfold into a pattern of two parts. The first part consists of eight chapters, the first of which is the “Acto preparatorio.” In this chapter, which offers a static vision of life in the town, Yáñez employs few verbs—including many sentences with no verbs at all—to create a sense of timelessness. A series of repetitions, such as the mention of “mujeres enlutadas” four times throughout the chapter, creates a sense of tediousness and monotony that are the essence of life in the town. The minimal sense of the flow of time operates in contrast to the forces of repression and reaction against change.

Stylistic suggestions of the opposition between change and repression of change set up, in effect, the entire first part of the novel’s structure; the next seven chapters operate on the basis of a series of oppositions or dualities. Chapter 3, for example, contrasts Marta and María, sisters who are characterized as opposites in everything from their physical appearance to their personalities, like their New Testament namesakes. Marta is cautious and conservative; María is bold, progressive, and interested in modern life beyond the town. María reads foreign novels and dreams of traveling to modern cities, from Aguascalientes (Mexico) to Rome and Constantinople. The seventh chapter, “Los norteños,” introduces characters who have been in the United States and bring back modern ideas about life and politics in opposition to the fixed ways of the townsfolk.

Yáñez did not have quite as deep an interest in oral culture as Asturias, but traces of oral culture are evident in this first part of the novel. In this context, a chapter titled “El viejo Lucas Macías” stands out. The old man Lucas Macías, the repository of oral culture in the town, remembers and relates the town’s past and its traditions—the conventional role of the storyteller in oral cultures. He is an illiterate who bridges the gap between oral and writing cultures, since much of his knowledge actually comes from what the townsfolk have read to him.

In the role of the oral storyteller, Lucas Macías is the synthesizer of the stories he hears from others and a central figure in the town. As storyteller, his stories contain some of the formal qualities of the oral tradition and lack some of the qualities of writing culture. Yáñez imitates his oral style in Lucas’s story about a circus that came to town, which is transcribed in one sentence that extends over two pages in length. In another type of reproduction of oral storytelling, this same chapter contains a minutely detailed description (of almost two pages in length) of the coffin in which don Timoteo’s wife, Tacha, is buried. The copiousness of this description recalls the oral tradition as defined by Ong.⁷ In the last chapter, as the news of the revolution reaches the town, Lucas recognizes that he belongs to an earlier (preliterate) order and states “¡Eh! yo ya soy más del otro mundo que de éste” (Oh! I’m now more from the other world than from this one).⁸ When the revolution has overtaken the town near the end of the novel, it is the wise Lucas Macías who announces “¡Estamos al filo del agua!” (We’re at the edge of the storm! Al filo del agua, 376) and then dies, thus signaling a changing of the guard in the town, in essence, the shift from a preliterate to a modern world.

In his role as oral storyteller, it is notable that Lucas is also something of an author figure for Yáñez, articulating the role of the modern writer. This is not really an idea cherished by the oral storyteller, who either likes to see the events or feign having seen them. Here, rather, Lucas plays the role of the modern (Yáñez figure) who affirms the right of invention.

The eighth of the seventeen chapters, “Canicas,” functions as a type of intermezzo, recapitulating some of the novel’s themes and prefiguring the revolution.⁹ This chapter prefigures the upcoming change in the town, which is about to be drawn into the larger scene in Mexico. The chapter also introduces Gabriel, the bell ringer whose music is central to the town’s entire daily rhythm and life. The narrator associates Gabriel’s creative force with the revolution.

“Canicas” begins with the arrival of the new political boss (director político), who attempts to negotiate political support from don Dionisio and the church. But the first segment suggests that rather than being subject to the will of either the political director or don Dionisio, the townsfolk will find their future in “rodar de las canicas” (rolling the dice; Al filo del agua, 163). Soon thereafter, in the second narrative segment of the “Canicas” chapter, Yáñez uses the image of the canicas (dice) in the town as a synecdoche for the nation: “Mientras ruedan lentamente las oscuras canicas de la parroquia, se precipita la vida del país” (While the black dice roll slowly, the country’s life goes on; Al filo del agua, 164). The remainder of the chapter continues developing a vision of life as simply a process of seeing how this game of chance—this canicas—plays itself out. A “dark” player is in the background, too, the canica oscura that is the figure of Gabriel the bell ringer (Al filo del agua, 166). In this “Canicas” chapter, then, three intangible, subjective forces are in operation: the unpredictable canicas, the conservative forces of the church, and the growing political tensions that are entering the town from the outside. The image of the canicas is repeated in oral storytelling fashion throughout the chapter, and the chapter ends with the statement “Va rodando la bola” (The ball rolls on), suggesting that the future of Mexico is as uncertain as a game of chance.

In the novel’s second part, the ninth chapter, entitled “Gabriel and Victoria,” functions as an overture to the novel’s second half and thus has a function parallel to the “Acto preparatorio” in the first half.¹⁰ This chapter relates the relationship of Gabriel and the attractive Victoria, but the relationship becomes an abstraction, for Gabriel is characterized not only as a bell ringer but also as the artist in the abstract: he is not interested in merely imitating the styles of other bell ringers in other churches but is so committed to his art that he is not capable of such betrayal of his artistry. Gabriel’s mysterious origins contribute to his specialness as a character, giving him mythic qualities.

The novel’s last seven chapters function as a mirror image of the first part, creating a symmetrical structure. They continue to portray relationships among the people of the town as well as the growing rebellion. By the end, the hermeticism of the town is broken by the revolution. The mirror-image effect with the first part is created by repeating elements similar to those seen in the first part. María, for example, continues reading foreign novels and continues dreaming of life in such remote cities as Paris, Vienna, and Constantinople. Gabriel is characterized as an individual who mirrors María. This characterization, in turn, contributes to Gabriel’s identity as a mythic character—the other-worldly artist. In Yáñez’s constant play of opposites and mirrors in the novel, he presents María and Gabriel, interestingly enough, as parallel characters who erroneously think they are opposites (Al filo del agua, 182). With this characterization, Yáñez invites the reader to question the validity of extreme opposites: oppositions can also contain parallels and harmonies, so reality cannot necessarily be reduced to simplistic oppositions.

One of the most subtle mirror images of the first part is stylistic: certain passages in the second half of the novel reflect back stylistically on the first part. For example, in the narrator’s description of the third time that Gabriel and Victoria saw each other, the narrator creates a stylistic mirror image of the “Acto Preparatorio,” with short sentences and without the use of conjugated verbs, as in the “Acto Preparatorio.” The effect of this passage is to recall the novel’s opening, to evoke the long-term static quality of the town, and to place the sprouting relationship between Victoria and Gabriel in this context.

The meaning of Al filo del agua is multileveled. The Catholic Church is an overwhelming presence, affecting all aspects of life and thought in the town. At the novel’s conclusion, the church’s domination of the town is ended with the coming of the revolution from the outside. Near the beginning of the last chapter, the priest, don Dionisio, feels tired and wants to die, a symbolic characterization suggesting the overall malaise of the church. The outcome of the church’s role is signaled by the statement near the end of the chapter with the priest’s demise: “El cura se derrumba sin sentido en el pavimiento” (The priest falls down unconscious on the pavement; Al filo del agua, 386). In its totality, however, the novel is less about religion than tyranny, as Brushwood points out: “Yáñez’s novel is not antichurch or even anticlerical, as some have wished to make it; it is very much anti the tyrannies men allow themselves to create and then suffer.”¹¹ It is also a novel that creates oppositions and dualities while inviting the reader to question any sense of reality that reduces individuals and events to simple and consistent dichotomies: in the end, the world of Al filo del agua is too nuanced and complex for the reader to accept all such reductions.

Rarely does one encounter a modernist novel with such a seemingly perfect harmony between form and content as Al filo del agua. The two-part structure leads the reader through a process from fragmentation to harmony; the content of the novel also points to the fragmentation of the characters in the first half and their harmonious fulfillment of desires when they join the revolution.

Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo has many connections with Al filo del agua, both as modernist text and as a novel set in a rural ambience in which oral culture is important. Like El Señor Presidente and Al filo del agua, Pedro Páramo is the transcendent regionalist text that uses a regional setting for a microcosm to relate a story of broader, universal interest.¹² In Spanish, in fact, the title itself has universal implications.¹³ A short novel, Pedro Páramo consists of seventy brief segments (ranging in length from three lines to eight or nine pages) that tell the story of Juan Preciado, one of the many children of Pedro Páramo.¹⁴ The setting is the fictional town of Comala, a small town in the desert that is similar to the rural areas of Jalisco where Rulfo was reared.

This is a novel of a quest: Juan Preciado comes to Comala in search of his father, and the reader soon discovers that Páramo is dead; in segment 37, about sixty pages into the novel, it is evident that all the characters of Comala, in fact, including Juan Preciado, are dead. The narrative alternates between first-person accounts of Juan Preciado and narratives related by an omniscient narrator. In their totality, the brief segments and the numerous voices (of the two narrators and the characters) provide a portrait of Pedro Páramo as a ruthless cacique. There are eight different first-person narrators and at least seventy-three characters. The lack of causality is extreme for a novel published in 1955: only near the end do all the pieces come together well enough for the reader to ascertain that Páramo had forced Dolores Preciado to marry him, then abandoned her after gaining control of her fortune. Embittered by the loss of the one woman he apparently loved, Susana San Juan, Pedro Páramo pursued women and power and eventually left town.

Pedro Páramo does not offer the precise and systematic structural duality of Al filo del agua. The first half of the novel deals primarily with Juan Preciado’s search for his father, as well as conversations with deceased residents of Comala and anecdotes from the past, including the funeral for Páramo’s son Miguel. In the second half, it is revealed that Comala has suffered because Páramo wanted to punish the town after it celebrated the death of Susana San Juan. It also becomes apparent that Páramo’s illegitimate son, Abundio, killed Pedro.

The matter of exactly who narrates each of the novel’s segments has been much disputed; it is generally accepted that Juan Preciado narrates most of the first half of the novel (segments 1–37). In fact, he narrates eighteen of the narrative segments to an old woman, Dorotea, in their common tomb, and the second narrator of importance is Pedro Páramo himself, who narrates seven segments.¹⁵ Since there are multiple narrators and a variety of temporal levels, the reader experiences an initial impression of facing a chaotic and potentially confusing text. Nevertheless, a certain order and sense is gained as the text advances. The fact that Juan Preciado and Dorotea speak in a state of death does not need to imply, for example, that all of their lives or that all the conversations they hear are from the dimension of death.¹⁶ In addition, Pedro Páramo is not as completely atemporal as some critics have suggested. To the contrary, there is an important chronology of events at the temporal level, and there are enough time indicators for the discerning reader to reconstruct many of the stories in time.¹⁷

Like Yáñez, Rulfo was a master of style who seemed to imitate rural speech but who in fact used stylistic nuances that meant innovating conventional literary language and everyday speech. As Lindstrom has observed, Rulfo’s accomplishment was to develop a type of speech that seems plausible in the mouths of uneducated characters yet is unmistakably poeticized.¹⁸ Similarly, Brushwood has explained that Rulfo captures and uses the essence of rural speech so that we accept his language as authentic, but Rulfo allows it to remove us from a folkloric plane to a mythic plane where we observe not customs but symbols of customs.¹⁹ In Al filo del agua, the language of the omniscient narrator and characters such as el viejo, Lucas Macías, is copious and repetitive; in Pedro Páramo, the language of the omniscient narrator and the characters tends to be sparse. The effect of this sparse language and neutral tone is a certain mythic quality that permeates Pedro Páramo and makes it the transcendent regionalist text that seems to belong to a specific regional setting, yet it has much broader thematic overtones.

In addition to language, several other facets of Pedro Páramo create mythic effects. The basic story line contains the mythic dimension of a son’s search for his father. In addition, the entire story offers certain analogies with classical myths, beginning with relatively obvious biblical allusions. In Juan Preciado’s introduction to Comala in the novel’s first segment, for example, there are several suggestions that the characters are in hell, including the statement by one character that Comala is “en la mera boca del infierno” (in the very mouth of hell).²⁰ Páramo’s life can be associated with the biblical Fall. Rulfo returns to some of the most basic forms of myth, but without creating characters with the solemnity of many mythic characters.²¹

The novel’s mythic qualities offer a level of unity to this fragmented work, giving the reader the opportunity to find order in the reading of the novel as allegory. In addition, the use of certain imagery, such as water imagery, creates a sense of unity. Rulfo uses water imagery to lead the reader into flashbacks, telling key events in the past in connection with raindrops, for example. The narrative segments dealing with Páramo’s lover Susana, for example, are flashbacks introduced with water imagery. By offering the reader unities in the form of allegorical readings and imagery, Rulfo created one of the most subtle modernist texts to have been written in Latin America by mid-century.

The competent modern reader finds unities in Pedro Páramo in the process of reading and is presented with an allegory in the character of Juan Preciado, whom one critic has identified as a “surrogate” for readers.²² This competent reader assumes a task—indeed, a search—parallel to Juan Preciado’s, actively attempting to establish identities and find order. Arriving at halfway through the text (segment 37), the reader must make adjustments, accepting the new reality of a fictional world that is entirely deceased. Despite all the adjustments that the modern reader must make, readers have not questioned the basic verisimilitude of this text; once the reader moves beyond segment 37, the novel’s mythic truths require the reader to set aside conventional ideas of causality and logic.

The novel’s final image of Pedro Páramo as a “montón de piedras” (pile of stones) can be seen as a symbol of both the unity and fragmentation of the text, thus capturing the essence of the reader’s experience of the work’s early chaos and final unity.²³ Indeed, from the first narrative segment to the last line, Rulfo has constructed a masterpiece that the competent modern reader might conclude is indeed the perfect novel (within the parameters of modernist aesthetics). If Al filo del agua offers the perfect structure, Rulfo uses the perfect set of ambiguous fragments and language.

Rulfo creates characters of specific individual identity that is in line with modern concepts associated with the singular and the existential. The identity of Pedro is of macho and cacique, and the other males in Pedro Páramo tend to fit the paradigm of the classic macho personified by Pedro. The women in the novel have their identity defined and limited by societal conventions. Susana San Juan is one exception: she stands forth as an individual who is unconventional, who celebrates her sensuality and sexuality, and who can be linked with the spirit of life. Like Gabriel in Al filo del agua, she is a creative force.

Pedro Páramo is a noteworthy book in the context of more recent discussions of the masculinist aesthetic that predominated in much Latin American fiction of the first half of the century. The destructive and repressive actions of Pedro underline the worst that a conventional patriarchal society can produce. His desire for total possession of his lover’s body is a description of a patriarchal hold on the female body. The counterpart to this patriarchal scheme, however, is Susana: as the sensuous and sexual individual, she is the voice of life and regenerative element in this fictional world. The counterpoint of Susana makes it possible to view Pedro Páramo as a transitional text between the masculinist aesthetics of writers such as Guiraldes and the postmodern and feminist aesthetics of later writers such as Eltit, Piglia, and Molloy.

Leopoldo Marechal and Carlos Fuentes, in contrast to Asturias, Yáñez, and Rulfo, are urban writers with distance from oral cultures, from folk traditions, and from transcendent regionalism. Their settings for the novels Adán Buenosayres and La región más transparente are Buenos Aires and Mexico City. In Argentina, Marechal suffered marginalization because of his politics (his association with Perón), one of the principal reasons his novel Adán Buenosayres did not receive the recognition it deserved in Argentina (or Latin America) during the 1940s and 1950s. Like Asturias, Yáñez, and Carpentier, Marechal was interested in European avant-garde writing; he participated in the cultural activities of the “Martín Fierro” group in Buenos Aires in the 1920s. Since the 1960s, there has been a Marechal revival in Argentina; writers and critics of several generations have expressed their admiration for his creative work.

Lengthy, complex, and sometimes daunting, Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres had its genesis in Paris in the 1930s, when, according to Marechal, he was suffering a profound spiritual crisis and wrote a first draft. The novel consists of seven libros that are divided into three parts. The first part, which contains five of these books (368 pages), centers on Adán Buenosayres and his cohorts. The second part, book six (36 pages), is Adán Buenosayres’s “Cuaderno de tapas azules” (Notebook with blue covers). The third part, book seven (239 pages) is entitled “Viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia” (Trip to the dark city of Cacodelphia). In the first five books, Adán Buenosayres engages his intellectual and writer friends in a lengthy dialogue. In a “Prólogo indispensable” (Indispensable prologue) preceding these books, the narrator tells of the burial of Adán Buenosayres, an act that is described less as the death of a man than as the material of a “poema concluido” (finished poem). The narrator-author then explains that Adán had given him two manuscripts on his deathbed: “Cuaderno de tapas azules” and “Viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia.” After reviewing them and deciding that they merited publication as valuable contributions to Argentine letters, the narrator-author decides to provide a portrait of the author and protagonist of these two pieces. After further consideration, however, he opts to portray the protagonist in the context of the conflicts and crises in his own life. The result is the five books that follow the prologue, covering one day in the life of Adán Buenosayres. The narrator-author sets the tone for the novel by mentioning that he himself wrote the first draft for this work in Paris in 1930 and then suffered a spiritual crisis. Adán Buenosayres can be read as an important satirical novel dealing with the world of avantgarde literati in Buenos Aires in the 1920s.²⁴ An intellectually induced circumstance created by the personalities in the novel is the basis for the work’s style. For Lindstrom, Adán is a metaphor and can be seen as a figure of man at the outset of life, or a representative of the human quest, and he incarnates the Argentine, the man of Buenos Aires, or the city itself figured in human form.²⁵ Adán, however, alternates between metaphorical and realistic traits, just as the novel alternates between abstract and realistic modes of representation. The novel’s themes follow a similar dual pattern, involving the reality of Buenos Aires as well as neo-Platonic and Christian philosophical concerns.

The first book, which begins on an April 28 sometime in the 1920s, tells of Adán Buenosayres’s life in Buenos Aires as a poet and intellectual fascinated with Greek and Roman literature. Like Pedro Páramo, he suffers from an idealized love for a woman (Solveig Admussen) as well as from a general existential anguish. There is mention of the “Cuaderno de tapas azules,” Adán’s prized work that he gives to Solveig. In this chapter, the narrator also introduces Samuel Tesler, a Russian emigré from Odessa who practices philosophy.

The second, third, fourth, and fifth books continue the story of Adán, his love for Solveig, and his intellectual friends. Adán’s walks around Buenos Aires are portrayed in the epic terms of the hero involved in a quest. He participates in a lengthy literary tertulia with his friends—a soirée at which they discuss Argentine and world literature, particularly the former. At another level, the text functions as a roman à clef that satirizes certain Argentine intellectual figures of the 1920s; these, in turn, criticize and satirize Argentine society of the time, particularly its bourgeois values.

The sixth book (and second part of the novel), “Cuaderno de tapas azules,” is Adán’s notebook in which he has recorded the history of his soul and his emotional states since childhood. To some extent, it is also a history of his insanity: he probes into the depths of his afflicted soul, letting his imagination run free, and reveals his dreams. At the end of his tortuous spiritual quest, he concludes his notebook by observing that his life finally has a clear direction and hope.

The seventh book (and third part of the novel) is Adán’s surreal trip through the nine levels or circles of the dark city of Cacodelphia (a name that plays with the word for excrement in Spanish). The astrologer Schultze serves as Adán’s guide, explaining in the beginning that Cacodelphia is not a mythological city but a real one. After approaching a foggy part of town, they descend into its center. (The reader is warned early in the book either to return to Buenos Aires or to continue the trip.) During the playful and satirical journey, Marechal continues his critique of Argentine literature and society. Numerous allusions throughout the novel also make it a parody of classical Greek texts.

The humorous effects and remarkable style in Adán Buenosayres depend to a large extent on Marechal’s use of language. The text’s standard discourse is an elegant literary style into which Marechal occasionally inserts colloquial or vulgar words and phrases, thereby creating a farcical effect. The vulgar language tends to emphasize the anal, and the humorous consequences tend to deflate the pretentious.²⁶

An ambitious modernist novel, Adán Buenosayres is distant from the oral tradition and transcendent regionalism of Al filo del agua and Pedro Páramo. Like La región más transparente, however, this novel prefigures some of the impulses toward the “total” novel seen in the 1960s Boom. Indeed, this lengthy and Joycean text shares several of the characteristics of the total novel, certainly making it a much more viable example than had been seen in ambitious yet conventional works such as Doña Bárbara.

Fuentes’s La región más transparente shares Marchechal’s totalization impulse. The urban setting for La región más transparente is a Mexican city similar to the Mexico City of the 1950s, when the nation was in a process of ongoing modernization. La región más transparente deals with the nation in this context and the issue of identity. Fuentes’s desire to be modern is exhibited both in modernist technique and in the work’s dealing with modernity as a theme: Mexico’s modernity is fictionalized within a context of rapid capitalization and promotion of industrial and technological change as questionable progress. Like Pedro Páramo and Adán Buenosayres, the characters are representations of the modern individual subject; progress is fictionalized in a context of the successes and failures of individuals, with their respective ascents and descents in Mexican society. Identity, in fact, is frequently conceptualized in this novel in opposition to progress: the modern Mexican is portrayed as an uprooted individual who has lost much sense of past and identity.

La región más transparente appeared at a time when identity was more of an issue for Mexican intellectuals than it was for Marechal in Argentina. In Mexico, the essays of Samuel Ramos and Alfonso Reyes in the 1930s and Paz’s essay Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) set a discursive direction for many Mexican intellectuals. Thus, in La región más transparente, Fuentes appropriates and fictionalizes many of Paz’s themes, such as the characterization of men as violators and women who are violated and Mexicans’ use of masks to hide their identity.²⁷ It deals self-consciously with the conventional macho paradigm and is overt in its questioning of masculinist aesthetics.

Fuentes began this first novel by establishing a distinction between “novel” and “history” more clearly delineated: a page appears at the beginning with a chronological outline of the novela and another with the events of Mexican historia. After this six-page chronological overview, Fuentes offers a four-page guide to all of the eighty-three characters, with brief, one-line descriptions of the role of each. They are classified, to a large extent, by social status. The wide range of characters includes the de Ovanda family, the Zamaconas, the Polas, a bourgeois group, intellectuals, foreigners, socialites, a lower-class group, and representatives of the Indians—Ixca Cienfuegos and his mother Teódula Moctezuma. For Fuentes, the numerous individuals and social groups have intricate and seemingly endless connections and contacts. Thus, what might appear to be a chaotic presentation of a large panoply of characters eventually becomes a huge network with connections that provide one of the numerous levels of unity to La región más transparente.

In La región más transparente, Fuentes fully exploits the technical devices pioneered by First World modernists as well as by Rulfo and Yáñez to explore the past and present of modern Mexico. In this novel, he uses the multiple points of view and collage effects of this work’s most important predecessor, Manhattan Transfer. Fuentes employs the possibilities of the first-, second-, and third-person narrations, thus moving Mexican narrative one step beyond Yáñez and Rulfo strictly in terms of narrative technique. Like Dos Passos, Rulfo, and Yáñez, Fuentes the modernist moves from a fictional world of an apparent fragmented chaos to one of order and harmony.

These novels share several commonalities as modernist texts written in the 1940s and 1950s. Asturias, Marechal, Rulfo, Yáñez, and Fuentes were engaged in a search for truth. Each of these authors created characters who were involved in a quest of mythic proportions. With respect to characterization, these five authors portrayed characters who are modern rather than postmodern individuals: they tend to be singular and existential rather than the multiple self that breaks ontological barriers.²⁸ These five modernist texts question many of the assumptions of the masculinist aesthetic that preceded them in Latin America; in El Señor Presidente, Al filo del agua, Pedro Páramo, and La región más transparente, the authority figures of patriarchal society are questioned.

The relative lack of communication among the Latin American nations and its writers in the 1940s and 1950s—at least compared to the 1960s and 1970s—was one of the main reasons there was no internationally acclaimed “boom” of the Latin American novel with the publication of these ambitious, historical, and intensely modernist novels in the 1940s and 1950s. With the exception of small groups of well-informed writers and intellectuals, local critical reaction to these novels tended to range from negative to a kind of neutral puzzlement. One exception was Julio Cortázar, who, in 1949, wrote in laudatory terms about Adán Buenosyres (and a generally marginalized Leopoldo Marechal).²⁹

In the 1940s and 1950s, Latin American writers successfully confronted what Alonso has identified as a burden of modernity.³⁰ Paradoxically, as they faced their modernist task, they began to incorporate oral culture into fiction more successfully than had ever been seen in Latin American fiction, thus realizing the task which the criollistas failed to fully understand as an essential part of their labor as writers committed to telling the autochthonous stories of their respective regions. Of these five novels, El Señor Presidente, Al filo del agua, and Pedro Páramo incorporate oral culture most successfully.

Some of these novelists prefigured the Boom by demonstrating a totalizing impulse that Fuentes associated with the writing of the Boom. Fuentes himself exhibited this totalizing interest in La región más transparente, but the explicitly totalizing project was Adán Buenosayres. Yáñez and Asturias also reveal some interest in the total novel as described by Fiddian, for Al filo del agua and El Señor Presidente contain several characteristics of this same elusive novelistic experiment.

This modernist project began to form the new, modern, active reader who will be so important to the novelistic process in the novels of the 1960s Boom. The text that fictionalizes a reader most carefully and systematically is Pedro Páramo. After the publication of the short fiction of Borges and this novel by Rulfo, anything was seemingly possible in the Latin American novel, and this was clearly evidenced in the novels that came forth in the 1960s. Each of these five novelists successfully used the strategies of a modernist aesthetic to become the first generation of universal Latin American novelists.