Eight

Novels and Contexts of the Boom and Beyond

The Boom of Spanish American fiction during the 1960s began with international recognition of the remarkable quality of the fiction written by a select few talented Latin American modernists—Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar. Notably, a modernist of the previous generation, Miguel Angel Asturias, received the Nobel prize in literature precisely in 1967—at what might be considered the apogee of the Boom. What a few writers and critics have viewed as a burden of modernity was for these four writers and many others a celebration of heterogeneity and the right of invention in fiction. By 1967, the indicators of a radically modern—or postmodern—fiction were also evident.

This fourth moment of the desire to be modern was evident well beyond the writings of these four novelists. In each of their respective nations—Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Argentina—these novelists had compatriots equally dedicated to the modernist enterprise, writers such as Rosario Castellanos, Elena Garro, and José Emilio Pacheco in Mexico, Julio Ramón Ribeyro in Perú, Manuel Mejía Vallejo, Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, and Héctor Rojas Herazo in Colombia, and David Viñas and Ernesto Sábato in Argentina. In addition, novelists such as José Donoso in Chile (who was closely associated with the Boom), Salvador Garmendia in Venezuela, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Amado, and Autran Dourado in Brazil, Jean Rhys, Rosa Guy, and José Lezama Lima and Guillermo Cabrera Infante in the Caribbean participated in the creation of a new, modernist novel in Latin America.

In their desire to be modern, these writers of the Boom produced some of their most complex and totalizing novels during this period, as did their contemporaries throughout Latin America. Julio Cortázar published Rayuela (1963), the Cuban José Lezama Lima wrote Paradiso (1966), and the Mexican Fernando del Paso created José Trigo (1966), all three lengthy works with many qualities of the “total” novel that writers of the Boom found attractive.

Many of the novelists of the 1960s continued in the search for the universal through the creation or re-creation of Western or indigenous myths. Continuing in the path of Asturias and Carpentier, writers such as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Rosario Castellanos created new myths or further elaborated known ones. Some novelists continued writing in a Faulknerian mode and using the procedures of transcendent regionalism. García Márquez, Viñas, Cepeda Samudio, and Rojas Herazo published novels with both regional and universal overtones. Cepeda Samudio’s La casa grande (1962) and Rojas Herazo’s Respirando el verano (1962) are neo-Faulknerian texts set in small towns in Colombia, and both were key novels for the rise of modernist fiction in Colombia. In En noviembre llega el arzobispo (1967), Rojas Herazo continues the family story initiated in Respirando el verano, although he characterizes a broader spectrum of society than in his first novel.

This Boom of the Latin American novel in the 1960s was the result of the fortunate confluence of numerous individuals, institutions, and circumstances, among them the Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells, the appearance of a brilliant translator (Gregory Rabassa), the Cuban Revolution, publishers Harper and Row in the United States and Seix Barral in Spain, the rise of international Latin Americanism as an academic discipline, and the publication of the literary magazine Mundo Nuevo in Paris. In his book on the subject, Historia personal del Boom, Donoso observes that Carlos Fuentes was the catalyzer who promoted the unity of the group.¹ Donoso, in fact, wrote a novel while living in a bungalow on Fuentes’s property in the early 1960s.

The social, cultural, and political context of the early 1960s was dominated by the Cuban Revolution and other radical and antiestablishment movements, such as the international youth rebellion that emanated from the United States and Europe. Puerto Rico was in a process of change caused, to a large extent, by the transformation of the island from an agricultural to an industrial economy. This transformation, in turn, resulted in the increased social mobility of many Puerto Ricans, even though the U.S. Project Bootstrap is generally considered a failure. Puerto Rican intellectuals became increasingly critical of the island’s dependent status, and the political crisis in Puerto Rico reached its apogee when Governor Luis Muñoz Marín stepped aside from his position, and his party, the PPD, lost its first election in more than two decades. In this period, writers Luis Rafael Sánchez, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Ana Lydia Vega, Rosario Ferré, and Manuel Ramos Otero became visible on the Puerto Rican cultural scene for the first time.

At the outset of the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution became a rallying point for most Latin American intellectuals, and the writers of the Boom uniformly supported Fidel Castro’s revolutionary ideals. When Castro arrived triumphantly in Havana in January 1959, Fuentes was awaiting him to offer his congratulations and support. García Márquez was also an early ally of the revolution, and soon thereafter Vargas Llosa and Cortázar offered their solidarity, as did Caribbean intellectuals such as C. L. R. James.

The symbolic moment in which the ideology of the Cuban Revolution and the politics of the Boom were united occurred in 1962 at a literary conference in Concepción, Chile. There, Fuentes declared to Donoso and other prominent Chilean writers that the Latin American intellectual should be engagé and join in support of the Cuban Revolution. As Donoso has explained in his history of the Boom, never before had he heard a writer express such political positions so stridently.

In Spain, literary agent Carmen Balcells and the Seix Barral publishing firm also contributed to the rise of the Boom. Balcells set high professional standards for Latin American writers and their writing; in doing so, she was highly influential in the rise of Latin American novelists as full-time professional writers. Before Balcells, the vast majority of them had to make a living in other professions and write as a sideline when they could.

By the 1960s, the Latin American novel had numerous masters besides García Márquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar. José Donoso published an impressive set of novels and, as a personal friend of these writers, was sometimes associated with the Boom. Salvador Garmendia was perhaps the exemplary novelist who was not part of the Boom: he has written a long and uninterrupted series of novels since the 1960s but has remained basically ignored by critics and readers outside of Venezuela. The Brazilians Clarice Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa were recognized primarily by a growing number of scholars, although they have been translated into Spanish and on occasion into English. Jorge Amado, however, enjoyed considerable commercial success with Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1967).

Novelists such as Donoso, Lispector, and Garmendia wrote a type of modernist fiction that differs markedly from the major novels of the Boom. These novelists generally did not write the works of expansive geographies and histories observed during the Boom. Their work has little or none of the magic realism or broad historical vision of García Márquez. Donoso’s early novels, including El lugar sin límites (1966) and Este domingo (1966), were more closely associated with the realist tradition and interior, psychological spaces than with the modernists’ right of invention. Many of his main characters are aristocrats; Donoso’s family belongs to this upper class in Chile. In El lugar sin límites, a small rural town is a symbolic hell where the arrival of a transvestite cabaret performer destabilizes local relations. The setting (a brothel) and the personalities of the main characters (among them a biological father who also is a psychological mother) make this an early example of Donoso’s very particular understanding of human beings. Este domingo is a return to the problems of the old aristocracy and class differences in Chile. In it, Donoso is once again concerned with the subtleties of human relations, often with existential overtones.

Lispector’s daring narrative experiments began to gain international attention in the early 1960s and have since been translated. Garmendia has published more than fifteen books of fiction since the late 1950s; like Lispector, he is a small-screen novelist who is a master of narrative technique. In the early 1960s, he was in the avant-garde among a small group of Latin American writers—including Fuentes—who were successfully using the narrative strategies recently pioneered by the French nouveau roman. In addition, in the 1960s Garmendia was using techniques from film. The protagonist of Día de ceniza (1964) is a frustrated writer suffering a crisis, and Garmendia employs the strategies in vogue in the nouveau roman, such as the narrator with a camera-lens perspective.

What Eduoard Glissant has identified as the Caribbean region’s “irruption into modernity” was increasingly evident in the 1960s and part of a cultural process of which Caribbean writers were acutely aware. This process was seen by some Caribbean intellectuals as an important stage beyond colonialism; others focused on the inter action among the diverse cultures of the Caribbean region. Writing in 1962, the Trinidadian C. L. R. James set forth a teleological view of Caribbean history as a quest for national identity initiated in 1804 with the Haitian Revolution and culminating in 1959 with the Cuban Revolution.² As Dash has explained, James did not see the Caribbean as a collection of static, victimized nations, but as cultures in dynamic engagement with global history.³ Writing in 1964, Wilson Harris of Guyana conceived of the Caribbean as “overlapping contexts of Central and South America as well.” For Harris, the Caribbean’s early models of the modern nation-state were a groping toward alternatives, possibilities, and relationships which remained unfulfilled in the early 1960s.⁴

The writing of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and José Lezama Lima embodies some of these cultural analyses. Cabrera Infante began writing in his native Cuba, then went into exile in the 1960s. He has published a continual flow of books since then, most of which escape easy genre definition. Tres tristes tigres (1967), a disperse and witty book set in prerevolutionary Cuba, was of major impact for at least two reasons. On the one hand, it opened the door to humor in the Latin American novel; on the other hand, its Joycean play with language proved important for postmodern novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. After a prologue-like opening set in a Havana nightclub, Tres tristes tigres is narrated by three characters who take the reader through a zany world that seems to be nearing an end. As such, the predominant tone is one of nostalgia. Epistemological problems are not the main concern of certain sections of this novel, and the shift from an epistemological focus to an ontological one is a primary characteristic of the transition to postmodern fiction.⁵ Given the focus on language and the ontological, Tres tristes tigres is a key text for the publication of many postmodern novels in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

José Lezama Lima also placed considerable focus on language as a theme in itself. Best known as a poet, his novel Paradiso (1966) was a major work of the 1960s that was praised by Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar soon after its publication. It is the story of José Cemí, but the dense language and digressive style make any clear sense of plot questionable. Its language is intensely metaphorical, justifying Lezama Lima’s own description of it as a “poem-novel.” As he develops both the time-bound story of the Cemí family and the time-free elements of metaphorical language, Lezama Lima confronts the contradictions of time and language throughout this text.⁶ Neither the chapters of Paradiso nor its characters are linked to a particular time frame. Rather, the characters themselves are metaphors who are in constant search of origins, a search that is the primary theme of the novel.

The “overlapping contexts” of which Harris spoke are evident in the novels of the French, English, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean. Sylvia Winter set her novel Hills of Hebron in her native Jamaica, continuing the quest theme set forth in several Latin American novels of the 1950s, such as Pedro Páramo. This quest involves Afro-American people seeking their own physical space and their own black deity. As a novel of Afro identity, Hills of Hebron heralds a time of “radical reorientation” in the Caribbean.⁷ Rosa Guy set the novel Bird at My Window(1966) in the United States; its theme—the African desire for liberation and authentic identity in the Americas—is of interest in much of Latin America as well as in the United States and the Caribbean.

The heterogeneity of the Latin American novel was increasingly evident in the 1960s with the breakdown of conventional norms of sexual relations and gender. Cortázar’s Rayuela played a major role in the subversion of these conventional morés. Rosa de Lima’s Tomorrow Will Always Come was an exceptional piece in its presentation of sex roles between the protagonist and his male lover. The transvestite central character in Donoso’s El lugar sin límites also breaks down traditional roles in Latin American fiction. An early novel with homosexual themes in Mexico was Miguel Barbachano Ponce’s El diario de José Toledo (1964). Chicano writer John Rechy has been ignored in some circles because he is openly gay and writes about gay characters, even though he has published several significant novels, including City of Night (1963) and Numbers (1967). Rayuela and the works of writers such as Donoso, Barbachano Ponce, and Rechy signaled the demise of a masculinist aesthetic in the Latin American novel.

In Brazil, in addition to Lispector, Autran Dourado, Carlos Heitor Cony, Erico Veríssimo, Jorge Amado, Dalton Trevisan, Rubem Fonseca, and other writers contributed to the heterogeneity of the Latin American novel of the 1960s. Several Brazilian novelists responded to the ambitious projects of the Boom. Dourado’s Opera dos mortos (1967) resonates of Faulkner and García Márquez, and Amado’s Dona Flor e seus dois maridos relates the entertaining story of the female protagonist’s erotic fantasies, but it has also been read as a political allegory.⁸

A prominent fiction writer, poet, and essayist in Mexico, Rosario Castellanos, unlike Donoso and Lezama Lima, was generally ignored by the writers of the Boom. Nevertheless, she did publish twenty-seven books before her death in 1974. Castellanos is a writer associated with feminism and the Indian world in which she grew up—Chiapas, Mexico. Her major novel, Oficio de tinieblas (1962), based on a historical uprising of the Chamula Indians in Chiapas in 1867, had an unusual protagonist: a female Indian. Although Castellanos was not as interested in language per se as Lezama Lima or Cabrera Infante, Oficio de tinieblas exhibits a mastery of narrative technique.

Manuel Mejía Vallejo, like Garmendia and Castellanos, has been the antithesis of the jet-set public intellectual of the Boom. He spent much of his life writing in his farmhouse in rural Antioquia, Colombia, rarely traveling beyond nearby Medellín. Mejía Vallejo’s major novel, El día señalado (1964), depicts political violence in Colombia in the 1950s, incorporating both oral tradition and the aesthetics of modernism. The action takes place in a small provincial town, reminiscent of the setting for Juan José Arreola’s La feria. Using a series of narrative segments to create a mosaic, Arreola characterizes a series of individuals and the town as a whole. The narrative segments produce a generalized understanding of the town; Fanny Buitrago uses narrative segments and multiple voices for similar effects in El hostigante verano de los dioses (1963). It is a small-screen novel that communicates a sense of boredom among a group of a younger generation. Brushwood describes small-screen novels as fiction with a limited scope. They typically involve a small group (such as a family) in a limited physical space (such as a home). These novels tend to deal with human relationships rather than broader issues of nation, history, or the like.⁹

The small-screen fiction of Donoso and Lispector focuses on the subtleties of human relationships. Sergio Galindo, Jorge Edwards, and Silvina Bullrich are additional specialists in small-screen fiction. Galindo’s La comparsa (1964) is set in Xalapa, Veracruz. As in La feria, the novel portrays the whole town, focusing on the celebration of carnival. La comparsa offers a view of Mexican society across classes and generations. Edwards’s El peso de la noche (1965) changes in focus between two male characters, Joaquín and Francisco, to describe a clan’s matriarch, mostly through the memories and dreams of the two males. In Bullrich’s Los burgueses (1964), a first-person narrator—who is never clearly identified—relates the story of a family on an Argentine estancia. The ambiguity of the narrative voice and the transformation of society provide the novel’s dynamic quality.

The small-screen fiction of Bullrich and Donoso portrays human relationships in the context of upper-class decadence. In the case of Los burgueses and Donoso’s Este domingo, the aristocracy is in decline. Este domingo dramatizes crises both on the personal and class level, underscoring not only the decline of an aristocratic family, but its exploitation of and symbiosis with the servant class.

Adalberto Ortiz and Gabriel Casaccia produced well-wrought small-screen novels dealing with human relationships that expanded in focus beyond the typical limitations of small-screen fiction. In Ortiz’s El espejo y la ventana (1967), the scope begins as broad and historical and then becomes more limited to a family and one of its members. In La llaga (1964), Casaccia probes the relationships among a mother, her son, and her lover, but the plot then expands beyond the family to a revolutionary uprising in Asunción.

In the mid-1960s the first signs of a radical experimentation with modernist aesthetics were evident, the first indicator of what would become the postmodern novel of the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America. Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) was a late modernist experiment but also opened the doors to many subsequent postmodern exercises. The writer figure in the novel—Morelli—proposes a series of radical innovations that were, in effect, a call for a postmodern novel in Latin America. In Rayuela, Morelli questioned the assumptions of the realist novel as well as many of the operations of modernist fiction.

A first wave of Mexican postmodern writing emanated directly from Borges and Cortázar, writers whom José Emilio Pacheco and Carlos Fuentes had promoted among Mexican intellectuals in the early 1960s. An early reaction against the modernist tradition in Mexico came in the form of the irreverent young writers of the Onda, such as Gustavo Sainz and José Agustín. They were associated with counterculture in the United States and rebellious attitudes of the 1960s. Vicente Leñero was also one of the novelists who helped set the stage for later postmodern fiction in Mexico.

In his novel Los albañiles (1964), Leñero questions the possibilities of truth, and his play with versions of truth was a predecessor to postmodern fiction. Los albañiles deals with the identification of a murderer, but it ultimately questions the epistemological constraints that define truth in a social context. Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf (1965), Sainz’s Gazapo (1965), and Agustín’s Deperfil (1966) constitute significant early contributions to the Mexican postmodern.

Farabeuf is one of the most hermetic novels of the period, narrating over and over again a limited number of the same episodes. Devoid of significant action and of characters with fixed identities, Farabeuf places the reader in a vague space, involved in the novel’s main image: Dr. Farabeuf dissecting a live body while gazing at someone else. In a postmodern fiction that discards action and also discounts characters and content as worthwhile elements, it privileges language itself to such an extent that, in a world in which only language remains, human cruelty is neither an issue of morality or immorality, but simply an amoral, neutral act. Consequently, the title character, Dr. Farabeuf, executes the specialized techniques of Chinese torture, techniques of no more and no less moral content than those highly specialized narrative gestures of Salvador Elizondo and José Emilio Pacheco and the equally specialized roles the fictionalized reader must play in order to execute the reading of Farabeuf.

The fiction of Gustavo Sainz and José Agustín questioned the traditional boundaries between high and low culture, a common strategy of postmodern writers. Like Farabeuf, Sainz’s Gazapo affords the reader a sense of fiction and empirical reality as versions and possibilities but shares little else with Elizondo’s fiction. An early text of the Onda, Gazapo was a notable innovation for the Mexican and Latin American postmodern: it brought the language of adolescents into the Mexican novel, as well as the new technologies of communication—especially by means of tape recorders and other media. Above all, the fiction of Sainz was an irreverent contrast to the dominant modernist practices in Mexico in the early 1960s. A story of adolescent relationships and trivial actions, it seems apparently distant from the historical and political fiction of Fuentes and Pacheco. The history of Gazapo, however, is the history of a continual present in which the narrative transpires, for Gazapo also privileges memory: what human memory might forget is recorded in precise detail on tapes. Agustín shares many of Sainz’s attitudes in De perfil, and it also relates a young man’s process of maturation. Both novels are notable—and attractive—for their humor and their portraits of rebellious youths of the 1960s.

By 1967, signs of the early postmodern were evident with the publication of novels like Cabrera Infante’s above-mentioned Tres tristes tigres, José Emilio Pacheco’s Morirás lejos, and Fuentes’s two novels Zona sagrada and Cambio de piel. The four works have some of the epistemological qualities of modernist fiction and some of the ontological qualities of postmodernist writing. Like Morirás lejos, Cambio de piel is a historiographic metafiction and a novel in which characters have no fixed identity. Set in Mexico in the 1960s, Cambio de piel relates the story of two couples who spend a weekend together in the Mexican town of Cholula, although there are numerous digressions into the past and other continents, including the Nazi period covered in Morirás lejos.

Cambio de piel is one of Fuentes’s early experiments with characters of multiple (rather than just double) identities. When it is ultimately revealed that the voice telling the story is that of a madman in an asylum, it is apparent that Fuentes’s fiction has moved from concerns over the epistemological (La región más transparente and La muerte de Artemio Cruz) to the ontological.

Despite its unresolved contradictions and metafictional qualities, Cambio de piel, like Fuentes’s other postmodern fiction, is deeply historical and political. His postmodern work is a “transhistorical carnival” (as McHale calls it) in which characters in their projected worlds interact with those of empirical reality.¹⁰ Simultaneously, Fuentes engages in multiple intertextual boundary violations, injecting characters from other novels into his texts. Thus the reader of Fuentes’s postmodern fiction experiences an even more complex confrontation with history than does the reader of Fuentes’s overtly historical and political modern texts.

Many Latin American novelists of the 1960s accomplished what their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s had failed to do in their modernist writings. On the one hand, novelists of the 1960s wrote the harmonious, unified works that tended to develop from chaos to unity, from fragment to harmony, in effect, the perfect modernist texts. On the other hand, these writers of the 1960s actively promoted the new agreement between author and reader that Daiches had set forth with respect to the modernist novel. Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and many of their contemporaries published essays and granted interviews that were all part of this new contract. The most successful of these promoters of a new contract were Fuentes (above all in his book La nueva novela hispanoamericana) and Vargas Llosa, in his multiple stories about his stories, communicated in the form of interviews, lectures, and essays.

By 1967, the heterogeneity of the Latin American novel was more of a possibility than ever before. The publication of Rayuela, the presence of women writers such as Castellanos, Garro, and Lispector, and the appearance of overtly gay writers opened the door to new approaches to issues of sex and gender and the parallel demise of the predominant masculinist aesthetics.

García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, as well as works by Fernando del Paso, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes, contributed toward a body of “total” novels of a sort that modern writers aspired to produce. Less-known novelists such as Héctor Rojas Herazo and Elena Garro manifested their desire to be modern by engaging in the aesthetics of modernism and the search for the total novel.

A few of the writers who never were recognized as part of the select group of the Boom nevertheless occupied ambiguous positions inside and outside its parameters. Donoso, Cabrera Infante, Amado, and Lezama Lima, to varying degrees, participated in the Boom, interacted with its members in the private and public sphere, and perhaps even benefited, albeit in minor ways, from the rise of the Boom as a cultural phenomenon in Latin America.

On the other hand, numerous gifted writers in Latin America were either unable or unwilling to assume such a public identity; Mejía Vallejo, Garro, and Castellanos are just a few of the writers in that category of the “writer’s writer” who did not venture into the public sphere. The list of talented and productive writers in Latin America whose work has passed by with far less recognition than it deserves stretches far beyond the authors presented here.¹¹ An overview of Latin American fiction of the 1960s does indicate that by 1967 the aesthetics of modernism were pervasive, and the initial signs of the postmodern were evident. Indeed, on the international scene, not only were some of the most talented masters of Spanish American fiction at their apogee, but also several others were writing in ways never before imagined.