Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez have written a large corpus of outstanding fiction, and each has published more than one novel that has garnered broad critical acclaim and a large international readership. Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez have published several best-selling novels in the United States and Europe. Among the most recognized Spanish American works of fiction to appear during the 1960s were Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963), Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde (1965), and García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967). These works have had considerable impact among readers and writers in Latin America. Indeed, many scholars and writers already consider them modern classics. In each of these novels, the author uses a variety of approaches to express his desire to be modern and to assume his modernity.
These four novels and a few others were the initial cause for the discussions by Latin American writers and critics in the 1960s and 1970s of the “total novel.” The total novel aspires to represent an inexhaustible reality; it is conceived as a microcosm of signification; it is characterized by a fusion of mythical and historical perspectives.
1 Indeed, these four novels were ambitious modernist works that contained many of the elements associated with the total novel. For example, all four cultivate an encyclopedic range of reference as a means toward representing an inexhaustible reality; at the same time, all four were conceived as self-contained systems or microcosms of signification.
Fuentes had been writing short fiction since the early 1950s, and
La muerte de Artemio Cruz appeared after
La región más transparente and
Las buenas conciencias. With the publication of these novels, Fuentes confirmed what he and many of his young contemporaries were stating in their cultural magazine
Revista Mexicana de Literatura: Mexican literature needed to be more modern and universal. For Fuentes, being modern meant joining in the international modernist movement in fiction.
La región had considerable impact in Mexico, where it created quite a stir, but it was not until
La muerte de Artemio Cruz that Fuentes became well known beyond the borders of Mexico. With this novel, Fuentes assumes not only his modernity, but also his own national history.
Fuentes himself considers all his fiction one work, a lifetime writing project he has organized around fourteen cycles that he has entitled “La edad del tiempo”—a lengthy reflection on time. The four works that Fuentes calls “El mal del tiempo” comprise the first of these fourteen cycles, and they deal with the problem of time itself. In them, any sense of Western linear time is blurred; in different ways, they undermine and destroy time.
2Narrated in alternating segments of first, second, and third person, La muerte de Artemio Cruz is the story of one man as well as of twentieth-century Mexican history. As a prototype modernist fiction, it consists of a series of fragments that the reader places together in the process of reading in order to find an implicit unity of the novel. Paradoxically, as the reader finds progressively more order, the protagonist and the nation suffer greater fragmentation. Cruz’s story is a reconstruction of his life that parallels the rise of the new order that took power in Mexico during and after the Mexican Revolution.
As Faris has observed, four specific failings of postrevolutionary Mexican society recur throughout
La muerte de Artemio Cruz: class domination, Americanization, financial corruption, and the failure of land reform.
3 In the early scenes of the novel, Fuentes takes the reader through a series of brief portrayals of Cruz as an individual devoid of feelings for his wife and family and of the entire family’s hierarchy of dominance. For Cruz and his family, there is always something more important—a business deal or a shopping trip—than the masses of people suffering from the domination of the upper class to which Cruz belongs. Clearly, Cruz and his class represent a betrayal of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution and the 1917 Constitution that was to bring it to institutional fruition.
In the end, the implied author of
La muerte de Artemio Cruz shares many of the ideas set forth by Octavio Paz in
The Labyrinth of Solitude. Mexico is divided between the powerful (the
chingones) and the weak (the
chingados), the rich and the poor, the Spanish and the Indian. Despite the critical tone and pervasive pessimism of the novel, however, Fuentes does offer some hope for Artemio Cruz and for Mexico. Fuentes represents memory as power, and to some degree (at least temporarily), Cruz’s memory triumphs over his circumstance.
4 This note of optimism defies critics’ claims that the writers of the Boom are systematically pessimistic.
5A constant pattern in Fuentes’s fiction is that of a character trapped within the confines of an architectural construct, desiring or needing to escape. Such is the basic circumstance of Artemio Cruz and of the protagonists of several other Fuentes fictions. In some, characters find the enclosed space sacred, as is the case of the protagonists of
Zona sagrada and
Terra Nostra. Fuentes was smitten by the desire to be modern with readings of Dos Passos, Borges, Kafka, and Faulkner at a young age and soon by certain postmodern elements of Joyce, Borges, and Cortázar as well. The most powerful of Fuentes’s modernist works are
La región más transparente, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, and
Zona sagrada. In these three novels, Fuentes fully exploits the technical devices pioneered by First World modernists to explore Mexico’s past and present. The structure and the narrators of the fiction of Faulkner and Butor are evident in
La muerte de Artemio Cruz; Fuentes the modernist moves from a fictional world of an apparent fragmented chaos to one of order and harmony. For McHale,
La muerte de Artemio Cruz represents a variant of the modernist novel of interior monologue that focuses on a grid which each mind imposes on the outside world or through which it assimilates the outside world.
6 This early Fuentes, like his modernist predecessors and the other writers of the Boom, was still searching for truths and still producing the totalizing grand narrative.
Vargas Llosa was well advanced into his own totalizing project by the time he wrote La casa verde in the early 1960s: he already had published the ambitious and totalizing modernist novel La ciudad y los perros, an immediate bestseller that catalyzed the international recognition of the Boom. With La casa verde, Vargas Llosa assumes his Faulknerian modernity and attempts to assume his nation’s multicultural makeup as well as the contradictions of Peruvian society. Like Fuentes, Vargas Llosa had read Sartre well, considered himself fully engagé, and was interested in novelizing his nation’s history.
Like
La muerte de Artemio Cruz, La casa verde offers a complex yet systematic structure. This novel consists of four parts and an epilogue.
Parts 1 and
3 and the epilogue contain four chapters;
parts 2 and
4 have three chapters each. The chapters of
parts 1 and
2 contain five narrative segments; those in
parts 3 and
4 have four narrative segments. Numerous stories are woven through this novel, but the work offers two broad settings that correspond to two general plots.
As in La muerte de Artemio Cruz, the logic of cause and effect in a sequential, conventional story line is systematically undermined in La casa verde. Incidents leading to the development of conflicts as well as those pertaining to their resolution are revealed before the exposition of a climactic moment for each character. For example, Bonifacia’s story involving the mission in Santa María de Nieva has not been fully developed when it is revealed that she has become a prostitute in Piura.
La casa verde is a patently dialogic novel in several ways. First, the novel is richly dialogic in its incorporation of multiple layers by means of telescoping. The novel is also dialogic in its use of many-layered discourses from different spheres, such as religion and various social classes. The reader is in constant contact with a changing sense of the real in continual flux. Since the variant communications of languages are in opposition, reality takes on a capricious quality that the reader becomes accustomed to questioning. Reality becomes so innately relative, in fact, that the nature of truth and even the possibility of truth are called into question. And this type of questioning created by the techniques specific to La casa verde is essential to the experience of the modern Vargas Llosa reader, who also comes to question the possibility of attaining a complete understanding exclusively through rational means. Using a variety of strategies, Fuentes and García Márquez question this possibility in their novels of the Boom, too. In many ways, La casa verde was an early version for Vargas Llosa of the total novel.
Vargas Llosa is a storyteller in the Faulknerian tradition that so pervasively affected Latin America during the 1940s and 1950s; of the writers of the Boom, he and García Márquez were the most loyal to Faulkner in this stage (the 1960s) of their careers. This type of fiction, identified as transcendent regionalism in Spanish American literature, has been practiced in a variety of ways since the rise of modernist fiction in Latin America in the 1940s. Unlike Cortázar and some postmodern writers, Vargas Llosa has never questioned the value of storytelling in itself but rather has sought to clarify in his fiction, essays, and plays how the writer creates and what function the story and storytelling have in society.
The writers of the Boom all sought—using differing strategies—to be universal. Several characteristics of Vargas Llosa’s themes and techniques contribute to this universality. The interest in the total novel makes him comparable to Faulkner and Fuentes. The successful development and incorporation of literary romance—from the early stories through La casa verde and later novels—distinguish Vargas Llosa from many Latin American writers who share his political and social perspectives but who produce a more overtly “social” literature.
García Márquez, like Fuentes and Vargas Llosa, grew up idolizing Faulkner. Perhaps the most intensely committed to the idea of being modern of these four writers of the Boom, García Márquez grew up in Colombia, which historically has resisted modernity and change in culture. His major novel, Cien años de soledad, is the culmination of his cycle of Macondo, which consists of the novels La hojarasca (1955), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961), and La mala hora (1962). Cien años de soledad is the story of the Buendía family and the story of the town of Macondo.
Cien años de soledad might seem at first like a book of fantasy, but it is one of the most historical books of the Boom, and it abounds in social and political implications. Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who fights endless battles in the novel, is modeled after a late-nineteenth-century figure, General Rafael Uribe Uribe, who was a leader of the liberals who suffered numerous defeats in Colombia. The strike of banana workers, which is related as one of the most fantastic events in the novel, is in fact one of the most historical. In November 1928, Colombian workers declared a strike against the United Fruit Company, and the massacre of several hundred workers ensued. García Márquez was among the first to relate and popularize this lamentable episode.
One consistently used technique of oral storytelling in
Cien años de soledad is overstatement or exaggeration when referring to the commonplace and, in contrast, an absolute coolness or understatement when describing incredible situations. The narrator regularly reacts to the most marvelous and fantastic events with utter passivity—a technique García Márquez learned from the oral tradition of the northern coast of Colombia where he grew up. In the first chapter, José and his children witness a man vanish upon drinking a special potion. Neither the narrator nor the characters pay particular attention to this extraordinary occurrence.
Walter Ong has observed that many cultures and subcultures, even those immersed in advanced technologies, preserve much of their original and primary orality.
7 García Márquez, a sophisticated product of writing culture, juxtaposes print culture with much of the residually oral milieu of his youth in Aracataca. Both a primary oral culture and sophisticated writing culture permeate
Cien años de soledad, often in hilarious juxtaposition.
This transition from orality to different stages of literacy is essential to the experience of Cien años de soledad and is particularly evident when one compares the initial chapters with the ending. In the first chapter, the mind-set of a primary orality predominates; in the last chapter, the most intricate exercises of a writing culture are carried out. In the first chapter, these two extremes are represented by Melquíades, who is of a writing culture from the outside, and by Ursula, who possesses a mind-set of orality. The Macondo of the first paragraph is a place of paradisiacal and primary orality in which stones are “white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.” The prehistoric associates Macondo with a prehistory, prewriting stage. It is not only a prewriting stage but also one that borders on pre-speaking. José Arcadio Buendía, between the two extremes of Melquíades and Ursula, serves as a special link in this chapter between oral and writing cultures. He also paradoxically belongs to both, reacting in some circumstances as an oral culture person. Oral culture persons tend to view many of the modes and concerns of a writing culture as irrelevant or even ridiculous. Similarly, Ursula, in the first chapter, is uninterested in definitions and loses her patience with José Arcadio Buendía when he defines the world as round like an orange. The oral mind-set is also situational rather than abstract, the former being Ursula’s constant mode of operation. When José Arcadio Buendía attempts to convince her to move from Macondo with his (abstract) fantastic stories and the (abstract) promise of a prodigious world, her response is to bring him down from this high level of abstraction to the concrete reality of the present, admonishing him to think less about crazy inventions and more about taking care of his sons. Thus, the first chapter emerges as an orality (Ursula), a writing culture (Melquíades), and a humorous semi-orality (José Arcadio Buendía) that bridges the gap between the two.
After the first chapter, Macondo moves from preliteracy to literacy. The narrator’s mind-set also shifts from the feigned preorality of the first chapter to the historicity of the second. In the first chapter, he had used the preliteracy image of prehistoric eggs; in the first line of the second chapter, he uses the historical discourse of writing—“When the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Ursula Iguarán’s great-great-grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove.”
8 In the final chapters,
Cien años de soledad announces itself not only as writing but also as an example of the highly sophisticated forms of self-conscious fiction.
Much of this novel recreates the shift from orality to writing, changes hitherto labeled as shifts from “magic” to “science” but which can be more cogently explained as shifts from orality to stages of literacy. What often has been identified in this novel by the term “magic realism” can be more precisely described as a written expression of this shift. The effects of the interplay between oral and writing cultures are multiple. García Márquez has fictionalized numerous aspects of his youth in the oral culture of rural Aracataca in Colombia. The unique traditionalism and modernity of this novel are based on various roles the narrator assumes as oral storyteller in the fashion of the tall tale, as narrator with an oral person’s mind-set, and as the modern narrator of a self-conscious (written) fiction. With roots in oral culture, history, and myth,
Cien años de soledad exhibits a tendency toward the novel as Archive.
9 It is the total story (and history) of Macondo.
Cien años de soledad, La casa verde, and
La muerte de Artemio Cruz are now classic modernist works of Latin America. The most radically modern of now-classic novels of the Boom, however, is Cortázar’s
Rayuela. The very structure of this novel was radical in the Hispanic world in 1963 because it offered the possibility of reading at least three different novels, as Cortázar explains in a prefatory note. The first consists of chapters 1 through 56, which tell the story of Horacio Oliveira, a bohemian Argentine expatriate in Paris (chapters 1 through 36), and his relationship with a woman named La Maga. Oliveira lives in constant emotional crisis and does not seem capable of understanding himself or his role in life, despite his sophisticated intellectual repertoire. His physical, romantic, and intellectual wanderings lead him to emotional and moral dead ends that eventually take him to Buenos Aires (chapters 37 through 56), where he continues his quest. Once in his homeland, he connects with his old friend Traveler and Traveler’s wife, Talita. The three of them join a circus and engage in increasingly unorthodox activities and relationships. They eventually end up in an insane asylum, and the denouement offers an ambiguous situation in which Oliveira might or might not commit suicide. This first novel within
Rayuela, then, relates the story of Oliveira in a basically chronological fashion.
The first novel, if it were the complete text of an entire novelistic work, would be an attractive and intriguing fiction in the modernist vein, replete with its use of multiple points of view, fragmented structure, and language play associated with the stratagems of modernism. As a modernist text, the first novel contains the characteristic search for the ineffable and the fascination with ambiguity as a value in itself. In this sense, it is comparable to La muerte de Artemio Cruz, La casa verde, or Héctor Rojas Herazo’s Respirando el verano.
Recalling modernist texts of the 1950s such as Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the principal theme of chapters 1 through 56 is the quest. Read as such, these fifty-six chapters constitute a novel of Oliveira’s search for some kind of authenticity or substantive meaning in life. The novel begins with the question “¿Encontraría a La Maga?” (Would I find La Maga?) and thus announces the point of departure. Indeed, the search for an authentic relationship with La Maga constitutes much of the story in Paris. In addition, Oliveira’s search is played out on a variety of other levels: as a metaphysical search, as a search for intellectual superiority, as a search for true artistic expression. In the end, his inconclusive quest leads him to ridiculous situations and impending suicide.
The second novel proposed in Rayuela, as suggested in Cortázar’s prefatory note, consists of chapters 1 through 56 and ninety-nine more, chapters 57 through 155. But these chapters do not appear in numerical order; rather, the reader moves back and forth among the previous chapters and the new “expendable” ones, jumping, for example, from 56 to 73, then 1, 116, 3, 84, and 4. In this second novel, Oliveira’s story is expanded; several chapters further develop his story in Paris and Buenos Aires. This novel also has numerous chapters about literature, art, philosophy, and the like, as well as a few short narratives that on first reading seem like non sequiturs. With more consideration, however, it becomes evident that each diverse element has its respective function in the novel.
Some of these playful narrative fragments have the function of distancing the reader from the events at hand, inviting the modern reader to pause and reflect on actions and ideas in a fashion comparable to Brechtian theater. Occasional comical passages serve the same function. The long-term strategy with this distancing effect is to invite the reader of this second novel to reflect not only on the actions and characters but also on the novel form itself as well as on the assumptions of traditional readers and writers of fiction in general. Paradoxically, then, the most playful and apparently frivolous aspects of the novel turn out to be the most provocative and perhaps even revolutionary.
With respect to content, however, even more important are the expendable chapters that introduce the writer figure Morelli and his theory of the novel. Morelli questions not only the assumptions of the realist novel but also many of the operations of modernist fiction as well; in this sense, Rayuela differs from the other novels of the Boom and most other outstanding modernist texts of the 1960s published in Latin America. He invites writers (who soon became known as postmodern) to undermine Western concepts of representation and time and, similarly, the very idea of linearity and plot. But one of his most radical proposals is for an entirely new role for the reader—as an active (macho) participant. The postmodern reader of much of the innovative fiction that has been published in Latin America since Rayuela is fundamentally Morelli’s idea of the active reader.
In addition to proposing a new, postmodern role for the reader,
Rayuela undermines the concept of author. Lucille Kerr has argued convincingly that
Rayuela poses questions about the figure of the author and the attribution of authorship.
10 One also finds evidence that this book’s propositions about the author’s authority both affirm and undermine authorial privileges. In this second reading of
Rayuela, the figure of the author seems to reclaim its own privilege under the names of several authors—Cortázar, Morelli, and others. By the end of the second reading, authorial figures and the very concept of authority are questioned.
The postmodern active reader also is offered a third reading of Rayuela, although this reading is implied rather than clearly delineated, because it is only hinted at in Cortázar’s prefatory note. Cortázar suggests that the third reading is one the reader constructs; this is the radical novelistic adventure of the type proposed by Morelli. This form of reading generates the open novel that Cortázar seems to desire but that is never actually attained in the first or second reading.
Many aspects of more complete (second and third) readings of
Rayuela inevitably bring the postmodern reader back to questioning the fundamentals of Western culture, writing, and even thought. With this novel, Cortázar opened the door for two generations of postmodern fiction writers in Latin America and explored the possibilities and limits of radically undermining some of the most venerable assumptions of Western culture and thinking. Among these assumptions is what Cortázar (and Fuentes) considered the Western tendency to conceive of many issues in strictly dualistic terms. Manichean thought, for Cortázar and Fuentes, is one of the Western traditions in most need of radical subversion. This radicalizing aesthetic and political agenda became the new literary and political program of much postmodern and feminist fiction published in Latin America after the appearance of
Rayuela. Paradoxically, the novel that spoke of the
macho reader became the work that contributed significantly to feminist writing in Indo-Afro-Iberoamerica during the last three decades of the century.
These four novels of the Boom represent the successful realization of a century-long desire to be modern. Indeed, the four novels have become classic modernist texts, widely read in numerous languages. For the modern reader, Latin America finally had what Borges two decades prior was calling the perfect novel. With Rayuela, Cortázar assumes his modernity and rejects all forms of the traditional. He saves Latin American literature not only from its traditionalism, but also from its modernity—by promoting ideas that would bloom in later postmodern fiction. In La casa verde, Vargas Llosa assumes his Faulknerian modernity and attempts to assume, just as well, his nation’s multicultural identity—its class and cultural contradictions. With the culmination of his cycle of Macondo, García Márquez assumes his modernity and his tradition (both oral and literary). In this sense, Cien años de soledad represents the culmination of a century-long search for the authentic and the autochthonous; the Colombian novelist carries out successfully the project that interested the criollista novelists but that they were far less able to realize.
In different ways, each of these novelists wrote “total” novels in the 1962–1967 period, although Vargas Llosa and Fuentes would more fully realize their ambitions of the total novel later—with
Conversación en La Catedral (1969) and
Terra Nostra (1975), respectively. During this period, Cortázar and Fuentes began the successful undermining of a masculinist aesthetic, which they questioned in a context of revolutionary politics, literary experimentation, and a recognition of the cultural politics of heterogeneity and difference.