The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

The 1970s and 1980s were characterized by a flourishing of the most heterogeneous and perhaps the most compelling novelistic production seen in any earlier period of the century. The desire to be modern now took a postmodern turn at the same time that the challenge of modernity was intensely embraced by women writers and other marginalized groups, such as writers of gay, lesbian, and testimonial fiction. The novelistic production in this period indicates that the experience of radical discontinuity that Latin American fiction had been attempting to tell since the vanguardia years of Torres Bodet and Huidobro was coming to fruition. The appearance of novelists such as the Chilean Isabel Allende, the Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré, and the Brazilian Nélida Piñón ushered in a new era for women writers in Latin America.

Scholars have not reached a consensus about the major directions of Latin American fiction published since the 1960s, nor is there agreement about nomenclature. In the 1970s, it became apparent that the political, aesthetic, and personal bonds of the writers of the Boom were vanishing; some writers and critics began speaking of a “Postboom” of Latin American fiction.¹ By the mid-1980s, it was equally apparent that the quantity and quality of fiction authored by women in Latin America were indicative of a shift from a predominantly masculinist aesthetic to a scenario in which some of Latin America’s most notable novelists were women. By the late 1980s, it was also evident that many of Latin America’s most innovative writers were participating in a radical and highly innovative version of modernism—a kind of hypermodernism—that some scholars have identified as the postmodern.² Experimenting with the postmodern and entering into dialogue with postmodern culture have been yet another end-of-the-century way of exhibiting the century-long desire to be modern.

The most significant cultural and political context of this period was the rise of repressive military dictatorships in the 1970s and their fall in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The fall of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua was a watershed for the history of Nicaragua. The military coup in 1973 that led to the death of Chile’s Salvador Allende, who headed the leftist coalition Unidad Popular, led to the prolonged dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. His sanguine rule was paralleled by military regimes in Argentina and Brazil in the 1970s. In Argentina, the “Proceso de Reorganización Nacional” (1976–1983) was the euphemistic name the military dictatorships gave to a program that entailed repressing the more progressive sectors of the citizenry. Since the 1980s, the human and cultural meaning of these dictatorships and others is still being accounted for by novelists.

During the 1970s, in fact, enough Latin American writers published novels dealing with military regimes that the “dictator novel” became a common nomenclature. The most celebrated of these novels were Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (1974), Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo, el Supremo (1974), and Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (1975);³ these novelists drew upon the historical record to create fictionalized versions of dictators. Other novels about authoritarian figures were Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversación en La Catedral (1969) and Denzil Romero’s La tragedia del generalísimo (1984), both lengthy and complex works. Conversación en La Catedral stands out as one of the most ambitious technical enterprises for Vargas Llosa and for the modernist novel in Latin America; the dictator portrayed here is General Manuel Odría (leader of Peru from 1948 to 1956).

In addition to the four above-mentioned novelists, others published works dealing with either dictators or authority figures. For example, Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975), set primarily in sixteenth-century Spain, can be included here, with the authority figure being Felipe II. Sergio Ramírez’s ¿Te dio miedo la sangre? (1977), moreover, is a complex mosaic of Nicaraguan society under the Somoza dictatorship; it has been described as a “dictator novel without the dictator.”⁴

In the 1970s and 1980s, acutely and subtly political fiction appeared that did not fall strictly within the genre of dictator novels. Two very different political novels were Julio Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel (1973) and Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta (1976). In Libro de Manuel, Cortázar portrays revolutionaries in a setting of urban guerrilla warfare. This postmodern novel consists of a multiplicity of texts that the protagonist and his friends place together for the next generation—represented by a character named Manuel. Cortázar encourages the reader to think beyond the most immediate political questions to consider broader issues, such as language, sexuality, and modes of interpretation themselves. Erotic play operates in Libro de Manuel as an exploration of liberation and a questioning of social norms: the novel portrays eroticism in a variety of facets.⁵ The implicit political themes of Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta are more subtle than the surface politics of Libro de Manuel. Pizarnik rewrites the story of the real-life Hungarian Countess Erzébet Báthory (died 1614), who tortured and killed more than six hundred young women. Written in metaphoric language that blurs both traditional and modernist concepts of the novel, it is a brief text that consists of eleven vignettes. On the surface, this horrifying text seems divorced from the politics of Argentina. Considered within the context of the military rule over Argentina in the 1970s, however, La condesa sangrienta can be read as a meditation on the horror of absolute power.⁶ In a political reading of this text, it has been argued convincingly that this novel is a confirmation of the masculinist violence of the patriarchy whose martyrs are betokened by the countess’s hundreds of female victims.⁷

Another counterpart to the dictator novels in Latin America was the novel of exile written in Europe or the United States. A first wave of such writers included the Cuban Matías Montes Huidobro (in the United States) and the Chileans Antonio Skármeta (writing in Germany) and Ariel Dorfman (writing in the United States), followed by Guatemalan Arturo Arias and Julia Alvarez from the Dominican Republic (both writing in the United States). The diaspora into exile included writers who found refuge in France, such as Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Luisa Futoransky, Juan José Saer, and Osvaldo Soriano. Spain became the temporary residence for José Donoso, Juan Carlos Onetti, Cristina Peri Rossi, Mario Benedetti, Mempo Giardinelli, Tomás Eloy Martínez, and Pedro Orgambide.⁸

In some cases, the distance of exile produced critique that the writers could not have published in their homelands. In No habrá más pena ni olvido (1980), Osvaldo Soriano denounces the massacres under the military dictatorship in Argentina. Tomás Eloy Martínez dramatizes rivalries within the ranks of Peronism in La novela de Perón (1985). In Después de las bombas (1979) Arturo Arias rewrites the history and experience of the 1954 overthrow by the CIA of the progressive Arbenz government in Guatemala. A modernist text conceived in the mode of many novels of the Boom, Después de las bombas tells the story of Máximo Sánchez from childhood to adulthood, with close connections to the testimonio.⁹ Arias’s later novels Itzam (1981) and Jaguar en llamas (1989) are also closely related to testimonio.

Some of the writers were more concerned with the cases of the uprooted individual living abroad, thus taking a more existential than strictly political approach. Daniel Moyano offers an existential focus on exile in Libro de navío y borrascas (1983). Reynaldo Arenas’s fiction of the 1980s reflected problems associated with the diverse cultural and political issues faced by many Cuban intellectuals living in exile in the United States.

Moyano’s existential themes were echoed in Alvaro Mutis’s novels concerning the spiritual quest of the protagonist, Gaviero, a sailor, adventurer, and philosopher. The first book of a trilogy, Mutis’s La nieve del Almirante (1986) contains Gaviero’s diary, followed by notes written by persons acquainted with him. These texts, composed of the protagonist’s meditations and the thoughts of others about him, offer an examination of Gaviero’s spiritual life.

Some novelists developed the novel of exile on a more abstract level than did Mutis, as was the case of Federico Patán in Ultimo exilio (1986). The novel portrays a Spaniard’s exile in Mexico, but the most significant exile is of psychological space. Luis Arturo Ramos’s Intramuros (1983) functions in a similar manner, fictionalizing both physical and psychological exile.

Finally, tales of dictatorship and exile can be related to a generalized interest during the 1970s and 1980s in the historical novel.¹⁰ Novelists such as Abel Posse, Rosario Aguilar, Marcos Aguinis, Nélida Piñón, and Fernando del Paso participated in this rewriting of Latin American history. Posse’s Los perros del paraíso (1983), Aguilar’s El guerrillero (1976), Aguinis’s La cruz invertida (1970), Piñón’s A República dos sonhos (1984), and del Pasos’s Noticias del Imperio (1987) were just a few of the most prominent historical texts of the 1970s and 1980s. Menton has noted others, among them Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, César Aira, Juan José Saer, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Márcio Souza, José J. Veiga, Harold Maranhão, and the Martinican Michel Tauriac.¹¹ In the case of Marcos Aguinis, focus on distant history was a method for discussing contemporary politics metaphorically in Argentina during the dictatorship. In La cruz invertida, Aguinis also considers historically based themes, here issues of the Catholic Church. Set in an unnamed Latin American nation, it shows the interaction among the clergy, the oligarchy, the military, communists, and students. Two progressive priests generate the conflict in the novel.

Luisa Valenzuela and José Donoso wrote subtle novels of exile. Valenzuela’s Novela negra con argentinos (1990) develops a detective story around the presence of two Argentine novelists voluntarily exiled in New York. The text is more a postmodern play on detective novels than a classic rendering of them. Donoso’s El jardín de al lado (1981) portrays a Chilean writer and his wife exiled in Spain. The two novels share several characteristics including similar imagery, and the theme of both texts is the otherness of exile.¹²

The cultural identity of the Caribbean remained a focus of polemics in the 1970s and 1980s. The ambiguous political status and cultural identity of Puerto Rico was intensely debated among Latin American intellectuals. Novelist and essayist José Luis González contributed significantly to this dialogue with the publication of his influential essay El país de cuatro pisos (1980), an analysis of Puerto Rico’s culture and society. In a lecture delivered in 1970, Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris promulgated the idea that creative activity should involve “a drama of consciousness which reads back through the shock of place and time for omens of capacity.”¹³ González, Harris, and Freddy Prestol Castillo agreed that literary activity, indeed, was an engagement with critical thought. In El Masacre se pasa a pie (1973), Prestol Castillo novelizes a 1937 massacre of Haitian and Haitian-Dominican families. In this historiographic metafiction, a first-person narrator provides a testimonial account and metacommentary about his own role as witness and as author. This genocide was the outgrowth of historic conflicts between the two Caribbean nations, and the deaths were legitimated by anti-Haitian discourse of the Dominican elite.¹⁴

Some Brazilian novelists publishing during this period, including Clarice Lispector, Jorge Amado, and Osman Lins, engaged in political, historical, and postmodern exercises comparable to those found among the writers throughout the rest of Indo-Afro-Iberoamerica. Lispector’s novels in this period were Uma apprendizagem ou O livro dos prazeres (1969), Agua viva (1973), and Ahora da estrela (1977). The first of these three novels involves two individuals’ identity search, and Lispector’s feminist concerns were increasingly evident. Jorge Amado continued his career as a novelist with Tereza Batista cansada de guerra (1972), a rewriting of popular cordel ballads. In this playful text, Amado creates an authorial narrator who supposedly knew a legendary heroine personally. Lins published the experimental Avalovara (1973).

The Chicano novel—now in dialogue with the Latin American Boom—flourished. During this period, in fact, some of the most compelling Chicano novels of the century appeared. The salient figures included Rolando Hinojosa, Tomás Rivera, Miguel Méndez, and Rudolfo Anaya. The coincidence of the Chicano political movement in the United States and the Boom of the Latin American novel were important factors for these Chicano writers, some of whom have written of their admiration for contemporary Latin American fiction. Among the most notable of these dialogic novels were Rivera’s Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974), and Hinojosa’s Klail City y sus alrededores (1975). These writers drew upon their own cultural history as Hispanics in the southwestern United States as well as on Hispanic literary tradition, broadly conceived, to participate in the multicultural dialogue in the United States.¹⁵ The novels written by these authors represented a flowering of the Chicano novel in Spanish.

During the early part of this period, many novelists reaffirmed the political role of the writer. Some of these public intellectuals—Fuentes, Cortázar, and García Márquez—remained most adamant, well into the 1980s, about the political commitment of the Latin American writer. In 1973, Cortázar stated that his “machine gun” for political revolution was literature.¹⁶ Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and García Márquez had made similar statements in the 1960s.

In the ongoing discussions on the Latin American novel after the Boom, one of the most prominent scholarly exponents of the idea of a Postboom has been Donald Shaw.¹⁷ The novels that Shaw identifies as part of this Postboom represent, in effect, a continuation of the modernist project initiated in Latin America in the 1940s and continued masterfully by the writers of the Boom, particularly García Márquez and Vargas Llosa.¹⁸ Writers such as Antonio Skármeta and Mempo Giardinelli (two of Shaw’s Postboom writers) do share generational attitudes that distance them from their immediate predecessors of the Boom. Nevertheless, their fiction is fundamentally a continuation of modernist aesthetics. These writers are by no means traditionalists; indeed, they employ the narrative strategies explored and refined by modernist writers since the 1940s. As such, Skármeta, Giardinelli, Allende, and a host of other Latin American storytellers belong to the tradition of the modernist novel—frequently adding a touch from their local tradition, be it orality, magic realism, or rewriting regional or national history.

The Postboom represents a return to accessibility, more realism, and pop elements that reflect a greater cultural autonomy and the revival of democracy in parts of the continent, according to Shaw.¹⁹ Citing writers such as Skármeta, Shaw proposes that the assumptions made by the Boom writers—whether about literature or society—were to be directly contradicted in the next generation. Making reference to Giardinelli, Shaw emphasizes that the “extreme pessimism” characteristic of the Boom was shifted to a new optimism in the Postboom, although not all scholars agree that the Boom was necessarily so pessimistic.²⁰ Giardinelli and others have stated that their generation was defeated politically in Latin America and that consequently they lost much of the optimism conveyed by their earlier writing.

Many of the writers associated with the Postboom are politically committed storytellers whose writing can be seen as a post-Macondo phenomenon: they write either with or against the storytelling vitality and magic realist approaches of García Márquez. Writers such as Isabel Allende and Luis Sepúlveda produced a fiction with many overtones and stylistic characteristics from García Márquez’s magical fictional worlds.²¹ On the other hand, Colombian novelists such as Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal in El bazar de los idiotas (1974) and Marco Tulio Aguilera Garramuño in Breve historia de todas las cosas (1975) have written parodies of Cien años de soledad.

Several writers and critics have pointed to the importance of testimonio and a closer attachment to empirical reality among Postboom writers. Isabel Allende, for example, believes that her writing breaks from two of the basic tenets of the Boom: she is neither “detached” nor “ironical.”²² Several critics have argued that the Boom writers lacked a radical criticism of society, embracing liberal solutions to mask their acceptance of the status quo. For Shaw, a more radical response to the political reality in Latin America was the Postboom writing of Allende’s De amor y de sombra, Skármeta’s La insurrección, and Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco. Similarly, Sklodowska has demonstrated the importance of the documentary genre of testimonio in Postboom narrative.²³

In contrast, in studies of Postboom fiction in Mexico, other critics attempt to avoid the reduction of the Mexican novel to the more accessible works only.²⁴ These scholars take into account the writing of novelists such as Juan García Ponce, Angelina Muñiz, and Humberto Guzmán, whose experiments with fiction are far from accessible. The more accessible writers of Mexican fiction in the 1970s and 1980s who could be associated with a Postboom are Sergio Galindo, Armando Ramírez, Arturo Azuela, Luis Zapata, Vicente Leñero, Luis Spota, and Jorge Ibargüengoitia. Galindo continued his modernist writing into the 1980s, publishing Terciopelo violeta in 1985 and Otilia Rauda in 1986. In the latter, he uses a backdrop of twentieth-century Mexican history and traditional narrative forms to tell the tale of an attractive and liberated woman, Otilia, and her lover. It is the most attractive story line constructed by Galindo in his career, leaving behind most of the strategies of the small-screen fiction that had been his mainstay for most of his career. Arturo Azuela also published novels with a broad historical scope, beginning with a family story, El tamaño del infierno (1973). He followed with the story of a town, Un tal José Salomé (1975), and a work about his own generation in the 1960s and 1970s, Manifestación de silencios (1979). In Chin-Chin el teporocho (1972), Ramírez focuses on everyday life in a working-class neighborhood in Mexico City. Ramírez followed with Regreso de Chin-Chin el teporocho (1978), a parody of the popular literature of soap operas and comic books. La princesa del Palacio de Hierro (1974) by Sainz was a reaction against the complexities of the fiction of the Boom, and also against the hermetic qualities of the Onda, as new fiction by young writers was identified in Mexico. In this novel, an unnamed female protagonist relates a humorous story of failed relationships, sexual misadventures, and crime.

The most representative writers of the Postboom in Spanish America, according to Shaw, were Isabel Allende, Antonio Skármeta, Luisa Valenzuela, Rosario Ferré, and Gustavo Sainz. Undoubtedly one of the major literary events in the early 1980s, as Shaw has observed, was the publication of Allende’s La casa de los espíritus in 1982, the same year that García Márquez received the Nobel prize in literature.²⁵ This novel’s overwhelming commercial success, coupled with a generally favorable response among scholars and critics, have made it part of the canon of Postboom writing. An historical novel, it portrays the Chilean oligarchy through magical elements that are easily associated with magic realism. Following the Trueba-del-Valle family through four generations, the novel’s context is Chilean society and politics from the beginning of the twentieth century to Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Several critics have focused on the women characters in La casa de los espíritus, for they are strong and imaginative individuals who resist the patriarchy with heroism; in this characterization of women, Allende challenges the masculinist aesthetic that long pervaded the Latin American novel. For Shaw, what marks this work as a Postboom novel is that the reader can recognize that reality could be generally understood in a chronological sequence of cause and effect, and it is written as if the ability to detect historical progress formed part of that understanding. In his discussion of La casa de los espíritus, Shaw clarifies as follows: “The whole problem of Postboom writers in Allende’s category is precisely to avoid this extreme and to walk an uneasy path between the Barthes—Tel Quel—Sarduyian notion that the text can have no exterior referent and the old-fashioned idea that the relationship between signifier and signified is completely unproblematic.”²⁶ Allende followed La casa de los espíritus with De amor y de sombra (1984) and Eva Luna (1987), novels as accessible as her first. De amor y de sombra is a continuation of her testimony of political repression in Chile.

Antonio Skármeta’s early short fiction, according to Shaw, does not manifest the same optimism and hope to be found in Isabel Allende and other writers of the Postboom. His novel Soñé que la nieve ardía (1975), however, can be seen as one of the novels marking a shift from the Boom to the Postboom.²⁷ This novel deals with politically active working-class individuals in an urban setting. Ardiente paciencia (1985) is a love story set during the crucial period in Chile from 1969 to 1973. In this novel and others, including La insurección (1982) and Match Ball (1989), Skármeta questions middle-class values related to the individualism found in sports and other spheres of bourgeois society. In No pasó nada (1980), Skármeta considers the complexities of living in exile as perceived by an adolescent in the family portrayed. His regular use of colloquial language has been associated with the Postboom.²⁸

Using Shaw’s scheme for the Postboom, one could identify other Latin American novelists (not mentioned by him) as part of the Postboom. Sergio Ramírez and Fanny Buitrago wrote fiction in the 1970s easily associated with this Postboom. Four other Colombian novelists who participated in the Postboom—using Shaw’s criteria but likewise not identified by him—were Germán Espinosa, Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal, Manuel Mejía Vallejo, and Alvaro Mutis. One of Espinosa’s most accomplished novels, Los cortejos del diablo (1970), is an historical work set in the colonial period. It portrays Juan de Mañozga, an inquisitor in Cartagena, Colombia, identified by some as the “Torquemada” of the Indies. Espinosa’s later novel, Sinfonía del nuevo mundo (1990), is an historical novel involving Bolívar, with a quickly moving plot that is apparently directed to a potentially broad reading public.²⁹

Like Espinosa, Alvarez Gardeazábal is critical of the Catholic Church in several of his Postboom novels, although his stories generally satirize numerous Colombian institutions and parody modernists who preceded him, such as García Márquez. The most noteworthy of his Postboom novels were Cóndores no entierran todos los días (1972), Dabeiba (1972), and El bazar de los idiotas (1974). All of these novels have the strong story line of Postboom writing. Cóndores no entierran todos los días relives the period of La Violencia in Colombia. It is one of the few novels dealing with this civil war not to celebrate the bloody massacres and purely physical aspect of the conflict. In Dabeiba, Alvarez Gardeazábal displays his ability to tell stories in relating the life of the inhabitants of the town of Dabeiba over a period of several days. His technical mastery is more evident in this than in his other novels. In his later novels El titiritero (1977), Los míos (1991), and Pepe Botellas (1984), Alvarez Gardeazábal satirizes Colombia’s basic institutions and creates situations featuring political power and characters obsessed with power.

Manuel Mejía Vallejo and Alvaro Mutis likewise published novels in the 1970s and 1980s that were modernist in impulse and can be included in the Postboom. Mejía Vallejo’s Aire de tango (1973) treats an aspect of popular culture in Colombia: the passion for the tango. Aire de tango was published, in fact, on June 24, 1973, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the death in Medellín of legendary tango master Carlos Gardel. In this novel, an unidentified narrator tells anecdotes related to Gardel and an admirer of Gardel in a Medellín neighborhood.

The most representative writers of the Postboom in Peru were Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Gregorio Martínez, and Isaac Goldemberg. Bryce Echenique’s Un mundo para Julius (1970) is a story of growing up in upper-middle-class Lima; but more than the typical rite de passage, the novel satirizes this particular social class in a parody of its own language. His other novels are Tantas veces Pedro (1981), La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña (1981), El hombre que hablaba de Octavia de Cádiz (1985), and La última mudanza de Felipe Carrillo (1988). Julio Ortega has observed that Echenique’s novels are exercises in an aesthetic of hyperbole and performance.³⁰ Goldemberg’s La vida a plazos de don Jacobo Lerner (1975) tells the story of not only the disenfranchisement of the protagonist, but of his entire Jewish clan in Peru. It is a novel of the diaspora and cultural conflict.

Some of the most significant Postboom works of the 1970s and 1980s came from writers associated with the Boom itself. Novels such as Vargas Llosa’s Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973), Fuentes’s La cabeza de la hidra (1978), Donoso’s La misteriosa desaparición de la Marquesita de Loria (1980), and García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985) were these authors’ reactions against much of their own work of the 1960s. More specifically, these fictions were a dialogue with the novels of the Boom, for they did not represent a total rejection of the novelists’ earlier modernist interests.³¹ With Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977), as well as with his fiction of the 1980s, Vargas Llosa returns to some of his demons of the 1960s, obsessions such as the Peruvian military and the role of storytelling in contemporary society. Donoso reacted against his own totalizing impulses with La misteriosa desaparición de la Marquesita de Loria, a brief novel in dialogue with erotic and detective fiction.³²

Some Latin American writers published texts in the period of the Boom yet never were associated with these celebrities. Four such novelists were Salvador Garmendia, Elena Garro, Adriano González León, and Lisandro Chávez Alfaro. Garmendia, who belonged to the Boom generationally but was not a part of the foremost group, also wrote novels that could be associated with the Postboom. His Memorias de Altagracia (1974) and El Capitán Kid (1983) were a continuation of his interests of the 1960s. Garro continued her novelistic career of the 1960s with the publication of several novels in the 1980s. Like Fuentes, her main theme—indeed, her lifelong obsession—is time. In Testimonios sobre Mariana (1980), three voices evoke the life of Mariana, attempting to defeat the loss of memory associated with the passing of time. La casa junto al río (1983) is an elaboration of the themes of time and memory; the main character is a woman remembering the past. The relationship between time and the levels of fiction becomes more complex in Reencuentro de personajes (1982), as characters from the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh appear in the “present” of the “real” Mexico recreated by Garro.

Summarizing, then, the reaction against the writing of the 1960s Boom has been characterized as a Postboom, and the most active writers of this group were Allende, Skármenta, Mejía Vallejo, and Giardinelli, in addition to a host of others who made themselves accessible to a broad readership. They were perhaps more optimistic in vision than the writers of the Boom. The overall panorama of Latin American fiction from the 1970s to the 1990s, however, is far more complex than such generalizations allow the reader to discern. Feminist, gay, and innovative postmodern writing, for example, was quite significant during this period, and it is difficult to make broad and fixed generalizations about the readership, language, or optimism of these frequently marginalized and often postmodern writers.

Fanny Buitrago was generally less interested in innovation and feminist theory than were Angel, Molloy, and other feminists. Buitrago has published a consistent body of fiction since the 1960s. She writes with interests in oral tradition and modernist aesthetics and, consequently, is easily associated with the Postboom. Her main interests are human relationships, and her characters tend to be isolated, abandoned, and constrained by social morés. Her most complex work was Cola de zorro (1970), a family story, but not of the traditional sort. The three major characters in this work—Ana, Emmanuel, and Malinda—are connected by Benito, a man of such special qualities that he is characterized with mythic dimensions. The reader gradually discovers blood relations and other relations that connect the main characters, and the novel is a study of these human relations. Buitrago’s novels Los pañamanes (1979) and Los amores de Afrodita (1983) demonstrate her interest in stories that are accessible to a broad reading public yet avoid the clichés of fiction for mass markets. Los amores de Afrodita can be read as a volume of short stories, similar to volumes that appeared throughout Latin America.

The fiction of Elena Poniatowska, Luisa Valenzuela, and Rosario Ferré has not competed in sales with that of writers such as Allende and is not experimental enough to be associated with the postmodern writers. Nevertheless, these three writers do have feminist interests, and their fiction is significant. Poniatowska’s early writing was nonfiction, but she has since published several novels. From 1968 to 1990 she published the testimonial books Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) and La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), the collection of stories De noche vienes (1979), the epistolary novel Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela (1978), and the novel La “Flor de Lis” (1988). Hasta no verte Jesús mío is an oral history of a washerwoman, Josefina Bórquez, who appears under the fictitious name of Jesusa Palancares. After interviewing Bórquez on a weekly basis for a year, Poniatowska created this fictionalized version of the woman’s life. Palancares is a feminist who is defiant of all forms of authority. Her language is a synthesis of popular speech of working-class women of Mexico City, inviting Shaw to categorize this as a Postboom novel. The plot of La “Flor de Lis” parallels Poniatowska’s own life: the protagonist is from an aristocratic family background, immigrates from France to Mexico City, and eventually comes to understand the social and political realities of her adopted nation. In Poniatowska’s work, the documentary spirit is constant, as is her search for social justice in Mexico. She also recognizes the relativity of truths, which links her to postmodern fiction.³³

Although she shares Poniatowska’s interest in testimonio, Luisa Valenzuela has dedicated more of her career strictly to writing fiction. Valenzuela is just as political as Poniatowska, as demonstrated in a body of work focused primarily on politics, language, and women.³⁴ Her first novel of the 1970s, El gato eficaz (1972), deals with a woman narrator’s playful—and serious—dialogue with literature. Valenzuela tests the previous limits for women writers with respect to self-censorship and the erotic, frequently incorporating various types of language in her novels. Her novel El gato eficaz (1972) also contains these multiple discourses.³⁵ Cola de lagartija (1983) is an overtly political work in which Valenzuela gives the narrator-protagonist her own name. The fictional Luisa Valenzuela of the novel confronts the chaotic process of writing and the increasingly absurd world around her.

Rosario Ferré, Julieta Campos, Sandra Cisneros, Alejandra Pizarnik, Cristina Perri Rossi, Elizabeth Burgos, and Domitila Barrios published heterogeneous works ranging from modernist fiction to testimonio narrative. Barrios focuses on her experience as a woman in Bolivia, as Burgos does on women in Guatemala. Burgos is known for her collaboration in Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio of political struggles in Guatemala, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1976). Menchú relates the customs of her indigenous people in a small farming community and the loss of family members; the veracity of the book became a polemical issue in the 1990s.³⁶ Barrios published two books of literatura testimonial. Having grown up in a family of miners in Bolivia, she provides an account of her life in “Si me permiten hablar …” (1976). Her religious experience with a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses and her growing political awareness, political commitment, and political activity inform much of this testimonio. She also offers an eyewitness description of massacres at the mine. Her book Aquí, también, Domitila (1985) is a narrative about a hunger strike to protest the imprisonment of political prisoners.

Many women writers from Venezuela and Latina writers from the United States have been generally unknown beyond their respective national borders. Some scholars, nevertheless, have brought to the forefront the fiction of Venezuelan women writers such as Milagros Matos-Gil, Ana Teresa Torres, and Laura Antillano.³⁷ Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas have made innovative contributions to the novel as Latina writing in the United States, exploring themes of race and gender. These three writers and several others in the United States criticize racism in Anglo American society, while Castillo’s The Mixquihuala Letters (1986) explores internalized racism among Latinas. The connections of this novel to Latin America are obvious; Castillo states at its outset that she writes “In memory of the master of the game, Julio Cortázar,” thus indicating that it is the author’s duty to alert the reader that this is not a book to be read in the usual sequence. Castillo explains that all letters are numbered to aid in following any one of the author’s proposed options. Cota-Cárdenas’s Puppet (1985) is innovative with respect to language, for this work both incorporates multiple languages and is a reflection on language. In this, her writing is comparable to much postmodern fiction published in Latin America in the 1980s. Cisneros’s highly successful The House on Mango Street (1985) is a series of vignettes about a young girl growing up in a Latino section of Chicago. This is the most celebrated of Cisneros’s works on gender and race.

In conclusion, the new feminisms of the 1980s represented a major change of emphasis in the Latin American novel. The critical work of feminist scholars such as Franco, Sommer, Castillo, Guerra, and Castro-Klarén, among others, has situated much of this writing in a Latin American and international context and analyzed the crucial negotiations between this writing and the masculinist aesthetics of much that preceded it.

Parallel to the rise of women writers was an increased publication of gay, lesbian, and testimonio writing in the 1970s and 1980s. Latin American literature has been historically silent about themes of gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, an increasing number of critics now recognize the presence of queer discourse in the region. A seminal gay novel of Mexican literature was José Ceballos Maldonado’s Después de todo (1969), a first-person account of the middle-age male protagonist’s sexual encounters with teenage boys. The narrative assumes that the reader is not necessarily sympathetic to homoeroticism.³⁸ David W. Foster has established an inventory of sexual themes by addressing lesbianism and gayness in Latin American literature.³⁹ He indicates that at the end of the century the multiple discourses of sexuality had become important factors of the Indo-Afro-Iberoamerican novel. The fiction of Silvia Molloy, Luis Zapata, and Fernando Vallejo illustrates the Latin American exploration of the discourses of gender and sexuality.

Significant gay and lesbian novels of this period include Silvia Molloy’s En breve cárcel (1981), Darcy Penteado’s Nivaldo e Jeronimo (1981), José Rafael Calva’s Utopía gay (1983), Luis Zapata’s En jirones (1985), Oscar Hermes Villordo’s La otra mejilla (1986), Isaac Chocron’s Toda luna dama (1988), and Fernando Vallejo’s El fuego secreto (1986). Chicano/a writers also have produced gay and lesbian texts; in her personal ethnic memoir Loving in the War Years (1983), Cherríe Moraga sets forth the idea of a productive Chicana lesbianism. A pioneer gay writer in the Chicano community, John Rechy, wrote of gay relationships.

Luis Zapata and Fernando Vallejo established a place for gay writing in Mexico and Colombia, and they are the most prominent gay writers in their respective homelands. Zapata’s novels depict specifically gay characters; his development of gay themes questions and undermines the norms of the heterosexual order. En jirones (1985) consists of a notebook (cuaderno) that establishes relationships between gay love and writing. It is outstanding as one of the most unabashedly gay books and obviously postmodern texts to appear in Mexico in recent years.

Manuel Puig, Reynaldo Arenas, and Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal write on homoerotic themes, though less explicitly than Zapata and Vallejo. In La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968), El beso de la mujer araña (1976), and Cae la noche tropical (1988), Puig explores different stereotypes and concepts of homosexuality. As Foster has suggested, El beso de la mujer araña is exceptional for its demonstration of how sexual and political liberation must be viewed as integral parts of the same process.⁴⁰ In this novel, Puig explores the power of politics and gender, and the relationship between the two.

Writing identified by scholars of gay and lesbian literature as queer discourse of the 1970s and 1980s served functions similar to that of many feminist and overtly political writers. Queer discourse has contributed as much to the subversion of patriarchal order as many of the feminist and postmodern writers have.

Like many gay and postmodern writers, the authors of testimonio tend to move away from totalizing viewpoints to observe the “ubiquity of testimony.”⁴¹ The writing of testimonio has included practitioners such as Elena Poniatowska, Hernán Valdés, Rigoberta Menchú, Ariel Dorfman, Jacobo Timmerman, Domitila Barrios de Chungara with Moema Viezzer, Florencia Varas with José Manuel Vargara, Violeta Parra, and Angela Zago. Linda Craft has observed the nontotalizing and testimonio impulse in much Central American fiction.⁴²

As of the late 1960s, it became increasingly evident among critics that the radically heterogeneous literary phenomenon in Latin America corresponded in many ways to what was being called postmodern fiction in the West. The term Postboom has been useful to distinguish some tendencies of fiction published after the 1960s Boom. However, as the heterogeneity of this writing became more evident, the term Postboom has been increasingly limited as a rubric for the rich variety of literary phenomena produced since the early 1970s. By the 1980s, it became more appropriate to describe some of the new novels—although certainly not all of them—published since the late 1960s and early 1970s with a term that captured exactly what it was: postmodern fiction. Thus, there has been a growing acceptance of the idea of a postmodern novel in Latin America. If the writers identified with the Postboom tended to follow modernist aesthetics, postmodern writers have demonstrated other interests. These interests have been particularly evident since 1968, with the novels of Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Ricardo Piglia, Diamela Eltit, and others. And as we have seen, some postmodern writers such as Reynaldo Arenas and Silvia Molloy can be easily associated with Postboom gay or lesbian writing.

Umberto Eco claims that the postmodern is born at the moment when the world has no fixed center and power is not something unitary that exists outside of us. This moment occurred in Latin American literature with the rise of Borges, who became a seminal figure for many European theorists and Latin American postmodern novelists in the 1960s and 1970s, even though the now-classic Borges fiction they most admired was published in the 1940s. The Argentine’s two seminal books were El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan (1941) and Ficciones (1944). More specifically, Borges’s “La biblioteca de Babel” and “Pierre Ménard, autor del Quijote” are foundational texts for postmodern fiction in Latin America. In them, the boundary between fiction and essay is blurred, opening the way for the fictionalized theoretical prose of Severo Sarduy, Ricardo Piglia, José Balza, and several others. Borges’s fiction operates in a fashion similar to what Hutcheon notes in the fiction of North American and European postmodern writers: the narrator’s discourse is paradoxically postmodern, for it both inscribes a context and then contests its boundaries.

The Postboom, to a large extent, can be read as a post-Cien años de soledad phenomenon; the postmodern novel in Latin America can be read as a post-Rayuela event. The wild experimentation of Rayuela, as well as Morelli’s call for an “anti-novel,” opened the door to a postmodern fiction that has frequently been a dialogue with Rayuela. Another important factor to the rise of the postmodern since Rayuela was the first generalized presence of Joyce in Latin American fiction in the 1960s. As Gerald Martin has delineated, Joyce’s entry into the general consciousness of the Latin American writer comes late and is not really noticeable until the appearance of works such as Rayuela and Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (1967).⁴³ In addition, it should be pointed out that Cortázar’s popularization of the ludic in Latin American fiction was accompanied by a broad-based entrance of the ludic in modern fiction. As Motte has demonstrated, the ludic is essential to such internationally recognized writers as Breton, Nabokov, Perec, Calvino, and Eco;⁴⁴ these writers were not only translated, but quite well known among Latin American novelists of the 1960s.

Other radical and innovative novelists soon appeared on the Latin American literary scene, including Diamela Eltit, Ricardo Piglia, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Héctor Libertella, Salvador Elizondo, Carmen Boullosa, Ignacio Solares, José Balza, and R. H. Moreno-Durán. In their early writing, Libertella and Eltit were particularly interested in the type of linguistic innovations utilized by Sarduy. Seen in their totality, these postmodern writers and their cohorts offer radically diverse kinds of postmodernisms—perhaps a postmodern phenomenon in itself: if Culture (with a capital C and singular) becomes cultures in postmodernity, as Hutcheon has suggested, then the provisionality and heterogeneity of postmodern cultures in Latin America is even more extreme than in the United States.⁴⁵ Many of these Latin American postmodern writers—like their First World counterparts—are interested in heterogeneous discourses of theory and fiction. Consequently, the essays of Severo Sarduy, Tununa Mercado, and José Balza read like fiction and vice versa; Eltit’s early fiction appropriated the theoretical discourses of Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and others. Balza has preferred not to distinguish between the essays and the fiction of his “exercises,” and Tununa Mercado has published texts of fiction/essays.

Several scholars have noted the postmodern tendency to bridge the gap between what was formerly considered “elite” and “popular” art.⁴⁶ For theorists such as Hutcheon, postmodernism’s relationship with contemporary mass culture is not just one of implication but also one of critique. This argument is perhaps stronger in the Latin American case because the historical and political bases have been consistently present.

The appearance of several radically innovative novels in 1968 was one clear indicator of a cultural shift among some writers in the direction of the postmodern novel. These works of 1968 were Cortázar’s 62: modelo para armar, Puig’s La traición de Rita Hayworth, Jorge Guzmán’s Job-Boj, Alberto Duque López’s Mateo el flautista, José Agustín’s Inventando que sueño, and Salvador Elizondo’s El hipogeo secreto. These six novels and many to follow in the 1970s and 1980s were as obviously indebted to Cortázar’s Rayuela as Castillo’s Mixquiahuala Letters. Duque López’s Mateo el flautista is dedicated to a character in Rayuela, and it is difficult to imagine the creation of such playful experiments as Inventando que sueño without Rayuela as a precedent.

These novels place into practice, in different ways, Morelli’s radical proposals in Rayuela for the “anti-novel,” the description of which is quite similar to many of the theoretical propositions developed a decade later by Hassan, Hutcheon, and other theorists of the postmodern novel. The most direct connection between Morelli’s proposal and these novels is Cortázar’s own 62: modelo para armar, which is an outgrowth of Morelli’s propositions in chapter 62 of Rayuela. In chapter 62, Morelli sets forth the possibility of constructing a novel on the basis of random notes and observations. In 62: modelo para armar, the characters are caught up in a pattern of random events in four places: London, Paris, Vienna, and “the City.” Another of Morelli’s many critiques involves the concept of “character,” in essence, the same question many postmodern novelists set forth about the possibility of a unified subject.

The fiction of Manuel Puig in general, and La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) in particular, were a watershed for the postmodern novel in Latin America. In La traición de Rita Hayworth, Puig established a postmodern reader with an active and unstable role to play, for there is no controlling narrator to organize the anecdotal material related by a multiplicity of voices. In telling the story of the young boy Toto, the main referent is not Argentina, but Hollywood film. His later novels, such as The Buenos Aires Affair (1973) and El beso de la mujer araña (1976) question gender-based behavior, genre-bound thinking, and concepts of authority and truth.⁴⁷

Two experimental postmodern novels published in Mexico were José Agustín’s Inventando que sueño and Salvador Elizondo’s El hipogeo secreto. The former consists of a set of stories that can be read as separate pieces or as a novel. It functions like an album of rock music containing several songs, and rock music is one of the predominant themes of the book. El hipogeo secreto is an even more experimental metafiction, with overtones of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

Fuentes’s Terra Nostra is a Borgesian postmodern text that rediscovers the heterogeneity of Latin American culture and the radical heterogeneity of postmodern culture in Indo-Afro-Iberoamerica. Set in sixteenth-century Spain, Terra Nostra has been described by Brian McHale as an anthology of postmodern themes and devices.⁴⁸ In addition to the particulars of Latin American history, Fuentes is concerned with how history, culture, and identity are constructed and then understood.

Sergio Pitol’s novelistic production, almost as vast and encyclopedic as Fuentes’s, shares the modernist and postmodern impulses of his Mexican compatriot. His early endeavor El tañido de una flauta (1972), establishes a fictionalized dialogue with other literatures, arts, and film, interwoven around three related plot lines. Pitol continues his Bakhtinian dialogue in Juegos florales (1982), El desfile de amor (1984), and Domar a la divina garza (1988). Domar a la divina garza includes a fictionalized metacommentary on texts of Nikolai Gogol, Italo Calvino, and Dante Alighieri. Pitol’s work has not only many of the encyclopedic literary impulses of Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, but also shares metafictional and historical qualities of the fiction of Fernando del Paso and of Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial.⁴⁹

After the hyperexperimentation of the late 1960s that culminated in the fiction of Pacheco, Fuentes, Agustín, and Elizondo, postmodern fiction in Mexico after 1968 was less hermetic and more accessible. Nevertheless, postmodern attitudes of the 1960s became more acute. In addition to the work of such recognized writers as Fuentes, the later postmodern writers in Mexico included Luis Arturo Ramos, María Luisa Puga, Brianda Domecq, Carmen Boullosa, and Ignacio Solares. Ramos’s early writing, particularly his short fiction, had clear affinities with Cortázar. His novel Este era un gato (1987) tells of a retired U.S. Marine captain who had participated in the 1914 invasion of Veracruz. Like much postmodern historiographic metafiction, this novel does not fall into either “presentism” (denial of the past) or nostalgia in its relation to the past.

Carmen Boullosa and Ignacio Solares also have contributed to the Mexican postmodern novel. Solares established well-defined interests in both history and invention in his novels Puerta al cielo (1976), Anónimo (1979), El árbol del deseo (1980), La fórmula de la inmortalidad (1982), Serafim (1985), Casas de encantamiento (1988), and Madero, el otro (1989). Boullosa’s first novel, Mejor desaparece (1987), contains the subjective mirada, the gaze, of Fuentes’s and Ramos’s fiction. Like Ramos and Solares, Boullosa consistently places storytelling ahead of her interests in innovation per se.

In the 1970s and 1980s, postmodern fiction in the Southern Cone nations and the Andean region was prominently exemplified by writers such as Piglia, Eltit, Borinsky, Libertella, Mercado, Adoum, Angel, Moreno-Durán, Darío Jaramillo, and Balza. Borinsky’s Mina cruel (1989) is one of her early novelas de espectáculo (as she has identified her comic and absurd fiction). In its dialogue with Macedonio Fernández and Manuel Puig, the comic absurd in Mina cruel consists of surfaces that are a mix of kitsch and camp. Without any of the moralizing of much fiction of exile, this novel includes a backdrop of repression, bare survival, and exile. Tununa Mercado’s highly experimental Canon de alcoba (1988) is one of her first theoretical fictions on the experience of exile and writing. Her treatment of exile goes beyond the exhausted themes of nostalgia and alienation. Libertella’s postmodern writing often blurs the traditional boundaries between essay and fiction; two of his volumes that read more like essayistic than fictional exercises are his most engaging contributions. Libertella questions the viability of both the Spanish language and writing in a subtle and subversive fashion in El paseo internacional del perverso (1990), a short novel that averts its status as a novel and as any fixed language. It also avoids any fixed subject, for the main character, an itinerant person who travels around the world, never takes on any fixed identity.

The postmodern writers of Uruguay who have followed the paths of Hernández, Borges, and Cortázar include Híber Conteris, Armonía Sommers, Cristina Peri Rossi, Teresa Porzekanski, and Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León. Conteris wrote El diez por ciento de la vida (1986) while incarcerated as a political prisoner. This novel can be read as a detective tale; like the fiction of Eltit, however, it can also be deciphered as a postmodern allegory of resistance.

Some critics have suggested that the heterogeneous and disjunctive Caribbean has always been a postmodern culture. Novels such as Severo Sarduy’s Cobra and Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La guaracha del Macho Camacho support such a proposition.⁵⁰ The writing of Sarduy contributes significantly to the Caribbean postmodern, and it has had considerable impact on the Latin American postmodern in general. Written in the hermetic mode of Lezama Lima, Cobra (1972) is Sarduy’s novelistic reflection on language and writing. In it, language is not just a means of communication, but a meditation on the very function of language. The novel’s title refers to a poem by Octavio Paz from Conjunciones y disyunciones that dramatizes the generation of language. The association of words in this poem creates more words, a process parallel to much of Cobra, which was one of the early Latin American texts to blur the line between fictional and theoretical discourse; this novel refers freely to Derrida and Lacan. Works such as Maitreya (1978) and Colibrí (1983) represent a continuation of Sarduy’s postmodern project. Sarduy returns to the very roots of Latin American culture, deconstructing its most basic elements, beginning with language. A culture as inherently postmodern as Cuba’s has produced several other postmodern writers, including Senel Paz and René Vásquez Díaz.

In contrast to Sarduy, the writing of Luis Rafael Sánchez has little relationship with literary theory, for it is based primarily in popular culture. La guaracha del Macho Camacho refers to the Puerto Rican music that permeates the text, the guaracha. The novel’s title is that of a popular song; Sánchez takes a refrain from it as his epigraph and includes its lyrics in an appendix. In his one-paragraph preface, he writes that the story is about the success of this song as well as the miserable and splendid extremes of life. The fragmented text is filled with the popular music, mass culture, and the heterogeneous cultural reality of everyday life in Puerto Rico, highlighted by an enormous traffic jam and appearances by Puerto Rican television star Iris Chacón. As in the fiction of Sarduy, space and characters are conceived in a fashion opposed to modernist procedures. Sánchez’s La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988) is a more overtly postmodern text about a popular singer of the 1940s and 1950s, the Puerto Rican Daniel Santos. The author figure, who is identified in the text as a gay writer named Luis Rafael Sánchez, travels from Puerto Rico to several Latin American cities where the singer had performed, in search of the complete story of Santos.

The work of Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá also escapes genre definition. His first heterogeneous text, Las tribulaciones de Jonás (1981), is a testimonial account of the renowned Puerto Rican political figure Luis Muñoz Marín. El entierro de Cortijo (1983) centers on the wake for a popular band leader, an experience that was especially significant for Puerto Ricans of African descent. Alonso has pointed out that Rodríguez Juliá does not attempt to impose coherence on the conflicting and contradictory gestures in these two texts; there is no overarching interpretive scheme.⁵¹ La noche oscura del Niño Avilés (1984), offers the active postmodern reader a series of historical and fictional documents to decipher.

Benítez Rojo has described the Caribbean as a culture of “performers,”⁵² and the postmodern fictions of Sarduy, Sánchez, and Rodríguez Juliá are indeed performances. Benítez Rojo’s reference to the “aquatic” quality of Caribbean culture also recalls the aquatic quality of the ever-transforming texts of Sarduy and Sánchez. The heterogeneous, aquatic, and double-coded nature of the unresolved contradictions in these Caribbean texts places it among the premier examples of postmodern fiction in Latin America.

The overall heterogeneity—the radical modernity—of the Latin American novel of the 1970s and 1980s far surpassed the innovations in writing that had yet been witnessed in the century. The novel of dictators and of exile, along with the Postboom, gay, feminist, and postmodern writing, meant both refined modernism and a hypermodernism with theoretical and cultural interests that exceeded those of their predecessors of the vanguardia. Women and explicitly political novelists wrote within the general framework of these modernist and postmodern modes, producing fiction dealing with issues of feminism, gender, sexuality, and politics. Gay and lesbian writing was more visible and explicit than ever before. Heterogeneous cultural areas, such as the Caribbean, also surfaced as forceful cultural entities. And heterogeneous genres such as the testimonio blurred the boundaries of narrative.

Feminist writing had become central to Latin American fiction by the late 1980s. As Naomi Lindstrom has explained, the difficult problem of adapting European and North American feminism to Latin America has been the theoretical work of feminist critics such as Debra Castillo, Sara Castro-Klarén, Lucía Guerra-Cunningham, and Gabriela Mora.⁵³ In addition, Jean Franco, Francine Masiello, and Doris Sommer have made valuable contributions to this effort. Feminist writing, as well as that of gay novelists such as Manuel Puig, signaled the end of a masculinist aesthetic as the predominant mode in Latin America; this shift was a process increasingly evident since the early 1960s.

As writers of the 1970s and 1980s entered into dialogue with the powerful cultural experience of the Boom, the results took two broad directions. On the one hand, writers of a fundamentally modernist impulse—following the footsteps of Faulkner, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez—continued telling stories in an accessible fashion that attracted a broad readership in Latin America and abroad. These writers (some of whom critics associated with the Postboom) of modernist interests included Isabel Allende, Elena Garro, Antonio Skármeta, and the Vargas Llosa and García Márquez of the 1970s and 1980s.

On the other hand, writers of more postmodern interests—following the footsteps of Borges, Cortázar, and the later Donoso—constructed fictions that were generally less accessible, more experimental, and of interest to a more limited readership of academics, writers, and intellectuals. These postmodern writers also tended to share an admiration for Joyce, Roland Barthes, and Severo Sarduy. One could read Eltit, Pizarnik, and others as postmodern feminists. Yet certainly there is no definitive line that divides modernist from postmodern writing. Fuentes, Puig, Molloy, and many other novelists, in fact, exhibit characteristics associated with both tendencies. Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Garro, Pitol, and del Paso share totalizing impulses typical of high modernist writing, while in some of their works in this period they exhibit postmodern tendencies.