The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

El bazar de los idiotas was a dialogue with the fiction of the Boom and, more specifically, a parody of Cien años de soledad. Seen in retrospect, it was also a forerunner of the fiction of Isabel Allende. It relates a bizarre story focusing on a pair of miracle-producing adolescents in Tuluá, a small town near Cali, Colombia. The humor and magical quality of some of the events of the novel recall Cien años de soledad; in this case, two masturbating idiots become heroes in Tuluá and Colombia. The two idiots become heroes when they discover that, despite their mental deficiencies and inability to cope with life in conventional terms, through masturbation they can miraculously cure illnesses. As their fame grows in the process of their becoming heroes, so does the economy of the surrounding area, which becomes a tourist center. A significant aspect of their becoming heroes involves the people they cure—a gallery of types ranging from a paralyzed ex-beauty queen to a homosexual suffering from “sickness of the soul” after losing his lover. The idiots attain hero status when their feats achieve such fame that national and foreign experts converge upon Tuluá. On the last page of the novel, however, everything ends: they die, assassinated by their bastard half brother.

Also like García Márquez, Alvarez Gardeazábal uses procedures intimately associated with oral storytelling. The narrator assumes the role of the writer who has access to anecdotes which the (oral-culture) citizenry of Tuluá have forgotten. This narrator’s apparently total access to Tuluá’s story includes both oral and written versions. Indeed, much of what he narrates has oral roots—what has been said (dizque) and perhaps repeated over the years. The narrator’s seemingly complete access to orality and full exploitation of it both reveals the author’s totalizing impulse and constitutes a successful exploitation of Latin America’s cultural heterogeneity.

Gustavo Sainz does not refer as directly to the novels of the Boom as does El bazar de los idiotas, but La princesa del Palacio de Hierro should be read as a reaction not only to the narrative complexity of Boom novels, but also to the complex narratives published by Mexican writers of the postmodern and irreverent Onda—José Agustín and Sainz. By the early 1970s, the Mexican novel had become extremely experimental and hermetic.¹ La princesa del Palacio de Hierro derives its humor from different sources than does El bazar de los idiotas; now the narrator functions within the fictional world. Sainz’s novel is a lengthy first-person narrative—a monologue by a woman that could well be one side of a rambling telephone conversation. An employee of a department store (the “Palacio de Hierro” of Mexico), she narrates her life to an unidentified friend. Her story begins with her adolescence and covers several years; her life is banal yet paradoxically never boring and consists of a series of relationships that inevitably fail. The special quality of the experiences that inform the novel is her particular way of developing her relationships and her mode of expression that was surprisingly uninhibited for a female character in a Mexican novel of the mid-1970s. In this sense, La princesa del Palacio de Hierro anticipates some feminist fiction of the 1980s and 1990s (such as Susan Torres Molina’s Dueña y señora), in which the discursive levels of women are opened even more radically.²

A key to the humor in La princesa del Palacio de Hierro is the presence of a fictitious character whose presence is felt although she never appears as a character per se and is not identified throughout the novel’s 345 pages. This entity is the “tú” to whom the protagonist directs her monologue from the first lines. The presence of this tú is key for the novel’s humor, as seen in this passage: “A veces nos reuníamos para hablar de nuestros problemas. Y cuando estábamos juntas empezábamos a hablar de todas las cosas que habían pasado, los cambios de maridos, los orgasmos felices, los abandonos y cosas así” (Sometimes we’d get together to talk about our problems. And when we were together we began to talk about everything that had happened, the changing of spouses, the great orgasms, the abandonments, and things like that).³ The reader notes a loss of the basic intimacy of the conversation; this principle, the violation of the code of intimacy between the princess and her fictitious reader by part of the real reader, is the basis of the humor in the novel.

The main strategy to fictionalize the reader in La princesa del Palacio de Hierro, however, relates to the intellectual and analytical content of this novel. The reader is superior to the characters observed and fundamentally an intellectual. A strategy employed to fictionalize this intellectual (and superior) reader is the inclusion of a series of quotations of the poetry of Oliverio Girondo at the end of each of the princess’s twenty-one monologues. They have the effect of distancing the reader, and they make the somewhat frivolous anecdotes a focus of analysis.

In the process of reading La princesa del Palacio de Hierro, the reader also becomes aware that Sainz, like Alvarez Gardeazábal and Vargas Llosa, communicates critical attitudes about basic national institutions. The institution in La princesa del Palacio de Hierro is language, placing Sainz close to the interests of Eltit and Piglia. The flow of the princess’s verbalization is an expression of her inability to understand her past or herself. She speaks in concentric circles without being able to hit a mark, find a center, or perhaps reach a kind of self-awareness. Her metaphors express the banality of a life consisting of repetitive cycles that recreate themselves in a series of substitutions but which, in reality, never change.

When Vargas Llosa published La tía Julia y el escribidor in 1977, he had already reacted against the complexities of the Boom and explored humor with his novel Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973). In La tía Julia y el escribidor, as in El bazar de los idiotas and La princesa del Palacio de Hierro, the reader encounters a humorous entertainment. In this semi-autobiographical novel, Vargas Llosa relates the double story of a young Mario marrying his older aunt and the ongoing stories of radio soap operas in 1950s Perú. La tía Julia y el escribidor presents four persons who are writers. The first, Pedro Camacho, appears in chapters narrated by Marito. Camacho can be described more precisely as a “scribbler,” to use the term of Roland Barthes. The second writer is Marito, the young narrator of the odd-numbered chapters. The third writer present in the novel can be identified as Pedro Camacho as narrator, who appears implicitly as such in the even-numbered chapters (text of the nine soap operas).

It is important to make the fundamental distinction between an author (in this case the person Pedro Camacho) and a narrator (the fictional entity present in any narrative). The fourth writer is Mario Vargas Llosa himself, the author of several novels and, a notable factor here, of numerous critical and theoretical texts. These four writers are related; the relationships among them are the basis for the dynamic interaction among the “writers” of the novel. Marito learns about the art of writing; one of the themes of the novel is this art, and the relationships among the writers give the reader a prolonged experience of the act of writing itself. In this experience the reader contributes to the creative process, incorporating “theoretical” writings; and it becomes evident that the novel proposes a corollary to the problem of writing: reading. The reader is invited to resolve technical problems of reading, and the reader concurrently encounters the act of reading as a theme in itself.⁴

Marito’s career as a writer deals directly with a complementary problem: the reader. The young novelist discovers that his first obstacle to the attainment of literary success depends less on literary merit than on the reaction of his readers. He uses Aunt Julia as a reader, for example, and discovers for the first time the discrepancy between the author’s perception of his literary creation and that of the reader. When he reads her “The Humiliation of the Cross,” he notes that precisely what she criticizes are the imaginative elements. This anecdote is important, for it is an early lesson in the realization that in the communication of fiction a new entity exists: the reader.

La tía Julia y el escribidor begins with an epigraph from a novel by the Mexican novelist Salvador Elizondo: “I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing.” (Elizondo’s solipsistic observations continue for several more lines.) Such a commentary reflects a common attitude of writers of Indo-Afro-Iberoamerica in the 1970s. Vargas Llosa’s novel can be seen as part of a general trend toward self-conscious, postmodern fiction. This is Vargas Llosa’s first novel about writing. Nevertheless, it has features that distinguish it from much metafiction. The dynamics of reading and writing make this novel more entertaining, like Sainz’s La princesa del Palacio de Hierro, than much self-conscious fiction, which is often characterized as dry “writers’ writing.”

Ferré’s Maldito amor, like El bazar de los idiotas and La tía Julia y el escribidor, interacts with popular culture; in this case, the very title is that of a popular, late-nineteenth-century love song in Puerto Rico. The volume Maldito amor contains a novel and three short stories whose themes are interrelated.⁵ The novel is the story of several generations of the de la Valle family in Puerto Rico. The setting is the family ranch near the village of Guamaní. The eventual ruin of their sugarcane business destroys the family. The main theme of the novel has a feminine focus: it involves the search for personal identity of the women of the de la Valle family and extends to a search for social identity in Puerto Rican society at large.⁶ Much of this identity search relates to various bloodlines that have descended from Spain, Africa, and the Americas and that different characters represent.

The novels of Alvarez Gardeazábal, Vargas Llosa, and Sainz offer the possibility of subtle political readings. In Maldito amor, however, a more obvious political search is evident. Here the characters represent various positions with respect to the appropriate relationship with the United States. Ferré uses several female and male narrative voices to articulate these positions in terms of identity and politics. The novel begins with an unidentified voice that narrates the history of the region of Guamaní; this opening describes the ideal world that pervaded before North American mainland interests dominated the island. Later in the text, the reader realizes that this voice belongs to Hermenegildo, the narrator and historian of the de la Valle family. As Lee Skinner has demonstrated, however, Hermenegildo’s attempts to construct a coherent, totalizing historical discourse centering around the heroic figure of de la Valle and to inscribe nostalgias into that historical project are shattered from within the novel’s text.⁷ Thus, this decentered fiction takes a certain postmodern turn away from the “total” novel.

Fuentes’s Terra Nostra obviously exhibits numerous totalizing impulses, thus distinguishing it from La princesa del Palacio de Hierro and Maldito amor; Fuentes’s lengthy novel represents an attempt to rewrite Latin American cultural history in a comprehensive manner that has led to its characterization, mentioned earlier, as a postmodern anthology. As a postmodern text, Terra Nostra articulates the twelfth-century proclamation that “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Attributed to Hasa-Sabbah in the year 1164, this statement is particularly appropriate because Fuentes, too, frequently returns to the Middle Ages in his act of recovering history and knowledge.

Piglia proposes a mediated version of historical truth, according to Daniel Balderson.⁸ All understanding, historical and other, is considerably mediated in this novel. A multiplicity of voices narrates, and there is no narrative authority. The primary narrator in part 1, Renzi, is only a provisional narrator at best, and a substantial portion of part 2 consists of letters from his friends and others. The mediation takes more subtle technical forms, too, when Renzi narrates what others have written or told him. In part 2, Tardewski narrates, but most of his narration is actually a quotation of another, or a quotation of a quotation, thus recalling similar procedures employed by Sainz. This constant mediation in part 2 forces the reader to engage in an ongoing and intense process of evaluation of the sources of possible truths in the story.

Piglia’s dedication of the novel resonates with multiple meanings: it is to “Elías and Rubén who helped me to come to know the truth of history.” After the experience of Respiración artificial, it is difficult to imagine knowing any significant truths about Argentine history. Truths are, in the end, unspeakable. On the other hand, the reader can speculate that “coming to know the truth of history” could well mean coming to know the truth of history as impossible to know. More than discovering Argentina’s true past, the reader observes how truths are constructed in the Argentine cultural and political environment.

Respiración artificial, like Fuentes’s Terra Nostra and Eltit’s Por la patria, also sets forth the issue of patria and language, particularly in long discussions on Argentine literature (most of which appear in the second half of the book). Characters are highly critical of turn-of-the-century poet Leopoldo Lugones, a literary icon who has been institutionalized in Argentina. Lugones is criticized as the National Poet with the most “pure language” and thus can be associated, implicitly, with the “sanitization” process of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. Roberto Arlt, in contrast, is much admired by the characters in Respiración artificial (as he is extratextually by Piglia) and represents the opposite of Lugones’s purity—Arlt’s language can be characterized as often crude, clumsy, even vulgar. By criticizing Lugones and praising Arlt, Piglia critiques the very foundations of the traditional Argentine concept of patria. The key modern characters in Respiración artificial, tellingly enough, feel very limited and imprisoned by their mother tongue or unable to communicate in it.

Several situations in Respiración artificial lead one to read them as metaphors for the writer’s circumstance under a repressive regime, as was the Argentine military dictatorship of the late 1970s. This novel is a protest against the military regime in Argentina, but it is a subtle criticism that also places into question how language and writing can function and survive under such regimes.

La princesa del Palacio de Hierro, Terra Nostra, and Respiración artificial are experiments with fiction, but Diamela Eltit’s Por la patria is one of the most radical aesthetic and political experiments of the 1970s and 1980s. Ortega has observed that in this novel “the communitarian is the feminine subjective space of the subversive.”⁹ Eltit relates a story of contemporary Chile, alluding to the political repression of the Pinochet regime but always returning to the historical origins of language, repression, and resistance. Going back to medieval epic wars, she inevitably associates these historical conflicts with the contemporary situation. Thus, Eltit’s postmodern is patently historical and political. By exploring the origins of the mother language and incorporating numerous historical and colloquial languages into Por la patria, Eltit is concerned with the relationship originally explored by Foucault between language and power, also the subject of much of the writing of Piglia and Fuentes.

Por la patria, like Eltit’s previous novel Lumpérica, reveals a sense for origins in Latin, the “mother” of the Romance language family that is present in both these novels. The discursive contexts change in the different fragments of Por la patria, evoking a connection with the heritage in Latin and resonances of medieval Spanish and Italian. These historical languages coexist, in unresolved contradiction, with a modern masculine discourse subverted by other contemporary discourses—colloquial Chilean Spanish and feminine discourse.

Molloy’s En breve cárcel and Angel’s Las andariegas share many of Eltit’s and Piglia’s concerns. En breve cárcel is the story of an Argentine woman who returns to an apartment in New England where she had once had an affair with another woman and where she writes a memoir about this experience. From the initial pages in the novel, it becomes evident that the process of writing is also a process of constructing this relationship and of rewriting and remembering, acts that suggest a new beginning. She struggles with her expression, and her self-conscious rereading of her writing makes this novel comparable to much postmodern fiction. The narrator-protagonist is also engaged in an identity search related to her writing—what Foster has described as the topos of the “prison-house of love.”¹⁰

In this novel, Molloy avoids the use of the word “lesbian” in the text, thus continually destabilizing the notion of a fixed or essential identity. Consequently, the novel’s process of coming into being is paralleled by the protagonist’s coming into being. The provisional and continuously disputed ontological status of this protagonist is one of the novel’s postmodern characteristics. The narrator-protagonist continually destabilizes other boundaries, as does Eltit, and this process is typical of much postmodern fiction.

The innovative language and experimental techniques of Las andariegas are important aspects of its écriture feminine. Much of the narrative consists of brief phrases, often with unconventional punctuation. Rather than developing a consistent plot, these phrases often contain an image. The use of linguistic imagery is supported by visual images—a set of twelve drawings of women. Angel also experiments with the physical space of language in the text in a manner similar to the techniques of concrete poetry. The four pages of this type consist of a variety of circular and semicircular arrangements of the names of women famous in history. These four pages universalize the story of the constantly traveling women. Las andariegas ends with a type of epilogue of another quotation from Monique Wittig, comprising four brief sentences that call for precisely the undertaking that is the essence of this novel: a new language, a new beginning, a new history for women. This new beginning, in turn, relates to the rewriting and new beginning suggested in Molloy’s En breve cárcel.