Thirteen

Modern, Postmodern, and Transnational: The Latin American Novel in the 1990s

The postmodern and transnational interests of the Latin American writer were evident in the 1990s, a period when the Latin American novel was a heterogeneous cultural manifestation of modernist, postmodern, post-postmodern, feminist, and gay fiction. These fives modes overlap in many ways, frequently sharing a commitment to subverting the predominant discourses of authority and power. Novelists still writing in a primarily modernist vein were associated in Latin America with what was called the Boom and the Postboom. Among these, in the view of many readers and critics, were Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Rosario Ferré, César Aira, Mempo Giardinelli, Isabel Allende, and Antonio Skármeta.

Laura Esquivel became one of the best-selling writers of the decade with her first novel, Como agua para chocolate (1990); in its English translation, Like Water for Chocolate, this novel had considerable repercussions throughout the Americas in the 1990s. Writers such as Diamela Eltit, Alicia Borinsky, and Ricardo Piglia, with a more radical aesthetic and political agenda that some critics have identified as postmodern, published in the 1990s, as did a new generation of post-postmodern writers that included such novelists as the Mexicans David Toscana, Juan Villoro, and Jorge Volpi, the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, and the Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán.¹ Feminist, gay, and lesbian writers, who became quite visible in the 1980s—and some of whom can easily be associated with the modernist and postmodern novel—continued writing in the 1990s. By the 1990s, Elena Poniatowska, who had been known primarily as a journalist and author of testimonio, became established as a prominent feminist novelist with the publication of her Tinísima (1992).

Latin American writers and their readers observed the economic and cultural globalization of the 1990s. The most important cultural context of the increasingly transnational 1990s was the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and accords that were made on a lesser scale throughout the Americas. Globalization was an important phenomenon of the 1990s, and many Latin American intellectuals, including novelists and cultural critics such as Néstor García Canclini, were critical of this change. With the end of the Cold War and its bipolar agenda, Latin American leaders and intellectuals had to rethink and reconfigure the old lines of left versus right and the attendant ideological boundaries.

NAFTA and globalization meant a new relationship between the United States and the other nations of the Americas, particularly Mexico. The uprising in Chiapas in 1993 served as a reminder to the Mexican government that the new economic order was not successfully incorporating all segments of Mexican society. The ongoing delegitimization of the PRI culminated in its loss of credibility among the majority of the populace in Mexico by the end of the 1990s.² Throughout the decade, the nation mulled over the memory of Vargas Llosa’s public declaration in the early 1990s that Mexico’s PRI was la dictadura perfecta. Colombia’s endless crises led to de facto civil war by the late 1990s, with the country’s terrain divided among the government, leftist groups, and drug lords. Several Colombian novelists wrote fiction related to this crisis and the drug culture; Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios (1994), set in the periphery of Medellín, was one of the most widely read.

One significant cultural factor in the 1990s globalization has been the effect of multinational publishing companies on the novelistic production of Latin America. The expansion of these multinational publishing firms has shrunk the space for new writers and innovative fiction. Two young writers, the Chileans Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, responded to this situation with a volume of fiction titled McOndo (1996),³ which they deem an anti-magic realist set of fictions.

In the 1990s, several Latin American nations were still paying the political and social and economic costs of the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Chile and Argentina. In December 1999, leftist and conservative candidates for the presidency of Chile engaged in a heated campaign with considerable residue from the legacies of Allende and Pinochet. In the 1999 elections, socialist Ricardo Lagos and rightist Joaquín Lavín fought to a virtual draw, causing a runoff election in early 2000. Lagos led a center-left coalition that was a reaction to the free-market-type economic programs institutionalized in Chile during the dictatorship. This election also demonstrated the disillusionment with the political establishment in Chile: hundreds of thousands of usually civic-minded Chileans refused to vote or cast blank ballots. Similarly, novelists in Chile and throughout Latin America were disinterested in assuming the political role of the public intellectual. Some of these writers, such as Diamela Eltit and Alicia Borinsky, took the position that the publication of fictional texts did not authorize them to make public political pronouncements; Eltit considered the subtle cultural resistance of her fiction to be their only desired political statement.

In Argentina, many citizens were still pursuing answers to the disappearance of adults and children during the “dirty war” of the 1970s and 1980s under the military dictatorships of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (1976–1983). Writers continued to reflect on issues of exile in books such as the Argentine Tununa Mercado’s En estado de memoria (1992). In general, the redemocratization under capitalism created a new series of crises and responses among novelists in Latin America. For some of these repatriated novelists, the counter-site of exile became a new imaginary condition to be reflected upon, as in the fiction of Mercado and Borinsky.

The transnational 1990s witnessed the ongoing breakdown and blurring of cultural borders. The figures of Rosario Ferré, Alicia Borinsky, Luis Arturo Ramos, and David Toscana are telling in describing these shifting borders. The Puerto Rican Ferré wrote all her early work in Spanish; in the 1990s, she began to write in English for the U.S. readership and then self-translated into Spanish. Borinsky is a writer of Argentine birth residing in the United States since the late 1960s who has made a career as a scholar of Latin American literature, first at Johns Hopkins University and later at Boston University. She has published fiction in Spanish in Argentina and in English in the United States. Interestingly, Borinsky received a “Latino” literature prize in 1996, awarded by the Latin American Writers Center. Luis Arturo Ramos spent most of his career writing in his native state of Veracruz in Mexico, but in the 1990s lived in El Paso, Texas, making him culturally a border writer. David Toscana lives in Monterrey, Mexico, distant from the cultural centers of Mexico City and the United States. His career as a writer in Monterrey does not depend on local support, however, but rather on his use of the Internet and the moderate success that his novel Estación Tula (1995) has attained in English translation as Tula Station (2000). These four writers (and many others throughout the Americas) blur the increasingly subjective and fragile borders of what have traditionally been called “Latin American,” “Latino,” and “Hispanic” writers.

The U.S.–Mexican border was intensely discussed and analyzed in the 1990s. The spaces of Mexican immigrants, as Chicana Rosaura Sánchez pointed out in 1993, like that of exile, become a counter-site of sorts, an imaginary heterotopia of displacement in opposition to the real sites of work and home.⁴ Chicano novelists such as Helena María Viramontes, Rolando Hinojosa, and Miguel Méndez often communicate a sense of being displaced between two locations and belonging to neither. For example, in Mother Tongue (1994) by Chicana Demetria Martínez, the search for identity in Anglo society is an experience of living in-betweenness.

Another cultural border of increasing significance was the metaphorical borderland on the Eastern corridor of the United States that is shared with Caribbean writers. Thus, another counter-site was in the Northeastern region of the United States, where writers such as Gianini Braschi, Oscar Hijuelos, and Julia Alvarez wrote in a variety of discourses and languages. Central American novelists such as Sergio Ramírez, Arturo Arias, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Juan Escoto, Gloria Guardia, and Mario Roberto Morales attempted to write beyond the borders of their culturally marginalized nations. Certainly Ramírez and Arias have been the most successful in being recognized beyond the border of Central America. Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing (1999) is an allegorical border novel that deals with the cultural and linguistic borders between the Caribbean culture of the Spanish language and Anglo culture. More important, it is a gender essay in the sense that it questions the genre border between the “novel” and the “essay” at the same time that its topic is the status and reality of women in modern society.

The modernist novelists associated with the Boom and Postboom continued publishing totalizing works such as Los años con Laura Díaz (1999) by Carlos Fuentes, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997) by Mario Vargas Llosa, Tinísima (1992) by Elena Poniatowska, Hija de la fortuna (1999) by Isabel Allende, La boda del poeta (1999) by Antonio Skármeta, and Santo Oficio de la memoria (1991) by Mempo Giardinelli. At the same time, ethnic discourses were paramount, as Chicano novelists such as Sandra Cisneros, Rolando Hinojosa, and Rudolfo Anaya continued publishing in the 1990s. The Chileans Marco Antonio de la Parra and Marcela Serrano, the Peruvian Alfredo Bryce Echenique, the Brazilian João Ubaldo Ribeiro, and the Argentines César Aira and Marcos Aguinis participated in the 1990s continuation of the Postboom, as did the Mexicans Enrique Serna, Vicente Leñero, and Héctor Aguilar Camín and the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez.

Fuentes, Poniatowska, Serna, Giardinelli, Héctor Aguilar Camín, César Aira, and Juan José Saer wrote historical novels of vast dimensions, although their attitudes about the potential of being historical voices varied. Fuentes’s Los años con Laura Díaz is another of Fuentes’s vast historical novels, seemingly covering the entire twentieth century in its scope. Also ambitious was Poniatowska’s Tinísima, an account of the life of Tina Modotti as well as history of early-twentieth-century Mexico. Enrique Serna moves back to the nineteenth century to provide a version of the life of one of Mexico’s anti-heroes, Santa Ana. Serna’s interest in historical accuracy and legitimacy is far superior to Fuentes’s, as is evident in the historical guidelines and documentation he provides at the end of El seductor de la patria. Mempo Giardinelli published a lengthy and totalizing rewriting of Argentine history, Santo Oficio de la memoria, which tells the story of the Domenicelle family. Giardinelli’s alter ego, Pedro, returns from exile in Mexico and is one of the four principal narrators of this novel. The work explores connections between exile, immigration, history, and literature. Giardinelli privileges the role of the woman, giving major roles to La Nona (a first-generation Italian immigrant) and Franca (a woman writer in search of identity). Franca’s role relates this book to the gender essay of Braschi. Consistent with Giardinelli’s previous novels and vision as a writer, he incorporates contemporary conflicts and critique in this historical work. Skármeta’s historical vision takes the reader to pre–World War I Europe in La boda del poeta, a tale of a love affair. Aguilar Camín’s El resplandor de la madera (1999) deals with the nineteenth-century exploitation of the jungle in Yucatán for the production of lumber. Less concerned with historical veracity and documentation, and winking at both Cortázar and postmodern fiction, Aguilar Camín offers the reader the possibility of different readings. In this novel, one story line tells of a cacique, while another relates the history of a small town.

Rosario Ferré and César Aira wrote less ambitious historical novels. In Ferré’s Vecindarios excéntricos (1998), a female narrator tells not only the story of two families, but the social history of Puerto Rico. Aira’s La liebra (1991) is set in nineteenth-century Argentina, where a British naturalist, a relative of Darwin, engages in a search for a rare type of hare. This search places him in contact with recognizable people and places in Argentina. Aira’s La mendiga (1998) lacks historical ambition; it is the story of two exceptional women, one impoverished and the other an actress.

Although Fuentes and Giardinelli wrote historical novels, not all of the Boom and Postboom works, of course, were historical. Many of these writers, such as the Chileans Marcela Serrano and Marco Antonio de la Parra, the Brazilians João Ubaldo Ribeiro and Moacyr Scliar, and the Cuban Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, wrote of situations that were local and contemporary. In Antigua vida mía (1995), Serrano relates the feminine experience throughout generations, as narrated by a woman. De la Parra’s Cuerpos prohibidos (1991) is a young man’s story, told by himself and set in a specific neighborhood in Santiago. It is a novel of voyeurism and eroticism with a nineteenth century-type plot, and the generational language is both attractive and entertaining. Gutiérrez’s El rey de la Habana (1999) is set in the Havana of 1990s poverty, with a testimonial-type account of minimal survival, focusing on the life of the Rey, who lives as a beggar, a thief, a taxi driver, and a professional don Juan. But Gutiérrez explores other levels of human survival beyond the material, questioning the spiritual poverty of the characters, as well as the role of memory in the entire process.

Much of the recent fiction of Fuentes and Giardinelli exhibits some postmodern tendencies, and the same can be said of Vicente Leñero, María Luisa Mendoza, and Gonzalo Celorio. Leñero’s La vida que se va (1999) is a family story of personal relationships that presents different explanations and truths with no final authority. It is the narration of a reporter’s encounter with the grandmother of a deceased colleague. The journalist writes the grandmother’s tale, and the game of chess becomes the central metaphor for the narrative’s complexities. Mendoza relates an anecdote of human relations in Fuimos mucha gente (1999) and fictionalizes some of the postmodern destinies found in Ramos and Piglia. Celorio’s Amor propio (1991) tells the story of three characters in a three-part work covering the period from 1965 to 1980. In this early work, too, Celorio’s main theme is the progressive degeneration of the individual and the nation, a matter evident in Y retiemble en sus centros la tierra (1999). His text El viaje sedentario (1994) is a set of memoirs, fictions, and reflections only vaguely related to either the genre of the essay or the novel. In some ways, it can be associated with Braschi’s gender essay, even though gender itself is not Celorio’s primary interest.

Some of the most innovative fiction of the 1990s was published not by the writers of the Boom but by those with postmodern interests. In Mexico, for example, the “Serie Rayuela Internacional,” coordinated by Hernán Lara Zavala, represented an effort to publish experimental writers throughout Latin America, and this series included writers such as Tununa Mercado, Diamela Eltit, and the young Mexican Margarita Mansilla. This series was one of several important efforts to support fiction that falls outside the commercial mainstream.

Postmodern novelists of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Diamela Eltit, Ricardo Piglia, Alicia Borinsky, Tununa Mercado, Darío Jaramillo, and R. H. Moreno-Durán, continued their postmodern projects well into the 1990s. Each of them and several of their postmodern cohorts, such as José Balza and Gustavo Sainz, published noteworthy novels. The 1990s offered a wide variety of postmodern and feminist trends as found in novels such as Eltit’s Los vigilantes (1994) and Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998), Piglia’s La ciudad ausente (1992) and Plata quemada (1997), Luis Arturo Ramos’s La casa del ahorcado (1993), Darío Jaramillo’s Cartas cruzadas (1995), Solares’s El sitio (1995), and Alicia Borinsky’s Cine continuado (1997).

Eltit, Mercado, and Borinsky wrote engaging and sometimes purposely irritating works that resist easy or entertaining reading; at the same time, they are works that play a political role in the cultural sphere. Relatively unconcerned with either accessibility or having a large readership, Eltit, Mercado, and Borinsky challenge the reader. Their novels tend to leave the reader lacking sufficient information to construct a complete story, and thus they question the authority of the Boom novelist to create the total novel. Resisting the new redemocratization under capitalism, these writers often looked to the periphery or the margins for destabilization of the meaning produced by the center. Consequently, writers with these interests often included marginalized characters in their novels. In Chile, this radical stance was theorized in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Eltit and a group of her cohorts—artists such as Juan Dávila, Eugenio Dittborn, and Paz Errázuriz and the cultural critic Nelly Richard.

Eltit’s fiction often needs to be read by the active postmodern reader as political allegory, and she has spoken about the “scenes of power” as well as the ideology of the body in extratextual interviews and in her books of fiction. In the 1990s, she published Vaca sagrada (1991), Los vigilantes (1994), and Los dictadores de la muerte (1998). Like her earlier fiction, these are political allegories that resist literal interpretation and address unspeakable themes related to gender and the body, such as incest and rape. Los vigilantes has been read as a national allegory unfolding within an Oedipal triangle; it also addresses issues of political writing.⁵ Los dictadores de la muerte can be read as a political allegory that re-elaborates Eltit’s themes of power and the body, with the father figure once again prominent. Here, the daughter figure is engaged in a symbolic search for the father in a trip from Santiago to Concepción.

Alicia Borinsky pursued her novelistic career in both Argentina (where she is read as an Argentine writer) and in the United States (where she is read in English translation as a “Latina” writer). She calls her books Sueños del seductor abandonado (1995) and Cine continuado (1997) novelas de espectáculo; they relate more to show and spectacle than to the expectations of much modernist fiction. To paraphrase what she herself has observed in Cortázar, Borinsky (echoing Morelli of Rayuela and Macedonio Fernández) wants to dismantle the notion of causality as an adequate tool for explaining behavior; she undermines the unity of character with strong selves.⁶ This dismantling and undermining is a radical literary project; her characters are often in a process of transformation, as they were in Severo Sarduy’s Cobra. Thus, the characters of Cine continuado have little fixed identity, and there is little causality in the series of fragments that constitute this novel. In addition, there is no consistent pattern that could appear in virtually any order without significantly changing the experience of her novel, thus suggesting the arbitrary nature of identity. Writing after and against Sarduy and Donoso, Borinsky’s ludic approaches to the topoi of postmodern literature and poststructualist theory place her in a rarefied group of postmodern writers. By turning the postmodern kitsch of Puig into raucous spectacle, she parodies the theory and practice of much postmodern fiction.

Piglia’s Plata quemada, in contrast, does not deal at all with theory; it is in the basic genre of detective fiction, telling the intricate story of a crime that the newspapers of Buenos Aires reported in 1965. Given the participation of politicians in the crime, Plata quemada offers a political level of reading.

In Mexico, Carmen Boullosa, Ignacio Solares, Gustavo Sainz, Angelina Muñíz-Huberman, Ethel Krauze, Brianda Domecq, Aline Petterson, Silvia Molina, Margo Glantz, Luisa Josefina Hernández, María Luisa Mendoza, Federico Patán, Luis Arturo Ramos, and Bárbara Jacobs continued their postmodern writing of the 1980s. Boullosa’s La milagrosa (1993), Cielos de la tierra (1997), and Treinta años (1999) were noteworthy contributions in the 1990s. In La milagrosa, Boullosa tells the story of a faith healer. The novel is symptomatic of a nation and a fiction that are irrational; paradoxically, it also involves a search for understanding of things beyond the rational. Cielos de la tierra is a postmodern work in which language becomes the only sustaining force not only of memory but of reality itself.

Both La milagrosa and Ignacio Solares’s El gran elector (1993) are implicit critiques of politics in postmodern Mexico. They represent the crisis of authority in Mexican society, the crisis of a world with little transcendence and truth. Both novels contain a multiplicity of discourses—popular, political, ecclesiastical—in unresolved contradiction. Their concerns are predominantly ontological in a world with characters suffering identity crises.

Gustavo Sainz continued his experimental writing with A la salud de la serpiente (1991) and La novela virtual (1998). The former is a novel of more than eight hundred pages, but in accordance with Sainz’s ongoing interest in experimentation, the work consists of one sentence, centered on the Tlatelolco massacre and related events that took place in Mexico City in 1968. This novel also deals with the political and cultural movements of 1968. On a different level of reading, A la salud de la serpiente is a dialogue with the intellectuals and writers who surrounded Sainz when he was living the experience of the 1960s. In its totality—as a story of the young rebels and as a literary dialogue—this work is a postmodern questioning of power relations. La novela virtual and Quiero escribir pero me sale espuma (1997) are a continuation of Sainz’s hyper-experimental and self-conscious fiction.

In general, the fiction of Jacobs and Muñiz-Huberman has not been as experimental as Sainz’s. Nevertheless, Jacobs’s novel Adiós humanidad (1999) is a self-conscious and ludic approach to telling a family story in an autobiographic mode but with focus on a character named Cool Charlie. Jacobs offers the active postmodern reader a series of sections on “Technique” and a “Glossary.” Her referents are a wide variety of writers and artists from William Blake to Edvard Munch. Muñiz-Huberman’s Dulcinea encantada (1992), like the work of Jacobs, Ramos, and Patán, blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior reality as well as between fantasy and empirical reality. It is a metafiction that offers the possibility of multiple levels of intertextual reading.

Colombians Darío Jaramillo, Rodrigo Parra Sandoval, and R. H. Moreno-Durán continued their postmodern projects well into the 1990s. Jaramillo’s Cartas cruzadas (1995) is an epistolary novel that communicates much of the urban experience of living in postmodern Colombia as well as the author’s special relationship with writing and culture. More specifically, Cartas cruzadas relates a story of human relations in the 1970s, when cocaine culture was on the rise in the region of Antioquia. More important, Jaramillo’s novel suggests that fiction affects and has superiority over empirical reality. In both this novel and Novela con fantasma (1996), Jaramillo writes with a minimalist approach to language with self-conscious commentary and understatement as a rhetorical strategy. Jaramillo’s fiction is critical in the most subtle ways, but Parra Sandoval and Moreno-Durán authored postmodern novels that overtly debunk such sacred Colombian institutions as its academic and cultural traditions. Parra Sandoval’s Tarzán y el filósofo desnudo (1996) is a satirical academic novel, and Moreno-Durán’s El caballero de la invicta (1993) fictionalizes urban decay and cultural decadence.

Numerous new writers of the 1990s advanced a postmodern literary and political agenda into the 1990s, but their condition of relative marginality and lack of a broad readership minimalized their recognition. Some of these writers are the Argentines Clara Obligado and Rodrigo Fresán, the Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and the Brazilians Ana Miranda and Lya Luft. Living in Spain, Obligado is distant from potential readers and critics in both Latin America and the United States. Her first novel, La hija de Marx (1996), is a transgressive exploration of homoerotics as well as heterosexual erotics, set in the historical context of the nineteenth-century Europe of Karl Marx’s daughter. Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala but spent years living and writing in New York and Morocco. His novels Cárcel de árboles (1991), El cojo bueno (1996), Que me maten si (1997), and La orilla africana (1999) are an impressive body of fiction that constructs a tenuous relationship between the interior and exterior worlds of the characters. In La orilla africana, the two main characters, Hamsa and Angel Tejedor, are only tangentially related in a text with the stylistic minimalism of Darío Jaramillo.

In the 1990s, various groupings of young novelists declared their independence from the predominant modes of the multinational literary industry. Some of these new novelists were young enough to be the third generation in Latin America to declare its aesthetic and political independence from the Boom. Many of these writers were also adamant about distancing themselves from the ways of “magic realism” and the commercialism of novelists such as Isabel Allende.

These declarations included the publication of the volume titled McOndo in Chile and, in the late 1990s, the statements of the self-declared generación del crack in Mexico, which included writers Ignacio Padilla and Jorge Volpi. There was some overlapping among writers of the two groups, and they repeated the three-decade tradition of declaring the death of the Boom and of magic-realist writing.

A generation of post-postmodern novelists born from the mid- 1950s to the late 1960s shared a set of experiences and attitudes that distinguishes them from other writers of the decade. Novelists David Toscana (Mexico, born in 1961), Jorge Volpi (Mexico, born in 1968), Juan Villoro (Mexico, born 1956), Philip Potdevín (Colombia, born 1955), Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia, born 1967), Alberto Fuguet (Chile, born 1964), and Rodrigo Fresán (Argentina, born 1963), among others, wrote texts that were in many ways indistinguishable from much of the postmodern fiction written in the 1980s and 1990s by novelists of other generations. Indeed, some of these young, post-postmodern writers were less interested in technical experimentation than the most radical innovators among their postmodern predecessors.

Having been born since the mid-1950s, these post-postmodern novelists share the common experience of being the first generation of Latin American writers to have been reared on television. National television was first available in Colombia in 1955 and was broadcast throughout Latin America from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. Toscana, Potdevín, Fuguet, and others have emphasized the centrality of television to their cultural experience. The young Colombian Octavio Escobar Giraldo (author of El último diario de Tony Flowers), in fact, claims that the television experience determined his cultural formation as a writer far more than the reading of canonical modernist literary texts.⁷ This experience represents a paradigm shift from all of their predecessors—whether modernist, Postboom, or postmodern—who have generally been avid readers of Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and many of the other canonical modernists of the West. The postmodern writers of the Piglia and Eltit generation also tend to share not only the political experience of 1968 but also the common cultural experience of the international group of ludic writers that included Eco, Nabokov, Calvino, and Perec. In contrast, this generation of post-postmodern writers is generally more distant from Borges and Cortázar than any group of writers this century, although some of these novelists do still read Borges with interest.⁸

The paradigm shift of the young post-postmodern writers, however, should not be construed to mean that they write in a literary vacuum. Their cultural interests range from television and film to the writings of Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Paul Auster, and William Gass. In the 1990s, these young novelists read the translations of foreign writers that appeared with the Spanish publishing company Anagrama, which included Auster. One of their main transnational connections with international culture has been the Internet; they are the first generation to use the Internet for communication and the word processor for writing from the beginning of their literary careers. Colombian writer Juan B. Gutiérrez, in fact, has published his novel Condiciones extremas (1998) on the Internet.

The eclectic literary interests and cultural baggage of these young writers still includes Borges in some cases. In 1999, Rodrigo Fresán authored a fictionalized version of an encounter with Borges titled “El día en que casi mato a Borges.”⁹ David Toscana also read Borges but considers the Argentine a mere model for form and style; Onetti is a writer with whom he feels a closer affinity.¹⁰

The two most active Chilean writers of this generation have been Antonio Ostornol and Alberto Fuguet. In his third novel, Los años de la serpiente (1991), Ostornol challenges the postmodern reader with a variety of languages and texts that only vaguely constitute something like a novel. Fuguet’s Mala onda (1991) is a fictionalized testimonial of postmodern Chile under Pinochet’s regime, written in the hip, young language of Chile’s alienated youth of the dictatorship. His novels Tinta roja (1996) and Por favor, redobinar (1998) are a continuation of Fuguet’s urban chronicles, which, like the fiction of Ostornol and Potdevín, only vaguely belong to the genre of the novel.

Among these new novelists of the 1990s, the Mexican Jorge Volpi and the Colombian Philip Potdevín published lengthy novels that exhibit some of the totalizing impulses of the writing of the Boom, some postmodern aspects, and no small amount of interest in the commercial market. Their common literary tradition, as Mexican and Colombian writers, is more the writing of Umberto Eco (particularly In the Name of the Rose) than the fiction of any contemporary Latin American writer. Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor (1999) is set in Hitler’s Germany and is a novel of suspense, with a fast-moving plot. At the same time that the thick plot develops, Volpi elaborates theories on science and the novel as a genre. Potdevín’s Metatrón (1999) offers as much scientific and historical erudition as En busca de Klingsor, but less plot, although it does relate a complex intellectual and spiritual search.

Toscana, Fresán, and Paz Soldán construct fiction with a clear story line. Toscana’s two novels of the 1990s, Estación Tula (1995) and Santa María del Circo (1998) are quite traditional and linear in many ways, giving the reader an initial impression of a conventional plot. His Estación Tula, however, is a multilayered exercise in unresolved contradictions in the process of telling part of the history of a rural town, Tula, and human relations in it. With vague echoes of Cervantes, Fuentes, and García Márquez, Toscana offers fiction that also interacts with film and television in ways that reiterate Escobar Giraldo’s statements about the importance of television for this generation. Like Darío Jaramillo and Luis Arturo Ramos, Toscana creates situations in his text that suggest that fiction not only affects empirical reality but seems to determine some aspects of everyday reality. Fresán’s Esperanto (1995) fictionalizes elements of postmodern culture: the protagonist is a thirty-five-year-old musician who has the public image of a James Dean.

Many of the writers of the late 1990s wrote accessible texts with an easily recognizable story line. Toscana, Giraldo, and Fresán are all writers of this type. A few novelists—certainly a small minority by the end of the 1990s—continued along the lines of a highly experimental vein. The young Mexican Margarita Mansilla, for example, published Karenina express (1995), which includes the story of a writer’s interest in Tolstoi’s Ana Karenina. Colombia’s Héctor Abad Faciolince, Hugo Chaparro Valderrama, and Juan B. Gutiérrez published experimental novels. Abad Faciolince’s Asunto de un hidalgo disoluto (1994) is a self-conscious and narcissistic story of a seventy-two-year-old man who narrates the vicissitudes of his life from his adolescence, using the model of the Spanish picaresque novel. Chaparro Valderrama’s El capítulo de Ferneli (1992) is one of the most wildly innovative fictions published in Colombia for more than two decades; it has origins in detective fiction, horror movies, Cortázar, Sue Grafton, and Raymond Chandler. Gutiérrez’s Condiciones extremas is a hyperfiction that integrates text and image in such a way that the organizing principle is time, and the themes are technology, power, racism, and pollution.

Other innovators of this generation are the Cubans Senel Paz and René Vasquez Díaz, the Colombian Santiago Gamboa, the Ecuadorian Leonardo Valencia, the Peruvian Jaime Bayly, and the Chilean Lina Meruane. Bayly’s Yo amo a mi mami (1999) is a story of an adolescent’s rite de passage. Meruane has published a set of brief narrative texts titled Las infantas (1998) that can be read as a novel.

Queer discourse of the 1990s was typically dedicated to the subversion of the patriarchal order.¹¹ Gay and lesbian writers have contributed to a variety of heterogeneous cultural configurations that have shaped recent postmodern Latin American fiction. Gay and lesbian writers Luis Zapata, José Rafael Calva, Luis Arturo Ojedas, and Sara Levy have established a cultural space previously unknown in Mexico. The journal Debate feminista and the magazine Fem promoted the new sexual politics of gay and lesbian writing in Mexico, and Nelly Richard’s journal Revista de crítica cultural opened new space for heterogeneous writing in Chile. Autobiographical essays such as Jaime Manrique’s Eminent Maricones (1993) and Reynaldo Arenas’s memoir Antes que anochezca: autobiografía (1992) present issues related to modern and postmodern writing as well as queer discourse in Latin America. Both of these works can be related to the gender essay of Braschi. The writings of Manrique, Arenas, Silvia Molloy, Fernando Vallejo, and a host of other writers have reaffirmed the end to the masculinist aesthetic of earlier in the century. Chicana Terri de la Peña’s schematic lesbian novel, Margins (1992), affirms a lesbian continuum in Hispanic culture that can also be observed in the writings of Cherríe Moraga.¹²

With the globalization of the 1990s and the transnational cultural interaction of this period, the desire to be modern is evident in ways significantly different from the totalizing projects of the Boom, as well as from many of the writers of the Postboom. Young writers of the post-postmodern, including the authors of the first cybertexts, are redefining what it means to be modern and “literary.”

In the 1960s, Cortázar and the writers of the Boom called for a radical modernization of the Latin American novel. They were the aesthetic and political revolutionaries of their times, and their voices were heard not only in Latin America but throughout the Hispanic world, including the U.S. Southwest, as well as the French- and English-speaking Caribbean. Among the Chicano writers, the diversity of cultural identities produced a frequent intersection of competing discourses of gender, ethnicity, and class.¹³ The fiction of Chicano writers Sandra Cisneros, John Rechy, and Tomás Villaseñor and the Haitian Edwidge Danticat attest to this intersection in the 1990s; this new fiction also made evident the blurred cultural borders of the transnational 1990s. By the end of the century, in fact, transnational writing was one of the most active and productive modes of the youngest group of novelists.

The continued importance of the historical novel relates directly to the growing production of testimonio: readers encountered fiction and quasifictional accounts of real events with an interest in learning about historical and empirical reality, just as they did at the beginning of the century. Some of the historical novels, such as Serna’s El seductor de la patria, contain the ample documentation needed to assure the reader of the historical veracity of the fiction. The unstable borders of the testimonio and historical fiction were tested once again when a polemic arose around the veracity of certain details in Rigoberta Menchu’s testimonial account of the war in Guatemala.¹⁴

By the end of the century, the desire to be modern was played out in a variety of increasingly heterogeneous ways. Borges’s reaffirmation of the right of invention in the 1940s had been a seminal contribution to this growing heterogeneity. The 1960s Boom represented a turning point in this process, for the right of invention became a fait accompli in all regions of Indo-Afro-Iberoamerica. By the 1960s, the predominantly masculinist aesthetic had begun to wane, and by the 1980s, women writers were at the forefront of the multiple aesthetic and political agendas of Latin American writing. In the 1990s, post-postmodern, feminist, and queer writing, as well as other heterogeneous discourses, challenged the more commercialized and popular versions of traditional and modernist fiction of the Americas as well as dominant cultural and political discourses of authority.