The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

2. Studies on postmodern fiction in Latin America include Santiago Colás, Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994); Antonio Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1989); Rosalía V. Cornejo-Parriego, La escritura posmoderna del poder (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1993). In my volume The Postmodern Novel in Latin America (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), I emphasize the political implications and themes of innovative fiction in Latin America.

1. Francine Masiello and Doris Sommer, among other scholars, have done important research to identify and study the work of women writing in the early twentieth century. See in particular Masiello’s Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), and Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

2. See John S. Brushwood, The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth-Century Survey (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), chapter 1.

3. Cathy L. Jrade, Modernismo, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 4.

4. Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism, 116.

5. Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism.

6. David W. Foster, Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 11.

7. Among those who have written of a “realist-naturalist” novel in Latin America see, for example, Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, chapter 1.

8. Beatriz Sarlo cited in Carlos Alonso, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 115.

9. Aníbal González, “Modernist Prose,” in Twentieth Century, vol. 2 of The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, ed. Roberto González-Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 69.

10. Naomi Lindstrom, “Argentina,” in Handbook of Latin American Literature, 2d ed., ed. David W. Foster (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 16.

11. Aníbal González, “Modernist Prose,” 110.

13. Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 37.

14. John S. Brushwood, Mexico in Its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), 171.

15. Francine Masiello discusses at length the prostitute as literary object in Between Civilization and Barbarism, chapter 4.

17. I have discussed the novels and ideology of Soledad Acosta de Samper at more length in The Colombian Novel, 1847–1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 33–35.

18. Debra Castillo makes reference to the “masculinist aesthetic” of early-twentieth-century writing in Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), chapter 2, “Meat Shop Memories: Gamboa.”

19. Jrade, Modernismo, 137.

20. Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism, 89.

21. For discussion of Santa and a masculinist aesthetic see Castillo, Easy Women, chapter 2.

1. The writers’ struggle as described in chapter 2 was basically a male project in the early twentieth century, although several women writers who really belonged to the nineteenth century, such as Soledad Acosta de Samper, continued publishing well into the twentieth.

2. David W. Foster, Debra Castillo, and Francine Masiello have made this forceful argument. See Foster, Gay and Lesbian Themes; Castillo, Easy Women; and Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism.

3. Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 6.

4. Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, Sangre patricia (1902; reprint, Caracas: Ediciones Nueva Cádiz, 1950), 7. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. Author’s translations throughout except as otherwise noted.

5. Andrew P. Debicki, “Díaz Rodríguez’s Sangre patricia: A ‘Point of View’ Novel,” Hispania 53, no. 1 (March 1970): 59–66.

6. Recognizing the place of humans in the animal kingdom was a common device in Latin American fiction of this period, as Debra Castillo has observed in Federico Gamboa’s Santa; see Castillo, Easy Women, chapter 2.

7. Jorge Ruffinelli, El primer Mariano Azuela (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1982), 72.

9. Mariano Azuela, Los de abajo (1916; reprint, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1970), 47. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

10. José Emilio Pacheco, prologue to Diario de Federico Gamboa (18921939), by Federico Gamboa. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1977), 22.

11. Castillo, Easy Women, 53.

12. Federico Gamboa, Santa, in Novelas de Federico Gamboa (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1965), 736. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

13. Brushwood, Mexico in Its Novel, 151.

14. Castillo, Easy Women, chapter 2.

16. Pocaterra mentions Efraím and María, the main characters of Isaacs’s María; José Rafael Pocaterra, Política feminista (Caracas: Tipografía Cultura, 1913); 76. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.

17. See Beatriz Sarlo’s article on miradas, "El imperio de los sentimientos: Ficciones de circulación periódica en la Argentina (1917–1925),” Hispamérica 39 (1984): 3–17-

18. Debra Castillo, in Easy Women, chapter 2, discusses a similar issue of commodity value in Santa.

19. Walter Ong has studied the explicit and implicit complicity between reader and writer in “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 90, no. 1 (January 1975): 9–21. Castillo has studied the issue of complicity and the reader as voyeur in Santa in Easy Women, chapter 2.

20. Manuel Gálvez, El mal metafísico, 3d ed. (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1962), 65. All quotations are from this edition.

21. For a study of ideology, grammar, and the Regeneration in Colombia see Gilberto Gómez Ocampo, Entre “María” y “La vorágine”: La literatura colombiana finisecular (1886–1903) (Bogotá: Ediciones Fondo Cafetero, 1998).

22. See Castillo’s discussion of sales of this erotic book in Easy Women, chapter 2.

23. The editorial history of Santa is reviewed in Gamboa, Novelas de Federico Gamboa.

24. Gamboa, Diario, 29.

1. Several scholars have questioned the validity of the centrality of lo nacional as a critical theme. In La vibración del presente (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987), Noé Jitrik is quite critical of the lengthy debates on lo nacional and refers to them as a “peste” (plague).

2. Naomi Lindstrom and several other scholars place Don Segundo Sombra in the vanguardia; Lindstrom, Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 73–74.

3. See Roberto González-Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 52.

5. Puerto Rico was the exception, for its interests in the avant-garde were more of local than European origin. See Noé Jitrik, Vertiginosas textualidades (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1999), 193–226.

6. Gerald Martin has provided an informed and thorough overview of the presence of Joyce in Latin American fiction in Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Writers in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1989).

7. Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism, 140–142.

8. María Bustos Fernández, Vanguardia y renovación en la narrativa latinoamericana (Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1996), 69.

9. See Merlin Forster and K. David Jackson, compilers, Vanguardism in Latin American Literature: An Annotated Bibliographical Guide, 133.

10. Jitrik, La vibración, 198.

11. Vicky Unruh, Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 2.

12. Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism, 146–147.

13. Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 103–104.

14. César Uribe Piedrahita, Toá (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1979), 130.

15. Anna Housková, “Tipo de novela mundonovista,” Revista de Crítica Literaria 13, no. 26 (1987): 69.

16. Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 103.

17. Benito Lynch, La evasión (Barcelona: Editorial Cervantes, 1918), 11.

18. When I use the terms “oral culture” and “orality” in this study, I refer to oral tradition as delineated by Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).

19. Brushwood makes brief comparisons between Aguilera Malta and García Márquez in Spanish American Novel, 99.

21. Elzbieta Sklodowska, Todo ojos, todo oídos: control e insubordinación en la novela hispanoamericana (1895–1935) (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1997), 163–182.

22. Frank Dauster, Xavier Villaunutia (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1971),

23. Carol Clark D’Lugo, The Fragmented Novel in Mexico: The Politics of Form (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 35.

24. Arturo Torres Rioseco cited in Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 81.

25. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Idle Fictions: The Hispanic Vanguard Novel, 1926–1934 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982), 139.

26. The ongoing research on the vanguardia has produced an ever-growing list of novels of vanguardia. See the work of Verani, Forster, Bustos Fernández, and others.

1. See Lindstrom’s discussion of Don Segundo Sombra in Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction, 73–75.

2. Sommer has studied these criollista novels as important texts for nation building in Foundational Fictions.

3. Carlos Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), epilogue, 163.

4. See Sommer, Foundational Fictions, chapter 1.

5. In making this statement, Sommer seems to overlook the historical work of writers such as Fuentes and García Márquez who have written historical novels and addressed the issue of the otra historia that they relate. In Foundational Fictions, Sommer states: “But since the 1960s, since Latin America’s post-Borgesian Boom in narrative and France’s self-critical ebullience in philosophy and literary studies, we have tended to fix on the ways that literature undoes its own projects” (10).

6. Ricardo Guiraldes, Don Segundo Sombra (1926; reprint, Barcelona: Losada, 1968), 11. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

7. Alonso, Spanish American Regional Novel, 79–108.

8. In general, scholars have been hypercritical about these criollista classics. Doris Sommer, Carlos Alonso, and Seymour Menton have offered a more balanced and generous reading of these novels.

9. Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 46.

10. Alonso, Spanish American Regional Novel, 107.

11. The point about Guiraldes’s elitism is well taken. Nevertheless, a response to those critics who have made this point is his interest in oral tradition, which is a democratizing factor in the novel.

12. Rómulo Gallegos, Doña Bárbara (1929; reprint, with prologue and notes by Mariano Picón Salas, Mexico City: Editorial Orión, 1971). All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

13. Sharon Magnarelli, The Lost Rib: Female Characters in the Spanish-American Novel (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1985), 44.

14. Mariano Picón Salas, “A veinte años de Doña Bárbara,” in Gallegos, Doña Bárbara, 7–19.

15. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 274.

20. Emir Rodríguez Monegal popularized the term “total novel” in El Boom de la novela latinoamericana (Caracas: Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 1972).

21. Robin William Fiddian, “James Joyce and Spanish-American Fiction: A Study of the Origins and Transmissions of Literary Influence,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 66 (1989): 23–39.

22. Ibid. For Fiddian, “total” novels are typically Joycean.

23. See Kessel Schwartz, New History of Spanish American Fiction (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1972), 1:259.

24. For Carrasquilla’s negative comments on Rivera see Eduardo Neale-Silva, Horizonte humano. Vida de José Eustasio Rivera (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960). Brushwood is among harsh critics of the protagonist; see his Spanish American Novel, 42–45.

25. Randolph Pope, “La vorágine,” in The Analysis of Literary Texts: Current Trends in Methodology, ed. Randolph Pope (Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1980), 256–257; and Magnarelli, Lost Rib, 38.

26. Jean Franco and Otto Olivera, among others, have called Cova a “romantic poet.” See Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1967), and Otto Olivera, “El romanticismo de José Eustasio Rivera,” Symposium 14 (1960): 7–25.

27. Magnarelli, Lost Rib, 38.

28. See for example Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 53–55, and Bull, “Nature and Anthropomorphism in La vorágine,” Romantic Review 39 (December 1948): 307–318.

29. José Eustasio Rivera, La vorágine (1924; reprint, Buenos Aires: Losada, 1970), 35. Subsequent references are from this edition.

30. Magnarelli, Lost Rib, 42.

31. For a history of the editions of María see Donald McGrady, Jorge Isaacs (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972).

32. Neale-Silva, Horizonte humano; for an overview of La vorágine’s reception see chapters 15 and 16.

33. Ibid., 297; in the original edition of Neale-Silva’s study, a photo is included of Arturo Cova as it appeared in an edition of La vorágine.

34. Jonathan Tittler, Narrative Irony in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 190.

35. Schwartz, New History.

36. Teresa de la Parra, Las memorias de Mamá Blanca (1929; reprint, Caracas: Monte Avila, 1989), 90. All quotations are from this edition.

37. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 292.

39. I have discussed the orality in the fiction of Carpentier, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa in The Modern Latin American Novel (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998).

1. Scholars and writers who have made this connection between the fiction of vanguardia and postmodern fiction include Unruh, Bustos Fernández, Piglia, and Eltit.

2. David Daiches, “What Was the Modern Novel?” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 4 (June 1975): 813–820.

3. In Enciclopedia de la literatura argentina, ed. Pedro Orgambide and Robert Yahni (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamérica, 1970), 477.

4. The two-volume edition of the novels of Jaime Torres Bodet is Narrativa completa (Mexico City: Editorial Offset, 1985). With respect to the scholarly recognition of Jaime Torres Bodet see Beth Miller, editor, Ensayos contemporáneos sobre Jaime Torres Bodet (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1976).

5. Recent readings of Proserpina rescatada include those in Pérez Firmat, Idle Fictions, Bustos Fernández, Vanguardia y renovación, and D’Lugo, Fragmented Novel.

6. D’Lugo, Fragmented Novel, 37.

8. Jaime Torres Bodet, Proserpina rescatada, in Torres Bodet, Narrativa completa, K232. All subsequent quotations in text, cited with page numbers, are from this edition.

9. Pérez Firmat, Idle Fictions, 98–99.

10. Bustos Fernández, Vanguardia y renovación, 27.

11. D’Lugo, Fragmented Novel, 40.

12. In Proserpina rescatada, Torres Bodet follows the technical strategies generally associated with modernist fiction (fragmentation, innovative use of time and space, and the like). Nevertheless, I inquired of a group of graduate students at the University of California, Riverside, who are well versed in postmodern fiction whether they would associate Proserpina rescatada (which we had just read in a graduate seminar) more closely with Agustín Yáñez’s high modernist text Al filo del agua (1947) or Salvador Elizondo’s experimental and postmodern Farabeuf 1965). Interestingly, the majority of these students were adamant in affirming that they would associate Proserpina more closely with Farabeuf than with Al filo del agua. I consider this student reaction yet another indicator, albeit subjective, of the connection between the fiction of vanguardia and postmodern fiction in Latin America.

13. Brian McHale has explained that the emphasis on the ontological rather than the epistemological is typical of postmodern fiction; see McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987).

14. Vicente Huidobro, Mío Cid Campeador (Madrid: Ibero-Americana de Publicaciones, 1929), 22. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

15. Before the postmodern novel of the 1970s and 1980s, important predecessors who used language as a subject of fiction were Borges, Cortázar, and Cabrera Infante.

16. When I speak of the “ambition” of the novelists of the Boom, I refer specifically to the length of the novels as a factor in these ambitious modernist projects.

17. Hugo J. Verani, editor, Las vanguardias literarias en hispanoamérica (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986), 52.

18. Pérez Firmat, Idle Fictions, 82.

19. Torres Bodet, Margarita de niebla, in Torres Bodet, Narrativa completa, 29.

20. Pérez Firmat, Idle Fictions, 83.

21. McHale discusses the importance of the ontological in Postmodernist Fiction.

22. Merlin Forster, in Beth Miller, editor, Ensayos contemporáneos, 71.

23. Bustos Fernández, Vanguardia e renovación, 72.

24. Martín Adán, La casa de cartón (1928; reprint, Lima: Librería Editorial Juan Mejía Baca, 1971), 38.

25. José Carlos Mariátegui, in preface to Adán, La casa de cartón, 93.

26. Borges in preface to Adolfo Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel (1940; reprint, Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1986), 12. Quotations are from this edition.

27. I discuss the crisis of truth in the postmodern novel of the 1970s and 1980s in my Postmodern Novel.

28. Lucía Guerra-Cunningham, La narrativa de María Luisa Bombal (Madrid: Playor, 1980), 73.

30. Borinsky, Theoretical Fables: The Pedagogical Dream in Contemporary Latin American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 113.

31. Unruh, Latin American Vanguards, 169.

1. Brushwood introduced the idea of Borges reaffirming the “right of invention”; see Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, chapters 11 and 12.

2. Césaire quoted in Michael J. Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 64.

3. Dash, The Other America, 62.

4. Simon Gikandi discusses the modernism of Cahier in Writing in Limbo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 5.

6. Eduoard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Michael J. Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 91.

7. Gikandi, Writing in Limbo, 16.

8. See González-Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier, and Michael Dash, The Other America.

9. Dash, in The Other America, has drawn this comparison between Alexis and Carpentier.

10. González-Echevarría quoted in Dash, The Other America, 89.

11. Daiches, “What Was the Modern Novel?”

12. Many of the Latin American nations experienced a more localized version of the paradigm shift described as the general pattern in Latin America. In Colombia, for example, the publication of three modernist (and overtly Faulknerian) texts signaled this shift: García Márquez’s La hojarasca (1955), Héctor Rojas Herazo’s Respirando el verano (1962), and Alvaro Cepeda Samudio’s La casa grande (1962). David Viñas’s Cayó sobre su rostro (1955) served a similar function in Argentina.

13. See Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, especially chapters 12 and 13.

14. In numerous interviews and essays, García Márquez has spoken highly of Pedro Páramo. In a personal interview in Cartagena in March 1994, García Márquez described Pedro Páramo as the novel he wished he had written.

15. Yolanda Forero-Villegas has studied the rise of modernist fiction in Colombia in Un eslabón perdido: La novela colombiana de los años cuarenta (1941–1949).

16. For a further discussion of the bogotazo and the period of La Violencia see Orlando Fals Borda, Germán Guzmán Campos, and Eduardo Umaña Luna, La violencia en Colombia (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1980).

17. For further study of these strategies in Onetti’s novels see Josefina Ludmer, Onetti: Los procesos de construcción del relato (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1977), and Djelal Kadir, Juan Carlos Onetti (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977).

18. Bustos Fernández, “Ana Isabel, detrás de la reja: identidad y procesos de subjetivación en Ana Isabel, una niña decente,” in Escritura y desafío, ed. Edith Dimo and Amarilis Hidalgo de Jesús (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1995).

19. Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 252.

20. José David Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 50.

21. González-Echevarría cited in Dash, The Other America, 77.

22. See Richard Callan, Miguel Angel Asturias (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1970), 54.

23. See Alonso, Burden of Modernity.

24. González-Echevarría has pointed out that the most appropriate description of the “marvelous real” in El reino de este mundo is actually the “fantastic”; González-Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier, 98.

26. See Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) 69.

27. For further study of the Afro-Latin American novel see Richard Jackson, Black Writers and Latin America (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1998), and Marvin A. Lewis, Treading the Ebony Path: Ideology and Violence in Contemporary Afro-Colombian Prose Fiction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987).

28. For ample studies of magic realism see Seymour Menton, Magic Realism Discovered, 1918–1981 (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1983); Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, editors, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). I would propose that much of what is identified as magic realism in the Spanish American novel is actually typical expression of oral culture in literature; see Ong, Orality and Literacy, and Raymond Leslie Williams, The Colombian Novel, 1847–1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), chapter 4.

1. Brushwood has pointed out the importance of these four writers in the reaffirmation of the right of invention in the 1940s in Spanish American Novel, chapter 12.

2. García Canclini quoted in Alonso, Burden of Modernity, 3–4.

3. There has been a consistency in Latin America in the resistance to modernity, even among scholars and critics. Torres Rioseco’s reaction to innovative literature of the 1920s can be compared to a similarly negative later critique of postmodern culture among critics such as García Canclini and Nelson Osorio.

4. I discuss Fuentes’s situation in Mexico in the mid-1940s in Raymond Leslie Williams, The Writings of Carlos Fuentes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), part 1.

5. Lindstrom, Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction, 100.

6. Joseph Sommers, After the Storm (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 42.

7. I refer to formal qualities of the oral tale as defined by Walter Ong, among them “copiousness”; see Ong, Orality and Literacy, chapter 2.

8. Agustín Yáñez, Al filo del agua (1947; reprint, Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1969), 354. All quotations are from this edition.

9. Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 165.

12. Ibid., chapters 12 and 13.

13. Yvette Jiménez de Báez, Juan Rulfo, del páramo a la esperanza: Una lectura crítica de su obra (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 197.

14. Terry J. Peavler, El texto en llamas: El arte narrativo de Juan Rulfo (New York: Peter Lang, 1988). Peavler writes that the novel has sixty-six to seventy segments, depending on the edition; the 1981 edition of the Fondo de Cultura Económica has seventy.

15. Peavler, El texto en llamas, 46–47.

18. Lindstrom, Twentieth-Century Latin American Fiction, 155.

19. Brushwood, Mexico in Its Novel, 31

20. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (1955; reprint, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura, 1981), 9.

21. Jiménez de Báez, Juan Rulfo, 268.

22. D’Lugo, Fragmented Novel, 70.

24. Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 168.

25. Lindstrom, Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction, 106.

26. Brushwood, The Spanish American Novel, 168.

27. D’Lugo offers more connections with Paz in Fragmented Novel, 97.

28. See chapter 12 of this study for more discussion of the ontological element in postmodern fiction. The concept is from McHale, Postmodernist Fiction.

29. Cortázar quoted in Mario Goloboff, Julio Cortázar: La biografía (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1998), 88.

30. García Canclini and Alonso emphasize the problems of modernity and modernization in Latin America. These problems obviously exist and are historically based. Nevertheless, the present study also indicates that writers from each generation of the twentieth century embraced modernity.

1. José Donoso discusses the development of the political positions of the writers of the Boom in his Historia personal del Boom (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1972).

2. See C. L. R. James’s argument in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Santo Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963).

3. Dash, The Other America, 44–45.

4. Wilson Harris, Tradition, Writing, and Society: Critical Essays (London: New Beacon, 1967), 30.

5. Raymond D. Souza, Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 93

6. Raymond D. Souza, The Poetic Fiction of José Lezama Lima (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 21–37.

7. Selwynn R. Cudjoe, editor, Caribbean Women Writers (Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux Publications, 1990), 42.

8. Bobby Chamberlain sets forth the reading as political allegory in Jorge Amado (Boston: Twayne Publishers), 61–64.

9. Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, chapters 15–16.

10. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 11.

11. Other noteworthy novels of the period 1962–1967 include Bomarzo (1962) by Manuel Mujica Lainez, Manuel Pacho (1962) by Eduardo Caballero Calderón, El siglo de las luces (1962) by Alejo Carpentier, Acto y ceniza 1963) by Manuel Peyrou, La situación 1963) by Lisandro Otero, Gestos 1963) by Severo Sarduy, Los burgueses 1964) by Silvina Bullrich, Toda la luz a mediodía by Mauricio Wácquez, El peso de la noche 1965) by Jorge Edwards, and Alrededor de la jaula by Haroldo Conti.

1. Fiddian uses these three elements as typical of the total novel; see Fiddian, “James Joyce.”

2. Fuentes discusses his cycle “La Edad del Tiempo” at length in an interview published at the end of Williams, Writings of Carlos Fuentes.

3. Wendy Faris, Carlos Fuentes (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983), 55–56.

5. In his studies of the Postboom, Shaw argues that the writers of the Boom were “pessimistic.” See Donald Shaw, The Post-Boom in Spanish Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), and Antonio Skármeta and the Post-Boom (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1994).

6. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 15.

7. Ong, Orality and Literacy.

8. Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, trans. Gregory Rabassa under the title One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 27.

9. Roberto González-Echevarría develops the concept of Archive in Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).

10. Lucille Kerr, Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 27.

1. For critical studies on Cepeda Zamudio and Rojas Herazo see Brushwood, Spanish American Novel; Seymour Menton, La novela colombiana: planetas y satélites (Bogotá: Plaza y Janés, 1977); and Williams, Colombian Novel.

2. See Williams, Colombian Novel, chapter 1.

3. Franz Stanzel makes the distinction between the narrating self and the experiencing self in Narrative Situations in the Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).

4. Héctor Rojas Herazo, Respirando el verano (Bogotá: Ediciones Faro, 1962), 66. Subsequent quotations in text are from this edition.

5. Ong states that oral and writing noetics are so profoundly different that the way a writing culture person thinks may seem ridiculous or senseless to an individual in an oral culture, and vice-versa. Oral cultures use situational rather than abstract noetic processes; this manner of thinking is prevalent among characters in Respirando el verano. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 51.

6. Ibid., 42–43; Ong discusses the conceptualization of things “close to the human lifeworld.”

7. Seymour Menton, “Respirando el verano, fuente colombiana de Cien años de soledad,” originally published in Revista Iberoamericana 41, no. 91 (April-June 1975): 203–217.

8. See Williams, Colombian Novel, chapter 5.

9. Menton, La novela colombiana, 217–246.

10. Manuel Mejía Vallejo spoke often of his admiration for Carrasquilla. For example, see his essay “Don Tomás Carrasquilla y Kurt Levy,” in Mejía Vallejo, Hojas de papel (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional, 1985).

11. See Beth Miller, “Historia y ficción en Oficio de tinieblas de Castellanos: Un enfoque Gramsciano,” in De la crónica a la nueva narrativa mexicana: Coloquio sobre literatura mexicana, ed. Merlin H. Forster and Julio Ortega (Mexico City: Editorial Oasis, 1986), 407–422.

12. Franco, Plotting Women, 139.

14. Brushwood, Spanish American Novel, 258.

15. Franco, Plotting Women, 134–135.

16. Castillo, Easy Women, 63.

17. Elena Garro, Los recuerdos del porvenir (Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1963), 28. Quotations are from this edition. Ong would identify this passage as “close to human lifeworld.”

18. Franco, Plotting Women, 138.

19. Castillo, Easy Women, 82.

1. See Shaw, Post-Boom, and Philip Swanson, The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture after the Boom (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995). In these two studies, Shaw and Swanson cite numerous other writers and scholars who have commented on the Postboom; Shaw cites novelists Antonio Skármeta and Mempo Giardinelli at length.

2. Book-length studies on the postmodern novel in Latin America include Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite; John Beverly and José Oviedo, editors, The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America: A Special Issue of Boundary 2 20, no. 3 (fall 1993); Colás, Postmodernity in Latin America; Cornejo-Parriego, La escritura posmoderna; Salvador C. Fernández, Gustavo Sainz: Postmodernism in the Mexican Novel (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); George Yúdice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores, editors, On Edge, the Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Roberto González-Echevarría, La ruta de Severo Sarduy (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1987); Nelly Richard, La estratificación de los márgenes (Santiago, Chile: Francisco Zegers, 1989); Lauro Zavala, La precisión de la incertidumbre: posmodernidad, vida cotidiana y escritura (Toluca, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, 1999).

3. Among the numerous studies on these dictator novels see Angel Rama, Los dictadores latinoamericanos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976).

4. Linda J. Craft, Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 59.

5. Tittler, Narrative Irony, chapter 6.

6. David W. Foster, “Of Power and Virgins: Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta,” in Structures of Power: Essays on Twentieth-Century Spanish-American Fiction, ed. Terry J. Peavler and Peter Standish (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 146.

8. Among the numerous studies of the exile of these writers see Jean Franco, Critical Passions: Selected Essays (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 60–61; Mempo Giardinelli, “Dictaduras y el artista en el exilio,” Discurso Literario 3 (1985): 41–49; and Shaw, Post-Boom.

9. Craft, Novels of Testimony, 134–149.

10. With respect to the historical novel in Latin America see in particular Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), and Raymond D. Souza’s La historia en la novela hispanoamericana moderna (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1988).

11. Menton studies these authors in Latin America’s New Historical Novel.

12. Sharon Magnarelli compares the two novels in “Images of Exile/Exiled Images: the Cases of Luisa Valenzuela and José Donoso,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 31, no. 1 (January 1997): 61–76.

13. Wilson Harris, History, Fable, and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas (Georgetown: Ministry of Information and Culture, 1970), 82.

14. Fernando Valerio-Holguín, “Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic,” in Primitivism and Identity in Latin America, ed. Erik Camayd-Frixas and José Eduardo González (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 81.

15. Studies on these Chicano novelists include Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative; José David Saldívar, The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical; and César A. González-T., editor, Rudolfo A. Anaya: Focus on Criticism.

16. Julio Cortázar quoted in Goloboff, Julio Cortázar, 228.

17. See Shaw, Post-Boom, and Swanson, New Novel.

18. In terms of narrative technique, the writers of the Boom continued using the basic strategies associated with the modernist novel.

19. Shaw, Post-Boom, 3–24.

20. Ibid., 10. Shaw describes the writers of the Boom as pessimistic, though it could be argued—depending on which texts of the Boom one reads—that they were neither consistently pessimistic nor optimistic. Certainly some factors in the writings of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and García Márquez made them pessimistic. Nonetheless, an ongoing faith in the future of humanity suggests some optimism. Considering a broader range of fiction than Shaw includes, I do not concur with Shaw that the writers of the Postboom are necessarily more optimistic than the writers of the Boom. It likewise would be difficult, given the numerous texts at hand, to generalize that the writers of the Postboom are necessarily more pessimistic.

21. See Menton, Magic Realism Rediscovered, and Parkinson Zamora and Faris, editors, Magical Realism.

22. Allende cited in Shaw, Post-Boom, 11.

23. Elzbieta Sklodowska, Testimonio hispanoamericano: Historia, teoría, poética (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), chapters 1 and 2.

24. Recent studies by Brushwood, Kay S. García, and Cynthia Steele include Mexican novels that would fit into Shaw’s description of the Postboom. See Brushwood, La novela mexicana, 1967–1982 (Mexico City: Enlace/ Grijalbo, 1985); García, New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994); and Steele, Politics, Gender, and the Mexican Novel, 1968–1988 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).

25. Shaw, Post-Boom, 53.

28. Ibid., 79. Shaw proposes that the use of colloquial language is typical of the Postboom. The preponderance of colloquial language in Spanish American fiction before, during, and after the Boom makes it difficult to accept this proposal as a defining characteristic of one particular group of writers.

29. Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel, 123.

30. Julio Ortega, El hilo del habla: la narrativa de Alfredo Bryce Echenique (Guadalajara: Universidad Guadalajara, 1994), chapter 1.

31. With respect to narrative technique and the formal aspects of their work, most of the Postboom writers employed the narrative strategies typical of modernist fiction, even though some of them did not engage in such ambitious, lengthy, and complex works as had the writers of the Boom in the 1960s.

32. Swanson, New Novel, 95–96.

33. Sklodowska makes this point with respect to Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco; see Sklowdowska, Testimonio hispanoamericano, 159.

34. Magnarelli, “Luisa Valenzuela,” in Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, ed. Sharon Magnarelli and Diane Marting (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), 533.

36. The polemics associated with Rigoberta Menchú involved accusations that her story was not historically accurate. See David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).

37. For further discussion of these women writers in Venezuela see Julio Ortega, El principio radical de lo nuevo: Postmodernidad, identidad y novela en América Latina (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997), and Amarilis Hidalgo de Jesús, La novela moderna en Venezuela (New York: Peter Lang, 1995).

38. Foster, Gay and Lesbian Themes, 104.

39. See Foster’s Gay and Lesbian Themes and his Sexual Textualities: Essays on Queering Latin American Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).

40. Foster, Sexual Textualities, 15.

41. Sklodowska, Testimonio hispanoamericano, 64.

42. Craft, Novels of Testimony.

43. Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth.

44. Warren Motte has analyzed this international group of ludic writers in Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

45. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988).

46. Shaw also considers the use of “popular” art a characteristic of the Postboom. Given the widespread presence of popular culture in contemporary Latin American literature, however, it is not entirely clear if the presence of popular culture should be used as a defining characteristic of either a Postboom or the postmodern.

47. Lucille Kerr, Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 244.

48. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 15.

49. Salas Elorza has discussed Pitol as a postmodern writer in La narrativa dialógica de Sergio Pitol (Cranston, R.I.: Ediciones Inti, 1999).

50. In La isla que se repite, Benítez Rojo has discussed the inherent postmodernity of Caribbean culture.

51. Alonso, “La guaracha del Macho Camacho: The Novel as Dirge,” Modern Language Notes 100, no. 2 (March 1985): 350.

52. Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite.

53. Naomi Lindstrom, The Social Conscience of Latin American Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 141–142.

1. Brushwood has noted the experimentation in the Mexican novel of the late 1960s and early 1970s in La novela mexicana.

2. See Foster, Gay and Lesbian Themes.

3. Gustavo Sainz, La princesa del Palacio de Hierro (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1974), 180.

4. I have studied the readers and writers in La tía Julia y el escribidor at more length in Raymond Leslie Williams, Mario Vargas Llosa (New York: Ungar, 1986).

5. Suzanne S. Hintz, Rosario Ferré: A Search for Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 47.

7. See Lee Skinner, “Pandora’s Log: Charting the Evolving Literary Project of Rosario Ferré,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 29 (1995): 461–476.

8. Daniel Balderson, “Latent Meanings in Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración Artificial and Luis Gusman’s El corazón de junio,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 12, no. 2 (winter 1988): 212.

9. Julio Ortega, “Diamela Eltit y el Imaginario de la Virtualidad,” in Julio Ortega, El discurso de la abundancia (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1992), 53.

10. Foster, Gay and Lesbian Themes, 111.

1. In this chapter, I am referring to postmodern writers born after 1954 as “post-postmodern writers” to distinguish them from the previous generation of postmodern writers.

2. In July 2000, after the period covered in this study, the delegitimization of the PRI was evident in the election of PAN candidate Vicente Fox as president of Mexico.

3. Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, editors, McOndo (Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996).

4. Rosaura Sánchez, “Discourses of Gender, Ethnicity and Class in Chicano Literature,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 1021.

5. Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 179.

6. Borinsky, Theoretical Fables, 56.

7. Escobar Giraldo described this aspect of his cultural formation to me in a personal interview in Bogotá in 1995.

8. David Toscana, interview with the author, Riverside, Calif., March 10, 2000.

9. See this story in Pablo Brescia and Lauro Zavala, editors, Borges múltiple: Cuentos y ensayos de cuentistas (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999).

10. Toscana, interview.

11. Foster, Sexual Textualities.

13. Sánchez, “Discourses of Gender,” 1021.

14. The polemic around the veracity of Rigoberta Menchu’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia arose when David Stoll published Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. In response to Stoll, Arturo Arias edited The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).