Preface
In 1966, Octavio Paz wrote that since the nineteenth century, the Latin American writer desired to be modern: “Modernity has been our style for a century. It’s the universal style. To want to be modern seems crazy: we are condemned to be modern, since we are prohibited from the past and the future.”1 Indeed, several generations of Latin American writers since the late nineteenth century have exhibited their urgent desire to be modern, to participate in modernity. This postromantic desire assumed numerous guises and variations for Latin American writers over the twentieth century.
From the work of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío at the turn of the century to that of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, as well as among the younger writers of today, the idea of being modern often has taken some form of cosmopolitanism. For the poet Darío and his cohorts, this cosmopolitanism meant being simultaneously very Latin American and very French. For Borges, it meant trips to Madrid and Paris in the 1920s, bringing the innovations of ultraísmo to Argentina and a transatlantic dialogue with writers across the continents and across the centuries. For Fuentes, being modern and cosmopolitan has meant not only residing in the major cities of Latin America, Europe, and the United States most of his adult life but also assuming the innovations of European modernism and fully accepting his multicultural heritage from Latin America, Spain, and France. For postmodern writers such as the Chilean Diamela Eltit and the Argentine Ricardo Piglia, being modern has meant participating in a transnational cultural life and literary dialogue with Latin American and European writers as well as with theorists of literature and politics.
But the cosmopolitan postures and intellectual urbanity of the Latin American writer, as constant as they might have been in the twentieth century, were only the external trappings and sometimes necessary masks of a far more significant and profound series of cultural interventions in Latin America. In most of the first half of the century, relatively few Latin American writers found success in their search for a way to be both authentically Latin American (or Mexican, or Argentine, etc.) and participants in the fin-de-siecle and later modernist projects of their European and North American counterparts. Their appropriation of modernist aesthetic practices from the 1940s to the end of the century, however, met huge success in both Latin America and abroad, highlighted by the “Boom” of the Spanish American novel written in the 1960s.
For some critics, postmodern culture present in Western societies since approximately the late 1960s has been lacking in political substance. Nevertheless, since 1968, the variant of modernist fiction writing described in Latin America as “postmodern” had its own innovative technical features, critical stances, and politically significant (or thematically substantive) approaches to being modern.2
Despite the occasional outdated admonitions about the traditionalism of the Latin American novelist and despite the consistent resistance by more traditional writers and critics alike to these ongoing attempts at being “modern,” the Latin American writer has often been, in fact, condemned to being hypermodern—from the hypermodern Darío and Borges to the hypermodern Fuentes and Eltit. The cultural environment in which the search for the modern has taken place has been polemical, from early debates about the new republics to recent controversies about postmodern culture. Rubén Darío, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and many other Latin American writers were accused by some of their compatriots of being too modern (i.e., too European) and somehow not authentically “national” enough.
In this study of the Spanish American novel, I have organized my readings and critical history of the novel around five moments when the desire to be modern took different (but not entirely contradictory) directions. The first moment (Part I of this book) is associated in Spanish America with modernismo, but throughout Latin America, modernism ostensibly involved oppositional forces centered, on the one hand, on fin-de-siècle symbolist and Parnassian aesthetics and, on the other, positivism and more scientific approaches to culture and society. This was the moment captured in the work of Rubén Darío. The second moment (Part II) was the period when the desire to be modern led some writers to the European avant-garde movements, while others maintained that the new (modern) nation-state needed to be supported by a more autochthonous writing. This was the moment of Ricardo Guiraldes, Rómulo Gallegos, Teresa de la Parra, Jaime Torres Bodet, and many others. Part III involves the third moment of desiring to be modern, a moment that produced the modernist novel throughout Spanish America in the 1940s and 1950s. This was the modernist novel of Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Agustín Yáñez, and others. The fourth moment (Part IV) was in the 1960s, when the modernity and accomplishment of Spanish American writing was internationally recognized as never before. A select group of the most modern, cosmopolitan, and accomplished of these writers (García Márquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa) came to be associated with the Boom of the Spanish American novel. Part V deals with the moment from the 1970s to the 1990s that some critics called the “Postboom” at the outset but which to some extent was a refining, a hyper-modernist writing more appropriately identified as postmodern. In reality, both modernist and postmodern aesthetic practices were important in the last decades of the century, and the presence of women writers was remarkable.
This book is a study of the twentieth-century Spanish American novel; I offer brief analyses of specific novels and a critical overview of the Spanish American novel published from 1900 to 1999. In developing this analysis and overview of the Spanish American novel, I have kept a broader Latin American context in view, and I occasionally mention Latin American novels not published in Spanish. I offer these comments to deepen the understanding of the Spanish American novel and not as a review of the Latin American novel published in Brazilian Portuguese or Caribbean French and English. Such a study would be considerably more ambitious than space allows in this book.
I have organized each of the book’s five parts into two sets of chapters. In the first chapter of each part, I introduce the novels, literary contexts, some cultural debates, and references to the Brazilian, Caribbean, and U.S. Chicano novel. In the following chapter (or chapters) of each of the five parts, I analyze a more limited number of Spanish American novels.
Several well-informed and well-conceived studies of the Spanish American novel are predecessors to this study. John S. Brushwood’s The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth-Century Survey (1975) is also a partial model, as is Jean Franco’s An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature (third edition, 1994). Gerald Martin’s Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989) offers incisive commentary on a broad range of twentieth-century fictional texts. Giuseppe Bellini’s Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana (1985) is impressive for its thoroughness and detailed scholarship. Naomi Lindstrom’s Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction (1994) offers much of the breadth and rigor found in the surveys of Brushwood and Bellini. The present study differs from these predecessors in two fundamental ways: it covers the entire twentieth century (1900–1999), and it is different in structure, focus, and emphasis.
Of course, the term “Latin America” has been amply debated for several decades now, and Carlos Fuentes has pointed out that the term was coined by the French in the nineteenth century to justify their own colonial interests in the region. Fuentes proposes that the most appropriate and accurate term for the region is “Indo-Afro-Iberoamerica.” I concur and occasionally use Fuentes’s term to refer to this region. The main problem with Fuentes’s term, however, is its stylistic clumsiness. For the sake of style, I use the term “Latin America” most frequently. Of course, when I refer to the “Spanish American” novel, I am using a term limited specifically to novels written in the Spanish language.
Much has happened to the Spanish American novel and literary criticism since Brushwood published his survey in 1975. Both the theory revolution and the critical work of the next generation of prominent scholars of the Latin American novel—notably Carlos Alonso, Debra Castillo, Sara Castro-Klarén, David William Foster, Aníbal González, Roberto González-Echevarría, Lucía Guerra-Cunningham, Cathy Jrade, Naomi Lindstrom, Sharon Magnarelli, Francine Masiello, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Nelly Richard, Beatriz Sarlo, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Doris Sommer, and Cynthia Steele—have changed much of the way we read Spanish American fiction of the twentieth century. Since the mid-1970s, women’s writing has become much more prominent throughout Latin America. I take particular account of Carlos Alonso’s The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (1998), Debra Castillo’s Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (1992), Naomi Lindstrom’s The Social Conscience of Latin American Writing (1998), Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Idle Fictions: The Hispanic Vanguard Novel, 1926–1934 (1982), Cathy L. Jrade’s Modernismo, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature (1998), and Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991).
I am indebted to numerous colleagues, students, and writers for their goodwill and collaboration over the years. A complete list of all of them would be difficult to compile and include in this brief preface. Most recently, I have appreciated the dialogue and information offered by speakers on the campus of the University of California, among them Alicia Borinsky, Debra Castillo, David William Foster, John Kronik, Elzbieta Sklodowska, and Randolph Pope. Directly or indirectly, they have contributed to this book. Graduate research assistants Martín Camps, Traci Roberts, Kevin Guerrieri, and Mark Anderson were exceptionally efficient and helpful. I am particularly indebted to those colleagues who read part or all of this manuscript at its various stages or who provided valuable information: John S. Brushwood, Debra Castillo, Diamela Eltit, Isabelle Favre, Michael Handelsman, George McMurray, Seymour Menton, Otto Morales Benitez, John Ochoa, José Miguel Oviedo, Federico Patán, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, David Toscana, Catharine Wall, and William Wiley. Certainly I do not wish to hold them accountable for any shortcomings the book may have; rather, I hope they may find some satisfaction that rewards their cooperation.
I dedicate this book to my earliest mentors: my sister Judith Williams and my high school teachers of Spanish and French, Ms. Grace Swan and Mrs. Sharon Erickson. Their early teachings were extremely important, and without them, this book would not have been possible.