Guide to the Latin American
Boom
Alexander Coleman
The Boom In Spanish American
Literature: A Personal History
Jose Donoso
New York: Colombia University Press
8
At Harvard in the late fifties, I took a course entitled "Masterpieces
of Spanish American Literature." With some honorable, even
sensational exceptions, there weren't many masterpieces on the
reading list, though I was moved by the passion and determination
of the teacher, the late and unforgettable Edward Glaser. At graduate
school (Columbia), the same thing. Many weak novels were acclaimed
as masterpieces from Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, and so
on. I thought it odd that in an age of Proust, Joyce, and Mann,
students of Spanish American literature would be handed works
that could best be described as examples of literary regionalism,
sometimes with a glossary at the end so that the particular national
character inherent in the work would be revealed by means of words
unique to the region. But it was not just the vocabulary
that was irritating: it was the moving force that could at times
be felt behind the texts themselves—Zolaesque documentation,
noble populism, the idea of literature as a weapon with which
to pummel the Wall Street jackals. So while my classmates in Comp.
Lit. were delving into Gide, Proust, Joyce, Mann, Kafka,
and the then-reigning John Hawkes, we dutiful majors in Span.
Am. Lit. were trying to cope with Mariano Axuela's The Underdogs,
Jose Eustacio Rivera's The Vortex, Enrique Larreta's Golywynesque
historical novel entitled The Glory of Don Ramiro, Ciro
Alegrik's passionate denunciation of Indian oppression in Peru
entitled Broad and Alien Is the World. I noted with
some unease that these works belonged at best to the histories
of the national literatures of Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru,
or whatever, and that they were examples of a well-intentioned
but derivative literature of a continent whose literary consciousness
was just being born. Nonetheless, these were the standard "masterpieces"
that were taught at major universities as the best that the continent
could offer. And this went on well into the sixties. Judging from
many of the syllabi and course descriptions that I have seen lately,
things have not changed radically in the seventies. These works
have not lost their hoary power over an older generation of teachers
of Spanish American literature. The key words to describe this
suffocating brand of literary localism are criollismo and
social protest. No one knows more about these pestiferous
genres than the gifted Chilean novelist Jose Donoso. He says:
With their entomologist's
magnifying glasses, the criollistas were cataloguing the
flora and proverbs which were unmistakably ours. A novel was considered
good if it loyally reproduced these autochthonous worlds, all
that which specifically makes us different—which separates
us—from other areas and other countries of the continent,
a type of foolproof , chauvinistic machismo . . . Along with the
criollistas, social realism also attempted to raise isolating
barriers: the novel of protest, preoccupied with national concerns,
with the "important social problems" which urgently
needed to be solved, imposing a lasting and deceptive criterion:
in addition to being unmistakably ours, as the criollistas
wanted, the novel should be, above all else, "important
. . . serious," an instrument which would be directly useful
to social progress. Any attitude which might be accused of leaving
the bad taste of something that might be labelled "Aestheticism"
was anathema. Formal experimentation was prohibited.
For me, one of the more depressing
yet illuminating matters revealed in this literary memoir is the
fact that the books that were driving me crazy as a Spanish major
at Harvard in the late fifties were precisely the same books that
were driving one Jose Donoso crazy at the same time in Santiago
de Chile, as he was beginning his literary career as a novelist
and short story writer. Donoso's aid-memoire shows with luxuriant
detail how a conspiracy of silence reigned over any Spanish American
work which did not conform to the broad tokens of mimesis, xenophobia,
chauvinism, and local color. The only exception that perforce must
be made is the literary hothouse that was and is Buenos Aires. As
Donoso and Carlos Fuentes have mentioned on various occasions, the
Babel of cultures that makes up Buenos Aires was the window out
onto Europe, the bridge to literary freedom. Argentina's literature,
too, is hardly free of criollismo, but a good portion of
the literature and criticism shows considerable independence from
excessively nationalistic currents. Argentineans are born comparatists:
Borges, Bioy Casares, Cortazar, Jose Bianco, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada,
Enrique Anderson-Imbert.
Nonetheless, what we are talking about, is an
atmosphere reigning over a whole epoch before the sixties—a
particular brand of ether that remained impervious to the literature
of North America and Europe for decades. European literature of
the twentieth century made no effect upon the criollistas;
they made no effect upon a European reader. The criollistas
were happy with their local triumphs, while Europe dismissed
the literature of whole continent with the back of its collective
hand. This atmosphere is at the heart of Donoso's eloquent rage
against what might have been his literary forebearers: "A
defensive and arrogant Olympus of writers whom we who were younger
found unsatisfactory, even though their pressure—more than
their influence—weighed on us and on our first novels: these
were in most cases the fruits ofthe struggle between a nationalistic
asceticism and the great tides which brought more complex ideas
from abroad. We were orphans. . . ." The atmosphere hanging
over this minor Olympus is really worth talking about, since it
is born of two historical and cultural manias in Spanish America:
terror of cultures and literatures beyond one's own frontiers
(cultural machismo) and some degree of colonial attitudes
expressed by Spanish Americans of a certain generation toward
themselves and their own cultures. The following examples having
to do with these matters come from two distinguished criollistas,
Ciro Alegria and Miguel Angel Asturias. Let me begin with
Alegria, in the prologue to his Broad and Alien Is the World:
I consider that international influence
of literary schools and the emigration of new forms are cultural
phenomena of all times. But it so happens that many Latin American
writers not only ally themselves to these schools and blindly
imitate the styles and techniques of Yankee [sic] and European
writers; unfortunately, they also imitate the sensibility, the
philosophy, and the attitudes toward life. They think that in
that way they will be right up front. Consequently, according
to the latest fads, we count upon many Sartres, Faulkners, Hemingways,
Kafkas, etc., in miniature. What importance can this have? I think
that, without rejecting useful innovations, we should work with
them, adapting them to our needs and without losing our American
personality.
This is a precious text of the "what is
ours" (lo nuestro) variety. After all, we are speaking
of an author who won a major North American prize in 1941 with
the above-mentioned novel. The preface I have translated is dated
1960, and to me it is an example of someone who felt the ground
slipping out from under him, but who still was going to defend
something "ours," i.e., "lo americano, "
against international and cosmopolitan contaminations. By
the way, the runner-up in the competition (sponsored by the then-Farrar
and Rinehart) was the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti, one
of the secretive directors of the literature some people call
the literature of the Boom.
On the matter of cultural colonialism practiced
by Latin Americans upon themselves, this topic is best expressed
by Miguel Angel Asturias, the Guatemalan Nobel Prize winner. Read
the following and consider the implications (from Rita Guibert's
Seven Voices, Knopf, p. 151):
Our Latin American literature has always
been a committed, a responsible literature .
. . the great works of our countries have been written in response
to a vital need, a need of the people, and therefore almost all
our literature is committed. Only as an exception do some of our
writers isolate themselves and become uninterested in what is
happening around them; such writers are concerned with psychological
or egocentric subjects and the problems of a personality out of
contact with surrounding reality. . . . To believe that we
Latin Americans are going to teach Europeans to reflect, to philosophize,
to write egocentric or psychological novels, to believe that we
are already a mature enough society to produce a Proust or a Goethe—that
would be daydreaming and self-deception. We are living in
an epoch of creative literature, but it is a fighting literature,
sowing for tomorrow that sense of responsibility which will make
future authors follow in the steps of great Latin American writers
and write responsible works of their own.
(Italics mine)
That last sentence has something of an ominous
threat to it—Latin American literature has always been "responsible,"
he seems to say, therefore new generations must also "be
responsible" in the future, and forget about experimentation,
the ivory tower, the "psychological" novel. In other
words, forget about any European or North American novel published
in the twentieth century. That literature is not "ours,"
it is not "responsive" to our needs. Instead, break
out your tired copies of The Grapes of Wrath, Gladkov's
Cement, Sholokhov, and so forth.
As unsettling as the above-quoted statements
may seem, I wish to remind readers that Alegria has always been
considered to occupy a first position among Peruvian novelists,
and this was certified by Farrar and Rinehart's first prize in
1941. The same for Miguel Angel Asturias of Guatemala, as certified
by the Nobel Prize in 1967. This atmosphere is dramatized effectively
in Donoso's lethal book about his own creative development and
that of his generation. They were effectively orphans in their
own respective countries, because they simply found the "great
figures" unreadable.
What strikes me as I review the matters contained
in Donoso's memoir is the following fact: fine works of contemporary
fiction had of course been written and published in Spanish America
and in Brazil, but simply got nowhere among the flood of more
"relevant" works. All of Borges's major works were written
by 1950, to take a convenient date - I refer to Ficciones,
El Aleph, The Garden of the Forking Paths, Universal History of
Infamy. Juan Rulfo's somber masterpiece Pedro Paramo was
published in 1953. Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World
dates from 1949, his The Lost Steps from 1953, Ouimarges
Rosa's The Devil to Pay in the Backlands from 1956. But
the "grandes figuras" dominated the minds and hearts
of all teachers above and below the Rio Grande, and so this conspiracy
of silence: Borges,
Carpentier, Onetti were practically unknown in Chile before the
1960s. The exemplary isolation of Onetti delayed the dissemination
of his works. The metaphysics and Europeanism of Borges and the
excessive language of Carpentier caused them to be labelled, if
they were known at all, as aesthetes, as writers of useless literature,
and they were set aside.
It might be said that the same
thing applied to the reception of this new literature in the United
States. Someone like Borges was just not "Latin" enough,
was too cosmopolitan, too egocentric, and worst of all too "difficult"
. . . why go on?
In point of fact, the fortunes
of Borges here in the United States are a good example of how
powerful were these criollistas, these regionalistas,
these purveyors of social protest, both in academe and in the
publishing world. Alfred Knopf was one of the few houses that
took any interest in Latin American literature during the forties,
fifties, and the sixties. But they rejected Ficciones of
Borges, Hopscotch of Julio Corbizar, and at first rejected
Donoso's relatively traditional but still slightly experimental
novel, Coronation. The gray eminence behind these rejections
was the translator and literary consultant Harriet de Onts, whose
letter to Donoso about the negative decision explains perfectly
well why Knopf often missed the best of contemporary Spanish American
fiction, while Grove Press, Harper and Row, Pantheon, and New
Directions published the Knopf rejects and did well. In this letter,
de Onil explains the rejection of Donoso's Jarnesian Coronation
by saying that "it is not clear on whose side the author
is; whom he admires and whom he condemns." In other words,
the work was ambiguous, i.e., modern, and, thus, was not acceptable.
I emphasize the fact that this letter was written in 1960, not
1935.
I have dwelt on these matters
rather excessively, I know, but they are part of the fabric of
the times in which talents of the caliber of Donoso himself, Garcia
Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Guillermo Cabrera
Infante were writing their first books, attempting to get out
from under this domination by the elders. And too, there are other
more mundane elements to Donoso's story. For instance, it is a
fact that books in Spanish America did not and do not circulate
freely among the various nations of the continent. Chilean books
were generally not available in other countries and here in the
United States. Most books arrived in Santiago de Chile only through
the medium of a friendly suitcase. Argentinean and Mexican books
have better luck, but the fact remains that Donoso, as a fledging
writer in Santiago, desirous of reading anything new in Spanish
American literature of quality, got the books of Borges, Carpentier,
Fuentes, Rulfo, and Vargas Hosa through friends such as musicians
or painters that brought the books from the place of publication
to Santiago. Not one of the major books commented upon by
Donoso was bought by him; all were passed from hand to hand.
Such were the restrictions of
currency exchange and customs. And too, in Latin America there
were relatively few writers who could say that they were living
from the income derived from their fiction alone. Donoso is a
classic case, among hundreds, of a writer who began ex nihilo
with a book of short stories paid for by a subscription collected
from among ten friends, and who then sold the book himself on
Santiago streetcorners and trolleys. Almost the same for his fine
first novel, the above-mentioned Coronation. As he remembers
it, "I recall my good-natured father seated at the entrance
to the Union Club in a chair covered in Genoan velvet with a stack
of yellow volumes at his side, selling them there to his follow
members with their canes, or later at the card table."
In spite of a liberating two years
at Princeton University, Donoso was still a blocked writer. As
he saw it, the destructive element in his early fiction was an
excessive degree of false simplicity in his fictional discourse.
The catalyst that was to begin the process toward a new kind of
vision and diction was the reading of Fuentes's Where the Air
Is Clear. As he puts it, "the Chilean dogma of the need
for a transparent and pure language that . . . embodies our irony
was the first thing that fell apart as I read Carlos Fuentes's
novel. . . . Reading it was a cataclysm for me. Until then, I
had been governed by a paralyzing good taste, and for me, the
politics and forces giving shape to our history were matter of
hometown gossip on the level of friendly phone calls, never on
the level of myths, invasions, or idolatries. . . . This awareness
that someone in my world and of my generation had written a novel
of such formal freedom that it had exploded all my laws was the
first real stimulus that I, as a writer, received from another
writer."
Fuentes, a dashing and alluring
figure, is really the psychic axis of Donoso's book. After all,
it was Fuentes who got Knopf to reconsider the first novel, it
was Fuentes who carried Donoso forth out of the embattled provincialism
of Chile and brought him to the attention of the other authors
of the Boom, that novelistic efflorescence of the fifties and
the sixties that brought Spanish American literature to the level
of critical consideration previously accorded to a Nabokov or
a Gunter Grass. As the reader might have already inferred, the
Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges is the commanding older figure among
this Boom generation—he and his compatriot Adolfo Bioy Casares
carried on from the twenties on a lonely campaign against low
mimesis and high propaganda in fiction. It took a while, but they
won—both Garcia Marquez and Fuentes are unthinkable without
the liberation that Borges's work signified for the whole continent.
"Boom" is a term that
should have died long ago, because it is such an ugly word. But
the word has kept bouncing around in critical journals, mostly
because of the jealous detractors who have kept it going. But
there are a few things about the Boom that can be said with some
accuracy and equanimity. The authors involved are resolutely engaged
in a transfiguration of Latin American reality, from localism
to a kind of heightened, imaginative view of what is real—a
universality gained by the most intense and luminous kind of locality.
That is what Garcia Marquez, Rulfo, Donoso, and Fuentes have done,
among others. These are the eternal lessons of authors as disparate
as Jane Austen, Faulkner, and Thomas Mann. The boom novel is never
reportage, it is never blatant political protest, it is never
"responsible," in the suffocating sense. And too, the
Boom announced a cultural hegemony and unity out of disparity
that would have been unthinkable some twenty or thirty years ago.
Some elements that aided in this newly forged continental consciousness
are such disparate facts and events as the cultural impulse given
to Latin America by the Cuban Revolution, and in particular the
Review of the House of the Americas, the most distinguished
cultural organ of the Castro revolution; the existence of the
distinguished Ford Foundation-financed literary review Mundo
Nuevo, which, although it only lasted some two years under
the formidable editorship of Emir Rodriguez Monegal, managed to
introduce most of the authors of the new wave, those of whom we
are now speaking. And of course it is significant that Borges
enjoyed a retainer from The New Yorker, and that the same
magazine, under the aegis of William Shawn and Alastair Reid,
has begun a comprehensive search for new texts from Latin America,
to be translated expressly for the magazine. And no one is surprised
when a Cortazar short story is transformed into a film by Antonioni
(Blow-up), or short stories by Borges undergo brilliant
radical surgery by such filmmakers as Bertolucci (The Spider's
Stratagem) or Nichohs Roeg (Performance). These are
details, of course, but these details are indicative of a change
of atmosphere, and that is everything. Nothing like this would
have occurred in the forties or the early fifties. Latin American
literature has gained an enormous readership just in the past
twenty years.
The Boom in Spanish American
Literature: A Personal History is a breezy exercise in literary
parricide—the old boys are ejected from the pantheon, the
local gods are outraged, the whippersnappers take over, a whole
new profile for Latin American culture gradually takes form. Jose
Donoso is not only a witness to it, he is a fundamental part of
this literary process. His memoir should not be missed by anyone
who cares about literature. It is a unique and discerning document,
done with equal amounts of black bile and good humor. Thankfully,
he has been eloquently served by his nimble translator, Gregory
Kolovakos. By the way, for those interested in a lucid overview
of the whole movement, with an abundance of useful factual material,
I recommend Emir Rodriguez Monegal's El Boom de la Novela Latinoamericana
(Caracus: Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 1972). <
A short list of Boom authors,
in alphabetical order, in English translation:
Borges:
Ficciones, A Personal Anthology, El Aleph and Other Stories
Cabrera Infante:
Three Trapped Tigers
Carpentier:
Explosion in a Cathedral, The Lost Steps, Reasons of State
Cortazar:
The Winners, Hopscotch, Blow-Up and Other Stories
Donoso:
Coronation, This Sunday, The Obscene Bird of the Night
Fuentes:
Where the Air is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, Change
of Skin, Terra Nostra
Garcia Mirquez:
No One Writes to the Colonel, One Hundred Years of Solitude,
The Autumn of the Patriarch
Guimaraes, Rosa:
The Third Bank of the River, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Puig:
Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, The Buenos Aires Affair
Rulfo:
Pedro Paramo
Sarduy:
From Cuba With a Song, Cobra
Vargas Llosa:
The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral
Originally
published in the Fall 1977 issue of Boston Review
|
home