The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel Since 1945

Raymond L. Williams

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780231501699
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

In this expertly crafted, richly detailed guide, Raymond Leslie Williams explores the cultural, political, and historical events that have shaped the Latin American and Caribbean novel since the end of World War II. In addition to works originally composed in English, Williams covers novels written in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Haitian Creole, and traces the profound influence of modernization, revolution, and democratization on the writing of this era.

Beginning in 1945, Williams introduces major trends by region, including the Caribbean and U.S. Latino novel, the Mexican and Central American novel, the Andean novel, the Southern Cone novel, and the novel of Brazil. He discusses the rise of the modernist novel in the 1940s, led by Jorge Luis Borges's reaffirmation of the right of invention, and covers the advent of the postmodern generation of the 1990s in Brazil, the Generation of the "Crack" in Mexico, and the McOndo generation in other parts of Latin America.

An alphabetical guide offers biographies of authors, coverage of major topics, and brief introductions to individual novels. It also addresses such areas as women's writing, Afro-Latin American writing, and magic realism. The guide's final section includes an annotated bibliography of introductory studies on the Latin American and Caribbean novel, national literary traditions, and the work of individual authors. From early attempts to synthesize postcolonial concerns with modernist aesthetics to the current focus on urban violence and globalization, The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel Since 1945 presents a comprehensive, accessible portrait of a thoroughly diverse and complex branch of world literature.

Part I

Introduction, Chronological Survey, and Regional Survey

Introduction to the Latin American and Caribbean Novel

The Colonial Legacy

The diverse peoples, languages, and cultures of the region today called Latin America and the Caribbean share a colonial legacy. Spain and Portugual ruled the region for approximately three centuries and other European nations have exercised a colonial presence. Taking into account its indigenous, African, and Iberian cultural heritages, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes has eschewed the very term Latin America and identified this vast region as “Indo-Afro-Ibero America.” The numerous indigenous languages and cultures (literally hundreds, from Mapuche in Chile to Nahuatl in Mexico), the several African languages and cultures, and the several Western European languages and cultures (principally from Spain and Portugal, but including French, English, and Dutch) make the vast region that—for lack of a better term—we call Latin America and the Caribbean patently heterogeneous.

The colonial legacies that are important and still live topics of the Latin American and Caribbean novel today are also diverse in themselves. The colonial legacy from Spain has produced the writing of novels in the Spanish language in over twenty nations as well as Puerto Rico and the Unites States. Writing in Spanish, novelists from Mexico to Chile are still assessing the colonial legacy from Spain, some of whom have returned to the medieval roots of their “mother” language. The colonial legacy from Portugal is still being written about in the Portuguese language in Brazil, both in historic research and historical novels. France’s colonial legacy is extant in the three “departments” they still govern in the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guyana) and where novelists such as Maryse Condé write “Caribbbean” novels in French about their African and colonial identities, among other topics related to the colonial past. The colonial legacies of Great Britain and Holland are also the focus of fiction being written in English and Dutch in nations such as Jamaica and Suriname, among other parts of the Caribbean, often called the West Indies, where English and Dutch are spoken and written. Novelists such as Erna Brodber, who writes in English in Jamaica, and Astrid Roemer, who writes in Dutch in Suriname, are testimony to this part of the European legacy of colonialism.

Writers such as Carlos Fuentes in Mexico and Diamela Eltit in Chile, as well as many of their cohorts, have addressed a variety of issues related to these colonial legacies, some of which have been addressed in subtle and complex novels. In the broadest of terms, however, Latin American and Caribbean writers have addressed the colonial legacy in three general areas: in novels about the wars of independence (mostly dealing with nineteenth-century Enlightenment thought as well as the early nineteenth-century political conflicts themselves), in novels about about the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), and in novels about the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

The literature about the independence period is vast, for numerous contemporary novelists have felt the need to reassess that key period of nation building in Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, novelists such as Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote the novel El general en su laberinto (1989, The General in His Labyrinth) on a prominent political figure of the independence, Simón Bolívar, were interested in rewriting the history of the foundation of the Latin American nations. Numerous historical novels about the nineteenth century have been written—reassessments of the empirical history, of Enlightenment thought, and of nineteenth-century foundational fictions that had proposed other versions of the period’s history. These novels question, for example, whether or not the political independence of these nations represented an authentic cultural and economic independence. They also question the values of the old aristocracies that tended to remain in power after the political independence from Spain, Portugal, and the other European powers with interests in Latin America. The Argentine Ricardo Piglia’s novel Respiración artificial (1979, Artificial Respiration) returns to the roots of Argentine nationhood in the nineteenth century, as he reviews in depth the nation’s cultural and political history.

The literature about the Mexican Revolution is as vast as the literature of independence and the foundational fictions of the nineteenth century. The Mexican Revolution was a broad-based rebellion against not only the authoritarian regime of Porfirio Díaz but also a reaction against the old elite—the same families that had ruled Mexico since the colonial period. From Mariano Azuela’s classic novel of the Mexican Revolution, Los de abajo (1915, The Underdogs) to the modern fictional critique of the postrevolutionary political establishment in Fuentes’s modern classic, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962, The Death of Artemio Cruz), an entire series of novels were published in Mexico to create the genre called the novel of the Mexican Revolution. These novels cast a critical eye on not only the old regime surviving the regime of Porfirio Díaz, but also tended to portray the revolution itself as a chaotic conflict lacking the firm ideological clarity that the same political forces (and official historians) have attempted to portray it as having.

The other major disruption of the colonial legacy was the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and it also produced a vast literary response that took several directions. The Cuban Revolution produced a set of novels about Cuban society, politics, and culture before, during, and after the revolution. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, for example, offered a nostalgic reflection on life in Havana immediately before the revolution in his novel Tres tristes tigres (1967, Three Sad Tigers). On the other hand, Jesus Díez’s Las iniciales de la tierra (1989, The initials of the land) is a historical work that explores the adventure of the Cuban Revolution and the efforts to construct a new nation in the 1960s.

The Cuban Revolution has also indirectly produced a substantive set of novels of exile and fiction of cheísmo (celebrating Ernesto “Che” Guevara) dealing with guerrilla insurgency. Writers such as the Peruvian Edmundo de los Ríos, whose novel Los juegos verdaderos (1968, The real games) deals with youthful political rebels who follow a Che Guevara–type guerrilla warfare path. Cuban writers from different generations, such as Reynaldo Arenas, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Zoé Valdés, have written very different kinds of novels relating the experiences of Cuban exiles. Valdés is the youngest of the three, and her novels of the 1990s mostly set in Paris, a parody some of the clichés of exile fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, such as nostalgia for the homeland that is so common in fiction by writers in exile.

Beyond the Colonial Legacy: Contexts of the 1940s and 1950s

The colonial legacy of rule by elites, unequal distribution of wealth, and different forms of racial and gender discrimmination have survived well into the twentieth century in Latin America and the Caribbean. Most novels written since 1945 deal with this legacy in one way or another. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Latin American and Caribbean novel often present the social world in Manichean terms. Even the classic novels of the 1920s—La vorágine (1924, The Vortex) by the Colombian José Eustacio Rivera, Don Segundo Sombra (1926, Don Segundo Sombra) by the Argentine Ricardo Güiraldes, and Doña Bárbara (1929, Doña Barbara) by the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos—portrayed characters as stereotypes, little moral ambiguity, and a simplistic view of Latin American reality as “civilization” versus “barbarisim.” These classic works, nevertheless, were canonized in Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s.

Among the early twentieth-century exceptions to this generalization, the avant-garde movements centered in cities such as Buenos Aires and Mexico City promoted modernist aesthetics and what they generally considered more “universal” approaches to storytelling. Writers such as the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier were involved with these same avant-garde movements in Europe, and in the 1940s Asturias and Carpentier began publishing fictions that reflected the interests of European avant-garde and modernist aesthetics.

In the 1940s and 1950s Latin American novelists began to successfully synthesize the long-standing sociopolitical commitment of the writer concerned with the colonial legacy and the new modernist aesthetics. Indeed, these writers of the 1940s and 1950s—Asturias, Carpentier, Agustín Yáñez, Clarice Lispector, Juan Rulfo, and others—were as politically committed as they were dedicated to the idea of writing a new national literature that would be both modern (which meant a variety of things) and universal (which also had numerous understandings).

The political scenario in the mid-1940s was as varied in Latin America and the Caribbean as its uneven socioeconomic development and its often unstable democracies. The end of World War II was of far less significance in Latin America than it was in Europe and the United States, although there were repercussions in some areas of the Hispanic world. In France’s DOM (overseas departments) of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guayana, the blacks who had participated in the European war now demanded more rights; the end of the war marked the growth of the négritude in much of the Caribbean. In Brazil the end of WWII marked the end of the neofascist government of Getúlio Vargas, who had headed the Estado Novo since the early 1930s.

The series of military dictatorships that had plagued several Central American states during the first half of the century finally waned in one of the parts of the region in 1945 in Guatemala, with the end of General Ubico’s government, the establishment of democratic elections, and the reestablishment of the political rights and other freedoms of most democracies. The election of progressive Jacobo Arbenz in 1953, however, resulted in a reaction by local elites, who, in conjunction with the U.S. government (and U.S. airplanes dropping bombs on urban areas of Guatemala), demolished the short-lived democracy and reestablished favorable operations for the United Fruit Company. Years later a Guatemalan writer who had been a young child when his nation was attacked, Arturo Arias, wrote a novel of the experience, Después de las bombas (1979, After the Bombs).

In Argentina Juan Domingo Perón rose to power with massive popular support in the mid-1940s. In 1945 the military pressured him to resign from his positions as vice president and minister of labor, but he not only remained in power with ample popular support, he also took control of the nation in 1946, offering power to the working class and taking privilege from the upper-middle sectors by nationalizing the banks, urban transportation, the train system, and public services. This crucial and controversial period of Argentine history has been amply documented in novels published since the 1950s and in La novela de Perón (1985) by Tomás Eloy Martínez.

After World War II, Peru seemed to be on a democratic path, with the designation of Luis Bustamente y Rivero as president in 1945, but by 1948 a coup by General Manuel Odría resulted in a nearly decade-long authoritarian regime (1948–1956). Mario Vargas Llosa was a student during this period and later wrote the novel Conversación en La Catedral (1969, Conversation in The Cathedral) as his account of the brutal government in power during those years. In this elaborate portrayal of life in Peru in the 1950s, Vargas Llosa presents a sinister regime that perpetrates the most perverse aspects of the colonial legacy.

The 1940s were unstable years in Colombian and Venezuela. In Colombia the assassination of the Liberal Party’s populist candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948, resulted in massive civil unrest, violence in the streets, and many deaths in Bogotá. This instability and decade-long conflict between the two traditional parties (the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party) led to the civil war of the 1950s (1948–1958) identified as La Violencia. The literary response to this conflict was the production of a large number of novels (over a hundred) published from the 1950s to the 1970s dealing with La Violencia. Most of them were detailed, bloody descriptions of questionable sociological or literary value, but some of the more accomplished novels from this war are Gabriel García Márquez’s La mala hora (1962, In Evil Hour), Manuel Mejía Vallejo’s El día señalado (1963, The signaled day), and Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal’s Cóndores no entierran todos los días (1972, Condors do not bury every day). In Cóndores no entierran todos los días Alvarez Gardeazábal told horrorific stories from his own youth, when he awoke in the morning to see cadavers on the streets of his hometown in the Valle del Cauca (the town of Tuluá)—a night’s work by the professional assassins of the Conservative Party who were called pájaros (“birds”). In Venezuela President Rómulo Gallegos, a well-respected writer, was deposed from his presidential role after a few months, and this coup was a predecessor to the authoritarian government of Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s. Colombian Gabriel García Márquez worked in Venezuela as a journalist during this period and claims that one of the numerous models he used for writing his novel about the prototypical dictator, El otoño del patriarca (1975, The Autumn of the Patriarch), was based on his experience living under the government of Pérez Jiménez. Several Venezuelan novelists have fictionalized this period, including Miguel Otero Silva.

One of the most stable regimes in Latin America during the post-WWII period was in Mexico, where the PRM (Partido Revolucionario Mexicano, or Mexican Revolutionary Party) that had evolved since the early-century Mexican Revolution became the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional). President Miguel Alemán led the PRI government in the early 1950s to what was described by some political and economic observers as the “Mexican Miracle,” although critics of the regime point to the severe social and economic inequities that persisted in Mexico into the 1950s and beyond. In Mexico, as in most Latin American nations, there was a mass movement from the rural areas to the city, and Mexico City followed a path of rapid growth in the entire post-WWII period. Carlos Fuentes attempted to capture the essence of this new urban life in one of the first urban novels to be published about this period in Mexico, La región más transparente (1958, Where the Air Is Clear). In this novel Fuentes was also highly critical of the new ruling class presiding over the Mexican Miracle.

In the 1940s and 1950s, then, writers such as Asturias, Carpentier, García Márquez, João Guimarães Rosa, Fuentes, and a host of others drew upon the venerable tradition of the Latin American writer as social critic, as voice of its indigenous traditions, its historic past and political present and its vast and heterogeneous cultures. In addition, these writers were interested in employing modernists aesthetics (including those of Jorge Luis Borges) to establish the groundwork for the new Latin American novel of the post-1945 period.

The Dictator Novel and Its Contexts: The Critique of the Colonial Legacy

As the writers of the 1960s Boom—Fuentes, García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa—surveyed the political scene of Latin America in the early 1970s, the situation was dismal. A military dictatorship had been in power in Brazil since 1964, military governments were entrenched in Argentina, Uruguay, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Paraguay, and General Augusto Pinochet had just overthrown the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende in 1973. As a response, these writers of the Boom and others decided to use the pen, writing novels dealing with real and fictionalized dictators to unmask the operations of not only the dictators that dominated Latin America at that moment but other strongmen who were part of the historic experience of these writers, such as two from the 1950s, General Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela and General Rojas Pinilla of Colombia. García Márquez had lived in both Colombia and Venezuela in the 1950s, so he had firsthand experience with such regimes.

The result was a series of novels about dictators, political authority, and the operations of power, from Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (1974, Reasons of State) and García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca to Mario Vargas Llosa’s more recent La fiesta del chivo (2000, The Feast of the Goat).

The early masterpiece of the dictator novel was Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (1946). Asturias had lived a good portion of his life under dictatorships in Guatemala. He was born in Guatemala in 1899, the year after Manuel Estrada Cabrera orchestrated the assassination of the extant president of Guatemala, ruling for two decades. Estrada Cabrera immediately militarized public education and passed a law to assure his control over workers. He signed a contract allowing the United Fruit Company into Guatemala under exceptionally favorable conditions, and his government made other deals that favored foreign investment, often to the detriment of local business interests and Guatemalan workers. Given the repression Asturias’s family suffered under the Estrada Cabrera regime, his parents moved out of the capital to a rural area when Asturias was still a young boy. There Asturias was in close contact with the local Mayan population and learned to speak Quiché. His interest in indigenous cultures continued for the rest of his life and eventually became an important part of his fiction, including the novel El Señor Presidente.

In high school in Guatemala City, Asturias was a student activist against the dictatorship of Estrada Cabrera, which finally ended in 1920 when the National Assembly declared him mentally incompetent; he responded by ordering his soldiers to bomb the city. Nevertheless, the opposition did manage to imprison the dictator, ending his regime. Asturias began writing a short story in 1922 about the horrifying experience of living under the Estrada Cabrera regime; over a process of many years this story evolved into the novel El Señor Presidente. The novel itself does not name the dictator or refer to specific years; much of the focus, however, is on the machinations of Estrada Cabrera in the year 1916, with the torture and politically motivated jailings of the sort that Asturias himself had suffered as a student. In 1923 Asturias was forced into political exile in Europe, where he continued writing his novel. While in Great Britain and France, he studied topics su...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction, Chronological Survey and Regional Survey
• Part II: Nations, Topics, Biographies, and Novels
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index