The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel by Raymond Leslie Williams

Author:Raymond Leslie Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2013-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

Many Latin American novelists of the 1960s accomplished what their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s had failed to do in their modernist writings. On the one hand, novelists of the 1960s wrote the harmonious, unified works that tended to develop from chaos to unity, from fragment to harmony, in effect, the perfect modernist texts. On the other hand, these writers of the 1960s actively promoted the new agreement between author and reader that Daiches had set forth with respect to the modernist novel. Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and many of their contemporaries published essays and granted interviews that were all part of this new contract. The most successful of these promoters of a new contract were Fuentes (above all in his book La nueva novela hispanoamericana) and Vargas Llosa, in his multiple stories about his stories, communicated in the form of interviews, lectures, and essays.

By 1967, the heterogeneity of the Latin American novel was more of a possibility than ever before. The publication of Rayuela, the presence of women writers such as Castellanos, Garro, and Lispector, and the appearance of overtly gay writers opened the door to new approaches to issues of sex and gender and the parallel demise of the predominant masculinist aesthetics.

García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, as well as works by Fernando del Paso, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes, contributed toward a body of “total” novels of a sort that modern writers aspired to produce. Less-known novelists such as Héctor Rojas Herazo and Elena Garro manifested their desire to be modern by engaging in the aesthetics of modernism and the search for the total novel.

A few of the writers who never were recognized as part of the select group of the Boom nevertheless occupied ambiguous positions inside and outside its parameters. Donoso, Cabrera Infante, Amado, and Lezama Lima, to varying degrees, participated in the Boom, interacted with its members in the private and public sphere, and perhaps even benefited, albeit in minor ways, from the rise of the Boom as a cultural phenomenon in Latin America.

On the other hand, numerous gifted writers in Latin America were either unable or unwilling to assume such a public identity; Mejía Vallejo, Garro, and Castellanos are just a few of the writers in that category of the “writer’s writer” who did not venture into the public sphere. The list of talented and productive writers in Latin America whose work has passed by with far less recognition than it deserves stretches far beyond the authors presented here.11 An overview of Latin American fiction of the 1960s does indicate that by 1967 the aesthetics of modernism were pervasive, and the initial signs of the postmodern were evident. Indeed, on the international scene, not only were some of the most talented masters of Spanish American fiction at their apogee, but also several others were writing in ways never before imagined.

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