Postmodern Literature in Latin America

▪ 1996

by Raymond Leslie Williams

       Latin- American literature blossomed and received international acclaim in the 1960s and 1970s with the so-called boom in the novel, a movement signaled by the publication of major works by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Argentine Julio Cortázar, and the Chilean José Donoso. (More recently, the Chilean Isabel Allende [see BIOGRAPHIES (Allende, Isabel )] has become one of the most widely read Latin-American novelists.) The rise of these writers was anticipated by the master who served as father figure for them all: Jorge Luis Borges. The cultural importance of the region also became evident in the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to several Latin-American writers beginning in the 1960s: the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias (in 1967), the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1971), García Márquez (1982), and the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1990).

      The Latin-American literature of the 1990s includes some of the writers from the 1960s, for Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, García Márquez, and Donoso have continued their brilliant literary careers. Cortázar died in 1984, but his heirs have published several of his writings posthumously. Beyond these novelists, however, a new generation of Latin-American writers has surfaced, and these writers are creating a heterogeneity in literature never seen before in the Hispanic world. This new generation includes the Argentine Ricardo Piglia, the Chilean Diamela Eltit, the Colombian R.H. Moreno-Durán, the Venezuelan José Balza, the Puerto Rican Luis Rafael Sánchez, and the Mexican José Emilio Pacheco.

      The writing of the 1990s in Latin America exhibits a trend toward postmodern experimentation, with Piglia, Eltit, Moreno-Durán, Balza, Sánchez, and Pacheco its most prominent exponents. Piglia and Eltit are the most radically experimental, and the fiction of Piglia is one of the most aesthetically innovative and politically significant since the writings of Cortázar. Piglia's fictional works consist of Nombre falso (1975; Assumed Name, 1995), Respiracíon artificial (1980; Artificial Respiration, 1994), Prisión perpetua (1988), and La ciudad ausente (1992). The four works can be seen as an outgrowth of Borges' writings, for they are fictional meditations that can also be read as essays. Piglia's fiction is a major rewriting of Argentine history and literature in a fictional world of provisional truths. Along with the work of Piglia and Fuentes' Terra nostra (1975), Eltit's total writing represents one of the most ambitious, challenging, and profound searches for historical origins published in Latin America. Her project consists of the four novels Lumpérica (1983), Por la patria (1986), El cuarto mundo (1988; The Fourth World, 1995), and Vaca sagrada (1991). As her first three books were written under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Eltit joined other young novelists in the creation of a writing of resistance.

      Moreno-Durán and Balza are less experimental in their writing, but they are concerned with much the same aesthetic and political program as are Piglia and Eltit. The roots of Moreno-Durán's hermetic trilogy of the 1980s, Fémina suite, are found not in the empirical reality of Colombia but rather, as is the case in much postmodern fiction, in modernist literature. The subjects of Moreno-Durán's seven books of fiction are writing and language; with his later novels he has assumed the role of the chronicler of postmodern Bogotá. Balza has published numerous volumes of fiction in various forms, including several books of different variations and combinations that he, like Moreno-Durán, considers his "exercises." Like Moreno-Durán, Piglia, and other postmodern writers with whom he closely identifies, Balza often blurs the line between fictional and essayistic discourses, writing fictions about literature and essays in a fictional mode.

      After having previously published short fiction and plays, Sánchez brought postmodern fiction to the forefront of Puerto Rican culture with the publication in 1976 of La guaracha del macho Camacho (Macho Camacho's Beat, 1980). He continued his postmodern writings with a second novel, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1989). After the breakdown of the frontiers between popular and high culture already effected by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Severo Sarduy, Sánchez's novelization of the popular culture of Caribbean music and American television in Macho Camacho's Beat was a logical step in the Caribbean postmodern.

      Pacheco is just one of a group of postmodern writers in Mexico that includes Salvador Elizondo, Luis Arturo Ramos, and Carmen Boullosa. Signs of early postmodernism were evident in Mexico as early as the late 1960s, and Pacheco's novel Morirás lejos (1967, You Will Die in a Distant Land, 1987) has some of the qualities of such writing. The postmodern character of the novel betrays and subverts the unity suggested in reading it as an ultimately harmonious, modernist text. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ramos and Boullosa have published high-quality postmodern fiction.

      Thus, there are numerous postmodern tendencies in the Latin-American fiction of the past two decades. The centres of this literary production are Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone nations. Never constituted to be a repetition or a duplication of the boom of the 1960s, this heterogeneous and often political fiction marks several directions for Latin-American literature at the end of the century.

Raymond Leslie Williams is professor of Spanish at the University of Colorado. His writings include The Postmodern Novel in Latin America.

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