Preface

The subject of this book is the postmodern novel in Spanish America, with focus on the fiction written from the l970s to the present. Given the range of postmodern cultural activity in the Americas in recent decades, I often use the plural postmodernities in recognition of the heterogeneity that I wi1l explore in each chapter. One theorist recently published a book titled Against postmodernism because of (as he himself admitted from the outset) the "irritation" of the omnipresent discourse of and about postmodernism in academia today. My study has been written with a full awareness of the irritation many scholars feel about the term postmodernism and, in a minor way, as a response to my own irritation with the proliferation of articles and books on postmodernism today. In particu1ar, I am responding to the looseness and vagueness surrounding the term postmodernism in the context of Latin American literature. The most notable critics who write against postmodernism tend to be critical theorists with a relatively weak background in contemporary fiction, such as Alex Callinicos and Fredric Jameson. I am a scholar of Latin American Literature writing---- I will be clear about my position from the beginning--in favor of postmodernism.

I am fully aware that there is no common agreement on the exact definition of the postmodern novel and that several critics have questioned the appropriateness of using the term postmodern when speaking of Latin America. On the other hand, others have argued that Latin America, in fact, set the precedent of postmodernity long before the notion appeared in the North Atlantic regions. Theorists such as Cal1inicos and Jameson have simplified the concept of what contemporary postmodern fiction writing is, and then, in turn, questioned the political function of this supposedly simple and popular fiction. One of my several interests is to reveal and hopefully elucidate the political in the Latin American postmodern: I will argue that the postmodern novel is as political as its more traditional (realist-naturalist) and modern (modernist) predecessors in Latin America.

My point of departure is the assumption that Latin America is concurrently a region of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies, a fact supported by numerous scholars. Many of its rural areas, small communities, and villages are still premodern; most of its major cities have been undergoing an intense process of modernization since the l93Os and l94Os, and some urban sectors of Latin American society are as postmodern as Los Angeles, Boulder, Miami, New York, and Paris. In this book, I am concerned primarily, of course, with the fiction produced under the sign of the postmodern, but, rather than entering yet another inevitably futile (and perhaps ideologically or aesthetically limiting) exercise in defining postmodern fiction, I will discuss a broad range of the postmodernities that correspond to the different nations, regions, and conditions in Latin America.

This book was born in l989 for several reasons. On the one hand, I had comp1eted a book, The Colombia Nope1, 1844--1987, in which the last chapter offered a brief, schematic view of modem and postmodern fiction in Colombia. This chapter left me with an interest in expanding and refining those ideas in a broader, Latin American context. In the fall of l989, I offered a graduate seminar at the University of Colorado on the postmodern novel in Latin America, which forged beyond the schemes introduced in the book on the Colombian novel. In that seminar (and several similar seminars that followed), we read a variety of contemporary Latin American fictions within the context of the ongoing critical and theoretical dialogue on postmodernism, beginning with the writings of Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, Jameson, and others. At the end of that semester, in December of l989, I went to Mexico City and found myself explaining my recent seminar at a dinner in Carlos Fuentes's home to a group of Mexican intellectuals. After listening patiently to my brief description of the seminar, the Mexican cultural critic Roger Bartra lamented that the Mexicans were still concerned about becoming modern, and here the gringos were already teaching seminars on postmodernity. Later that evening, while watching U.S. troops invade Panama on CNN in the Hotel Maria Cristina, I decided to write this book. I thought of the project then as a logical culmination of my readings in postmodern theory, as a response to the many Roger Bartras in Latin America (and the United States, too), and as an outgrowth of my own postmodern experience in Latin America over the past two decades--including watching CNN in numerous hotels throughout Latin America while I skimmed Gabriel Garcia Marquez novels or read the local press.

Most scholars of Latin American literature and culture, including my friend Roger Bartra, are far less skeptical about postmodernism in Latin America today than they were a decade ago. Recent Latin American cultural and political magazines have published numerous artic1es related to issues of postmodernity, such as Nuevo Texto Critico and Boundary 2, which have dedicated special numbers to this matter. There have been a broad range of responses to these issues in Latin America. Some critics, such as the Chilean Nelson Osorio, consider it a foreign importation and sign of cultura1 imperialism, just as the nationalist intellectuals of the l920s resisted the modern novel of the avant-garde writers who were hidden in sma1l (and often elite) pockets of Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Havana, and a few other cities. Given the cultura1 interaction that Europe has always maintained with the Americas, beginning with the Spanish language, this nationalist argument seems as questionable now as it was in the l920s.

Several social scientists and cultural critics have set forth much more substantial arguments against the postmodern in Latin America. Two prominent Latin American voices, the Chilean cultural critic Jose Joaquin Brunner and the Mexican philosopher Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, both arguing from Latin American perspectives strongly influenced by Jurgen Habermas, are highly critical of the postmodern. For Brunner and Habermas, postmodern culture is one of mass media manipulated by the dominating classes. Sanchez Vasquez argues that postmodern culture is essentially conservative in that it reproduces the Cultural forms of the dominant ideology. Brunner, Sanchez Vasquez, and some other Latin American intellectuals, such as Fredric Jameson in the early 1980s, find little to recommend the postmodern, although none of these critics makes specific reference to contemporary Latin American fiction in their generalized condemnation of the postmodern. Certainly the recent work of Linda Hutcheon, particularly The Politics of Postmodernism, has done much to find value in the postmodern, including its critical politica1 practices. Jameson's recent Postmodernism or the CuItura1 Logic of Late Capitalism also recognizes politics in postmodernism that the followers of Habermas have been re1uctant to see, including Jameson himself in early writings on postmodernism.;

"Is there a story?" the narrator of Ricardo Piglia's Artificial Respiration" (l980) asks at the beginning of the novel, and one narrator of Car1os Fuentes's Holy Place (1967) asks "Is there another place?" The possibilities of telling a story and of telling it in this place are questionable in Latin America today, after Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for very different reasons. It was also prob1ematic to tell a story under the military regimes of the 1970s and to fix the locus of the telling of these stories. These are all issues of the postmodern writings of Jose Emilio Pacheco, Ricardo Piglia, Carlos Fuentes, and others.

A lively debate on postmodern culture and society has arisen in Latin America over the past decade. Young writers, such as the Venezuelan Jose Balza, the Colombian R. H. Moreno-Duran and the Chilean Diamela Eltit, consider themselves postmodern and politically progressive, despite the positions of the neo-Marxists Brunner and Sanchez Vasquez. In another postmodern direction, the Cuban Severo Sarduy, a key figure of these Latin-American postmodernities, has found his artistic roots in Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, and has searched for a divorce between ideology and writing.

In Santiago de Chile, on the other hand, an impressive group of young intellectuals between the ages of 35 and 50, who for the most part survived the Pinochet dictatorship (l973- l988) living in Chile as underground resistors have surfaced as Chile's leading writers, cultural critics, and artists. The young novelist Diamela Eltit, who has published four books, heads the group Symbolically and collaborates on their new journal Revista de Critica Cultural, directed by Nelly Richard. They conceive of their work in literature, criticism, and the visual arts as their space in una acena de le escritura (a scene of ecriture).

A different "scene of ecriture" has arisen out of complex cultural and political contexts in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. During the early l980s, a phenomenon of marginality in Buenos Aires similar to the situation in Chile resulted in the publication of such diverse texts as Alejandra Pizamik's violent rewriting of a vampire legend (an underground and subculture best-seller throughout the l980s), Ricardo Piglia'S experimental literary and historical fiction, and in Argentina the cu1tural speculations of various critics on postmodernism. Colombian inte1lectuals have organized several public discussions on postmodernity in Bogota over the past five years (in some of which l have participated), and Colombian novelists such as Albalucia Angel and R. H. Moreno-Duran have numerous affinities with foreign postmoderns.

The scene with respect to postmodern culture is very complex in Mexico City, where Jameson is well known, Octavio Paz has questioned the very concept of postmodernity, and one of several feminist groups has begun publishing a journal called El debate feminista, with collaborations of writers such as Diamela Eltit and A1balucia Angel.

These discussions and, above all, the Latin American literally production of recent decades, suggest that there' has been an epochal break in Latin America that took place in the late l960s. From the late 1960s, as I will demonstrate in the upcoming chapters, a change in attitudes toward fiction and a change in novelistic production is evident. These changes correspond in many ways to what is currently being identified as tostn1odern in First World or North Atlantic academia.

Concepts of postmodern society and a postmodern fiction began to appear in Latin American intellectual circles in the mid-1980s, for both in Latin America and among First World academics actively engaged in the study of Indo-Afro-Iberoamerican culture. By the late l980s, lines of division had been demarcated, as the "debate" had begun between critics and proponents of the postmodern. Since then, numerous social scientists, cultural critics, and academics have taken positions on postmodernism in Latin America, including (in addition to those already mentioned above) George Yudice, Santiago Colas, Neil Larson, and John Beverly in the United States; Hernan Vidal, Martin Hopenhayn, and Norbert Lechner in Chile, Fernando Calderon from Bolivia; Ernesto Laclau; the Brazilians Luiz Costa Lima, Renato Ortiz, Heloisa Buarque de Holanda, and Silviano Santiago; Jesus Martin-Barbero; the Venezuelans Celeste Olalquiga and Luis Britto Garcia; Ricardo Gutierrez Mouat; the Uruguayan Jorge Ruffinelli; Ticio Escobar in Paraguay; Antonio Benitez Rojo from Cuba; the Colombians Alonso de Toro and Carlos Rincon; the Argentine Beatriz Sarlo.

My approach to the numerous and heterogeneous Latin American postmodernities is to discuss a group of the most representative, innovative, and postmodern novelists writing today. In chapter 1, I offer a general introduction to the development of Spanish-American modern and postmodern fiction, beginning with the origins of both the modern and postmodern in Borges, within several contexts, including the context of truth claims. I refer briefly to the historical discussion of truth claims as articulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, and then address this question within the context of modern and postmodern fiction in Spanish America. In chapters 2 through 5, I analyze the production of novels from four regions: Mexico, the Andean region (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia), the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), and the Caribbean (the Spanish-speaking islands of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico). In each of these four regions, I offer a brief introduction to the postmodern cultural scene in general, and then analyze three or four texts of writers such as Severo Sarduy, Manuel Puig, Jose Donoso, Ricardo Piglia, Luis Rafael S4nchez, Diamela E1tit, Salvador Elizondo, Jose Balza, Jorge Enrique Adoum, and R. H, Moreno-Dur4n. Hardly any of the novelists I study are "popular" writers (with the exception of Puig and Donoso), although each has a respectable readership in Latin America and, in most cases, a substantive body of work consisting of at least three novels. Chapter 6, "In the Margins," is dedicated to writers who have been marginalized, such as women writers, or who write about marginalized groups. I include commentary on both modernist and postmodern writers, as well as on the fiction of the two countries most frequently marginalized in discussions of Latin American culture, Brazil (linguistically marginalized in Latin America) and Paraguay (geographically marginalized from the West). This chapter also deals with Central American fiction, gay and lesbian writing, and the testimonio. Much of this fiction does not fit easily into most concepts of postmodernism rather than forcing them into a category, I will discuss their affinities and differences with the variety of postmodernities described in the previous chapters.

I would like to thank the Council on Research and Creative Work of the University of Colorado at Boulder, which provided a semester research leave to advance this project. I would also like to express my appreciation to the Dean's Fund for the Humanities. Institutions in Latin America have kindly afforded me the opportunity to present and discuss ideas in this book at their early stage of development, including the Universidad Javeriana and Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango in Bogota, the Universidad Central in Caracas, and the Universidad de Caldas in Manizales, Colombia. Several groups of graduate students were extremely helpful to my finding coherence in this project, particularly the participants in that l989 seminar, which included Guillermo Garcia-Corales, Laura Lopez Fernandez, Sandra Garabano, Yolanda Forero-Villegas, Maria Dolores Blanco-Arnejo, Alicia Rolon, Gina Ponce de Le6n, and Alicia Tabler. I would also like to thank graduate assistants Jana DeJong, Michael Buzan and ]ennifer Margit Valko. I appreciate the opportunity I had to speak formally and informality with numerous writers about the state of Latin American cu1ture and literature, including their own; writers Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ricardo Piglia, Diamela Eltit, R. H. Moreno-Dur4n, Jose Balza, Jose Emilio Pacheco, Severo Sarduy, Luis Rafael Sanchez, and Federico Patan have been both generous and helpful, and have affected this book in a variety of ways, directly and indirectly. John Brushwood, Howard Goldblatt, George McMurray, and Donald Schmidt have made useful suggestions on the manuscript in its different stages. The ideas set forth in this book, however, are mine, as are its inevitable errors in fact and critical reading.