Recent Work

Raymond L. Williams
Department of Hispanic Studies
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

Published in : BULLETIN OF HISPANIC STUDIES, 2002

FROM MODERNISMO TO THE POSTMODERN: THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY DESIRE TO BE MODERN AND SPANISH AMERICAN FICTION

The concepts of Hispanic modernismo and posmodernismo have been occasionally discussed within the context of European Modernism and European/Anglo-American postmodernism, as well as other isms related to modernity. Indeed, the discussions have been abundant on postmodernism and the like, but the results have frequently created more ambiguity--perhaps even confusion--than clarification. The current trend to identify so much contemporary literature as inevitably "postmodern" certainly has not helped the situation. In this brief discussion, I will point to similarities and differences in Spanish American fiction among the following concepts: modernismo, vanguardia, Modernism, and postmodernism. The central focus of these comments is the novel published in Spanish America, and my understanding of the postmodern novel has been informed by theorists and critics of postmodern fiction such as Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, and Ihab Hassan, among others (1).
Before entering into a more detailed and nuanced consideration of these four concepts and Latin American fiction, I offer basic assumptions as a point of departure for this discussion. First, Spanish American modernismo was the literary movement headed by Rub¨¦n Dar¨ªo that was at its height from approximately 1888 to 1915. This modernismo was a phenomenon primarily of poets, but included some incursions into the other genres, including, of course, the novel. The term posmodernismo was originally meant to refer to poetry of the early part of the twentieth century following modernismo, and is of little interest in this essay focussed on Spanish American fiction. With respect to vanguardia, I refer to the variety of avant-garde cultural movements in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, the most recognized of which were the Contempor¨¢neos in Mexico, Jorge Luis Borges and his cohorts in Buenos Aires, Vicente Huidobro in Chile, and the like. I use the term "Modernism" to refer to that literature first associated with the European Modernism of the period approximately from the 1890s to the 1930s. This Modernism has been important in Latin America from the 1920s to the present and, as I will explain, was central to the rise of the Latin American novel in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Its counterpart, postmodernism, is a variant of Modernism apparent since the 1960s, and particularly evident in Latin America since 1968 (2). Each of these assumptions and terms require elaboration and I will attempt clarification of the Latin American case primarily by the use of the examples of specific Spanish American novels.

I. Introduction

Writing in the 1960s, Octavio Paz stated that for over a century, the Latin American writer has desired to be modern. Paz affirmed: "Modernity is our style for a century. It's the universal style. To want to be modern seems crazy: we are condemned to be modern, since we are prohibited from the past and the future" (3). Several generations of Latin American writers since the late nineteenth century have exhibited their urgent desire to be modern or to participate in modernity. This post-Romantic desire has assumed numerous guises and variations for Latin American writers over the twentieth century. Indeed, since the modernismo of the late nineteenth century, Latin American writers have desired to be modern, and the concepts under consideration here, such as modernismo, Modernism, and the postmodern, represent different ways of exhibiting this desire. Consequently, there are also some continuities and similarities in these literary manifestations of the modern.
One phenomenon that has made Latin America a special case (when compared to Europe and the United States) is the matter of national identity and nation building. This ongoing process of nation building frequently involved the promotion and exaltation of traditional and autochtonous values. At the same time, individuals, groups and institutions in favor of promoting national identity have frequently viewed modernity, modernization, and the desire to be modern as threats to national values. Consequently, throughout the twentieth century, from the modernismo of Dar¨ªo to the postmodern of Sarduy, these literary manifestations of the desire to be modern have been not only questioned as legitimate literatures, but also attacked as anti-national. Thus, modernista poetry was identified by some nationalists as "escapist," the Latin American new novel was called by some "imitative" of the European, and postmodern literature and theory have been widely attacked as "foreign models" "imposed" on Latin America. Similarly, the influential critic of his time Arturo Torres Rioseco, writing in 1929, described the avant-garde novel of the 1920s as "inappropriate" forms of literary expression (4). Arguing along very similar lines, more than one contemporary critic has questioned whether it is possible to speak of a "postmodern" novel in regions still struggling with issues of modernity and modernization. As consistent as the desire to be modern has been the resistance to modernity.
Carlos Alonso's recent proposals about the Latin American writers' response to modernity emphasizes this resistance. Alonso explains:
Hence, the Spanish American text argues strenuously
for modernity, while it signals simultaneously in
a number of ways its distance from the demands of
modernity's rhetoric as a means of maintaining its
discursive power. In this way, the discourse of
modernity constitutes both the core of the Spanish
American work and the center from which it has to
flee in a centrifugal flight for the preservation
of its own rhetorical authority. The uniqueness
and particularity of the Spanish American postcolonial/
neocolonial ambivalent movement toward and away from
modernity (5).
Certainly Alonso is correct in observing the Latin American writer's ambivalent attitudes toward modernity. Nevertheless, Alonso inexplicably ignores some of the most successful manifestations of cultural modernity in Latin America--such as the Latin American Modernist novel of the 1940s and 1950s. Similarly, he fails to recognize the enormous contributions of the novels of the 1960s (Modernist) Boom in the cultural debates that underline the ambivalent attitudes toward modernity. Indeed, from the beginning of the century to the end, it has been difficult for writers and scholars of Latin American literature to embrace their modernity.

II. Modernismo and the Desire to Be Modern

The literature of fin de siecle modernismo and vanguardia shares commonalities with several other of the modern impulses. Modernismo has been amply recognized, of course, primarily as a poetic movement. Nevertheless, some of the modernista novels were as widely acclaimed in their time as were the novels of the 1960s Boom, and deservedly so. The aesthetic accomplishments of Manuel D¨ªaz Rodr¨ªguez's Sangre patricia and Enrique Larreta's La gloria de don Ramiro were remarkable. More interestingly, however, is the totalizing impulse of La gloria de don Ramiro, which makes it comparable to some of the totalizing novels of the 1960s, such as Vargas Llosa's La casa verde and Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez's Cien a?os de soledad.
In Latin America, the early twentieth century really belongs culturally to the nineteenth in many ways, particularly at the immediate turn of the century, when Spanish American modernismo was, among other things, the Spanish-language version of the Parnassian and Symbolist writing from France. The most "modern" (in the general sense of contemporary) writing of the period was generally perceived to be the poetry of modernismo. The subjects of novels written in the early part of the century also tended to deal with end-of-the-century matters, frequently problems and conflicts related to the old aristocracies and patriarchal order that still lingered in power in most regions of Latin America. Many of the writers of the period, such as the modernistas and Tom¨¢s Carrasquilla, made statements or literary manifestos expressing their desire to be modern. Nevertheless, they were not uniformly consistent in their ability to reject the past and embrace modernity. Carrasquilla's fiction, for example, offered a nostalgic tone that tended to exalt the past.
In this first moment of desiring to be modern, dealing with the first two decades of the century, the modernistas of Spanish America predominated only in poetry, for the production of modernista novels was relatively scarce, even though An¨ªbal Gonz¨¢lez indicates that over forty modernista novels were published. The modernista poets of Latin America thought of themselves as the most cosmopolitan and "modern" intellectuals of their time and, in many ways, they were.
Modernista writers had ideas about literary language that were later developed by writers of vanguardia and of the 1960s Boom. As Jrade has pointed out, the modernistas proposed a worldview that imagined the universe as a system of correspondences in which language was the double capable of revealing profound truths regarding the order of the cosmos (6). As did many of the major novelists decades later, they sought to invent a new discourse that might reveal hidden realities as well as address matters related to the empirical reality of Latin America. Novels such as the Venezuelan Manuel D¨ªaz Rodr¨ªguez's Sangre patricia (1902) reveal both the search for profound truths and the concern for the political reality of Venezuela. The modernista writers shared with postmodern writers a certain self-conscious reflection on language; nevertheless, neither D¨ªaz Rodr¨ªguez, nor Enrique Larreta nor Ricardo Jaimes Freyle dedicated entire books to this reflection in the manner of postmodern writers such as Severo Sarduy or H¨¦ctor Libertella. This commmon interest, however, justifies Jrade's observation that "The move from modernismo to the avant-garde to the deconstructionist discourse of today's postmodernism thus appears to be more of a gentle slide than a series of cataclysmic realignments" (7). Indeed, some of the differences between modernismo and the postmodern are only differences of degree and emphasis.
During each period of literary expression of the modern throughout the twentieth century, there is a competing view that might be considered more scientific, pragmatic, material. During the period of modernismo, a competing perception of being modern embraced a more scientic model, even though many aspects of this late nineteenth-century "science" obviously are considered pseudo-science today. Numerous forms of rationalist intellectual rigor were in vogue throughout Latin America at the turn of the century, particularly positivism, which promoted the idea of progress with empirical science and free enterprise as its vehicle. A positivistic, materialistic, and pragmatic discourse predominated in literary expression. In Latin America, the novelistic outcome of this more scientific world view was the realist and naturalist novel, which in general was more broadly read and considered more important among most intellectuals of the period than the modernista novel.
In both the politics and culture of much of Latin America during the early part of the century, the competing view of reality basically involved the modern and progressive ideas of science and positivism versus competing ideas that related to traditionalist worldviews and cultural values. Many of the writers made statements expressing a desire to be "modern," yet they frequently embraced seemingly competing views of what it might mean to be modern. For the new middle classes, being modern meant assuming ideas of positivism and pragmatism; for some of the writers, being modern meant rejecting these ideas and embracing a combination of new European aesthetics and certain ideals of Romanticism. Aesthetic programs were effected in a manner similar to the way politics were practiced, i.e. in a contradictory and chaotic fashion. Many of these writers, such as Carlos Reyles and P¨ªo Gil, wrote in the mold of their nineteenth-century predecessors: they were much more concerned about immediate political circumstances than the aesthetics of fiction. An exception to this generalization was Mariano Azuela, who was both politically motivated and a master in the art of fiction. For Reyles and P¨ªo Gil, being modern meant associating with a pragmatic vision of the world ushered in by the scientists. Consequently, they thought of themselves as "modern" even though they are not generally read today as "progressive" writers.
The fiction of the Uruguayan novelist Carlos Reyles embodied some of these contradictions, for quite the opposite of modernista writers and many of the intellectuals of the period, Reyles supported positivism and pragmatism of fin de siecle progress. His novel Raza de Ca¨ªn (1900)--written in the realist-naturalist mode--tells the story of a pragmatic character who dominates an idealist. Reyles wrote in favor of the accumulation of material wealth, a position rarely found among intellectuals of the period, although, of course, there were many other writers who embraced a program of positivism, nineteenth-century science, and material progress as priorities for Latin America.
For the Venezuelan D¨ªaz Rodriguez and the conservative intellectuals in Colombia (i.e. Jos¨¦ Manuel Marroqu¨ªn), being modern meant a "regeneration"--a reactionary move. The scientific view was that of the Naturalists and positivists, who were obviously unaware of how simplistically their Manichean schemes with their binary oppositions operated. Of course, some writers blurred the boundaries between this very binary opposition itself of modernismo versus realist-naturalist. As "modern" as these writers liked to think of themselves, many of the social and political debates implied in these novels were fundamentally outgrowths of nineteenth-century ideas and cultural values.
As Jrade convincingly argues, modernismo represents Spanish America's full-fledged intellectual response and challenge to modernity (8). The resulting novelistic dialogue with the new modern values and ideas was complex because it was shaped by numerous conditions. In this period, novels such as Sicardi's Libro extra?o (1894-1902) and G¨¢lvez's El mal metaf¨ªsico (1916) were among those that set forth these complexities. Above all, the contradictions of these writers were evident, for neither their aesthetic nor their ideological programs were consistent and coherent. For this reason and other factors, the novel was a problematic genre at the beginning of the twentieth century, and there was no "pure" or coherent modernista novelistic project (any more than there was one uniform type of "postmodern" novel at the end of the century). Throughout the remainder of the century, it is questionable if it is possible to conceive of the Latin American novel as an embodyment of any one aesthetic program, be it modernista, vanguardista, or somehow "postmodern." In many ways, modernista fiction appeared to be as incoherent and marginal as did the postmodern novel several decades later.

III. Vanguardia and Modernist Aesthetics

The cultural debates were intense in Spanish America during the 1920s and 1930s, and many of the discussions focussed on the literatures of vanguardia dealt with the dichotomies--and false dichotomies--of periods before and after. Several scholars of the vanguardia period have underlined the connections between this vanguardia and the later writing of the 1940s, the 1950s, and the novels of the Boom (9). At the time, the novelists of vanguardia, such as Jaime Torres Bodet, Mart¨ªn Ad¨¢n, Enrique Labrador Ruiz, and Vicente Huidobro, were fascinated with not only the new European avant-garde in general, but also with the innovations of the European and American Modernist novel in specific--the fiction of Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and others.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the desire to be modern took the Spanish American writer in two general directions--toward a traditionalist's reaction against modernity and toward an embracement of modernity in the mode of vanguardia. Among novelists interested in modernity, there were the writers committed to exploring the possibilities of New Worldism or criollismo who were profoundly concerned with issues of national identity and cultural autonomy. A second group of writers and intellectuals conceived of being modern as the appropriation of European avant-garde Modernist aesthetics, particularly as they were practiced in France, Spain, and Italy. They were motivated by the Surrealist writings of Andr¨¦ Breton, the Futurist writings of Marinetti, and the like. For some Latin American intellectuals and in some of their texts, these two basic concepts of being modern operated dialogically. Guiraldes, for example, has been associated with both groups, and his Don Segundo Sombra (1926) contains stylistic registers of both types of fiction (10). From this group came novelists who have been far less recognized than Guiraldes, Gallegos and Rivera, such as Mart¨ªn Ad¨¢n, Mar¨ªa Luisa Bombal, Juan Emar, Enrique Labrador Ruiz, Dulce Mar¨ªa Loynaz, Xavier Villarrutia, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Jos¨¦ F¨¦lix Fuenmayor. Like many of the modernista predecessors and their postmodern followers, they occupy a marginal, liminal space as writers and as a part of literary history.
Most of the groups of vanguardia were inspired by European Modernist aesthetic programs and the writers they mentioned most often were, in addition to Joyce and Proust, the Spaniard Benjam¨ªn Jarn¨¦s. In their typically brief fictional experiments, they pursued innovative narrative forms, exploring the possibilities of interiorization of characters, the use of multiple points of view, striking imagery, and interior monologues. In some cases, such as Torres Bodet and Arqueles Vela, they were more effective in undermining the conventions of traditional (realist-naturalist) fiction than in constructing their own fully developed novels. Beyond being strictly novelists, writers such as Dulce Mar¨ªa Loynaz, Gilberto Owen, and Macedonio Fern¨¢ndez were engaged in a multi-facted cultural activity to modernize Spanish American culture, including its fiction.
Loynaz, Owen, Fern¨¢ndez, and many of these novelists of vanguardia often related the stories of the interior lives of their characters, rather than dwelling on their immediate surroundings. Owen's Novela como nube is the story of the protagonist's search for the ideal woman. The author uses surrealist imagery to communicate the moods of this protagonist; in the end, the vague imagery makes it unclear exactly what is real and unreal of the protagonist's women as well as the contents of the novel. Fern¨¢ndez's Papeles de recienvenido (1929) is even more radical in its irreverence toward everyday, empirical reality, for the narrator's perspective is frequently incongruent with standard perceptions of reality. The spirit of radical experimentation in these books makes them directly comparable to much experimental postmodern fiction.
As P¨¦rez Firmat has suggested, vanguard fiction exists between parentheses (11). From its inception, the novel of vanguardia occupied a liminal space--a parenthetical placement--that has been amply documented in the hostile articles and reviews written at the time; much of this critique is easily comparable to a similar reaction against postmodern fiction in the last three decades of the century, for they also occupy a liminal space, a matter about which novelist Diamela Eltit has insisted. The questions that interested Torres Bodet, Macedonio Fern¨¢ndez, and numerous other writers of vanguardia--such as characterization in fiction--were of relatively little interest to most readers and critics at the time. Alejo Carpentier and Demetrio Aguilera Malta, in Ecu¨¦-Yamba-O (1933) and Don Goyo (1933) respectively, bridged the gap for many readers and critics who shared some of the interests of the Modernists, but were also deeply concerned with debates on identity and cultural autonomy in the New World.
The Spanish American novelists of vanguardia, nevertheless, were a cultural minority who pursued an aesthetics inspired by European and North American Modernists. Their novels are virtually forgotten in Latin America except for the scholars of the 1970s and 1980s who resuscitated some of these works, as well as by postmodern Latin American novelists of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Diamela Eltit and Ricardo Piglia, who felt an aesthetic alliance with these frequently marginalized writers. This condition of marginality from the mainstream, in fact, is one of the most notable connections between this vanguardia and the innovators of the 1970s and 1980s that scholars have identified as postmodern. The novels of vanguardia offer different degrees of innovation and experimentation with time, plot, and character, clearly distancing themselves, in the process, from the traditional (realist-naturalist) modes of Rivera, Gallegos, and other criollistas.
Deemed "inappropriate" for Latin American readers by Arturo Torres Rioseco, the writers of the vanguardia were, in reality, proposing a fundamental change in the cultural paradigm (12). For David Daiches, the Modernist novel in the United States and Europe meant a basic breakdown of the implied agreement between author and reader about what was significant in the human experience (13). In Latin America, this basic breakdown began in the 1920s with the publication of the first novels of the vanguardia and the cultural debates promoted by Torres Bodet and Arqueles Vela in Mexico, by Huidobro in Chile, by Bioy Casares, Borges, and Victoria Ocampo in Argentina and by numerous other intellectuals. Whatever the more contemporary assessments and revisions of this fiction may be, most of these works were viewed as failures as novels in their times, despite the aesthetic qualities they offered.
These novelists--Arqueles Vela, Torres Bodet, Ad¨¢n, Huidobro, Bioy Casares, and Bombal--did not represent a unified cultural or ideological front, nor were they all necessarily associated with the old aristocracies. To the contrary, they were a heterogeneous group with limited communication among themselves, holding diverse literary and political agendas, as well as different ideas about their Modernist project. They were all afflicted by different degrees of a desire to be modern and held different levels of enthusiasm for the new modernist cultural agenda. Clearly, they rejected the norms of the realist-naturalist tradition, and thus shared a similar spirit of innovation and rebellion with the modernistas.
These writers, like their predecessors of modernismo and their future cohorts of the postmodern, were often more connected to their local settings than many of their critics claimed. Mart¨ªn Ad¨¢n and Torres Bodet, for example, made references to specific places in Lima and Mexico City in their fiction. They expanded national geography in such a way that the urban spaces were now at the center, and this also constituted a relatively new approach in Latin American fiction. Bioy Casares and many of the writers of vanguardia were often misunderstood or misinterpreted by their contemporaries with respect to their use of space. The vanguardista fiction writers did indeed use their nations--both its urban centers and its rural areas--as settings. Their objective, however, was to be "universal," and many of them viewed their cities as more similar to European novelistic spaces than the pampa or the llano. Mar¨ªa Luisa Bombal, on the other hand, sets her works in casas de campo in Chile. She is yet another special case in Latin America, for she is not frequently associated with groups of vanguardia.
Jaime Torres Bodet and Vicente Huidobro wrote inventive works the reading of which requires a new (Modernist) tacit agreement between author and reader about what is significant. Torres Bodet's short novel Proserpina rescatada relates the story of the relationship between Delfino Castro Vald¨¦s and Proserpina Jim¨¦nez. Delfino is a doctor and Proserpina (also called Dolores Jim¨¦nez) is a medical student who becomes his lover. The main structuring device for this novel is memory and, consequently, it is a fragmented novel that follows the illogical pattern of the associative process involved in memory. This basic fragmentation of the structure appears as a parallel fragmentation at other levels of reading. Torres Bodet's desire to be modern is so overt in Proserpina rescatada that it could be described as an anxiety of the modern that recalls Rub¨¦n Dar¨ªo's similar anxiety, and could well be compared to the intense desire to be m odern evident in Fuentes's Terra Nostra (1975). The characterization of Proserpina underlines, in addition to her multiple identities, her modernity.
Proserpina rescatada is a Modernist text and, consequently, an evident forerunner of the rise of Modernist fiction in the 1940s and 1950s in Latin America. It is also a less obvious forerunner to postmodern fiction of the 1970s and 1980s. Like much postmodern fiction, the main interests of Proserpina rescatada are more ontological than epistemological, for the ontological status of Proserpina is frequently ambiguous (14). Vague in its thematic focus, the main subject of the novel is actually language itself, and self consciously so, as is the case of much postmodern metafiction published several decades later, particularly that of Severo Sarduy, H¨¦ctor Libertella and Ricardo Piglia.
Unlike Proserpina rescatada, Vicente Huidobro's M¨ªo Cid Campeador is one of the least discussed novels of the vanguardia. Nevertheless, it is a noteworthy work, particularly in comparison to later innovative fiction. Like Proserpina rescatada and the postmodern fiction of Sarduy, it is an exercise in digressions. The use of a mythical literary figure as the protagonist is also typical of the vanguardist writer who desired to be modern by being "universal."
Proserpina rescatada and M¨ªo Cid Campeador are the products of inventive, entertaining, and iconoclastic novelists who were, in effect, proposing a new idea of what was significant (to paraphrase Daiches) in the reader's experience of reading fiction. They were also proposing a new cultural paradigm. Their Modernist projects had neither the ambition nor the depth of the high Modernist texts that the novelists of the Boom completed in the 1960s--the brief Proserpina rescatada will never compete with Vargas Llosa's La casa verde for a place in the canon of the most accomplished Modernist texts of the century. Arqueles Vela and Ad¨¢n were perhaps less entertaining than Torres Bodet and Huidobro, but equally committed to new ideas about what fiction might be. Arqueles Vela's El Caf¨¦ de Nadie deals with a central character and a setting, and the latter predominates. There is virtually no plot. Given Arqueles Vela's interest in being "universal" (i.e. "modern"), he provides no names for the city or its streets.
The protagonist of El Caf¨¦ de Nadie, Mabelina, is in ongoing crisis. Her fragmented identity, like that of Torres Bodet's Proserpina, is one of being in itself. This problem of being and the generalized vagueness and anonymity of the other characters places this book, like much postmodern fiction, in the sphere of ontological interests. In El Caf¨¦ de Nadie, however, the author is fully and enthusiastically committed to exploring every possible avenue for subverting any conventional concept of "character." Thus, the waiter is a hypothetical character, and the other characters are more beings in the process of collective and ongoing transformation than subjects of fixed and stable personalities. In this sense, it is a direct predecessor to such novels as Sarduy's Cobra.
The potentially excessive imagery in the fiction of Torres Bodet is even more cultivated in Mart¨ªn Ad¨¢n's La casa de cart¨®n. The other aspects of this work, however, are as little developed as they were in much Latin American avant-garde fiction, for La casa de cart¨®n is, in fact, another brief novelette, in this case consisting of ninety pages and thirty-eight brief narrative segments. Ad¨¢n's technical adventure is a remarkable precursor to Modernist novels that test the limits of technical innovation. Anticipating by two decades Agust¨ªn Y¨¢?ez's innovative stylistic procedures in the opening chapter of Al filo del agua, Ad¨¢n uses images virtually without employing conjugated verbs, thus creating a sense of timelessness.
As Unruh has point out in her discussion of the avant-garde, it could well be that Spanish American literature's time has come at the end of the century (rather than in the 1920s) precisely because it has been in tune with the cacophonous disclocation of our postmodern times (15). A rereading of these Spanish American texts, in fact, suggests that the experience of radical discontinuity is a story that the literature of Latin America has been attempting to tell about itself for an entire century--from modernismo to the postmodern.
In their desire to be modern, many of these novelists were more successful in writing against the conventions of traditional (realist-naturalist) fiction than they were in creating fully developed Modernist novels: there is no Ulysses hidden in the annals of the vanguardia. For the postmodern reader, they are provoking and often entertaining experiments. Given the overall unsure and insecure status of the national novel during this period, these brief experiments did little to assure the nascent middle-class reading public that each of the Latin American nations did indeed possess a mature national literary culture.

IV. The Rise of the Modernist Novel

The avant-garde writers of the 1920s and 1930s had laid the groundwork for a Modernist novel in Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s. Unfortunately, their work in fiction had relatively little immediate impact on the Spanish American novel; the more important forerunners for the rise of Modernist fiction Latin America were not writers such as Torres Bodet and Huidobro, but rather Proust, Dos Passos, Kafka, and Faulkner, in addition to other foreign Modernists. For novelists, aspiring to be modern in this period tended to consist of the desire to be the Latin American Dos Passos or the Latin American Faulkner. Paradoxically, the seminal Spanish American figure behind the rise of the Modernist novel and the reaffirmation of the right of invention in Spanish America was the short-fiction writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. In the case of the Latin American novel, during the 1940s and 1950s, the desire to be modern was played out primarily by employing the strategies of Modernist fiction. In this period, numerous cultural tensions surfaced, and writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, and Jos¨¦ Mar¨ªa Arguedas fictionalized attendant issues of cultural conflict, cultural difference, and hybridity.
Borges's promotion of avant-garde aesthetics in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, his innovative short fiction of the 1940s in the form of Ficciones, and his translations of Faulkner into Spanish, among other contributions, made him a central figure for the rise of the Modernist novel in Latin America. Of these contributions, his book Ficciones represented not only innovation just in terms of form, but a reaffirmation of the right of invention (16). Seemingly an obvious right for Modernist novelists in Europe and the United States, pure invention had been under attack from the traditionalists and criollistas, thus falling into disrepute. Given this background, Borges's reaffirmation of the right of invention was a cultural revolution in itself. El jard¨ªn de los senderos que se bifurcan (1941) and Ficciones (1944) suggested innovative, new paths for Latin American writers. Both Modernist and postmodern fiction are to be directly linked to these books: specific stories in each can be seen as groundwork for later Modernist and postmodern fiction.
The new Modernist fiction in Latin America was published by Asturias, Carpentier, and such recognized writers such as Agust¨ªn Y¨¢?ez, Juan Rulfo, and Leopoldo Marechal. Additional Modernist writers were Rosario Castellanos, David Vi?as, Antonio Di Benedetto, Yolanda Oreamuno, and Salvador Garmendia. The list of noteworthy Modernist novelists could potentially be quite long, but should also include, in the 1950s, Eduardo Caballero Calder¨®n, Miguel Otero Silva, and Ram¨®n D¨ªaz S¨¢nchez.
The narrative strategies appropriated by these Latin American Modernists could be easily associated with numerous European and North American fiction writers. These strategems included the use of interior monologues, stream of consciousness, fragmentation, varying points of view, neologisms, and frequent lack of causality. Just as important as these narrative techniques, however, were some fundamental changes of attitude that came with Modernism. One obvious change with the acceptance of new concepts of time, as well as the promotion of new concepts of space. The basic breakdown of the implied agreement between author and reader about what was significant in human experience (as postulated by Daiches, as suggested earlier) was evident: in the 1920s, this basic rupture had begun to take place in Latin America, but the breakdown became significant, widespread, and successful as promoted, above all, by Borges (17). Modernist fiction tended to present a chaotic and fragmented modern world in seemingly chaotic and fragmented texts. The Modernist text, nevertheless, tends to imply some kind of unity; the postmodern text, to the contrary, often leaves the fragments in unresolved contradiction.
As Brushwood has amply discussed, the clearest indicator of the rise of the new Modernist novel in Spanish America--another major shift in the cultural paradigm--was the appearance in successive years of Miguel Angel Asturias's El Se?or Presidente (1946), Agust¨ªn Y¨¢?ez's Al filo del agua (1947), Leopoldo Marchal's Ad¨¢n Buenosayres (1948), and Alejo Carpentier's El reino de este mundo (1949). With these books, the right of invention was evident; a radical rupture of the previous (realist-naturalist) implicit agreement between author and reader had taken place. The experience of radical discontinuity had become central to the culture (even though postmodern fiction became even more radical decades later).
During this period, Gabriel Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez and several other Latin American writers were intrigued by the possibilities Faulknerian narrative approaches could offer for telling stories in their respective regions. Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, David Vi?as, Di Benedetto, and Rulfo were immersed in the writing of Faulkner in the 1950s and produced Modernist texts crafted in the Faulknerian mode: La hojarasca (1955), by Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, Cay¨® sobre su rostro (1955) by Vi?as, El pent¨¢gano (1955) by Di Benedetto, and Pedro P¨¢ramo by Rulfo exhibit clear affiliations with Faulkner.
Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, Vi?as, Di Benedetto, and a host of other novelists of this period use a specific region to create a more "universal" (i.e. modern) human experience than had generally been the case for Latin American regionalists before the 1940s. This new type of regionalism, which one critic has identified as transcendent regionalism, is the type of Modernist fiction also cultivated by Juan Rulfo (18).
Galindo and Mallea changed the focus from the broad and external to the details of the characters' interior lives. A similar and significant change in the direction of Modernist aesthetics in Colombia was signaled by the presence of six fiction writers in the 1940s: Tom¨¢s Vargas Osorio, Rafael G¨®mez Pic¨®n, Elisa M¨²jica, Ernesto Camargo Mart¨ªnez, Jaime Ib¨¢?ez, and Jaime Ardila Casamitjana. Novels such as Ardila Casamitjana's Babel (1943), Ib¨¢?ez's Cada voz lleva su angustia (1944), and M¨²jica's Los dos tiempos (1949) carry thematic overtones of reaction against Colombia's process of modernization at the same time that the novelists exhibit interest in Modernist fiction.
In their desire to be modern, the Latin American novelists of the 1940s and 1950s were well aware of the basic tenets of Modernism, and their understanding of the aesthetics of Modernism dramatically transformed Spanish American fiction. The Latin American roots of this novelistic revolution are to be found in the vanguardia of the 1920s and the fiction of Borges. Like their counterparts in Europe and the United States, these writers search for new methods to know the world through individual consciousness. Unlike their counterparts, however, many of these Latin American Modernists remained deeply concerned with the world of ideas or things that could be objectively known--the social and political realities that had concerned several previous generations of Latin American writers. For example, their successful understanding of oral cultural traditions--as can be observed in the fiction of Asturias, Carpentier and others--was a significant innovation for Modernist writing in Latin America. This deft incorporation of oral tradition made Latin American fiction a special case, differentiating it from European and North American writing, where orality, clearly, had ceased being a matter of importance in literature for well over a century. Cultural conflict was a common theme in many of the Latin American Modernist texts of this period, including what was essentially a conflict between writing and oral culture. Asturias, Fuentes, Carpentier, and Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, for example, were experimenting with both individual consciousness and the objective world of cultural conflict. The desire to be modern was played out with Modernist aesthetics and a new focus on problems of identity and cultural conflict.

V. The 1960s Modernist Boom, the Postboom, and the Postmodern

The rise of the much renowned Boom of Spanish American fiction during the 1960s was the international recognition of the remarkable quality of fiction written by a select number of a particularly talented group of Latin American Modernists--Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, and Julio Cort¨¢zar. Coincidentally, an equally talented Modernist of the previous generation, Asturias, received the Nobel Prize for Literature precisely in 1967--at what might be considered the apogee of the Boom and of Latin American Modernist fiction this century. What some critics have viewed as a burden of modernity was for these four writers and many others, in fact, a celebration of heterogeneity and the right of invention--as it had been for Dar¨ªo and Torres Bodet. By 1968, the indicators of a radically modern--or postmodern--fiction were also evident.
The desire to be modern, of course, was evident well beyond the writings of these four novelists. In each of their respective nations--Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Argentina--these novelists had compatriots equally dedicated to the Modernist enterprise, writers such as Rosario Castellanos, Elena Garro, and Sergio Galindo in Mexico, Julio Ram¨®n Ribeyro in Peru, Manuel Mej¨ªa Vallejo, Alvaro Cepeda Samundio and H¨¦ctor Rojas Herazo in Colombia, and David Vi?as and Ernesto S¨¢bato in Argentina. In addition, novelists such as Jos¨¦ Donoso in Chile, Salvador Garmendia in Venezuela, and Jos¨¦ Lezama Lima and Guillermo Cabrera Infante in the Caribbean participated in the creation of a new, Modernist novel in Latin America.
In their desire to be modern, the writers of the 1960s produced some of their most complex and totalizing novels during this period, as did their counterparts throughout Latin America. These were the most ambitious novels to appear in the region since Marechal's Ad¨¢n Buenosayres Larreta's modernista text La gloria de don Ramiro. Consequently, not only did Cort¨¢zar and Vargas Llosa publish the lengthy and totalizing novels Rayuela (1963) and Conversaci¨®n en La Catedral (1969), respectively, but Jos¨¦ Lezama Lima wrote Paradiso (1966) and Fernando del Paso created Jos¨¦ Trigo (1966), all four lenghty works with many qualities of the "total" novel that Larreta and the writers of the Boom found attractive (19). Interestingly, neither the writers of vanguardia nor the postmodern novelists were generally attracted to such vast projects. The writers of the Boom did share with their modernista cohorts a certain implicit search for truths, matters of little or no interest for the vanguardia and the postmoderns.
Latin American novelists of the 1960s accomplished what many of their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s had failed to do. These writers of the 1960s actively promoted the new agreement between author and reader. Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and their cohorts published essays and granted interviews that were all part of this new contract. The most successful of these promoters of a new tacit agreement were Fuentes (above all in his book La nueva novela hispanoamericana) and Vargas Llosa, in his multiple narratives about his stories, communicated in the form of interviews, lectures and essays.
An overview of Spanish American fiction of the 1960s does indicate that by 1967 the aesthetics of Modernism were pervasive, and the initial signs of the postmodern were also 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 rarely imagined in Latin America, with the exception of Borges in his Ficciones.
After the 1960s Boom, the 1970s and 1980s were characterized by a flourishing of the most heterogeneous and perhaps most compelling novelist production seen heretofore in any period of the century, from Rub¨¦n Dar¨ªo to Carlos Fuentes. The desire to be modern now took a postmodern turn at the same time that the challenge of modernity was intensely embraced by women writers and other marginalized groups. The novelistic production of this period indicates that the experience of radical discontinuity that Latin American fiction had been attempting to tell since the vanguardia years of Torres Bodet and Huidobro was coming to fruition.
Scholars have not reached a consensus about the major directions of the Spanish American novel published since the 1960s, nor is there a widely accepted agreement about nomenclature. In the 1970s, it became apparent that the political, aesthetic and personal bonds of the writers of Boom were vanishing; some writers and critics began speaking of a "Postboom" of Latin American fiction (20). By the mid-1980s, it was equally apparent that some of Latin America's most notable writers were women. By the late 1980s, it was also evident that many of Latin America's most innovative writers were participating in a radical and highly innovative version of Modernism--a kind of hyper-modernism--that some scholars have identified as the postmodern (21). Experimenting with the postmodern and entering into dialogue with postmodern culture have been yet another end-of-the-century way of exhibiting the century-long desire to be modern.
In the ongoing discussions on the Latin American novel after the 1960s Boom, one of the most prominent scholarly exponents of the idea of a "Postboom" has been Donald Shaw (22). The novels that Shaw identifies as part of this Postboom represent, in effect, a continuation of the Modernist project initiated in Latin America in the 1940s, and continued masterfully by the writers of the Boom, particularly Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez and Vargas Llosa (23). Writers such as Antonio Sk¨¢rmeta and Mempo Giardinelli (two of Shaw's Postboom writers) do share generational attitudes that distance them from their immediate predecessors of the Boom. Nevertheless, their fiction is fundamentally a continuation of Modernist aesthetics. These writers are by no means traditionalists; indeed, they employ the narrative strategies explored and refined by Modernist writers in Latin America since the 1940s. As such, Sk¨¢rmeta, Giardinelli, Allende, and a host of other Latin American storytellers belong to the tradition of the Modernist novel--frequently incorporating elements from their local tradition, be it orality, magic realism, or rewriting regional or national history.
The Postboom represents a return to accessibility, more realism and pop elements that reflect a greater cultural autonomy and the revival of democracy in parts of the continent, according to Shaw (24). Citing writers such as Sk¨¢rmeta, Shaw proposes that the assumptions made by the Boom writers--whether about literature or society--were to be directly contradicted in the next generation. Making reference to Giardinelli, Shaw emphasizes that the "extreme pessimism" characteristic of the Boom was shifted to a new optimism in the Postboom, although not all scholars uniformly agree that the Boom was necessarily so pessimistic (25). Giardinelli and others have also stated that their generation was defeated politically in Latin America, and that, consequently, they have lost much of the optimism conveyed by their earlier writing.
Several writers and critics have pointed to the importance of testimonio and a closer attachment to empirical reality among Postboom writers. Isabel Allende, for example, believes that her writing breaks from two of the basic tenets of the Boom: she is neither "detached" nor "ironical" (26). Several critics have argued that the Boom writers lacked a radical criticism of society, embracing liberal solutions to mask their acceptance of the status quo (similar critques, of course, were directed against the writers of modernismo and vanguardia). For Shaw, a more radical response to the political reality in Latin America was the Postboom writing of Allende's De amor y de sombra, Sk¨¢rmeta's La insurecci¨®n and Elena Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco. Similarly, Sklodowska has demonstrated the importance of narratives of testimonio Postboom narrative (27).
The most representative writers of the Postoom in Spanish America, according to Shaw, were Isabel Allende, Antonio Sk¨¢rmeta, Luisa Valenzuela, Rosario Ferr¨¦, and Gustavo Sainz. Undoubtedly one of the major literary events in the early 1980s, as Shaw has observed, was the publication of Allende's La casa de los esp¨ªritus in 1982. This novel's overwhelming commercial success, coupled with a generally favorable response among scholars and critics, have made it part of the canon of Postboom writing. For Shaw, what marks this work as an example of the Postboom novel is the fact that the reader can recognize that reality could be generally understood in terms of a chronological sequence of cause and effect and as if the ability to detect historical progress formed part of that understanding (28). In his discussion of La casa de los esp¨ªritus, Shaw clarifies as follows: "The whole problem of Postboom writers in Allende's category is precisely to avoid this extreme and to walk an uneasy path between Barthes--Tel Quel-Sarduyian notion that the text can have no exterior referent and the old-fashioned idea that the relationship between signifier and signified is completely unproblematic" (29).
Whatever one's attitude toward a Postboom novel might be, it has become increasingly evident since the late 1960s that the radically heterogeneous literary phenomena in Latin America--far more complex and heterogeneous than descriptions of the Postboom can emcompass--corresponded in many ways to what has been called postmodern fiction in the West. One the one hand, the term Postboom has been useful to distinguish some tendencies of fiction published in Spanish America after the 1960s Boom. However, as the heterogeneity of this writing became more evident, the term Postboom has been increasingly limited as a rubric for the rich variety of literary phenomena produced since the early 1970s. By the 1980s, it became more appropriate to describe some of the new novels--although certainly not all of them--published since the late 1960s and early 1970s with a term that captured exactly what they were: postmodern fiction. Thus, there has been a growing acceptance of the idea of a postmodern novel in Latin America (30). If the writers identifed with the Postboom tended to follow Modernist aesthetics, postmodern writers have demonstrated other interests. These interests have been particularly evident since 1968, with the novels of Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Ricardo Piglia, Diamela Eltit, and others.
Umberto Eco claims that the postmodern is born at the moment when the world has no fixed center and that power is not something unitary that exists outside of us. This moment occurred in Latin American literature with the rise of Borges, who became a seminal figure for many European theorists and Latin American postmodern novelists in the 1960s and 1970s, even though the now-classic Borges fiction they most admired was published in the 1940s. His stories "La biblioteca de Babel" and "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" are foundational texts for postmodern fiction in Latin America: the boundaries between the genres of fiction and the essay are blurred, opening the way for the fictionalized theoretical prose of writers such as Severo Sarduy, Ricardo Piglia and Jos¨¦ Balza. Borges's fiction operates in a fashion similar to what Hutcheon notes in the fiction of North American and European postmodern writers: the narrator's discourse is paradoxically postmodern, for it both inscribes a context and then contests its boundaries. Many postmodern writers, such as Piglia, have openly spoken of their debts to Borges; some have written of their affinities with the virtually forgotten avant-garde writers of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Torres Bodet and Huidobro. Eltit, Piglia, Torres Bodet and Huidobro have occupied similar liminal spaces.
After Borges, one of the most notable contributions to the later publication of Latin American postmodern fiction was Cort¨¢zar's Rayuela. Cort¨¢zar's work in itself is not a fully elaborated postmodern work, but its Morelli chapters near the end of the book were a radical proposal for a postmodern fiction. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the postmodern novel began to appear in Latin America, usually under the sign of either Borges or Cort¨¢zar, and it was constituted by such experimental fictions as Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres (1967), N¨¦stor S¨¢nchez's Siberia Blues (1967), and Manuel Puig's La traici¨®n de Rita Hayworth (1968). Other key novels for early Latin American postmodern fiction were Jos¨¦ Emilio Pacheco's Morir¨¢s lejos (1967), Alberto Duque L¨®pez's Mateo el flautista (1968), Jos¨¦ Donoso's El obsceno p¨¢jaro de la noche (1970), and Severo Sarduy's Cobra (1972). Cobra, in fact, has become a seminal text for postmodern writing in Latin America, a frequent point of reference for many experimental writers.
The Postboom, to a large extent, can be read as a post-Cien a?os de soledad phenomenon; the postmodern novel in Latin America can be read as a post-Rayuela event. The wild experimentation of Rayuela, as well as Morelli's call for an "anti-novel," opened the door to a postmodern fiction that has frequently involved a dialogue with Rayuela. Another important factor for the rise of the postmodern since Rayuela was the first generalized presence of Joyce in Latin American fiction in the 1960s. As Gerald Martin has delineated, Joyce's entry into the general consciousness of the Latin American writer came late, and is not really noticeable until the appearance of works such as Rayuela and Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres (1967) (31). In addition, it should be pointed out that Cort¨¢zar's popularization of the ludic in Latin American fiction was accompanied by a broad-based entrance of the ludic in modern fiction.
A group of radical, innovative and generally liminal novelists appeared on the Latin American literary scene after the early 1970s, including Diamela Eltit, Ricardo Piglia, Luis Rafael S¨¢nchez, H¨¦ctor Libertella, Carmen Boullosa, Ignacio Solares, Jos¨¦ Balza, and R.H. Moreno-Dur¨¢n. In their early writing, Libertella and Eltit were particularly interested in the type of linguistic innovations utilized by Sarduy. Seen in their totality, these postmodern writers and their cohorts offered radically diverse kinds of postmodernisms--perhaps a postmodern phenomenon in itself: if Culture (with a capital C and singular) becomes cultures in postmodernity, as Hutcheon has suggested, then the provisionality and heterogeneity of postmodern cultures in Latin America is even more extreme than in the United States (32). Many of these Latin American postmodern writers--like their First World counterparts--are interested in heterogeneous discourses of theory and fiction. Consequently, the essays of Severo Sarduy, Tununa Mercado and Jos¨¦ Balza read much like fiction and vice-versa; Eltit's early fiction appropriated the theoretical discourses of Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and others. Balza has preferred not to distinguish between the essays and the fiction of his "exercises," and Tununa Mercado has published texts of fiction/essays.
The appearance of several radically innovative novels in 1968 was one clear indicator of a cultural shift among some writers in the direction of the postmodern novel--the most important shift since Borges's Ficciones in 1944 and Dar¨ªo's Azul in 1888. These works of 1968 were Cort¨¢zar's 62: modelo para armar, Puig's La traici¨®n de Rita Hayworth, Jorge Guzm¨¢n's Job-Boj, Alberto Duque L¨®poez's Mateo el flautista, Jos¨¦ Agust¨ªn's Inventando que sue?o, and Salvador Elizondo's El hipogeo secreto. These six novels and many to follow in the 1970s and 1980s were obviously indebted to Cort¨¢zar's Rayuela in a variety of ways. Duque L¨®pez's Mateo el flautista is dedicated to a character in Rayuela, and it is difficult to imagine the creation of such playful experiments as Inventando que sue?o without Rayuela as a precedent.
These novels place into practice, in different ways, Morelli's radical proposals in Rayuela for the "anti-novel," the description of which is quite similar to many of the theoretical propositions developed a decade later by Hassan, Hutcheon, and other theorists of the postmodern novel. One of the most direct connections between Morelli's proposal and these novels is Cort¨¢zar's own 62: modelo para armar, which is an outgrowth of Morelli's theoretical propositions in chapter 62 of Rayuela; in chapter 62, Morelli theorizes about the possibility of constructing a novel on the basis of random notes and observations. In 62: modelo para armar, the characters are caught up in a pattern of random events in four places: London, Paris, Vienna, and "the City." Another of Morelli's many critiques involves the concept of "character," in essence, the same question some postmodern novelists set forth about the possibility of a unified subject; Sarduy takes up this questioning in Cobra.
The fiction of Manuel Puig in general, and La traici¨®n de Rita Hayworth (1968) in particular, were major events for the postmodern novel in Latin America. In La traici¨®n de Rita Hayworth, Puig established a postmodern reader with an active and unstable role to play, for there is no controlling narrator to organize the anecdotal material related by a multiplicty of voices. His later novels, such as The Buenos Aires Affair (1973) and El beso de la mujer ara?a (1976) question genre-bound thinking, and concepts of authority and truth (33). A generalized skepticism with regard to truth differentiates the 1960s writers of the Boom (who tended to search for truths) and many postmodern writers (who tend to question the enterprise of establishing truths).
Equally important to the construction of a postmodern fiction in Latin America was Fuentes's Terra Nostra, a Borgesian postmodern text that rediscovers the discontinuity of Latin American culture and the radical heterogeneity of postmodern culture in the region. Set in sixteenth-century Spain, Terra Nostra has been described by Brian McHale as an anthology of postmodern themes and devices (34). In addition to many of the particulars of Latin American history, Fuentes is concerned with how history, culture and identity are constructed and then understood.
After the hyperexperimentation of the late 1960s that culminated in the fiction of Pacheco, Fuentes, Agust¨ªn, and Elizondo, post-1968 postmodern fiction in Mexico was less hermetic and more accessible. Nevertheless, postmodern attitudes of the 1960s became more pronounced. In addition to the work of such recognized writers as Fuentes, the later postmodern writers in Mexico included Luis Arturo Ramos, Mar¨ªa Luisa Puga, Brianda Domecq, Carmen Boullosa, and Ignacio Solares. Ramos's early writing, particularly his short fiction, had clear affinities with Cort¨¢zar. His novel Este era un gato (1987), which is not hyperexperimental and is reasonably accessible, tells of a retired American marine captain who had participated in the 1914 invasion of Veracruz. Like much postmodern historiographic metafiction, this novel does not fall into either "presentism" or nostalgia in its relation to the past.
Some critics have suggested that the heterogeneous and disjunctive Caribbean has always been a postmodern culture. Novels such as Sarduy's Cobra and S¨¢nchez's La guaracha del Macho Camacho support such a proposition. As suggested, the writing of Sarduy in general has had a considerable impact on postmodern fiction in Latin America. Written under the hermetic sign of Lezama Lima, Cobra is Sarduy's novelistic reflection on language and writing. In it, language is not just a means of communication, but a meditation on the function of language and literary discourses. The novel's title refers to a poem by Octavio Paz from Conjunciones y disyunciones that dramatizes the generation of language. The association of words in this poem creates more words, a process parallel to much of Cobra, which was one of the early texts of Latin American to blur the line between "fictonal" and "theoretical" discourse; this novel refers freely to Derrida and Lacan. Works such as Maitreya (1978) and Colibr¨ª (1983) represented a continuation of Sarduy's postmodern project. Like Fuentes in Terra Nostra, Sarduy returns to the very roots of Latin American culture, deconstructing its most basic elements, beginning with language.
In contrast to Sarduy, the writing of Luis Rafael S¨¢nchez has little relationship to literary theory, for it is based primarily on popular culture. La guaracha del Macho Camacho offers a heterogeneous and fragmented text with popular music, mass culture, and the diverse cultural reality of everyday life in Puerto Rico, highlighted by an enormous traffic jam. As in the fiction of Sarduy, characters and space are conceived in a fashion opposed to Modernist procedures. S¨¢nchez's La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988) is a more overtly postmodern text about a popular singer of the 1940s and 1950s, the Puerto Rican Daniel Santos. The author figure, who is identified as a gay writer named Luis Rafael S¨¢nchez, travels from Puerto Rico to several Latin American cities in search of the complete story of Santos, who had sung in those cities.
Antonio Ben¨ªtez Rojo has described the Caribbean as a culture of "performers," and the postmodern fictions of Sarduy, S¨¢nchez and Edgardo Rodr¨ªguez Juli¨¢ are indeed performances (35). Ben¨ªtez Rojo's reference to the "aquatic" quality of Caribbean culture also recalls the aquatic quality of the always-transforming texts of Sarduy and S¨¢nchez. The heterogeneous, aquatic, and double-coded nature of the unresolved contradictions in these Caribbean texts places it among the premier examples of postmodern fiction in Latin America.
Postmodern fiction in Latin America has not been the predominate mode over the past three decades any more than modernista fiction was at the beginning of the century or the fiction of vanguardia was in the 1920s. This postmodern writing is generally marginal to the broader culture dominated by globalization, the ongoing publications of the writers of the Boom and Postboom, and the more commercially viable writings of novelists such as Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel.

VI. Conclusion

A reading of postmodern writers in Latin America suggests that there is no definitive line that divides Modernist from postmodern writing; rather, postmodern fiction is a radical variant of Modernist aesthetics. It is evident that a group of writers with postmodern interests have surfaced since the late 1960s, following in the footsteps of Borges and Cort¨¢zar. These postmodern writers also tended to share affinities with Joyce, Roland Barthes, and Severo Sarduy. But writers such as Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Puig exhibit characteristics associated with both tendencies, writing sometimes more in the Modernist tradition, at others as postmoderns. Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Garro, Pitol and Del Paso, for example, all share totalizing impulses typical of high Modernist writing; in some of their works, nevertheless, such as Fuentes's Terra Nostra, they exhibit some postmodern tendencies. Writers such as Diamela Eltit, Albaluc¨ªa Angel, Sylvia Molloy, and Alejandra Pizarnik can be read as postmodern feminists.
With globalization and other cultural changes of the 1990s, the desire to be modern has recently been evident in ways significantly different from the totalizing projects of the Boom, as well as from the postmodern tendencies of the 1970s and 1980s. Some young writers publishing their first texts in the 1990s are redefining what it means to be modern and "literary." Nevertheless, Modernist novelists associated with the Boom and Postboom have continued publishing totalizing works such as Los a?os con Laura D¨ªaz (1999) by Fuentes, La fiesta del Chivo (2000) by Vargas Llosa, Tin¨ªsima (1992), La piel del cielo (2001) by Poniatowska, and Santo Oficio de la memoria (1991) by Giardinelli. These works not only connect their authors directly to their Modernist predecessors in Europe and North America (their most recognized literary fathers), but to the ambitious desire to be modern as it was manifested by Larreta in his totalizing novel La gloria de don Ramiro.
In the 1960s, Cort¨¢zar and the writers of the Boom called for a modernization of the Latin American novel. They were the aesthetic and political revolutionaries of their times, undoubtedly more radical than Dar¨ªo amongst his modernista contemporaries or Torres Bodet amongst his cohorts of the vanguardia. The voices of these writers of the 1960s were heard not only in Latin America, but throughout the Hispanic world, Europe, and the West in general. Their ability to publish Modernist texts with cultural and politial themes significant to Latin America made these writers of the Boom the most widely recognized writers of the century and unquestionably the most broadly successful exponents of a desire to be modern.
By the end of the century, the desire to be modern was played out in a variety of increasingly heterogeneous ways. Borges's reaffirmation of the right of invention in the 1940s had been a seminal contribution to this growing heterogeneity. The 1960s Boom represented a turning point in this process, for the right of invention became a fait accompli throughout Latin America. By the 1980s, women writers, feminist and gay writers, as well as other heterogeneous discourses, challenged more commercial and popular versions of both traditional and Modernist fiction. From modernismo to the postmodern, the traditional (realist-naturalist) novel has served as a backdrop against which writers have created, challenging established modes of writing fiction, as well as other dominant cultural and political discourses of authority (36). In this sense, Rub¨¦n Dar¨ªo, Vicente Huidobro, Carlos Fuentes, Diamela Eltit and Severo Sarduy have much in common, even though their methods of challenging tradionalist forms of cultural expression vary considerably in emphasis. Unquestionably, the legacies of the realist-naturalist tradition and the writing of modernismo have had an enormous impact on virtually all literary efforts to be somehow "modern" in the twentieth century, including postmodern fiction.
Finally, it is now evident that the "mainstream" of recent Latin American fiction is not best described as either Postboom or postmodern. The main thrust (and "mainstream") is Modernist, from Asturias's El Se?or Presidente (1946) to the recent fiction of Allende, Sk¨¢rmeta, and including the novels of Carpentier, Y¨¢?ez, Marechal, Rulfo, Onetti, Vi?as, Otero Silva, S¨¢bato, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez in between. The writers of the Boom have been a part of this Modernist mainstream, as have many writers associated with what some have identified as the Postboom.
Raymond Leslie Williams
University of California,
Riverside

Notes
1. Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale and Ihab Hassan have set forth some of the basic concepts of the postmodern novel in the West. In my own synthesis of their proposals, I observe the following tendencies of postmodern fiction in Latin America: unresolved contradiction; emphasis of the ontological over the epistemological; breaking of genre boundaries, particularly by using theoretical discourse; historiographic metafiction; a self-conscious awareness of the Modernist tradition of the novel; fragmentation that does not lead to ultimate unity or harmony; self-conscious lack of center and lack of unified character as "beings"; a generalized skepticism toward any possibility of search for or establishing of truths. These tendencies should not be construed as a "definition" of postmodern fiction. I would suggest, however, that novels with several of these tendencies can easily be associated with postmodern fiction of the West. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988); Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987); Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987).
2. I have reviewed the postmodern novel in Latin America since 1968 in The Postmodern Novel in Latin America (New York: St. Martin's, 1995). In this study, I explain in more detail why the postmodern novel in Latin America is primarily a post-1968 phenomenon, providing discussion and analysis of a large number of post-1968 novels. In this study, I argue in favor of a political reading of the postmodern novel in Latin America, a subject beyond the scope and space limitations of this essay.
3. Octavio Paz, "Pr¨®logo," Poes¨ªa en movimiento: M¨¦xico, 1915-1966 (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1966), p. 5.
4. John S. Brushwood cites Torres Rioseco in The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth-Century Survey (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), pp. 81-82.
5. Carlos Alonso, Burden of Modernity: the Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 26.
6. Jrade, Modernismo, Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. 4.
7. Jrade, ibid, pp. 138-139.
8. Jrade, ibid, p. 137.
9. Vicky Unruh, Latin American Vanguards: the Art of Contentious Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
10. Naomi Lindstrom and several other scholars place Don Segundo Sombra in the vanguardia. See Lindstrom, Twentieth Century Spanish American Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 73-74.
11. Gustavo P¨¦rez Firmat, Idle Fictions: the Hispanic Vanguard Novel, 1926-1934 (Durham: Duke University Press), p. 139.
12. Sommer has studied these criollista novels as important texts for nation-building in Foundational Fictions: the National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
13. Carlos Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See Epilogue.
14. Sommer, op cit., p. 274.
15. Unruh, op. cit.j p. 169.
16. Brushwood introduced the idea of Borges reaffirming the "right of invention" in The Spanish American Novel. See Chapters 11-12.
17. David Daiches, "What Was the Modern Novel?" Critical Inquiry 1 (June 1975): 813-819.
18. Brushwood discusses "transcendent regionalism" in The Spanish American Novel. See especially Chapters 12 and 13.
19. Robin William Fiddian discusses the characteristics of the "total" novel in "James Joyce and Spanish-American Fiction: A Study of the Origins and Transmissions of Literary Influence," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 66 (1989): 23-39.
20. See Donald Shaw, The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) and Philip Swanson, The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). In these two studies, Shaw and Swanson cite numerous other writers and scholars who have commented on the Postboom. Shaw cites novelists Antonio Sk¨¢rmeta and Mempo Giardinelli at length.
21. Book-length studies on the postmodern novel in Latin America include Antonio Ben¨ªtez Rojo, La isla que se repite: el Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1989); John Beverly and Jos¨¦ Oviedo, Editors, The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. A Special Issue of Boundary 2. Vol. 20, No. 3 (Fall 1993). Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Santiago Colas, Postmodernity in Latin America: the Argentine Paradigm; Rosal¨ªa V. Cornejo-Parriego, La escritura posmoderna del poder; Salvador C. Fern¨¢ndez, Gustavo Sainz: Postmodernism in the Mexican Novel; Juan Flores, Jean Franco, and George Y¨²dice, Editors, On Edge: the Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture; Roberto Gonz¨¢lez Echevarr¨ªa, La ruta de Severo Sarduy; Nelly Richard, La estratificaci¨®n de los m¨¢rgenes (Santiago de Chile: Francisco Zegers, 1989); Lauro Zavala, La precisi¨®n de la incertidumbre: posmodernidad, vida cotidiana y escritura.
22. See Donald Shaw and Philip Swanson, op. cit.
23. In terms of narrative technique, the writers of the Boom continue using the basic strategies associated with Modernist fiction.
24. In his The Post-Boom of Spanish American Fiction, Donald Shaw provides an outline of the basic characteristics of the Postboom. See pages 3-24.
25. Shaw describes the writers of the Boom as pessimistic in his The Post-Boom of Spanish American Fiction (p. 10). It could also be argued-depending on which texts of the Boom were to be used for the argument--that they were neither consistently pessimistic nor always optimistic. Certainly some factors in the writings of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Cort¨¢zar and Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez made them less "pessimistic" than Shaw argues, if nothing else because of their ongoing faith in the future of humanity, a factor frequently present in the fiction of Fuentes and Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez.
26. Donald Shaw, The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction, 11.
27 24, Ch 11
28. Shaw, op. cit., 57.
29. Ibid.
30. For studies on the postmodern novel in Latin America, see note 21 above.
31. Gerald Martin offers an informed discussion of Joyce in Latin America in Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Writers in the Twentieth Century.
32. See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction.
33. Kerr, Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig, p. 244.
34. McHale has described Terra Nostra as an encyclopedia of postmodern devices and themes in Postmodernist Fiction.
35. See Antonio Ben¨ªtez Rojo, La isla que se repite: el Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna.
36. James Parr has recently questioned the use of periodization in Spanish Golden Age Literature in such as way that suggests that similar questions could well be set forth with respect to questions of modernismo, Modernism, and the postmodern in Latin America. See Parr, "A Modest Proposal: That We Use Alternatives to Borrowing (Renaissance, Baroque, Golden Age) and Leveling (Early Modern) in Periodization," Hispania 84 (September 2001): 406-416. My colleagues John Ochoa and Catharine Wall have provided valuable commentary on earlier versions of this essay, which is part of an unpublished manuscript: The Twentieth Century Spanish-American Novel: Critical History. Wall has recently published an article that contributes to the ongoing understanding of the interartistic interests of the writers of vanguardia. See Catharine Wall, "Jorge Luis Borges, Interart Aesthetics, and the Hispanic Avant-Garde: 'Apuntaciones cr¨ªticas: la met¨¢fora' (1921)," Romance Quarterly Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring 2001): 100-110.