Introduction to the Spanish American
Modernist and Postmodern Novel

There is growing acceptance of the idea of a modernist and postmodern novel in Latin America, but the characteristics, definitions and chronologies are in the process of discussion and debate. l The Literature of Latin America was mostly ignored by scholars and general readers alike until the l96Os, when the now much-acclaimed Boom of the Latin American novel arrived. Until then, this entire body of literature was typically relegated to a sma1l and usually Secondary sector of the Spanish departments in First World academia, and only occasion-a1ly mentioned (usually in the context of "magic realism") among general readers. The rise of the modern novel in the 1950s and l960s, in addition to severa1other factors, has radically changed the situation.2 The entrance of postmodern fiction from Latin America into the consciousness of scholars and readers, however, has been a far more complex issue. In one of the early chapters of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jose Arcadio Buendia p1aces a sign at the entrance to Macondo that reads "God exists"-in response to its inhabitants' loss of memory. In the early l950s, before Garcia Marquez had published any novels, Diego Rivera painted a mural that stated just as boldly Dios no existe (God does not exist). These two affirmations bring to bear a central issue of this study--truth claims.3 Can we establish truths in writing7 Under what conditions can we speak of truth in contemporary Latin American pre-modern, modem, and postmodern society? I will 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 Latin American modem and postmodern fiction. ln the process, l will attempt to clarify my understanding of the concept as it may be used in reading contemporary fiction in Latin America. The characteristics and chronologies of this fiction will be of some concern.

The problem of 'truth claims" has its historical origins in the philosophical discourse of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and phenomenological hermeneutics. Gadamer has recently articulated this hermeneutical tradition, which he, in turn, inherited from Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Martin Heidegger. Since Schleiermacher, the problem of interpretation has been historicized. Dilthey also conceived of hermeneutics within a historical context: he saw himself as a historical being and maintained that there is no such thing as a universal subject, only historical individuals.4 Citing Hegel, Cadamer points out in Trutb and Metbod that the truth that lies in every artistic experience is recognized and at the same time mediated with historical consciousness. Reading this philosophical tradition, Gadamer views the development of hermeneutics in the modern period as the culmination of the rise of historical consciousness.6 Cadamer concludes that "Understanding is, essentia1ly, a historically effected event."7 Trutb and Metbod has been appropriately described as one of the most serious attempts in contemporary theory to recover history for textual interpretation.'

For Gadamer, the hermeneutical problem is not a matter of method, but of knowledge and of truth. In the foreword to the second edition of Trutb and Metbod, Gadamer explains that the purpose of his research is not to offer a general theory of interpretation and an account of its methods, but to discover what is common to a1l modes of understanding and to show that understanding is never a subjective relation to a given "Object" but to the history of its effect. In other words, according to Gadamer, understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood. Gadamer's position on hermeneutics depends to a large degree on the concepts of horizon and prejudice. He describes horizon as the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Returning to Dilthey, we find that he argues that the prejudices of the individual, far more than its judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.' Citing Heidegger, Gadamer states that "the important thing is to be aware of one's own ideas, so that the text can present itself in all its truth against one's own fore-meanings."

Tradition is another important concept for Gadamer's understanding of interpretation and truth, and tradition grows out of the senses of historicity and the concept of horizon. Interpretation includes our sense of historical past and our own present situation. As such, Gadamer approaches the text as a speaker in a tradition. In addition, our ever-renewed fusion of ever-changing horizons is crucial to the understanding of ourselves-as interpreters-as part of a tradition.

For Gadamer, the text may present itself in all its newness and thus be able to assert its own truth.11 He argues that the phenomenological return to aesthetic experience (Erfabrung), teaches us that this aesthetic experience is real truth." Cadamer's conclusion demonstrates his profound faith in the truth to be found in the operations of hermeneutics, a discipline that, for him, guarantees truth through its processes of questioning and inquiry.
Ricoeur concurs with Gadamer on many positions concerning language and has developed numerous positions with respect to truth: in History and Trutb he has argued for the pluridimensional nature of truth. Ricoeur has noted our historical temptation to unify the truth by violence and has proposed a differentiation of the orders of truth in our cultural history. Like Gadamer, he returns to a sense of tradition in his discussion of truth:

At a first glance, nothing is simpler than
the notion of truth. Tradition defines it
as an agreement, an agreement at the level of
our Power of judgment (of affirmation and
-negation), an agreement of speech with
reality, and, secondarily, an agreement among
ourselves, an agreement of minds. Let us
note the features of this definition of
truth: it is a manner of disposing ourselves
"in conformity with, in the same way as"

Gadamer and Ricoeur have exercised an enormous influence, of course, on literary studies and theory in recent decades. Gadamer's positions relate to connections in literary studies between society and literature, and Ricoeur's .,iting1emphasizing the plurivocity of texts and the multiplicity of reading-corresponds to some aspects of poststructura1ist theory. Jameson favors Gadamer's historicism and agrees with what Gadamer calls "prejudices," which Jameson ca11s "class habits" and ideological thought modes inherent in our own concrete social and historical situation.l4 jameson also points to Ricoeur's "negative hermeneutics,,' which are a demystification and are at one with the most fundamental modern critiques of ideology and illusory consciousness associated with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. According to Terry Eagleton, hermeneutics sees history as a living dialogue between past, present, and future, and seeks patiently to remove obstacles to this endless mutual communication.

Nevertheless, Habermas and some other critical theori5ts have raised serious questions about hermeneutics, claiming, for examp1e, that Gadamer overlooks social processes involved with language. Habermas also questions Gadamer's "rational character of understanding," but perhaps his strongest critique concerns the claim to ''Universality" by Cadamer and others in hermeneutics. Habermas criticizes validity claims for being "universalistic." Both rationality and universa1ism, of course, have been historical foundations for truth claims, as reason and universality have justified the dominant truths. Habermas a5sociates truth claims with domination and force; Cadamer wants to see authority of the great work and of the teacher who explains it as a claim on us that is rooted in knowledge and in free recognition, never in force.

ln retrospect, the concerns that Gadamer and Ricoeur have developed over the issue of truth claims, within their respective philosophic work, have resulted in what might be called a "discourse of truth." This philosophical-theoretical discourse of truth has had universalistic intentions and has not questioned the very nature of this discourse or the very possibility of making truth claims. To the contrary, Gadamer holds the hope that the spirit of dialogue and open communication--both important for this hermeneutics--can prevail in society. He argues for the inexhaustibility of truth that is handed down by tradition----y way of the works of predecessors. Gadamer agrees with post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes that the text has no fixed meaning or truth, but, in the end, Gadamerdistinguishes himself from the post-structuralists by returning to the idea of some meaning that the interpreter finds through the Linguistic community and tradition. By means of these concepts, Gadamer has remained faithful to the tradition of the discourse of truth.

lf truth claims have their roots in this philosophical-theoretical discourse of hermeneutics, issues of truth also have a venerable tradition in discussions of strictly literary texts. The Anglo-American New Critical tradition provided for the acceptance of the "poetic truths" that poets establish with the carefully delineated boundaries of the autonomous text. Under these rules, he poetic voice establishes a "truth" that has a meaning as "truth" because of the inherent unity and coherence of the text, a truth discovered by the reader. From these "poetic truths" internal to the text, "Universal" truths were often extrapolated, or at least inferred.

Ricoeur's hermeneutics coincide in some ways with this idea of the "poetic truths," for Ricoeur is willing to accept the idea that truths can be created within the framework of an individual text. He affirms: "Even the imagination has its truth with which the novelist is very familiar as well as is the reader: a character is true when its internal coherence, its complete presence in the imagination, dominate5 its creator and convinces the reader".15 Similarly, Ricoeur privileges the power of the individual novelist to evoke truths in texts:

On the contrary. he will create something
new, something which is socially and
politically valid, only if he is faithful
to the power of analysis which flows from
the authenticity of his sensitivity as well
as from the maturity of the means of expression
which he has inherited.16

For Ricoeur, writers establish orders of truth that are mutually contested and then reinstated in an endless "circle."

Many contemporary writers, including prominent Latin American novelists, have taken positions on the truth claims implied by these "poetic truths."Mario Vargas Llosa, however, calls these illusions lies, rather than the truths of fiction.l7 Vargas Llosa would agree with Ricoeur's proposition that truths somehow flow out of an unconscious level of the artist's creation. Ricoeur states: 'True art, in conformity with its proper motivation, is engaged when it has not deliberately willed it, when it has agreed not to know the principle of its integration within the total setting of a civilization."" Gabriel Garcia Marquez makes numerous statements about being a "rea1ist" who attempts to describe the reality of Colombia as truthfully as possible, despite the insistence of many foreign readers on classifying him as a fantasy writer or an imaginative fabricator of the chimeras associated with the now defunct magic realist enterprise. For Carlos Fuentes, the historians of Latin America have so distorted or ignored truth that it is the responsibility of the Latin American novelist to tell the "other history," to find truth in the imagined past. ln thel960s, both Julio Cort4zar and Carlos Fuentes questioned the Western philosophical search for universally valid truths, pointing out that this search has always been a Western, logocentric exercise.

The modern and postmodern novel in Latin America have given a different status to truth. Modernists such as Gabrie1 Garcia Marquez and the young Chilean postmodern writer Diamela Eltit represent, in certain ways, these different approaches to truth, In the first chapter of Carcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of solitude, Jose Arcadio Buendia, after an apparently thorough search, announces proudly to his wife, Ursula: "The world is round, like an orange." In the next line, the narrator registers Ursula's reaction: "Ursula lost her patience."" This interchange is the first of many juxtapositions of writing versus oral culture, for Ursula consistently reacts, throughout the novel, as a person who belongs to a primary oral culture. As such, her truths are fundamentally contextual, and she responds to the most immediate circum-stances. The very idea of truth claims represents as much nonsense to her as the idea of her obviously flat town described as a piece of round fruit. Consequently, she consistently ridicules truth claims throughout the novel, as would any member of an oral culture.

Jose Arcadio Buendia, unlike Ursula, both understands and believes in truth claims, as is evidenced in the sign that he places at the entrance of Macondo, "God exists." His claim is a repetition of traditional Catholic doctrine that has predominated in Latin America for five centuries. Nevertheless, the reader Laughs at Jose Arcadio Buendia's truth claim because of the contextual error that jose Arcadio Buendia commits, substituting the everyday instructions of traffic signs with a grandiose truth claim of biblical rather than bureaucratic language. By ridicu1ing the u1timate truth claim--the claim of the existence of God--this novel associates truth claims with the superannuated language of medieval disputes and, finally, with absurd propositions.

A third truth claim is written as an anecdote of a banana workers' strike. The subject of this part of the novel is truth. The event that occurs in it seems impossible: the workers of Macondo declare a strike and a rumor spreads that the government has massacred hundreds of workers, if not more. The passage is incredible, seemingly one of the most fantastic of the novel: a historic massacre is reduced to rumor and story. Nevertheless, historians and literary scholars have documented the fact that this chapter is one of the most historical, indeed, the most truthful, of the entire novel, for it refers to the massacre of striking banana workers in Cienaga, Colombia, in l928.22 In this sense, Dee Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel that relates truths that, unlike those "poetic truths" consistent only with textual strategies, correspond to real historical issues.

For Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Latin American writing, One Hundred Years of Solitude represented a culmination, in I967, of a modernist project that sti1lprivileged issues of truth. A follower of WiIliam Faulkner and Franz Kafka since the beginning of his writing career, Garcia Marquez began writing in the late l940s and published his first novel, Leafstorm, in l955. He continued his Colombian e1aboration of Yoknopatawpha County, which he called the town of Macondo, with the publication of two novels and a volume of short stories; he then synthesized his entire project in One Hundred years of Solitude This literary production coincided with the growing complicity in First World academia between the formation and reproduction of the discipline of English (the dominant form of literary studies) and the very notion of modernism itself. Carcia Marquez's modernist project was relatively late in arriving on the First World modernist scene. It was written almost exactly, in fact, at the time when John Barth began his postmodernist reflections on the literature of exhaustion and when Leslie Fiedler, for better or for worse, popularized the term to postmodern.

ln this sense One Hundred years of solitude was one of the last significant confrontations with truth in Latin American modernist fiction. At the same time that the possibilities for universal truth claims are questioned in this book, there was a general sense among the contemporary Latin American novelists that they were among the most resonant voices of the few in such closed societies who could speak for historical truth. They shared with Habermas and the critical theorists in general (and with Gadamer, as well) their project of social emancipation, their defense of reason as an ideal, and the Enlightenment faith in social progress as possibly ana1ogous to the progress of knowledge achieved in the sciences.

Modernist aesthetic theory, as practiced by many First World writers, functioned on the basis of a separation of the sphere of art from other cultural and political practices. This separation had little acceptance in Latin America, where two generations of modernists, from Miguel Angel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier to Garcia Marquez and Fuentes, enthusiastically appropriated the narrative strategies of Western modernism. But they insisted on bringing to bear their own political agenda and their interest in historical truth, the same search for truth found in Garcia Marquez's revelation about the 1928 strike and Asturias's denunciation of Latin America's historical dictatorships.

"Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable," Charles Baudelaire stated in l863 in his essay "The Painter in Modern Life." This is the modernity of Garcia Marquez and his generation in Latin America, for their key works, One Hundred years of Solitude, Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz, and others, express the contingent at the same time that they reveal their desire for the eternal and the immutable.

The commonly accepted tenets of literary modernism, were developed by Writers such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, and further exploited by Kafka and Faulkner. These tenets involve formal innovation (fragmentation, the use of multiple points of view, the use of neologi5ms, and the like). a breakdown in th. nineteenth-century insistence on causality, and an incessant search for order within an apparently chaotic world. The British scholar Raymond Williams criticizes the ideology of modernism because it gives preference to some writers "for their denatura1izing of 1angUage, their break with the allegedly prior view that language is either a clear, transparent glass or a mirror, and for making abruptly apparent in the very texture of their narratives the problematic status of the author and his authority." Williams conc1udes that modernism is uncritical and has lost the "anti-bourgeois stance" of some previous literary expression. This is not necessarily the case with the Latin American modern novel.

Seen in retrospect, modernism as practiced in the North Atlantic nations has suffered harsh critique in general, even from its former supporters. Walter Benjamin, an admirer of some modern writers, nevertheless lamented after World War I the devaluation of "experience" in the modern novel.25 Frank Kermode criticizes its "elitist" need for order and its revolutionary fOrmalinnovations.26 David Daiches, one of the early champions of modernism, later questioned its anarchistic urge to destroy existing systems and its reactionary political vision of an ideal order.27 Jean-FranGois Lyotard is very critical of its melancholy regret for the loss of presence and its experimental energy and power of conception." Some, but not all of these critiques, might be posed before the Latin American novel, particularly in the area of the politics of modernism in nations with a strong tradition of writing as social protest, as well as faith in certain utopian ideals and truths.

Jameson agrees with Benjamin's questioning of modernism and sees high modernism as a dead phenomenon: 'This is the sense in which high modernism can be definitely certified as dead and a thing of the past: its Utopian ambitions unrealizable and its forma1 innovations exhausted."29 Jameson views the modernist search for truth as exhausted and failed.

The Anglo-American modernist project also became associated with a subjectivist relativism, as critic Steven Conner points out.30 Consequently, modernism had increasingly less to do with the world of "ideas or substances which may be objectively known in themselves" than with the fictionalization and understanding of the world that can be known and experienced through individual consciousness.31 A first generation of modernists in Latin America, consisting of relatively ignored avant-garde novelists of the l920s and l930-Jaime Torres Bodet, Vicente Huidobro, Martin Adan, and others--enthusiastically subscribed to this credo. Torres Bodet's Primero de enero ("First of January," I934), for example, was just one prominent celebration of this subjectivist relativism. ln these pioneer Latin American novels, truth became a subjectivized part of each individual's psychological experience. ln EI Senor Presidente (l946), Miguel Angel Asturias filters the image of a dictator through the individual consciousness of several characters, using a series of strategies well developed in First World modernism. Similarly, Garcia Marquez uses Faulknerian strategies in Leafstorm, which is related by three narrators; he also privileges individual consciousness. His later work shares the modernist predisposition toward subjective relativity, where truth is mediated by individual consciousness, and universal truth comes into play inasmuch as one can argue for the supposed universality of the individual experience fictionalized in the modern novel.

The modernist novelistic tradition in Latin America spans from the l920s to the present, but its' most notable production was really from the l940s (with the advent of Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, Agustfn Yanez, and Alejo Carpentier) to the l960s, culminating in such complex exercises in elaborating individual consciousness as Juan Rulfo'S Pedro Paramo ("Pedro'P4ramo," l955), Salvador Garmendia's Los pequenos seres ("The Little Beings,"l962), Carlos Fuentes's The Death 0f Artemio Cruz (l962), Mario Vargas Llosa's The Time 0f the Hero (l963), Cortazar's Hopscotch (l 963) and juan Carlos Onetti'S Juntacadaveres ("Gathering of cadavers," 1964). In First World modern-ism, this Subjectivism was accommodated with a whole series of announcements of the end of individual subjectivity, such as Eliot's famous defense of impersonality in '7radition and the individual Talent" and Joyce's promotion
of an aesthetic authorial detachment, in which the author of a literary work removes himself or herself from the work.32 Fuentes makes a similar announcement in his Death of Artemio Cruz, balancing Cruz's subjective (first-person and second-person) passages with the detachment of third-person sections. During this Boom of the modernist project in Latin America, truth, whether a functioned individua1 subjectivity or authorial detachment, was at its apotheosis. The culture industry of modernism was also an industry that developed and protected the truths of liberal humanists, including the Latin America of the Boom years of the l 960s.33 Many of these writers, agreeing with Habermas and the critical theorist--above all Fuentes and Cortazar --were acutely aware of the social processes involved with language.

But modernism is an ideological expression of capitalism, Fredric Jameson argues bold1y in The Political Unconscious. 34 An analogy for Jameson's polemical statement is that modernism is the truth of capitalism. These were the truths of liberal humanism. Indeed, those pioneer Latin American modernists of the l920s (for example, jaime Torres Bodet, Martin Adan, etcetera) were accused of being "false" to Latin American social; and political reality: the Contemporaneos and Florida groups in Mexico and Argentina, respectively, were under attack for their interest in individual psychology at the expense of the truths embodied in nationalistic and social concerns. Later, in the 1940s, the truths of human suffering fictionalized in The Edge of the Storm (l947) by Agustin Y4fiez were still strategies of containment that ignored the massive capitalization of the Mexican economy and social in justice in the Mexico of the late l 940s, which operated under the institutionalized banner of nationalism and the Revolution.

The culminating moment of Latin American modernism called the Boom, however, can hardly be viewed simply as a product of capitalism (as Jameson maintains in the case of First World modernism) that engages in the strategies of containment to deny the truth of history. In The Death of Artemio Cruz(dedicated to the Marxist economist C. Wright Mi1ls), Fuentes does not engage in the strategies of containment that Jameson finds in certain modernists or that I have noted in the pioneer novelists of the l920s in Latin America.35 To the contrary, Fuentes's early fiction is a strong critique of Mexico's institutionalization of modern capitalism. Seen from various perspectives, then, the Latin American nove1ists of the modernist project, although adopting many of the narrative strategies pioneered by First Worldmodernists, stil1 believed in the possibilities of articulating truths through the 1960s. ln this sense, they coincide with the totalization project proposed by Gadamer and Ricoeur. Given their understanding of literary 1anguage and the social processes involved with language, they did not engage in the strategies of containment that, according to Jameson, characterized much First World modernist narrative.

With respect to postmodernism, common concepts used in the context of the North Atlantic nations have been discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentering, indeterminacy, and antitotalization. As Hutcheon points out, the cultural phenomenon of postmodernism is contradictory, for it installs and then subverts the very concepts it challenges." Postmodernism works to subvert dominant discourses. In The Dismemverment of Orpbeus, Hassan was instrumental in developing a critical language and concepts for postmodernism, creating parallel columns that place characteristics of modernism and postmodernism side by side. As Hutcheon points out, however, this "either/or" thinking suggests a resolution of what should be seen as unresolvable contradictions within postmodernism. These unresolved contradictions are just as common to postmodern Latin American fiction as they are to postmodern North Atlantic architecture.

Differing concepts of First World or North Atlantic postmodernity are articulated most prominently by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Jameson. These three theorists are interested primarily, in the analysis of Culture and society in the postindutrial North Atlantic nations, and all three frequently equate "post-industrial" with "postmodern." Lyotard's oft-cited The PostModern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is an essay on the state of knowledge in postindustrial society. ln his foreword to the English edition of Lyotard's influential piece, Jameson makes reference to the crisis of representation which, in turn, points to a crisis in the categories of adequacy, accuracy, and "truth" itself.38 Lyotard maintains that we are now living at the end of the "grand narrative" or master narrative, such as the master narratives of science, the nation state, the proletariat, the party, and the like, which have lost their viability. In postmodern cu1ture, according to Lyotard, 'The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation".39

The deligitimation of the old master narratives in post-industrial society has also delegitimated the old discourse of truth:

Knowledge, then, is a question of competence that
goes beyond the simple determination and app1ication
of truth, extending to the determination and
application of criteria of efficiency (technical
qualification), of justice and/Or happiness
(ethical wisdom), of the beauty of a sound or
color (auditory and visual sensibility), etc.

As Hutcheon points out, Lyotard and other theorists, including Habermas, question the bases of our Western modes of thinking, which we usually label liberal humanism.41 (At the same time, it should be noted that many of the premises of this Western humanism were placed into question by Cortazar and Fuentes in the l960s.) The works of Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, and other theorists of the postmodern have been translated into Spanish and have become central to the debates over modernism and postmodernism in LatinAmerica.42

Postmodern society as viewed by Baudrillard shares many of the proposals of Lyotard, including his statement on truth. In Simulations, Baudrillard proposes that the real is no longer real, but the order of the hyper-real and of simulation. Questioning the existence of any difference between the true and the false, Baudrillard rejects the discourses of truth of the hermeneutic tradition by making statements such as "We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons."43 According to Baudrillard "this anticipation... is what each time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory --all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle."" Baudri1lards postmodern is a world in which everything is seemingly exchangeable and nothing holds intrinsic value. ln contemporary Latin American fiction, Baudrillard is not the subject of parody, but of pastiche, in the hands of writers such as Diamela Eltit.

Jameson describes postindustrial society in terms of a loss of history, the dissolution of the centered self, and the fading of individual style. He characterizes postmodernity as a result of the capitalist dissolution of bourgeois hegemony and the development of mass culture. ln general, Jameson is skeptical of the postmodern enterprise and is often critical of postmodern fiction. For example, one of the characteristics he attributes to postmodernism is pastiche, or the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion. For Jameson, pastiche is a negative, while Hutcheon and others view such phenomena as examples of the inherent contradictions that are essential to postmodernism. In Latin America, this pastiche need not necessarily be seen in a negative light.

For a reading of Latin American postmodern fiction, the politics of postmodernism are an extremely important issue. Hutcheon argues against the critical postures Jameson takes toward a postmodernism that he sees as politically suspicious for its lack of historicism. She argues in favor of a postmodern novel that is indeed historical and gives numerous examples of postmodern novels with strong historica1 components. Her answer to Jameson is that "The past as referent is not bracketed or effaced, but given new and different life and meaning."" For Hutcheon, then, the postmodern novel does not strive for the truth, as Jameson might wish, but deals with truths and questions the conditions under which truths are established.

As poststructuralist thinkers who have had enormous impact on postmodern literary culture in general, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have also been quite influential in Latin America.46 Foucault attempted to establish the location of power in literary texts and rethought the subject as a discursive construct. Derrida questioned the concept of center as well as the possibilities of history capturing a way to truth. Obviously playing off Foucault and Derrida on the matter of the subject, the Tel Quel group in Paris organized an attack on the founding subject or concept of author. The Cuban Severo Sarduy, a member of the Tel Quel group, questions the idea of subject and then proceeds to parody Derrida in his novel Cobra (l972). Sarduy is frequently cited by the Latin American postmodern writers. including Diamela Eltit and R. H. Moreno-Duran.
Writing about contemporary fiction in general, Hutcheon is interested in the contradictions of postmodernism. Citing Larry McCaffery, she begins her definition of postmodernism by referring to Literature that is metafictionally self-reflective and yet speaks to us powerfully about real political andhistorica1 realities.47 For Hutcheon, the key concepts for postmodernism are paradox, contradiction, and a movement toward antitotalization, all of which appear throughout her books A Poetics of Postmodemism and The Politics of Postmodernism. The concepts of the multiple, the provisional, and the different are also important for Hutcheon.48

Hutcheon proposes that the term 4o5tnlodemi5m in fiction be reserved for what she calls "historiography metafiction."49 This postmodern fiction, as she describes it, often enacts the problematic nature of writing history to narrativization, raising questions about the cognitive status of historical knowledge. It "refuses the view that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claims to truth from that identity." Historiographic metafiction suggests that truth and falsity may not be the right terms. Rather, we should be speaking of truths in the plural .51

Umberto Eco claims that the postmodern is born at the moment when we discover t4at the world has no fixed center, and that, as Foucault taught, 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 both many European theorists and Latin American postmodern novelists in the l960s and l970s, even though the now-classic Borges fiction they were reading dated back to the l940s. The two books that contained these groundbreaking stories were The Garden of Forking Paths (l94l ) and Ficciones (l944). One of the repeated images in Borges's fiction was the labyrinth as a centerless universe, a figure developed in stories such as "The Library of Babel," and "Garden of Forking Paths"; the concept of the1abyrinth as a centerless universe is elaborated most directly in 'The Library of Babel." In 'The Circular Ruins," language has priority over empirical reality, as the protagonist, who has the power to dream a person into being, realizes at the end that he, too, is an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him. Consequently, the imagined reality of dreams, which are figments of the imagination, and language, which is the written product of the imagination, are both more powerful than empirical reality.

Borges's stories "The Library of Babel", and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" are also foundational texts for postmodern fiction in Latin America. In them, the line between essay and fiction is blurred, opening the gates for the fictionalized theoretical prose of Piglia, Sarduy, Balza, Pacheco, and several others.
Some critics view Borges's writing as too autonomous and independent from sociopolitical reality, and conservative as a literary project. Borges's fiction often functions on the basis of an abstract rather than Argentine or Latin American referent. Nevertheless, Borges's literary discourse functions in a way similar to what Hutcheon notes in Berger: the narrators discourse is paradoxically postmodern, for it both inscribes a context and then contests its boundaries.

Some critics of postmodernism, such as Alex Callinicos, are confused or made impatient by its inherent contradictions, and view the contributions of poststructuralist theorist-in particuIar, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault--as the source of an incoherent thrust to postmodern-ism. In reference to these three theorists, Callinicos states: "Despite their many disagreements, all three have stressed the fragmentary, heterogeneous, and plural character of reality, denied human thought the ability to arrive at any objective account of reality, and reduced the bearer of this thought, the subject, to an incoherent welter of sub-and trans-individua1 drives anddesires."52 Much postmodern writing, of course, gives human thought a considerably more privileged status than Callinicos would have us believe. Many Latin American writers discussed in this book, who have been enormously influenced by Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault, suffer from none (or very little) of the "incoherence" that Callinicos attributes to postmodern culture in general.

A concept of what exactly constitutes the postmodern in Latin America is just as polemical among critics of Latin American culture. Despite the doubts of Joaqufn Brunner, Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, and others, Latin American society and culture have experienced the same crisis of truth that Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Jameson describe as existing in the North Atlantic nations. With the breakdown of the grand narratives of the nation-state, Latin America's traditional ruling classes now respond to the same multinational companies, corporate 1eaders, high-level administrators, and the like that Lyotard describes as the new rulers of the North Atlantic nations.53

The discourse and concepts of First World postmodernism are now circulating in Latin America--lo indeterminado (the indeterminate), la problematizacion del centro (the problematization of the center), la marginalidad (marginality) la descontinuidad (discontinuity), la simulacion (simulation) and the like. One of Diamela Eltit's common terms, 4recariedad (precarious) is similar to "the provisional," which is emphasized by many of the North Atlantic postmoderns. Perhaps the word North and South share the most, however --with no translation necessary--is Borges. The same Borges who was cited by the European poststructuralist theorists Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lyotard, also planted the seeds for a Latin American postmodern fiction with his stories of the l940s.

After Borges, the most notable contribution to the later publication of a Latin American postmodern fiction was Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch (l963).Cortazar's novel in itself was not really a postmodern work, but its Morellichapters at the end were a radical proposal for postmodern fiction (see chapter 4). In the late 1960s and early l970s, the postmodern novel began to appear in Latin America, almost always inspired by either Borges or Cortazar, and it was constituted by such experimental fictions as Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers (l967), Nestor Sanchez's Siberia Blues(l967), and Manuel Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (l968). As mentioned, another key nove1 for the formation of a Latin American postmodern was Severo Sarduy's Cobra (l 972). Interestingly enough, Charles Jencks proposes that l972 was a turning point for modern and postmodern culture, for Jencks dates the end of modernism and the passage to the postmodern as July 15, l972, when the Pruitt-lgoe housing development in St. Louis was dynamited.

Soon several other radically experimental novelists appeared on the Latin American scene--most since Sarduy including the Argentines Ricardo Piglia, ReWa Roffe, and Hector Libertella; the Mexicans Salvador Elizondo, Carmen Boullosa, and Jose Emilio Pacheco; the Colombians R. H. Moreno-Duran and Albalucia Angel, the Venezuelan Jose Balza; and Diamela Eltit of Chile. Eltit followed the linguistic innovations offered by Sarduy, except for parody, which she openly rejects. These writers offer radically different kinds of postmodernisms--perhaps a postmodern phenomenon in itself: if Culture(with a capital C and in the singular) becomes cultures in postmodernity, as Hutcheon has suggested, then the provisionality and heterogeneity of postmodern cultures in Latin America are even more extreme than in the North Atlantic nations. For the most part, these Latin American postmodern writers, like their First Wor1d counterparts, are interested in heterogeneous discourses of theory and 1iterature. Sarduy's essays read like fiction and vice versa; Eltit's fiction appropriates the theoretical discourse of Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and others. Balza prefers not to distinguish between the essays and the fiction of his "exercises".

Some theorists, particularly those arguing from a neo-Marxist position, such as Christopher Norris and Alex Callinicos, find this fusion of theoretical and 1iterary discourse potentially threatening. Norris and Callinicos, in fact, argue that to collapse the distance between theory and narrative is to "argue away the very grounds of rational critique." In reality, much Latin American postmodern discourse uses rational methods to carry out its critique. Other highly critical writing questions the very foundations of Western "rational" methods. After all, both Adolph Hitler and Augusto Pinochet (characters in more than one postmodern Latin American novel) were most rational, as Jose Emilio Pacheco and Dianiela Eltit have reminded us.

This Latin American postmodern shares many of the trends of First World postmodernism noted by Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and Steven Conner. A broad range of cultural critics share the consensus that the postmodern as a cultural phenomenon arose in the l960s, an interestingparalle1 with Gadamer's Truth and Method, which was published in l960 and which places emphasis on the truth, above all, of language. Gadamer states unequivocally that "All understanding is interpretation, and all interpretation takes place in the medium of a language that allows the object to come into words and yet is at the same time the interpreter's own language." This privileging of language in itself became doctrine for postmodern writers. For Hutcheon, the 1960s "did provide the background, though not the definition, of the postmodern... "56 ln one sense, Gadamer'5 position is comparab1eto Cortazar's, for both are fundamental1y totalizing moderns who help set the stage for the postmodern in the late l960s.

Many Latin American women share with their First World counterparts what Hutcheon calls the postmodern valuing of the margins. The women postmodern novelists in Latin America frequently write with a self-conscious awareness of feminist and poststructuralist theory. This is the case with Albalucia Angel, whose recent novels incorporate the 1anguage of feminist theory, as do the writings of the Brazilian Helena Parente Cunha, Sylvia Molloy, Diamela Eltit, and others.

Numerous North Atlantic critics have observed the postmodern's bridging of the gap between elite and popular art. Since the l960s, the Latin American writers who have been the object of intense academic study have, at the same time, frequently been best sellers, particularly Garcfa MArpuez, Vargas Llosa, lsabel Allende, Luis Rafael Sanchez, and Manuel Puig. Three of the works that have so1d particularly well to both the general public and to academe (and seemingly bridged the gap between elite and popular art) are Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Script Writer, Allende's House of the spirits, and Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Forefold--three novels that could arguably be called, for different reasons, postmodern. For Hutcheon, postmodernism's relationship with contemporary mass culture is not just one of implication, but also one of critique." This critical position toward mass culture is particularly evident in Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Script Wiiter and Luis Rafael Sanchez's Macho Cantacbo's Beat. Jameson tends to categorize postmodern fiction in terms of mass culture, limiting the postmodern to what might be considered its "lighter" versions.

ln a recent study of postmodernism and popular culture, Angela McRObbie suggests that recent debates on postmodernism possess both a positive attraction and a usefulness to the analyst of popular culture. Citing the work of Andreas Huyssen, McRobbie notes the "high" structuralist preference for the works of high modernism, especially the writing of James Joyce or Stephan Mallarme. Postmodernism, in contrast, has been more interested in popular culture than the canonical works of literary modernism. McRobbie also draws paral1els between Susan Sontag's perspective on a camp sensibility and what Jameson calls pastiche.

One major difference between North Atlantic postmodernism, as it is articulated in the First World, and Latin American postmodernism, centers on the issue of critique. Some critics, such as Jameson, consider North Atlantic postmodernism politically neutral or uncritical. Latin American postmodernism is resolutely historical and inescapably political, as Hutcheon argues for the North American case.60 This argument is perhaps stronger in the Latin American case because the historical and political have been consistently present in the entire tradition of the Latin American novel.

To cite the example of Diamela Eltit, her postmodern nove1istic project was born in the 1980s, after she began participating in cultural and political practices of an underground resistance in Pinocher's, Chile during the l970sand early l980s. Her first two novels can most obviously be associated with the postmodernism of First World writers and Latin Americans such as Sarduy and Piglia. The first of these, Lumperica ("Lumperica," 1983), takes place in a public plaza in Santiago de Chile, has no real plot, and has as protagonist a character named L. lluminada. This public plaza is a postmodern world of Baudrillard, where human beings have the same exchange value as merchandise (see chapter 4). Eltit's second novel, Por la patria ("For the country," l986), is even more markedly experimental. She alludes to the political repression of the Pinochet regime, always returning to the historical origins of language, repression, and resistance. ln this way, returning to Medieval epic wars, she inevitably associates these historical conflicts with the contemporary situation.

Consequently, Eltit's postmodern is patently historical and political, and could be identified as an a1legorical fiction of resistance (see chapter 4).Her third novel, El cuarto mundo ('The fourth world," l988), deals with family relationships and is related by two narrators: the first half of the work is narrated by a young boy, Marfa Chipia, the son of the family, and the second half is told by his twin sister. El cuarto muttdo is not a work of the broad historical truths elaborated in One Hundrcd Years of Solitude or The Death of Artemio Cruz. The generation of Garcia Marquez and Fuentes remained not only overtly historical, but engaged in a project of the truths of social emancipation. EI cuarto mundo, however, is about other kinds of truths--the truths of private and public space, the truths of relationships, the truths of the body, and a questioning of the possibi1ities language holds for articulating truths.

El Cuarto Mundo and other selected Latin American postmodern novels question the truth industry of modernism. In the Latin American case, the novel has moved from utopia to what Foucault calls heterotopia--from the centered and historical universe of the utopian Alejo Carpentier and Cabriel Garcia Marquez to a centerless universe of the postmoderns Severo Sarduy and Diamela Eltit. What is at stake for the Latin American postmoderns who have arisen since the late l 960s--Pacheco, Sarduy, Moreno- Duran, Eltit, and others--is not truth. Lyotard claims that the question is no longer "Is it true?" but "What use is it?", and "How much is it worth?"; the latter are questions are posed in El cuarto mundo and in much of what might be called postmodern cultural practice in Latin America.

Juxtaposing,of Garcia Marquez's modern project of One Hundred Years of Solitude (and his other fiction published from l955 to I967) and Eltit's postmodern writing reveals the transitional state of truth in Latin American fiction and the particular condition --difficult ones, to say the least--under which truth claims can be considered. One Hundred years of Solitude plays on images of center, with the ultimate centers being the Buendia family and Macondo. In contrast, Eltit's figures represent marginality--the lumpen and women, just as the art of her generation in Chile, Ia avanzada ("avant-garde"), uses imagery of the marginalized."

In his vigorous questioning of the cultural critics and theorists of postmodernism, Callinicos laments the "contradictory character" of postmodern art. He states:

Postmodernism corresponds to a new historical
stage of social development (Lyotard) or it
doesn't (Lyotard again). Postmodern art is a
continuation of (Lyotard) or a break from (Jencks)
Modernism. ]oyce is a Modernist 0ameson) or a
Postmodernist (Lyotard). Postmodernism turns its
back on social revolution, but then practitioners
and advocates of a revolutionary art like Breton
and Benjamin are claimed as precursors."

These apparent contradictions, Which seem to confuse and irritate Callinicos, can be explained. First, the inherently contradictory character of postmodern culture needs to be accepted and, as Hutcheon argues so convincingly, should be seen as a value in itself. On the other hand only a minimal literary sophistication and intellectual flexibility will allow one to accept the proposition that postmodern art can be both a continuation of(Lyotard) and a slight break from (Jencks) modernism. lt is also relatively obvious for readers well acquainted with contemporary fiction that some postmodern fictions represent more of a continuation of modernism, and others are more of a break from it. With respect to Joyce, he has been considered a modernist by most informed literary critics for decades; only recently have a few scholars, those generally less informed on matters strictly literary (such as Lyotard), attempted to make this pioneer and ground-breaking modernist a postmodern writer. With respect to social revolution, again, some postmodern writers are more progressive than others. Seen in a literary context, then, CaIIinicos'S confusion and irritation are somewhat
disingenuous and simplistic. Viewed within the context of Latin American fiction, two seminal precursors were Joyce and Borges. Rather than considering them postmodern writers, they should be recognized as modernists who facilitated or opened the doors to postmodernism with their particular use of language, their attitudes about literary language, and Borges'S conflation of essay, Literary theory, and fiction 'Truth is the significance of fact," Mies van der Rohe has stated, and David Harvey has cited van der Rohe to point out that a host of cultural producers, particular1y those working in and around the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s, intended to impose a "rational order."63 This rational order (rational defined by technological efficiency and machine production) was for socially useful goals, such a5 human emancipation, emancipation of the proletariat,
and the like.

Postmodern culture, as seen from the North and the South, does not support cultural practices 1eading to the establishment of textual truths. One limitation is observed by Edward said, who sees the history of the twentieth century as a progressive withdrawal from general questions and responsibiIity and an increasing collusion with a system that divides knowledge into specialisms to disallow in advance any radical or effective engagement with general issues.64 Similarly, Lyotard maintains that since this century's second European war, grand narratives have been losing their power to provide a legitimating force in society. In the case of the Latin American novel, the "grand narrative" was the modern writing of Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, and Vatgas Llosa in the 1960si the opposite of this grand narrative is the work of Eltit, Pacheco, Sarduy, and the other postmodern writers.

In response to the complex questions of truth claims, the conditions are vanishing in Latin America for any textual assertions to be evaluated in terms of truth claims. Latin American writers such as E1tit and Piglia share with North Atlantic postmoderns a generalized mistrust of the capacity of any language to render truths about the world. The discourse of truth has been reduced to exchange values. Consequently, the very exercise of considering the im-plications of hermeneutical philosophical discourse of truth claims becomes a suspicious activity in those cultural spaces of Latin America-paces occupied by Severo Sarduy, Rcardo PigIia, Jose EmiIio Pacheco, DiameIa Eltit, and numerous others--where postmodernism organizes new discourses.

These new discourses-these new postmodernities--grow direct1y from modernist writing in Latin America-he writing of Borges, Asturias, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, and others. They are also cultural practices that represent a fundamental break from this past as recent as the l940s, the 1950s, and the early l960s. Callinicos asks why it is that in the past decade so large a portion of the Western intelligentsia became convinced that both the socioeconomic system and the cultural practice are under going a fundamental break from the recent past." ln the Latin American literary case, as will be demonstrated in the following chapters, the reason is that literary practices undergo radical changes beginning in the late 1960s.