4 - Spanish American narrative, 1920-1970

Summary

Venezuelan critic Guillermo Sucre raised a crucial point about how the Spanish American novel's concern to name things in a 'new' world, its 'Adam-like passion', duplicated the foreign or exotic view of Latin America and led to exotic clichés about Latin America. The writer most linked to this task of Adamic naming was the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-80). In his seminal essay-prologue 'De lo real maravilloso americano' [About American Marvellous Reality], Carpentier combined a compensatory theory called lo real maravilloso that located a natural surrealism in the excesses of Latin American history and geography (as opposed to an inner, dream-based surrealism emanating from the Paris he knew so well in the 1920s and 1930s) with a baroque intention to include everything in a novel, because the uniqueness of Latin American reality still had not been described. Behind this poetics lay a blueprint inherited from the great scientific travellers of the nineteenth century who attempted to categorize and list in European taxonomies all that was new to them, supplanting or ignoring the local indigenous ones, and aiming to surprise European readers with the novelties of an unimaginable reality.