Disaster Innovation in the Mid-century Spanish American Novel

doi:10.1017/9781009177771.005

Chapter 4 - Disaster Innovation in the Mid-century Spanish American Novel

Carpentier, Asturias, Donoso

from Part I - War, Revolution, Dictatorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2023

Stephen Henighan

Edited by

Amanda Holmes and

Par Kumaraswami

Show author details

Amanda Holmes: Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
Par Kumaraswami: Affiliation:
University of Reading

Book contents

Get access

Summary

This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.

Keywords

disaster Boom magic realism Alejo Carpentier Miguel ángel Asturias José Donoso Spain Guatemala Chile

Type: Chapter
Information: Latin American Literature in Transition 1930–1980 , pp. 65 - 80

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009177771.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Arias, Arturo. Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.Google Scholar

Asturias, Miguel Ángel. Tres de cuatro soles. Paris: Éditions Klincksieck/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1977.Google Scholar

Asturias, Miguel Ángel Mulata. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Delacorte Press, 1967.Google Scholar

Asturias, Miguel Ángel Mulata de tal. 1963. Rpt. Nanterre: Colección Archivos 48, 2000. Ed. Arias, Arturo.Google Scholar

Ayén, Xavi. Aquellos años del Boom: García Mórquez, Vargas Llosa y el grupo de amigos quelo cambiaron todo. Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2014.Google Scholar

Bolaño, Roberto. Between Parentheses. Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998–2003. Ed. Ignacio, Echevarría. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: New Directions, 2011.Google Scholar

Bolaño, Roberto. Entre paréntesis. Ensayos, artículos y discursos (1998–2003). Edición de Ignacio Echevarría. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004.Google Scholar

Breton, André. Manifeste du Surréalisme. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962. “First Surrealist Manifesto.” In Manifestos and Declarations of the Twentieth Century. Ed. Patricia Cormack, pp. 203–226. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998.Google Scholar

Carpentier, Alejo. Conferencias. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1987.Google Scholar

Carpentier, Alejo. Crónicas. Tomo II. Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1976.Google Scholar

Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World. 1967. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Rpt. London: André Deutsch, 1990. Prologue trans. Heather Martin.Google Scholar

Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo. 1949. Rpt. Mexico City: Compañía General de Ediciones, 1967.Google Scholar

Castañeda, Jorge G. Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.Google Scholar

Davisson, Brian. “Exile, Allegory and the Totality of the Nation: Miguel Ángel Asturias After the Guatemalan Revolution,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 65.3 (2011): 186–206.Google Scholar

Donoso, José. The Garden Next Door. Trans. Hardie St. Martin. New York: Grove Press, 1992.Google Scholar

Donoso, José. Historia personal del “boom”: Nueva edición con Apéndice del autor seguido del “El ‘boom’ doméstico” por María Pilar Serrano. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983.Google Scholar

Donoso, José. El jardín de al lado. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981.Google Scholar

Donoso, Pilar. Correr el tupido velo. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2009.Google Scholar

Feinstein, Adam. Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004.Google Scholar

González Echevarría, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.Google Scholar

Henighan, Stephen. “El hundimiento de la Casa Europa: una reescritura carpentieriana de Edgar Allan Poe.” In Foro Hispánico 25: En el centenario de Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980). Eds. Collard, Patrick and Rita, De Maesseneer, pp. 85–95. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2004.CrossRef Google Scholar

Henighan, Stephen Assuming the Light: The Parisian Literary Apprenticeship of Miguel Ángel Asturias. Oxford: Legenda, 1999.Google Scholar

Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. London: Island Press, 2006.Google Scholar

Iber, Patrick. Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.Google Scholar

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2007.Google Scholar

Lindstrom, Naomi. Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.Google Scholar

Martin, Gerald. Gabriel García Márquez. A Life. New York: Penguin, 2008.Google Scholar

Martin, Gerald. Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1989.Google Scholar

Nadeau, Maurice. Histoire du Surréalisme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964.Google Scholar

Rama, Ángel. La novela en América Latina: Panoramas 1920–1980. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1982.Google Scholar

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.Google Scholar

Santana, Mario. Foreigners in the Homeland: The Spanish American New Novel in Spain, 1962–1974. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000.Google Scholar

Schlesinger, Stephen and Kinzer, Stephen. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1982.Google Scholar

Sorensen, Diana. A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar

Vargas Llosa, Mario. Tiempos recios. Madrid: Alfaguara 2019.Google Scholar

Vargas Llosa, Mario Making Waves: Essays, 1962–1983. Ed. and trans. King, John. London: Faber & Faber, 1997.Google Scholar

Vargas Llosa, Mario Contra viento y marea (1962–1982). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983.Google Scholar

Vásquez, Carmen. “Alejo Carpentier en París (1928–1939).” Coloquio 2006. Escritores de América Latina en París (Paris, 2006), Centro Virtual Cervantes: 101–114.Google Scholar

Wahlström, Victor. Los enigmas de Alejo Carpentier: La presencia oculta de un trauma familiar. Lund, Sweden: Études Romanes de Lund 107. Lund University Centre for Languages and Literature, 2018.Google Scholar

Williamson, Edwin. The Penguin History of Latin America. London: Penguin, 1992.Google Scholar