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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
“The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”
Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Lecture, 1982In the second half of this century, we have been told, the Latin American novel came of age. Authors no longer felt constrained to subject indigenous contents to alien forms. Instead contents suggested forms truly representative of societies, polities, and cultures in search of identity and struggling with numerous historic problems, some not even of their own region's making.
Although Latin American novels have long been recognized as important to the area's cultural development, as indicators of literary achievement, and as valuable sources for scholars, few works published between Machado de Assis's Dom Casmuro (1900) and Miguel Angel Asturias's Men of Corn (Hombres de maiz, 1949) could be described as aesthetic magna opera. In the long hiatus essayists took up the task of portraying reality, producing such classics as Euclides da Cunha's Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões, 1902), José Vasconcelos's The Cosmic Race (La raza cósmica, 1925), José Carlos Mariátegui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, 1927), Alberto Edwards Vives's The Aristocratic Fronde (La fronda aristocrática, 1927), and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada's X-Ray of the Pampa (Radiografía de la pampa, 1933).
A version of this essay was presented to The Midwest Association for Latin American Studies, Lincoln, Nebraska, November 1984
1 Brotherston, Gordon, The Emergence of the Latin American American Novel (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 5–7.Google Scholar Cunha’s masterpiece may now be complemented through a reading of Vargas Llosa’s historical novel of Canudos, , La guerra del fin del mundo (Barcelona, 1981),Google Scholar rendered into English by Lane, Helen R. as The War of the End of the World (New York, 1984).Google Scholar I have retained Spanish and Portuguese titles in the text and notes owing to the need to place works mentioned chronologically.
2 Donoso, José, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History (New York, 1977), p. 10.Google Scholar
3 See, for example, Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), p. 54 Google Scholar; Eagleton, Terry, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), p. 6 Google Scholar; Eagleton, , Criticism and Ideology (London, 1982), p. 74 Google Scholar; and Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983), pp. 44, 47.Google Scholar As evidence of the impact of historico-political implications of the “new novel,” specifically one of Vargas Llosa’s works, on dependency theory, see Fenwick, M.J., Dependency Theory and Literary Analysis: Reflections on Vargas Llosa’s The Green House (Minneapolis, 1981).Google Scholar
4 Gallagher, D.P., Modern Latin American Literature (New York, 1973), p. 89.Google Scholar
5 In the specific case of Peru, one thinks next of Adolph’s, José B. A Round of Generals (La ronda de los generales, 1973),Google Scholar Ribeyro’s, Julio Ramón Change of Guard (Cambio de guardia, 1976),Google Scholar and Thorndyke’s, Guillermo The Tiger’s Stripes (Las rayas del tigre, 1973).Google Scholar All provide “alternative realities,” and express “mendacious inventions” and “authoritarian lies,” in each case quite successfully, without pulling punches. See also Luna, Norman, “The Barbaric Dictator and the Enlightened Tyrant in El otoño del patriarca and El recurso del método .” Latin American Literary Review, 7, 15 (Fall-Winter 1979): 25–32 Google Scholar (hereafter LALR); and Castellanos, José and Martínez, Miguel A., “El dictador hispano-americano como personaje literario,” Latin American Research Review, 16, 2 (1981): 79–105 Google Scholar for solid discussions of the authoritarian as fictional character.
6 Gallagher, pp. 89–91. See also Mcmurray, George, “The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa,” Modern Language Quarterly, 29, 3 (September 1968): 329–340 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Oviedo, José Miguel, Mario Vargas Llosa: La invención de una realidad (Barcelona, 1970).Google Scholar
7 See Donoso, passim.
8 See the marvelous evocation of Latin America’s “outsized reality” in García Márquez’s “The Crux of our Solitude” (1982 Nobel Lecture). Two modern Brazilian novels that provide classic case studies of outsized reality comparable to magisterial, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967)Google Scholar are Rosa’s, João Guimarães The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Grande Sertão: Veredas, 1956),Google Scholar and Ribeiro’s, João Ubaldo Sergeant Getúlio (Sargento Getúlio, 1977).Google Scholar
9 See Mcadam’s, Alfred J. Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason (Chicago, 1977),Google Scholar passim, for comments on time in the linear and historical sense and stream of consciousness. See also de Baldussi, Rosa Boldori, Vargas Llosa: Un narrador y sus demonios (Buenos Aires, 1974).Google Scholar The citation is from p. 99. Brushwood, John S. ably places Vargas Llosa in a contemporary context in The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth Century Survey (Austin 1975), pp. 253–56, 267–70, 282–84, 326–39.Google Scholar A valuable source for the study of Vargas Llosa is Rossman, Charles and Friedman, Alan Warren, eds., Mario Vargas Llosa: A Collection of Critical Essays (Austin, 1978).Google Scholar
10 Smith, Clifford R., “The Central Andes,” in Blakemore, Harold and Smith, , eds., Latin America: Geographical Perspectives (London, 1983), p. 253.Google Scholar Two perceptive essays that capture the telluric, grotesque, and naturalistic side of Vargas Llosa’s “setting” of a novel are Castro-Klaren’s, Sara “Humor and Class in Pantaleón y las visitadoras ,” LALR, 7, 13 (Fall-Winter 1978): 64–79 Google Scholar; and Forsch, Marta Morello, “Of Héros and Martyrs: The Grotesque in Pantaleón y las visitadoras,” LALR, 7, 14 (Spring-Summer 1979): 40–44.Google Scholar
11 In Marcha (Montevideo, 23 July 1971): 31, cited in Gallagher, p. 122.
12 See Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado, Memoria presentada por el director correspondiente al año académico de 1947, through Memoria…1952. The novelist’s record appears in the 1951 Memoria.
13 The remarks were made in 1969 and were not for attribution.
14 See the new work on the boarding school phenomenon by Chandos, John, Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800–1860 (London, 1984).Google Scholar In his incisive La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 3rd ed. (Mexico, 1972), p. 39, Carlos Fuentes comments harshly on the perpetuation of adolescent male values by life in military shcools such as Leoncio Prado.
15 See Franco, Jean, The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist (Baltimore, 1970), p. 254 Google Scholar; and Lafforgue, Jorge, “La ciudad y los perros: Novela moral,” in Lafforgue, , ed., Nueva novela latinoamericana (Buenos Aires, 1969), pp. 209–240.Google Scholar
16 The following discussion is based on a reading of the Spanish text, La ciudad y los perros (Barcelona, 1962) and the Kemp, Lysander translation, The Time of the Hero (New York, 1966).Google Scholar Excerpts are from the latter, hereafter cited TH.
17 Frank Dauster comments on the Slave, the Poet, and the Jaguar as representative of Peruvian social strata, thus placing the work in a historico-social continuum. See his “Vargas Llosa and the End of Chivalry,” Books Abroad, 44, 2 (Winter, 1970): 41–42.
18 See as examples, Prada, Gonzalez, “Discurso en el Politeama,” Páginas libres, 2 vols. (Lima, 1966), 1: 63–64, for his indictment of the “mendacious inventors’ of his age: politicians, priests and judges: Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, trs., Urquidi, Marjory (Austin and London, 1971)Google Scholar; Jarrín, Edgardo Mercado “El ejército de hoy y su proyección en nuestra sociedad en período de transición.” Revista Militar del Perú (Nov.-Dec, 1964): 1–20 Google Scholar; and Nunn, Frederick M., “Professional Militarism in Twentieth Century Peru: Historical and Theoretical Background to the Golpe de Estado of 1968,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 59, 3 (August 1979): 391–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 TH, p. 310.
20 TH, p. 181.
21 TH p. 75.
22 TH p. 185.
23 TH, pp. 191–92.
24 TH p. 253.
25 TH pp. 214–15.
26 See TH, pp. 85–87, 91, 106–07, 135, 399.
27 TH p. 91.
28 TH p. 107.
29 TH, pp. 247–49.
30 TH pp. 274–83, passim.
31 TH p. 315.
32 On the presence of history in Vargas Llosa’s work see Fernández, Casto Manuel, Aproximación formal a la novelística de Vargas Llosa (Madrid, 1977)Google Scholar; and the novelist’s own comments on the creative process in La historia secreta de una novela (Barcelona, 1971).
33 Llosa, Mario Vargas, “A Media Stereotype,” The Atlantic (February 1984): 22.Google Scholar See also his “In-quest in the Andes,” New York Times Magazine (July 31, 1983), for a brilliant analysis of the January 1983 killings of terrorists and journalists by Iquichano villagers near Ayacucho, killings which, in the novelist’s words, “have magical and religious as well as political and social overtones.”