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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2022
1. Burn, released in 1969 under the original Spanish title of Quemada, is based on a story written by the film's director, Gillo Pontecorvo. In the film, the British colonial oppressor is played by Marlon Brando.
2. Angel Rama, “El ‘boom’ en perspectiva,” Escritura 7 (1979):3-45; and José Guilherme Merquior, “Situación del escritor,” in América Latina en su literatura, edited by César Fernández Moreno (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno; Paris: UNESCO, 1972), 372–91.
3. I am fully aware of the tendency of contemporary critical theory to deconstruct, and of literary writing to overcome in practice, the traditional differentiations between “high” or “serious” and “sub-” or “popular” or “pulp” modes of writing. I am also aware of the tendency of recent writers to blur the distinction between “historical” or “documentary” or “journalistic” writing and “literary” writing. The application of such terms to Latin American culture is appraised critically by several contributors to the González Casanova anthology reviewed here (see Stavenhagen and Monsiváis particularly).
4. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; first edition published in French in 1979); Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
5. Adolfo Prieto states that works by national authors rarely sold out a single small edition of one to three thousand copies, or an infrequent printing of five thousand, whereas works by Ernest Hemingway and Henri Maurois frequently exhausted five to twenty-five larger printings. Prieto does not mention that novels by at least two national writers (Hugo Wast and Manuel Gálvez) enjoyed a significantly broader reading public a decade earlier. See Prieto, Sociología del público argentino (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veinte, n.d. [ca. 1955]), 82. Francine Masiello mentions that Wast's La casa de los cuervos sold eighty-thousand copies and Gálvez's Nacha Regules sold one hundred thousand. See Masiello, Lenguaje e ideología: las escuelas argentinas de vanguardia (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1986), p. 48, n. 37. Merquior states that in the early 1970s, a printing of five thousand books was a generous standard for serious reading markets in Mexico and Brazil. See Merquior, “Situación del escritor,” 382.
6. Rama reproduces figures provided by Sudamericana in Buenos Aires demonstrating the significant growth in sales that began in the mid-1960s for Cortázar's writings: the initial printing of twenty-five hundred to three thousand volumes of three works published before 1960 had not sold out by 1964. But after that year, the reprintings of these three books, now joined by two new ones, averaged fifteen to twenty thousand per year. After 1970 the reprintings for all five averaged around ten thousand volumes per year. See Rama, “El ‘boom,‘” 29.
7. Sara Castro-Klarén and Héctor Campos offer valuable data and insights on the recent diffusion and translation of narrative works by Latin America's superstar ‘boom’ writers, but they offer no sales statistics that would place the recent popularity for boom and national writers into a larger perspective. See Castro-Klarén and Campos, “Traducciones, tirajes, ventas y estrellas: el ‘boom,‘” Ideologies and Literature n.s. 4, no. 17 (1983):319-38.
8. This dire view was the early argument of Luis Alberto Sánchez and Manuel Pedro González (see Rama, “El ‘boom,‘” 18-23). It was more recently defended by Hernán Vidal in Literatura hispanoamericana e ideología liberal: surgimiento y crisis (una problemática sobre la dependencia en torno a la narrativa del boom) (Buenos Aires: Hispamérica, 1976).
9. Benito Milla, “La nueva promoción de lectores,” interview with Emir Rodríguez Monegal in Mundo nuevo 19 (1968):91-92.
10. Penetrating studies on the role of the mass media within Latin American culture can be found in several works: Rama, “El ‘boom,‘”; and Carlos Monsiváis, “Cultura urbana y creación intelectual en América Latina: el caso mexicano,” in the Mushakoji et al. collection edited by González Casanova, 25–41. See also Monsiváis, “Landscape, I've Got the Drop on You!,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 4 (1985):236-46.
11. Prieto estimated in Sociología del público argentino that in 1955 Argentina's total population of ten million included perhaps one hundred thousand serious readers, some 1 percent.
12. Roberto Escarpit explains that in France in 1952, only 3.5 percent of all literary books sold fell into the serious category. See Escarpit, Sociología de la literatura (Barcelona: Edima, 1968). Prieto's Sociología del público argentino quotes a survey by Gino Germani stating that a quarter of those in the “cultured” category read fifty to sixty books per year, but the group average was less than fifteen.
13. Rama, “El ‘boom,‘” 7–8.
14. José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History, translated by Gregory Kolovakos (New York: Columbia University Press and Center for Inter-American Relations, 1977), 56–57.
15. Ariel Dorfman, “Bread and Burnt Rice: Culture and Economic Survival in Latin America,” Grassroots Development 8, no. 2 (1984):20-21.
16. Rubén Darío, “Palabras liminares,” Prosas profanas (1986 reprint).
17. Gabriel García Márquez discusses his literary relationship with Fidel Castro in the February 1983 issue of Playboy.
18. Noé Jitrik cites Carlos Fuentes's article in Mundo nuevo 1 (Paris, 1966) in “Destruction and Forms in Fiction,” his contribution to the Fernández Moreno collection (p. 179, n. 4).
19. Adolfo Prieto makes this association in La literatura autobiográfica argentina (Santa Fe: Universidad Nacional del Litoral, n.d.), 158.
20. Donoso makes this assertion in The Boom, 68.
21. Five essays appearing in the first edition of the Fernández Moreno anthology, América Latina en su literatura (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno and UNESCO, 1972) that were subsequently omitted from the English-language edition treat the relationship between Latin America's serious literature and the lived reality of its different population groups: see Rubén Bareiro Saguier, “Encuentro de culturas”; Antônio Houaiss, “La pluralidad lingüística”; Juan José Saer, “La literatura y los nuevos lenguajes”; Mario Benedetti, “Temas y problemas”; and Augusto Tamayo Vargas, “Interpretaciones de América Latina.” The authors of other essays omitted from the English-language edition are Estuardo Núñez, Jorge Enrique Adoum, José Guilherme Merquior, and Adolfo Prieto.
22. Julio Ortega deals more explicitly with the relationship between aesthetic practice and lived reality in Relato de la utopía: notas sobre narrativa cubana de la revolución (Barcelona: Gaya Ciencia, 1973).
23. See also Julio Ortega, “Borges y la cultura hispanoamericana,” Revista Iberoamericana 43 (1977):257-68.
24. Masiello discusses this kind of discursive power in relation to Argentina's vanguardist writers of the 1920s in Lenguaje e ideología, 80 and 13.
25. See my review of One Earth, Four or Five Worlds in Chasqui 15, nos. 2–3 (1986): 91–94.
26. David William Foster, Para una lectura semiótica del ensayo latinoamericano: textos y representaciones (Madrid: Porrúa, 1983).
27. Jean Franco made this statement in relation to the literature of Fuentes, Cortázar, and Sarduy. See Franco, “The Crisis of the Liberal Imagination and the Utopia of Writing,” Ideologies and Literature 1, no. 1 (1977):6-24.
28. This “new sense in the value of democracy” is pointed out by Jean Franco in “Death Camp Confessions and Resistance to Violence in Latin America,” Socialism and Democracy (Spring-Summer 1986):5-17. She calls attention to the new work by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), translated by Winston Moore and Paul Cammack.
29. Albert O. Hirschman, “Out of Phase Again,” New York Review of Books, 18 Dec. 1986, 53–57; see also his “Notes on Consolidating Democracy in Latin America,” in his Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (New York: Viking, 1986).
30. Jitrik proposes the reading theory of Cortázar as a link between postmodern or deconstructive literary ideology and social change: “Late, perhaps, for Latin America …, the fragmentariness of [novels like Cortázar's] Hopscotch makes a similar attempt at the destruction of ‘technique’ as supreme power: … new planes are established: the principal one is that of the organization in the form of ‘model’ which is arrived at, a model which does not impose itself nor conclude since its intelligibility is not presented ‘in itself,’ but instead projected into the deciphering ability of the recipient who finishes it, adapts it, connotes it, internalizes it, rejects it. As Cortázar says, the reader stops being ‘female’ and acts.” See Jitrik, “Destruction and Forms,” Latin America in Its Literature, 173.
31. See Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People, foreword by Henri Nouwen, translated by Matthew J. O'Connor (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1984), 34; Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Seabury, 1973), 4; and Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, translated by Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1984), 135.
32. My own observations of working-class women commenting on the Scriptures in base ecclesial community meetings (near Cuernavaca, Mexico, during the summer of 1985) largely coincide with the conclusions expressed by Ariel Dorfman in “Culture and Economic Survival,” 20–21. Dorfman reviewed experiments in presenting new Latin American fiction to working-class participants in the neighborhood of Quilmes, outside of Buenos Aires. First, participants are afforded a valuable exercise in literacy skills. Second, they lose their timidity and learn to express themselves publicly with clarity and coherence. Third, the text invites them to use their own experience as a vehicle for interpretation but also frees them mentally from that experience, thereby creating a distance from which they can interrogate and explore their lives. All these operations help the participants break up frozen mental categories that have blurred their problems and encourage them to develop their creative potential as human beings.
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