Latin American Boom

The Latin American Boom (Boom Latinoamericano) was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world. The Boom is most closely associated with Julio Cortázar of Argentina, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia. Influenced by European and North American Modernism, but also by the Latin American Vanguardia movement, these writers challenged the established conventions of Latin American literature. Their work is experimental and, owing to the political climate of the Latin America of the 1960s, also very political. "It is no exaggeration," critic Gerald Martin writes, "to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World generally, and secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba between 1959 and 1971."

The sudden success of the Boom authors (hence the movement's name) was in large part due to the fact that their works were among the first Latin American novels to be published in Europe, by publishing houses such as Barcelona's avant-garde Seix Barral in Spain. Indeed, Frederick M. Nunn writes that "Latin American novelists became world famous through their writing and their advocacy of political and social action, and because many of them had the good fortune to reach markets and audiences beyond Latin America through translation and travel—and sometimes through exile." Some of the Seix Barral-published novels include Mario Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero (1963) and his Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973), and Manuel Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971).

Historical background

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of political turmoil all over Latin America, in a political and diplomatic climate strongly influenced by the dynamics of the Cold War. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the subsequent US attempt to thwart it through the Bay of Pigs invasion can be seen as the start of this period. Cuba's vulnerability led it to closer ties with the USSR, resulting in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when the US and USSR came dangerously close to nuclear war. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s military authoritarian regimes ruled in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and many others. For example, on September 11, 1973 the democratically elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown in Chile and replaced by General Augusto Pinochet who would go on to rule until the end of the 1980s. Chile under Pinochet became "infamous for [...] human rights abuses and torture techniques", and in Argentina the 1970s brought the Dirty War, notorious for its human rights violations and the disappearances of Argentine citizens. Many of these governments (who were supported by the US) cooperated with each other in terms of torturing or eliminating political opponents and "disposing of their bodies" in "the so-called Operation Condor."

A radical shift in the way in which history and literature were conceived, interpreted, and written produced a change in the self perception of Spanish American novelists between 1950 and 1975. The development of the cities, the coming of age of a large middle class, the Cuban Revolution, the Alliance for Progress, an increase in communication between the countries of Latin America, the greater importance of the mass media, and a greater attention to Latin America from Europe and the United States all contributed to this change. The most important political events of the period were the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the Chilean coup d´état in 1973. The fall of General Perón in Argentina, the protracted violent struggle of the urban guerrillas, brutally repressed in Argentina and Uruguay, and the unending violence in Colombia also affected writers, as they generated explanations, or testimonies, or provided a troubling background for their work.

The greater attention paid to Spanish American novelists and their international success in the 1960's, a phenomenon that was called the Boom, affected all writers and readers who lived through this important event. A number of gifted novelists, but what mainly brought writers together and focused the attention of the world on Spanish America was the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which promised a new age. The period of euphoria can be considered closed when in 1971 the Cuban government hardened its party line and the poet Heberto Padilla was forced to reject in a public document his so-called decadent and deviant views. The furor over Padilla's case brought to an end the affinity between Spanish American intellectuals and the Cuban inspirational myth.

Literary influences

The rise of Latin American literature starts with the writings of Jose Martí, Ruben Darío and José Asunción Silva's modernism stepping aside from the European literary canon. However, European modernist writers like James Joyce have influenced the writers of the Boom, as have the Latin American writers of the Vanguardia movement. Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez argues that the writers of the Vanguardia were the "true precursors" to the Boom, writing innovative and challenging novels before Borges and others conventionally thought to be the main Latin American inspirations for the mid-20th century movement.

The history of the Spanish American novel from 1950 to 1975 saw a change in the standing of the native writers, who went from marginal and tolerated—the center having been earlier Paris and New York—to central and celebrated. As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the Boom introduced a series of novel aesthetic and stylistic features to world literature. In general—and considering there are many countries and hundreds of important authors—at the start of the period Realism prevails, with novels tinged by an existentialist pessimism, with well-rounded characters lamenting their destinies, and a straightforward narrative line. In the 1960's, language loosens up, gets hip, pop, streetwise, characters are much more complex, and the chronology becomes intricate, making of the reader an active participant in the deciphering of the text. Late in the period the political adventure goes sour, while the linguistic sophistication reaches a new height, and novelists turn more to a reflection on their own writing, a fiction on fiction or metafiction, while characters and story lines show the corrosive power of a Postmodern society, where all is equally available and insignificant.

Precursors

However, in the light of the Boom's success, the work of a previous generation of writers also gained access to a new and expanded public, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Juan Rulfo

Jorge Luis Borges (1898-1986) was an Argentine poet, short story writer and essayist whose most famous works include A Universal History of Infamy (1935) , Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949). He wrote stories that he described as fiction or symbolic stories, with real or imaginary characters which move between the reality, magic and satiric scenes.

Origins

While most critics agree that the Boom started some time in the 1960s, there is some disagreement as to which work should be considered the first Boom novel. Some (such as Alfred McAdam) would start with Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963) while others prefer Llosa's La ciudad y los perros which won the Biblioteca Breve Award in 1962. Fernando Alegria considers Roa Bastos's Hijo de hombre the inaugural work of the Boom even though, as Shaw notes, "it was published in 1959." One could, however, even go as far back as Miguel Ángel Asturias's 1949 novel Hombres de maíz.

Another variation is articulated by Randolph P. Pope: "The story of the Boom could start chronologically with Miguel Angel Asturias´s El Señor Presidente (published in 1946, but started in 1922). Other starting points could be Sabato´s "El túnel" (1948). or Onetti's "El Pozo" (1939). Or go even farther back, to the vanguardist movements of the 1920's. However, the wirters of the Boom declared themselves orphaned and without any autochthonous model, caught between their admiration for Proust, Joyce, Mann, Sartre and other European writers and their need to have a Spanish American voice, even if they rejected the most respected Spanish American writers "Indigenistas", Criollistas, and Mundonovistas."

The major representatives of the Latin American Boom adopted the avant-garde strategy of proclaiming a new beginning and declaring most of the traditional masters obsolete. Carlos Fuentes in his influential study "La nueva novela hispanoamericana", argued convincingly that the Spanish American novel had been devoured by the jungle, the mountains, the rivers, in short by a descriptive passion for Spanish American nature.

Hallmarks

The Boom novels are essentially modernist novels. They treat time as nonlinear, often use more than one perspective or narrative voice and feature a great number of neologisms, puns and even profanities. As Pope writes, in reference to the style of the Boom: "It relied on a Cubist superposition of different points of view, it made time and lineal progress questionable, and it was technically complex. Linguistically self assured, it used the vernacular without apologies." Other notable characteristics of the Boom include the treatment of both "rural and urban settings," internationalism, an emphasis on both the historical and the political, as well as "questioning of regional as well as, or more than, national identity; awareness of hemisphereic as well as worldwide economic and ideological issues; polemicism; and timeliness." Boom literature breaks down the barriers between the fantastical and the mundane, transforming this mixture into a new reality. Of the Boom writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is most closely associated with the use of magical realism; indeed, he is credited with bringing it "into vogue" after the publishing of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1966.

Magical realism

See also: Magical realism

In The Ends of Literature, Brett Levinson writes that magical realism, "a key aesthetic mode within recent latin American fiction...materializes when Latin American history reveals itself as incapable of accounting for its own origin, an incapacity which traditionally...represents a demand for a myth: mythos as a means to explain the beginnings which escape history's narrative." The awestruck writings of the Chroniclers of the Indies and their sense of being in another world, conquering strange new lands unparalleled outside of chivalric romances, became a cultural touchstone for the people of Latin America. From these fantastical tales developed a new aesthetic, which matured into magical realism and (as conceived by Alejo Carpentier) marvelous realism or lo real maravilloso. According to this aesthetic, unreal things are treated as if realistic and mundane, and mundane things as if unreal. Plots, while often based on real experiences, incorporate strange, fantastic, and legendary elements, mythical peoples, speculative settings, and characters who, while plausible, could also be unreal, and combine the true, the imaginary, and the nonexistent in such a way that they are difficult to separate.

Historical fiction

An interest in history is another characteristic of the novels of the Boom period. Indeed, the epitome of this is the dictator novel where historical figures and events were portrayed in a way that connections between them and contemporary events in Latin America could not be doubted. An example is Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme, which depicts the 19th century Paraguayan dictatorship of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia but was published at the height of Alfredo Stroessner's regime. Nunn writes that "novelists of the Boom themselves evinced a sophisticated grasp of their genre's ability to depict parallel and alternative history. And they actively participated in the cultural and political debates of the region that questioned the very meaning and worth of history."

Major representatives

Who is and who is not to be included in the Boom has been widely debated and never settled. On the other hand, a few writers exerted wide and undisputed influence. While the names of many other writers may be added to the list, the following may not be omitted:

Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium in 1914 and lived with his parents in Switzerland until moving to Buenos Aires at the age of four. As an adult, Cortázar, like the other Boom writers, questioned the politics in his country and his public opposition to Juan Domingo Perón caused him to leave his professorial position at the University of Mendoza and ultimately, to his exile. He moved to France, where he spent most of his professional life and, in 1981, he became a French citizen. Like García Márquez, Cortázar publicly supported the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, as well as leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende and other left-wing movements like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Cortázar was influenced by Borges, as well as Edgar Allan Poe. He was perhaps the most radically experimental of all the Boom authors. His most important work, and the one that propelled him to international recognition, is the highly experimental novel Hopscotch. This consists of 155 chapters, 99 of which are "expendable," which can be read in multiple orders according to the reader's predeliction.

His other works include the collections of short stories Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), Las Armas Secretas, Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966). His other work includes the novels Los Premios (1960) and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (1967), and the unclassifiable Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962). Cortázar died in Paris, France in 1985.

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes has been writing for five decades. He is the son of a Mexican diplomat and has lived in cities such as Buenos Aires, Quito, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as Washington, D. C.. His experiences with anti-Mexican discrimination in the United States led him to examine Mexican culture more closely. Probably his best-known novel is The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), which describes the life of a former Mexican revolutionary on his deathbed, employing innovative changes in narrative point-of-view. Other important works include Where the Air Is Clear (1959), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), and the post-Boom novella The Old Gringo (1985).

Fuentes not only wrote some of the most important novels of the period, but was also a critic and publicist of Spanish America. In 1955 Fuentes and Emmanuel Carballo founded the journal Revista Mexicana de Literatura which introduced Latin Americans to the works of European Modernists and the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In 1969 he published the important critical work, La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Fuentes held the position of professor of Latin American literature at Columbia University (1978) and at Harvard (1987). He once said that "the so-called Boom, in reality, is the result of four centuries that, literarily, reached a moment of urgency in which fiction became the way to organize lessons from the past."

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez is undoubtedly the most internationally renowned of the Boom writers. He started out as a journalist and has written many acclaimed non-fiction and short stories; his earliest published writings were short stories which appeared in Bogotá's El Espectador newspaper in the 1940s.

However, he is best-known for novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), novellas such as No One Writes to the Colonel (1962), as well as post-Boom work such as Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). He has achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for introducing what has been labeled magical realism to the literary world. He experimented with more or less traditional approaches to reality, so that "the most frightful, the most unusual things are told with the deadpan expression". A commonly cited example is the physical and spiritual ascending into heaven of a character while she is hanging the laundry out to dry in One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez is now considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, as is attested by his winning the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist and literary and political critic. He attended Lima's University of San Marcos and subsequently attained a doctorate in Latin American literature in Spain. In fact, his thesis was on Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He shot to fame with his novel The Time of the Hero (1963). In this novel he gathers hate and violence, the elements of a city.

Vargas Llosa also wrote The Green House (1966), the epic Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973), and post-Boom novels such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977). Vargas Llosa returned to Lima in 2000, following the resignation of President Fujimori who won the 1990 Peruvian election, beating Vargas Llosa.

Other figures

Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo. Juan Rulfo, the author of two books, only one of them a novel, was the acknowledged master incorporated a posteriori; a writer who balances social concern, verbal experimentation and unique style. Other writers also associated with the Boom include the following: Augusto Roa Bastos of Paraguay, whose Hijo de hombre is considered by some the first novel of the Boom. His highly experimental Yo el supremo (I the Supreme) has been compared to Joyce's Ulysses and is "one of the most highly regarded works of fictional history to ever come out of South America." Manuel Puig, an Argentine, is a central figure, along with Vargas Llosa, of the Seix-Barral publishing world. José Donoso is a Chilean writer of both the Boom and the post-Boom. In his book, Historia Personal del "Boom", Donoso also mentions other writers associated with the movement. Examples are Jorge Amado of Brazil, Salvador Garmendiä and Adriano González León of Venezuela and David Viñas of Argentina, among many others.

Publishing Latin American Boom novelists

Not surprisingly, "most novels that feature in the Latin American Boom were published in Havana, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Asunción or Santiago. Those have been the sites of important publishing houses and strong centers of cultural innovation."

• Santiago in Chile, is presided by the criticism of Alone, while the older generation of Benjamín Subercaseaux, Eduardo Barrios, Marta Brunet, and Manuel Rojas is quietly superseded by José Donoso. Other writers, such as Enrique Lafourcade, have a large national readership.
• Cuba is a lively cultural center, first with the group of Orígenes, and then with Lunes de Revolución.
• In Colombia the rural novels of Caballero Calderon are displaced by García Márquez who is followed by Alvarez Gardeazábal.
• Mexico continues a tradition of strong regional writers and diverse schools of writing, from Yañez to Sainz, with novelists such as Luis Spota or Sergio Fernández, the first a popular, the other a refined, writer, both better known in Mexico than abroad.

It should be noted, however, that this period saw the publishing of Boom novels in Barcelona, reflecting the new interest of Spanish publishing houses in the Spanish American market. However, as Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola notes, the revenue generated by the publishing of these novels gave a boost to the Spanish economy, even as the works were subjected to Franco's censors. A crucial figure "in the promotion of Latin American literature in Spain," (and elsewhere) was the "super-agent" Carmen Balcells, whom Llosa referred to as "The Big Mama of the Latin American novel."

Critique

A common criticism of the Boom is that it is too experimental and has a "tendency toward elitism." In his study of the Post-Boom Donald L. Shaw writes that Mario Benedetti was very critical of Boom writers like Garcia Marquez who, in Benedetti's view, "represent a privileged class that had access to universal culture and were thus utterly unrepresentative of average people in Latin America." Also oft criticized is the Boom's emphasis on masculinity, both in the fact that all of the movement's representatives were male and the treatment of female characters within the novels. The Boom fiction's emphasis on history and the fantastic has also been the subject of criticism as it was claimed that it is too removed from the realities of Latin American political situations that it criticized.

Impact

The Boom had an immediate impact as it changed the way Latin American culture was viewed around the world. The commercial success of the Boom writers had the effect of elevating them almost to rock star status in Latin America. Of course, translation played a major role in the success of the Boom writers because it gave them a much larger audience. In addition, the Boom opened the door for new Latin American writers in terms of the international scene.

Post-Boom

Since the 1980s it has become common to speak of Post-Boom writers, most of whom were born during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. However, as Shaw writes, it is difficult to clearly situate the Post-Boom as many of its writers were active before the end of the Boom. Indeed, some writers, like Jose Donoso could be said to belong to both movements. His novel The Obscene Bird of the Night (1970) is considered, as Philip Swanson notes, "one of the classics of the Boom." His later work, however, fits more comfortably into the post-Boom. It is important to note, however, that this uneasiness in categorization is perpetuated by the fact that major wirters of the Boom (Fuentes, Garcia Marquez and Llosa) continued writing well after the end of the Boom. The post-Boom is distinct from the Boom in various respects, most notably in the presence of female authors such as Isabel Allende, Luisa Valenzuela and Elena Poniatowska. While Valenzuela and Poniatowska were both active writers during the Boom period, Allende is considered "a product of the Boom." Shaw also identifies Antonio Skarmeta, Rosario Ferre and Gustavo Sainz as Post-Boom writers. The Post-Boom writers challenge the perceived elitism of the Boom by using a simpler, more readable style and going back to realism.

See also

• Latin American literature
• Dictator Novel
• McOndo

References

• Aguilar, Mario I. (2004), "Charles Horman versus Henry Kissinger: US Intervention in 1970s Chile and the Case for Prosecutions", in Jones, Adam (ed.), Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity, London: Zed Books, pp. ???-???, ISBN 1-84277-191-4

• Coleman, Alexander (Fall 1977), "Guide to the Latin American Boom. Review of José Donoso's The Boom In Spanish American Literature: A Personal History", Boston Review, retrieved ?? {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link).

• Coonrod Martinez, Elizabeth (2001), Before the Boom: Latin American Revolutionary Novels of the 1920s, New York: University Press of America, ISBN 0-7618-1948-7.

• Donoso, José (1972), Historia Personal del "Boom", ??: Editorial Anagrama, ISBN ?? {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help).

• González Echevarría, Roberto, ed. (1996), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN ?? {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help).

• Herrero-Olaizola, Alejandro (2007), The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco's Spain, Albany: SUNY Press, ISBN 978-0-7914-6985-9.

• Levinson, Brett (2001), The Ends of Literature: The Latin American "Boom" in the Neoliberal Marketplace, Stanford: Stanford University Press, ISBN 0-8047-4346-0.

• Martin, Gerald (1984), "Boom, Yes; 'New' Novel, No: Further Reflections on the Optical Illusions of the 1960s in Latin America", Bulletin of Latin American Research, 3 (2): 53–63, retrieved 2008-03-29.

• McMurray, George R. (1987), Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez, Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., ISBN 0816188343.

• Nunn, Frederick M. (2001), Collisions With History: Latin American Fiction and Social Science from El Boom to the New World Order, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, ISBN ?? {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help).

• Ocasio, Rafael (2004), Literature of Latin America, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ISBN 0-313-32001-2.

• Pilger, John (2003), The New Rulers of the World, London: Verso, ISBN 1-85984-412-X

• Pope, Randolph P. (1996), "The Spanish American novel from 1950 to 1975", in González Echevarría, Roberto (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, Volume 2: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. ??–??, ISBN 0521410355.

• Sens, Allen; Stoett, Peter (2002), Global Politics: Origins, Currents, Directions (2nd ed.), Scarborough, ON:: Nelson Thomson Learning, ISBN 0-17-61690-5 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: length (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

• Shaw, Donald L. (1998), The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction, Albany: SUNY Press, ISBN 0-7914-3826-0.

• Shaw, Donald L. (April, 1994), "Which Was the First Novel of the Boom?", The Modern Language Review, 89 (2): 360–371, retrieved 2008-03-29 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link).

• Swanson, Philip (Winter, 1987), "Donoso and the Post-Boom: Simplicity and Subversion", Contemporary Literature, 28 (4): 520–529, retrieved 2008-03-27 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link).

• Williams, Raymond L. (2002), "Fuentes the Modern; Fuentes the Postmodern", Hispania, 85 (2): 209–218, retrieved 2008-04-01