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Latin American Boom

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The Latin American Boom (Boom Latinoamericano) is the name applied to a period during 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. The sudden success of these authors (hence the movement's name) came in large part thanks 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.[1] 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."[2] Some of the Seix Barral-published novels include Mario Vargas Llosa's La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1963) and his Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1973), and Manuel Puig's La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1971).[3]

"It is no exaggeration," 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."[4]

Background

The rise of Latin American literature starts with the writings of Jose Marti, 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.[5]

While most writers 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 Cortazar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963) while others prefer Llosa's La ciudad y los perros which won the Biblioteca Breve Award on 1962.[6] 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."[7] One could, however, even go as far back as Miguel Angel Asturias's 1949 novel Hombres de maiz.[8]

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, 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, but there were also others that affected writing, as they generated explanations, testimonies, or served as a troubling background:

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.[10]

Influences on the Latin American Boom

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. Simultaneously there was a shift from the novel as history to history as a novel, from the power of facts to the preeminence of the world. [citation needed]

Precursors of the Boom

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.[12]

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. It is also recognized that what was promoted in the 1960´s in Spanish America as a distinct move away from tradition can be traced back to the experimentation of the avant-garde movements in the early part of the century.{[fact}}

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.[13]

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

Cortazar was born in Belgium in 1914 and lived with his parents in Switzerland until moving to Buenos Aires at the age of four.[14] As an adult, Cortazar, like the other boom writers, questioned the politics in his country and his public opposition to Juan Domingo Peron caused him to leave his professorial position at the University of Mendoza and ultimately, to his exile.[15] He moved to France, where he spent most of his professional life and, in 1981, he became a French citizen.[16] Like Garcia Marquez, he publically 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.[17]

Cortazar was influenced by Borges, as well as Edgar Allan Poe.[18] The novel that propelled him to international recognition is the highly experimental Rayuela which set a new standard of experimentation.[16]

His works are Final del Juego, Bestiario, Las Armas Secretas, Todos los juegos el fuego, the storytellers of Rayuela and the Premios, Winners in 1960, novels like: Historias de Cronopios y de famas and another famous novel is Vuelta al día en 80 mundos. His most important work was the novel Rayuela. He died in Paris, France in 1985.

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes

Fuentes is the son of a Mexican diplomat and as a result has lived in several cities such as Buenos Aires, Quito, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as Washington, D. C..[19] His experiences with anti-Mexican discrimination in the United States led him to examine Mexican culture more closely.[20] He not only wrote some of the most important novels of the period, but was also an indefatigable and brilliant publicist of Spanish America.[citation needed] He held the position of professor of Latin American literature at Columbia (1978) and at Harvard (1987).[21] Fuentes 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."[22]

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist and literary and political critic.[23] He attended Lima's University of San Marcos and subsequently attained a doctorate in Latin American literature in Spain.[24] In fact, his thesis was on Gabriel Garcia Marquez.[25] He shot to fame with his novel La ciudad y los perros. In this novel he gathers hate, and violence, proper elements of a city. He also wrote La casa verde, Los Cachorros, Pantaleón y las visitadoras, Conversación en la Catedral, La tía Julia y el escribidor. The characteristics of his novels were a complex tecnique where there are overlapping monologues, dialogues, actions, different spaces and time. He gives very vague descriptions with an implacable and hard style of writing. One of his most important dialogues of this famous Peruvian novelist is called Día Domingo. Vargas Llosa returned to Lima in 2000, following the resignation of President Fujimori who won the 1990 Preuvian election, beating Vargas Llosa.[26]

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez

Undoubtedly the most internationally renowned of the boom writers, Garcia Marquez now spends a lot of his time in the capacity as mediator between the government and the FARC rebel group in his native Colombia.[27] His earliest published writings were short stories which appeared in Bogota's El Espectador newspaper in 1945.[28] The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, Garcia Marquez continued writing well after the end of the boom. His best known work remains One Hundred Years of Solitude. Other well-known works include Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and The General in His Labyrinth.

However, in the light of these authors' 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.

Jorge Luis Borges (1898-1986), whose most famous works include El Aleph, Historia Universal de la Infamia, and Ficciones wrote stories that he described as fiction or symbolic stories, with real or imaginary characters which move between the reality, magic and satiric scenes.

As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the Boom introduced a series of novel aesthetic and stylistic features to world literature. Though the various Boom authors often differ very much from each other, and should not be regarded strictly as a school or movement, they have come to be associated above all with so-called magical realism.[citation needed]

Other figures of the Boom

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.

Hallmarks of the Boom

Style and techniques used by the authors of the Boom

In reference to the style of the Boom, Pope writes that "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."[30]

Magical realism

See also: Magical realism

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.

Comparing a novel written before the Latin American Boom to one written under its influence, the former is likely to strive for authenticity and reality, depicting a plain and somber reality, while the latter strives to show multiple facets of each character and each place. 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.[31]

Historical fiction is another characteristic of the novels of the Boom period.[32] Historical figures and events were portrayed in a way that connections between them and contemporary events in Latin America could not be doubted. 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."[33]

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."[34]

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.[38] A crucial figure "in the promotion of Latin American literature in Spain," (and elsewhere) was the "super-agent" Carmen Balcells, whom Llosa reffered to as "The Big Mama of the Latin American novel."[39]

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.[40] In addition, the boom opened the door for new Latin American writers in terms of the international scene.

Critique

A common criticism of the Boom is that it is too experimental and has a "tendency toward elitism."[41] 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. The authors themselves were also criticized for writing from the comfort of safety in the countries where they lived in exile.


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. 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.[42]

Chronology

Some of the major publications and landmarks of the Boom and its precursors:

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Herrero-Olaizola, p. xxi
  2. ^ Nunn, 4.
  3. ^ Herrero-Olaizola, 65-67; 163
  4. ^ Martin, 53.
  5. ^ Coonrod Martinez 2001, pp. 2–3, 119
  6. ^ Shaw 1994; P. 360
  7. ^ Shaw 1994; 360
  8. ^ Shaw 1994; 361
  9. ^ Pope 1996, p. 226
  10. ^ Pope 1996, p. 229
  11. ^ Donoso 1972
  12. ^ Pope 1996, p. ???
  13. ^ Pope 1996, p. 229
  14. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 105
  15. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 106
  16. ^ a b Ocasio 2004, p. 107
  17. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 107
  18. ^ Ocasio, 109-10
  19. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 119
  20. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 120
  21. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 121
  22. ^ Fuentes, quoted in Nunn, 122
  23. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 112
  24. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 113
  25. ^ Nunn, 150
  26. ^ Nunn, 150
  27. ^ Ocasio 2004, pp. 125, 129
  28. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 127
  29. ^ Donoso 1972
  30. ^ Pope 1996, p. 231
  31. ^ Ocasio 2004, p. 92
  32. ^ Nunn, 73
  33. ^ Nunn, 211-12
  34. ^ Pope 1996, p. 230
  35. ^ Pope 1996, p. 230
  36. ^ Pope 1996, p. 230
  37. ^ Pope 1996, p. ???
  38. ^ Herrero-Olaizola, xxi
  39. ^ Herrero-Olaizola, 173-74
  40. ^ Martin, 54
  41. ^ Shaw, 27-28
  42. ^ Shaw, 10, 22-23.

References

  • 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
  • Martin, Gerald. "Boom, Yes; 'New' Novel, No: Further Reflections on the Optical Illusions of the 1960s in Latin America." Bulletin of Latin American Research. Vol. 3, No. 2. (1984) 53-63.
  • Nunn, Frederick M. Collisions With History: Latin American Fiction and Social Science from El Boom to the New World Order. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2001.
  • Ocasio, Rafael (2004), Literature of Latin America, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ISBN 0-313-32001-2
  • 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
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