Latin American Boom

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. This climate formed the background for the work of the writers of the Latin American Boom, and defined the context in which their sometimes radical ideas had to operate. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the subsequent U.S. attempt to thwart it through the Bay of Pigs Invasion can be seen as the start of this period.[4] 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.[5] 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 went on to rule until the end of the 1980s.[6] Chile under Pinochet became "infamous for [...] human rights abuses and torture techniques",[7] and in Argentina the 1970s brought the Dirty War, notorious for its human rights violations and the disappearances of Argentine citizens.[8] Many of these governments (which were supported by the US) cooperated with each other in terms of torturing or eliminating political opponents and "disposing of their bodies" in "the Operation Condor."[9]

The period between 1950 and 1975 saw major changes in the way in which history and literature were approached in terms of interpretation and writing.[10] It also produced a change in the self perception of Spanish American novelists. 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.[11] 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 Juan Perón in Argentina, the protracted violent struggle of the urban guerrillas, brutally repressed in Argentina and Uruguay, and the unending violence in Colombia[10] also affected writers, as they generated explanations, or testimonies, or provided a troubling background for their work.

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 Hopscotch (Rayuela in Spanish) from 1963 while others prefer Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros in Spanish) which won the Biblioteca Breve Award in 1962.[12] Fernando Alegria considers Augusto Roa Bastos' Hijo de hombre the inaugural work of the Boom even though, as Shaw notes, it was published in 1959.[12] One could, however, even go as far back as Miguel Ángel Asturias's 1949 novel Men of Maize.[13]

Another variation is articulated by Randolph D. Pope: "The story of the Boom could start chronologically with Miguel Ángel Asturias's El Señor Presidente (published in 1946, but started in 1922). Other starting points could be Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel (1948) or Onetti's El pozo (1939), or even the vanguardist movements of the 1920s. However, the writers of the Boom declared themselves to be an "orphan" literary generation ––without a Latin American parent influence, an autochthonous model––, caught between (a) their admiration for Proust, Joyce, Mann, Sartre and other European writers and their owing much of their stylistic innovation to the Vanguardists[14] and (b) their need to have a Spanish American voice, even if they rejected the most respected Spanish American writers Indigenistas, Criollistas, and Mundonovistas."[15] Jean Franco writes that the Boom marks "a refusal to be identified with the rural or with anachronistic narratives such as the novela de la tierra."[16]

The greater attention paid to Latin American novelists and their international success in the 1960s, a phenomenon that was called the Boom, affected all writers and readers in that period. What mainly brought writers together and focused the attention of the world on Latin 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.[15] The Padilla affair is thought by some to have signalled the beginning of the end of the Boom.[17] However, in a significant sense, the Boom has not ended; the writers associated with the Boom have continued to publish books that have been read by audiences far larger than those enjoyed by Latin American writers prior to the Boom. The books of such writers as Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa are widely distributed and translated into other major European and Asian languages to a much greater extent than those of such significant pre-Boom writers as José María Arguedas, Eduardo Mallea or Manuel Rojas.

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."[25] The writings of the Chroniclers of the Indies depicted the exotic "new world" and their accounts of conquering strange new lands became accepted as history.[26] These often fantastical stories helped to bring about a new aesthetic, which morphed 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."[20]

An interest in history is another characteristic of the novels of the Boom period.[27] 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 José Gaspar Rodríguez 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."[28]

Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium in 1914 to Argentinian parents with whom he lived in Switzerland until moving to Buenos Aires at the age of four.[29] Like other Boom writers, Cortázar grew to question the politics in his country: his public opposition to Juan Perón caused him to leave his professorial position at the University of Mendoza and, ultimately, led to his exile.[30] He moved to France, where he spent most of his professional life and, in 1981, he became a French citizen.[31] 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.[31] In his fiction, however, political elements were generally muted or absent until the publication of the explicitly political novel Libro de Manuel in 1973.

Cortázar was influenced by Borges, as well as by Edgar Allan Poe.[32] 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 (1963).[31] This consists of 155 chapters, 99 of which are "expendable", which can be read in multiple orders according to the reader's predilection.

His other works include the short story collections Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), Las armas secretas (1959), Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966). He also wrote novels such as 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 in 1984.

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes was born on November 11, 1928 and began to publish in the 1950s.[33] He was the son of a Mexican diplomat, and lived in cities such as Buenos Aires, Quito, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro as well as Washington, D. C.[34] His experiences with anti-Mexican discrimination in the United States led him to examine Mexican culture more closely.[35] His 1962 novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz in Spanish), which employs innovative changes in narrative point-of-view, describes the life of a former Mexican revolutionary on his deathbed. 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.[36] 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)[37] and more recently was associated with Brown University. 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."[38] Fuentes died on May 15, 2012.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez started out as a journalist and wrote 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.[39]

He is best known for novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), No One Writes to the Colonel (1962), and 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".[40] 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. García Márquez died on April 17, 2014.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist and literary and political critic.[41] He attended Lima's University of San Marcos and subsequently attained a doctorate in Latin American literature in Spain.[42] In fact, his thesis was on Gabriel García Márquez.[43] He shot to fame with his novel The Time of the Hero (1963), a scathing indictment of cruelty and corruption in a Peruvian military academy (and, by implication, in Peruvian society).

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.[43] The Swedish Academy awarded him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Since the 1980s it has become common to speak of Post-Boom writers, most of whom were born during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, such as Roberto Bolaño (By Night in Chile, 2000; The Savage Detectives, 1998), the post-Boom Spanish-language writer who has made the greatest impact on world literature.[56] 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 José Donoso could be said to belong to both movements. His novel The Obscene Bird of Night (El obsceno pájaro de la noche, 1970) is considered, as Philip Swanson notes, "one of the classics of the Boom."[57] His later work, however, fits more comfortably into the post-Boom.[58] Manuel Puig and Severo Sarduy are considered writers whose works embody the transition from the Boom to the Post-Boom.[13] It is important to note that this uneasiness in categorization is perpetuated by the fact that major writers of the Boom (Fuentes, García Márquez and Vargas 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 (The House of the Spirits, 1982), Luisa Valenzuela (The Lizard's Tales, 1983), Giannina Braschi (Empire of Dreams, 1988; Yo-Yo Boing!, 1998), Cristina Peri Rossi (Ship of Fools, 1984) and Elena Poniatowska (Tinisima, 1991).[59][60] While Valenzuela and Poniatowska were both active writers during, and in Poniatowska's case even before (Lilus Kikus, 1954), the Boom period,[61] Allende is considered "a product of the Boom."[62] Shaw identifies Antonio Skármeta (Ardiente paciencia, 1985), Rosario Ferré ("La muñeca menor", 1976; The House on the Lagoon, 1999) and Gustavo Sainz (The Princess of the Iron Palace, 1974; A troche y moche, 2002) as Post-Boom writers.[63] The Post-Boom writers challenge the perceived elitism of the Boom by using a simpler, more readable style and going back to realism.[64]