Collisions with History: Latin American Fiction and Social Science from "El Boom" to the New World Order (review)

This intriguing book separates itself into three parts: "Cataclysmic History," in which "El Boom" writers collide with Latin America's conventional, celebratory history; "History between the Lines," where several now-celebrated Boom writers assess the health of the region; and "History in Disguise," in which Latin American social scientists offer their critique of the turbulent present. The author insists that the book is neither a history of Latin American literature nor an overview of social science in the region. Just what is it? The author frames it as "a book about the historicity of ideas expressed in fiction, commentary, and social science" (p. 215 ). The postmodernists among us might translate the claim as three different discourses on the production of Latin America's presence in the world today. In either case, a certain puzzlement remains. Perhaps a review of each part will help.

The emergence of Latin American literary figures onto the international scene in the early 1960 s, known as "El Boom," gained additional ferocity as it collided with conventional history. Now-familiar figures such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Agusto Roa Bastos produced fictional histories in which legendary heroes of discovery, conquest, and revolution became flawed creatures, if not outright villains. The drive to turn history on its head, or even on its butt, came from the writers' critique of the present; outrage at the injustices of the twentieth century were projected onto the past. In part 2 , these Boom writers speak out against the perceived inequities of the contemporary era through interviews or features for newspapers and magazines. Nunn suggests that, in a manner echoing William Faulkner's assessment of the Southern past as not even passed, these writers claimed the past portrayed in their revisionist prose is "omnipresent" (p. 119 ). In part 3 , Nunn moves from the interviews and expository prose of the Boom novelists to the investigations of Latin American social scientists. In this genre, history becomes "constricted" or even disguised (p. 184 ), but the tenor of criticism remains sharp. The defects that Boom writers portrayed in their fictional history are the dysfunctions that the region's social scientists reveal in the charts and graphs of today's academic journals. Nunn interprets all this as corresponding to the corsi and ricorsi (flux and reflux) that Giambattista Vico argued is the character of history. Having said that he finds evidence that the Boon writers have a familiarity with Vico's theory, Nunn issues another disclaimer: that his book is not one about Vico and Latin America.

Although I remain a bit puzzled by what exactly Nunn is up to, I appreciate his pleasant, relaxed prose, with its occasional smile here and there. I suggest the book deserves your attention, especially to the manner in which El Boom collides with its past to produce cataclysmic history.