The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

Ten: Rereading the Spanish American Novel beyond the Boom

Ten Rereading the Spanish American Novel beyond the Boom The international recognition and commercial success of the Boom tended to obscure the writing of numerous outstanding modernist novelists who published fiction in the s. The Colombians Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, Héctor Rojas Herazo, and Manuel Mejía Vallejo, as well as the Mexicans Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro, published remarkable transcendent regionalist novels. Important works to appear during this period included Cepeda Samudio’s La casa grande (), Rojas Herazo’s Respirando el verano (), Castellanos ’s Oficio de tinieblas (), Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir (), Mejía Vallejo’s El día señalado (), and José Emilio Pacheco’s Morirás lejos (). All six writers shared a desire to be modern and labored actively to modernize their national literature. Pacheco also exhibits certain postmodern tendencies that became more pronounced in the Latin American novel in the s and s. In the early s, Alvaro Cepeda Samudio and Héctor Rojas Herazo were masters of modernist narrative technique and considered innovators in Colombia.1 Cepeda Samudio and García Márquez shared a great enthusiasm for William Faulkner, as well as a common history: both were from the Caribbean coastal region of Colombia that had been the United Fruit Company’s site of operation during the first quarter of the century. La casa grande and Respirando el verano are books of similar origins (Faulkner and Colombian history), comparable dimensions (each are family stories of approximately  to  pages), and an identical focus (a home, casa). They were the first novels for each of the respecTseng 2003.2.4 07:37 6754 Williams / THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL / sheet 163 of 280 150 Modern and Cosmopolitan Works, 1962–1967 tive authors, although Cepeda Samudio had published Todos estábamos a la espera (), a volume of short stories, and Rojas Herazo had been publishing poems since .Cepeda Samudio set his only novel in the costeño area of Ciénaga, the site of a  strike and massacre of banana workers. Rojas Herazo was born and reared in the Colombian costeño town of Tolú, the setting of all three of his novels, beginning with Respirando el verano. In addition to the  banana workers’ strike, La casa grande tells the story of a family that dominates the town and occupies la casa grande (the big house). A narrative tour de force, this novel consists of ten unnumbered chapters, each with a different method of developing a story set in a time frame immediately preceding and following the massacre.The principal characters are members of the family that has dominated the entire town from the casa grande, an imposing edifice visible to all. The first chapter, ‘‘Soldados’’ (Soldiers), consists almost entirely of dialogue between two unidentified soldiers traveling to a zone in rebellion.Ten of this chapter’s seventeen sections are the soldiers ’ dialogue (only voices with no intervening narrator), and seven are sections conveyed by a third-person omniscient narrator.The first sixteen sections take place prior to the massacre, and the last after the tragedy. This handling of events is Cepeda Samudio’s first innovation of narrative technique: the history and story of the massacre are told without actually depicting the major event itself, a technique radically different from the typically sanguinary novels about La Violencia , the Colombian civil war that began twenty years after the banana workers’ strike and massacre.2 The second chapter, ‘‘La hermana’’ (The sister), consists of an interior monologue that one sister directed (in the form of tú) to another . The time frame for this chapter is after the massacre. The third chapter, in which townspeople kill the father, begins with an omniscient narrative about the father and then moves to nine numbered sections of dialogue among unidentified people who speak of the killing . In the tenth section of this chapter, instead of relating the father’s death directly, the omniscient narrator relates what the girl hears— in effect, news of the father’s death. The fourth chapter, ‘‘El Pueblo’’ (The town, or The people), contains two and one-half pages in which an omniscient narrator describes the town, always in simple and direct language. The fifth chapter is unique: it is a textual reproduction of ‘‘Decreto No. ’’ (Decree No. ) dated December , , and is the only historical document in the novel. Elsewhere, the conflict is genTseng 2003.2.4 07:37 6754 Williams / THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL / sheet 164...