The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

Preface

Preface In , Octavio Paz wrote that since the nineteenth century, the Latin American writer desired to be modern: ‘‘Modernity has been our style for a century. It’s the universal style. To want to be modern seems crazy: we are condemned to be modern, since we are prohibited from the past and the future.’’1 Indeed, several generations of Latin American writers since the late nineteenth century have exhibited their urgent desire to be modern, to participate in modernity. This postromantic desire assumed numerous guises and variations for Latin American writers over the twentieth century. From the work of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío at the turn of the century to that of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, as well as among the younger writers of today, the idea of being modern often has taken some form of cosmopolitanism . For the poet Darío and his cohorts, this cosmopolitanism meant being simultaneously very Latin American and very French. For Borges, it meant trips to Madrid and Paris in the s, bringing the innovations of ultraísmo to Argentina and a transatlantic dialogue with writers across the continents and across the centuries. For Fuentes, being modern and cosmopolitan has meant not only residing in the major cities of Latin America, Europe, and the United States most of his adult life but also assuming the innovations of European modernism and fully accepting his multicultural heritage from Latin America, Spain, and France. For postmodern writers such as the Chilean Diamela Eltit and the Argentine Ricardo Piglia, being modern has meant participating in a transnational cultural life and literary Tseng 2003.2.4 07:37 6754 Williams / THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL / sheet 7 of 280 viii The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel dialogue with Latin American and European writers as well as with theorists of literature and politics. But the cosmopolitan postures and intellectual urbanity of the Latin American writer, as constant as they might have been in the twentieth century, were only the external trappings and sometimes necessary masks of a far more significant and profound series of cultural interventions in Latin America. In most of the first half of the century, relatively few Latin American writers found success in their search for a way to be both authentically Latin American (or Mexican , or Argentine, etc.) and participants in the fin-de-siecle and later modernist projects of their European and North American counterparts . Their appropriation of modernist aesthetic practices from the s to the end of the century, however, met huge success in both Latin America and abroad, highlighted by the ‘‘Boom’’ of the Spanish American novel written in the s. For some critics, postmodern culture present in Western societies since approximately the late s has been lacking in political substance . Nevertheless, since , the variant of modernist fiction writing described in Latin America as ‘‘postmodern’’ had its own innovative technical features, critical stances, and politically significant (or thematically substantive) approaches to being modern.2 Despite the occasional outdated admonitions about the traditionalism of the Latin American novelist and despite the consistent resistance by more traditional writers and critics alike to these ongoing attempts at being ‘‘modern,’’ the Latin American writer has often been, in fact, condemned to being hypermodern—from the hypermodern Darío and Borges to the hypermodern Fuentes and Eltit. The cultural environment in which the search for the modern has taken place has been polemical, from early debates about the new republics to recent controversies about postmodern culture. Rubén Darío, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and many other Latin American writers were accused by some of their compatriots of being too modern (i.e., too European) and somehow not authentically ‘‘national’’ enough. In this study of the Spanish American novel, I have organized my readings and critical history of the novel around five moments when the desire to be modern took different (but not entirely contradictory ) directions. The first moment (Part I of this book) is associated in Spanish America with modernismo, but throughout Latin America, modernism ostensibly involved oppositional forces centered, on the one hand, on fin-de-siècle symbolist and Parnassian aesthetics and, Tseng 2003.2.4 07:37 6754 Williams / THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL / sheet 8 of 280 Preface ix on the other, positivism and more scientific approaches to culture and society. This was the moment captured...