A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (review)

Examining the intersections of politics and aesthetics that emerged in the course of the Latin American 1960s, Diana Sorensen’s analysis—with few exceptions—is principally concerned with the manner in which an earlier generation of writers remembered the past. For while the decade was marked by revolutionary impulses within the sphere of aesthetics as well as on the terrain of the political, Sorensen maintains that this desire existed alongside a longing for origins. Of course, the boom writers—and, in particular, Julio Cortázar—are featured prominently in this account, yet she also extends her discussion to other significant figures—such as Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Elena Poniatowska—as well as to the construction of the boom and the role played by both editoriales culturales and periodicals. Investigating the relation between “the structure of feeling of the period” and “different forms of writing” (p. 10), Sorensen’s analysis is largely informed by an inquiry into the exchanges between a utopian desire for transformation and a kind of cultural memory that informed “the making of a new culture” (p. 211) throughout this period.

Reading Carlos Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz as one of several boom novels in which she locates this articulation of utopia and memory, Sorensen explains that Artemio’s memory “could be construed as a form of nostalgia for transformative opportunities that were not realized in Mexico’s twentieth century history” (p. 188). For Sorensen, the return to beginnings that underlie novels such as Fuentes’, as well as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, Mario Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde, and Cortázar’s Rayuela, presented readers with those possibilities refused by the economic, political, and social impasses endemic to the region. Thus, “nostalgia” is here shorn of its traditionalist—to say nothing of reactionary—connotations to suggest a “look back” (p. 187) that, in effect, points to a future radically different from the present. It is the conjunction of these tendencies, then, that underwrites Sorensen’s investigation of the manner in which literature, and culture more generally, addressed political and social exigencies within national, continental, and transnational contexts alike. Locating the concomitance of this “look back”—the commitment to a mining of the past for conceptions of the future—and an attendant “modernizing impetus” (p. 208)—the desire for a total rupture with that past—in the cultural texts of the period, Sorensen’s investigation gestures toward productive comparisons between the boom literatures of the 1960s and the great modernisms of the twentieth century.

At the same time, however, what the investment in cultural memory gives rise to is an emphasis on the negotiations between different identities (cultural, national, gender, class) that take place within these contexts. Therefore, although Guevara’s chronicle of the campaign in the Sierra Maestra is vetted with an eye to explicating the exchanges between memory and utopia, this account is informed largely by an inquiry into the relationship between gender and revolution. Similarly, her reading of Octavio Paz’s and Poniatowska’s responses to Tlatelolco 1968 examines the ways in which mobilizations of cultural and collective memory give rise to competing notions of Mexican national identity that speak to the state’s monopoly on the historical archive.

Sorensen, then, conceives these negotiations as the key to understanding the politics of the 1960s. For insofar as the relationship between past and present is mediated by the subject alone—mediated, that is to say by his or her memory—any conception of the future, she suggests, will ultimately be determined by the identity of this subject as well as by the position he or she assumes within various contexts. And yet, if remembering (the “look back”) might constitute “a precondition for imagining other possible outcomes” (p. 187)—constitute, in other words, the conditions of possibility for any form of politics directed at transforming the present—then [End Page 261...