Espectáculos de realidad. Ensayo sobre la narrativa latinoamericana de las últimas dos décadas (review)

In his new book, Reinaldo Laddaga argues that certain traditional ways of writing and thinking about works of literature—a paradigm to which we might attach the label "high modernist"—have nowadays become obsolete. Recent changes in the global socio-cultural environment have resulted in the emergence of a new approach to narrative fiction. Laddaga's goal in Espectáculos de realidad is to develop "algunos elementos para la construcción del mapa de este imaginario en formación" (21). His elegantly-written book accomplishes this goal with unusual insight and dexterity.

Laddaga focuses on the work of seven Latin American authors: Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, Fernando Vallejo, João Gilberto Noll, Osvaldo Lamborghini, César Aira, and Mario Bellatin. He is interested in the formal features of the texts he discusses and in the various ways in which the texts themselves put forward a conception of the literary work, in particular of the kind of literary work that is most responsive to the world we live in today. But he consistently relates the structural aspects of the works he studies, as well as the poetics he extracts from them, to a broader set of concerns. In Espectáculos de realidad, Laddaga shows how certain ways of writing, and certain theories about the nature of literature, are linked to specific ideas about the subject, about society and about reality itself.

So what are the distinctive traits of the recent Latin American narratives Laddaga discusses? To begin with, the author draws attention to a resistance to form that all of the writers he studies share. These are writers who explore the aesthetic possibilities of flux, randomness and fragmentation. They tell erratic stories about nebulous characters and they typically end their works in an inconclusive or discordant fashion. The authors featured in Laddaga's essay are suspicious of the notion of the work of art as a rounded and complete object that seeks to achieve a monumental quality. Instead, they write books that highlight their own imperfection and impermanence, refuse to adopt a clear and intelligible structure and thwart the reader's efforts at comprehension and elucidation. Steering us away from the aesthetic values of clarity and grandeur, these texts are marked by a sense of collapse, of failure, of dissolution and of doubt. Or, as Lamborghini puts it in a passage cited in Espectáculos de realidad, "La única verdad es la indecisión" (100). Laddaga gives an especially interesting example of how an aesthetic of indecisiveness plays out on the compositional level of the text when he discusses the way in which Aira's novels typically get started. He notes that whereas Aira's novels are generally short, his beginnings are often very long. Laddaga reads this as the sign of "una cierta renuencia a comenzar, como si el escritor dudara de la pertinencia de escribir el libro que está escribiendo"(118). In other words, Aira's books seem to have great difficulty getting started because the author himself isn't sure whether what he is writing is worthwhile. We might speak of a poetics of diminished expectations—a poetics that has, paradoxically, helped Aira become one of the most productive Latin American authors of all time, with over sixty books to his name.

The attack on traditional notions of literary form, in particular on the ideal of the well-crafted work of art, runs parallel to the assault on the conventional view of the self as a coherent, unified entity. The authors of the works Laddaga discusses have abandoned the goal of presenting a clear, distinct image of the self, for such a self is assumed to...